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

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

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced Friday that the next Independence variant littoral combat ship will be named after Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who survived being shot in the head last January when a gunman opened fire as Giffords met with constituents outside a Tucson grocery store.

Six others, including nine-year-old Christina Taylor-Green, [and George H.W. Bush-appointed federal judge John M. Roll, whom the Tribune either forgot to mention, or doesn't want to include because it clutters the narrative -- Ed] were killed in the shooting and 13 others, including Giffords, were wounded.

Mabus said the ship’s sponsor will be Roxanna Green, Taylor-Green’s mother. In naval tradition, a ship’s sponsor’s “spirit and presence guide the ship throughout its service life,” according to a Defense Department statement.

Giffords was presented with an artist’s rendering of what will be the USS Gabrielle Giffords at a Pentagon ceremony Friday afternoon.

You can see an illustration of the ship here. Curiously, it isn’t powered by windmills, nor does the Tribune seemed too upset about the potentially inflammatory rhetoric tacit in the ship’s ultimate purpose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?”

The late Sam Francis gave us the invaluable term “anarcho-tyranny” to describe that state of society in which “we refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny).”

Britain is far gone in anarcho-tyranny. Among my Christmas mail were a card and letter from a relative we barely communicate with the rest of the year. To make up for her side of the delinquency, she sends us a nice chatty summary of all that’s happened to her large and bustling family in the previous twelve months.

As the Derb concludes, “Anarcho-tyranny: coming soon to a jurisdiction near you” — which we like to call around here, California.

As Victor Davis Hanson recently noted, “In the new pay-as-you-go state, shrouded in politically correct bureaucratese, Californians have developed a keen sense of cynicism. The scores of Highway Patrol cars that now dot our freeways are looking for the middle class — the minor, income-producing infractions of the generally law-abiding — inasmuch as in comparison the felonies of the underclass are lose–lose propositions.”

(Via Ace of Spades.)

(H/T: 5′F)

Gregory then turned to the more realist element of the debate: “what makes you so sure you will triumph” and a Republican president will not rebuke your pledge? “I don’t think a Republican would be likely to win a Presidential election in the general if it wasn’t clear that he wanted to go in a different direction than Obama,” Norquist replied. “If you want to raise taxes to pay for Obama’s bigger government, then you vote Democrat, for crying out loud.” He noted that all the Republican presidential candidates save Jon Huntsman had signed his pledge, and noted that an otherwise successful President like George H.W. Bush could be defeated by making a wrong move on taxes.

The problem in Washington, Norquist concluded, was misspending and not, as Democrats claimed (in his words,) that “the peasants aren’t ending enough cash in for the king to spend.”

King Barack, mentored by the man who famously said, “white folks’ greed runs a world in need,” told his fellow leftwing elitists during the 2008 coronation season that blue-collar liberals were bitter and clinging — and “something everybody knows is true.” Why would he be surprised that at his ascendance to the throne hasn’t changed that?

Speaking of which, as  Joseph Curl notes in the Washington Times, Obama’s snooty proboscis continues to remain upturned:

“Over the last decade, we became a country that relied too much on what we bought and consumed.”

- President Obama, Nov. 19, 2011

“Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”

- President Carter, July 15, 1979

There are only two ways to look at the Obama re-election campaign right now: Either the upstart candidate who stunned the world when he defeated the Clinton machine to capture the Democratic nomination three years ago has lost every bit of that massive mojo, or the bruised and battered president, after three years in office, just doesn’t want another spin in the Oval Office.

Even before George H.W. Bush lost in November of 1992, the knock against him was that he didn’t want to repeat — despite seeming to knock off a major tyrant in the Middle East. But despite Obama’s reactionary punitive liberalism, nobody wouldn’t expect Barry to phone it in the same way the courtly Bush did 20 years ago.

Related: Daniel Pipes on “Obama’s Leftist Conundrum,”  and how it has hamstrung the SCOAMF POTUS when it comes to foreign policy.

The est movement became particularly fashionable amongst the Hollywood crowd, but eventually, Frum writes, “Erhard was hit by accusations of sexual molestation from one of his daughters, a colossal IRS tax lien, and a tough story by 60 Minutes. He fled the country in 1991. The tax case was eventually settled, but Erhard’s empire never recovered.” But the legacy of est lives on, particularly in its additions to the Newspeak Dictionary:

Every time someone says “I take responsibility for that,” or when we assure a friend who has got into trouble that we “support” him, or ask to be left alone by saying that we “need our space”—we are chatting away in est-speak. The essence of est-speak is its clever packaging of moral evasion as moral responsibility. What, after all, does it mean to “take responsibility”—as Attorney General Janet Reno ostensibly did after the conflagration of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, that left eighty-six people dead? She was not defending her action as right or proper under the circumstances, but neither was she apologizing or expressing remorse. Certainly she was not resigning. What she was saying, evidently, was that the action she took was taken by her. Beyond that, she had nothing to add. In a similar vein, we might wonder what it means when we tell an errant friend that we “support” him? That we condone what he has done? Probably not. That we will forgive him if he makes amends? Then we should emphasize not our support, but our expectations. That we will remain his friend no matter what he has done and whether he apologizes or not? But that’s a contemptible thing to say, isn’t it?

Not if you’re in the Obama Administration — or the MSM, judging by this headline at ABC: “Energy Secretary Chu Takes Full Responsibility for Solyndra.”

As the Professor writes, “But doesn’t resign,” the Professor adds. “He’s accepting ‘responsibility,’ but not the blame.”

The Obama’s obsession with the dated policies of corporatism and crony socialism, aging technology such as solar, and dated liberal psychobabble are yet more examples of an Administration cocooned in the past — specifically, the Carter-era seventies. They’re permanently trapped there; the rest of us can escape less than a year from now — if we want to.

Related: “Chu just said he didn’t know the Bush DoE had turned down Solyndra’s loan. Didn’t he?”

Update: Welcome Kathy Shaidle’s readers!

“They think having a camera makes them a journalist. Instead, this is a cheap caricature of journalism,” writes Columbia journalism school Dean of Student Affairs Sree Sreenivasan, who recently became one of O’Keefe’s interview subjects. “He shows once again that ambush interviews and selective editing don’t make you into a citizen journalist.”

Why not? Ambush interviews and editing — and by its very nature, all editing is “selective” — have been a staple of Sixty Minutes and their legacy media knock-offs or decades. Presumably Sreenivasan has condemned this form of journalism as well, right?

As Hugh Hewitt as written, the bitter and clinging facility of the Columbia Journalism School are desperately trying to save the old order.  Or to put it another way, Investigative Journalism: It’s All Fun and Games until the MSM Gets Stung.

Having fled these attitudes among my rural southern neighbors, I now live in a modern, liberal America where Ivy League colleges are building segregating housing because “race matters.” I actually heard one modern defender of segregated public schools (blacks-only academies) say “black people learn differently from white people.” Gee, I haven’t heard that since I was 12 — from a Klan member!

“Black people learn differently from white people” was the very argument Rev. Wright would later make while speaking to the NAACP in 2008 (video here), about 15 minutes before he went under then-candidate Obama’s bus in 2008 and into the MSM’s memory hole. And in the years between Graham’s book and Rev. Wright’s speech, American education’s self-imposed segregation has only gotten worse, particularly on college campuses. (Anderson Cooper, always a safe barometer for center-left conventional wisdom, defended the practice last year on CNN.)

A new article at the London Telegraph spotlighted by Mark Steyn on his homepage reports on a similar racial bifurcation occurring in England:

He insisted that Britain was becoming a “silo society” as many young people never leave their own housing estate or mix with children from different racial and religious backgrounds.

The comments come amid continuing alarm over segregation in inner-city communities.

Entrenched segregation in the education system was seen as one of the fundamental causes of the race riots that rocked parts of northern England a decade ago.