30 June 2005 @ 9:11PM >> From The Times (of London):

In person, Mr. Bush is so far removed from the caricature of the dim, war-mongering Texas cowboy of global popular repute that it shakes one’s faith in the reliability of the modern media.

30 June 2005 @ 1:18AM >> A good point in an excellent piece called “Making markets in the political economy“:

I watched Howard Dean on The Daily Show last night, and rarely have I seen a major political figure so thoroughly, even painstakingly, inept at appealing to voters. His remarks elicited cheers from the true-blue supporters in the audience, but only at the expense of alienating every single other person in the country. If he wasn’t making ham-fisted attempts to prove Democratic moralistic superiority by selective and theologically shallow quotation from the bible—an activity that even bible-thumping Republican congressmen undertake with more caution (and erudition) than Mr Dean did—he was claiming that his was the party of real moral values. Cringe. When was the last time you heard an RNC chair say something like that? Answer: you don’t, because the “Family values” guys know that you do not garner votes by saying “Everyone who voted for the other guy is immoral” . . . especially when the other guy got a majority.

29 June 2005 @ 12:21PM >> A columnist for Newsday (Long Island, New York) thinks that CNN should hire Dan Rather. Among the author’s arguments is that Dan Rather would bring “credibility” to CNN.

29 June 2005 @ 2:00AM >> If you haven’t yet read about the Supreme Court’s decision in the Kelo vs. New London case, then you might not appreciate how much I love this:

Could a hotel be built on the land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter? A new ruling by the Supreme Court which was supported by Justice Souter himself itself might allow it. A private developer is seeking to use this very law to build a hotel on Souter’s land.

Justice Souter’s vote in the “Kelo vs. City of New London” decision allows city governments to take land from one private owner and give it to another if the government will generate greater tax revenue or other economic benefits when the land is developed by the new owner.

On Monday June 27, Logan Darrow Clements, faxed a request to Chip Meany the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire seeking to start the application process to build a hotel on [...] the present location of Mr. Souter’s home.

Clements [...] points out that the City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and economic benefits with a hotel on [Mr. Souter’s land].

The proposed development, called “The Lost Liberty Hotel” will feature the “Just Desserts Cafe” and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon’s Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

Clements indicated that the hotel must be built on this particular piece of land because it is a unique site being the home of someone largely responsible for destroying property rights for all Americans.

“This is not a prank” said Clements, “The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development.”

Clements’ plan is to raise investment capital from wealthy pro-liberty investors and draw up architectural plans. These plans would then be used to raise investment capital for the project. Clements hopes that regular customers of the hotel might include supporters of the Institute For Justice and participants in the Free State Project among others.

(Note: Links in quoted text above added by me.)

28 June 2005 @ 8:05PM >> Mark Steyn on “Selective Ansgt“:

Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s kleptocrat strongman, destroyed a mosque the other day. It was in Hatcliffe Extension, a shantytown on the edge of Harare, razed by the “police.” Mr. Mugabe is an equal-opportunity razer: He also bulldozed a Catholic-run Aids center.

[...]

The point is the world’s Muslims seem entirely cool with Infidel Bob razing a mosque. Unlike the fallout over Newsweek’s fraudulent story about the Koran being flushed down a toilet, no excitable young men went bananas in Pakistan; no Western progressives berated Mr. Mugabe for his “cultural insensitivity.” And sadly most of the big-shot Muslim spokespersons were still too busy flaying the Bush administration to whip their subjects into a frenzy over Hatcliffe Extension’s pile of Islamic rubble.

27 June 2005 @ 8:04PM >> NPR reporter Nina Totenberg and Newsweek editor Evan Thomas bicker over the “liberal” label:

Evan Thomas: Can I ask, is this going to, is this attack going to make NPR a little less liberal?

Nina Totenberg: I don’t think we’re liberal to begin with and I think if you would listen, Evan, you would know that.

Thomas: I do listen to you and you’re not that liberal, but you’re a little bit liberal.

Totenberg: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s a fair criticism, I really don’t — any more than, any more than you would say that Newsweek is liberal.

Thomas: I think Newsweek is a little liberal.

Hey, at least Thomas is honest.

Speaking of honesty, the New York Times is once again admitting that it knows what it is. In a recent memo to Times staffers (PDF file, 10 pages), editor Bill Keller wrote:

[D]iversifying the range of viewpoints reported — and understood — in our pages is not mainly a matter of hiring a more diverse work force. It calls for a concerted effort by all of us to stretch beyond our predominantly urban, culturally liberal orientation, to cover the full range of our national conversation.

That would be a nice trick, if the Times can pull it off. Either way, it’s a good sign that the Times is thinking in such terms.

Five years ago, you never would have heard such admissions of bias coming straight from the mouths of the establishment media elites. We’ve come a long way...

26 June 2005 @ 1:34PM >> The post-Ashcroft Justice Department appears to be a little less modest than its predecessor.

26 June 2005 @ 12:55PM >> The Arts section of today’s New York Times discusses the emerging conservative film movement. Although it’s quite nice that the article contains a mention of Brainwashing 101, the casual reader would probably leave with the impression that conservative = religious right. That’s too bad; conservatism as an intellectual strain is far more diverse than that, which was very apparent at last year’s two conservative film festivals.

25 June 2005 @ 11:34AM >> Several months ago, Google News—which accepts other opinion sites—rejected this site for inclusion in their roster. But apparently, a jihadist web site suits Google News just fine.

24 June 2005 @ 5:52PM >> A press release from World Ahead Publishing—a publisher of conservative and libertarian books—charges that Google banned an ad for a book critical of Bill and Hillary Clinton:

Popular search engine Google reversed course late last week and banned a previously approved online ad campaign for a new book that documents abuses of power by Bill and Hillary Clinton. The surprise move prompted the book’s author and publishing house to publicly question if the politics of Google’s CEO - a financial backer of Hillary Clinton - played a role in this change of course.

“Google’s decision to reverse its prior approval and shut down this banner ad campaign reeks of political bias,” charges [author] Candice E. Jackson. [...]

The controversy comes at a time when the search engine giant is facing increasing scrutiny for claims of editorial unfairness by conservative organizations. Last month RightMarch.com, a conservative activist group, went public with claims that Google was rejecting its ads targeting House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi while at the same time running identical ads attacking Republican Leader Tom DeLay.

Representatives for Google - whose corporate motto is “don’t be evil” - attempted to defend the surprise ban on the book’s ads by claiming their policies prohibit ads that are against an individual. But while the ads for the book - which featured images of the book’s cover and pictures of the former First Couple - were suddenly deemed too offensive, Google happily accepts advertisements with headlines such as “Hate Bush? So Do We,” “Bush Belongs Behind Bars,” and “George W. Bush Fart Doll.”

Early last month, a similar controversy erupted when Google accepted ads targeting Republican Congressman Tom DeLay while rejecting similar ads targeting Democratic Congressman Nancy Pelosi. On May 9th, WorldNetDaily reported:

Google, the Internet’s No. 1 search engine, is still running attack ads against besieged House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, despite assurances by the company’s spokesman they were all pulled last week.

The issue of the anti-DeLay ads came to light when a conservative activist group discovered the ads and designed a similar campaign, using the same verbiage, targeting House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

When the anti-Pelosi ads were rejected by Google, RightMarch.com protested what it saw as political bias in Google’s content.

When questioned about the apparent double-standard by WND, Mike Mayzel, spokesman for Google, said both the anti-Pelosi ad and the anti-DeLay ad were pulled.

“Both ads were taken down,” he told WND. “Any assertion to the contrary is false. As soon as an ad is reviewed and found to be in violation of our policies, we take it down as soon as possible. Any suggestion we would leave some ads up longer than others for reasons of political bias is false.”

However, a search of Google’s site yesterday shows at least three more anti-DeLay ads still running[.]

As of this writing nearly two months later, anti-Tom DeLay ads are still running, despite Google’s assurances that they wouldn’t be. However, one anti-Nancy Pelosi ad is also running, which makes me wonder whether the problem is one of corporate political bias or simply one of bias—or incompetence—on the part of individual staffers who administer the ad approval process. Google may have dozens of employees who approve these ads, which could explain the inconsistent application of its policy.

Whatever the explanation, this kind of information doesn’t exactly help Google’s case:

A WorldNetDaily search of Google executive and employee political contributions filed with the Federal Election Commission showed nearly 99 percent of its $469,500 went to Democrats over the last three election cycles.

As a private company, Google is fully within its rights to accept or reject any ad it sees fit. However, if these charges are true, then the public should at least be aware of the fact that Google is making political calculations in the selective application of its ad policy. Google would also be wise to tighten up the application of this policy; the appearance of bias for a company that aspires to be the world’s gateway to the Internet would be devastating.

21 June 2005 @ 8:19AM >> The New York Post reports that the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero—which was at some point renamed the “International Freedom Center”—is morphing into “multimillion-dollar bash-America palace.”

The fireworks started earlier this month when Debra Burlingame, a sister of the pilot of one of the hijacked 9/11 planes, wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Ground Zero has been stolen right from under our noses.”

Burlingame, a director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, specifically charged that [International Freedom Center president Richard] Tofel and others are planning to host exhibits at Ground Zero devoted to such wholly off-topic issues as the alleged “genocide” of Americans Indians, the fight against slavery, the Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag.

Worthy subjects for study, each and every one — but not at Ground Zero.

Tofel, for his part, insists that the controversy is all about nothing.

But when Cavuto asked, specifically, whether the museum would feature “atrocities Americans have committed,” Tofel repeatedly refused a direct answer.

“Atrocities is such a loaded word,” he stammered, the weasel.

[...]

“The International Freedom Center will host debates and note points of view with which you — and I — will disagree,” Tofel wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

Debates?

Like, whether America is sufficiently sensitive to other cultures?

Whether Muslims — and non-Americans generally — need to protect themselves from U.S. “hegemony”?

How did this happen? The Post notes some of the more ideologically-driven people steering the project:

Tom Bernstein, an IFC founder, and Michael Posner, an advisor, also run the George Soros-funded Human Rights First, a bash-America forum of the first order. If you doubt it, visit the Web site: humanrightsfirst.org.

Board member Anthony Romero of the ACLU (aclu.org) reportedly wants exhibits on what he believes have been post-9/11 “curbs to civil liberties.”

Stephen Heintz, the board’s secretary, is with the Rockefeller Bros. Fund (rbf.org), which at present is concerned with what it terms the “pressing need to examine the content, style and tone of U.S. global engagement and to ensure that they reflect an understanding of the reality and implications of increasing global interdependence.” (Translation: Blame America First.)

Eric Foner, a Columbia University professor who, three weeks after 9/11, said he wasn’t sure which was more frightening, the attack or the White House’s response, is another adviser.

If the project proceeds, it wouldn’t be the first time such a memorial was taken over by the forces of political correctness, the Post says:

Ten years ago, the Smithsonian Institution proposed a seemingly benign plan to commemorate the 50th anniversary of end of World War II in the Pacific.

The undertaking swiftly morphed into a naked attack on American war motives, tactics and strategy that highlighted Japanese suffering and totally ignored the fact that Tokyo started the conflict.

That happens these days when academics are left to their own devices.

These developments inspired Debra Burlingame, the sister of the pilot whose hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon on September 11th, to set up a “Take Back the Memorial” petition.

20 June 2005 @ 10:39PM >> Am I the only one wondering why the ACLU is not suing the Federal government over the Korans at Guantanamo Bay?

As everybody’s probably aware by now, our tax dollars are used to purchase and distribute Korans to incarcerated Islamists. That’s in addition to the prayer mats, the five-times-a-day announcements for prayer, the signs pointing towards Mecca, and the gloves that our infidel military personnel must wear so their unclean hands don’t defile the Muslim holy book by touching it directly.

This, for some reason, is perfectly acceptable in the same country where Christmas trees are removed from public squares because they supposedly violate the separation between church and state.

It’s funny that we show more respect to the religions of people trying to destroy this country than we do to the religions of the people who founded it.

20 June 2005 @ 10:26PM >> Mark Steyn has some thoughts on music, torture, Korans and Guantanamo:

The first time the full-blast junk-pop treatment caught the eye of the media was a decade and a half back, when US troops bombarded the Panamanian strongman General Noriega with the Bobby Fuller Four’s “I Fought The Law (And The Law Won)”. In those days, nobody reckoned it was torture. But these days torture seems to be in the ear of the behearer. Because the jihadi find western culture depraved — and I’m not necessarily in disagreement on that, at least where Christina Aguilera’s concerned — we’re obliged to be extra-super-duper-sensitive with them.

Says who? Again, the more one hears the specifics of the “insensitivity” of the American regime at Guantanamo, the more many of us reckon we’re being way too sensitive. For example, camp guards are under instructions to handle copies of the Koran only when wearing gloves. The reason for this is that the detainees regard infidels as “unclean”. Fair enough, each to his own. But it’s one thing for the Islamists to think infidels are unclean, quite another for the infidels to agree with them. Far from being tortured, the prisoners are being handled literally with kid gloves (or simulated kid-effect gloves). The US military hand each jihadi his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship The Times of London. When I bought a Koran to bone up on Islam a couple of days after 9/11, I didn’t wear gloves to the bookstore. If that’s “disrespectful” to Muslims, tough. You should have thought about that before you allowed your holy book to become the central motivation for global jihad.

15 June 2005 @ 8:31PM >> Poor Kofi Annan just can’t catch a break these days. Shortly after the U.N. Secretary General’s hand-picked investigative team expressed only weak confidence that Annan was not directly involved in the Oil for Food scandal, two of the investigators behind the report resigned, saying that it was too soft of Kofi.

The investigators’ suspicion surrounded Cotecna, the European company contracted by the U.N. to oversee the Oil for Food program. During the time that Cotecna was supposedly keeping watch over oil transactions from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, many tens of billions of dollars were diverted by the Hussein regime in order to pay off allies. Also during that time, Kofi Annan’s son Kojo was being paid exorbitant consulting fees by Cotecna.

So, did Cotecna pay Annan’s son in order to get the U.N. contract? Was Cotecna a willing accomplice in letting Saddam Hussein subvert the Oil for Food program? The U.N. investigation never uncovered a smoking gun, perhaps because of the efforts of Kofi’s Chief of Staff:

The most significant finding in the Volcker Report is undoubtedly the revelation that Kofi Annan’s then-Chief of Staff Iqbal Riza authorized the shredding between April and December 2004 of thousands of UN documents—the entire UN Chef de Cabinet chronological files for the years 1997, 1998 and 1999, many of which related to the oil-for-food program.

That makes it a little hard to conduct a thorough investigation, which may explain why the U.N.’s investigators found “no evidence that the selection of Cotecna in 1998 was subject to any affirmative or improper influence of the Secretary-General in the bidding or selection process.” It isn’t easy finding evidence once it’s been destroyed.

But just as Kofi and Kojo have begun settling into their post-investigative relief, an incriminating document surfaced that threatens their comfort once again:

The United Nations panel investigating the Iraq oil-for-food scandal said yesterday it is “urgently reviewing” a 1998 memo in which U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appears to endorse a bid by the Swiss firm Cotecna to monitor the program.

If accurate, the memo would contradict a claim by Mr. Annan that he did not know about the bid by Cotecna at the time — a potential conflict of interest because Cotecna employed Mr. Annan’s son, Kojo Annan.

[...]

According to the memo, first reported in yesterday’s editions of the New York Times, Cotecna officials had “brief discussions with the [Secretary General] and his entourage” and said they were told that “we could count on their support.”

[...]

The Geneva-based company won the nearly $10 million contract in late 1998, and investigators charge that it continued to pay the younger Mr. Annan long after he told his father that he had broken all ties with the company.

With or without Kofi Annan at the helm, the United Nations is a seriously flawed organization. Kofi’s resignation wouldn’t fix the U.N.’s structural problems, but with him out of office, at least the U.N. could start rethinking its future. If Kofi insists on staying, the U.N. will continue to be paralyzed by the perpetual damage-control stance that has marked his tenure. Maybe that isn’t so bad, though. An ineffective U.N. might be better than the alternative.

14 June 2005 @ 10:01AM >> Canada’s universal healthcare system guarantees that every citizen receives equal access to care. In order to enforce such equality, Canada made it illegal for a person to spend his own money on private care. Doctors who provide medical care outside of the Canadian state system are therefore breaking the law.

But that might be changing. Canada’s Supreme Court recently opened the door for Quebec’s citizens to pay for private care outside the socialized medicine system:

Canada’s Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a Quebec law that banned private insurance for services covered under Medicare, a landmark decision that could affect the country’s universal health-care system.

The justices took a year to rule on a case that began in 1997, when George Zeliotis, an elderly Montreal man, tried to pay for hip replacement surgery rather than wait nearly a year for treatment at a public hospital.

[...]

Although the ruling was made on the Quebec law, it likely will affect other Canadian provinces that forbid residents from buying private health care insurance for treatment under the country’s Medicare system.

Opponents of changes to Medicare claimed it could force Canada into a two-tiered health care system in which those who have deeper pockets get faster, better service from doctors who opt out of the public health-care program.

The logic of the opponents here is that everyone should be forced to be equal by preventing people from buying better care elsewhere if they can afford it. They’d prefer someone to go without medical care as long as equality is maintained.

The Canadian system is a perfect example of socialism in action: everyone receives equally crappy care, and everyone has to spend an equally long time on the waiting list in order to receive that care.

The 1984 Canada Health Act affirmed the federal government’s commitment to provide mostly free health care to all, including the more than 200,000 immigrants arriving each year, under a system called Medicare.

But the universal health-care system [...] has been plagued by long waiting lists and a lack of doctors, nurses and new equipment. Some patients wait years for surgery, MRI machines are scarce and many Canadians travel to the United States for medical treatment.

In most Canadian provinces, it is illegal to seek faster treatment and jump to the head of the line by paying out of pocket for public care. Private health clinics have sprouted up even though they are technically illegal, though the provincial governments tend to look the other way.

This article, which appeared in London’s Guardian, also sports a little editorializing from the writer, who asserts that Canada’s system is “considered one of the fairest in the world.” Precisely who considers the Canadian system fair is not stated; the writer just assumes everyone agrees. I bet that the people who spend months and years waiting for procedures that they could have today if only they lived in the United States would not consider the system fair.

13 June 2005 @ 9:31AM >> That’s it. Shut down Guantanamo. Torturing detainees with Christina Aguilera music? What a sick, twisted society we’ve become. We truly are no better than the “terrorists” we’re fighting.

9 June 2005 @ 11:24AM >> NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen discusses the Watergate myth, how it distorts education within journalism schools, and how it contributes to what ails the press today:

By giving the warrant of history, and the mandate of heaven, to the adversarial press, and the Fourth Estate model (where the press is an essential check on government, a modern addition to the balance of powers); by telling each new crop of journalists how to be heroes and how do good; by glamorizing the underworld of confidential sources, the mythos of Watergate had very definite effects in journalism.

[...]

Trying to understand this took me right into the religion of journalism—a belief system and meaning-making kit that is shared across editorial cultures in mainstream newsrooms. Young people are introduced to the religion in J-school, where it also lives, but even if they skip the academies they learn it within a few years on the job.

In the daily religion of the news tribe, ordinary believers do not call themselves believers. (In fact, “true believer” is a casting out term in journlism, an insult.) The Skeptics. That’s who journalists say they are. Of course, they know they believe things in common with their fellow skeptics on the press bus. It’s important to keep this complication in mind: Not that journalists are so skeptical as a rule, but that they will try to stand in relation to you as The Skeptic does.

[...]

Meanwhile, “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” is handed down not as a slogan too clever by half, but as a public service philosophy. Find 100 journalists who know the slogan, perhaps five can tell you the origin. And they don’t know that the author (Finley Peter Dunne) was being sarcastic, either. Is this education?

[...]

Deans of Journalism, scribble a note: Investigative reporting, exposing public corruption, and carrying the mantle of the downtrodden [are taught] not as political acts in themselves—which they are—and not as a continuation of the progressive movement of the 1920s, in which the cleansing light of publicity was a weapon of reform—which they are—but just as a way of being idealistic, a non-political truthteller in the job of journalist. (Which is bunk.)

[...]

In the newsroom faith that I have been describing, Watergate is not just a big, big story with a knock-out ending. It is the great redemptive tale believers learn to tell about the press and what it can do for the American people. It is a story of national salvation: truth their only weapon, journalists save the day. Whether the story can continue to claim enough believers—and connect the humble to the heroic in journalism—is to my mind a big question. Whether it should continue is an even better question.

Life must be satisfying if you fancy yourself a hero. It also becomes rather easy to ignore your mistakes and excuse your motives. You are, after all, a hero, and you can quite easily comfort yourself because you, like Superman, are doing good, caring, important, vital work. This mentality seems obvious and pervasive in today’s news media. The press must first recognize this thinking, or it will never understand its critics, and will always have a reason to dismiss them. Because if you are the hero, anyone who criticizes you must therefore be the villain.

8 June 2005 @ 2:35PM >> Is it possible that someone in the MSNBC control room doesn’t like Norah O’Donnell?

8 June 2005 @ 9:40AM >> For some reason, my comments on the TV show 24 yielded more e-mail than any recent post. A friend of mine even left me a voicemail defending the show!

Of the e-mailers who’ve seen the show, the unanimous verdict is that 24 is quite excellent. People were split, however, on whether the show was becoming weak-kneed and politically correct in its portrayal of terrorists.

Lydia Brodeur wrote:

Augh! Your last post at BT almost had me writhing on the floor.

Admittedly, I haven’t seen the fourth season of 24 yet. My fiance Ben and I
always wait for the DVDs to come out, and they haven’t yet. 24, being
a show mostly about stopping various threats to the country, can’t
avoid tidbits of political commentary. But that article you
apparently drew your opinion from is NOT representative of the show.
It makes the show seem so shallow, when it’s not! The show is really
thrilling and the story is always fantastic. Edge-of-your-seat,
literally. Ben and I would stay up until 4 am sometimes watching the
DVDs because we always had that “Oh, just one more episode” attitude.
Just
couldn’t put the remote down. Any of our friends that weren’t
watching WITH us just assumed we were unavailable on Friday and
Saturday nights for a few weeks every time we got a new season on DVD.

[...]

Look, my point is, please don’t swear off 24 because of that article.
It’s just not representative. If you get the chance to watch 24,
please do. Just make sure to watch from the beginning. It’s not a
show you can jump into the middle of.

Jon Koolpe said:

Regarding your comments on “24,” I felt compelled to write you a quick note. While I do agree that the producers/writers very much whitewashed Islam by the end of the season by removing almost all references to this religion, I do feel that the show was well done and did expose some of the liberal hypocrisy and naivete that is so prevalent in this country.

For instance, when the heroes had a suspect in custody that was not cooperative, the first thing that the Marwan character did was to contact a liberal lawyer in what was an obvious swipe at such “humanitarian” groups as Amnesty International and the ACLU in order to get a lawyer to delay the proper interrogation of the prisoner. AI has certainly managed to up the ante in their foolishness this past week with their absurd “Gulag” claim....

[...]

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I truly enjoyed “24” and found it worthwhile even though I was also pretty upset at the obvious changes that the producers undertook due to Islamic pressure groups. There was still enough there to enjoy and at least this one TV show had some cajones in this case, even if they weren’t as steadfast as I would have preferred...

8 June 2005 @ 8:44AM >> The Hollywood Reporter is carrying an article on conservative filmmakers, which contains a brief blurb on me:

Then there’s Evan Coyne Maloney, who gained attention in 2003 by pointing a camera at protesters before the U.S. attacked Iraq and asking them to explain their concerns. The humorous result is one of a series of short films he has posted on the Internet.

Maloney and a couple of partners then founded On the Fence Films, which has begun to earn acclaim for “Brainwashing 101,” a documentary that spotlights political correctness on college campuses and plays primarily — where else? — on college campuses.

“People making documentaries today are primarily on the left, so stories that don’t interest them would go untold,” Maloney says.

7 June 2005 @ 2:38PM >> In “When Drama Becomes Propaganda,” an interesting long-form essay over at OpinionJournal.com, Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal’s drama critic, wonders “Why is so much political art so awful?”

Instead of seeking to persuade—to change the minds of its viewers—[today’s political art] takes for granted their concurrence. It assumes that everyone in the audience is already smart enough to hate Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and, above all, George W. Bush, and thus does not need to be reminded of their underlying humanity, or of the possibility, however remote, that their intentions might be good. By extension it also takes for granted that no truly creative artist could possibly think otherwise, that good art is by definition liberal (or, to use the term commonly preferred by such artists, “progressive”) in its view of the world, and that only progressive thinkers are truly creative. Conservatives are generally thought too repressed or narrow-minded for creative activities.

3 June 2005 @ 9:03AM >> Wait a minute...I thought Iraq had no WMD capabilities:

U.N. satellite imagery experts have determined that material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles has been removed from 109 sites in Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors said in a report obtained Thursday.

U.N. inspectors have been blocked from returning to Iraq since the U.S.-led war in 2003 so they have been using satellite photos to see what happened to the sites that were subject to U.N. monitoring because their equipment had both civilian and military uses.

In the report to the U.N. Security Council, acting chief weapons inspector Demetrius Perricos said he’s reached no conclusions about who removed the items or where they went. He said it could have been moved elsewhere in Iraq, sold as scrap, melted down or purchased.

He said the missing material can be used for legitimate purposes. “However, they can also be utilized for prohibited purposes if in a good state of repair.”

He said imagery analysts have identified 109 sites that have been emptied of equipment to varying degrees, up from 90 reported in March.

The report also provided much more detail about the percentage of items no longer at the places where U.N. inspectors monitored them.

From the imagery analysis, Perricos said analysts at the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission which he heads have concluded that biological sites were less damaged than chemical and missile sites.

The commission, known as UNMOVIC, previously reported the discovery of some equipment and material from the sites in scrapyards in Jordan and the Dutch port of Rotterdam.

Perricos said analysts found, for example, that 53 of the 98 vessels that could be used for a wide range of chemical reactions had disappeared. “Due to its characteristics, this equipment can be used for the production of both commercial chemicals and chemical warfare agents,” he said.

The existence of this much “dual use” equipment—combined with the cat-and-mouse games played by Saddam Hussein whenever the weapons inspectors were in Iraq—means that we would have had to take Hussein at his word that nothing nefarious was going on. That begs the question: how much trust should we have put in Saddam Hussein?

This story also sets up a new twisted-logic opportunity for the perpetual critics of the United States. On the one hand, the fact that the equipment is dual-use means that they can still claim that Saddam Hussein had no WMD program. At the same time, they can complain the United States failed to secure this dangerous equipment after the invasion. (Of course, this assumes that we didn’t move it ourselves, which the U.N. would have no way of knowing.) By this reasoning, the equipment was completely innocuous until the day the U.S. invaded, at which point it became very dangerous. This allows the Saddam-was-never-a-threat argument to conveniently coexist with the United-States-is-completely-negligent argument. Everybody wins!

1 June 2005 @ 10:52AM >> I admit, I’ve never watched the show 24. Everybody tells me I should, all my friends rave about it, even one of the executive producers of my upcoming film recommended it for editing ideas. But, like The Sopranos or Desperate Housewives, it seems to be one of those shows you have to watch from the very beginning in order to truly understand its greatness.

Although the last thing I need in my life is another time commitment, I would’ve been willing to check out 24 if it’s really as good as everyone says. But now, after reading this, I’m much less inclined to do so:

The creators of “24,” Fox Television’s thriller-diller starring Keifer Sutherland as counterterror super-agent Jack Bauer, almost put together a compelling TV series rooted in the onerous reality of the war on jihad terrorism. But thanks, apparently, to a few helpful suggestions from the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), they managed to steer clear of all political and historical relevance.

This couldn’t have been easy. After all, CAIR didn’t even come to their rescue until after the show’s season had begun with a couple of episodes that featured a typical Islamic sleeper cell embedded in a typical American sleepy suburb. After these and other obvious blunders — a terse exchange of “Allahu Akbar” between terrorists, for instance — the creative types behind the hit series managed to get their act together and save the world for political correctness. How? Two things: They laid down a suitably distracting Chinese subplot, and cast a bunch of mid-Westerners, instead of Middle Easterners, to wear the key black hats. There was the ex-Air Force pilot — obviously blond, obviously disgruntled — who shot down Air Force One; a nefarious ex-Marine; and a Patty-Hearst-like commando who just shot whatever.

Whatever is right. By this week’s season finale, Marwan, the head jihadist, had been comic-stripped of all religious identity and motivation, and cloaked in a heavy disguise of moral equivalence. As in: You think we’re evil and we think you’re evil. This is pretty much what hero-Jack actually said to Marwan, the terror kingpin, who had just that day blown up a train, kidnapped the Secretary of Defense, sent multiple nuclear plants into meltdown, and lobbed a nuclear warhead at Los Angeles. Oh well. Marwan was ultimately overshadowed by Someone Worse — the President of the United States.