I have no idea whether or not Matthew Continetti’s new Washington Beacon will ultimately succeed, but he kicks it off with one helluva manifesto, which promises a little political jiu-jitsu. “What would happen,” Continetti asks, “if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right?”

After hours listening to the drone of Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, or Scott Pelley, one might conclude that America is a one-party state ruled by the GOP. But in fact the Republicans have controlled just one chamber of Congress for just one year, have been outspent by Democrats in the two most recent election cycles and are likely to be outspent in the current cycle, have drawn the ire and opposition of the 10 richest zip codes in the country, and have been so inept at shaping public opinion that one of America’s premier anti-cancer organizations had to backtrack when it decided to part ways with the country’s largest abortion provider.

Meanwhile, rather than tease out the connections between the big banks, unions, alternative energy companies, entrenched market incumbents, institutions such as the Center for American Progress and its Action Fund, and the policy apparatus of the Democratic Party, the press is far happier to mock Republicans as rubes and incompetents and to cover with relish Mitt Romney’s latest gaffe.

What would happen, though, if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right? What picture of the world would one have in mind if the morning paper read like the New York Times—but with the subjects of the stories and the assumptions built into the text changed to reflect a conservative, not liberal, worldview? What would happen if the media wolf pack suddenly had to worry about an aerial hunting operation?

You are about to find out. The Washington Free Beacon is here to enter the arena of combat journalism. Our talented staff will add to the chorus of enterprising conservative reporters, publishing original stories, seeking out scoops, and focusing on the myriad connections between money and power in the progressive movement and Obama’s Washington. Our research and war room divisions will supplement that reporting with context, additional materials, and breaking video. At the Beacon, you will find the other half of the story, the half that the elite media have taken such pains to ignore: the inside deals, cronyism cloaked in the public interest, and far-out nostrums of contemporary progressivism and the Democratic Party. At the Beacon, all friends of freedom will find an alternative to the hackneyed spin, routine misstatements, paranoid hyperbole, and insipid folderol of Democratic officials and the liberal gasbags on MSNBC and talk radio. At the Beacon, we follow only one commandment: Do unto them.

Hey remember all that hypocritical BS a year ago by an MSM railing against war and gun-related imagery? I think Continetti just told the MSM to shove it all up their lavalier mics.

And the timing of his new Website couldn’t be better, as an otherwise unrelated post by Peter Robinson makes clear today at Ricochet:

As recently as this past Friday, I would still have said that the single, overriding issue in this election year would be the economy.  Yet in the past 100 hours, Planned Parenthood and its pro-choice supporters in the press have savaged the Komen Foundation; the Obama administration, which might easily have backed down from its regulations forcing Catholic health care institutions to provide contraceptives in direct violation of Catholic teaching, has instead mounted a public relations offensive to insist upon its position; and the Ninth Circuit has ruled unconstitutional California’s Proposition 8, issuing its decision in language so self-righteous and so bald that it could only have been intended to insult the millions of Californians who supported the ballot measure.

As Peter writes, “Already the highest in a generation, the stakes in this election have just risen.” It would nice if the right had anything approaching parity with old media and the establishment left. Perhaps a more pugilistic tone might be a good first start.

Related: “And what is true of liberal politics is also true of liberal public policy, Jonah Goldberg writes in USA Today. “As the Obama administration has made clear to the Catholic Church, there is no neutrality, no safe harbor from liberalism’s moral vision. You’re either with us, or against us — which means we shall be against you.”

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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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I started out on Photoshop in the early naughts, fumbling my through the program and using it for basic photo editing. A minor breakthrough came in 2005, when I submitted some Photoshopped images of Hugh Hewitt’s Blog book in various strange places. This was for a Fark-like Photoshop contest that Hugh’s producer Generalissimo Duane held, and I ended up placing Hugh’s book on Lawrence of Arabia’s desk, being bandied about by the pioneering multimedia journalists of the New York Inquirer, and being promoted by Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock:

A few years later, when I began to produce my Silicon Graffiti videos, an unanticipated side benefit is that I found myself using Photoshop more and more to produce artwork to go into the videos, including on the monitors in the virtual set behind me. If you watch the shot that begins here of a mushroom cloud followed by photos of various dictators, everything behind me, including the virtual set, is a single Photoshop .PSD file, with various layers animated in Adobe’s Premiere Pro to appear in sequence, timed to an ancient British Cinesound explosion sound effect.)

However, producing artwork for PJM, including many of the 85X85 pixel thumbnails on the PJM homepage greatly accelerated my learning curve. Around Christmas of 2009, while visiting the now sadly closed Borders bookstore in Santana Row, I came across Art and Design in Photoshop: How to simulate just about anything from great works of art to urban graffiti. While a fair amount of political correctness and left-wing sucker punches (including a demonic Reagan Photoshop parody) mars the book, there’s a lot to be gleaned from it. As its subtitle implies, the book walks the reader through how to recreate everything from old movie posters to food and toy packaging to Mondrian, Roy Lichtenstein, and other pop art images.

I also found a slightly older title, Photoshop Classic Effects: The Essential Effects Every User Needs to Know, which I purchased later, to be an excellent learning guide. (The one thing I miss about the local Borders closing is being able to browse through books such as these to see which ones viscerally grab me. If it’s love at first sight, I’m much more likely to spend hours in the book, rather than a how-to guide I feel like I’m pulling teeth to learn from.)

And so from those books, and a lot of trial and error, here are some of the better images I’ve produced over the last few years.

This image of President Obama in his plus-fours, inspired by a quip by Mark Steyn, grew out of a shot of Donald Sutherland in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, and was bordered by a Polaroid Photoshop brush plug-in, which James Lileks referred me to:

This Salvador Dali parody was produced following the instructions in the aforementioned Art and Design in Photoshop. I just replaced the melting clocks with similarly dissipated Obama logos:

Last fall, when Obama became obsessed with his sippin’ Slurpees metaphor, this was a natural, which I used for a time as my Twitter avatar. It’s just the hat artwork that Stacy Tabb produced for my blog’s masthead back in 2004 on top of an existing 7-11 Slurpee ad, on top of a default Photoshop gradient layer. The shadows and reflection at the bottom were cribbed from the instructions in  Photoshop Classic Effects:

Having been one of those legendary 45,000 people who bought the Velvet Underground’s first album shortly before forming his own rock group, this parody for a Zombie blog post’s thumbnail, when former VU drummer Mo Tucker supported the Tea Party last year, was a natural:

I had lots of fun parodying MSNBC’s silly “Lean Forward” ads in the fall of 2010. This one, created when Olbermann was still earning a paycheck from General Electric proved to be strangely prophetic…

When it was obvious that their party was going to lose Congress last year, and a majority of Americans disapproved of the Ground Zero Mosque, the MSM really teed off on their customers. This was my response to a bitter and punitive Time magazine cover late in the summer of 2010:

In 2009 or so, I purchased some Photoshop templates from Digital Juice for use in both videos, and as stand-alone artwork. I spent a pleasant half an hour or so putting this one together one Saturday last year:

This one I think I did around Christmas of 2009. It took quite a while to copy and paste, and line-up the text to produce this Spinal Tap-inspired image, which appeared in a Silicon Graffiti video on media bias, and an item here and during a stint guest-hosting on Hot Air.com about studying the Washington Post (then Newsweek’s owners) Kremlinologist-style.

This image was for a thumbnail for a post last year by Richard Fernandez called “Gone with the Wind.” For most of these images, I start big, and then use Photoshop’s “Save To Web” feature to reduce the images down to an 80 or 85 pixels square jpeg. I always save the layers in their original size as a Photoshop file, since you never know when you’ll need a larger image, or want to modify the image into something else. For obvious reasons, I’m hoping to reuse this image right around this time next year:

This was for a Victor Davis Hanson post last year on Obama’s poll numbers going into freefall. I wonder how many people have looked at this, and assumed it was simply a skydiver promoting Obama in 2008? I took an existing photo of a skydiver, tilted his angle to make him appear more out of control, and then placed the Obama logo on top of his ‘chute. I cut the various colors of the Obama logo into different layers, and then set the blending options on each layer to different settings, and different degrees of transparency, to make it appear as if the whole thing was blended into the fabric of the parachute. A fair amount of work, but the end result was pretty effective, I thought:

Finally, another image for a VDH post, this one from last month on “The Coming Post-Obama Renaissance,” and really well received. (The lads on Trifecta even mentioned it on PJTV.) It’s a photo of Obama heading for Marine One, with the sky clipped out, and a glorious sunrise pasted in underneath. I tried to visually convey the message of VDH’s post: When BHO is no longer POTUS, it will be Morning in America once again:

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Everybody has their story of how they discovered the Blogosphere; for lots of people, it was via Instapundit.com, which turned ten years old this week. Here’s my take, a visit to the Jurassic days of the early Blogosphere.

Ten years ago, when I was making my living as a freelance writer, and writing four to six articles a month to magazines in various fields — back then mostly “on dead tree,” I had only just started to write for political Websites. I had submitted an article on the Mies van der Rohe exhibition then ongoing at New York’s Museum of Modern Art to National Review Online, and then followed up with an article on the Computer History Museum, then at Moffett Field in northern California. I was always doing Google vanity searches on my name, to see who was linking to my articles online.

Shortly after the piece on the Computer History Museum went up at NRO, I found it had been linked to by something or someone called “Instapundit.” I had seen Weblogs before, but they were always of the “I went to the mall and bought a great pair of Nikes” or “I had a really great date at Applebee’s last night” variety of daily diaries.

And I had seen self-published e-zines, in the form of Virginia Postrel’s Dynamist.com, KausFiles, and maybe Andrew Sullivan in whatever incarnation he was then currently in, plus of course the self-published Drudge Report, and had thought about launching a Website of my own, but these looked like they were beyond my then-meager Web skills. Designing a page template? FTP’ing up new pages every day? I didn’t know of any programs that automated that sort of thing.

But what set Instapundit apart, at the time, was that it was on Blogger. In fact, as Glenn Reynolds mentions in his new video at PJTV celebrating the tenth anniversary of his pioneering blog, his original URL was indeed instapundit.blogspot.com.That little Blogger Button in the corner of Glenn’s Weblog made all the difference. It suddenly became obvious that the platform of Blogger.com and the content it held were two very different things. While the vast majority of blogs on Blogger.com’s Blogspot hosting site were daily diaries, in reality, a blog could be anything.

And it helped that Glenn picked a catchy name for his nascent enterprise. As marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout once wrote, there’s reason why we remember Apple as the first personal computer, and not the Altair 8800 or the IMSAI 8080. Because Apple had the name that made computing sound simple, easy to learn, and reliable, and not something you needed Wehner von Braun and Stanley Kubrick to walk you through. Similarly, the name Instapundit instantly explained the purpose of this new Website. Want news? Want opinion? What it fast? Who doesn’t, in the age of the World Wide Web? Well, this is your Website.

Once I saw the short “hit and run” style of Instapundit, the light bulb went off for me, as it did for hundreds, possibly thousands of other would-be bloggers back then: you could point readers to a story, and interject a short comment, but you needn’t hold yourself out as an expert on a particular topic. You were essentially an Internet traffic cop, directing traffic to the hot story of the moment, and blowing the whistle on those stories were the journalist got it wrong. And unlike a magazine article, which typically is of a fixed word count to fit into an existing page space in-between advertisements, a blog post could be any length, as we’ve seen from Glenn’s short one sentence (occasionally even one word) posts, to 5,000 word essays that Steven Den Beste routinely used to post in the first half of the previous decade. Or a blog could be devoted primarily to photos or video.

In other words, it was immediately obvious there was a whole new freeform style that had opened up, when I clicked on Instapundit around September 3rd or 4th of 2001.

And then the next week, the world changed. As Bryan Preston writes  at the Tatler:

It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since Glenn Reynolds started InstaPundit.com. His blog was the first I ran across in the chaos of 9-11, and I was instantly hooked by his calm, reasonable, patriotic and liberty-focused take on the horrors of that day, and he way and speed with which he assembled opinion and reaction from all over the world. The way he dissected and destroyed media memes was a lifeline to sanity. InstaPundit was a revelation to me. Later I would start my own blog, JunkYardBlog, inspired and led by Glenn’s work. Thousands of other bloggers out there have been similarly impacted and inspired by Glenn Reynolds, and millions of readers have too. Glenn Reynolds is the blogfather to the blogosphere itself, among the right and libertarian blogs.

Right from the start, Glenn’s list of permalinked Weblogs were worth clicking on in and of themselves, just to see who was out there in this new world of journalism.

In early 2002, as I was planning to launch Ed Driscoll.com, originally simply to promote my magazine articles, I decided to use the Blogger.com interface to allow for easy access of the site, but with a different color scheme to differentiate myself from Glenn. (The hat design, based on a Trilby I had picked up in London in the summer of 2000, and swanky ’50s font came a couple of years later, when I commissioned Stacy Tabb to update my Weblog.)

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Over at the new PJM Lifestyle blog, I have an interview with Glenn Reynolds to discuss the state of the DIY culture that he explored in An Army of Davids, and why it’s progressing, while old media, in the form of Hollywood and the recording industry is regressing in quality. Plus a look at the British phone hacking scandal, the state of the 2012 election, and much more. Click here to listen.

Note: No puppies were blended in the making of this interview.

I think.

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And if you live in California, you’re the man (as am I; I received an email notification from Amazon a couple of hours ago):

Last night, California Democrats reached an agreement with Gov. Jerry Brown on a proposed state budget that, among other things, would force online retailers like Amazon.com and Overstock.com to collect sales tax in California.

Already, Amazon has made its objections clear, threatening to drop the thousands of “Amazon Associates” in California who make money by referring web users to Amazon.com to buy goods.

Pitting the wealthiest and most populous state in the union against the premier online retailing conglomerate, this is a battle of two amazons — Goliath vs. Goliath, if you will.

But caught in between are thousands of bloggers, marketers and publishers who make money through Amazon’s affiliate program, called Amazon Associates. Basically, if a blogger links to Amazon products on a post and a reader ends up buying something through that link, then the blogger gets a percentage of the sale for making the “referral.” Small retailers and marketers also use the Associates program.

All these people are at risk of being cut off from this revenue source should the California budget pass on Tuesday.

This appeared at the San Francisco Business Times, which adds, “The Business Times has editorialized that California should force Amazon and others to pay state sales taxes.”

Because the man is hiding his stash there, somewhere.

Maybe in his corporate jet.

Related: “California, a State that Has Gone Stark Raving Mad.”

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Schaefer  — it’s the one beer to have, when you’re having more than one Moog synthesizer:

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Marshall McLuhan once said that “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” That’s certainly true of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), though as Ross Douthat writes in the otherwise Weiner-friendly though uber-PC puritanical New York Times, “In every time and place, people have associated new technologies with moral decline:”

“Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce,” Henry David Thoreau griped in 1854, “and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour … but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.” Similar anxieties have greeted most subsequent inventions, from the automobile to the iPhone: We’re always teetering on the brink of baboondom, always one technological leap away from forfeiting our humanity.

Sometimes, though, the pessimists are right to worry. Technology really does affect character. Cultures do change from era to era, sometimes for the worse. Particular vices can be encouraged by particular innovations, and thrive in the new worlds that they create.

In the sad case of Representative Anthony Weiner’s virtual adultery, the Internet era’s defining vice has been thrown into sharp relief. It isn’t lust or smut or infidelity, though online life encourages all three. It’s a desperate, adolescent narcissism.

As Douthat notes, Weiner’s “tweeted chest shots are more telling than the explicitly pornographic photos that followed. There was a time when fame and influence were supposed to liberate men from such adolescent insecurity. When Henry Kissinger boasted about power being the ultimate aphrodisiac, the whole point was that he didn’t have to worry about his pecs and glutes while, say, wooing the former Bond girl Jill St. John.”

Of course, that was before the ’80s fad of hitting the gym; the “Let’s Get Physical” MTV-era foreshadowing and influencing Internet culture. As Tom Wolfe said to an interviewer in 1987, “This is the generation in which the deltoids, the trapezius, the pectoralis major, the latissimus dorsi, are all better known than the names of the major planets.” And Weiner is simply riding that particular fad out, combining it with the cell-phone cam and Twitter.

That technology became a way for Weiner to transmit one aspect of his narcissism, just as blogs and cable TV were ways to express another side of it. As Douthat concludes:

This is a depressingly accurate anticipation of both the relationship between Weiner and his female “followers,” and the broader “look at me! look at meeeee!” culture of online social media, in which nearly all of us participate to some degree or another.

Facebook and Twitter did not forge the culture of narcissism. But they serve as a hall of mirrors in which it flourishes as never before — a “vast virtual gallery,” as Rosen has written, whose self-portraits mainly testify to “the timeless human desire for attention.”

And as Anthony Weiner just found out, it’s very easy to get lost in there.

At the Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez writes, “Long before there was Anthony Weiner, Ray Bradbury knew what would happen. Technology would change us in ways that we never anticipated beforehand. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes, who knew?”

Richard links to a video from Bradbury’s 1980s TV show. The communications technology has progressed since then, the fashions have arguably regressed, but this video seems remarkably prescient. I wonder if Weiner is having similar conversations in whatever “therapy” he’s going through right now?

Related: Boston talker Michael Graham on “The Modern Male Leftist.”

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While the press conference was ongoing, I was watching the video of the Breitbart-Weiner show in my computer’s right monitor, and had Weiner’s bete-noire, Tweetdeck, open in my left monitor. So during the mad rush of Tweets during the conference, when Jonah Goldberg retweeted the New York Times’ response, I thought for sure he was spoofing them.

No, the New York Times, which rumor has it was once something called a “newspaper,” actually tweeted, “Representative Anthony D. Weiner Acknowledges Communication With Women Online.”

Oh. Well, that’s certainly a nothingburger then. Move along, no news to see here.

As Mark Steyn writes:

Jonah, re that New York Times “news alert” — “Representative Anthony D. Weiner Acknowledges Communication With Women Online” — nobody who could write that headline with a straight face should be in the news business.

It’s one thing to lose the story to Andrew Breitbart because you’re too snooty to sully yourself with Weiner’s briefs. It’s another thing to pile on and support Weiner’s slandering of Breitbart out of ideological solidarity. But, when the congressman himself is at a press conference admitting he’s e-mailed explicit photos of himself around the Internet and you choose that headline to convey the story to your readers, you’re basically telling them you’re the paper for court eunuchs.

Which dovetails perfectly with Andrew Klavan’s remarks at the Tatler:

Watching Breitbart crush Weiner beneath his heel like an insignificant weiner, it occurs to me that Breitbart’s genius – and he really is an information genius – consists almost entirely of two pieces of knowledge:  one, leftists will lie knowing the media will back them and two, the media will back them.  With those two principles, he manages to make utter fools of both lying leftists and their corrupt mainstream media cronies again and again.  Not to mention again.  It’s wonderful.

And this is what the MSM both dreads and can’t come to grips with: much as every aging hippie wants to recapture the halcyon days of 1967 and the “Summer of Love,” the MSM wants to recapture that golden moment in 1974, when the news consisted of three commercial TV networks, PBS, AP, Reuters, and the writers’ bullpens at the New York Times and the Washington Post. (See also the JournoList, which was an attempt to recapture that moment in an era of otherwise decentralized media.)

I think Andrew knows this as well — which adds to his fun, and the fun that Rush, Drudge, and the starboard half of the Blogosphere are having reminding them that the legacy part of the phrase “the legacy media” means that they’re no longer the gatekeepers of information, and that 1974 is fading into the distance almost as much as the 1960s.

Which is why, no matter what happens to Weiner, today was a landmark day for New Media.

Related: Victor Davis Hanson on the Ruling Class and “The Collapse of a Rotten Edifice.”

Update: Former Democratic speechwriter turned cheerleader Chris Matthews, who dallied with the nascent media of the right in the 1990s because of his disgust with Bill Clinton, is so eager to circle the wagons to rehabilitate Weiner, it’s come to this: “Maybe [Weiner's Wife] Was Partly Responsible:”

The Anchoress has a nice summation of the reaction of old media:

This is the problem with the mainstream media in a nutshell. They “know” the people they’re supposed to be covering, and they consider themselves “friends” of those people. And it has ruined them. As you listen to [Barbara] Walters, all you see is passionate advocacy; not a newswoman concerned with the truth of a story, but a partisan doing everything she can to divert attention from a story she doesn’t like — even to comparing a private citizen on a bus to a sitting congressman having some sort of cyber-engagement in his office — and championing her “friend.”

This has never been a nice story, which is why I haven’t written about it until now. But I still am less interested in Weiner than in how the press reacted to this story. Some were willing to believe him, simply because he said they should. Some seemed like they didn’t want to believe him, but didn’t want to not believe him, even more. The usual partisans tried to blame and smear the usual partisans.

We don’t actually have a genuine press any more.

Old Media tried to hang onto the “objective” canard for far too long — future historians will argue long and hard when that word ceased to be accurate, though.

Related: “The Borg deactivate,” at least temporarily. And don’t miss Richard Fernandez on “The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” — as Richard asks, “What does the truth look like before it’s revealed? Well what patterns are you prepared to see?” And how much does your ideology require you to circle the wagons?

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Well, that was fun, wasn’t it?

Hey, nothing like being upstaged at your own press conference. Andrew Breitbart was at the press conference, and if I understand correctly from the zillion-tweets-a-minute going on during the conference, reporters asked Andrew to answer questions. Naturally, he took the podium, achieving a moment of New Media Awesomeness:

“I want to hear the truth. I want to hear the truth from Congressman Weiner and I would like an apology for him being complicit in a blame-the-messenger strategy,” Andrew Breitbart said at a presser before Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) took the podium — at the same place.

“I am accused of being a hacker. He said nothing. He allowed for that to go. The minions perpetuated that false, maliciousness and he went on to CNN to attack me and I feel he was complicity. You can talk. The girl’s story, I believe, will be on “World News Tonight,” and she can talk to you more specifically. I have seen a lot of this Congressman’s body and he is in very good shape and it appears to be his body. So … okay, everything that I have said so far has come to be true.”

If you thought the legacy media and the left (but I repeat myself) hated Breitbart before this, well…

Oh, and what of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY)? He came clean, sorta, kinda. Naturally, he’s not resigning. At least as of now:

Embattled Rep. Anthony Weiner admitted to posting lewd photos of himself on Twitter at a Monday afternoon press conference.While addressing the media at the Sheraton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, Weiner made the following statement: “Last Friday night I tweeted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle. Once I realized I posted it to Twitter, I panicked, I  took it down and said that I had been hacked. I then continued with that story to stick to that story which was a hugely regrettable mistake.”

“I am so sorry to have disrupted her life in this way. To be clear, the picture was of me and I sent it. I am deeply sorry for the pain this has caused my wife Huma and our family, and my constituents, my friends, supporters and staff,” Weiner said.

In addition, the congressman said that “over the past few years I have engaged in several inappropriate conversations conducted over Twitter, Facebook, email, and occasionally on the phone with women I have met online.”

Fausta has a good timeline of the press conference, which she live-blogged:

4:50PM Says he also misled his Congressional staff.

4:48PM Says did not violate the rules of the House, or violates the Constitution.

Dan Blatt’s also liveblogging.

4:40PM Accepts full responsibility. “My constituents will have to make the determination to vote [him out of office]“. He’s not quitting, alright.

The WaPo is carrying this story in their LIFESTYLE section, along with the decorating and parties.

4:35PM Weiner apologizes to Andrew Breitbart.
He says he never had any physical relationship with any of the women but does not deny phone sex, and “won’t rebut anything” the women are saying.

Earlier in the press conference,
Anthony Weiner states during this afternoon press conference: “To be clear, the picture was of me, and I sent it.”

Would have saved himself a world of trouble if he had just said it in the first place.

He’s not resigning.

He also initially claimed that his account was hacked, a serious allegation for a congressman to make. I wonder if there will be any repercussions for that?

Conspicuously absent at the press conference? Mrs. Weiner, Hillary Clinton’s former aide-de-camp. Make of that what you will.

Say, does anyone know which reporter shouted at the very end of the press conference as Weiner was dismounting the podium, “Were you fully erect or are you capable of more!?” You stay classy, MSM Howard Stern Show.

At Hot Air: “Weiner admits to sending photo, not resigning; Update: Apologizes to Breitbart; Update: Woman who received Weiner pics speaks to ABC.”

As somebody said on Twitter, the left will forgive Weiner of anything. But not apologizing to Breitbart.

Mickey Kaus adds:

I thought Weiner did almost as well as he could possibly do. He had the requisite L.A. Confidential bare honesty. … But if he isn’t addicted to sex, he’s clearly addicted to air time. He couldn’t get off the podium until he’d said at least one obnoxious thing, which is that he had “not much desire” to actually meet the women he was tweeting with (and that he was now supposedly apologizing to). …

And as Ace (who has owned this story almost as much as Breitbart) notes, “So, in ‘coming clean,’ [Weiner] lied a whole bunch of times, and continued to evade.”

Will the GOP Congress let him off the hook?

Of course they will.

Jennifer Rubin adds, “Will he survive? I suppose if he wants to tough it out and there is no evidence of illegality, he can try. But he’s ruined himself and disgraced his office. That, I suppose, is where things stand.”

Worked pretty well for Teddy and Bill, didn’t it?

Update: I’d embed the video from the press conference here, but for technical reasons, it would prohibit me from easily updating this post. So click here to watch, and then come back for more reaction and updates.

I’ve also added video of Andrew Breitbart’s incredible warm-up act at the same link. As Allahpundit asks:

If you’re wondering what the left’s next move will be after this, you haven’t been reading blogs for very long. Exit question: If Breitbart hadn’t asked for an apology from Weiner, would the press ever have thought to ask for one on his behalf? A rhetorical question, of course.

Meanwhile, back in old media, the Weiner rehabilitation tour begins: Reuters editor “Chrystia Freeland Blown Away by Weiner’s ‘Classy Touch’”

Well that’s one way to put it.

Astonishingly, Congressional Minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Palomino) says she’s calling for an investigation, according to CNN:

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi called Monday for an ethics committee investigation of Rep. Anthony Weiner to determine if government resources were used or House rules were violated in Weiner’s online relationships with women through social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Perhaps headlines such as this at the Washington Examiner are spurring Pelosi on: “Weiner didn’t communicate with underage girls — but only to the best of his knowledge:”

Of all the things he said, none of them were more destructive than when he was asked whether he knew for sure that all of the females he was communicating with were adults. He would only say they were, “to the best of my knowledge.”

Even if you take him at his word (and this is the guy who claimed that he couldn’t with “certitude” identify a photo of him in his underwear), it’s extra sleazy that he would engage in these sort of relationships without even knowing for sure whether he was swapping photos with underage girls.

Ultimately, Weiner declined to resign. Whether or not he survives this episode, at the very minimum, his chances  of being elected mayor of New York City have taken a severe hit.

Over to you, GOP.

Update: I started to write this as an update, but figured I’d spin it off into its own post on what a landmark day today was for new media, no matter what happens to Weiner.

And barring anything groundbreaking, I think that’s the last of the updates to this post. As always, the rest of the blog is open 24 hours a day for your dining and dancing pleasure, to paraphrase M*A*S*H.

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Via the Media Research Center’s new MRC-TV video aggregation site:

And from Hot Air, video of Andrew Breitbart on the podium:

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The Vancouver Sun asks, in a headline that’s catnip to Matt Drudge, “Could the Net be killing the planet one web search at a time?”

It’s Saturday night, and you want to catch the latest summer blockbuster. You do a quick Google search to find the venue and right time, and off you go to enjoy some mindless fun.

Meanwhile, your Internet search has just helped kill the planet. Depending on how long you took and what sites you visited, your search caused the emission of one to 10 grams of carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.

Sure, it’s not a lot on its own — but add up all of the more than one billion daily Google searches, throw in 60 million Facebook status updates each day, 50 million daily tweets and 250 billion emails per day, and you’re making a serious dent in some Greenland glaciers.

The Internet has long promised a more efficient and greener world. We save on paper and mailing by sending an email. We can telecommute instead of driving to work. We can have a meeting by teleconference instead of flying to another city.

Ironically, despite the web’s green promise, this explosion of data has turned the Internet into one of the planet’s fastest-growing sources of carbon emissions. The Internet now consumes two to three per cent of the world’s electricity.

So what? I’ll believe the Vancouver Sun takes their own rhetoric seriously when they go off the Web and return to being a paper-only publication. Of course, then they’d have needless guilt over deforestation, but hey substituting environmentalism for religion means that you have to have guilt over something. In the meantime, Harold Camping, call your office — you’ve got far too much competition in the Apocalypse Now department. 

And speaking of substitute religions and old media, as Investor’s Business Daily notes:

The new editor of the New York Times is Jill Abramson, an old hand who thinks the Times is God. But the Gray Lady is one journalistic deity no one can resurrect.It was a statement so telling, and so over the top, that within hours the Times removed it from its Thursday web story announcing Bill Keller’s replacement as executive editor.

“In my house growing up, the Times substituted for religion,” said Abramson, the former Washington bureau chief. “If the Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”

That is how the left-leaning media establishment in America wants it. But we now live in a time when “The Times” no longer inspires awe, and is far less feared by elected officials.

In 1971, the New York Times could help North Vietnam defeat the U.S. by publishing the Pentagon Papers. By 2005, its story on the National Security Agency’s terrorist surveillance program operating without warrants against U.S. citizens with terrorist contacts could not — at least not yet — help the U.S. lose the global war on terror.

That’s because we’re in an era in which even a prominent TV network news anchorman, such as CBS’ Dan Rather, can be unseated by fact checking conducted at lightning speed by blogs, talk radio, newspapers and magazines that refuse to toe the “mainstream media” line.

Which brings us back to where we started. To paraphrase the hothouse Sun, could the Net be reducing tensions by exposing environmental hoaxes and doomsday theories depressing the planet one web article at a time?

Related: “Those who pollute science with politics, emotion, and other things that are not science deserve our contempt. Expose them. Criticize them. They are great malefactors.”

Indeed.™

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John Hawkins interviews Ben Shapiro on his new book, Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. Read the whole thing; but here’s the conclusion:

Why couldn’t we see a Hollywood studio or channel do the same thing with entertainment that Fox has done with news? Why couldn’t we see a channel or a studio that has a slight rightward tilt instead of a big leftward tilt? Wouldn’t that capture a lot of audience that’s being lost?

It absolutely would, but here are a couple of problems. One is that when people watch news, they’re watching news because they’re interested in the political slant on the channel. Rightwing news picks up a lot of audience because a lot of people are dissatisfied with CNN. When people watch TV for entertainment value, the last thing they want is to be hit over the head with politics. That annoys them when they’re hit over the head with politics.

So if you make a conservative television channel, people are not going to tune in because it’s a conservative television channel. What they’re going to do instead is… they’re going to say, “Is it entertaining? Is it good? Is the content something that I would want to watch?” So, what we need is to create programming that’s entertaining first and conservative second. We need to enter the market place not on a self proclaimed conservative channel, but on mainstream television networks by going to places like Proctor and Gamble and places like Johnson and Johnson and getting them to sponsor family friendly programming that’s really good.

This is where conservatives go wrong. Conservatives want to think politically instead of thinking entertainment wise. Liberals always understood that the key here is to make something really entertaining that happens to also be incredibly liberal — whereas conservatives, they take precisely the opposite approach. I mean, David Zucker’s a friend and I don’t want to talk badly about American Carol, but that was a movie that took the opposite approach and it didn’t work.

Right. We need to be more like Avatar.

Right, exactly, exactly. I mean the most conservative movies ever made are things like “Braveheart,” “The Dark Knight.” I mean if you think in terms of TV shows, “24″ is a show that a lot of liberals liked — not because it was conservative, but because it was exciting and it had a good plot.

Perhaps because of the original blacklist, in the era when film was still a mass media, leftwing Hollywood writers became masters by the late 1950s and ’60s at burying the themes of their stories in the subtext of their films, so that their stories could work on multiple levels. They were profitable, entertaining dramas first, agitprop second. (Of course this was back when Hollywood still produced dramas to be watched by grownups, before they concentrated on films where the plot was an excuse to simply blow stuff up, first via miniatures, and then CGI, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.) Leftwing Hollywood forgot those writing skills when it came to release all of their anti-Iraq war movies in the mid-naughts, causing the American public to simply ignore them. Budding conservative filmmakers and TV producers need to learn this lesson as well, and those who cross over to join with those of us already one with the dark side of The Force, such as David Zucker and his surprisingly painful American Carol need to remember it, if they hope to succeed on a mass scale.

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I’m a day late to this one, but read Brad Schaeffer at Big Hollywood for a look at Townshend’s contributions as a musician and songwriter. As for how he wrote those songs, since so many early bloggers had a background in DIY music, here’s a look back at a post I wrote in 2003 for the then-nascent Blogcritics Website on Townshend’s “Scoop” series of albums, which helped to popularize home music recording, beginning in the 1980s, as the first affordable cassette four-track machines began to enter the market.

But years before that, beginning in the early 1960s, Townshend was first recording his music at home, initially on large reel-to-reel machines. Townshend, then a fledgling songwriter in the earliest incarnation of The Who, initially couldn’t read music. To make up for that, he started “writing” his songs by overdubbing first a drum track (first with real drums, eventually with drum machines), then a guitar track, then a bass track, and finally a vocal track to present his bandmates in The Who with an audio demo of his song.

Today, the technology has advanced sufficiently so that the line between “demo” recordings and the finished product has blurred — and the recording technology inside a $35,000 Fairlight sampling synthesizer of the early 1980s is inside almost any PC with a good quality soundcard and the appropriate software. And actually, the video below is a little outdated, since it promotes the benefits of 64-bit computing for recording, a technology that’s now fairly ubiquitous. But it does a good overview of what’s possible these days with the right hardware, software, and musical chops:

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I’ll be back to blogging here in just a bit, but in the meantime, I just wanted to point out this latest insanity from the self-proclaimed “Don’t be evil” folks at Google. Yet another reminder why I’m glad I quit Google-owned Blogspot.com seven years ago.

Update: Ann has resumed blogging on her backup blog (also on Blogspot, alas); meanwhile, the moderator of the “Help” thread at Google, whom as I understand from some of the comments on Ann’s blog is not a Google employee, but is certainly acting as their surrogate, is taunting her, and her readers.

That seems remarkably stupid. In and of itself it may not be evil, but it’s certainly banal.

Update: Understatement of the year: “Google is not helping itself today.”

Incidentally, Ann’s original blog is back online, but as of the moment, sans its years of content. Hopefully Google can repopulate that material.

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Well, sort of — DirecTV has recently added an interface to their HD-DVR set-top boxes that allows customers to search for content not just on the to-be-expected DirecTV channels, but on YouTube as well. So it was quite amusing to search on “Silicon Graffiti” and watch episodes of my video blog on the big screen. There’s some pixelation of course, but the videos uploaded in 16X9 720P hold up reasonably well, particularly if the only motion is a talking head. (In other words, watching a bootleg copy of Star Wars somebody uploaded to YouTube on your 55-inch TV, versus watching the HD version that the Spike channel shows from time to time, will likely be a disappointing experience, to say the least.)

20 years ago, the buzzword in home theater was convergence — with technology such as this, and Amazon’s recent MP3-cloud player thingee (if you’ll pardon the technical jargon) it’s increasingly a reality.

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The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports,”Tsunami warning center raises magnitude of Japan quake to 9.1:”

The Japan earthquake was the fourth most powerful ever recorded with a magnitude of 9.1, twice more powerful than the initial estimate of 8.9, Gerard Fryer, geophysicist of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, said this morning.

Three others that were more powerful since the late 1800s when seismometers started measuring ground motions were in 9.5 in Chile in 1960, 9.2 in Alaska in 1964 and 9.1 in Sumatra in 2004, according to Fryer.

The paper adds that “The U.S. Geological Survey estimate of the quake’s magnitude is still 8.9,” though.

Japan has spent a billion dollars to allow for people living areas outside of an earthquake’s epicenter to have approximately 60 seconds of early warning time; just enough to shut off the gas — and duck and cover. This chilling video of one such warning going off on television is eerily reminiscent of Cold War-era American civil defense alerts,  or with the robotic calm female onscreen voice doing the doomsday countdown, the destruct sequence in a science fiction movie:

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Note that the above clip, as with so many we’ve been seeing since Thursday night were shot by amateurs; as Richard Fernandez writes at the Belmont Club, expect that to be the norm going forward, as the number of camcorder-armed citizens (especially in Japan, of course) now far outweighs professional news-gatherers.

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Establishing a foothold in the world of art and design isn’t easy, but watching your career become exiled to Siberia certainly is. A pair of new posts this week explore what happens when épater le bourgeois goes horribly wrong.

We’ve referenced the concept of “épater le bourgeois” a few times around here over the years, but for those unfamailar with the term, let’s let Roger Kimball explain:

It’s a lot of fun being an artist these days. Only a tiny percentage makes any money, but there is a big consolation prize in the form of attitude. Back in the late 19th century, many aspiring French artists were out to “épater le bourgeois.” The great problem going forward was that almost all artists were themselves part of the much-maligned group, the bourgeoisie. How, then, to amaze and startle oneself?

Early in the last century, Marcel Duchamp pioneered the two main strategies: the boring and the bizarre. To the first category belongs such “ready-mades” as “In Advance of the Broken Arm,” a “work” that consists of an ordinary snow shovel which, because Duchamp had the wit (or was it only the effrontery?) to exhibit it in an art gallery, suddenly achieved the transfiguring nimbus of Art with a capital “A.”

Duchamp’s second innovation aimed not to anesthetize viewers but to shock them. “Fountain,” an ordinary urinal displaced from the bathroom to the exhibition hall, was the founding gesture of that large gift to perpetual adolescents.

We’re much more sophisticated — at least, we’re much coarser — nowadays, so we are no longer shocked by the exhibition of a plumbing fixture. But in its time “Fountain” was every bit as shocking as (e.g.) Andres Serrano’s photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine.

There were plenty of titters, and probably other, less agreeable, sounds when Duchamp pulled his pranks, but what a large opening he created for those coming after him!

Of course, these days, there’s no traditional bourgeois left to shock, and to build on Roger’s comments above, with a century of repetition behind it, épater le bourgeois is better described in Yiddish than French. It’s shtick, and I dare say that most of us on the right are long-since immune to these techniques. And these days, it’s the art world itself that’s far more bourgeois than bohemian these days, to borrow David Brooks’ bobo formulation. (QED.)

First up a look at how to do it the horribly wrong way. Found via the Manolo, Linda Grant of the Guardian describes how former Christian Dior designer John Galliano epatered himself right out of the business:

According to fashion journalist Melanie Rickey, of the Fashion Editor at Large blog and Grazia, for years the industry has pushed Galliano to greater and greater extremes: “All everyone has ever wanted from John is transgressive fashion, and to use his excessive ideas to sell nice handbags and perfumes,” she says. And once you are set on a path to break taboos, it is almost impossible to find new ideas. So how on earth do you shock, when you have already exhausted S&M dungeons for ideas for haute couture? The great taboo in France and Germany is antisemitism. On this ground Jews were murdered or transported to be murdered. Watching the video of Galliano slumped alone at his bar table hurling insults at a woman who evidently asked why he didn’t make clothes that all women could wear, he spits out rage. She is ugly, he loves Hitler, he invokes the gas chambers. It’s a toxic mix of hate-speech, of racism and misogyny. How is it possible to go further than this?

If you are breaker of taboos, then antisemitism is only another taboo, no different from any other. It’s the saying of the unsayable. It has become the last frontier for those demanding freedom of speech, for whom everything, even the Holocaust, is fair game. Is Galliano an actual antisemite who hates Jews? Who knows what passes through his mind, but by invoking the name of Hitler and gloating about the gas chambers, he is only doing what others have always paid him to do: shock.

It’s Galliano’s fortune and misfortune to have been named as a genius. He wants to go to the S&M clubs of the Parisian underworld and bring back chains and put it over a black leather bag and call the bag Bondage? Why not? Who would dare tell him that he has no idea what he is talking about when he says he loves Hitler, or that there is something the matter with abusing women in bars? Around him are innumerable yes men and women, bowing to his great thoughts.

Which highlights how old and boxed-in the game of épater le bourgeois has become, and how tired and exhausted those who wish to practice it seem these days.

And speaking of boxed-in, here’s how to do it right — or at least, from the right. But first, some background. As Tom Wolfe wrote in The Painted Word back in 1975, an artist who hope to make a name for himself had to abandon whatever pretenses he had towards developing his own style, hop a Greyhound from Ohio or Iowa to the Village, and begin what Wolfe described as the “Apache Dance:”

During the 1960s this entire process by which le monde, the culturati, scout bohemia and tap the young artist for Success was acted out in the most graphic way. Early each spring, two emissaries from the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr and Dorothy Miller, would head downtown from the Museum on West Fifty-third Street, down to Saint Marks Place, Little Italy, Broome Street and environs, and tour the loft studios of known artists and unknowns alike, looking at everything, talking to one and all, trying to get a line on what was new and significant in order to put together a show in the fall . . . and, well, I mean, my God—from the moment the two of them stepped out on Fifty-third Street to grab a cab, some sort of boho radar began to record their sortie . . . They’re coming! . . . And rolling across Lower Manhattan, like the Cosmic Pulse of the theosophists, would be a unitary heartbeat:

Pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me . . . O damnable Uptown!

By all means, deny it if asked!—what one knows, in one’s cheating heart, and what one says are two different things! So it was that the art mating ritual developed early in the century—in Paris, in Rome, in London, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and, not too long afterward, in New York. As we’ve just seen, the ritual has two phases:

(1) The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he doesn’t care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown.

(2) The Consummation, in which culturati from that very same world, le monde, scout the various new movements and new artists of bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards—and shower them with all the rewards of celebrity.

By the First World War the process was already like what in the Paris clip joints of the day was known as an apache dance. The artist was like t he female in t he act, stamping her feet, yelling defiance one moment, feigning indifference the next, resisting the advances of her pursuer with absolute contempt . . . more thrashing about . . . more rake-a-cheek fury . . . more yelling and carrying on . . . until finally with one last mighty and marvelously ambiguous shriek—pain! ecstasy!—she submits . . . Paff paff paff paff paff. . . How you do it, my boy! . . . and the house lights rise and Everyone, tout le monde, applauds . . . The artist’s payoff in this ritual is obvious enough. He stands to gain precisely what Freud says are the goals of the artist: fame, money, and beautiful lovers. But what about le monde, the culturati, the social members of the act? What’s in it for them? Part of their reward is t he ancient and semi-sacred status of Benefactor of the Arts. The arts have always been a doorway into Society, and in the largest cities today the arts—the museum boards, arts councils, fund drives, openings, parties, committee meetings—have completely replaced the churches in this respect. But there is more!

There is, but you get the gist. (You can read more from an excerpt of Wolfe’s The Painted Word online at Wolfe’s Website.) But woe betide the artist who shines a light upon the whimsies and peccadilloes of his benefactors or his peers. Remember, you’re in the club — the rest of the world outside is fair game, but never your fellow club members.

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Rockford Illinois knows the clock is ticking on its 15 minutes of fame:

The Rockford Area Convention and Visitors Bureau is seizing upon a moment in Wisconsin history. It’s using the budget battle being waged in Madison as a way to encourage people to “Hideaway in Rockford.”

In a news release, they say, “whether you’re a state senator or not, you can come to Rockford to explore ‘hideaway hotspots’ and take advantage of ‘runaway rates’ at local hotels.”

As you can see in the YouTube clip’s still shot, Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen, a longtime resident of Rockford has some fun in the video as well. No word yet what Bun E. Carlos thinks of the town, though:

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“NBC Ruins The Fun, Fires Employee Over ‘What Is Internet’ Video,” according to Matt Burns of the CrunchGear tech blog:

By now you’ve probably seen the Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel pondering the wonders of the Internet. It’s a bit hokey and of course shows the NBC hosts talking nonsense about something outside of their expertise. Well, NBC clearly didn’t find it as cute as everyone else and reportedly fired the employee that uploaded it. Best Buy almost did that once. Remember how that turned out?NBC went and pulled most of the videos from the Internet. The video we embedded is dead. But of course they couldn’t get them all. Simply searching Google for Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel pulls dozens of copies. Nothing ever goes away online. NBC should know this by now. It’s called the Internet.Seriously, NBC. No one was laughing at your then-star hosts. We were all laughing with them. It’s not like they were asking questions about the Internet now. This was 1994. No one outside of universities and X-Files watchers had any clue about the Internet. The video simply served as a nice reminder that the Internet grew in importance so rapidly that even some of the world’s most versed newscasters were simply clueless in the early days.

Talk about backfiring — instead of allowing viewers a minor laugh at two employees who aren’t even with NBC anymore (though there were rumors this past summer that Katie could return), NBC beclowns itself via its heavy-handed tactics. Though as CrunchGear reminds us, plenty of copies remain online, such as this one. At least for the moment:

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