Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851), View of the boulevard du Temple, taken 1838 or 1839

The on-line image (released by the government of France) is a bit small (click on photo above for larger image), but shows distantly a man standing being served by a bootblack. To my eye, the most exotic aspects of the scene are all the fairy-tale style chimney pots and the paired allées of trees on each side of the street.

When Louis Jacques-Mande Daguerre made his daguerreotype of the Boulevard du Temple in 1838, the exposure time was so long (probably between 10 and 20 minutes) he was unable to capture the hurrying figures and the moving traffic in this busy Paris Street. Only a man who had to remain still while his shoes were polished by a boot-black, was completely captured on Daguerre’s silvered copper plate. Although, as a contemporary noted at the time, the boulevard in question was “constantly filled with a moving throng of pedestrians and carriages”, the street in Daguerre’s early photograph appeared to be completely deserted “except for an individual who was having his boots brushed.” In fact, the shoeshine man himself must also be included as one of the first human figures to be depicted in photography. But as a German magazine of 1839 observed, the man “having his boots polished . . . must have held himself extremely still for he can be very clearly seen, in contrast the shoeshine man, whose ceaseless movement causes him to appear completely blurred and imprecise.”

Nicholas Jenkins analyzes the photo best, locating the shot, identifying the time of day, and explaining why we can’t see the bootblack.

According to the Gernsheims in L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype, Daguerre took the images from his laboratory-eyrie in the 350-seat Diorama Building, which stood at 4, rue Sanson, at the intersection with the rue des Marais, and which from the back looked out roughly southwards, high over the rooftops, towards boulevard du Temple.

Read the whole thing.
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From Listverse via Andrew Sullivan.

Is it an epidemic? an earthquake? a fire? a flood? No, it’s Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Mark Steyn observes:

The proposition that a new federal administration is itself a federal emergency is almost too perfect an emblem of American government in the 21st century.

Richard Perle evaluates the Bush record in foreign policy (to the limited degree that Bush was allowed by the federal bureaucracy to have a say in the matter) and attacks the left’s false narrative of the reasons for bringing about regime change in Iraq.

[T]he salient issue was not whether Saddam had stockpiles of WMD but whether he could produce them and place them in the hands of terrorists. The administration’s appalling inability to explain that this is what it was thinking and doing allowed the unearthing of stockpiles to become the test of whether it had correctly assessed the risk that Saddam might provide WMD to terrorists. When none were found, the administration appeared to have failed the test even though considerable evidence of Saddam’s capability to produce WMD was found in postwar inspections by the Iraq Survey Group chaired by Charles Duelfer.

I am not alone in having been asked, “If you knew that Saddam did not have WMD, would you still have supported invading Iraq?” But what appears to some to be a “gotcha” question actually misses the point. The decision to remove Saddam stands or falls on one’s judgment at the time the decision was made, and with the information then available, about how to manage the risk that he would facilitate a catastrophic attack on the United States. To say the decision to remove him was mistaken because stockpiles of WMD were never found is akin to saying that it was a mistake to buy fire insurance last year because your house didn’t burn down or health insurance because you didn’t become ill. No one would take seriously the question, “Would you have bought Enron stock if you had known it would go down?” and no one should take seriously the facile conclusion that invading Iraq was mistaken because we now know Saddam did not possess stockpiles of WMD.

Bush might have decided differently: that the safer course was to leave Saddam in place and hope he would not cause or enable the use of WMD against the United States. How would we now assess his presidency if, say, Iraqi anthrax had later been used to kill thousands of Americans? He would have been accused—rightly in my view—of having taken a foolish risk by not acting against a regime we had good reason to consider extremely dangerous. (And no one would be so stupid as to ask: Would you have left Saddam in place if you had known he was going to supply anthrax to terrorists?)

Read the whole thing.

Kyle Smith alerts us to a recently published guide to the land of the “progressives.”

For 143 years, The Nation magazine has maintained, in its adorable way, the blue-faced scowl of an angry toddler shaking its fist at the grown-ups. But while you could go to The Nation in recent years for instruction on how to think about the latest perfidy of the Bush administration, the magazine was no help when it came to advice on, say, how to find a really good lesbian knitting cooperative within easy bicycling distance or where to buy anti-globalization comic books printed on recycled hemp.

The long wait is over. Now comes “The Nation Guide to the Nation,” a travelog/catalog/almanac (whatever you do, don’t call it a bible) “for and about a community of committed, passionate people who have active consciences and a lively sense of social justice.”

Vilija Lobačiuvienė

Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

[A] Lithuanian debt collector is offering an unconventional service to retrieve arrears: witchcraft. The Vilnius-based Skolu Isieskojimo Biuras (debt collecting bureau), has hired Vilija Lobačiuvienė, the Baltic nation’s most famous self-styled witch, to hunt down companies and individuals who are failing to pay up. Lobaciuviene, 53, who claims to use hypnosis, herbal medicines and “the bio-energy field,” promised Thursday to “do whatever I can to help people.”

William Ranney, Battle of Cowpens, 1845, oil, South Carolina State House

Colonel William Washington’s servant, “a waiter, too small to wield a sword,” saved his master’s life by wounding a British officer about to cut him down.

On this day in history, my neighbor, Brigadier-General Daniel Morgan with 800 men gave Colonel Banstre Tarleton’s Legion, 1100 men, what Morgan described in a post-battle letter as “a devil of a licking” at Cowpens, South Carolina, January 17, 1781.

They have a statue of Morgan over in Winchester, whose base bears the motto: “Fought everywhere, defeated nowhere.”

Ross Douthat, in the New York Times Book Review, offers depressed conservatives some winter cheer with a delightful anecdote about the first meeting of William F. Buckley with Ronald Reagan.

On the night that William F. Buckley met Ronald Reagan, the future president of the United States put his elbow through a plate-glass window. The year was 1961, and the two men were in Beverly Hills, where Buckley, perhaps the most famous conservative in America at the tender age of 35, was giving an address at a school auditorium. Reagan, a former Hollywood leading man dabbling in political activism — the Tim Robbins or Alec Baldwin of his day — had been asked to do the introductions.

But the microphone was dead, the technician was nowhere to be found and the control room was locked. As the crowd began to grumble, Reagan coolly opened one of the auditorium windows, stepped onto a ledge two stories above the street and inched his way around to the control room. He smashed his elbow through the glass and clambered in through the broken window. “In a minute there was light in the upstairs room,” Buckley later wrote, “and then we could hear the crackling of the newly animated microphone.”

David Brooks shares:

It’s true, I did break bread with Obama. It was amazing. He was carried into the house by cherubs, Bruce Springsteen and Oprah Winfrey spread rose pedals on the carpet where he was about to walk and he very considerately asked me what vintage of wine I wanted my water turned into.

It’s also a sign that Obama can talk to and understand Americans at all social levels. For example, that night with us, he had an elegant dinner filled with sophisticated ideas and complex policy conversation with a bunch of right-leaning commentators. Then the next day, he had a meeting with some liberal commentators where, I presume, he was just as fluid while using much simpler sentences, shorter words and serving Froot Loops and Hostess Twinkies. There are pundits at all levels of cognitive distinction, and Obama has to learn to address all of them.

Was identified as having its origin in Russia. Multiple attempts to gain access took place for over four hours. Entrance finally occurred via a vulnerability in an older WordPress release. Every php file was altered and scripts inserted to copy and transmit entered data. My stolen password was then presumably used to hijack my email account at another site, which tends to suggest strongly that one should avoid being lazy like me and using the same password on more than one account.

Mencius Moldbug, most prolix of bloggers, goes on at great length, but is still often worth a read.

The mysterious Moldbug, it has been learned, is a 1992 Brown graduate who majored in Computer Science. Further details here.

In this alleged introduction to his blog, Moldbug accurately identifies the enemy (complete with whimsical H.P. Lovecraft allusions).

[I]n post-1945 America, the source of all new ideas is the university. Ideas check out of the university, but they hardly ever check in. Thence, they flow outward to the other arms of the educational system as a whole: the mainstream media and the public schools. Eventually they become our old friend, “public opinion.” This process is slow, happening on a generational scale, and thus the 45-year lag.

Thus whatever coordinates the university system coordinates the state, through the transmission device of “public opinion.” Naturally, since this is 100% effective, the state does not have to wait for the transmission to complete. It can act in advance of a complete response, as in this case the Supreme Court did in 1967, and synchronize directly with the universities.

This relationship, whose widespread practice in the United States dates to 1933, is known as public policy. Essentially, for everything your government does, there is a university department full of professors who can, and do, tell it what to do. Civil servants and Congressional staffers follow the technical lead of the universities. The residual democratic branch of Washington, the White House, can sometimes push back feebly, but only with great difficulty. ...

There are a few brief periods of true reaction in American history – the post-Reconstruction era or Redemption, the Return to Normalcy of Harding, and a couple of others. But they are unusual and feeble compared to the great leftward shift. Nor, most important for our hypothesis, did they come from the universities; in the 20th century, periods of reaction are always periods of anti-university activity. (McCarthyism is especially noticeable as such. And you’ll note that McCarthy didn’t exactly win.)

The principle applies even in wars. In each of the following conflicts in Anglo-American history, you see a victory of left over right: the English Civil War, the so-called “Glorious Revolution,” the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Clearly, if you want to be on the winning team, you want to start on the left side of the field.

And we are starting to piece the puzzle together. The leftward direction is, itself, the principle of organization. In a two-party democratic system, with Whigs and Tories, Democrats and Republicans, etc, the intelligentsia is always Whig. Their party is simply the party of those who want to get ahead. It is the party of celebrities, the ultra-rich, the great and good, the flexible of conscience. Tories are always misfits, losers, or just plain stupid – sometimes all three.

And the left is the party of the educational organs, at whose head is the press and universities. This is our 20th-century version of the established church. Here at UR, we sometimes call it the Cathedral – although it is essential to note that, unlike an ordinary organization, it has no central administrator. No, this will not make it easier to deal with. ...

Whatever you make of the left-right axis, you have to admit that there exists some force which has been pulling the Anglo-American political system leftward for at least the last three centuries. Whatever this unfathomable stellar emanation may be, it has gotten us from the Stuarts to Barack Obama. Personally, I would like a refund. But that’s just me. ...

intellectuals cluster to the left, generally adopting as a social norm the principle of pas d’ennemis a gauche, pas d’amis a droit, because like everyone else they are drawn to power. The left is chaos and anarchy, and the more anarchy you have, the more power there is to go around. The more orderly a system is, the fewer people get to issue orders. The same asymmetry is why corporations and the military, whose system of hierarchical executive authority is inherently orderly, cluster to the right.

Once the cluster exists, however, it works by any means necessary. The reverence of anarchy is a mindset in which an essentially Machiavellian, tribal model of power flourishes. To the bishops of the Cathedral, anything that strengthens their influence is a good thing, and vice versa. The analysis is completely reflexive, far below the conscious level. Consider this comparison of the coverage between the regime of Pinochet and that of Castro. Despite atrocities that are comparable at most – not to mention a much better record in providing responsible and effective government – Pinochet receives the full-out two-minute hate, whereas the treatment of Castro tends to have, at most, a gentle and wistful disapproval. ...

[T]he problem is not just that our present system of government – which might be described succinctly as an atheistic theocracy – is accidentally similar to Puritan Massachusetts. As anatomists put it, these structures are not just analogous. They are homologous. This architecture of government – theocracy secured through democratic means – is a single continuous thread in American history.

Andrew Levy, alarmed by the recession, hopes to supplement his income by blogging for Huffington Post. Excerpt from sample editorial:

In the wake of the events of 1-15, in which a wedge of Geese brought down a US Airways aircraft, here’s what you won’t be hearing about from the so-called “Mainstream Media”: We brought this on ourselves.

After an event such as this one, it’s important to look at the root causes: Why did the Geese attack us? Well, the truth is, for years we have been oppressing the Geese, using them for the fuel they provide for our bodies.

Boneless Goose Breast, Brandied Roast Goose, Roast Goose with Cumberland Sauce and Apricot Stuffing. And of course, the Christmas Goose. In the name of religion, we have been engaged in what can only be called a Crusade against the Geese. Is it any wonder that a few brave suicide Geese would seek revenge?

Patrick Joseph McGoohan was born in Queens of Irish parentage, but raised in Ireland and England, where he attended Ratcliffe College, a Roman Catholic public school boasting the architecture of Pugin, in Leicestershire, where, according to Wikipedia, he excelled at mathematics and boxing.

McGoohan was perfect for the role of British secret agent, having intellectual good looks, a natural aptitude for conveying the impression of competence and intensity of will, and possessing a distinctly U accent.

He might have been far more famous as an actor, but he turned down the roles of James Bond and the Saint back in the 1960s, just as he turned down the roles of Gandalf and Dumbledore more recently.

He will be remembered for The Prisoner (1967-68), which he produced, wrote, and starred in, and frequently directed. The series flopped in Britain, but proved in hit in France and the United States producing its own cult following. The Prisoner was revolutionary television, operating at a wholly unprecedented level of surrealism, metaphor, and sophistication, and scarcely equaled since as a vehicle of ideas.

2:58 video

Varifrank posted yesterday:

My favorite quote from “The Prisoner”, which seems rather timely right about now is this exchange with Leo McKern as “Number 2”.

Number 2: What in fact has been created? An international community. A perfect blueprint for world order. When the sides facing each other suddenly realize that they’re looking into a mirror, they’ll see that this is the pattern for the future.
Number 6: The whole earth as… ‘The Village’?
Number 2: That is my hope. What’s yours?
Number 6: I’d like to be the first man on the moon!

Reason quotes a reader of the French newspaper Le Monde: “Patrick McGoohan finally escaped.”

FaceBook shut down Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice promotion, citing privacy concerns. I agree with Michael Arrington that the decision was the kind of triumph of corporate stodginess over creativity and humor that demonstrates that the people in charge, with the power, haven’t a clue.

Original posting

Everyone knew that Cass R. Sunstein was an extreme “progressive,” a socialist, and an adversary of the US Constitution as actually written, but one particularly dangerous aspect of Sunstein’s personal political philosophy is not particularly well known.

The Center for Consumer Freedom has issued a press release reminding Americans that Cass Sunstein is additionally an Animal Rights activist and extremist.

How extreme?

Well, in The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer, 2002, later recycled into the introduction to Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, an anthology he co-edited in 2004, he argues:

“Animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law … Any animals that are entitled to bring suit would be represented by (human) counsel, who would owe guardian like obligations and make decisions, subject to those obligations, on their clients’ behalf.”

Sunstein, who is soon likely to be gifted with extensive powers as “regulatory Czar,” has argued in favor of bans on animal cosmetics testing, hunting, greyhound racing, and… meat eating!

Facing Animals 1:41:36 video – Sunstein’s keynote address begins around 39:00.

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Hat tip to Claude Sutton, MFH.

Lots of problems today.

1) My email account was hijacked by a spammer who mysteriously somehow acquired my password, so the hosting service closed it down. It’s back up and back under my control (with a new password), but if you received an email recently from me asking you to invest my $30 million dollars of ill-gotten Nigerian diamonds, I recommend passing up the deal.

2) NYM’s host server went down in a major way with every file corrupted (fortunately, backups did exist). Possibly a cyber attack from disgruntled overseas readers. There has not yet been time to identify the cause.

3) Xena, baddest of the Maine coon cats, who knows no fear, was found this morning perched in one of the 10’ ( 3m.) high little windows just below the gambrel ceiling of my third floor office. Her route included the top of some four drawer filing cabinets and the frame of my wife’s late mother’s oil portrait hanging high on the wall. She also knocked out the wireless modem on her way up. Take my advice: avoid owning coon cats!

A life of crime tires one out

Llewellyn in 1979

The British Press pays admiring tribute to Sir Dai Lewellyn, who died younger than most, not from the years but the mileage.

Evening Standard:

One-time debs’ delight Sir Dai Llewellyn, who has died aged 62, never did anything remotely useful in his career. Defying every known rule of moderation, he simply lived life to the full – and that cheered up a lot of people.

The Telegraph:

The 4th Bt, who died on Tuesday aged 62, became famous as a playboy, bon viveur and darling of the gossip columns, his reputation reflected in soubriquets such as “Seducer of the Valleys”, “Conquistador of the Canapé Circuit”, “Dai ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’ Llewellyn” or simply “Dirty Dai”.

The son and heir of the gold-medal-winning equestrian baronet Sir Harry “Foxhunter” Llewellyn, and brother of Princess Margaret’s one-time paramour Roddy Llewellyn, Dai Llewellyn was celebrated for his serial seductions of “It” girls, models and actresses, his relentless appetite for partying and his outrageous indiscretions. ...

He never grew up. On a visit to South Africa aged 60, he claimed to have fallen through a bedroom floor into a cellar while “attempting to roger a girl called Nettie”, the girlfriend of a friend. “I wish I could tell you this was an isolated incident,” he told a journalist.

Daily Mail:

Sir Dai, wracked by cancer, cirrhosis of the liver and anaemia, died in a Kent hospital where he had been receiving treatment for several weeks.

His death leaves a gap in London society that will be hard, if not impossible, to fill. Sir Dai was defined by a recklessness that belongs to another age.

He was 62, a child of the post-war era, but he lived like an Edwardian rake, strutting the boulevards with a wicked smile, never too far from another drink or a beautiful woman. ...

As a young man, Sir Dai pursued a modelling career under the name David Savage.

Nicky Haslam, the interior designer and writer said: ‘When I first met Dai he was incredibly good-looking and well dressed. The girls fell for him like mad.’

Sir Dai assisted the process with relentless flattery and assiduous attention, but he always maintained that women loved a rascal, especially those who make them laugh.

But it didn’t work on one young beauty who, it is said, was the love of his life. ...

His modelling career flopped and when he arrived back in London, two years later, she had married someone else.

Sir Dai threw himself with even more enthusiasm into the life that came to characterise him: parties, drinking and seduction.

Some detected a Celtic self-destructive streak and he was indeed a child of the valleys.

In an interview at the hospice last November he said he once drank eight bottles of wine, a bottle of rum, a bottle of port and a bottle of vodka in one night, yet in the morning he was perfectly lucid.

It was a tale that will pursue him to the grave.

Hat tip to John Brewer.

left:Ali al-Kurdi, Right: Mohammed el-Qahtani in Yemen jail

Susan J. Crawford, the convening authority for military commissions, Bob Woodward gleefully reports, has announced that she is unwilling to try Mohammed el-Qahtani (the intended 20th 9/11 hijacker who missed his flight) because interrogation techniques applied to him, including “sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold” impaired the poor chap’s health and thus amounted to torture.

Crawford . . . .said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani’s health led to her conclusion. “The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge” to call it torture, she said.

He says, if discomfort, embarrassment, and water poured on your face are torture, he was tortured himself.

Sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold I experienced in basic training. Waterboarding I experienced later during escape and invading training.

Here we have a Bush Administration official, with a long record of working for Dick Cheney, by the way, inhibited from prosecuting a principal participant in the worst attack on the United States in history costing the lives of 3000 innocent civilians
because she is willing to regard discomforts used in interrogation essentially identical to stresses endured by US military personnel in training as “torture.” Once Crawford is gone and some Obama appointee is in her place, we’ll have hairy Pathan mass murderers released because some corporal crushed their spirits with a cutting remark.

All this demonstrates that the Bush Administration approach of military commissions operating at Defense Department level in the full view of the domestic media and the humanitarian bien pensant left was always insane. The correct procedure was always minimum formality and drumhead courts martial for illegal combatants and captured terrorists under the immediate local US military authority followed by speedy dispatch to the Muslim Paradise at rope’s end.

Carol Marin, of the Chicago Sun Times, contrasts the MSM’s crusading zeal in dealing with Rod Blagojevich with its supine courtiership toward Barack Obama.

It was media deference and self-imposed restraint which made Obama’s electoral victory last November possible. A closer and more skeptical look at Obama’s mysterious life history, associations, and personal benefits connected with shady deals would have sunk his candidacy. Instead, the press operated as his personal fan club.

The honeymoon is still going on, but the day when all this changes will come.

As ferociously as we march like villagers with torches against Blagojevich, we have been, in the true spirit of the Bizarro universe, the polar opposite with the president-elect. Deferential, eager to please, prepared to keep a careful distance.

The Obama news conferences tell that story, making one yearn for the return of the always-irritating Sam Donaldson to awaken the slumbering press to the notion that decorum isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The press corps, most of us, don’t even bother raising our hands any more to ask questions because Obama always has before him a list of correspondents who’ve been advised they will be called upon that day.

We reporters have earned our own membership in the Bizarro universe.

Who are we, after all? The ones rapid-firing at Rod Blagojevich with tough questions until we drive him from the room? Or the Miss Manners crowd, silent until called upon, quietly accepting that only a handful of questions will be taken at a time?

Karen will like this one!

link

Hat tip to NavySealDad.

Barack Obama is widely expected to fulfill his campaign promise to close the US detention center at Guantanamo, if not on Day One of his administration, as soon as can practically be arranged.

The prison at Guantanamo Bay has been made into a symbol of Bush Administration offenses by the left, and its closing will appropriately signal the left’s victory in the struggle with George W. Bush for public perception of reality. But, delightful as the consummating moment of wet liberal humanitarianism’s triumph ought to be, clever democrats like Obama can probably already predict the ultimate consequences.

Simply transferring jihadis to US federal prisons will amount to moving them to the US domestic justice system, with all of them armed and equipped with top flight representation right out of America’s best law schools and white shoe law firms. Renditioning Guantanamo inmates to remote foreign locations where leftwing reporters and attorneys from Shearman & Sterling are in shorter supply would be effective, but rendition has been made into a dirty word.

The Bush Administration, squirming and wriggling ineffectively under continual liberal attack, already released all the likely safe bets and questionable case prisoners.

Reuters reported yesterday on just how well that worked out.

The Pentagon said on Tuesday that 61 former detainees from its military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, appear to have returned to terrorism since their release from custody.

The Pentagon declined to give the names of the 61 released detainees, but at least one, Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi, is pretty well known. He blew up seven Iraqi security force officers and himself in a suicide bombing last April 26th.

I’d say Barack Obama is in a no win situation.

P.J. O’Rourke asks the question of the hour: Is it too soon to talk about the failed Obama presidency just because Obama isn’t president yet?

Business Week’s Steve Hamm says the problem is greedy investors’ short term thinking and aversion to risk, and those stingy VCs should start funding “bold new directions” while waiting for Uncle Obama to open up the federal tap.

Hamm’s article lit the fuse of Michael S. Malone at Live from Silicon Valley.

Since Steve Hamm and Business Week aren’t willing to give you anything but their own big government/big business solutions to the perceived crisis, let me give you the real story – and real solutions – from somebody who has been on the ground here in Silicon Valley for 45 years:

Yes, Silicon Valley – and by extension, the U.S. high technology industry, is in something of a crisis right now. Part of it is the fact that, as the largest manufacturing sector in the US economy, electronics is not immune to the larger financial crisis currently impacting the world.

But there a lot of other problems as well. For one thing, the venture capital industry is in real trouble – not because of a lack of courage, but because government interference – most notably, Sarbanes-Oxley – has proven almost fatal to the new company creation process. With almost no potential for a big pay-out on the back end (because companies don’t ‘go public’ any more), VC’s are having to be much tighter on the front end. That’s good business, not gutlessness.

As for the entrepreneurs themselves, to charge them with a lack of courage or character is truly insulting. Instead of hob-nobbing with senior executives, Steve should have called me. I would have taken him to the little Peet’s Coffee shop in nearby Cupertino where I get my lattes twice per day. There, I would have shown him that on any given day you can see at least two entrepreneurial teams – a half-dozen guys huddled over a single laptop editing spreadsheets – almost always different, and all dreaming of starting the Next Big Company. There are hundreds of these start-up teams all over the Valley right now – indeed, I think there is more entrepreneurial fervor going on right now than just about any other time in Valley history.

Are these folks thinking small? Are they short on courage? No, what they are is pragmatic. That’s the essence of being an entrepreneur. They know what the business landscape is out there, and they are adjusting their plans to succeed in that new reality.

No, the problem is not that entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and the rest of high tech aren’t thinking big, it’s that they aren’t being allowed to. If Business Week would just take off its ideological blinders, it would realize that if Washington really wanted to help a sick Silicon Valley, it would get out of the way, and strip away all of those worthless regulations that are inhibiting the imagination and the creativity of this town.

Eugene Volokh discusses U.S. v. Arzberger a case in which a defendant charged with possession of child pornography when released on bail would previously have automatically lost his right to possess firearms simply by virtue of being accused of a federal crime.

The federal magistrate found that, D.C. v. Heller having recognized the existence of a Constitutionally-protected individual right, Due Process comes into play, and it becomes necessary for the Government to establish the existence of a public danger of such a defendant engaging in violent actions using firearms before his Right to Keep and Bear Arms may be infringed.

The US Constitution has begun returning from exile.

Green on the outside, pink on the inside.

Stephen Dinan reports at the Washington Times:

Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for “global governance” and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner’s name and biography had been removed from Socialist International’s Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group’s congress in Greece was still available.

Socialist International (motto: Progressive Politics For a Fairer World – DZ), an umbrella group for many of the world’s social democratic political parties such as Britain’s Labor Party, says it supports socialism and is harshly critical of U.S. policies.

Walter Olson dropped me an email two days mentioning this, and observing that the Obama team must be worried about how this is going to play in Dubuque since they got Socialist International to pull her name.

It was never really demonstrated that any crime had ever been committed by anyone, and Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald already knew that it was Richard Armitage who told Robert Novak about Valerie Plame when he indicted Lewis Libby on the basis of his account of conversations a few years back differing from those of his interlocutors.

Clarice Feldman, who did a superb job of covering the Plamegame scandal at American Thinker, calls on President Bush to pardon Lewis Libby before leaving office.

She’s right, and I think he will.

Everyone with blue eyes shares a common matrilineal ancestor who lived between 6000 and 10000 years ago.

LiveScience

This 9:07 video describes how Britain’s bans on handgun ownership and self defense have resulted in unprecedented, previously unimaginable levels of violent crime. The British policeman, formerly equipped with a nightstick, now carries a pistol and wears body armor.

Jack Bauer violating a prisoner’s human rights

The Telegraph reports that the American left has succeeded in breaking the famed secret agent who will appear on television this evening to confess his crimes and offer apologies.

US conservatives are up in arms that the election of President-Elect Barack Obama has led the show’s producers to pander to the liberal consensus in Hollywood, which they claim has led to the blacklisting of those who disagree with their anti-war views.

When the series returns for its seventh season on Sunday night, Bauer will mouth the views of Mr Obama, who has vowed to end “enhanced interrogation”, also known as torture, and close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

And in an apparent bid to get in tune with the new president, the new season opens with Bauer facing a congressional investigation probing his use of torture and summary executions in previous series. “It’s better that everything comes out in the open,” Bauer says, echoing Democrat demands for greater transparency over US counter-terrorist tactics.

“We’ve done so many things in the name of protecting this country, we’ve created two worlds. Ours and the people’s we’ve promised to protect. They deserve to hear the truth and decide how far they want to let us go.”

Keep a close watch on Bauer’s eyelids. He may be signaling with Morse code that he is being coerced.

Alex Wissner-Gross, Environmental Fellow at Harvard, according to the London Times, has estimated the greenhouse gas effect of one typical on-line activity.

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.

Of course, you have to subscribe to a whole assortment of stupidities to believe that any of this matters.

Would you trade 10 friends for a hamburger?

Burger King is running a promotion called Whopper Sacrifice. The idea is that FaceBook members can receive a coupon good for one free Whopper for every ten persons they eliminate from their friendship list.

Hopefully our (former) friends will understand.

Eric Felton reports that European vermouth maker Noilly Prat has decided to quit making the special dry-formula vermouth favored by Americans for modest use in the ultimate cocktail, the Martini. Only a far-sweeter and heavier, soi disant “traditional” formula Noilly Prat will be available henceforward.

First Obama wins the election, then this!

Felten quotes the poet Hugo Williams: “What a strange coincidence it is that everything always changes for the worse during the course of a single lifetime.”

Canadian journalist Paul Watson received the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of the naked body of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia.

What does someone like Watson do for a follow-up almost a decade and a half later? Why, he goes to Afghanistan to ride with the Taliban and record their boasts and praise their hospitality for the LA Times.

Centcom ought to have a special Hellfire missile-equipped drone following Watson. When he next goes off behind the lines to rub elbows with the enemy, its controller can just wait until the traditional pashtunwali hospitality and America-bashing is well underway, then deliver a brand new award of 18 lb (8 kg) of metal augmented explosive charge.

Don’t slap that PTSD sufferer, General. Give him the Purple Heart!

Michael A. Cohen, Senior Research Fellow at New America Foundation, thinks the Pentagon is just plain mean for refusing to award Post Traumatic Stress Disorder victims the Purple Heart, a military decoration given in the name of the president to members of the Armed Forces killed or wounded in combat.

The original form of the award, invented by George Washington during the Revolutionary War, stated: “Let it be known that he who wears the military order of the purple heart has given of his blood in the defense of his homeland and shall forever be revered by his fellow countrymen.”

Mr. Cohen rejects the Pentagon’s (and George Washington’s) criteria of shedding blood for one’s country. For him, internal emotional suffering is quite enough.

Simply because their wounds are not evident to the naked eye does not mean they are not real and debilitating. In many respects, those who suffer from PTSD never truly recover and suffer through all sorts of deep psychological trauma. And as for the notion that it’s difficult to diagnose; perhaps the people who made this decision should crack open the latest copy of the DSM.

One would hope that in the 21st century, with all we’ve learned about the debilitating nature of mental illnesses, that these sort of simple-minded and uninformed characterizations of “war injuries” would be restricted to the peanut gallery. But instead they are seemingly driving Pentagon decision-making.

This failure to recognize PTSD has real consequences. Not only will those who are suffering not receive the added—and much-needed—medical benefits that come to Purple Heart recipients, but the stigma around mental illness in the military is only perpetuated by this action. One can only imagine the chilling effect that this decision will have on soldiers already uncomfortable about facing mental illness.

In the characteristic manner of pundits on the left, Mr. Cohen indignantly asserts the unproven and unprovable as a matter of established fact, pointing to the opinion of his ideological confreres, i.e., the liberal compilers of the American Psychiatric Association’s highly controversial and notorious for changing with the winds of fashion Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as inarguably probative.

His unexpressed, even possibly unconscious, goal is really more egalitarianism. From the viewpoint of the left, concepts of individual responsibility and good character must be discredited and rejected. No one is really better than anyone else. Some are simply more privileged than others. It is the inferior, whose failures in war as in peace must be regarded as lying beyond his own control and treated as the basis for a claim against society, who must be championed and decorated.

In her recently published journals, Susan Sontag writes (1957, p.131):

One of the main strands in modern literature (and in modern politics – DZ) is diabolism—that is, self-conscious inversion of moral values. This is not nihilism, the denial of moral values, but their inversion: still rule-bound, only now a “morality of evil” instead of a “morality of good.”

Hat tip to Excitable Andrew.

Lifehacker reports that underestimated volume turned the Windows 7 Beta trial into another Mac advertisement.

You’d think that getting soundly beaten by Google and Yahoo over and over in the online space would mean that Microsoft would take the web a little more seriously. You’d be wrong.

Case in point: Today’s epic failure around the distribution of the Windows 7 public beta download. This morning Microsoft’s web servers fell to their knees under the pressure of constant web page refreshes by enthusiasts who want to volunteer their time to test Windows 7 after Steve Ballmer’s announcement the download would be available at noon today. (Since noon today, the download was there, then pulled, and back up again only if you know the direct links, and the promised product keys still aren’t available. There’s “no ETA” when they will be.)

Is it fantastic that Microsoft is offering this freebie preview? Yes. Is it shameful that they’d be so woefully unprepared for the demand it would draw? That also would be a YES.

The Wall Street Journal comments with astonishment on Obama’s choice of Dawn Johnsen, leading opponent of the Bush Administration’s defense of executive branch authority, as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which interprets the law for his entire administration.

One of the OLC’s main duties is to defend the Presidency against the inevitable encroachment of the judiciary and Congress on Constitutional authority, executive privilege, war powers, and so forth. Ms. Johnsen knows this, or should, having served as acting OLC head in the Clinton Administration between 1997 and 1998. The office has since become all the more central in a war on terror that has been “strangled by law,” to quote Jack Goldsmith, a former Bush OLC chief.

Yet Ms. Johnsen seems to think her job isn’t to defend the Presidency but to tie it down with even more legal ropes. She has written that “an essential source of constraint is often underappreciated and underestimated: legal advisors within the executive branch.” And in touting her qualifications, the Obama transition cited her recent law review articles “What’s a President to Do?: Interpreting the Constitution in the Wake of the Bush Administration’s Abuses”; and “Faithfully Executing the Laws: Internal Legal Constraints on Executive Power.”

In other words, Mr. Obama has nominated as his main executive branch lawyer someone who believes in diminishing the powers of the executive branch. This is akin to naming a conscientious objector as the head of the armed forces, or hiring your wife’s divorce lawyer to handle your side of the settlement too.

David Brooks looks at Obama’s unprecedented stimulus package plan and predicts that “by this time next year, he’ll either be a great president or a broken one.”

40 years on, American Movie Channel has made all 17 episodes of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner available on-line.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Theodore Dalrymple, in New English Review, deplores the estrangement of contemporary art from tradition, technique, values, and beauty.

From having talked to quite a number of art students, it seems that art school these days resembles a kindergarten for young adults, where play is more important than work. The lack of technical training is painfully obvious at the shows the students put on. Many of the students have good ideas, but cannot execute them successfully for lack of technical facility. Indeed, their technical incompetence is only too painfully obvious.

It is very striking, too, how few art students have any interest in or knowledge of the art of the past. Do you visit galleries, I ask them?

No, they reply, a little shocked at the very suggestion, and as if to do so would inhibit them in their creativity or to condone plagiarism.

As for art history, they are taught and know very little. This is all part of the programme of disconnecting them radically from the past, of making them free-floating molecules in the vast vacuum of art.

It is true that they are sometimes taught just a little art history. I had what was for me a memorable conversation with an art student when she was my patient. She was in her second year of art school, and told me that one of the things she enjoyed most about it was art history. I asked what they taught in art history.

‘The first year,’ she said, ‘we did African art. But now in the second year we’re doing western art.’

I asked what particular aspect of western art they were doing.

‘Roy Liechtenstein.’

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The election of leftwing democrat Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency has been widely reported to have provoked a public stampede to purchase firearms likely to be banned by the democrat-controlled Congress during the new administration. Strong evidence of the accuracy of those reports of surging gun sales in the following BATF notice.

Form 4473 is the document which must be filled out whenever someone purchases a firearm.

BATF online:

A notice will be posted at the expiration of this temporary authorized change.

It sounds like a lot, but, after all, as Edwardsville’s mayor explained, it will affect the entire region! And isn’t saving the planet, starting with Northern Alabama, worth every penny?

US News:

At first glance, the town of Edwardsville, Ala., with a population of 194 people, might raise a few eyebrows with its bid to receive $375 million from the economic stimulus package being assembled by Barack Obama and lawmakers in Congress.

The tiny town, located near the Georgia border and 26 miles from the nearest “big city” of Anniston (population: 24,276), added 33 proposals—about two thirds of them related to “green” energy—to the list of “ready- to- go” projects assembled by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Total sum: $375,076,200.

Australian Daily Telegraph reports PETA’s latest atrocity.

Radical international animal rights group PETA has launched its most bizarre campaign yet, demanding fish be renamed “sea kittens”.

PETA - People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals – believes calling fish sea kittens will make sea food less appealing.

It wants to change the image of fish as slimy and slithery creatures by claiming they are similar to cuter, more popular animals. “Would people think twice about ordering fish sticks if they were called sea kitten sticks?” PETA asked on its website.

Roger Kimball in the January New Criterion:

It is often said that an anthropologist is someone who respects the distinctive values of every culture but his own. We in the West are all anthropologists now. It is curious, though, that proponents of relativism and multiculturalism should use ethnocentrism as a stick with which to beat the West. After all, both the idea and the critique of ethnocentrism are quintessentially Western. There has never in history been a society more open to other cultures than our own; nor has any tradition been more committed to self-criticism than the Western tradition: the figure of Socrates endlessly inviting self-scrutiny and rational explanation is a definitive image of the Western spirit. Moreover, “Western” science is not exclusively Western: it is science plain and simple. It was, to be sure, invented and developed in the West, but it is as true for the inhabitants of the Nile Valley as it is for the denizens of New York. That is why, outside the precincts of the humanities departments of Western universities, there is a mad dash to acquire Western science and technology. The deepest foolishness of multiculturalism shows itself in the puerile attacks it mounts on the cogency of scientific rationality, epitomized poignantly by the Afrocentrist who flips on his word processor to write books decrying the parochial nature of Western science and extolling the virtues of the “African way.”...

Why does relativism, which begins with a beckoning promise of liberation from “oppressive” moral constraints, so often end in the embrace of immoral constraints that are politically obnoxious? Part of the answer lies in the hypertrophy or perversion of relativism’s conceptual enablers—terms like “pluralism,” “diversity,” “tolerance,” and the like. They all name classic liberal virtues, but it turns out that their beneficence depends on their place in a constellation of fixed values. Absent that hierarchy, they rapidly degenerate into epithets in the armory of political suasion. They retain the aura of positive values, but in reality they are what Gairdner calls “value-dispersing terms that serve as an official warning to accept all behaviours of others without judgment and, most important, to keep all moral opinions private.” In this sense, the rise of relativism encourages an ideology of non-judgmentalism only as a prelude to ever more strident discriminations. “Where conditions permit,” Gairdner writes, the strong step in:

either to impose a new regime or, as in the Western democracies, where overt totalitarianism is still unthinkable, to further permeate ordinary life with the state’s quietly overbearing, regulating role. Relativism is the natural public philosophy of such regimes because it repudiates all natural moral or social binding power, replacing these with legal decrees and sanction of the state.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Give these to your kids and they’ll all grow up to write Symbolist poetry. Four for $10.

Hat tip to David Pescovitz.

A short which has appeared at 34 film festivals and received 17 awards. Too warm and fuzzy for my taste, but some people may enjoy it.

16:23 video

Most blogs produced by retired Intelligence Community professionals are either moderately or severely negative.

Jeff Stein quotes a retired operations officer:

A retired senior CIA operations officer who quit last summer after 20 years tracking terrorists says the rank-and-file reaction to President-elect Obama’s choice of Leon E.Panetta to run the spy agency has been “overwhelmingly negative.”

Charles “Sam” Faddis, who led a CIA team into northern Iraq before the 2003 invasion, says he had “already heard from a large number of rank and file within CIA on this choice, and the reaction has been overwhelmingly negative.”

Faddis added:

“These are people who are sweating blood everyday to make things happen and living for the day that somebody is going to come in, institute real reform and turn the CIA into the vital, effective organization it should be. To them this choice just says that no such changes are impending and that all they can look forward to is business as usual.”

A number of field operatives have voiced similar sentiments to me since word spread Monday that Obama had chosen Panetta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton known for his budget expertise, to run the CIA. Panetta was also a Democratic congressman from the Monterey area of California from 1977 to 1993.

“His credentials do not warrant the appointment, especially in a wartime footing,” said one CIA operative who has been pursuing al Qaeda in Afghanistan, in a typical remark.

Faddis, who was working on nuclear nonproliferation issues when he left the agency in May after 20 years as a covert operator, called Panetta “a disappointing choice.”

“I am a big supporter of President-Elect Obama,” Faddis added, “but Panetta is not the guy we need to run CIA right now. He may be a very good man. (But) he knows nothing about intelligence, particularly human intelligence”—recruiting and managing spies

“The central problem at CIA is that it is not doing a very good job of collecting the information it was created to collect,” Faddis said.

“To fix that you need to get down in the weeds and really address the nuts and bolts of how CIA is performing its mission. You cannot do that unless you understand the business, and, frankly, you probably can’t do it unless you have been out on the street doing the work yourself.”...

Voices from below decks insist that’s not enough to get a grip on what they call a self-serving, insular corps of middle managers in the clandestine service, which, they say, has become hidebound and risk adverse.

“When Panetta ends up sitting in a room with the senior ‘spooks’ from the agency, and they start with the smoke and mirrors and obfuscation, how is he going to cut through that?” Faddis asked, echoing a common view. “He’s not.”

“No matter how well intentioned he is or how intelligent, he does not have the background. He does not even speak their language. He will end up like Porter Goss did, sitting in an office, talking on the phone, and, at ground level, nothing will change,” Faddis maintained.

——————————————————————————

Spook 86 (20 year veteran of military intelligence):

Mr. Obama is entitled to the CIA Director of his choice. But the selection of Leon Panetta is a reflection of the next commander-in-chief and his own, limited intelligence experience. A few weeks ago, the president-elect named retired Navy Admiral Dennis Blair as the new Director of National Intelligence. Like Mr. Panetta, Admiral Blair has a long resume as a leader and administrator. But in terms of intel, his only experience is as a consumer.

The big-picture view is even more disturbing. President-elect Obama, a man who is decidedly short on national security experience, has appointed a pair of neophytes to fill our most important intelligence positions. Those men, in turn, are supposed to advise him on the most critical (and sensitive) intel and national security issues. That planned “arrangement” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. ...

Panetta may be a sop to liberal bloggers and activists who torpedoed John Brennan, the CIA veteran said to be Mr. Obama’s first choice to run the agency. Brennan was unacceptable to those elements of the Obama coalition because of his support for the “forceful” interrogation of suspected terrorists.

Given the complexity of intelligence issues and the many real or perceived intelligence failures in the history of that agency, a thorough professional understanding of the intelligence profession is indispensable for effective leadership of the CIA. It is precisely because this agency needs reforms to produce more timely and actionable intelligence for U.S. national security decision-making, that its director must understand the capabilities and limitations of the intelligence business, and not be fooled by insiders’ ability to “wait out one more director.”

Some of the very qualifications touted by Panetta’s fans are not desired or needed by a director: he does not need “the ear of the president” since that is the function of the DNI. Nor does this position require political savvy, since that is not a function of any intelligence agency director. In fact, it would be downright counterproductive, given repeated criticism of the “politicization of intelligence” in recent years. ...

Mr. Panetta: with all due respect to your fine public policy credentials, decline this appointment for the good of the intelligence community and the decision makers it serves. You would make an effective governor of California!

Well for that matter why not pick Al Franken, or James Carvell, or even Chris Matthews? Too bad he’ll fly through the surrender-crat senate for confirmation. Hopefully though he get’s ZERO cooperation from the field and he get’s “set up for failure”, so that his term is short. This should tell you all you want to know about how serious Obama takes our national security. But then again he did say that his goal was to disarm us didn’t he? ...

His only qualification seems to be his stance against interrogation techniques that have saved thousands of lives.

I am a tad amused by the insistence that we need a CIA director with “intelligence” experience. Really? Then why in the hell is the CIA Headquarters named for a guy who was, by this criteria, one of the least experienced CIA Director’s ever named. I refer of course to George H. W. Bush. ...

In terms of temperament Leon Panetta reminds me a lot of Bush 41. Both are politicians but neither seemed to relish the partisan blood feuds that have become the norm in Washington over the last twenty years.

But Panetta has some decided advantages over George Bush Sr. Unlike Bush senior, he served as White House Chief of Staff and headed up the Office of Management and Budget. So he actually goes into the job with more management experience the Bush 41 ever had. ...

Do we want someone who has been to a CIA training center and completed the Field Officer’s Training Course? Sorry, I do not think any of the CIA Directors in the last fifty years have done that. Richard Helms and William Colby had OSS experience. I don’t think they ever did FOTC.

Do we want someone who understands the difference between intelligence collection and intelligence analysis? Absolutely. And I think Panetta meets that bill. Do we want someone who understands how certain decisions based on imprecise or inadequate information can damage irreparably a Presidency? Yes! ...

Does Leon Panetta have the personal strength to tell a President keen on pursuing a foreign fiasco to steer clear? I do not know the answer to that.

If the answer is ‘no” then the legacy of Panetta at the CIA is already foretold. He will be another war story about a bad Director. If the answer is “yes” then we may be on the threshold of an era of enlightened leadership at the CIA. I hope for the sake of our country that it is the latter and not the former. I am certain of this–Leon Panetta has enough experience in Washington to know what will destroy you and what is truly lasting. I believe he is smart enough to seek the latter.

They leaked all over George W. Bush, and now spooks disgruntled by Obama’s choice of an outsider to head the Agency have run right over to tell their troubles to the Washington Post, which dutifully obliges with a helpful headline: Obama Is Under Fire Over Panetta Selection .

Meanwhile, in a press interview reported by the New York Times, Obama seemed to be backing carefully away from the Panetta appointment.

Question: Some are – some are questioning Leon Panetta’s lack of intelligence – lack of experience on intelligence matters. Sorry about that. I know this is tricky for you since you haven’t announced it yet, but what does he bring to the table for you?

Obama: Well, as you noted, I haven’t made – haven’t made a formal announcement about my intelligence team.

(cell phone rings)

Obama: That may be him calling now… finding out where it’s at.

Obama: I have the utmost respect for Leon Panetta. I think that he is one of the finest public servants that we have. He brings extraordinary management skills, great political savvy, an impeccable record of integrity.

As chief of staff, he is somebody who – to the president – he’s somebody who obviously was fully versed in international affairs, crisis management, and had to evaluate intelligence consistently on a day-to-day basis.

Having said all that, I have not made an announcement.

It looks like Leon Panetta had better start reading the job ads all over again.

Hard times are not only impacting large financial institutions like Lehman and AIG.

NY Times:

Queen Elizabeth, the Kremlin and the White House have been customers, but in the current economic climate, luxury crystals and ceramics are a hard sell as Waterford Wedgwood conceded Monday.

The company, which is based in Dublin and whose roots go back 250 years, makes and sells crystal vases, glasses and ceramic figurines and kitchenware. It made the ball that drops each New Year’s Eve in Times Square, and its crystal chandeliers decorate Windsor Castle and the Kennedy Center.

Waterford Wedgwood said on Monday that its 10 British units and 4 businesses in Ireland were placed into administration, similar to bankruptcy protection in the United States, after running out of money and failing to find a buyer. The remaining subsidiaries, including those in the United States, Germany and Canada, remain unaffected.

The auditor, Deloitte, was appointed as administrator of the troubled businesses, which employ 2,700, or more than half of Waterford’s 5,000 employees. The units will continue to operate until the administrator decides to sell, close or reorganize them.

“I am disappointed that certain of the group’s U.K. and Irish subsidiaries have had to go into administration and receivership, but we remain optimistic that ongoing discussions will result in a buyer being found for the business,” the chief executive of Waterford, David Sculley, said.

Waterford Wedgwood was created in 1986 when the Irish crystal maker Waterford acquired the British ceramics company Wedgwood. Both companies have a rich history. Wedgwood was founded in 1759 by Josiah Wedgwood in Stoke-on-Trent, England. Charles Darwin, who formulated the theory of evolution, married a member of the Wedgwood family in the 19th century and was able to finance his research with the help of the family fortunes.

Waterford was founded in 1783 by the brothers William and George Penrose and named after the Irish harbor town where they lived. Waterford faced difficult times in 1851, when it closed because of rising taxes, but the business reopened almost 100 years later. The Irish government gave Waterford glassware as a present to each American president from Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan, who kept his jelly beans in a Waterford dish.

Barack Obama carefully avoided advocacy of new gun control measures during his presidential campaign, but that does not imply that there is the slightest likelihood of his vetoing any gun control legislation emanating from the new Congress.

Alan Korwin warns about H.R. 1022, the renewal of the (so-called) Assault Weapons Ban, introduced by gun control fanatic Carolyn McCarthy and 67 co-sponsors in February 2007. Korwin predicts that, in the new Congress, the same bill will include a much more spectacular feature.

Slipping below the radar (or under the short-term memory cap), the Democrats have already leaked a gun-ban list, even under the Bush administration when they knew full well it had no chance of passage (HR 1022, 110th Congress). It serves as a framework for the new list the Bradys plan to introduce shortly.

I have an outline of the Brady’s current plans and targets of opportunity, I’m working on getting that news out asap after these ban lists, probably be ready in the next few days. It’s horrific. They’re going after the courts, regulatory agencies, firearms dealers and statutes in an all out effort to restrict we the people. They’ve made little mention of criminals. ...

Attorney General gets carte blanche to ban guns at will:

Under the proposal, the U.S. Attorney General can add any “semiautomatic rifle or shotgun originally designed for military or law enforcement use, or a firearm based on the design of such a firearm, that is not particularly suitable for sporting purposes, as determined by the Attorney General.” Note that Obama’s pick for this office (Eric Holder, confirmation hearing set for Jan. 15) wrote a brief in the Heller case supporting the position that you have no right to have a working firearm in your own home.

In making this determination, the bill says, “there shall be a rebuttable presumption that a firearm procured for use by the United States military or any federal law enforcement agency is not particularly suitable for sporting purposes, and a firearm shall not be determined to be particularly suitable for sporting purposes solely because the firearm is suitable for use in a sporting event.”

In plain English this means that ANY firearm ever obtained by federal officers or the military is not suitable for the public.

That presumption can be challenged only by suing the federal government over each firearm it decides to ban, in a court it runs with a judge it pays. This virtually dismisses the principles of the Second Amendment.

The last part is particularly clever, stating that a firearm doesn’t have a sporting purpose just because it can be used for sporting purpose—is that devious or what? And of course, “sporting purpose” is a rights infringement with no constitutional or historical support whatsoever, invented by domestic enemies of the right to keep and bear arms to further their cause of disarming the innocent.

WorldNetDaily takes Korwin’s posting and accompanies it with a big brass band.

A perfect storm is developing for Second Amendment opponents that could allow President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for attorney general – Eric Holder – to “ban guns at will” despite the 2008 affirmation from the U.S. Supreme Court that U.S. citizens have a right to bear arms.

And this particular threat is only the first of what will undoubtedly be many.

Andrew Breitbart’s new group blog forum for film industry conservatives launched yesterday. First day’s posters include Andrew Klavan, John Nolte, Orson Bean, Melanie Graham, and “Veritas Obviam” (who obviously does not want to lose his career). Perhaps this one will fill the badly needed role of main conservative outlet for commentary on new movie releases and the ideological excesses of the establishment film industry.

Held at the Yasukuni Shrine during New Year’s holiday.

8:00 video

Hat tip to Paul Martin.

Ann Coulter takes aim while visiting Woodstock, NY

Ann Coulter had been scheduled to appear this morning on NBC’s Today program promoting her new book Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, but on Sunday the “progressive” blog-site Media Matters cracked the ideological whip and reminded NBC of its duty to provide no aid or assistance of any kind to opponents of the Revolution, especially those who go around saying such politically incorrect things.

Media Matters has documented that NBC has repeatedly provided Coulter a platform to spew her inflammatory rhetoric even as NBC-affiliated hosts and anchors have expressed disapproval of her statements or criticized the media for promoting her. Coulter’s latest book is rife with such inflammatory and offensive comments.

Matt Drudge reports that NBC has faithfully fallen into line, and has banned Coulter for life, at least.

The nation’s top selling conservative author has been banned from appearing on NBC, insiders tell the DRUDGE REPORT.

“We are just not going to have her on any more, it’s over,” a top network source explains.

But a second top suit strongly denies there is any “Coulter ban”.

“Look for a re-invite, as soon as Wednesday,” said the news executive, who asked not to be named.

NBC’s TODAY show abruptly cut Ann Coulter from its planned Tuesday broadcast, claiming the schedule was overbooked.

Executives at NBC TODAY replaced Coulter with showbiz reporter Perez Hilton, who recently offered $1,000 to anyone who would throw a pie at Ann Coulter. Hilton is also launching a new book this week. ...

Coulter was set to unveil her new book, GUILTY.

One network insider claims it was the book’s theme—a brutal examination of liberal bias in the new era—that got executives to dis-invite the controversialist.

“We are just not interested in anyone so highly critical of President-elect Obama, right now,” a TODAY insider reveals. “It’s such a downer. It’s just not the time, and it’s not what our audience wants, either.

Life is short, it seems. Michael Calderone is reporting that NBC has changed its mind again.

Conservative author Ann Coulter will appear on Wednesday’s “Today” show, according to an NBC spokesperson.

Coulter has been talking up being bumped by NBC for the past two days, both on other networks and the radio. A controversy erupted when Drudge splashed that she’d been “banned for life,” leading NBC to deny that she was banned, and later offering her a new segment.

On her website, Coulter writes that “Drudge gets results: Today show changes mind.” She’ll be appearing during both the 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. hours.