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Did I call this yesterday or what? NBC’s Matt Lauer begins a Today Show segment on rising gas prices by saying, “There’s some troubling news. Gasoline prices are back on the rise, and some analysts say it could get even worse, just in time for the summer driving season.”

If Matt sounds even more robotic than usual reading the script in his ‘prompter, that’s because the dean of NBC newsreaders anchormen pleaded with incoming president-elect Obama on Meet the Press to raise gasoline prices, when they were temporarily at their lowest, back in early December of 2008:

TOM BROKAW: Let’s talk for a moment about consumer responsibility when it comes to the auto industries. As soon as gas prices dropped, consumers moved back to the larger cars once again. The SUVs are the big gas consumers. Why not take this opportunity to put a tax on gasoline, bump it back up to $4 a gallon where people were prepared to pay for that, and use that revenue for alternative energy and as a signal to the consumers: “Those days are gone. We’re not going to have gasoline that you could just fill up your tank for 20 bucks anymore.”

You can see Brokaw in action in a Silicon Graffiti video I made at the time called “Rendezvous with Scarcity.” I’ve cued-up the YouTube clip to just before Brokaw’s appearance.

Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters wrote at the time in response:

If you needed any more proof that liberal media members don’t give a darn about the state of the economy or the American people, and instead just want to raise taxes, you got it Sunday when Tom Brokaw advocated gas prices, which have plummeted recently, be kept at $4 a gallon with government keeping the added cost.

And as I mentioned in the video, the New York Times and the Washington Post expressed near-concurrent identical sentiments as Brokaw. Groupthink or JournoList-style message coordination? You make the call!

Back in the fall of 2010, James Taranto coined the phrase “Green Supremacists” to describe a particularly eliminationist-obsessed subset of radical environmentalists:

What kind of people blow up children?

White supremacists, for one example. On the morning of Sept. 15, 1963, members of a Ku Klux Klan “splinter group” set off dynamite under the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four girls: Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. Denise was 11; the other three were 14.

Islamic supremacists, for another example. Groups like Hamas and al Qaeda not only attack civilians indiscriminately but frequently employ Muslim children as suicide bombers. Our friend Brooke Goldstein made a whole movie about it.

There’s a new kind of supremacist on the scene: green supremacists. They haven’t blown up any children–not in real life. But they’ve been thinking about it.

A British outfit called the 10:10 Campaign hired Richard Curtis, a writer and producer of cinematic comedies, to produce a four-minute video promoting its effort to encourage people to cut “carbon emissions.” The result, titled “No Pressure,” struck James Delingpole, a global-warming skeptic who writes for London’s Daily Telegraph, as “deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful.” He’s being too kind.

You can see the 10:10 video embedded above, and earlier examples of green supremacists rounded up here. But Kate at Canada’s Small Dead Animals blog really puts the mindset behind it into context via a recent quote from a German environmentalist, who’s apparently taking Al Gore’s “Assault on Reason” book title just a little too literally. As Kate writes, “Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!”

• Adolf Hitler to Heinrich Himmler, 1942; – “The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world.”
• Petra Döll, German climate scientist, February 2012 – “Klimaskeptiker sind wie Viren”.

But hey, no pressure to conform, right?

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.

“Students at East Orange school named for Whitney Houston mourn singer’s death,” the Newark, NJ-based Star-Ledger reports. The school was renamed in 1997; it was previously called Benjamin Franklin Elementary School.

Barack Obama is the first black president of the United States, but his doctrine is by no means unique. He follows in the footsteps of other presidents with a similar vision, the vision at the heart of the Progressive movement that flourished 100 years ago.

Many of the trends, problems, and disasters of our time are a legacy of that era. We can only imagine how many future generations will be paying the price — and not just in money — for the bright ideas and clever rhetoric of our current administration.

The two giants of the Progressive era — Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — clashed a century ago, in the three-way election of 1912. With the Republican vote split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt’s newly created Progressive party, Woodrow Wilson was elected president, so that the Democrats’ version of Progressivism became dominant for eight years.

What Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had in common — and what attracts some of today’s Republicans and Democrats, respectively, who claim to be following in their footsteps — was a vision of an expanded role of the federal government in the economy and a reduced role for the Constitution of the United States.

Like other Progressives, Theodore Roosevelt was a critic and foe of big business. In this he was not inhibited by any knowledge of economics, and his own business ventures lost money.

“In this he was not inhibited by any knowledge of economics” — what a marvelous turn of phrase. And as Sowell concludes regarding another president with a lacuna of economic common sense, “Barack Obama’s rhetoric of ‘change’ is in fact a restoration of discredited ideas that originated 100 years ago.”

Think of it as “Barack to the Future.”

Of course, Wilson and both Roosevelt had the advantage of getting there first, and expanding a then-small government. Today, after a century of unending bloat, the left is now a series of competing special interest groups, often working at cross-purposes with each other, all vying, hat-in-hand for their president’s attention and the taxpayers’ money. Just as the Keystone pipeline pitted unions (who’d like more jobs) against radical environmentalists (who in the Rousseauian heart of hearts would like to see all industrial production everywhere end, as long as they can keep NPR and their local Starbucks), as the Anchoress writes,  “Obama Has Stranded the Catholic Left:”

But Obama’s move on Friday wasn’t about nuance; it was about destroying the surprising unity of the “Catholic Right” and the “Catholic Left” on this issue; it was about dividing and conquering. In a deeply cynical move, Obama used Sister Carol Keehan to foment that division; he needed her credibility to reassure the Catholic Left that it could prefer unity with his administration over unity with the church.

His punch was off. Possibly he hadn’t anticipated a block to guard the possession of rights, which are not his to dole out as he sees fit. He seems not to realize, even now–as his administration muddies up the story with talk of costs and savings–that his Catholic allies’ rejection of his HHS Mandate wasn’t about contraception or sterilization, nor could their approval be regained with a skillful uppercut to the men in the miters. What the HHS Mandate has revealed is that the preservation of the freedom of religion–of the churches rights to be who and what they are and to exercise their missions–is worth going to the mat for, no matter which corner you’re coming from.

QED.

If journalists at those institutions have the chutzpah to produce another round of sob stories about average working people suffering under higher energy prices, we’ll know it’s all boilerplate, and that their bosses at least aren’t themselves very sympathetic to the idea.

It’s not often that one person plays key roles in two — count ‘em, two — trillion-dollar disasters. Welcome, my friends, to the world of well-connected Democrat Jamie Gorelick.

You’ve been warned.

Third time’s the charm! Though if Gorelick does to Amazon what she did to Bill Clinton’s nascent non-war on terrorism and then to Fannie Mae, they’re in heap big trouble. Amazon has run roughshod over first Borders and then Best Buy — what happens to the Internet if the 800 pound gorilla of online retailing falls?

• Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World, by Jay Nordlinger.
• The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, by Jonah Goldberg.
• Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, by Charles Murray.
• American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.

The last title dovetails nicely with my recent interview with Thomas Hibbs, the author of the newly updated Shows About Nothing, set at the corner of Hollywood and Nietzsche.

The books by Jonah and Jay Nordlinger are due out in the spring. The titles by Hibbs, Murray and Ratner-Rosenhagen have been out for a bit. If you’ve read them, please post your thoughts in the comments.

(Cross-posted at the Tatler.)

“Remember when no one understood why ABC asked about contraception at the NH Republican debate?” William A. Jacobson writes, adding that Newt’s comeback (posted above) “was prophetic in hindsight:”

Well what do you know, about a month later the Obama administration proposes administrative rules under Obamacare which would require free contraception be provided even by religious institutions which oppose contraception on religious grounds.

It’s almost as if Stephanopoulos got the memo first. Unless, of course, you believe in coincidences.

Disney-ABC in tight message coordination with Democrats? Heaven forfend.

At the Tatler, Clarice Feldman adds, “It’s time the RNC asks [Stephanopoulos] if he coordinated this with the White House directly or through its media shills like Media Matters.  And if he did or refuses to answer or to offer a credible explanation, ABC should be booted from further debate moderating privileges.

Why should the RNC grow a spine now?

Earlier: “CNN Host Asks If Initial Outrage Over Contraception Mandate was ‘Manufactured’ to Hurt Obama.” Can you spell projection, boys and girls?

John Hinderaker of Power Line writes:

Athens is burning tonight, as leftists and others protest against the Greek Parliament’s vote in favor of the measures that are required by the EU in exchange for a 130 billion Euro bailout–enough to keep Greece afloat for now, at least. The rioters have nothing intelligent or constructive to say. They believe, evidently, that Greeks are entitled to consume far more than they produce, forever. Nice work if you can get it.

Best observed, to borrow the title of Victor Davis Hanson’s latest essay on the topic, from the rearview mirror. But Blue America’s woes are quite similar — and may get nearly as violent, in the coming months and years.

“What are you rebelling against?” Marlon Brando’s character was famously asked in 1953′s The Wild One. “Whadda you got?” he famous replied. (“Oh, I don’t know,” James Lileks replied, albeit somewhat belatedly. “The Pure Food Act, antibiotics, an industrial infrastructure that makes it possible for you to ride your bikes around, paved roads, a foreseeable successful conclusion to rural electrification, sewers, the ability to walk into any small café and order a Coke and know you won’t be squitting your guts out 12 hours later into a hole in the ground alive with squishy invertebrates. Little things.”

Flashforward nearly 60 years. “What are you protesting?” Michelle Fields of the Daily Caller asks an astroturfed group of Occupiers in front of CPAC in the above video.

“I don’t know,” several reply. Others refused to appear on camera, perhaps the first camera and press-shy protesters in the history of mankind.

Well, other than the $60 bucks one of the would-be Occupiers said he received from the Sheet Metal Workers Local 100.

Update: “A search on ‘CPAC’ at the Associated Press’s main national site returns five stories on the conference. A search on ‘CPAC occupy’ (not in quotes) returns none. It would appear that the AP is doing all it can to make sure as few news readers, listeners and viewers as possible learn how totally humiliated the Occupiers’ not so excellent adventure at CPAC this weekend really was.”