JOSH CHAFETZ WRITES that he doesn’t see my point in this post, where the following passage from an article on sexism in TV ads drew my criticism:

The trade group does cite some ads for portraying women in a positive light. For example, MasterCard will be praised tonight for a commercial in which a woman opens a jar of pickles after her weakling husband fails the test.

I wrote: “Women as sex objects: bad and demeaning. Men as weaklings: good, and progressive.” Josh actually thinks that’s right, and observes:

So ads that reinforce the stereotypes are bad in a way that ads which undercut those stereotypes are not. That is, show a woman as a sex object and you’re playing to the idea that all women are sex objects. Show a woman as stronger than a man, and you’re cutting against the idea that all women are weaker than men. The former message is socially bad; the latter is socially good.

I guess that Josh must not watch much TV. Because if he did, he’d see that the stereotypical male in commercials, in sitcoms, and most other places, is weak, foolish, etc. Women — at least when contrasted with the males — are almost always strong and sensible. While such a role-reversal might have been pioneering, oh, 40 years ago, now it is the stereotype. This is something I’ve noted before.

A.N.S.W.E.R. IS PLANNING A PROTEST MARCH IN SAN DIEGO, and L.T. Smash is planning a counter-protest. He’d like your help, if you’re in the area.

If you go, take a camera!

ARE CHANGED ACCOUNTING RULES THE REAL CAUSE OF THE DEFICITS? Advisory Opinion notes this New York Times story by Floyd Norris that says so. Excerpt:

The wild swings in federal budget deficits might have been reduced. Companies would owe a lot less money. Less wealth would have been transferred from shareholders to managers, but then perhaps less paper wealth would have been created. Richard A. Grasso might still be running the New York Stock Exchange.

All that might have happened if American politicians, a decade ago, had not forced the Financial Accounting Standards Board to back down from its proposal to force companies to record as a compensation expense the value of stock options given to employees. . . .

That helped to produce the Clinton budget surpluses, and the bursting of the bubble meant that most of the forecasted surpluses were going to vanish anyway, even before the Bush administration cut taxes.

Interesting. I wonder why we haven’t been hearing more about this?

GEITNER SIMMONS HAS OBSERVATIONS AND REMINISCENCES on CNN and the yawning-Florida-kid story: ” I took a bit of delight, frankly, in CNN’s egg-on-the-face circumstances. My reaction stems from an experience I had with CNN on July 4, 1992.” Read the whole thing.

BARBARA BOXER IS RIGHT to chastise the TSA for its continued foot-dragging where armed pilots are concerned.

I’VE BLOGGED LESS THAN USUAL this week for a variety of reasons, but one is that my laptop was off being fixed, as I mentioned earlier. It just came back, with a brand-new keyboard, courtesy of NEC. And the technician, “Jeff,” sent a nice note. Thanks, Jeff — it seems to work fine!

What’s really amazing, of course, is that it broke just before the warranty expired.

TAPED A TV INTERVIEW THIS AFTERNOON, and the InstaWife came along and watched on the monitors from the truck, which was kind of cool.

THIS IS INTERESTING: “U.S. receiving more ‘outsourced’ jobs than it’s losing.”

UPDATE: It’s proof that Clinton was right! Well, he was.

READER CHARLIE NILSSON seems to have solved the Kerry Daisy mystery.

Now if we could just answer the question “Why?”

UPDATE: Lou Dolinar emails with some speculation:

Hmm, lets see:

Oversized flower pull to help grasp zipper.

Complaints of aches, joint pain and weakness (see Link).

Loss of appetite

“Fabulously fit” becomes clumsy on slopes, falls down.

Outbursts of anger (Frustration with failing body or Prednisone use?)

Surgery/ For what?

Won’t release medical records.

I’m betting on rheumatoid arthritis. Perhaps you could run a contest.
(Link)

I think I’ll pass. But if the Kerry camp doesn’t want to see this sort of speculation, it might want to be more forthcoming, especially given Kerry’s history of lying about health problems. (As the Post article linked above notes: “Kerry lied to the Boston Globe when asked whether he was sick.”)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Adam Maas is skeptical of Dolinar’s theory:

It’s doubtful, simply because RA is an illness which rarely strikes men, and even mild suffers will avoid activities like snowboarding, which is hard on the joints.

My mother has severe chronic RA and she’s never had much problem doing up jackets either, and her hands were hard hit.

I think the Daisy is either Bad Taste or one of those Family Gifts you get stuck with.

Hmm. At least there are treatments for Rheumatoid Arthritis.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Now readers are talking Marfan’s Syndrome. Er, whatever. Given doctors’ difficulty in diagnosing illness when the patient is right in front of them, I’m not convinced that non-doctors are especially good at diagnosing patients who aren’t. But this sort of speculation and worry will only grow if Kerry doesn’t make a clean breast of it, especially in light of his past behavior where medical issues are concerned.

OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA:

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif., March 31 — Galvanized politically in ways they have not been since the early 1990’s, Hollywood’s more liberal producers and writers are increasingly expressing their displeasure with President Bush with not only their wallets, but also their scripts.

In recent weeks, characters in prime time have progressed beyond the typical Hollywood knocks against Washington politicians to calling out the president directly or questioning his policies, including the decision to go to war in Iraq, the support of the antiterrorism law and the backing of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

Unaccountable corporate money influencing politics? Obviously, campaign finance reform hasn’t gone far enough. . . .

And they wonder why viewership is down.

UPDATE: More here.

JOB GROWTH FIGURES are suddenly looking a lot better.

LEFTY BLOGGER KOS DOES HIMSELF NO CREDIT by gloating over the deaths in Fallujah. (“They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.”) (Via Spoons.)

Eugene Volokh has some more constructive observations.

UPDATE: More here, in an excellent post from Belmont Club.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related thoughts here, and here. And Zach Barbera emails: “The comments only make it worse. Again. It is not that they dissent. They are just on the other side.”

Well, some of the comments are sane. But Bush-hatred has clearly turned into America-hatred in some quarters. Or maybe it was the other way around all along. Brendan Loy has more thoughts.

MORE: Jay Reding offers faces and bios of the “mercenaries” whose deaths leave Kos unmoved. Sadly, Kos isn’t alone. Reader Ricky West emails to ask “What’s up with the left? Have they gone completely bonkers?” Beats me, but there seems to be a lot of hate out there, and it’s no longer limited to marginal settings like Democratic Underground.

Roger Simon has some sane thoughts on the Left’s weird behavior:

Back in the Early Paleolithic Period, when I first joined the left, it was this idealism that motivated all of us. I assume it did for Zuniga et al. But some kind of cognitive dissonance set in after those planes came crashing into the World Trade Center. They refused to accept that anything good could happen under another name (Republicanism, conservatism, Bush, etc.). Good only comes from the names they traditionally associate with it. So heinous and barbaric acts are excused by people who under other circumstance would never do that. It’s depressing and it’s frightening.

Yes, it is. On the other hand, this post by a teenager on the Fallujah murders is far more inspiring:

Why, you may ask, does a teenager support the continued struggle to bring Democracy to the Middle East? My answer is simple, and only three words long:

Freedom. Isn’t. Free.

Live your lives to the fullest; this nation provides you that outstanding opportunity. I believe others should have it as well.

I guess the Left really has lost its teen spirit.

MORE: The link to Kos now goes to a different post, replacing the original, which opens:

There’s been much ado about my indifference to the Mercenary deaths in Falluja a couple days ago. I wrote in some diary comments somewhere that “I felt nothing” and “screw them”.

Some diary comments somewhere? You can see the original post in a screenshot here. You can decide for yourself whether the new post is an adequate response to the old one. Free speech: His blog, his choice on what to write — and your choice on what to think about it.

Matthew Hoy has a sum-up post here. And this comment from Roger Simon’s page is worth reproducing:

Remember, this guy was a major force in helping the web-based insurgency of Howard Dean, which at one point seemed poised to take over the Democratic Party. This is one of the most popular and most respected “liberal” (or whatever the hell he calls himself) blogs out there. Many mainstream Democratic political candidates advertise on it. This is not some fringe, freakshow thing like indymedia. This is one of the biggest voices on the left on the internet.

As I say, the hate has spread way beyond places like the Democratic Underground. Military blogger BlackFive has further thoughts, and addresses the “mercenary” claim. And echoing the mainstream point above, Best of the Web observes:

It’s worth noting that the Daily Kos is popular among Democratic leaders. Zuniga is a principal in the Armstrong Zuniga political consulting firm, which touts the Daily Kos as “the most popular political weblog with over 3 million monthly visits.” Friedman has a list of congressional candidates who advertise on the site, and in a February posting Zuniga reported that Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, “asked if I would post” a “Message to Blog Community.”

I should note that at least one of those congressional candidates appears to have pulled his ad. Sentiments like Kos’s are distressingly common among Democrats of the political class, but they’re far from universal.

STILL MORE: Tacitus: “I didn’t think this nonsense was representative of Democrats as a whole — good to see some folks who count are standing up to make that clear.” There’s also more at Winds of Change — and this observation in the comments: “I think there have always been two lefts, divided between progressives who believe in the essential goodness of American values, which they perhaps even want to strengthen and implement more widely, and those who believe in the essential badness of American values, which they want to combat.” I think that’s right.

More here. And here. And Allah has a quiz.

Oliver Willis: “I admire what Kos has done for Democrats over at the Daily Kos, but his remarks about the civilians killed in Fallujah were way the hell over the line.”

Kevin Drum: “I wish Kos would just step up to the plate and apologize . . . Bottom line: like it or not, Kos is a spokesman for the left these days, and this kind of stuff doesn’t help us. His advertisers are pulling out because of course they can’t be associated with statements like this. It’s a vote killer.”

John Kerry campaign blog: “In light of the unacceptable statement about the death of Americans made by Daily Kos, we have removed the link to this blog from our website.” I’m not generally a fan of de-linking, but as Kevin says, it’s unavoidable here.

Mark Kleiman: “Any human being not a partisan of the Ba’athist or Islamist resistance to the American presence in Iraq ought, first of all, to mourn the deaths of four fellow human beings. . . . Nor are the ties of nationality entirely irrelevant here; these men were our fellow-citizens, engaged — though as private employees rather than soldiers or public officials — in carrying out the policy of our lawful (whatever you think of what happened in Florida) government. Indifference to their deaths strains the ties that bind the country together.”

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY UPGRADE: Much appreciation to the very cool reader who, thanks to an Adobe connection, sent me a free copy of Photoshop CS which has a lot of features that my Photoshop Elements lacks, and a price-tag to match. He called it an in-kind tipjar donation, and it’s an awfully nice one.

UPDATE: Link busted before. Fixed now. Sorry.

HERE’S AN AMUSING INTERVIEW, with a photograph even, of the elusive Wonkette.

STEVEN DEN BESTE has some sensible observations on what’s going on in Iraq:

The Baathist insurgency thought that ongoing attacks would cause American demoralization and retreat. That didn’t work, because they monumentally misjudged the American character. But the goal of this attack is to inspire American fury. What they hope is that the Americans will be blinded by hatred and will do something extremely stupid: to punish the Sunnis collectively for the actions of the terrorist group. . . .

Paul Bremer understands that and seems to be responding to it appropriately. But he’s being criticized by hotheads who don’t seem to understand that swift, strong, broad reaction against Sunnis collectively would be a blunder of the first order.

Read the whole thing, along with these thoughts from Donald Sensing.

JEFF JARVIS: “And now Google is flexing its power against the little guy. Sounds evil to me.”

LARRY LESSIG’S FINAL GUEST-BLOG is up over at GlennReynolds.com.

I’LL BE ON HUGH HEWITT’S SHOW shortly, along with James Lileks. You can listen online by following the link and clicking on “listen online.”

UPDATE: Started off a bit distracted, as my tomcat was for some reason hurling himself against the closed door to my study, but it picked up after that. Hope the thuds didn’t make it over the air. Sticking around into the next hour.

James Lileks, who’s sticking around too, says that more people should be reading Mitch Berg. He’s right, of course.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon has joined us!

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: We’ve been talking about guerrilla media. Here’s the independent pro-Bush ad I just mentioned. And here’s an ad by Flashbunny.org on whether we were misled about Iraq.

JOHN PILGER IS CHALLENGING RICHARD CLARKE’S CREDIBILITY — Tim Blair has more.

THE U.S. NEWS LAW SCHOOL RANKINGS are out. Tennessee moved up a couple of spots, now ahead of American U., Case Western, and Tulane — I think we were more or less tied with them last year.

All of which means pretty much nothing, I suppose. But people love rankings.

IS THE OUTSOURCING BUBBLE BURSTING?

Dell admits it has “learnt its lesson” after being forced to drop its Indian call centre last year after customer complaints about the quality of service.

The call centre operation for the OptiPlex desktops and Latitude laptops was moved back to the US and, in an exclusive interview with silicon.com, Dell CIO Randy Mott said the Bangalore centre was unable to deal satisfactorily with the volume of calls generated by the rapid growth of those product lines.

Outsourcing makes sense sometimes, but I think it became a bit of a management fad in recent years. I expect we’ll see some more backtracking along these lines.

UPDATE: Reader Don McGregor emails:

A friend of mine who works up in the valley for a major chip design firm says their company looked at outsourcing, but had heard about too many
IP issues. Things like patents and trade secrets are not necessarily respected by the population, employees, or the courts in low-wage countries.

They weren’t too keen on having their chip designs stolen and used against them, and having no realistic recourse to the courts for protection.

Yes, there are all sorts of issues that don’t show up in a one-dimensional cost-based analysis.

UPDATE: More outsourced customer-support horror stories.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here. And a reader says that Dell is still outsourcing customer support for its low-end products at ferocious pace. I hope not.

SEXIST DOUBLE STANDARDS: Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story (p. B6) describing the “Advertising Women of New York” group’s complaints about sexist advertising. They’re most upset about an ad for Sirius Radio featuring Pamela Anderson in a wet tank top. (“She uses her bottom as a chrome buffer.” No wonder Stern is thinking of moving to Sirius)

But that’s not the only sexism in the story. Get this:

The trade group does cite some ads for portraying women in a positive light. For example, MasterCard will be praised tonight for a commercial in which a woman opens a jar of pickles after her weakling husband fails the test.

Women as sex objects: bad and demeaning. Men as weaklings: good, and progressive.

UPDATE: Steve Verdon has opined on this before.

WINDS OF CHANGE has an interesting post on Al Qaeda in Africa, with special emphasis on something frequently noted here, the Algerian connection.

RICHARD MINITER, AUTHOR OF LOSING BIN LADEN, has thoughts on the Clarke affair:

Curiously, about the Clinton years, where Mr. Clarke’s testimony would be authoritative, he is circumspect. When I interviewed him a year ago, he thundered at the political appointees who blocked his plan to destroy bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan in the wake of the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Yet in his book he glosses over them. He has little of his former vitriol for Clinton-era bureaucrats who tried to stop the deployment of the Predator spy plane over Afghanistan. (It spotted bin Laden three times.)

He fails to mention that President Clinton’s three “findings” on bin Laden, which would have allowed the U.S. to take action against him, were haggled over and lawyered to death. And he plays down the fact that the Treasury Department, worried about the effects on financial markets, obstructed efforts to cut off al Qaeda funding. He never notes that between 1993 and 1998 the FBI, under Mr. Clinton, paid an informant who turned out to be a double agent working on behalf of al Qaeda. In 1998, the Clinton administration alerted Pakistan to our imminent missile strikes in Afghanistan, despite the links between Pakistan’s intelligence service and al Qaeda. Mr. Clarke excuses this decision — bin Laden managed to flee just before the strikes — as a diplomatic necessity.

As I’ve said before, I don’t really blame the Clinton Administration too much for this. Nobody took terrorism seriously enough before 9/11. But Clarke’s choice of targets today is revealing. Read the whole thing.

GO READ LILEKS.

We stopped pretending we would ratify Kyoto. We only spent $15 billion on AIDS in Africa. We did not take dictation from Paris. If we had done these things, it would minimize the world’s anger.

Is the world angry at Russia, which spends nothing on AIDS and rebuffed Kyoto? Is the world angry at China, which got a pass on Kyoto and spends nothing on AIDS for other countries?

Is the world angry at North Korea for killings its people? Angry at Iran for smothering that vibrant nation with corrupt and thuggish mullocracy? Angry at Syria for occupying Lebanon? Angry at Saudi Arabia for its denial of women’s rights? Angry at Russia for corrupt elections? Is the world angry at China for threatening Taiwan, or angry at France for joining the Chinese in joint military exercises that threatened the island on the eve of an election? Is the world angry at Zimbabwe for stealing land and starving people? Is the world angry at Pakistan for selling nuclear secrets? Is the world angry at Libya for having an NBC program?

Is the world angry at the thugs of Fallujah?

Is the world angry at anyone besides America and Israel?

Read the whole thing. Especially if you’re John Kerry.