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 “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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“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?

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“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.”

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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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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

• “NBC’s Lauer to Obama: Can Mitt Romney ‘Identify With the Middle Class?’”

– Newsbusters, February 6th.

• “Sources connected to NBC tell TMZ … Lauer was done with Today and wanted out — but the word at the network is he will now re-sign if NBC ponies up way more than the $17 mil he’s currently making, “TMZ reported yesterday. “We’re told negotiations are now ongoing — but if NBC agrees … Lauer could score as much as $30 MILLION a year.”

Related: “Multimillionaire Chris Matthews: Is Mitt Romney ‘Just Too Damn Rich?’”  Matthews’ fortune is estimated at “$16 million with an annual salary of $5 million.”

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Forget six degrees of separation — CNN’s Roland Martin is separated by only one — very famous — person away from President Obama. During the 2008 NAACP speech by Obama’s infamous, presumably former spiritual advisor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Martin was namechecked, along with his fellow CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien (who dubbed Wright’s speech “a home run” on the air) as a “long-term friend” by Wright. Martin has also had friendly chats on CNN with Wright’s equally inflammatory colleague Father Michael Pfleger. But just as Obama threw Wright under the bus almost immediately after the aforementioned speech — with CNN quickly following his lead — when one of Martin’s Tweets hit the fan at the start of week, Martin discovered that everybody’s expendable in the MSM:

Roland Martin, tweeted on Sunday, walked it back Monday, chastened on Tuesday, suspended on Wednesday…

That’s the short version of recent events in the life of the CNN commentator and author of Speak, Brother! A Black Man’s View of America.

The tale begins on Super Bowl Sunday, when Martin tweeted:

If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!

and

Who the hell was that New England Patriot they just showed in a head to toe pink suit? Oh, he needs a visit from #teamwhipdatass.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) took umbrage, immediately tweeting back:

@rolandsmartin Advocates of gay bashing have no place at @CNN #SuperBowl #LGBT.

The organization followed up with a statement demanding Martin’s dismissal.

As John Nolte writes at Big Journalism:

Fascistic GLAAD wins another scalp.

Over the years, CNN’s Roland Martin has said some awfully outrageous stuff about Republicans and the Tea Party — and not on his Twitter feed, but on the air at CNN. [Not to mention the rest of the country -- Ed] He’s pretty much accused us of being everything  just short of Nazis due only to legitimate policy differences we’ve had with his precious Barack Obama. As a response, the left-wing speech police — who disguise themselves as “media watchdogs” — have never (according to memory and Google) put any pressure on CNN to have Martin fired, suspended, or reprimanded.

And they shouldn’t. Martin has every right to be a racial demagogue, and CNN has every right to broadcast him. I don’t like the guy, but the thought of trying to silence him is anathema to everything I believe in. Unfortunately for Martin, the Washington Post and Politico aren’t big fans of the First Amendment and, as a result, just a few minutes ago it was reported that CNN has suspended Mr. Martin “for the time being.”

Martin’s sin? Tweeting a few childish jokes only a fascistic outlet like GLAAD could get away with pretending they are offended by.

Martin’s mistake? Martin inadvertently stepped into a trap he probably didn’t know existed, and as a result he is now receiving an invaluable lesson about today’s politically-correct hierarchy, where gay trumps black.

But a year ago, Martin himself was eager to join the rest of the leftwing MSM in its calls for a new civility in the wake of clip art that a crazed apolitical assassin likely never saw not leading to his shooting of Democrat Senator Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tuscon, in an editorial at CNN with the now ironic title, “After Tucson, will media tone it down?”

Note the first sentence in the quoted passage below:

If we are to embrace the notion of civility and humility in our discourse, that means not falling into our old habits. I was impressed that Roger Ailes, head of Fox News Channel, relayed to Russell Simmons’ GlobalGrind.com what he told his staff after the Tucson shootings: “I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that.”

Who knows if this edict will be photocopied and posted in the office of every Fox talk show host, and throughout its newsroom, to serve as a reminder to everyone when the nation moves further and further away from the shooting?

And he’s correct; those who vehemently oppose the views of Fox News and conservative radio hosts must also adhere to the president’s call for civility.

Maybe what we should all do is make “Remember Gabby and the Tucson 6″ buttons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers, as a way to stop someone in his tracks who chooses to get out of control.

Live by political correctness, die by it as well — or at least go into broadcasting purgatory. Or as Michael Graham asks at the Boston Herald, “What do the Catholic Church, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and CNN’s Roland Martin all have in common? They’ve all just been given a lesson in liberal ‘tolerance:’”

The most confused victim of the New Tolerance has to be CNN’s Roland Martin. All he did was send a tweet: “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!”For reasons I don’t understand, this makes Martin a homophobe. GLAAD demanded he be pulled off the air, and his lame joke was labeled “the equivalent of cheerleading for violence against gays” in The Washington Post.

Now this isn’t David Duke. It’s Roland Martin — one of the New Tolerance thugs who has long played the race card in service of the liberal agenda.

If the left is willing to throw him under the bus, nobody is safe. Forget “Yes We Can!” Today it’s “You’ve Been Warned.”

Considering Martin’s impeccably radical chic connections, like the supine Outer Party member Parsons when he winds up in 1984′s Ministry of Love for political re-education and/or a visit to Room 101, he must have been astonished to find himself a victim of the same forces of political correctness — and correction — he’s long since championed. But then, as P.J. Salvatore writes at Big Journalism, “Nobody Expects The Progressive Inquisition.”

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“Barbara Walters, Shameless Hypocrite: Hits Kennedy Mistress for Greed, Tells Her She Should Have Stayed Quiet,” Tim Graham writes at Newsbusters:

Almost four years ago, ABC’s Barbara Walters came out with her memoir Audition, using as its selling point a tale of her tawdry 1970s affair with married black Sen. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.). Seldom has a TV personality been a more shameless public hypocrite than Walters was on Friday with former Kennedy mistress Mimi Alford during an interview on “The View.”

Walters battered Alford four times with the notion she was greedy, with four different outbursts like “She’ll make a lot of money!” (That one came in the introduction.) Walters asked Alford why she would hurt Caroline Kennedy and her family, and then assaulted her with the reverse idea, that she could have “saved” Monica Lewinsky from ridicule if she’d talked earlier. But mostly, she insisted the book “did not have to be written” and “You could have let it go!” [Video and MP3 at Newsbusters.]

It’s always a bit amazing for a journalist, who’s supposed to want to reveal secrets, to tell people they should shut up and not tell their story. It’s more amazing to tell someone not to write a tell-all memoir after you’ve already done so, with a ka-ching. Walters was probably signaling to Alford: “I’m famous, people want to know about my fascinating life. You’re a nobody, just trying to exploit a famous man’s aura for a few bucks.”

As an elite Northeast Corridor liberal journalist, Walters is required to take one for the team on a whole host of issues — from John Edwards (keep rockin’!) to the ACORN scandal to ClimateGate, which the New York Times famously tried to bury in 2009 with this sorry defense, the mirror image of their making their bones in the WaterGate era with the publication of the Pentagon Papers:

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

To which Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard responded at the time, “As a journalist, there is no greater glory than publishing materials that were not meant to be published.”

But for Walters and many “journalists” on the left, silence at the appropriate time, in the cause of either advancing the Official Narrative or keeping the old legends preserved intact is an even greater reward.

Or course, as my PJM colleague Andrew Klavan has noted, “just shut up” has long been the motto of the left:

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Kathy Shaidle spots Timothy Noah of the New Republic (link safe; goes to Hot Air) with a bad case of the vapors over the newest revelations concerning JFK’s improprieties, in article titled “JFK, Monster:”

Afterwards, Alford says she was “deeply embarrassed,” and as she climbed out of the pool she “could hear Dave speak in as stern a tone as I ever heard him use with his boss. ‘You shouldn’t have made her do that,’ Dave said. ‘I know, I know,’ I heard the President say. Later, a chastened President Kennedy apologized to us both.” Alford believes that Kennedy showed “his darker side … when we were among men he knew. That’s when he felt a need to display his power over me.” Kennedy didn’t just have a thing for Social Register girls; he had a thing for humiliating Social Register girls. He also had a thing for humiliating his fellow Irishman, Dave Powers.

Maybe Kennedy wasn’t this much of a creep all that much (though Alford also tells of him once forcing her to take an amyl nitrite “popper” in Bing Crosby’s living room). But the poolside ritual of humiliation is not easy to reconcile with any kind of worldly tolerance for Kennedy’s peccadilloes. Perhaps the fairest conclusion to make is that Kennedy did some good things in his public life (and also some bad), but that he was capable of monstrous cruelty that’s hard to forgive and also hard to equate even with that of successors like Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon (or with any in his less polished younger brother Ted, whose own private life had plenty of dark moments but whose public accomplishment ultimately outshone JFK’s). Clinton shared many vices with President Kennedy, but I can’t imagine him ever doing anything like this.

“I can, very easily. So can my readers,” Kathy writes, dubbing Noah’s response a textbook example of liberals as “naive sophisticates:”

As a matter of fact, isn’t one of the most famous quotes about the Clintons that of the female Democrat who claimed she’d have blown Clinton, just to thank him for keeping abortion legal? [Nina Burleigh, then-White House correspondent for Time magazine -- Ed.]

It’s always surprising what liberals claim they “can’t imagine,” despite all the stubborn protestations of “backward, paranoid” right wingers.

You don’t usually have to “imagine” it, guys. It’s usually right in front of you, and you’re just refusing to see it, because we’re the ones showing it to you.

Which dovetails into a related post of mine from November of 2010:

Ann Althouse spots an endless reoccurring cliche amongst Leftwing Elites:

Welcome to my world: Dane County, Wisconsin, home of people who tell themselves they are the smart people and those who disagree with them must certainly be dumb. They don’t go through the exercise of putting themselves in the place of someone who thinks differently from the way they do. But how would it feel to be intelligent, informed, and well-meaning and to think what conservatives think? Isn’t that the right way for an intelligent, informed, and well-meaning person to understand other people? If you short circuit that process and go right to the assumption that people who don’t agree with you are stupid, how do you maintain the belief that you are, in fact, intelligent, informed, and well-meaning?

What is liberal about this attitude toward other people? You wallow in self-love, and what is it you love yourself for? For wanting to shower benefits on people… that you have nothing but contempt for.

You see this worldview manifested endlessly among the left, whenever you hear the hyperbolic phrase, “I can’t understand why anyone would be a conservative/Republican/libertarian/vote for Bush/vote for Reagan, etc.” Well, why the heck can can’t you? Is it really that difficult to mentally spend a few minutes in our shoes? We’re always asked by the left to celebrate diversity, and to try to understand those not like ourselves. How hard it can be to get a handle on why someone has a different view on say, income tax rates, transfer payments, small business, and government handouts than you do? Or why he likes to get his news from channel #360 on his DirecTV dial than say, channel #202 or #356?

Another example of this mindset can be in the title of Harry Stein’s terrific book last year, which grew out of a conversation he had with a self-described “liberal,” when Harry dared to supply the voice of reason at a dinner party in 2008 and suggest that the young would-be emperor, soul-fixer and lightworker had no clothes.

Perhaps the ultimate mote in a far leftist’s eye can be found here.

Also Related: Paul Rahe at Ricochet on “American Catholicism’s Pact With the Devil.”

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In his weekly column, Mark Steyn writes, “The president of the United States has decided to go Henry VIII on the Church’s medieval ass:”

Announcing his support for Commissar Sebelius’ edicts on contraception, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion, that noted theologian the Most Reverend Al Sharpton explained: “If we are going to have a separation of church and state, we’re going to have a separation of church and state.”

Thanks for clarifying that. The church model the young American state wished to separate from was that of the British monarch, who remains to this day Supreme Governor of the Church of England. This convenient arrangement dates from the 1534 Act of Supremacy. The title of the law gives you the general upshot, but, just in case you’re a bit slow on the uptake, the text proclaims “the King’s Majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England.” That’s to say, the sovereign is “the only supreme head on earth of the Church” and he shall enjoy “all honors, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits and commodities to the said dignity,” not to mention His Majesty “shall have full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts and enormities, whatsoever they be.”

Welcome to Obamacare.

You know what to do next.

Related: “No one wants to believe the president of the United States or any other high governmental official would deliberately lie to the Archbishop of New York. But what other conclusion can a reasonable person reach? That Valerie Jarrett and Kathleen Sebelius made him do it?” Michael Walsh writes:

One of the problems the Right consistently has in dealing with the Left is its touching credulity in their stated motives, instead of assessing their genuine objectives. Like the Archbishop, we’re constantly taken by surprise when the entirely predictable happens. Haven’t any of the princes of the Church read the essential text on the subject of good and evil (and the deception that evil must practice in order to overcome good), Milton’s Paradise Lost?

It’s star was certainly beloved by Saul himself.

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Ace asks a question that all of us have pondered at one point or another in the career of Barack H. Obama. “Has he gone insane?” As Ace notes in his headline, “Obama’s Compromise: I’ll Just Mandate That Employers Contract With Insurers To Cover Contraception For Free, and Hence Employers Cannot Be Said To Be Paying For It:”

The revised Obama mandate will make religious groups contract with insurers to offer birth control and the potentially abortion-causing drugs to women at no cost. The revised mandate will have religious employers refer women to their insurance company for coverage that still violates their moral and religious beliefs. Under this plan, every insurance company will be obligated to provide coverage at no cost.Essentially, religious groups will still be mandated to offer plans that cover both birth control and the ella abortion drug

According to Obama administration officials on a conference call this morning, a woman’s insurance company “will be required to reach out directly and offer her contraceptive care free of charge. The religious institutions will not have to pay for it.”

The birth control and abortion-causing drugs will simply be “part of the bundle of services that all insurance companies are required to offer,” White House officials said.

So here’s how this works.

I’m an insurer. Here were your two options, before Obama’s brilliant solution:

I could cover your employees for x dollars.

If you want birth control/abortifacient coverage, we’ll add that rider for y dollars. So this option is x + y dollars.

Obama’s genius solution is:

Hey, we’ll cover your employees for x + y dollars as a baseline. But we’ll toss in abortifacient coverage for 0 dollars.

Uhhh… That x+y is what it cost to have base insurance + birth control/abortifacient coverage. All that’s being done here is that people are lying about the costs — now the insurer and the contracting party lie and pretend the base insurance cost is x + y (which it isn’t; it’s x) and also pretend the cost for the birth control coverage is 0 (which it isn’t; it’s y).

All Obama’s doing is mandating that employers enter into a contract with insurers in which both parties pretend that the base cost of the service is higher than it is, and that abortifacient coverage now costs zero dollars.

Obama’s mandate solution is now just to force the conscience-objectors to lie about it.

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey concurs with that last sentence:

Basically, the Obama administration told religious organizations to stop complaining and get in line.  This “accommodation” only attempts to accommodate Obama’s political standing and nothing more.

Update: The LA Times’ Jon Healy calls this new position “magical thinking”:

Here’s where the magical thinking comes in. The following is from the fact sheet the White House released Friday:

Covering contraception saves money for insurance companies by keeping women healthy and preventing spending on other health services. For example, there was no increase in premiums when contraception was added to the Federal Employees Health Benefit System and required of non-religious employers in Hawaii. One study found that covering contraception lowered premiums by 10 percent or more.

Making everyone in a pool carry coverage whether they need it or not spreads the cost, saving money for those who really do need it and who’d choose to carry it if it were merely optional. But costs faced by the insurer are the same — and when the care is provided with no out-of-pocket costs, the insurer’s costs are likely to go up because more people will use it. Such is likely to be the case with contraception.

Also, let me emphasize one point that this does not address.  The government is forcing religious organizations to both pay for and facilitate activities that violate their religious doctrine.  If anyone thinks that passes muster with the First Amendment, that’s even more magical thinking than this funding shell game.

Mr. Obama has engaged in magical thinking throughout his public career. However, I’m not sure if the L.A. Times is the best source to attack him from that angle, lest anyone recall this infamous moment from the paper.

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We already know about the JournoList, and the Obama administration emailing MSNBC to “correct” them mid-show. And the Washington Post’s then-ombudsman admitted immediately after the 2008 election how deeply in the tank her paper was (and is) for the then-president elect. Now a new article at the Washington Beacon notes that the New York Times’ angel investor dropped by the Obama White House this week for a chat, which his admittedly liberal paper “unexpectedly” chose not to disclose:

The world’s richest man quietly slipped into Washington, D.C., this week for a series of powwows with top Obama administration officials – but you would not know it if you read the New York Times.

Univision’s Jordan Fabian reports that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim held a series of closed-door meetings with senior Obama officials such as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

Slim is worth an estimated $63 billion, and owns more than seven percent of the New York Times Company – though the eponymous newspaper of record didn’t deem it necessary to report on its partial owners’ D.C. trip. (Slim also loaned the Times $250 million last year, which earned him warrants to bump his holding in the company to nearly 16 percent.)

Often referred to as “Mexico’s Mr. Monopoly,” Slim has been accused of employing mafia-esque tactics to retain control of his 70 percent stake in the country’s telecom industry. Last week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development accused Slim’s telecommunications companies of overcharging customers and stymieing economic growth in Mexico.

Overcharging customers and stymieing economic growth? No wonder he feels so close to Mr. Obama.

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In Time — which is careful to remind its delicate readers that “the views expressed are solely his own” — Charles Murray outlines some of the material in his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010:

What makes the new upper class new is that its members not only have power and influence but also increasingly share a common culture that separates them from the rest of the country. Fifty years ago, the people who rose to the most influential positions overwhelmingly had Hank’s kind of background, thoroughly grounded in the American mainstream. Today, people of influence are characterized by college education, often from elite colleges. The men are married not to the girl next door but to highly educated women socialized at the same elite schools who are often as professionally successful as their husbands. They were admitted to this path by a combination of high IQ and personality strengths. They are often the children — and, increasingly, grandchildren — of the upper-middle class and have never known any other kind of life.

As adults, they have distinctive tastes and preferences and seek out enclaves of others who share them. Their culture incorporates little of the lifestyle or the popular culture of the rest of the nation; in fact, members of the new upper class increasingly look down on that mainstream lifestyle and culture. Meanwhile, their children are so sheltered from the rest of the nation that they barely know what life is like outside Georgetown, Scarsdale, Kenilworth or Atherton. If this divide continues to widen, it will completely destroy what has made America’s national civic culture exceptional: a fluid, mobile society where people from different backgrounds live side by side and come together for the common good.

Much truth in Murray’s diagnosis, but I can’t say much for his prescription for a cure though, as Kathy Shaidle writes, paraphrasing Murray’s solution. “Competent, responsible rich people should move next door to incompetent, irresponsible poor people, who will then supposedly be inspired by the former’s example to pull themselves up by their own Air Jordan laces:”

Murray’s startling reverse-Beverly Hillbillies “solution” to the great divide’s “problem” is his new book’s biggest “takeaway,” and not always in a good way.

Writing in The American Conservative, Rod Dreher remarked dryly:

But why, concretely, should a particular family choose to do that? Murray, a libertarian, suggests that it would make life more interesting for them. I bet it would….

Yes, no doubt life was terribly “interesting” for Helen Hill, Susan Poff, and Robert Kamin—right up to the second they were killed by the “underprivileged” ingrates they’d stooped to embrace.

(Naturally, The New York Times’ David Brooks thinks Murray’s idea is just dandy and would be even better if it was turned into a federal government program.)

Charles Murray has forgotten more about race, class, education, and intelligence than I could ever learn, so I feel deeply sheepish issuing the same challenge to him (and to David Brooks) that I would to any semi-anonymous, upper-class, bumper-stickered do-gooder preaching “zero population growth,” state-sponsored solar-powered homes, and a ban on the internal-combustion engine:

After you, sir.

Immediately after the 2004 election, Rush Limbaugh was fond of quoting this exchange between David Westin, then the president of ABC News (the initial reporting on 9/11 certainly proved a challenge to Westin, you may recall), and Tina Brown, now the editor of the Daily Beastweek, then the host of a long-since-canceled CNBC show.

RUSH: So, anyway, she’s got David Westin on the program, and she says, “David, would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities?” She’s talking about the red states of America here, folks. “Would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities and saturate themselves in these cultures so that they get more stories from those communities?”

WESTIN: I think we don’t do that enough, and I’m not just talking religious communities. I’m talking all sorts of communities across the country. I think that… You understand this, Tina, living in New York or in Los Angeles, we have busy jobs. We go into the office every day. We tend to socialize with the same people, or the same types of people, and I think it’s terribly important for journalists to get out whether it’s overseas or domestically and try to understand.

RUSH: We need more foreign correspondents in Alabama! We need more foreign correspondents north of Palm Beach County in Florida! We need embeds to go to church, find out what’s going on with these holy rollers! Ah, folks, you can’t know how much I love this.

Instead of dispatching foreign correspondents to red state Alabama, what Murray is calling for is wealthy coastal elites to “Occupy” less fortunate neighborhoods mostly in their own blue states. Living in Silicon Valley, adjacent to Palo Alto,  Marin, and the aforementioned Atherton, I can’t see that happening, well, ever. Can you?

Update: “Mitt did it all wrong” Don Surber writes, in a very much related post:

No matter who you support this year, you have to admit Mitt Romney went about becoming president the wrong way. Instead of wasting his time learning how business works and building a multi-billion-dollar company that really did save or create hundreds of thousands of jobs, Mitt should have lived off his daddy’s fortune like Jack Kennedy. Chasing skirts and molesting teenage virgin is a lot more fun than figuring out how to revive an old business.

Instead, Mitt Romney gave his inheritance to charity. Who does that anymore?

The press loves the kids of privilege — Bobby Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller and the rest of the trust fund babies — but only if they support huge government programs that transfer wealth from workers to non-workers. Remember, the press says liberals win despite their wealth while the press says conservatives win because of their wealth. The press never inquires into the manipulation of the tax code that allows wealth to transfer on to the fifth generation of a 19th century robber baron or 20th century bootlegger.

As the Professor writes, read the whole thing.™

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Deadline Hollywood reports that AMC Entertainment had a rough 2011:

The exhibition chain reports this morning in an SEC filing that it had a $72.8M loss in the last three months of 2011 — more than double its $32.8M loss in the quarter a year ago — on revenues of $557.3M, down 7.6%.  Attendance fell 8.7%. With a decline in the number of 3D and Imax films which come with higher ticket prices, patrons on average paid 1.4% less to get in than they did a year ago.

From Hollywood and the White House’s perspective, that’s nothing but good news, right? If, as President Obama said last fall, America has “gotten a little soft,” less movie watching should help ameliorate some of the national flab he perceives, right? Robert Redford is anti-energy, and less movie attendance should help reduce our energy consumption a little bit. Less toilet paper being consumed in the restrooms should make Laurie David and Sheryl Crow happy.  Then there’s the main consumer product that movie theaters distribute. If, as James Cameron said in 2010, “DVDs are wasteful…It’s a consumer product like any consumer product.” If DVD are a wasteful consumer product, isn’t movie watching as well? It sets the Hollywood cycle of selling consumer products in motion — and sells plenty of non-Michelle Obama-approved junk food in the process.

And speaking of eco-puritans at the intersection of DC and LA, “Al Gore’s Current TV Could Go Belly-Up If Keith F’n’ Olbermann Doesn’t Start Delivering Big Ratings,” Ace writes.

If, as Al claims, we have less than four years left to save the planet, shouldn’t he eliminate his channel voluntarily to help reduce his carbon footprint?

Flashback: “Prominent Environmentalist Finally Discovers His Religion’s Catch-22.”

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Whether it was on the field…

Eli Manning and the New York Giants, all but given up on mid-December, saved their best for the last, pulling out a dramatic fourth-quarter comeback against the New England Patriots to finish off a brilliant stretch of play with a 21-17 victory Sunday for the franchises’ fourth Super Bowl title.

Manning delivered a 78-touchdown drive, capped by six-yard Ahmad Bradshaw touchdown run against an uncontested Patriots defense with 1:04 left. New England tried to give Tom Brady as much time for a comeback as possible, but the Giants defense stopped them to seal the victory.

It was Manning’s seventh fourth-quarter winning drive of the season for the Giants, who seemed to court disaster and play their best with everything hanging in the balance. It also signaled another late-game, Super Bowl outdueling of Brady, considered among the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. Manning previously won a duel between the two in Super Bowl XLII.

The Giants took over at their own 12-yard line, trailing 17-15 with just 3:46 remaining. Manning started with a pass to Mario Manningham, who made a circus 38-yard grab down the sideline. The Giants moved methodically the rest of the way, both killing the clock, burning New England timeouts and eventually forcing the Patriots to concede the winning points rather than allow a field goal with no time left.

…Or during the halftime show…

While sharing the stage with Madonna and Nicki Minaj during the song “Give Me All Your Luvin,” M.I.A. — in Cleaopatra gear and black stiletto boots — gave the middle-finger insult directly to a camera for a full second.

Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction” in which her breast, with a nipple guard, became exposed during her halftime show with Justin Timberlake has been a difficult-to-top moment in TV history.

Jackson’s indiscretion resulted in a $550,000 fine levied by the FCC against CBS for airing the uncensored, highly controversial moment.

…This Super Bowl had a distinct sense of deja vu about it, right down to yet another Government Motors, Chrysler division commercial praising the joys of bombed out, government stimulus-ed out Detroit, this time with Clint Eastwood — once a  self-professed libertarian — playing the role of Eminem:

And once again, presumably Mark Steyn’s next weekly column or Corner post writes itself.

Update: “Would Dirty Harry ask for a handout? Hell no, he wouldn’t.” In contrast, the attendees at the Super Bowl have a bit more common sense than Clint: “#Occupy Protesters Heckled Outside Super Bowl.”

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Heathrow’s flight controllers would never cut it at O’Hare or Minneapolis:

Heathrow Airport faced questions last night as to why half of all flights were cancelled hours after it stopped snowing.

BAA, the Spanish-owned airport operator, incurred the wrath of passengers after 600 flights were grounded at Heathrow despite just three inches of snowfall, disrupting the plans of as many as 18,000 travellers.

The disruption was in stark contrast to airports across Europe where, despite record low temperatures, flights took off as normal.

But why wouldn’t Heathrow’s flight controllers be unnerved at the thought of any snow, based on the stories that their hometown newspapers were running a decade ago?

Related: “Global Warming Engine Unexpectedly Slows,” Walter Russell Mead writes. Though not before England’s James Delingpole writes at Ricochet.com, “Memo to the Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven’t had quite enough death threats yet…”

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At the DC Examiner, Charlie Spiering writes:

An obvious victim of CNN’s graphic-heavy election presentation, news anchor John King called Mitt Romney “Governor Mormon” last night, during coverage of the Nevada election results.

“If you look here among faith, obviously Governor Mormon is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” King said. “He’s a Mormon and he also won big among Mormons.”

Romney won the vote of 9 out of 10 Mormons in Nevada.

“Bigotry will slip out,” Glenn Reynolds writes, clearly in nowhere near as charitable a mood as Spiering. Nor should he be. A year ago, King apologized on-air for a guest using the word “crosshairs,” which for a time was a temporarily-loaded word amongst King’s fellow left-leaning members of old media — even on one that for years hosted a show with an almost identical title:

On Tuesday’s John King USA, CNN’s John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term “crosshairs” during a segment: “We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language” (audio available here). This action stands in stark contrast to an incident over a year earlier where former anchor Rick Sanchez took four days to apologize for using a unconfirmed quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh.

Since King himself set the standard, clearly, he must apologize for using his own similarly potentially inflammatory language or risk being called a hypocrite.

Well, again, especially given his network’s repeated penchant for religious bigotry.

Update: As a commenter asks below, does King ever refer to Harry Reid as “Senator Mormon?”

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“Politico: Enough of the ‘Indignation Industry,’” Ace writes:

I wish they were serious about this. I’d sure like an end to the left’s incessant “He said a dirty word” childish tattletaling and, even worse, the silly crap we on the right respond with in kind, to make the point.

I get the reason to make the point, to notify the left of what the same rules feel like when used as a weapon against them. But despite that defensible point, I feel silly about doing it. It doesn’t feel like us. It feels like them. It feels like imbeciles who shriek at the sight of a mouse.

Jonathan Martin of Politico recently referred to the “cracker counties” of Florida (those bordering Georgia and Alabama), and the right has taken him to task for his very own Macacca Moment.

After he complained how silly that all was, now a fellow writer at Politico writes about how silly the game is, generally.

I agree. But let’s remember that going forward, huh? Let’s not just realize it’s silly when applied against a co-worker, eh?

* * * * *

Back to Politico’s point: It’s a great point. I’m glad someone in the liberal media made it.

And I expect they’ll drop what they know about the essential falseness and triviality of the Indignation Industry the next time the Democratic Party and Obama for America needs them to.

Especially given that it’s Politico, which makes its living pitting various American political factions against each other — invariably, given the Website’s liberal allegiances, using conservatives as punching bags.  It’s awfully rich of them to pretend to get offended when someone calls them on their shtick.

(And don’t miss Ace’s thoughts in the same post on why Romney is running. Romney’s reasoning as a candidate is a sort of Reader’s Digest condensed version 0f the decisions Bush #43 made in office, determined to avoid the mistakes his father made as president.)

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

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

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

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

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

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

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

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

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

– Headline at Newsbusters today.

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

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

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

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

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

1. Celebrity news

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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