Andrew Sullivan prefaces his recent Newsweek article offering an unusually optimistic assessment of the current president’s prospects and achievements by confessing:

I write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. I did not expect, or want, a messiah. I have one already, thank you very much.

Barack Obama is, only too obviously, a political figure originating from the most extreme fringe of the radical left remodeled into a merely aggressively Progressive democrat. Barack Obama deliberately chose to break with the New Democrat/New Labour 1990s center leftism model successfully adopted by William Clinton and Tony Blair, in which politicians of the left offered an implicit understanding that their efforts to deliver more benefits to labor and the less well off would be pursued with restraint and never in such a way as to jeopardize economic growth and the general welfare of the country.

How it is, in any way, shape, or form, legitimately possible for a “conservative minded” person to be a supporter of Barack Obama is a mystery to me.

If one were so pacifistically-inclined that George Bush’s wars made one into a democrat, well, it is difficult to fail to notice that Barack Obama has continued the same military efforts.

Pointing to Bush’s war-time debt increases as justification for supporting Obama goes beyond obliviousness, on the other hand, far, far into hypocrisy. Barack Obama presided over a domestic spending spree utterly unprecedented in history in straightened economic times, multiplying dramatically all previous debt and, finding himself faced with a imminent crisis in funding existing entitlement obligations, proceeded, in defiance of an enormous public outcry of protest, to add a new massive entitlement.

Referring to mildly coercive interrogation techniques, carefully limited so as to inflict no real injury or permanent effects, as torture, while indulging in wildly exaggerated rhetoric and striking sanctimonious poses has become one of the principal exercises of Andrew Sullivan’s journalism. Sullivan has thereby become one of the foremost practitioners of the school of moral instruction combining flamboyant and in-your-face sexual latitudinarianism with Pecksniffian priggery applied to defense activities.

So, I start out, even before evaluating Sullivan’s analysis, arguments, and appraisals, confronted with a set of obviously fraudulent credentials. Andrew Sullivan is not “conservative minded.” He is a notoriously unstable and emotionally volatile partisan of the Homintern, who used to be on the right, but who has transferred his political loyalties to the left, partly in order to further the political agenda of his sexual subculture, and partly simply because the opportunities and accommodations are so much better over there.

No wonder that Ann Althouse didn’t even bother reading through the article. She knew perfectly well what she was going to find.

There was a time when Little Green Footballs was probably the most respected blog commenting from the right. Its author, Charles Johnson, essentially cost Dan Rather his job by demonstrating via a simple gif that the National Guard letter CBS was reporting as written in 1973 had been created in Microsoft Word, using the MS Times Roman font.

In 2009, Mr. Johnson broke ranks with the conservative side of the blogosphere, publicly switching sides. He was infuriated, he announced in his “Drop dead, Conservatives” kiss off posting, by a number of prominent conservative blogs having some sort of sinister associations with European nationalist parties; by conservatives being hostile toward statism, being politically incorrect, and skeptical of catastrophist theories of Anthropogenic Global Warming; because conservatives typically oppose the creation of Same-Sex Marriage as a public institution; and because conservative bloggers are too mean to Muslims and Barack Obama.

It was hard to understand reading all that how Mr. Johnson had previously done such an excellent job of opposing statism, exposing Islamic pathologies, and debunking liberal stupidity and mendacity himself.

Now, we can see the transformation has become complete. The formerly brilliant and admirable Charles Johnson has successfully turned himself into another obnoxious, prevaricating and sophicizing leftist idiot.

Johnson clocked in yesterday on the recent alleged Obama Lincoln gaffe:

Here we go again. Don’t these people ever get tired of humiliating themselves?

Practically the entire right wing blogosphere went into vapor-lock this morning, shrieking in unison at the evil librul PBS for “editing” the transcript of the President’s joint session speech on jobs, to cover up his “gaffe” that Abraham Lincoln was a founder of the Republican Party.

American Stinker leads the pack with this typically vitriolic, hate-filled post (but it’s currently on at least a dozen other blogs too): Blog: PBS alters transcript to hide Obama gaffe.

At one point Mr. Obama made a major gaffe; he identified Abraham Lincoln as the founder of the Republican Party.

Lincoln did not join the Republicans until 1856, over two years after the party was founded. The first Republican convention was held in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854.

Such a gaffe would have brought huge amounts of ridicule and derision on George W. Bush, but in the case of Obama the media yawned.

Actually, they did more than yawn; government-funded PBS has altered the transcript of the President’s speech, removing the offending comment.

So are they right? Did PBS edit the transcript?

Gasp! Yes, they did!

Johnson goes on to justify the PBS emendation on the basis that it was really a White House emendation.

Then, he proceeds to grab, out of the mouth of the opposition itself, a close-enough-for-government-work citation to “prove” that those identifying “Lincoln founded the Republican Party” as a gaffe were wrong.

[L]et’s see what the Republican National Committee website has to say about Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln | RNC: Republican National Committee | GOP

Abraham Lincoln helped establish the Republican Party with a speech denouncing an 1854 law, written by a Democrat Senator, that allowed slavery to expand into the western territories. Two years later, he co-founded the Illinois GOP. Lincoln was runner-up for the 1856 Republican vice presidential nomination and then became a Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Charles Johnson then performs the classic happy dance of the demented left-wing troll happily preaching to his own one-sided choir.

Oops! Wingnuts with egg on their faces … again. I guess they must enjoy the embarrassment, because they just keep falling for this crap, over and over and over.

It is simply amazing how blogging for the left can so thoroughly and absolutely transform a one-time astute and dignified voice of reason into a shrill, slangy, repetitiously name-calling partisan hysteric.

Compare the post that destroyed Dan Rather
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And, who’s right? Was it a gaffe?

I’m a fair-minded guy. I think you could vaguely and imprecisely refer to Lincoln that way. But it is vitally important to bear in mind that the overwhelmingly liberally-biased mainstream media does not grant the same “vaguely and imprecisely is ok” benefit of the doubt to Republicans. If Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, or Rick Perry make any kind of historical statement, each of them had better be dead right, or else.

Proving my point, and demolishing Mr. Johnson’s, Ace quotes Tom Maguire pointing out that “Lincoln founded the Republican Party” has already been established as a gaffe, at least when a Republican says it.

Surprise: Time Magazine Noted Non-Candidate Huckabee’s “Lincoln Founded The Republican Party” Gaffe In 2008; Refuses To Note Obama’s Exact-Same Gaffe In Joint Session

It’s almost as if they have a rooting interest.

Actually, Huckabee’s error was noted by one Jay Carney. That must explain it, then: The only guy in the media capable of doing a quick Wikipedia search is now in the Obama Administration, so lucky him. ...

It’s pretty easy to appear to be a good student when a doting teacher corrects your errors for you, and gives you nothing but gold stars.

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Exactly how incorrect it is to say “Lincoln founded the Republican Party” is a trivial point. But clearly the impact of conversion to the left on someone’s dignity, style, integrity, and stature can be really devastating. Reading LGF these days is like encountering unhappily today someone you knew and admired at college, coming upon them lying in the gutter drunk and homeless. The experience is shocking and painful. “If only there were anything one could do,” one thinks as one shudders and passes on.

Of course, Andrew Sullivan blogs on a considerably more prolific and professional scale than I do. He is infuriatingly intellectually dishonest, shamelessly manipulative and propagandistic in his arguments, but he otherwise does a pretty commendable job. (The backing of a major magazine and a budget providing funding for a staff undoubtedly helps.)

If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.

What do you do when you’re supporting a duck as lame as Barack Obama, a failed president with the ugliest record of economic failure and executive maladministration since American voters gave Jimmy Carter the heave-ho back in 1980, and along comes a truly frightening challenger, a good-looking, outspoken Republican governor with a record of creating roughly 40% of all jobs created in the country recently in his one state?

If you are a sanctimonious and mendacious leftist like Andrew Sullivan, you squeal in outrage, lift your skirts in the manner of a 1950s housewife frightened by a mouse, jump to the top of your highest portable moral pedestal, and make a Hail Mary! try at persuading readers that flavorful regional rhetoric is really the same thing as a promise of actual violence, and a metaphorical reference to “ugly treatment” really means lynching.

No one can be altogether surprised when the school of political commentary that proceeds toward the keyboard after rising from its knees on the mens’ room floor stoops to combining grand moral dudgeon with opportunistic melodrama, but when Republicans like Karl Rove and Tony Fratto, motivated by spite stemming from past feuds in Texas politics, are willing to join the left’s attack Chihuahuas in biting at the ankles of the probable next Republican nominee, that is surprising and causes some of us to begin reevaluating our positive opinion of Mr. Rove in particular.

Joining the phony baloney left-wing chorus of “Oh, my gracious! What he said.” is just plain despicable, and it is a grave and serious disservice to the country and to the political process to assist in the emasculation of political speech demanded by the left’s PC inquisitors.

The left is, not surprisingly, having a field day recriminating with conservatives for our new association with terrorism.

A number of left-wing sources are pointing out with great pleasure that Anders Behring Breivik in his Manifesto quoted several prominent conservative blogs associated with criticism of Islam and of Islamic immigration to Europe, including Gates of Vienna, Atlas Shrugs (Pam Geller), and most particularly the Fjordman blog (which closed down operations in 2005).

Leftwing JoeBlow delivered a bombshell, quoting sources reporting that Breivik actually is the much-admired Fjordman.

Norwegian bloggers are reporting that Breivik is the author of a blog called Fjordman and that he’s guest blogged for Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch and Gates of Vienna “for years.” As Breivik, he publicly praised one of her posts. Elise Hendrick has translated a passage from Realisten which confirms that Fjordman and Breivik are one and the same:

According to his own statements, Anders Behring Breivik previously operated the blog ‘Fjordman’, and later wrote for many years under the pseudonym Fjordman for the anti-Muslim and Zionist blogs Gates of Vienna and Jihad Watch

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Fjordman a terrorist bomber and child-killer? That would be pretty embarrassing to conservatives, especially to the owners of blogs who linked (like me), or who even hosted, his postings!

Pretty to think so, if you are a leftist, but happily for us, not so.

Fjordman answered attacks, on Gates of Vienna, today, assuring readers that he is not Anders Behring Breivik. He never met Anders Behring Breivik. And he does not support terrorism.

Hat tip to Stephen Frankel.

Pity the fate of the less-than-top-rank right-wing blogger. Not only did the Age of Obama not create booming traffic for us, we’re actually an endangered species, argues John Hawkins.

[W]hen Barack Obama got into power, you’d have expected that traffic on the Right side of the blogosphere would have surged just as it did on the Left side of the blogosphere in the early Bush years.

That didn’t happen.

Sure, there were a few outliers that took off: Hot Air, Redstate, and the Breitbart empire for example, but most conservative blogs have either grown insignificantly, stayed the same size, or even shrank. Most bloggers on the right side of the blogosphere haven’t increased their traffic significantly in years. Moreover, the right side of the blogosphere as a whole is definitely shrinking in numbers as bloggers that have had trouble getting traction are quitting and fewer and fewer bloggers are starting up new blogs.

The problem is that there are no ecological niches vacant anymore, he contends. Insignificant microbes, to employ NZ Bear’s metaphors, find it harder to evolve. You become a Crunchy Crustacean or even a Flappy Bird, and that’s it. The days of evolving into Higher Beings are over. There is simply too much higher quality competition for almost any blogger to overcome.

The market has also become much more professionalized. When I got started, back in 2001, a lone blogger who did 3-4 posts a day could build an audience. Unless your name is Ann Coulter, you probably couldn’t make that strategy work today.

Instead, most successful blogs today have large staffs, budgets, and usually, the capacity to shoot traffic back and forth with other gigantic websites. Look at Redstate, which is tied into Human Events, Hot Air which connected with Townhall, Instapundit, which is a part of Pajamas Media, Newsbusters which is a subsidiary of the Media Research Center and other monster entities like National Review and all of its blogs, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and the Breitbart media empire. An independent blogger competing with them is like a mom & pop store going toe-to-toe with Wal-Mart. Some do better than others, but over the long haul, the only question is whether you can survive on the slivers of audience they leave behind. ...

Most bloggers are not very good at marketing, not very good at monetizing, there are no sugar daddies giving us cash, and this isn’t the biggest market in the world to begin with. In other words, this is a time-consuming enterprise, but few people are going to make enough money to go full time. How many people can put in 20-30-40-50 hours a week on something that’s not going to ever be their full time job? Can they do it for 5 years? 10 years? 15? 20? This is the plight that 99.9% of serious, independent conservative bloggers face. This has already created a lot of attrition and over the next few years, as people realize that their traffic is more likely to slowly, but surely significantly deteriorate rather than explode, you’re going to see a lot more people give up.

I think there is more than a small amount of truth in what he says. The top ranking bloggers are very, very talented people who are incredibly hard working, and the successful ones now have staffs. Few people and only the most professional are going to make it to the top.

But Ann Althouse is right in offering the response that not every conservative blogger is really trying to play the game professionally. A number of bloggers, like myself and the talented crew who publish at Maggie’s Farm, think of ourselves as “boutique bloggers,” catering to a smaller, but more sophisticated and discriminating, audience. Our blogging activities reflect our own eccentric and individualistic personalities.

I often think of my own blogging as just an alternative high tech way of forwarding links to my friends.

As to future readership growth, who knows? I do find it is much more difficult to get links from the top blogs anymore, but I also long ago quit emailing links to them seeking their attention. I’m looking forward to seeing what the 2012 election is going to do for blog readership myself.

Some people are predicting that blogging in general is already out of date, and arguing that blogs are already in the pricess of being replaced by new social networking formats like Google+.

I’m more optimistic. I think, on the prospects of blogging, we can refer to Henry David Thoreau’s estimate of the human condition generally: “There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

Glenn Reynolds started polling yesterday on which other president Barack Obama most reminded his very numerous readers.

Jimmy Carter (no surprise!) came in first, with (currently) 63%. But number 2 was none other than Zaphod Beeblebrox (16%).

Poll

Results

But, whoops! it turned out that a computer error by a red-faced County Clerk had misplaced more than 14,000 votes from the city of Brookfield. Once the missing votes were added to the tally, Justice David Prosser zoomed into a lead of 7,582 votes over his challenger.

Mary Katherine Hamm observed via Twitter: Small, state-wide election with vital national implications soon to have no national implications whatsoever.

Alas! America must really be turning to the right. Despite both men’s admirable records at releasing passion and their unequaled capacity for burying their adversaries in billingsgate, we learned yesterday that both would be moving on from their current well-paying and prestigious positions.
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Frank Rich

Jack Schafer notes that going from the New York Times to New York Magazine is not a step up the ladder of success.

Let me see if I’ve got this straight: Frank Rich is leaving a weekly column at the nation’s most important daily newspaper for a monthly column at the second best weekly in the country.

If Rich’s move is about wanting to spend more time with his family, gain greater distance from Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal, free himself to pursue his HBO projects more aggressively, or to work once again with New York Editor Adam Moss, with whom he has a mind-meld, I understand. But unless the deal came with Bloombergian bags of cash, it makes no sense.

I’m not suggesting that Frank Rich will disappear when he departs the Times for New York magazine, but the switch will transform him from the fat man in the biggest room in the oversized mansion of newspaper journalism to just another high-profile scribbler at a magazine. Oh, the New York press release says Rich will be editing a special “section anchored by his essay,” and be commenting on the magazine’s Web site, but it’s a step down. Today, Rich’s column appears in supersized format in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, which has a print circulation of 1.35 million, and more than 34.5 million unique monthly visitors to its Web site, compared to New York magazine’s 405,000 circulation and 8.5 million uniques.

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Andrew Sullivan

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin-hater-extraordinaire Andrew Sullivan is also moving. His Daily Dish is departing from from the prestigious Atlantic blog-site to become part of a shaky start-up web-site operation involving Tina Brown’s Daily Beast joining up with Newsweek. Newsweek recently was sold reputedly for $1 (and the assumption of a ton of debt) by 92-year-old Sidney Harman.

Since there was no hope of your seeing them in the initial chart, he then offered a 10x magnified close-up

President Obama’s 2012 budget will be roughly $3,800,000 million ($3.8 trillion).

The anticipated 2012 budget deficit will be $1,500,000 million ($1.5 trillion). This means we are borrowing that amount from our children to fund all of the Democrats’ Utopian spending programs.

Finally, the president has proposed “tough budget cuts” that total $775 million. No, that’s not a joke.

The president’s response is disappointing even to people on the left. Andrew Sullivan was a particularly conspicuous bellwether today, departing from his customary role of flack and harshly criticizing Obama.

[T]his president is too weak, too cautious, too beholden to politics over policy to lead. In this budget, in his refusal to do anything concrete to tackle the looming entitlement debt, in his failure to address the generational injustice, in his blithe indifference to the increasing danger of default, he has betrayed those of us who took him to be a serious president prepared to put the good of the country before his short term political interests. Like his State of the Union, this budget is good short term politics but such a massive pile of fiscal bullshit it makes it perfectly clear that Obama is kicking this vital issue down the road.

To all those under 30 who worked so hard to get this man elected, know this: he just screwed you over. He thinks you’re fools. Either the US will go into default because of Obama’s cowardice, or you will be paying far far more for far far less because this president has no courage when it counts. He let you down. On the critical issue of America’s fiscal crisis, he represents no hope and no change. Just the same old Washington politics he once promised to end.

Obviously, thought the great big leftwing brains, she must mean 1776. After all, nothing of any significance happened in 1773. (Except the original Boston Tea Party, of course.)

Then, as William Jacobsen describes, liberal America was laughing itself sick over Christine O’Donnell ’s ignorance of the First Amendment’s wall of separation between church and state.

[At] Widener Law School …as soon as O’Donnell questioned whether “separation of church and state” was in the First Amendment, the crowd erupted with gasps of disbelief and mocking laughter.

And if O’Donnell’s imperfect—or perhaps nuanced?—understanding of the First Amendment w[as] so outrageous, how about the inability of Chris Coons, a Yale Law School graduate, to identify the other freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and his misquoting the text of the First Amendment in his challenge to O’Donnell:

“Government shall make no establishment of religion,” Coons responded, reciting from memory the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (Coons was off slightly: The first amendment actually reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”)

Ann Althouse has more on how Coons simply was wrong in his quotation of the First Amendment which led to O’Donnell’s supposed major gaffe about the Establishment Clause, and how the press has taken O’Donnell’s comments out of context:

O’Donnell reacts: “That’s in the First Amendment?” And, in fact, it’s not. The First Amendment doesn’t say “government.” It says “Congress.” And since the discussion is about what local school boards can do, the difference is highly significant.

Also, it isn’t “shall make no establishment of religion.” It’s “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” There’s a lot one could say about the difference between those 2 phrases, and I won’t belabor it here. Suffice it to say that it was not stupid for O’Donnell to say “That’s in the First Amendment?” — because it’s not. Coons was presenting a version of what’s in the cases interpreting the text, not the text itself.

A literal reading of O’Donnell’s comments reflects that she was correct, but of course, the press and the blogosphere don’t want a literal reading, they want a living, breathing reading which comports with their preconceived notions.

In an age of an increasingly sophisticated public in which alternative information channels, like Fox News, AM talk radio, and the blogosphere exist, it is becoming more and more difficult to succeed in winning debates on the basis of crude sloganeering and oversimplification of complex issues and the leftwing mob winds up looking stupider and stupider when it tries relying on its traditional tactics.

I almost simply referenced Andrew Breitbart’s video published yesterday of Shirley Sherrod apparently giving a tutorial on successful discrimination in federal program administration in a simple sarcastic posting, but it was short and I happened to watch it a second time, and then I began wondering about its editing.

A day later, everyone knows that all the wheels have come off of Andrew Breitbart’s discrimination story. (the Politico)

Breitbart was doing damage control, telling Talking Points Memo that he didn’t do the editing and was not even in possession of the full video when he launched the story. (sigh)

But the silver-lining in this unfortunate episode is that NYM was not alone in noticing the tricky editing. It was only to be expected that many blogs would be fooled. The truth is that everyone sometimes posts hastily without deep consideration of the material being passed along.

But the right-side of the blogosphere really does differ from the left with respect to honesty and responsibility.

The Anchoress was also paying attention yesterday, and her reservations received major attention because they were linked by Instapundit.

[Here’s] what is troubling me.

Doesn’t it seem like, after all of that sort of winking, “you and I know how they really are” racist crap wherein Sherrod–intentionally or not–indicts her own narrow focus, she was heading to a more edifying message? What did it open her eyes about? Was she about to say “I took him to one of his own, but it shouldn’t have mattered about that; my job was to serve all the farmers who needed help.”

Was she about to say, “I learned about myself and about how far we still have to go?”

Was she about to say “it’s not poor vs those who have, because we are not at war, we are just in the same human reality that ever was?”

Was she about to say, “poor is poor, hungry is hungry and the past is the past when a family can’t eat?”

I want to know. Because it seemed like Sherrod was heading somewhere with that story, and the edit does not let us get there. I want the rest of the story before I start passing judgment on it. ...

I want to see the rest of the tape. I cannot believe Sherrod ended on “I took him to one of his own.” Either she said something much worse after that (which we would have seen) or she said something much better.

If it was something “better” then we should have seen that, too.

Before long, her skepticism was being echoed throughout the right side of the blogosphere. So much for Andrew Sullivan’s “virulence of the far right.”
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UPDATE

James Taranto, on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, also noticed that editing and he had no doubts.

It seems to us that Sherrod got a bum deal in all this. While her description of her attitude toward the white farmer is indeed appalling, even in Breitbart’s video it is clear by the end that the story was one of having learned the error of her ways.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

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Congratulations to Shirley Sherrod on her vindication.

David Frum, guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan, recently proposed the parlor game of writing a one-sentence description of a “modernized, reformed conservatism.”

His own offering went as follows:

A reality-based, culturally modern, socially inclusive and environmentally responsible politics that supports free markets, limited government and a peaceful American-led world order.

In other words, “modernized, reformed” conservatism of the Frumish variety would be:

A conservatism subservient to the opinions of the journalistic and academic establishment (reality-based);

Committed to the aesthetics and favored causes of the community of fashion (culturally modern);

Supportive of the left’s program of conferring official status and special privileges to victim groups (socially inclusive);

And faithful to the Luddite dualist heresy which regards human life and productive activity as intrinsically transgressive, contaminative, and blameworthy (environmentally responsible);

Whenever possible, of course, when not obliged by its commitment to all of the contemporary left’s principal agenda items, MRC (Modern, Reformed Conservatism) would be in favor of free markets and limited government.

Those markets, of course, would inevitably not be all that free, since they would require all sorts of regulating for purposes of environmental protection, redistributivist social justice, socially-engineered diversity, and coercive tolerance, by a government which could hardly be very limited, considering all the matters it would necessarily need to supervise, control, regulate, and direct.

Foreign policy is treated as a rather vague afterthought, but it is similarly couched in oxymoronic, having your conservative cake, though applauding as the left eats your lunch, terms. Mr. Frum refers to a peaceful American-led world order. The “peaceful” reference is obviously intended as a subtle reproach to the policies of the previous Republican Administration which indulged in war.

America ought to lead the world, but it should be obliged to do so using pan-pipes rather than its military. This tag end of a single sentence fails to provide room for an explanation about how the US ought to go about peacefully leading countries which provide bases for terrorist activity directed at American civilians.

I’ll play. What Messrs. Sullivan and Frum would like would be:

A conservatism agreeable to unstable journalists of foreign nationality intent on promoting the homosexual subculture’s political agenda and cultivating personal careers within the media establishment.

John Hinderaker from Power-Line, respects Obama’s behavior.

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Conservative cultural commentary venues The Notes and Culture11 went under. (link 1 & link 2).

Some people think they were not populist enough, but I am inclined to believe that the fact I never previously heard of either one of them could be part of the problem.
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Cigarettes $10 a pack in NYC.

New Yorkers ought to take up chewing tobacco.
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Write fiction based on your own life experience and they’ll sue you.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

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Essex cockerel and hens victorious when fox invades their coop.

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The LA Times finds that Italians have better political scandals.

Reporting from Rome — The governor made off to a monastery after having affairs with transsexuals, but not before the cops videotaped a tryst, all flesh and white powder, and offered to sell copies to a magazine owned by the prime minister, who, at the time, was rumored to be entangled with an underage Neapolitan model.

Then one of the transsexuals, a Brazilian named Brenda, turned up naked and dead, her laptop computer submerged under a running tap. Oh, yeah, and the drug dealer who supplied cocaine to the governor and Brenda would meet his own demise. It’s an odd coincidence.

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Glenn Reynolds explains why the federal government has come to resemble Schlitz beer.

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Leo Grin, at Big Hollywood has a four part essay on Werner Herzog, Timothy Treadwell, and “Grizzly Man” (2005). Pt1, Pt2, Pt3, Pt4.

Big Hollywood is promising more in-depth reviews of significant conservative films.

Multiple hat tips to Karen L. Myers.

Relatively rational liberal commentator Robert Michael “Mickey” Kaus has filed his nomination papers to run against Barbara Boxer in the democrat primary in California for that party’s nomination to the US Senate.

Kaus went to Harvard and has been a prominent blogger since 1999. Although he’s a liberal, he fairly frequently posts well-reasoned analyses I agree with and link.

Investor’s Business Daily describes his politics as follows:

Kaus is a strong supporter of national health care, though he harshly criticized the White House “cost control” marketing strategy. However, he is a harsh critic of labor unions, a skeptic of affirmative action and an opponent of amnesty for illegal immigrants. Kaus is known for his honesty about the motivations of his allies, his opponents and himself.

I’m not sure that Mickey Kaus is any worse than Carly Fiorina overall, and either of the two would be a definite improvement over Barbara Boxer. I think Kaus has a chance of winning the primary, and is bound to make it an interesting race.

That Skull and Bones balloting box was not actually sold. Apparently, Christie’s withdrew it from the sale late last month, IvyGate reports, after receiving a mysterious “title claim.” The Russell Trust has plenty of lawyers.

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Hot Air (one of the most important conservative blogs) has been sold to Salem Communications. Congratulations and good luck.
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As part of the Carnival celebration, preceding the beginning of Lent, in the Spanish village of Laza, “Peliqueiros” or ancient tax collectors, are portrayed wearing warning cowbells and prepared to beat the villagers with sticks. 39 Carnival photos.

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Stratfor: Tradecraft in Dubai Assassination
3:14 video

The big news of the day (from the perspective of the left blogosphere) was the HuffPo photo taken during her speech at the Tea Party Convention revealing some talking points jotted on the palm of Sarah Palin’s left hand.

This one did not impress many people outside the left, but it did provoke derision from Ann Althouse and a humorous response (see photo above) from Sarah Palin herself.

I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You’d walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it’s just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak.

Did you see that new Pew study that came out yesterday? It put a big fat exclamation point on what a lot of us have come to realize recently: blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet. It’s even uncooler than editing Wikipedia articles or having a Second Life avatar. In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It’s only geezers – those over 30 – who are doing more blogging than they used to.

The blog Unhappy Hipsters exists to mock the spare and alienated modern architectural and interior design aesthetic celebrated by très, très chic Dwell Magazine simply by captioning some of its photos of the sophisticated “at home in the modern world.”

My wife, who brought this one to my attention, is naturally sympathetic to Unhappy Hipsters’ jaundiced viewpoint on expensive moderne minimalism. Our preferred houses tend to be old, and thoroughly cluttered with books, weapons, natural history specimens, Orientalia, and sporting prints. A friend from Yale once described our native habitat as “decorated by Stalky & Co.” Our design aesthetic might be described as Addams Family Excess.

Where do those hipsters keep their books? one always wonders.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Little Green Footballs’ Charles Johnson sold his share of Pajamas Media in 2007. (I didn’t know that! How come PJM, Glenn Reynolds, and Roger Simon never reported it? Could I possibly have somehow missed reading about it?)

Johnson is teaming up with Barrett Brown at Vanity Fair to start a new blogging consortium described as intended to expose the failures of establishment news outlets.

Charles Johnson seems to me to have gone off the deep end recently, devoting his blogging activities principally toward a crusade to enforce some particular notions of political correctness of his own, and a return to criticizing targets of wider interest strikes me as potentially a positive development, but Vanity Fair, home of the self-important windbag James Wolcott, is an unlikely venue for objective and intelligent news correction in the old LGF manner.

Still, let’s hope for the best.
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This New York Times magazine article describes Johnson’s rupture with the Right Blogosphere supplying some details that even those of us who followed all this had missed.

It notes that Johnson changed sides on Global Warming just in time to get blindsided by the Climategate scandal, which seems to have permanently tarnished the appeal of that particular delusion, and it even reveals the disturbing behavior pattern that puzzled and depressed those of us who had long admired Charles Johnson.

The soundest conclusion seems to be that he has indeed changed his mind — less about issues (though there are a few, global warming chief among them, on which he will admit to having gradually reversed positions) than about the people with whom he is willing to share the stage, or, perhaps, about his willingness to share the stage at all. Not that changing your mind, even in today’s political environment, makes you into some kind of intellectual hero. People change their minds all the time, for all kinds of reasons.

No one ever said L.G.F., or any blog, had to be about the free exchange of ideas. “It’s his sandbox,” Pamela Geller says simply. “He can do whatever he wants.” Still, if you read L.G.F. today, you will find it hard to miss the paradox that a site whose origins, and whose greatest crisis, were rooted in opposition to totalitarianism now reads at times like a blog version of “Animal Farm.” Johnson seems obsessed with what others think of him, posting much more often than he used to about references to himself elsewhere on the Internet and breaking into comment threads (a recent one was about the relative merits of top- versus front-loaded washing machines) to call commenters’ attention to yet another attack on him that was posted at some other site. On the home page, you can click to see the Top 10 comments of the day, as voted on by registered users; typically, half of those comments will be from Johnson himself. Even longtime commenters have been disappeared for one wrong remark, or one too many, and when it comes to wondering where they went or why, a kind of fearful self-censorship obtains. He has banned readers because he has seen them commenting on other sites of which he does not approve. He is, as he reminds them, always watching. L.G.F. still has more than 34,000 registered users, but the comment threads are dominated by the same two dozen or so names. And a handful of those have been empowered by Johnson sub rosa to watch as well — to delete critical comments and, if necessary, to recommend the offenders for banishment. It is a cult of personality — not that there’s any compelling reason, really, that it or any blog should be presumed to be anything else.

“This is one area where I did change,” Johnson admitted. “I realized you can’t just let it be free speech. It doesn’t work that way on the Internet. Total free speech is a recipe for anarchy when people can’t see each other.”

Andrew Sullivan is in tears.

I suspect serious health insurance reform is over for yet another generation.

Even if Coakley wins – and my guess is she’ll lose by a double digit margin – the bill is dead. The most Obama can hope for is a minimalist alternative that simply mandates that insurance companies accept people with pre-existing conditions and are barred from ejecting patients when they feel like it. That’s all he can get now – and even that will be a stretch. The uninsured will even probably vote Republican next time in protest at Obama’s failure! That’s how blind the rage is.

Ditto any attempt to grapple with climate change. In fact, any legislative moves with this Democratic party and this Republican party are close to hopeless. The Democrats are a clapped out, gut-free lobbyist machine. The Republicans are insane. The system is therefore paralyzed beyond repair.

No man’s life, property, or liberty is safe when the legislature is in session, John Adams remarked, and at this point in history, paralysis is devoutly to be wished, followed by euthanasia at the polls in 2010 and 2012 for incumbents.

PJM, at least, survived, but nobody got rich. Heck, Charles Johnson even lost his good sense, changed sides, and now devotes his blogging activity to defending Warmism, enforcing political correctness, and bashing conservatives. Sad, very sad.

Let’s hope Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, launching today, proves more fortunate.

DC has been described as intended to represent “a conservative answer to Huffington Post.” Arianna Huffington responded to the launch with a gracious post, observing amusingly that her own Huffpo was founded as “the progressive answer to Drudge.”

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Peggy Noonan says passage of the Health Care Bill is going to be a catastrophic victory for democrats. Republicans are currently simply waiting for democrats to finish destroying themselves, and she warns them that, with respect to their own coming political accendancy, they should take a cue from the film Saving Private Ryan (1998) and: “Earn this”
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How’s that Global Warming working out for you? Snow covers the United Kingdom from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.
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WordPress is retiring the much-admired Kubrick as its default format theme. Never Yet Melted started out briefly using Kubrick, like just about everybody else.

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Michael Scheuer says Obama Counter Terrorism Czar John O. Brennan in 1998 blocked a CIA operation that could have klilled or captured Bin Ladin.

Glenn Reynolds yesterday found the above photo on the White Houses’s Flicker page and posted it (along with the enlarged detail below) inviting readers to “interpret the body language.”

Barack Obama has always been a mirror, reflecting back to individual members of the American public their own preconceptions, and the Instapundit selection provides a perfect opportunity for a wide range of interpretation.

I, for instance, thought Obama looked like the Godfather contemptuously rebuking an incompetent consigliere.

Over on Flicker, MCarrier1 thought Obama looked like James Bond.

Hot Air immediately launched a caption contest, where FishGov offered:

The Emperor Obama: [to the Senate] In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society which I assure you will last for ten thousand years.

Biden: [to Emperor Obama] So this is how liberty dies… with thunderous applause.

Ann Althouse, on the other hand, just thought The man is tired and it’s a way to get above it all. And that’s the other thing I see in that face: He’s tired and he’s floating above it all.

Andrew Sullivan had to puzzle for a while over what exactly Glenn Reynolds was trying to pull posting this cryptic photo, (a)nd then I realized why this photo immediately strikes some people are damning. Obama is a black man who looks as if he is condescending to a white man. That’s political gold.

Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano assures CNN that “the system worked.”

She announces with a note of assured complacency that “right now, we have no indication it was part of anything larger”.

“We have initiated more screening and what we call mitigation measures at.. uh… airports.”

“I would advise you, during this heavy holiday season, (voice sweetens) just to arrive a bit early.”

“The traveling public is very very safe in this air environment.”

In response to Candy Crowley inquiring why even a father’s report that his son had ties to terrorists and might be dangerous was not enough to move him onto the no-fly list, Janet Napolitano responded: “You need information that is specific and credible if you are going to bar someone from air travel.”

The directrex of Homeland Security’s performance was reminding me of someone, and after a minute it came to me who it was. Napolitano’s reassurances sound exactly like those of 1970s era Mayor of Amity, Larry Vaughn.

Janet Napolitano 6:06 video

Larry Vaughn 4:01 video

Andrew Sullivan awarded her a “Heckuva Job, Janet” column.

The head of DHS had the gall to say that “the system worked.” What she meant is that after the incident in Detroit, the response was good. Fine. But she has no assurance that this could not happen again, and even declared that the would-be terrorist was properly screened.

More to the point, she evinces no sense of responsibility for this lapse in security. I’m sorry but that’s her job and instead of preening about how she handled it after the fact, she should be apologizing for yet another instance of government incompetence and complacency. She is stonewalling and smug.

Really: disgraceful, glib, complacent, moronic. I want to know who is being fired for not taking the warning about this one seriously enough, and if Napolitano really believes that a near-miss, averted by the terrorist’s incompetence and the passengers’ courage, is a sign that the system is working, then she needs to be fired as well.

Even Andrew is dead right every now and then.

There’s nothing wrong with having a support staff (if one’s blog’s revenues support that kind of thing), but in Andrew Sullivan’s case, there seems to be a certain inconsistency, even hypocrisy.

Lachlan Markay blows the whistle on Sullivan.

Remember all those blog posts from the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan bashing Sarah Palin for employing a ghostwriter? Well, it turns out many of those posts may have been written by…a ghostblogger! Apparently Sullivan’s busy schedule prevented him from writing everything on his site, so, without informing his readers, he employed a few ghostbloggers to write in his name.

Daily Dish readers were surely surprised at the announcement—posted by one of the ghostbloggers on Saturday—given Sullivan’s insistence that his “one-man blog” is “honest” and “personal”. They may have been a bit perturbed to learn, in Ace’s words, that “half the blog isn’t personal to Sullivan at all, and all of it is dishonest.”

Wrote ghostblogger Patrick Appel,

As always, it a pleasure to step in while Andrew gets some much needed rest. Guest-blogging is not all that different than my day-to-day activities on the Dish – 24 of the 50 posts currently on the front page were written by me. All the substantive posts are Andrew’s work, but it’s my and Chris’s job to read through the blogosphere and pick out the choicest bits. Andrew edits, approves, and spins what we find, but the illusion of an all-reading blogger is maintained by employing two extra sets of eyes.

“As always”? “24 of the 50 posts”? Ghostwritten posts were hardly an insignificant element of Sullivan’s blog.

Sullivan—or maybe his ghostbloggers—wrote numerous blockquote-style posts bashing Sarah Palin for using a ghostwriter named Lynn Vincent for her book, even referring to “Going Rogue” as “Lynn Vincent’s ‘book’”. Might we call the Daily Dish “Patrick Appel’s ‘blog’”?

1. They’ve achieved a great deal less in life than she has, even though some are quite a bit older than she is.
2. They don’t want to be called “haters,” although their reaction to her is purely negative and purely emotional; I’m left groping for another word and “bashers,” far from being a perfect fit, ends up being the least-unsuitable. ..

6. They breathe hard and their pulse quickens. I haven’t run into too many people who are ready to calmly explain Sarah Palin’s lack of qualifications. ...

8. Their lofty opinions of the minimal requirements for the offices Palin has sought, or might seek, is selective. When the topic of conversation shifts to Joe Biden, suddenly it seems the Vice Presidency doesn’t demand a whole lot out of anyone.
9. They don’t seem to think it takes a whole lot to govern Alaska, or to even live there. They don’t appear to think very highly of Alaskans. One wonders if they’d back a Constitutional amendment establishing a “geographical litmus test” for future candidates, and if so, how many other states would go in the “No Can Do” column

It seems to me that Palin provokes fury in members of the community of fashion simply by being an outsider. As the Tanenhaus mugging in the New Yorker so effectively demonstrated, to the American elite the possibility that someone from outside their own class and culture and residential regions could possibly aspire to national leadership seems incongruous and insulting.

Sarah Palin, I have noticed, also provokes a special animus on the part of the lavender left. Andrew Sullivan, for example, seems about to tear himself into pieces à la Rumplestiltskin by an excess of negative passion inspired by Sarah Palin’s very existence. My guess is that the authentic femininity of a beautiful woman when associated with traditional cultural values unfriendly to sexual inversion has roughly the kind of impact on the likes of Andrew Sullivan that the crucifix has on vampires. The volume of the hissing and the screeching is directly proportionate to the frustration of the faux female confronted by what he recognizes as his definitive nemesis and rival. For those of us who had Roman Catholic childhoods the image of those ubiquitous statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary treading on the head of the serpent always come to mind when reading Andrew Sullivan on Palin. It’s all very Jungian: the serpent does not like the idea of the feminine principle, the Mother Goddess Creatrix, which can crush him into the earth with ease.

Move fast, Andrew!

This is the explanation?

According to Charles Johnson, the author of Little Green Footballs, he has abandoned his formerly brilliant attacks on liberal lies, stupidity, and hypocrisy and has instead turned his attention to scolding conservative blogs because of sinister associations with European nationalist parties, associations with fringy representatives of the palecon right, and because conservative bloggers are too mean to Muslims and Barack Obama.

Hmm. I’m frequently pretty nasty about Islam, but beyond, as far as I’m concerned, he does not exactly strike a nerve.

I am sorry to see him leave, as I have for a long time had the highest respect and admiration for Mr. Johnson, who, it ought always to be remembered, made history by debunking the CBS News National Guard letter, and driving Dan Rather right out of the news business.

Charles Johnson personally made blogging into a serious and important factor in the 2004 Presidential Election.

I had seen LGF’s focus change, and I gradually quit reading it very often.

Finally, earlier this fall, I reluctantly transferred the LGF link out of my “Essential Blogs” category, and with considerable personal sadness placed it in the category reserved for hostile, leftwing blogs. I found Charles Johnson’s defection so depressing that I avoided mentioning any of this at the time.

Mr. Johnson’s change of heart and politics does not make sense to me. I could guess about his motives and psychology. I have my own theories, but I have never met Charles Johnson. I do not know him personally, and I see no point in sharing (quite possibly completely erroneous) uncomplimentary speculations of my own.

I don’t suppose that Charles Johnson will change back into being a conservative and Republican again, but I do still feel considerable gratitude and admiration for his contributions in the past. He is so intelligent that I think he must sooner or later quarrel with other people about other issues, and I will watch his future postings with interest. I do not agree with Mr. Johnson that the right blogosphere has a serious problem with racism, craziness, and hate speech, but I wish him well.

Charles Johnson’s Wikipedia entry

April 2009 Independent article on Johnson’s break with the Right.