Walter’s newspaper, which breaks out the airbrushes yet again:

Today’s speech by Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, about the sanctions on his country and its determination to persist in its quest for nuclear capability was a significant news event. Khamenei served notice on the United States that he would not be bluffed into giving up his nuclear plans. Though he conceded the economic pressure on his country has hurt, he said Iran is undaunted and would retaliate against the United States should its nuclear facilities come under attack. All this was reported in newspapers around the world, including the New York Times, which posted a story on the speech Friday morning.

However, there was something missing from the Times report of Khamenei’s speech that was reported elsewhere. Other accounts noted that in addition to threatening the United States, Khamenei said this: “The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor and it will be removed.” While we don’t know how or why a mention of this element of the speech managed to get excised from the account in the Times, it’s a question worth pondering.

Any discussion of the nature of the Iranian nuclear threat that ignores the regime’s murderous intentions toward Israel is clearly incomplete.

As we noted when Jill Abramson became the paper’s lead editor last year, “The Gray Lady Sure Knows Her Way Around an Airbrush.”

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“The Sun says tweets and blogs threaten future of paper,” the Financial Times breathlessly reports:

Online news sources such as Twitter and celebrity-focused blogs could put newspapers like The Sun out of business, its editor told a parliamentary committee on Thursday.

Dominic Mohan said that if such sites were able to report scandals that newspapers were forbidden to write about because of privacy injunctions, readers and advertising money could flow from the press to the internet.

Mr Mohan told the privacy and injunctions committee of peers and MPs: “We are competing for eyeballs with social media.”

Needless to say, this isn’t exactly breaking news.

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In his weekly column, Mark Steyn writes:

As Sen. Obama said during the 2008 campaign, words matter. Modern “liberalism” is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of “tolerance” are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to “celebrate diversity” coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity. Thus, the Obama administration’s insistence that Catholic institutions must be compelled to provide free contraception, sterilization and abortifacients. This has less to do with any utilitarian benefit a condomless janitor at a Catholic school might derive from Obamacare, and more to do with the liberal muscle of Big Tolerance enforcing one-size-fits-all diversity.

The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else: In Sweden, expressing a moral objection to homosexuality is illegal, even on religious grounds, even in church, and a pastor minded to cite the more robust verses of Leviticus would risk four years in jail. In Canada, the courts rule that Catholic schools must allow gay students to take their same-sex dates to the prom. The secular state’s Bureau of Compliance is merciless to apostates to a degree even your fire-breathing imams might marvel at.

Consider the current travails of the Susan G. Komen Foundation…

Read the whole thing.

(Sorry posting was so light the past couple of days; dealing with some family issues at the moment.)

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In the new issue of Commentary, Andrew Ferguson does a great job of deconstructing the Princess Di-level of mourning that Christopher Hitchens received upon his demise from some quarters — many of whom should have known better:

Most unexpected of all, at least by me, was the overpraise for Hitchens’s habits of mind, and for his politics, which supposedly placed him courageously at odds with the establishment. “He offered a model of how to think,” wrote one grief-stricken acquaintance. The PBS historian Simon Schama mourned the “unfillable space where his prose rocked and rolled in face of the demure, the hypocritical, and the ignorantly self-important.” [Which is a nice description of your average NPR staffer -- Ed]

Such excess obscures the most obvious conclusion we can draw from Hitchens’s politics, which is that he was a crank. In the early 1980s he was convinced that the Reagan administration had colluded in the Soviet Union’s downing of the airliner KAL 007. A few years later he was a vigorous promoter of the “Secret Team” theory that fit the Iran-contra scandal into a world-girding conspiracy of international bankers and private militias. A handful of memorialists dismissed his hatred of Bill Clinton as a lapse in judgment, but maybe you had to be there to see how unhinged it was: He really did believe that Clinton had been an accessory to the murder of a pair of hillbillies back in Arkansas. And the Queen, that “whore,” was almost as evil as the Albanian dwarf.

There were lots more opinions where these came from, and any combination of two or three of them, expressed with Hitchens’s ardor and bloody-minded indifference to fact, would have got any one else run out of polite society. In media circles—not to be confused with polite society, I know—even the whole package couldn’t disqualify Hitchens. Where his polemics failed as models of logic or casemaking, they excelled as attention-getters. Only his later embrace of Republican foreign policy threatened his hallowed place among media people, but the threat was temporary and finally inconsequential.

After his death, I puzzled over the universal praise and its intensity. I thought of his charm, his learning, the preternatural fluency of his writing. But surely mere talent and amiability weren’t enough to indemnify him so thoroughly among the journalistic class that memorialized him so excessively. No, that required fame, the ultimate inoculation.

And then I remembered the Dreyfuss story. Hitchens might not have been famous back then, but he wanted to be, and he worked hard at it, and in the end, as he knew, he could reap fame’s rewards from a class of people for whom mere fame is the ultimate intoxication—far more impressive than learning or talent or rigorous argument. The scurrilous opinions might bring him fame, but the fame would guarantee that the opinions wouldn’t matter.

It’s maybe not the best fate for a man who once might have hoped that his ideas would be taken seriously, but it’s the fate Hitchens chose. At least that’s my theory. And I knew the man for more than a quarter of a century. Did I mention that?

Exit quote: “Andrew Sullivan, a well-known blogger, reprinted a New York magazine story about his arrival at a Hitchens party: Sullivan, the magazine reported, greeted [the host] with a hug and a kiss. ‘I want tongue. Give me tongue,’ Hitchens implored, to no avail.”

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First the gaffe. As Jonah Goldberg writes, “What is Wrong With This Guy?”

A case in point, here he is this morning talking about how he’s “not very concerned about the very poor” (video here). I get the point he’s making. It’s a point that Bill Clinton won the presidency with — but with language that attracted voters. Romney’s language won’t do anything of the sort. And the concern is, after nearly a decade of running for president, if he can’t get this stuff down now he never will.

After winning the Florida primary, GOP presidential nominee hopeful Mitt Romney explains to CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien that he is focused on a particular portion of the American population in his campaign.
Romney says, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair , I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich…. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”
O’Brien asked him to clarify his remarks saying, “There are lots of very poor Americans who are struggling who would say, ‘That sounds odd.’”
Romney continues, “We will hear from the Democrat party, the plight of the poor…. You can focus on the very poor, that’s not my focus…. The middle income Americans, they’re the folks that are really struggling right now and they need someone that can help get this economy going for them.”

Again, I’d happily vote for Romney over Obama. And I’d be fine with Romney crushing Obama with negative ads, if that was remotely possible. And there are plenty of things one could say to defend Romney on the merits of what he says here. But great politicians on the morning after a big win, don’t force their supporters to go around defending the candidate from the charge that he doesn’t care about the poor. They just don’t.

Then the grace under pressure. As By Brian Bolduc writes at the Corner, “Mitt Gets Glitter-Bombed — And, surprisingly, handles it well:”

As Tim Graham of Newsbusters tweets, “Question: When will Obama get ‘glitter bombed’ by someone? And how long will they serve in jail?”

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I’m sure this is entirely a coincidence:

“Soaring Beef Prices Force Shoppers To Find Other Foods.”

– CBS Philadelphia, January 30, 2012.

“First lady pushes Jay Leno to eat healthy hoods.”

– AP, January 31, 2012.

To borrow a line from James Lileks, why didn’t Leno tell his fellow “progressive” that he remembers a time when the motto on the left was “my body, my choice.” Or was that just the ’70s equivalent of “Stuff Liberals Say?”

Related: The one campaign promise Obama has kept.

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Over at the Lifestyle blog, I have a really fascinating interview with frequent National Review contributor Thomas Hibbs about the latest version of his book, Shows About Nothing:

• How post-WWII Hollywood originally explicitly rejected Nietzsche and nihilism, before ultimately embracing him with open arms.
• Why horror movies eventually eradicated God for charming nihilists who fashion their morality as “beyond good and evil,” such as Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
• Seinfeld: the sunny side of nihilism.
• How man successfully threw off the encumbrances of authority and tradition only to find himself subject to new, more devious, and more intractable forms of tyranny.
• How aesthetics came to usurp morality.
• Mad Men’s Don Draper: the man in the gray nihilistic suit.
• Can Hollywood move beyond nihilism?

Click here to listen to the interview.

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

Is that the use of the – I’ve never seen the floor used like this. I mean I worked on the Hill, you’re a member, elected member. I’ve never seen politicians come on and say their purpose in life is to say their purpose is to end someone’s political career. To defeat another politician. Isn’t there any minimal, minimal civility left? That somebody like Bachmann – well first of all she’s there. She was elected. Nobody can do anything about that. But there she is saying her purpose in life, right now, is to eliminate a presidency. Do you think that’s good politics? To just talk like that?

– Chris Matthews on MSNBC, January 19th, 2011.

“Chris Matthews Calls Romney’s Attacks on Gingrich ‘A Snuff Movie.’”

– Headline at Newsbusters today.

Related Video: “NBC’s Brian Williams points fingers about pointing fingers, evidence points back to him.”

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Now is the time when the Small Dead Animals blog juxtaposes:

2011-09-27 – North Carolina Democrat Governor Bev Perdue suggests quite soberly & succinctly that Congressional elections should be suspended for two years.

2012-01-26 – Governor Bev Perdue announces that she will not be seeking a 2nd term because she has been “plagued by low approval ratings.”

Related: A Gaston, NC newspaper has published an editorial stating that Perdue “battled for her beliefs.” Not one word was mentioned of the Democrat politician’s very undemocratic remarks.

Which could be taken as a tacit endorsement of her “modest proposal,” if the paper takes its ideological cues from Big Brother up north.

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Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots such as Occupy DC (not to mention its supporters in the MSM) are all about increasing the already leviathan size and power of government — so they shouldn’t be at all surprised when that government turns on them as well:

In late 2009, a DC policeman was caught on video pulling his gun on a group of hipsters having a snowball fight, as several inches of global warming once again descended upon the city. Why wouldn’t those same police officers tase an unruly protester?

The news filtering out from the other Obamavilles might also be a reason why the DC police have itchy taser fingers: “Mostly Peaceful Occupy Oakland Thugs Hurl Bottles, Pipes, Rocks and ‘Improvised Explosive Devices’ at Police.” In-between their supporters issuing anti-Semitic manifestos.

Of course, there may well be more to come: “Summer 2012: Yes, They’re Planning To Riot,” David Steinberg warns at the Tatler.

Rage hard against the dying of the status quo!

Related: “MSNBC ‘Now’ Panel Bemoans How Occupy Movement’s ‘Moral Argument’ Has Been Drowned Out.” Yes, the stench from defecating on police cars (amongst other crimes and misdemeanors, olfactory and otherwise) tends to overwhelm the sweet smell of success.

Related: From anti-Semitism to anti-Catholicism: Occupy Protesters throw condoms at Catholic School Girls.

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Mitt Romney to Laura Ingraham: Of course the economy’s getting better, Laura, as Jonah Goldberg writes:

When Romney was on Laura Ingraham’s show last week he was asked if the economy is getting better. He replied:

Of course it’s getting better. The economy always gets better after the recession. There’s always a recovery. There’s never been a time anywhere in the world where an economy has never recovered. The question is how is recovered by virtue of something the president has done or has he delayed the recovery and made it more painful? And the latter, of course, is the truth.” “The president’s policies have made the recession deeper and have made the recovery more tepid and more difficult on the American people. This is the worst recovery that we have seen from a recession since Hoover. And President Obama wants to take credit for things getting better, he’s in fact made things worse. He’s made this recovery take much longer, but, will our economy get better someday? Of course it will.

When Laura asked Romney if that’s a hard argument to make — that “Obama is making the economy better, but vote for me,” Romney replied: “Do you have a better one Laura?”

Well, I do. First, while Ingraham was right and smart to ask the question that way,  Romney should have rejected the premise that “Obama is making the economy better.” The whole upshot of his position is that the economy isn’t getting better because of Obama, it’s getting better in spite of Obama and the president’s policies are a drag on what should be a roaring recovery.

Moreover, if he wants to know how to talk about an improving economy under an unpopular president, there are several thousand hours of remarks from Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama he can crib from. He could say something like “Sure, the headlines are better, but if you  go around this country and ask people if they feel like there’s a recovery, their answer is no.” Or he could say, “It’s not a recovery until the millions of people who’ve been chased out of the workforce entirely feel like it’s even worth looking again.” Or, “It’s not a recovery for the millions of people underwater on their mortgages.” Or, “Hey look, I’m a numbers guy. And I won’t lie that there are some improving numbers out there, but those numbers aren’t people and if you ask people what they think of the economy, if you ask them ‘Are you better off than you were 4 years ago’ the answer is a loud ‘No!’”

Where do we find a guy with Gingrich’s skill at attacking his opponents, without baggage piled as high as Moonbase Alpha? Because if Romney doesn’t improve his messaging soon, he risks rapidly heading towards McCain/Dole/Bush #41 in ’92 nice guy to deliver the concession speech territory.

Update: Ace (who has up to now I believe, not been much of a fan of the former governor) believes that he’s playing a much more strategic maneuver, in case there isn’t a double (triple? quadruple?) recessionary dip later this year. I hope he’s right.

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“The Daily Mail has overtaken the New York Times to become the world’s most visited newspaper website, according to online tracking service Comscore,” the BBC claims. “The biggest increase in readers has been in the US — so how did this very British institution do it?”

There is something compellingly simple about MailOnline. No fancy site navigation, picture carousels or slideshows – just a front page with stories and pictures. Thousands of them.

The New York Times claims it is still the world’s most popular newspaper website, because the Mail figures include visits to sister sites.

But let that not detract from the British newspaper’s achievement in going from nowhere to 45.3 million unique visitors a month in just five years. What is its secret?

1. Celebrity news

MailOnline’s success in the United States has been partly built, most pundits agree, on celebrity gossip. It is a very different beast from its more strait-laced print sister, even though it shares a lot of content with it.

Celebrity journalist and author Jo Piazza believes it is much imitated by rival US-based gossip sites.

Speaking in frank terms, she says: “Until we started seeing this influx of gossip websites here in the United States, the media was very ass-kissy towards celebrities, whereas the Daily Mail has never done that.

Just as an aside, this has long been one of the greatest failings of the Los Angeles Times. It has Hollywood right in its backyard, and yet, perhaps because it’s so “ass-kissy towards celebrities” (when it isn’t really ass-kissy towards politicians), it can’t get out of its own way and run amok covering the endless Hieronymus Bosch tableaux outstretched before them, that’s begging for them to report on it, in a fun, breezy way.

In a way, the problem is even worse at its northeastern cousin, as William McGowan noted in his landmark 2010 deconstruction of the New York Times’ myriad woes, Gray Lady Down:

“The entire social and moral compass of the paper,” as the former Times art critic Hilton Kramer later said, was altered to conform to a liberal ethos infused with “the emancipatory ideologies of the 1960’s” and drawing no distinction between “media-induced notoriety and significant issues of public life.” The Times took on more and more lightness of being. It became preoccupied with pop-culture trivia and über urban trends, reported on with moral relativism and without intellectual rigor.

The change was met by disaffection and derision within the paper’s newsroom. Grace Gluek, who ran the culture desk for a while as replacement editor, was one of the disaffected, and famously once asked, “Who do I have to f*** to get out of this job?” Howard Kissel, the theater critic of the Daily News, said the new cultural pages reminded him of a middle-aged woman learning how to disco: “She put on a miniskirt and her varicose veins are showing.” Gerry Gold, a staff reporter, commented, “We do all these pieces on pop icons as if they are important artistes. In fact they are creations of the big record companies. Yet we try to intellectualize them.”

That last sentence dovetails well with the other reason why the London Daily Mail is blowing the doors off the Times, which not surprisingly, the BBC can’t fully articulate, because it’s one of their own institutional weaknesses: It’s having fun. As Mark Steyn said, nearly six years ago:

In London, the most competitive newspaper market in the world, papers thrive by encouraging distinctive controversial voices. In America, the average Gannett or other monodaily prefers a tone of self-regarding dullness. As my friend John O’Sullivan put it, “They neither offend nor delight” – as a matter of policy. Yes, they’re broadly “liberal,” but not in a lively virtuoso engaging way, only in a dreary J-school way. I think they’re missing the point here. They don’t realize that they do have competitors now, in new media. In 1978, having driven your print competitors out of business, you could afford to be a dull city newspaper. I don’t believe you can now.

Of course, it’s often the case that generating the appearance of having fun requires an enormous amount of hard work (just ask Fred Astaire, who sweated blood to make his dance routines appear effortless). But readers can sense a paper with an institutional sense of playfulness, versus one that’s attempting to Very Seriously Talk Down To Them From High Atop The Mountains. Which has long been the message from the Times, particularly since Pinch transformed it from a fairly reliable (Duranty aside) straightforward news source into such a personality-driven paper, one of the leitmotifs of McGowan’s book. And the sense that readers get from those personalities is that:

• Krugman hates everybody, particularly Occupy Wall Street, since they’re too stupid to realize how they got played by one of the ultimate One Percenters.
• Friedman wants to turn America into totalitarian China, as long as he gets to keep his mansion.
• Pinch blames all of modern America’s shortcomings on his generation’s failures. And we really must all consume less for the environment. But in the meantime, damn, that new Dylan CD sure sounds fantastic on the CL600′s sound system while cruising over to the Hamptons, doesn’t it?
• MoDo really needs a drink and a smoke. And maybe a kicky new pair of Manolo Blahniks.

In contrast, the New York Post is having loads of fun with its over-the-top-headlines. Matt Drudge brings a similar tone to his coverage. At the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto at least is having fun rounding up the biggest stories of the day, and deflating the pretensions of the “progressive” elite. Here at PJM, Steve Green, Roger Kimball, the mysterious Zombie, and Roger Simon, our Maximum Pajamahadeen, among others here, bring a welcome sense of humor to the grim news of the day. (As does Glenn Reynolds, who single-handedly seems to crank out more links daily than all of Pinch’s bloated enterprise.)

Oh, and one other reason why the Daily Mail is winning the newspaper war: it is willing to deflate the religious beliefs held most dear by the management and editorial bullpen of the New York Times.

As Peter Biskind wrote in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, when Robert Altman’s nimble, low-budget, no-name cast adaptation of Richard Hooker’s novel M*A*S*H overtook Mike Nichols’ leaden, spare-no-expense all-star version of Joseph Heller’s similarly-themed Catch-22 at the box office in 1970, Altman hung a sign in his office that said “CAUGHT-22.” The increasingly far left worldview that pervades the New York Times’ offices as badly as it does Mayor Bloomberg’s, has transformed it into a paper that’s full of Catch-22s, a newspaper far more concerned with ideological purity than actually reporting news that people want to read in a lively fashion. If the Daily Mail really has overtaken the Gray Lady’s Web traffic, all I’m left to ponder is, what took them so long?

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“Writing about the onset of the Great Depression, John Kenneth Galbraith famously said that the end had come but was not yet in sight, Walter Russell Mead writes in his latest essay. “The past was crumbling under their feet, but people could not imagine how the future would play out. Their social imagination had hit a wall:”

The same thing is happening today: The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old system become more inescapable and more damaging, our national discourse remains stuck in a bygone age. The end is here, but we can’t quite take it in.

In the old system, most blue-collar and white-collar workers held stable, lifetime jobs with defined benefit pensions, and a career civil service administered a growing state as living standards for all social classes steadily rose. Gaps between the classes remained fairly consistent in an industrial economy characterized by strong unions in stable, government-brokered arrangements with large corporations—what Galbraith and others referred to as the Iron Triangle. High school graduates were pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment in a job that provided a comfortable lower middle-class lifestyle; college graduates could expect a better paid and equally secure future. An increasing “social dividend”, meanwhile, accrued in various forms: longer vacations, more and cheaper state-supported education, earlier retirement, shorter work weeks, more social and literal mobility, and more diverse forms of affordable entertainment. Call all this, taken together, the blue model.

In the heyday of the blue model, economists and social scientists assumed that from generation to generation Americans would live a life of incremental improvements. The details of life would keep getting better even as the broad outlines of society stayed the same. The advanced industrial democracies, of which the United States was the largest, wealthiest and strongest, had reached the apex of social achievement. It had, in other words, defined and was in the process of perfecting political and social “best practice.” America was what “developed” human society looked like and no more radical changes were in the offing. Amid the hubris that such conceptions encouraged, Professor (later Ambassador) Galbraith was moved to state, in 1952, that “most of the cheap and simple inventions have been made.”

Kodak likely thought the same thing. Then the digital camera was born in the late 1990s, and the legendary purveyor of film and film cameras failed to adapt, as Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch write at Reason:

Eastman Kodak share prices tumbled from $60 in 2000 to $40 in 2001, to $10 in 2008, and under the $1 threshold by the end of 2011. The Dow Jones kicked the stock off its bedrock industrial average in 2004, and the New York Stock Exchange threatened the company with de-listing. Kodachrome—subject not just of a hit Paul Simon song but of the 1954 antitrust settlement that the federal government was trying to maintain four decades later—vanished from stores in 2009, and developers stopped processing the stuff for good on New Year’s Day 2010. The company closed scores of plants, laid off more than 10,000 employees, and has now filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

What happened? Technological advances gave consumers choices that Kodak’s fat bureaucracy was unwilling to provide. Writing in the Wall Street Journal in November 2006, William M. Bulkeley explained how the implications of this insight ranged far afield from the world of processing photographs:

Photography and publishing companies shouldn’t be surprised when digital technology upends their industries. After all, their business success relied on forcing customers to buy things they didn’t want. Photo companies made customers pay for 24 shots in a roll of film to get a handful of good pictures. Music publishers made customers buy full CDs to get a single hit song. Encyclopedia publishers made parents spend thousands of dollars on multiple volumes when all they wanted was to help their kid do one homework paper. The business models required customers to pay for detritus to get the good stuff. . . . Eastman Kodak and Fuji Photo Film had a highly profitable duopoly for 20 years before digital cameras came along. They never dreamed customers would quickly abandon film and prints.

When given real choice, especially the choice to go elsewhere, consumers will drop even the most beloved of brands for options that enhance their experience and increase their autonomy. We have all witnessed and participated in this revolutionary transfer of loyalty away from those who tell us what we should buy or think and toward those who give us tools to think and act for ourselves. No corner of the economy, of cultural life, or even of our personal lives hasn’t felt the gale-force winds of this change. Except government.

Think of any customer experience that has made you wince or kick the cat. What jumps to mind? Waiting in multiple lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Observing the bureaucratic sloth and lowest-common-denominator performance of public schools, especially in big cities. Getting ritually humiliated going through airport security. Trying desperately to understand your doctor bills. Navigating the permitting process at your local city hall. Wasting a day at home while the gas man fails to show up. Whatever you come up with, chances are good that the culprit is either a direct government monopoly (as in the providers of K–12 education) or a heavily regulated industry or utility where the government is the largest player (as in health care).

Unlike government and its sub-entities, Kodak couldn’t count on a guaranteed revenue stream: Consumers abandoned its products, and now the company is basically done. The history of private-sector duopolies and even monopolies is filled with such seemingly sudden disappearing acts: The A&P supermarket chain—if you’re under 40 years old, or from the West Coast, you probably haven’t even heard of it—enjoyed a U.S. market share of 75 percent as recently as the 1950s. Big-box music retailers and bookstores were supposed to bestride the land like colossi at the turn of our new century, but Virgin megastores have all but disappeared, and Borders has been liquidated. Dominant newspapers in one-paper towns were able to book some of the economy’s highest profit margins for four decades—more than 20 percent a year, on average, positively dwarfing such hated industrial icons as Walmart—yet with the explosion of Web-based competition, these onetime mints are now among the least attractive companies in the economy.

The president’s plan during these changing times? As Daniel Henninger wrote last year, “For Barack Obama, the private economy is an intellectual abstraction.” How abstract? This abstract:

“On Tuesday at the State of the Union, I laid out my vision for how we move forward,” President Obama said at a campaign event in Las Vegas, Nevada. “I laid out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last, that has a firm foundation. Where we’re making stuff and selling stuff and moving it around and UPS drivers are dropping things off everywhere.”

No wonder, as Mead writes, “The blue social model is in the process of breaking down, and the chief question in American politics today is what should come next.”

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In the immortal words of Mark Knopfler, “When you point your finger ’cause your plan fell through, you’ve got three more fingers pointing back at you…”

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How desperate are Obama’s media supporters to fling the charge of racism to prop his support? As Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters, this desperate: “New MSNBC Anchor Likens Obama-Brewer Face Off to 1957 Integration Confrontation in Little Rock:”

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY: The fact is, when I see that still, I cannot help but to be reminded of the still photograph that was captured in 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas, of the young woman Hazel screaming at a young Elizabeth Eckford on her way trying to get into Little Rock High School, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. And the reason I bring up that image is because what we’ve come to know about Hazel in the years later is that as a young woman, Hazel, the young woman who was screaming at Elizabeth Eckford, was not herself sort of particularly, you know, full of racial animus or anything like that. But she was, she was caught up in this moment of racial anxiety, of making this point against these people who were coming in and trying to force their way into the school, and she sort of enjoyed the show or being able to yell at Elizabeth Eckford in this moment. But that image captured all of the ugliness, all of the nastiness of the larger political milieu, and I feel that this picture does as well.

It’s fascinating watching a half-century of civil rights progress tossed out the window by an overzealous newsreader employed by General Electric to defend the president. I love the “I cannot help but to be reminded” throat-clearing at the beginning of her stemwinder. If that’s the first metaphor that pops into your mind, you probably should have scrolled through the Rolodex a little longer before reducing the most powerful man in the world — who can nuke billions and has spent trillions — to an oppressed black teenage schoolgirl living 65 years ago in the racist south.

And just a reminder — it’s still January. The “fun” is just getting started.

Related: “Real Time Guest KOs Maher and Bashir: If Brewer Were Dem Pointing Finger at GOP Prez, You’d Praise Her.”

Oh sure, that’s different, and female empowering and stuff.

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When “liberal pundits” were raving over the concept of an “Arab Spring” last year, the facts on the ground were very often “unexpectedly” different from how the concept was sold to the rest of the world. Kate McMillan of Canada’s Small Dead Animals liked to quip at the time, “What We Really Need Is Democracy. With a totalitarian party to vote for.” At National Review Online last week, Andrew McCarthy wrote that from the so-called Arab Spring’s point of view, that’s a feature, not a bug:

Of course, conventional wisdom in the West holds that the Arab Spring spontaneously combusted when Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor, set himself ablaze outside the offices of the Tunisian klepto-cops who had seized his wares. This suicide protest, the story goes, ignited a sweeping revolt against the corruption and caprices of Arab despots. One by one, the dominos began to fall: Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya — with rumblings in Saudi Arabia and Jordan as well as teetering Syria and rickety Iran. We are to believe that the mass uprising is an unmistakable manifestation of the “desire for freedom” that, according to Pres. George W. Bush, “resides in every human heart.”

That proclamation came in the heady days of 2004, when the democracy project was still a Panglossian dream, not the Pandora’s box it proved to be as Islamic parties began to win elections. Like its successor, the Bush administration discouraged all inquiry into Islamic doctrine by anyone seeking to understand Muslim enmity, indulging the fiction that there is something we can do to change it. Inexorably, this has fed President Obama’s preferred fiction — that we must have done something to deserve it — as well as the current administration’s strident objection to uttering the word “Islam” for any purpose other than hagiography. In this self-imposed ignorance, most Americans still do not know that hurriya, Arabic for “freedom,” connotes “perfect slavery” or absolute submission to Allah, very nearly the opposite of the Western concept. Even if we grant for argument’s sake the dubious proposition that all people crave freedom, Islam and the West have never agreed about what freedom means.

Once again, a reminder that 1984 was a warning, not a user’s guide:

Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of O’Brien’s face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt himself helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from the cheekbones. O’Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer.

‘You are thinking,’ he said, ‘that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?’

He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand in his pocket.

‘We are the priests of power,’ he said. ‘God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: “Freedom is Slavery”. Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone — free — the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter — external reality, as you would call it — is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.’

Or to put it another way, “Islam fits me really well,” a 34-year old music teacher in post-Christian Stockholm, Sweeden was quoted as saying in the L.A. Times in 2010 after he converted. “I am completely against capitalism.”

(H/T: 5′F.)

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In what amounted to a love letter to California’s Democratic Governor Jerry Brown on Thursday’s NBC Nightly News, special correspondent Tom Brokaw gushed: “It’s not sunshine every day for the California economy, but Jerry Brown has not given up on big dreams. His new big dream, a high-speed rail line from the north to the south…”

Anchor Brian Williams set the scene for Brokaw’s fawning report: “California is mounting a comeback led by a man whose name has been synonymous with California government for decades.” Brokaw sympathetically declared: “The one-time boy wonder of California politics is now the state’s aging lion….Sticking up for his state.”

–”NBC’s Brokaw: California’s ‘Aging Lion’ Jerry Brown ‘Has Not Given Up On Big Dreams’” at The Media Research Center, on Friday.

Via POLITICO’s Reid Epstein, NBC News and Tom Brokaw are loudly objecting to the Mitt Romney campaign’s use of footage from the 1990s in an ad blasting Newt Gingrich over his House ethics charges.

Brokaw, whose statement noted he was speaking on his behalf, said, “I am extremely uncomfortable with the extended use of my personal image in this political ad.  I do no [sic] want my role as a journalist compromised for political gain by any campaign.”

– The Politico, Saturday.

(Hey, all Romney has to do is call for higher gas prices or denounce conservative bloggers, and all will be golden with the “non-ideological” Brokaw once again.)

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“President Obama called to change the way American politics is practiced when he ran for president. So, too, did John Boehner and House Republican leaders when they campaigned to take control of Congress. But those calls were drowned out by the usual political shouting, yelling, and threats. Tragically, however, the shooting Saturday at a congressional event in Arizona — killing six and wounding 14, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) — now has the real ability to do what these elected officials haven’t been able to do: usher in a more civil era in politics and, at a minimum, simply start a SERIOUS conversation about the awful tone.”

– “First thoughts: A new chance for civility?” headline at MSNBC.com, January 10th, 2011.

“MSNBC Runs Viewer Tweet Urging Secret Service to Break Jan Brewer’s Finger, ‘Drop Her.’”

– Headline at Newsbusters, today.

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Ralph Cramden’s early 1950s calls for a lunar exploration made much more fiscal sense than Newt Gingrich’s Florida-pandering proposals today. Just ask Doug Ross, whose new post boils the US’s budget woes down to a Hooneymooners-sized annual budget. He finds an illustration that takes the United States’ tax revenue, the federal budget and our debts, and removes the zeros, which notes “I love it when complex things are simplified so that we can all understand:”

You know it’s effective, because this lefty Seattle Website (found at the top of Google when searching on the previous sentence, naturally) raises its upturned nose at both the concept, and those who wish to see the budget brought back to Planet Earth. “This kind of thinking may be fine for rural types who have nothing better to do than pray, go to church, buy guns, set traps, and tip cows. But it’s completely useless information if you live in the real and very social world.”

Funny, I never thought of Mark Steyn as being into cow-tipping. But perhaps his henchmen do that sort of thing during some of the quieter moments at his Blofeldian New Hampshire lair. Likely while Mark is writing his weekly column:

The president’s first term has added $5 trillion to the debt – a degree of catastrophe unique to us. In an Obama budget, the entire cost of the Greek government would barely rate a line-item. Debt-to-GDP and other comparative measures are less relevant than the hard-dollar numbers: It’s not just that American government has outspent America’s ability to fund it, but that it’s outspending the planet’s.

Who gets this? Not enough of us – which is exactly how Obama likes it. His only “big idea” – that it should be illegal (by national fiat) to drop out of school before your 18th birthday – betrays his core belief: that more is better, as long as it’s government-mandated, government-regulated, government-staffed – and funded by you, or Warren Buffett, or the Chinese Politburo, or whoever’s left out there.

What of his likely rivals this November? Those of us who have lived in once-great decaying polities recognize the types. Jim Callaghan, Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street in the Seventies, told a friend of mine that he saw his job as managing Britain’s decline as gracefully as possible. The United Kingdom certainly declined on his watch, though not terribly gracefully. In last Monday’s debate, Newt Gingrich revived the line and accused by implication Mitt Romney of having no higher ambition than to “manage the decline.” Running on platitudinous generalities, Mitt certainly betrays little sense that he grasps the scale of the crisis. After a fiery assault by Rick Santorum on Romney’s support for an individual mandate in health care, Mitt sneered back at Rick that “it wasn’t worth getting angry over.” Which may be a foretaste of the energy he would bring to any attempted course correction in Washington.

Newt, meanwhile, has committed himself to a lunar colony by the end of his second term, and, while pandering to an audience on Florida’s “Space Coast,” he added that, as soon as there were 13,000 American settlers on the moon, they could apply for statehood. Ah, the old frontier spirit: I hear Laura Ingalls Wilder is already working on “Little House In The Crater.”

Maybe Newt’s on to something. Except for the statehood part. One day, when America gets the old foreclosure notice in the mail, wouldn’t it be nice to close up the entire joint, put the keys in an envelope, slide it under the door of the First National Bank of Shanghai, and jet off on Newt’s Starship Government-Sponsored Enterprise?

As Mark concludes, “Before we can make any more giant leaps for mankind, we have to make one small, dull, prosaic, earthbound step here at home — and stop. Stop the massive expansion of micro-regulatory government, and then reverse it. Obama has vowed to press on. If Romney and Gingrich can’t get serious about it, he’ll get his way.”

Related: Roger Kimball on “The Suicide Club.”

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Ah, the joys of venture socialism. “Barack Obama is a Terrible Fund Manager, and a Rotten Tech VC,” Rob Long writes at Ricochet:

First, he lost $500 million on a failed, foolish, and almost corrupt investment in Solyndra, the high-flying and high-overhead solar panel maker, run by some of his financial backers.  Talk about crony capitalism.

Now, he’s lost another $100 million on something called Ener1.  From Heritage’s excellent blog, The Foundry, a post by Lachlan Markay — and if you’re not bookmarking him, you should be:

After months of financial turmoil, an Energy Department-backed lithium ion battery company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The company, Ener1, received a $118 million grant from DOE in 2010 as part of the president’s stimulus package. The money, which went to Ener1 subsidiary EnerDel, aimed to promote renewable energy storage battery technology for electrical grid use.

But despite generous federal support for the company, Ener1 was racked by problems last year. In October, NASDAQ delisted the company due to non-compliance with Securities and Exchange Commission filing requirements. A month later, the company’s president, chief executive, and top financial officer were fired.

Read the whole thing. As Rob writes, “Obama is a terrible tech investor.  If the USA was a hedge fund, he’d be looking at a total collapse.”

I’m not sure if the president wouldn’t view that as a feature. We know at least one of his most prominent early supporters does.

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