ALPHECCA WEIGHS IN on the whole Conservative Media Bias issue. On the other side of the question, I got a long, thoughtful email from Dave Roberts, endorsing this piece on the Daily Howler.

It seems to me that there are three issues here. One is that the media world is very different than it was the last time we had a Republican President. (This is the gist of Alphecca’s comments). Another is that any President has a lot of power to set the media agenda — most of the anti-Bush complaints along these lines seem to me to be near-verbatim echoes of what I heard conservatives say about Clintonian media control. And finally, and most interesting, is the extent to which a lot of journalists and pundits, including many who lean left, seem to despise Al Gore as a phony at a very personal level. So far I haven’t seen a piece that pulls all three of these threads together.

NICK DENTON SAYS I’M UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT.

MY SHARIA AMOUR: Mark Steyn on the new, culturally-sensitive Miss World pageant.

But you just know that he wrote the whole column to have an excuse for the pun in the title.

LOTS OF VENEZUELA UPDATES at El Sur. Just keep scrolling.

CHARLES OLIVER has thought about Mary Daly’s support for a world with only 10% men and he likes the idea: “A 9:1 ratio? Heck, Hugh Hefner insists on a mere 2:1 ratio of women to men for his parties. So in essence, this arch feminist would turn the world into the Playboy Mansion with spares. Sounds good to me.”

Of course, Charles is assuming he’d be one of the men left. . . .

Meanwhile, Jim Miller reports on a nation that had a ratio leaning that way, but with results that Mary Daly probably wouldn’t endorse.

ANOTHER BLOGOSPHERE WEDDING is in the offing. Congratulations and best wishes!

BELLICOSE WOMEN ARE A PROBLEM FOR THE DEMOCRATS, reports Thomas Edsall:

Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center, found a dramatic shift in women’s views about the creation of a national missile defense system. Just before the attacks, his polling showed that 29 percent of women and 42 percent of men agreed that “we need a national missile defense system right now.” In October, after the attacks, support among men grew only slightly, to 47 percent, while among women the percentage soared to 51 percent, with 59 percent of women with children backing immediate creation of such a system.

Similarly, a post-9/11 survey by the Winston Group, a Republican firm, found that a higher percentage of women than men backed the idea of arming commercial airline pilots (76 percent as compared with 73 percent).

All of these findings point to the increased receptivity of women to the generally more aggressive and tougher stands of Republicans on issues of military preparedness and dealing with foreign adversaries. These shifts may be temporary, a product of the terrorist threat. But while a war with Iraq might come and go, no one knows how long the threat of terrorist attack will continue. There is no reason to believe that this aspect of the political environment will change in the near future.

Meanwhile, Al From and Bruce Reed have some advice for the Party:

[S]top pretending that we can win a majority simply by energizing our base. . . .

Half that battle is simply respecting the values of mainstream America in the first place. We will never be the party that loves guns most, but we can respect law-abiding citizens’ rights to own them. We will never be the pro-life party, but we can show that we want abortion to be rare as well as legal.

I think they’re on the right track.

ARE WOMEN MORE LIKELY THAN MEN TO SLEEP WITH INTERNS? This poll says so, for whatever that’s worth.

(Via Amish Tech Support).

AFGHAN WOMEN ARE MAKING DOCUMENTARY VIDEOS — but they’re having trouble getting them on TV. I think we should encourage Afghan state television to broadcast these.

OKAY, THAT’S A NEW ONE: I was doing a post on the laptop, when the cats chased each other across my lap. A paw hit the wrong key and the post got deleted somehow. Heh.

INSTAPUNDIT IS NUMBER ONE! I’m not sure what this means, but it’s nice to be on top. Thanks to reader Michael Safrin for the link.

GEITNER SIMMONS has some observations regarding hate speech, and accusations thereof.

THE SAUDI CONNECTION TO 9/11 GETS MORE ATTENTION in an article by Stephen Schwartz in The Weekly Standard. Wahhabism, the state religion of the Saudi royal family, is intimately bound up with terrorism, he writes.

HATE CRIME IN MINNESOTA.

UPDATE: Juan Gato, channeling Tom Daschle, blames Garrison Keillor.

IT’S “BUY NOTHING DAY” AND — to judge from the crowds at the mall parking lot — this is having about as much impact as similar advocacy-group publicity stunts. Steven Chapman asks:

Why is it that every Left-Green-Christian plan for Saving The Planet (TM) involves individuals spending less and having less, and governments taxing more and spending more? And is it any wonder so many of us think they’re retarded for trying to squeeze the square peg of Less into the round hole of More?

No wonder at all.

INTERESTING REPORT FROM CANADA:

Toronto’s recent wave of street murders — more than 40 since the beginning of 2001 — debunks the claim that Ottawa’s gun registry is making Canadians safer from crime. As the price tag for this colossal bureaucratic mess nears $1-billion, it is clearly time for the federal government to consider shutting it down and redirecting some or all of the resources to real crime-fighting measures.

Nearly all of the Toronto murders have been committed with handguns. Yet handguns have been subject to registration in Canada since 1934. In fact, registration has done nothing to stem the use of handguns in murder: In the past 15 years, the proportion of all firearm murders committed with handguns has nearly doubled in Canada from just over one-third to nearly two-thirds.

Imagine that — just as gun-rights supporters predicted.

WHAT’S MOST INTERESTING ABOUT THIS ITEM on a “mystery contrail” is that it’s evidence of someone comparing satellite images with radar tracks and air-traffic-control information.

SOPHOMORIC, YET SATISFYING: ShellShocking reports on things you can only say at Thanksgiving.

JORGE SCHMIDT POINTS OUT THIS EDITORIAL in the Washington Post:

THE WORLD’S fourth largest oil producer, a key American supplier and ally, stands on the brink of a political explosion, and possibly a civil war. Its capital increasingly is split between hostile armed camps; military and police units are faced off against each other, central highways are sometimes blocked by burning barricades. . . .

Mr. Chavez, a muddled socialist whose closest political ally is Fidel Castro, was himself democratically elected in 1999; he then used a series of referendums and new elections to rewrite the constitution and extend his term until 2007, even as he wrecked Venezuela’s economy and antagonized the military and middle class. A new election or referendum — like that ordered yesterday by Venezuela’s national electoral council — would offer a way out. But Mr. Chavez has been reluctant to agree — his supporters said they would appeal the council’s decision — and increasingly the opposition appears to hope that he can be forced out of office, as he was briefly last April. Opposition supporters rally around some 140 military officers who have rebelled against the government and occupied a city square, while Mr. Chavez’s followers vow to fight any coup in the streets. Both sides have been arming themselves.

Hmm. Where might you have heard about this before?

MERYL YOURISH says that the latest attacks indicate that Al Qaeda is growing desperate.

I also note that, as I suspected, the bin Laden tape now appears to be a fake. That strongly suggests that he’s dead. The IndePundit agrees. And he’s got, er, pictures.

IS IT SEXIST TO WISH FOR A WORLD WITH FEWER MEN? My earlier post on feminist scholar Mary Daly’s expressed desire for a world where only one person in ten was male (which one reader called Strangelovian) has inspired Eugene Volokh to wonder whether such sentiments are sexist or not. I don’t know: Would wishing for a world with fewer black people be racist?

Megan McArdle is less charitable to Daly:

I am not under the impression that all feminists, or even professors of Women’s Studies, believe this sort of nonsense. But I’ve spent enough time around the movement to know that the majority don’t challenge the people saying it, which is almost as bad. . . .

I’m also aware that the reason they say things like that is that no one pays attention to them. But if you’re going to propose genocide with the offhand arrogance of a high school essayist, you can’t really complain that no one takes you seriously.

Well, it’s not exactly genocide, but I take her point. And if, say, Andrew Sullivan expressed the wish for a world that was 90% male, I feel sure he’d be accused of something along those lines.

UPDATE: Reader John Beckwith writes:

Just a thought but maybe, deep down, Ms Daly anticipates the eventual imposition of Sharia.

In this case it actually makes sense to limit the number of men. Islamic law allows men to take up to 4 (and, in some interpretations, more) wives. This feature of Sharia often leads to undesirable consequences like 9 year old girls getting married and legions of sexually deprived young men hanging around the mosque with little entertainment beyond waging suicidal jihad. Ms Daly’s proposal would perfect Osama’s version of heaven on earth by rightsizing the ratio of breeding stock in the human popluation.

Paving the way for a better Sharia is odd agenda for a feminist, to be sure, but at least it would unshackle Ms Daly and her sisters from the oppression of Western patriarchy.

Yes, it does seem to be the Western variety of patriarchy that Daly and her ilk find troubling.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh thinks that my analogy to racism, above, is overdrawn. Hmm. Maybe. Maybe not. Some people who emailed me found rather disturbing overtones in Daly’s language. So did some commenters on Megan McArdle’s page.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Brian Carnell is puzzled by Eugene’s stance.

HOWARD KURTZ ON AL GORE’S LATEST:

Al Gore has become a true believer in the vast right-wing conspiracy. . . .

Maybe he’s just frustrated that his book isn’t selling better, despite a zillion media appearances with Tipper.

Let’s say Gore is right, that conservative news outlets are trying to blacken the reputations of people like him. Doesn’t complaining about it just sound like whining? Or is he playing to his base, the way conservatives have done all these years by moaning about the liberal media?

After all, if you’re going to take on Saddam and Osama, you’d better be able to deal with the likes of the Washington Times. The conservative media aren’t going anywhere. Deal with it.

Poor Al. Clinton could have pulled this off, but Al just can’t.

UPDATE: Greg Wythe, who was blogging furiously on Thanksgiving, wonders when “Clinton envy” will become a term in popular discourse.

PERRY DE HAVILLAND has some observations on context where the Kenya attacks are concerned.

AMERICANS ARE MORE POPULAR IN BRITAIN than at any time in the past several decades, according to a poll reported in The Scotsman. Moral: “Don’t believe everything you read in the Guardian.”

Commenting on this, Tim Blair observes: “Everything? Try anything.”

CITIES ARE BECOMING MORE RACIALLY INTEGRATED, especially in the South and West. Increased integration appears to be a function of growth.

UPDATE: And here’s more good news: More African Americans starting businesses.