Frey Hustles Oprah & Hollyweird

Frey’s Million Little Nose Nuggets are getting picked in public, but not by OPRAH. Screenplay will be based on "facts" for upcoming Hollyweird production.

We might have guessed that if "Queen of Found-Memories" Oprah was excited, something must have been very wrong about Mega-Fraud James Frey.

Frey’s unmasking and then total strip-searching in public by TSG has got "Found-Memories Oprah" making all sorts of excuses for the hoaxer on the Larry King Show.

Since the book's 2003 publication (the $14.95 paperback was issued last summer by Anchor Books), Frey has defended "A Million Little Pieces" against critic claims that parts of the book rang untrue. In a New York Times review, Janet Maslin mocked the author--a former alcoholic who has rejected the precepts of Alcoholics Anonymous--for instead hewing to a cynical "memoirist's Twelve Step program."

According to a blog named Swallowing the Camel in a post called A Million Little Pieces of Crap Frey eschewed AA and the 12 Steps because, as an atheist, he refused to relinquish his life to a Higher Power.

You can imagine the low-life audience this hustler was trying to achieve when you read a "memoir" of a drunk who ridicules Alcoholics Anonymous. AA advises submission to a Higher Power. AA has long been the enemy of those who seek to absolve perps and pervs and bongers and drunks of all or any accountability/responsibility for their own social pathologies.

Oprah & Hollyweird & her buddy Frey appear to believe the Highest Power is in reality their own fantastically bloated hedonistic egomania.And of course, that story:

"the time in Paris (he's supposedly fled to Europe after jumping bail in Ohio) when, on his way to commit suicide by throwing himself into the Seine, Frey stops into a church to have a good cry. There, a "Priest," while pretending to listen to Frey's description of his wrecked life, makes a lunge for Frey's crotch. "You must not resist God's will, my Son," says the priest. A vicious beatdown ensues, with Frey possibly killing the grasping cleric, whom the author kicked in the balls 15 times. Mon dieu!"

Yes, you can be sure Frey thought that little vignette would win over those holdouts who weren’t satisfied with bashing AA. Wonder why he didn’t make up a synagogue and rabbi fable? Or a mosque and mullah make-believe? Or transvestite near-murder? I'll bet Frey's French was up to the blurted confession. Or maybe the "priest" understood Middle-West obscenities like Frey?

Simpleton blubberers like Oprah are an easy mark. But leftist trashing of any red-state icons like AA or respected institutions like the Catholic Church has become a mantra-staple of the MSM. Frey knew how to get trash-mongers like the Talese group interested.

In their classic deconstruction of Oprah and her entire fantasia fan-club funny farm, entitled THE MAN WHO CONNED OPRAH, TSG says:

we chose to focus on the crime and justice aspect of "A Million Little Pieces." Which wasn't much of a decision since almost every character in Frey's book that could address the remaining topics has either committed suicide, been murdered, died of AIDS, been sentenced to life in prison, gone missing, landed in an institution for the criminally insane, or fell off a fishing boat never to be seen again.

How convenient for pulp-fiction hack-shops like the Talese Family.

The Smoking Gun proceeds to completely destroy any credibility that poseur Frey may have claimed. But the gullible Oprah stands [or weeps] firm: The Toronto Globe and Mail, a liberal megaphone, uncharacteristically snipes at the liberal MSM, but then at the very end, BLAMES IT ALL ON BUSH! [spoiler alert!]

What's more intriguing is why sleepy ol' Booktown has reacted so violently. Just let's say that not a whole lot of work got done this week in literary America.
The reason is that the Frey fray has unmasked so many of the book biz's shameless practices.
The first of these is the quixotic power of Oprah to create bestsellers. Ms. Winfrey went gushy over the Frey book last fall, referring to its author as "The Man Who Kept Oprah Awake At Night" and hailing the tome as "like nothing you've ever read before."
Now, the Empress is revealed as not wearing a full set of clothes, woo-hoo, woo-hoo. On-line discussions are still raging as to whether she let her audience down by touting a book whose veracity she didn't bother to examine.
Then came the next cry: Where were the publisher's fact-checkers? I have news for you: Publishers generally don't check facts. Hell, they barely edit. I'd be willing to wager this newspaper is edited five times more carefully than almost any book you've read in five years. Publishers claim they can't afford it.
Hence the second weakness exposed by the Frey fracas: The publishing industry's conveniently loosey-goosey attitude toward separating "facts" from "fiction" in highly profitable "memoirs."

But this book was published by "New Journalism" huckster Nan Talese:

Even Nan Talese, the top-rank editor who published the Frey book, was quoted in The New York Times defending Mr. Frey's inventions as a memoirist's right. "Memoir," she said, "is personal recollection. It is not absolute fact."
Her husband, the famous New Journalist Gay Talese, came out in the same story saying the opposite. "Non-fiction takes no liberty with the facts, and it should not," he said. "All writers should be held accountable."

Yes, the New Journalism by sex-addicted Gay is more than about self-absorbed New Journalists. But Quis custodiet custodes? Or who are the custodians? It turns out that facts are very low on New Journalism’s priority list. Nor, by extension, the venerable publishing industry that munches on the MSM BS and calls it Hershey Chocolate.

The Globe and Mail goes on:

Gay's right. It's not quantum physics, after all. If you made it up, it's fiction. I'm not talking about changing names, or subjectively remembering a conversation that took place long ago, all of which seems defensible in a memoir. But inventing a three-month jail term? That's a spitball.

But what about real literary lions and really great memoir as literature?

Defending it as "memoir" gives honest non-fiction -- Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life or Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, to name two -- a bad name.
Would it be acceptable to alter facts in a memoir about, say, the Holocaust? Of course not. Recovery memoirs evidently have lower standards.
Which is yet another publishing industry secret Mr. Frey's case has uncovered -- the degraded but profitable state of the addiction and recovery genre.
Emotionally clich?d, intellectually vapid and stylistically excruciating, the vast majority of these books rely on boilerplate format: Start with the darkest, most hackneyed account of one's downfall; invent a lily-white and utterly infantalized vision of goodness and redemption at the other end of the scale; and proceed swiftly from one to the other, simplifying all emotion along the way.

Just the kind of stuff Lionel Trilling wannabee Oprah touts along with Faulkner and Tolstoy!

John Dolan, co-editor of The eXile, a Moscow-based English-language alternative webzine (http://www.exile.ru), put it best last week, having long-doubted Mr. Frey's bona fides: "Rehab stories provide a way for pampered trust-fund brats like Frey to claim victim status. These swine already have money, security and position and now want to corner the market in suffering and scars, the consolation prizes of the truly lost. It's a fitting literary metonymy for the Bush era: The rich have decided to steal it all, even the tears of the losers."

The Hurricanes, Tsunamis, Global Warming, New Journalism, ALL BUSH'S FAULT!

BLUE PLATE SPECIAL from Earth-tones ex-VEEP

The blue phantom appears again and again, getting bluer with each apparition.

Former Vice President Al Gore will deliver a major address Monday on the threat posed by policies of the Bush Administration to the Constitution and the checks and balances it created. The speech will specifically point to domestic wiretapping and torture as examples of the administration's efforts to extend executive power beyond Congressional direction and judicial review.

Yes, Al will address the two concerns Americans have about the Republicans, oops, maybe I mean Democrats?

National Security and Crime [actually both in the cases of wiretapping and torture].

Not even the Democratic lunatic fringe on the Left Coast is charging that the wiretaps by the NSA are trying to eavesdrop on American political organizations to play political tricks. They are tapping lines to learn of possible attacks on America.

Nor have the allegations of torture, outside of the Abu Gharaib fiasco which was never authorized by a general officer, ever held serious water. Renditions of foreign suspects to other countries or exposure to extreme mental duress at Guantanamo may have taken place, but the suspected perps have again been potential threats to national security, not Amcits charged with disturbing the domestic peace.

The portentous nature of the event is described thusly:

The Vice President will make the case that the country -- including the legislative and judicial branches and all Americans -- must act now to defend the systems put into place by the country's founders to curb executive power or risk permanent and irreversible damage to the Constitution.

Actually, the founders were halfway-minded to make George Washington a king. It was our First President who demurred and actually ramped down executive power, but even George I never foresaw Lilliputians in Congress and the courts trying to tie down George III [!?!] in matters of national and domestic security.

Al is giving additional evidence that his defeat in Florida was fortuitous for the Republic. Al’s Deep Indigo shade of blueness won’t gain traction in a country still unconvinced that the Democrats don’t have strong credentials on national defense [against terrorism, for instance] and crime [like treason, for instance].

Bill Clinton tended to look the other way when he had opportunities to catch potential miscreants as when Sudan offered Osama’s head on a plate in 1995-6. Too many legal hoops to jump through and smoke-rings in his mind for Bill and his phalanxes of lawyers to confront.

George I never became king, but George III never wants to become one. GW only wants to make sure another 9/11 doesn’t happen on his watch. If Al’s former boss Bill had paid more attention to sleuthing out the perps after the 1993 World Trade Tower attacks, the '98 Embassy bombings in Africa, the attack on the Cole, and the first 9/11 might never have happened.

Ultra-violet Al will catch the attention of the Boston-Beltway corridor and the Left Coast blue crabs, but his whimpering will not halt the red-shift in the flyover states toward valuing defense and domestic security.

Friday the 13th Wishes to Iran: Have a nuclear accident soon!

Almost all of the UN Security Council except Russia and China condemn Iran’s move to develop nuclear weapons. Oh well, maybe those two will come around. Or NOT!

Iran does not even repeat any more the hilarious fiction that the country in the world with the second greatest reserves of natural gas [after Russia] is going nuclear for its “energy needs.” Now the ex-terrorist hostage-taker President of Iran proclaims the “right” to make a bomb.

Happily, even the normally supine Europeans have objected and the Bush/Merkel meeting has resulted in a strong
condemnation of Iran’s new nuke policy.

But China is thirsty for Iranian oil and Russia makes money from helping Iran develop the nukes, so those two sturdily moral guiding lights of the international scene are a sure bet to equivocate on a UNSC meeting. Plus maybe Russia and Iran can set higher natural gas prices if the relationship remains stable.

My guess is that the UN will be as effective in thwarting Iran’s nuclear ambitions as it has been quelling the Sudanese genocide in Darfur. Any takers?

ALITO HEARINGS SYMBOLIZE KENNEDY's DOWNFALL

Peggy Noonan has a WSJ piece that rhapsodizes a bit about Joe Biden and his whimsical verbosity wandering the landscape in search of a thought. Unlike Richard Cohen in the Washington Post, who believes Joe’s nutty sort of everyman humor deprives him of the gravitas Cohen believes is required to run for President.

Cohen’s article is humorous, but Noonan actually hits some sort of paydirt when she notices that Joe Biden is unlike some of the other Democrats on the Committee:

In this, in the hearings, Biden is unlike Ted Kennedy in that he doesn't seem driven by some obscure malice--"Uh, I, uh, cannot, uh, remembuh why I hate you, Judge Alioto, but there, uh, must be a good reason and I will, um, damn well find it." When he peers over his glasses at Judge Alito he is like an old woman who's unfortunately senile and quite sure the teapot on the stove is plotting against her. Mr. Biden is also unlike Chuck Schumer in that he doesn't ask questions with an air of, "With this one I'm going to trap you and leave you flailing like a bug in a bug zapper--we're going to hear your last little crackling buzz any minute now!"

Reading Noonan's paragraph above, I was suddenly struck by the memory, when she mentions Kennedy, of the grade school bully when I was in the third or fourth grade of Christ King School in Wauwatosa, WI. He was a fellow named Reilly who was an eighth grader with a college football player’s build and body, and he would wale the living daylights out of anyone who looked at him crossways. Reilly had that pugilistic Irish punk demeanor of Sean Penn, who blames Bush for not allowing him to give up smoking, and Reilly terrorized the playground more or less on a daily basis and the nuns could not or would not do anything about him.

Maybe Reilly and Teddy share an Irish bully gene, one that fellow Irishman Biden obviously lacks. Teddy’s oldest brother, war hero Joe, was reputed to be very much a bully in his Harvard days. Perhaps it came with being from the second generation of Irish students at Harvard [Teddy’s poppa Joe was the first and had to behave well and fit in] who could shrug off the WASPs' closet snobbery with superior athletic prowess in and out of the boxing ring.

I should mention here that my sister-in-law worked for Teddy as a Legislative Assistant long ago and has told my wife that Teddy has long had to work from cue cards very closely, as he is not at all the sharpest tool in the Kennedy-brother shed. He does have difficulty conducting civil discourse and verges on being insultingly clueless when asked to explain himself or what he is trying to say.

Strange that this Senator since 1962 has done so much damage to the Democratic Party‘s Ascendancy he inherited while his brother was President and another brother Attorney General and even more dominant after the country voted overwhelmingly for Johnson in the mid-60s.

Since then, Kennedy has single-mindedly engaged in a decades-long samurai-suicide rite of self destruction both politically and personally. His chronic drinking resulted in a young woman’s death in one of his philandering expeditions---he tried to get a family friend to take the rap before fessing up---and this massive personal indiscretion was followed by a gigantic POLITICAL indiscretion when he ran for President against a sitting first-term Democrat in 1980.

Liberals have a forgetfulness gene which helps explain their obscure loyalty to the fellow who almost single-handedly accomplished the advent of Ronald Reagan to the American Presidency and began the long process of the Democrats' degeneration into a minority party in Congress. Only the MSM’s bizarre touting of the eccentric Ross Perot’s off-again, on-again campaign in ‘92 boosted Clinton into the White House. Clinton was a fluke delaying the inevitable downfall of the Democrats that Teddy started decades earlier when he lost the Senate Majority Leader job through political hamhandedness. JFK was a leader, Bobby may have become a leader, but the Benjamin of that brood lacks that essential leadership quality: moral authority.

But now is the Gotterdaemmerung of the Democrats as they watch their long-term strategy of judicial activism centering on their Supreme Court majority at last fade into the past.
Alito will be the fifth sitting Catholic SCOTUS member and perhaps no single person deserves more credit for this newly acquired Republican dominance in all three branches of US government than Teddy Kennedy, who made Reagan President in 1980 and now cannot stop Alito from gaining the Supreme Court.

If Kennedy had a conscience or any moral character, he would be ashamed of himself.

MY YEAR IN IRAQ, by L. Paul Bremer III

The Charlie Rose Show featured a full hour with Mr. Bremer, who I knew and disliked from my long-ago days in the State Dept and continued to blame for much of the hardships our foreign policy faces in Iraq.

Although Bremer did not convert me, his cogent replies to Rose’s excellent probing inquiries did put a different perspective than the one conveyed by the MSM.

First, the two big "mistakes" that Bremer allegedly made were disbanding the Iraqi armed forces and de-Baathification of the governing class of the country.

Bremer insists that the Iraqi Army deserted the instant Baghdad fell three weeks after the start of the invasion, that they had been asked to "stand to" by Tommy Franks at their barracks for payment of their meager wages, but that the conscript army of 300,000 were mainly lowly Shi’ites who had already looted the barracks and long since gone south toward home. The mainly Sunni officer class and the elite Republican Guard were stationed north of Baghdad and were supposed to be handled by the American forces coming from the north, the same forces that the Turks forbade transit at the last minute. The Guard melted away, though they too were offered paychecks, according to Bremer. Some of the Guard are suspected to have formed the backbone of the nascent insurgency, so we can thank the Turks for their stab-in-the-back at the last minute. {They’ll fit right into the EU, but I hope they get rejected for EU membership just because of their inconstancy.]

On the de-Baathification issue, Bremer says that only about one percent, or 20,000 of the top Baathists ranked high enough to be denied jobs in the new governing body. The rest were about 2 million mostly Sunni careerists who had joined the Party to get jobs or avoid threats.

Bremer says in his book that he did have disagreements with Rumsfeld and Feith and Wolfowitz, but only over modalities and shades of policy nuance. He did mention that Gen. Sanchez mentioned that forty thousand more American troops would have made Baghdad much safer, but says the trade-off would have been higher American casualties.

Bremer thinks Ahmed Chalabi played several dangerous games both with DC Beltway types after the invasion opposing Bush policies in late 2003; more tantalizingly, the overly clever Chalabi also played the Iranian card, but Bremer refused to go into details. In any event, Chalabi’s party was repudiated in the recent elections.
Chalabi may remain in politics, but mainly as a skilled technocrat.

Even though the Iraqis have inherited the Arab gift of fractious factionalism in spades, the recent elections were a milestone because the Sunnis did participate in sufficient numbers to give them a voice in the new set-up.

However, the Sunnis still want more than their electoral representation and the Al Sadr militia among the Shi’ites also gives cause for future grave concerns. Al Sadr did win about 30 seats in Parliament, so he does not need to play the military card. However, the Sunnis are somewhat delusional in their hopes to attain a footing in the new constitutional regime anywhere near their former paramount position under Saddam's dictatorship.

Bremer makes no claims to be either a regional expert nor a military expert, but his explanations have a ring of verisimilitude, if not truth, concerning the present and future of Iraq. He says that he relied greatly on State and DoD advisors to keep things on an even keel during his time at the helm in Iraq.

He insists, as of course one would expect him to, that the Iraqis have gone a great distance from the ruined-by-sanctions and by malfeasance country liberated from Saddam to stable currency, central bank, improved security forces and improving economy of today. The insurgency is slowly diminishing in impact, though daily incident rates still remain high.

Finally, Bremer notes that the US is not a country noted for its patience and consistency in foreign policy matters. But he believes that the security forces are now reaching a capability that will enable the US to depart in an orderly fashion over the next several years. This will not be fast enough for those who believe that the US should just pull up the covers and leave the rest of the planet alone, but Bremer was kind enough not to mention the eight years of relative Clintonian neglect of the Middle East, save to gain a Nobel Prize for solving the Arab/Israel conflict.

Although Bremer makes a convenient straw man or scapegoat, the NYT's best Iraq reporter, John Burns, believes that Bremer was the single most respected American among the Iraqi elites and streets. Burns says that Bremer's incredible work ethic and honest attempt to work out the kinks in the Gordian Knot he inherited with the job make him a person to commend, if not admire.

History may be kinder to Bush and Bremer and Rumsfeld than the MSM and the flamers on the left. The right is not without fault in its presumptions and the Cheney doctrine of pigheaded wrong-footed clumsy overstatement and talking like a simpleton Pollyanna.

But Prez Bush 41 left Afghanistan in the lurch, Clinton let Osama leave Sudan without grabbing him as the Sudanese wanted him to [too many legal hurdles for this obsessive-compulsive legal beagle] and Bush 43 went after Iraq because 9/11 needed a strong response or he was political carrion.

All may be blamed by historians, but Bremer’s book is the first out of the box by a man on the ground during the difficult reconstruction of a country ruined by 30 years of dictatorial misrule.

"High School Nonsense"

The Political Teen has news about Teddy's school days and personal character:

Ted Kennedy was expelled from Harvard for cheating: "Lastly, there is doubt on the part of some about the character of Senator Kennedy himself. He was briefly expelled from Harvard when he was an undergraduate for cheating in an examination."

— From The Economist

Even medium-lefty Chris Matthews has had it with the bloviator from Massachusetts. He mentioned that Kennedy told Specter that "he hadn’t been to the gym" for the reason Teddy didn’t alert Arlen that he wanted to subpoena the CAP documents [which have already been vetted and found Alito-less by others, including the NYT].

Matthews called Kennedy’s antics "high school nonsense" twice on his program. If a Democrat like Matthews dislikes Kennedy’s tactics [as does Gloria Borger for the Dem-leaning CBS Evening News] and shows Mrs. Alito weeping at the insulting Big Smear Tactics the Dems used to fault Joe McCarthy for doing, guess what the average couch lizard thinks of the Sophomoric tricks the drunk from Chappaquiddick is trying to pull off?

In fact, the Fathead Blowhard senior [since ‘62] member of the Judiciary Committee is now rightly being compared to the original Big Smear Senator from Wisconsin.

Not to mention letting a girl drown in his car while driving dead drunk and then trying to have a family friend take the rap.

Yep, Massachusetts leads the country in one absolute worst department [hint: pick either US Senator, it's almost a tie]----wonder what Teddy thinks of his buddy Castro now that it’s coming out that Fidel had his brother murdered?

Did the Cubans assassinate Kennedy?
By Kate Connolly in Berlin
(Filed: 04/01/2006)

The Cuban secret service was behind the assassination of President John F Kennedy, according to evidence presented in a new television documentary.

Rendezvous with Death, to be shown on German television on Friday, offers the most convincing evidence that Fidel Castro's regime was behind the most talked-about murder of the 20th century.


John F Kennedy in Dallas just before he was shot and killed
A former agent of the Cuban secret service G2 talks for the first time about how Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, was, he claims, pointed out to the Cubans by the KGB.

Oscar Marino, who fell out with the Castro regime, said the Cubans were desperate to eliminate Kennedy, an opponent of the revolution who wanted to kill Castro.

"You ask why we took Oswald?" he said to the German film maker Wilfried Huismann. "Oswald was a dissident: he hated his country. He possessed certain characteristics.

"There wasn't anyone else. You take what you can get. . . Oswald volunteered to kill Kennedy."

Oswald was a Communist who spent three years in the Soviet Union and shot Kennedy in Dallas. He was killed by Jack Ruby after his arrest, leaving his motives shrouded in mystery.

Huismann spent three years persuading people to break their silence about Oswald's alleged Cuba connections. His film is based on testimony by former US, Cuban and Russian agents, KGB files and Mexican archives.

One of the main witnesses is a retired FBI agent, Lawrence Keenan, now in his eighties. Keenan was sent after the assassination to trace Oswald's footsteps in Mexico.

The evidence he found - linking the Cubans with the murder - prompted the FBI head, J Edgar Hoover, on the orders of President Lyndon Johnson, to withdraw Keenan after three days.

"This was perhaps the worst investigation the FBI was ever involved in," said Keenan.

"I realised that I was used. I felt ashamed. We missed a moment in history."

Mexico City was considered a "Pandora's Box" by the Johnson administration, which feared a war with Cuba were the truth to be revealed to the American people.

"They were afraid of what will happen. They didn't want to. . . know the truth for fear it would mean we go to war. Johnson sincerely feared for his own life." It was convenient therefore for the administration to paint Oswald as a loner.

Alexander Haig, a military adviser to Kennedy and Johnson who became secretary of state in 1981, said in the film that Johnson was terrified his people would learn the truth.

"He [Johnson] said 'we simply must not allow the American people to believe that Fidel Castro could have killed our president'.

"And the reason was that there would be a Right-wing uprising in America, which would keep the Democratic party out of power for two generations."

Mr Haig added: "He [Johnson] was convinced Castro killed Kennedy, and he took it to his grave."

Huismann's interviews and documents he found show the extent of the secret war, involving murder and sabotage plots, between Castro and the Kennedy brothers.

Without the knowledge of Congress or the American public, John and Robert Kennedy allegedly planned eight assassination attempts on Castro, all of which failed.

Huismann's explanation for the failures is a Cuban who fought alongside Castro but who later fell out with him.

The film-maker claims that this man was "contracted" by Robert Kennedy to murder the "Maximo Lider", and was provided by the CIA with pistols disguised as fountain pens and powerful poison to carry out the task.

But Castro always found out about the plots in advance, leading to suspicions of a double agent.

The film claims that in November 1963 the Cuban took his last order from Robert Kennedy to murder Castro. The act, involving poison and the fountain pen, was to be carried out on Nov 22, the very day Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

"Unfortunately, Castro was better than us," said a CIA agent in the film who is not identified.

Marino said Oswald was recruited to the secret service organisation by the same agent who had been recruited to kill Castro, a year before the Kennedy assassination.

"In other words the very man Robert Kennedy recruited to kill Fidel Castro hired his brother's murderer," Huismann said.

KGB files released in Moscow document a meeting between Oswald and the Cuban, who is now a retired surgeon living in Madrid.

Interviewed for the film, however, he denied any connection to Oswald, calling it an "outrageous lie".

Marino did not want to answer the question as to whether Castro had direct knowledge of the Oswald assassination plan.

Huismann wrote his film with Gus Russo, author of the 1998 book on the Castro-JFK rivalry, Live by the Sword.

22 November 2003: The greatest murder mystery of all time

ENCORE UPDATE ON TEDDY MORPHING INTO JOE McCARTHY!

The Captain’s Quarters Ed Morrissey brings up Teddy Kennedy’s growing resemblance to Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, another Irishman whose love for the sauce finally overwhelmed his reasoning powers.

Morrissey neglects to point out that Teddy’s late lamented brother Bobby worked for Joltin’ “Congress needs a Tail-Gunner” Joe McCarthy before Bobby’s mid-life conversion to ultra-liberal hogwash.

Also, bitch-slapped Teddy doesn’t mind extensively quoting from articles that Judge Sam Alito had already said he never had read and implying that Alito agreed with the articles because he had once said he was a member of CAP. Teddy wastes everybody's time, but that's why they call him a wastrel!

JOE McCARTHY WOULD HAVE SAID THAT TEDDY WAS A CHIP OFF THE OLD BLOCK OF HIS Fascistic POPPY JOE KENNEDY, the sire of the brood that has ended in Teddy's hyperventilating hysterical leftist blood-sausage censorship of reading materials!

TEDDY is evidently becoming the SCION and truest son of his HITLER-LOVING DADDY! Just took Teddy longer to get to the dogmatic dictatorship mode than his precocious pappy!

This is the same vaudeville-slapstick-artist Teddy who had formerly whimpered about the Patriot Act looking into library records to see who took out certain subversive books ABOUT MAKING ATOMIC BOMBS FROM SCRATCH! Demogoguery or Buffoonery? The Senior Senator from Taxachusetts is starting to see snakes, or pick up gene-vibes from his Secret Santa Joe McCarthy. Or both.

Finally, this following is not linked, but is in a WaPo blog about why Arlen bitch-slapped Teddy so ferociously in public and may be what motivated Arlen if he knew that Teddy was going to try to blindside him with the silly subpoena request.

"According to Senate Judiciary sources, Sen. Ted Kennedy this morning was informed that a number of media outlets - including the New York Times, as well as both Democratic and Republican staff from the committee - had reviewed a wealth of documents related to Concerned Alumni of Princeton and that there was no evidence that Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito played a major role personally or financially in the organization at any time. This information was passed to Kennedy after he raised the issue of possibly requesting a subpoena for all of CAPs documents before he entered the hearing room for the third day of confirmation hearings. “We told him we’d gone through it, and that seemed to be the end of it,” says a committee staffer. So big surprise that despite knowing what he needs to know, Kennedy decided to simply create a few moments of entertaining political theater for the nightly news."

I wouldn’t be surprised if this is true.

UPDATE ON ARLEN BITCH-SLAPPING TEDDY

The comment here should be read before the transcript below:

Of about a hundred-plus comments concerning the dialogue below, ninety percent are abusively, though often more in sorrow than in anger, critical of Teddy the Bloated One. Turns out the Judiciary Committee Staff had already done the entire CAP records search anyway without finding any evidence of Alito's membership, so the entire Kennedy performance was delirium tremens in action.

KENNEDY: And I want to do that at an appropriate time. I’d move that the committee go into executive session for the purpose of voting on the issuancing of -- the sole purpose for issuing the subpoena of those records.
SPECTER: Well, we’ll consider that, Senator Kennedy. There are many, many requests which are coming to me and many quarters. And, quite candidly, I view the request -- if it’s really a matter of importance, you and I see each other all the time and you have never mentioned it to me.
And I do not ascribe a great deal of weight -- we actually didn’t get a letter, but...
KENNEDY: You did get a letter. Are you saying...
SPECTER: Well, now wait a minute; you don’t know what I got. I’m about to...
KENNEDY: Yes I do, Senator, since I sent it.
SPECTER: Well, the sender does not necessarily know what the recipient gets, Senator Kennedy. You are not in a position to say what I receive.
If you’ll bear with me for one minute.
KENNEDY: But I am in a position to say what I sent to you on December 22.
SPECTER: You’re in a position to tell me what you sent.
KENNEDY: I renew my request, Senator. And if I’m going to be denied, then I’d appeal the decision of the chair.
I think we are entitled to this information. It deals with the fundamental issues of equality and discrimination.
This nominee has indicated he has no objection to seeing us these issues. We’ve gone over the questions and we are entitled to get that kind of information. And if you’re going to rule it out of order, I want to have a vote on that here on our committee.
SPECTER: Well, don’t be premature, Senator Kennedy. I’m not about to make a ruling on this state of the record.
I hope you won’t mind if I consider it, and I hope you won’t mind if I give you the specifics that there was no letter which I received.
I take umbrage at your telling me what I received. I don’t mind your telling me what you mailed. But there’s a big difference between what’s mailed and what’s received. And you know that.
We’re going to move on now.
Senator Grassley...
KENNEDY: Mr. Chairman, I’d appeal the ruling of the chair on this.
SPECTER: There has been no ruling of the chair, Senator Kennedy.
KENNEDY: Well what is the -- my request is that we go into the executive session for the sole purpose of voting on a subpoena for these records that are held over at the Library of Congress -- that purpose and that purpose only.
And if I’m going to be denied that, I’d want to give notice to the chair that you’re going to hear it again and again and again and we’re going to have votes of this committee again and again and again until we have a resolution.
I think it’s...
SPECTER: Well, Senator Kennedy, I’m not concerned about your threats to have votes again, again and again. And I’m the chairman of this committee and I have heard your request and I will consider it.
And I’m not going to have you run this committee and decide when we’re going to go into executive session.
We are in the middle of a round of hearings. This is the first time you have personally called it to my attention, and this is the first time that I have focused on it. And I will consider in due course.
Now we’ll move to Senator Grassley for 20 minutes.

SAM ALITO, YOU'LL NEVER BE JOHN ROBERTS!

Elizabeth Bumiller has an article in the NYT entitled But Enough About You, Judge; Let's Hear What I Have to Say that sums up the mindless egomania prevailing on the Judiciary Committee.

Even hard-left NYT sluggers like Adam Nagourney and Adam Liptak had praise for Judge Sam, although they had an almost obligatory deference to the now JFK-like aura of the new Chief Justice:

Judge Alito was not Judge Roberts, to be sure - far less personable, rarely smiling and struggling to draw even the occasional burst of laughter. But he came across as far less ideological than Democrats have suggested, undercutting their efforts to stir public opposition by portraying his writing as outside the American mainstream.

However, Alito did have one near-Roberts moment:

Like Judge Roberts, Judge Alito declined to adopt the terminology of the Judiciary Committee chairman, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, that the status of Roe v. Wade was "super precedent" or "super duper precedent," a reference to the fact that its core holding had been reaffirmed in later cases. "It sort of reminds me of the size of laundry detergent in the supermarket," Judge Alito said, in one of the very few comments he made that gave rise to laughter.

But again, the TWO ADAMS damned Judge Alito with faint praise, comparing him to Roberts again and again at Judge Sam’s disadvantage.

Judge Alito's command of the law was impressive, but it did not have Judge Roberts's effortless, Olympian quality. In responding to one of many questions about presidential power, for instance, he slightly misstated an element of the framework set out in a 1952 concurring opinion by Justice Robert H. Jackson

.
Nagourney and Liptak obviously believe Roberts is a water-walker:

Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, asked Judge Alito, as he had asked Judge Roberts, whether it was appropriate for American courts to look to the precedents of foreign courts. The differences in their responses were illuminating.
Judge Roberts was crisp. "Looking at foreign law for support," he said, "is like looking out over a crowd and picking out your friends. You can find them. They're there. And that actually expands the discretion of the judge."
Judge Alito was more methodical. "I don't think that foreign law is helpful in interpreting the Constitution," he said, adding that it might be helpful in other contexts, including the interpretation of treaties and of issues in private lawsuits.

There was even a moment of self-deprecating wit on the part of two Republican Senators:

Judiciary Committee Chairman Specter pressed Judge Alito on whether judges "have some method of reasoning which is superior" to that of Congress.
Sen. Specter: Hard -- hard to figure out what they were getting at. We do know what they said. They said our method of reasoning was defective. But I take it from your statement, you wouldn't subscribe to overturning congressional acts because of our method of reasoning?
Judge Alito: I think that Congress's ability to reason is fully equal to that of the judiciary, and I think Congress's --
Sen. Specter: And you think that even after appearing here for a day and a half? (Laughter.)
Judge Alito: I have always thought that, and nothing has changed my mind about that.
Sen. Hatch: Starting to worry about you! (Laughter.)

Although every day makes Alito a better bet, barring a miracle counterintuitive outburst from the dipsomania victim representing Massachusetts gaining some traction, to attain the fifth Catholic seat on SCOTUS, he will probably never match his recent predecessor before the Committee, who received a terse one-sentence encomium from the normally hyper verbose Joe Biden:

"Judge Roberts, you’re the best I’ve ever seen before this Committee."
As is often the case when they question or comment, the Senators have the last word.

ARLEN bitch-slaps TEDDY

I almost drove off the road laughing as I listened to Arlen Specter demolish the degenerate drunk from Massachusetts after, who else, Teddy made a fool of himself trying to insist that Sen. Specter must have got a letter that the over-the-hill former philanderer sent back in December. Given the quality of Kennedy's thought-processes and the mistakes his staff makes on a frequent basis, Specter was absolutely resolute that he had not received the letter about CAP Kennedy says that he sent last December.

Then the blustering blowhard insisted that the Committee go into Executive Session to vote on subpoenaing the CAP records, which might show that Judge Sam had, what, paid his dues or actually gone to a meeting? Sen. Specter bitch-slapped the chronic drunk into near sobriety by reminding him that Specter was running the Committee. Kennedy blurted incoherently that he would continue to press for a vote "again and again and again" [although given his attention span, he might forget the whole thing].

Judge Sam artfully reminded the neurologically-challenged boor from Mass. that his main reason for joining CAP was because of Princeton's disrespect for the ROTC.

Count on Schumer and Biden to be as ineffective as Kennedy in making any coherent case against Judge Sam, who obviously is one or two standard deviations above almost all the Committee Dems on the IQ charts [Feingold might be as smart], which of course Dems do not believe are a true measure of intelligence. They have to believe that, being merely average or, in Kennedy's case, a two-digit moron no longer capable of doing much except drooling into the mike.

Evan Thomas on Alito and on Plamegate and Risen

The always interesting Charlie Rose had a fascinating discussion on his show last night concerning the President’s Constitutional prerogatives during wartime, including the hot topic of the NSA eavesdropping.

Both lawyers, a Mr. Yoo from UC Berkeley Law School and a Mr. Feldman of NYU Law School defended their respective perspectives well, but agreed that the right of the President to wiretap phones in the USA might come up before the SCOTUS some day, which of course brought up the subject of the Alito hearings.

Then Charlie had the always perspicacious Evan Thomas from Newsweek give his rundown of Alito’s chances after the first two days of Senate Hearings. Thomas gave Alito high marks for answering the Senators’ questions with just the right mixture of respect and evasion. Thomas believed Alito will get through the hearings, barring an unforeseeable event, pretty much unscathed, though not virtually untouched as was his predecessor John Roberts, now CJ.

But Thomas had an interesting take on the new Risen book on the NSA wiretaps. Evan believes that the DOJ investigation may not turn up the government leakers to Risen, which would then put Risen in the same position as the Plamegate reporters who failed to reveal their sources, namely jail-bound. Thomas believes that the Special Prosecutor drama of the Plame Affair might play out again for much higher stakes, since real issues of national security are involved, and not the identity of a desk-jockey in Langley.

Lastly, Rose asked Thomas the identity of the original leaker to Novak. Thomas said the same person leaked to both Novak and Woodward, as my two blogs of November 20th had mentioned here and here. Thomas believes that Richard Armitrage is the perp [as I did not at the time, but now concede is probably true], although he certainly did not leak the Plame name with any malice aforethought, as the paranoid leftist press has proclaimed ever since the leak.

It is becoming more and more apparent, as Woodward realized from the start, the entire Plame affair was a manufactured coup de pouce by the Artful Prestidigitators of the NYT and the WaPo and other usual suspects. Scooter Libby was a fall-guy for a victimless non-crime.

And now that Risen and a real set of crimes are coming to the fore, the same crew that manufactured Plamegate will attempt to deconstruct Risen's revelations of criminal leaks from highly serious threats to national security down to mere First Amendment issues.

KENNEDY FAILS TO MAKE ALITO SCALITO!

As the Washington Post's best domestic reporter tersely understates it,
Dan Balz says:

But on this nomination, as with Roberts's, there has been a clear disconnect between the zeal of activists and the detachment of the general public.

Indeed, performances by blowhard Ted Kennedy, zany monologue-prone Joe Biden, and autistically self-absorbed Chuck Schumer can only be regarded as preaching to the converted, because these three stooges could not convince any neutral observer of anything save their own hyper-partisan extremism.

As an excellent article in the Chicago Sun-Times by John O'Sullivan points out, the Democratic inmates on the Judiciary Committee are apparently being hoist by their own petard.

Several Democrats Monday, including the reliable Sen. Edward Kennedy, seemed on the verge of making an even worse tactical error. They suggested that Alito's respect for executive branch prerogatives would make him too ready to approve wiretapping and other surveillance of terrorists. That shows a deep misreading of U.S. opinion.

Not only do most polls show that a small plurality of Americans favors wiretapping as a tool against terrorism, but even those against do not consider it a wildly extreme position. When the Democrats campaign against Alito on those grounds, they reinforce the public view of themselves as weak on national security.

Yes, but Teddy has by no means restrained his self-destructive impulses to merely diminishing our national security.

As O'Sullivan goes on to say:

Unfortunately for the Democrats, they cannot restrain their own partisanship. They know the stakes are high. If Alito is confirmed, the Democrats will finally lose their majority on the Supreme Court that for 50 years has allowed liberals to legislate from the bench on everything from racial preferences to the detention of terrorists.

Their desperation makes them imprudent. Instead of rooting their arguments in what the public believes, they base them on their own passionate political commitments. They consistently misread public opinion as a result. And they think they see in Alito their own worst nightmare: the election of a conservative judge who will legislate conservatism from the bench as their judicial nominees legislated liberalism

The Democrats on the Committee are in a bubble where they project their own judicial activism onto their Republican opponents. But is this lucid thinking? Again, O'Sullivan makes an important observation:

All conservative lawyers with realistic Supreme Court ambitions believe the role of a judge is to interpret the laws passed by the legislature rather than to make them. They all respect the written words of the Constitution and reject foreign precedents in constitutional cases. And none thinks his own policy preferences should determine his legal judgments

So are the Democrats paranoid about the new "Catholic" Supreme Court turning back the clock? Yes and No.

Some conservatives -- William Rehnquist in later years -- are prepared to let bygones be bygones. They apply strict judicial construction to future cases, but they will respect the precedents of the last 50 years even when they believe those cases to have been wrongly decided. Others -- Justice Scalia springs to mind -- are prepared to overturn at least the more egregious judicial errors of recent years when either the Constitution or statute law points plainly to a different verdict.

So is Judge Sam a "Scalito?"

In effect the first school, conservative in temperament, would entrench the established liberal gains since the Warren Court; the second school, conservative in philosophy, would overturn the judge-made successes of liberalism in the past as well as challenge those in the future. Democrats are hoping to demonstrate Alito belongs to the second and more disruptive school. They seek to defeat him on those grounds. But they -- or rather Kennedy -- scored yet another own goal Monday on this very point.

"Scoring an own goal" means shooting oneself in one's own foot, something the self-destructive Kennedy seems to specialize in!

Kennedy produced a study by Chicago's Professor Cass Sunstein that purported to show that Alito had ruled against individual rights in 84 percent of the relevant cases before him. Now, Sunstein's study was so scrupulously hedged with qualifications that it was more or less worthless in proving the senator's intended point. It did, however, contain the following judgment:

"A preliminary analysis suggests two points. First, Judge Alito's opinions are carefully reasoned, well-done, attentive to law, lawyerly, and unfailingly respectful to his colleagues. Second, it is fair to say that the law, fairly interpreted, could well be taken to support those claims. Hence he has exercised his own discretion, not lawlessly but in a way that helps to illuminate his general approach to the law."

In other words, Alito is the kind of temperamental judicial conservative who is likely to be attentive to precedent and averse even to a counter-revolution from the bench. That is the best the Democrats can hope for in today's political world.

Looks like Kennedy and his staff blundered again! But don't count on the MSM to point out that the clueless Kennedy contradicted himself by his own documentation! Their self-appointed task appears to be supporting the Democratic agenda, even if the strange crew of Democrats on the Judiciary Committee seem to get in the way of this goal!

O'Sullivan ends his article with a solid piece of good old-fashioned common sense:

Whether or nor it is the best that the rest of us can hope for is another matter. Judicial errors should not be permanently protected by precedent against correction. Wherever possible, the Supreme Court should hand back such still controversial questions to the legislatures and the voters. Where not, they should sometimes reverse their initial mis- judgment. Then, both Democrats and Republicans would learn a valuable democratic lesson: If they want to change the world, they will have to run for Congress.

JOE KLEIN CATCHES PELOSI

Tom Maguire quotes a Time Online piece by Time Commentator Joe Klein extensively in a piece well named "How to Stay Out of Power." Klein takes the Liberal Dems and in particular Nancy Pelosi to the woodshed for a good old-fashioned butt-whuppin’ over the NSA eavesdropping.

Klein exposes Pelosi’s apparent dishonesty in sending the NYT a 10/11/2001letter which made her appear to protest a program the NSA had not yet initiated. Indeed, the witless Pelosi expressed concern that Hayden, who had briefed the House Intelligence Committee about the steps he was taking to track down al-Qaeda terrorists after the 9/11 attacks, was not acting with "specific presidential authorization."

In fact, a 2002 investigation by the Joint Intelligence Committees concluded that the NSA was not doing as much as it could have been doing under the law—and that the entire U.S. intelligence community operated in a hypercautious defensive crouch. The dishonest Pelosi signed off on that
Joint Inquiry which indeed faulted FISA courts for dilatory responses to FBI requests [Finding 12]

Joe Klein quotes:

"Hayden was taking reasonable steps," a former committee member told me. "Our biggest concern was what more he could be doing."

At the risk of redundancy, here is Joe again:

The release of Pelosi's letter last week and the subsequent Times story ("Agency First Acted on Its Own to Broaden Spying, Files Show") left the misleading impression that a) Hayden had launched the controversial data-mining operation on his own, and b) Pelosi had protested it. But clearly the program didn't exist when Pelosi wrote the letter. When I asked the Congresswoman about this, she said, "Some in the government have accused me of confusing apples and oranges. My response is, it's all fruit."

Joe is too kind or pro-Dem to point out Pelosi’s chronic opportunism verging on dishonesty. He does point out that what her objective aims at is the goal of misrepresenting a national security issue as a civil liberties threat---thus activating the ACLU anarchistic left that she and Howard Dean love to prod into action.

But Klein has a very serious point here:

There is also evidence, according to U.S. intelligence officials, that since the New York Times broke the story, the terrorists have modified their behavior, hampering our efforts to keep track of them—but also, on the plus side, hampering their ability to communicate with one another.

He points out in praising the NSA leaks

the Democrats are on thin ice here. Some of the wilder donkeys talked about a possible Bush impeachment after the NSA program was revealed.
The latest version of the absolutely necessary Patriot Act, which updates the laws regulating the war on terrorism and contains civil-liberties improvements over the first edition, was nearly killed by a stampede of Senate Democrats. Most polls indicate that a strong majority of Americans favor the act, and I suspect that a strong majority would favor the NSA program as well, if its details were declassified and made known.
In fact, liberal Democrats are about as far from the American mainstream on these issues as Republicans were when they invaded the privacy of Terri Schiavo's family in the right-to-die case last year.
But there is a difference. National security is a far more important issue, and until the Democrats make clear that they will err on the side of aggressiveness in the war against al-Qaeda, they will probably not regain the majority in Congress or the country.

The fact remains that back in 2001, the protean Pelosi was asking for "specific presidential authorization," in 2002 she signed as Co-Chair with Porter Goss on the
Joint Inquiry that the FISA courts were not acting fast enough [Finding 12] and in 2005, the artful dodger from SF brays that the President exceeded his constitutional prerogatives in trying to defend the country. Which Pelosi should we believe?

With Democratic Leadership harking back to Nixon Era paranoia, looks like the Republicans might just pull off another couple of national election victories.

TWEEDLEDUMB AND TWEEDLEDUMBER on your marks.

The newest poll concerning Judge Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court is in line with a long series of polls except for one, the notoriously pro-Democratic skewed Harris Poll. The
Washington Post/ABC News Poll shows a clear majority of 53% of Americans asked want Alito to be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice. Only 27% believe he should be rejected and the remaining 20% are undecided.

Even among Democrats polled, 40% SUPPORT Alito and only 39% oppose his confirmation.

The strong national support for Alito will not keep Sens. Tweedledumb Schumer and Tweedledumber Kennedy from braying loud and long about 20 year-old memos and letters. Kennedy says he is “disturbed,” we all know that mentally that has been the case for quite a while, about the Alito background memos during his Justice Dept days.

The entire country has been “disturbed” since Chappaquidick that this alcoholic manslaughterer has been a spokesperson for the Party of Rum, Romanism and Rebellion. This specimen of male chauvinism’s personal life has been a long cavalcade of disrespect for women. I have personally talked with a former "serial girl friend" of Tweedledumber who describes him as a thoughtless self-centered boor [and bore, for that matter].

Oh well, they’ve never won a majority presidency since he drove off that bridge in the early ’70s, though Clinton got close at 49%.

Tweedledumb
Schumer may score a couple of points, but the Republicans have a 10-8 majority on the Judiciary Committee and Specter and Alito are fellow-Phillies fans, which means the vibes from Specter, often a wishy-washy ally, will probably remain strong for Alito.

And Tweedledumb’s threat of a possible filibuster is about as likely as this loudmouth obnoxious microphone-addict getting a nomination for Vice President on a national ticket. The Gang of 14 won’t hold unless Alito starts walking in doors backwards or claims he is deadest against abortion, both unlikely to happen.

Let the posing and posturing by fraudulent hypocrites on the left begin!

SENATE HEARINGS ON ALITO TOMORROW

Rabid hard-leftist attack dog Robert Kuttner raves wildly in a Boston Globe editorial comment about his own inner demons [which he shares with Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi, evidently] about Samuel Alito. Calling the judge an “ultra-conservative” who would support a “monarchical” presidency, Kuttner disgraces his profession with a sputum-flecked rant against anything and everything to the right of Castro.

This slashing mindless agitprop contrasts nicely with a relatively balanced piece in the Washington Post which quotes colleagues and respected observers of the judiciary to the effect that very few of his friends have ever heard him express a political opinion about anything.

The almost hard-left New York Times has a long list of caveats that omit any mention of the fact that Judge Alito has one of the most distinguished records and reputation of any Appeals Court jurist in the USA. One has the feeling that the NYT cribbed its editorial from the Moveon Soros bunch or the People for the UnAmerican Way. I believe that the mindless publisher of that paper would assemble a contrarian editorial brief against Buddha or Jesus Christ if the ultra-left-wing political agenda of Pinch and his myrmidons called for it.

We will begin to discover tomorrow why the United States Senate is no longer considered “The Most Distinguished Debating Society in the World” as the Democrats are led by an immoral alcoholic manslaughter perpetrator who cheated in his college exams in a charge against a truly distinguished jurist.

Despite the hysteria of the MSM, the Dems are defeatist overseas and defeatable domestically.

CATS and their domestication of humans

Drudgereport has an article from Science magazine on the evolution of cats, whose various lineages had been impossible to decipher by fossil evidence, but has now been [more or less] pieced together by DNA genome analysis.

But I followed the Science mag back for previous articles on cats and came up with this 2002 shocker.

CATS DOMESTICATE HUMANS

This is no secret to anyone with a cat or two [we have two] in their household. The cat that owns me is a very large Maine Coon/Himalaya mix. His mother Chloe lives with us too, but Dumpling fits into the category of a controlling cat who employs various pitches of meows to alert me to his various needs, usually alimentary.

Here is the 2002 article as relayed by the BBC

Evolution of supercats

Cats are adept at manipulating humans

By Helen Briggs
BBC News Online science reporter

Anyone who has ever owned a cat will know that there is no limit to feline charm.
But now a US psychologist has come up with evidence that nature is giving a helping hand. Cats are domesticated animals that have learned what levers to push, what sounds to make to manage our emotions

Nicholas Nicastro, of Cornell University, believes housecats are evolving into supercats that are better able to exploit humans.

He says cats have learned what buttons to press to please their owners after 5,000 years of living with us. Apparently, it is all down to the miaows they choose to get what they want.

The rewards are clear - more pampering, tastier food and a seat in the comfiest chair. But not all scientists are convinced.

Dr John Bradshaw of Southampton University, UK, says there is no doubt that cats are good at handling humans. But he says there is no evidence to suggest that artificial selection is taking place.

The term was coined by Charles Darwin to explain how man has shaped plants, crops and domestic animals by selective breeding.

Learned response

"Cats learn to meow in ways that manipulate their owners but it's got nothing to do with evolution at all - it's a learned response," says Dr Bradshaw, an animal behaviourist.

Many cats seem to have a set of meows they use for different contexts, he says.

For example, a cat might choose a particular noise to signal it wants to be let out and a different one to demand to be fed.

But when you compare cats, there is nothing in common between these miaows, he says.

This suggests that each cat learns how to get its owner's attention, something that is nothing to do with genetics.

"There's a much more plausible explanation," Dr Bradshaw told BBC News Online. "Each cat tends in its own lifetime to learn the noises that interest its owner."

The controversy arises from a Cornell University evolutionary psychology study.
After 7,000 years of domestication, cats are very different from their wild relatives. Mr Nicastro, a graduate student, put together a sample of 100 different vocalisations from 12 cats.

He played the cat calls back to 26 human volunteers and asked them to rate each one for pleasantness and appeal.

The same set of sounds was played to a second group of volunteers who were asked to rate how urgent and demanding the miaows were.

Humans seem to be able to distinguish between longer, raucous miaows and softer, more pleasing ones.

An urgent or demanding call is "the kind we hear at 7 am when we walk into the kitchen and the cat wants to be fed," says Mr Nicastro.

"The cat isn't forming sentences and saying, specifically, 'take a can of food out of the cupboard, run the can opener and fill my bowl immediately', but we get the message from the quality of the vocalisation and the context in which it is heard," he adds.

Fickle humans

Mr Nicastro, who owns two cats, goes further. He says the pleasant sound is the one a cat might use, say in a rescue centre, to ask to be taken home. More demanding calls could cause a feline to be left behind to face an uncertain fate.

The psychologist says humans have long been selecting for the most pleasant sounding cats.

"Seven thousand years ago, when we think the ancestors of our domesticated cats began wandering into Egyptian granaries and offering to trade rodent-control services for shelter, it was probably the pleasant-sounding cats that were selected and accepted into human society," he says.
The idea that a female would go up to a male in a back alley somewhere and say, 'could I hear your miaow to see if the kittens you father will be appealing to people', couldn't happen

Dr John Bradshaw, Southampton University
It is this point that is the bone of contention for Dr Bradshaw. He says for moggies at least, breeding is not under human control.

Although it might be possible to select for certain vocal abilities in pedigree cats, there is no evidence that this is actually happening.

"In ordinary domestic moggies, they go out and select their own mates," he told BBC News Online.

"The idea that a female would go up to a male in a back alley somewhere and say, 'could I hear your miaow to see if the kittens you father will be appealing to people', couldn't happen. Cats don't have that level of communication."

But that conclusion is unlikely to satisfy Mr Nicastro. "Cats are domesticated animals that have learned what levers to push, what sounds to make to manage our emotions," he says. "And when we respond, we too are domesticated animals."

See also:
03 May 02 | UK
Britons 'prefer cats to dogs'

STEVENSON/McCARTHY AND McGOVERN

I remember meeting a very young Marty Peretz in DC back in the summer of '68 and this article sums up very much of what I felt and thought about "the candidate" that year. Here are his reflections on Eugene McCarthy:
Keen for Gene
by Martin Peretz

[The Dems were looking for an anti-war candidate to challenge LBJ] But the savior whom the kingmakers really desired was Bobby Kennedy. He was unwilling even to test the waters, and no one knew whether he was really against the war or still for it.

Gene's stand was characteristically clear, and he was willing to stake his career on the toppling of the president. But the specter of Bobby haunted the campaign. We were working with folk whom you knew might defect the moment the assassinated president's brother decided that his time had come. (And, when his time came, defect they did.) In a strange way, the Kennedy candidacy energized the "Clean for Gene" effort. The rivalry was old and deep. At the Democratic convention in 1960, McCarthy stirred liberals with his impassioned appeal to nominate Adlai Stevenson for the third time--a last-ditch attempt, with Eleanor Roosevelt as its symbolic leader, to deny JFK the nod. Stevenson was a sure loser in the general election, but the liberals had sufficient reason not to be eager for John Kennedy to be president. There was the ugly shadow of his father and the stunning fact of his brother having served an intimate stint in Joe McCarthy's legislative hanging court--and, by the way, when had John Kennedy ever stuck out his neck for a true liberal cause?

It is a shame that the 1968 campaign is mostly remembered for the bitterness between the Kennedy and McCarthy camps. After all, Gene took down a sitting president. Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection two days before McCarthy was sure to trounce him in the Wisconsin primary. Gene's popularity in the polls, even after Bobby's assassination on the night of the California primary, should be read as a confirmation that Americans were once ready to listen to quiet words and reasoned arguments. The diffidence of the poet-politician annoyed the political professionals, but it was intrinsic to his message. One should not seek the presidency in a frenzy, he seemed to be saying. When he would say that he was "willing to be president," one heard echoes of the Founding Fathers' own ideals of tempered ambition and their insistence upon the debt of politics to philosophical ideas. Gene was a Democrat who disciplined himself to republican virtue.

O, for someone like him in American politics now! [my emph] I have never encountered anyone in politics who so knew his own mind. …………Three weeks before the Chicago convention, George McGovern announced his own candidacy, scavenging among the Kennedy delegates. He won a pathetic 146.5 delegates. The shambles of the convention and the riots--which Tom Hayden designed to prove the fascist nature of the U.S. state, as, earlier that spring, he had told Michael Walzer and me he would--left McGovern as Kennedy's heir apparent for 1972. And the Democrats have not yet recovered from the most startling defeat of any major party candidate in our history. When you hear liberals and Democrats blame U.S. policy for Islamic terrorism, you are hearing the McGovernite temper. In societies as in individuals, the survival capabilities of self-loathing are vast. But Gene, a genuinely original man, never traveled in those territories. There was something pure about him, but he was not an innocent.

Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief of TNR and in his maturity has recognized the suicidal tendencies of Democratic extremists, who, as Jon Meacham said last week on Tim Russert, "desire defeat." The utterly pathetic will-to-lose extends now even to wars overseas. The fear and self-loathing of the hard-left has no apparent limits.

But I digress.

McCarthy loved William Butler Yeats and perhaps this poem reflects some of the inner man----an outdated phrase in this era of imagineering---Gene possessed as a part of his spiritual character To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing

NOW all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours' eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

William Butler Yeats

ABRAMOFF BI-PARTISAN BROUHAHA

The chips are falling where they may, despite frequent

delirious effusions from the moonbat loonies:

Records show not ONE Democrat has been offered or accepted money from him, despite attempts by the GOP to paint this as an issue tainted on both sides of the fence (you'll be hearing that a lot in the coming days)

It’s obvious that both sides had their hands in the cookie jar.

With its customary partisan inaccuracy, the
Washington Post’s resident bolshie, Jonathan Weisman, avers that

All but three of the 24 politicians giving up the funds are Republicans. The three Democrats -- Sens. Max Baucus (Mont.), Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) and Byron L. Dorgan (N.D.) -- have pledged to shed a total of $97,000 in contributions.

Weisman then puts that righteous little Mormon prig Reid in his customary “stuck-on-stupid” mode by quotinga spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) that

Reid has no intention of shedding the $47,000 he has received from Abramoff's lobbying team and tribal clients.

The clueless Reid spokesman demonstrates spectacular syllogistic gymnastics by stating

"Abramoff was a Republican operative, and this is a Republican scandal," said Reid spokesman Jim Manley. "Any effort by Republicans to drag Democrats into this is doomed to failure."

Get that? Reid gets to keep the money. You see, IT’S OKAY FOR A DEM TO KEEP THE MONEY CUZ IT IS A REPUBLICAN SCANDAL.
And you wonder why the Dems are not going to become the majority party for a long time, at least while the clueless Reid is the Senate Minority Leader.

There are more names that the Post, always lenient to the Dem’s peculations, fails to name. Like hard-left Senators Harkin and Stabenow.

Among those named by the NationalRepublicanSenatorialCommittee as the worst examples of "Democrat hypocrisy" for taking money from Abramoff and his associates are: Sen. Byron Dorgan, (D-N.D.) who received at least $79,300; Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who received at least $45,750; Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who received at least $68,941 and Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who received at least $6,250.

The vertically-challenged Reid has been named in the press thus:

In a little-noticed story in November, The Associated Press revealed that Reid had accepted tens of thousands of dollars from an Abramoff client, the Coushatta Indian tribe, after interceding with Secretary of the Interior Gail Norton over a casino dispute with a rival tribe.

Reid "sent a letter to Norton on March 5, 2002," reported the AP. "The next day, the Coushattas issued a $5,000 check to Reid's tax-exempt political group, the Searchlight Leadership Fund. A second tribe represented by Abramoff sent an additional $5,000 to Reid's group. Reid ultimately received more than $66,000 in Abramoff-related donations between 2001 and 2004."

And compulsive-cupidity victim Reid answered questions on TV thus:

Questioned about the donations last month by "Fox News Sunday's" Chris Wallace, Reid immediately turned testy.

"Don't try to say I received money from Abramoff. I've never met the man, don't know anything," he insisted.

When Wallace protested: "But you've received money from [one of his Indian tribe clients]," the top Democrat shot back: "Make sure that all your viewers understand - not a penny from Abramoff. I've been on the Indian Affairs Committee my whole time in the Senate."

When the Fox host pressed again on the Abramoff-linked donations, a flustered-sounding Reid continued to stonewall, saying: "I'll repeat, Abramoff gave me no money. His firm gave me no money. He may have worked [at] a firm where people have given me money. But I have – I feel totally at ease that I haven't done anything that is even close to being wrong."

The exempt media employs artful dodgers like Weisman to carry its water for the Dems and just like its exempt from deconstruction fellow traveller the NYT, the Post will not retract its misstatements or omission.

THE POST IN ITS CUSTOMARY PARTISAN-BIASED FASHION FAILS TO POINT OUT THE WAY REID MISUSES AND ABUSES HIS POSITION.

GUESS THE MSM DOUBLE-STANDARD CONTINUES TO APPLY. NO FAULT ON THE LEFT.

DEMOGRAPHY IS DESTINY, PART TWO

Mark Steyn has a brilliant piece in today's Wall Street Journal that pretty much sums up the collective demographic suicide that the twittering moonbats purvey to the chattering classes via the MSM.

The blogosphere commentariat ought to go splenetic on the left side of the spectrum, but I have serious doubts that they

1] will read anything in the Wall Street Journal

2] have ever heard of the New Criterion

3] will understand that the narcissistic left contemplates itself in a self-absorbed stupor

4] until nihilistic self-hatred eventually gives the leftist collective an impetus for its

5] lemming-leap moment [or perhaps whimper-moment would best fit the style of the left] into the dustbin of history.

But Steyn says it far better than I'll ever be able to.

Canada's best export to the United States should get a much broader audience among the parts of the MSM, such as Jon Meacham's Newsweek, that remain open to self-examination.

Don't look for Mark Steyn soon on the Op-Ed pages of the NYT, WaPo, or LAT.

LEBANON MORE HOPEFUL THAN IRAQ?

Michael J. Totten has an article in the Wall Street Journal putting a good case forward on how Lebanon is a functioning democracy.

I recommend it as a good primer on the labyrinth of Levantine politics---Lebanese style. Totten leaves out the clans and a lot of the sectarian kaleidoscope that makes Lebanon a sort of tidal pool into which all sorts of ?migr?s from the surrounding bad neighborhoods fetch up and find lives better than the ones they left.

I’m thinking of the Armenian gentleman who did work for me while I lived in Beirut. Or the Assyrian landlord whose summer home I rented in Suq Al-Gharb. Or the Greek Orthodox or Greek Melkites living nearby. And the Druze just down the road. All these tiny minorities add to the patchwork quilt of Lebanon, living in the shadow of the big three: Maronite Christians, Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, who control the main organs of government.

Lebanon is an example of a collection of entrepreneurial and professionally adepts who do so well overseas that Mexico's Carlos Slim is the third richest man in the world and US ex-Lebanese, some via other countries, number Selma Hayek, Paula Abdul, Ralph Nader, Dr. DeBakey, Danny/Marlo Thomas, Sen George Mitchell [now chairman of Disney] and Vince Vaughn are just a few of the success stories out of this Land of Milk and Hummus.

A few years ago, I had a chance to travel from Israel to Jordan to Syria and then to Lebanon; all aided by the Amoco connection, and got a first-hand lesson on the economic differences between a democracy [Israel], a benevolent monarchy [Jordan], a repressive autocracy [Syria] and a thriving Entrepot of cultural clashes, a veritable mezze of multiculturalism, that is Lebanon.

That was before much-admired and beloved Rafik Hariri was murdered by Syrian intelligence operatives, with the full cooperation of Lebanon’s Quisling President Ernile Lahoud, walking evidence of the total funhouse mirror politics of the larger Levant around Lebanon‘s borders..

ASSAD AND SYRIAN MOB UNDER NEW UN GUN

First, I was extremely moved by a story by the WaPo’s best “WashingtonPostForeignService” reporter, an intrepid, Arabic-speaking American named Anthony Shadid who reminds us that Saddam was not the only Baathist Chief of State involved in war crimes.

The world screams for justice for Pinochet and the Argentine military who trampled on human rights and were involved in the murder of thousands in Chile and Argentina.

But there has relative silence concerning Syria, because the UN has a whole Group of 77 [or whatever the number is at the moment] who include the Arab League and the African Union and disparate third-world countries all united in what used to be called The North-South Dialogue.

NOW THAT IS CHANGING FOR THE BETTER

As the NYT wire service news says:

United Nations investigators have asked to interview Syria's President, Bashar al-Assad, about the killing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, wire services reported today.
The United Nations panel asked for similar interviews last summer during the early phase of its investigation, and was rebuffed. But in recent months the panel has issued a report implicating high-level members of the Syrian government, and received new backing from the Security Council, which voted two weeks ago to require Syria to cooperate more thoroughly or face sanctions. The move also comes three days after a former vice president of Syria charged that Mr. Assad had directly threatened Mr. Hariri months before the suicide bombing that killed him and 20 other people last February.

The excellent news also relates that the former vice president, Abdel-Halim Khaddam told Al Arabia television that Mr. Hariri had been summoned to Damascus for a meeting with Mr. Assad.

The Syrian president warned Mr. Hariri "in extremely harsh words" not to interfere with Mr. Assad's plan to extend the term of his Lebanese ally, President Emile Lahoud, Mr. Khaddam said. He quoted the Syrian president as telling Mr. Hariri in 2004: "You want to bring a [new] president in Lebanon. I will not allow that. I will crush whoever attempts to overturn our decision."
The Syrian Parliament responded to the Khaddam interview by voting on Saturday to demand that the government put him on trial for treason, and the ruling Baath party voted yesterday to expel him.
Mr. Khaddam, who fled to exile in Paris last summer, was widely regarded as the architect of Syria's policy in Lebanon under Mr. Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000. His statement represents the first break among the so-called Old Guard who had supported the elder Mr. Assad and still dominate the tight ruling circles in Damascus.

If Khaddam tells where all the bodies are buried, the blunt and stupid son of Hafez will be an international outlaw. The French authorities had better have 24/7 protection around Khaddam or he will explode like Hariri, this time in the streets of the City of Light!

It must be said that Bashar Al-Assad is not the unflinching mass murderer his ruthless father Hafez was before he died and went straight to Hell. But Bashar is several standard deviations lower on the IQ scale.

Finally, the wheels of UN justice grind exceeding SLOW:

two relatives of Mr. Assad who were implicated in a draft report by the panel that was released through a computer error: the president's brother, Maher al-Assad, who commands the presidential guard, and his brother-in-law, Asef Shawkat, the head of Military Intelligence.
But Detlev Mehlis, the German prosecutor who until recently led the investigation, reported to the United Nations last month that his work had been continually blocked by "procedural maneuvering and sometimes contradictory feedback from the Syrian authorities." The United Nations Security Council recently extended the term of the investigative panel by another six months and is expected to name a replacement for Mr. Mehlis

Syria, Iran, Israel, and France and the United States have all been employing the tiny state of Lebanon as rope in a tug of war. As far as I know, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and Iraq do not have a dog in that fight, but five ambitious foreign policy heavyweights [even if Syria, Iran and Israel are relatively Light Heavyweights] make the gorgeous country where I spent a great year learning to read and speak Arabic a place where tensions can literally explode at any moment.

More on Lebanon later, as the drama intensifies on the constant crossfire over the Levant and the Baathist Syrian regime continues to escalate.

"Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement"

Robo-bow-wow ultra-leftist Crazy Jane Hamsher must be sampling a lot of that Oregon methamphetamine stuff she’s writing a book about. Her HuffnPuff rant today about Tim Russert and Meet the Press certainly had the aura of the crystal vision that vets on the coke/meth front collectively rhapsodize about.
Meth-mama Crazy Jane [note Yeats reference] wouldn’t understand what Doris Kearns Goodwin was talking about, because it’s so sensible:

Well, you know, oddly I just reread Mr. Bush's Sr.'s "All The Best," which is his letters and diaries, and if the junior would read that, it talks about bipartisanship, it talks about shmoozing with the congressmen, being much more open and being willing to just listen to what people are saying. I think he's taken the negative parts of his father about raising no taxes and not using the political capital. There's a lot of positive pieces in that classy father that are in that book.

"Classy," now there's a word that ain't in the Hamsher lexicon.

Meacham must have had froth-at-the-mouth types like trailer-troll Jane when he observed:

Interestingly, Democrats have come to like defeat, I think, and so they will--I think Gene's right. The hard left will get upset with Hillary for positioning herself in a way that she could win. I think--ultimately I think this is probably McCain v. Hillary, and if I were John McCain, I would raise a--start a PAC to make sure Rudy Giuliani gets in the race so that McCain looks like the centrist, the Reagan figure. He needs--I think George Bush Sr. is the model here for Giuliani. Reagan needed a George Bush Sr. so he didn't look like the most conservative guy in the field in 1980, and I think McCain needs somebody, and it would be Giuliani on that side, to make him look like the centrist Reaganist figure.

Meacham again must have had the HuffnPuffers in mind when he noted about the media:

I think in the media we should be breaking the news and not being the news so much. I think that we have in a way been to much of a player on the stage as ourselves this year, and I think we...
MR. RUSSERT: How do you avoid that?
MR. MEACHAM: I think you just work like hell to get it right and to understand the biographical and human forces on the other guy, on the institutions you're covering. Know that the other institutions are as fallible as yours and with a measure of charity and dignity and respect you write and cover other institutions as you would want to be covered.

I know the word "perspective" isn’t in the vocabulary of Hollyweird hard-left burnt-septum types like the bong-toting Hamsher, but the serious ninety-nine percent of the USA who watch Meet the Press aren’t tuning in for updates on Exempt-Media hyperventilations and suspected-leaker canonizations.

THE MSM UNHINGED ABOUT BLOGS

I am still unable to HTML all the excellent links on Michelle Malkin's outstanding cavalcade of MSM discredited losers [Mary Mapes, Bill Press] far-left sputum-flecked mouthers [Ted Ralls, Michael Crowley, the late David Shaw], and CNN fans who loved Eason Jordan's style of smearing the American fighting man in Iraq. Actually, I like Kathleen Parker, a local Florida leg-puller.

Michelle also names those MSM Cooperstown candidates who give today's journalism its sheen and luster: Jayson Blair, Mitch Albom, Stephen Glass, Eric Slater, Janet Cooke, Barbara Stewart, Patricia Smith, Mike Barnicle, and Jack Kelley.

I would also nominate one more person [sorry, no link], here answering a question in an interview by Marvin Kalb at the Shorenstein School of flatulent impertinence this last year:

Marvin Kalb: We're discussing differences between, in a way, old Media and new media. And we're very much old media.

Dan Rather: You are, Marvin. I'm out there on the cutting edge of new media, as you well know.

Yes, Dan, you are out there all right, on the razor-edge between cluelessness and insanity!

Here is Michelle's top-ten hits. Link to her site for a link-rich funhouse of laughter at the expense of overpaid ink-stained wretches:

2005 IN REVIEW: THE WAR ON BLOGS
By Michelle Malkin · December 31, 2005 06:56 PM
To the dismay of the MSM, the blogosphere didn't go away in 2005. Here are some of the more memorable moments in the clash of the bloggers vs. MSM:
10. Commentator Bill Press's condemnation of bloggers as people "with no credentials, no sources, no rules, no editors and no accountability." Press's idea of good journalism can be found here and some of his shady financial backers can be found over at the Radio Equalizer.
9. NYTimes editorial writer Adam Cohen's whine that bloggers post personal attacks without calling their targets first. Cohen himself would never do something so unprofessional. Yeah, right.
8. WSJ editorial writer Bret Stephens', uh, meltdown over bloggers who shined the light on former CNN exec Eason Jordan's unsubstantiated claim that American troops deliberately murdered journalists in Iraq.
7. New Republic editor Michael Crowley's clueless diatribe arguing that conservative bloggers march in lockstep with the GOP leadership to "to provide maximum benefit for their issues and candidates." Two months earlier, conservative bloggers helped bring down George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court.
6. Far-left cartoonist/columnist Ted Rall's sneering, elitist attack on Ed Morrissey, whom Rall regards as unqualified to engage in journalism. A few weeks later, Morrissey published documents that led to the collapse of the Canadian government.
5. The late LATimes media critic David Shaw's critique of blogs, including his now-famous claim that Times articles are vetted by at "least four experienced Times editors," who check for "accuracy, fairness, grammar, taste and libel." We all know how well that works.
4. Forbes magazine's front-cover hit piece on blogs, which suggested that Eason Jordan and Dan Rather were unfairly "hounded" out of their jobs by Powerline and other conservative blogs. An excerpt:

"Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective....[Blogs] are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns...."

3. Columbia Journalism Review editor Steve Lovelady's description of bloggers who helped bring down Eason Jordan as "salivating morons who make up the lynch mob."
2. Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker's description of bloggers as "creepy" wired squatters who are "untempered by restraint and accountability" and "insidious enemies of decency, humanity and civility - the angry offspring of narcissism's quickie marriage to instant gratification." MSM outlets, by contrast, "are filled with carpal-tunneled wretches, overworked and underpaid, who suffer near-pathological allegiance to getting it right." You know, those poor, truth-telling, underpaid ink-stained wretches like Jayson Blair, Mitch Albom, Stephen Glass, Eric Slater, Janet Cooke, Barbara Stewart, Patricia Smith, Mike Barnicle, and Jack Kelley.

1. Former CBS News producer Mary Mapes' attack on conservative bloggers as "far right," "hard-core, politically angry, hyper-conservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS" who anonymously slime "anyone and everyone who raised http://michellemalkin.com/
TrackBack <10>
2005 IN REVIEW: THE WAR ON BLOGS
By Michelle Malkin · December 31, 2005 06:56 PM
To the dismay of the MSM, the blogosphere didn't go away in 2005. Here are some of the more memorable moments in the clash of the bloggers vs. MSM:
10. Commentator Bill Press's condemnation of bloggers as people "with no credentials, no sources, no rules, no editors and no accountability." Press's idea of good journalism can be found here and some of his shady financial backers can be found over at the Radio Equalizer.
9. NYTimes editorial writer Adam Cohen's whine that bloggers post personal attacks without calling their targets first. Cohen himself would never do something so unprofessional. Yeah, right.
8. WSJ editorial writer Bret Stephens', uh, meltdown over bloggers who shined the light on former CNN exec Eason Jordan's unsubstantiated claim that American troops deliberately murdered journalists in Iraq.
7. New Republic editor Michael Crowley's clueless diatribe arguing that conservative bloggers march in lockstep with the GOP leadership to "to provide maximum benefit for their issues and candidates." Two months earlier, conservative bloggers helped bring down George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court.
6. Far-left cartoonist/columnist Ted Rall's sneering, elitist attack on Ed Morrissey, whom Rall regards as unqualified to engage in journalism. A few weeks later, Morrissey published documents that led to the collapse of the Canadian government.
5. The late LATimes media critic David Shaw's critique of blogs, including his now-famous claim that Times articles are vetted by at "least four experienced Times editors," who check for "accuracy, fairness, grammar, taste and libel." We all know how well that works.
4. Forbes magazine's front-cover hit piece on blogs, which suggested that Eason Jordan and Dan Rather were unfairly "hounded" out of their jobs by Powerline and other conservative blogs. An excerpt:
"Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective....[Blogs] are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns...."
3. Columbia Journalism Review editor Steve Lovelady's description of bloggers who helped bring down Eason Jordan as "salivating morons who make up the lynch mob."
2. Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker's description of bloggers as "creepy" wired squatters who are "untempered by restraint and accountability" and "insidious enemies of decency, humanity and civility - the angry offspring of narcissism's quickie marriage to instant gratification." MSM outlets, by contrast, "are filled with carpal-tunneled wretches, overworked and underpaid, who suffer near-pathological allegiance to getting it right." You know, those poor, truth-telling, underpaid ink-stained wretches like Jayson Blair, Mitch Albom, Stephen Glass, Eric Slater, Janet Cooke, Barbara Stewart, Patricia Smith, Mike Barnicle, and Jack Kelley.

1. Former CBS News producer Mary Mapes' attack on conservative bloggers as "far right," "hard-core, politically angry, hyper-conservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS" who anonymously [Mary is even more clueless than her boss, Danny boy Rather. Even I know how to get the name of Tom Maguire] slime "anyone and everyone who raised questions about the president."
Judging from the thoroughly unhinged tone of the old media, I'd say bloggers had a fabulous year.
Cheers!
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GOOD NEWS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW YEAR

Looks like a Fort Sumter moment within the NYT.

Herewith follows the cannonade across the bow of the ethically-challenged about-to-be-investigated ueber-rag New York Times taking the insufferable broadsheet to task for its shoddy journalistic practices. The text is from Michelle Malkin's quoting of in-house ombudsperson Byron Calame's complaints. Not to worry, a Special Prosecutor is bound to get to the bottom of this flagrant illegal-leaking cum book-publishing scam that hopefully will get bantamweight Pinch Sulzberger out of the Publisher's Chair and into the seats of his collection of Harleys FULL-TIME.

The New York Times's explanation of its decision to report, after what it said was a one-year delay, that the National Security Agency is eavesdropping domestically without court-approved warrants was woefully inadequate. And I have had unusual difficulty getting a better explanation for readers, despite the paper's repeated pledges of greater transparency.

For the first time since I became public editor, the executive editor and the publisher have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making. My queries concerned the timing of the exclusive Dec. 16 article about President Bush's secret decision in the months after 9/11 to authorize the warrantless eavesdropping on Americans in the United States.

I e-mailed a list of 28 questions to Bill Keller, the executive editor, on Dec. 19, three days after the article appeared. He promptly declined to respond to them. I then sent the same questions to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, who also declined to respond. They held out no hope for a fuller explanation in the future...

...On the larger question of why the eavesdropping article finally appeared when it did, a couple of possibilities intrigue me.

One is that Times editors said they discovered there was more concern inside the government about the eavesdropping than they had initially been told. Mr. Keller's prepared statements said that "a year ago," officials "assured senior editors of The Times that a variety of legal checks had been imposed that satisfied everyone involved that the program raised no legal questions." So the paper "agreed not to publish at that time" and continued reporting.

But in the months that followed, Mr. Keller said, "we developed a fuller picture of the concerns and misgivings that had been expressed during the life of the program" and "it became clear those questions loomed larger within the government than we had previously understood."

The impact of a new book about intelligence by Mr. Risen on the timing of the article is difficult to gauge. The book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," was not mentioned in the Dec. 16 article. Mr. Keller asserted in the shorter of his two statements that the article wasn't timed to the forthcoming book, and that "its origins and publication are completely independent of Jim's book."

The publication of Mr. Risen's book, with its discussion of the eavesdropping operation, was scheduled for mid-January - but has now been moved up to Tuesday. Despite Mr. Keller's distancing of The Times from "State of War," Mr. Risen's publisher told me on Dec. 21 that the paper's Washington bureau chief had talked to her twice in the previous 30 days about the book.

So it seems to me the paper was quite aware that it faced the possibility of being scooped by its own reporter's book in about four weeks. But the key question remains: To what extent did the book cause top editors to shrug off the concerns that had kept them from publishing the eavesdropping article for months?

A final note: If Mr. Risen's book or anything else of substance should open any cracks in the stone wall surrounding the handling of the eavesdropping article, I will have my list of 28 questions (35 now, actually) ready to e-mail again to Mr. Keller...

Michelle quite sensibly asks for transparency from Calame about the questions he posed to the cover-up crew running the NYT. Some grist for the Special Prosecutor.

There are questions all over the lot. Buzz Machine asks very sensibly why after several hardball pitches,

What Calame does not address is the timing of the eventual release of the story just as Congress debated the extension of the Patriot Act.

And Jeff Jarvis goes on to quote Instapundit thusly:

The Times’ behavior on this story, and the Plame story, has undermined the unwritten “National Security Constitution” regarding leaks and classified information. Since the Pentagon Papers, at least, the rule has been that papers could publish classified information in a whistleblowing mode, but that they would be sensitive to national security concerns. In return, the federal government would tread lightly in investigating where the leaks came from. But the politicization of the coverage, and the outright partisanship of the Times, has put paid to that arrangement. It’s not clear to me that the country is better served by the new arrangement, but unwritten constitutions require a lot of self-discipline on the part of the various players, and that sort of discipline is no longer to be found in America’s leadership circles.

If the Times decided that its job was to tell its readers everything it knew, when it knew it, then it would have a good argument for publishing this sort of thing. But since the Times has made clear that it’s happy to keep its readers in the dark when doing so serves its institutional interests, it doesn’t have that defense for publishing stuff that’s bad for national security.

When does the public's need to know surpass the need for public safety? All the time, according to the Fifth Column at the NYT.

The NYU Journalism Guru Jay Rosen has a terrific overview of the issues of transparency, accountability, and the entire lamentable ethos of the New York Times, which has transgressed the boundary between observation of politics and wandered way into the role of participant in political adversarial opposition.

I'm waiting for Richard A. Posner to come out and explain again to Bill Keller and Pincheroo just how money-grubbing big-time journalism has become. I'll try to go back and find Judge Posner's letter to the editor that had Keller and his posse of liberal sidekicks with steam coming out of their ears.