Editor & Publisher is previewing an article from next Sunday’s New York Times to be titled “Conservative Blogs are More Effective.” Michael Crowley evidently concludes that blogs on the Right do a better job of using their on-line soap-boxes to influence the public debate, while liberal blogs primarily just talk to liberal audiences. We knew that already.

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Ho, ho! The contemptible Atrios is blogging indignantly, in his usual foul-mouthed manner, and in extreme looney-tune-leftist paranoid mode about how it wouldn’t even matter

If all the wingnut blogs disappeared tomorrow it really wouldn’t have any impact on the national discourse. Sure they’re there and the Right is better at using them but they don’t really *need* them

Because we’ve got on our side, according to the addled Atrios,

both the massive right wing media

(Let’s see: Rush Limbaugh, Fox News [sort of], and the Manchester Union-Leader]

and the mainstream media.

Welcome NY Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, 5000 other papers, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, HBO and Showtime, Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, the NY Review of Books, the Yale Alumni Magazine, and these days, Fly Rod & Reel and Field & Stream, all former leftist MSM stalwarts to the Right!

Poor Little Atrios alone on the barricades with only, what? the Daily Worker? Mother Jones? CounterPunch? on his side.

Definition and video.

If there was ever the slightest doubt in anybody’s mind that gun registration leads to gun confiscation, well, here you are. It’s happening in Canada, and it can happen here. To prevent it, JOIN THE NRA.

ShrinkWrapped (who was on duty when John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman, was brought in) remembers that night (hat tip to Baron Bodissey):

John Lennon was shot to death 25 years ago today. His killer was an undistinguished and indistinguishable man named Mark David Chapman. He was arrested, brought to Central booking, and arraigned the next day, at which point he was remanded to the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital Prison Ward for Psychiatric observation and evaluation. As it happened, I was on-call the night he was admitted… I had grown up with the Beatles and was saddened, though not surprised, when they broke up. They have left us some of the most memorable music from an era that produced an exceptional flowering of pop music in all its myriad forms. Their music will be with us for a long time.

I remember feeling sorrow for John Lennon myself, and thinking that his unfortunate death marked the end of a period of rock music history coinciding with my own generation’s youth. By that time, of course, John Lennon had developed the relationship with Yoko Ono, which seemed to bring him happiness, but which unhappily also led to the break-up of the Beatles, and which was leading Lennon into further and further depths of intellectual banality and embarassing displays of vanity.

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The Solid Surfer speculates that John might have straightened out, given time, and that had he lived, he’d be a Republican today. Could be. I personally think Taxman on Revolver may well represent a better picture of John Lennon’s natural politics than Imagine. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

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Bolshevik David Corn blames gun ownership by private citizens, and the National Rifle Association‘s defense of Individual Rights, for a madman’s act, and today, as then, believes more Gun Control is the answer to crime. I don’t recall Mark David Chapman having a New York pistol permit, which suggests that gun control laws don’t necessarily deter persons willing to break one law from breaking a second as well.

Mr. Corn will blame insufficiently strict laws in other US states (since Chapman purchased the gun in Hawaii), but no law would ever have prevented Chapman from buying an illegal gun, anymore than any law ever kept Chapman, Lennon, or millions of the rest of us back then from buying marijuana and other illegal substances. And the banning of firearms owned by tens of millions law-abiding Amerrican hunters, target shooters, and collectors, and ordinary people wanting a means of self defense would do nothing whatsoever to prevent crime. In fact, gun control increases crime by eliminating criminals’ fear of potentially armed victims. Not long after John Lennon’s murder, Bernard Goetz shot some assailants in the NYC subway, and in the period when the unknown subway gunman had not yet given himself up, street crime temporarily vanished.

Comrade Corn’s twaddle is worth a look, however, because the conniving Mr. Corn reveals how all he had to do was invent an imaginary organization, the so-called Citizens against Gun Violence, an “ad hoc citizens group” consisting of Mr. Corn, period; and a few photocopied fliers and some calls to the MSM later, he had a full-fledged moonbat rally of his own, and 15 seconds of fame.

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Since unfortunately they did not hang him:

On-line Petition Opposing Parole for Mark David Chapman

Do not press the red button!

A Nebraska judge recently ruled that driving one’s motorcycle at 128mph did not necessarily constitute reckless driving.

The Establishment has never liked Ayn Rand, but her books continue to sell, and Rand and her ideas enjoy a strong popular following, combined with growing academic attention, as Jenny Turner notes disapprovingly in a London Review of Books article on a new biography by Jeff Britting.

Rand is everywhere on the internet: stickers, coasters, car number plates, CDs featuring a Randian ‘Concerto of Deliverance’ at starshipaurora.com. Randians can meet ‘at least’ four thousand others, it is claimed, through the Objectivist dating agency at theatlasphere.com, which last January carried an ad for an Ayn Rand social evening at a New York City restaurant called Porter’s (the evening was to feature ‘gourmet hors d’oeuvres’ served by ‘uniformed strolling waiters’ and ‘an artistically decorated birthday cake’). Professional philosophers can join the Ayn Rand Society at aynrandsociety.org; people in easy reach of Denver can choose between FROG (Front Range Objectivist Group), FROST (Front Range Objectivist Supper Talks) and FROLIC (Front Range Objectivist Laughter Ideas and Chow). Names pop up from website to website, agreeing and disagreeing, welcoming and banning, calling for papers, publishing books. There’s a whole community of Objectivists out there, with its own structure and hierarchy, controversies and disputes, outcasts, fellow-travellers, stars. A peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, was founded in 1999, and continues to run out of New York University; a paper by Slavoj Zizek is among past highlights. In 2001, the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Research established a $300,000 fellowship in the philosophy department at the University of Texas at Austin. Austin’s current Anthem fellow is the author of, among other things, a paper called ‘Money Can Buy Happiness’. Fellowships have also been established at the University of Pittsburgh and Ashland University in Ohio.

The astute reader will detect in Turner’s review the suspiciously well-informed Rand reader professionally performing a proper hit job on a once well-loved author in order to establish the reviewer’s credentials as an authentic literateur. A bit of praise for Rand’s storytelling is permitted to creep in:

But really, storytelling was Rand’s talent, and it is in her novels that her vision takes its truest shape. In Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, power, greed, life’s grandeur flow hot and red in thrilling descriptions of urban and industrial landscapes, all ‘girders, cranes and trusses’ and ‘glowing cylinders’ and ‘fountains of sparks’ and ‘black coils of steam’. She’s good at sublimes, in other words, physical and elemental, the awe and terror as great as in any Romantic view of rocks and hills.

But is quickly tempered with condemnation, ringing every chime in the Rand-villain repertoire from 1957’s:

‘From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding — To the gas chambers, go!’ Whittaker Chambers wrote in a notorious 1957 review. It was a crude thing to say, but you can see why he said it.

to today’s:

Slavoj Zizek sees Rand as one in a line of ‘over-conformist authors who undermine the ruling ideological edifice by their very excessive identification with it’. Rand’s mad adoration of capitalism ‘without its communitarian, collectivist, welfare etc, sugar-coating’, he argues, actually serves only to make the inherent ridiculousness of capitalism ever more plain.

It may be accurate to say that Rand’s novels are examples of “the really good bad book,” but it will take far more integrity and accuracy than this reviewer is able to bring to the task to do justice to their “really good” features and to appraise properly what about them may be bad.

Seasonal unmelted humor posted by Seneca the Younger (who typo’d reindeer) on YARGB.

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Yet Another Really Great — Flares Into Darkness is a very new group blog, only slightly older than ourselves (YARGB: 17 Sep 2005 vs. NYM: 29 Oct 2005). We think YARGB is most interesting new blog we’ve come upon in a long time, and we intend to look in regularly.

Imperial Storm Troopers keep the peace on Tatooine.

Since the late 1960s, Vermont, home of Calvin Coolidge and other rock-ribbed Republicans, has found its natural beauty a mixed blessing. The Granite State’s bucolic charms, its green mountains and Christmas card village greens, have attracted a major wave of immigration from the flatlands, bringing to Vermont the equivalent of an invasion of Californians. Vermonter Stephen Morris reports on a recent florescence of exotic political life forms.

Walter Olson reports that two secretaries will share a settlement of around $450,000 from the Atlantic City, N.J. school district and its insurer after filing sexual-harassment charges based on a fallacious interpretation of an assistant superintendent’s remark.

DepkaFile counter-terrorism sources and Al Qaeda press contacts dispute Hamza Rabia’s reported death by US drone attack and deny his role as No. 3 in Al Qaeda.

Depkafile:

On Dec.3, Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf declared his 200 percent certainty that Egyptian-born Abu Hamza Rabia was killed. Headline stories in the world media proclaimed he was in a house in Isory village, North Waziristan near the Afghan border, when it was hit by two missiles shot from CIA pilotless Hellfire planes.

DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources report that Rabia was somewhere else at the time of the attack. A month ago, on Nov. 5, he was in a building with his family in the same region when it was struck from US drones. Rabia’s wife and 11-year old daughter were killed. He escaped with a broken leg and has been fleeing from village to village ever since.

Intelligence circles involved in counter-terror activity were skeptical from the first about the report which maintained that five al Qaeda operatives died in the attack. It later transpired that the victims were two sons of the house aged 17 and 8. Their father Haji Mohammad Siddiq claimed no “foreigners” were living in his house or those of his neighbors.

It is not Al Qaeda’s practice to confirm or deny the loss of senior operatives, but Tuesday, Dec. 6, the terror group publicly contradicted the announcement of Rabia’s death, asserting “he continues to carry out his war duties.”

According to our sources, Abu Hamza Rabia is in charge of an operational sector in North Waziristan – but is not a member of al Qaeda’s high command and certainly not Osama bin Laden’s Number Three. He was subordinate to Abu Faraj al-Libbi who was captured by the Pakistani security service last May and handed over to the Americans.

Pakistan Daily Times 12/04 and 12/07