THE ULTIMATE RUBE REMAINS SILENT: “Still Waiting For Keith Olbermann To Condemn Obama’s Assassination Program…”
Archive for 2010
May 23, 2010
NFL FILMS’ LOST TREASURES: Football junkies rejoice! Around the beginning of the year, Hulu added a whole boatload of NFL-related videos, including lots of material from NFL Films, the league’s in-house film division. NFL Films began in their early ’60s, and in the early naughts, put together a fascinating 40th anniversary retrospective called “Lost Treasures” that ran for a while on ESPN, and then disappeared. Fortunately, now they’re back, albeit online.
Boomer mythology tends to smash cut from the days of Camelot straight to Woodstock, but there’s a reason why it was called the counterculture. Something like watching a real life Mad Men episode, or flipping through James Lileks’ archives, the episodes of “Lost Treasures” give a real sense of the game in the 1960s, and the primary culture in which it existed.
Plus the innocence of seeing a very small Army of Davids (to coin a phrase) armed with 16mm cameras and reel-to-reel tape recorders makes for quite a contrast with the sprawling operation of its modern-day equivalent, whose Mt. Laurel, NJ facilities I toured a few years ago, after interviewing their principals for Videomaker and TCS Daily.
“SO THE RED WIRE GOES TO THE BOTTOM SCREW? YOU’RE SURE?” Pakistani Army major “had cellphone contact with Faisal Shahzad just before the bombing attempt” according to the LA Times.
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: We are not done with Goldstone.
JOBPOCALYPSE NOW: “This week, the Senate is expected to extend jobless benefits to more than 5 million Americans through the end of the year. It is the sixth time in nearly two years that they’ve expanded or extended unemployment benefits — putting off, again, a day of reckoning our political leaders seem unwilling to face. With the national unemployment rate at 9.9% — and 9.8% here in New York City — officials are afraid of what will happen to our cities, our welfare rolls and our struggling economy if these long-term unemployed are no longer given government assistance.”
RELATED: Not Evil, Just Stupid.
ELENA KAGAN SITS “with her legs ajar.” Why point that out? We’re grasping at any clues about the nominee’s activism or restraint.
Markdowns on car electronics
IN THE MAIL: A new and updated edition of John Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime.
IS OPEN SOURCE BIOLOGY the solution to bioterrorism? In the Economist’s world, white-hat biologists quickly cure any disease the bad guys dream up. I can see why biologists like that solution; it means more funding for them. But haven’t we already tried outcompeting the black hats in the world of computer malware? How’s that working out?
A PIONEERING BLOG RETURNS: Libertas, the original conservative film blog pulses back to life; John Boot has details at PJM:
Libertas, which was originally launched in 2005, went dark in 2008 while promising a rethink and a reboot. In the meantime, it lost its most resonant voice — that of writer John Nolte when Big Hollywood launched and tapped him as its editor. Libertas’s founders and editors, Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo, are still running it, but when it relaunched May 19 they promised “a different emphasis from” the original Libertas. They say the former site “spent most of its time critiquing the ideological content of Hollywood entertainment — much of which is still inimical to freedom.”
The new site promises to:
“[Promote] films that celebrate freedom, democracy, and the dignity of the individual [by featuring] short films, webisodes, movie clips and trailers, podcasts, as well as news and reviews of pro-freedom films that are currently in theaters or are available on DVD. … Libertas’ goal is to show our readers movies they can enjoy — not just to warn them about movies to avoid.
This last sentence seems to imply that competitor sites are joyless and negative — but if the web has proved one thing in the last ten years, it’s that loathing can be entertainment. How many sites — cultural, political, economic, whatever — are devoted partly or mainly to appalling the reader? High dudgeon is a valuable commodity. I enjoy a little outrage with my morning coffee. If you’re on this site, maybe you do too.
Based on that last paragraph by Boot, it sounds like Libertas may be returning to life with something of the same pugilistic tone with which they started. Say what you will, it’s likely not to be dull.
WELL, HERE’S A REASSURING HEADLINE: “Dow Theorist Richard Russell: Sell Everything, You Won’t Recognize America By The End Of The Year”
(H/T: Maggie’s Farm, which adds, appropriately enough, “Yikes.”)
DJOU HEAR ABOUT THIS? Via Matt Drudge:
As the San Francisco Chronicle notes though, “Djou will have to run again for a full, two-year term in November’s midterm elections:”
Maryland Representative Chris Van Hollen, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, on May 20 predicted his party would probably lose the special election because of a vote split between Case, 57, a former House member, and Hanabusa, 59, president of the Hawaii state Senate. Neither would agree to yield to the other as the campaign progressed and Djou, a member of the Honolulu City Council, took a lead in polls.
Faced with the Case-Hanabusa standoff, Van Hollen’s committee earlier this month ended television commercials it was financing that sought to keep the seat Democratic.
The DCCC spent more than $300,000 trying to prevent a Republican win before terminating the ad campaign, according to Federal Election Commission.
Democrats hope to regroup and regain the seat in November, Van Hollen said in his comments on May 20.
“We’re looking at November in Hawaii,” Van Hollen told reporters in Washington. He said he could “confidently predict” that the district’s Democratic candidate “in November will get a majority of the vote.”
Well of course he would say that. For a look back at some of the the other elections earlier this week, check out the latest edition of PJM Political, online here.
May 22, 2010
THE WASHINGTON POST FRETS ABOUT the “controversial social studies standards” just adopted by the Texas state board of education, but it fails to quote or even to link to the text of those standards. Everything is paraphrased… appallingly inaccurately.
IT’S A HAZARD OF THE PROFESSION: Al Qaeda big shot in Yemen blows himself up while tinkering with a bomb.
THE JOYS OF grilled duck breast.
THE FOOL ON HIS ERRAND: John Kerry returns to Syria hoping Bashar Assad and his Baath Party regime will work toward a pan-Arab peace treaty with Israel. He’ll fail.
LAW SCHOOL: THE POSTRADICAL GENERATION.
MISS ME YET? Old-school style.
A QUERY WITH A UNIVERSAL APPLICATION: “What The Hell Was He Doing On MSNBC?”
GORDON CHANG on Obama, the sinking of the Cheonan, and the failure of nuclear deterrence.
MARKDOWNS ON magazine subscriptions.
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: The rest of Europe began the 20th century unsure of how to handle its powerful German-speaking center. It’s starting the second decade of the 21st century with much the same unease, as Victor Davis Hanson writes from Munich.
(Related thoughts from Theodore Dalrymple here.)
UPDATE: “The euro has many flaws, but its weakest link is Greece, whose fundamental problem is that for years it spent too much, earned too little and plugged the gap by borrowing in order to enjoy a rich man’s lifestyle. It flouted EU rules on the limits to budget deficits; its national accounts were a moussaka of minced statistics, topped with a cheesy sauce of jiggery-pokery.”
Mmmm, moussaka…
MORE: Hitler posters in 21st century Italy? Hey, everything old in Europe really is new again.
RICHARD ARMITAGE: Who’s he?