Mary Eberstadt is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, and a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute. In the 1990s, she was the executive editor of National Interest magazine, and in the mid-1980s, she worked with George P. Shultz and Jeane Kirkpatrick in the Reagan administration.

In the introduction to her new book, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, Eberstadt does not shy away from asking the big questions about life in the west in the first decades of a new millennium. (Say, how are those things reckoned, anyhow?) She writes:

Why was belief in the Christian God and his churchly doings apparently taken for granted by most Europeans, say, six hundred years ago— whereas today merely alluding to the possibility of the existence of that same God is now guaranteed to provoke uneasy dissent in some sophisticated quarters and savage ridicule in others? How much did the Enlightenment and rationalism and scientifi c thinking have to do with this enormous transformation— this sea change from a civilization that widely fears God, to one that now often jeers him? How much did various historical infl uences fi gure into this reshaping of our shared civilization— factors like technology, the world wars, politics, church scandals, the changing social status of women, and more?

These and other large questions will be considered in the pages ahead— including, at the outset, the radical question raised by some scholars, which is whether Western Christianity has even declined in the first place.

It is the contention of this book that just about everyone working on this great puzzle has come up with some piece of the truth— and yet that one particular piece needed to hold the others together still has gone missing. Urbanization, industrialization, belief and disbelief, technology, shrinking population: yes, yes, and yes to all those factors statistically and otherwise correlated with secularization. Yet, even taking them all into account, the picture remains incomplete, as chapter 2 goes to show. It is as if the modern mind has lined up all the different pieces on the collective table, only to press them together in a way that looks whole from a distance but still leaves something critical out.

As Eberstadt goes on to write, her new book “is an attempt to supply that missing piece.” Its Amazon page adds:

The conventional wisdom is that the West first experienced religious decline, followed by the decline of the family. Eberstadt turns this standard account on its head. Marshalling an impressive array of research, from fascinating historical data on family decline in pre-Revolutionary France to contemporary popular culture both in the United States and Europe, Eberstadt shows that the reverse has also been true: the undermining of the family has further undermined Christianity itself.

During our interview, Eberstadt will discuss:

• What is the relationship between spiritual decline and demographic decline?
• Is religious belief suppressed in secular Europe and Blue State America?
• How the rise of “New Age” spiritualism beginning in the 1960s impacted and interacted with the decline of religion in the west.
• Some background on the book’s publisher, Templeton Press, founded by pioneering mutual fund manager turned philanthropist Sir John Templeton.
• Could today’s ongoing economic and demographic crises help to strengthen the family?

And much more. Click here to listen:

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Transcript of our interview begins on the following page; for our many previous podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.

“So much scandal is swirling around President Obama that it was hard to spot what must be the biggest strategic error of the week,” the New York Sun opines, “his warning to Prime Minister Cameron that if Britain leaves the European Union it could lose clout in Washington. The story ran in few, if any, places other than the London Financial Times, which featured on page one a picture of Messrs. Cameron and Obama in the Oval Office:

The headline read, “Obama warns Cameron that Britain would lose influence in the US if it pulls out of EU.”

Who in the world came up with that brainstorm? The idea seems to be, as the FT quotes Mr. Obama as articulating it for Mr. Cameron, that Britain’s membership in the EU is “an expression of its influence and its role in the world.” The president advised Mr. Cameron, in public statements yesterday, to try to “fix what’s broken” in the European Union rather than pull out. In context that’s an intervention by Mr. Obama into Britain’s domestic political situation, where a fast-growing political party is challenging Mr. Cameron’s government over the issue of Europe.

The challenger is the United Kingdom Independence Party. It was founded in 1993 in the wake of the Maastricht Treaty, which led to the creation of the European Union and the Euro. For years a marginal group, with a libertarian streak, UKIP has been surging lately. It has helped box Mr. Cameron in to promising a referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Union, and if recent polls are an indication, there’s a fair chance that Britons would decide to exit the socialist satrapy that has been set up in the years since Maastricht.

So when did it become American policy to set itself against the British voters? A British exit — known as “Brexit” in British shorthand — ought to be seen as an opportunity for America. These columns have been making this point for some years, urging the idea that an exit of Britain from the EU would present a chance to forge something substantive out of the “special relationship” that Britain and America are supposed to enjoy. It’s a situation that calls for creative thinking in the White House and the State Department.

As James C. Bennett and Iain Murray noted in the Wall Street Journal in 2o11, a savvier president would have offered England a membership in NAFTA, if it departed from the EU.

“Not Too Sharp,” quips James Taranto today:

Morgan Whitaker, a producer for NBC newsman Al Sharpton’s show, doesn’t seem to think either the murder of four Americans in Benghazi or the Obama administration’s use of the IRS to target political opponents is any big deal. She weighed in with a blog post yesterday titled “The 7 Other ‘Scandals’ That Didn’t Turn Out to Be Obama’s Watergate”: Solyndra, Fast and Furious, the alleged offer of an administration position to a 2010 Senate candidate, national-security leaks, Obama’s birth certificate, the White House’s links to MediaMutters and Janet Napolitano’s order giving work permits to some illegal aliens.

This was posted at 4:30 p.m. ET yesterday. The AP broke the story of the Justice Department’s surveillance some 20 minutes later. It’s the worst timing since the New York Times’s puff piece on unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, which ran on Sept. 11, 2001.

MSNBC President Phil Griffin told NPR in 2011 that Al Sharpton is “smart. He’s entertaining. He’s experienced. He’s thoughtful. He’s provocative, all the things I think that MSNBC is.” (And how.)

I’m sure Griffin feels that goes double for Sharpton’s producer.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a “Philadelphia abortion doctor convicted of killing three babies born alive at his grimy clinic was spared a possible death sentence Tuesday in a deal with prosecutors,” AP reports today on the ABC News Website:

Dr. Kermit Gosnell gave up his right to appeal and in return will spend life in prison. Gosnell, 72, was found guilty Monday of first-degree murder in a case that became a flashpoint in the nation’s abortion debate.

Former clinic employees testified that Gosnell routinely performed illegal abortions past Pennsylvania’s 24-week limit, that he delivered babies who were still moving, whimpering or breathing, and that he and his assistants dispatched the newborns by “snipping” their spines, as he referred to it.

Prosecutors had sought the death penalty because Gosnell killed more than one person, and his victims were especially vulnerable given their age. But Gosnell’s own advanced age had made it unlikely he would ever be executed before his appeals ran out.

Prosecutors instead agreed to two life sentences without parole, and Gosnell was to face further sentencing Wednesday: in the death of the third baby, an involuntary manslaughter conviction in the death of a patient and hundreds of lesser counts.

Gosnell has said he considered himself a pioneering inner-city doctor who helped desperate women get late-term abortions.

Of course he does. Margaret Sanger could not be reached for comment.

Note that the AP wire report appears on the ABC News Website; it was only yesterday that ABC television viewers first heard about the case:

Fifty six days after the grisly trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell began, ABC broke its self-imposed blackout and finally offered coverage. World News anchor Diane Sawyer belatedly told viewers that Gosnell was convicted on three counts of first degree murder against newborn babies, as well as on a slew of other charges. Terry Moran explained, “For two months, jurors heard often shocking, grisly testimony.” He described the details as a “house of horrors.” A house of horrors that ABC took 56 days to notice.

As the Media Research Center has aggressively documented, ABC went from March 18, 2013 (the trial’s start) through Monday afternoon with no coverage. Yet during the same time, the network devoted a staggering 187 minutes (or 70 segments) to other shocking criminal cases, such as Jodi Arias and Amanda Knox.

Just shameful.

The new film’s resident villain, that’s who:

Will the new Star Trek sequel boldly go where much of Hollywood has gone before–bashing President George W. Bush?

Benedict Cumberbatch, the British actor who plays the mysterious villain in Star Trek Into Darkness, told BBC America that the new film’s futuristic setting didn’t stop it from reflecting on recent global events.

In the film there’s a debate among Starfleet personnel over how best to extract an enemy in a distant part of the galaxy — and whether that enemy should be subjected to due process.

The British actor says: “It’s no spoiler I think to say that there’s a huge backbone in this film that’s a comment on recent U.S. interventionist overseas policy from the Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld era.”

Gee, wait’ll Cumberbatch finds out that James T. Kirk was inspired by John F. Kennedy, and the United Federation of Planets by JFK and LBJ’s New Frontier/Great Society interventionist overseas policy. Or that the Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld era of foreign policy flowed directly from the previous Clinton, Gore and Madeleine Albright era?

The trick to good sci-fi is to bury the politicization deep in the subtext, which is made much easier when the layer on top of that contains spaceships, phaser pistols, and the distaff half of the crew in miniskirts. The writers know that — even if the actors hired to speak their lines give the game away far too often.

“It’s a bad rerun of a show that was awful the first time, and yet ran far too long.” Rand Simberg writes today at PJM:

Enemies lists, IRS audits of same, cover-ups at high levels of government, an aloof president who has others do his (unspoken?) bidding — after the events of the past week, many have been comparing the Obama administration to another one that ended almost forty years ago. And while many of the comparisons of Barack Obama to Richard Nixon are indeed apt, one doesn’t have to go that far back in history to find an even better parallel.

For those of us politically aware in the 1990s, the Obama administration has come to seem like a bad rerun of the corrupt Clinton era, complete with witness intimidation and character attacks on their political opponents, stonewalling and obfuscating while claiming that their crimes are being “politicized,” false claims of “exoneration” by official reports, and, yes, even IRS audits of their political enemies. All with a sycophantic media complicit, and even incestuous and inbred, with the White House.

For example, several days ago, when the Benghazi scandal started to climb out of the grave to which the administration and its enablers in the press thought they had consigned it last fall, the first response from the president’s spokesman was that it was something that happened a long time ago, seemingly back in the Cambrian era of late 2012. As opposed, of course, to the Bush administration, which apparently remains evergreen four and a half years after its departure, at least when it comes to assigning blame for otherwise unexplainable and “unexpected” mishappenings during this one. Of course, as PJ Media’s Ed Driscoll points out, Jay Carney’s own corruption is not exactly new-fallen snow.

This was a standard tactic of the Clinton administration and its defenders, in every scandal from Whitewater and Castle Grande, to the illegal campaign donations from James Riady (who, in another case of what was old is new again, has somehow recently turned up in the new series as well). And then there was  John Huang and the Chinese donations (and others too numerous to recount in this brief piece), to L’Affaire Grand — the Lewinsky scandal.

In each and every case, the tactic would be to prevaricate, stonewall, and withhold requested documents for weeks, months or years. Then, when some evidence managed to evade the combined media/administration cover-up and come to light (such as Hillary Clinton’s law-firm billing records), it would suddenly become “old news.”

We’re seeing a repeat of other tactics as well.

Read the whole thing.

And then check out Jim Treacher, who notes that “The only difference between this week and every other week for the last 4 years is that for once we’re not the only ones paying attention.”

Speaking of which, as Moe Lane writes, guess who wrote this six years ago:

In Washington, scandals metastasize, growing and changing until we can’t remember what they were about in the beginning. A bungled burglary became a cancer on the presidency, forcing Richard Nixon to resign in disgrace. A money-losing Arkansas real estate deal led to Monica, a blue dress and Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Already, the furor over the dismissal of eight U.S. Attorneys has shifted focus from the crass but essentially routine exercise of political patronage to the essential project of George W. Bush’s presidency: its deliberate and aggressive efforts to expand and protect Executive power.

If you haven’t already figured it out, click over to Moe’s blog for schadenfreude, super-sized style.

Update: “News Anchor: IRS Targeted Me After Obama Interview.” Love the photo juxtaposition at the top of the page.

In 2006, Boston University professor (and PJM contributor) Richard Landes brought you “Pallywood,” which illustrated how Palestinians are experts at faking news on a Hollywood-style assembly line basis for a gullible western media that wants to believe:

Later that same year, Reuters was busted for its heavily Photoshopped image of Beirut under attack, in which Reuters’ Mideast stringer and ace Photoshop user Adnan Hajj was busted for criminal image assault with a Photoshop clone tool. An embarrassed Reuters grudgingly issued a “Picture Kill” update to the papers that rely on the wire service for its content:

And over the past decade, there have been numerous other examples of bad Photoshoppery from the Mideast region; sometimes from freelance stringers such as Hajj, sometimes from Mideast government propaganda shops.

Today, the ExtremeTech.com Website explores how, in their estimation, “the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop:”

The photo, dubbed Gaza Burial, was purportedly captured on November 20, 2012 by Paul Hansen. Hansen was in Gaza City when Israeli forces retaliated in response to rocket fire from Palestinian rocket fire. The photo shows two of the casualties of the Israeli attack, carried to their funeral by their uncles. Now, the event itself isn’t a fake — there are lots of other photos online that show the children being carried through the streets of Gaza — but the photo itself is almost certainly a composite of three different photos, with various limbs spliced together from each of the images, and then further manipulation to illuminate the mourners’ faces.

Just looking at the photo, you can tell there’s something off. The perspective of the buildings looks weird; it seems like there’s so much unsharp mask or a similar Photoshop filter on the bald men in the front that he looks painted in, and the focus seems off on the other men in the photo:

After some extensive and (given the name of the Website) appropriately technical background on how the photo was assembled, ExtremeTech notes:

Basically, Hansen took a series of photos — and then later, realizing that his most dramatically situated photo was too dark and shadowy, decided to splice a bunch of images together and apply a liberal amount of dodging (brightening) to the shadowy regions. For what it’s worth, Hansen claims that the light in the alley was natural — and to be fair, sometimes magical lighting does occur. I think most of you will agree, though, that the photo simply feels fake — there’s just something about the lighting that sets off a warning alarm in your brain. As for why World Press Photo didn’t forensically analyze the photo using freely available, advanced, accurate analysis tools such as FourMatch or FotoForensics… who knows.

Oh, I forgot to mention the best bit: Hansen was meant to provide the Raw file for his winning photo, as proof that he didn’t significantly modify the final image — but so far, he hasn’t.

Because, as we mentioned at the top of the post, so many leftwing western news agencies want to believe. But then, modern wars — and especially postmodern wars — are fought not just on the battlefield, but inside the TV screen and Web monitor as well.

Update: Speaking of postmodern, ABC News ventures into the murky realm of “even better than the real thing” at the conclusion of their analysis of Hansen’s controversial photograph:

Ironically, the magic of Photoshop makes it possible to edit photos to look as if they had not been edited with Photoshop. Palmisano believes that in the future photographers will increasingly emphasize authenticity by using post-processing to make their images look less perfect than if they had been taken with a digital camera. The worse a spectacular photo looks, the more genuine it feels. [Ironically, this is the sort of thing that Hollywood CGI artists have been doing for the last 20 years. They frequently add simulated lens flares, camera shakes, artificial smoke elements and other techniques all designed to deliberately "dirty up" a digital special effects shot, to add verisimilitude. -- Ed]

When Paul Hansen took his picture in the Gaza Strip, another photographer was nearby. His photo must have been taken in almost the same location and at almost the same time, but it is an ordinary-looking news photo. It lacks the perfect cropping, the magical light and the debate over authenticity, but it also lacks the resonance and sympathy of Hansen’s image.

Hansen says that he wants to achieve good things with his work. Perhaps an ordinary news photo wouldn’t have been enough for that.

So the House of Stephanopoulos is entering further into “fake but accurate” territory? I thought Dan Rather and the New York Times had the lock on that defense.

Here’s an interesting Der Spiegel video (in German, but with English subtitles) with some further thoughts on how the above photo was manipulated:

And in a 2011 blog post titled “Is This Photo Ethical?” A photographer examines a 2010 image taken by Hanson of young girl shot by police after the Haiti earthquake. While Photoshop trickery isn’t discussed, photographer Eric Kim writes:

Looking at the image [of the young dead Haitian girl], it is a very emotional image that does bring great amounts of awareness to this horrible issue. However when looking at the photo below shot by photographer Nathan Weber, I feel that the story changes. Rather than having the image being a positive political tool, it looks like the photographers below are more like vultures– all trying to get the best version of the image and exploiting this horrible crime.

Yes, it’s always disconcerting to see the MSM’s sausage being made.

The very definition of “Pop Psychologist,’ Brothers was a staple of network TV in the 1970s:

With a doctorate from Columbia University, she was a pioneer of the television advice show.

Her celebrity took off in 1955 after she entered a television quiz show called The $64,000 Question. She became the only woman to ever win the show’s top prize.

In a broadcasting career spanning four decades, Brothers hosted syndicated radio shows, dispensing advice to callers. She also appeared – usually as herself – on dozens of TV programs, from Saturday Night Live to CHiPs, and several movies.

Found via the Internet Movie Database, which has a page devoted to her over 160 TV and movie appearances over the years.

“It may be time to start addressing our President as ‘Barack Milhous Obama.’ What did he know, and when did he know it?”

— Rush Limbaugh, today.

“Barack Milhous Obama”

— Headline, Ed Driscoll.com, this past Friday, May 10th.

(And we previously used it as a headline in October of 2011.)

Update: As the Professor writes, “The Boston Herald Goes All In On The Obama Scandals;” read the whole thing.

“Could Detroit Be the Next City to Go Bankrupt?“, Veronique de Rugy asks at the Corner:

Why is the city in such a terrible financial situation? Because it spends too much and it suffers from rampant corruption:

Orr, a Washington-based turnaround expert and bankruptcy attorney, was selected by Gov. Rick Snyder to oversee Detroit’s finances. In his report, Orr described the city’s operations as “dysfunctional and wasteful after years of budgetary restrictions, mismanagement, crippling operational practices and, in some cases, indifference or corruption.”

“Outdated policies, work practices, procedures and systems must be improved consistent with best practices of 21st century government,” Orr wrote. “A well-run city will promote cost savings and better customer service and will encourage private investment and a return of residents.”

As such, we shouldn’t be surprised that Detroit has lost almost 26 percent of its population between 2000 and 2011. But don’t despair Detroit, the Light Rail is coming to you:

In January, US Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced a federal commitment of $25 million to the M-1 Rail project, thus tentatively setting construction to begin in the summer for the 3 mile stretch of rail between downtown and New Center. Gone will be the days when Detroit’s only rail transit is a glorified amusement park ride!

Ahh, the desire named streetcar; it’s particularly desirable, even in broke cities such as Detroit, because the potential to spread the graft around is so much more than simply buying new busses:

A transit agency that expands its bus fleet gets the support of the transit operators union. But an agency that builds a rail line gets the support of construction companies, construction unions, banks and bond dealers, railcar manufacturers, electric power companies (if the railcars are electric powered), downtown property owners, and other real estate interests. Rail may be a negative-sum game for the region as a whole, but those concentrated interests stand to gain a lot at a relatively small expense to everyone else.

It looks like Detroit could also be getting a statue of Robocop, in much the same way that similarly exhausted Philadelphia has an iconic-slash-cheesy statue of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky character. But what’s fascinating is that judging by these headlines on today’s Drudge Report, real-life Detroit actually appears in far worse shape than the dystopian projections that 1987′s Robocop depicted for the city’s 21st century future:

• Too late to save Detroit?
• ‘Dysfunctional, wasteful’…
• 27% of Detroit Homes Vacant…

Wow: “Govt obtains wide AP phone records in probe,” the Associated Press claims:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” Pruitt said.

Perhaps Ann Coulter has the justification, at least from BHO’s POV: “Obama’s Signature Move: Unsealing Private Records,” she noted in August of last year, in an article that’s been re-linked at the Drudge Report today:

Mitt Romney presents one enormous problem for Barack Obama’s campaign: No divorce records. That’s why the media are so hot to get their hands on Romney’s tax records for the past 25 years. They need something to “pick through, distort and lie about” — as the Republican candidate says.

Obama’s usual campaign method, used in 100 percent of his races, has been to pry into the private records of his opponents.

Democrats aren’t going to find any personal dirt on the clean-cut Mormon, so they need complicated tax filings going back decades in order to create the illusion of scandal out of boring financial records.

Romney has already released his 2010 tax return and is about to release his 2011 return. After all the huffing and puffing by the media demanding those returns, the follow-up story vanished remarkably quickly when the only thing the return showed was that Romney pays millions of dollars in taxes and gives a lot of money to charity.

Let’s take a romp down memory lane and review the typical Obama campaign strategy. Obama became a U.S. senator only by virtue of David Axelrod’s former employer, the Chicago Tribune, ripping open the sealed divorce records of Obama’s two principal opponents.

Read the whole thing.

“Note to President Obama: IRS Scandal Is Why We Distrust Government,” Jonathan S. Tobin wrote at Commentary yesterday. Today’s latest Obama scandal isn’t exactly rehabilitating their reputation. Or as Erika Johnsen writes at Hot Air in response to Obama’s AP phone hack:

 This is not a good day for the White House. The IRS has been specifically targeting conservative groups; and now it looks like the DOJ has been seriously meddling into the freedom of the press? No doubt they’ll claim that it was all for the sake of national security and plugging leaks of classified information, or hey, perhaps that this was just a mix-up by some low-level Justice employees, or something… Or maybe they’re going for a, ‘Heck, let’s just overwhelm everybody and air the thugocracy scandals out all at once’-type strategy?

Which shoe drops next?

“Looks as though Joe Klein is back on the Narrative Plantation,” John Nolte writes at Big Journalism. “After blistering the Obama Administration over revelations that the IRS was targeting conservative groups, today Klein took his marching orders from Ezra Klein and publicly walked it all way back:”

I may have swung a bit too hard, putting Barack Obama’s Administration in the same league as Franklin Roosevelt’s and Richard Nixon’s when it comes to the Internal Revenue Service. The situation remains a major embarrassment, though.

The most important difference is that the Roosevelt and Nixon IRS depredations came from the White House. This mess seems to have percolated from the middle–the IRS’s Cincinnati office (a major facility, by the way)–up to the upper-middle. It was an overreaction, to be sure–but, as Ezra Klein explains, it was a response to a very real problem[.]

“So now Joe Klein is back in the club — back on the Narrative Plantation as a member of Ezra Klein’s JournOlist in good standing,” Nolte adds. “Now that everyone is in line and knows their place, the media can proceed to circle the wagons.”

I’d love to know how Joe was instructed to dial it back. Did anything need to be spoken, or was it simply understood? “Joe, you’re 66 years old, only a few years younger than Bob Woodward. You saw what me and the rest of the boys in the Juicebox Mafia did to him a couple of month ago, right? Shame if something like that were to happen to you…”

Update: And again (times two): “The New JournoList spin on the IRS,” as spotted by Meryl Yourish:

That’s funny. Two different articles, one in Mother Jones, one in the WaPo, yet they’re running the exact same explanation as to why the IRS targeted conservative groups filing for tax exemptions.

“I found two,”  Yourish adds. “How many more New JournoList IRS apologists can you find?” Add Klein to the list, which could keep on growing.

NBC, November 4th, 2007: the network, owned by GE, which makes its money selling lightbulbs, goes dark to hector viewers into going “green:”

The Atlantic today on NBC’s dismal upcoming primetime schedule: “This Is the Not-So-Bright Future of NBC:”

I just sat through NBC’s upfront presentation, which teases the new season lineup for advertisers and other assorted looky-loos, and boy, does the future not look bright for the struggling Peacock network. After clearing whole swaths of its schedule through cancellations, this could have been NBC’s chance to revitalize itself with sharp, interesting fare. But I suppose the economic realities of running a major network are such that it seemed wiser to roll out a slate of boring, predictable, almost parodic shows, none of which seem likely to do the network any good.

And speaking of National Broadcasting Karma, this also seems appropriate:

From Newsbusters, yesterday: “Chris Hayes’ ‘Easy’ Solution To Poverty: Give People Money!”

Chris Hayes is what passes at MSNBC for a progressive intellectual.

Which makes his simple-minded and manifestly mistaken proposal that much more maddening. Making a peek-a-boo video-clip appearance on today’s Melissa Harris-Perry’s show, which focused on finding solutions to poverty in America, Hayes was seen holding up a hand-written sign with his solution, reading “Giving people money: It’s actually that easy.” View the video after the jump.

Presumably then Hayes and the rest of the on-air “talent” at MSNBC are OK with this Reuters story, on advertisers giving less money to NBC, and the other TV networks:

“Advertisers have many more places to go to, so broadcasters are probably a little reticent of trying to push stronger (rates), even with this stronger economy,” Fratrik added.

Viewers’ biggest distraction is cable TV, which is churning out more hits that lure eyeballs from the Big Four. AMC’s zombie thriller “The Walking Dead” and the A&E reality show “Duck Dynasty” haul in broadcast-sized audiences. “Walking Dead” averaged 10.7 million viewers this season, more than all but the top 12 shows on broadcast TV.

Online video players such as Hulu and Google Inc’s YouTube are jockeying for ad dollars, and viewing hours are growing on Netflix, the streaming service that is making a big push into original programming with shows like political thriller “House of Cards.”

Plus, networks don’t yet get full credit in Nielsen ratings for the viewers who catch their favorite shows online.

So far this season, combined prime-time ratings on the four broadcasters declined 7.5 percent, the biggest year-over-year decline in six years, according to Nielsen data provided by Horizon Media and based on live viewing and those who record and watch the show the same day.

Hey, CNN also advised Americans to spend less in 2010; a year after NBC’s Tom Brokaw personally begged Mr. Obama to take money out of consumers’ pockets in the form of higher gasoline taxes. If they’re consuming less television, that’s all good news, right?

Phila abortionist Kermit #Gosnell guilty 1st degree murder in 3 of 4 babies.

— jdmullane (@jdmullane) May 13, 2013

That’s according to J.D. Mullane, the Bucks County Courier reporter who has been covering this trial from the onset — and who tweeted the famous photo of the empty press section of the courthouse holding the Gosnell trial.

At LifeNews.com, Steven Ertelt adds:

The jury in the murder trial of abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell returned a verdict and found him guilty on three of the four first-degree murder charges he faced.

The guilty verdict on these three counts subjects the abortion “doctor” to the potential he will face the death penalty when a second jury considers his sentencing on the convictions.

One local reporter covering the trial indicated Gosnell “heard verdict passively, with small bitter faced smiles.”

Gosnell is charged with four counts of first-degree murder for killing babies following delivery in an abortion process that involved “snipping” their necks and spinal cords. He also faces a third-degree murder charge related to the death of a woman, Karnamaya Mongar, 41, of Virginia, from a botched legal abortion. Gosnell, who has been in jail since his January 2011 arrest.

The abortionist faces 258 counts total and other charges against him include one count of infanticide and one of racketeering, 24 counts of performing third-trimester abortions and 227 counts of failing to follow the 24-hour waiting period law before an abortion so women can consider its risks and alternatives.

Allahpundit adds that Gosnell was also found guility “of involuntary manslaughter for the death of Karnamaya Mongar, the woman who died in a late-term abortion.”

More as it comes in.

Update: ” The penalty phase will begin one week from today,” Bryan Preston writes at the Tatler. “The first degree convictions could get [Gosnell] the death penalty.”

More: “The linguistic hoops the NYT jumps through here to avoid saying ‘murdered babies’ are impressive.”

That’s what the Hollywood Reporter is claiming tonight, with the caveat that she’ll remain on The View for one more year:

After more than half a century in broadcast journalism and nearly 40 years at ABC News, Barbara Walters is officially ready to retire. Walters will make the announcement herself on Monday’s edition of The View – the ABC daytime program she co-created and has hosted since 1997.

Walters, who will turn 84 in September, intends to remain on The View through next season and will step down after the season wraps in summer 2014. She’ll continue to be a co-executive producer of the show and will be involved in selecting new co-hosts to replace Joy Behar and Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Behar announced in March that she’ll depart after the current season. Hasselbeck has yet to confirm that she’s leaving the show.

As I wrote in March at Instapundit when the news first broke (either as a scoop, or an ambush from ABC to set her retirement in motion), the decade worth of train wrecks on The View — not the least of which were Rosie’s 9/11 Trutherisms and Whoopi’s Moon Landing Truther moment — will certainly tarnish Walters’ legacy when her career is ultimate assessed.

Update: “Didn’t Barbara Walters leave journalism years ago when she started on The View?” Well, yes.

In Orwell’s 1984, there’s a moment when Winston Smith, newly imprisoned in the sinister “Ministry of Love” sees O’Brien, his former conspirator entering his cell. Thinking he had be been arrested like himself, Winston says, “They got you, too!”

“Oh, they got me a long time ago, Winston,” O’Brien replies, revealing that it was he, an ambitious cog in the Inner Party, who had Smith arrested. (I’m writing this from memory; the effect is even more dramatic in the movie, when Richard Burton speaks the line in his sonorous baritone.)

The only torture that Jay Carney performs are his daily waterboard-like press conferences, and increasingly as the Obama administration spins out of control, they’ve become as agonizing for the performance artist as they are to the rest of us, his audience. But keep O’Brien’s phrase in mind, when reading Peter Wehner’s look at “The Corruption of Jay Carney” at Commentary:

So Mr. Carney obviously misled the public in November; the only question is whether he did so willfully. Yet rather than admit to his multiple misleading statements in the past, Carney blamed Mitt Romney and Republicans. The spin Carney used was transparently dishonest. He constructed a false reality to defend himself and the administration. In the process, he has merely further damaged his credibility. You can watch the whole painful press briefing here.

Once upon a time, Jay Carney was a journalist who wanted to search for truth. Now he is an Obama White House official awkwardly attempting to hide it. He is now part of a cover-up. The questions are just how wide and deep the cover-up extends, how many more falsehoods the Obama White House will employ in its defense, and whether being played for fools by a liberal administration will bother the elite media and White House press corps.

We’re about to find out.

It’s a great post, but the idea that “Once upon a time, Jay Carney was a journalist who wanted to search for truth,” rings rather falsely. Or, if it’s true, the idea of truthful journalistic searching was bled out of Carney’s reporting a very long time ago. Astride the White House podium, Carney looks like a smarmy teenager wearing hipster nerd glasses and his first grown-up suit; I was astonished to discover that he’s 47 years old, when I looked up his age before writing this post. But it makes sense, considering he was a Time-Warner-CNN-HBO employee dating back to the beginning of the 1990s, when he was writing liberal hack work such as these examples:

“In towns like Pushkino (pop. 90,000), many Russians view the tumult sweeping Moscow with more anxiety and skepticism than do their big-city compatriots…they wonder if the destruction of Soviet communism will bring them anything more than uncertainty and hardship.” — Time reporter James Carney, September 9, 1991.

“The fear that continues to fester about Bush — as we read about his periodic foreign-policy gaffes and then hear him blithely assert that what he doesn’t know he can learn from his advisers–is that at 53 he has the same cavalier attitude toward knowledge that he had at 21: he could learn what he needs to know, but he doesn’t seem to think it’s worth his time….There was something else jarring about what Bush said [about Israel]. There is no such thing as an ‘inter’-ballistic missile. These mistakes may seem minor, but taken together they suggest that Bush is still under water when grappling with foreign- and defense-policy basics.” — Time reporter James Carney playing up Bush gaffes, November 15, 1999.

“As he unveiled his new-look campaign in South Carolina last week, including Oprah-style sessions with citizens and banners heralding him as A REFORMER WITH RESULTS,  Bush tore into McCain like a pit bull let loose in a slaughterhouse.” — Time reporter James Carney describing “My Jog With George,” February 21, 2000.

“If it sounds as if George Bush is protesting too much, that’s because he’s got a credibility problem. It’s hard enough being the leader of a party that has made headlines by shutting down the government and refusing to add a few quarters to the minimum wage. The Texas Governor also has his own recent past to overcome, including a bruising primary fight that featured him cozying up to the religious right and running a singularly uncompassionate campaign against his opponent, John McCain.” — Time’s James Carney and John F. Dickerson, April 24. 2000.

In April of 2001, Dickerson and Carney would co-author a profile of Karl Rove for Time with this infamous passage:

Setting priorities and delivering bad news to friends is just a sliver of what Rove does as Bush’s top political gun. It was Rove who shaped the agenda, message and strategy that got Bush–the least experienced presidential nominee of modern times–into the White House. Now it is Rove’s job to keep him there through 2008.

Did Carney really believe what he wrote in that last passage — that a man who had previously been governor of Texas, toppling Democrat Ann Richards in the process, really was “the least experienced presidential nominee of modern times”? If so, how could he have taken such a high-profile job with a president who had infinitely less experience — and virtually none outside the leftwing political-academic bubble he spent his entire adult life marinating in, and no business experience, unlike Bush, before running for the job?

Which brings us to David Gerstman’s look at the Legal Insurrection blog, at how the Benghazi debacle punctures the Obama administration’s “team of rivals” myth. The “team of rivals” line was promoted in the summer of 2008 by Joe Klein, another Time-Warner-CNN-HBO-paid hack, as a way to add Lincoln-esque spin to describe the brain trust the otherwise woefully unprepared presidential candidate imagined he’d surround himself with. As with many of the early Obama myths processed in the JournoList vegan tofu sausage factory, it sounded nice on paper. But once he took office, the real Obama, as blogger Neo-Neocon notes in Gerstman’s post, “seems to prefer to have people around him with even less experience and expertise than he has, which is saying something.”

Or as Gerstman concludes:

Barry Rubin observes that the problem wasn’t just with Obama’s team either:

Benghazi is the perfect symbolism of the president of the United States going to sleep in the face of a crisis, the living embodiment of a 2008 election ad by his opponent about whether he would deal with a crisis that erupted at 3:00 a.m.

In order to “prove” that Obama was ready for the presidency despite his marked lack of relevant experience the MSM created a number of myths to help him evade the scrutiny they would have cast on any other candidate. One of them was that he’d surround himself with the best people. After the Benghazi hearings that myth has been effectively shattered.

If old media journalists continue to turn on Obama, it may because they’ve invested so much time and their own credibility (such as it is) building up their fantasy candidate and president, beginning around 2007. But if any of them really began their careers as “objective” journalists passionately in search of the truth, their lust for Inner Party status overtook their desire to report long ago.

Update: Moments after I hit the “Publish” button on this post, I came across an article by Brett Arends in the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch column, on five ways why “The news media is even worse than you think,” which includes this passage:

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world. Once upon a time you saw people like this in every newsroom in the country. They often had chaotic personal lives and they died early of cirrhosis or a heart attack. But they were tough, angry SOBs and they produced great stories.

Do you want to know what kind of people get promoted and succeed in the modern news organization? Social climbers. Networkers. People who are gregarious, who “buy in” to the dominant consensus, who go along to get along and don’t ask too many really awkward questions.

Which sums up the JournoList crowd rather perfectly, no?

Things Conservatives Have Been Proven Right About Lately: ☑ Benghazi; ☑ Pigford;☑ Obamacare; ☑ IRS. Next up: The immigration reform scam.

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) May 10, 2013

“I suspect that list will grow longer,” Joel B. Pollack adds at the Breitbart.com “Conversation” group blog. give that “Obama Is Every Bit as Bad as We Warned You.”

Speaking of which, say, what did Gen. Petraeus, then still the head of the CIA, think about the Benghazi talking points before Susan Rice made the rounds on five Sunday talk shows back in September?

And Moe Lane asks, “…So, Pat Smith would have the same ‘absolute moral authority’ as Cindy Sheehan, right?”

Update: DaTechGuy on “MSM Conventional Wisdom Circa May 5th 2013 vs This Morning.”

“Whoa: Did the IRS also target Jewish groups for ‘extra-special attention’?,” Twitchy asks:

The IRS admits to targeting conservative groups for additional review and laughably claims the witch hunt wasn’t “motivated by political bias.” What will its math-challenged spokeswoman Lois Lerner say about allegations that the IRS gave “extra-special attention to the tax-exempt status of some Jewish groups for political reason”?

* * * * *

The pro-Israel group Z STREET filed a lawsuit against the IRS in 2010, claiming an IRS agent said the organization would come under extra scrutiny because it’s “connected to Israel.”

In addition, the IRS agent told a Z STREET representative that the applications of some of those Israel-related organizations have been assigned to “a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.”

* * * * * *

The Jewish Press reports:

The IRS even took the position that because Israel is a country “where terrorism happens,” the service was justified in taking additional time to determine whether Z STREET was involved with funding terrorism.

The first hearing in Z STREET v IRS is reportedly scheduled for July.

And that’s in addition to John Podhoretz’s post at Commentary yesterday, in which he wrote:

As it happens, I know something about the chilling effect of an IRS investigation into a non-profit’s 501 (c)-3 status because in 2009, COMMENTARY (a non-profit) received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service threatening the revocation of the institution’s standing as a non-profit due to a claim that on our website we had crossed the line in the 2008 election from analysis to explicit advocacy of the candidacy of John McCain for president. (Non-profits are not permitted to endorse candidates.) The charge was false—all we had done was reprint a speech delivered at a COMMENTARY event by then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman in which he had endorsed McCain.

Taking away a non-profit’s ability to receive tax-exempt charitable contributions is equivalent to a death sentence.

We were told by counsel that, should the IRS rule against us, we would have almost no recourse. You might think free speech rights would trump any such effort, but of course no one is challenging your speech rights, merely finding that what you say runs afoul of laws dealing with non-profits. You have no constitutional right to non-profit status, after all.

Disproving the false charge, which we did eventually in part by literally printing out the 2 million words that had appeared on this site in 2008 and sending them in many boxes to the IRS to show that the words in which Lieberman said he was supporting McCain were essentially a part per million, cost us tens of thousands of dollars and dozens upon dozens of hours of lost work time. The inquiry, which never should have been brought, was closed. But talking to lawyers and strategizing and the like in such a circumstance make the experience an ordeal that leaves you a bit shell-shocked—which is, of course, the point.

Now, I had assumed that a hostile reader or hostile liberal group was responsible for the IRS inquiry into COMMENTARY, but there is a salient detail in today’s story that makes me think something else might have been at work. IRS official Lerner said the effort against the conservative groups in 2012 came from “low-level” officials in the Cincinnati office. The investigation into COMMENTARY came out of the Columbus office. Is there something going on inside the IRS offices in Ohio?

Who will find out?

“Well whaddataknow,” Iowahawk tweets today. “Turns out ‘low level IRS employees in Cincinnati’ was IRS Chief Counsel in 2011.” (Another Iowahawk tweet today was the basis for our headline above.)

More after the pagebreak.

November 24, 2008. Curiously, Time meant their headline to be a compliment.

You can’t say you weren’t warned:

● “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.”

— Press release, UCLA Newsroom, August 10, 2004.

● “RECOVERY SUMMER #4: Obama: Our economy is ‘poised for progress.’ Or is it #5 now?”

— Blog post, Instapundit.com, today.

Or as a recent video at Prager University asked:

Oh, and speaking of Time, when I searched Google for the above cover, I came across three stories which chart the annual progress of how Time viewed BHO in relation to FDR:

● November 24, 2008: Time magazine publishes above cover with BHO as FDR, complete with Roosevelt’s jaunty cigarette holder, which is probably the most miraculous portion of the illustration, considering the leftwing MSM’s obsession with political correctness.

●  July 6, 2009: Time’s cover headline sagely cautions, “What Barack Obama Can Learn From FDR,” which seems more than a little odd, considering that a year ago, Time thought Obama was FDR.

● February 22nd, 2010: The metatag on a Time article, in other words, the headline that comes up when searching on Google  warns,  “Why Obama is not FDR.”

Given the moribund nature of the American economy, perhaps Time’s first assessment was more correct than they realized.

Old and busted among insane college kids: “drinking” vodka shots through your eye, or through vodka-soaked tampons. New hotness? Drinking beer through your ear.

The London Daily Mail sagely cautions, “Why you shouldn’t try this at home,” but the apparent existence of Ear Beer consumption does beg the question: Which brand would Van Gogh have preferred?