The slang term for rendering your laptop or cell phone inoperable is “bricking it.” Turning hundreds or thousands of dollars of electronics into an inert, brick-like state, which may cost a good chunk of change to fix — so much so that buying a new device might be the best bet.

That’s also a risk with the coal-powered uber-expensive Tesla electric car, according to Gawker-owned Jalopnik.com:

Tesla Motors’ lineup of all-electric vehicles — its existing Roadster, almost certainly its impending Model S, and possibly its future Model X — apparently suffer from a severe limitation that can largely destroy the value of the vehicle. If the battery is ever totally discharged, the owner is left with what Tesla describes as a “brick”: a completely immobile vehicle that cannot be started or even pushed down the street. The only known remedy is for the owner to pay Tesla approximately $40,000 to replace the entire battery. Unlike practically every other modern car problem, neither Tesla’s warranty nor typical car insurance policies provide any protection from this major financial loss.

* * * * *

Tesla Motors is a public company that’s valued at over $3.5 billion and has received $465 million in US government loans, all on the back of the promise that it can deliver a real world, all-electric car to the mainstream market. Yet today, in my opinion, Tesla seems to be knowingly selling cars that can turn into bricks without any financial protection for the customer.

Until there’s a fundamental change in Tesla’s technology, it would seem the only other option for Tesla is to help its customers insure against this problem. As consumers become aware that a Tesla is possibly just a long trip, a bad extension cord, or an accidental unplugging away from disaster, how many will choose to gamble $40,000 on that not happening? Would you?

Back in 2009, CNN reported that “The Obama Administration will lend Tesla Motors $465 million to build an electric sedan and the battery packs needed to propel it.” If the Jalopnik report is true, that’s yet more proof, as Rob Long wrote last month, “Obama is a terrible tech investor.  If the USA was a hedge fund, he’d be looking at a total collapse.”

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The more things change at CBS…

Daniel Schorr’s passing on Friday, at age 93, reminded me of the kind of assaults CBS News unleashed on conservatives before there were any countervailing forums available. A 2001 Weekly Standard article (nine years in my “pending” file!) detailed a particularly vicious left-wing hit piece he narrated in 1964 which linked Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater with neo-Nazis in Germany, a CBS Evening News story notorious enough to earn a mention – if without any censure – in the New York Times and Washington Post obituaries.

In a June of 2001 Weekly Standard review of a memoir by Schorr about his years with CBS, CNN and NPR, Andrew Ferguson recited the piece which aired during the GOP’s convention:

“It looks as though Senator Goldwater, if nominated, will be starting his campaign here in Bavaria, center of Germany’s right wing” also known, Schorr added helpfully, as “Hitler’s one-time stomping ground.” Goldwater, he went on, had given an interview to Der Spiegel, “appealing to right-wing elements in Germany,” and had agreed to speak to a conclave of, yes, “right-wing Germans.” “Thus,” Schorr concluded, “there are signs that the American and German right wings are joining up.” Now back to you, Walter, and have a nice day!

Ferguson pointed out what eluded the Washington Post and New York Times: “Though easily checkable, it was false in all its particulars” and “was false in its obvious implication of an Anschluss between German neo-Nazis and U.S. Republicans.” Nonetheless, “if Schorr was embarrassed by the Goldwater episode, his memoir shows no signs of it.”

…The more they remain the same: “CBS accuses Santorum of comparing Obama to Hitler:”

Santorum makes the point of why the greatest generation is called the greatest generation, and it’s because they were there for American when it needed them, at a ‘time of great peril’, and they did great things. And his larger point from there is that we can be like the greatest generation because our country needs us right now.But this is where the MSM acts as though they don’t understand what he was saying. He then makes the point that the challenge we face now is not as clearly defined as was the challenge for the greatest generation, that is WWII. And yet still, even they sat on the sidelines for a year and a half while Germany plunged Europe into darkness. Why did they wait, he asks? He answers it this way:

Because we’re a hopeful people. We think, ‘Well, you know it’ll get better. Yeah, he’s a nice guy. I mean, it won’t be near as bad as what we think. This will be okay.’ I mean, yeah, maybe he’s not the best guy after a while, after a while you find out some things about this guy over in Europe and he’s not so good of a guy after all. ‘But you know what, why do we need to be involved? We’ll just take care of our own problems. We’ll get our families off to work and our kids off to school, yeah we’ll be ok‘. That’s sorta the optimistic spirit of America.

But sometimes, It’s not OK. It’s going to be harder for this generation to figure this out. There’s no cataclysmic event. It’s going to be hard.

You understand it, you’re here. You wouldn’t be here if you don’t get it. But what about the rest of America? Do they understand what is happening?

He’s really just comparing this generation to the greatest generation and why this situation is going to be harder for our generation to grasp. It’s that simple. There was no Hitler/Obama comparisons made.

Click over for the CBS article and the video of Santorum’s speech.

Silly Santorum — doesn’t he know that only lefties like Paul Krugman are allowed to use the Moral Equivalent of War argument?

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Back in 2010, when Keith Olbermann was still on MSNBC, before he wore out his welcome at yet another cable network, we had a lot of fun comparing his fire and brimstone style to another hypocritical podium thumper,  Sinclair Lewis’ 1920s Elmer Gantry character. But while Keith has since left MSNBC for even lower ratings,  that old-time religion continues to emanate from the GE subsidiary’s studios:

MSNBC’s newest host, leftist professor Melissa Harris-Perry debuts Saturday morning, creating an actual four-hour block for the radicals at The Nation magazine. Harris-Perry is on the cover of this week’s Metro Weekly, a gay D.C. news magazine. At the end of the interview with Chris Geidner, there’s this whopper: her bible is written by Al Sharpton and Rachel Maddow.

“Undoubtedly, a little bit of both. Look, I love Politics Nation with Al Sharpton and The Rachel Maddow Show. And, I can’t think of two shows on the same network that are more different in tone and content.” Then she said: “I see them as my Old Testament and New Testament. I really need them both. I need to smite my enemies, and I need to understand them. And then I need to smite them, and then understand them. I probably will do a little bit of both on my show.”

But how can MSNBC be the Old and New Testament, when there’s the New York Times, and Jill Abramson, its latest editor, who famously said last year:

Ms. Abramson said that as a born-and-raised New Yorker, she considered being named editor of The Times to be like “ascending to Valhalla.”

“In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion,” she said. “If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”

The paper of “absolute truth” quickly airbrushed out the above uber-embarrassing quote from its then-incoming editor’s press release. But still, as Daniel J. Flynn wrote in 2008′s A Conservative History of the American Left:

Before the religious Right, there was a religious Left. The twentieth-century American Left got ideas from Karl Marx; the nineteenth-century American Left, from Jesus Christ.

“Religious Left” strikes contemporary ears as an oxymoron. Could Michael Moore, Bill Maher, or Susan Sarandon venture inside a church without melting? There are the reverends Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Barry Lynn, but they preach politics. The hostility to religion often associated with the Left was not always so pronounced. Indeed, Christianity once served as the primary influence upon American leftists. Its influence on early American leftists was so profound that it put its stamp on their decidedly irreligious offspring. Secular reformers admired the sacrifice and the communal unity of the early religious fanatics but not, generally, the religious beliefs. Religion and politics mixed in the Social Gospel, whose enthusiasts ultimately reached for more social, less gospel. What emerged was a political religion, or, perhaps more accurately, a religious politics. The secular kept the forms without the function. They promised salvation, exalted saints, pursued heretics, revered holy books, enforced dogma, viewed history teleologically, and acted with a self-righteousness generally confined to the elect and an ends-justifies-the-means mentality characteristic of millennial deliverers. They lost faith in God, but not faith itself.

Or to paraphrase Mark Knopfler, two women say their “news” organizations are Jesus. One of them must be wrong.

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Every generation gets the media it deserves. In the 1950s, there was Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, decades before the conspiracy theories kicked in. Today’s media? Goodnight and good luck, indeed. First up, the generally left-leaning Media Bistro finally calls Keith Olbermann’s number:

When Big Journalism Contributor Lee Stranahan complied all the rape and sexual assault stories about Occupy in one post for the world to see, you’d think that would’ve been the end of it. But Olbermann’s ego won’t allow anyone to have the last word on anything, so he “debunked” each one, one by one.

Unfortunately for Keith, the Breitbart websites are not the silent, wallflower types even if their writing is sometimes abominable.

In his “debunking,” Olbermann changed his tune from “No Occupy rapes” to “Because almost none of the allegations are of rape and most of this list are duplicated…” to “2 stories duplicated” to “Occupy MEMBERS were victims.” That’s quite a journey in just one day, especially without ever acknowledging his position completely changed.

Even still, where he ended up, that the victims and not the perpetrators were the only Occupy people involved in these rapes and sexual assaults, isn’t the truth. After Olbermann’s “debunking, Stranahan was back a few hours later with a section by section debunking of what Olbermann said. Keith then went silent, maybe to bed, maybe to play with his baseball cards, or maybe to Stuart Smalley in the mirror to calm his nerves.

Hey, say what you will about the man behind Stuart Smalley; while Olbermann’s inability to play well with others during recess has driven him further and further into the bowels of cable media (from ESPN to MSNBC to CurrentTV aren’t exactly steps upward on the ol’ CV), Al Franken’s particular brand of idiocy took him from Saturday Night Live to the halls of the U.S. Senate. From that perspective, Al did OK playing a pretend journalist on “Weekend Update.”

And speaking of pretend journalists, Jon Stewart, dubbed “the most trusted man in America” and “the most-respected journalist in America” by his fellow Obama worshipers in the MSM* has a moment of clarity, regarding a fellow postmodern poseur. Hey Rube!, as the Professor would say:

”I don’t know if he’s going to re-elect us. I worry about Obama. … I get the sense with Obama, he doesn’t really like us all that much. He’s kind of had his fill.

But it’s just a moment, before Jon quickly retreats to the warm innervating afterglow of 2008:

He’s the only president I’ve ever seen who begins each press conference with a heavy sigh. … [Bush] was the kid in sixth grade who gave the book report about a book he clearly hadn’t read. … Obama is the kid who has read the book in first grade and he can’t believe you idiots are just getting around to it.”

Well, that’s what he wants you to think, but until he actually releases his grades (among the many known-unknowns of BO’s bio), why should we believe he’s smarter than George W. Bush — who after all is smarter than Obama’s 2004 media-created prototype?

To paraphrase a certain fictional starship captain** I’m laughing (to keep from crying) at the results of the superior intellect:

Besides, if it’s brainpower you want, Obama’s got plenty just down the hall:

* Which tells you all you need to know about the “real” journalists in the MSM. Not that there are many left.

** As opposed to the non-fictional starship captains…

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Dateline Hollywood reports on a story that also played on CNN this afternoon:

The Colbert Report mysteriously cancelled tonight’s taping, Mediaite reports. Ticketholders for tonight’s taping were notified that episodes of the show had been canceled due to “unforeseen circumstances” for at least the rest of the week. Viewers tuning into Comedy Central tonight found a rerun of Colbert talking about Herman Cain. Comedy Central has not commented on why the show is repeating for the rest of the week.

Since Colbert is basically doing a spoof of Bill O’Reilly (in much the same way that Jon Stewart is doing a long-form daily version of SNL’s venerable Weekend Update), why not ask O’Reilly himself to sit in for the rest of the week? He and Colbert are on good terms professionally  — and he certainly knows his pop culture.  The audience response would be electric, to say the least…

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What could go wrong?  Just as I was ripping a few more CDs to upload to the Amazon cloud, comes ominous news indeed from Doug Ross that the “Amazon board adds Jamie Gorelick, former Fannie Mae and DOJ official.” That PR-style headline from Geek Wire hides the fact that, as Doug writes, “Gorelick is best-known for her leading roles in two epic, trillion-dollar catastrophes, which earned her the nomme de guerre ‘The Mistress of Disaster:’”

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?

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Everybody and his cousin in the starboard side of the Blogosphere has linked to the Daily Caller’s first expose inside the paranoid Media Matters bunker, the sequel to their brilliant 2010 reporting on the JournoList, the self-described “non-official campaign” in the Beltway media to help elect Obama president in 2008. And speaking of which, note this in yesterday’s article:

“The entire progressive blogosphere picked up our stuff,” says a Media Matters source, “from Daily Kos to Salon. Greg Sargent [of the Washington Post] will write anything you give him. He was the go-to guy to leak stuff.”

“If you can’t get it anywhere else, Greg Sargent’s always game,” agreed another source with firsthand knowledge.

Reached by phone, Sargent declined to comment.

“The HuffPo guys were good, Sam Stein and Nico [Pitney],” remembered one former staffer. “The people at Huffington Post were always eager to cooperate, which is no surprise given David’s long history with Arianna [Huffington].”

“Jim Rainey at the LA Times took a lot of our stuff,” the staffer continued. “So did Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle. We’ve pushed stories to Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne [at the Washington Post]. Brian Stelter at the New York Times was helpful.”

“Ben Smith [formerly of Politico, now at BuzzFeed.com] will take stories and write what you want him to write,” explained the former employee, whose account was confirmed by other sources. Staffers at Media Matters “knew they could dump stuff to Ben Smith, they knew they could dump it at Plum Line [Greg Sargent’s Washington Post blog], so that’s where they sent it.”

Smith, who refused to comment on the substance of these claims, later took to Twitter to say that he has been critical of Media Matters.

Smith was also a self-confessed member of the JournoList; as Glenn Reynolds notes, MMFA and the JournoList share some remarkable traits:

Of course, to the extent that Media Matters affects coverage it’s because left-leaning journos regard it as legitimate, and want to help. In this regard, like JournoList, it’s a “self-herding device.”

And like the JournoList, a way to take ordinarily mild-mannered folks and whip them into a frenzied mob.

But Ed Morrissey, the source of our headline above, wonders if the Daily Caller didn’t out-think themselves and wound-up burying the lede on their story:

The actual story here might be the reverse of how Carlson et al frame it here.  This sounds as though the White House uses Brock and Media Matters to conduct a proxy war against its perceived enemies in the news media and to push its propaganda out through the MSM.  The DC’s descriptions of attacks on reporters and media outlets who don’t fall in line would make MMFA a very valuable pitbull for Jarrett and Obama, and one with some plausible deniability, at least until now.  This should really be the screaming red flag in the article, rather than some of the salacious tidbits about Brock.

Interestingly, just a few days ago someone else connected the White House to Media Matters, along with a warning that their relationship could cost Obama the next election.  The name of that right-wing nut?  Alan Dershowitz:

Read the whole thing (both Ed’s post and the underlying Daily Caller article).

Another timely question is posed by P.J. Salvatore of Big Journalism: “Who did MMfA tick off that so many sources as of late are throwing them under the bus?

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Near the end of his life, Osama Bin Laden gave up on his chosen profession, and advised his relatives to enter the 21st century, Walter Russell Mead writes:

The big news today: according to family members, by the end of his life Osama bin Laden was telling his family to “Go to Europe and America and get a good education.”

What? The great Islamic umma, center of global culture and light of the world has no universities where the children of the Great Jihadi can get a decent education?  The clueless, hell-bound infidels of Europe and America make the Sons of the True Faith look incompetent and backward on the vital matter of educating the young?  It isn’t enough to sit on a dirt floor in Pakistan memorizing the Koran and learning how to wear a suicide bomb vest?

But what about the obligation to take up the cause of jihad and violence and crush the evil doers in the West?

Never mind about all that, Osama supposedly told his children and grandchildren.  “Do not follow me down the road to jihad,” he said.  “You have to study and live in peace and don’t do what I am doing or what I have done.”

All those Salafi ideologues promoting the idea of jihad against the West as a sacred obligation compulsory on all Muslims are presumably choking on their beards as they read these words.  The homosexual-hangers and the adultress-stoners are having a bad morning. No doubt they will tell themselves that this story is yet another lie from the cynical west, but they will have to wrap themselves ever more tightly in the delusions and wishful thinking that blinker their thoughts — and undermine their political effectiveness.

They’ll give up on jihad right around the same time that ClimateGate convinces the a different group of religious zealots to change their own destructive course. (QED)

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Richard Rushfield of Ricochet paints a damning portrait of a news channel twenty-odd (very odd) years past its prime, and riding on fumes. “Tonight, in its coverage of the death of Whitney Houston, CNN gave its viewers a horrible glimpse into the hollowness at its core:”

As the very young Saturday anchor on duty scrambled to fill the air time, viewers and Houston fans were treated, on top of the usual grasping at straws inanities to the following:

• A parade of America’s leading ghouls and vultures fighting for their a bit of air time in the wake of the death including Al Sharpton, Dr. Drew and Hollywood publicist Howard Bragman – the latter a regular presence on Breaking News Hollywood death broadcasts, this time appearing with the stunning report that the Grammy Party of Clive Davis, Houston’s mentor, was likely to be affected by the news.
• A reporter stopping people on the street to gleefully break the news of Houston’s death and capture their stunned reactions, like some sort of Letterman prank.
• The only “news” the Cable News Network provided in these first hours has thus far been reading of celebrity tweets responding to the death.  The fun began in the first hour of the coverage when the anchor suddenly announced that Malcolm Jamal Warner had tweeted his condolences. The 140 character regrets of Kim Kardashian among others soon followed.

This seems to be what we need a major news organization for these days: to read celebrity tweets to us.  Because apparently they think 140 characters are more than we could get through on our own.

Because Twitter has been so kind to the network’s on-air “talent.”

Related: Another recent look at the MSM bungling a celebrity’s obit: “Joe Paterno, 1926-2012; CBS Jumps the Gun Reporting Obit.”

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The weekend before the election of 2004: Walter Cronkite tells Larry King* that George Bush and Karl Rove had captured Osama bin Laden and were evidently holding him in cryogenic storage at the Ministry of Defense alongside Austin Powers, Evel Knievel and Vanilla Ice.

Flash-forward to election year 2012: “Current TV** host Cenk Uygur claimed President George W. Bush had no interest in finding Osama bin Laden,” adding that Bush was “sitting on his ass.”

Bill Clinton could not be reached for comment.

Related: “Oh my: Majorities of liberal Democrats now support drone strikes, keeping Gitmo open.” Fancy that.

* The Piers Morgan of your parents’ generation.

** No, we’re not sure what that refers to, either.

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“Do Aliens Go Invisible by ‘Going Green,’” the Discovery Channel asks for reasons unknown, other than perhaps it being a slow news day:

Canadian science fiction writer Karl Schroeder has come upon a novel solution to the failure of astronomical observations to solve the Fermi Paradox. He proposes: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.” (This is a takeoff on Arthur C. Clarke’s posit: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”)

In other words, smart aliens have “gone green” and generate no waste products that we could detect. They therefore blend into the galaxy. Therefore, “artificial and natural systems are indistinguishable,” writes Schroeder.

Our response is in video form at the top of the post.

Beyond that rebuttal, the Discovery Channel doesn’t appear to be any hurry to do their part to accelerate this process by discontinuing their cable TV channel and deactivating their Web server, but it is a reminder of the end game of radical environmentalism: putting the toothpaste of western civilization and technological progress back into the tube and returning mankind to a primitive pre-industrial state.

Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Democrat Governor, appears to be particularly eager to help.

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Ann Coulter goes all-in for Mitt Romney:

“you owe me and you’d better be as right-wing a President as I tell people you will be!”

– Ann Coulter on Hannity last night recounting her exchange with Mitt Romney

That’s the quote The Blaze and Mediaite are jumping on to highlight — a pundit who has taken a lot of hits for her defense of Romneycare insisting to the candidate that he really does pursue a conservative course once in government. One dares even imagine how sharp Coulter’s barbs would be for a President Romney devolving back into Massachusetts Moderation.

Another one that’s more important though is the quote I chose for the headline. “We’ve killed off Rockefeller Republicans” Coulter declares, pointing out that Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum have little ideological differences and juxtaposed with John McCain are much more conservative.

I missed the memo — Romney is in many ways a good man, and would be a far better president than Barack Obama — but then that’s not setting the baseline very high. But if only by way of RomneyCare, isn’t he the very definition of a Rockefeller Republican?

Related: Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades on “Mitt Romney and the Tea Party Pundit.”

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It’s no coincidence that SF stands for both “science fiction” and “San Francisco” — terms that are increasingly interchangeable as a once great city continues to collectively go further off a cliff:

Above the Law may need to hire a full-time legal bathroombeat reporter.

A few days ago, we learned that Harvard Law School named a bathroom after an alumnus with an, umm, unusual last name.

Last night, we received a tip about the San Francisco branch of a national law firm that delivered an office-wide email concerning “restroom etiquette.” The email is hilarious, and if nothing else, impressively thorough. They thought of everything. The missive covered tips for masking awkward bathroom noises, suggestions for choosing a urinal, and an emphasis on the ways bathroom behavior can affect your professional reputation.

Let’s see which firm has (toilet) water on the brain, and take a look at the memo after the jump….

Without further ado, the hygienically minded firm is Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith.

I prefer the video version, myself:

Related: In Florida, an “environmentally-friendly” restroom goes “unexpectedly” horrifically wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(H/T: 5′F.)

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

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

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

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

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

– The Politico, Saturday.

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

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“President Obama leaves event promoting clean energy in a motorcade of 22 fossil-fueled vehicles:”

On January 26, 2012, President Obama visited a Las Vegas UPS plant. Stimulus subsidy for said UPS plant to purchase natural-gas-powered trucks: 5.6 million dollars. Stimulus subsidy for North Las Vegas green energy plant that laid off 200 workers yesterday: 5.9 million dollars. Using taxpayer dollars to leave an event promoting clean-energy vehicles in a motorcade of twenty-two fossil-fueled vehicles: Priceless.

It’s time to end all energy subsidizes, and let average Americans, like the President does, select the fuel they want, free of government interference.

For Obama, it’s just like a weekend jaunt at Martha’s Vineyard. Still though, they got out of the driveway at least; clearly the Oba-cade is making progress with its driver’s lessons. Recall this post from May of last year:

What goes around…

Obama needled one questioner who asked about gas prices, now averaging close to $3.70 a gallon nationwide, and suggested that the gentleman consider getting rid of his gas-guzzling vehicle.

“If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know,” Obama said laughingly. “You might want to think about a trade-in.”

…Goes aground:

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We know why Obama enjoys being president; why do the other candidates? As Seth Mandel writes at Commentary, “There’s an episode of the hit TV show ‘The West Wing’ in which the president’s likely re-election opponent is asked why he wants to be president and flubs the question. The president’s advisers enjoy a good laugh at their opponent’s mistake–until they realize their boss also doesn’t know why he wants to be president:”

This is not to suggest there are no differences between Romney and Obama or between Gingrich and Obama. But there is a puzzling incoherence. I like the spirit behind Gingrich’s resuscitation of the space program. But it’s unrealistic to suggest a permanent American moon colony won’t cost the federal government a fortune.

Gingrich criticizes the president for spending too much while trying to do too much and then proposes radical changes that would cost billions, probably trillions. And as for Romney, in one sentence he criticizes the president for demonizing success and then sheepishly suggests maybe he shouldn’t have been able to make or vastly increase his personal fortune.

They all want to be president. But they all need to make a better case for why they want to be president.

Obama’s current channeling Groucho Marx’s Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff character in Horse Feathers — even before he knows who the GOP candidate will be, whoever he is, he’s against him. But then, the antediluvian Obama’s the very definition of a reactionary, so he’s got that going for him, at least.

Actually, given their inability to articulate how they differ on policy, these have to be the least inspiring presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle, since, well, 2008. Is it too late for a do-over?

Related: Jay Cost adds, “Somebody else – somebody with the ability to make the case for reform in a sober and courageous manner – should jump into this race. And not just to keep Obama from a second term. If 2012 is a decisive election – then we need a candidate with the courage and rectitude to make the choice clear to the voters, so that once in office he has the mandate to fix this mess.”

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“Some said the state of our union was getting stronger, while others said it was getting weaker,  but I was getting bin Laden.”

– PBHO¹ at the SOTE², as neatly summarized in a single sentence by Prof. William A. Jacobson. (I actually did a quick Google — it really does sound like something Barry¹ would say to a crowd, doesn’t it?”

1. Apologies for the non-MSNBC-approved terminology there.

2. State of the Election speech. But for Obama¹, aren’t they all?

Update: Boil that boilerplate! (Video moved to top of page to not conflict with ad.)

Related: You can answer this question for the president in the coming months.

More: Obama pulls trigger on January Surprise: a mass refinancing plan for U.S. mortgages. What could go wrong?

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Scheduled for release to the Kindle and in analog dead tree form in April — the 17th, not the 1st surprisingly — is The Occupy Handbook, complied by Janet Byrne and published by the Hachette Book Group, the second largest publisher in the world, according to Wikipedia.

The book’s Amazon description claims:

Analyzing the movement’s deep-seated origins in questions that the country has sought too long to ignore, some of the greatest economic minds and most incisive cultural commentators – from Paul Krugman, Robin Wells, Michael Lewis, Robert Reich, Amy Goodman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Gillian Tett, Scott Turow, Bethany McLean, Brandon Adams, and Tyler Cowen to prominent labor leaders and young, cutting-edge economists and financial writers whose work is not yet widely known – capture the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon in all its ragged glory, giving readers an on-the-scene feel for the movement as it unfolds while exploring the heady growth of the protests, considering the lasting changes wrought, and recommending reform. A guide to the occupation, THE OCCUPY HANDBOOK is a talked-about source for understanding why 1% of the people in America take almost a quarter of the nation’s income and the long-term effects of a protest movement that even the objects of its attack can find little fault with.

Since it’s likely still in pre-production, for completion’s sake, here are some helpful suggestions to flesh-out the book:

• Which police cars have the smoothest surface to excrete against.
• What not to say to the media when you’re interviewed after an altercation with the police.
• Why David Duke totally digs OWS.
• The camp rapist: misunderstood soul?
• How to be the first protest dedicated to preserving the status quo.
• How my $90,000 in student loans for a degree in deconstructionist lesbian poetry led me to spend 93 days sleeping in a tent in downtown New York.
• #Occupymobiusloop: How to run up your student debt even more studying #OWS.
• Occupy Your Backyard! It’s not just for ten year olds playing GI Joe anymore.
• How to win friends and influence people by terrorizing minimum wage bank tellers.
• Those who attempt to appease you are simply showing weakness — attack! — whether it’s 1939 or 2011.
• Radical Chic: look sharp — look Soviet!
• Left-wing anti-Semitism: the hot new trend for the 21st century.
• The Bible: Like the Constitution, it’s over 100 years old and outdated. Best to discard by throwing it at your enemies.
• Churches too are part of the 1 percent. Steal with impunity.
• JFK was a plutocratic One Percenter. Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country can do for you!
• If we’re so hip, how come the people supporting us are so damn old?
• Why is a prominent spokesman for General Electric supporting OWS?
• If we’re so radical and dangerous, why do establishment media sources like the New York Times, a major publishing house, and Time magazine think we’re so cool?

I’m sure there are numerous other topics that could help make this title the best it can be, so feel free to add yours in the comments. Or maybe just occupy the Hachette Book Group’s New York offices, since they’re giving such protests their blessing by going all in with them.

(Headline suggested by the eminent Abbot H. Hoffman.)

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