30 September 2008 @ 9:45PM >> The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto eulogizes The New York Sun, which published its final issue today.

Back in January 2005, the Sun was the first newspaper to cover the film project that ultimately became Indoctrinate U.

The Sun’s content was ahead of its time, in an industry that doesn’t seem to have much time left.

30 September 2008 @ 9:14AM >> “A reader at a major newsroom” e-mailed Glenn Reynolds:

Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for [Obama] is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working.

If Barack Obama wins, the media will have won it for him. And if so, it will be proof that—despite a decade of seismic changes in the media landscape—the establishment media still wields tons of power. The media seems not to care that the exercise of their power in service of electing Obama comes at the expense of the media’s credibility and therefore diminishes their future power.

What other presidential candidate could have gotten away with spending 20 years in a hateful, racist church? What other candidate could have gotten away with having as a close mentor an unapologetic terrorist who spent years blowing up U.S. Government buildings?

Usually, the press hammers away at issues far more mundane than that. Just ask Sarah Palin’s family.

29 September 2008 @ 9:02AM >> If you happen to be in Washington, D.C. this week, there are a few films you should take time out to see.

Do As I Say exposes the hypocrisy of the political and media elite, who preach one thing to the masses while practicing another.

U.N. Me is a searing indictment of the United Nations and how its institutional fecklessness has cost countless lives and wasted billions of dollars.

I’ve seen early edits of both of these films. You will be stunned.

One film I can’t wait to see is An American Carol, David Zucker’s hilarious-looking sendup of Michael Moore and the politics of Hollywood.

All of these films will be shown at the American Film Renaissance festival, from October 1st through the 4th. Scheduling information and tickets are available online.

13 September 2008 @ 12:16PM >> Will be offline for a couple of weeks. See you at the end of September.

11 September 2008 @ 12:00AM >> Remember.

10 September 2008 @ 11:51PM >> In the wake of the megalomaniacal Eliot Spitzer, current New York Governor David Patterson seemed like a breath of fresh air.

How disappointing, then, that he’s been reduced to the role of the Democrats’ race-card-player-du-jour:

At the Crain’s Business Forum this morning, Paterson drew attention to a phrase used numerous times by speakers at the Republican National Convention to describe Barack Obama’s leadership experience: community organizer.

“I think the Republican Party is too smart to call Barack Obama ‘black’ in a sense that it would be a negative. But you can take something about his life, which I noticed they did at the Republican Convention - a ‘community organizer.’ They kept saying it, they kept laughing,” he said.

Paterson referred to McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin who compared her work experience to Obama’s.

“So I suppose a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities,” she said at the convention.

Paterson sees the repeated use of the words “community organizer” as Republican code for “black”.

“I think where there are overtones is when there are uses of language that are designed to inhibit other people’s progress with a subtle reference to their race,” he said.

So does that make Barack Obama’s repeated references to his former job some form of reflexive racism? Or is it acceptable for Obama to talk about his career history but not his opponents?

Any criticism of Senator Obama is a sign of racism, it seems.

10 September 2008 @ 8:16AM >> Camille Paglia, the iconic liberal feminist whose intellectual honesty routinely defies conventional wisdom, has some thoughts on Sarah Palin and her brand of feminism:

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

[...]

Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War — long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did — which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.

Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics — which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama’s campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don’t see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.

[...]

It is certainly premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin’s boffo performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn’t worth a warm bucket of spit.

[...]

Now that’s the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism — a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

9 September 2008 @ 6:28PM >> An illuminating quote of the day:

Tuition has risen at twice the rate of per capita income and this year it will cost just under $50,000 to attend the average private college. If the cost of milk had risen as fast as the cost of college since 1980, a gallon would be $15.—Congressman Peter Welch (D-Vermont)

When other industries are seen as gouging the consumer, Congress likes to hold showy hearings and investigations. How long until the honchos of higher ed are hauled before some subcomittee or another?

8 September 2008 @ 8:52AM >> Sex doesn’t sell, at least not in Europe:

[Members of European Parliament] want TV regulators in the EU to set guidelines which would see the end of anything deemed to portray women as sex objects or reinforce gender stereotypes.

This could potentially mean an end to attractive women advertising perfume, housewives in the kitchen or men doing DIY.

Such classic adverts as the Diet Coke commercial featuring the bare-chested builder, or Wonderbra’s “Hello Boys” featuring model Eva Herzigova would have been banned.

The new rules come in a report by the EU’s women’s rights committee.
Swedish MEP Eva-Britt Svensson urged Britain and other members to use existing equality, sexism and discrimination laws to control advertising.

She wants regulatory bodies set up to monitor ads and introduce a “zero-tolerance” policy against “sexist insults or degrading images”.

5 September 2008 @ 12:27AM >> In a piece that touches on many topics—read the whole thing—Victor Davis Hanson identifies the crux of the cultural divide highlighted by the reaction to Sarah Palin:

A beautiful, confident, articulate, independent, accomplished—and conservative—woman apparently has enraged Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia, as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America.

When Palin talks about her present life it sounds as authentic as Biden’s showy populism came off as false. Enraged feminists are apparently the gatekeepers for less well-educated American women, who are supposed to have 0-1.5 children not 5! Their husbands must be professors, lawyers, CEOs, editors—not snowmobile champions, union members, oil workers, and fishermen—or, worse, all in one! And unlike a Pelosi, Quinn, or Clinton, Palin, God forbid, did not rely on a powerful, wealthy husband or father to energize her career. Worse still, she took no women’s studies class, never attended the Ivy League, and shoots moose. The danger is not just that Sarah Palin could win McCain the election, but she could expose the entire flimsy structure of doctrinaire liberalism as the hypocrisy—and chauvinism—it has become.

Traditional, 1970s-style feminists believe that women can do anything—even become Vice-President—unless those women happen to be conservatives, in which case apparently they’re only permitted to stay home and tend to their families.

By being a successful female politician who doesn’t rely on identity politics, Sarah Palin represents a brand of post-feminism, and to whatever extent she can succeed further, she dumps another shovelful of dirt on the coffin of old feminism.

That’s why she must be destroyed.

2 September 2008 @ 8:46AM >> I’ll be a guest this evening on It’s Your Call with Lynn Doyle discussing politics and the party conventions. The show airs with a special schedule tonight, from 8PM to 11PM, on Comcast’s CN8 news channel.