AT AMAZON, markdowns in Exercise & FItness.

MISTER, THE GRAY LADY COULD USE A MAN LIKE RICHARD NIXON AGAIN:

• “In fact, surveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.”

— Paul Krugman, The New York Times, August 30th, 2009. (Found via this Nick Gillespie item in Reason from back then.)

• “It seems to me, though, that if Mr. Gingrich is looking for hopeful historical comparisons, the more apt one might be Richard Nixon.”

— Matt Bai, The New York Times, today, on Newt’s presidential bid.

(Via Ann’s post here.)

UPDATE: It seems safe to say that no matter the ultimate denouement of Gingrich’s career, no one in the New York Times’ editorial bullpen will judge him to be “One of Us,” as one ex-Timesman ultimately, grudgingly, dubbed the Big Government-oriented Nixon.

TRUMP SLUMP.

VIDEO: TEXAS BURNS, OBAMA FUNDRAISES.

OSLO FREEDOM FORUM is being livestreamed:  This is what the human rights movement should look like, but doesn’t and never will.  Says the Economist: “A spectacular human-rights festival … on its way to becoming a human rights equivalent of the Davos Economic Forum.”  This whole venture is the brain child of Thor Halvorssen, the remarkable young man who, while still an undergraduate, brought us the most important new civil liberties organization in America in decades, FIRE.  Check out the Human Rights Foundation and consider contributing; it does more good on fewer resources than any organization I can think of.

GINGRICH IS LIKE EISENHOWER De Gaulle Reagan Nixon.

HANGING WITH HEZBOLLAH, Part II. Part I is here.

REMEMBER, BATHROOM EMERGENCIES ARE NOTHING TO LAUGH AT: “Further on in the article, in the 13th paragraph, AP attempted to shed some light on the man’s intentions by quoting a relative of the man who helpfully suggested, ‘He might have seriously mistaken the cockpit for the bathroom…. He’s only been on three planes in his whole life.'”

More from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

FAUX NEWS VS. 60 MINUTES—STOP THE FIGHT! Christian Toto, guest-blogging at Ed Driscoll.com while I help hold the fort down here, weaves a tale of two recent, and rather divergent TV interviews on the capture of Bin Laden.

(And then stop by Christian’s site for plenty of film-related content.)

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, if it wants to retain what credibility it hasn’t yet lost, might want to cancel this event.

LIBYA’S REBELS make “significant” gains against Qaddafi.

SCHADENFREUDEMANIA: Video highlights from the Media Research Center’s MSM DisHonors Awards of 2011; PJTV regular Andrew Klavan was one of the presenters, along with Ann Coulter, Neal Boortz and Cal Thomas.

“STOP WRITING ABOUT GEOLOGY. And it’s on the letterhead of a law firm in Boston. I did not write back and say, One thing this country could very much use is one less lawyer. Why don’t you stop doing law?”

I’M SENSING A THEME HERE: The San Francisco Chronicle of all places reports, “‘Social justice’ in contracts costs S.F. millions.” — huh; I thought the Chronicle was rather copacetic with that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, up north, Canada’s Small Dead Animals blog notes:

SDA reader, David, provided a link to a very interesting article. Even though the Vancouver School Board has an $8.4-million funding shortfall, they have to buy $405,725 worth of carbon offsets as per provincial government legislation instituted by BC’s last premier, Gordon Campbell.

Lest anyone forget, the Greens among us have frequently said that “going green” won’t cost us anything. Well, in this case 5 teachers are going to lose their jobs in order to pay for these absolutely ridiculous carbon offsets.

Oh and speaking of Canada and “social” “justice,” Mark Steyn alerts us to “The Criminalization of the Link” — the hyperlink that is:

If you wanted to confirm the notion that elections are a waste of time, you could hardly do it more swiftly than the new Canadian Conservative majority government is with its omnibus crime bill. Clause Five criminalizes the “hyperlink” — that’s to say, if you include a link to a site “where hate material is posted”, you could go to jail for two years.

I don’t recall this figuring as a policy proposal during the election campaign. I would imagine that almost no Tory voter is in favour of the proposal: The vast majority would be either opposed or indifferent, or bewildered as to why it’s happening at all. After all, at the last Conservative conference, the vote to scrap Section 13 was unanimous.

That last one — why’s it happening? — is easy to answer. It’s happening because it’s the kind of remorseless incremental annexation of individual liberty to which the permanent bureaucracy has become addicted. And, as I always say, the lesson of the post-Second World War west is that you don’t need a presidency-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life. It’s an outrageous law, poorly written.

Read the whole thing. While it’s still (more or less) legal.

HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE CALLED A RACIST? Here, in Madison, in the midst of a concealed carry debate, a local liberal (Stu Levitan) comes out with a statement that would be a career-ender if it came from a conservative, and a local conservative (Dave Blaska) refrains from “going ‘all-Madison'” on him. What Levitan wrote:

I think it would be fun to have 2 or 3 dangerous-looking black guys testify next week in support of concealed carry. The more gang-banger the better. Let the committee know EXACTLY who they’ll be letting carry guns.

(Cross-posted at Althouse, in case you want to comment.)

LEFTY RADIO TALKER: “I’m A Bloodthirsty Liberal.”

Huh. It’s so hard to keep up with fads these days — it seemed like just yesterday, eliminationist rhetoric was quite a bad thing.

PARTY LIKE IT’S 1999: Mickey Kaus has some fun with the New York Times’ profile of Tina Brown of Newsweek/The Daily Beast aka Beastweek:

P.S.: I especially admired the sentence brushing aside the Daily Beast’s not-good-enough web stats:

While The Beast, as Brown calls it, is a long way from profitability, it’s an impressive achievement whose relatively few visitors (just under four million uniques per month) belie its cultural influence.

Reminds me of the skillful paragraph in Newsweek’s 1996 cover story hyping Seattle, dealing with the inconvenient fact that the city was not growing:

SOONER OR LATER, IT SEEMS, everyone moves to Seattle, or thinks about it, or at least their kids do. The city is a demographic paradox, a place whose population — 532,900 in 1995 — is essentially stable, yet …

In the end, it almost doesn’t matter if the Hitler diaries are genuine the Beast’s numbers are good or not …

Over the weekend, we mentioned the ozone layer of the Times’ editorial department and its seeming inability of  to get new media as diverse as the Huffington Post and Twitter. So why would they get this strange shotgun marriage of new media and old?

In contrast: “Drudge Report: Small Operation, Large Influence.” More here.

INSTAVISION — “The Fast and Furious: NRA News’ Cam Edwards on the ATF Scandal and How Gun Owners Can Bypass the MSM:”

Glenn Reynolds catches up with Cam Edwards, the star of NRA News, to discuss the ATF gun running scandal and how the NRA has been able to get it’s message out with alternate media.

“A lot of times the MSM simply just isn’t interested and is not going to cover stories that just aren’t important to gun owners, but are really important to everybody.” — Cam Edwards

Click here or on the screen capture below to watch:

“THE TRAGEDY OF SARAH PALIN” is the melodramatic title of a lengthy new article in The Atlantic. I haven’t read it. I’ve been staring at the odd illustration, a weirdly masculinized painting of Palin. That title and that painting… so angsty… so expressive of something eating at the hearts of Palin-haters.

(Cross-posted at Althouse, where you can comment.)

THE VIETNAM WAR: A Guide To The Perplexed.

If, as Zhou Enlai has long been quoted as saying, it’s “too soon to tell” what the impact of the French Revolution has been, it’s not all that surprising that a war that was concluded less than 40 years ago is still being hotly debated today.

KLOPPENBURG SHOULD CONCEDE, says Prof. Jacobson. Her “only chance of winning is to knock out several thousand legitimate votes by challenging ‘ballot security’ based on gaps and openings in ballot bags,” when we know these “supposed… flaws did not affect the vote count…. And now there is proof of Kloppenburg’s craven gamesmanship, because Kloppenburg has ignored almost identical ballot bag issues in Dane County, which unlike Waukesha County, went heavily in her favor.”

WISCONSIN WOLF HUNTING. “I would say that, absolutely, people want a hunt… I don’t mind when there are a few wolves, but I talk to a lot of people around here and they’re pretty much upset with the number of wolves we have here.”

IN THE MAIL: The Wolf: How One German Raider Terrorized the Allies in the Most Epic Voyage of WWI.

“THREE OF THE MORE LIBERAL JUDGES on the Fourth Circuit Court are randomly selected to hear Tuesday’s arguments on the constitutionality of the new federal health care law.”

BREAKING NEWS FROM 1348: “Bubonic plague is back — this time in New Mexico man,” the L.A. Times reports.

Time for some homemade DDT? That was the topic of an Insta-post from last year, which ultimately sorta-kinda warned against the idea. Don’t try this at home kids!