Good-bye, books

Your lifelong ambition was to become a published author? Better kiss that dream good-bye:

The specter of commercial death has been haunting the whole book business lately. It wasn't exactly the best of times for publishers and booksellers before the economy melted down. Afterward, the headlines got truly grim: There was "Barnes & Noble Braces for 'Terrible' Season" and "Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Places 'Temporary' Halt on Acquisitions." (Translation: Publisher with scary debt issues can't afford to pay authors for books.) Then came "Layoffs at Random House, Simon & Schuster," followed quickly by "Publishing Death Watch."
On Dec. 1, Publishers Weekly posed what could be construed as a hopeful question: "As Bad As It Gets?"
Not likely. After the holidays, most observers believe, things will only get worse.

Just posting this for future reference, the next time somebody tries to tell me that the death-spiral of the newspaper industry is a function of liberal bias. On the contrary, the decline of publishing -- not just newspapers, but magazines and books, too -- is a consequence of the coming-of-age of the post-literate generation.

Remember, next time you board an airplane, to observe your fellow passengers to see if any of those under 30 brought a book, magazine or newspaper to read. Instead, in nearly every case, you'll see them zone out to the iPod. Reading for pleasure, or for edification, is a habit that almost no one under 30 ever acquired. Or ever will.

Whatever their ability to read, reading's function for the under-30s is almost entirely utilitarian or job-driven. The idea of browsing a bookstore to purchase an anthology of short stories, a history of colonial New England, or a new volume by their favorite columnist -- dude, they don't read newspapers, how are they supposed to have a "favorite columnist"?

What we have been watching over the past few decades is the slow but relentless decline of reading as a mass phenomenon. Without a mass market to pay the bills, publishers are trying to find a business model that will permit them to survive in a world where reading is the province of a dwindling elite.

UPDATE: One of the commenters has accused me of hyperbole. Here are just a couple of data from this year's Pew survey of American news consumption habits:

• "Since the early 1990s, the proportion of Americans saying they read a newspaper on a typical day has declined by about 40%; the proportion that regularly watches nightly network news has fallen by half." And online news readership has not made up the loss.
• "In spite of the increasing variety of ways to get the news, the proportion of young people getting no news on a typical day has increased substantially over the past decade. About a third of those younger than 25 (34%) say they get no news on a typical day, up from 25% in 1998." Note that these figures for the "newsless" include news from all sources, including TV and online.

There is a net decline in readership, and the driving force behind this overall decline is the relatively low rate of readership among the younger generation. Of course, the Pew survey's focus was specifically on news consumers (including people who watch TV news), rather than on literacy or general reading. But the data are consistent with my argument.

We are living in the Age of the Image, where the picture on the video screen is utterly dominant over any truth that can be conveyed by the written word. Children who are immersed from infancy into an all-pervasive media bath of images in motion -- 24/7 cable TV, DVDs, video games, etc. -- are permanently stunted in their mental habits, glued to the floor, as it were. A child raised on a diet of nonstop image-action will never develop the reading habit, and without habitual readers, there is a dwindling market for the written word.

FACT: In 2000, the two magazines with the largest paid circulation were the AARP Bulletin and Modern Maturity (about 20 million each). The leading news magazine, Time, had a circulation of about 4 million in 2000, which fell to 3.3 million in 2007, while AARP Bulletin/Modern Maturity subscriptions increased to 24 million each. Do you get the point?

The problem faced by the publishing industry is a problem of diminishing demand. It is not an issue of content or marketing, and technological innovation (e.g., Kindle) will not fix the problem. The decline of habitual reading has passed a tipping point, so that it is no longer possible to speak of a "mass market" book or a "mass market" magazine, especially for the younger generation.

Now, it may be that you are under 30 and object to this broad generalization -- after all, you are reading, aren't you? But aren't you conscious of what a relative rarity you are amid your generation?

Postmodern nuptial customs

To begin with, congratulations to Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin on the arrival of their son, Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnson, who was a healthy 7 pounds, 7 ounces, when born Saturday morning. May God bless you all.

And now the cultural criticism: What's up with this "baby first, marriage later" thing?

Johnston . . . told the Associated Press in October that he and fiancée Bristol plan to wed in 2009 and raise the child together.

What's wrong with a private hurry-up wedding before the baby comes, so that a few years from now young Tripp isn't staring at his birth certificate wondering why his parents are listed with different surnames?

Conservative ought to support real traditional values: "Paint the shotgun white, Pa -- it's going to be a formal wedding!"

UPDATE: Linked at . . . the Village Voice?

Worth a thousand words

Beyond the comic orthography of hate, we have reached a seminal moment in the development of the blogosphere, I would suggest, when Marty Peretz of the New Republic links Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugs. Apparently, however, this photo of a protest on New York's Fifth Avenue derives from another blog, The Silent Majority, which has a whole album of photos, plus videos including this one:

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

UPDATE: Ace of Spades:

But it's worth the speculation just to note that in addition to dancing, homosexuality, rock music and the clitoris, the would-be global caliphate has also declared war on juice.
Not that it affects me. Atkins and all. But I don't want to live in a world where I can't drink a nice cool glass of Cran-Grape.

Madcap hijinks ensue.

Ace the Magic Ewok

Amid all the "Magic Negro" uproar, Ace the Magic Ewok offers a genuinely thoughtful reflection on the subject. Among other things, he points out octaroon as "a word people aren't quite sure they're allowed to say."

BTW, when he's not blogging, Ace is a screenwriter and so is thoroughly familiar with the origin of the term "Magic Negro" to describe a cinematic archetype, a role that black cultural critics see as insultingly servile. This goes to the intent and purpose of the Paul Shanklin parody, and is not intended as a defense of Chip Saltsman from the charge of stupidity.

UPDATE: Ewoks are notorious misogynists, but that's just part of their authentic culture and only Western hegemonic imperialists would judge them for it.

Short answer: No

A "liberal beta male" -- to use Allah's tag -- ponders his reproductive fitness:

Can it really be right to have children when they’ll grow up in a world dominated by narratives of social and environmental catastrophe the worst aspect of which, following the likely failure of my own generation to act, is that the ability to alter the course of events may well have disappeared?

As the father of six happy, confident children, I can happily and confidently tell Guy Damman: No, you are not "fit to breed."

The exquisite sensibilities of the effete intellectual are antithetical to good parenting. If you're the kind of neurasthenic wuss who sits around fretting about "environmental catastrophe," the world can do without your progeny who, by both nature and nuture, will be bent toward your own self-doubting pathology.

What the world needs is cheerful courage, undeceived and undeterred by the propaganda of secularist gloom which tells people, on the one hand, that man has no need for God, and on the other hand, that only all-powerful government can save us from man-made catastrophe. I have recently been re-reading William F. Buckley's 1951 classic God And Man At Yale, in which the first seedlings of this poisonous harvest of liberalism were discerned. One sees in retrospect that the spiritual bankruptcy of the old liberal elite was manifested a full generation before our campuses erupted in radical madness, that the hand-wringing over "the superstition of academic freedom" displayed the weakness of a regime that would crumble at first contact with any real challenge. This weakness is now manifested as exaggerated concern about "environmental catastrophe," et cetera. Will liberals never learn that what they think of as a political philosophy is in fact but the symptom of a fatal disease of the soul?

Please, gloom-and-doomers, do not feel compelled to inflict upon the world your feeble offspring, genetically predisposed toward your own suicidal perspective. We don't need more whiners.

UPDATE: Linked by CrankyCon. Thanks!

The problem with crystal balls

If we pause for a minute to think about what we expected a year ago, we realize that we don't have the ability to predict the future, a point I make in my latest column for Pajamas Media:

In light of how things turned out, it is an amusing irony that in late 2007 it was Republicans who worried about a long, ugly struggle for their party's nomination. "I fear our intraparty fury will destroy all leaders and send us off to a brokered convention -- and from thence, probably to defeat," Tony Blankley wrote in his column on Dec. 19, 2007. "If the Democrats have their candidate by February and we are campaigning harshly until August, we surely would start in a deep hole."
Instead, Romney surprised Republicans by announcing on Feb. 7 that he was suspending his campaign, effectively ceding the nomination to McCain. And while the Democrats struggled on until June — with Obama finally defeating Hillary only because of a shift in support among the party's superdelegates -- that long, bruising campaign seemed to enhance, rather than diminish, the Democratic advantage in the general election.

Please read the whole thing.

Alabamistanis?

Mark Steyn:

Forty years ago, the mills of northern England needed workers so Britain imported them from Pakistan. The mills closed, but the workers stayed, and now Yorkshire has adopted Mirpuri customs of arranged cousin marriage: in Bradford, 75 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins.

Mill workers married to their first cousins? Man, those Pakistanis would feel right at home in Alabama.

Of course, they'd have to get nicknames. Everybody in Alabama has a nickname, and especially if you've got a foreign-sounding name that folks in Alabama can't pronounce, you'll need a nickname. Suppose your name is Khawaja Nazimuddin. In Wetumpka, you automatically become "Mudcat." Or suppose your name is Shahid Masood. In Heflin, everybody will call you "Moose."

This is how we know Barack Obama wasn't raised in Alabama. If he'd grown up in Opelika, he'd be "Bubba." Roughly half the population of the state is nicknamed "Bubba." The other half answers to Betty Mae or Mandy Sue.

Of course, Mr. Steyn didn't really mean to compare Pakistani immigrants in England to Southern rednecks. He meant to say that they are clannish religious extremists prone to violence.

Hey, wait a minute . . .

The murder gap

New York Times:

The murder rate among black teenagers has climbed since 2000 even as murders by young whites have scarcely grown or declined in some places, according to a new report.
The celebrated reduction in murder rates nationally has concealed a "worrisome divergence," said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University who wrote the report, to be released Monday, with Marc L. Swatt. . . .
The main racial difference involves juveniles ages 14 to 17. In 2000, 539 white and 851 black juveniles committed murder, according to an analysis of federal data by the authors. In 2007, the number for whites, 547, had barely changed, while that for blacks was 1,142, up 34 percent. . . .
The report primarily blames cutbacks in federal support for community policing and juvenile crime prevention, reduced support for after-school and other social programs, and a weakening of gun laws.

Well, isn't that just peachy? Conservative policies are to blame for murders committed by black teenagers (very few of whom vote Republican, by the way). If whites commit more murders during the Obama administration, do we get to blame that on liberalism?

I didn't think so.

True story

At the party I went to Saturday night, I was talking to a guy (a Democrat) and said something deprecatory about the Obama administration's fondness for Keynesianism. The guy says, "You sound like [Cato Institute economist] Dan Mitchell. He plays left field on my softball team and he's always talking about the Keynesians, the stimulus and the bailouts."

To which I replied: "Dan Mitchell in left field? Are you crazy? He belongs in right field -- no, better yet, far-right field."

Failure of imagination

Whatever else Niall Ferguson imagines for 2009, he can't envision a scenario in which the Obama administration fails.

Israel ready for long fight

Washington Post:

Israeli officials said that they were prepared for an extended campaign in Gaza, possibly including ground forces, and that the goal is to break Hamas's military capacity. "We will continue to attack as long as they fire," said a senior Israeli military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Israel's military, he said, intends to pressure Hamas to the point where the Islamist movement either "runs out of will or runs out of capability to launch more attacks."
Israeli officials said they were choosing targets that they believed were being used for weapons manufacturing or storage. The Israeli cabinet called up 6,500 reserve forces Sunday, and troops stationed along the border with Gaza were on "the highest level of alert," according to Israeli military spokesman Capt. Benjamin Rutland.

So, they'll just keep pounding as long as necessary. This attack was planned for six months.

UPDATE: Naturally, Washington's provincial elitists think it's all about Obama:

Part of what is going on today with Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak's unleashing of massive Israeli airpower against Hamas offices in Gaza is a test of Obama's America. Hamas's decision to end its "lull", or temporary ceasefire with Israel, also has a lot to do with testing the U.S. and seeing what the outlines of Obama's policy will be.
Barack Obama cannot afford to allow his presidency and its foreign policy course to be hijacked by either side in this increasingly blurry dispute.

Right. The world teeters on the brink of Armageddon and what's important is the political impact on Obama's policy. And people accuse me of being un-serious . . .

UPDATE II: Dave at Israelly Cool is all over it. The revolution will not be televised, but the Apocalypse will be blogged.

UPDATE III: Just in case you were worried about oil prices getting too low, don't worry.

UPDATE IV: Video via Hot Air:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

UPDATE V: Noah Pollak on "The Juicebox Mafia":

The only time its members write about Israel is when they can condemn it. The truth of the matter is that they have nothing invested in Israel other than their American liberalism and their Jewish surnames. Being a Jewish critic of Israel is ever so much more compelling and melodramatic than being just another leftist critic of Israel: Instead of trafficking in banalities, one can claim disillusionment, embarrassment, and betrayal. Pardon me if I call this out for what it is -- moral preening and pure cynicism.

Sort of like guilt-ridden white Southerners who specialize in moralistic hand-wringing over the backward ways of their homeland. Someone once defined a liberal as a man who's afraid to take his own side in an argument. When your neighbors are attacking you with mortars and rockets, and your biggest concern is that retaliatory action might be too drastic . . . Well, as Jeff Foxworthy would say, "You might be a liberal if . . ."

UPDATE VI: David Bernstein, while mining the rich motherlode of idiocy that is Glenn Greenwald, pauses to observe:

Hamas . . . is perfectly willing to fight Israel to the last Palestinian civilian.

Exactly.

Unions strangling industry

It's not just pay and benefits:

Union rules have been a joke for as long as I can remember but now they are no laughing matter. . . . Those rules have been slowly bleeding our auto companies to death and the very best the UAW can offer now is a defiant demand that we taxpayers pick up the tab for its greed.

The UAW gained control of the American auto industry at a time when foreign imports were non-competitive. By making demands that artificially drove up the price of domestic-made cars and drained from U.S. automakers the capital necessary for innovation, the UAW was a major cause of Detroit's competitive decline. And now that they've driven their employers to the verge of bankruptcy, the UAW refuses to acknowledge their own role in this destructive process.

'Why are only skinny white women with fake boobs naked?'

So asks a feminist at Feministing in regard to this Danish TV commercial, which is extremely NSFW:

Link:

The ad is for a Siemens washing machine that costs 4,999.00 DKK (or about $900), according to TechCrunch, which calls it "the best commercial ever made." Via Eratosthenes, who seems to share my joyous contempt for feminism. Anything that annoys feminists is a good thing, although in point of fact, I share the quoted feminista's dislike for fake boobs. To my taste, natural A-cups are better than fake C-cups.

Oh, also notice that the annoyed feminist commenter seems to find something vaguely wrong in the fact that this Danish commercial features only white women. Hello? It's Denmark -- 91 percent of the population are native Danes. Actually, however, a careful viewing of the video reveals that there is at least one Asian model (at the right of the screen at the :05 mark). The largest immigrant group in Denmark is Turks and the model at the right of the screen at the :15 mark could definitely be Turkish. Nor do all of the women have fake boobs. A careful viewing, I said . . .

UPDATE: Linked at Conservative Grapevine.

UPDATE II: Matthew Archbold:

Walking by Abercrombie or Victoria's Secret is essentially a walking tour of porn for children. . . .
They see it. They internalize it. They think that window display represents the realm of adulthood. They intuit that adults desire 8-pack abs and 38 D breasts. And kids want to be adults.

Via Free Republic. Believe it or not, I'm actually a social conservative, it's just that I'm not a prude -- the two things are not synonymous -- and understand that kids don't need to log onto political blogs to find naked women on the Internet. As for adult readers, I think your morals are unlikely to be corrupted by that silly Danish commercial. I'm far more bothered by all these TV ads for Cialis, Viagra and contraceptives. You can't watch a football game with your kids nowadays without being subjected to warnings about four-hour erections.

UPDATE III: Ace says, "There is, of course, a political angle here of great import." Exactly. And not just because the Conservative Blogger of the Year said so, but because Jessica Valenti can never be mocked too much.

Hayek on MTP, 1975

MP3 audio from "Meet the Press," June 22, 1975, courtesy of the Mises Institute via NewsAlert, with the Nobel laureate Friedrich Von Hayek talking about inflation.

Notice how Hobart Rowan (1:45) attacks Hayek's "theories" as "unrealistic," and pushes the Keynesian nostrum of a necessary tradeoff between inflation and unemployment -- despite the fact that the U.S. economy was then staggering into the morass of "stagflation," which rather emphatically invalidated the Keynesian theory.

Oprah falls for another hoax

She's a sucker for too-good-to-be-true stories:

On Saturday, Berkley Books canceled [Herman] Rosenblat's memoir, "Angel at the Fence." Rosenblat acknowledged that he and his wife did not meet, as they had said for years, at a sub-camp of Buchenwald, where she allegedly sneaked him apples and bread. The book was supposed to come out in February. . . .
Rosenblat's believers included not only his agent and his publisher, but Oprah Winfrey, film producers, journalists, family members and strangers who ignored, or didn't know about, the warnings from scholars that his story didn't make sense. . . .
Winfrey fell, as she did with James Frey, for a narrative of suffering and redemption better suited for television than for history.

More background from the New Republic:

Professor Kenneth Waltzer, the director of the Jewish Studies program at Michigan State University, first began to doubt the truthfulness of Herman's tale a couple of years ago. . . . Waltzer's main critique is that the book's central premise--that Roma threw Herman apples over the fence outside the Schlieben camp in the winter of 1945--is an impossibility. . . . Waltzer concluded from studying maps of Schlieben that it was impossible for either a prisoner or civilian to approach the fence; the only spot where one could access the perimeter at all was right next to the SS barracks.

I wonder if this makes anyone rethink the significance of Oprah's support for Obama.

UPDATE: Note how the guy who bought the movie rights to Rosenblat's hoax scapegoats the Holocaust historian who pointed out the factual problems with the story:

"Deborah Lipstadt has never read the book. . . . She has never spoken to Herman Rosenblat. I find that to be pretty disgusting."

Right. You paid good money for bogus a story, and instead of blaming the con man who hustled you, you instead attack the person who is exposing the fraud perpetrated against you.

This is a fundamental problems with the Oprahfication of culture. There are a lot of people who love a great story more than they love the truth. And so when you tell someone like that a too-good-to-be-true story as memoir or history, the aesthetic of the story gives it a certain credibility in their mind. People like that are cursed with a defective bullshit detector, and can't seem to comprehend that the very perfection of the story as a story argues against its veracity.

From such beautiful fictions are myths made. Much of the popular myth of "McCarthyism" -- the idea that efforts to prevent and expose Soviet subversion during the Cold War was a paranoid "witch hunt" -- is based on bogus anecdotes with no more historical credibility than Rosenblat's fiction. But because the alleged heroism of Edward R. Murrow or the alleged victimhood of the "Hollywood 10" makes such a great story, the ugly truth can't get a fair hearing.

Camelot: 'Gaelic for chutzpah'

Time for Caroline Kennedy to get the hook:

Her handlers and family enablers insist she feels no entitlement to the Senate job, yet there is no other possible reason to give it to her. Her name is the sole reason she even dares go for it. Camelot must be Gaelic for chutzpah. . . .
Kennedy apparently decided to go public to build support and scare off others, including Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, whose nasty divorce from her cousin still roils both clans. Kennedy also had to introduce herself to Democratic party leaders because, other than endorsing Obama, her politics were a mystery.
But the minute she faced the routine questions that help define a candidate for virtually any office, she had nothing to say. There was no "there" there.

Caroline: The Oakland of the Kennedy clan. (Via: Instapundit.)

UPDATE: Via Hot Air, the obligatory Cuffy Meigs video where Caroline says "you know" 30 times in a little over 2 minutes:

'Appeal against the thunderstorm'

"You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war."
-- Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, Sept. 12, 1864

Marty Peretz describes the Israeli attack on Hamas in blunt terms:

So at 11:30 on Saturday morning, according to both the Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz, as well as the New York Times, 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters demolished some 40 to 50 sites in just about three minutes, maybe five. Message: do not fuck with the Jews.

This, says Glenn Greenwald, is a "uniquely despicable view" and Peretz is a "psychopath" for expressing it, because the Israeli attack will result in "the slaughter of scores of innocent Palestinians" and "several hundred Palestinian dead -- including numerous children."

Greenwald correctly asserts: "Opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are so entrenched that any single outbreak of violence is automatically evaluated through a pre-existing lens, shaped by one's typically immovable beliefs about which side bears most of the blame for the conflict." And he is certainly not exempted from the effects of entrenched opinion and immovable belief, unequivocally placing himself in the Blame Israel First camp.

Are there no innocent Israelis, no "numerous children" imperiled by the haphazard Hamas rocket and mortar attacks of recent days? Did not Israel warn Hamas that a continuation of the attacks would not be tolerated? It seems to me that one must either justify the Hamas attacks or else admit Israel's right to act in self-defense. Greenwald and other critics might argue that Israel had a right to act, but has overreacted. However, in doing so they seek to make themselves arbiters of Israeli defense policy.

Sherman's sober words about the "terrible hardships of war" were written to the mayor of Atlanta, who had complained about the cruelty of the Union commander's order for the evacuation of the civilian population of the city. Sherman's merciless attitude was motivated by his belief that the South bore responsibility for starting the war, and thus had no legitimate grounds to complain about the consequences of war. Sherman furthermore believed that by devastating the interior of the Confederacy, destroying its infrastructure and resources, he would hasten the end of the war and thereby end its attendant misery:

We must have peace , not only at Atlanta, but in all America. To secure this, we must stop the war that now desolates our once happy and favored country. To stop war, we must defeat the rebel armies . . .

Understand that I am a native of Atlanta, taught from the cradle to hate Sherman as a wicked instrument of the War of Northern Aggression. Nevertheless, he had a point: Those who inaugurate war must be prepared to accept the consequences. Hamas decided to begin bombarding Israel, and continued that bombardment despite warnings. Surely Hamas has no right to complain of the predictable consequences.

Beyond that, it is rather odd of Greenwald to speak of "innocent" Palestinians. Did not the Palestinian people themselves elect Hamas by a landslide majority? And haven't the Palestinians overwhelmingly supported every atrocity of this Islamicist fanatic group?

I would remind Glenn Greenwald of the words of Barack Obama's spiritual mentor, who declared that the 9/11 attacks represented "chickens coming home to roost" for America. Is it not possible, by the same standard, to see the Israeli attacks on Gaza as "chickens coming home to roost" for the Palestinians? Or how about we apply the standard of progressive hero Ward Churchill and view the allegedly innocent Palestinians as "little Eichmanns"?

Instead of imprecating Israel for its "brutal" and "grotesquely inhumane" policies, perhaps Greenwald and the rest of the Blame Israel First crowd ought to be grateful for the relative restraint Israel has shown in its response to the Hamas attacks. If the IDF had a Sherman in command, he would no doubt vow to "make Gaza howl" with a March to the Sea.

(BTW, it's worth noting that Sherman's attitude toward the media was ahead of its time: "I hate newspapermen. . . . I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast.")

UPDATE: Donald Douglas has a roundup of reaction to the IDF attacks.

UPDATE II: A fatwa against Israel:

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a religious decree to Muslims around the world on Sunday, ordering them to defend Palestinians against Israel's attacks on Gaza, state television said.
"All Palestinian combatants and all the Islamic world's pious people are obliged to defend the defenseless women, children and people in Gaza in any way possible. Whoever is killed in this legitimate defense is considered a martyr," state television quoted Khamenei as saying in a statement outlining the fatwa.
Khamenei also criticized some Arab governments for their "encouraging silence" towards the Israel's raids on Gaza. "The Zionist regime must by held accountable by Islamic governments. The heads of this regime must be held personally accountable for these crimes and the ongoing siege," the religious leader said.

The familiar denunciations of the "Zionist regime," the rote call for "martyrs" -- old times there are not forgotten, eh? Minor quibble: Do Palestinians qualify for "martyrdom" when they're gunned down by Egyptian border guards?

UPDATE III: Ed Morrissey:

Hamas insists on a war of annihilation and won't accept any other solution. Let them have it.

Guess the "uniquely despicable" views of Marty Peretz aren't quite so unique after all. We await Greenwald's denunciation of Ed Morrissey.

UPDATE IV: A very thoughtful analysis of the motivations of Hamas at HuffPo, which is not where one usually goes in search of thoughtful analysis.

UPDATE V: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

UPDATE VI: Oh, classic. Greenwald accuses Reynolds and myself of "swaggering around," because we recognize that . . . well, war is a terrible thing, and Hamas bears the onus of provoking it. Note well the double standard: Greenwald believes that the Iraq war is a terrible thing, and does not hesitate to condemn Bush for the invasion, but Hamas can shell Israeli civilians without deserving criticism.

Furthermore, hypothetically suppose that Israel's attacks on Gaza result in negative consequences for Israel. Suppose, for example, that Hamas succeeds in a major suicide-bomb attack. Greenwald would "swagger around" and say Israel has sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind. So whatever happens, Greenwald's response is the same: Blame Israel First. It's formulaic.

Here is the thing: The leaders of Israel must surely be aware that this attack on Hamas will incite a violent response, and have taken that fact into consideration in the cost-benefit analysis of their military offensive in Gaza. But is there any better alternative? Hamas was already doing everything in its power to kill Israelis.

You cannot negotiate with a shark. To the extent that Hamas represents any coherent political philosophy, that philosophy can be summed up in two words: Kill Jews. So long as there remains a single Jew alive in the Middle East, Hamas will call for that Jew's violent death, and once they've slaughtered or driven out all the Jews in the Middle East, Hamas will then go abroad in search of Jews to kill elsewhere.

It is only because Hamas believes they can find useful-idiot sympathizers in the West, to intervene and compel Israel to engage in suicidal negotiations, that their murderous fanaticism has any hope of success. And how does Hamas define success? Kill Jews.

If American Jews like Greenwald are willing to serve as apologists for Hamas, they've got much worse problems than the "swaggering" of a few conservative critics. Problem Number One: How do you sleep?

First, do no harm

Jennifer Rubin on Obama's New New Deal:

The Obama transition team, soon to be the Obama administration, is concocting a reenactment of the New Deal.
A trillion dollar stimulus is going to "create" jobs, and the government will "bailout" failing industries (with additional debt funded by the Chinese, so long as they have an appetite for quickly depreciating dollars). If you think this sounds half-baked and suffers from historical amnesia, you are right.
Despite the obvious shortcomings with this approach (e.g., it's never worked before), the Republican Party so far isn't doing a very good job of coming up with alternatives. Plainly, they don't like the mounds of debt. And they are skeptical of a gigantic public works projects. But what could be done instead?

What about doing nothing? It seems to me that the "do something" demand for economic intervention is fundamentally misguided. We are experiencing the downside of the business cycle which, however painful, is certainly temporary. In its stimulus-and-buyout frenzy over the past several months, the federal government has already made extraordinary interventions. What Obama proposes is essentially more (much more) of the same.

Isn't the true conservative response to say that the federal government has already done too much, and that doing more will only compound the problem? If the problem is too much intervention -- and cutting the prime rate from 6.5 percent in July 2000 to 1 percent in October 2003 can be characterized as an intervention deeply implicated in our current woes -- then less intervention would seem a plausible solution.

The compelling urge to "do something" about the economy may be a political necessity for the incoming administration and the Democrats in Congress, but it does not follow that Republicans, a powerless minority in Congress with no meaningful influence in the Obama administration, must offer "do something" counter-proposals. Republicans could without political peril respond to Obama's New New Deal with a simple three-word message: "It won't work."

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

Disorienting news

I went to a holiday party Saturday night -- actually sat in with the band for two numbers -- and you'll forgive me for being a bit discombobulated today. I freaked out when I saw this headline at Hot Air:

Iran hangs ten on Christmas Eve

The phrase "hangs ten" struck my cerebral cortex at an odd angle. Surfing? In Iran? This must be a feature about Iranian youth succumbing to yet another decadent aspect of Western cultural imperialism, perhaps inspired by bootleg DVDs of old Frankie Avalon movies. And then I read the story:

Norway deplores the executions of 10 persons in Iran on Christmas Eve. Prior to the executions Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere appealed to Iran to stop in time and not go ahead with the executions. …

Ah, so the Iranians didn't actually "hang ten" on some gnarly curls in the Persian Gulf. I feel better already. I was afraid something weird was happening.

'Devotees of Kwanzaa'

That peculiar phrase makes its appearance in a column by intellectual race hustler Michael Eric Dyson:

But the holiday's most faithful practitioners proclaim its original intent: bridging black folk across the chasms of land, language, water and religion as they forge solidarity in resisting obstacles and embracing opportunities to their common destiny. As the devotees of Kwanzaa understand, those aspirations have never been of much interest to the mainstream during any period of the nation's history. And the increased fortunes of black folk cause many of them to focus their energy and attention elsewhere. But for its true believers, Kwanzaa is as relevant and necessary now as it's ever been.

Are your eyes rolling out of your head yet?

Anybody want to send me to Iraq?

Pay me, I'd love to go. I'd also love to cover Capitol Hill or the White House on a regular basis. But first, pay me.

This, in reference to the punditry/reporting argument being kicked around by, inter alia, Ed Driscoll, Glenn Reynolds and Jules Crittenden. The problem with demanding more reporting is that somebody's got to pay for that reporting.

Just last night, I was at a party talking to a lawyer who's done work at Guantanamo, and who suggested I should go down and do some reporting there. Well, OK, fine -- love to do it. But who's going to pay to send me down there?

You send a reporter to cover Capitol Hill full-time, and he's got to grind out a lot of story-of-the-day coverage on his way to developing the sources necessary to get the Big Scoop that (maybe) justifies his salary. It's an expensive proposition. The Politico started out with the two top political reporters from the WaPo and got more Drudge links than you could shake a stick at, and yet they're still in the red.

Meanwhile, the journalistic "farm system" is drying up. I talk to my old newspaper buddies in Georgia and the horror stories they tell! A 5% across-the-board pay cut, on salaries that were already pathetically low. The alternative was company-wide layoffs, even though they've already cut their news staffs to the bone. Similar stories abound throughout the news industry, and are much, much worse at community newspapers in small-to-medium markets where "liberal bias" isn't even possible as an explanation.

The Internet has not (yet) generated the kind of revenue stream necessary to fund (many) full-time reporters. Paul Mulshine has a point, even if he shouldn't have attacked Insty to make it. With every passing week, there are fewer and fewer reporters to cover the basics of the news -- school boards, county commission meetings, cops-and-courts, etc. The result is a less-informed citizenry, and this is a real loss.

UPDATE: Don Surber has more thoughts. I think I'm about as blogger-friendly as any journalist on the planet, and hostility between bloggers and reporters strikes me as atavistic. There is a lot of misunderstanding on both sides.

What do bloggers do? Well, they do a lot of different things, but the most important thing the news/politics blogger does is aggregate -- they sift through news to find what interests him, links it and comments on it. In this, the blogger functions somewhat like a newspaper editor, except that (a) he doesn't assign stories to reporters, and (b) generally, he doesn't feel the need to provide comprehensive coverage.

On point (b): Bloggers take for granted that the reader is surfing around through multiple information sources and, if he wants the latest news on the Caylee Anthony murder or the coup in Guinea, he'll find that somewhere. No blog is or aspires to be a one-stop news outlet, which leaves the blogger free to aggregate and comment on the news that seems to him most interesting or where he thinks he can gain more readers. (I blog about politics, but I also blog about Christina Hendricks, because somebody has to.)

Which leaves us with point (a): While there are bloggers who do reporting, and other bloggers who do online research that substantially enhances the news content they provide, there is no blog that can deploy people to do first-source reporting in the way that newspapers, wire services and other Old Media news organizations do.

This is where a lot of bloggers go off track in criticizing Old Media. The cult of "professionalism" in journalism produces a backlash, so that intelligent people outside the news business look with resentment toward industry insiders as some sort of privileged caste. Too many journalists emit messages of elitism: "We know what we're doing because we're professionals -- and since you're not a professional journalist, your criticisms of us have no credibility." There is a circular logic here that is infuriating.

As infuriating as this kind of media snobbery may be, it does not negate the fact that somebody has to do the first-source reporting, and it is that kind of reporting that is being jeopardized by the deep cuts in newsroom staffs. I love the blogosphere, but certainly in the near term, blogs are not going to fill the void created by the evisceration of American newsrooms.

Do a thought experiment: Suppose that Pajamas Media wanted to establish a Washington bureau. At the very minimum, you'd need three full-time staffers: One for the White House, one for Congress, and a "swing" reporter who'd cover the departments and agencies (Justice, State, Pentagon, etc.) while backstopping the other two. Even lowballing the salaries, you'd be looking at something like $120,000-$150,000 a year for that three-man bureau, not including benefits, payroll taxes, etc. (This assumes the bureau would have no actual brick-and-mortar office. It also assumes no travel budget, so when the president flies off to Brussels for a G8 summit, you don't get on-the-spot reporting.)

Would the reporting produced by a three-man shoestring D.C. bureau justify such an investment for an online operation like PJM? Consider that Cox Enterprises -- which owns 17 papers and generates annual revenue of $15 billion -- recently closed its D.C. bureau. If having a Washington bureau doesn't make sense for a giant media conglomerate like Cox, how does it make sense for PJM?

However much you loathe Old Media, then, the shriveling of the press corps must inevitably result in less reporting, and it is very difficult to see how New Media can ameliorate that loss.

UPDATE: Linked at Political Byline and Pirate's Cove (with bonus pinup).

'Negroes,' magic and otherwise

A candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee has gotten himself in hot water by sending out a 22-song gift CD that includes the Paul Shanklin parody, "Barack, the Magic Negro." This act has "appalled" the current RNC chairman and provoked widespread commentary from the blogosphere.

While the mob descends to feast upon the bones of Chip Saltsman, can we pause long enough to ask ourselves exactly why his action was offensive?

Let us begin with the expression "Magic Negro" -- a term of cultural criticism applied to a certain type of character in fiction, especially in movies, who serves a symbolic function as a helper to the white protagonist. (Richard Brookhiser has used the phrase "Numinous Negro" with a similar meaning.)

The evocative phrase "Magic Negro" was first applied to Barack Obama by Hollywood writer David Ehrenstein in a March 2007 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that concluded:

Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn't project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.

Ehrenstein's column provoked a lot of discussion at the time of its publication, and among those discussing it was Rush Limbaugh who -- if memory serves -- related Ehrenstein's analysis to the theme developed by Shelby Steele in his recent book, White Guilt.

At some point afterward, Shanklin adapted the phrase to the tune of "Puff, the Magic Dragon" for a parody that featured Al Sharpton grousing about Obama's political success:

Barack the Magic Negro lives in D.C.
The L.A. Times, they called him that
'Cause he's not authentic like me.
Yeah, the guy from the L.A. paper
Said he makes guilty whites feel good
They'll vote for him, and not for me
'Cause he's not from the hood.

Whatever its value as political analysis, Shanklin's song aptly summarizes a point made by Ehrenstein about the "is-he-black-enough" criticism that was being made of the Harvard-educated Obama in early 2007:

The only mud that momentarily stuck was criticism (white and black alike) concerning Obama's alleged "inauthenticity," as compared to such sterling examples of "genuine" blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg. Speaking as an African American whose last name has led to his racial "credentials" being challenged -- often several times a day -- I know how pesky this sort of thing can be.

Note the phrase, "Speaking as an African American" -- the author of the column that inspired the Shanklin parody is a black man himself! And, in case you didn't notice, the main point of the Shanklin parody was not to attack Obama, but to lampoon the envious reaction of Sharpton, as you can see from this one-minute video version:

These facts would seem relevant to the question of whether the Shanklin song is objectively "racist." Of course, facts are not in the least relevant to the ritual denunciation of Chip Saltsman -- no Republican ever gets the benefit of the doubt in these sorts of controversies, so Saltsman's bones will be added to the same pile with the skeletal remains of Trent Lott and George Allen.

UPDATE: My memory of Limbaugh's monologue invoking Shelby Steele's book was accurate:

He's just there to assuage white guilt. In other words, the only reason Obama's anywhere is because whites are willing to support him because they feel so guilty over slavery. Now, before you reject this, Shelby Steele has written a great book about the whole concept of white guilt and how it is allowing our society to become more and more passive about any number of transgressions that the country has made from its inception.

Limbaugh perhaps exaggerates Ehrenstein's argument (and Steele's) but not by much.

UPDATE II: A commenter anonymously asserts that Saltsman used the Obama song as a coded attack on two of his rivals for the RNC chair, Ken Blackwell and Michael Steele. If so, this attributes to RNC members a level of cryptogrammatic expertise I lack, as the possibility of such a motive never occurred to me. Saltsman himself says he and Shanklin are longtime friends, which seems a better explanation.

UPDATE III: Linked by Michelle Malkin, who references Peter Yarrow's outrage and comments:

All of sudden — after eight years of "F**k Bush" bumper stickers and "Kill Bush" assassination chic and Bush-or-Chimp parodies — the left is concerned about insulting the office of the Presidency?

And it's not like Malkin's unfamiliar with how liberals use racial slurs when it suits their purpose.

UPDATE IV: Hmmmm. Allah does an "obligatory" post about the controversy . . . and doesn't link The Boss? As to Allah's point, yes, of course it is ridiculous for the Republican Party to invest resources in defending the use of "an archaic term." And as such, it was stupid of Saltsman to include the parody in his gift to RNC members. But how is it that Obama suffers no political consequence for spending 20 years in the pews of Rev. Jeremiah "God Damn America" Wright's church, while the entire GOP is irredeemably tainted because of one satirical tune by Paul Shanklin? Does this mean that Rush Limbaugh's 20 million listeners are also hatemongering bigots?

You've got to pick your fights, and I don't think this is a hill worth dying for -- I'd never even heard of Saltsman until this brouhaha erupted -- but if you never fight, you never win.

UPDATE V: Jammie Wearing Fool has some interesting observations on the Complete Moral Authority of Peter Yarrow, who was pardoned for his crime by President Carter. Hey, it's for the children.

On education

Oglethorpe University Professor Joseph Knippenberg laments the "technologically-induced short attention span" of his students:

Exaggerating for the sake of clarity, the relative incapacity to read, write, and think that I deprecate is surely superior to illiteracy or semi-literacy. Stated more soberly, when more people read -- or rather are assigned -- Homer and Aristotle, we might lose some depth of exposure, but we surely gain breadth, don't we?

What troubles me is Professor Knippenberg's assumption that none of his students would read Homer or Aristotle unless it were assigned to them. This assumption is no doubt correct -- if left to his own devices, the typical college student today would never put down his Wii -- but it is still troubling.

Professor Knippenberg's assumption is all the more troubling when you consider that Oglethorpe isn't some second-tier state school, but a private liberal arts college where the annual tuition is more than $25,000. If the professor is to be believed, then, the relatively bright students at this relatively prestigious school lack any personal curiosity about the classics, and will read the ancient Greeks (in translation, I'm sure) only if these texts are mandated as part of the curriculum.

When I was in college, I went to the library in my spare time and read through most of Plutarch's Lives of the Great merely to satisfy my own curiosity, after seeing the mention of Plutarch in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (a selection of which was included in my sophomore American literature anthology). If Franklin thought it "time spent to great advantage" to read Plutarch, it seemed to me I should try it myself.

The autodidactic impulse was perhaps always unusual, but if Professor Knippenberg is correct, it has been utterly extinguished in the current generation of youth. Why? I would suggest it is because of the waning of what might be called the "adversarial Socratic" method in education.

When I was a kid, it seemed that our best teachers didn't shrink from asking questions in such a way as to expose their students' yawning ignorance. The student who gave the wrong answer was made to feel embarassed. If you've seen The Paper Chase, you know what I mean in describing this as an "adversarial" method, and the best of my teachers used an approximation of this method as early as fifth or sixth grade.

In recent decades, however, teachers have become so concerned for the self-esteem of children that it is no longer permissible to call the student's attention to his own ignorance, to shame him when he fails to identify a comma splice or when his pronouns disagree with his antecedents. Similarly, the red pen of correction has been abandoned and, if reports are to be believed, no one ever gets an "F" anymore. As to corporal punishment as a means of enforcing discipline, it appears that my generation was the last to be subjected to that regime.

Professor Knippenberg's column has inspired my American Spectator colleague Hunter Baker, who teaches at Houston Baptist University, to attempt an experiment:

I'll be teaching an intro to political science survey where I intend to have the students leave the laptops shut and to read through Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Mill, Locke, and many others with me.

Grill them, Professor Baker. Assign the readings, and then grill them good. Employ sarcasm freely and if, in the process, you should bring some young ignoramus to tears of shame, you'll know you've made a start in the right direction.

But . . . no Burke, sir?

Take that, Teddy!

Mussing up the neocon icon:

The fact that conservative politicians such as John McCain and writers like William Kristol and Karl Rove are attracted to our 26th president [Teddy Roosevelt] is strange because, if we want to understand where in the American political tradition the idea of unlimited, redistributive government came from, we need look no further than to Roosevelt and others who shared his outlook.

Read the whole thing. There is significance in the mere fact that the Wall Street Journal would rebuke the "national greatness" crowd by publishing this critique of their hero.

Hey, big spender

Oh, the evil of big money in politics:

In capturing the presidency, Obama, 47, became the first major-party nominee to reject federal funding for the general election. He spent $740.6 million . . .
McCain spent $227.7 million. . . .
Arizona Senator McCain, unlike Obama, accepted $84.1 million in public financing for the general election, a decision that barred him from raising money privately. Obama outspent him by a 4-to-1 margin from Sept. 1 through Nov. 24, FEC records show.

All the liberals who complained for years about the GOP's historical fund-raising advantage will now be silent.

It's come to this

An armed society is a polite society:

A South Philadelphia man enraged because a father and son were talking during a Christmas showing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button took care of the situation when he pulled a .380-caliber gun and shot the father, police said.
James Joseph Cialella Jr., 29, of the 1900 block of Hollywood Street is charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault, and weapons violations.

They ought to pin a medal on the guy.

Summers: Bigger is better

Larry Summers, who will head Obama's National Economic Council, spills the neo-Keynesian beans:

In this crisis, doing too little poses a greater threat than doing too much. Any sound economic strategy in the current context must be directed at both creating the jobs that Americans need and doing the work that our economy requires. Any plan geared toward only one of these objectives would be dangerously deficient. Failure to create enough jobs in the short term would put the prospect of recovery at risk. Failure to start undertaking necessary long-term investments would endanger the foundation of our recovery and, ultimately, our children's prosperity.
That is why his economic team is crafting a broad proposal, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, to support the jobs and incomes essential for recovery while also making a down payment on our nation's long-term financial health.

It won't work. But the big question, I suppose, is whether nationalizing health care will be among those "investments" Team Obama has in mind. What he does say is:

Investments to modernize our health-care system, which is necessary to improve care in the short term and key to driving down costs across the board.

Never mind the subject-verb disagreement ("Investments . . . is"), Americans already have the best health-care system in the world. How does Summers propose to drive down costs? He doesn't say. The lack of specificity is strategic -- opponents can't criticize a plan that exists only as a collection of vague bromides about "investment," without any details or dollar amounts attached.

Summers is an actual economist. He must know better than this. Why do I suspect that this op-ed was ginned up by Jon Favreau and the Obama speechwriting shop and issued under Summers' name with minimal participation by the putative author?

UPDATE: A liberal blogger credits the Summers op-ed with "some precision." But there's not a single specific in the whole thing!

Princess Caroline on J-Lo

Caroline Kennedy:

I admire the journey J. Lo has traveled. I've been to a school in the Bronx near the house she grew up in and so I actually have a lot of admiration for her and she looks pretty good but in terms of public policy and as we spend our adults lives and I don’t think there is really much we have in common.

"I've been to a school in the Bronx . . ." Yeah, and I've been to a bar in the East Village. So what?

That's from an interview Caroline did with a New York TV station. Allahpundit has more.

UPDATE: Associated Press:

Since Kennedy's name first surfaced as a possible replacement for Clinton, her advisers have shielded her from the media, with the exception of a few brief interviews on a swing through upstate New York and a visit to Harlem with the Rev. Al Sharpton. Some commentators likened her to Sarah Palin in the way her dealings with the media were being carefully managed.

Except, as Allah notes, when she finally talks to the press, Kennedy doesn't get a pop quiz about the Bush doctrine. Still, there is a valid point here about media relations: The "avoidance" strategy is always a bad idea in politics. If you can't handle an impromptu 20-minute press conference, why should voters believe you can handle the responsibilities of high office?

Israel strikes Gaza

Wiping out Hamas strongholds:

Israeli aircraft struck Hamas security compounds across Gaza on Saturday in unprecedented waves of simultaneous attacks, and Hamas and medics reported dozens of people were killed. . . .
Health Ministry official Moawiya Hassanain said at least 120 people were killed and more than 250 wounded. Officials said others were still buried under the rubble.
In one of the Hamas compounds, the bodies of more than a dozen uniformed security officers were seen lying on the ground. . . . Among the dead was the Gaza police chief, Maj. Gen. Tawfiq Jaber, witnesses said.
Hamas officials said all of Gaza's security compounds were destroyed. Hamas said it would seek revenge, including launching new rocket attacks on Israel and sending suicide bombers to Israel.

Of course, this kind of "revenge" -- Hamas bombarding Israeli towns -- is what necessitated the IDF attacks. The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Kony on the run

African terrorist Joseph Kony and his "Lord's Resistance Army" flee their pursuers:

Ugandan rebels fleeing a multinational offensive have raided a Congolese village and killed at least 15 people, U.N. peacekeepers said on Friday.
Uganda, Congo and South Sudan launched a joint assault on December 14 against bases of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan rebel group, in Democratic Republic of Congo. But they have so far failed to corner its reclusive leader, Joseph Kony.
The United Nations mission in Congo (MONUC) said fleeing LRA fighters attacked the village of Faradje, near Congo's porous border with Sudan, on December 24 and 25.

Looking at a map, Faradje is a crossroads town east-southeast of the Garamba National Park, where the LRA hideout was raided two weeks ago. Faradje is about 30 miles west of the border of South Sudan, but Kony's gang can't expect to gain safety by crossing that border toward Yei. More likely they'll head south.

UPDATE: The Uganda New Vision has a better account, with a map that indicates the LRA has scattered three ways from Garamba:

On Christmas day, the rebels pounced on Bitima village on the Congolese side of the border with south Sudan, killing 13 people. The same day, another group hit Doroma near the Central Africa Republic (CAR), where they killed 12, ransacked homes and looted food and property. Simultaneously, other rebels attacked Faradge village, 150km from the allied forces’ base in Dungu, killing three people and abducting an unspecified number. Uganda, Congo and southern Sudan have a joint base in Dungu. On Christmas Eve, the rebels had ambushed a pick-up truck between Laforo and Mambe roads in South Sudan, along the border with the DRC. The allied forces found five civilians killed Southwest of Sekuru along the DRC-Sudan border.

From this, it appears that part of the LRA left Garama headed west and hit Doroma; another fragment went north and hit Bitima; and the third part went east toward South Sudan, hitting Faradje.

Pakistan threatens India

Very disturbing news:

Pakistan began moving thousands of troops from the Afghan border toward India, officials and witnesses said Friday, raising tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors and possibly undermining the U.S.-backed campaign against al-Qaida and the Taliban.
The country also announced that it was canceling all military leave in the aftermath of last month's terror attack on the Indian financial capital of Mumbai.
India has blamed Pakistani militants for the terrifying three-day siege; Pakistan has demanded that India back this up with better evidence.
Pakistan's latest moves were seen as a warning that it would retaliate if India launches air or missile strikes against militant targets on Pakistani soil - rather than as an indication that a fourth war was imminent between the two countries.

Pakistan sponsors terrorism against India. When India becomes angry, Pakistan threatens war. Like Joe Biden said, Obama will be tested.

PC insanity

Via Michelle Malkin, Andrew Marcus tells the story of a student found guilty of "racial harassment" at a university because of his co-worker's illiteracy.

How much worse can it get?

Perversity and popular culture

Kate Winslett defends her new movie, The Reader -- in which her character has an affair with a teenage boy -- against the accusation that the action depicted is statutory rape. Winslett's defense prompts questions from lawyerly Ann Althouse, which elicits additonal legal clarification from Eugene Volokh.

The controversy over all this is rounded up by Instapundit, with a link to Robert Franklin discussing a Texas case in which a 26-year-old woman gets a mere 90 days in jail for having sex with her 13-year-old foster son.

Wait a minute -- Texas? Did you say Texas? Remember that Texas child-welfare officials instigated a SWAT raid at the El Dorado FLDS cult compound and seized 436 children because of the suspicion that underage girls were being sexually exploited. This week, Texas released a report finding that just 12 girls at the compound has been "spiritually married" before age 16:

Two girls were 12 when married; three were 13; two were 14; and five girls were 15 when married. Seven of these girls have had one or more children after marriage.

As I have repeatedly said, if Texas is going to launch a paramilitary raid every time a teenager has sex or gets pregnant, they'll need to hire a lot more SWAT officers, because Texas leads the nation in teen pregnancy. This is not to minimize or excuse the bizarre polygamous practices of the FLDS cult, but rather to put into perspective the overkill instincts of child-welfare officials in the El Dorado case -- and also to point out how cultural forces shape popular perception about sexual deviance.

In the immediate aftermath of the El Dorado raid, lurid headlines about the "underage sex cult" fed the atmosphere of moral panic reminiscent of the notorious McMartin preschool case. Why? According to the Guttmacher Institute, there were 1,750 pregnancies among girls under age 15 in Texas in 2000 (and another 28,000 pregnancies for girls 15-17). Yet we hear nothing about prosecution of those men who routinely impregnate Texas teens, while the existence of a dozen underage brides within this renegade cult creates a worldwide firestorm of publicity.

Which brings us back around to Kate Winslett and her defense of the cinematic depiction of a 30-something woman's affair with a 15-year-old boy:

That boy knows exactly what he's doing. For a start, Hanna Schmitz [Winslett's character in the movie] thinks that he's seventeen, not fifteen, you know? She's not doing anything wrong. . . . They enter that relationship on absolutely equal footing. Statutory rape -- really please, don't use that phrase. I do genuinely find it offensive actually. This is a beautiful and very genuine love story and that is always how I saw it. . . . She wasn't cruel to him. She didn't force him into anything at all.

Althouse replies:

Don't all statutory rapists say this sort of thing? . . . Do you think 36-year-old women should be free to seduce 15-year-old boys?

This is really the issue. Either the act is a crime or it is not, and the law can't excuse crime because the criminal considers it "a beautiful and very genuine love story." Such acts are either legal or they are not. You cannot on the one hand excuse the Hanna Schmitzes (or Mary Kay Letourneaus) of the world and then, on the other hand, send SWAT teams to round up every child at the El Dorado compound.

To such an extent as The Reader glamourizes and justifies the actions of Hanna Schmitz, it undermines the law by establishing in the mind of the audience the self-exculpatory perspective of the criminal. Perhaps you'll understand the allegory when I spoil The Reader by telling you that Hanna Schmitz was a Nazi concentration camp guard whom her erstwhile boyfriend must eventually prosecute for war crimes.

Only in Texas

A Lone Star Christmas:

A naked man who was banging on doors and windows at a northside [Houston] apartment complex died Wednesday after being shocked by Tasers at least three times during a confrontation with Harris County sheriff's deputies, authorities said.
About 4 a.m., deputies received calls from residents at the apartments in the 200 block of Dominion Park near Kuykendahl.
Investigators said the 46-year-old man was randomly knocking on doors and windows and yelling while walking around the complex. At one point, he kicked open a front door and briefly went inside an occupied apartment, officials said.
The resident "did not know who he was," said Lt. John Legg of the Sheriff's Office.

When you get so high you don't know who you are, you must be in Texas -- where the sheriff's department is authorized to Taser you out of existence.

This gives new meaning . . .

. . . to the phrase "drug wars":

The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.
Four blue pills. Viagra.
"Take one of these. You'll love it," the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.
The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes -- followed by a request for more pills.
For U.S. intelligence officials, this is how some crucial battles in Afghanistan are fought and won.

Winning their hearts and minds -- one erection at a time.

Against motherhood?

John Mallon recalls that what was once a figure of speech for an extremely unpopular position -- "That's like being against motherhood and apple pie!" -- is much more commonplace nowadays. That is to say, hostility to motherhood has become quite fashionable in some quarters.

Obama/Adonis

Shirtless Obama sends a thrill up the leg of ABC News, causing Ace to comment:

Bush was never slobbered over by the media for having an extraordinarily low resting heartbeat, nor for being in what appears to be near-peak physical condition for his age. On the other hand, the smoker Obama is hailed as a deity for having moobs.
Note also the differing reactions to physical attractiveness -- Sarah Palin was derided as a beauty-queen chillbilly Caribou Barbie for being kinda awfully hot. But the media indulges its id when it comes to Obama.

Trust me, Obama won't get this kind of coverage forever. Nobody does. If nothing else, other reporters who are less enamored with The One will become embarassed by the sycophancy and go negative on him just to maintain their own self-respect as journalists.

In fact, with so many in the press corps providing hagiographic coverage, there might be an extra premium on hard-hitting investigative reporting of the new administration. A scoop is a scoop is a scoop, and with so many reporters trying to cover Obama the way Tiger Beat covered the Bay City Rollers in 1976, the big opportunity for scoops will be in terms of negative coverage.

UPDATE: Noting that Obama can't be bothered to attend church at Christmas, Jammie Wearing Fool says:

In fact, ever since he dispatched Jeremiah Wright back in May, it doesn't seem as if anyone in his sycophantic press corps has bothered to ask The Messiah how that search for a new church is going. Apparently there's a shortage of psychotic spiritual mentors out there.

See? If this absence of serious reporting is evident to bloggers, don't think reporters will ignore it forever. Sooner or later some clever reporter will start asking those kinds of questions. Jake Tapper, at least, doesn't seem intimidated.

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers. And, indeed, the professor did invoke the tartan-clad boy band in July.

Maybe you have to be a certain age to remember the pre-MTV era when Tiger Beat was the main vehicle for marketing teen idols to middle-school girls. A couple of examples of Tiger Beat covers featuring the Bay City Rollers:

BONUS: BAY CITY ROLLERS PINUP! (Totally gay, or what?)

The deciders decide

Purple Avenger at AOSHQ took notice of a snarky column by Hugh Bailey in the Connecticut Post, apparently indicating that the newspaper would no longer publish letters calling attention to the role of Democrats like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd in the mortgage meltdown. What caught my eye was a later paragraph in the column:

The notion that the tens of billions of dollars we spend killing people in Iraq could be better spent on schools and hospitals in this country is not radical. Huge majorities in this country support a robust social safety net, so that people who experience a run of misfortune don't lose everything. All other industrialized nations on the planet have some form of universal health care. None of this is controversial.

Now, first of all, P.J. O'Rourke once pointed out the fallacy of thinking that there is some kind of exchange center where we can go trade in fighter jets for social services. Whatever one's feelings about the Iraq war, it is not self-evident that deploying troops abroad automatically drains money from "schools and hospitals." Maybe it drains money from the federal departments of Education and HHS, but that's another proposition.

Yet since we're on the subject, how many of those "other industrialized nations" with universal health care can deploy so much as a single carrier task force or an infantry division? The Canadians and Swedes and Japanese have no effective military. We still have U.S. troops in Bosnia. Why? Because none of those European social democracies has enough firepower (or enough balls) to police their own backyard. If you expect the Belgians and Italians and Dutch to contribute meaningful military manpower to deterring dictators and preventing genocide, you're going to be bitterly disappointed.

As to the "huge majorities" who support the social safety net, one wonders if Mr. Bailey was whistling that majoritarian tune in 2002, when Republicans were riding high. And he closes with this:

Finally, about the penchant for using the word "liberal" as an epithet -- despite what your radio tells you, it's not an insult.

Mr. Bailey thus depicts his critics as mindless followers of talk-radio whereas he, Mr. Bailey, is entirely an independent thinker. Who is insulting who here?

The Santa Killer

A semi-automatic Christmas:

A distraught man dressed as Santa Claus opened fire at a Christmas Eve party and then set the house ablaze, killing at least eight people, authorities said.
Several hours later, the shooter killed himself.
Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, 45, who had recently been divorced and is believed to have lost his job, knocked on the front door of a home owned by the parents of his ex-wife in Covina around 11:30 Wednesday night, said Police Chief Kim Raney.
An 8-year-old girl ran to the door to answer Pardo's knock, police said. He shot her in the face, stepped into the house and began to fire indiscriminately with a semiautomatic handgun. . . .
Pardo is thought to have worked in the aerospace industry as an engineer, police and acquaintances said.

I am reminded of another laid-off, divorced aerospace engineer, Michael Douglas's character in the 1993 movie, Falling Down.

UPDATE: Associated Press adds details:

Pardo, 45, had no criminal record and no history of violence, according to police, but he was angry following last week's settlement of his divorce after a marriage that lasted barely a year.
"It was not an amicable divorce," police Lt. Pat Buchanan said. . . .
Pardo's next-door neighbor . . . said he moved in more than a year ago with a woman and a child. She said they kept mostly to themselves and the woman later moved out with the child. . . .
He also served regularly as an usher at evening Mass at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Montrose, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Jan Detanna, the head usher at the church, was stunned when told about the violence.
"I'm just — this is shocking," Detanna told the Times. "He was the nicest guy you could imagine. Always a pleasure to talk to, always a big smile."

Nice guy. Big smile. Eight dead.

Eartha Kitt, R.I.P.

Dead at 81 -- amazing that the singer of "Santa Baby" should have died on Christmas Day:

Video: Christmas, 6:30 a.m.

With six kids, ages 6 to 19, Christmas morning is an exciting occasion, especially when the boys get Nerf Blasters.

Merry Christmas!

(BTW, I'll be continually bumping this to the top through Christmas.)

UPDATE: Environmentalists say Christmas lights are bad for the planet? Peace on Earth -- and to hell with environmentalists! Muslims erect anti-Christmas banners in Nazareth? Peace on Earth, etc.!

We seem to be aswarm with Grinches this year . . .

UPDATE II: Some holiday cheer:

(H/T: Astute Bloggers.)

UPDATE III: Silent Kwaanza?

UPDATE IV: Merry Jewish Christmas!

UPDATE V: Kwaanza greetings from . . . Ann Coulter?

Dept. of It Won't Work

Obama's job-creation scheme doesn't function as basic arithmetic:

There are currently about 10 million unemployed workers in the U.S. . . . "If we write a check for $75,000 to each of the unemployed, we won't have anyone 'unemployed,'" said former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. . . . The Obama administration’s goal of creating 3 million new jobs by January 2011 will run smack into "the natural demographic flow, which will add 3.2 million people to the workforce" in the same time period, O'Neill said. In effect, "we are going to spend $750 billion, the number of unemployed will rise and the (unemployment) rate will go down slightly." O'Neill did the math so you don't have to. Each job "will cost $250,000, which doesn't suggest much labor intensity for the dollars spent," he said. "It makes me wonder if any of the planners or commentators are good at arithmetic."

Repeat after me: It won't work.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)