A few years ago I shook my head when a much younger colleague -- now a rising star at The Times -- included what seemed to me a gratuitous piece of information in a political story. Reporting on a rumble in the Senate over Democratic filibusters of President Bush's judicial nominations, she noted: "The fight between Republicans and Democrats inflamed passions to the point where Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, the third ranking Republican, drew parallels between the 'hubris' of Democrats and that of German dictator Adolf Hitler."

"As opposed to all the other Hitlers?" I asked myself at the time, shifting into middle-aged-cranky mode. Who didn't know that Hitler was a German dictator? Would we have to begin referring to Jesus as "the first-century religious teacher whom many believe to have risen from the dead"? Or the Civil War as "a 19th century conflict between North and South over slavery"?

I had the same reaction -- only stronger -- this week when I read a Reuters story about a federal appeals court  overturning the kidnapping and conspiracy conviction of a former Ku Klux Klansman charged with holding two black men at gunpoint while companions beat and killed them in 1964. The story included this helpful historical aside:  "The secret group, known for its white robes and pointed hoods, formed in the U.S. South after the Civil War to reassert white supremacy and enforce racial segregation, terrorizing blacks with lynchings, cross-burning and murders."

Oh, that Ku Klux Klan!

But maybe I'm judging the Reuters reporter unfairly. In the 1959 edition of "The Elements of Style" -- the usage bible I first encountered in high school -- E.B.White argued for spelling out the full names of organizations like the NAACP because babies were being born all the time who one day would scratch their heads over what the letters stood for. Later editions removed the NAACP example, perhaps because "colored people" had become politically incorrect. But White's point about showing consideration for new generations of readers is a valid one. A baby was born today who doesn't know what "lol" means.

Instead of bewailing the fact that some newspaper readers don't know that Hitler was a dictator or that KKK members wore pointed hoods, maybe I should be grateful that these whippersnappers are reading the newspaper at all. Or perhaps I should say: "reading the newspaper, a primitive precursor of the Internet made of wood pulp."

Xenia, Ohio Burger King declares a 2319 after an employee takes a bath in the kitchen sink. Timothy "Mr. Unstable" Tackett gets canned, along with several co-workers, after posting the clip to his MySpace page. BK orders the sink sterilized twice, liquidates all utensils involved:

I have low expectations of cleanliness anytime I dine out. So I'll ask: What made Mr. Unstable's baño any less hygienic than use of the sink to clean, say, pests and pest droppings, spoiled food, employee hands, vomit, stuff that fell on the floor, or any of the other contaminants that routinely need to be cleaned up even in the best restaurants?

"My first thought was oh my God," Greene County health commissioner Mark McDonnell tells WDTN's Megan O'Rourke, and his second and third thoughts aren't much more coherent. Mr. Unstable hosts a clip of McDonnell free-associating on the possible dangers involved in letting a tattooed punker take a birthday bath in a kitchen sink: "Contaminating a food utensil, cleaning sink; employee health; spreading bacteria all over food contact surfaces; spreading bacteria all over... Bacteria that happened to be on his skin could be deposited on the utensils too. Could promote a food poisoning."

Again, are these risks rendered any greater by a guy taking a bath? I say this is another case of aesthetic disapproval pretending to be a public safety concern.

Which isn't to say Burger King shouldn't have fired the guy (pity Xenia, where this is what an underappreciated show business genius has to do for fun on his birthday), though it's a shame to see that the real protagonist of the video — money-grubbing manager "Karen," the only person doing any real work in the joint — seems to have taken a fall as well.

Can we ever get enough of mature women sex tourists on Viagra? I didn't think so! Commenter Jeannette Belliveau (I just hear that name and I'm already hooked) hipped us yesterday to her book "Romance on the Road," that describes female sex travel "as a qualified victory for feminism." The brief excerpt available on her site is terrific, in particular the "Sexual Geography" world maps, which feature fat and skinny arrows pointing all over the place and look like the rise-and-fall-of-the-Axis endpapers they used to have in histories of World War II. But Belliveau's world conquerors are even more impressive. Dig these feats from the sex travellers Hall of Fame:

In Jamaica, a tourist woman in one night took three lovers page 47

In the Dominican Republic, in 14 days a German woman took 18 lovers page 100 

Hot stuff! And as demonstrated in this hilarious blog post detailing the nearly total fabrication of an interview with the Daily Mail, she's an effective critic of that weird combination of sweaty-palmed leering and pleasure-hating moralism with which the mainstream media always treat matters of lust. Check out her site.

Back in the halcyon days of the 20th century, L.A. Times contributor A. S. Hamrah, along with the great illustrator R. Sikoryak, concocted a Hamrahesque gag so recondite it worked: an exploration of the striking similarities between the spare, absurd stage dramas of postmodern pioneer Samuel Beckett and the spare, absurd "Nancy" comic strips of Ernie Bushmiller. Appearing in Issue # 15 of the late, lamented Hermenaut, and scandalously absent from the web ever since (which is the real point of this post), "The Beckett/Bushmiller Letters" purported to be the newly discovered correspondence between the two creators. 

If it was unintentional hoax, it is still proving to be an effective one after nearly a decade. Editor and Publisher reports with a straight face that R.C. Harvey's Rants & Raves newsletter (also apparently with a straight face) has begun a new investigation into this intriguing, and heretofore totally unknown, literary friendship. Once again, though, the story has proven too good to be true. Tom Spurgeon suspects this thing's as fishy as a makeshift rod and reel Sluggo would leave dangling while he catches a nap. Dan Nadel concludes that it's as phony as a three-dollar bill from Rollo's chauffeur. I can also attest that the Beckett/Bushmiller correspondence is entirely a product of the imaginations of bored Gen-Xers, back when they still had those.

The rumor about how Sluggo died from eating Pop Rocks and drinking Pepsi, however, is 100% true.

Update: E&P has updated its article, calling the article a "hoax," which it's actually not, but it's worth it for this observation:

"Nancy" has been perceived as a simple children's strip by some and sort of existential by others.

Portland, Oregon's Clark Haass was just one of many readers sending his July 4th thoughts today, but he put more effort into it than anybody. Here is the full text of his revised Declaration of Independence:

America's most recently re-appreciated Founding Father got it almost-right 232 years ago. Put this one in your firecracker and blow it up:

The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forevermore.

— John Adams, July 3, 1776

Read all about it.

Over at the WashPost, Gene Weingarten is still polishing that Pulitzer they gave him for his widely discussed Joshua Bell busking story from last year, but he's got an embarrassing revelation: Somebody at a long-dead Chicago paper did almost exactly the same story in 1930.

To his credit, Weingarten breaks the story himself, but some commenters are saying, "fiddlesticks!" One demands he give back the prize, and commenter lhooq46 has a critique I can really agree with:

What was more unoriginal than the article was the selection of music that Joshua Bell played. I'm sorry, but I would not have stopped to listen for "Thais" or "Ave Maria" no matter how well they were performed - I've heard these pieces hundreds of times & I'm beyond sick and tired of them!!!

But for my money, the best analysis of the original busking stunt came in this vehement and contemptuous article by Richard Taruskin:

All concerned knew perfectly well that people at rush hour are preoccupied with other things than arts and leisure, and would not break their stride. But the fulfillment of the self- fulfilling prophecy gave Weingarten the pretext he sought, in an article titled "Pearls Before Breakfast," to cluck and tut, to quote Kant and Tocqueville, and to carry on as if now we knew what really happened at Abu Ghraib.

Bloggers took up the refrain. Notice, wrote one, that "all the children wanted to stop and listen. They knew. But their parents kept them moving on. Sadly it reminds me of an occasion when children wanted to stop and listen to Christ but his disciples didn't let them." Saddest for me was that the weblist of the American Musicological Society, my professional organization, added its meed of clucking and cackling. Scholars are supposed to be skeptical of spin and pose, but here we were piling on. My hat goes off to one Ben H., a netizen who saw through it all. "Perhaps the Post could do a whole series of articles about philistines ignoring Joshua Bell's sublime music-making in different locations," he suggested:

1. Outside a burning building (not one fireman stopped to listen!)

2. At a car crash site (one paramedic actually pushed him aside!)

3. During a graduation exam (shushed by the invigilators!)

4. At a school play (thrown out by angry parents!)

5. On an airport runway (passing jet liners seemed oblivious!)

My alma mater has an excellent Drew Carey video examining the anti-free-trade palaver of the candidates and the MSM, and wondering why that same hatred never gets leveled against the real enemies of the proletariat: machines.

Sorry for the late hit, but what really grabbed me was a montage of foreigner-bashing in the media that included this old cover of Time that does for Indians what Der Stürmer did for the Jews. Maybe you have to put it into historical context: Way back in 2006, overpaid magazine editors just didn't have our modern sense of human rights. At least now we know the only sub-humans are fat kids.

(Also, anybody know what movie that is with the giant scorpion robot and the decapitating robot? That looks like something I'd like to see.)

Update: Producer and L.A. Times contributor Ted Balaker informs me that the robot movie is the Jim Wynorski joint "Shockwave" a.k.a. "A.I. Assault" — which was apparently too far ahead of its time for mainstream audiences to appreciate.

The Judge Alex Kozinski funny pictures story, which we last addressed in John Wright's Blowback "What porn says about the man," continues to draw comments. One reader wants to know what Kozinski knew and when he knew it:

In my reading of the Los Angeles Times extensive coverage of the Kozinski matter, the most important issue does not appear to have been raised at all: Was this First Amendment case randomly assigned to Judge Kozinski or did Judge Kozinski himself select the case assignment? If the answer is the latter, then this is an instance of judicial activism gone very seriously wrong.

How would he have conducted the trial? A judge has tremendous influence upon the outcome of a jury trial by his words and issuance of rulings from the bench. And, it is logical to assume that the tone and substance of the written opinion on this important case that Judge Kozinski would have likely issued following the trial are reflected in the personal web site content that he maintained for his own family to view. In his written opinion, Judge Kozinski would ultimately decide, as a matter of law, the definition of the word “obscenity.” If the case was then appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court and, thereafter, upheld on appeal, Judge Kozinski’s definition of “obscenity” would become binding authority precedent upon all federal and state courts within the jurisdiction of the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and persuasive authority precedent with all other federal courts. As a settled matter of appellate court jurisprudence, findings by a district court judge (and most especially those findings made by the Chief Justice of the reviewing federal appellate court) are given great deference in appellate court review.

If one man or woman with an extreme view on an important Constitutional issue can so easily manipulate the judicial process to the detrimental consequence of millions of citizens, there is a very serious problem within the judiciary that needs to be immediately, emphatically addressed!!!

David Lockmiller

From that great city to the north comes another take on what has become one of the central meta-questions (if a meta-question can in fact be central) in this story: What constitutes cavorting? (Is it somewhere on a continuum with capering and canoodling?)

The temptation for the LA Times reporter who initially reported the Kozinski story (and his editor) was the irresistible man bites dog quality to “Judge presiding over porn trial caught with porn”, and the related temptation to fudge the description of the porn on trial (characterized as vaguely fetish) and enhance the description of the Kozinski material (bestiality) in aid of drawing a parallel between the judge and the judged.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight and some helpful links, we are all (at least those of us who take the time to look beyond the sound bites) able to judge the alleged “porn” for ourselves.

The portrait of The Times that emerges is less than that of careful journalism.

The man “cavorting with” (a deliberately vague word choice by your reporter that can connote some form of sexual play) an aroused donkey turns out to be a humorous video downloaded from You Tube (which is where I watched it) of a laughing fat guy being chased around a pasture by a donkey with an erection. This is neither “porn”—since it is intended to make us laugh and not to arouse—nor is it “bestiality”.

The porn forming the basis of the prosecution over which Judge Kozinski was presiding when The Times story broke: Commercial videos of women having human excrement smeared on their faces. Not even remotely close to the ribald humor found on Judge Kozinski’s family web storage device.

When the suggested parallel between the judge and the judged disintegrates under critical scrutiny, the story is hardly newsworthy at all.

“Judge found with joke emailed pictures of naked ladies with body paint and other bawdy themes on his home computer”? Yawn.

There are temptations in every profession to cut corners and, unfortunately, The Times reporter (and his editor) fell victim to that temptation in this instance.

Fortunately, the legal Blogosphere—one of the few places Kozinski was widely known, came to the rescue and set the record straight. However, not before the story of the “porn judge” with images of “bestiality” on his computer was picked up by almost every media outlet around the world.

The real shame is, for those who had not previously heard of Judge Kozinski, the “porn judge” story will be their first and lasting impression. That harm, caused by a momentary journalistic lapse, cannot be undone.

Very truly yours,

STEPHEN R. GIANELLI
San Francisco, CA

Bad economics, bad politics and bad poetry: Do they all go together? This Louis Menand article on Ezra Pound raises that question. Starting with the important insight that Pound "desperately did not want to be misunderstood," Menand tries to figure out why the poet failed so spectacularly in that project, producing a vast library of barely readable verse that is rapidly fading from cultural memory.

You may be familiar with the cramped and crabbed story of Ezra Pound: dynamo of High Modernism; indispensable mentor and door-opener for James Joyce, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost and many others; editor who saved The Waste Land from its (allegedly) bloated limbo; and not incidentally, crazed fascist, anti-Semite, enthusiastic traitor to his country and wartime propagandist for Benito Mussolini. Few have resisted the temptation to turn him into a type of the Troubled Genius, a great poet laid low by his demons. I say he was an empty poet whose demons go a long way to explaining his emptiness.

Here's an interesting take on why the lifelong Cantos project failed:

The seed of the trouble lies in what most people find the least problematic aspect of the Imagist aesthetic: the insistence on “the perfect word,” le mot juste. This seems a promise to get language up to the level of experience: artifice and verbiage are shorn away, and words point directly to the objects they name. Language becomes transparent; we experience the world itself. “When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish,” Pound wrote in 1915. This is a correspondence theory of language with a vengeance. We might doubt the promise by noting that in ordinary speech we repeat, retract, contradict, embellish, and digress continually in order to make our meaning more precise. No one likes to be required to answer a question yes or no, because things are never that simple. This is not because individual words are too weak; it’s because they are too powerful. They can mean too many things. (“Palace in smoky light”: could this be Buckingham Palace in the fog?) So we add more words, and embed our clauses in more clauses, in order to mute language, modify it, and reduce it to the modesty of our intentions. President Clinton was right: “is” does have many meanings, and we need to be allowed to explain the particular one we have in mind. In “The Cantos,” Pound became the prisoner of his own technique, and he must have found his poem unfinishable (he never did end it) because he couldn’t control the significances his images unleashed.

Minus the gratuitous defense of President Clinton, this is a very clever analysis. But the problem is more than technical. The personality you can piece together from Pound's writings is spiteful, churlish, vehement, humorless though sarcastic, and surprisingly unintelligent; when I read his stuff I detect very little of the charismatic, perceptive personality his peers described. (There is an evident antic disposition and a taste for full-bore invective which I guess could pass for a kind of energy in person.) I think this goes beyond the temperament attributed to Neal Cassady, for example: a great talker and catalyst for other writers who was unable to get a lick of that personality down on paper. Pound got plenty of a personality down on paper, but it's a completely unlovable personality.

In theory at least, the quality of your output is not correlated to your quality as a human being. But what if the bigotry, the bad verse and the fascism were all bound up in a certain, well, stupidity about the way the world works? In another recent piece on Pound (not available online), Frank Kermode devoted some time to Pound's famous malediction against usury, citing it as evidence of anti-Semitism. He might have mentioned that it's also bad econ. Condemnation of lending at interest is an old tradition, but by making the case in detail, Pound actually reveals how vacuous it is:

with usura, sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour

with usura the line grows thick

with usura is no clear demarcation
and no man can find site for his dwelling
Stone cutter is kept from his stone
weaver is kept from his loom 

Even accounting for the antique phrasing, this is actually a description of what happens without usura. If he couldn't appreciate the way the industrial-age trend toward readily available credit helped create a multi-century boom in production of food, housing, textiles and even cultural products, then the king of Modernism didn't know much about modernity. August Bebel may have been wrong when he said anti-Semitism was the socialism of fools (socialism is the socialism of fools), but he understood that both are expressions of disinterest in what gets produced by a modern economy.

All of Pound is like that: His work is heavy on revitalizing the past or building some dynamic new futurismo, but it shows no appreciation for the present. He's encyclopedic about the culture of his time, but he never goes beyond an adolescent condemnation of everything ("The English Rubaiyat was still-born in those days"), to provide any reason why we should keep following him. You can write difficult literature and still satisfy your small but fanatical fan base, but a reader does have the right to expect some reward for attending to your every mental belch.

People are talking about the anti-religion comments and sour attitude toward the Chosen People expressed in Albert Einstein's letter to his pal Goodchild, but I think the most interesting phrase is in in a throwaway clause:

And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power.

Einstein produced plenty of random thoughts on the passing scene, most of which strike me more for their banality than anything else. Whether he did or did not believe in Goddess doesn't seem to me probative of much — and like Manley Pointer, I been believing in nothing ever since I was born. In fact, I'm pretty sure appealing to authority to support your disbelief defeats the whole purpose of being a rationalist.

But there's one aspect of Einstein's non-scientific punditry that has always been catnip to me: his abiding, total and frequently repeated hatred of patriotism and the use of force. You can always depend on Albert E. for good anti-bullyism, and his Actonian formulation here is the clearest expression of that philosophy I've seen. What sets it off from sermon-on-the-mount piety is that it doesn't pretend to any great moral position; force and power are bad not because they're wicked but because they're stupid and unhealthy.

Remember that Red Sox jersey that a construction worker — who also happened to be a Sox fan — dropped into the wet concrete of the New York Yankees' fresh, new stadium? And how the Yankees spent a cool fifty grand to dig it right back out, fearing a Red Sox curse embedded in their home field — a decision the editorial board called "a reminder that for all of humanity's pretensions to modernity and reason, we are essentially just bald monkeys who wear shoes"?

Yeah, now it's on eBay. Just posted yesterday — and as further demonstration of humanity's supersitious nature and penchant for totems, it's already racked up 116 pre-approved bids and is sitting pretty at $37,600. But if you think it's going to go to cover the Yankees' deconstruction costs, you don't give the baseball industry enough credit: Proceeds go to the cancer-fighting nonprofit Jimmy Fund. Proof that while you couldn't make this stuff up, that doesn't mean there can't be a happy ending. Or at least, a face-saving one.

*Photo courtesy AP.

Responding to my Sunday Opinion piece about Pope Benedict's predilection for super-tall miters and elaborate pre-Vatican II vestments, a liturgy buff questions whether Americans will see many of the pope's new clothes during his visit here. "I wouldn't expect to see anything in terms of the USA," he wrote, "as the vestment selection is typically picked by those hosting the pope. Often times as well, these are specially commissioned by the host country for the larger masses as well."

We'll see whether Benedict's new tradition-minded fashion guru allows local practice to trump the pope's preferences. It will be interesting to see if the pope reverts to the short Gothic miter favored by the archbishop of Washington. Meanwhile, the pope seems to have swapped the modernistic pastoral staff showing Jesus' Crucifixion for a more robust model.

Paul Leonard goes toe to toe with Christopher Thornberg on forcing lenders to renegotiate with defaulters. More to come later today.

You don't believe FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and LAPD Chief Edward M. Davis were uncredited script doctors on the All In the Family pilot? We've got evidence!

Robert Ellis laments what the ruling party is doing to Turkey.

In our most recent installment of the inaptly named Opinion Daily, Jon Healey lays odds on Jango's race to survive in an imploding market for webcasting.

Seventh months after a Los Angeles Times editorial urged Hillary Clinton to expedite the release of records from her time as first lady, the National Archives and the Bill Clinton Library have disgorged more than 11,000 pages of her official schedules.

Having sifted through such artifacts in a previous life, I sympathize with the reporters who are now excavating the files for newsworthy nuggets. It helps when they’re available, as the Clinton cache is, on the Web or a CD. I have unfond memories of being part of a posse of reporters who had to prowl through the paper records of John G. Roberts Jr.’s service in the Reagan administration.

Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, the pesky public-interest group that filed suit to obtain the first lady files, said a quick eyeballing of the document (or datebook) dump indicated that Hillary was indeed a “co-president.” Fitton presumably meant this as a criticism, but it bolsters Hillary’s claim that her experience in the White House is relevant to her campaign to return there under her own colors. But if the Clinton campaign wants to make that argument, it should explain why it didn’t move heaven, Earth and the National Archives to produce this material earlier.

Something that had been not-quite-missing from my daily routine these past few months was the very mixed blessing of being able to rubberneck movie and TV productions. The Soloist did film on our third floor during the strike, and the cast and crew, in sharp distinction to the tradition of movie-production jackholery, were notably polite and patient, with the Steve Lopez-portraying Robert Downey Jr. personable and sober as a judge at 8:30 in the morning. On the other hand, a Tom Arnold comedy which included a prop van topped with a giant-ant simulacrum ("See, you can tell it's a comedy," one P.A. told me, pointing at the van) was filming late at night in the no-man's-land around the corner from me a few weeks back, and while walking one of my kids to sleep I got a snippy attitude from somebody who was at least acting like a director. (I like to think it was The Skeptic helmer "Tennyson Bardwell," because if you're going to get rudeness you might as well get it from somebody with a cool-sounding name, but the plot synopsis doesn't sound like what I saw shooting.)

Now that the productions are back in earnest, I am again haunted by an economic question: How can an industry with such a dubious future still support such largesse? Shark was filming outside the L.A. Times building a few days back: Seven trailers, ten or so tents, two 18-wheelers, several more six-wheelers, assorted pickup trucks and other vehicles, the usual mountains of food... Now I like pretty much anything with James Woods, who came as close as any American to preventing the 9/11 attacks, but does a second-ten-rated series really generate that kind of economy anymore?

Heather Mac Donald's lightning-rod piece on campus rape takes the top spot this week, with Dallas Weaver's Blowback on copyright a very close second. Readers didn't make this another mostly-Obama week, opting instead for conscience-stricken paparazzi and stubborn sadness. Here they are:

1. What campus rape crisis? by Heather Mac Donald
2. Copyright this, by Dallas Weaver
3. Surge doesn't equal success, by Michael Kinsley
4. The snapper snapped, by Nick Stern
5. Too good to win, by Joel Stein
6. White like us, by Gregory Rodriguez
7. What a little bird told us, by Jonathan Rosen
8. The miracle of melancholia, by Eric G. Wilson
9. Stonehenges all around us, by Craig Childs
10. Food or fuel? by the editorial board

With an obit, an Op-Ed, an editorial, blog posts and more, we've added our own cannons to the 21-gun salute to the late William F. Buckley, but before we move along, a last word on National Review, or as it was known back in the Kennedy years, "National Review Bulletin."

Our editorial noted that the early NR "had a fair claim to being the foremost cultural magazine of its time," and after two hours of microfiching the 1963-1964 run of the magazine on Wednesday I can expand on that. The cultural sections of the magazine were quite lively, and the sharpness of the overall package still comes across after four decades. Among the big names: Theodore Sturgeon, Arlene Croce (on Resnais and Antonioni!), Steve Allen (yes that Steve Allen), Thomas Szasz (as always channeling either Michel Foucault or L. Ron Hubbard with a piece on "Psychiatry's threat to civil liberties"), John Leonard, Fritz Leiber, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (is that where they met?), Auberon Waugh, Garry Wills, Hugh Kenner (on Cleanth Brooks!), John dos Passos (with a piss-take on Edmund Wilson — so far so good, but unfortunately the criticism centered on The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest, a book NR probably should have been defending), Myrna Bain and Emilie Griffin (a not-insensitive look at John Osborne's Luther). There was also a pretty good, and prescient, appreciation of Mary McCarthy as a refugee from the left, as well as a critical pan of the movie adaptation of The Cardinal, which Michael McGough references in his Opinion Daily today. And if you think the catalogue of rightwing poetry begins and ends with W.H. von Dreele (who was in there too), cast your eyes on Ezra Pound's "Mindscapes," which appeared first in Buckley's rag in Old '63. I didn't see any Renata Adler but I understand she was in there too back in the day.

Between this and Encounter, you could make a case that the right, or at least the strong-anti-communist coalition, was not only culturally competitive but dominant in the fifties and early sixties. Part of that may be materials selection: At what other time were you going to get Didion writing about Evelyn Waugh or Waugh's own son discussing Muriel Spark? Some ambitious historian ought to do an analysis of NR and Ramparts as the secret Catholic movers of everything in the sixties, the Gallant and Goofus of the Great Disruption.

I make no case for the decline of this or the dumbing down of that, and if all the material above strikes you as an odyssey of boredom, well, I'll fight like hell for your right to feel that way. But I think the soft power of conservatives is in eclipse. The post-Allen Bloom bellyaching about how feminists or queer theorists are brutalizing our culture might be a little more credible if you could believe the people complaining had something interesting to say about the culture themselves. We know what you think of Hillary, Rich Lowry, but what do you think of James Joyce?

Can anything or anybody replace Barack Obama in readers' hearts? Not this week: Despite a selection of hot topics from Scientology to gun control to torture to the Christian Oscars, and even a surprise return by perennial favorite Stonehenge, Sarah M. Miller's Obama Blowback drew more traffic than the rest of the Top 10 combined. Hats off to Obama for continuing to draw readers and voters, and to you for reading the L.A. Times Opinion pages.

1. Open letter to Barack Obama, by Sarah M. Miller
2. The invasion of America, by Andrew P. Napolitano
3. A leap beyond faith, by Michael Shermer
4. 'Prayers' just won't do, by Tim Rutten
5. Hola, Obama, by the editorial board
6. Stonehenges all around us, by Craig Childs
7. Peter Principle of award shows, by Joel Stein
8. Political surge in Iraq, by the editorial board
9. Fidel's slow fade, by Jon Lee Anderson
10. Shame, Sen. McCain, by the editorial board

USA-193, we hardly knew ye. Per Peter Spiegel's excellent L.A. Times piece this morning, the U.S. Navy's destruction of the rogue satellite last night was a ballistic hit, involving no explosives. With very high confidence that the hydrazine tank apparently at issue was successfully ruptured, we can say at least that this was an impressive technical feat, leaving little in the debris field larger than nectarine-sized Bush-bashing and mircometeoroids of conspiracy theory.

Which isn't to say the Future Imagery Architecture project isn't due for a swift kick. [See update below.] If you're not following Noah Shachtman's Danger Room blog at Wired, do yourself a favor. Shachtman's got what looks like launch-to-impact footage. Well, take a look for yourself:

Also of interest: A simulation from Analytic Graphics that seems to show the satellite was moving in a pole-to-pole orbit. I haven't followed this story that closely: Is that accurate? [No, it was not. See below.] And a history of the ambitious but costly intelligence project that produced the rogue.

Update: In an interview after posting, Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, corrected me on two points: USA-193 was not part of the FIA program. Also, the satellite was not in polar orbit but angled 58.5 degrees to the equator.

With the news that Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton, the late alleged murderer of two police officers and three city officials in Kirkwood, Missori, was a well known city-council gadfly, we set the wayback machine to 2003, for a Los Angeles Times story by Hugo Martin, explaining some of the tensions involved in giving broad leeway to public blowhards. Here it is in full print-spec glory:

Los Angeles Times
Wednesday September 24, 2003

THE STATE
COLUMN ONE
Freedom's Test, or Just a Pest?
* Gadflies deemed out of order are arrested or ejected from some public meetings. The 1st Amendment and decorum are at odds.

Home Edition, Main News, Page A-1
Metro Desk
53 inches; 1834 words
Type of Material: Column

By Hugo Martin, Times Staff Writer

After greeting the San Bernardino County supervisors with a mock Nazi salute, Jeff Wright, a homeless Air Force veteran, stepped to the public microphone to complain about being arrested at a regional transportation meeting a few months earlier.

Board Chairman Dennis Hansberger told him to stay on the topic under discussion, which was the salaries of county attorneys. Wright then threatened to seal the supervisor's mouth with duct tape, which he had brought with him.

Hansberger responded by ordering sheriff's deputies to eject Wright, who was led out of the building in handcuffs, screaming about police brutality.

It was nothing new -- for Wright or for the board of supervisors.

The March incident was among the more than 100 arrests or ejections deputies have carried out at meetings of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors since 1989, according to an unofficial tally by one local activist.

Although law enforcement officials say they cannot confirm the exact number, they put the tally in the dozens.

In 2000, reports of those arrests earned the Board of Supervisors the "Black Hole" award, a dubious distinction given by the California First Amendment Coalition to public agencies and officials that the group says show disregard for open government and 1st Amendment rights.

In the past year, the pace of arrests and removals at San Bernardino County supervisors' meetings has increased to about one per month, with most speakers being removed for failing to stick to the agenda and then refusing to surrender the lectern.

If you enjoyed John Mueller's recent Rambo charticle, which tracked the pneumatic commando's varied career along a rising death-per-minute axis, you were not alone. The United Kingdom tabloid The Sun got enough of a kick out of the Ohio State professor's math that it decided the most sincere form of flattery would be to make up some fake quotes and attribute them to Mueller. According to The Sun's story on the Rambo chart:

Mr Mueller said the movie, out next month, showed “the most depraved level of man’s inhumanity to man”.

Mueller has a different story. In an email to us, he states, "I just want to say that I never made the statement quoted — to the Sun or to anybody else." In addition to being concerned that the invented quote might allow an inference that he was reviewing the film rather than subjecting it to rigorous scientific testing, Mueller says he's troubled because "the words put in my mouth are so prissy and sanctimonious they make my skin crawl."

In case there's any doubt, Mueller adds, "I  hope I am not overly naive about the journalistic standards of the British tabloids... I have sometimes been misquoted in other papers — but in those the reporter at least actually  talked to me and was clearly TRYING to get it right. Total fabrication is new to me..."

Original charticle here.

Christopher Hitchens remembers Fleet Street in all its squalor here.

Robert Burns laments man's inhumanity to man (a phrase I always thought was invented by Mad magazine) here.

Hillary, Hillary, the return of Stonehenge and more Hillary were your favorites this week. Sure, our old friends Max Boot, Jonathan Chait and Gregory Rodriguez, as well as another batch of Kennedys ('cause you can never get enough) did the actual writing, but it was Hillary's week in Opinion L.A. Without further ado:

1. Is the right right on the Clintons?, by Jonathan Chait
2. Kennedys for Clinton, by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kerry Kennedy
3. Stonehenges all around us, by Craig Childs
4. This primary is secondary, by Ethan Rarick
5. When Bill Clinton attacks, by the editorial board
6. Why Clinton can count on Latinos, by Harry P. Pachon and Rodolfo O. de la Garza
7. Iraq's No. 1 problem, by Bing West and Max Boot
8. Clinton's Latino spin, by Gregory Rodriguez
9. Dust-Up: It's the stupid economy, by Steven Landsburg and Jason Furman
10. A bitter pill for Big Pharma, by Melody Petersen

If you still don't believe good old free-market capitalism is history's greatest engine of artistic creation, dig this wonderful work of Flash pop art from HEMA (or Hollandse Eenheidsprijzen Maatschappij Amsterdam), a chain of medium-low-price stores in the Netherlands. Who could complain about a system where some web-enabled Murakami in the Low Countries is willing to put togther something so entertaining just to sell you a three-dollar frying pan?

Courtesy of VeryShortList.

Last week's Bigfoot on Mars story demonstrates two important truths: 1. This wonderful age of human discovery and achievement is too good for many if not all of the humans lucky enough to live in it; and 2. the evil MSM can't win.

First point: When you see a picture like the one at right, a panorama of a valley in the Gusev Crater on a planet five-to-ten light-minutes away from us (see the picture in its full-sized glory here), is your first reaction: a) to get misty thinking of the intellects vast and cool and partially sympathetic who managed to send robot envoys on this magnificent journey; b) to consider the barren, nearly airless, geologically inert rustscape and consider what it has to teach us about our own prehistory and ecology; or c) scan the picture carefully looking for evidence of a boring old hoax by a bunch of rustics?

C was the choice of observers who found evidence of Bigfoot taking a load off out on the surface of the Red Planet. Here's the detail, an optical illusion that was treated to some deadpan news coverage, a few revealing enhancements and a (clearly unnecessary) debunking. I'm not sure anybody actually believed the humanoid-form-on-Mars story, and at least this news cycle wrapped up more quickly than the Face-On-Mars fad that endured through most of the nineties and even inspired an expensive NASA-assisted Hollywood movie. But really, there's something off about this need to find the most banal, people-sized mysteries, whatizzits lifted from old Six Million Dollar Man episodes, in a field that doesn't lack for real, interesting mysteries. Accept the verdict of science, earthlings: You ain't all that.

On the second point, one Bigfoot buff uses this story to generate (what else?) a bloglashing of the mainstream media, which not only refuse to accord this story the respect it deserves, but allegedly used the same deride-and-conquer strategy to dismiss the 2006 O'Hare airport UFO sighting. As it happens, the O'Hare story is precisely the wrong example to pick if you're looking to reprimand the MSM in this way: The tale got a fresh wind and much wider distribution thanks to some FAA shenanigans that were revealed thanks to a FOIA request from that obscure blog The Chicago Tribune.

Images courtesy of NASA.

Republicans must really be feeling down at the mouth. If the GOP presidential field weren’t in such disarray, surely by now we would have been hearing full-throated harangues about a dangerous, ascendant liberal dynasty.

Not the Clintons. The Brolins.

Oliver Stone’s making a bio-pic of George W. Bush; the 43rd president is to be played by actor and registered Democrat Josh Brolin, he of the SAG award-winning ensemble cast of  ‘’No Country for Old Men.’’ George W. Bush, before things went pear-shaped on him, was a conservative hero who aspired to be like his great conservative hero, Ronald Reagan.

And in a 2003 Emmy-nominated TV miniseries, Reagan was played by … James Brolin, Josh’s father, also a registered Democrat.

Which means that the two actors cast in the only movies to date to portray two significant Republican leaders are the stepson and the husband of … Barbra Streisand, the Hollywood liberal Republicans love to loathe.

Coincidence????

Let the conspiracy spinning begin...

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's flirtation with a presidential bid has had a dreamy-eyed media playing effeuiller la marguerite. He'll run! He won't. He'll run! He won't. Will he?

But that daisy may have already wilted under the California sun. According to the Field Poll, one quarter of the state's registered voters said they'd consider voting for Bloomberg — but two thirds said they'd definitely not.

Why so disenchanted, and so soon? It may be that Bloomberg inadvertently fell into the Thompson trap, by not entering early enough to capture the public's imagination. And left-leaning Californians (including the ever-growing population of decline-to-staters) might feel their choices among the Dems are more than ample, thanks all the same.

Unfortunately for a Bloomberg bid, politics this season has been fun. At Monday's Democratic debate in South Carolina, the audience gasped, laughed or cheered at nearly every jibe the candidates threw at one another. No matter how they felt about each contender, they weren't going to let favoritism get in the way of having a good time.

If Bloomberg was ever planning to run, he was probably looking to walk into a race that needed a little shaking up. But starting with Iowa and New Hampshire, the ground has shifted so often that it's hard to believe the mayor could ever get solid footing on his own.   

At ITWorld, Josh Fruhlinger, the award-winning Comics Curmudgeon (and once an L.A. Times contributor whose article now exists only in fragments in our pages but is still viewable in its entirety here), takes a jaunt through generic-domain-name history to discover a saga of defunct companies, foiled business schemes and web squatters. Sample:

eat.com: If music.com had real geek cred in its earliest incarnation, a cursory look at the 1996 version of eat.com might lead you to believe that it was a similar outpost on the new frontier of the World Wide Web. "Mama's Dining Room" is the page's name, and the text -- charmingly unformatted on a white background on a hideous gray background, apparently unedited by anyone professional, offering a variety of tasty Italian meals. Then you get to the verbiage at the bottom of the page: "Mama's niece Ana, the lawyer, wrote this next part: Copyright 1996 Lipton, Inc. All rights reserved. Ragú, Chicken Tonight, and Pizza Quick are registered trademarks of Lipton, Inc." Yes, eat.com was one of the world's first astroturfing sites! The current iteration of the site is a much more straightforward homepage for the Ragú brand, now owned, like the other Lipton brands promoted by the entirely fictional "Mama", by Anglo-Dutch megacorporation Unilever.

The saddest part is that the outdated nineties aesthetic on display at these old, archive.org-preserved versions still looks cool and hip and now to me. Whole article.

Messenger probe takes some closeup pics of Mercury, and proves that having an atmosphere and a magnetic field isn't everything: The first planet looks as inert and uninviting as the moon. Dig the photos from JPL and Johns Hopkins.

The half-life of Ron Paul's racist newsletters, a story that has gained almost as little traction as the Paul campaign itself, gets a new wrinkle as Reason's Julian Sanchez and Dave Weigel name the infamous Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. as the pigment- and wrist-strength-obsessed ghostwriter. That was my guess when the identity of Mr. or Madame X became an issue, and the authors have got a host of fellow travelers stating that it was indeed Liberty Lew.

As with so many things that Everybody knows, there's always the possibility that this one is not true. Rockwell himself has denied the charge in other media and refused to comment to Sanchez and Weigel. One commenter says Reason is exaggerating Rockwell's role in order to spare Paul himself.

That doesn't seem to be supported by the article, and S&W surely understand that the negligence defense does nothing to get Paul off the hook. To use the reductio ad absurdum libertarians are said to enjoy, suppose Paul actually became president: Presidential administrations are constantly acting on issues bound up in race. Would any person be willing to give the benefit of the doubt when a Paul appointee to the Justice Department or the Federal Election Commission makes even a valid argument against some race-based policy or dismisses claims about disenfranchising black voters? (That is, in the unlikely event a Paul Administration had an FEC at all.) Nevertheless, the piece allows the inference that the man who would save "the blacks" from unfair drug laws is guilty mainly of sins of omission:

The tenor of Paul's newsletters changed over the years. The ones published between Paul's return to private life after three full terms in congress (1985) and his Libertarian presidential bid (1988) notably lack inflammatory racial or anti-gay comments. The letters published between Paul's first run for president and his return to Congress in 1996 are another story—replete with claims that Martin Luther King "seduced underage girls and boys," that black protesters should gather "at a food stamp bureau or a crack house" rather than the Statue of Liberty, and that AIDS sufferers "enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."

With more interesting ancient history about the Rothbard-Rockwell alliance and their libertarian version of the Southern Strategy. As with most libertarian movement history, the back story is an Illiad of breaks-with, fallings-out, mutual excommunications and hurt feelings, but the specific case is pretty straightforward. Whole article.

Related: Rockwell always feels like somebody's watching him and he's got no privacy.

One career strategy I considered during my happy time at Reason magazine was to become just enough of a bright boy of the libertarian movement to allow me to stage a very public falling out, write a tell-all book with a title like Ex-Friends or Movement Man or Up From Libertarianism or Whose Freedom?, then build a career as a David Horowitz/Michael Lind-style intellectual turncoat, getting paid to warn the masses about the dangers posed by my erstwhile allies. The strategy was unworkable for many reasons: It was a little too dishonest even for me; libertarianism doesn't generate enough public interest to support a longterm market in defection; and as it happens, defectors from and within libertarianism are a dime a dozen.

But the tactic I was planning to use would have been very effective: Simply collect story after story of the moonlight-and-magnolias Confederate nostalgists, stop-the-war-on-men misogynists, traditionalist homophobes, scientific racists and similar fringe characters who seemed to gravitate toward libertarianism, in numbers that I and others found remarkable.

Actually, I probably wouldn't have been very good at this tactic either: I don't do well with policing unacceptable commentary, "kicking" people "to the curb," writing colleagues out of polite society, defining away extremists and all those other things movement types (in all movements) love to do.

Which is a longwinded way of saying I'm not well suited to commenting on the treasure trove of jarring commentary Jamie Kirchik is publicizing from Ron Paul's old newsletters. Virginia Postrel has a fairly succinct reaction that I agree with (though given the timing and Paul's own tepid response to the matter, I'd be inclined to dial back the ho-hum, been-there attitude), and I'm fascinated by Wendy McElroy's call for the true author of the commentaries (apparently a real person) to reveal him- or herself. And I could hardly improve on the coverage by my beloved former colleagues at Reason.

But I do think there's a discussion to be held among libertarians about why this political philosophy seems to draw so many (classically) illiberal figures; and the hubbub over Paul's newsletters, which are revelatory whether Paul wrote them or not, seems like an opportunity.

Here's what you were reading in the last full week of 2007. Our American Values series finally scored, as did our holiday Big Fix feature. The violent deaths of Timothy Johnson and Benazir Bhutto drew attention, but as always, Jesus, dogs and Jonah Goldberg were tops with readers.

1. The cancer drug by Diana Wagman
2. A life and death, raw by commenters
3. Aunt Benazir’s false promises by Fatima Bhutto
4. The common defense by the editorial board
5. Tracking the mild coyote by Meghan Daum
6. A little bit of heaven on Earth by Joel Stein
7. It’s a campaign, not a crusade by Charlotte Allen
8. Domestic tranquillity by the editorial board
9. Politics? We’ll take good cheer by Jonah Goldberg
10. Collar the dogs by Will Beall

When I was a lad they'd have been burning those cars!

Whatever your thoughts on the WGA strike, the writers deserve some credit for their civility. My route most days takes me past the CBS entrance that forms the fourth turn in the intersection of Beverly Blvd and one of those little streets running north (Orange? Ogden? Genesee?). There's a traffic light, barely required at what is effectively a three-way intersection, yet the writers honor it every time it changes, patiently waiting with their signs on both sides of the driveway, and allowing people to drive on and off the CBS lot. I go by Paramount's Windsor and Bronson entrances too occasionally, and observed the same behavior there this morning. I can't say as how the writers' respect for jaywalking laws is doing much to blast into atoms the remorseless gears of capitalism, but it shows good breeding.

That ought to get to the bottom of it...

If you haven't read Richard Verrier and Claudia Eller's 12/12 piece on the strike, be sure to read through to the end, for an appearance by our man in the Dust-Up Craig Mazin, as well as this bon mot:

[Unionized directors] are expected to be more flexible on terms and more sympathetic to studio arguments that Internet-related businesses are still in the formative stages and that there are many uncertainties about where and how soon those future revenues will pour in.

The Directors Guild has spent more than $1 million to study those very questions, hiring two outside firms to prepare a detailed report on new media. The findings will be presented at tonight's meeting.

Got your own strike observations, hints or allegations? Share your thoughts in the comments or by mailing opinionla@latimes.com.

I vowed a long time ago never to refer to the "Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences" with a straight face until the Academy graduates its first class of cadets. But maybe sometimes all that solemn self-regard about Oscar® has its value.

Last week I got a chance to attend a 25th-anniversary screening of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater. As I regard E.T. not only as a fine movie but as an essential weapon in America's Cold War soft power arsenal, I was bracing for the worst from this screening to a nearly full house (stocked with parents like me in various stages of disappointment, denial and bargaining at their children's insufficient enchantment with one of the great warhorses of our own youth). The film has been famously modified by its own creator, who in 2002 released a remix filled with bad improvements, including but not limited to some additional footage (in a movie that is not terribly fast-paced to begin with), the obligatory CGI version of the eponymous alien (seamless, flawless and charmless from what I've seen in the trailer) and most notoriously, digital hoodoo that removes the firearms from the hands of the federal-agent characters at the climax.

This last has always struck me as a crucial error in a drama that flirts throughout with tweeness and needs at least a hint of danger to work, but I've never wanted to find out. On the principle that you don't have to smell a whole egg to know it's rotten, I've avoided the re-edited version, but figured I'd swallow that scruple in the spirit of the occasion.

What a pleasant surprise to find I didn't have to do that. In the version screened the other night the feds were armed and dangerous the way God and Steven Spielberg made them. There was no additional footage or digital E.T. either. (I didn't pay attention to whether the word "terrorist" had been undisappeared from one line of dialogue.) And it turns out I have the Academy to thank. All official screenings must be of the version that was originally eligible for Academy Award consideration, which made it necessary to strike a brand new print of the undesecrated E.T. for this screening.

Sure, we could carp about the presumptiousness of honoring a film for its handful of technical awards without mentioning that the movie itself was beaten out for Best Picture by Richard Attenborough's Ghandi (a picture Ben Kingsley himself is unlikely to want to sit through again). But at least the Academy's strict adherence to its own rules resulted, in this case, in a small stumbling block on the path to universal mediocrity.

This also leaves me curious about this whole new-prints-of-old-versions business. It costs between $6,000 and $10,000 to strike a new print from existing materials, and according to a representative of the Academy, studios frequently make new prints for the organization's screenings, then donate them to the Academy's archives. In this case, however, the person I spoke with at the Academy says Universal did not donate the print after the screening. So where did it go? Seems like a simple question, but after a week of trying to find out from spokespeople for Universal and Dreamworks, I have no answer.

That doesn't mean there's anything fishy; the Academy representative I talked with noted that the organization already has several copies of the film in its archive and thus didn't particularly need to keep a new print. A spokesperson for Dreamworks says she believes the print will in fact be donated to the Academy (though for two days now she has been unable to confirm that) so it could just be a miscommunication. And of course, 10 grand is a drop in the bucket to these behemoths. But the rule of thumb is that when people can't get you information, there's something wrong with the information. And you'd think that having re-edited your old work, you'd keep a close watch on 35mm copies of what is now your rough draft.

So I'm positing or hoping that Spielberg has seen the error of his later years and is planning a New Coke/Classic Coke bait and switch, in which the original version of this Hollywood classic will sneak back into circulation, and the 2002 disimprovement will be quietly retired. Maybe this will even build into a groundswell, and all those director's cuts, definitive editions and other misguided remasterings will begin to recede in favor of the versions that actually pleased audiences in the first place. Then again, maybe not. But I'm still happy that the real E.T., rather than a post-9/11 impostor, got one more chance to phone home.

For an editorial I'm working on I've been learning about the process by which the MTA auctions off its retired buses (don't ask, just be glad you're not me).  My journey of spiritual discovery brought me down to a facility in Long Beach where Ken Porter Auctions at 10:00 am tomorrow will get rid of 55 former Metro buses, plus some non-running, no-provenance relics like the one pictured to the right. The MTA auctions off old buses once or twice every year, and according to the auction company there's a pretty brisk business in such liquidations for various municipalities. I was really struck by this plug-ugly vehicle because its interior is in pretty good shape and it seems like a steal for anybody in the set design or construction business. Isn't there a constant demand for vintage stuff like this in period films? For the prices we're talking about (inside dope is that most or all of tomorrow's inventory will be bought by scrap dealers), it would even be worth it for some high school class to buy this baby, strip off one side and use it as the set to do a Rosa Parks school play.

For that matter, who wouldn't want to buy one of the MTA's own, more recent, orange-and-white diesel gems? (See more details at the Ken Porter site.) My pal at Ken Porter Auctions tells me 44 of these babies have full engines and transmissions and could, in theory, still run. Won't they need a dozen or so buses to trash whenever they get around to making the next Die Hard picture? You could pick up a bunch now and sell them to Fox for a tidy profit! Or just buy a running vehicle, get your bus license, do some smog work and put in a port-a-john, and you've got the ideal traveling home.

Anyway, if you're thinking big or just want to keep me company, show up at 10 tomorrow morning (Wednesday) at 970 W. Chester Pl. Long Beach Ca 90813.

Tonight marks the begining of Hanukkah! But apparently California didn't get the memo. According to the Sacramento Bee:

The 76th annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony will be held at 5:15 p.m. on the west steps of the Capitol, with festivities beginning at 4:30 p.m., according to a news release by Shriver's office.

"We light this tree as a symbol of the true meaning of Christmas which is love, prosperity, peace and joy," Schwarzenegger stated in the release.

But don't think the state has forgotten the true meaning of the holiday:

Hanukkah, which begins at sundown Tuesday, also will be commemorated at the Capitol this week during a menorah lighting ceremony Thursday afternoon...

(Incidentally, City Hall — apparently a little savvier than the state — seemed to be doing something on the lawn involving a menorah, a very loud man and lots of folding chairs about an hour ago. Good for us.)

The Hanukkah (or is it Chanukah?) roundup continues...

What do shoe company moguls do with their free time? The Wall Street Journal finds out:

Late one spring afternoon last year, a mystery man sat in the back of a creative-writing seminar at Stanford. Evidently a student, he was much older than anyone else in the room. He was wearing a black blazer and white Nikes. He said his name was Phil.

As the days passed, the man's identity gradually came into focus. The instructor "made several vague allusions to Phil taking off in his private jet," recalls André Lyon, an English major enrolled in the class. And tales about Michael Jordan found their way into the man's literary discourse.

After a couple of weeks, a rumor began to circulate that the old dude in the Nikes was Philip H. Knight, the billionaire founder of the world's largest sportswear company.

It's hard to say which is more intriguing: The fact that a Nike exec wanted to be an English student, or the fact that he blended in so well.

He's not the only high-profile personality to go undercover for higher ed. This summer, Shakira took classes at UCLA:

She enrolled in a history of Western civilization course under her middle and last names, Isabel Mebarak, telling clueless classmates she was just visiting from Colombia.

"Oh, it was such a respite for me," Shakira recalls. "I felt that need to put a brake on everything, to escape from the celebrity life and reclaim a normal life for a while. It was very healthy for me."

College: the new secret rehab.

You can't blame stars for keeping educational endeavors below the radar. While some seem to do rather well by college, a la Julia Stiles, others find that their academic decisions become uncomfortably public, as happened with Mary-Kate Olsen's leave of absence from New York University. Most, though, generally seem to view college as something to do before their careers take them off to new heights, similar to normal students taking a year off to travel before facing the real world.

Not all stars view college as just an academic feather in their celebrity caps — Network World profiles a range of actors, singers and others in show biz who come from uber-geeky backgrounds. For these Tinseltowners, such as chemical engineer Terrence Howard, returning to college means picking up a career that was set aside when the acting (or singing, or directing) bug bit.

On the whole, this seems like a social positive: Personalities are making college cool. Forget Kabbalah or exotic tatoos — now a pop princess can flaunt her B.A. in art history.

This frontpage La Opinion headline goes out to tireless commenter Mitchell Young, who spanks us whenever our love of border-jumpers becomes too clear:

No hablar ingles afecta a latinos

Here's the interesting Pew Hispanic Center report that generated that story, as well as coverage, with fairly different emphases, in the Times and the O.C. Register.

It's a day early, I know, but tomorrow we'll all be too busy prepping and cooking birds to read (or write) about them. If you haven't heard, President Bush pardoned two turkeys today in what is an annual ceremony dating back to Harry Truman (though some say the tradition goes back to Abraham Lincoln's time). Never mind that no records can be found of any turkey pardoning happening under Truman's watch; in fact according to the Austin American-Statesman's Window on Washington blog,

Truman, it seems, was more interested in turkey dinner than poultry mercy.

From the Truman Library website: “The library’s staff has found no documents, speeches, newspaper clippings, photographs, or other contemporary records in our holdings which refer to Truman pardoning a turkey that he received as a gift in 1947, or at any other time during his presidency. Truman sometimes indicated to reporters that the turkeys he received were destined for the family dinner table.”

Gulp.

That hasn't stopped the last two administrations from turning it into a bipartisan tradition. This year's delectable duo's names are May and Flower. Last year it was Flyer and Fryer, and in 2003, Stars and Stripes. We only have ourselves to blame: The American people get to christen the turkeys online.

That's not to say all presidents love this annual ceremony: Richard Nixon avoided the tradition, while defendants of unpardoned Ginny the Pig cry fowl: After all, it was oinkers, not gobblers, that ended up joining Pilgrims and Indians for dinner on that pseudo-historic first feast.

None of this answers the question, what crime did these birds commit? Was it the sin of their fathers, AWOL from the original meal? Or just having delicious thighs laced with tryptophan? (FYI: When it comes to sleep-inducing amino acids, turkeys are totally within the legal limit.)

Well, we already knew left-leaning softies were to blame for Rush, but it's not just because they give the radio personality someone to rail against. It's also because liberals are actually tuning into his program. That's according to a poll conducted by Zogby International and USC's Norman Lear Center.

Given what the terms liberal and conservative are actually supposed to mean, it may not be a surprise that bluebloods value diverse viewpoints, while the red-blooded prefer programming aimed at reinforcing their beliefs. And granted, this is the kind of finding that seems to be right up Zogby's alley. Nevertheless, it's intriguing that the anecdotal evidence has actually been validated by people who know how to handle statistics.

But the research didn't just show liberals' media sources to be more varied than conservatives'. It found that, based on entertainment preferences, people can be clearly grouped into one of three categories: liberal, conservative and moderate. You are what you watch. And read. And play.

A sample of the findings: Liberals like PBS, conservatives dig FOX News. Moderates, meanwhile, watch talk shows and avoid politics as much as possible. It indicates, Lear's deputy director Johanna Blakley told KPCC's Larry Mantle, that Oprah's endorsement of Barack Obama may turn out to be a crucial victory for him.

The whole thing seems to reflect better on lefties than on right-wingers — though happily, they both love Hugh Laurie. But moderates (or "purples," as the study calls them) come out looking the worst of the bunch. Then again, don't take my word for it — go read Zogby's summary yourself, and tell us what you think.

Opinion L.A.: We blog. YOU decide.

No, it's NOT an Onion article. It's a real-news piece from Congressional Quarterly, documenting one of the FBI's increasingly desperate attempts to make terror out of teriyaki. Bad metaphor, but...

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists. 

Of course, I need to start out by pointing out how absurd this short-lived plan was. It's like saying you can track Americans traveling around the world because they all head to the nearest McDonalds! Oh, wait...

Never mind, of course, that the falafel is not an Iranian dish. It's a "uniting, pan-Middle Eastern" meal, as well as a popular alternative American fast food rivaling the burrito and chow mein (other plates plundered from unsuspecting immigrant cultures). Thus, along with unfairly targeting innocent Americans, the FBI would have caught in its net rabid vegans — not to mention homesick Israelis.

If you're hoping the LAPD could use these tactics to improve its Muslim-mapping project, though, don't hold your breath. According to CQ,

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

Too bad. I could do with a comprehensive map of good falafel joints in this town — and the cops could use a break from donuts and coffee.

I'm always looking for material in my one-man jihad to rehabilitate the reputation of the pre-Otis-Chandler Los Angeles Times, so I was excited to come across an interesting tidbit recently. A few weeks ago the editorial board reacted to the second fall of Karen Hughes by noting that centralized government information offices are never as good at promoting America's image as is the private sector. Sample:

The challenge has never been getting fair-minded people to agree that there are things to admire about Americans and our society. Hughes was fond of noting that the initials PD "remind us that public diplomacy is people-driven." But people do not make diplomacy. Governments do. New York and Los Angeles already do a creditable job of selling American culture to the world. Washington's job should be selling U.S. policy.

This is just a rehash of the brilliant thesis, laid out half a decade ago by Chuck Freund, that vulgar culture -- of exactly the sort that both leftwing and rightwing American politicians have always deplored -- is actually among the most powerful weapons in this country's "soft power" arsenal. It's not a new idea that Elvis did far more than the Congress for Cultural Freedom to win hearts and minds behind the Iron Curtain, but I did think this was the kind of notion that would get a more sympathetic hearing among post-Goldwater libertoid types than among the center-right, Nixon-boosting, foreigner-disdaining, reliable-men-in-charge-of-everything types I imagine running the mid-century Times.

But the following editorial from March 9, 1952, arguing that Voice of America is a waste of time, makes me rethink that stereotype. Between their skepticism about an anti-communist boondoggle and their lengthy citation of Henry Hazlitt's The Freeman, I'd have to say those editorial board alter kockers of yore knew a bit more about freedom (and not just True Industrial Freedom either) than history has given them credit for. As background you may need to know that the Coast Guard cutter Courier, which is pictured at right (buy the postcard at eBay!), was a vessel outfitted with powerful radio equipment that spent more than a decade cruising the Mediterranean and broadcasting the sounds of liberty into Eastern Europe. The editorial board, which was as anti-Red as any in the country, nonetheless argued that this was a straight-up waste of taxpayer money:

A Better Job for Less Money

As the President was launching the Coast Guard cutter Courier on her maiden voyage as a floating radio transmitter (with three times the power of any American station) the newsstands had an article by George Creel, who did a similar job much better and for very much less money during World War I. 

Voice of Experience

Creel's article, called "Study in Planned Futility," in The Freeman, is criticism of the Voice of America by a man who can justly be called an expert. His campaign as head of President Wilson's Committee on Public Information, during the full two years of World War I, cost just $4,912,553. In addition to running the propaganda office, which was highly successful, Creel also ran the censorship.

In World War II the Army and the Navy and the other so-called "information" offices — really propaganda agencies — spent at least $500,000,000 for the same purposes; with so little success that the administration felt it necessary, as Creel remarks, to "continue the courtship of other people on a larger and even more lavish scale."

Here's what we've had at Opinion L.A. over the past few days:

Pakistan's and the stock market's unhappy upheavals prompt some digging through the old archives.

Past boards on healthy international relationships:

It comes hard to blame the Pakistanis for breaking off their affair with the United States.

Pakistan has given the United States whole-hearted support from Korea on, siding with us in hot and cold crises.

We have failed to back Pakistan as stoutly in the dispute with India over Kashmir. India's Nehru has broken his pledged word to allow a decision by plebiscite in Kashmir. He has temporized, brushed off the recommendations of neutral commissions, and still hangs on to the province.

On nationwide money woes:

This country has withstood graver dangers than the present, and when it was not half as strong. Stand fast! The Republic lives! Long live the Republic!

Catholic author Gregory Popcak objects to Garry Wills' argument that religion has nothing to say about abortion:

Scripturally, the basis of Christian condemnation of abortion comes not only from the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" as Wills asserts, but from the fact that the Bible considers children a supreme gift and blessing from God. One does not reject a gift from God lightly. Jeremiah 1:5 tells us that God knew us in the womb, and Exodus 21:22-23 imposes a penalty for those who cause the miscarriage of a fetus.

Web editor Tim Cavanaugh, in a Swift turn of logic, argues for restrictions on problem-breeders like himself. Editorial researcher Paul Thornton, meanwhile, bonds with Stalin over their shared atheism.

Finally, LAPD superstar Chief William Bratton joins the editorial board to chat about overtime, drivers licenses for illegal immigrants and, or course, crime. Some candid remarks on that last topic:

I don't think it has anything to do with warmer weather, it has nothing to do with lead poisoning, it has nothing to do with abortions, and if it does those are very minor influences on the crime rate. What does influence crime is people deciding to break the law, or unintentionally finding themselves in violation of the law.

Tell it like it is, Chief.

"I do not believe in bothering famous people when they are out in public."

That's Rick Jacobs at HuffPost describing how he interrogated and photographed an unwilling Ann Coulter in West Hollywood Saturday night while the xanthochroidal xenophobe tried to dine. Photographic evidence of Coulter dining on a NASA soundstage in a WeHo restaurant included.

Jacobs burns to know what would bring the supposedly gay-unfriendly Coulter to the alleged center of gay living on the West Coast. Maybe she's boy crazy. I suspect she's not there for the food: Jacobs starts his post off with a stemwinder about the restaurant's design and chandeliers, and you know about restaurant reviews that start off praising the decor.

Think Americans are the only ones with a God-given right to groundbreaking TV? Think again. Granted, this season showcases the morbidly adorable Pushing Daisies, the grimly hilarious Reaper, and the culture-clashing Aliens in America, whose young protagonist finds himself saddled with a Pakistani Muslim exchange student.

But even that last move by the CW is overshadowed by Iran's hot new drama, Zero Degree Turn, in which a young Iranian man rescues his beloved, a Jewish woman, from the concentration camps. And on state-run television, too.

Pause, and rewind: President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has publicly denied the existence of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the month of Ramadan is prime TV-watching time throughout the Muslim world, and the romantic drama is probably a refreshing change from the clerics that normally feature on the "Bearded Box."

Iran may be trying to reshape its image through fiction, but across the border, entertainment is thumbing a televised nose at the state. Iraqis currently have a choice of at least three (count 'em) shows satirizing their beleaguered government, according to NPR:

One show is called Government. With a slight change in Iraqi Arabic, this phrase means, "Help me, I'm dead" — a pun lost on no one here.

Ouch. And I thought Warner and Levin were harsh.

If you haven't been following our Dust-Up on China engagement with Joseph Farah and Andrés Martinez, here's a sample from Tuesday's exchange. Said Farah:

I'm a fan of imports from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. I think most Americans are. These countries are known for producing quality goods at reasonable prices, for paying their workers fair salaries and for sharing many of our most basic values about human rights and liberties.

And Martinez:

I commend you for loving Japanese imports, but I must say a lot of the same people who are so exercised about China taking on the U.S. on the global stage are the same people who worked themselves into a frenzy over Japan's rise in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Remember when Toyotas were chainsawed on Capitol Hill? I don't play the race card lightly, but I do think there is an element of "yellow peril" mongering at issue here. The hysteria has moved from Japan to China, but the point is no one ever rants about German imports or Dutch foreign investment (the way they moaned about Japanese foreign investment).

The youngsters out there may be saying, "What are these two talking about? Isn't Japan that place with all the ganguro or something?" But you'll find a different story in the ever-forgettable first drafts of history...

Set the wayback machine to those zaibatsu-crazy days of chop-suey rock and full-bore Tokyophobia, before the Japenese bubble burst, when our nation's fascination with Japan Inc. (and vice-versa) expressed itself in such short-lived cultural monuments as Akio Morita's The Japan That Can Say No, Michael Crichton's Rising Sun and the Ron Howard joint Gung-Ho. (Jesus, what were we on?)

Believe it or not, back when "Ronald Reagan" was not yet the name of an airport and "George Bush" was still the name of a Dana Carvey routine, this country cowered in existential, yellow-peril horror because American drivers were appreciating the superior gas mileage of the Corolla, or because Sony was buying Columbia pictures, or most of all because the Mitsubishi Group had bought Radio City Music Hall — or as the late Art Buchwald called it in a 1989 column printed in the Los Angeles Times, "Radio City Tojo Hall" (complete with a "Kamikaze Ice Skating Rink").

Channeling the protectionism of the time was no less a figure than The Donald, whom Times reporter Frank Clifford quoted bashing the Rising Sun in New Hampshire in late 1987 (when Trump was still rumored as a possible '88 presidential candidate). "The fact is we don't need a tax increase," Trump told supporters. "We should have a tax decrease. We should have Japan and we should have Saudi Arabia and we should have all of these countries who are literally ripping us off left and right.... They should pay for our $200-billion deficit.... We are supporting — we are literally supporting — Japan, which is the greatest money machine ever created, and we created it to a large extent."

By the middle of the following year, Trump had warmed to the topic, telling Times reporter Nina J. Easton, "There is going to be a tremendous backlash against what Japan is doing in this country  — sucking the lifeblood out of it because of our stupid policies. Our policy is to have free trade, but Japan is not reciprocating."

Were the American People in sympathy with Trump's dimestore demagoguery? You betcha! As the decade Bob Giraldi built drew to a close, La Jolla's own Bob and Ann Gotfredson were hipping the Times' John M. Glionna to their own plan to fight back against the "financial volleys" against "sacred American institutions," with a Japanese-product boycott that would kick in on December 7. Bob Gotfredson explained the message of Akio Morita's book: "'We have a lot of wealth in your country. We employ a lot of your people, and one of these days we're going to show you the samurai sword."

Japanophobia hit full stride with the Rockefeller Center purchase in October of 1989, with disappointed tourists in the Big Apple complaining about our "selling the country away" and losing "some American spirt in the sense of keeping our property." By the end of the year the Times ran a UPI story hinting darkly of a Japanese group's ambition to buy up Chicago's Sears Tower. That rumor ended up in the same limbo as last year's terrorist plot in the Windy City against the perpetual bridesmaid of America's tragic skyscrapers.

As Bryan Caplan noted in a recent Reason article, "During the anti-Japan hysteria of the 1980s, British foreign direct investment in the U.S. always exceeded that of the Japanese by at least 50 percent." But that didn't stop the whole country from going stark, seppuku-inducing mad.

The whole country, that is, except the L.A. Times' editorial board, which, as it had in the days of Sputnik sputtering, maintained an even keel throughout the Crazy Eighties, and brought Gen. Otis' motto of "True Industrial Freedom" to life for a new generation. Some examples:

It's striking, in looking back over President Dwight Eisenhower's memoirs and the contemporary editorializing that marked the original Sputnik launch, to note not only how unhinged and terror-stricken the American media reaction to the event was but how hard the administration worked to calm people down. As Matthew Brzezinski (whose recent OpEd on Sputnik you oughta read) puts it in his wonderful book Red Moon Rising, "The more the administration told Americans not to worry, the louder the media beat their doomsday drums." Today's editorial on Sputnik cites a very panicky Walter Lippmann column, which is hard not to quote at greater length:

"The few who are allowed to know such things and are able to understand them are saying that the launching of so big a satellite signifies that the Soviets are much ahead of this country in the development of rocket missiles... In short the fact the at we have lost the race to launch the satellite means that we are losing the race to produce ballistic missiles. This in turn means that the United States and the western world may be falling behind in the progress of science and technology... The critical question is how we as a people...will respond to...a profound challenge to our cultural values...to the way in fact we have been living our life... With prosperity acting as a narcotic, with Philistinism and McCarthyism rampant, our public life has been increasingly doped and without purpose... [T]here is no standard raised to which the people can repair." And so on, and on. You really need to work in news to understand how stupid the news is.

One proud exception to the general knicker-twisting? The editorial board of the Los Angeles Times, whose primary response to the news of Sputnik's launch was a Pattonesque slap at all the blubbering ninnies. From our Oct. 8, 1957 editorial "Moonshine About the New Moon"...

This week-end's outpourings over the Russian satellite show most of the American spokesmen at their juvenile worst. They act like the alumni who want to fire the coach every time the team loses a game. That is exact: they view the satellite launching as a race which the United States has lost.

With section heds entitled "Sputtering Response," "What We Are Doing" and "Surmise and Facts," the editorial goes on to condemn the "half-cocked explosion of pseudo expertise," chastise one misinformed astronomer for "looking through the wrong end of his telescope," criticize the Eisenhower administration for not sending hearty congratulations to Moscow and thus reminding "the President's fellow citizens that they have a reputation for sportsmanship to maintain," throw cold water on Pentagon efforts to use the crisis to monopolize space development, and dismiss calls for a "crash program" as "the squirrel cage reaction which succeeds only in losing sight of facts." The editorial board also pulls some quotes from Project Vanguard officials who had noted, in the months prior to Sputnik, that the United States was on schedule to launch its satellite early in the next year (which is how things ended up going), and concludes with a list of the handful of facts then available, finally noting:

It is only a half century since man first got a machine off the ground through the application of power. Now they have gotten a thing out of this world. Perhaps it is a symptom of our time that the first reaction should be apprehension rather than exultant wonder. We ought to recover the pleasant use of our eyes and imaginations.

But the ed board wasn't through shaming the Chicken Littles. On Oct. 10, an editorial goes into much greater detail, noting that an article in the July issue of Missiles and Rockets had already made clear that the Russians would probably get the first satellite up and thus nobody should have been surprised. (Eisenhower in his memoirs makes the same point.) "So far," says the board, "there have been opinions without measure but very few measured opinions." (Lippman's piece, which falls into every one of the traps the ed board noted, appeared the following day.)

Has America learned to chill in the half-century since this first outbreak of sublunary lunacy? Hardly. A few days ago NASA administrator Mike Griffin mentioned his belief that China may get to the moon before the United States gets back. The AP's reaction, in an article titled "China May Win New Space Race, NASA Says," was to phrase what would essentially be a footnote in the history of science as an ominous new loss for American prestige:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The Soviets beat the United States at getting a satellite, and a man, into space. Now, the Chinese may get to the moon before the U.S. can make a return visit.

Fifty years after Sputnik became the world's first artificial satellite, a new race is under way with the finish line on the moon. NASA, the former lunar champion, already is predicting defeat.

As Gen. Kevin Chilton notes in his OpEd today, when China demonstrates its willingness to endanger the world's civilian and military satellite system, that's a problem. When China gets to the moon, almost fifty years after Apollo 11, that will be a reason to congratulate the Chinese.

The strange thing about space hysterias is that given the lead time involved in getting up there, space breakthroughs almost never come as a surprise. One of my all-time favorite books, Mae and Ira Freeman's You Will Go To the Moon, was published way back in 1959, yet as these illustrations by Robert Patterson make clear, the basic ideas of the Apollo-style (or CEV-style) mission were common knowledge enough at the time to be the material for a kids' book:

The Wall Street Journal's Brody Mullins, camera in hand, treks out to the badlands of San Mateo County to find the seemingly modest house of the Paw family, who in conjunction with their associate, New York-based wheeler-dealer Norman Hsu, have made generous contributions to the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-New York). The numbers:

Six members of the Paw family, each listing the house at 41 Shelbourne Ave. as their residence, have donated a combined $45,000 to the Democratic senator from New York since 2005, for her presidential campaign, her Senate re-election last year and her political action committee. In all, the six Paws have donated a total of $200,000 to Democratic candidates since 2005, election records show.

That total ranks the house with residences in Greenwich, Conn., and Manhattan's Upper East Side among the top addresses to donate to the Democratic presidential front-runner over the past two years, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of donations listed with the Federal Election Commission.

The article takes hypothetical pains not to say that the Paws are being given money by wealthier people to invest in Clinton's political future, but just to note that if, in some alt.reality, they were doing that, it would violate campaign finance laws. The story is far from probative: The Paws have a large family with some seemingly successful children (one manages a mutual fund). Their son Winkle acknowledges the family's association with Hsu (excuse me, Mr. Hsu), and least persuasive of all is the campaign-finance-investigation-by-architecture-review portion of the story:

The Paw's Daly City home is a one-story house in a working-class suburb of San Francisco. On a recent day, a coiled garden hose rested next to a dilapidated garden with a half-dozen dried out plants. The din of traffic from a nearby freeway was occasionally drowned out by jumbo jets departing San Francisco International Airport.

Don't let that "working-class" business fool you, comrade. Daly City, a little slice of Purgatory just below the Heaven of San Francisco, is as outrageously priced as only a town on the Peninsula can be. I know an Orthodox priest who spent nearly $800,000 on a D.C. dump not much different from the one in Mullins' photo — and that was in the late nineties, long before the market peak. I find it not at all surprising that an extended family that can get its paws on this lime-green palace would be able to spend $200,000 becoming "Hillraisers." Still, this is an interesting piece of enterprise journalism, even if you, like me, are one of those crazy people who believe how you spend money in exercising your First Amendment right to express your political views is your own damn business. And with the warning that life ain't easy for a boy named Hsu, I commend you to the full story.

Dick Cheney was one of the primary proponents for war with Iraq. So imagine my surprise when I heard, on radio station KPCC last night, a 1994 interview with then-ex-Secretary of Defense Cheney that sounded uncannily prophetic. Almost in one breath, the current vice president rattles off the reasons that invading Iraq during the Gulf War would have been a bad, bad idea:

Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?

CHENEY: No.

Q: Why not?

CHENEY: Because if we’d gone into Baghdad we would have been all alone, there wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got into Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off—part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim, fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

Who IS this guy? And where was he four years ago?

Granted, this is a worst-case scenario, but where it hasn’t happened exactly as our balding Cassandra predicted, it has come close. The only major ally we’ve maintained in our policies in the Middle East has been Britain — a partnership that’s already looking shaky with Gordon Brown in office. We had a hell of a time creating a viable government, which remains ineffectual—the Iraqi parliament achieved little before its August recess. We’ve seen Iran rise in power, Kurdish separatists seek more autonomy and Turkey bridle over border issues.

This interview is making the rounds thanks to YouTube, and it's no surprise. I'm sure many could accept that the occupation of Iraq has been mishandled and that the war in Iraq was an unforseen political snafu. But this revelation — that the second-in-command must have known what we were getting into — could have far-reaching political consequences if it percolates through to major media outlets. Cheney would certainly have to answer some uncomfortable questions, and it could seriously demoralize those Bush supporters still holding the line. If the White House knew what would happen all along, why bother defending Bush's Iraq policy?

I suppose that if nothing else, it’s a testament to the folly of man — particularly politicians. 

Cheney goes on to make a more poignant argument:

The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad [and] took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many. And I think we got it right.

Too bad they got it so wrong the second time around.

At the risk of seeming obsessed by SCTV, I must note that “Wheel of Fortune,” “Jeopardy!” and hotel deals weren’t Merv Griffin’s only achievements. Griffin inspired three of the most inventive and free-associative parodies produced by SCTV, all of them anchored by Rick Moranis’ impersonation of Griffin, which consisted of a gray wig, a padded rump and two vocalizations: “Oooooooh” (Merv/Rick’s sycophantic response to anything his B-list celebrity guests said) and “We’ll be right back!”

In the “Merv Griffith Show,” which built on the frail similarity between Merv’s last name and Andy Griffith’s, Merv was the sheriff of Mayberry. In “Merv Griffin: The Special Edition,” Steven Speilberg directed Merv, Orson Welles (John Candy), HAL the Computer from “2001: A Space Odyssey,”  George Plimpton (Joe Flaherty)  and Griffin regular Phyllis Newman in a televised space flight that managed to parody all concerned along with “Star Wars,” the rivalry between Spielberg and George Lucas and Plimpton’s sideline as a pitchman for Intellivision video games.

Then there was the tribute to Merv’s “theme shows”: a clueless salute to the psychedelic '60s with a Nehru-jacketed Merv singing, “There must be some kinda way outa here,” and bantering with Dennis Hopper (Dave Thomas) and an out-of-it Jackie Vernon (Candy). Oooooooh!

Attention, all you fashionistas: Marge Simpson is smokin'. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the brilliant spreads in the August edition of Harper's Bazaar. Tucked in between photos of standard pouty models and some Jessica Simpson glam shots, “The Simpsons go to Paris” showcases the infamous cartoon family traipsing through Europe bedecked in yards of haute couture.

While it's formatted like your standard photoshoot, each page offers up new wonders. In one scene, Homer scrounges for change in the background while Linda Evangelista, Bart Simpson's favorite (real-life) supermodel, fastens an Alber Elbaz necklace around a delighted Lisa’s neck. In another, twins Patty and Selma participate in the notorious Viktor & Rolf photoshoot, outfits complete with spotlights and scaffolding. In my personal favorite, Marge lounges in Versace and lets her hair down, unafraid of showing off her curves.

That’s quite a contrast to most of the two-dimensional or plastic women out there — from retro Betty Boop to trashy Bratz — whose dimensions are often realized in the entertainment industry. The tide may be turning, however: Spain's establishment of a minimum Body Mass Index may have embarrassed the American industry, though it didn't cow them into setting their own standards. While America's Next Top Model is still the model for the small screen, shows like Mo'Nique's Fat Chance have made a splash.

Body image isn't getting a makeover, though — more of a frenzied touch up. In fact, in less cosmetic arenas, fat is being further stigmatized. Some insurance companies are charging workers more if they're overweight, and a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine warned of the contagious nature of obesity. Skinny still reigns supreme, whether in plastic, on paper or in the flesh.    

Harper's statement, then, is an interesting one. As these spreads dress up womanly figures — Patty and Selma's ankles are bared in all their chubby glory — they reject the standard vamp silhouette. Granted, Linda E.'s two-dimensional avatar remains as slim as her real self, but middle-aged Marge proves to be just as glamorous.

Don't expect to catch plus-sizes on the cover of Vogue anytime soon, illustrated or otherwise. While the Simpsons spreads were a breath of fresh air, change ain't coming if it takes an imaginary character to combat unrealistic body images. All the same, it’s nice to see toons imitate life for once — and come out looking damn good, too. 

Here's a wonderful artifact of the culture boom: You can get a fulltime blog just out of weird and telling book covers. The semiotics of popular book covers is a topic I've always enjoyed, and I've got plenty of company among lovers of lez-sploitation art, general purpose pulp sleaze and the strangely appropriate dime-novel covers of modern literary classics.

But blogger "Maughta" does yeoman service by demonstrating that the art of the unbelievable book cover is alive and well, and not only in the pulp covers that are such a familiar part of the pop-reappreciation landscape. For your reading — or more exactly, your viewing — pleasure, it's "Judge A Book By Its Cover." Maughta culls the underworld of romance novels, TV-show tie-ins, mid-list literary fiction, junior high chestnuts and the ever-reliable pulps for cover art that is so bad it's good, so bad it's bad, so bad it's good-bad, or sometimes just too weird to fit into the good/bad continuum.

For my money, Maughta can be a bit too perfunctory in her japery. I'd prefer she augment her stellar collection of titles with more probing meditations, unmotivated flights of fancy, tangential skylarking, and so on, but for the most part it's pretty much a cover image and a snarky aside. But it's not for me to gainsay Maughta's magnificent achievement in assembling this collection of oddities and rarities, along with the occasional irregular. Dig the three-handed woman in the cover to the right. That I'd never have noticed this mutation if I stumbled across this book in the store is a testament to Maughta's eagle eye, and to Judge A Book's value as a reinvigorator of pop detritus. Read on, MacDuff!

Back in the early aughts, I wrote a column about the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) that came to an angsty, forelock-tugging, hand-wringing, chin-stroking inconclusion: MEMRI's agenda was pretty obviously to find the most extreme and daffy points of view in Arabic and Farsi media and present those as representative of the mainstream, but (forelock-tugging alert) it was also true that the kind of wackiness found at MEMRI had far more mainstream currency than many Americans (still in the grip of the unexamined except-for-a-few-bad-apples-most-Muslims-are-good-hardworking-folks platitudes that had currency at the time) were aware. So who was to blame? MEMRI for trying to make Muslims look like nuts, or Muslims for making MEMRI's job so easy? How to decide? My hands wrung, my heart ached, beads of cartoon flopsweat flew from my brow...

A few years on, I think there's less need to draw the conclusion, because to a substantial degree the dilemma has gone away. Liberal and rational Arab pundits—once as rare as Halley's Comet in the MEMRIverse—now appear with great regularity (albeit usually posed against fiery imams or maniacal theologians in televised debates). Whether this is a matter of conscious choice by MEMRI or a reflection of greater openness in the increasingly competitive Arab media market is an interesting question, but it certainly makes for a more entertaining selection. Case in point is this edited Al Jazeera exchange between Arab Students Union Chairman Ahmad Al-Shater and Syrian author Nidhal Naisa, featuring some astonishingly forthright criticism from Naisa:

Nidhal Naisa: "This decline is evident in... Take, for example, that show, 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.' This shows demonstrates the degree of decline in values and knowledge in these societies. With all due respect to the host of the show, this isn't the issue... He sits opposite that 'genius' guest, who came from I don't know where. They bring this young 'genius' guest, and he brings along his wife and his whole tribe. They sit the guest down opposite the host, who asks him: 'What is the capital of Egypt - is it Cairo, Mairo, Fairo, or Makro?' The 'genius' scratches his head, and says: 'Could you please eliminate two answers?' The host eliminates two answers, and leaves Cairo and Mairo. Then he says: 'Can I please phone a friend?' He phones a friend, and the whole neighborhood comes over..."

Faysal Al-Qassem: "It's not as bad as that, Nidhal."

Nidhal Naisa: "I swear, Dr. Faysal, it happens with even more idiotic questions."

More of those comedy stylings in the transcript here, but it's worth watching Naisa's televised performance with subtitles, because his delivery is as sprightly and absurd as something out of Moliere. The reason satire closes on Saturday night (or I guess Thursday night in Qatar) is that telling audiences they're stupid is never much of a crowd pleaser. But there's also a truth that the clergy never forget: Making fun of a pious extremist is a great way to get under his skin.

I haven't given up my ambition to write a song using all these cutesy acronyms for Middle East watchdog/research/anti-defamation groups, something like: "My CAMERA brought back the MEMRI of  the FLAME of our love when we still CAIRed for each other out on the MESA." Meanwhile, it's encouraging to see Naisa and others like him working the comedy club/religious debate circuit. 

So a few nights ago I'm walking my kids past Mel's Drive-In at Highland and Hollywood, when we get flagged down by a strangely chimerical penguin (a penguin, I later learned, with longer, airworthy wings and the head of an eagle). He's Norky, an all-purpose mascot whose press materials describe him as "the Hybrid Peneagle from the North Pole" and also "'The New Original GOODWILL Character' who appears anywhere any day of the year." Norky and his handler, Brady Farmer, were working bystanders for a free-food offering from a local ad hoc committee to save the Hollywood Christmas Parade. The guy in the Norky suit was pretty good: He successfully engaged my five-year-old for a couple minutes without scaring her, and when Farmer namedropped Mickey Rooney as a supporter of the save-the-parade campaign, I said "Hey, isn't that Mickey in the Norky suit?" and Norky without missing a beat squatted down until his peneagle suit was almost a perfect sphere and began waving: "No this is Mickey in the Norky suit," he said—which wasn't the funniest gag ever but was fairly witty for an on-the-spot reaction.

Anyway, the save-the-parade meeting was sparsely attended. For a story about the campaign in late March, an aide to Councilman Eric Garcetti told the L.A. Times' Bob Pool, "[O]ur office looks forward to learning more about their efforts," but sadly, neither Garcetti nor Councilman Tom LaBonge responded to invitations. Melrose Larry Green, on the other hand, was in attendance, and I wish the activists the best in their efforts. A recent Times Op-Ed mourned the passing of the parade, and it seems strange that the center of the global entertainment complex can't compete in the parade market with Pasadena or Philadelphia: I'd suggest moving the resurrected parade away from the Macy's Thanksgiving competition and into an early-December date—maybe Día de la Inmaculada Concepción (12/8 this year) or even Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (12/12), both of which would seem to fit L.A. to a tee. The Christmas-parade niche is wide open, but not if you hold it on Thanksgiving weekend.

But it's Norky who's really fired my imagination. Just what is the peneagle's status in the lovable-character/mascot pecking order? The enthusiastic Farmer assured me that the character does solid business in Kentucky Derby appearances, has TV deals in 30 countries and, after five years in action, is set to expand into a range of media. Eight-year-old Christian A. Henley, for example, has authored Adventures with Norky: Teamwork. For more documentary evidence, here's a gallery of Norky photo opps. This pic of the peneagle, Santa Claus and L. Ron Hubbard's spirit all supporting the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights is from Norky's site, which ominously warns that Norky "even shows up in your dreams."

The one place Norky hasn't shown up has been on my radar screen, and while I don't like to brag, the last few years have given me more than a passing acquaintance with sub-A-list-level kid-friendly characters. If you're talking Miffy, the strangely deathless Noddy, even Jakers! The Adventures of Piggly Winks, you're talking my language. But Norky? Never heard of him until the other night. And not to put too fine a point on it but it's a seller's market these days for penguin avatars; if anything we're rapidly approaching the saturation point. I'd suggest Norky ditch the half-eagle stuff in a hurry and just start marketing himself as a magical penguin who flies and plays Polar Ball.

Norky's also got an uphill climb in terms of brand recognition. While he tops the Google results for a search on "norky," the first results page also turns up entries on Norky's Peruvian restaurant in Tampa, Florida; a seemingly more swank Norky's in Lima; and most disastrously, several mentions of a character named Norky who showed up on the Ewoks television show in the eighties, and is described by witnesses as "a marsupial-type creature" and "an obnoxious kangaroo-like creature." At the very least, Norky is going to have to close out the competition in the imaginary-creature space, and also distinguish a separate brand identity from the various bulletin-board Norkys who self-identify as Opera browser users, Buddhist guitar fans, and the "King of Kings."

Nevertheless, Farmer, who recently took charge of building the brand as Norky Entertainment's director of entertainment and community affairs, says the company is doing well enough to employ 20 people, including an assistant for himself—and to my rather too blunt question, he replied that yes, they are making payroll. He also promised to send some Norky swag my way, and I will be sure to give my report when that arrives. And in fact, I intend to keep an eye out for Norky in the future. While I hope he can help lead the Hollywood Christmas Parade to a triumphant return to life, I'm mainly just fascinated by the franchising prospects. Every day people are striking it rich on brands you've never heard of—another fascinating region of the Long Tail era, even if penguins don't have very long tails.

Here's the caption:

Protesters waved Iraqi flags as they marched in Najaf, south of Baghdad, to demand the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Event security was handled by Iraqi troops and police officers, and there were no reports of violence.

Here's the picture.

Questions? Comments?

(The California version of the print edition, by the way, reads "Iraqis tore an American flag at a protest rally in Najaf called by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr on the fourth anniversary of Baghdad's fall.")

Hang in there, Mrs. Butterworth! The glass ceiling that has kept not only women but racially embarrassing corporate avatars out of the top ranks of American business may finally be cracking. The New York Times reports that Uncle Ben, the fictional mascot for a line of rice and side-dishes, likes his own product so much he bought the company:

"Uncle Ben...is being reborn as Ben, an accomplished businessman with an opulent office, a busy schedule, an extensive travel itinerary and a penchant for sharing what the company calls his 'grains of wisdom' about rice and life."

A visit to Uncle Ben's boardroom hints at what a thankless task it is to try and explain away these uncomfortable institutional histories. Couldn't they at least have let Ben lose the bowtie? It's an effort that reminds you of the "Cook's Chicken" plot in the movie version of Ghost World; the attempt to revise the past is almost as embarrassing as the actual past. It turns out the Uncle Ben logo isn't some turn-of-the-twentieth-century icon that existed into the postwar era; he was actually invented in 1946. Not exactly recent history, but not colonial history either: As early as the 1934 version of Imitation of Life (not as good as the Douglas Sirk remake but worth watching, among other reasons, because it's partly set in this reporter's home town: get both versions on a single DVD!), the use of Louise Beavers' mug as the logo for a product she doesn't get to own was a major plot point—and even back then the audience was clearly supposed to understand the irony in that.

It's an interesting site. Among the features are Ben's appointment calendar and little book of aphorisms. These illustrate the kind of self-doubt and fearful circumspection that go into an effort like this—and yet you still can't help thinking it all sounds too white. What exactly are they getting at with the Uncle Benism "How about some respect for the meat & rice man?" And isn't there a hint of Robert Ripleyesque exoticism in Ben's writing about his adventures "traversing through Bengal and Doab...Turkey, Persia, the Steppes, and the Blue Mediterranean...magnanimous countries"? Or this item from Ben's appointment book: "travel to Australia—meet with Tasmanian Aborigines. Demonstrate why my Instant Long Grain White Rice is far more expedient than a mortar and pestle."

And what's with that hyperurbanized writing style? "Tree sledding in Japan, while remarkably exhilirating, has a chafing factor that I had not fully taken into consideration." Or: "[T]he ground rules of proper gentlemanly etiquette prevent me from revealing my chronological age." For a while I thought the diction was supposed to sound overly clunky and high-falutin'. But then I noted that even in his jotted notes, Uncle Ben makes sure to respect the registered trademark logo, as in: "Perhaps this is why plates of my READY RICE® pilaf are so popular..." Never attribute to malice what can be explained by a tin-eared copywriter.

Related: Josh Glenn reveals the hidden kinship of Jane Austen and Aunt Jemimah.

Berkeley, which has long considered itself a very important place, declared itself a “nuclear-free zone” two decades ago. No matter that the city was taking on a federal issue that it had no power to control. The municipal label might have been meaningless, but it celebrated Berkeley’s own brand of solipsistic chutzpah.

Now New Mexico has left Berkeley in the nuclear-free dust by declaring state powers over the solar system. When Pluto passes over New Mexico, the state legislature decided earlier this month, it will have full planet status.

For those who missed Pluto’s demotion last year, scientists decided to shrink the solar system down to eight planets because there are other little round things circling the sun that are just as big. Now Pluto is one of a handful of “dwarf planets” in the solar system.

It’s all about hometown pride. Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, was a New Mexico resident who had no formal astronomy training, but still built his own telescopes and found—well, a little round thing out there beyond Neptune.

A personal note on Tombaugh. Back when my now-23-year-old daughter was in second grade, she called Tombaugh for a report she was doing on Pluto. (People were listed in those days.) He was uncommonly kind about answering the sorts of questions a 7-year-old thinks up. (“How’s your cat?” “Uh...it died.” Flood of tears.) When he died seven years later, she cried again.

In an age that celebrates advanced degrees over just plain smarts, we don’t have many Tombaughs, and it’s honestly sad to see his accomplishment diminished in any way. But he was a scientist above all, who knew, as New Mexico’s lawmakers apparently don’t, that science is about what’s true, not about what we wish were true.

A small portion of Tombaugh’s ashes are carried on the New Horizons spacecraft mission to Pluto. He wouldn’t mind that they were speeding through space toward a dwarf planet discovered by a genius.

If I seemed to be singling out the L.A. Times in my recent filbuster on La Cucaracha and the crisis in the funny pages, let me note that the cancer in comic strips has spread far and wide. At the barber shop this weekend, my kid scored a classic one-pack of Bazooka bubble gum, and was so unimpressed by the enclosed comic that she fobbed it off on me without comment. In common with an estimated 100% of humanity, I have always loathed Bazooka Joe comics, so it took me a few days and a pocket-emptying change of pants to take note of Joe's new blue-and-white look: