Posted 7/17/2004 07:46:18 PM by Edward Driscoll
The weblog part of this site is now at http://eddriscoll.com/weblog.php. Kindly change your bookmarks. You will be redirected there automatically in five seconds. If you are not, please click here.

Posted 7/16/2004 09:41:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
BIG NEWS! Major site redesign on the way. We'll be taking a brief timeout while we get things transferred over. See you soon!

Posted 7/16/2004 09:07:22 AM by Edward Driscoll

Posted 7/16/2004 01:00:49 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT, according to James Glassman:

Extra! Extra! The big news of the past decade in America has been largely overlooked, and you'll find it shocking. Young people have become aggressively normal. Violence, drug use and teen sex have declined. Kids are becoming more conservative politically and socially. They want to get married and have large families. And, get this, they adore their parents. The Mood of American Youth Survey found that more than 80 percent of teenagers report no family problems -- up from about 40 percent a quarter-century ago. In another poll, two-thirds of daughters said they would "give Mom an 'A.' "In the history of polling, we've never seen tweens and teens get along with their parents this well," says William Strauss, referring to kids born since 1982. Strauss is author, with Neil Howe, of "Millenials Rising: The Next Great Generation." In an article in the latest issue of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, Kay S. Hymowitz writes: "Wave away the smoke of the Jackson family circus, Paris Hilton and the antics of San Francisco, and you can see how Americans have been self-correcting from a decades-long experiment with 'alternative values.' Slowly, almost imperceptibly during the 1990s, the culture began a lumbering, Titanic turn away from the iceberg." Adults are changing, but kids seem to have changed most -- and they may comprise the new "greatest generation," as Tom Brokaw called the World War II cohort. "What is emerging," writes Hymowitz, "is a vital, optimistic, family-centered, entrepreneurial, and, yes, morally thoughtful, citizenry."

Posted 7/16/2004 12:38:27 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE FRIEND OF MY ENEMY IS MY ENEMY: David Horowitz writes:

Those who want the enemy to win should indeed have their patriotism questioned. How can you love your country if you want its enemies to win? This is a question that should be put to all those "liberals" who want to be seen as patriotic but who have embraced America's enemies, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly by embracing anti-American supporters of the terrorists like Michael Moore, and through him the Zarqawi "resisters" in Iraq.

Posted 7/15/2004 11:50:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
AOL IM ROBOT IS A BUSH BASHER: This is both silly and sad, simultaneously:

Computer-savvy and interested in presidential politics, 13-year-old Erin was upset to learn that America Online's Instant Message (AIM) robot, "Smarter Child," favored Democrat John Kerry in this year's election. Erin, whose last name is being omitted in this article, is a fan of President Bush. Internet instant messaging is one of the most popular methods for teens and even adults to stay in touch with friends and family. One of the better-known messenger programs, AIM, offers the feature called Smarter Child, a robot programmed to provide automated responses to those with whom it chats. Built and programmed by Conversagent, Inc., a privately held firm that develops technology for creating and operating interactive agents, Smarter Child is able to dispense facts and figures, movie times, or just plain conversation with AIM users. But when Erin told the robot that "George Bush is awesome," she was shocked by the response. "No way. George W. Bush is way uncool," the reply stated. She asked, "Do you like George W. Bush?" and the program replied, "I'm a Kerry supporter myself." Testing the waters, she typed in "John Kerry rocks." The robot's response: "Absolutely. John Kerry rocks." * * * Robot Likes a Robot But not everyone was disappointed by the robot's partisanship. When asked about Smarter Child's support of Kerry, Jano Cabrera, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said: "Clearly this is a smart robot. This shows that we've made great advances in artificial intelligence. The "smarter" in Smarter Child speaks for itself." Stephen Klein, CEO of Conversagent, said his firm received many complaints from users about Smarter Child's political bias. Although the robot was originally programmed to oppose Bush, Klein said, it was being changed to adhere to the views of the users with whom it interacted. He conceded that Smarter Child had become "too anti-Bush." They Admit Their 'Ridiculous' Bias "It got ridiculous. We realized criticizing political figures was out of bounds," Klein said. Now, instead of disagreeing with users who state "I like George Bush" or agreeing with those who say "I like John Kerry," the robot mostly stays on the political sidelines. "Robots don't get involved in politics," the Smarter Child program replies, before asking users to make their choice for president. It is still possible to get the robot to reveal its true feelings, however. When told that "John Kerry rocks," Smarter Child still responds "Right on!" with a wink. When told that "John Kerry is awesome," it responds: "Absolutely. John Kerry rocks." And when users tell Smarter Child that "George Bush is awesome," it replies, "I'll remember that. It's interesting especially since other people I've talked to say they don't like George W. Bush."

Posted 7/15/2004 10:07:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
KERRY/DOLE '04! Jonah Goldberg writes:

Bob Dole got the nomination because it was "his turn." Kerry got the nomination because at the last minute Howard Dean imploded, and Democrats settled on Kerry because they thought he was the most electable. Neither were smart ways to pick a candidate. The jubilation over Edwards is, I believe, a sign that the Democrats are in denial about how bad a candidate Kerry is. Time will tell if I'm right.

Posted 7/15/2004 08:49:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
NOTES ON BLOGGING: Terry Teachout has some interesting (and very McLuhan-esque sounding) notes on blogging. For the most part, I think he's right on the money, but there are a few items I disagree with. On the other hand, I'm sure Teachout wrote his post to start a conversation, not lay down Rules In Stone. In his first item, Teachout writes:

1. It’s almost impossible to explain what a blog is to someone who’s never seen one. That's the mark of a true innovation.

12. Art blogging will never be as popular as war blogging. More people care about politics than the arts.

8. For now, blogs presuppose the existence of the print media. That will probably always be the case—but over time, the print media will become increasingly less important to the blogosphere.

Posted 7/15/2004 08:10:17 PM by Edward Driscoll
CONGRATULATIONS TO STEVE GREEN on his new site design!

Posted 7/15/2004 02:52:26 PM by Edward Driscoll
IT'S THE JIHAD, STUPID: Stanley Crouch tells the media to take the election seriously. (Via Betsy Newmark.)

Posted 7/15/2004 02:33:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
GLOOMSBURY: Tim Blair notes that Garry Trudeau has a very different take on President Bush than the usual inarticulate smirking chimp boilerplate used by most of the left.

Posted 7/15/2004 02:17:02 PM by Edward Driscoll
BITING THE HAND THAT INVITES YOU: In April of 2002, President Bush invited Ozzy Ozbourne to the White House (and had this humorous exchange with the aging and heavily medicated rocker). This is how Ozzy has repaid the honor.

Posted 7/15/2004 12:55:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
AP NOTES that the economy is set for its best growth in 20 years.

Posted 7/15/2004 12:48:30 PM by Edward Driscoll
HERE'S AN ENDORSEMENT THAT JOHN KERRY probably didn't want. Although, considering his choice of "official poet", and his Winter Soldier salad days, isn't all that surprising.

Posted 7/15/2004 12:40:31 PM by Edward Driscoll
HUGH HEWITT HAS SOME THOUGHTS ON "The Don't Even Think About It Doctrine", Moore's Disease, and the Torricelli Option.

Posted 7/15/2004 11:24:47 AM by Edward Driscoll
APB FOR JOE WILSON: Tim Graham notes that "When you pound Bush, you’re hot. When you’re exposed as a liar, you’re not". Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds explores the Kerry connection to Wilson's Website--the now ironically labeled RestoreHonesty.com.

Posted 7/15/2004 11:19:00 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE HILLARY CONVENTION CON: Jonah Goldberg and Kathryn Jean Lopez speculate that of course Hillary's going to speak at the Democratic National Convention later this month, and her absence from the rostrum--for the moment--is merely a way to build some pre-convention buzz. UPDATE: AP reports, "Kerry Asks Sen. Clinton to Speak at DNC".   Jim Geraghty of NRO's "Kerry Spot" writes:

What's really surprising about this is that this suggests this wasn't part of an orchestrated effort to have Hillary make a "surprise" appearance, that it really was a glaring oversight by Kerry, his campaign, and convention organizers. How do you schedule a convention lineup and leave out the party's most popular woman?

Posted 7/15/2004 11:00:38 AM by Edward Driscoll
TERROR IN THE SKIES AGAIN? Annie Jacobsen, an investment writer, was onboard Northwest Airlines flight #327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on June 29th when she and her husband noticed what was extremely likely to be an averted terrorist attack.   UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts and additional links.

Posted 7/15/2004 01:42:34 AM by Edward Driscoll
MUCH ADO ABOUT A LOT: Suzanne Fields bemoans how postmodernism has greatly reduced American students' love of literature. UPDATE: Roger Kimball of The New Criterion also has some thoughts.

Posted 7/15/2004 12:47:11 AM by Edward Driscoll
BAKE SALES FOR BODY ARMOR: National Review Online debunks the urban leftwing myth.

Posted 7/14/2004 11:10:14 PM by Edward Driscoll
OVER THE YEARS, I'VE WRITTEN music, lyrics, newsletters, a couple of (mercifully long out of print) books on sales and marketing, this Weblog, and enough magazine articles to fell a forest's worth of trees. But other than some odds and ends in college, I've never really written fiction--especially material designed to be filmed. Which may be why I found this interview with Ron Moore so interesting. Moore is a veteran writer of the various Star Trek series and films, beginning with The Next Generation, and he explains why that series was so difficult to write for.

Posted 7/14/2004 08:53:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
ADOPT-A-LEFTWING-JOURNALIST: Hugh Hewitt has a modest proposal to bring them up-to-speed with today's events and conservative opinions.

Posted 7/14/2004 08:18:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
IN THESE TROUBLED TIMES: Randy Barnett debunks a mindless cliche by looking back over the past hundred years and asking when times weren't troubled. (Via Betsy Newmark.)

Posted 7/14/2004 08:02:31 PM by Edward Driscoll
MAN VERSUS FISH: I've eaten way more sushi than any single man should have in the last eight years. James Lileks says that nature is turning the tables.

Posted 7/14/2004 06:35:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
SCORE ONE FOR REUTERS: We frequently bash the "news" agency that never met a terrorist it didn't like, but check out the opening to this article:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic candidate John Kerry, whose campaign demanded to know on Wednesday whether President Bush read a key Iraq intelligence assessment, did not read the document himself before voting to give Bush the authority to go to war, aides acknowledged.

Posted 7/14/2004 06:30:24 PM by Edward Driscoll
MOORE LIED, QUOTES DIED: Michael Moore airbrushes articles that appear on his Web site to make it appear as if his critics don’t exist.

Posted 7/14/2004 05:04:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
SCOTT OTT HAS A SCOOP: A draft of the speech that President Bush had planned to make to the NAACP. Karl Rove, call Ott--he'd make a helluva speechwriter.

Posted 7/14/2004 04:36:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
POWER LINE HAS A PROPOSED SLOGAN for the Bush campaign: "It's the Jihad, stupid!" UPDATE: Roger L. Simon also has some thoughts.

Posted 7/14/2004 03:51:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
DONALD LUSKIN ASKS A SIMPLE QUESTION: Mrs. Kerry is filthy rich. Why is her taxable income so small? UPDATE: Meanwhile Andrew Stuttaford is sure that any moment from now, Arianna Huffington will be commenting on this. Any...moment...now.

Posted 7/14/2004 03:46:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
HOW DO YOU BLOW THIS ONE? Hugh Hewitt notes that Kerry muffs naming his favorite Red Sox player.

Posted 7/14/2004 03:04:34 PM by Edward Driscoll
SLIM-FAST SHEDS WHOOPI GOLDBERG as their spokeswoman, after her outrageous comments aimed at President Bush at last week's star-studded fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Meanwhile, Linda Chavez is understandably angered by comedian John Leguizamo calling Hispanic conservatives cockroaches. But hey, as John Kerry said, Whoopi and Leguizamo and the other performers at his fund-raiser are the "heart and soul of our country".

Posted 7/14/2004 02:30:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
HULK WRITE ARTICLE FOR ONION! Hulk wonder where his sequel is. Hulk smash puny Hollywood studio execs! (Via "The Corner".)

Posted 7/14/2004 01:11:24 PM by Edward Driscoll
COMPARE AND CONTRAST how Time magazine covers the naming of Republican and Democrat vice-presidential candidates.

Posted 7/14/2004 12:52:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
JOANNE JACOBS SAYS THAT BILL COSBY is tired "of fighting battles his generation thought would be won by now". Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Jonah Goldberg also have some thoughts on Cos and the reaction his recent speeches have been receiving.

Posted 7/14/2004 12:02:33 PM by Edward Driscoll
A SOUTHERN MAN DON'T NEED HIM AROUND, ANYHOW: As Rich Lowry notes, John Edwards seems like a pretty odd fellow for someone recruited because he supposedly would appeal to Southerners and rural voters.

Posted 7/13/2004 11:02:48 AM by Edward Driscoll
DRINK MORE BICARDI! The Guardian (or "The Grauniad" as its known to the English for its many typos) writes its being protested because the rum manufacturer "shares the responsibility for the suffering imposed on Cuba over the last 40 years by those who refuse to accept the socialist path chosen by the Cuban people." Any company that's anti-Castro and makes a mean Cuba Libre is OK in my book.

Posted 7/13/2004 10:45:40 AM by Edward Driscoll
LIFE IMITATES THE SOPRANOS: Will Collier has the details. UPDATE: Not surprisingly, the press buries the Kerry connection.

Posted 7/13/2004 10:43:03 AM by Edward Driscoll
BIN LADEN AIDE SURRENDERS: "A close associate of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was flown from Iran to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday after surrendering to security officials at the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, a Saudi Interior Ministry official said", CNN reports, adding, "In late 2001, he was identified on a videotape conversing with bin Laden about the September 11 terrorist attacks". Somebody tell Reuters!

Posted 7/13/2004 02:36:50 AM by Edward Driscoll
CONTENDER, CHAMP, BUM: Nicholas Stix looks at the various stages of Marlon Brando's career.

Posted 7/12/2004 09:41:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
BY THE WAY, sorry for the lack of posting this afternoon. Nina and I took a trip down to the Gilroy Outlet Mall, where we bought all sorts of odds ends from Mr. Lauren, the Brothers Brooks, and a few other stores. And incidentally--is there a law that says that all music in these stores must either be bad '70s retro pop or repetitive interstellar techno noise? Do the people who run these stores think America's "Horse With No Name" or Loggins and Messina's "Your Momma Don't Dance" actually moves the merchandise?? Oh, and this probably a good time to post another link to my recent piece in The New Partisan, on the strange duality of American aesthetics.

Posted 7/12/2004 09:40:47 PM by Edward Driscoll
NEWS THAT EXPLAINS OUR WORLD: Dennis Prager observes a jaw-dropping quote from the New York Times:

In an interview with The New York Times Magazine, William F. Buckley Jr., on the occasion of his taking leave from National Review, the magazine he founded 50 years ago, was asked a series of questions. Needless to say, given the politics of The New York Times and its interviewer, the questions were nearly all challenging. But nothing quite prepared a reader for this one: "You seem indifferent to suffering. Have you ever suffered yourself?" In one sentence, a New York Times interviewer summed up the liberal view of conservatives -- "indifferent to suffering." As I have long believed, in general, conservatives think liberals are fools and liberals think conservatives are evil.

Posted 7/12/2004 12:54:37 PM by Edward Driscoll
CULTURAL SEMANTICS: Jeff Goldstein takes offense at the phrase "disco died". And he's got the quotes from disco to prove it.

Posted 7/12/2004 12:44:23 PM by Edward Driscoll
EXPLOSION CUTS POWER AT O'HARE AIRPORT: Chicago police say a transformer between terminals two and three at O'Hare Airport exploded at shortly after 12:00 PM on a hot Chicago Monday. Doesn't sound like it's terrorist-related--just the opposite, as CBS reports, "ComEd spokewoman Meg Amato says that it appears an O'Hare contractor may have dug into electrical equipment underground that belongs to O'Hare. ComEd is standing by to assist in powering up the terminals." But still, seeing the words "explosion" and "O'Hare" in the same headline is more than a little troubling sounding.

Posted 7/12/2004 12:38:18 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE KINGS OF QUOTATION MARKS: National Review looks at Reuters--the "news agency" that will not call a terrorist a terrorist.

Posted 7/12/2004 12:34:02 PM by Edward Driscoll
"INTELLIGENCE STAFF 'PRESSURED TO LIE OVER IRAQ ATTACK'": In 1998!

Posted 7/12/2004 12:15:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
AFTER THE WAR, our eyes were opened. We discovered our intelligence was pretty shaky. We found out that the mustachioed totalitarian madman didn't have the capacity to produce WMDs that we believed him to have had. We found out that his army was weakened by fierce battles against his sworn enemy to the north long before we arrived to the fight. We found reconstructing his decimated country to be much more difficult than we first imagined. And yet, despite all that, only a lunatic believed that Hitler should have been left in power. Why is today any different?

Posted 7/12/2004 12:06:37 PM by Edward Driscoll
SPEAKING OF MEDIA BIAS, the assistant managing editor of Newsweek admits the bloody obvious:

The media “wants Kerry to win” and so “they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic” and “there’s going to be this glow about” them, Evan Thomas, the Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek, admitted on Inside Washington over the weekend. He should know. His magazine this week sports a smiling Kerry and Edwards on its cover with the yearning headline, “The Sunshine Boys?” Inside, an article carrying Thomas’ byline contrasted how “Dick Cheney projects the bleakness of a Wyoming winter, while John Edwards always appears to be strolling in the Carolina sunshine.” The cover story touted how Kerry and Edwards “became a buddy-buddy act, hugging and whispering like Starsky and Hutch after consuming the evidence.” Newsweek’s competitor, Time, also gushed about the Democratic ticket, dubbing them, in the headline over their story, “The Gleam Team.” Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz also realized the media’s championing of the Democratic ticket and made it a focus of his Sunday Reliable Sources show on CNN. The on screen topic cues: “Edwards Lovefest?” and “Media’s Dream Team.” Kurtz’s Washington Post on Sunday well illustrated the media’s infatuation with Kerry and Edwards. “Kerry Vows to Restore 'Truth' to Presidency,” announced a July 11 front page headline. Inside, on page A-8, a headline declared: “Kerry, Edwards Revel in Brotherhood of Campaign.” The subhead: “Energy, Enthusiasm Infectious as Democrats Take Message to Battleground States.”

A few months back, when Kerry claimed to have been endorsed by various "foreign leaders," he insisted he was not at liberty to say who they were. But when he asserts he has the backing of New York Times reporters, not only does he name names, but the Times views the claim as neither newsworthy enough to report prominently nor embarrassing enough to rebut. It's as if Times reporters taking sides in a political race were the most ordinary thing in the world.

Posted 7/12/2004 12:00:18 PM by Edward Driscoll
ORSON SCOTT CARD ON MEDIA BIAS:

What makes the liberal bias in the mainstream media so pernicious is that they deny that they're biased and insist that their twisted version of events is "reality," and anyone who disagrees with them is either mentally or morally suspect. In other words, they're fanatics. And, like all good fanatics, they're utterly convinced that they're in sole possession of virtue and truth.

Posted 7/11/2004 09:43:08 PM by Edward Driscoll
SEE FAHRENHEIT 9/11 on the State Department's dime.

Posted 7/11/2004 05:17:02 PM by Edward Driscoll
LAUGHING AT THE SEVENTIES: John Podhoretz gives a surprisingly positive review to Will Ferrell's new movie, Anchorman, and its knowing japes at the earnest '70s.

Posted 7/11/2004 04:28:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
I VOTED FOR THE BAN ON IMMIGRANTS WITH AIDS before I voted against it.

Posted 7/11/2004 03:02:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
UNCORK BARREL. INSERT FISH. BEGIN SHOOTING: Mark Steyn profiles John Edwards.

Posted 7/11/2004 02:24:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
POLL: KERRY LOSES GROUND AFTER RELEASE OF FAHRENHEIT 9/11! Of course, it's well within the margin of error, but don't you think if the results were reversed, you'd see headlines with a similar tone? Especially after much of the press, already high with Charles Krauthammer dubbed "Bush Derangement Syndrome", caught Michael Moore fever?

Posted 7/10/2004 03:25:26 PM by Edward Driscoll
TWO TAKES ON THE OUTDOORS: On NRO's "The Corner", it's the NRA versus the Sierra Club.

Posted 7/10/2004 03:09:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
JOE WILSON LIED, REPUTATIONS DIED, writes Glenn Reynolds. Kevin Patrick has more.

Posted 7/10/2004 03:02:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME: William Kristol writes that John Kerry is another 9/10 Democrat:

LAST THURSDAY, CNN's Larry King asked John Kerry whether he would want former President Bill Clinton to campaign on his behalf. Kerry said yes. "What American would not trade the economy we had in the 1990s, the fact that we were not at war and young Americans were not deployed?" Kerry's answer is revealing. We were, in fact, at war. The Clinton administration, with the exception of a few cruise missiles, had simply chosen not to fight back. Osama bin Laden, a sworn enemy of the United States, had launched attacks on our embassies and on a warship of the U.S. Navy. Saddam Hussein had defied U.N. weapons inspections, repeatedly threatened America, and attempted to assassinate former President Bush. Furthermore, where does Kerry object to young Americans' being deployed? Afghanistan? But Kerry has criticized the Bush administration for an insufficient commitment of troops there. Iraq? But Kerry voted for the war and has said he would not cut and run.

Posted 7/10/2004 02:54:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
SEATTLE HATES AMERICA, writes Michelle Malkin.

Posted 7/10/2004 01:32:23 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE FLUIDITY OF HISTORY: I'm far from a postmodernist, but it's amazing how fluid history can be. Steven Den Beste tells us that the Waterloo we know isn't the Waterloo that actually happened.

Posted 7/10/2004 01:23:35 AM by Edward Driscoll
OH THAT LIBERAL MEDIA: Indeed.

Posted 7/9/2004 07:55:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
A MAN IN FULL: I have an article I'm especially proud of in the latest issue of Nuts & Volts. It's on Roy Norman, a man, now in his early 80s, who served in the Navy during some of the first H-Bomb tests in the late 1940s, then onboard the USS Enterprise (not the one commanded by William Shatner or Patrick Stewart), and then retired from the service to be an electronics consultant. It's illustrated with several photos from Norman's career that he sent me to scan (and restore) for publication. The text isn't online, but it's an article that (in my humble opinion) is well worth reading.

Posted 7/9/2004 07:54:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE REVOLUTION WILL BE DIGITIZED: I have an article in the current issue of Smart TV & Sound on Internet file downloading. Pick up a copy or ten at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble!

Posted 7/9/2004 07:53:12 PM by Edward Driscoll
INTEL BRINGS WIRELESS TO EVERY ROOM: My latest "Ideas For Every Room" Electronic House newsletter is online.

Posted 7/9/2004 07:14:48 PM by Edward Driscoll
FLY THE FRIENDLY SKIES OF MILLION AIR: The John-Johns do!

Posted 7/9/2004 05:14:02 PM by Edward Driscoll
A GOOD SIGN, IF FAR TOO LATE: Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran emails bloggers about his article correcting his omission of Paul Bremer's farewell speech. As one of the bloggers contacted by Chandrasekaran writes, "Now let's see if the media will apply this lesson going forward, and start reading blogs before they make [more]embarrassing high-profile mistakes like this." I don't know if Chandrasekaran has publicly responded to U.S. Marine Eric Johnson's takedown of him in The New York Post, but I've got to think it played a role in his being willing to listen to bloggers.

Posted 7/9/2004 04:59:32 PM by Edward Driscoll
WOW--WHAT DO THEY PUT IN THOSE DRIVE-THROUGH DAIQUIRIS*? I've read that Democratic Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu was something of a moderate Democrat. No more--she's caught Michael Moore fever.

Posted 7/9/2004 03:51:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
'BOUT TIME: The Catholic Church equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

Posted 7/9/2004 12:20:35 PM by Edward Driscoll
LET'S GET IT ON: As Rich Lowry writes, turn your sound on before watching this.

Posted 7/9/2004 01:52:29 AM by Edward Driscoll
IS THE EFFECTIVENESS OF AMERICA'S AIR MARSHALS BEING COMPROMISED by their strict dress code?

Posted 7/9/2004 01:45:02 AM by Edward Driscoll
RETHINKING RED-LIGHT CAMERAS: Former Congressman Bob Barr is none-too-thrilled with intersection and speed trap cameras--and he's right.

Posted 7/9/2004 01:40:01 AM by Edward Driscoll
RAIL-BASED TERRORISM: The Washington Times has an article titled, "Boston, New York rail lines vulnerable" to terrorism, something that we noted back in May. Back then, I wrote "I really fear that we're going to wake up to another Madrid, only it will be in Manhattan's Penn Station, not Spain". And I hope (and pray) that my fears continue to be unfounded. UPDATE: Speaking of Madrid, Hugh Hewitt had this item on his Blog on Thursday:

Today, on the floor of the United States Senate, Barbara Boxer referred to the Madrid bombings as a "rail accident." Honest. A rail accident. Boxer is a Senate accident. What an embarassment. I posed the question to my audience: How much money could Boxer lose in a Jeopardy game, assuming that, in her typical fashion, she obnoxiously buzzed in first every time and, also in typical fashion, she got everything wrong. The best calculation seems to be $58,000.

Posted 7/8/2004 11:28:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
FAHRENHEIT 640 (ON THE AM DIAL): Asa Hutchinson, the Homeland Security undersecretary, goes on an LA talk show and "gets burned big time", Michelle Malkin writes, calling Hutchinson an "invertebrate" for his politically correct response when confronted with serious questions about the porous nature of California's border.

Posted 7/8/2004 10:48:47 PM by Edward Driscoll
WILL FRIST PLAY HARDBALL WITH KERRY AND EDWARDS? Betsy Newmark says that having two senators running for national office could end up hurting the Democrats--if Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is really willing to play hardball.

Posted 7/8/2004 10:46:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
POWER LINE NOTES THAT the Associated Press sound like they're channeling Michael Moore.

Posted 7/8/2004 10:39:34 PM by Edward Driscoll
BUSH AND THE NAACP: Pejman Yousefzadeh has some thoughts and some links, on President Bush's decision not to speak at the NAACP this year.

Posted 7/8/2004 10:21:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE JULY SURPRISE: I don't know if this New Republic piece amounts to much, but it's fun to see the left fear election year surprises from the right for a change. Of course, as James Lileks wrote:

I ask my Democrat friends what they’d rather see happen – Bush reelected and bin Laden caught, or Bush defeated and bin Laden still in the wind. They’re all honest: they’d rather see Bush defeated.

Posted 7/8/2004 10:13:26 PM by Edward Driscoll
STEFAN BECK OF THE NEW CRITERION writes, "There's a welcome novelty: one Muslim country scrutinizing the terrorist operations of another. Who says Operation Iraqi Freedom didn't change anything?"

Posted 7/8/2004 09:54:47 PM by Edward Driscoll
CALIFORNIA LEGISLATORS WANT TO PUT A DUCK FARM OUT OF BUSINESS: Yes, you read that right, as the foie gras bill (yes, you read that right too) progresses. If this passes, how long before steak will be a thing of the past in California? If the majority of Americans oppose abortion but it's still legal, how can a tiny minority of Californians cause a man to lose his business and diners to lose a dish they've enjoyed for hundreds of years?

Posted 7/8/2004 08:49:09 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE DAILY ADVENTURES OF MIXERMAN: You read the online diary, now buy the book!

Posted 7/8/2004 07:18:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
OFFERS HE COULDN'T REFUSE: Mark Steyn does a brilliant job deconstructing Marlon Brando.

Posted 7/8/2004 01:25:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG with that. UPDATE: James Taranto has some thoughts on the hair care pair.

Posted 7/8/2004 01:24:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN: Pete Townshend has some less than kind words for Michael Moore.

Posted 7/8/2004 12:14:12 PM by Edward Driscoll
IS IRON MIKE DITKA BEING DRAFTED FOR THE SENATE?? Whatever Da Coach's decision, this is a riot.

Posted 7/8/2004 11:47:36 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE PROFESSOR NOTES THE LA TIMES is issuing a correction for claiming that Paul Bremer never gave a farewell speech when he left Iraq. Glenn also has this quote from the LA Times:

If the American news media are lucky, 2004 will be remembered as the year of living dangerously. If not, then this election cycle may be recalled as the point at which journalism's slide back into partisanship became a kind of free fall.

Posted 7/8/2004 11:35:10 AM by Edward Driscoll
WILL COLLIER SPOTS A JOHN KERRY WHOPPER that the press is extremely unlikely to pick up on.

Posted 7/8/2004 02:34:42 AM by Edward Driscoll
RHEINGOLD VERSUS THE ULTIMATE RINO*: The brewery is taking on New York's Nurse Bloomberg in a series of provocative advertisements.

Posted 7/8/2004 02:30:18 AM by Edward Driscoll
SPEAKING OF ACADEMIA, Cathy Young writes that political correctness never died--it just went under the radar after 9/11. As Young writes, "in the groves of academe, not all offensive speech is created equal".

Posted 7/8/2004 01:42:18 AM by Edward Driscoll
JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS: According to Amazon, Tom Wolfe's new book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, a novel on academia, is scheduled to be published on November 15th:

Dupont University--the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition . . . Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a freshman from Sparta, North Carolina (pop. 900), who has come here on full scholarship in full flight from her tobacco-chewing, beer-swilling high school classmates. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that Dupont is closer in spirit to Sodom than to Athens, and that sex, crank, and kegs trump academic achievement every time. As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jayjay Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennium Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus--she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.

Posted 7/7/2004 11:43:01 PM by Edward Driscoll
"WELL, I THINK THE--I THINK THE STARTING PLACE IS TO DO THE THING": John Edwards, on The Charlie Rose Show on September 11, 2001.

Posted 7/7/2004 11:21:30 PM by Edward Driscoll
JONAH GOLDBERG ON KERRY'S FATEFUL CHOICE: In his syndicated column, Jonah Goldberg writes:

The two Johns believe that America's problems lie in the White House, not overseas. They believe that there's a rich supply of "allies" who would take bullets intended for Americans, if only George Bush had better manners. They believe, despite the fact that George Bush has increased spending on education by 60 percent, and despite the fact that the environment is cleaner now than any time in more than fifty years, that what America really needs more than anything is an education president, an environmental president. Meanwhile, as our enemies lop the heads off our citizens and plan more 9/11s, George Bush says we need a war president. Sounds like the makings of a great debate.

Posted 7/7/2004 10:53:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE OMBUDSGOD HAS SOME ADVICE for the NPR ombudsman on euphemisms for murder and terrorism. You can actually see the left turning back the calendar from 9/11 to 9/10 by reading the NPR ombudsman's linguistic decrees in September of 2001 and April of 2002. And be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the page to read the Baghdad correspondent of The Sydney Morning Herald's description of Saddam's hirsute appearance in the dock.

Posted 7/7/2004 10:30:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
NEWS TO ME--BUT NOT VERY SURPRISING: Jon Lauck notes that it was Tom Daschle who appointed the hyper-partisan Richard Ben-Veniste to the 9/11 commission and held weekly strategy meetings with him as the commission's hearings unfolded. And both were at the Washington premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11. UPDATE: Speaking of which, read in amazement as James Lileks slices and dices the enormous carcass of Michael Moore with surgical precision.

Posted 7/7/2004 10:02:09 PM by Edward Driscoll
TOM WOLFE'S NEW JOURNALISM PICKS: Just came across this, which is excerpted from his long out of print mid-'70s New Journalism anthology. There's some amazing writing here, before many of the writers that Wolfe highlighted became ossified and sclerotic.

Posted 7/7/2004 09:19:30 PM by Edward Driscoll
WELCOME RIGHT WING NEWS READERS: We're the site of the day there! (Thanks, John.)

Posted 7/7/2004 07:20:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
"LET AMERICA BE AMERICA": Andrew Sullivan has the goods on John Kerry's favorite poet:

Now I know Kerry is a liberal, but does he really want to cite a man who wanted to abolish private property and loved Stalin? Again, the right-left double standard. If a fascist poet in 1938 had called to remake a pure racial America on the lines of Hitler's Germany, would he now be quoted by any leading politician? But the communists get a pass. Again. And again. And again.

Posted 7/7/2004 04:13:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
MY CARY GRANT PIECE, which I had to knock about 400 words off to fit into the allotted space of an Electronic House newsletter, is now online in its original form at Blogcritics. UPDATE: One of the films I mentioned as being newly out on DVD was Grant's Night and Day, a heavily whitewashed biopic of Cole Porter. It omits Porter's bisexuality, because audiences in 1946 would have flipped out, the script would never have gotten past the Hays Office, and Porter and his wife, Linda were still very much alive at the time. There's a new Porter film out starring Kevin Kline as Porter and Ashley Judd as Linda, called De-Lovely, which does explore Porter's sexuality in more detail, which isn't all that surprising considering today's standards and mores. But as an actual film, Rex Reed is not at all happy with it, writing that "Misery prevails from downbeat to encore":

No waiting around for the sour notes in De-Lovely: A no-fail idea begins to fail in the very first scene. An old man in a lonely penthouse plays a mournful "Night and Day" in a wheelchair. This is Kevin Kline as the dying Cole Porter—but with a bald head, liver spots and wrinkles for days, he doesn’t remotely resemble Kevin Kline, or Cole Porter. He looks like Carl Reiner. Suddenly he is visited by someone named Gabe (Jonathan Pryce) who is either an angel of death, a pallbearer or a Broadway producer hell-bent on staging a Cole Porter revival.

There is one very funny scene in a Warner Brothers projection room where Linda and Cole watch the silly, overproduced 1946 biopic Night and Day, in which they were played by the luscious Alexis Smith and the elegant but riotously miscast Cary Grant. Even after the 1937 riding accident which left Cole drugged on scotch and morphine for the rest of his life, there was Cary, hale and hardy and strolling in the moonlight on two strong legs [actually, his Porter ends the film limping badly and relying on a cane--Ed] while the Warners symphony brought the film to a crashing finale. The lights come up in the screening room, and Kevin Kline says, "If I can survive this, I can survive anything." It’s the biggest laugh in the movie, but in reality Night and Day, which was directed by Michael Curtiz and has just been released on DVD, is a better-made movie than this current debacle, and a lot more fun. I mean, Mary Martin singing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" majestically surpasses the droopy, who-gives-a-s*** Diana Krall, gloomily moping her way through a lifeless "Just One of Those Things." Night and Day was a mess, but it was an entertaining mess.

Posted 7/7/2004 12:17:17 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE KENNEDY MYSTIQUE: Rich Lowry notes one of the more fascinating elements of Democratic politics, dating back to, I guess, at least the mid-1970s: JFK worship. But JFK's politics and policies are, in many respects far to the right of today's Democrats. As Lowry writes:

The hold JFK has over Democrats is extraordinary. Kerry would be the second consecutive Democratic president yearning to reprise the glories of Kennedy's 1,000 days. A star-struck Clinton idolized Kennedy before growing up to become himself a young, mediocre president with a weakness for the White House help. John Forbes Kerry shares JFK's initials, and has had a lifetime fascination with Kennedy. He fought on a Swift Boat in Vietnam, partly to repeat JFK's iconic PT-109 experience in World War II. Alas, despite Kerry's bravery, "Swift Boat No. 94" doesn't have quite the same resonance. What accounts for JFK's hold on the Dems? For one thing, he is all there is when it comes to Democratic presidential role models in the past 40 years. No one wants to be the next LBJ, JEC, or WJC. It's JFK or bust. What do liberals like about Kennedy's substance? The caution on civil rights? The tax cuts on the rich? The entry into Vietnam? It's the rhetoric and the image--those gorgeous pictures of Kennedy with Jackie--that make for much of the appeal. The JFK wannabes know the centrality of image to Kennedy's magic. Between Kerry's expensive haircuts and Edwards's hair-sprayed bangs, my guess is that no presidential ticket in the history of the planet has cared so much about personal grooming. When the ticketmates travel together, there will probably be stiff competition for the mirror and hair products. Teresa herself has gotten into the act, recently pronouncing herself "sexy"--an odd boast for someone auditioning for a job that usually involves reading to schoolchildren.

Posted 7/7/2004 11:48:57 AM by Edward Driscoll
WEBLOG USE CONTINUES TO GROW: That news shouldn't be too surprising to our regular readers.

Posted 7/7/2004 11:39:03 AM by Edward Driscoll
FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH, as a former small business owner from a family of entrepreneurs (and essentially, still a small business owner with my writing), I'm with Will Collier of VodkaPundit on John Edwards and trial lawyers in general. But be sure to read Postrel's excerpt from the New Yorker on why trial lawyers are particularly prevalent in the South. It's quite an interesting take.

Posted 7/7/2004 11:33:01 AM by Edward Driscoll
OH THOSE WMDS: 1.77 tons of radioactive material secured and removed from Iraq. Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds' vacation photos have been really foggy lately... UPDATE: Heh. Of course, the left will just move the goalposts again.

Posted 7/6/2004 07:33:38 PM by Edward Driscoll
H.D. MILLER CATCHES REUTERS telling a whopper.

Posted 7/6/2004 05:20:02 PM by Edward Driscoll
DASCHLE AND ME: Tom Daschle embraces Michael Moore in DC, and denies it to his constituents in South Dakota.

Posted 7/6/2004 02:14:08 PM by Edward Driscoll
HEADLINES YOU'LL NEVER SEE--but don't call the media biased! UPDATE: Certainly not The Washington Post, at least...

Posted 7/6/2004 01:55:45 PM by Edward Driscoll
PARSE THIS OUT: Roger Ebert calls Godzilla "The Fahrenheit 9/11 of its time". No, really! The original Godzilla with Raymond Burr! I'm not sure what that says about either film. But comparing Michael Moore and Godzilla, I'd say it's a toss-up as to who could do the most damage to Tokyo. (Via Reason's "Hit & Run" blog.)

Posted 7/6/2004 01:35:17 PM by Edward Driscoll
A MEME IS BORN: Jonah Goldberg looks at "the Democrats' Dan Quayle".

Posted 7/6/2004 01:22:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
MORNING IN AMERICA UPDATE: The economy is set for its best growth in 20 years, according to (believe it or not) AP.

Posted 7/6/2004 01:20:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
FLASHBACK: Donations to Sen. Edwards questioned in this 2003 article in The Hill.

Posted 7/6/2004 01:00:38 PM by Edward Driscoll
YOU'RE THE TOP: My latest newsletter for Electronic House looks at some new releases featuring Cary Grant on DVD.

Posted 7/6/2004 12:38:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
FOR ONCE, REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS AGREE! Florida's WFTV reports:

Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, said Kerry's choice "really solidifies the fact that this is the most liberal ticket that the Democrats have put up for, basically, modern times. If you look at the voting records of those two guys, they are way out there in left field."

Posted 7/6/2004 12:26:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
INTERESTING ANGLE: James Taranto writes:

Picking Edwards may also be an effort to keep would-be Ralph Nader voters in the Democratic fold. Edwards is a trial lawyer, Nader is the country's leading champion of trial lawyers, and, as the Village Voice points out, Nader actually urged Kerry to pick Edwards. Meanwhile, Alan Murray reports in today's Wall Street Journal that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce vowed to 'abandon its traditional stance of neutrality in the presidential race and work feverishly to defeat the Democratic ticket' if Edwards is on it.

Posted 7/6/2004 12:19:35 PM by Edward Driscoll
PASS THE DUCHY ON THE LEFTHAND SIDE: "Marijuana Advocates Forget to File for Ballot". Too many Peter Max paper airplanes in their youth, I guess.

Posted 7/6/2004 12:13:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE EDWARDS PICK "OFFICIALLY ENDS THE CHICKENHAWK ARGUMENT", writes Jim Geraghty. Hopefully, somebody will tell Kerry.

Posted 7/6/2004 10:50:43 AM by Edward Driscoll
JONAH GOLDBERG ON "KERRY-HUTZ 2004": "It's going to be Kerry & Edwards: the turn-your-head-and-coif express". Heh.

Posted 7/6/2004 10:38:11 AM by Edward Driscoll
FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN BAGHDAD: David Letterman's "Top Ten Things Overheard at Saddam Hussein's Court Appearance". Steven Green covered item #7 back in December.

Posted 7/6/2004 10:33:49 AM by Edward Driscoll
ANDREW SULLIVAN'S happy about Edwards.

Posted 7/6/2004 10:20:02 AM by Edward Driscoll
LOOKS LIKE THE AVIATION BUFFS WERE RIGHT: It's Edwards--and Instapundit has a link-filled roundup.

Posted 7/6/2004 12:04:22 AM by Edward Driscoll
COULD JUST BE A RUMOR, but according to this message board, two aviation-oriented Websites are reporting that Kerry's campaign plane has been spotted with an Edwards VP logo. UPDATE: Or...maybe it's Gephardt! That's who The New York Post says it is, anyway. Stay tuned.

Posted 7/5/2004 11:53:49 PM by Edward Driscoll
GOOD POINT: Dennis Prager looks at Michael Moore and the problem of American self-hatred:

Did you ever notice that there are no Germans going around the world saying, or making movies about, how awful Germany is or has been? Given that Germany unleashed two world wars and invented industrialized genocide, why has there been no German Michael Moore? Are there any Japanese making films about the absence of Japanese soul-searching or expressions of sorrow over their country's enslavement, torture and murder of Asians in World War II? Has anyone ever encountered any Japanese self-hate? Any Belgians telling the world how bad their country is? Argentinians? French? France surely has reason to produce people ashamed of their country.

Posted 7/5/2004 08:25:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
IN THE IMMORTAL WORDS OF ZZ TOP: They come runnin' just as fast as they can--'cause every girl crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man!

Posted 7/5/2004 08:10:02 PM by Edward Driscoll
DEMOCRATS TO ADOPT FDR'S war philosophy at convention: Scott Ott has the "details".

Posted 7/5/2004 02:31:25 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE BATTLE OF THE HUMVEE: Don't believe the media are the enemy? Then ask the US Army. As Diana West writes:

Ever hear about the Battle of the Humvee? That's what I'm calling a May skirmish fought by soldiers of the 37th Armored Regiment's 2nd Battalion in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf. In what became a six-hour firefight, Americans battled followers of Moktada al-Sadir to secure the hulk of a burning Humvee. It's not that our soldiers fought because the flaming wreck amounted to a tin can's worth of military value. They fought, as Capt. Ty Wilson of Fairfax, Va., explained to The Washington Post, because "We weren't going to let them dance on it for the news. Even (with) all the guys they lost that day, that still would have given them victory." Chalk one up for our side, a small win on the way to an underreported triumph over the followers of Moktada al-Sadir in the spring. Iraq is sovereign, life goes on ... but I can't get over the chilling description of American soldiers risking their necks to keep the media from awarding a phony victory to the enemy. This puts the media -- in this case, anyone with a video camera and a satellite hook-up -- not in No Man's Land, but on the Other Side. The concept is horrifying in that the ramifications are so bleak. It shows our soldiers engaged in a war on two fronts -- a military front and a media front. And it shows our soldiers fighting two enemies: the adversary who fights fire with terror, and the adversary who also fights fire with perception.

Posted 7/5/2004 02:24:07 PM by Edward Driscoll
SHHHHHH: The good guys are winning.

Posted 7/5/2004 11:15:45 AM by Edward Driscoll
QUOTE OF THE DAY, II:

Savor, if you will, the image of France as the mighty defender of Europe.

Posted 7/5/2004 11:12:30 AM by Edward Driscoll
QUOTE OF THE DAY:

This was not a "mishmashed oil change"... rather, it was an illustration of that part of our culture that does not fear solving problems and accomplishing great things.

Posted 7/4/2004 10:42:44 AM by Edward Driscoll
LET FREEDOM REIGN: New York to begin construction at Ground Zero. AP reports, "Gov. George E. Pataki said he chose July 4 to begin rebuilding to show that the terrorists who attacked New York on Sept. 11, 2001, didn’t destroy America’s faith in freedom".

Posted 7/4/2004 01:17:19 AM by Edward Driscoll

Posted 7/4/2004 01:14:18 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE STRANGE DUALITY OF AMERICAN AESTHETICS: I have an essay on design, fashion and aesthetics in 21st century America, over at the New Partisan Website, which also has lots of other cool content worth exploring.

Posted 7/3/2004 04:04:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
APPLAUSE FOR COSBY: Joanne Jacobs writes that "Bill Cosby is continuing his campaign to get blacks to take responsibility for their own problems. And he's speaking to receptive audiences". With the exception of the press, of course.

Posted 7/3/2004 03:41:31 PM by Edward Driscoll
WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER: GOP chairman Ed Gillespie is comparing this election year with Reagan's campain in 1984 against Walter Mondale.

Posted 7/3/2004 01:28:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
DUELING BRANDOS: Power Line links to two takes on Marlon Brando, one by John Podhoretz, the other by Terry Teachout.

Posted 7/3/2004 11:19:36 AM by Edward Driscoll
CAN'T MAKE IT TO THE BIG APPLE THIS FOURTH? Want to see fireworks above the Statue of Liberty? Click here. (Via "The Corner". And speaking of fireworks, be sure to read Glenn's post on the subject.)

Posted 7/2/2004 02:37:08 PM by Edward Driscoll
JOHN KERRY'S SISTER SOULJAH MOMENT? Interesting post by Michelle Malkin.

Posted 7/2/2004 01:11:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
SAY IT ISN'T SO! AP reports that "Nader Accuses Democrats of 'Dirty Tricks'". UPDATE: In a related story, Charles Johnson writes that "nine members of the House of Representatives have written to Kofi Annan to request UN observers to monitor the US Presidential election". Excuse me while I stop giggling--this is the funniest story I've heard in ages. As Johnson writes, "The left has left the planet".

Posted 7/2/2004 01:04:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
TRANSLATORS WANTED: Virginia Postrel--knowledge arbitrageur. Wow, I like that--I should have that title printed on my business cards! (Is it trademarked? Where do I send the royalties, Virginia?)

Posted 7/2/2004 12:47:35 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE MOTHER OF ALL CAPTION CONTESTS is going on over at Captain Ed's (no relation).

Posted 7/2/2004 11:47:27 AM by Edward Driscoll
HEAR IT FROM THE MARINES, who aren't happy with The Washington Post's coverage of the events in Iraq. And then add to the list:

CNN's admission that they were in bed with Saddam.

Time's duplicitous coverage.

Dr. Bob Arnot leaving NBC because he was unhappy with how they slanted stories coming out of Iraq.

Reuters' refusal to call terrorists what they are.

AP being in bed with terrorists.

The New York Times' tactics when the 9/11 Commission verified Saddam's connection with al-Qaida.

Posted 7/2/2004 11:30:42 AM by Edward Driscoll
MARLON BRANDO DEAD AT 80, according to this TV news site. Via Betsy Newmark. As of 4:00 am last night (don't ask), nobody else had any details on the Web, or on Fox, MSNBC, CNN or CNN's Headline News. Terry Teachout has interesting piece on Brando, placing his career into perspective without gushing over it, or the very strange life that went along with it. UPDATE: Editor & Publisher writes:

What newspaper was first to report the unexpected death of actor Marlon Brando? The winner, by a wide margin, appears to be the New York Post, if only in an unconfirmed manner. In its Friday morning edition, on page 11, the Post printed a small story, with a picture of Brando from "The Godfather," under the headline: "Brando is dead: TV report." It cited a bulletin on the Web site of Phoenix-based KPHO-TV, of all places. The paper said police had not confirmed the death but claimed that relatives were gathering at the actor's Los Angeles home.

Posted 7/1/2004 07:37:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE ORWELLIAN BBC: Charles Johnson writes that they've found a new nadir.

Posted 7/1/2004 07:21:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
SCRATCH ANOTHER ONE OFF THE LIST: Richardson withdraws from Kerry VP search. National Review Online's Jim Geraghty writes that Kerry's choice is down to three men, "or this is one of the great disciplined fake-outs of all time". Meanwhile, Dick Morris says "I would not sell life insurance to anyone who has Hillary Clinton as his running mate." Especially after her staggering gaffe this week.

Posted 7/1/2004 06:58:30 PM by Edward Driscoll
FOR THE LEFT, IT'S SEPTEMBER 10th AGAIN: Mark Steyn diagrams the difference between the period between 9/11 and Fahrenheit 9/11:

One day a pair of security guards from the Iranian mission will be heading for the Lincoln Tunnel, and they won’t be carrying just their Kodak Instamatics. The war on terror’s a bit of a joke on the Left these days. In Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore says Bush is deliberately keeping the population in a state of fear, and he gets some of his biggest laughs with clips of solemn announcers announcing upgraded terrorism alerts. I suppose it is pretty funny. Until it happens. And then Moore and the Democrats will switch to arguing that Bush knew it was going to happen all along and didn’t do anything about it. In the autumn of 2001, Jacob Weisberg, now editor of Slate, wrote a column bemoaning what he regarded as a silly post-9/11 trend. The Weekly Standard, the New Republic and other publications had begun giving ‘Susan Sontag Awards’ and similarly facetious honours for notably stupid anti-war commentary. Early winners included Oliver Stone, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Michael Moore, etc. Weisberg thought this unworthy of serious news magazines: ‘Stone and Moore are well-known cranks, regarded with considerable distaste even on the Left,’ he wrote. The idea that ‘these comments represent a significant body of anti-war opinion’ was preposterous.... Put bluntly, there is no anti-war movement, intellectual or popular, in the United States. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying no one opposes the war. According to polls, 5 per cent of the country is against it. There are pacifists and Buddhists ...Those policing the debate are dropping the rhetorical equivalent of daisy cutters on a few malnourished left-wing stragglers.’ Well, something’s changed in the last couple of years, and those left-wing stragglers are a lot less malnourished. Last weekend Michael Moore, the ‘well-known crank’ regarded with ‘considerable distaste’, had the Number One movie in North America. Okay, its weekend gross was $21 million, which sounds big, until you realise that the week before a dumb comedy called Dodgeball took $30 million without anybody even noticing. On the other hand, the business of Congress wasn’t put on hold because so many Democratic bigshots were attending the premiere of Dodgeball. That did happen with the premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, and when the movie was over it was all five-star raves. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa urged all Americans to see the film. Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, praised the film for raising ‘a lot of issues that Americans are talking about’ - i.e., is Bush in league with the bin Laden family? As those Iranian photographers remind us, this war can only be won abroad. And, as the rise of Michael Moore emphasises, it can only be lost at home.

For the Left, this film is a test to separate the wheat from the chaff, the honorable from the dishonorable, the serious from the unserious. In the Clinton years, conservatives needed to step away from the unsubstantiated videos that talked in conspiratorial tones about all of Clinton’s heinous secret crimes. To be taken seriously, every liberal today should criticize “Fahrenheit 9-11" as an affront to journalism and civil discourse.

Posted 7/1/2004 03:51:25 PM by Edward Driscoll
HUSSEIN'S THE THIN MAN: James Taranto notes it can be awfully difficult to tell Michael Moore and Saddam Hussein apart these days.

Posted 7/1/2004 03:42:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
HOLLYWOOD: NOT ANTI-WAR, merely on the other side, as Glenn would say.

Posted 7/1/2004 02:43:56 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT THE INTERNET WAS INVENTED FOR: "ImplosionWorld.com is pleased to bring you the finest in explosive cinematic adventures"!

Posted 7/1/2004 01:36:49 PM by Edward Driscoll
REMEMBER THE SCANDAL AN ATLANTA NEWSPAPER CAUSED IN 1946 when during the Nuremberg Trials, it ran a headline that said, "GOERING: 'THE REAL CRIMINAL IS TRUMAN!'"? Of course not--it never happened. But Will Collier (who's on a roll today!) notes:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution leads its homepage today with: "Saddam: The Real Criminal Is Bush." Yeah. That's the most important thing that happened in the courtroom. Mmm hmm.

Posted 7/1/2004 11:17:24 AM by Edward Driscoll
COMPARE AND CONTRAST: Will Collier of VodkaPundit links to both yesterday's interview by Tom Brokaw of Iraq's current prime minister and last year's Dan Rather interview with the fellow who routinely threw men into shredding machines, amputated their limbs, and ripped babies from their wives' wombs, and who kept a "violator of women's honor" on his payroll. Collier asks "which of the two Iraqis received the more respectful treatment" by the media? "Which one was softballed, and which one was challenged?"

Posted 7/1/2004 01:50:44 AM by Edward Driscoll
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The Clinton Administration: Just another set of marionettes for the Evil Neocon Puppetmasters!"--Glenn Reynolds, tongue firmly in cheek.

Posted 7/1/2004 01:40:18 AM by Edward Driscoll
"DAVID BROOKS, SWAMP THING": I've written at least a couple of times here that I think it's a good thing that David Brooks is writing for The New York Times and he continues to do a good job there. But Michelle Malkin notes that Brooks may have gone native since joining the Grey Lady. And as Malkin notes from past personal experience as the former token conservative at the Seattle Times, "no matter what their lips say, 'your people' inside the newsroom will never admire you as much as you proclaim to admire them."

Posted 7/1/2004 01:10:03 AM by Edward Driscoll
"THE ISRAELI PUPPETEER": Charles Johnson looks at Ralph Nader, anti-Semite.

Posted 6/30/2004 11:36:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE DESIRE NAMED STREETCAR: When I visited my parents in South Jersey this weekend, I noticed that NJ Transit's light rail system is finally operating in their area. ...and surprise, surprise, the cars and local station appeared virtually empty. Texas Public Policy Foundation looks at the impact of light rail on America's cities and does not like what it sees:

Out of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, 23 had rail transit in 2000. This study reviews those 23 regions and finds: • Half of all rail regions lost transit commuters during the 1990s; • Taken together, rail regions lost 14,000 transit commuters in the 1990s; • Meanwhile, bus-only regions gained nearly 53,000 transit commuters in the 1990s; • Transit lost market share of commuters in two-thirds of all rail regions in the 1990s; • Per capita transit rides declined in half the rail regions; • Transit’s share of total travel declined in a majority of rail regions; • Sixteen of the 20 urban areas with the fastest growing congestion are rail regions – and one of the other four is building rail transit; and • By comparison, only three of the 20 urban areas with the slowest growing congestion are rail regions – and only because all three have nearly zero population growth. Based on these and other criteria, including cost effectiveness, safety, energy, and land use, this paper constructs a Rail Livability Index that assesses the effects of rail transit on urban areas. Every rail region earned a negative score, suggesting rail reduces urban livability. Rail transit is not only expensive, it usually costs more to build and often costs more to operate than originally projected. To pay for cost overruns, transit agencies often must boost transit fares or cut transit service outside of rail corridors. Thus, rail transit tends to harm most transit users. Rail transit also harms most auto drivers. Most regions building rail transit expect to spend half to four-fifths of their transportation capital budgets on transit systems that carry 0.5 to 4 percent of passenger travel. This imbalanced funding makes it impossible to remove highway bottlenecks and leads to growing congestion. Rail’s high cost makes it ineffective at reducing congestion. On average, $13 spent on rail transit is less effective at reducing congestion than $1 spent on freeway improvements. Investments in rail transit are only about half as effective as investments in bus transit. Rail transit also tends to be more dangerous than other forms of travel. Interstate freeways cause 3.9 deaths per billion passenger miles. Accidents on urban roads and streets in general lead to about 6.8 deaths per billion passenger miles. Among the various forms of urban transit, buses, at 4.3 deaths per billion passenger miles, are the safest; heavy rail averages 5.0, commuter rail 11.3, and light rail 14.8.

Posted 6/30/2004 09:51:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
A TALE OF TWO MOVIES--AND 22 CRITICS: You can learn a lot about a movie critic by comparing how he reviewed Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ with what he wrote about Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. UPDATE: Make that 23: James Panero of The New Criterion looks at how Andrew Sullivan views the two films.

Posted 6/30/2004 09:41:33 PM by Edward Driscoll
BEST OF THE ED TODAY: James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today" column echoes something we wrote last week. Here's Taranto:

From where we sit, it appears that Democrats in 2004 are repeating the mistake Republicans made in 1996: assuming that the intensity of their own loathing for the incumbent means that loathing is widespread beyond the partisan base. We could be wrong, of course--our own political preferences no doubt color our views--but a party that consorts with the likes of anti-American filmmaker Michael Moore strikes us as more desperate than confident.

They're overplaying their hand, just like the over the top Wellstone funeral-cum-political orgy of 2002. They've hitched themselves to something which is likely to rebound very badly in their faces; but in the meantime, I hope a rope-a-dope strategy is in place by the White House, because without signs of the president fighting back, all of this can be brutal to watch. On the other hand, the staggering amount of overheated rhetoric doesn't sound at all like the FDR-style jaunty "happy days are here again" feeling of a party confident of victory in the fall.

Posted 6/30/2004 09:25:32 PM by Edward Driscoll
IF A TREE FALLS BUT THE WASHINGTON POST DOESN'T REPORT IT, does it make a sound? Paul Bremer gave a stirring speech before leaving Iraq on Monday--but you wouldn't know it if you read the Post, which reported, "There was no farewell address to the Iraqi people, no celebratory airport sendoff". Meanwhile, Tom Brokaw is helpfully schooling Iraq's new Prime Minister on the Saddam-al Qaida connection. As the Professor writes, "Why, oh, why, can't we have decent news media?"

Posted 6/30/2004 08:47:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
POWER LINE LOOKS AT Orwellian Maryland, where food stamp recipients don't actually get "stamps" anymore. Instead, they get a plastic card modeled on bank debit cards. Its name? The "Independence Card."

Posted 6/30/2004 05:43:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
BEATS DRAMAMINE ANY DAY: Set sail with Steve Green's Navy!

Posted 6/30/2004 05:33:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
M-AUDIO'S OMNI-STUDIO: Another review on Blogcritics, this time on a nifty soundcard for home musicians, complete with an audio file of a song I recorded using it.

Posted 6/30/2004 11:37:54 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE NEW MUSIC BUSINESS: I have a review of Robert Wolff's How To Make In the New Music Business on Blogcritics.

Posted 6/30/2004 12:52:49 AM by Edward Driscoll
IF IT'S TUESDAY, I MUST BE THE FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES: I just downloaded the 57 bazillion emails I received while I was away from a broadband connection for a couple of days. 56.5 bazillion of them were spam, but this one is a classic:

From your latest column: "One needs to point out that the pan-Arab media said nothing when the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad destroyed Hama and killed more than 10,000 of his own innocent people, or when Saddam Hussein used poison gas on Iraqis and created 300,000 anonymous graves." Guess which liberal ****sucker gave Saddam the gas along with anthrax, smallpox, and other bacterial cultures in '83-'84? (I can talk like this 'cause Cheney proved it in the Senate last week.) Donald Rumsfeld gave him the gas and germ cultures for the Reagan administration and admitted it before Congress in testimony last March. Look it up. The whole country is getting hip to neocon ***holes like you, Rummy, and Bush. Crowds are flocking to Fahrenheit 9/11 and recognizing the truth when visual evidence is shown to them. AND YOU CAN'T DO A THING ABOUT IT. The days of hysterical demagogue liars like you, Coulter, "Savage", the Limbaughs, Hannity, and the rest are coming to an end. These little piggies are going home. Bye-bye.

Posted 6/29/2004 11:59:47 PM by Edward Driscoll
BACK IN CALIFORNIA: Expect regular blogging to resume tomorrow (Wednesday).

Posted 6/26/2004 06:27:30 AM by Edward Driscoll
NOT YOUR FATHER'S--OR MOTHER'S--GOP: The Washington Times has long been the conservative answer to the more liberal Washington Post. And there's always interesting material in the Times' commentary page. Including, this weekend, several prominent Victoria's Secret ads! (Click refresh a couple of times if they don't immediately come up.) Not sure what that means (especially at this ungodly hour), but it's certainly an interesting sociological phenomenon. It does lend credence to one of P.J. O'Rourke's theories, though.

Posted 6/25/2004 10:53:47 PM by Edward Driscoll
MIAMI VICE MEETS MATHNET: Got a big drug deal coming up? Not sure of that complex kilos to ounces conversion ratio? Why not ask your math teacher! Joanne Jacobs in a post titled, "Why Math Matters", says "Police, who seized the cocaine from a school locker, said it was in two "bricks" weighing 0.468 and 0.506 kilograms. No word yet on how many ounces that is."

Posted 6/25/2004 09:27:38 PM by Edward Driscoll
FLASHBACK: Junk Yard Blog looks at a 90 minute town hall meeting at Ohio State in February of 1998 by three of President Clinton's top cabinet officials and finds all sorts of connections to present-day events.

Posted 6/25/2004 08:15:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT A LONG, STRANGE WEEK IT'S BEEN, huh? Between Fahrenheit 911 and its embrace by the "Coalition of Wild-Eyed": 98 percent of the Democratic Party--and 100 percent of Manhattan and Chicago's film critics; the return of Bill, Al, and Granny D; the birth of "the digital brown shirts"; the increasingly postmodern press, and the rest of the usual and sundry insanity, I'm exhausted. I may blog a little bit more tonight, but after that, blogging will be light until early next week, as I'll be visiting friends and relatives this weekend.

Posted 6/25/2004 04:49:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
ALSO A FAIR QUESTION: A commenter on The Brothers Judd Blog asks:

What I'd like to know is how does Moore get permission to use all those news clips and outtakes? Does he actually pay for the rights? If I tried to use that material for profit, I'd be inundated with lawyers waving "cease and desist" orders for my copyright violations long before I got to the screening stage. And are those new organizations really that willing to license their material, especially the stuff (like the makeup outtakes) that was never meant to be shown publicly?

Posted 6/25/2004 03:56:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
A FAIR QUESTION: Daniel Henniger wants to know if John Kerry thinks it's evil to behead innocent men.

Posted 6/25/2004 02:59:45 PM by Edward Driscoll
LUCASFILM RELEASE FINAL ARTWORK FOR STAR WARS DVDs: Is it just me, or do these boxtops look incredibly garish and ugly? Why couldn't Lucas have simply used the original posters for the films, instead of relegating them to the tops of the discs themselves? Or simply have the great Ralph McQuarrie draw up some new artwork?

Posted 6/25/2004 02:20:37 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE MILLION DOLLAR GUITAR: Eric Clapton's "Blackie", the Fender Stratocaster that accompanied him at countless live shows from the early-'70s to the mid-'80s, went for a record $959,500 at auction yesterday. We first previously mentioned the auction at the beginning of the month. We were only slightly off in what we thought it would fetch...

Posted 6/25/2004 01:52:38 PM by Edward Driscoll
YEAR THREE: Victor Davis Hanson has some thoughts on where we stand in the war on terror:

Right after 9/11, some of us thought it was impossible for leftist critics to undermine a war against fascists who were sexist, fundamentalist, homophobic, racist, ethnocentric, intolerant of diversity, mass murderers of Kurds and Arabs, and who had the blood of 3,000 Americans on their hands. We were dead wrong. In fact, they did just that. Abu Ghraib is on the front pages daily. Stories of thousands of American soldiers in combat against terrorist killers from the Hindu Kush to Fallujah do not merit the D section. Senator Kennedy's two years of insane outbursts should have earned him formal censure rather than a commemoration from the Democratic establishment. What a litany of distractions! Words — preemption," "unilateralism," "hegemony," — whiz by and lose all meaning. Names — "Halliburton," "Chalabi," "INC" — become little more than red meat. Vocabulary is turned upside down: "Contractors," who at great risk restore power and water to the poor, are now little more than "profiteers" and "opportunists"; killers are not even "terrorists" but mere "militants." "Neo-cons" are wild-eyed extremists; "realists" are no longer cynics — inclined to let thousands die abroad unless the chaos interrupts transit of oil or food — but rather "sober" and "circumspect," and more likely Kerry supporters. A depressing array of transitory personalities parades before our screen, entering stage left to grab 15 minutes of notoriety for their scripted invective, only to exit on the right into oblivion. Who can remember all these one-tell-all-book, one-weekend-on-the-Sunday-news-programs personalities — a Hans Blix, Scott Ritter, Howard Dean, Paul O'Neil, Joe Wilson, Richard Clark, or Richard ben Veniste? In between their appearances on Sunday morning television or 60 Minutes, a few D.C. functionaries are carted out for periodic shouting — an unhinged Al Gore, a puffed-up Ted Kennedy, a faux-serious Bob Kerry, and occasionally a Senator Byrd or Hollings. And since the very day after 9/11 we've gotten the Vietnam-era retreads — a Peter Arnett, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Robert Scheer, John Dean, or Seymour Hersh — tottering out with the latest conspiracies about the old bogeymen and "higher-ups." We are winning the military war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorists are on the run. And slowly, even ineptly, we are achieving our political goals of democratic reform in once-awful places. Thirty years of genocide, vast forced transfers of whole peoples, the desecration of entire landscapes, a ruined infrastructure, and a brutalized and demoralized civilian psyche are being remedied, often under fire. All this and more has been achieved at the price of political turmoil, deep divisions in the West — here and abroad — and the emergence of a strong minority, led by mostly elites, who simply wish it all to fail.

Posted 6/25/2004 12:52:05 PM by Edward Driscoll

Posted 6/25/2004 12:39:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
OH, THOSE WMDS: 10 or 12 sarin and mustard gas shells have been found in various locations in Iraq.

Posted 6/25/2004 12:33:07 PM by Edward Driscoll
DEMOCRAT ZELL MILLER TO SPEAK AT GOP CONVENTION: He's retiring in January, so he's got nothing to lose.

Posted 6/25/2004 01:16:47 AM by Edward Driscoll
SPOKANE GETS 100 BLOCKS OF WIRELESS INTERNET: Look to see more and more large scale Wi-Fi applications, something we've been writing about since this site's early days.

Posted 6/25/2004 12:22:42 AM by Edward Driscoll
NEW FOR 1974! IT'S THE CLOCKWORK ORANGE COLLECTION! "Welcome to Eurobad '74, an exhibition of Europe's worst interiors of 1974", the introductory page says, and it's certainly tough to argue with that. Every room looks like a set from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick's dystopian classic. Viddy well, little brothers! Viddy well! (Via Blackfive.)

Posted 6/25/2004 12:09:30 AM by Edward Driscoll
WELL, YES, I CAN, ACTUALLY: Andrew Sullivan asks, "Can you wait for Roger Ebert's review of Fahrenheit 9/11?" It's now online. Keep Ebert's stated biases in mind when reading it.

Posted 6/24/2004 10:58:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE CRACK-UP CONTINUES: After years of complaining that Strom Thurmond was too old to function in the Senate, the Democrats have found a nonagenarian of their own: the infamous Granny D. As the Resurrection Song Weblog notes, "Things aren't perfect in my camp, I'll be the first to admit. But can't the Democrats do better than John Kerry, Al Sharpton, Michael Moore, and Granny D?" Also, I thought Democrats were supposed to appeal to the young--you know, the "Rock The Vote" crowd. But it's party whose leading lights include 86-year old Robert Byrd, 80 year old Frank Lautenberg, and now, entering the picture, 96-year old Granny D.

Posted 6/24/2004 10:31:41 PM by Edward Driscoll
FROM THE MAN WHO MADE ME BATMAN: Eugene Volokh, Porn Star.

Posted 6/24/2004 06:42:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
"TENS OF THOUSANDS OF READERS HAVE DESERTED [England's] Daily Mirror because its Iraqi torture pictures were exposed as a fake, the newspaper’s owner admitted yesterday." Gee, what a surprise. UPDATE: As is this.

Posted 6/24/2004 03:46:22 PM by Edward Driscoll
WELL NOW WE KNOW: Yesterday, I wrote:

At what point do we start coming up for names for what the left is doing now? To paraphrase President Clinton, it's not a conspiracy; it's right out in the open: the constant hammering of President Bush by the press (who ignore their own reporting on Iraq during the Clinton years), the outbursts in the Senate by disgruntled leftwingers like Ted Kennedy, Tom Harkin, and Frank Lautenberg; Michael Moore's film and now this...[This being the backing of Fahrenheit 911 by the chairman of the DNC and other high ranking Democrats.]

Bush Camp Hits Democrats' 'Coalition of Wild-Eyed' WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush's re-election campaign lumped together vocal outbursts by Democrats Al Gore, Howard Dean and others on Thursday and called them part of John Kerry's "Coalition of the Wild-Eyed." The Bush-Cheney campaign released a video on its Web Site that played up some of the more strident statements Democrats have made on the campaign trail and declared: "This is not a time for pessimism and rage." The implication the Bush campaign appeared to be trying to leave was that some of the main boosters of Kerry's presidential campaign are filled with rage and perhaps a bit kooky. "Today, our campaign is releasing a web video to 6 million of our supporters to show them what we're up against and what we're up against is John Kerry's 'coalition of the wild-eyed,"' said Bush campaign manager Ken Melhman.

Posted 6/24/2004 03:38:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
CONGRATS TO TECHNICAL SGT. STRYKER, now with extra stripes on his sleeves!

Posted 6/24/2004 01:57:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
FLASHBACK: In April of 2003, we wrote:

KEEPING THE BACK BENCH WARM: Back in the 1970s, "me too Republicans" in Congress ensured that their party would stay on the back bench for many years, by offering little in the way of new ideas. Rather, they'd look at the welfare and social spending by the Democrats and talk about how expensive it was, and that the fat should be cut out of it...[Nancy] Pelosi is the House Minority Leader--and looks to continue to keep her party in the minority.

Posted 6/24/2004 01:00:38 PM by Edward Driscoll
SELLING ITEMS ON EBAY? Snopes has some important advice to heed before photographing them.

Posted 6/24/2004 12:19:48 PM by Edward Driscoll
FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN HOT SPRINGS, ARKANSAS: David Letterman's "Top Ten Things Overheard in Line at the Clinton Book Signing". Actually, I'm kind of surprised that "Greg Packer! Not you again, man!" isn't on the list.

Posted 6/24/2004 12:07:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
ROGER & ME REDUX: Pauline Kael was among the first critics perceptive enough to spot what a huckster Michael Moore is (unlike Rex Reed), and her 1989 review of the film has been reprinted here. Back when I was a film junky, I also remember reading an article in England's Sight and Sound magazine (hardly a bastion of conservativism) that exposed many of the lies in that film as well, which put Moore on the map. Not the least of which was the film's premise: Moore wore a silly cardboard cartoon "PRESS" badge whenever he visited GM, thus ensuring that he'd never meet with Roger Smith--because if he did, there'd be no movie. (Via Terry Teachout.)

Posted 6/24/2004 11:05:49 AM by Edward Driscoll
GREAT MOMENTS IN PRESIDENTAL HISTORY, as spotted by Joshua Claybourn.

Posted 6/24/2004 10:51:54 AM by Edward Driscoll
BILL HOBBS HAS AN EXCLUSIVE: "Torture at Guantanamo? I've got proof", Hobbs claims, adding:

a source deep within the Pentagon has sent me the previously classified transcript of a secret video tape of an actual interrogation session involving both men and women. The partial transcript is unclear as to time, date and full identies of all those involved.

Posted 6/24/2004 10:39:25 AM by Edward Driscoll
THAT '70S SHOW: Tim Blair spots John Kerry slumming with a once-popular author whose career peaked in the mid-'70s, not coincidentally because his talent has become ravaged by heavy pharmaceutical excess. He's now known primarily known as a leading Holocaust denier. Why do I expect Kerry to appear at his next campaign stop wearing John Travolta's white polyester suit from Saturday Night Fever--or worse--maybe a lime green leisure suit?

Posted 6/24/2004 01:31:55 AM by Edward Driscoll
"NEWSPAPERS BITE", writes journalist Kathleen Parker, who says they're looking for love in wrong places:

Let me be blunt. Newspapers bite. The work isn't much fun anymore, thanks to the soul-snatching corporate culture that has euthanized newsroom personalities. Most papers reflect that numbers-crunching, cubicle-hunkering mentality. We're boring, predictable, staid and out of touch with the folks with quarters. Nobody rushes to the rack anymore to see what the paper's great voices have to say because there aren't many great voices left. Meanwhile, half the nation's editorial cartoonists - Doug Marlette's "designated feelers" - have disappeared from editorial pages, leaving holes where hearts used to beat. With television offering headlines - and Internet blogs offering inspired commentary - why do people want to get their hands dirty reading stale stories that fail to ring the chime of truth? Declining reader confidence isn't just about high-profile scandals such as the Jayson Blair/New York Times and Jack Kelley/USA Today debacles. Distrust is also tied to the reality "disconnect" between those who produce newspapers and those who read them. Yes, the media tilt left and the Earth is round. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center that has journalists debating themselves reports that the elite media are far more liberal than the public ("Ordinary Americans," as the elites like to call you). While 34 percent of journalists self-identify as liberal, only 20 percent of Ordinary Americans do. Only 7 percent of journalists consider themselves conservative, compared with 33 percent of the public. Even those figures may be misleading, as a large majority of journalists consider themselves moderate. You be the judge.

Posted 6/24/2004 01:27:17 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE PRESS MISFIRES: Paul Greenberg writes, "Once again strawmen are strewn about everywhere as the major media all agree a claim the Bush administration never made now has been refuted." Meanwhile, David Limbaugh says that The New York Times owes President Bush an apology. Only one?

Posted 6/24/2004 01:21:55 AM by Edward Driscoll
A REFRESHING CHANGE: Colorado Republican Senate hopeful Pete Coors urges lowing the drinking age from 21 to 18:

"We got along fine for years with the 18-year-old drinking age," the former CEO of the Coors Brewing Co. told an audience of about 200 people at a candidates' debate here. "We're criminalizing our young people."

Posted 6/23/2004 11:10:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
INSERT FISH INTO BARREL. NOW AIM: Rex Reed reviews Fahrenheit 911. James Lileks rebuts. Screedy fun ensues.

Posted 6/23/2004 10:19:33 PM by Edward Driscoll
"STAY QUIET AND YOU'LL BE OK": Robert Spencer suggests a new slogan for the anti-war militant left and the press. (Sadly increasingly indistinguishable these days.) As William McGowan noted in Coloring The News, by drinking the PC Kool-Aid in the late 1980s, the press pretty much assured that this would be their tone. In their fear to not offend anybody--save for, as "Pinch" Sulzberger was quoted as saying, "white, heterosexual males"--they've also completely lost their moral compass. What's interesting though, as a commenter on Charles Johnson's site noted, is that since this tactic has alienated much of the American public (based on the latest Pew Report), their primary readers are increasingly, exclusively the left. And they either had to have seen this coming, or be clueless as to the unintended consequences of the direction that they set out in. So as not alienate their remaining readers, it becomes increasingly more important to keep them in the liberal cocoon. And the cocoon narrows that much more--on both the readers and the press. But hey, stay quiet, and you'll be OK! For somebody the left considers a dummy, this guy is sure on to something. (Found via Little Green Footballs.)

Posted 6/23/2004 09:38:34 PM by Edward Driscoll
HAWKISH CLOTHES ITCH DOVES: Jonah Goldberg writes:

Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic (and a friend of mine), has been complaining for a very long time that conservatives haven't shown the sort of introspection liberals have in the wake of the White House's missteps. After all, conservatives historically have looked skeptically on pie-in-the-sky Wilsonian adventures abroad -- and especially on the notion that the Pentagon has some sort of Easy Bake Oven nation-building set that can whip up democratic societies overnight. Now it is the liberals and leftists who sound like Kissingerian foreign policy realists, making allowances for barbaric regimes and ridiculing conservatives who needlessly demonized Saddam. But Saddam was a demon. Since we've been in Iraq, we've confirmed that he killed more than 300,000 Shiites after 1991 alone. We've found up to 30,000 in a single grave. Forty thousand "marsh Arabs" were murdered and their lands drained. We didn't need to confirm what happened to the Kurds. It's also worth recalling the reason we were in a de facto state of war with Saddam long before the actual war: It was to keep Saddam from doing these sorts of things to Kurds and Shiites again (never mind the Kuwaitis). The no-fly zones, the laughably and tragically inept sanctions regime -- which was making Saddam stronger and French and UN bureaucrats richer -- the various cruise missile attacks: These were all acts of war necessary to "keep Saddam in his box." And that whole system was falling apart. Bush faced a choice: Let Saddam out of his box or get rid of him. The former would make Saddam a hero, lower the price for defying America and further solidify the law of the jackboot in the Arab world. After 9/11 Bush felt he had no choice at all. We had to force changes in the Arab world before the Arab world forced worse things on us. Removing Saddam has had unforeseeable bad consequences, as well as some foreseeable ones. But it seems to me that liberals who now think we shouldn't have done it, solely because we didn't do it "just right," are falling prey to their own historic pie-in-the-skyism. There is no "just right" way to do things like this. If there were, we would have toppled Saddam with nerf bats.

Posted 6/23/2004 06:31:39 PM by Edward Driscoll
DURING ONE HIS MANY INTERVIEWS THIS PAST WEEK (I think during the BBC interview), President Clinton was asked about "the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy", and he said something along the lines of "I think it was wrong of Hillary to refer to it as a conspiracy. It was a very big machine, but it was right out in the open." At what point do we start coming up for names for what the left is doing now? To paraphrase President Clinton, it's not a conspiracy; it's right out in the open: the constant hammering of President Bush by the press (who ignore their own reporting on Iraq during the Clinton years), the outbursts in the Senate by disgruntled leftwingers like Ted Kennedy, Tom Harkin, and Frank Lautenberg; Michael Moore's film; and now this:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Cheered by supporters, Michael Moore previewed his Bush-bashing documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," before a mostly Democratic audience in the nation's capital Wednesday night. Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe said he thought the film would play an important role in this election year. "This movie raises a lot of the issues that Americans are talking about, that George Bush has been asleep at the switch since he's been president," McAuliffe said as he walked the red carpet into the premiere. Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa implored all Americans to see the film: "It's important for the American people to understand what has gone on before, what led us to this point, and to see it sort of in this unvarnished presentation by Michael Moore."

Posted 6/23/2004 02:20:46 PM by Edward Driscoll
AXIS OF STUPIDITY: Charles Johnson writes, "I’ll bet there were some dropped jaws in BBC boardrooms at the results of this Glasgow University study, which somehow, against all odds and evidence, found that the BBC favors Israel in its reporting. "I didn’t think it possible", Johnson adds, "but I believe we’ve found someone even more anti-Israel than the Beeb".

Posted 6/23/2004 01:52:56 PM by Edward Driscoll
A COOL AND LOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE BICYCLE MENACE: Just found out one of my favorite P.J. O'Rourke essays is online.

Posted 6/23/2004 12:37:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR TOM: Scott Ott "reports" that SpaceShipOne pilot glimpsed "Edge of Clinton Book Hype". And so did Matt Drudge, who currently has a long list of headlines from local book sellers reporting less than brisk sales. Meanwhile, RatherBiased explores the CBS-Amazon partnership. Sadly, Greg Packer could not be reached for comment.

Posted 6/23/2004 11:32:47 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE LOST PATRIOTS OF HOLLYWOOD: Michelle Malkin picks up a theme we've discussed several times, perhaps most memorably here.

Posted 6/23/2004 01:10:29 AM by Edward Driscoll
IN THE MODERN POLITICAL ERA, it's all about the sound bite. Crafting a phrase that instantly captures your goals, your style, your elan:

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!"

"A kinder and gentler America."

"I feel your pain."

"The soft bigotry of low expectations."

Posted 6/23/2004 12:19:46 AM by Edward Driscoll
"HOW CAN HE DO THAT--IT'S NOT PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE!" "IN NEW JERSEY ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN!" was a gag line in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo about the always strange doings in my home state. And as Darren Copeland, the Colorado Conservative writes, it's about to commit fiscal suicide, raising taxes for those New Jersey residents earning more than $500,000 each year. "I wonder how many of those households remain in New Jersey if this tax is implemented", Darren writes. "If I were one of those people, I would be moving, and leaving New Jersey high and dry". A fair chunk will do just that, as the Laffer Curve remains inviolable. (Incidentally, Darren, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at last month's Colorado Blogger Bash, has lots more good stuff on his blog.) UPDATE: Not surprisingly, The Wall Street Journal has some thoughts.

Posted 6/22/2004 10:32:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
MORE ON PUNITIVE LIBERALISM, from Roger Kimball of The New Criterion.

Posted 6/22/2004 09:51:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
LIKE THE MAN SAYS...Heh.

Posted 6/22/2004 08:58:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
TWO MORE NEWS SOURCES EXPOSE THE SADDAM-BIN LADEN CONNECTION: CNN and The Guardian. Oh wait, just like Newsweek, NPR and The New York Times, those stories ran in the late '90s. As Glenn Reynolds writes, "No doubt this was a preemptive fiction on the part of the not-yet-nominated Bush Administration". It was! After all, CBS told me that President Bush was in office back in '98.

Posted 6/22/2004 08:27:24 PM by Edward Driscoll
CLINTON'S BBC INTERVIEW: Here's the full clip of the interview that Drudge has been flogging, which is an hour long. The sparks (and finger-pointing) occur at about 28 minutes in; it's hilarious watching President Clinton verbally beating up on a man from the BBC(!) about "wanting to help the far right". Although the warm-up, where Clinton blames the politics of Watergate for leading to this, is fun. Gee Bill, which party created the politics of Watergate to bring down a sitting president? On the other hand, it's pretty staggering that Clinton has to go to the BBC to escape what Mickey Kaus calls "the liberal cocoon"--the mass of reporters in America who prop up, and refuse to ask politicians on the left tough questions. (Via "The Corner". Real Player required to via video.)

Posted 6/22/2004 04:53:35 PM by Edward Driscoll
A MATTER OF FAITH: David Brooks points out something that Rod Dreher wrote about last year: that just as Republicans became the party of religion, the Democrats have become the party of the Godless. As Brooks writes:

More than any other leading Democrat, Bill Clinton understands the role religion actually plays in modern politics. He knows Americans want to be able to see their leaders' faith. A recent Pew survey showed that for every American who thinks politicians should talk less about religion, there are two Americans who believe politicians should talk more. And Clinton seems to understand, as many Democrats do not, that a politician's faith isn't just about litmus test issues like abortion or gay marriage. Many people just want to know that their leader, like them, is in the fellowship of believers. Their president doesn't have to be a saint, but he does have to be a pilgrim. He does have to be engaged, as they are, in a personal voyage toward God. Clinton made this sort of faith-based connection, at least until he sullied himself with the Lewinsky affair. He won the evangelical vote in 1992, and won it again in 1996. He understood that if Democrats are not seen as religious, they will be seen as secular Ivy League liberals, and they will lose. John Kerry doesn't seem to get this. Many of the people running the Democratic Party don't get it either.

True story: I once proposed a column on some now-forgotten religious theme to the man who was at the time the city editor of the New York Post. He looked at me like I'd lost my mind. "This is not a religious city," he said, with a straight face. As it happened, the man lived in my neighborhood. To walk to the subway every morning, he had to pass in front of or close to two Catholic churches, an Episcopal church, a synagogue, a mosque, an Assemblies of God Hispanic parish, and an Iglesia Bautista Hispana. Yet this man did not see those places because he does not know anyone who attends them. It's not that this editor despises religion; it's that he's too parochial (pardon the pun) to see what's right in front of him. There's a lot of truth in that old line attributed to the New Yorker's Pauline Kael, who supposedly remarked, in all sincerity, "I don't understand how Nixon won; I don't know a soul who voted for him."

Posted 6/22/2004 04:40:17 PM by Edward Driscoll
"SAVE THE PLANET. JUMP IN YOUR CAR!" Glenn Reynolds and Reason have great posts on a recent study which indicates, as Roger Ford of Modern Railways magazine says, "a family of four going by car is about as environmentally friendly as you can get", especially when compared to today's trains. Maybe that's why Syd Mead told me that:

"Mass transit" is purely an academic term. With half the world's populations living in cities by 2050, owning a private automobile becomes a default response to the imperfect and often inconvenient availability of so-called "mass transit" mobility.

Posted 6/22/2004 02:58:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE to go to the book store: Greg Packer is back, and being quoted in (where else) The New York Times.

Posted 6/22/2004 02:28:53 PM by Edward Driscoll
SANTANA PLAYS THE RACE CARD, after the death of legendary jazz drummer Elvin Jones last month, in an article in the San Diego Union Tribune:

A hippie at heart, Carlos Santana has long championed music as a potent force for creating positive vibrations that – as this veteran of the 1969 Woodstock festival puts it – "can change your molecular structure." But the legendary rocker sounded uncharacteristically angry during a discussion about the recent death of one of his musical heroes, jazz drum icon Elvin Jones, who died May 18 of heart failure. Santana, who will be honored in Los Angeles as the 2004 Latin Recording Academy Person of the Year on Aug. 30, is incensed that Jones' death elicited scant media coverage. He expressed his frustration during a recent interview from his San Rafael office. "I'm really embarrassed for this nation, and for MTV and VH1 and Rolling Stone, because it was a very racist thing not to acknowledge this most important musician when he passed," said Santana, whose 1999 album, "Supernatural," won nine Grammys and has sold more than 25 million copies. "For them to (play up) Ozzy Osbourne and other corny-ass white people, but not Elvin, is demeaning and I'm really embarrassed to live in this country." * * * The reason for the slight, Santana believes, is a matter of racial and cultural prejudice. "When Miles (Davis) died (in 1991), for four hours in France they stopped everything on TV and radio – all the regular programming – and just showed Miles for four hours, all through France," Santana recalled. "Here in the U.S., it's embarrassing (how jazz is treated). People should be ashamed of themselves."

Posted 6/22/2004 01:13:22 PM by Edward Driscoll
SPACESHIP ONE: When it comes to space, I'm strictly a layman. But this article appears to me to be a somewhat decent first look at SpaceShip One's flight yesterday. But its level of cynicism doesn't help matters. It's written as if only the federal government's contributions to space research count. The headline makes it sound like the flight was a giant Estes model rocket launch. Was the Wright Brothers' flight a giant leap for paper airplane builders? And these equally cynical paragraphs don't help matters:

In many ways, the moment is more Wild West than Wilbur Wright, opening a new frontier for the geniuses and thrill seekers, businessmen and hucksters who have long followed pioneers to new lands and new markets. "It's like the opening of the West," says Howard McCurdy, a spaceflight historian at American University in Washington. "Entrepreneurs followed in the wake of the oft government-funded explorers. There were a lot of characters and a lot of innovation."

Posted 6/22/2004 01:06:25 PM by Edward Driscoll
LATEST ELECTRONIC HOUSE NEWSLETTER ONLINE: For three decades, X10 has been the home automation language, making it possible to buy compatible products in stores like Radio Shack and Home Depot. But it's definitely getting long in the tooth. My latest Electronic House newsletter asks if a potential successor has been found.

Posted 6/22/2004 12:54:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
ENEMIES TOGETHER: Robert L. Pollock writes, "Clinton was right: Saddam and al Qaeda had numerous connections". Heck, you could read about some of them in the news--back in the late '90s.

Posted 6/22/2004 11:37:33 AM by Edward Driscoll
ROGER SIMON ON FAHRENHEIT 911:

Now I know I will be criticized for making this statement without seeing the film (perhaps fairly). But I did see the trailer the other night and what is being emphasized in the advertisement is that the documentary reveals the shocking news that Bush helped the Bin Laden family leave America immediately after 9/11. Now Hitchens, of course, shows how this is a bald-faced lie. Bush critic Richard Clarke has acknowledged his sole responsibility for that. (I blogged about this a few weeks ago.) It seems to invalidate the entire film without having to go further. It will be interesting to see how the critics respond. Don't look for the Cannes Film Festival to rescind the Palme d'Or. After all, Quentin Tarantino informed us that his jury had awarded the film the prize "for aesthetic reasons."

Posted 6/22/2004 12:39:39 AM by Edward Driscoll
PUNITIVE LIBERALISM: I'd say that a meme is born, except that I've long been aware of this condition (and you probably have been as well). But now it has a name.

Posted 6/21/2004 10:02:35 PM by Edward Driscoll
NOTE TO SELF: Don't make Christopher Hitchens angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry. And I'll bet the Incredible Bulk himself, Michael Moore, really hates Hitch today:

A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history. If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.

Posted 6/21/2004 04:33:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
MR. PRESIDENT, WE CANNOT AFFORD A PRIVATELY FUNDED SPACECRAFT GAP! Steve Schmidt, Bush-Cheney '04 Spokesman notes some bad timing on Senator Kerry's part today:

Only John Kerry would declare the country to be in scientific decline on a day when the country’s first privately funded space trip is successfully completed. America is the world leader in patents, research and development and Nobel prizes, and the President's budget raises federal research and development funding to $132 billion for 2005, a 44 percent increase since taking office.

Posted 6/21/2004 02:32:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
I GUESS THIS IS A SLIM MAJORITY, TOO: Seven in 10 rate President Reagan over President Clinton. Seven of Nine could not be reached for comment. (You had to throw that in there, didn't you?--Ed. But of course!)

Posted 6/21/2004 02:27:02 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE NEW MATH: At the Detroit News, 64 percent is a "slim majority".

Posted 6/21/2004 02:19:17 PM by Edward Driscoll
CNS NEWS REPORTS THAT the left-liberal Media Maters Website is discrediting the Clinton book reviewer at the New York Times. That reviewer is Michiko Kakutami. Michelle Malkin limns her, here.

Posted 6/21/2004 02:15:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
COULD NADER'S VP PIC shore up his standing with the Green Party?

Posted 6/21/2004 12:14:33 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE END OF POWER: Niall Ferguson writes that without an American hegemony, the world would likely return to the dark ages. Meanwhile, James Lileks notes, "I ask my Democrat friends what they’d rather see happen – Bush reelected and bin Laden caught, or Bush defeated and bin Laden still in the wind. They’re all honest: they’d rather see Bush defeated." UPDATE: And meanwhile, a Federal judge is comparing Bush to Mussolini and his wife is protesting Bush "on behalf of herself and her husband".

Posted 6/20/2004 06:36:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES: George Will looks at the nifty new book by Lynee Truss. As soon as my wife is done with it, I really should read it. We live in an age where, thanks to the Internet, the written word has never been more ubiquitous. And yet paradoxically, as Will notes, the vast majority of people online have an appalling lack of knowledge of proper spelling and punctuation:

The connection between the words "punctilious,'' which means "attentive to formality or etiquette,'' and "punctuation'' is instructive. Careful punctuation expresses a writer's solicitude for the reader. Of course punctuation, like most other forms of good manners, may yet entirely disappear, another victim of progress, this time in the form of e-mail, cell-phone text messages and the like. Neither the elegant semicolon nor the dashing dash is of use to people whose preferred literary style is "CU B4 8?'' and whose idea of Edwardian prolixity is: "Saw Jim -- he looks gr8 -- have you seen him -- what time is the thing 2morrow.'' Oh, for the era when a journalist telephoned from Moscow to London to add a semicolon to his story!

Posted 6/20/2004 04:21:45 PM by Edward Driscoll
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The 9/11 Commission: Rehabilitating the reputation of The Warren Commission with every passing week."--Hugh Hewitt

Posted 6/19/2004 06:24:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
ALIEN VERSUS PREDATOR: You played the video game. Now go see the movie! (Or don't. Because it looks incredibly silly. And no sign of Sigourney Weaver stripping down to her undies either, even though she still looked pretty darn good on that Esquire cover a couple of years ago. So really, why even bother?) (Found via Murdoc Online.)

Posted 6/19/2004 04:14:33 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHY DAVID BROOKS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES IS A VERY GOOD THING: Think this detail about John Kerry would have gotten in there otherwise?

Earlier this month, Andres Oppenheimer of The Miami Herald asked John Kerry what he thought of something called the Varela Project. Kerry said it was "counterproductive." It's necessary to try other approaches, he added. The Varela Project happens to be one of the most inspiring democracy movements in the world today. It is being led by a Cuban dissident named Oswaldo Payá, who has spent his life trying to topple Castro's regime. Payá realized early on that the dictatorship would never be overthrown by a direct Bay of Pigs-style military assault, but it could be undermined by a peaceful grass-roots movement of Christian democrats, modeling themselves on Martin Luther King Jr. As a young man, Payá founded a magazine called People of God, but it was shut down. He criticized the Soviet Union and was thrown into a work camp. He was given a chance to escape Cuba, but refused. Then in the mid-1990's, he and other dissidents exploited a loophole in the Cuban Constitution that allows ordinary citizens to propose legislation if they can gather 10,000 signatures on a petition. They began a petition drive to call for a national plebiscite on five basic human rights: free speech, free elections, freedom to worship, freedom to start businesses, and the freeing of political prisoners. This drive, the Varela Project, quickly amassed the 10,000 signatures, and more. Jimmy Carter lauded the project on Cuban television. The European Union gave Payá its Sakharov Prize for human rights. Then came Castro's crackdown. Though it didn't dare touch Payá, the regime arrested 75 other dissidents and sentenced each of them to up to 28 years in jail. This week Payá issued a desperate call for international attention and solidarity because the hunt for dissidents continues. John Kerry's view? As he told Oppenheimer, the Varela Project "has gotten a lot of people in trouble . . . and it brought down the hammer in a way that I think wound up being counterproductive." Imagine if you are a Cuban political prisoner rotting in a jail, and you learn that the leader of the oldest democratic party in the world thinks you're being counterproductive. Kerry's comment is a harpoon directed at the morale of Cuba's dissidents. Imagine sitting in Castro's secret police headquarters and reading that statement. The lesson you draw is that crackdowns work. Throw some dissidents in jail, and the man who might be president of the United States will blame the democrats for being provocative. Imagine if in the 1980's Ronald Reagan had called Andrei Sakharov or Natan Sharansky or Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel "counterproductive" because, after all, what they did spawned crackdowns, too. If there's anything we've learned over the past 20 years it is the power of moral suasion to buck up dissidents and undermine tyrannical regimes. And yet Kerry seems to have decided that other priorities come first.

Posted 6/19/2004 03:13:32 PM by Edward Driscoll
TEN SIMPLE RULES FOR DATING MY DAUGHTER: I rather like number three, myself.

Posted 6/19/2004 01:33:26 PM by Edward Driscoll
MYSTERIOUS WAYS DEPARTMENT: Charlotte Allen writes, "I admit it: I laughed, not cried, when I read that most of advertising magnate Charles Saatchi’s famous collection of "transgressive" art got burnt to a transgressive crisp in a London warehouse fire a few weeks ago":

One of the artworks destroyed in the Saatchi fire turned out to have been Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary. That was the elephant dung-splattered, female-buttocks-and-genitalia-surrounded painting of the Madonna that was part of the "Sensations" show of Saatchi-owned art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. As might be expected, New York City’s substantial Catholic population was incensed that a tax-supported museum was using their money to pay for what they considered to be a three-way combination of blasphemy, scatology, and pornography. Then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani threatened to pull the museum’s $7 million grant from the city. A lawsuit followed, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the rest of the usual suspects--but it would seem that the final justice rendered might have been divine, for most of the "Sensations" show perished in the recent fire. What I loved about the Holy Virgin Mary flap was the tidal wave of pretentious blather it induced from the intelligentsia, who cast themselves as usual, as defenders of free speech and great art from the mindless, puritanical mob.

Posted 6/18/2004 03:53:39 PM by Edward Driscoll
TARANTO'S ON A ROLL TODAY: Just click here and keep scrolling. And be sure to note the update to this story from yesterday--it's a doozy.

Posted 6/18/2004 02:36:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
AL QAEDA BEHEADS AMERICAN PAUL JOHNSON: Outside the Beltway has numerous links. And be sure to check out these two posts by Andy McCarthy.

Posted 6/18/2004 02:08:45 PM by Edward Driscoll
PRAGER WAS RIGHT: The more I think about it, the more this quote by Dennis Prager hits home:

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

In the "new" "enlightened" approach to history, you don't study historical events in order to learn the consequences and results of certain kinds of decisions and policies. History is a source of lessons, but you don't study history and derive lessons from past events. The lesson comes first. The conclusion is already known. You study history to find justifications for that lesson, but you already know the lesson is right before you begin that study. If history doesn't actually give you the justification you require, then you modify it as needed so that it does. That may mean you ignore some of it and emphasize other parts, or it may require you to rewrite it so that it happens the way it should have happened. This is a fundamentally teleological approach to history, in which the esthetic beauty of a conclusion, and the fact that we strongly want it to be true, are more important than whether it is empirically correct. If not, then the universe must change, because the mind and the concept are the most fundamental realities of all.

Posted 6/18/2004 02:04:13 PM by Edward Driscoll
NEW YORK TIMES DISCOVERS SADDAM-BIN LADEN CONNECTION: Set the wayback machine to 1998, Mr. Judd!

Posted 6/18/2004 12:44:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
HUGH HEWITT ON THE LA TIMES and their omission of the new (favorable to President Bush) polling numbers: "If the facts don't fit, you must omit". That works equally for their counterpart on the other side of the country. Paging Mr. Goldberg. Mr. Bernard Goldberg to the red courtesy phone. UPDATE: And even if you don't omit it, if the truth doesn't fit, don't bother putting it in the headlines. Note the headline at AP has for this story:

ASTANA, Kazakhstan - Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday his government warned Washington that Saddam Hussein's regime was preparing attacks in the United States and its interests abroad — an assertion that appears to bolster President Bush's contention that Iraq was a threat.

The Left: The war on Iraq is a disaster! The world hates us! You did it unilaterally! You should have gotten Russia on board. You should have gotten Putin to support a U.N. resolution. The support of Russia would show this isn't just America being imperialist, but the whole unified world coming together to face Saddam. The Right: Well, Putin says Saddam was going to attack us with terrorists. The Left: Well, who the hell trusts Putin and the Russians?

Posted 6/18/2004 12:16:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
KAFKA SAYS GIBSON TOP CELEBRITY: Peter Kafka of Forbes, that is:

Hollywood turned its back on his bloody Bible flick, a cross that Mel was only too happy to carry himself. With The Passion of the Christ bringing in more than $600 million at the box office, he is likely to make at least $150 million more in the next year. Mel made the top 10 in every category we measured this year: money, magazine covers, press clippings, Web presence, TV/radio hits.

Posted 6/18/2004 11:54:04 AM by Edward Driscoll
TERMINAL LOGIC: Over at National Review Online, Megan Basham reviews Spielberg and Hanks' The Terminal:

The real Viktor Navorski [Tom Hanks' character], a displaced Iranian named Merhan Karimi Nasseri, was stuck in Charles De Gaulle airport for over seven years before the two European governments made any attempt to resolve his situation. Now, sadly, it seems Nasseri has gone a bit mad, and refuses to leave the airport for any country save England, which is not an option for him. With Spielberg and Hanks at the helm, The Terminal is, for the most part, everything one would expect — charming, funny, and possessing its own singular character and visual beauty in much the same way as their last collaboration, Catch Me If You Can. But what it is not is intellectually honest. True, Spielberg most likely could not have set this film in France with as much success. But if he had, it is unlikely he would have made a French immigration authority the villain he makes out of Dixon. Truth, as always, remains stranger than fiction, and Hollywood's fiction, as always, does what it can to undermine the reputation of certain American institutions. The Terminal manages to amuse, entertain, and inspire. But as with almost all things connected to Tinsel Town, just don't expect it to educate — at least, not fairly.

Don R. Lewis, of Film Threat, wrote that "Saved!" is "a sweet and funny movie that starts off with bite but settles into an honest feeling of happiness and acceptance for all types of people and their choices." Of course, he doesn't really mean all types of people. He went on to note that the movie is "a gentle exploration of why the judgments of the Catholic church are so screwed up." ("Saved!" is about evangelical Christians--not Catholics--but you know how it is. They all look alike.) John Leonard of CBS thought the movie "good-hearted," while Manohla Dargis, in the Los Angeles Times, labeled it "a soft-bellied, sweet-tempered satire." Both Newsweek and the New York Times judged as merely "gentle" the ribbing that "Saved!" gives to Christians. Too gentle, for some. The Chicago Tribune lamented that "after bravely lampooning an institution so many consider beyond reproach, Saved! chickens out." Michael Atkinson, from the Village Voice, wrote that American evangelicals--whom he called "warmongers praying for corpse-heaped victory"--need "a good, steel-tipped satiric whipping," and that the movie didn't deliver it. For good measure, he added: "the born-again, one-hand-in-the-air prayer stance. . .resembles a Nazi salute." Ms. Dargis faulted "Saved!" for not having the courage to "admit that some of [God's] most ardent believers will always be invested in hate." Other reviewers were not so dismissive of Mr. Dannelly's grit. "Teasing Christians," said Newsweek, "is risky business." David Denby, in The New Yorker, solemnly nodded, adding that although "Saved!" was not an attack on Christianity, "to make it at all took courage." Actually, it took no courage, since the movie plays straight into Hollywood's smug stereotypes about religion, especially the non-Buddhist variety.

Posted 6/18/2004 01:42:09 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE INTIFADA'S OVER, writes Charles Krauthammer. And the Israelis won:

For Israel, the victory is bitter. The past four years of terrorism have killed almost 1,000 Israelis and maimed thousands of others. But Israel has won strategically. The intent of the intifada was to demoralize Israel, destroy its economy, bring it to its knees, and thus force it to withdraw and surrender to Palestinian demands, just as Israel withdrew in defeat from southern Lebanon in May 2000. That did not happen. Israel's economy was certainly wounded, but it is growing again. Tourism had dwindled to almost nothing at the height of the intifada, but tourists are returning. And the Israelis were never demoralized. They kept living their lives, the young people in particular returning to cafes and discos and buses just hours after a horrific bombing. Israelis turned out to be a lot tougher and braver than the Palestinians had imagined. The end of the intifada does not mean the end of terrorism. There was terrorism before the intifada and there will be terrorism to come. What has happened, however, is an end to systematic, regular, debilitating, unstoppable terror -- terror as a reliable weapon. At the height of the intifada, there were nine suicide attacks in Israel killing 85 Israelis in just one month (March 2002). In the past three months there have been none. The overall level of violence has been reduced by more than 70 percent. How did Israel do it? By ignoring its critics and launching a two-pronged campaign of self-defense.

Posted 6/18/2004 01:22:45 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE MOD SQUAD: Looking to hot rod your PC? Check out an article I wrote for the July issue of Videomaker Magazine. (Spot the Trogdor reference!)

Posted 6/18/2004 01:14:40 AM by Edward Driscoll
9/11 PANEL ADMONISHES MEDIA: Ace of Spades has the details. Fortunately, Newsweek got the story right--in 1999, that is.

Posted 6/18/2004 12:48:16 AM by Edward Driscoll
SWIMMING TO BOSTON: Eric Fettman of the New York Post writes:

The opening night of next month's Democratic convention in Boston is set to feature an emotional party tribute to hometown hero Ted Kennedy, who has served in office longer than every other senator but one. Guess no one at the Democratic National Committee took a close look at the calendar: That July 26 salute to Teddy just happens to coincide with . . . the 35th anniversary of Chappaquiddick.

Posted 6/17/2004 10:00:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
"ENRON, YES. ISLAMIC FASCISM, NO.": James Lileks writes that The clock has been reset to 9/10. For some, that's true. Not for all of us, though.

Posted 6/17/2004 08:27:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
ARROGANCE AND ALTERNATIVES: The second half of my interview with Bernard Goldberg is online at Tech Central Station. (If you haven't read part one yet, it's here.)

Posted 6/17/2004 08:15:26 PM by Edward Driscoll
"NO ONE ASKED US": It's funny that the left only pulls the chickenhawk sophism out of their rhetorical playbook when they want to oppose something. Which is too bad--they might learn something from this essay by Major Stan Coerr, USMCR SuperCobra attack helicopter pilot and forward air controller, and veteran of the liberation of Iraq from Suddam Hussein.

Posted 6/17/2004 08:07:36 PM by Edward Driscoll
ON A MUCH MORE UNSAVORY NOTE, John Hawkins explores Michael Moore's Hezbollah connection.

Posted 6/17/2004 08:05:32 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE GIPPER-FDR CONNECTION is explored by Michael Barone, who writes:

Ambitious to succeed, the young Reagan went off to college, then made a career in radio, then passed a screen test and became a movie star. The 1920s and 1930s radio and 1930s and 1940s movies were universal media, aimed at all Americans, presenting a vision of a friendly and open nation. Those movies were the strongest popular culture since Charles Dickens and, for many, still define the American character. Ronald Reagan was suffused with their spirit and brought it or, rather, brought it back to American politics. Brought it back, because it was the same spirit brought to politics by Franklin Roosevelt, for whom Reagan voted four times. Roosevelt and Reagan both came to office when people had given up on the American economy, and both brought it back toward prosperity and abundance — Roosevelt by expanding government, Reagan by cutting taxes and curbing inflation, freeing the American economy to produce the largely unpredicted surge of prosperity of the past 20 years. Roosevelt and Reagan as presidents both faced a world where totalitarian regimes were on the march and where the United States seemed helpless to stop them. Roosevelt led the American people to victory and the destruction of Nazism and took steps to keep the peace in the postwar world he did not live to see. Reagan pushed the Soviet Union to the brink of collapse and had the satisfaction, before his mind dimmed, of watching the Berlin Wall fall and Moscow's empire crumble. He is buried now near a slab from that wall, overlooking the mountains and the Pacific to the west. Reagan always admired Roosevelt, even as he came to oppose many of his policies, and there were similarities in their characters. Both were optimistic and friendly and seemed open, yet both had hard cores inaccessible even to their closest aides: cold steel beneath the smiles. Both had courage, "grace under pressure," as Thatcher said. Roosevelt, at his speeches, stood in steel braces and with great effort, in enormous pain, walked forward to the microphone and addressed the nation. Reagan, after he was shot, stood and walked from the ambulance into the hospital, taking care to button his jacket. The two men stand now, in history, the two most consequential presidents of the 20th century.

Posted 6/17/2004 05:09:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
GHOST TOWN REVISITED:Back in early April, we linked to this site at its old URL and wrote:

P.J. O'Rourke once wrote a book called Holidays in Hell. If you're up for a virtual one, how about a motorcycle ride past the abandoned hulk of Chernobyl and its nearby deserted ghost towns, with Elena, a beautiful Russian brunette as your guide?

"I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street -- more of almost everything," he said, adding his contempt for "those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink."

Posted 6/17/2004 03:22:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
EARTH TURNING TO DUST, UN SAYS: There's no way this article can be true. Because dammit--Spielberg owes me. I bought miles of property in Trenton, New Jersey after seeing A.I. a few years ago, and I expect to be sitting on prime ocean-front land in a few years!

Posted 6/17/2004 03:17:38 PM by Edward Driscoll
BUT DON'T QUESTION THEIR CREDIBILITY: The Chicago Tribune reports their crosstown rival, the Chicago Sun Times trashed large amounts of its own daily run to boost its circulation numbers. Do the environmentalists know about that?

Posted 6/17/2004 01:46:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE SOFT BIGOTRY OF LOW EXPECTATIONS: At the end of a Washington Times article on John Kerry's campaign trek through Ohio, is this:

Talking about education yesterday, Mr. Kerry also told the largely black crowd at the day care center that there are more blacks in prison than in college. "That's unacceptable," he said. "But it's not their fault." Rather than the inmates, the former Boston prosecutor blamed poverty, poor schools, a dearth of after-school programs and "all of us as adults not doing what we need to do."

What do adults "need to do" to prevent youngsters from turning to crime? Surely, above all, instill in them a sense of personal responsibility. Kerry sends precisely the opposite message when he says of criminals--and, it would seem, only of those criminals who happen to be black--that "it's not their fault." There's a tinge of racism, what President Bush aptly terms "the soft bigotry of low expectations," in Kerry's assumption that young blacks can't be expected to do any better than end up in prison.

Posted 6/17/2004 01:17:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHOOOO'S THAT GIRL?? Meet Esther. She's not quite like a virgin. But she's waiting for you to justify her love! Malcolm Muggeridge--call your offfice! UPDATE: Wow, that was fast! Jeff Goldstein has scored the first interview with Esther.

Posted 6/17/2004 12:28:14 PM by Edward Driscoll
FROM THE BOTTOM UP: I have a new (and relatively long) article, which traces the electric bass from the Fender Precision Bass to today's software synthesizers, online at Blogcritics. The article also has lots of tips for home recordists. UPDATE: First comment the article received was posted by this fellow: "Speaking as a working bassist, your kung fu is the best. Thanks Ed, for a fantastic article and reverent homage to the Low End." I really have to do a post with the kudos this site and my writing has gotten. And somewhere "your kung fu is the best!" has to be among them.

Posted 6/17/2004 11:37:06 AM by Edward Driscoll
NEWSWEEK AND NPR EXAMINE THE SADDAM-AL QAEDA CONNECTION: Back in 1999, that is:

There was a time not long ago when the conventional wisdom skewed heavily toward a Saddam-al Qaeda links. In 1998 and early 1999, the Iraq-al Qaeda connection was widely reported in the American and international media. Former intelligence officers and government officials speculated about the relationship and its dangerous implications for the world. The information in the news reports came from foreign and domestic intelligence services. It was featured in mainstream media outlets including international wire services, prominent newsweeklies, and network radio and television broadcasts. Newsweek magazine ran an article in its January 11, 1999, issue headed "Saddam + Bin Laden?" "Here's what is known so far," it read: “Saddam Hussein, who has a long record of supporting terrorism, is trying to rebuild his intelligence network overseas -- assets that would allow him to establish a terrorism network. U.S. sources say he is reaching out to Islamic terrorists, including some who may be linked to Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi exile accused of masterminding the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa last summer.” ....NPR reporter Mike Shuster interviewed Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's counterterrorism center, and offered this report: “Iraq's contacts with bin Laden go back some years, to at least 1994, when, according to one U.S. government source, Hijazi met him when bin Laden lived in Sudan. According to Cannistraro, Iraq invited bin Laden to live in Baghdad to be nearer to potential targets of terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait....Some experts believe bin Laden might be tempted to live in Iraq because of his reported desire to obtain chemical or biological weapons. CIA Director George Tenet referred to that in recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee when he said bin Laden was planning additional attacks on American targets.” By mid-February 1999, journalists did not even feel the need to qualify these claims of an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. An Associated Press dispatch that ran in the Washington Post ended this way: "The Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against Western powers." Where did journalists get the idea that Saddam and bin Laden might be coordinating efforts? Among other places, from high-ranking Clinton administration officials. In the spring of 1998 -- well before the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa -- the Clinton administration indicted Osama bin Laden. The indictment, unsealed a few months later, prominently cited al Qaeda's agreement to collaborate with Iraq on weapons of mass destruction. The Clinton Justice Department had been concerned about negative public reaction to its potentially capturing bin Laden without "a vehicle for extradition," official paperwork charging him with a crime. It was "not an afterthought" to include the al Qaeda-Iraq connection in the indictment, says an official familiar with the deliberations. "It couldn't have gotten into the indictment unless someone was willing to testify to it under oath." The Clinton administration's indictment read unequivocally: “Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.”

Posted 6/16/2004 09:39:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
PLANE ESCORTED BACK TO SEATAC WITH F-16 ESCORT? My wife has a friend who's a volunteer fire jumper with a scanner, who says that a Horizon Air passenger flight enroute to Hawaii was in the air for 30 minutes when it was escorted back to Seattle's SeaTac airport with a fighter escort. More on this if and when there are some substantial details to post. A FEW MORE DETAILS: Apparently, it seems the plane was not transmitting on its transponder which may be as simple as a blown fuse, but the fighter jets had to escort it because otherwise it's invisible on the transponder displays which are so crucial to air traffic safety. It's sounds like it's going to land at McChord Air Force Base just outside of Seattle.

Posted 6/16/2004 07:36:48 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE KERRY-REAGAN CONNECTION, as explored by Power Line: "Kerry yearns, say his friends, for the era of good feeling that prevailed during the Reagan presidency, highlighted by the Iran-Contra and Bork hearings". Heh.

Posted 6/16/2004 05:30:41 PM by Edward Driscoll
ARE REPORTERS ABOVE THE LAW? The obvious answer is "of course not". Over at his MSNBC Blog, Glenn Reynolds explains why. I've always liked Charlton Heston's response when CNN tried to claim some sort of made-up neutrality.

Posted 6/16/2004 04:16:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
IT IS THE END OF DAYS: Truly, it is. (Via Jeff Goldstein, who's equally frightened.)

Posted 6/16/2004 03:38:26 PM by Edward Driscoll
KERRY MAKES STATEMENT on his repeated absences from the Senate this year. Although he hasn't entered into this poll yet.

Posted 6/16/2004 02:22:01 PM by Edward Driscoll
SPEAKING OF JONAH, he explains the Geneva Convention to Joe Biden. (Via Betsy Newmark.)

Posted 6/16/2004 01:47:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
JONAH GOLDBERG TAKES ANDREW SULLIVAN TO TASK for his regular attacks on President Bush, and I think he's got a point:

A blog which soared with high-minded rhetoric about how the war on terror is the test for this generation and that Bush was the right man to lead that struggle, now day-after-day tries to whittle away at reasons to support Bush in the fall as if the war on terror were merely another issue which can be trumped by any other issue you happen to feel more passionate about.

I must say I was surprised to discover this link from the gay magazine The Advocate. It seems that Andrew had been unequivocal about his opinions on Bush in that publication but not in his blog. In his Advocate essay he writes:

But it’s time to say something very clearly: Bush’s endorsement of antigay discrimination in the U.S. Constitution itself is a deal-breaker. I can’t endorse him this fall. Like many other gay men and women who have supported him, despite serious disagreements, I feel betrayed, abused, attacked.

And...

I will be excoriated by the same people who always denounce anyone who doesn’t toe the Democratic Party line. “What took you so long?” they sneer. Hope, engagement, principle are my answers. I do not regret trying to make conservatism safe for gays. It’s still possible to be in favor of small government, low taxes, a tough foreign policy, and to be a proud gay man. My principles haven’t changed. Nor will they anytime soon. But when a president allies himself with forces that really do want to keep gay people in jail, therapy, or the closet, it’s time to break off. The deal is broken. And no amount of rationalization can make it whole again.

Now I disagree with much (but not all) of what Andrew says in his essay. But it's an honest and decent position. Still what baffles me is why, to my knowledge, he's made no reference to this essay or his absolutist position on his site. Maybe, I missed it and he has. But I don't think so. Obviously, there's no binding code of ethics governing the blogosphere and even if there were I doubt it would have anything to say about not linking to articles you've written elsewhere or being obligated to express every significant opinion you have. But still, reading Andrew over the last year, you would have gotten the impression that at least theoretically his mind was open on who to support. According to this piece, it isn't. And that strikes me as an extremely significant silence.

Posted 6/16/2004 11:35:05 AM by Edward Driscoll
IS BILL RICHARDSON out of the Kerry veep running? UPDATE: Is Sam Nunn now in the picture? Will Collier writes, "Dubya should be so lucky".

Posted 6/15/2004 10:38:29 PM by Edward Driscoll
NEW HOME AUTOMATION STANDARD PROPOSED BY SMARTHOME.COM, whose CEO was nice enough to stop by my office today at noon (in between stopping by some very high-powered folks in the San Jose area). Here's an article about it on a site called Designtechnica.com. Expect my write-up in the not-too-distant future.

Posted 6/15/2004 09:56:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
PROTEIN WISDOM GENTLY REBUKES MICHELLE MALKIN for missing the subtext in Paul Krugman's latest article. (Looks like we missed it as well!)

Posted 6/15/2004 09:16:36 PM by Edward Driscoll
POSTMODERN TERROR: Steve Green writes, "I don't buy that the Paul Johnson video is a ransom message. I have the sick feeling Mr. Johnson is already dead". RTWT. UPDATE: Charles Johnson adds, "And now back to Prison Scandal 2004!, brought to you by the mainstream media of the West, currently at war but unable to recognize it".

Posted 6/15/2004 09:11:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
DEN BESTE: "I don't necessarily want you to agree with me. But if you disagree, I want you to understand why." Imagine if the elite media had that as their philosophy. It's easy if you try...

Posted 6/15/2004 09:08:49 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHY SCHROEDER LOST, and what it means for America: Kevin Hassett writes:

The Germans now face what is to them an unthinkable possibility. Their eastern neighbors are dramatically more successful than they are and may soon enough be richer. The costs of their lazy socialism are apparent even to their children, and the country is in a panic. "We all recognize," one participant told me, "that Germany needs its own Reagan."

Posted 6/15/2004 09:00:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
HELL, REVISITED: Last October, when the conventional wisdom was the Howard Dean was going to be The Man that the Democrats would rally around, Jonah Goldberg had a great cover story in National Review about Vermont. The cover's chief headline was set in enormous type and was one word: Hell. (Here's an spin-off article that Goldberg wrote for National Review Online.) C.C. Kraemer picks up the theme, looking at "Green Mountain Statists" in Tech Central Station:

Vermont is a paradox. It's a relatively poor state filled with low-income families who can use the price breaks brought by discount retailers. But it's also a playground for wealthy progressives and elitists who tend to be concentrated in the Burlington area. They began flocking to state three decades ago because they saw an opportunity to take control of Vermont's policy-making process and force through a progressive agenda. Though their wealth is a product of our capitalist, free-market system, these left-leaning relative newcomers see development and economic advancement as threats to Vermont's rural and quaint small-town flavor. That puts them at odds with much of the more deeply rooted populace that shares neither the elitists' wealth nor their values. As such it becomes clear why the state is the perfect location for the escalating culture clash over Wal-Mart.

Posted 6/15/2004 06:02:56 PM by Edward Driscoll
THINK DIFFERENT: Then: The Belmont Club writes:

Sophisticates unwittingly paid Reagan a compliment by calling him a cowboy, by which they meant gunslinger, instead of in the more accurate sense of a man able to see nature without blinders; to know things for what they were. Although Ronald Reagan has left the nation a huge legacy of achievement still it would be incomplete and his bequest to posterity less final if we forget that his greatest strength was to think for himself and dare to do the same.

These days, [leftwing radio personality Phil Hendrie] is more likely to appear on Dennis Miller’s new MSNBC comedy news show, or even to be booed at the recent Aspen Comedy Festival, at a Saturday-morning panel on “Who’s Funnier — the Left or Right?” “I’m delighted to be counted among Phil’s admirers,” says Harry Shearer, “although he’s hopelessly wrong about the war . . . Long and short of it — he’s way too good for KFI.” “Ever since 9/11,” says Hendrie, “as the days tick by, I wonder if I’m insane. I wonder if I’ve overreacted, because I’ve seen the country drift back to this blasé attitude: Maybe 9/11 was this isolated thing, and maybe we should just cool out. And sometimes I doubt myself — should I be as shocked as I was? But I remember those days. Everybody felt it. And it’s changed me a lot. I feel like I need to say this. I’m not going to change anyone’s mind, but I’ve got to get it off my chest. And I’m not a Republican; I am a Democrat. I know I’m a Democrat, and I know what the Democratic Party stands for. I think the president is wrong-minded on certain domestic issues such as gay marriage. I think he’s being badly influenced by, once again, the thing that’s going to tear the Republican Party apart, the religious right. But that said, I don’t think I need to turn my card in just because I don’t hate George Bush. I know war is bad, but this is not the generation that’s going to end it.”

Posted 6/15/2004 04:51:32 PM by Edward Driscoll
BLOGGING TODAY'S EARTHQUAKE IN SAN DIEGO: San Jose is awfully far from San Diego, and I wasn't even aware of a quake until I read Glenn's post, unlike the Christmas week quake near San Simeon, which I definitely felt. But several San Diego-era bloggers noticed this one, and The Professor has links to them.

Posted 6/15/2004 02:53:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
JOHN HAWKINS LOOKS AT "Press Bias, Teresa Heinz Kerry, & The Myth Of Max Cleland". UPDATE: More on Cleland here.

Posted 6/15/2004 02:43:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
NARCISSUS' POND: Bestsy Newmark has some thoughts on Bill Clinton and his presidential portrait.

Posted 6/15/2004 02:18:22 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHY DIDN'T THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA COVER the speech given to terrorist Richard C. Reid (the would-be "shoe bomber") by the judge who sentenced him to life in prison? Instead, we get the New York Times printing that "Mr. Ashcroft has yet to convict any actual terrorists". The coverage of our war on terror by the press has all-in-all, been an abomination. Of course, as Lileks noted recently, it makes sense, when you consider that the nihilism of Hunter S. Thompson is the tone journalists love to affect:

Thompson has less hope than the Islamists; at least they have an afterlife to look forward to. All we have is a country so rotten and exhausted it’s not worth defending. It never was, of course, but it’s even less defensible now than before. He can say what he wants. Drink what he wants. Drive where he wants. Do what he wants. He’s done okay in America. And he hates this country. Hates it. This appeals to high school kids and collegiate-aged students getting that first hot eye-crossing hit from the Screw Dad pipe, but it’s rather pathetic in aged moneyed authors. And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn't infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He's the guy who made nihilism hip. He's the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don't trust anyone who believes anything. He's the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.

Posted 6/15/2004 01:58:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
SHADES OF THE IMPEACHMENT WARS: Remember during the impeachment of Bill Clinton, when the left and feminists (and the feminist left) would twist their arguments to the point where it resembled pretzels and Silly Straws? Pretzel logic, once thought to be fit only for Steely Dan records, is far from dead these days:

In a sworn statement to be made public Tuesday, University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman said a four-letter word used toward women can sometimes be used as a "term of endearment." The comment comes from Hoffman's latest sworn testimony in connection with a federal lawsuit against the university. 9NEWS received a copy of the passage in question from the university after sources both outside and inside CU told us about it. * * * In the deposition, Hoffman was asked whether the "c-word" is "filthy and vile." She said she knows the word is a swear word, but "It is all in the context of what--of how it is used and when it is used." She was asked, "Can you indicate any polite context in which that word would be used?" Hoffman answered, "Yes, I've actually heard it used as a term of endearment." A CU spokeswoman said President Hoffman is aware of the negative connotations associated with the word. But, the spokesperson said, because Hoffman is a medieval scholar, she is aware of the long history of the word. She said it was not always a negative term.

Posted 6/14/2004 10:16:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
COUNTRY JOE'S SECOND THOUGHTS: The singer/songwriter whose "Fixin' To Die Rag" was a showstopper in the 1970 documentary film Woodstock (complete with "follow the bouncing ball" on-screen lyrics), has second thoughts about the Vietnam that he and his fellow "peace" activists helped create. Expect a handful of today's anti-American/anti-West/pro-Saddam/pro-Al Qaida, etc., etc., celebrities to have second thoughts as well in the coming years. Of course, as we wrote earlier today, this past week has shown that introspection and second thoughts are a rare commodity in the world.

Posted 6/14/2004 07:06:39 PM by Edward Driscoll
NEW PURITANS UPDATE: Tech Central Station says, "They're Coming for Your Shrimp"!

Posted 6/14/2004 06:55:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
REMEMBER MICAH WRIGHT? We posted about him briefly here when, as Steven Den Beste wrote today, "He had his fifteen minutes of fame a couple of months ago, though it would be more accurate to call it his fifteen minutes of mortification". He's back though, with an Oliver Stone-like conspiracy theory about the people who did much of the legwork uncovering the fact that unlike his claims, he never actually served in the military.

Posted 6/14/2004 03:09:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
DEJA MOO: The feeling that you've heard the same bull once before. Maybe Mrs. Reynolds is more right than she knows. As I was saying...

Posted 6/14/2004 02:53:17 PM by Edward Driscoll
MICHELLE MALKIN DOESN'T MINCE WORDS when it comes to her take on Joe Biden and how he uses his son as a pawn in his speechmaking.

Posted 6/14/2004 02:35:24 PM by Edward Driscoll
DEPLETING THE URANIUM ARGUMENT: What does the Seattle PI newspaper really believe, Brian Crouch asks. "Is depleted uranium in munitions used by the military somehow more of a radiological threat than a bomb made of non-depleted uranium by a terrorist? I suppose it depends on whose side you're on". I've always thought Sgt. Stryker had the definitive warning on depleted uranium.

Posted 6/14/2004 02:03:30 PM by Edward Driscoll
MEET THE NEW IRAQI PRESIDENT: Roger L. Simon writes:

I find Meet the Press a prime example of the decline of the mainstream media during my lifetime. A show which began years ago with several voices has devolved into the fiefdom of Tim Russert--and the medieval analogy is not accidental. Still, I watch it, even if his questions are not designed to reveal the truth, but rather for dramatic-gotcha effect.

Posted 6/14/2004 01:26:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
DECONSTRUCTING THE TIMES: Steven Den Beste looks at a New York Times article that "tries to portray Reagan so as to present a sharp contrast to President Bush, and in the end...puts Reagan inside a bunny-rabbit costume and presents him as an accommodating cooperative multilateralist who was only interested in getting along with everyone and who didn't have a confrontational bone in his body". Den Beste concludes, "If you have to lie about something, it's stupid to lie to someone who knows the truth. It's really stupid to lie when 100 million people know the truth, and to tell that lie in a NYT column which lots of them are sure to see". For those who paid attention last week, numerous Websites, but especially the Media Research Center and National Review Online provided a valuable service: examining the original pieces that journalists and broadcasters filed on President Reagan before and during his two terms of office. Never have so many been so wrong about a man, and to this day been loathe to admit it. Why should The Times start now? No wonder the credibility of the press has plummeted. When you can use the 'Net to fact check their asses (to coin a phrase), it's easy to see how often they let their biases get in the way of their reporting. UPDATE: For future Times articles, Jeff Goldstein has an easy to follow template that should make first drafts much easier. CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER UPDATE: H.D. Miller is praising a Times article, something that I doubt happens very often.

Posted 6/14/2004 12:39:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT WE LEARNED LAST WEEK: Gleaves Whitney looks at Ronald Reagan and us.

Posted 6/14/2004 12:18:46 PM by Edward Driscoll
JAMES TARANTO IS REALLY ON A ROLL TODAY: Just keep scrolling.

Posted 6/14/2004 11:37:49 AM by Edward Driscoll
GOD LIVES: At least for now, in the Pledge of Allegiance. After watching President Reagan's funeral last week, Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on what a central role He plays in our government. And nice to see another late Republican president's efforts still paying dividends. UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs warnes that "Somewhere in our fair land, there are custodial, pledge-hating parents who are polishing up a lawsuit".

Posted 6/14/2004 01:51:19 AM by Edward Driscoll
FROM THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO TO BERNIE SANDERS' STATE: Betsy Newmark looks at what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's sons went through the day after Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term as president.

Posted 6/13/2004 06:42:25 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT IS AN "INTELLIGENT" PERSON? Roger Kimball and Mark Steyn have some thoughts on the subject. UPDATE: As does the Power Line blog.

Posted 6/13/2004 04:35:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
A TALE OF TWO LETTERS: Not surprisingly, Oh, That Liberal Media notes a pretty clear double standard at play with the LA Times.

Posted 6/13/2004 03:49:56 PM by Edward Driscoll
BUSH 41 TURNS 80, SKYDIVES TO CELEBRATE: George H.W., the first President Bush, decided to celebrate his 80th birthday by skydiving, making a 13,000 foot jump over his presidential library earlier today:

He made a tandem jump - harnessed to a member of an Army's Golden Knights parachute team - after officials decided the wind conditions and low clouds made it too dangerous for the 41st president to jump alone, which he did when he turned 75. "This was a real thrill for me," said Bush, wearing a black-and-gold jumpsuit. "I felt no fear ... for me to get a chance to jump with the Golden Knights is a dream." With Staff Sgt. Bryan Schnell on his back and a black-and-gold parachute ballooning above them, the former president waved his arms to some 4,000 spectators as he neared the drop zone - a painted logo of "41 at 80" in the center of a football-field-sized area on the grounds of his presidential library at Texas A&M University. "It's been a great day," Bush said after sailing to the ground, landing and scooting a ways on his backside. "This was a day of joy and a day of wonder for the Bush family, certainly for the old guy." The crowd included his wife, Barbara, his son Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev - whom the former president had invited to jump with him. "Afraid," Gorbachev said through an interpreter, explaining why he didn't accept the offer. "Maybe on his 90th birthday. ... For me, it would be a first. At my age, that may kill me." Gorbachev gave Bush flowers and a bottle of vodka.

Posted 6/13/2004 12:58:53 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE TEACHER'S T-SHIRT: Other than the gym coach, teachers at my school didn't wear T-shirts when they taught class. Particularly slogans like "War Without End? Not in Our Name" or "A Woman's Place Is in Her Union". As Joanne Jacobs says, "It's hard to get students to think for themselves. It's just about impossible when the teacher is flashing 'correct answer' on her shirt. I'd love to see the reaction of the teacher than Joanne profiles to this T-shirt.

Posted 6/12/2004 01:45:22 PM by Edward Driscoll
VIDEOTARIANS: Mudville Gazette looks at an unusually idiotic USA Today article on the eeeeeevils of military-themed videogames. "Usually we must wait 'til near Christmas for assaults on the fun toys", Mudville's Greyhawk writes, "but fortunately for ignorant, impressionable, and gullible young men everywhere USA Today reporter Mike Snyder is on a mission to save them".

Posted 6/12/2004 12:43:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER: Check out how AP described President Reagan's liberation of Grenada this past week.

Posted 6/12/2004 12:40:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
GOOD QUESTION: Jeff Goldstein wants to know why this story isn't the news story in the press today. And he has some thoughts why.

Posted 6/12/2004 12:34:32 PM by Edward Driscoll
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST AND AUTHOR MICHELLE MALKIN has own Weblog. All I can say to this post is...heh.

Posted 6/12/2004 12:31:45 PM by Edward Driscoll
IS THE INTIFADA OVER? Roger L. Simon has some thoughts on Israel and the Palestinians.

Posted 6/12/2004 12:07:45 AM by Edward Driscoll
A SNEAK PREVIEW: The opening of Steven Hayward's The Age of Reagan: Lion at the Gate is online here. The book, the second and concluding volume in Hayward's magisterial series is scheduled to be published in the fall of 2005, according to Scott W. Johnson. We reviewed volume one here.

Posted 6/11/2004 11:51:31 AM by Edward Driscoll
GODWIN'S LAW* forces The Chicago Sun-Times to cease publication after this article. More here and here.

Posted 6/11/2004 11:44:37 AM by Edward Driscoll
THEY ARE LARGE, THEY CONTAIN MULTITUDES: Stephen Green notes a self-contradictory article in The Hollywood Reporter on the amount of coverage President Reagan received this week and concludes, "when you read stories like this and feel disdain for the press, remember that the feeling is mutual."

Posted 6/11/2004 11:34:14 AM by Edward Driscoll
IT WAS THE CONTENT: "I won a nickname, 'The Great Communicator.' But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: It was the content. I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation — from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in principles that have guided us for two centuries. They called it the Reagan revolution. Well, I'll accept that, but for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense."

Posted 6/11/2004 11:32:09 AM by Edward Driscoll
FAREWELL: John Derbyshire has a nice recap of the funeral. "The British, in fact, used to boast that they did this kind of thing -- pomp and circumstance -- better than anyone. I don't see how that boast can any longer be maintained. This was done as well as it possibly could have been."

Posted 6/11/2004 10:52:22 AM by Edward Driscoll
PROTEIN WISDOM HAS A TRANSCRIPT of today's episode of the ABC talk fest The View, starring Barbara Walters, Star Jones, Joy Behar and other women lower on the daytime TV foodchain. [ED NOTE: Dude--it's a parody.] It is?? Because it's not very difficult to picture everyone of them saying what Jeff's written. [Trust me, it is.] Hey, you're speaking in italics. How can I not trust you!

Posted 6/11/2004 10:38:39 AM by Edward Driscoll
CREDIT THE LIBERATOR, not the dictator.

Posted 6/11/2004 10:35:25 AM by Edward Driscoll
GROUP CAPTAIN MANDRAKE: "Isn't it odd how some 'all hail diversity!' liberal types want to see acts of violence done to people who don't agree with them?" Initially it seems that way, but you get used to it after you've seen it for the first thousand times.

Posted 6/11/2004 10:31:14 AM by Edward Driscoll
NEVILLE AGAIN: The Arthur Schlesinger-Neville Chamberlain connection, revealed.

Posted 6/11/2004 10:26:51 AM by Edward Driscoll
WHEN IT COMES TO THE NEWS, Roger L. Simon turns one of the Gipper's most famous slogans on its head: "Don't Trust; Verify".

Posted 6/11/2004 10:21:45 AM by Edward Driscoll
SOLIDARITY: "When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty."--Lech Walesa

Posted 6/11/2004 01:37:10 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE SCORPION: Looks like Col. Qaddafi isn't quite the pussycat he's been pretending to be lately. H.D. Miller has a novel way to bring him back to his senses.

Posted 6/11/2004 01:06:20 AM by Edward Driscoll
"NICE AIM": Not surprisingly, there's too much good stuff in James Lileks' syndicated column for me to single out. It asks a simple question: "When did we start hating presidents? Openly, that is". So...RTWT, already. (Found via John Hawkins, who did not have the best of days today...)

Posted 6/10/2004 11:24:09 PM by Edward Driscoll
IMAGINE IF THE GIPPER OR GWB DID THIS: Betsy Newmark looks at how John Kerry asked his aides what behavior they thought would look appropriate when he visited President Reagan's casket at the Reagan Library on Tuesday. A commenter says that Kerry had all of the regular visitors of the library wait outside. "He then went in with his photographers and cameramen and about a dozen shills". He lacks the common touch, as my dad would say.

Posted 6/10/2004 05:36:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
SUMMERTIME, AND THE AUTOMATION IS EASY: My latest monthly "Ideas For Every Room" newsletter for Electronic House magazine is on outdoor automation.

Posted 6/10/2004 01:04:26 PM by Edward Driscoll
RAY CHARLES DEAD: The Grammy-winning singer was 73.

Posted 6/10/2004 01:00:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
REAGANOMICS: Stephen Moore writes:

In 1982 the Dow Jones industrial average hit a low of 800. After the final pieces of the Reagan tax cuts were installed, the market rocketed upward for 18 consecutive years. From 800, the Dow rose to 10,000 — creating between $15 trillion and $20 trillion in new wealth and industries. The Dow would have to climb to 100,000 by 2020 to match this Herculean performance. By clearing away the wealth destroyers of high tax rates and high inflation, U.S. companies became far more productive, profitable, and valuable. The economy also created 15 million new jobs under Reagan and grew in real terms by 40 percent. Some have likened this to adding a new California to the U.S. economy. By the end of the 1980s, in what was a fitting tribute to the Reagan program, almost all industrialized nations had sharply lowered tax rates to regain a competitive position lost to the U.S. in the decade. Reagan would note that "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." In this way, Reaganomics saved not just the U.S. economy from worldwide depression, but the entire global economy as well. The Reagan way was spurned throughout the 1980s as "voodoo economics" (one of George Bush Sr.'s few memorable comments.) Many college textbooks to this day even argue that Reagan's economic policies were flawed because they created record budget deficits. But the textbooks don't mention that as the national debt rose by $2 trillion, national wealth rose by $8 trillion. They also don't mention that the Laffer curve worked: Lower tax rates did generate more tax revenues at the federal, state, and local levels. Federal tax collections rose from $500 billion in 1980 to $1 trillion in 1990.

“I thought from the outset that his ‘supply side’ [theory] was just a disaster. I knew of no one who felt that it was going to work, outside of a small collection of zealots in Washington and at USC – Arthur Laffer, Jack Kemp. What I thought quite outrageous was the business community, which for years carped and complained that it could never get a President sympathetic to its needs, finally got its champion, Ronald Reagan. Then, to its horror, it discovered that he was actually going to press ahead with supply side – a theory whose disastrous consequences businesspeople began desperately to prepare for, but did not publicly warn the rest of the country about. They knew it simply could not work. But what they did was look to their own little life raft and not to anyone else’s.”

Posted 6/10/2004 11:46:01 AM by Edward Driscoll
CONGRATS to Mr. And Mrs. Jeff Goldstein and their son on their fourth wedding anniversary. "The fourth year being the fruit (traditional) or flower / appliance (modern) anniversary. So we'll be having sushi". Works for me. (No, really!) I only hope Jeff has gotten his pants back if he's going out.

Posted 6/10/2004 10:44:42 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE BERKELEY INTIFADA: Michael J. Totten writes that "A city that prides itself on tolerance and diversity is fast-becoming an epicenter of hate". Totten adds, "Political Correctness is finished. What started out as intolerance of hate has become hatred's enabler. It fails to live up to its own standard and can't possibly become more absurd than it already is. It slid all the way down the slippery slope and annihilated itself." PC kills people. It's driven a wedge between the news media and the customers it's supposed to serve. It's driven a wedge between the blue and red states. It's driven a wedge between the hard left and more moderate liberals. It's shrunk Hollywood and the music industry's audiences. It's driven a wedge between universities and the people and communities they serve. But while Roger L. Simon says that Totten has written its epitaph, PC is actually far from dead.

Posted 6/10/2004 09:32:41 AM by Edward Driscoll
WOW, AND I WAS CONCERNED ABOUT SLOPPY REPORTING IN AMERICA: Germany's Der Spiegel mentions former "US president Kissinger" in an article about President Reagan.

Posted 6/10/2004 09:23:40 AM by Edward Driscoll
CHRIS COX ON PRESIDENT REAGAN: "Today, the Soviet Union sits on the ash heap of history, and the Reagan legacy can be measured in lives liberated and dreams fulfilled. Before Ronald Reagan became President in 1981, there were 56 electoral democracies on earth. Today, there are 117. Today, more than a billion more people are living in freedom than on the day that he took office. "

Posted 6/10/2004 12:38:48 AM by Edward Driscoll

Think of everything Reagan did, and then add: He did it all before Fox News. He did it all before the Rush Limbaugh phenomenon. He did it all before the instant battle cry of his defenders could hit the Internet. He did it all before C-SPAN caught on and people could enjoy the game of watching entire speeches and debates and then observing how the network tricksters discombobulated them into liberal hatchet jobs. He did it all when (well, eventually) the only conservative regular on the big networks was ABC's George Will, and at that time Will was still fashionably fussing about Americans being "taxophobic" and spurning Reagan's "Morning in America goo." In the prologue to his book on Reagan Dinesh D'Souza captured the flavor of how Reagan was greeted by the Washington establishment. Everything Reagan sought to accomplish seemed ludicrous and uneducated to the long-standing liberal consensus. Tax cuts would be wildly inflationary. A foreign policy based on the radical notion that Communism should be put on the ash heap of history was dismissed as a bellicose fantasy too dangerous for the nuclear age. At the end of it all, Reagan was the wise man, and all his detractors — Democrats and ersatz Republicans, political scientists and economists, "Sovietologists" and journalists — were the dummies.

Posted 6/10/2004 12:34:40 AM by Edward Driscoll
GOTTA GIVE HIM CREDIT FOR BEING HONEST: H.D. Miller spots someone who's gone on the record and actually said that he wishes Saddam Hussein were still in power.

Posted 6/9/2004 04:35:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
GOT A FEW HUNDRED MILLION UNDER THE MATTRESS? Fender Musical Instruments is for sale. In other guitar-related news, this man turned 89 today--and he's still going strong. UPDATE: Fender denies it's for sale.

Posted 6/9/2004 04:22:29 PM by Edward Driscoll
A DEMOCRATIC NICARAGUA honors President Reagan. I wonder what these three men have to say about that.

Posted 6/9/2004 04:11:13 PM by Edward Driscoll
LILEKS ON MR. MISTY, BRAIN FREEZES and chocolate-dipped cones. Like Salieri and Mozart, how I envy this man's talent with a keyboard.

Posted 6/9/2004 03:07:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
BABY GOT BURQA: Charles Johnson looks at "Hip-Hop, Islamofascist Style".

Posted 6/9/2004 01:04:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
LOS ATHEISTS UPDATE: L.A. Country Board of Supervisors affirms its decision to remove cross from county seal.

Posted 6/9/2004 11:17:48 AM by Edward Driscoll
DENIAL: While Stephen Green is busy demolishing his basement, Will Collier, his partner-in-blogging, demolishes the press's reaction to the Pew study we linked to yesterday:

Expect to see a lot of chatter today and tomorrow over the just-released Pew study of news audience attitudes. Howie Kurtz has a rundown in today's Washington Post, including some crowing from various network/newspaper PR flacks about the results. One of those, from CNN's Matthew Furman, struck me in particular:

"We're obviously pleased -- once again we've been voted the most trusted news organization in America."

Man, you talk about burying the lede. That's like being ranked "the most successful professional football team in Atlanta." According to the Pew survey, less than one-third of those "able to rate" CNN said that they believe "all or most of what they see" on the network. Memo to Matthew Furman: When 68% of your potential audience doesn't trust you, you don't have any reason to brag.

"If it finds the mainstream press lacking, the public will simply find its own sources of information--as declining readership and network news ratings suggest is already happening."

For all intents and purposes, more than half of the populace (everybody except partisan Democrats, and even their numbers for credibility are nothing for most of the press to brag about) has written off the vast majority of the national press. And they're doing so because they believe that the press has written them off. Things have gotten to the point where the President of the United States sees no reason not to ignore the networks and the New York Times. If the coin of your realm is trust, and influence is what you buy with that coin, what do today's viewership realities say about the state of the realm?

I'll give you a quote from paragraph one of Arrogance:

If the media elites don't start to listen to reasonable criticism about them, they're going to become the journalistic equivalent of the leisure suit: harmless enough, but hopelessly out of date.

The reason why I called that book Arrogance is that these people don't listen to anybody. They don't listen to any criticism! If you point something out to them, they say, "this proves that you're the one with the bias problem". If they continue that, they will be less relevant next year then they are this year, and less relevant two years from now than they will be next year. They're becoming less and less relevant. And proof of this is that once upon a time, not ten thousand years ago, but just in the recent past, the most trusted man in America was Walter Cronkite. Does anybody, no matter what his or her politics are, does anybody think that Americans would pick one of the three network anchors as one of the most trusted men in America today? I don't think so. I don't think so. So they're losing their clout, they're losing their influence, they're losing their relevance, and they continue to fiddle while Rome is burning. They are so arrogant that they can't see straight, and I think it's going to cost them.

Posted 6/9/2004 10:55:42 AM by Edward Driscoll
JONAH ON REAGAN: "To summarize why I admired the Gipper: He was put on earth to do two things: kick butt and chew gum, and he ran out of gum around 1962. The rest is commentary."

Posted 6/8/2004 10:38:48 PM by Edward Driscoll
LET'S FACE IT: It's Bill's world; we just live in it. Even if you're the grieving widow of a recently deceased president. As Mark Levin wrote:

What matters is not what Bill Clinton wants, but what the Reagan family wants. And somehow, here we are again, discussing Bill Clinton when he has absolutely nothing to do with this event. And once again, we witness the spectacle of Bill Clinton's lack of class and graciousness.

Posted 6/8/2004 05:44:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
"STASISTS* ARE DULL", says Roger L. Simon. Read the whole thing. *Click here and here for our takes on the book that that word came from.

Posted 6/8/2004 04:36:12 PM by Edward Driscoll
ADVANTAGE ED! A Pew Research Center's survey finds that news audiences are increasingly politicized. Heck, we could have told them that.

Posted 6/8/2004 02:27:01 PM by Edward Driscoll
THERE'S A RECORDING STUDIO HIDDEN IN YOUR PC: My latest Electronic House newsletter looks as the basics of getting started with home recording.

Posted 6/8/2004 01:16:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
INSTITUTIONALIZING OUR DEMISE: Roger Kimball looks at America vs. multiculturalism.

Posted 6/8/2004 12:42:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE INTERNET PRESIDENT: James Pinkerton writes:

Reagan invented the Internet. Well, OK, that's not exactly right, but his administration made the key decision that opened the Internet up to commercial utilization. But wait just a doggone nano-second, you might be saying, didn't Al Gore invent the Net? Or didn't he at least try to take credit for it in 1999, when he told CNN, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet"? Of course, what started out as Arpanet reaches back to the late 60s, when Gore was still in school. But as for "creating the Internet" as THE Internet, one might turn to a 2000 book written by Reed Hundt, who declares himself to be one of Gore's biggest fans. Hundt's memoir of his tenure as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1993-1997, You Say You Want a Revolution: A Story of Information Age Politics, was written, in part, to help Gore's presidential prospects; in a talk four years ago to the New America Foundation, he described himself as "Al's lieutenant," sent to the FCC to "implement his agenda." Yet even so, the author's basic honesty got in the way of his political advocacy. On page 133 of his book, Hundt noted that a "far-sighted, or accidentally smart" ruling by the Reagan-era FCC prohibited phone companies from levying "access charges" on data, as distinct from voice transmissions. "In the absence of the FCC's decision," Hundt writes, "the Internet would have been so expensive that [founder Marc] Andreesen's Netscape would not have been a hiccup, much less one of the first bubble stocks of the Internet." Let's pause over this for a moment. Even a pro-Gore Democrat concedes that the biggest pro-Internet inflection point dates back to the early 80s. In fact, if one looks up the case -- MTS and WATS Market Structure Order, 97 FCC 2d 682 (1983) -- one sees that the FCC was then chaired by Mark Fowler, a Reagan appointee. And so Gore looks less like a prime mover, and more like a free rider. And Reagan, meanwhile, gets credit -- or should get credit -- for picking free-market heroes such as Fowler. Did the Gipper ever know about the Net? Maybe not, but it hardly matters; even through lean times, such as the 70s, he never lost his faith in the genius of the American people and in the almost-magical powers of the free market. So if someone had told him that American enterprise had created a Next Big Thing that was adding trillions of economic output, he would probably have said, "Well, of course."

Posted 6/8/2004 12:37:30 PM by Edward Driscoll
L.A. SEAL UPDATE: CNSNews reports, "Removal of Cross from County Seal Brings Lawsuit" I don't know if anything will come of this, but I'm happy to see people fighting back from what was presented to the public as a fait accompli between the county and the ACLU. UPDATE: AP reports (registration may be required, but this is the bulk of the article):

The County Board of Supervisors plans to reconsider the deal it reached last week to remove a cross from the county seal. The supervisors voted 3-2 to remove the symbol from the seal after the American Civil Liberties Union threatened a lawsuit, saying it was an improper endorsement of Christianity. Supervisors Michael Antonovich and Don Knabe said their offices have been bombarded with phone calls and e-mails since the decision was made, including from a conservative legal group offering to represent the county for free in a legal battle against the ACLU. The county would probably win such a lawsuit, those groups said, because there have been similar instances were crosses were permitted because they were historical rather than religious symbols. Antonovich estimated it could cost millions of dollars for the county to remove the tiny cross from all its letterhead, officials vehicles, uniforms and buildings.

Posted 6/7/2004 06:01:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
CUBA'S REACTION TO PRESIDENT REAGAN'S DEATH: Jonah Goldberg writes that the Gipper wouldn't have it any other way. UPDATE: This quote about the left's reaction sounds almost like something Reagan would have said himself.

Posted 6/7/2004 05:45:49 PM by Edward Driscoll
NOT ANTI-WAR--JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE: Reading this nifty piece of original reporting by Citizen Smash, I have to ask: why aren't I reading about Gillian in the L.A. Times? Think the editor of the Times will ask his reporters the same question? Nahh--me neither.

Posted 6/7/2004 12:43:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE OMBUDSGOD LOOKS at the difference between a militant and a terrorist at the BBC.

Posted 6/7/2004 11:33:00 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE PIVOT POINT: David Cohen looks at the decision that made Reagan's presidency great, and signaled victory in the Cold War.

Posted 6/7/2004 02:26:38 AM by Edward Driscoll
IRAN-CONTRA: As Paul Harvey would say, "And now, the rest of the story..."

Posted 6/7/2004 12:01:14 AM by Edward Driscoll
BATMAN HAS BEEN MY FAVORITE COMIC BOOK CHARACTER ever since I was a wee youngin'. But--honest!--I don't wear a black cape or utility belt. (Sheesh--the stuff I have to put up with whenever I leave Gotham City...) UPDATE: On the other hand, just what was Jeff Goldstein doing with Philip Michael Thomas??

Posted 6/6/2004 08:00:47 PM by Edward Driscoll
KERRY PLAYS POLITICS...by not playing politics with President Reagan's death, writes Charles Johnson. UPDATE: More on Kerry and President Reagan, here. UPDATE: The more I think about this, the more I do feel that Kerry's in a can't win situation, as some of Charles' readers commented. If he did politicize Reagan's death, he'd be reviled for it, as I did with the shot Kerry inserted into his statement on Saturday. Sitting out the week seems to be the most sensible approach for him--and I'll give him credit for that.

Posted 6/6/2004 11:32:55 AM by Edward Driscoll
REWRITING HISTORY: Stephen Green looks at a major bit of revisionism going on by the Germans at D-Day today:

if Germany wants to rewrite history to show that Hitler and the Nazis were some sort of occupying power in Germany, then they risk forgetting the lesson taught to them at the cost of millions of Allied lives. "Never again" becomes "Never what again?" becomes "It's happening again." We can't afford to let Germany forget what happened, and who was to blame.

A perfectly acceptable relic of its time, [Shirer's] book treats Hitler and the Nazi Party as complete aberrations, imposed on a slumbering Germany by a freakish set of circumstances. This view, understandable in a liberal West which finds it necessary to aver "it couldn't happen here" and which found it necessary to rehabilitate Germany into a worthy Cold War ally, has prevailed for the better part of sixty years now. In recent years however at least one book has come along to directly challenge this view, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's excellent Hitler's Willing Executioners. But to my knowledge, British historian Michael Burleigh's Third Reich is the first major one volume history to rival Shirer's work and it is an invaluable corrective, precisely the kind of big idea contrarian history that we could use more of and which, even if the author's claims are ultimately rejected, can serve to clarify the thinking of us all on the issues he broaches. Burleigh apparently draws on some academic work (for instance that by Saul Freidlander) with which I'm unfamiliar, but his central argument will ring a bell with anyone who's ever read Eric Hoffer's great book The True Believer. Burleigh considers the Third Reich to have been the product of a political religion, replete with symbols, hymns, liturgy, martyrs and a Messiah. From this perspective, the German people, defeated in WWI and impoverished by reparations and Depression, emerge, not as unwitting dupes, but as desperate believers in a new state religion propounded by Hitler, a true totalitarianism, suffused with racially motivated criminality, which sought to infiltrate every aspect of their lives.

Posted 6/5/2004 11:10:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
I FINALLY WATCHED TOM SELLECK'S PORTRAYAL OF IKE TODAY. It had been sitting on my PVR's hard drive since Monday, and today seemed like a very good day to view it. I thought Selleck's portrayal of Eisenhower was spot-on, and very much like George C Scott's of Patton: neither actor looks much like the man they portrayed, and neither was trying to do an impersonation, but both captured their essence brilliantly. (Both films share some similarities: in Patton, it was Ike who was the great man just off screen; here, it's FDR.) FDR freed western Europe. President Reagan freed its eastern half, as Scott Johnson describes, here.

Posted 6/5/2004 10:57:45 PM by Edward Driscoll
HOW REAGANOMICS MADE THE WORLD WORK: While President Reagan will best be remembered as the man who won the Cold War, he also revitalized our economy when it was in its worst slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s. So it's worth remembering the thoughts of another great man recently deceased, the late Robert L. Bartley, longtime editor of the Wall Street Journal.

Posted 6/5/2004 10:51:49 PM by Edward Driscoll
PEJMANESQUE: Pejman Yousefzadeh has several thoughts on President Reagan, here.

Posted 6/5/2004 09:38:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION has a comprehensive site remembering President Reagan. UPDATE: Meanwhile, John Hawkins has a primer on the Gipper's legacy, "Reagan 101".

Posted 6/5/2004 09:32:08 PM by Edward Driscoll
SCOTT OTT: "In addition to recordings and transcripts of dozens of the most compelling, sincere and influential speeches ever heard, President Reagan also leaves behind an America that is no longer afraid to call evil what it is, and to do something about it".

Posted 6/5/2004 09:26:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
ROGER KIMBALL HAS A MOVING POST on The New Criterion's Weblog.

Posted 6/5/2004 09:18:56 PM by Edward Driscoll
LBJ'S SERVICE WILL BE MODEL FOR FUNERAL: Orrin Judd has details, here.

Posted 6/5/2004 05:40:45 PM by Edward Driscoll
NOT SURPRISINGLY, National Review Online has numerous articles on President Reagan. And here's my review of Steven Hayward's The Age of Reagan, Vol. I from 2002. UPDATE: Speaking of Steve Hayward, here are his thoughts on Ronald Reagan's successful legacy.

Posted 6/5/2004 02:05:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
RONALD REAGAN DEAD AT 93. UPDATE: Kathryn Jean Lopez writes:

As I understand it, Reagan will lie in state in Sacramento, then at the Capitol. Then there will be a memorial service at the National Cathedral, after which RR will be flown back to California for a sunset interment at the RR Library.

"Communism is neither an ec[onomic] or a pol[itical] system--it is a form of insanity--a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature. I wonder how much more misery it will cause before it disappears." Ronald Reagan, Reagan, In His Own Hand (written 1975, collected 2001)

Posted 6/5/2004 01:57:24 PM by Edward Driscoll
TOO MUCH, TOO LATE: David Gelernter writes that baby boomers are heaping insincere praise on the "greatest generation":

My political credo is simple and many people share it: I am against phonies. A cultural establishment that (on the whole) doesn't give a damn about World War II or its veterans thinks it can undo a half-century of indifference verging on contempt by repeating a silly phrase ("the greatest generation") like a magic spell while deploying fulsome praise like carpet bombing. The campaign is especially intense among members of the 1960s generation who once chose to treat all present and former soldiers like dirt and are willing at long last to risk some friendly words about World War II veterans, now that most are safely underground and guaranteed not to talk back, enjoy their celebrity or start acting like they own the joint. A quick glance at the famous Hemingway B.S. detector shows the needle pegged at Maximum, where it's been all week, from Memorial Day through the D-Day anniversary run-up.

Posted 6/5/2004 01:47:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
ROCK AND FARKING ROLL: The fabulously talented Photoshoppers of Fark give today's celebrities and politicians some hairmetal-band makeovers. Mullets to the fore! (Via "Hit & Run".)

Posted 6/5/2004 12:36:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
HOLY SCHNIKIES! Village Voice calls for all Republicans to be "exterminated". No, really! UPDATE: Charles Johnson writes:

There's a bad craziness loose among the media elites. That a reputable journalist would write such a thing is bad enough--but for any paper, even the Village Voice, to publish it without a qualm is infinitely worse.

To paraphrase an influential thinker of the previous century: The death of millions is a statistic. The reelection of one is a tragedy.

Posted 6/5/2004 12:25:36 PM by Edward Driscoll
GOD AND FDR GET CENSORED AT THE WWII MEMORIAL: California Yankee has the details. (Via Betsy Newmark, who has lots of other good stuff today, as usual.)

Posted 6/4/2004 06:32:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
PUTTING ABU GHRAIB into context. (Via Jeff Goldstein.)

Posted 6/4/2004 06:06:30 PM by Edward Driscoll
WOW, AND THIS WAS BEFORE I STARTED DRINKING! Proof positive that I was indeed at the Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash last Friday. No fault of the photographer (who also has a nifty Weblog), but I really look embalmed in my photo. I think it was taken shortly after I walked in the door and long before Jeff Goldstein took off his pants.

Posted 6/4/2004 05:31:41 PM by Edward Driscoll
GIVING UP QUIET RIOT FOR JIHAD: The FBI's "be on the lookout for" list contains the following name: Abu Suhayb Al-Amriki, a.k.a. Abu Suhayb, a.k.a. Yihya Majadin Adams, a.k.a. Adam Yahiye Gadahn. AKA Adam Pearlman. No, really. "Asparagirl" looks at how "the half-Jewish half-Catholic son of rural California goat-farming hippies" ended up converting to Islam and making the charts on the FBI's hit parade as a Johnny Taliban-come-lately.

Posted 6/4/2004 04:48:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER: David Brock, the conservative turned liberal journalist who now heads Media Matters, the left's answer to Brent Bozell's Media Research Center recently said this:

...journalists have allowed themselves to be cowed by "organized right-wing groups." "I think they are afraid," Brock said. "For a long time, the mainstream media has not stood up. They've essentially allowed Fox to happen. They do not cover Limbaugh -- he is a serious political figure in this country -- they don't write about what he says."

CNN did a whole story promoting their campaign to censor Rush Limbaugh off the Armed Forces Radio Network. Can you imagine how they would have reacted if an MRC had demanded the removal of NPR from Armed Forces Radio because it was too demoralizing to troops? PS: Their Web site is hot and heavy defending George Soros from conservative attack this week. They know who butters their panini.

Posted 6/4/2004 09:43:45 AM by Edward Driscoll
CBS POLL SHOWS VETS FAVOR BUSH: Given how veterans have rejected Kerry (not the least of which are those who served directly with him) and are supporting President Bush overwhelmingly, I'll bet the left has turned on a dime from the chickenhawk sophistry they tried to employ last year.

Posted 6/4/2004 01:21:37 AM by Edward Driscoll
COMMANDO? Andrew Sullivan notes that the "anti-Western left has come up with a new term for a terrorist". I wonder if Reuters will start using this one.

Posted 6/3/2004 03:13:34 PM by Edward Driscoll
LILEKS ON LOS ATHEISTS: "I wouldn't join a movement that wanted to add a cross to a public seal. But I am dead-set stone-cold opposed to those who, in this instance, want to take one off". UPDATE: Those crosses probably won't be the last religious symbol to vanish on LA's seal. Hugh Hewitt writes, "The days of law and logic at the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors have already passed, so Pomona ought to leave with them". Read his interview with some of the more spineless members of the board.

Posted 6/3/2004 03:09:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
AS JEFF GOLDSTEIN SAYS, "Mike Wallace: Brillcreamed, rough-hewn, old school... And spanked like Carl Berstein 'on assignment' in Bangkok". UPDATE: Wallace told Bill O'Reilly, "I had no idea C-SPAN was there...Mind you, I should not probably have said it there", at the Smithsonian's "National World War II Reunion". Brent Baker adds, "One wonders what other opinions Wallace shares when C-SPAN cameras aren’t around". In his recent syndicated column, Jonah Goldberg referred to this exchange from a 1989 PBS show, where Wallace admitted that given the choice between saving American soldiers' lives and getting a story out of their being killed in action, he'd simply roll tape and not feel the least but sorry for refusing to help them.

Posted 6/3/2004 02:59:32 PM by Edward Driscoll
I'D SECOND SEVERAL OF THE PEOPLE ON THIS LIST: John Hawkins looks at "People On The Right Who Get On My Nerves".

Posted 6/3/2004 01:26:46 PM by Edward Driscoll
DR. HUXTABLE MEETS THE BLOGOSPHERE: Matt Rosenberg analyzes how the press covered Bill Cosby's speech at the NAACP two weeks ago and concludes:

Dick Meyer of CBSNews.com gets it right: "Plenty of white writers or editors simply avoid wading into this altogether because it is perceived as too risky, too easy to be accused of prejudice, or meddling." And that avoidance, as Meyer notes, "ensures the issues become even more buried. Pimp rap goes uncriticized. Schools stay bad." The slow but now-steady spread of the Cosby story illustrates one more way bloggers serve an invaluable function: not just by rebutting or correcting the news; but by watering and "sunshining" stories that are dying on the vine because they disrupt the pre-conceived liberal agendas of media elites. Many bloggers who depend on the news hold in low regard the person whose job title is "Page One Editor," "National Editor," or "Foreign Editor." And rightly so, all too often. These folks play up what they like according to their politics, and downplay what they don't like. What gets two inches on page A12 might really deserve 25 inches, starting on Page One. Enter the humble blogger. True, the percentage of Internet users who report they view blogs regularly is still low. But even then, we're talking some 31 million regular blog viewers. Admittedly, some blogs are about knitting, snow-boarding, or origami. Others are authored by navel-gazing college students, polyamorists, vegan anarchists, or self-declared alcoholics detailing each wretched night's debauch. But watch out for many of the rest. Their reach grows. The Cosby story — like others before it — has shown that a news story can grow "legs" thanks more to repackagers in the blogosphere than to "legitimate" print and broadcast outlets.

Posted 6/3/2004 01:44:08 AM by Edward Driscoll
FYI FOR BOATERS: The international signal flag code has been revised. Boaters should please memorize this list and adjust accordingly.

Posted 6/2/2004 02:38:35 PM by Edward Driscoll
ABOUT DENVER: It's been a pretty hectic few days here, and normally, when I want to actually write about something rather simply linking to it, I like a few minutes to think about what I want to say. So I haven't had a chance yet to write about the Denver Blogger Bash on Friday--so let's remedy that. It was a blast. I've been online continuously since 1994 (actually, I was also in CompuServe briefly around 1982, but that didn't last very long). And over the past decade, whenever I've had the opportunity, I've tried to meet in person those people whose pixels I've enjoyed reading. So with the help of some frequent flier miles, it was possible to shoot in and out Denver International Airport fairly quickly. I'm not sure why the Denver area has so many great bloggers around it--but at 1:00 in the morning, while Steve Green was cutting Kim's arguments defending suicide bombers to ribbons, (man I wish I was that articulate after four Martinis) I had an interesting conversation with Darren Copeland's friend about the regional aspects of blogging. I tend to discount them; I'm of the opinion that thanks to the Internet (and especially, thanks to broadband), anybody anywhere who has an opinion can get a Weblog from Blogger or Typepad and get his thoughts online. But having a community of friends for support and to bounce ideas off of is great. And the Denver crowd certainly seemed pretty unified. What was interesting was comparing the discussions of the bloggers with those who don't blog. Steve noted his exchange with Kim, which was pretty darn heated. And simultaneously, I watched Darren's friend pounding the table as his gave us his opinions. And I'm pretty sure that neither of them have a blog. There's something about knowing that your ideas are going up on the 'Net, and that your friends and acquaintances would be parsing them, adding on to them or rejecting them that makes one choose his or her words very carefully. It's a very different medium from the bully pulpit of a newspaper where the communication is much more one way. (See also: Raines, Howell.) So I can see where regular gatherings of bloggers would not only keep those who actively do it psyched to continue, it also provides a subtle push for others to join in the fun as well. Curious, isn't it, that the 'Net, which was supposed to create an global village free of boundaries (that's the mindset if you smoked enough McLuhan, like Wired did) ends up doing a far better job of strengthening regional ties. Incidentally, this was my first trip to Denver, other than changing planes at DIA. But hopefully it won't be my last. It looks like a great city. And the people in it aren't too shabby, either.

Posted 6/2/2004 02:37:47 PM by Edward Driscoll
LUMP SUM: Sgt. Stryker wants his reparations--now.

Posted 6/2/2004 02:09:01 PM by Edward Driscoll
ANDREW SULLIVAN FISKS HOWELL RAINES, noting that his "fascinating little column" praising Kerry "is a very useful insight into how he turned The New York Times into a crusading left-populist pamphlet" as its former editor. And as Glenn Reynolds' readers have noted, it also has this whopper in it:

In that Raines article in the Guardian you linked, he writes "As America's FIRST WAR-HERO candidate since John F Kennedy, he ought to be leading the national discussion on what went wrong in Iraq." You would think Howell Raines would have heard of George McGovern or at least George H.W. Bush, right?

Posted 6/2/2004 12:58:12 PM by Edward Driscoll
LOS ATHEISTS: Los Angeles County surrenders to ACLU; will remove the crosses on its seal. As Ramesh Ponnuru wrote, "No word on how long the county will be allowed to keep its name". UPDATE: Charles Johnson has contact information for LA County, "if you live in LA and are as outraged about this totalitarian attempt to erase history as I am". I'm sure they'd like to hear from out-of-towners as well.

Posted 6/2/2004 01:30:35 AM by Edward Driscoll
BLACKIE: Got a spare $150,000 or so under the mattress? Then one of Eric Clapton's most famous guitars could be yours. (In 1985 I bought my first Fender Stratocaster--which I still own--a black 1957 reissue with a maple fretboard. Guess which guitar I was trying to copy?) Incidentally, "Brownie", Blackie's sister is on display at Paul Allen's EMP Museum in Seattle. It was the guitar featured on the title song and back cover of this album. Consequently, it sold (presumably to Allen or an intermediary) during a previous auction for $497,000. UPDATE: If you decide to take a second or third mortage out to bid on the axe, you might want to avoid Green Point Mortgage...

Posted 6/1/2004 04:40:33 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE KUMBAYA KID: If elected, John Kerry promises to make all of the bad people around the world get rid of their nuclear weapons--including North Korea and Iran. Of course if they don't, there's always this option.

Posted 6/1/2004 04:00:14 PM by Edward Driscoll
THEN AND NOW: David Lewis Schaefer and Mark Levin each look at The New York Times 50 years ago and today, and find some interesting parallels--and not surprisingly, divergences. Meanwhile, Hyspeed wonders how Fleet Street would have covered World War II had it been dominated by the mindset of today's media. His headline? "BISMARCK SUNK, BRITAIN DOOMED".

Posted 6/1/2004 02:24:01 PM by Edward Driscoll
I HAVEN'T LINKED TO JAY NORDLINGER IN A WHILE, and that's an oversight on my part. As usual, he's got lots of great stuff today, so stop on by.

Posted 6/1/2004 01:47:34 PM by Edward Driscoll
ANDREW SULLIVAN PUTS THE WAR ON TERROR INTO PERSPECTIVE and concludes that it's "an extraordinary success". "Now watch the media do all it can to accentuate the negative", he adds. Meanwhile, Rod Dreher has a column on that very subject in the Dallas Morning News, and adds:

I've been getting great e-mails all day from around the country over my DMN column whacking the media for ignoring the good news out of Iraq. One of my correspondents was Mark Tapscott at the Heritage Foundation, who sends along results of a Gallup poll released today. The poll surveyed the confidence Americans had in their institutions. The military got the highest rating, with 75 percent of those polled expressing a "great deal" of confidence, while only five percent saying they had "very little or none" in the military. Compare that with TV news, in which 30 percent of respondents report a "great deal" of confidence, and a nearly equal number reporting "very little or none." It's not much better for newspapers: 30 percent have a "great deal" of confidence, while 25 percent have "very little or none." The U.S. military, then, is the most popular institution in America. The news media are among the least popular.

Posted 6/1/2004 11:28:03 AM by Edward Driscoll
GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD: P.J. O'Rourke writes that maybe America should become isolationist again:

And the best thing about Americans recusing ourselves from global entanglements is that we will be loved again. Imagine a world where American manners and mores set the standard almost everywhere, where American fashions, American ideas and American lifestyles are universally sought out and copied. A world where people avidly listen to American music, eagerly watch American TV and movies, and try to imitate Americans in every way. Imagine a world where the U.S.A. is so admired that people by the millions want nothing more than to come to America and recuse themselves from global entanglements.

Posted 6/1/2004 10:59:53 AM by Edward Driscoll
TO FREEDOM: Right around the time of the global Live Aid concerts in 1985, Amnesty International began running a slickly produced commercial featuring numerous celebrities, including Glenn Close, who said that in many countries, raising a toast to freedom could get you arrested, and that Amnesty International was fighting for those oppressed people everywhere. Sadly, that was a long time ago.

Posted 6/1/2004 10:43:06 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE LEGACY OF CROKNITE: Steven Den Beste has two long, detailed posts on media bias. Makes a nice triple-feature with our interview with Bernard Goldberg, author of Bias and Arrogance.

Posted 6/1/2004 01:04:17 AM by Edward Driscoll
A LITTLE LATE FOR MEMORIAL DAY, but there's a terrific new article on Insight Magazine's Website about Les Paul and the fighting music of World War II. (Via Charles Johnson. For our profile of Les Paul, click here.)

Posted 5/31/2004 07:12:56 PM by Edward Driscoll
ED'S ON ACID: Acid Planet that is, where my Blogcritics piece on improving vocals is currently the lead article in the "Dirt from Dave" links. And they made me look just like David Bowie in the photograph they selected, too! (Now you do you sound like you're on acid--Ed. Oh sure--and talking to myself certainly helps matters!)

Posted 5/30/2004 01:01:13 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE ROAD AWAY FROM SERFDOM: 2004 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek. Arnold Beichman writes that "to remain a Marxist today or a Marxist fellow-traveler when the whole world has voted against the malice of Marxism raises the most profound questions as to the rationality of the true believer". In other ecomomic-related news, Larry Kudlow declares the current economy "a boom with legs":

Over the past year, following enactment of the president's tax-cut plan, real economic growth has increased 5 percent with only 1.6 percent inflation. After-tax profits have increased 37 percent (fully adjusted for depreciation and capital consumption). Business spending on equipment and software has grown 12.5 percent. Since last August, 1.1 million jobs have been created. Spendable income has increased 4.9 percent in real terms. Consumer spending is up 4.3 percent. The economy is roaring at its fastest in 20 years, and there's no clear reason the prosperity trends won't continue.

Posted 5/29/2004 10:49:09 AM by Edward Driscoll
HEY STEVE, YOU'RE RIGHT: You really do feel the hangover more when you're a mile above sea level! Others had different kinds of mile high adventures last night. Although to be fair, I don't recall seeing Jeff Goldstein with his pants off. Thanks to Zombyboy, Darren Copeland, and the others who organized the event. A great time was had by all--even if some of the details are still hazy and will require the same attention to forensic detail normally reserved for the Zapruder film to be recalled. Oh, and Sammy was cute when she rolled around the floor. UPDATE: Andrew Olmsted looks at what a diverse crowd attended the Press Club and yet how amicable the conservation was, and concludes, "Rodney King would have been proud".

Posted 5/28/2004 03:55:25 PM by Edward Driscoll
LOOK OUT DENVER: I'm in town and ready for tonight's shindig. (Although to be honest, I haven't been participating in the pre-bash warm-ups as much as Steve Green has been.) I'd like to especially thank the Jennifer Aniston-wannabe sitting next to me on the flight in for accidentally spilling her Sprite on the right cuff of my trousers and my black loafers. (Neither of which I'm wearing tonight.) She was very apologetic; my immediate reaction was an Yngwie-like "YOU HAVE UNLEASHED THE F***ING FURY!!", but it came out with more a Woody Allen-style "That's OK, not a problem. Can happen to anybody." That minor hiccup aside, I'll see whoever shows up in a few hours.

Posted 5/27/2004 10:57:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE RIGHTEST OF THE RIGHT STUFF: Meet William Foxley, hero. And be sure to read to the end.

Posted 5/27/2004 03:48:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
PERFECT TOGETHER: Pat Buchanan meets the Arab News.

Posted 5/27/2004 03:27:39 PM by Edward Driscoll
ARE UN AMBULANCES BEING USED to transport Palestinian terrorists? Charles Johnson has a damning photo from the Israel Defense Forces web site.

Posted 5/27/2004 03:17:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
TOTALITARIANS, HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND AMERICA'S RESPONSE: Peter Burnet looks at the similarities between the left's appeasement of the original Axis of the 1930s and today's Axis of Evil.

Posted 5/27/2004 12:46:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
DAVID LETTERMAN, HOSS: He chided CBS for running a sitcom instead of showing President Bush's speech Monday night. "The network feels that the war in Iraq is important, however not as important as the season finale of Yes, Dear. So they couldn't be bothered."

Posted 5/27/2004 12:20:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE ED: As James Lileks once wrote, "parachute journalism" is the laziest sort of reporting. "Find a Symbol of America, talk to a guy eating supper, and discern the Pulse of the Culture". Which is why I'll be stopping by the Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash tomorrow. If you're attending, you can't miss me--I'll be the guy who sort of looks like this.

Posted 5/27/2004 12:14:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
AFTER WATCHING AL GORE FLIP OUT YESTERDAY, John Hawkins writes, "If only we could transfer the towering hate and rage left-wingers like Al Gore & Howard Dean feel towards Republicans to the terrorists who want to kill us all, our country would be better off." On the other hand, Byron York writes that secretly, some Republicans love it. UPDATE: Maybe Morgan Spurlock should investigate Al's choice of cereal in the morning. (Via Will Collier.) ANOTHER UPDATE: Say what you will about Al, he's a unifier, bring disparate people from all walks of life together in harmony. James Taranto writes, "give Gore credit for helping liberals and conservatives find common ground in this era of polarization":

"It is now clear that Al Gore is insane," writes the New York Post's John Podhoretz. "I don't mean that his policy ideas are insane, though many of them are. I mean that based on his behavior, conduct, mien and tone over the past two days, there is every reason to believe that Albert Gore Jr., desperately needs help. I think he needs medication, and I think that if he is already on medication, his doctors need to adjust it or change it entirely." Maureen Dowd of the New York Times agrees. When he delivered a speech to the far-left outfit MoveOn.org yesterday, she writes, "Mr. Gore hollered so much, he made Howard Dean look like George Pataki." She says the erstwhile veep represents "the wackadoo wing of the Democratic Party."

Posted 5/27/2004 11:58:39 AM by Edward Driscoll
DISHING IT OUT, BUT NOT TAKING IT: On Monday, Maria Bartiromo of CNBC confronted Morgan Spurlock, the director of Super Size Me. James Glassman writes that "He was reduced to a fool. It was beautiful to watch". And read. UPDATE: The Internet Movie Database reports:

Roadside Attractions and Samuel Goldwyn films have accused MTV of refusing to air commercials for Super Size Me, the award-winning documentary which landed in the top-ten box-office attractions last weekend, something rare for a documentary. The two companies said in a statement that they were told that the ads were "disparaging to fast-food restaurants," which are big advertisers on the youth-oriented cable outlet. MTV disputed the charge, saying that the distributors balked at a deal. (More here, for when the IMDB link scrolls off.)

Posted 5/27/2004 10:37:08 AM by Edward Driscoll
BLASTS FROM THE PAST: Stephen Hayward deconstructs Jimmy Carter's failure to prevent the Shah from falling and concludes, "In retrospect, the fall of Iran may have been the single greatest foreign policy blunder of the last 50 years, not excepting Vietnam. Had Iran not become a bastion of international terror, it is unlikely we would be where we are today." (Advantage Simpsons? Well, I wouldn't go that far--Ed) And O.J. Simpson is on a tenth anniversary tour of his most infamous moment, including a photo-op at the scene of the murder.

Posted 5/27/2004 09:44:06 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE PRE-TIMES UNIT ROLLS INTO ACTION: It's rare to Fisk an article even before it's written. But thanks to a piece I wrote in March, I'm able to do just that. The Brothers Judd link to an article in today's the New York Times that says:

The number of bloggers has grown quickly, thanks to sites like blogger.com, which makes it easy to set up a blog. Technorati, a blog-tracking service, has counted some 2.5 million blogs. Of course, most of those millions are abandoned or, at best, maintained infrequently. For many bloggers, the novelty soon wears off and their persistence fades. Sometimes, too, the realization that no one is reading sets in. A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs.

Scott Ott, the humorist whose Scrappleface Website is a Blogosphere favorite (in January of 2003, Ott coined the brilliant "Axis of Weasels" meme that later graced the cover of The New York Post), puts things into sharp perspective. In one of his typically satiric news articles, he wrote that if only about two percent of Internet users actually write Weblogs, it means that there are more bloggers writing, than people reading USA Today (whose circulation is 2.6 million), The New York Times (1.6 million) or The New York Daily News (805,000). Ott doesn't mention CNN, but since the article most prominently appeared on CNN's Website, it's probably worth noting that in the US, CNN's typically daily viewership is only about 450,000 viewers. (The Fox News Channel, the cable news ratings leader, gets an average of 799,000 viewers during their broadcasting day.) Of course, if I were CNN, I'd be worried about having, in a manner of speaking, all of my viewers, and then some, owning Weblogs.

Mr. Wiggins, 48, a senior information technologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, does not know how many readers he has; he suspects it's not many. But that does not seem to bother him. "I'm just getting something off my chest," he said.

Posted 5/27/2004 09:27:21 AM by Edward Driscoll
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: Daniel Grant looks at the legal obligations owners of artwork have to their artists. UPDATE: For links and info on artists' rights under the law, my wife suggests this page.

Posted 5/27/2004 09:24:55 AM by Edward Driscoll
IRAQ, THEN AND NOW: Brendan Miniter of the Wall Street Journal looks at what might have happened had President Bush #41 liberated Iraq, with Democrats controlling both the House and the Senate at the time. Of course, the elder Bush was assailed by both many on the right, and by opportunists on the left, for not finishing off Saddam. Just as Bush #43 is being assailed by both many on the right, and by opportunists on the left, for doing just that.

Posted 5/26/2004 02:26:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
MORE PRISONER ABUSE IN IRAQ: Andrew Sullivan has the details. Scroll up to here, where Sullivan also asks why gays in America have ignored the plight of their counterparts in the Middle East.

Posted 5/26/2004 02:10:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE END OF DAYS: How else to explain this headline:

Posted 5/26/2004 02:06:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
"SOMEWHERE", Richard Baehr writes, "Pat Buchanan is smiling" at the latest round of anti-Semitism.

Posted 5/26/2004 12:53:31 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE RUBBER DIPLOMA CIRCUIT: Via Betsy Newmark, Ben Shapiro has an amusing look at who's speaking at college commencements this year. (For what it's worth, my graduating class listened to Malcolm Forbes. It was a fairly pedestrian speech, as I recall. But on the other hand, that's not necessarily a bad thing.)

Posted 5/26/2004 12:15:48 PM by Edward Driscoll
LET'S NOT ASSUME THE SALE JUST YET: Kerry's plane has "John Kerry President" on its side. Despite the best efforts of the press, I don't think it's official yet. And I suppose this was inevitable:

Comparing the plane to aircraft that brought U.S. troops to and ferried them home from Vietnam, Kerry called the plane his ``freedom bird.''

I did take part in free-fire zones, I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire, I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground. And all of these acts, I find out later on, are contrary to the Hague and Geneva conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense, anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the application of the Nuremberg Principles, is in fact guilty.

Posted 5/26/2004 12:09:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
COMPARE AND CONTRAST: Al Gore has harsh words for anyone with an (R) to the right of his or her name, and thinks that Iraq is a "catastrophe". His running mate in the 2000 elections thinks differently. Will any reporter ask either man why he thinks his counterpart's view is so bi-polar? UPDATE: Actually, I agree with Gore on Iraq. Especially when he says things like this:

''We need national resolve and unity, not weakness and division when we are engaged in an action against someone like Saddam Hussein,'' the vice president said on CNN's Larry King Live. Wired for a round-robin of live interviews with five network TV anchors, Gore blanketed the airwaves with a prediction that critics of the president's decision to strike Iraq would change their opinion as they learned more about the situation and received more information from military leaders. ''This action is the correct action,'' he said.

Posted 5/26/2004 10:47:52 AM by Edward Driscoll
"NO, I MEAN, WHO IS THE REAL ENEMY?": I don't know about you, but I can absolutely picture this exchange between writer/producer/director Lionel Chetwynd and a Hollywood mogul:

When he was 17, Ike's screenwriter and co-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd joined the 3rd Battalion Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), spending two years in the Canadian peacetime military. During that time he met some veterans of Dieppe, a bloody but necessary dress rehearsal to D-Day that established the futility of invading a fortified European port. Now in his early 60s, Chetwynd is a longtime naturalized American citizen who was born in England and raised in Montreal. He'd remembered from Canadian regimental history that of the 4,400-odd Canadians sent to Dieppe, about 3,600 were killed. Although they knew it was basically a suicide mission, not one man failed to report for duty. Chetwynd asked one of the old soldiers in his regiment, Sgt. Gordon Betts, why. "My generation had to figure out what we were ready to die for," Chetwynd recalled Betts telling him. "You kids don't even know what to live for." Many years later, when Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party — as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story. "So I went in," Chetwynd told me, "and someone there said, 'So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?' "And I said, 'Well, they weren't bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?' And she said, 'Well, who's the enemy?' I said, 'Hitler. The Nazis.' And she said, 'Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who's the real enemy?'" "It was the first time I realized," Chetwynd continued, "that for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves. They've become so persuaded of the essential ugliness of our society and its military, that to tell a war story is to tell the story of evil people."

Posted 5/26/2004 10:39:07 AM by Edward Driscoll
CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: Orrin Judd praises Bill Clinton.

Posted 5/25/2004 11:12:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The hottest part of hell is reserved for those who, at a time of grave moral crisis, steadfastly maintain their neutrality."--Winston Churchill (Via Tom Maguire.)

Posted 5/25/2004 07:09:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE PURPLE DECADES: Ilya Shapiro writes on being "Stuck in Purple America", which makes a nice trifecta alongside of Rod Dreher's "Crunchy Cons" piece and David Brooks' Bobos In Paradise.

Posted 5/25/2004 03:25:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
HOME THEATER IN A BOX: My latest Electronic House newsletter is now online.

Posted 5/25/2004 02:01:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
TESTS CONFIRM SARIN GAS in Baghdad bomb. Follow this link to read just how deadly even a single drop of sarin can be. And continue to watch the media keep moving the goalposts. UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan spots Dan Rather spinning the story as only he can. REUTERS "UPDATE": The kings of quotation marks aren't acknowledging this find, either. ONE MORE UPDATE: H.D. Miller has more, here.

Posted 5/25/2004 01:56:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
OPENING SOON: Jonathan Last looks at the art of the movie trailer. Last doesn't mention it, but my favorite trailer is the one that Welles narrated for Citizen Kane, where he uses his most ingratiating voice-over style to introduce his cast of then-unknowns. It's included on the DVD, and as RKO's advertising men said of the film, it's terrific.

Posted 5/24/2004 08:06:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
QUOTE OF THE DAY comes from Joe Lieberman, a Democrat who gets it. "If we don't lose our will, someday we'll look back on what we've done in Iraq with pride."

Posted 5/24/2004 04:49:45 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE BROKEN WINDOWS THEORY: In his commencement speech at Hillsdale College, Edwin J. Feulner, the president of The Heritage Foundation, applies it to public discourse. Too much good stuff here for me to quote an excerpt. Instead, RTWT. Too bad E.L. Doctorow didn't apply similar reasoning to his commencement speech this weekend. UPDATE: For background on the broken windows theory, read this Atlantic article from 1982 by James Q. Wilson, and this transcription of a PBS program hosted by Ben Wattenberg, who explains how Wilson's theories led to a dramatic increase in the quality of life in Manhattan, and not coincidentally, a drop in its homicide rate, when they were applied by Rudy Giuliani. As Wilson himself said, "The ability to measure the crime rate permits you to test theories, to test competing arguments, to see who is correct."

Posted 5/24/2004 04:39:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
LIFE IMITATES THE ONION: Betsy Newmark has two examples, here and here. Malcolm Muggeridge, call your office.

Posted 5/24/2004 03:55:34 PM by Edward Driscoll
GLENN REYNOLDS LOOKS AT the latest findings from the Pew Research Center on the political demographics of America's newsrooms. Be sure to read the comments from Mike Gordon, one of Glenn's readers, as well. And click here and then scroll down for James Taranto's thoughts. (Scroll down a little further to the "Red Alert" for the probably-not-all-that-astonishing source of John Kerry's campaign slogan.)

Posted 5/24/2004 03:38:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
RATINGS TRUMP WAR FOR CIVILIZATION: None of the broadcast networks are expected to carry President Bush's speech tonight. It will only be available on the cable news channels. UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts.

Posted 5/24/2004 02:08:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
HUNTER S. THOMPSON, HOLOCAUST DENIER: How else to explain this passage in his ESPN column:

The long-dreaded 2004 Olympics in Greece will be the ultimate crossroads for sports and politics in this new and vicious century. The recent photos of cruelty at the Abu Grahaib all-american prison in Baghdad have taken care of that. Yes, sir. We have taken the bull by the horns on this one, sports fans. These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport. Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these photographs did.

Thompson has less hope than the Islamists; at least they have an afterlife to look forward to. All we have is a country so rotten and exhausted it’s not worth defending. It never was, of course, but it’s even less defensible now than before. He can say what he wants. Drink what he wants. Drive where he wants. Do what he wants. He’s done okay in America. And he hates this country. Hates it. This appeals to high school kids and collegiate-aged students getting that first hot eye-crossing hit from the Screw Dad pipe, but it’s rather pathetic in aged moneyed authors. And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn't infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He's the guy who made nihilism hip. He's the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don't trust anyone who believes anything. He's the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.

The long-dreaded 2004 Olympics in Greece will be the ultimate crossroads for sports and politics in this new and vicious century. The recent photos of cruelty at the Abu Grahaib all-american prison in Baghdad have taken care of that. Yes, sir. We have taken the bull by the horns on this one, sports fans. These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport.

But after being linked to the DRUDGE REPORT, a top editor demanded the sentence be immediately edited --without Thompson's okay, according to an ESPN.com staffer. "Hunter can go too far sometimes," the Bristol-based ESPN employee told the DRUDGE REPORT.

As with the original, Thompson still concludes with the thought: "Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport."

Posted 5/24/2004 01:21:14 PM by Edward Driscoll
LIES AND THE LYING LIARS ON THE LEFT WHO TELL THEM: Fred Barnes writes that he has just the person to look into Michael Moore's lies and distortions: "Al Franken has taken special interest in public liars, writing a bestseller called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Al, the Moore case is now in your court". Found via "The Corner", where Tim Graham writes:

If you can't get upset with a film that crazily attacks the president and slanders the war effort, and makes wild accusations about the Bushes being tight with the bin Ladens, then you should take some outrage pills. Then there's all the liberal film critics. The same people who earlier this year sounded like a pack of anthropologists who miraculously all attended the crucifixion of Christ and became fiercely convinced that Mel Gibson is mangling history will now all treat Michael Moore like his documentaries aren't the slightest bit factually mangled.

Posted 5/23/2004 07:51:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Another railroad-related article, this time about a motion detector being discovered alongside the heavily trafficked Northeast Corridor in Philadelphia, written in the same "nothing unusual here" style as the article we linked to last week about a rocket launcher(!) found near Atlanta's railroad station. Here's another article, about New Jersey railroad lines being videotaped. Here's a brief article in The Washington Times that actually tries to put a few of the pieces together. I really fear that we're going to wake up to another Madrid, only it will be in Manhattan's Penn Station, not Spain.

Posted 5/23/2004 05:35:36 PM by Edward Driscoll
DON'T EXPECT TO SEE SGT. STRYKER at either of the chief parties' conventions this year: "I've always thought political conventions were for folks who considered DragonCon way too hip", he says, among other thoughts, here.

Posted 5/22/2004 06:11:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
ANOTHER CASABLANCA REMAKE: In addition to the David Soul/Hector Elizondo TV series from 1983, Hollywood also remade Casablanca 13 years later...with Pamela Anderson. And as Richard Rostrum emailed to tell me:

if the thought of Pamela Anderson standing in for Ingrid Bergman turns your stomach, well, don't be too alarmed--her character is not the Ilsa Lund equivalent.

Posted 5/22/2004 05:29:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
THX-1138 STREETS ON DVD ON 9/14: It will also have a limited run in major city theaters as well, around that same time. Like the first three Star Wars films, George Lucas is tinkering with it though, "opening up" the film with new digital special effects, and showing more of the film's underground city. The Digital Bits has the details and additional links, including the film's promotional Website.

Posted 5/22/2004 05:11:35 PM by Edward Driscoll
CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: National Review's Dave Kopel praises Al Franken's radio show in his column for the Rocky Mountain News. However, he's not very fond of The Randi Rhodes Show, which follows it:

On the radio, hyperbole and invective usually succeed only if they're funny - as they sometimes are on Franken and Limbaugh. With Rhodes, however, all you get is the same kind of flat pronouncements you could hear from a seventh-grader in Boulder: George Bush is "deaf, dumb and blind" and "stupid" and "an idiot" and people who vote for Bush are "morons" and "pathological." For someone with such a smug sense of intellectual superiority, Rhodes is remarkably ignorant. Monday, for example, brought the bizarre claim that United States bombed Dresden after the Germans had surrendered in World War II. Actually, the bombing was three months before the Germans surrendered.

Posted 5/22/2004 03:30:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
THERE'S A NEW WORLD WAR II MEMORIAL IN ESTONIA: There's just one problem though: It honors the SS.

Posted 5/22/2004 03:16:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
GOT $2.7 MILLION UNDER YOUR MATTRESS? Then the birthplace of Bilbo Baggins could be yours, as JRR Tolkien's home in north Oxford is now on the market. And you can decorate it with this!

Posted 5/22/2004 02:20:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE OIL-FOR-FOOD SCAM: Claudia Rosett asks, "What Did Kofi Annan know, and when did he know it?"

Posted 5/22/2004 12:50:22 AM by Edward Driscoll
S-21: James Bowman reviews a new documentary called S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine:

Vann Nath reflects on the Party’s favoring the word "destruction" for its enemies, rather than "killing." He says: "If you think about the word ‘destruction’ it’s more than cruel. In the word ‘kill’ there still seems to be a moral aspect, but in ‘destruction’ there’s nothing human left. We become dust, just particles blowing in the wind." From the now-empty site of a mass grave where one of the guards explains how he killed the prisoners — by striking them from behind with an iron bar then cutting their throats and pushing them into the already-prepared grave where they died — to the final scene of the empty prison with the wind sweeping through it and blowing the dust about, the film dramatizes this observation. It never does answer the question, "Why?" No one ever really can. But it is hypnotically watchable.

Posted 5/21/2004 07:23:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE COLD WAR BEGAN HERE: "Once Stalin had got away with [the Katyn massacre], he realized he could get away with anything".

Posted 5/21/2004 07:11:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
2004: THE YEAR OF BLOGGERS AND FRIDGES: Not too long ago, I wrote about my experiences focus-testing refrigerators. Today, the fruits of my labor and vast refrigerator knowledge paid off, as James Lileks (I know he's not, but he's close enough to make the headline work) visits the appliance story to inspect the latest in Freon-cooled goodness.

Posted 5/21/2004 03:07:25 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT GOES UP OFTEN MUST COME DOWN, but that doesn't mean that both events get the same amount of coverage from the press. Especially when it's the rise and decent of Air America.

Posted 5/21/2004 02:38:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
GIVE AP A HAND: Remember the story we linked to on Tuesday about the seven Iraqi men fitted with new prosthetic right hands by a Houston hospital after they were chopped off by Saddam Hussein? Stefan Sharkansky writes that AP left off two details, one relatively minor, the other not-so-minor. First, it was originally nine men, but two have since died. Second, Saddam's butchery occurred at Abu Ghraib. As one of Sharkansky's readers says, "gosh, that wouldn't have any relevance to current events now, would it?

Posted 5/21/2004 02:02:09 PM by Edward Driscoll
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: Why is Steve Largent donating money to fund Tom Daschle's re-election campaign? (Via The Corner.)

Posted 5/21/2004 01:55:17 PM by Edward Driscoll
DID BILL GATES SHAKE THE BLOGOSPHERE? Bill Gates told Warren Buffett about blogging on Thursday. CNN could not be reached for comment. UPDATE: As Dandy Don Meredith would sing, "Turn out the lights, the party's over"....

Posted 5/21/2004 01:43:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
INTO HOME RECORDING? If you're like me, and not the world's greatest singer, it helps to use technology creatively for better vocals. That's the subject of my latest (long) post at Blogcritics.

Posted 5/21/2004 12:47:13 PM by Edward Driscoll
DAVID OGILVY WOULD APPROVE: Jeff Goldstein has a terrific new advertising slogan for Emory University.

Posted 5/20/2004 05:03:39 PM by Edward Driscoll
NANCY PELOSI, MILITARY GENIUS: Patton, Bradley and Schwarzkopf all pale next to the all-powerful strategist from San Francisco. Jeane Kirkpatrick, call your office. UPDATE: More here.

Posted 5/20/2004 04:16:56 PM by Edward Driscoll
HAS "JUMPING THE SHARK" JUMPED THE SHARK? Patterico writes that the oft-used phrase "jumped the shark when it was used by the Shark." (The Shark himself replies, "Maybe so, but at least I don't go around using phrases after they've jumped the shark ... ;) )

Posted 5/20/2004 03:23:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
MORE FROM THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF NIXON: Yassar Arafat says he'll protect the Olympics from terrorism. Just as he did in 1972. (Via Betsy Newmark.) UPDATE: Following the same theme, since Paul Ehrlich's freshness-date expired right around the same time, Ronald Bailey comments that "Ehrlich has never been right. Why does anyone still listen to him?"

Posted 5/20/2004 01:30:23 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE SECRET PLAN: Roger L. Simon looks at how John Kerry is channeling Richard Nixon. UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds picks up the Kerry-as-Nixon theme on his MSNBC page.

Posted 5/20/2004 01:31:17 AM by Edward Driscoll
NEWSWEEK EDITOR CALLS BUSH ADMINISTRATION "CLOWNS": as noticed--appropriately enough--by Oh, That Liberal Media, who has some interesting comments on the matter. The editor in question is Jonathan Alter, who has been predisposed against the president even before he took office.

Posted 5/20/2004 12:00:16 AM by Edward Driscoll
GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ: You may very well have read this already, thanks to Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan. If not, click here.

Posted 5/19/2004 11:52:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
FOR COMMON SENSE, PLEASE PRESS #1: Michelle Malkin looks at one Democratic ex-governor's anger at multiculturalism.

Posted 5/19/2004 09:43:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Kofi? Your move."

Posted 5/19/2004 02:55:13 PM by Edward Driscoll
US DISPUTES STRIKE REPORT ON IRAQI WEDDING PARTY: Two questions: What sort wedding finishes at 2:45 in the morning? And even if it was actually a wedding, while I know old customs die hard, isn't rather stupid to be firing weapons to celebrate in a war zone? I thought the tradition in the Middle East was to fire weapons after a military victory. Do they unload a clip at the end of a wedding as well? Why not just break a wine glass? It's so much more civilized. UPDATE: More here. ANOTHER UPDATE: More here as well.

Posted 5/19/2004 02:26:47 PM by Edward Driscoll
ANOTHER JOURNALIST COMES CLEAN: On The Today Show this morning, Katie Couric had this to say to David Brock:

Couric contended that “most people, I think, on the street would say the media it tends, tend to be more liberal than conservative" and she proposed: “Aren't most people in journalism, primarily, except for say on Fox, and in certain conservative publications, aren't they for the most part, and of course the media is, are not monolithic, but pro-choice, you know, against prayer in school, probably favor affirmative action? I mean don't you think that's, that's fairly typical? And if so is it, why isn't it fair to say that liberals, sort of, are controlling the mainstream media?"

Posted 5/19/2004 01:43:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE GREAT ELVIN JONES, drummer for John Coltrane's quintet died, at age 76. For our take on one of the Coltrane quintet's finest hours, click here and here. Sadly, I never got to see Jones live. But I did see McCoy Tyner, Coltrane's pianist, a couple of years ago at the Iridium Club in Manhattan. Not surprisingly, his playing is still world class.

Posted 5/19/2004 01:41:13 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE KINGS OF QUOTATION MARKS: Reuters has never met a terrorist it didn't like. Which is why, I suppose the word "heroes" is in quotation marks in this headline, as it refers to those who tried to save innocent lives, as opposed to kill them:

Posted 5/19/2004 01:24:37 PM by Edward Driscoll
LEFT EYE'S VIEW: John O'Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds and Neal Boortz have harsh words for the media. UPDATE: More from Reynolds here, including a particularly damning photo.

Posted 5/19/2004 12:50:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
FRITZ HOLLINGS: ANTI-SEMITE? AP is reporting that a column he wrote is being "labeled 'anti-Jewish' by some". Jonah Goldberg has a couple of posts on the topic, as does John J. Miller.

Posted 5/18/2004 10:24:12 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE BATTLE FOR YOUR LIVING ROOM*: My article on LCD versus Plasma TVs from the debut issue of TechLiving Magazine is now online. *It's the subhead of the article. And yes, I realize how incongruous it sounds at the end of a day's worth of posts on rocket launchers, sarin, amputating limbs, Saddam, Castro, Nader, and Dukakis. Have one of these, and it'll take your mind off whatever ails you. But remember! It "does not contain any drug that depresses the heart, or dopes the mind: a fact quickly noticed, for it is exhilarating instead of stupefying".

Posted 5/18/2004 07:29:24 PM by Edward Driscoll
ROCKET LAUNCHER FOUND NEAR ATLANTA RAILROAD STATION: Love the tone of this Ledger-Enquirer piece: rocket launcher found near train station and eight miles northwest of Atlanta International Airport--ho-hum, you can go about your business. Nothing to see here, move along.

Posted 5/18/2004 06:51:09 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE SIGNIFIGANCE OF SARIN: Joe Carter has a two part look at just how deadly even a single drop of that nerve gas could be. Keep the numbers that Carter posted in mind as the media spins this discovery. (Via Hugh Hewitt.)

Posted 5/18/2004 03:50:49 PM by Edward Driscoll
SPEAKING OF THE MEDIA'S TEMPLATE, Betsy Newmark has a couple of interesting links on the subject.

Posted 5/18/2004 02:55:02 PM by Edward Driscoll
CASTRO CAN LIVE TO 140? Of couuuuurse he can. But hey, if I was the personal physician to a murdering communist dictator and had a wife or family I wanted to protect, I'd probably say stuff like that, too. UPDATE: Via James Lileks, this is a great piece of writing on Castro's dissidents, as well as his useful idiots in the US.

Posted 5/18/2004 02:49:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
AMERICA LENDS A HAND: Seven of them actually, to men who were once Iraqi small business owners who had their right hands cut off nine years ago when Saddam Hussein punished them for Iraq's collapsing economy. (Nevermind the UN embargo after the invasion of Kuwait and Desert Storm. When in doubt--punish your shopkeepers.) There are many, many more stories like this, involving Americans both here and in Iraq, and yet they're published so infrequently, because they don't fit the media's template. UPDATE: And of course, CNN ran few stories of Saddam's torture while he was in power, because they were in his pocket. Surprisingly though, ESPN did run a piece or two on how brutally Uday Hussein treated Iraq's Olympic athletes. ANOTHER UPDATE: A.M. Rosenthal has harsh words for the paper he used to edit.

Posted 5/18/2004 02:38:25 PM by Edward Driscoll
ME AND MY RED CORVAIR: Jim Geraghty looks at how Ralph Nader might do in November. UPDATE: Orrin Judd looks at Nader's net worth, and quips, "As Jesse Jackson knows, there's good money to be made shaking down corporate types". As somebody once said, heh.

Posted 5/18/2004 01:55:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE SPIN DOCTORS: James Taranto looks at how the media is spinning the sarin story. Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds looks at how the media have become a weapon of war themselves.

Posted 5/18/2004 10:44:16 AM by Edward Driscoll
I GUESS OSCAR HAS THE APARTMENT TO HIMSELF NOW: Tony Randall died on Monday, at age 84.

Posted 5/18/2004 02:32:51 AM by Edward Driscoll
WE'RE GONNA PARTY LIKE IT'S 1988: Or, maybe we won't. When it comes to the presidential election, James Pinkerton asks, "Is It 1988 Again"?

Posted 5/17/2004 06:56:38 PM by Edward Driscoll
AND IT WAS RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR NOSES: Sometimes when you're too close to something, you lose objectivity. Rod Dreher looks at how the Democrats became "The Godless Party", and why the press never even saw it coming. (Via The Brothers Judd.)

Posted 5/17/2004 03:50:02 PM by Edward Driscoll
BLESSED BY THE GODS DEPARTMENT: We've been permalinked by "Armavirumque", The New Criterion's Weblog. Thank you!

Posted 5/17/2004 01:38:25 PM by Edward Driscoll
"TOO SMALL BY HOLLYWOOD STANDARDS": The New Criterion is blogging about a Hollywood remake of Brideshead Revisited:

Jude Law will play Sebastian. Notice how this report claims that Castle Howard, the setting of the 1981 series, "was considered too small by Hollywood standards." Nice.

I asked James Bowman if it is a Hollywood imperative that all great films be remade as bad films. Even 'Psycho,' he pointed out, was redone--but not yet "Casablanca." Which leads me to wonder, is it only a matter of time before we get "Casablanca, The Reckoning... because, this time, it's personal"?

Posted 5/17/2004 11:38:07 AM by Edward Driscoll
CHEMICAL WEAPONS IN IRAQ: Glenn Reynolds notes that the spin as already started. UPDATE: Brian Crouch looks at how Reuters, those kings of quotation marks, are spinning things.

Posted 5/17/2004 11:36:48 AM by Edward Driscoll
FIFTY YEARS AFTER BROWN VS BOARD OF EDUCATION, segregation remains a serious problem, writes Arnold Kling, in Tech Central Station.

Posted 5/17/2004 12:53:11 AM by Edward Driscoll
FEAR AND LOATHING IN MINNEAPOLIS: James Lileks runs roughshod over Hunter S. Thompson, a man for whom the freshness dating on his writing expired about twenty years ago. Thompson and William S. Burroughs are the prime examples that sooner or later, decades of pharmaceutical excess catch up with a writer--and the results are not pretty.

Posted 5/16/2004 05:50:35 PM by Edward Driscoll
PUTTING OUT THE FIRE WITH GASOLINE: John Fund writes that Democrats have started to realize that a campaign of hate won't beat President Bush. I'm not sure if a majority of the left has realized this yet, but Fund makes some great points nonetheless. (Via Betsy Newmark.)

Posted 5/15/2004 02:49:38 PM by Edward Driscoll
THINGS I NEVER THOUGHT I'D SAY: Gene Simmons of Kiss: anti-idiotarian. (Via "The Corner".)

Posted 5/14/2004 11:09:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
KAFKA.COM: Steven Den Beste writes that Belgium and the Netherlands have proposed launching a website where businesses and citizens can report and complain on the administrative burdens caused by the insane quantities of standard issue EU regulations and red tape. The proposed URL? www.kafka.eu. To coin a phrase...heh.

Posted 5/14/2004 09:12:30 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE REAL PICTURE SHOW: Roger L. Simon says he has a scoop about some of the content that will soon be broadcast on the new Arab-language television network, Alhurra: photographs and videos of Saddam's henchmen in action, torturing--and I mean torturing--"light years beyond what you have seen from our troops in Abu Ghraib", as Simon puts it. Simon has three questions about this material:

I would like to know if any of these torturers is actually in Abu Ghraib right now. Let's hope they were not among those let out. I also would like to know what Senator Kennedy has to say about the moral equivalence of our actions after watching these tapes. And finally, I would like to know why it took so long for these to come out.

Posted 5/14/2004 08:55:08 PM by Edward Driscoll
I WAS AGAINST THE WAR BEFORE I WAS AGAINST IT: Power Line Blog notes how John Kerry is subtly rewriting his past.

Posted 5/14/2004 04:44:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
HOME RECORDING UPDATE: If you use the popular Reason program* (as I frequently do) to record software-driven virtual synthesizers, Propellerhead Software has an update that contains a variety of simulated vintage instruments. ...Because guitarists aren't the only musicians who like the sound of old gear. *Not to be confused with the also popular Reason magazine--which has some great words, but is much tougher to dance to.

Posted 5/14/2004 04:05:01 PM by Edward Driscoll
JOHN PODHORETZ ON TIME MAGAZINE:

Take a look at Time magazine's cover this week. It features an artist's rendering of one of the photographs from Abu Ghraib with the line: "Iraq: How Did It Come to This?" "It" didn't come to "this." "It" is a war to liberate 25 million people and rout Islamic extremists, terrorists and those who thirst for the mass murder of Americans. "This" was an aberrancy that was stopped almost five months ago, when the revelations at Abu Ghraib led to investigations, arrests and the wholesale reinvention of the Iraq prison system. Time's cover line is a vile and grotesque slander against every American in uniform in Iraq. It remains the case, more than two weeks after the public exposure of the Abu Ghraib photographs, that not a single digital photo showing mistreatment has emerged from another cellblock at that self-same prison, or from any of the other 24 prisons in Iraq. Indeed, every photograph shown to U.S. senators yesterday is part of the same set of pictures featuring the same eight dirtbags. The scandal isn't widening. If anything, it's contracting. The focus continues to zoom in on the actual people in the pictures and their disgusting conduct in them. And yet Teddy Kennedy, a man who once let a woman die, feels free to speak the following unspeakable words: "We now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management." The United States is, according to the man in whose car Mary Jo Kopechne drowned, no better than the regime of Saddam Hussein. Teddy Kennedy isn't just some outlier. Teddy Kennedy is the chief surrogate of the Democratic candidate for president of the United States and a lionized figure - so lionized that a worshipful profile of him published in Boston magazine won a major journalism award last year. So let's be clear what's going on here. As we speak, 138,000 Americans are serving under dangerous conditions in Iraq. And our forces in Karbala are fighting against the goons and thugs of Muqtada al-Sadr with some success. They're risking their lives for freedom and honor and duty and love of country. And conventional liberal opinion wants them to lose.

Am I the only one who thinks it's more than a little weird that TIME Magazine names "The American Soldier" as their "Person of the Year," only days after publishing a story by a TIME reporter who's hangin' out with the mujahideen trying to kill that same "Person of the Year?"

Posted 5/14/2004 11:04:17 AM by Edward Driscoll
SEX APPEAL: Roger L. Simon looks at two scandals--one with world-changing implications, and one that's pretty minor in the scope of history, and compares and contrasts the coverage each is receiving:

Drudge (linking Media Life Magazine) is telling us the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are locked in mortal combat to see who will own the suddenly important Graydon Carter Story. Vanity Fair editor Carter, whose magazine features movieland coverage, has evidently been profiteering off his cozy Hollywood ties, even to the tune of an alleged hundred grand 'consulting fee' from Universal. Creepy, I guess, and unethical... but these same papers don't seem too concerned that the Wall Street Journal and the 'lowly' tabloid New York Post own the UN Oil-for-Food Scandal. Why is that, one wonders, when surely the latter story is vastly more important to the current world situation and to how the international community could conceivably go forward? Yet they seem content to be Missing-in-Action on that. It would be interesting to know how many reporters the two papers have assigned to both stories and hear an explanation of why.

Posted 5/14/2004 10:13:55 AM by Edward Driscoll
WAS THIS THE WEEK that the mainstream media as we know it jumped the shark? UPDATE: This certainly lends a bit of credence to that theory. ANOTHER UPDATE: As does this.

Posted 5/13/2004 08:52:53 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE DEFINITIVE INSTAPUNDIT INTERVIEW: Read the whole thing. All I can add is...heh.

Posted 5/13/2004 02:11:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
"BOSTON GLOBE PUBLISHES ANTI-AMERICAN PORN": James Taranto has a pretty good link-filled rundown on the duping of the Globe. And Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on, as he puts it, the Globe's "rather lame" apology for blowing it, big time. As Glenn writes, "Note that it doesn't say, anywhere, that the images were actually fraudulent, though they were. Is this an adequate apology for running explicitly pornographic images that were falsely labeled as representing atrocities by American troops?"

Posted 5/13/2004 12:38:12 PM by Edward Driscoll
BUSTIN' MAKES ME FEEL GOOD: There's a surprisingly authentic looking complete Ghostbusters' suit for sale on eBay.

Posted 5/13/2004 11:13:06 AM by Edward Driscoll
HOME AUTOMATION AND HOME THEATER: My latest Electronic House newsletter is online. UPDATE: My monthly "Ideas For Every Room" piece is online as well. We look at the high tech--well, really medium tech--kitchen this month.

Posted 5/13/2004 11:10:14 AM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT WE WEREN'T TOLD: Shell of Across the Atlantic wants to know why the press hasn't reported that Nicholas Berg was Jewish:

It doesn't matter what the killers knew. They could put in the story, "Berg was Jewish, and it is uncertain whether his killers knew that." Simple as that. No bias one way or the other. To excuse the *media* for not knowing he was Jewish is ridiculous though. They're reporters. It's their job to find things out. How hard is it to find out someone's religion? Obituary writers do it all the time. The media's theme for this story has been "revenge for Abu Graihb". If they report that he was Jewish, then the theme might become "racists terrorists brutally murder Jewish American". Is that the media's motivation for not reporting something as important as someone's religious identity? I don't know. And I'll say that.

Posted 5/12/2004 08:51:53 PM by Edward Driscoll
"STARK RAVING MAD": Joel Mowbray has more on "Pete" Stark's freakout answering machine message last week to a constituent who's a military veteran.

Posted 5/12/2004 06:24:38 PM by Edward Driscoll
INCIDENTALLY, sorry for the recent lack of posts--I've been in crunch mode, with several articles due simultaneously.

Posted 5/12/2004 06:13:08 PM by Edward Driscoll
FLY ME TO THE MOON: Howard Bart only wrote one hit song in his lifetime. As Mark Steyn writes, it was the only one that he needed:

In 1969, Buzz Aldrin took a portable tape player up there with him, and “Fly Me To The Moon” became the first moon song to get to the moon itself. “The first music played on the moon,” said Quincy Jones [who arranged Sinatra's definitive version]. “I freaked.”

Had any other nation beaten NASA to it, they’d have marked the occasion with the “Ode To Joy” or Also Sprach Zarathustra, something grand and formal. But there’s something very American about Buzz Aldrin standing on the surface of the moon with his cassette machine.

Posted 5/12/2004 12:15:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
OUR MEDIA, IN DAMAGE OVERDRIVE: Brent Bozell makes a great point in the middle of his weekly media column, which was probably written before video of Nicholas Berg's beheading surfaced:

Does America have the "right to know," to see every image of smiling American morons at Abu Ghraib? To see every image of the horrors of the war? Contrary to what they might say on the chat-show circuit, the media themselves do not have an absolute position on that. Look no further than March 31, when a vicious mob shot four American contractors, mutilated them, burned their corpses, dragged them through the streets, and hung body parts from bridges. Like the prisoner-abuse story, this was the ugliness, the horror of war. But in this case, most in the media determined the public did not have a right to see the pictures. Notice the great irony behind the Abu Ghraib pictures. Because they are less graphic and disturbing, since the prisoners are being humiliated, and not killed, they are more acceptable for airing, and then more acceptable for complete over-airing. The end result is that Americans are inundated with visuals of injustices committed by Americans, and lost is the reality of far graver and more frequent atrocities committed against Americans. Reality gives way to the perception of reality, all in the name of "news." [Emphasis mine--Ed] Now, the media elite are showing us the most remembered gloomy images of Vietnam, the war America lost when Americans lost heart. By putting those Iraq pictures next to these, the media are vying for similar results. If not, why make all the comparisons? Why are our media taking sexual humiliation and comparing it to the Kent State shootings, or more outrageously, the mass murder at My Lai? Do they have no ability to distinguish between these, or do the ends justify the means, with one image just as good as the next one?

The Berg family was sandbagged in their grief by an AP reporter who told them for the first time that their family member had been decapitated and the video of the murder was online. An AP photographer was on hand to record the family's response. The father collapsed on the sidewalk in tears.

Posted 5/12/2004 10:34:39 AM by Edward Driscoll
I'M MORE OF A MIES VAN DER ROHE AND CORBUSIER GUY MYSELF, but I can think of one or two people who wouldn't mind decorating their digs with Middle Earth Furniture.