Just in time for the potential chaos on Tuesday, I talk with Hans von Spakovsky, the co-author (along with NRO’s John Fund) of Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk. As you may know from his frequent contributions to PJM, Hans is a Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission.

During our interview, we discussed:

● Did a 2008 article that appeared on a Website owned by the Washington Post really claim that “Believing in vote fraud may be dangerous to a democracy’s health”?
● On the flip-side, is discouraging voter fraud actually an attempt to suppress minority voters?
● We need to produce ID when we drive a car, purchase liquor, get on an airplane, and go to the hospital. Why don’t we need it to vote?
● Whatever happened to that 2008 case of the New Black Panthers brandishing billy clubs in front of a Philadelphia polling place on election day?
● The late Andrew Breitbart instructed readers that thanks to flip-cams and the Internet, they were now the media. Does that same Army of Davids spirit also allow individuals to be better poll watchers, as well?
● How did voting fraud impact the Minnesota race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken in 2008, and how did the election of a former Saturday Night Live writer to the Senate have ramifications for the entire nation?
● How quickly — or how slowly — could we know the winner this Tuesday?

And more.

Click here to listen:

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(12 minutes long; 11 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 3.33 MB lo-fi edition.)

If the above Flash audio player is not be compatible with your browser, click below on the YouTube player below, or click here to be taken directly to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

For my earlier podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.

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L to R: Breitbart, Glenn Reynolds, Driscoll at 2008 GOP convention.

In the early days of PJ Media — back when we were still had our pajamas, but before we founded PJTV — Andrew Marcus was our first in-house video maker, and gave me plenty of valuable advice when I first began to ever-so-tentatively dip my toes into the video pool back in 2007.

These days though, Andrew is directing on the big screen — his new documentary, Hating Breitbart, debuts later this month — and as Andrew explains during the interview, the keyword is later; its release has been delayed by the MPAA, who wish to slap an R-rating on the documentary, as The Hollywood Reporter recently mentioned:

The release of a documentary about deceased new-media provocateur Andrew Breitbart that was to open Friday has been delayed one week because of a rift between the filmmakers and the MPAA, which has rated the film R due to obscene language.

The movie, called Hating Breitbart, is largely about the subject’s battles against the mainstream media over the way it allegedly unfairly maligns the Tea Party movement. Clips of Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Bill Maher, Janeane Garofalo and others who call conservatives “teabaggers,” “racists” and other disparaging terms are used throughout the film.

The movie originally contained several uses of the F-word, which was routinely hurled at Breitbart when he’d show up at liberal gatherings. Breitbart also uses the word a few times in the film.

Under current MPAA guidelines, if a film uses “one of the harsher sexually derived words” — such as the F-word — more than a certain number of times, it receives an R rating. But the MPAA sometimes has made inconsistent rulings over language.

The MPAA gave Hating Breitbart an R rating last week, much to the dismay of director Andrew Marcus and distributors Rocky Mountain Pictures, who were hoping for a PG-13 rating. Marcus then cut out the offending word nine times but left in some that he deemed important to the integrity of the film. The MPAA still rated the film R.

We’ll also discuss:

• How Marcus sold Breitbart on the idea of a documentary by appealing to his love of ’80s rock.

• How the conservative Breitbart ironically became Saul Alinsky’s most brilliant disciple.

• The transformation of Breitbart from backroom boffin at the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post to master showman, culminating in the legendary moment when he took the stage at the press conference for Anthony Weiner’s press conference — aka The Best. Press Conference. Ever.

• The future of the conservative documentary, and Marcus’ thoughts on Dinesh D’Souza’s hit documentary, Obama: 2016.

• What Breitbart would think of the MSM’s all-racism-all-the-time approach to the presidential election.

• And where to find out more information about, and showtimes for Hating Breitbart.

Click here to listen:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(23 minutes long; 21MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 7 MB lo-fi edition.

If the above Flash audio player is not be compatible with your browser, click below on the YouTube player below, or click here to be taken directly to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

For my earlier podcasts, start here and keep scrolling — and don’t miss my first interview with Breitbart himself, originally recorded in late November of 2005 discussing his then-new book Hollywood Interrupted, click here.

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“I’ve always believed that nothing is withheld from us what we have conceived to do. Most people think the opposite – that all things are withheld from them which they have conceived to do and they end up doing nothing.”

“Wait”, I said, pausing at his last sentence ”What was that quote again?”

“Nothing is withheld from us what we have conceived to do.”

That’s good, who said that?

God did.

What?

God said it and there were only two people who believed it, you know who?

Nope, who?

God and me, so I went out and did it.

– Joel Runyon and Russell Kirsch. Read the whole thing.

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“The World Deserves a Giant Rideable Hexapod,” the IEEE Spectrum Website reports:

Okay, look. In a lot of ways, we’re really not living in the world of the future. Those jet packs we were promised? They’re more like ducted fan packs. And flying cars? Really just driveable planes. Sigh.

And then there’s Stompy. A giant hexapod. That you can ride in. The world needs this.

Stompy is the brainrobot of Artisian’s Asylum, a hackerspace out in Boston. This is a serious undertaking: the guys behind it are experienced roboticists from places like Boston Dynamics, Barrett, and DEKA. The robot will be powered by a 135 horsepower engine driving a whooole bunch of hydraulics, and while it’s largely designed to stomp around in an exhibitory manner, the team has big, huge, world-changing plans:

The robot isn’t just being built for fun, though – it has incredibly practical purposes, as well. With 6 force-sensitive legs and a ground clearance of 6 feet, the robot will be able to walk over broken terrain that varies from mountainous areas, to rubble piles, to water up to 7 or 8 feet deep – everywhere existing ground vehicles can’t go. Not only that, but while navigating such terrain, Stompy could carry 1,000 pounds at 2-3 mph, and up to 4,000 pounds at 1 mph. This is important because in disaster areas like Haiti’s Port Au Prince, it’s taken more than three years to clear the rubble out of some areas – meaning that throughout that entire time, people have had to be rescued or resupplied by helicopter, because no ground vehicle could reach them. Stompy (and the technology it represents) could easily reach people who can’t be reached by any other means in a natural disaster.

Stompy’s builders should hire Syd Mead to put the finishing touches on their new design.

Incidentally, you have to love any group that’s fundraising with T-shirts such as these:

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For 2000 years my ancestors dreamed of returning to their homeland and reestablishing their sovereignty. I have had the privilege of living that dream. How amazing is that?

We have to judge ourselves by whether we’ve lived up to our ideals and done our best. Not by the accumulation of power, wealth or fame; not for failing to achieve the impossible.

A famous Jewish story about that is the tale of Rabbi Zosia, who said that he did not expect God to berate him for not having been Moses—who he wasn’t—but for not having been Zosia.

To me, that means we must do the best to be ourselves while trying to make ourselves as good as possible. I’ve really tried to do that. I don’t have big regrets, nor bitterness, nor would I have done things very differently.

And I’ve discovered the brave community of those who are supporting and encouraging each other in the battle against this disease.

– Barry Rubin, “Why I’ve Always Written So Much with Such Intensity … And Why I Won’t Stop Now.”

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Yes, @instapundit is back online at Twitter.

Well, that was fun. After being offline for several months, and after no word from Twitter after Nina first contacted them in early July, Instapundit on Twitter is back. Thank you all for your help in getting Glenn Reynolds’ Twitter feed returned to his control. The RSS feed appears to working, and once Glenn unleashes his usual deluge of new blog posts in earnest tomorrow morning, they should begin to automatically appear on Twitter as well.

At least, that’s the plan. In the meantime, a big thank you from Nina and I for your help retweeting her post at the Tatler, and in getting the word to Twitter.

NOTE: If you were following Glenn on Twitter before, you’ll need to refollow his account. We have the user name back, but we weren’t able to recover the account’s followers list.

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If you’re wondering what’s happened to the Instapundit Twitter feed, Nina Yablok, PJM’s attorney* writes on her efforts to recover it, at the PJ Tatler:

[A]fter Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, asked me to try to get the Instapundit Twitter handle back for him, I found that Twitter had a special page for submitting trademark problems.  Instapundit is Glenn Reynolds’ registered trademark.

The Instapundit situation was somewhat unique in that it wasn’t a poacher or typical infringer who had taken the trademark as a Twitter handle. In our case, a fan had gotten to Twitter before my client and had used the @Instapundit Twitter account to push my client’s RSS feed through the Twitter account. Other than not being able to respond to direct tweets, this was OK with Glenn. He was going to use the account to do the same thing: push his RSS feed; he’s a big proponent of opening up the wild wide world of internet communications to everyone.

However, when Glenn modified his website, the RSS feed information changed. And the fan who had started the Twitter account never updated the link with the RSS feed. So the Twitter account with the Instapundit registered trademark is not tweeting. It’s dead, Jim.

And worse yet, the Instapundit trademark is associated with Glenn’s reputation as a very prolific blogger. Therefore, having a dead Twitter feed is beyond “not a good thing”; it’s a dilution of the mark’s value.

Direct tweets to the fan who opened the account resulted in no response.  We don’t know if the individual is dead or alive, bored or fed up, retired to a tropical island with no internet access, or what.

So I put in my somewhat simple trademark issue request on Twitter’s handy-dandy trademark issue form. And waited. And waited. Two weeks later I got an email saying they had received my form and would process it.  One small step for doing things right.

Two weeks after that I got an email with the subject line “Twitter Support: update on Trademark Issue – (tradename)” at 5:14 on a Friday night. The email said, “Please read this carefully and respond to confirm that your report as currently submitted is complete and valid or reply with the additional information required as described below. We will not be able to investigate further and this ticket will be closed unless we receive a response to this message.” It then had the same questions as on the original form I had submitted.  It did not clarify what question had not been answered to their satisfaction.

So I restated my case in slightly different terms, and sent back the email.  I received the exact same email again at 7:12 p.m., and again at 9:12 p.m., and again at 12:05 a.m. the next morning. I responded to all of the requests except the last one because I was pretty sure by that time that the LOLcats had taken over Twitter’s automated system.

I waited another 2 weeks and sent an email to Twitter’s support email again, basically saying “what’s up?” and I almost immediately received a reply saying, and I quote, “You tried to update a request that has been closed. Please submit a new request at http://support.twitter.com/forms. You can also visit our help center at http://support.twitter.com for self-help solutions to common problems. Thanks!”

Read the whole thing (to coin a phrase), and then if you’re on Twitter yourself, retweet early and often.

* AKA Mrs. Ed Driscoll.

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Rush Limbaugh, who started online, like a lot of us, on CompuServe in the 1980s (before signing them up as an early show sponsor) walks through the history of How the Web Was Won in a surprisingly detailed timeline, to rebut Obama’s know-nothing boast that “Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet:”

So, Crovitz writes, “If the government didn’t invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.” Do you know what TCP/IP is?  What? How would you explain TCP/IP to somebody?  Somebody in Rio Linda. (interruption) It’s like the phone number of a computer network.  It’s like the phone number of a computer. Okay, TCP/IP.  And hyperlinks, it’s obvious.  That’s the link in a story that you click to take you to some other site.  Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for creating the hyperlink.

“According to a book about Xerox PARC, ‘Dealers of Lightning’ (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn’t wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves.”  I mean, the government did create this labyrinth, but they didn’t know what to do with it. At no time were they even pondering commercial applications for this, which is the point.  Ah, you can debate — and people are gonna debate this ’til the end of time — whether it was a network communications system for nuclear attack; whether it was this or whether it was that.

The point that Crovitz is making here is that whatever it was and why it ever was invented, it was never intended by the government for commercial application.  And had it been left to the government and had it remained the sole property of the government, it wouldn’t exist today.  That’s all you really need to know about this.  And yet Obama is running around claiming credit for it, as Algore did, and making it one of the reasons businesses — (whispers) “corporations” — are successful.

Follow this Web-enabling hyperlink to connect your computer to Rush’s server to read the whole thing.

Related: Obama’s line about the Internet was yet another gaffe in the Speech That Keeps On Giving. As Jennifer Rubin wrote this week at the Washington Post:

Smarting from the attack on his “you didn’t build that”speech the Obama team is inexplicably running a whiny, defensive ad saying, “Those ads taking my words about small business out of context, they’re flat out wrong.” Wow. This is his version of the “I am not a witch” ad.

And of course, the liberal Bletchley Park has checked their magic decoder rings to inform you that accurately quoting the president’s words to reveal his socialist worldview is racist. Sorry, fellas — as even Jon Stewart has admitted, that race card was  maxed out long ago.

(H/T: 5′F)

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Portable five megabyte hard drive, 1956 edition:

Portable 128 gigabyte USB flash drive, 2012 edition:

Incidentally, the Website with the photo* of the 1956-edition of the IBM 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive adds a reminder to readers to “Start appreciating your 1 GB memory stick!”

Only one gig? That page was written in 2008, which is a reminder of how quickly that piece of computer hardware is expanding. Or shrinking. Or both…

(more…)

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“DNSChanger hype reveals media’s fearmongering technophobia,” Jesse Martin of Canada’s Maclean’s magazine writes:

I don’t know about you, but I had a relaxing summer Monday, some of it spent online. The DNSChanger malware may indeed have inconvenienced some people, but for 99.99999% of us, yesterday was just another day on the Internet. Unsurprisingly, few news outlets publicized the absolute normalcy of life online yesterday.

The problem with virus and malware news stories is that they typically originate with press releases distributed by computer security companies like McAfee and Symantec, whose business models rely on keeping the world in a constant state of digital paranoia. Many newspapers simply re-write these releases and call them articles, but some go to the trouble of contacting an “Internet security expert” or two. Of course, Internet security experts also rely on keeping the world in a constant state of digital paranoia.  Ask them at any time whether or not we should be afraid, and they will assure you that we should be very, very afraid.

It’s time for the media to grow up about computing. Technology plays too big a role in public life for news organizations to behave like bipolar lunatics, forever bouncing between uncritical praise for Apple’s Next Big Thing and untempered hysteria over the Next Big Threat.

Baby steps; baby steps. The legacy media would have to first grow up about electricity and where it comes from before they grow up about computing. And even then, they’d still be suckers for the latest doomsday scenario.

(Via Rand Simberg, who adds, “I love the picture in this story.”)

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Last week, when I linked to the video from McDonald’s Canadian division that explained why food almost always looks better — and typically bigger — in a photograph than in person, YouTube suggested the above video, titled “The Photoshop Effect” as a recommended choice at the end of the McDonald’s clip. It’s from 2008, but it’s still a relevant topic, especially considering how much more powerful Photoshop has gotten in the years since, including its new CS6 edition.

But arguments as to “is it fair” that supermodels and A-list Hollywood actresses have teams of skilled Photoshoppers making their already well-toned bodies and well-defined facial features look even better seems to be a rather specious argument. Celebrities want to look their best when they’ve got a new film to hawk, Sports Illustrated wants their swimsuit edition to jump off grocery counter checkout lines, etc. Does it promote a false ideal for women, as the young woman in the above video asks? Well no more than the physical fitness of models and actresses, who have hours blocked out of their day to spend at the gym with expensive personal trainers.

Funny though that no one complains that when Bruce Willis jumps off a 100-story skyscraper or fist-fights his way through a thousand heavily-armed terrorists, what we’re really seeing is a stuntman and plenty of CGI. But even if they did, in a way, that complaint, and the ones heard in the above video are somewhat akin to the arguments floated when massive amounts of overdubbing first took off in popular music in the mid-1960s. The early Beatles, at their best, were a tight little rock group, as can be heard on their first album. I believe all of those backing tracks were cut live, and only minimal overdubbing was done to patch up their vocals. But the time of the Sgt. Pepper-era, the Beatles were bringing in session musicians skilled in unusual instruments, whole orchestras, hiring outside arrangers, and their producer George Martin was developing new recording effects and increasingly complex strategies to push the equipment inside EMI’s Abbey Road studios to the very limit of 1966 and ’67-era recording technology. That the Beatles were a cash cow for EMI made it all possible.

20 years later, during the height of the MTV-era, Paul McCartney would release a stripped down, relatively low budget video shot in the London subway tubes to accompany his song “Press” and justify it during interviews by complaining about so many up and coming groups who would simply hiring the trappings of success — expensive cars, flashy clothes, dancing girls, and exotic locales for a day or two worth of video shooting, to make themselves look more successful and wealthier than they really were.

To which, as often is the case, the proper response is…”So?” (Though occasionally, too much Photoshopping can produce rather humorous results when compared to the real thing. But again, so what?)

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Since my blog was one of many inspired by Instapundit.com in the immediate wake of 9/11, and since it’s celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, I had wanted to do a video interview with Glenn Reynolds to discuss the history and state of the Blogosphere. Given that he has a new “Broadside” (much longer than most magazine articles, but shorter than most books) from Encounter Books on the Higher Education Bubble and the impact of its aftermath on both students and academia, this seemed like the perfect opportunity. With a little help from the folks at PJTV.com for arranging the video hookup between our two one-man in-home video studios, here’s my video with the Professor, in which he discusses:

• Glenn’s early blogging influences.
• The similar attempts to burrow their heads in the sand by Big Media and Big Education, despite knowing that both institutions are clearly in trouble.
• How a speculative bubble forms and then bursts, and this case, how education costs have completely outpaced the rise in housing and medical costs. (Here is the scary-ass comparison chart by economics professor Mark J. Perry that Glenn mentions during the interview.)
• The relationship between Occupy Wall Street and the higher education bubble.
• Why expensive universities pushed unemployable majors, and why students were so eager to sign up for them.
• Will the bachelor’s degree increasingly be seen as increasingly less important to success?
• How technology could help ameliorate the higher education bubble.

Click on the above video to watch; a handy embeddable YouTube version is available here. And click here and just keep scrolling, for three years worth of our earlier editions of our Silicon Graffiti video blog.

Update: Welcome readers clicking in from:

• Ace of Spades
• The American Enterprise Institute
• The Brothers Judd
• Five Feet of Fury
• Instapundit.com
• Maggie’s Farm
• Mark J. Perry’s Carpe Diem econo-blog
• Small Dead Animals
• And the PJ Media homepage

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Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so as long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.

– Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, Via Terry Teachout.

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Fortunately, here’s a screencap for when it’s pulled:

H/T: Instapundit.com.

Update: And again. At last, an action from the Obama administration I could support!

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At the American Thinker, S. Fred Singer writes that “Climate Deniers Are Giving Us Skeptics a Bad Name,” and near the end of his article, rounds up some fascinating quotes from the folks who seem to bring you new “Final Countdowns” and news of fresh disaster seemingly every day:

• “The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.” -Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research

• “The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.” -Dr David Frame, Climate modeler, Oxford University

•  ”It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” -Paul Watson, Co-founder of Greenpeace

•  ”Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.” -Sir John Houghton, First chairman of the IPCC [Update: A reader flags us that Houghton has denied these words are his -- Ed]

• “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony … climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” -Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment

As I’ve written before, it’s a fascinating development when people start admitting that they’re willing to lie for their cause.

Late last month, as a result of “GleickGate,” an author at Scientific American asked, “Should Global-Warming Activists Lie to Defend Their Cause?” It sure seemed to me that he was trying to answer the headline of his article in the affirmative, however reluctantly he arrives at his ultimate conclusion.

Given that the author was attempting to use the century-old “Moral Equivalent of War” argument, I wrote here in reply that as the old cliché goes, truth is the first casualty of war. Even eco-war, I guess. But perhaps what’s relatively new are members of the left who are willing to publicly admit they’re lying, as we explored in 2010, when a member of the Journalist, the self-described “non-official campaign” to elect Obama in 2008 tweeted:

As I noted back then, legacy media house organ Editor & Publisher ran a piece in 2007 that advocated similar tactics for the man-made global warming crowd titled “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers.”

Not to mention former CBS anchorman Dan Rather telling Bill O’Reilly back in 2001 that “I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things:”

Bill O’Reilly: “I want to ask you flat out, do you think President Clinton’s an honest man?”
Dan Rather: “Yes, I think he’s an honest man.”
O’Reilly: “Do you, really?”
Rather: “I do.”
O’Reilly: “Even though he lied to Jim Lehrer’s face about the Lewinsky case?”
Rather: “Who among us has not lied about something?”
O’Reilly: “Well, I didn’t lie to anybody’s face on national television. I don’t think you have, have you?”
Rather: “I don’t think I ever have. I hope I never have. But, look, it’s one thing – “
O’Reilly: “How can you say he’s an honest guy then?”
Rather: “Well, because I think he is. I think at core he’s an honest person. I know that you have a different view. I know that you consider it sort of astonishing anybody would say so, but I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”
— Exchange on Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor, May 15, 2001.

And Democrat former  Congressman Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, who lost his reelection bid in 2010, telling his constituents in 2008 this his party lied to take back Congress in 2006:

“I’ll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we…the Democrats, I think pushed it as far as we can to the end of the fleet, didn’t say it, but we implied it. That if we won the Congressional elections, we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of Government would know that wasn’t true. But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress, we sort of stretched the facts…and people ate it up.”

Video here:

Just this past month, “NY Democrat Rep. Kathy Hochul Admits at Raucous Town Hall: ‘Basically, We’re Not Looking to the Constitution’ when it Comes to ObamaCare Mandates.”

Back in 2004, Thomas Sowell said:

There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis–some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.

And justifying lying. Fortunately, then and now, the American public as a whole are much smarter than “the nature fakers,” as Theodore Roosevelt once call them, and they don’t much like being bullied, Steve Hayward writes in the Weekly Standard:

The Gleick episode exposes again a movement that disdains arguing with its critics, choosing demonization over persuasion and debate. A confident movement would face and crush its critics if its case were unassailable, as it claims. The climate change fight doesn’t even rise to the level of David and Goliath. Heartland is more like a David fighting a hundred Goliaths. Yet the serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David doesn’t need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty club and only hits himself square in the forehead.

Which, incidentally, sounds very much like the worldview of someone who was willing to charge right into those Goliaths.

(H/T: Maggie’s Farm.)

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In “The Gold Violin,” a second season episode of Mad Men, there’s a classic scene where Don has to deal with a pair of young writers that have been foisted upon him by Duck Phillips, his bete noire, in the hopes of attracting a younger, hipper demographic for a coffee company that Sterling Cooper is pitching to. (Perhaps the episode should have been titled 1,000,000 Years Before Starbucks.) In an effort to explain themselves to Don, the head of the tyro ad duo begins riffing in quasi-proto-hipster jazz speak-style riffs:

Smitty: I think it’s pretty clear why we’re here. You want to know how our generation feels. So! I get this letter from my friend back in Michigan. He’s still in school, man, and it’s got this – I don’t know – 60-page rant in it. So, dig it!

Smitty starts to read the Port Huron Statement: “We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance, by power in uniqueness, rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.”

Don: That’s a beautiful sentiment. Does your friend know what you do for a living?

Smitty: Yeah, there was a sh*tty note with it. But this whole concept, is deeeeep.

Don: Student for a Democratic Society. That’s a hell of a focus group.

Kurt, Smitty’s sidekick: It is…what it is.

Don (while shooting off a withering look): It’s idealistic – that’s nice.

Smitty: Your generation wants to talk about that newly designed can or the premium beans. But we don’t want to be told what we should do or how we should act. We just want to be.

Flash-forward to 2012. James Lileks asks,“Who’s up for a manifesto?”

 The Atlantic posted a Letter to Old People from the Web Generation today, the work of a young Polish chap. I’m writing this only because it was given some traffic by the Atlantic, and it’ll probably be held up as a brave thing the old, frightened media types will have to understand.

He begins with the usual mistake: young people are different than ANYONE ELSE and maybe your problem, pops, is that you don’t get it. You’re square. L-7. Herbert.

We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it.

Heavy, man. But perhaps Dick Clark said it best in 1967 — with a bitchin’ backing track, to boot.

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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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