A NANNY ON HORSEBACK: “Buoyed by the still unsettled field, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is growing increasingly enchanted with the idea of an independent presidential bid, and his aides are aggressively laying the groundwork for him to run.”
ISN’T IT ILLEGAL TO THREATEN VOTERS? Caucus for Biden, or he may kiss you!
THOUGHTS ON Kipling.
ABOUT A GAZILLION READERS have sent me this link to a report of an anti-military lawyer trashing a Marine’s car. All I can say is, it’s gobsmackingly vile, if true.
DANIEL DREZNER: Should celebrities set the global agenda?
I’ve got a one-word answer.
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK: Tennessean Sid Evans is moving south to take over Garden & Gun magazine. We get that; it’s not bad — somewhere between Town & Country and Sports Afield, with a touch of not-so-politicized Vanity Fair added in. And where else can you find out about Winston Groom’s favorite shotgun? (Via Michael Silence).
JOHN TIERNEY on the proposed Science Debate 2008: “I can’t imagine the candidates’ handlers are happy with this prospect, given how much extra work it would mean for them in bringing the candidates up to speed. Politics attracts lawyers and liberal-arts majors, not science whizzes.”
OF HILLARY AND P.G. Wodehouse.
FRED THOMPSON’S CLOSING ARGUMENT TO IOWA VOTERS:
(Via The Corner.)
UPDATE: Peter Robinson likes it: “Thompson has sat himself down, looked into a camera, and spoken for a quarter of an hour, calmly and straightforwardly making his case. I myself find this impressive—in a way, moving. Thompson seems to have stepped out of the eighteenth century. He trusts voters to think. And if the comments on YouTube are at all representative, plenty of people agree.” But enough?
REMEMBERING the election before Pearl Harbor.
TOM MAGUIRE: “Where’s the lefty traffic? (I blame Dick Cheney).”
A LOOK AT How and why knots form. There’s math.
THIS SEEMS LIKE GOOD NEWS: “The Iraqi interior ministry lauded its achievements over the past year on Saturday, saying that 75 percent of Al-Qaeda’s networks in the country had been destroyed in 12 months. Ministry spokesman Abdul Karim Khalaf also outlined sharp falls in the numbers of assassinations, kidnappings and death squad murders.”
BENAZIR BHUTTO apotheosis.
WHEN THE CORPSE TWITCHES, the jaws snap: “Record Industry Goes After Personal Use . . . the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.” The brain’s been dead for a while, though.
TIM BLAIR: “If you can’t laugh at murderous fanatics, what can you laugh at?” Those who run PC-interference for murderous fanatics?
MIKE HUCKABEE and the wages of sin.
WHY LAW PROFESSORS ARE HAPPY: “It is striking that job satisfaction among academics is high not only relative to those in private practice, but also relative to graduates employed in ‘public service,’ which is often viewed as a career path chosen in large part to maximize personal happiness rather than income.” Of course, the data involve Yalies, who are presumptively weird, so . . . .
MY CHRISTMAS PRESENT TO MYSELF: A copy of Propellerhead’s Reason 4 software. I’ve been happily producing podcast music — “stingers” and “bleebles” as they’re known in the trade. It’s very intuitive and easy to use. By the way, you can get a free copy of the software synth I’ve loved for years — the ReBirth RB-338 — here. All you have to do is register on the site.
UPDATE: Reader John Marcoux emails:
From a long ago email to you, I related how, in a conversation with Paul Van Dyk at a club in Chicago, I learned that many of the great European DJs, including Paul, run Reason on Apple notebooks (see pic below).
I fooled around with it but found it harder to master than you apparently have. Maybe it works better on an Apple. For dabblers (at 67, that’s me) this Amazon item is pretty good and only $30. Won’t run on Vista.
Yeah, there’s a lot of good cheap software out there. Meanwhile, I certainly haven’t “mastered” Reason; I’ve just figured out how to get some sounds out of it that I like. That’s step one . . . . I didn’t realize so many DJ’s were using Reason, though — I thought it was more Ableton Live or Final Scratch, but I’ve been out of touch with the DJ scene for a few years. I blame blogging.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader David Preiser emails:
You’re right about Reason. It’s a great studio tool, and a lot of pros on the creative end use it (as opposed to editors and sound guys, and studio mavens, I mean). If you ever do composing or create midi files elsewhere, Reason is great for making them come alive. And it is very intuitive, but only if you’ve ever worked with real equipment, even a little bit, which I know you have. The key feature that got me making noise within minutes was the Tab button. If you’ve already discovered that, you’ll know what I mean when I say that anyone over 25 who has ever handled real equipment will be forever grateful to the folks at Propellerheads for that one.
Yeah. Reason simulates a rack of hardware, and when you hit “Tab” it rotates to let you look at the back. You can see cables connecting the different pieces of virtual equipment, and repatch them by clicking and dragging. (And when the rack flips around, the “cables” jiggle, which is a nice touch that Reason has had since earlier versions.)
MORE: Here’s a short Reason video.
HOW CLEAN IS YOUR ELECTRICITY?
BILL KRISTOL’S NEW YORK TIMES COLUMN GIG IS CONFIRMED, and Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts. Plus, a response to the NYT review of his book.
FRED THOMPSON corrects the media. “Today I had this story written about me regarding what I said at a Town Hall event in Burlington, Iowa by a reporter who wasn’t even at the event.”
THE GREAT FALL OF CHINA: They’re still big, just not nearly as big as we thought. Walter Russell Mead looks at the implications.
UPDATE: Sam Dinkin has further thoughts.
WARNER BROTHERS goes copy-protection free with DRM-less MP3 downloads at Amazon. This is a good trend.
HORTON HEARS A WHO?
THOUGHTS ON evolution vs. creationism.
WE HAD FUN HANGING OUT WITH GUN-BLOGGERS LAST NIGHT: Helen posts a report. Just don’t tell the folks at WATE-TV about the picture! It shows her shooting one of those dangerous full-capacity firearms. . . .
MARC COOPER REPORTS on Hillary’s Iowa finale. Mama’s gonna make everything all right.
Meanwhile Mickey Kaus notes some Learjet liberalism: “It looks like that pro-Edwards ’527′ group defended by Paul Krugman as a ‘labor 527′ and a ’527 run by labor unions’ actually got about a third of its money ‘in a single check from an entity linked to Rachel Mellon, the widow of Paul Mellon, who inherited his share of the great American fortunes.’”
CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: Signs of moderation at the Modern Language Association? Well, by MLA standards, anyway. Best line: “‘I support speaking truth to power,’ said Rzepka, but that requires truth, he added.”
MARK STEYN channels Edward Gibbon.
Plus, is England ripe for revolution? Overripe, I’d say . . . .
THE BHUTTO ASSASSINATION: A sort of honor killing?
Meanwhile, Claudia Rosett looks at North Korea.
WHAT TIME SHOULD HAVE DONE: General Petraeus as Man of the Year at The Telegraph.
SAY UNCLE CORRECTS WATE-TV on assault weapons hysteria. Somebody needs to have a talk with Knoxville’s police chief Sterling Owen, too. Lots of law-abiding citizens — and voters — own highfull-capacity weapons. And given the miserable record of my local government lately in handling credit cards, legal obligations of openness, etc., they should show a bit more respect for law-abiding citizens. . . .
UPDATE: Reader John Steakley emails with a correction: “They aren’t ‘high’ capacity. They are ‘full’ capacity.” Excellent point. Correction made.
USA TODAY Dowdifies Fred Thompson?
A VICTORY FOR FREE SPEECH in Egypt.
HEH. I never noticed the resemblance to PeeWee Herman before.
MICHAEL YON: “Unfortunately my concerns for Afghanistan are proving well-placed. Afghanistan and Pakistan are inextricably linked. Together they might be called ‘Troublestan.’”
THOUGHTS ON LAW PROFESSORS, HAPPINESS, and distribution curves, from Tom Smith.
Some other thoughts here.
WRITER’S STRIKE UPDATE: Notes from the sidewalk.
DUMB LAW OF THE WEEK: “New Jersey enacted legislation on Thursday banning some convicted sex offenders from using the Internet.”
We should ban felons from New Jersey politics, too, but then who’d be left to run the state?
A SPACE JUNK update from Popular Science.
GOOGLEBOMB, or GoogleDud?
BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE I ROCK AND ROLLED: I don’t listen to much rock anymore; as James Lileks said a while back, “Techno does for me now what rock used to. Why, I couldn’t care less.” But I had to drive across town and popped in a Heart album and it was quite good. Crazy on You is without a doubt the best Cold War-inspired song about oral sex ever. Other tunes held up well, too.
LOOKING BACK at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, and what promises came true, and didn’t. My reporting from last year’s CES is here. And here’s that 108″ Sharp flat-screen TV they’re talking about.
ADVICE: “Barack — may I call you Barack? — this is not going to help. Apart from the absurdity of claiming that the housing conditions of one’s grandmother amount to foreign policy experience, no Iowan who has been as successful as Barack Obama would let his grandmother live in a ‘tiny hut.’ Somebody ought to take up a collection for the poor woman.”
CHRIS DODD unloads on Obama and Clinton. He’s not very nice to Bill Richardson, either.
DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: I linked this review of Jonah Goldberg’s book last night, and a reader pointed out that the text reference to Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration contained a hyperlink to articles about the National Rifle Association. The error is still there this afternoon. Despite having the same initials, those are not the same . . . .
I’m sure that mistake is not the fault of David Oshinsky, the reviewer, but rather of some undereducated staffer at the Times, but it serves to illustrate the need for the kind of history lesson Goldberg offers, as well as a point made by many, that the NYT doesn’t take its hyperlinks very seriously.
UPDATE: Ouch: “The NYT should be making a conspicuous show of its professionalism and superior resources on the web, but instead it is making mistakes that would mortify me — in my little one-person operation.”
WHY WE’RE IN THE PERSIAN GULF.
HILLARY CLINTON SOCK PUPPETS.
Should’ve hired an expert!
MICHAEL BARONE: Lessons from the Surge.
A BIG PAKISTAN ROUNDUP from Jules Crittenden.
A LAME CHRISTMAS VIDEO that takes the cake:
Via FrontBurner.
HERE’S PROF. KENNETH ANDERSON’S REVIEW of Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency. Our podcast interview with Goldsmith is here.
MORE ON THE PROBLEMS AT HARPER’S.
HUCKABEE SLIPPING? I don’t think polls are much use in predicting the Iowa caucuses, but we’ll know soon enough.
SAUDI ARABIAN nanotechnology.
JOHN EDWARDS: Obama living in Never-Never Land.
The former North Carolina senator labeled “ridiculous” comments made by the Obama campaign that seemed to link former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq, embraced Sen. Barack Obama’s politics over Clinton’s, and said an anti-Obama flier from a pro-Clinton union was “misleading” and “deceptive.”
Ouch.
HUCKABEE’S BAD WEEK continues.
More here, including video.
WHAT’S ON Tom Goldstein’s iPhone.
MICHAEL YOUNG LOOKS FOR NEOCONS IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION and can’t seem to find any: “So maybe it’s time to stop referring to the neocon policies of the Bush administration. The neocons are gone, many for so long that no one seems to remember their leaving. What we now have in Washington is a mishmash of old political realism and improvisation, topped with increasingly empty oratory on freedom and democracy. That should please quite a few of Bush’s domestic critics. He’s returned to the futile routine in the Middle East that they always urged him to.”
In other words, the bureaucracy won, with predictable results.
BENAZIR BHUTTO MAY BE DEAD, but she’s got a book coming out entitled Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West. Interestingly, the Insta-Wife used to babysit for Bhutto’s agent, Andrew Wylie. Well, it’s interesting to me, anyway.
A YEAR-END DEFENSE OF REBECCA AGUILAR: “It might have something to do with the fact that the shooter is white.” [LATER: That link's stopped working. Try this one.]
If Aguilar’s behavior was so seemly, then why did KDFW move so quickly to get the video off the Web? (More here, And background here.)
MICKEY KAUS: “Truthchecking the MSM’s Truthcheckers.”
NAOMI WOLF’S regrets.
WHAT? COLONEL SANDERS ISN’T AN ACTUAL COLONEL in the United States Army? Never mind.
THIS SEEMS LIKE A NON-STORY: Giuliani advised the maker of Oxycontin. So what? Yeah, it gets abused — most drugs do — but it also provides a lot of people with pain relief. I think the “crusade” against Oxycontin is just more drug-war hysteria, putting Giuliani on the side of the angels here. Well, paid on the side of the angels, but that’s as much as you can ask from lawyers in private practice . . . .
GO FIGURE: Traffic on Daily Kos Decreasing As Primaries Approach? Well, Kos has been pretty thoroughly co-opted, and become part of the Democratic establishment himself, which no doubt makes the site seem less fresh and interesting.
UPDATE: An alternate explanation: “Daily Kos is less fresh and interesting than in the past. But that’s because Kos hasn’t been as active there. He has stretched himself thin by taking on columns for establishment media outlets like Newsweek and The Hill. He’s also the father of two children as of April. . . . The Kos brand is languishing because the blogger is the brand and the blogger has more than his blog to feed these days.” That’s a good point, though of course the two aren’t entirely inconsistent.
Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus wonders if it’s General Petraeus’s fault: “I was at a very nice left-wing party over the holidays and the youthful antiwar types were saying that traffic was down on all the left-wing sites because of … Iraq. … That’s not what I said. It’s what they said. … Iraq just isn’t as salient now that it doesn’t seem to be spiraling into apocalypse. . . . Of course, some right-wing sites seem to be experiencing a mild decline since August also. Maybe the whole blogosphere was about Iraq!” Hmm. InstaPundit traffic is up considerably since August. But then, InstaPundit has a somewhat broader focus than just politics and Iraq. Come for the war, stay for the nanotechnology! And the gadgets! And the science fiction recommendations! And the podcasts . . . .
WESLEY CLARK ATTACKS BARACK OBAMA for Obama’s attack on Hillary.
HEIL, WOODROW! That’s the title of David Oshinsky’s surprisingly positive review of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism in Sunday’s New York Times. Excerpt:
Coming of age in the 1960s, I heard the word “fascist†all the time. College presidents were fascists, Vietnam War supporters were fascists, policemen who tangled with protesters were fascists, on and on. To some, the word smacked of Hitler and genocide. To others, it meant the oppression of the masses by the privileged few. But one point was crystal clear: the word belonged to those on the political left. It was their verbal weapon, and they used it every chance they got. . . .
Leftists still drop the “f word†to taint their opponents, be they global warming skeptics or members of the Moral Majority. The sad result, Goldberg says, is that Americans have come to equate fascism with right-wing political movements in the United States when, in fact, the reverse is true. To his mind, it is liberalism, not conservatism, that embraces what he claims is the fascist ideal of perfecting society through a powerful state run by omniscient leaders. And it is liberals, not conservatives, who see government coercion as the key to getting things done.
“Liberal Fascism†is less an exposé of left-wing hypocrisy than a chance to exact political revenge. Yet the title of his book aside, what distinguishes Goldberg from the Sean Hannitys and Michael Savages is a witty intelligence that deals in ideas as well as insults — no mean feat in the nasty world of the culture wars.
Read the whole thing. Our podcast interview with Jonah is here.
A REVIEW OF The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, from someone who’s read the book and who took two kids to the movie.
THAT WOULD BE NUMBER TWO, DAVID: Is the Internet destroying our culture, or is it just annoying our snobs?
FROM TIME TO THE NEW YORK TIMES? The HuffPo is reporting that Bill Kristol will become an NYT columnist in 2008. So far, HuffPo commenters seem less than pleased.
ARE LAW PROFESSORS UNHAPPY? Not this one!
TRUST THE GOVERNMENT WITH YOUR PERSONAL DATA: Full Social Security Numbers Were Compromised In Election Commission Theft.
SNOWBALLS: Fred Thompson vs. the press.
BLOOMBERG GROUP RUNS anti-gun ad in Iowa. Dan Riehl comments: “If that’s the first card Bloomberg has decided to play, his entry into the race is bound to help the Republican candidate more than anything else.”
CALLING FOR A 2008 SCIENCE DEBATE. Sounds like a good idea to me. And through the page, I notice that my former Tennessee colleague Stuart Pimm is one of the organizers.
Of course, the result might not be pretty.
RANDY BARNETT: Was the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Conditioned on Service in an Organized Militia?
UPDATE: Some related thoughts here.
FROM BLOGBURST TO TV: Jon Henke emails that the Thompson campaign is running this TV ad in Iowa with money raised from the blogburst.
FROM MICHAEL YON, a news flash for Osama bin Laden.
THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT WANTS TO regulate online communication.
ROAD TESTING the Terraniac. With video.
MORE ON Huckabee and stem cells, from The Politico. And it goes beyond stem cells:
Mike Huckabee last year accepted $52,000 in speaking fees from a bio-tech giant that wants to research human embryonic stem cells, a non-profit working to expand access to the morning after pill and a group pushing to study whether tightening gun control laws will reduce violence.
Ugh.
IRAQPUNDIT on Pakistan and Iraq.
JOHN HINDERAKER CHARGES HARPER’S with smearing U.S. troops.
ELEVEN IRANIAN SPECIAL-OPS TROOOPS killed in Iraq.
UPDATE: Oops, I misread that. They were “special groups,” not special ops — Iranian-backed militias. Was a bit rushed this morning as we were getting ready to return home from Atlanta, where the Insta- wife and daughter were hitting the after-Christmas sales. Or trying to, as a lot of stuff was sold out.
A FRIGHTENING POST FROM JEFF JARVIS, on the lowest common denominator and free speech.
Almost as depressing, however, was this photo of air travel as it used to be. Sigh.
PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Investor’s Business Daily tells Bush not to be shy:
The Congressional Research Service issued a report last week confirming that earmarks not included in the actual bill but written into accompanying reports — which is most of them — do not have force of law and can therefore be disregarded by the president. . . .
But don’t just blame Democrats. This out-of-control, unaccountable waste and abuse of the citizens’ hard-earned money is a bipartisan disgrace. Byrd’s Republican counterpart on the spending panel, Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, out-oinked even Byrd, with $774 million in earmarks. So did Alaska’s Sen. Ted Stevens, infamous for the taxpayer-funded Bridge To Nowhere and responsible for $502 million in earmarks this time around.
Not only would the president have the Constitution on his side if he declared war on the earmark racket; he would have the vast majority of Americans with him. Most people are tired of finding out after the fact that they’ve paid for billions of dollars in projects that should have been locally financed — or maybe not built at all — due to the 11th-hour stratagems.
I hope the President does the right thing.
I LIKE THE SNOWFLAKES at Katie Granju’s new digs.
SAY IT AIN’T SO, RON: “Yes, I know I wrote an article tentatively supporting Ron Paul, but please, someone, tell me this clip in which Dr. Ron Paul rejects the theory of evolution has been edited to remove the full context of the remark.”
GHALIA AYMEN REPORTS FROM PAKISTAN:
As they mourn and try to recover from the shock of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistanis are trying to come to terms with the security failure that allowed such a carefully coordinated shooting-suicide bombing to take place, and asking themselves if it was, indeed, a failure —or a conspiracy.
Neither answer is a good one. Even if there was no government–approved conspiracy to eliminated her, the fact remains that Bhutto was presumably being protected by the tightest security possible. Pakistanis ask themselves if someone of her stature is so vulnerable, how can a common person be safe in their home?
The feeling of insecurity and uncertainty combines with the general atmosphere of sadness and mourning. Bhutto’s supporters and even those who would not have voted for her are expressing their sympathy for her and her family.
The sadness is quickly transforming into anger.
Read the whole thing.
ABE FOXMAN: “We welcome and accept Will Smith’s statement that Hitler was a ‘vicious killer’ and that he did not mean for his remarks about the Nazi leader to be mistaken as praise.”
STEPHEN KAUS: Hillary bucks the spirit of the 22nd Amendment. Yes, that’s Mickey’s brother.
240 PROTESTS AGAINST the Iranian Regime this month.
