A victory for the rising tide

I put up a post a few months ago arguing that the effort by corporations to use copyright law as a club to try to control people's behavior is both philosophically problematic and economically counterproductive; the evidence shows, I believe, that they're better off letting the market work than trying to over-regulate it. As I noted, though, corporations would rather regulate competition out of the way than have to actually compete, and they would rather try to control the market by regulation than have to rely on making a better product or selling it more cheaply. Thus we had, for instance, Viacom suing YouTube to try to force YouTube to remove any videos that might infringe on copyright law; as Farhad Manjoo writes in Slate,

a ruling in Viacom's favor would have much wider repercussions. It would shift the balance of power between Web companies and entertainment companies, requiring sites to essentially ask permission or seek licenses from Hollywood and the music labels before innovating. Some of the world's biggest Internet companies—not just YouTube, but also Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Flickr and others—would never have been able to get off the ground had they been required, as struggling startups, to constantly police their networks for potentially infringing material.

Interestingly, though, Viacom didn't win—not at this stage, anyway; Judge Louis Stanton of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted YouTube's motion for summary judgment. Their policy has been to let copyright holders advertise alongside their content, and to take that content down if the copyright holder asks, and the judge decided that's good enough. Viacom appealed, of course, but Judge Stanton has given us an all-too-rare victory for common sense; here's hoping the decision stands.

Can he yodel?

I've been thinking about the President's Oval Office speech last week, and about his response to the BP disaster more generally. I saw Gov. Palin take him apart:

That wasn't surprising, of course, but watching Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews hit him even harder definitely was:

Even harder on the President—no real surprise, since he's less of a partisan than the MSDNC guys—was Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times in his "Top of the Ticket" blog:

Fox News and sexual hypocrisy

It's my observation that Douglas Wilson, of Credenda/Agenda and Christ Church of Moscow, Idaho, is at his best when he can let his snark ascend and just turn it loose; he's also at his best when he has something deep and profoundly important to set his teeth into and be snarky about. (This is, I think, why he was the perfect person to debate Christopher Hitchens.) As such, it's no surprise that his recent guest piece at the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog, titled "Foxy News," is Wilson at his best.

Preaching against porn while consuming it avidly is certainly inconsistent, and is what theologians in another old-timey era used to call "a sin"—a theological category that perhaps needs to be rehabilitated. But I want to consider this issue at another level—we need to start thinking about the politics of porn. . . .

A number of evangelicals are up in arms about President Obama himself, and Obamacare, and Obama-other-things, and Obama-anything-else, and are warning us in dire tones about the impending slavery that is involved in all this "socialism." And—full disclosure here—I am economically pretty conservative myself, just slightly to the left of King Arthur, so I am not pointing out this part of it to differ with any of it. But what I am noticing in this discussion is a striking public tolerance for right-wing skankyness. When I am cruising around for my Internet news, I am far more likely to run into Moabite women at Fox News than anywhere else. . . .

Surely it should be possible to access fair and balanced news without running into women who think they are supposed to be a sale at Macy's—with 40 percent off.

What then? On the assumption that what we are willing to associate with in public is just a fraction of what we are willing to associate with in private, one of my basic concerns about evangelical involvement in politics in the age of Obama (measured in this discussion by their general friendliness to Foxy News) is that they are not nearly as hostile to "slavery" as some of the rhetoric might seem to indicate. I know that politics is supposed to make strange bedfellows, but "strange bedfellows" was always supposed to be a metaphor, wasn't it?

A man cannot sell himself into slavery in his private life, and then turn around and successfully take a stand as a free man in the public square. At least, that is how the thinking used to go among conservatives. If sexual indulgence is one of the more obvious bribes that can be offered to a slave, how does it change anything if a person takes the bribe in private? And if that bribe is taken in private, over time, indications of that reality will start to show up in public, in the sorts of ways I have been discussing.

Be sure to read the whole thing—it's truly priceless. I remember when Fox was a favorite target for ire of conservatives, because of shows like "Married . . . with Children" and, yes, "The Simpsons." (It seems a little strange now to think of that.) People would occasionally point out, as a mitigating factor, that Rupert Murdoch was pretty conservative in a lot of ways, but that was usually dismissed with the comment that the sleaze he peddled disqualified him. Until he launched Fox News, and before too long, political expediency took over . . .

Pay your taxes . . . or else

Check this out—this is just amazing:

Boy, doesn't that make you feel good about paying up?

Run your own TV ad

Check this out—Google strikes again:

Interesting to think about running TV ads for our little congregation . . .

Climate and the American media

The theory of anthropogenic (i.e., human-caused) global warming is in serious trouble, but you wouldn’t know it if you get your news from the big U.S. outlets. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has a list of climate stories broken by the British media that have been ignored by the American media. His list is an impressive one, and it doesn’t even include the Daily Mail story challenging the credibility of Dr. Phil Jones, the former director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. The evidence mounting against AGW—and against the integrity and credibility of the folks pushing it—has grown to such an extent that even Canada’s Grey Lady, the Globe and Mail, felt compelled to take note of it; but the New York Times? Fuhgeddabouddit. When your motto is All the News that’s Fit to Print, and “fit to print” means that which fits your agenda, then clearly, there’s no reason to take notice of such inconvenient stories. “When the facts and the politics conflict, sir, print the politics.”

All the news that's fit to—wait, what?

Gregg Easterbrook, in his latest Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on ESPN.com (which includes, by the way, the best analysis I've seen of why New Orleans won the Super Bowl and Indianapolis lost), has this entertaining collection of corrections from the New York Times:

In the past six months, the Times has, according to its own corrections page, said Arizona borders Wisconsin; confused 12.7-millimeter rifle ammunition with 12.7 caliber (the latter would be a sizeable naval cannon); said a pot of ratatouille should contain 25 cloves of garlic (two tablespoons will do nicely); on at least five occasions, confused a million with a billion (note to the reporters responsible—there are jobs waiting for you at the House Ways and Means Committee); understated the national debt by $4.2 trillion (note to the reporter responsible—there's a job waiting for you at the Office of Management and Budget); confused $1 billion with $1 trillion (note to the reporter responsible—would you like to be CEO of AIG?); admitted numerical flaws in a story "about the ability of nonsense to sharpen the mind;" used "idiomatic deficiency" as an engineering term (correct was "adiabatic efficiency"); said Paul Revere's Midnight Ride occurred in 1776 (it was in 1775—by 1776, everybody knew the British were coming); "misstated the status of the United States in 1783—it was a country, not a collection of colonies" (dear Times, please Google "Declaration of Independence").

The Times also "misidentified the song Pink was singing while suspended on a sling-like trapeze;" confused the past 130 years with the entire 4.5 billion-year history of Earth (see appended correction here); misused statistics in the course of an article complaining that public school standards aren't high enough (see appended correction here); said Citigroup handed its executives $11 million in taxpayer-funded bonuses, when the actual amount was $1.1 billion (in the Citigroup executive suite, being off by a mere two zeroes would be considered incredible financial acumen); said a column lauding actress Terri White "overstated her professional achievements, based on information provided by Ms. White;" identified a woman as a man (it's so hard to tell these days); reported men landed on Mars in the 1970s ("there was in fact no Mars mission," the Times primly corrected).

The Times also gave compass coordinates that placed Manhattan in the South Pacific Ocean near the coastline of Chile (see appended correction here); said you need eight ladies dancing to enact the famous Christmas song when nine are needed; said Iraq is majority Sunni, though the majority there is Shiite (hey, we invaded Iraq without the CIA knowing this kind of thing); got the wrong name for a dog that lives near President Obama's house ("An article about the sale of a house next door to President Obama's home in Chicago misstated the name of a dog that lives there. She is Rosie, not Roxy"—did Rosie's agent complain?); elaborately apologized in an "editor's note," a higher-level confession than a standard correction, for printing "outdated" information about the health of a wealthy woman's Lhasa apso; incorrectly described an intelligence report about whether the North Korean military is using Twitter; called Tandil, Argentina, home of Juan Martín del Potro, a "tiny village" (its population is 110,000); inflicted upon unsuspecting readers a web of imprecision about the Frisians, the Hapsburg Empire, the geographic extent of terps, and whether Friesland was "autonomous and proud" throughout the Middle Ages or merely until 1500; inexactly characterized a nuance of a position taken by the French Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (philosophy majors must have marched in the streets of Paris over this); confused coal with methane (don't make that mistake in a mine shaft!); on at least three occasions, published a correction of a correction; "misstated the year of the Plymouth Barracuda on which a model dressed as a mermaid was posed;" "mischaracterized the date when New York City first hired a bicycle consultant" and "misidentified the location of a pile of slush in the Bronx."

Here, TMQ's pal Michael Kinsley duns the fastidiousness of Times corrections. Kinsley's column complaining about facts contains—you knew this was coming!—a factual error. Mike says the really big hunk of rock in southern Alaska is Mount McKinley on U.S. government maps, though commonly referred to by Alaskans as "Mount Denali." Actually, it is commonly referred to by Alaskans as Denali, which means "Great Mountain" in Athabaskan. "Mount Denali" would mean "Mount Great Mountain."

Granted, everyone makes mistakes, this is over a period of six months, and many of them are trivial (though some are ludicrously huge); still, I'm amused.

True colors

If you thought liberals were in favor of free speech, think again. Today, the United States Supreme Court released its decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which it struck down a major censorship provision of the McCain-Feingold "campaign-finance reform" act of 2002. In response, Ralph Nader's group Public Citizen issued a call for a constitutional amendment to partially repeal the First Amendment:

In their statement responding to the decision, Public Citizen demanded public financing of congressional elections, then added its call for an amendment, saying:

Public Citizen will aggressively work in support of a constitutional amendment specifying that for-profit corporations are not entitled to First Amendment protections, except for freedom of the press. We do not lightly call for a constitutional amendment. But today’s decision so imperils our democratic well-being, and so severely distorts the rightful purpose of the First Amendment, that a constitutional corrective is demanded.

We are formulating language for possible amendments, asking members of the public to sign a petition to affirm their support for the idea of constitutional change, and planning to convene leading thinkers in the areas of constitutional law and corporate accountability to begin a series of in-depth conversations about winning a constitutional amendment.

[. . .]

At least they are finally admitting that they view the First Amendment—which says Congress shall make no law respecting freedom of speech—as flawed. And that they judge themselves as smarter than James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights that begins with the First Amendment (actually it was the third, but that's another story), and the "Father of the Constitution."

Look for the smoke machine

You've probably heard it before: "Where there's smoke, there must be fire." Like most proverbs, it makes a lot of intuitive sense; it fits the balance of probabilities. Follow it, and you'll be right most of the time.

But not always, as I learned from the same source where I first ran across this proverb: Agatha Christie. Both of her main detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, dealt at various points with domestic mysteries in small villages, which usually featured "spinsterish old cats" (not unlike Miss Marple herself, actually, save for the latter's complete absence of malice) declaring that Dr. So-and-so must have murdered his poor wife, because everyone was saying so, and "where there's smoke, there must be fire." Usually, in those stories, there proved to be no fire at all, but someone else determinedly laying down a smokescreen.

To be sure, those were mere fictions to entertain an evening, but they highlight an important fact: certain kinds of people, and people in certain kinds of situations, find smokescreens very useful. They can misdirect the attention of people who might be watching; they can cover one's activities; and of course, they can conceal evidence, including evidence of one's own guilt. And because people are generally predisposed to think, "If there's smoke, there must be fire," one can often use them to convince the public of negative things about one's enemies.

This is, I think, the basic strategy of the Left for dealing with Sarah Palin. Should they ever find any actual fire in her life, you may be sure they'll pull every alarm they can reach and turn it into the biggest media conflagration in recent memory; but in the absence of that, they've settled for taking every chance they can spot, twist, or invent to blow smoke at her. It doesn't matter whether there's even the thinnest shred of a reasonable justification for doing so—they'll do it anyway.

In one recent ludicrosity, they've taken her observation about "In God We Trust" being moved from the face of the presidential line of dollar coins to the edge and put words in her mouth to accuse her of falsely blaming the current administration for that act. Before that, they tried twisting Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's words to make it look like he was dissing Gov. Palin. They falsely accused her of trying to force the Iowa Family Policy Center to pay her for a speaking event. They twisted her statement about death panels in the Pelosi/Obama/Reid health care plans. They continue to peddle old lies such as the accusation that she tried to ban books. (And yes, the "they" in these cases usually includes Politico's Jonathan Martin.) And the list goes on, and on, and on, and on . . .

Why are they doing this? They're creating a smokescreen, figuring that people are conditioned to think there must be a fire around somewhere; if Gov. Palin's enemies can just keep the smoke thick enough around her, they expect voters to infer a fire, never mind that they've never seen any actual evidence of one. Meanwhile, those of us on the Right (who aren't in thrall to one of the other 2012 contenders, or enthralled by the bright lights of the Beltway media) keep hooking up our fans and trying to blow the smoke away. Which is a laudable and necessary thing to do, and certainly we'll be hard at it from now through November 2012 and, very likely, beyond. Lies must be fought with truth, and liars must be answered; the sincerely misled must be given the opportunity to clear their eyes of the smoke. It is a worthy exercise for its own sake.

At the same time, though, we need to recognize that our fans aren't big enough to clear the air; and as such, we need to find ways to make another point to the electorate: watch the smoke. Watch the smoke and realize that it keeps changing—the color and direction are never the same twice. The storylines keep shifting, new accusations keep being made—often contradicting previous accusations. One might start to wonder if all this smoke is in fact coming from the Caterpillar's famed hookah, given the way it seems to enable one to believe six (mutually) impossible things before breakfast. Watch the smoke and realize it's all implication, allegation, suggestion, prediction, and third-hand claims; realize that for all the smoke, no one has yet actually found any fire. Watch the smoke, and learn the real lesson: when there's a little smoke, or a fair bit of smoke, yes, there's probably a fire; but when the smoke just keeps on billowing by without a hint of a spark or any cinders on the breeze, stop expecting a fire—and look for the smoke machine.

(Cross-posted from Conservatives4Palin)

The anti-transparency administration

Despite the President's bold initial words, that's what his administration is turning out to be. It shouldn't be a surprise, given the assault on the First Amendment conducted by his campaign in an effort to silence uncomfortable questions before the candidate had to face them; it shouldn't startle us at all that his response to being challenged by a media organization would be to try to shut that organization down. As Charles Krauthammer writes,

there's a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they're engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

There's nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.

Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand "the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties." They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other—and an otherwise imperious government.

The problem is, we have an amazingly thin-skinned administration, one that can't seem to take criticism, or even significant differences of opinion, with any sort of grace; which is all of a piece, I think, with the fact that they also can't seem to take a joke. As such, they don't roll with the tough questions, they don't rise to the challenge of being argued with, and they don't laugh at themselves—or even just let it pass when someone else does. Instead, whenever anyone messes with them, their collective instinct is to get out the biggest hammer they can find and try to smash them.

(Well, whenever any of their American opponents messes with them, anyway . . . if it's a foreign country like Iran or China or Russia, their instinct is rather different, to say the least.)

Obama media strategy: control the message

This is an absolutely fascinating presentation by Anita Dunn, the White House Communications Director, on the media strategy of the Obama campaign—and by extension, the Obama administration. Her analysis is, I think, critically important for anyone who wants to understand the relationship between politics and the media in the current environment, and the approaches that politicians who want to be successful will need to adopt going forward.

From what I've seen, most of the blogospheric reaction has followed the tone of this WorldNet Daily piece:

President Obama's presidential campaign focused on "making" the news media cover certain issues while rarely communicating anything to the press unless it was "controlled," White House Communications Director Anita Dunn disclosed to the Dominican government at a videotaped conference.

"Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn't absolutely control," said Dunn.

Though that presentation is not inaccurate, it's designed to support the title of the piece:

White House boasts: We 'control' news media

and that title is inaccurate, in two ways. In the first place, Dunn nowhere claims to control the media; what she's actually talking about is manipulating the media to control the message, to set things up in such a way that the story they have to report is the story you want them to report, so that your message gets out the way that you want it to get out. It's not about controlling the media but using them for your purposes. (This was, of course, made a lot easier for them by the generally lap-doggish attitude of the major media toward Barack Obama.) And in the second place—and this is more important than it sounds—Dunn wasn't boasting. She was simply reporting: "This is what we did, this is why we did it, and this is why it produced the result we wanted."

What Dunn is essentially talking about here is the ways in which the development of the Internet has weakened and is eliminating the long-held power of the legacy media to filter reality, to decide what the culture in general will be broadly aware of—and the ways in which, in consequence, politicians can use that development to control their message. Indeed, she's laying out a blueprint for doing so, and explaining why it was essential to her campaign's success.

The fact that the Obama campaign understood this intuitively, and thus was able to use that intuitive understanding to do just that to an unprecedented degree, while the McCain campaign was completely clueless is one of the reasons Barack Obama is now sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The fact that Sarah Palin understands this, and in consequence has turned her Facebook page into a potent political weapon, is one of the reasons she is in my judgment the most important and effective political force in the Republican Party at this moment despite the best efforts of the legacy media to filter her right into impotence and irrelevance. Anyone who wants to compete with them in the future on anything approaching a level playing field is going to need to be smart enough and tuned-in enough to do likewise.

That is the real meaning and significance of Dunn's presentation; rather than mistaking it for hubris on the part of the Obama administration and using it as one more cudgel with which to beat on the President, the Right needs to recognize her analysis of the political-media landscape as correct and her prescription as essential, and learn to go and do likewise. And the media had best do the same, and figure out how to adapt and respond, lest their current posture of lap-doggish servitude be institutionalized and rendered permanent.

HT: Janet McGregor Dunn

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

Short-term stimulus

There have been a lot of claims made about jobs "saved or created" by the so-called "stimulus" (and how you measure a job "saved" when you don't know the might-have-beens, I have no idea); but has it occurred to you to wonder how long those jobs have lasted? Apparently, not very long in some cases:

How much are politicians straining to convince people that the government is stimulating the economy? In Oregon, where lawmakers are spending $176 million to supplement the federal stimulus, Democrats are taking credit for a remarkable feat: creating 3,236 new jobs in the program's first three months.

But those jobs lasted on average only 35 hours, or about one work week. After that, those workers were effectively back unemployed, according to an Associated Press analysis of state spending and hiring data. By the state's accounting, a job is a job, whether it lasts three hours, three days, three months, or a lifetime. . . .

At the federal level, President Barack Obama has said the federal stimulus has created 150,000 jobs, a number based on a misused formula and which is so murky it can't be verified.

When even the AP is noticing that Democratic politicians are playing games with the numbers, you know it's hard to ignore. (Though it's worth noting that the AP appears to be trying to hide the story, judging by the fact that this link is down.) It should of course be pointed out that Oregon's behavior here is uniquely egregious:

Oregon's accounting practices would not be allowed as part of the $787 billion federal stimulus. While the White House has made the unverifiable promise that 3.5 million jobs will be saved or created by the end of next year, when accountants actually begin taking head counts this fall, there are rules intended to guard against exactly what Oregon is doing.

The White House requires states to report numbers in terms of full-time, yearlong jobs. That means a part-time mechanic counts as half a job. A full-time construction worker who has a three-month paving contract counts as one-fourth of a job.

That said, the response from the state to that criticism is telling:

Oregon's House speaker, Dave Hunt, called that measurement unfair, though nearly every other state that has passed a stimulus package already uses or plans to use it.

"This stimulus plan was intentionally designed for short-term projects to pump needed jobs and income into families, businesses and communities struggling to get by," Hunt said in a statement. "No one ever said these would be full-time jobs for months at a time."

But wasn't that the implication? After all, when the President talked about "3.5 million jobs saved or created," he didn't add the caveat "but only for a little while"; an extra week's worth of work is not nothing, to be sure—I've been a temp, I know the drill—but if that's the best the government can do, your job hasn't been saved, your job loss has just been delayed a bit. And when most people talk about "job creation," temp work is most certainly not what they have in mind.

The truth is, this story from Oregon highlights how fuzzy and dubious these job claims are even when the politicians aren't playing games with them. As the Reason Foundation's Anthony Randazzo points out,

The problem remains that there is still no good way of counting exactly the number of jobs that wouldn't have been lost because of the savings, and there is no way the government is going to track the number of jobs that have been lost because of stimulus spending (such as lost jobs in traditional energy because of green spending).

Put another way, all such claims depend on a knowledge of the might-have-beens—if we hadn't done this, what other things might we have done instead, and what results would they have produced? And what would have happened if we hadn't done anything at all?—and that's knowledge we don't actually have in any reliable way in most cases, and particularly when you're talking something as complex and interconnected as the national economy.

HT: David Riddle

Is President Obama not funny?

In response to my previous post, cyberfriend Doug Hagler suggested a couple reasons why late-night hosts haven't done much with Barack Obama up until he was (startlingly) awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. One, Joe Biden, I agree with; the VP is a walking punch line, giving them plenty of material to work with all by himself. Doug's right to call him a "comedic sacrificial lamb." He also has a point in noting that we're not that far into the Obama administration, though if you look back eight years, I think you'll find that that didn't slow the likes of Jay Leno much in going after George W. Bush.

His other suggestion, though, I think is off: that the President is "an articulate public figure" who doesn't give comedians many opportunities to poke fun at him. You know, the guy gives a good speech, but get him off his teleprompter and he's startlingly mortal—even Bush-like. Here's a few examples:

Austrian is a language?

Halting the rise of privacy?

When TOTUS fails:

Thinking on his feet:

57 of 59 states, one left to go:

None of this is to imply that the President is stupid, because he isn't; but were these lines all attributable to George W. Bush, they would have been fed right into the Bush-as-drooling-clown meme, and the jokes would have come cascading down. When Barack Obama says them? Crickets from the big guns of the media. Clearly, something's uneven here.

Now, I don't blame this on bias on the part of late-night hosts. I do think they're biased to some degree—because who isn't?—but I don't think bias drives their routines much at all; for those guys, the driver is getting a laugh, and they'll do anything within reason to get a laugh out of their audience. (And for Letterman—who's either the most biased of the group, I think, or just the meanest—maybe not just within reason.) They've tried telling Obama jokes, and studio audiences haven't responded. They don't want to tell jokes that leave the audience cold, and you can't blame them for that.

Part of this is that the President started off with such an elevated mood, with such elevated expectations, that many people didn't want to diminish that any by laughing at him; part of it is that over the course of the campaign, Barack Obama became increasingly unable to laugh at himself, and so far he's been running an administration that really can't seem to take a joke. That doesn't encourage public levity. It will be interesting to see if the laughter over the Nobel is an indication that public attitudes—as represented by talk-show studio audiences—are starting to change, or if it's just a blip. If it's the former, then the President had best relearn to take a joke, because as JibJab has known all along, he's plenty vulnerable to satire.

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The Nobel Prize for laughter

I have to say, the thing that has surprised me the most about Barack Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize has been all the laughter. Sure, I expected some people to laugh, but I wouldn’t have thought to see anyone literally doubled over and out of breath from laughter, and I have seen that. I would have expected more support from the decision around the world, instead of the incredulity that seems to be the general response from major global political figures. After all, someone argued that those who expected Copenhagen to hurt the President’s international prestige should similarly expect the news from Oslo to boost it, and that made a certain amount of sense; but it doesn’t seem to be playing out that way. And I thought that the Left would be pleased by the award, but so far, they haven’t been supporting it either.

Indeed, the late-night jokesters appear to have decided that this is something about President Obama that they can safely mock; and mock they have, with gusto. Here’s Jay Leno, for instance:

Congratulations to Barack Obama—he has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Apparently, the Nobel committee wanted to recognize the president’s fine work in bringing peace to a black professor and a white cop through the strategic use of beer.

President Obama said he was humbled to win the prize. Not as humble as he was when Rio got the Olympics. But still humble.

That’s pretty amazing, winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Ironically, his biggest accomplishment as president so far . . . winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

President Obama won another Nobel Prize today. This time in medicine for pretending to give up smoking.

The Nobel Peace Prize also comes with a cash award of $1.4 million. Apparently, this is President Obama's plan to finance healthcare reform.

And Conan O’Brien:

Today, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The committee said they gave it to Obama partly for his idealism and commitment to global cooperation, but mostly for calling Kanye West a jackass.

It’s a great honor for America that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, our economy is so bad, Obama’s already been forced to trade the medal in at “Cash 4 Gold.”

The Nobel Committee is saying the reason they gave Obama the Peace Prize is for reducing tension around the world. So, the runners-up for this year’s Nobel Prize were “red wine” and ”the Brookstone 3-Speed Massaging Recliner.”

Jimmy Fallon took the opportunity to skewer a rival:

Congratulations to President Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize this morning. That’s quite an accomplishment. I’m sure he’ll pick it up as soon as he’s finished fighting two wars.

Along with the Nobel Peace Prize President Obama also gets $1.4 million. Usually to get a check that big you need to blackmail David Letterman.

Jimmy Kimmel added a shot at the VP:

A day after declaring war on the moon, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Vice President Biden was awarded the Nobel Hair-Piece Prize.

And Craig Ferguson got off I think the best line at the expense of America’s best-loved losers:

The Chicago Cubs are filing for bankruptcy. They’re from Chicago; they’ve spent millions of dollars they don’t have . . . I smell Nobel Peace Prize.

I’m not sure if this means the President’s media honeymoon is wearing off, or just that the funnymen are that happy to have a “safe” way to get laughs out of him.

BBC admits: world stopped warming 11 years ago

Their admission threw the planet into a drastic cooling trend, as Hell promptly froze over.

HT: The Anchoress

New site in the sidebar

and I do mean new—Andrew Breitbart's latest venture, Big Government.com, only launched yesterday. It launched with a splash, though, an exposé of ACORN that would have made the old 60 Minutes proud: ACORN's Baltimore office facilitating child prostitution and tax evasion. It's quite a story, and quite a scoop for the folks who pulled it together. Check out the posts.

The remarkable reach of the hand of God

Brent Bozell tells a remarkable story:

I was stunned to read on Life Site News that a new movie is being planned about Our Lady of Guadalupe, so-named for an appearance of the Virgin Mary near Mexico City in 1531 that’s credited with converting nine million indigenous Mexicans to Christianity. The film, still untitled, will be produced by Mpower Pictures, the company that was launched with the pro-life movie "Bella" in 2006 and founded by "The Passion of the Christ" producer Steve McEveety.

That a movie would be made about Our Lady of Guadalupe is amazing, but that wasn’t half the surprise. The movie is being written by Joe Eszterhas. Yes, the same Joe Eszterhas responsible for screenwriting filthy movies like "Basic Instinct" and most infamously, "Showgirls," a movie so pornographic even the late Jack Valenti condemned it.

What I didn’t know until now is the story of the conversion of Joe Eszterhas in 2001, powerfully captured in his 2008 memoir entitled "Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith."

It's yet another reminder that God doesn't just do the impossible, he does the implausible. Read the whole thing.

If you want to know what's really happening in Afghanistan

read Michael Yon, who has established himself as the single most indispensable reporter from the Iraq-Afghanistan theater of operations. I’m realizing I’ve never linked to his site (that I’m remembering, anyway)—there’s always stuff I don't get to, that falls by the wayside for lack of time or energy; it’s to my discredit that I’ve never actually gotten as far as posting on his work, because what he’s been doing is profoundly important.

And it’s only getting more important. He's been embedded with the British forces there, but they just canceled his ticket because of his last dispatch; this on top of financial problems which have forced him to appeal for support, without which he'll have to give up his reporting and leave the country. If you care about what’s going on in Afghanistan, and are able to help support Yon’s work, it would truly be in your best interest (and the best interest of the nation) to do so.

This is a critical time for Afghanistan and Iraq both. As Yon testifies,

There is a crucial development and governance aspect to this war, and still a crucial smashing side. Sometimes you’ve got to swap hats for helmets. Mullah Omar is still alive, apparently in Pakistan, and he needs to be killed. Just on 20 August I heard a Taliban singing over a walkie talkie that Mullah Omar “Is our leader,” and they were celebrating shooting down a British helicopter only twelve hours before just some miles from here. . . .

The enemy often uses pressure cookers to make bombs, just as was done by the Maoists in Nepal. In Nepal, the government began confiscating pressure cookers (which angered many people), and the government often shut down cell service (angering many people) because the Maoists used cell phones. The Maoists won the war. We are operating far smarter in Afghanistan. Here it’s the enemy who actually shuts down cell towers—and this angers the people. Also, the enemy bombs around here are killing a lot of innocent people, and this also angers the people. Despite progress made by the Taliban, they alienate many people.

Meanwhile, Iraq is in a state of transition as the US is drawing down its presence there:

In the dangerous security vacuum that followed the demolition of Saddam’s regime, Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) ignited a civil war by unleashing ferocious terror attacks against the country’s Shia community. Now that American soldiers have withdrawn from urban areas and created another partial security vacuum, the shattered remnants of AQI are trying to ramp up that effort again. It won’t be as easy for AQI now as it was last time. . . .

Terrorist attacks against Shias by AQI won’t likely reignite a full-blown sectarian war as long as the Sunnis continue to hold fast against the psychotics in their own community and Maliki’s government provides at least basic security on the streets.

Iraq’s Sunnis have as much incentive as its Shias to fight the AQI killers among them. They suffered terribly at AQI’s hands, after all. Out in Anbar Province, they violently turned against “their own” terrorist army even before the Shias turned against “theirs.” And Tariq Alhomayed points out in the Arabic-language daily Asharq al-Awsat that Maliki faces the same pressure to provide security on the streets, especially for his own Shia community, that any Western leader would face under similar circumstances—he wants to be re-elected.

The uptick in violence following America’s partial withdrawal shouldn’t shock anyone. If you scale back security on the streets, more violence and crime are inevitable. The same thing would happen in the United States if local police departments purged the better half of their officers. That does not mean, however, that Iraq is doomed to revert to war.

Last time I visited Iraq, Captain A.J. Boyes at Combat Outpost Ford on the outskirts of Sadr City warned me that we should expect this. “When we leave and transition all of what we do now to the Iraqi Security Forces, will there be a spike in [terrorist] activity?” he said. “Absolutely. One hundred percent.” He thinks Iraq will probably pull through just fine, even so. “It should be up to the media to portray this as something expected. There will be a spike in violence because the insurgents are going to test the Iraqi Security Forces, but I have complete faith that the resolve of the Iraqis will be there. Eventually, the bad guys will understand that the Iraqi Security Forces are here to stay. They are improved. They are vastly superior to anything we have seen in the past.” . . .

Before he was promoted to commander in Iraq, General Petraeus was known for his mantra “Tell me how this ends.” It was something everyone needed to think about, though no one could possibly know the answer to. Iraq makes a fool of almost everyone who tries to predict the course of events. How all this ends isn’t foreseeable. Nor is it inevitable. But the current spate of violence we’re seeing was.

As a country, we can’t afford to forget about Iraq and Afghanistan, as if nothing of any importance is happening there anymore just because they’re no longer useful to a media establishment that no longer wants to use them to bring down the president; what happens there matters a great deal, and we need to know what’s going on. For that, we need people like Michael Yon and Michael Totten, and we should be thankful for them.

Calling the administration to account

During and (especially) after last year's presidential campaign, there was much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth on the Republican side of the aisle about how the Democrats were so much more hip to social media and Web 2.0 and texting and so on, and how far behind the Republicans were and how much of a disadvantage they were at as a consequence, and how hard the party would have to work to catch up. I'm not sure anyone went quite so far as to claim that this was the only reason Barack Obama won, but there were a few folks who seemed to be thinking that (as there are always people looking to blame the unexpected on something they consider to be a gimmick).

Now, I think we can safely say that at least one prominent Republican gets it: Sarah Palin. As governor of Alaska, she used Twitter to keep Alaskans up on what she was doing and what was going on—as well as giving quick, incisive comments on broader political issues—and won a large number of followers in so doing. Now that she's left office, she's turned from the scalpel to the sword, using her Facebook account to go to war with the current administration in Washington, DC, primarily over their efforts to deform the American health-care system; and though she's wielded Facebook like a rapier, her blows have fallen on the administration's efforts like great strokes from a claymore, depriving them of momentum and putting them on the defensive. For those of us who think Obamacare is the wrong approach at the wrong time and will only make matters worse, this is a very good thing, a nice change from politics as usual, and reason for real hope.

Just because her focus of late has been on health care (which is, after all, the domestic political issue at the moment), though, doesn't mean she has nothing else to talk about; energy is still a signature issue for her as well, and so when the Obama administration used the Export-Import Bank to commit $2 billion in loans to fund offshore drilling—in Brazil—she was quick to offer the following comment:

Today's Wall Street Journal contains some puzzling news for all Americans who are impacted by high energy prices and who share the goal of moving us toward energy independence.

For years, states rich with an abundance of oil and natural gas have been begging Washington, DC politicians for the right to develop their own natural resources on federal lands and off shore. Such development would mean good paying jobs here in the United States (with health benefits) and the resulting royalties and taxes would provide money for federal coffers that would potentially off-set the need for higher income taxes, reduce the federal debt and deficits, or even help fund a trillion dollar health care plan if one were so inclined to support such a plan.

So why is it that during these tough times, when we have great needs at home, the Obama White House is prepared to send more than two billion of your hard-earned tax dollars to Brazil so that the nation's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, can drill off shore and create jobs developing its own resources? That's all Americans want; but such rational energy development has been continually thwarted by rabid environmentalists, faceless bureaucrats and a seemingly endless parade of lawsuits aimed at shutting down new energy projects.

I'll speak for the talent I have personally witnessed on the oil fields in Alaska when I say no other country in the world has a stronger workforce than America, no other country in the world has better safety standards than America, and no other country in the world has stricter environmental standards than America. Come to Alaska to witness how oil and gas can be developed simultaneously with the preservation of our eco-system. America has the resources. We deserve the opportunity to develop our resources no less than the Brazilians. Millions of Americans know it is true: "Drill, baby, drill." Alaska is proof you can drill and develop, and preserve nature, with its magnificent caribou herds passing by the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), completely unaffected. One has to wonder if Obama is playing politics and perhaps refusing a "win" for some states just to play to the left with our money.

The new Gulf of Mexico lease sales tomorrow sound promising and perhaps will move some states in the right direction, but we all know that the extreme environmentalists who serve to block progress elsewhere, including in Alaska, continue to block opportunities. These environmentalists are putting our nation in peril and forcing us to rely on unstable and hostile foreign countries. Mr. Obama can stop the extreme tactics and exert proper government authority to encourage resource development and create jobs and health benefits in the U.S.; instead, he chooses to use American dollars in Brazil that will help to pay the salaries and benefits for Brazilians to drill for resources when the need and desire is great in America.

Buy American is a wonderful slogan, but you can't say in one breath that you want to strengthen our economy and stimulate it, and then in another ship our much-needed dollars to a nation desperate to drill while depriving us of the same opportunity.

—Sarah Palin

Now, this is not to say that this is a bad deal; in fact, though the Ex-Im Bank doesn't have a great record, there are some very strong reasons to be very glad the administration made this move. They probably have other reasons as well (such as the fact that it will pump a lot of money into George Soros' pocket), but those don't invalidate the deal by any means. It is to say, though, that this deal calls into question the administration's stance against energy development in the US, because there is simply no coherent way to support offshore drilling in Brazil and at the same time oppose new drilling off the Gulf Coast, in the Chukchi Sea, or in ANWR.

At least, there's no coherent economic or environmental argument for doing so; which suggests that those aren't the arguments that really matter to the White House.

Robert D. Novak, RIP

Robert Novak, longtime reporter, columnist, and commentator, died this morning at the age of 78 after a year-long battle with brain cancer; our country is the poorer for the loss of his voice. Like Tim Russert, Novak was one of the rare media figures who made a real difference in the politics of this country; like Russert's fellow Buffalonian (or whatever would be the proper term for someone from Buffalo, NY) Jack Kemp, an old friend of Novak's and one of the few politicians he liked and respected, it's hard to imagine the Reagan Revolution happening without him. As Kenneth Tomlinson points out in his Human Events piece on Novak,

Novak was the journalistic godfather of the supply-side movement, and his columns gave political legitimacy to Kemp’s 30% tax-rate cut proposal that would, at the 11th hour, make it into Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign offerings.

And like both Russert and Kemp, Novak was a good man who remained uncorrupted by Washington, DC and its ways.

Novak was a conservative icon, but he was much more than that; as Tomlinson says,

Novak worked political sources like no other reporter. That is why so many people would be astonished when his political sources would become known. . . . Who would have imagined that Novak’s source for the Valerie Plame CIA column was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s No.2 and certainly no friend of the Bush White House. . . .

Bob Novak was first and always a reporter, and that is what made the politics of his column so appealing for conservatives and liberals alike.

The Chicago Sun-Times bears witness to this as well in the statement from its editorial board:

Bob was a relentless reporter. His political columns were marked by his determination to dig out new information, behind-the-scenes anecdotes and Washington secrets to tell us something we didn’t know. He combined that with sharp analysis, insightful commentary and passion about the issues facing the nation to emerge as a brawling contestant in the great national debates of his era. . . .

But more than that, his contributions to the great debates of the day demonstrated that Bob was someone who thought deeply about his country, its system of government and the challenges both faced. . . .

Bob most definitely was a conservative, though he never let his political inclinations blind him to what he saw as the realities of the world, even when it angered his natural allies. . . .

We at the Sun-Times will remember Bob as a generous friend and colleague, a tireless workhorse, an innovator in journalism and an example of how to practice our profession. His most enduring legacy, though, may well be his work to pass down generation to generation his love of this country, its traditions and its values that guided his life and work.

There is, as always, more that could be said, and folks like Michael Barone and Mark Tapscott have good things to say. The most important thing, though, is that Novak (a late-in-life convert to Catholicism) was all about finding the truth, and would go wherever he believed it led. Tapscott relays this anecdote from Mal Kline that captures it all:

When the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, Novak did not become a pushover for the new GOP majority. "Bob, your problem is that you've been on defense so long that you don't know what to do when your team is on offense," a Republican congressman told Novak at the time. Novak smiled and said, "I'm not on your team."

Given how that majority ended up, one can only wish that more conservatives had taken that attitude.

HT: Michelle Malkin

Update: I had to add this from Larry Kudlow:

Bob had a lot of opinions—conservative opinions; Reaganesque opinions. But his pursuit of journalistic detail, facts, scoops, and stories that no one else got was remarkable. He was "old school" in this respect, which is why he was so esteemed by political allies and critics alike.

Shoe leather is a term that comes to mind, and doggedness, and very hard work. Bob had a deep distrust of government. But even during the Reagan years, when I confess to being a source, Bob would write tough stories about the administration he supported. That was the thing about Bob: He was both a conservative icon in terms of his unswerving political beliefs, and a journalistic icon in terms of his unyielding tradecraft. . . .

Over the past twelve years Bob became a strong and devout traditional Catholic. He converted at the age of 66 as he came to grips with faith and embraced Jesus Christ. He did so on very personal terms, without any drama, but his belief was strong and deep. He came to believe that Christ died for us and our sins and for our salvation. As he looked back on his own life, and his several brushes with death, he came to understand that Jesus saved him and had a purpose for him.

Requiescat in pace, Robert Novak.