Org DNA Profiler

Neat little survey here. It was surprisingly accurate when i took it. YMMV.

Nice Geraghty, good doggie

Last year, i said of Jim Geraghty when he appeared on PBS to discuss blogging:

Geraghty on the News Hour was like some yappy pomeranian trying to show a rottweiler that he meant no harm.

Nice to see it worked out for him. At least for a week he gets to blog at the CBS blog. And he still has less fight than a six pound Yorkie.

See also here:

Why i called Geraghty a lap dog

Ellen Goodman still has a column?

Who knew?

One of the nice things about the "new morning paper" is that you don't have to settle for pedestrian, predictable hacks like her.

I like the logic of this column. Because some bloggers said horrible things about Jill Carrol. The whole blogosphere should be ashamed.

Two years later, we have -- ready, fire, aim -- the Jill Carroll affair. These attacks raise the question of what bloggery is going to be when it grows up. An Internet op-ed page? Or a polarized, talk-radio food fight?

By her logic, i could describe print journalists as a cynical pack of liars, charlatans, and scam artists. After all, look at the newspapers with the biggest readership-- The Star, The National Enquirerer, News of the World.

It's also nice how she fails to name the bloggers who specifically cautioned against reading too much into Jill Carroll's interviews before we had the whole story. Or the vast number who said nothing at all.

Which brings up another point. Why did not the MSM highlight the fact that the interviews were suspect? Why, come do think of it, were they so eager to run terrorist propaganda?

The bloggers who attacked Carroll should have known better. On the other hand, the professional media did not provide the critical context when they ran parts of the interview over and over.

And Ellen Goodman thinks the blogger kettle is black?

UPDATE: Compare the way the Boston Globe (owned by the New York Times) handles its border with bloggers compared to the Washington Post. On the Globes page, you see only the Globe-approved opinion. At the Post, OTOH, you can also see the blogs that react to the story.

Which paper has more respect for their readers, more confidence in their writers, and a better understanding of the changes in "expanation space"?

Listen up!

School is in session and Ace is teaching.

After reading his reviews of Brick, i definitely want to see it.

But let's be accurate here. Hammett did not invent the hard-boiled detective. Before the Continental Op or Sam Spade, there was Race Williams. Which makes it even more clear that the hard-boiled detective story is not a sub-genre of film noir. The HBD came first and existed as a literary type long before movies could talk.

BTW: I once used the Chandler quote ("But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean" as the centerpiece on of an article on re-engineering. It acutally was published in a peer-reviewed journal.)

I hate it when people pull their punches

Jack Sparks on Kenny Chesney:

Johnny Cash couldn't stand you, Waylon Jennings couldn't stand you, Merle Haggard can't stand you and EmmyLou Harris can't stand you. If your only validity is record sales, and arenas full of a fraudulently co-opted demographic, it's a very hollow victory indeed my boy.

And while we're at it, Waylon couldn't stand your buddies at K102 either. Read what he said again...PAYOLA...I live for quotations like that. So while you're all backstage at the Xcel this weekend, eating catered chicken with mixed vegetables, patting yourselves on the back for your "Country Success," realize that the price of your success is an absolute and documented lack of validity with all of the strongest, wisest, and most authoritative persons in the genre.

Matt Welch loses hope

Farewell to Warblogging

But as I look back at December 2001, and prepare to hang up the blogging fun of Reason's Hit & Run for the stodgier print pages of the L.A. Times, I can't shake the feeling of nostalgia for a promising cross-partisan moment that just fizzled away. Americans are always much more interesting than their political parties or ideological labels, and for a few months there it was possible for readers and writers alike to feel the unfamiliar slap of collisions with worlds they'd previously sealed off from themselves. You couldn't predict what anyone would say, especially yourself.

He was one of the first bloggers I started reading after 9/11. I even pulled for the Angels in the Series because he was a fan.

Welch is a libertarian and does not like the Culture War battles. I can understand that. What I don't understand is why he made Reynolds such a target. Malkin is conservative, Hewitt is a Republican apologist, Willis seethes with Bush-hatred 24/7. But Instapundit is usually with Welch on the social issues. So why the venom?

Has Welch fallen into his own partisan trap? Does he feel the need to bash the targets of partisans whether they deserve it or not?

The subhead for the article reads:

I used to think blogs would transform ideologues into nonpartisan truth-seekers.
Man, was I wrong.

If that is true, Matt Welch was naïve. If it has taken him this long to wise up then he is a slow learner. The writing was on the wall a long time ago.

When Instapundit speaks

In fact, I think the promise of the blogosphere suffered its first serious set back when so many bloggers joined Sullivan's campaign against Howell Raines and slimed Rick Bragg as a means to that end.

TV News: Ripping away the curtain

Jonah Goldberg:

Now, as a free-market guy, I have no huge ideological problem with this. Executives at CBS have apparently concluded that they can sell more soap by having Ms. Couric read the news. What bothers me is all the reverence the rest of the media has for the people at the top of their profession and, worse, the grand fiction that there is a high wall between entertainment and news.

Three quick points:

1. Do media writers take TV new seriously because they think it is real news? Or do they think (despite the crashing ratings) that the yahoos in Hicksville still take it seriously.

2. How does a media critic talk about the importance "professional journalistic standards" with a straight face and then include pretty, perky, tanned, and blow-dried newsreaders in the club?

3. Is it possible TV news gets a pass because it is a reliable passive conduit that pushes Manhattan "news judgment" into 20 million homes in the hinterlands? In essence, CBS News is allied with and helps extends the reach of the New York Times in the battle for "explanation space."


OK, four points. Goldberg writes:

Ms. Vieira's official bio touts up front that she won a Daytime Emmy as a game-show host and buries the fact she won five real Emmys for her work as a 60 Minutes reporter.

How does she qualify as a reporter? Haven't we established that the real reporting at "60 Minutes" is dones by producers like Mary Mapes?

Five: Rebecca Dana is all over the Katie Couric story like a real reporter.

Too soon?

I'll admit, i don't understand the "too soon" controversy around the Flight 93 movie. Five years after Pearl Harbor we were occupying Tokyo and Berlin.

Texans did not wait a generation to "Remember the Alamo." They started at San Jacinto. More telling, Hollywood came out with Wake Island a year after the real battle of Wake Island.

Memories fade. People move on. If we don't honor the heroes of Flight 93 now, are we sure Hollywood will do it in 2016?

After all, how many people remember Wake Island? In 1942 it was a rallying cry alongside "Remember Pearl Harbor". But thiry years afterward it was all but forgotten. Is that what we want to happen with 9/11?

Actually, we don't have to forget Wake Island either. Some people still care:

The aged man appeared to be in his early eighties, but graying and frail were not the first words you would use to describe him. The bounce in his step was still there, and energy shone in his eyes, carrying more than a hint of what a force he once was.
He stood amidst the large gathering of naval and Marine officers, relaxing after a long day's schedule of reunion meetings. They sipped coffee and told tales of their service histories.

"Suddenly, someone spotted him, and in a deep voice barked out above the din, "Attention! Wake Island Marine on deck!"

"Everyone stopped talking," said a naval officer who witnessed the incident. "We stood at attention, faced the Marine, and saluted. Those guys are legendary in the Navy and Marines for what they did, and whenever one is around, you pay him the highest respect."

No wonder, sixty years ago, the old man was one of a tiny band of Marines who staged one of history's most dramatic battles..... that rank with those of the Spartans at Thermopylae, with the British who fought thousands of Zulu at Rorke's Drift in 1879, and with the Texans at the Alamo.

From Pacific Alamo by John Wukovits.


Back to Flight 93. I worry that "too soon" will gradually fade into "old news". In 2010 or 2015 it will be just a dim memory. Or worse. As the memory and outrage fades, the historical image of United 93 might be dominated by the conspiracy nuts. Heroes will be reduced to victims killed by their own government.

Exit the Hammer

Tom DeLay is leaving Congress. Bush will miss him. As majority whip and then majority leader he did an amazing job in the House. Even with razor-thin margins, he managed to push through most of the Bush program and kept the restive Republican caucus united.

In 2004 he helped save Bush from himself. When the president announced that he would sign an extension of the so-called Assault Weapons Ban if it passed Congress, he put his re-election in jeopardy. Gun rights voters felt betrayed. DeLay simply let it be known that the AWB was never going to pass the House and the issue went away. GWB was spared a fight with the NRA during his tight re-election fight.

The GOP has had a twelve year run in the majority. Amazing, really, when you remember that they controlled the House for only 4 years between 1932 and 1994. DeLay was a big part of that success. He lasted longer than Gingrich and Lott and has been more effective than Frist over in the Senate. No wonder liberals are ecstatic at his retirement.

DeLay the Hammer because he set out to shatter the underpinnings of the Democratic ascendancy-what Michael Barone called the "House that Phil built". Barone described it well in his , Almanac of American Politics 1996 :

To maintain the overall Democratic majority in the House, Burton relied not on the popularity of his issues, about which he entertained no illusions, but on institutional advantages such as redistricting and teaching talented young candidates with superior skills to hold otherwise Republican-leaning seats; he encouraged Democrats to rely on the perquisites of office and pork barrel projects.

[snip]

Democrats continued to win majorities in every election. They ignored Republicans, routinely used the rules to prevent direct votes on issues on which their stands were unpopular, maintained caucus solidarity and, under the leadership of Tony Coelho in the 1980s, bludgeoned business PACs into contributing to marginal Democrats and not contributing to Republican challengers.

One point that Barone did not mention, was that the House of Phil Burton was also sustained by docile Republicans who accepted their minority status and the way it was maintained. Gingrich and DeLay refused to do that. DeLay, in particular, went after the business PACs and their contributions. Lobbyists could no longer fund their opponents and expect the Republicans to support their cause out of "free market" solidarity. Now Republican challengers to marginal Democrats did not face an insurmountable fund-raising challenge.

It was necessary work that DeLay undertook. Important for the cause and the party. But it is also dirty work at the margins and that proved his undoing. The Abramoff scandal proved an unending embarrassment and burden. Now it has forced him from office.

I just hope he writes a frank memoir of his time in politics. He was in the middle of everything for fifteen years. He has important stories to tell.

Gallantry

Christina Hoff Sommers opens her review of Manliness with a telling bit of dusty history:

ONE OF THE LEAST VISITED memorials in Washington is a waterfront statue commemorating the men who died on the Titanic. Seventy-four percent of the women passengers survived the April 15, 1912, calamity, while 80 percent of the men perished. Why? Because the men followed the principle "women and children first."

The monument, an 18-foot granite male figure with arms outstretched to the side, was erected by "the women of America" in 1931 to show their gratitude. The inscription reads: "To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the Titanic. . . . They gave their lives that women and children might be saved."

Today, almost no one remembers those men. Women no longer bring flowers to the statue on April 15 to honor their chivalry. The idea of male gallantry makes many women nervous, suggesting (as it does) that women require special protection. It implies the sexes are objectively different. It tells us that some things are best left to men. Gallantry is a virtue that dare not speak its name.

This used to be the dominant image of the Titanic and the A Night to Remember : cool bravery and self-sacrifice. Today, I'm not so sure.

Hollywood reworked the story in its own inimitable way and puked up a junior high romance coated with class-war pretensions. I guess that is further evidence to support Sommers and Mansfield's point.

Before the Titanic there was the HMS Birkenhead. It, too, is a story that deserves to be remembered. As this site notes, the wreck of the Birkenhead and its aftermath grabbed the world's attention and made "women and children first" the established protocol for maritime disasters.

The soldiers and sailors on board became exemplars of manliness. The King of Prussia had an account of the Birkenhead "read aloud to every regiment in the Prussian Army, as an example of supreme discipline, courage and self-sacrifice"

Kipling referenced it his poem "Soldier an' Sailor Too":

But to stand an' be still to the Birken'ead drill
is a damn tough bullet to chew,
An' they done it, the Jollies -- 'Er Majesty's Jollies --
soldier an' sailor too!

It is easy to understand why the Victorians were awe-struck:

Capt Salmond climbed the rigging and urged all who could swim to abandon ship. But Lt-Col Seton, his sword still drawn, raised his hands above his head and told his men, "You will swamp the cutter containing the women and children. I implore you not to do this thing and I ask you all to stand fast". Seconds later the Birkenhead broke her back, not a man disobeyed Lt-Col Seton's orders and they shook hands and said goodbye as the water closed in over their heads.

Today the Leo DiCaprio version of the Titanic dominates the popular imagination. The older, historical version is not dead, however. Conservative Christian writers still see useful lessons in the events of April 15, 1912. This writer also remembers the Birkenhead.

The chasm between these two versions is more than academic. When an air-head like Nancy Grace interrogates a theologian on men, marriage, women and ministry, she sees and hears only power, patriarchy, and oppression. When she hears "submission" her sleaze-soaked brain can only picture BDSM and wife-beaters. She is deaf to the counter-point-the call for male self-sacrifice and masculine heroism as a virtue. That sounds like bull to her because she only knows Kate, Leo, and the awful rich fiancé. The real Titanic and the Birkenhead are lost to her.

Mark Wahlberg?

Mark effing Wahlberg?

Marky Mark is going to play Bob Swagger? Dirk Diggler is going to be Earl's boy? We're supposed to believe that a Calvin Klein model is the coolest operator who ever looked down a scope?

Hollywood is so messed up.

Opinion and reporting

Julie Neidlinger has some thoughts on the Molly Ivins column discussed below.

Lyn Nofziger

There have been many warm appreciations written about Lyn Nofziger. But they give short shrift to two essential qualities of the man. He had grit and he was a visionary.

It is easy to forget just how daunting the road was in 1975. The Reaganauts proposed to unseat an incumbent president in the primaries. Nofziger and others really believed that Reagan could take a minority party crippled by Watergate and realign the political balance of power.

Because that realignment happened, we act as though the Reagan Revolution was inevitable. It certainly did not look that way in 1976. The GOP establishment was solidly behind Ford. Reagan stumbled in the early primaries and fell far behind in the delegate count.

All the pragmatic political types wanted Reagan to get out of the race and ride off into the sunset.

Lyn Nofziger did not lose faith. Reagan came back to make a race of it in 1976 and, after Ford's defeat, was the front runner in 1980. The Reagan Revolution was ready for launch.

None of that could have happened if it wasn't for Reaganauts like Nofziger who persevered in the tough times of 1976.

Grit and vision.

Worse than i thought

I had thought that Nancy Grace's treatment of the churches of Christ was a simple matter of personal ignorance and her show's business model.

After reading this post, however, she clearly should have known better. So was she malicious or simply too arrogant to listen to her staff?

Nancy Grace steps in it again

OK, that's like saying the sun came up in the east this morning. Still, these posts do make interesting reading.

Does that stand for the "Cult News Network"?

"Cult News Network," part deux

CNN CULT ALERT

I know CNN loves her ratings, but shouldn't they be just a little embarrassed by her woeful ignorance?

Two related points. The tabloid media (both online and cable) are handling the murder of Matthew Winkler much differently than the murders of Laci Peterson or Rachel Entwistle. When the wife was the victim they said:

"What a sociopathic brute to kill a delicate, innocent flower like Laci."

But now, when the wife is the killer, they keep trying to frame the story as:

"What did that brute do to make that delicate innocent flower kill him?"

TV shrinks assured us that Scott Peterson wore a mask of normality but was evil underneath. Now they are warming up to explain that Mary Winkler was forced to wear a mask of normality and that is why her killing was not evil.

Point 2: On 9/11 Mohamed Atta killed 3,000 Americans in the name of Islam. The MSM worked overtime to remind us that the Islam, properly understood, had nothing to with those murders.

With the Winkler case, in contrast, people like Grace are working diligently to somehow blame the churches of Christ for Mary Winkler's actions.

That disparity might explain why some Christians feel mistreated by the MSM and the entertainment industry in Hollywood and New York.

What the....?

Prosecutor, Agent Indicted in Detroit

Misconduct Is Alleged in Terrorism Case

A former federal prosecutor and a State Department security officer were indicted yesterday on charges that they lied during a bungled terrorism trial in Detroit and then sought to cover up their deceptions once the case began to fall apart.

No matter which side you believe, this does not build confidence in our anti-terrorism efforts.

interesting

Franklyn Curran Nofziger was born in Bakersfield on June 8, 1924.

and

Soon, Buck turned his back on Nashville, and started making country records his way, using his own road band instead of Nashville players. The result was records that sounded more like a Buck Owens concert, and nothing like the string-laden smooth country-pop hit songs coming out of Nashville … and the Bakersfield sound was born.

If i had more time, i would try to weave this into a grand theory about the Reagan Revolution. But i'm going to pass for now. But just so you know, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and Lyn Nofziger are heroes, The Grapes of Wrath plays a role, Ayn Rand makes no appearance, and the neocons appear only as clowns.

The man weighs in

Jack Sparks on Buck Owens

Make no mistake, though. What he did between 1963 and 1967 was pure. The exposed wires from the Buckaroos' amped up guitars were the frayed nerves of hillbilly men and women who worked too hard, drank too much, and desperately clung to the hope that tomorrow might be different. People still bought the sappy treacly shit that came out of Nashville, but Buck drove them bananas, like Hank Williams had done the previous decade. If Buck and Harlan Howard made a song about a guy getting in a bar fight or leaving his wife, it was because they saw it happen the night they wrote the song. If the guitars were wide open and high on treble, it was because that's what the dancers were demanding out on the dance floor.

Farewell to one of the best of the Reaganauts

RIP, Lyn Nofziger

Molly Ivins has a point

I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter -- nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened. Or, as author-journalist Curtis Wilkie puts it, "Unless you can cover a five-car pile-up on Route 128, you shouldn't be allowed to cover a presidential campaign."

Of course, her target is bloggers. I, OTOH, was thinking about college newspapers. They should get rid of their editorial pages.

Molly sez that it takes years of reporting experience before your opinion is worth a lick. So those student editorials are just wasted newsprint that teach the wrong lesson to budding journalists.

I wonder if Molly and the Project for Excellence in Journalism agree?

Q: What is the greatest public service news papers perform?

A: They pay people to be bored.

Editors send reporters to planning commission sessions, school board meetings, and subcommittee hearings on the FY2008 budget for the Interior Department.

People will do punditry for free (hence, the ever-increasing size of the blogosphere.) Covering the boring, nitty-gritty stuff requires a pay-check.

Hard numbers on newspapers

James Surowiecki has an interesting column in the New Yorker. A lot of good information about readership, revenue, etc. This point is often overlooked in new media hysteria:

Established media—radio, the movies, television—haven’t vanished when new forms have come along. They’ve adapted by playing to their distinctive strengths.

On Books and libraries

A book is infinitely more comfortable and pleasant and informative than a screen. The very impress of the print on the paper is a valuable part of your experience of the book.

Libraries give us this physical engagement in a way that no Google ever will.

More at Miriam's ideas

"Greatest Debacle in the History of Organized Work?"

Photon Courier has the details here.

Two related posts are here and here.

Figures

I tried to send an email to Fox News about their over-the-top tabloid coverage. (Today's Big Story was odious-- maybe the worse thing i have ever seen on cable news.)

So, of course, the email bounced as undeliverable.

I wonder how Brit Hume and Neil Cavuto keep their self-respect working at such a place.

Bashing Newsprint

Three recent articles offer advice to newspapers and all propose the same bold strategy-get rid of the paper.

Jettisoning Print

Knight Ridder Sale Could be McClatchy's Chance to Ditch the Print, Go All Online All the Time

Newspapers in Trouble?

In the writers's view the paper is the problem. Online is the future-it's cheaper, it's better. Go for it.

While the articles make much of the fact that traditional print is expensive, they do not provide any hard numbers about the actual cost savings for going digital. It is all fuzzy pronouncements like this.

Those massive rolls of newsprint and the whirring machines they feed that print newspapers are exceeded only in personnel costs on the typical newspaper operation, so getting rid of the first two ought to free up tremendous amounts of capital to be invested in new technologies and perhaps even in expanding the editor staff.

Sounds impressive, but how much of that "expense" is really sunk costs? How does the cost of newsprint compare to the cost of reporters?

None of the writers admit that newsprint might have some benefits for the reader. Is it not probable that some current newspaper readers/subscribers like print because it is convenient, portable, accessible or persistent? How many readers will be lost if a local paper goes digital-only and will the revenue loss be smaller than the cost savings?

A digital-only local paper runs smack into a stark consumer prejudice. Most of us expect to pay for paper but want online news to be free.

Why would any business throw away a solid franchise (the current subscriber/paper model) and stake their future on an untested revenue model that prices the product higher than customers perceive as fair?

None of the articles mention advertisers and that is a huge oversight. How much advertising revenue will a digital newspaper lose? Advertisers expect to pay a lower CPM for online ads. So the Daily Planet Online could lose revenue four ways-lower subscriber base, lower subscription price, lower reader base (for advertisers), and lower rate card for advertising.

Are we really confident that getting rid of newsprint will make up for that lower revenue and allow for more editorial staffers? Once again, let's see some numbers please.

Newspapers are in trouble. But their problems go deeper than the price of newsprint. The digital only option looks like a bold solution, but it is more hype than solid strategy.

Highly, highly recommended

Saddam's Delusions: The View from the Inside

by Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006 (/2006/3.html)

EDITOR'S NOTE: The fall of Baghdad in April 2003 opened one of the most secretive and brutal governments in history to outside scrutiny. For the first time since the end of World War II, American analysts did not have to guess what had happened on the other side of a conflict but could actually read the defeated enemy's documents and interrogate its leading figures. To make the most of this unique opportunity, the U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) commissioned a comprehensive study of the inner workings and behavior of Saddam Hussein's regime based on previously inaccessible primary sources. Drawing on interviews with dozens of captured senior Iraqi military and political leaders and hundreds of thousands of official Iraqi documents (hundreds of them fully translated), this two-year project has changed our understanding of the war from the ground up. The study was partially declassified in late February; its key findings are presented here.

Another look at Nancy Grace

Reading Nancy Grace

I think it has the best summary of why these shows and their stories about missing girls dominate cable news:

The beauty part of the missing girls angle is that the story never ends; it's news that stays news ten years later. The girl is always still missing. Once you're missing, you're missing forever -- unless you're found, and that's even better. And if someone does finally get convicted, the story still doesn't have to end, because you can follow them through the trial and imprisonment, checking in at intervals with the victim's parents for doses of reliably gut-wrenching emotion.

Not only does tabloid television get high ratings, it's cheap as hell to produce. Essentially you are taking old archive footage from local stations and splicing in a few routine interviews to make it new. Night after night you promise the latest developments in the case to an audience who have no other way of knowing that there haven't been any developments.

Shirazi puts Grace into an ideological context, but that part of his argument is unpersuasive.

Nancy Grace is the first sub-ideological demagogue I have encountered. She doesn't shout about terrorists going nuclear in the Middle East or Mexicans pouring over our borders. She keeps things relatable: white girls raped by blacks in the tropics, and wives killed by their no-good husbands.

[snip]

When I was young, sympathy for victims was seen as the congenital weakness of the liberals, who were invariably called bleeding hearts. Today it is the conservatives who worship a cult of martyrdom validated by varying degrees of pain, revelling in stripes you earn by lashing yourself. So these days a TV personality denies being a journalist and dissociates herself from truth-twisting attorneys, and instead derives her authority by painting herself a victim speaking for other victims.

Glorified suffering is the bedrock foundation of popular conservativism. The real objection to the pathos of liberalism is that all external sympathy is misplaced, that any available sympathy should be drawn toward my own collapsed ego just as light is drawn backward into a black hole, that your sympathy and my own self-pity should merge perfectly with no wasted remainder.

First off, the writer ignores that the fact that the Aruba story has a white villan. Joran van der Sloot, like Scott Peterson, is a real life example of Tom Wolfe's Great White Defendant.

More importantly, conservatives are not the only ones pushing this tough on crime attitude. Clinton, Carville, and Begula used it in 1992 to prove that the Man from Hope was no liberal. A centerpiece of that repositioning was the execution of a brain-damaged man during the campaign in New Hampshire. (See here and here.)

Grace, like Clinton, panders on crime because it seems to be an issue that transcends ideology in a nation that is politically divided. Politicians want votes, anchors want eyeballs. Trivial issues and tabloid stories get each of them what they want.

Blame the victim headlines

The Junk Yard Blog has found another one.

Flipped Morality Tale at the Baltimore Sun

See here for previous example.

Nancy Grace is a caring individual

As an anchor, Ms. Grace is a firebrand, less concerned with legal nuance than with her own feelings about a case. As a boss, according to sources inside and outside her show, she presides over a sometimes-difficult workplace. The program is on its third director in a year, which sources described as a high rate of turnover at any television news program. At least four members of her staff have met with the network’s human-resources department to discuss problems with the management of the program, according to three sources.

From Rebecca Dana in the New York Observer.

One of the articles i mentioned before

Downhill Olympics

The vulgarized Winter Games feature pranks and petulance, not grit and beauty.

CNN's disGrace (and your little Fox, too)

A devastating look at CNN's rating star.

From the Daily Howler:

On the other hand, Grace is so repellent a figure that she serves a useful purpose; she helps us see the moral and intellectual corruption spreading through our mainstream "news" culture.

The piece dates from 2003 and subsequent events prove the Howler a prophet.

The one grace note: Grace's performance does helps us see where our corrupted "news" culture is going.

So true. Thanks to her appalling performance as a guest on Larry King Live she was given a show of her own on Headline News.

This point cannot be repeated enough:

During the summer of 2001, bin Laden's gang was preparing its mission. But on King, they had bigger things on their minds; people like Grace (and the late Barbara Olson) were trying to smoke Gary Condit for murder.

The Howler includes links to a bunch of Condit-Levy posts. They deserve a careful reading. They demonstrate just how useful lies and rumors are to a tabloid frenzy and how little effort cable news makes to screen out such chaff.

While cable chased Condit, Atta and KSM plotted. I hope our Aruba madness is not the prologue to another 9/11-type shock.

Fox News has plenty of shows as bad as Nancy Grace which makes them worse than CNN. For some reason, FNC has escaped criticism from the press-bashing right blogosphere. If the New York Times or PBS ignores important stories from the War on Terror, that is really no surprise. But FNC's obsession with tabloid crime feels more like a betrayal.

Fox was supposed to be different. After 9/11 it wrapped itself in the flag and donned olive drab. Then it lost interest. It decided to chase stories about missing white girls. The MSM might be giving us an incomplete picture, but FNC is not trying very hard to correct it.

OK. Back to Grace. The Howler has a soundbite from 2001 which has new resonance:

GRACE: You know, the fact that [Condit] would lie about the simplest things, his relationship, a sex relationship-how are we supposed to believe what he says about more important things, such as the last time he saw her? Did they argue? Was she pregnant? Was there a five-year plan? I can't believe anything the man says.

Now that we know about Nancy Grace's own problem with the truth, that is a funny quote in a painful sort of way.

The American Conservative Surprises

The latest issue has a dead-on article about the Olympics by Diana Moon and a nice appreciation of Christopher Lasch by Jeremy Beer. (Neither on-line yet.)

TAC is a maddening magazine. It is hard, most of the time, to tell what their conservatism represents (other than antipathy to the neocons). I keep resubscribing, though, because each issue usually has one or two articles that get it right-- articles that could never appear in National Review or The Weekly Standard.

An international Enron

Read David Warsh's latest reporting on the Harvard/Russia/Summers scandal: Gangsta-nomics. In many ways this was a more serious scandal than Enron. The culprits were more tightly connected to the executive branch and the shady dealings have poisoned Russian/American relations.

The only problem is that this is a purely Clintonian scandal and the bad guys are professors at Harvard, not Texans.

Steve Sailer has more here.

This could be the basis for a very useful book

It appears there's a fine line between an Army of Davids and a Mob of Clowns, both of which are empowered by the new communications technologies.

From the Coyote at the Dog Show

They really make it hard to like them

T.O. joins the Cowboys

The reviled receiver joined the Cowboys on Saturday, signing a three-year, $25 million contract to play for Jerry Jones and Bill Parcells in what promises to be an interesting combination of strong personalities. The deal includes a $5 million signing bonus, with salaries of $5 million this year, $8 million in 2007 and $7 million in 2008.

Balkan echoes

Dimitri K. Simes, "Jihad, Uninteded," The National Interest, Winter 2005/2006

One would have thought that the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the simultaneous attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the strike on the USS Cole in 2000, among other incidents, would have alerted policymakers that a new major challenge to American interests and American lives was in the making. However, instead of combating this threat, the United States focused on "wars of choice" and haphazard attempts to "nation-build" in the Balkans.

The architects of this tragic diversion are unrepentant and even proud of what they have done. As Richard Holbrooke, the person largely responsible for shaping a flawed U.S. policy in the Balkans, wrote in the Washington Post in July 2005, "Was Bosnia worth it? As we approach the 10th anniversary of Dayton, there should no longer be any debate."

Holbrooke's claim that there should be no debate about Bosnia demonstrates his chutzpah, but it does not pass even minimal analytic scrutiny. If the United States had wanted to stop the war, it could have supported the Vance-Owen plan-rejected by the Clinton Administration at the time as allegedly too favorable to the Serbs. And given the administration's inaction on genocide in Rwanda, it is not surprising that major powers like China and Russia found it difficult to accept that humanitarian considerations alone motivated the United States to act, first in Bosnia, then in Kosovo, especially when American protŽgŽs engaged in ethnic cleansing operations of
their own.

The "unintended consequences" of the Kosovo war in 1999 were to poison U.S. relations with Russia and China alike, leading eventually to the Clinton Administration's contemptuous rejection of Russian proposals for joint action against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda-proposals that resurfaced after 9/11 and eventually contributed to removing the Taliban from power.

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Mr. Holbrooke wants the United States to support independence for Kosovo, whether the democratic Serbian government accepts it or not. But what if ignoring Serbian objections discredits the moderate and pro-Western politicians now leading the country and results in a rabidly nationalist government there, reopening the Balkan can of worms? What if Russia takes the predictable position that what is good for Kosovo should be good for other unrecognized but de facto independent states such as Nagorno-Karabakh or the transdniester Republic? What of separatist regions like South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which share borders with Russia and where local populations overwhelmingly do not want to be a part of Georgia? In the latter case, the United States would face a series of unpleasant choices. Would the United States, in the name of principle, compel a pro-American Georgian regime to abandon its desire to restore the country's
territorial integrity? Or would Washington side with Tbilisi, especially if it decides to use force to recapture these regions? If the latter, the United States could find itself embroiled in a major dispute with Russia that could effectively end cooperation on other matters of vital importance to the United States. And how would the United States force a resolution granting independence to Kosovo through the UN Security Council over probable Chinese objections, without offering guarantees that Taiwan will never become a separate, independent state? Or argue that Kosovo deserves full independence without setting a dangerous precedent that the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey may seek to emulate? The potential for trouble seems serious and real.

More on the Balkans


Croatian President Franjo Tudjman
The Balkans' (not much) lesser evil

In 1995, Tudjman again showed his talent for limiting his brutality just enough to get away with it. That summer, he invaded the Krajina, the Serb area captured by Milosevic in 1991. The 200,000 Serb residents fled to Serbia rather than fight. Tudjman punctuated the arguably justified invasion with a vicious exclamation point. He had his troops burn down 70 percent of Serbian houses, passed laws to confiscate Serb property, and allowed gangs of Croat thugs to murder the few elderly Serbs who remained. "What he did after the invasion was inexcusable," says Peter Galbraith, then U.S. ambassador to Croatia.

Even so, Tudjman again restored himself to the West's (semi-) good graces by signing the Dayton Peace Accords and agreeing to let Serbs return to their burned homes. But he has not allowed them to return in fact. Only a handful of the 200,000 Serbs have come back to the Krajina. (He has also refused to extradite the Croats indicted for war crimes to the Hague, perhaps fearing they would implicate him.)

The War against Serbia: Illusion Versus Reality

In the Krajina region of Croatia, the United States tacitly accepted Croatia's ethnic cleansing of 300,000 Serbs because the killing weakened the Serb position in that country and in neighboring Bosnia. Because Turkey is a U.S. ally, the United States not only accepted the Turkish regime's brutal repression of the Kurdish minority (another conflict in which casualties have been much greater than those in Kosovo) but actively aided Ankara by helping apprehend the Kurdish leader Mohamad Ocalan.

Michael Kelly: A Perfectly Clintonian Doctrine

Finally, (4), it is at bottom a fraud. Note the use of the term "world community." There is no world community. The war against the Serbs in Kosovo was an exercise not of any global village but of the great powers, and the great powers pick and choose their moral causes. The great powers stood complacently by in the summer of 1995, when the Croats ethnically cleansed their turf in Bosnia of 300,000 Serbs, and they are standing by now, as the Kosovo Liberation Army and returning Albanian refugees rapidly cleanse Kosovo of 200,000 Serbs.

The emerging all-Albanian reality of Kosovo underscores the underlying fraud of the Clinton Doctrine, which is the idea that what the West is forging in the Balkans is a triumph for pluralism and democracy. It was a very good thing that the United States finally acted to stop the Serbs' slaughter in Kosovo, as it was a very good thing when it finally acted to stop the Serbs' slaughter in Bosnia. But it is nonsense to pretend that these accomplishments gave rise to a reversal of ethnic cleansing or anything like a pluralistic democracy.

Consider the reality of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as detailed in a searching article by Gordon N. Bardos in the April issue of the Harriman Review. As Bardos reports, four years and two missed deadlines for troop withdrawal after the Dayton Peace Accords, Bosnia is a protectorate of NATO divided into what Bardos calls three "ethnities" -- the Serbian entity of Republika Srpska, and a Croatian territory and a Bosnian territory that are uneasily federated under Dayton. Each is run by nationalist hard-liners backed up by ethnically pure military forces.

U.S. gave green light to terrorists in Bosnia

Yugoslavia policy helped build base in Europe for Hezbollah, others

The Dutch government has released a report that details the alliance between the United States and the Islamic effort to help Bosnian Muslims. The report determined that the United States provided a green light to groups on the State Department list of terrorist organizations to operate in Bosnia. This included the Lebanese-based Hezbollah. For the European Union, the U.S. effort marks a stain that calls into question Washington's war on terrorism.

For nearly a decade, the Clinton administration helped Islamic insurgents aligned with Chechnya, Iran and Saudi Arabia destabilize the former Yugoslavia. The insurgents were allowed to bring weapons and explosives to Bosnia-Herzegovina and fight Serbs and their allies. The insurgents also were allowed to move further east to Kosovo.

The United States was helped by a range of Muslim countries – from Iran and Saudi Arabia to Turkey. In short, the Clinton administration thought that the stronger the Muslims in Bosnia, the weaker the Serbian hold over Yugoslavia.

Today, there are tens of thousands of Islamic insurgents throughout such countries as Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, and many of them are moving west to Austria, Hungary, Germany and Switzerland.


A Massacre in Kosovo

A member of the United Nations police force murders his American colleagues.

ON APRIL 17, as reported in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, two American women and an American man were slain in Kosovo, and eleven people were injured when they came under armed attack by a Palestinian from Jordan. The killer was a member of the same body in which they served: the United Nations police force in the territory.

The male American, who died of his wounds, was Gary Weston, of Vienna, Illinois. The Palestinian, Sergeant Major Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim Ali, was killed when members of the contingent in which the Americans were traveling returned fire.

In the days since the first reports of the crime were received, more details have emerged, which make what was already a scandal for the United Nations in Kosovo even more alarming. First and most disturbing is that the dead assailant, Ali, is being investigated for connections with Hamas, the Palestinian terror organization. Second is that the same Ali had visited the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, home of the Wahhabi Islamic sect that produced al Qaeda, only a month before he was sent to Kosovo in March.

[snip]

Because Kosovo media operates under heavy U.N. censorship, the whole truth about this atrocity may not be known for some time.

Another reason why Steve Sailer may be the bravest man in the blogosphere

The Official Bad Guy of the Balkans is dead:

In a nutshell

Powerline gets to the heart of the matter:

The real issue here is: what is the Constitution? Justice Scalia has famously noted that the Constitution is a legal document which, like all legal documents, says some things and does not say others. In Justice Ginsburg's view the Constitution is, on the contrary, a roving charter for nine individuals to decide what "basic fairness" requires. It should hardly be necessary to point out that the former understanding, which was universal until quite recently, is a charter of freedom, inasmuch as the people's representatives can vote on amendments. Conversely, the "basic fairness" approach is a form of tyranny in which a small elite can impose its policy preferences on the rest of us.

It is also utterly unworkable. There is a reason why people reduce legal documents to writing: it's the only way to know what the deal is. Under Justice Ginsburg's approach, the "law" is ineffable. There is no way to know from one day to the next what it might be.

A point worth pondering

Regardless of whether culture change is or is not a part of the strategy, companies have to recognize that the very introduction of strategic management into a company requires a change in that organizations culture.

Ian Wilson, The Subtle Art if Strategy

All too often, the formal "culture change" initiatives end up fighting the strategic initiatives. I have blogged my thoughts on some aspects of this problem here:

Two ways to plan

Why corporate change is hard and failure almost inevitable

Why corporate change is hard and failure almost inevitable (II)

Why corporate change is hard and failure almost inevitable (III)

This must mean something

Looking at my traffic stats, I found something interesting. On Wednesday Ace linked to my post about prison movies. On Thursday, the Junk Yard Blog linked to my post on the Church arsons. Later in the day, Slate linked to that same post.

Both Ace and JYB sent over 200 readers this way. The Slate link brought less than 10 readers here.

If I worked for Gartner or Forrester, I would be tempted to spin this into a Grand Theory. Of course, the nature of the theory would depend on who was writing the check. I could say that this traffic differential shows that the typical blog reader is a restless, open-minded hunter of new information with an innate desire to verify and evaluate sources. In contrast, the readership of the MSM is unengaged, credulous, and happy to absorb the predigested content set in front of them. OTOH, I could say that this proves that most of the readers of the MSM see no value in blogs which means that the Army of Davids is no threat to the MSM hegemony in information space.

Like I said, it all depends on who signs the check.

The obstinate persistence of myth

From the New York Times:

From the beginning, investigators had theorized that the fires had no racial motive, as there had been for many church fires throughout the Southeast in the mid-90's. And that, they said, was borne out.

There was no racial motive this time. But then, the mid-90's "racial hate-crime arsons" were mostly hype and hoax. See Michael Fumento for more.

Prank?

Ala. Church Fires Started 'As a Joke'

Nothing to see here, just move along.

Oh, wait a minute:

An academic standout, his true love was deer hunting. But hunting was intertwined with booze, and a rebellious anger crept into Cloyd's personality.

After he got a speeding ticket - 85 mph in a 70 zone - his Web site musings grew cryptically violent. In a posting to Moseley last summer as the two planned a road trip, he wrote, "Let us defy the very morals of society instilled upon us by our parents, our relatives and of course Jesus."

or how 'bout this?

Said he was Satanist:

DeBusk, whose home address was listed as the Russet Woods subdivision in Hoover, had other interests as well. Friends said he and Ben Moseley were Satanists, which DeBusk told friends was "not about worshipping the devil, but about the pursuit of knowledge," according to Burgess.

DeBusk invited Burgess and others to go demon hunting last summer. Burgess said it didn't amount to much.

"All it ended up being was us playing guitar in the woods while a few of them got drunk," Burgess said. "I didn't think anything of it."

Burgess said he and DeBusk discussed religion loosely, debating whether pets go to heaven and what heaven looks like. "He told me I was one of the more intelligent Christians he's talked to," Burgess said. "Coming from a Satanist, I didn't know quite how to interpret that."

Ian Cunningham, a sophomore who lived in the same dorm as DeBusk, recalled returning from the campus chapel recently to snide remarks about being saved from DeBusk and Moseley. "He would constantly mock me," Cunningham said of DeBusk.

I'm still trying to figure out how arson and cruelty to animals can be written off as youthful pranks. Usually they are referred to as indications of a budding sociopath.

A little shot of Chesterton

I came back to the same conclusion: the sceptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not looked at the facts. The sceptic is too credulous; he believes in newspapers or even in encyclopedias.

Orthodoxy, Ch. 9.

What would we do without academics?

Here I thought that "Angels in Chains", "Chained Heat", "Red Heat", and "Fugitive Rage", were hyper-realistic portrayals of life inside women's prisons. Luckily, a professor did the hard work to discover the truth and set me straight.

But if you watch these films, you won’t know anything about the inside. From depictions of the inmates and their behavior, to the lack of security and impossible happenings of the celluloid facilities, the content of the four films viewed for this project can at best be described as misleading, and at worst, as damaging.

You, too, can be enlightened by reading DYKES, GANGS, AND DANGER: DEBUNKING POPULAR MYTHS ABOUT MAXIMUM-SECURITY LIFE in the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture.
--------------------
Thanks Ace.

Three stories

Three 6 Mafia: Oscar Winners

The whole process leading up to the Three 6 guys getting the award is just dumbfoundingly unlikely: young white director decides to make a movie about a pimp who wants to make crunk music, films it in Memphis instead of Atlanta or Miami or Houston, recruits legends from the local underground to write songs for the movie instead of out-of-town ringers. Said movie does well at Sundance, becomes surprise hit, quietly becomes one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the year despite not really being all that great.

Oscar Winner Hits Angry Chord

Several people interviewed said they found it ironic that the academy -- praised earlier in the evening by actor George Clooney for breaking down barriers for African Americans with an Oscar to Hattie McDaniel in 1939 for her role in "Gone With the Wind" -- would glorify the travails of a man who earns his living exploiting women.

Erika Scott, 17, a Largo High School eleventh-grader, said she was a little shocked. "Growing up where I live, you see, all the time, people who are wanna-be pimps and aspire to be pimps," she said. "Knowing that there is a song that tells the world about what goes on with people like that was surprising, and I was surprised that it won. It made me wonder what the world has come to."

Area Juvenile Sex Rings Targeted Using Anti-Trafficking Laws

The teenagers testified for hour after agonizing hour about their months of prostitution, quietly describing the tricks they turned on some of the District's and Maryland's seediest strips.

They performed sex acts with men in cheap motel rooms, alleys and the back seats of cars, they said. Clients had 10 minutes or it cost extra. One girl, 14 when she was recruited, said her quota was $500 a night, with various sex acts ranging in price from $50 to $150. Every dollar she and her "

That man, Jaron R. Brice, 27, of Northeast Washington, was convicted last week of sex trafficking of a minor, transporting prostitutes across state lines, pandering and child sexual abuse -- a litany of federal charges that probably will land him in prison for decades.

The paradox of elite tastes

Steve Sailer has this beauty from Steven Pinker:

People are surely better off with the truth. Oddly enough, everyone agrees with this when it comes to the arts. Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which everyone lives happily ever after. But when it comes to science, these same people say, "Give us schmaltz!" They expect the science of human beings to be a source of emotional uplift and inspirational sermonizing."

The decadence of cable news

Tim Rutten unleashes a broadside against Nancy Grace in the L.A. Times:

Grace, on the other hand, has no journalistic background whatsoever. Even her employers at the once reliable and now lamentable CNN Headline News are careful to call her simply the "host" of the rhetorical free-fire zone they have created for her. (It's the kind of programming decision that probably would have been forestalled by a slightly more expansive reading of the pandering statutes.) Grace's standing to badger, fawn, scold and grimace her way through 60 minutes of Time Warner's airtime every weeknight rests on just two credentials, which she endlessly repeats: She once worked as a prosecutor in Atlanta and she is a "crime victim" whose fiancé was murdered 27 years ago.

As it turns out, both credentials are a little crumbly around the edges.

He also has a theory about cable's slide into decadence:

Turner has a loose lip and an unsteady personality, but he never wavered in his belief that serious news has a place on television. The same cannot be said of the corporate apparatchiks now running CNN and CNN Headline and cringing before Fox News' success. They're the ones who have unleashed Grace on their Headline network and defaced CNN's regular report with things like Jack Cafferty's bizarre and incoherently histrionic intrusions into the afternoon news and the increasingly demagogic Lou Dobbs' second rate imitations of a Howard Beale rant.

These desperate acts have been triggered by CNN's inability to come even close to matching Fox in the ratings. The commercial genius of Rupert Murdoch's network, of course, resides in Roger Ailes' intuition that the talk radio model could be transferred to television, thereby avoiding the expense of real reporting while cultivating viewers with a taste for conservative partisanship and, more important, entertainment

As with most nostalgic myths, this one glosses over the less edifying bits of history. It is true that Murdoch and Ailes built Fox prime time around a talk radio and tabloid model. But the serpent was in the garden long before Roger met Rupert. Turner gave us Crossfire and Larry King. Greta got her first show on CNN. CNBC wallowed in the OJ trial and the Jon Benet Ramsey case in a way that Rush Limbaugh never did.

What remains striking is the evident lack of courage and imagination at MSNBC and CNN. Instead of trying to find a viable model for serious news, they meekly imitate the Fix recipe.

Nancy Grace

Her story of victimhood is central to her TV appeal and her on-air style. This New York Observer article suggests that she has twisted and exagerated parts of that story to make it more dramatic and compelling. In the process, she lied about the legal system she represents.

Because of what happened in Georgia, Ms. Grace has said over and over, she knows firsthand how the system favors hardened criminals over victims. It is the foundation of her judicial philosophy, her motivation in life, her casus belli.

And much of it isn’t true.

OU bomber: questions and dots

Mark Tapscott and Flopping Aces still have a lot of good questions about Joel Hinrichs and his suicide by bomb.

An odd way to put it

Wanted Man Gunned Down By U.S. Marshals

CHESTER, Pa. (AP) -- The man being sought for the shooting death of a central New York police officer was gunned down by U.S. Marshals last night outside Philadelphia.

"Gunned down" implies that Walter Richardson was shot in an ambush with no opportunity to surrender.

The reality is that he was a murder suspect who refused to give himself up and tried to shoot it out with police.

A man police believe was a cop-killer barricaded himself inside a Chester rowhouse last night, shooting at officers who had surrounded the home before being killed.

Few details were immediately available, but it was clear that about 10:30 p.m. an exchange of gunfire took place between a man holed up at 818 McDonald St. and officers from the U.S. Marshals Office, State Police, Chester Police and Delaware County detectives.

James Webb

Hugh Hewitt writes about the Virginia Senate race. He wants to make it a straight-up referendum on the Iraq war. But I think that will be only part of the story. Webb may also wage the campaign on the broader issue of the Bush administration's handling of our armed forces.

HH calls for modern Lincoln-Douglas debates in the campaign. I hope he gets them. But for that to happen Webb will have to avoid capture by the Sheehan left and not repeat the mistakes McCain made in 2000. At the same time, warbloggers and Fox News will have to give Webb an honest hearing instead of the Murtha treatment.

See also:

The Wall and Fran Townsend

ABLE DANGER: Filling in the blank spaces

ABLE DANGER: Is it fair to bring up Tailhook?

Blast from the past

Kaus from 2002

As a friend of mine once quipped, Carville and Matalin are famous because she's the woman who ran the worst presidential campaign in history, and he's the guy who beat the worst presidential campaign in history.

There are many paths to celebrity and most have nothing to do with competence.

The new tech boom

The Boswell of Silicon Valley offers some smart advice to would-be entrepreneurs.

I thought his assessment of the opportunities in the Blogosphere was especially good:

3. Marketing the Blogosphere -- OK, here's another blog-world opportunity. As I just noted, of those millions of blogs out there, the ones most likely to survive are those that nail down some serious advertising -- more than the current run of T-shirt makers and art galleries. Someday General Motors will place ads on Lileks, Kos and Little Green Footballs, but not for a while (most newspapers will have to die first).
The big, established advertising agencies are sticking to what they know best -- placing ads in the mainstream media -- stuff they know their advertisers read and trust, and where there are established reader profiles and metrics. Still, sometime in the next five years, hundreds of millions of advertising dollars are going to shift over to the blogosphere. Find yourself a place in the middle brokering that shift. Aggregate blogs, develop reader profiles and demographics, put together realistic rate sheets, and pitch, pitch, pitch. You'll starve for a while, but if you are good and can survive, when the big agencies finally come knocking, you'll enjoy one handsome buyout.

I think he is on to something, but i think there is another option that is also out there. I discussed it in this post.

The indispensable innovator is the advertising genius who will make internet advertising a serious competitor for print, TV, and radio. Once that happens, ad money will flow to the audience bloggers attract.

But right now, blog ads and pop-ups just don't fit the needs for most big advertisers.

Andrew Jackson

Dean Barnett is exactly right:

there is no denying Jackson's accomplishments. He is the Godfather of our democracy as surely as Washington is the father of our country.

Many, if not most, of the traits that distinguish American politics from European politics trace back to Jackson. The French can understand Jefferson. The English can see Washington through the prism of Cromwell or Wellington. But Jackson and the culture he embodied remains an enigma to Europe and our own coastal elites.

Nancy Grace: Defending the Bill of Rights is like working at Auschwitz

CNN's ratings star unloads this in a USA Today profile:

CNN Headline News dynamo Nancy Grace has no love for defense attorneys — especially those who know that their clients have killed people but use every possible legal maneuver to get them off or get them better deals. In other words, for doing their jobs.

"What they do is entirely acceptable under the Constitution and the court of law, but I just don't personally like it," Grace says. She quickly notes that her best friend is Renee Rockwell, a defense lawyer and regular on Nancy Grace.

But, she adds, "when people say defense lawyers are just doing their jobs and are necessary for our system, you could say that about a lot of people who claim they're just doing their jobs. You could say that about the guards at Auschwitz."

I am not really surprised. I just expected he to be a little more careful in expressing her disdain for a the idea of a fair trial. Someone like Grace was in at the start of most lynch mobs. We despise lynch law but CNN somehow gives this woman a talk show.

And shouldn't attorneys be held to a little higher standard when it comes to these kind of outbursts?

More on Grace here and here.

Madden and the SuperBowl

This is one of the best articles i've read on Madden's worse than mediocre performance at SB XL.

A few snippets on the two plays that drew the most post-game bloviation:

The fourth play of the series is the first of several that have dominated post-game conversation. On a play where the coverage of the Steelers’ secondary was every bit as good as the blocking of the Seahawks’ line, resulting in a seemingly endless downfield search and scramble by Hasselbeck, Darrell Jackson completed his route, then had to ad lib in an attempt to work himself free. In an end zone where he could have gone in any direction to try to elude Chris Hope, Jackson ran directly at Hope as though he was run blocking, forcing Hope to brace himself, then pushed Hope hard enough with his right hand to make the safety take a step backwards and propelled himself away in the opposite direction. Madden initially characterized the play as “When you think of push offs, that’s not the kind you think about.” Perhaps it would be easier to call if it looked more like a Seinfeld episode in which Elaine gives Jerry a double fisted pounding to the chest with an emphatic “Get out!”, but, short of that, it was a push off, as Madden would later confess. If it was a legal technique that Jackson used, then offensive coordinators around the league would be clamoring to teach their receivers the maneuver and had the official not called it, the league would undoubtedly be sending the Steelers another apology after the game. But Madden’s characterization of the play leaves many, particularly those with sympathetic to the Seahawks and officiating antagonists, believing it’s a call that should not have been made and that the referee who called it somehow doesn’t understand the spirit of the rule, when it was the analyst who was wrong.

****

Of course, another play that stirred controversy was the holding call that nullified a long Seahawks’ pass to Jeremy Stevens. Replays showed that Locklear did in fact grab Haggans’ jersey and pulled down to knock Haggans to his knees. Stating almost indifferently that he didn’t see any holding and that “you can call holding on any play” is simply not good enough, not in the Super Bowl, not on a play as critical as that. It was incumbent on Madden to study the play and make a declaration one way or the other, then support his argument. He was the expert.

**********

Clark Haggans was a mismatch for Locklear. He provided the only consistent pressure the Steelers had all day. The fact that Haggans got a great jump on the holding play because he could anticipate the snap count since Hasselbeck hadn’t changed up the cadence was never mentioned. Had he been credited properly during the broadcast, it’s possible that it would be Haggans not Hines Ward going to Disney World.

Credit where due: Tunch Ilkin, the Steelers's radio analyst, pointed to Haggans as an “under the radar” guy who would come up big against Seatle.

Demurral: I don't share Pasek's confidence in Tony Kornheiser. For my money, Kornheiser has become lazy and over-extended and substitutes a third-rate Borscht-belt routine for real thought and reporting.

What i think is funny is how Pasek praises Kornheiser:

Had Tony Kornheiser believed that a call was bad, you can be sure he would not only say so, but he would say so in several different sarcastic ways, then he’d proceed to question the referee’s eyesight. One of the delicious inputs we all anticipate from Tony will be to belittle on our behalf those who deserve it. Bad referees and pompous players like Randy Moss whose effort often doesn’t match their paycheck are sure to hate Tony’s input, words that will undoubtedly polarize viewers into two categories: those who will laugh loudly at what he says, and those on the other side of his tongue who will think violent thoughts when informed of what he’s said.

Kornheiser may do all of that. I'll hold my applause, though, in light of this bit of Tony history:

When Stephen Rodrick noted that "sports television turns [pundits'] columns into shrill, non-reported versions of their televised rants" in Slate earlier this year, Tony Kornheiser (who, in addition to his responsibilities as a Washington Post columnist, hosts a morning radio show and co-hosts Pardon the Interruption in the afternoon) had a conniption fit, calling on the Post (which had recently purchased Slate) to fire the writer.

It will be interesting to see how the thin-skinned Kornheiser handles the reviews when the season opens. Equally interesting will be Theisman's reaction when Kornheiser goes into his comedy routine to cover-up his lack of preparation.

I guess Texans are right

They are tougher than the rest of us. And politer, too.

Wounded hunting partner regrets trouble

His face marked with tiny birdshot wounds, the lawyer shot by Vice President Dick Cheney while quail hunting left a hospital Friday, saying "accidents do and will happen" and apologizing for the trouble the incident had caused the vice president.

"My family and I are deeply sorry for everything Vice President Cheney and his family have had to deal with," Harry Whittington said, his voice a bit raspy but strong in his first public comments since being shot on a south Texas ranch six days earlier.

Seventy-eight years old, gets hits with a load of birdshot. Walks out of the hospital in a week. And apologizes for the bother caused to the shooter.

Bryant Gumbel

His remarks on the Winter Olympics were not the first time that he played the race card under the guise of sports commentary.

Here's an example from early in his career as recounted in Mark Kram's excellent Ghosts of Manila

Seven months after the first fight, Bryant Gumbel, the editor of Black Sports, grafted on the temper of the day and stripped some more flesh from Frazier. He was a mediocre writer and thinker, excellent qualifications for the large success he would have on television's Today Show with a shallow, hard-worked ultra-sophistication, a cool broker of opinion next to Howard Cosell's weaselly conniving. Gumbel never let a bandwagon pass without jumping on it or trying to blow out its tires, depending on the mood of the day; the ultimate limo liberal. Durham said: "He's got soft written all over him, a country club black." Gumbel said he walked home after the fight with tears in his eye for Ali; a hired weeping pallbearer for the times and its temporarily stalled here. Strapping up his backbone, he wrote a piece meant to further Ali's campaign for victory by proclamation, to blur Frazier's definitive prize: Is Joe Frazier a White Champion in Black Skin?"

Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier

The MSM's insular echo chamber

Rabbi Daniel Lupin on one reason for the media's Cheney obsession:

Not only have most liberals never gone hunting, most don't even know anyone who goes hunting. In fact most wouldn't know a Browning A-Bolt long action Stalker from an office stapler. They simply cannot believe that someone who hunts actually made it to the White House.

What they don't realize is that they sound like fools to large parts of the country where hunting is a common pasttime.

See also this.

A good way to cut down gun crime

The Cincy Enquirer has a good story about straw purchasers and LE efforts to combat this often overlooked crime. What an idea--- target the criminals who buy guns for other criminals.

This race is about to become interesting

NRO has a good article on James Webb's run for Virginia's Senate seat. (HT: Irish Pennants)

I wrote about Webb and the GOP here. A smart, courageous man who understands the demography his state. George Allen could be in big trouble.

Threee women

Susan Sontag

Betty Friedan

Phyllis Schlafly

I liked this


52 REASONS ESPN/ABC/DISNEY SUCKS

The comment thread started back in November, it is still going with over 700 entries.

SuperBowl Wrap-up

I liked this one for a bunch of reasons.

A couple of choice bits:

So, that officiating … really not nearly as bad as a lot of people want to make it out to have been. The refs made a lot of good calls that get blown all the time: they rightly picked up the flag against Michael Boulware for helmet-to-helmet contact; they correctly overturned Hasselbeck's fumble; they didn't flag anyone for any ridiculous almost-but-not-quite-out-of-bounds late hits. Most of the whining has been that certain things that are in fact penalties should not have been called. Sorry … what? That's the best you can do? "Yeah, he did it, but it shouldn't have been flagged." Oh, okay.

-Let's see if I can cover these without wasting too much time: Darrell Jackson pushed off. Roethlisberger's ball probably crossed the plane, and if it didn't, there was no way to tell from the replay. If a pass rusher is between a lineman and the quarterback and his progress is impeded, he's being held. No, one foot in-bounds and one calf touching a pylon is not a completed catch, no matter what John Clayton said three years ago. Not every horse-collar tackle is illegal, and Porter's wasn't the sort that is. Am I missing any?

The truth is, most of the whining is as bad as it's been because of the apparent results of the plays that they negated. Not nearly as big a deal would have been made about the push-off on Jackson if it hadn't been an apparent touchdown. No one would have questioned the hold on King of Holding Sean Locklear if it hadn't wiped out an apparent long gain. Of course, such whining ignores the possible contributions that said penalty-drawing actions made to the plays in the first place. Would Hasselbeck have completed the pass as he was being drilled by Clark Haggans ? I tend to doubt it. Would Jackson have been able to change his momentum enough to catch the ball without pushing off? Who knows. Physics suggests otherwise. Would Hope have had a chance to jar the ball loose if he hadn't been pushed? Seattle's receivers' tremendous demonstration of good hands throughout the game suggests that he might have.

I'm still waiting to hear the uproar over the catch-and-fumble that Jerramy Stevens got away with, or the block in the back on Roethlisberger after his second interception. I'm not saying that Pittsburgh didn't, overall, get the benefit of the officiating. It wasn't nearly by the margin that a lot of people want to make it out to have been, though.

But this one is my favorite:

Hines Ward doesn't care who the safety is.

Unbelievable

Showing of Danish flag roils town

But many people in town saw the foreign flag display as insensitive and inflammatory. Several town employees told Stankiewicz they did not agree with his decision and worried the flag could provoke violence against Town Hall in light of the attacks against Danish and other European embassies throughout the Middle East. Stankiewicz described their concerns as an ''overreaction."

Wimps

Apologies

My PC crashed big time so blogging will be light for the next several days.

It's pretty surprising: in sixteen months i've had more trouble with this Dell equipment (two junk printers, a DVD drive, and now a compound problem) than i had with the previous four computers and three printers i've owned (combined).

Carnival

The Carnival of the Capitalists has its latest roundup of econ and business blogging.