A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE. Nina Totenberg says her "forgive the expression – a Christmas party" comment was a joke and not an assault on Christmas, which you might have guessed. I learned this via Ole Perfesser Instapundit! His title spins it a little, but what the hell, I'll take my sugar plums where I can find them. Let us beat our War of Christmas swords into soccer balls.

BREAKING THE DETECTOR. Maybe it's the holiday season, but much of what I'm seeing on the internet today activates the flashing "BULLSHIT" sign in my head. This, from Jay Nordlinger at National Review, is three-alarm bullshit:

Some have said, “You just can’t find cards that say ‘Merry Christmas.’ It gets harder and harder.” I know. Kind of like trying to find products not made in China [senile ramblings]...

I gave up on the “Merry Christmas” front too, where cards are concerned. I just get a pretty card that says “Season’s Greetings” or “Whass Happenin’ on the Holidays?” or whatever. Life’s too short to hunt down “Merry Christmas.”

Bull fucking shit. I was just at a drugstore here in Harlem. There were plenty of goddamn Christmas cards. And this is in Manhattan, epicenter of liberal fascism -- in fact, the woman next to me at the card rack was devouring a fetus (as they do in Europe: out of a cone made from a newspaper, with mayonnaise), while on the sidewalk a bum was persecuting Christians with his mind-rays. Still had Christmas cards.

If you can't find Christmas cards in America, get a flashlight and a map and, while you're at it, look for your ass.

JUST A REMINDER: EVIL NETWORK IZ EVIL. Miss Heather of New York Shitty:

224,629 page views and counting. Impressive. Where’s my cut of the revenue you undoubtedly gained as a result of this, my hard work, Fox News?

Adam Klasfeld of Courthouse News:

Last Friday, Fox News ripped off my exclusive coverage of the trial of Army Capt. Bryant Williams, who was convicted of bribing and accepting kickbacks from military contractors in Iraq. The network passed my reportage off as its own through at least 13 affiliates from coast to coast.

To be more specific, one or more anonymous employees of a Fox affiliate lifted large portions of my coverage for their own story, sometimes using my exact phrasing and often reporting information that they could only have learned from me, without attribution or a byline.

Amazing what people can get away with when they're rich and draped in American flags.

READER MAILBAG. In my recent Voice column on DADT repeal, I got a little kick out of W. James Antle III, who likes neither gays in the military nor women in the military. Antle responds:

Roy Edroso, the Village Voice's tour guide to the conservative blogosphere, finds it odd that I think there were any problems associated with integrating women into the military. I guess he's never heard of fraternization, pregnancies, or sexual harassment, none of which were much in evidence in the days of the Women's Auxillary Corps.

I have, but I've never heard of our fighting men and women failing to Take The Hill because they were too distracted by baby-making, fornication, and unwanted advances. Oh, wait, is that what happened in Vietnam?

But here's what I find odd: that progressives instinctively like the idea of women killing and dying in war.

I've got a few kinks, but I assure you this is not one of them. Besides, if that were a "progressive" thing, wouldn't liberal Hollyweird have churned out dozens of bloody female war epics for our pornographic delectation by now?

(Oh please oh please oh please bring up G.I. Jane; this post needs more laughs.)

UPDATE. Mission Accomplished!

NUMBERS RACKET. The new Census numbers are here, and there are few surprises, though I have to admit it is a shock to see that California gained population (though not House seats) -- to hear conservatives speak of it, one would have expected most of its citizens to have emigrated to Galt's Gulch, in desperate search of bootstraps. But this is unfair -- all states except Michigan grew in population. I guess those 10 years of socialism weren't such a turn-off, after all.

In other news, statist strongholds like New York and Pennsylvania continued their long losing streaks in Congressional apportionment, while Texas picked up four seats, which is meaningless as they're going to secede. Washington state was the only House seat gainer among traditional communist strongholds.

We'll have to wait for more information to see whether the new citizens of the gainer states migrated from simple hamlets and villages to godless cities, or vice-versa. One thing's clear, though -- with 307.8 million residents on board, America will make a hell of a splash when it goes down.

UPDATE. Business Insider points out that most of Texas' growth comes from Hispanics or, as they're called down there, Messicans. This casts doubt of the reliability of these new residents as Republicans. On the other hand, whoever the present Texas voters are, they voted pretty Republican iast November. And anyway by the time the young ones have grown up, however full of Democratic notions from Austin and El Paso they may be, Texas will have reclaimed its nationhood and shipped all its Messicans off to Cali.

UPDATE 2. Commenter mds says the Permanent Reapportionment Act of 1929 has made the House of Representatives less representative than it might be. I notice that some conservatives have said they think the Act has outlived its usefulness, too. But given the current result, don't expect them to throw it on the raft of Constitutional changes they've been yelling for.

LITTLE THINGS MEAN A LOT. Nina Totenberg said on some TV talk show, "I was at – forgive the expression – a Christmas party at the Department of Justice and" etc, and The War on Christmas is again aflame, with every conservative and his brother denouncing Totenberg and allied forces ("NPR Liberals Are Now Openly Apologizing – Forgive the Expression – for Using the Word 'Christmas' On the Air [Video]").

Meanwhile GOP Presidential prospect Haley Barbour had some kind words for the Citizens Councils of the Old South (which he recalls as working against the Klan, though the record of such Councils is a little more mixed). Some conservatives wonder why people are making a big deal out of it. "If you pick out a sentence or a paragraph out of a fairly long article and harp on it, you can manipulate it," says Barbour's spokesman.

I think, among our many differences, we even have different ideas about what's trivial.

UPDATE 12/23: Totenberg responds.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the rightblogger response to DADT repeal. A lot of them are actually getting out of the way, which should be heartening, but I do find the downside to that, too. I'm so negative.

LIBERTARIANISM IN A NUTSHELL. Ronald Bailey at Reason:

Brendan O'Neill, the editor of spiked, writes a furious and fascinating book review asserting that some neo-Malthsuian progressives are valorizing homosexuality as eco-friendly. Why? Because gays and lesbians are less likely to have children and children despoil Mother Earth.

Evidence offered: An old Anthony Burgess novel, a self-evident joke by George Monbiot, and... Paul Ehrlich. Seriously.

Pop over to his source, and you find that innocuous statements like "in an overpopulated world, it would be a good thing if there were more homosexuality," and the existence of "Cats Not Brats" t-shirts, are taken as threats by some shadowy legion of homosexual supremacists. (Similarly, I suppose, those ladies' t-shirts that say "BITCH" are signaling devices for gynocrat terrorists.)

Bailey sums up:

O'Neill is not objecting to gay sex nor to choosing to have no children, but against polticizing those lifestyles as being morally superior on ecological grounds. The implied concern is that asserted moral superiority could be translated into coercive public policy.

Yeah, that's what we should be worried about: Coercive pro-gay policies.

It's like when they defend banks against their would-be regulators and the rich from paying more in taxes -- In fact, it's what libertarianism is all about: Bravely defending the powerful from persecuted minorities.

UPDATE. Thanks to commenter Jeffrey Kramer for doing the hard work:

If you're playing buzzword bingo, O'Neill's piece has the "chattering class" of the "liberal elite" (aka "elite elements," aka "our moral betters" aka "the supposedly liberal and tolerant") which breakfasts on "muesli" while "feverishly" contemplating overpopulation, encouraged by Psychology Today, which is "the bible" of the "medical elite" and also by "the upper echelons" of the gay movement, who are "their self-styled" representatives, while drawing back in horror at "the baby-making masses" and employing "trendy-sounding" arguments from ecology to help establish a "morality police."

Oh, well, when you put it that way...

THE CAPTAIN SIGNS OFF. RIP Don Van Vliet.



Blues, rock, punk -- whatever he did, was his.

UPDATE. I recall an appearance by the Captain on Letterman around the time Ice Cream for Crow was released. The Captain revealed that he lived in a trailer in the desert. "Do you like living in the desert?" asked Letterman. "No," said the Captain. Letterman asked why he stayed then. "I love the tension," he said. "The discipline." (See it here.) A very advanced mind.

You may also enjoy the Captain's 1983 blindfold test by Vanity Fair. (On PIL's "Swan Lake": "Go back to Germany! That beat that loud - that's the thing that makes the money." On Guitar Slim's "The Things That I Used To Do": "That would be a nice thing to dance to with a girl close in, and feel through her Dyna-Match wool hair as thick as Ticonderoga pencils.")

SO MUCH FOR THAT COMMUNIST FRONT GROUP, THE LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS. Har:

CNN and Tea Party Express to host 2012 debate

CNN said Friday that it is joining forces with the Tea Party Express — a political action committee that played a key role in the 2010 midterm elections — to co-host a Republican presidential debate...

“Undecided voters turn to CNN to educate themselves during election cycles, so it is a natural fit for CNN to provide a platform for the diverse perspectives within the Republican Party, including those of the tea party movement,” CNN political director Sam Feist said in a statement. In it, he called Tea Party Express “a fascinating, diverse, grass-roots force that already has drastically changed the country’s political landscape.”

Feist added in an interview with POLITICO that CNN “reached out to other tea party groups” and would make an effort to include them in the debate.

This'll be a pip. For one thing, it will be the first debate where the "questions" are longer than the answers, as the former will no doubt consist of readings from speeches, letters to the editor, and old John Birch Society tracts, and the answers will all be "yes, sir."

Second, we'll get to see much more of Ron Paul, until Sarah Palin goes Manchurian Candidate on his ass. If we can't stop the country going down the drain, let's at least enjoy the patterns in the swirling.

CUI BONO. Kevin Drum, one of the more moderate voices out there, is disgustipated:

Democrats have some things they want to do, but in addition to satisfying their own interest groups they have to settle for third or fourth best policies because Republicans have simply decided they don't care about anything except tax cuts for the rich, hating gay people, and bennies for favored industries. In the middle of a massive recession they opposed a stimulus bill. In the aftermath of a financial crisis they opposed a financial reform bill. In the face of skyrocketing healthcare costs they demagogued modest cuts in Medicare spending. They spent months negotiating a spending bill — transparently, openly, via the ordinary committee process — and then killed it just because it would annoy Harry Reid. Global warming is a hoax, gay recruits will destroy the military, and creationism is an appropriate topic for high school biology classes...

On the other hand, as our leaders pass an enhanced tax relief bill that deprives the Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars, Republicans cut about eight billion dollars in earmarks, on which achievement they are able to brag about their seriousness. So it's not as if someone doesn't benefit from the situation.

THE LAND OF MAKE BELIEVE. Over at The Astute Bloggers they've found another liberal attack on our way of life:

I knew it was only going to get worse at DC Comics: in his continuing efforts to form Batman Inc, Bruce Wayne recruits an Algerian Muslim living in France, in Clichy-Sous-Bois, where the Muslim riots grew out of in 2005, over the death of 2 delinquents who electrocuted themselves by stupidly entering a power station, and the blame was laid upon at least 2 policemen who weren't even at fault and didn't even know they were there. How about that, Bruce Wayne goes to France where he hires not a genuine French boy or girl with a real sense of justice, but rather, an "oppressed" minority who adheres to the Religion of Peace. And this is a guy whose very parents were murdered at the hands of a common street thug!...

Thank goodness the JLA/99 special was a fiasco. We can only hope the same will be for this pretentious story. It certainly puts the lie to the whole notion that DC is "conservative".

Please, nobody tell 'em Batman slept with Talia al Ghul.

UPDATE. This too! Between these outrages and the treason of Captain America, maybe conservatives will have to join forces with Solomon Grundy or move to Earth 7 or some shit.

PROFESSIONAL COURTESY. Oh, McMegan:

Our founding fathers are no doubt spinning in their graves fast enough to provide cheap, clean, renewable power to the entire Atlantic seaboard.

I appreciate that you read me, but would appreciate it more if you gave me some credit. (See also.)

BLAKE EDWARDS R.I.P. In my youth I loved the Pink Panther movies. I still do. I don't know whether that makes them classic or me childish. I remain convinced that the "Does your dog bite?" schtick from The Pink Panther Strikes Again is one of the best-timed bits in film comedy history:



Timing was Edwards' strong suit. The conference of George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn with the wonderful John McGiver as the Tiffany salesman concerning an appropriately inexpensive gift in Breakfast at Tiffany's is a sweet piece of writing by George Axelrod, but its success owes much to the pacing. I think a lot of comedy directors would have chosen to play it far less dignified and deliberate, to say the least. Edwards and his players saw, though, the beauty of the scene: That the salesman takes their absurd requests seriously. And in playing that, they gave us the added pleasure of wondering how much of this is due to his professional dignity and how much to his perverse personal delight. There's something very, very New York about it.

Movie Videos & Movie Scenes at MOVIECLIPS.com

As to Edwards' other films, they were hit and miss, but he dared greatly and sometimes his audacity carried the day. Victor/Victoria is a horrible shambles and frequently embarrassing, but you have to admire a man willing to send James Garner, clad in immaculate full evening dress, into a Parisian workingman's bar to fight men covered with filth in order to prove his masculinity. And though the decision to make Lesley Ann Warren almost inhumanly brassy may have been, in context, an ill-considered gender statement, it was certainly fun to watch.

OLD WAYS. There's a lot you could say against Time's selection of Mark Zuckerberg as Person of the Year. (This isn't bad.) And then there's what Michael Knox Beran says:

Electronic community has its virtues, but the morbid craving for it evident in the success of Facebook reveals the degree to which actual community has collapsed in much of the West. A multitude of causes have brought the civilization closer to Tocqueville’s prophecy of the last democratic man, shut up in “the solitude of his own heart,” but among these the war a number of our elites have waged against traditional town-square culture is surely not the least.

I'll spare you, but will note that modern architecture, atheism, welfare, and public education are apparently the weapons these elites used to destroy our communities, condemning us to the social simulacrum that is Facebook. It's like The Matrix, and we may think of Beran as the Red Pill.

Someone should alert the Tea Party people that if they really want to save America, they'll abandon wicked social media and call their meetings exclusively by cowbell and hold them by the horse troughs.

UPDATE. Some interesting comments defending Beran's basic proposition, in whole or in part. I can see that the thing people like to call the public square is not what it was. I've written about related phenomena myself. But when you talk about elites as the culprit, I have to ask who you think they are. This is America, and like most of what's good or bad about us, money is involved, and before money condenses as a social force it moves around as an exchange mechanism. Before it's Big Money, in other words, it's our money, and though few of us get a vote on what banks and corporations do with it after they get it, most of us agreed to give it to them. And if we were under some pressure to do so, it wasn't Le Corbusier so much as The Joneses that exerted it.

This would make corporatism a better target than whatever shadowy cabal of progressives Beran means by "the elite." But in the end, if we're hanging out less on bocce courts or at county fairs than on Facebook, and we don't like it, we have mainly ourselves to blame.

PARANOIA RUNS DEEP. Some of you may know Robin of Berkeley, who dines out (or at least dines in on take-out) on having achieved conservatism despite the twin impediments of coastal California residence and employment as a psychotherapist. She is one of the Sadlynauts' favorite subjects; I last noticed her speculating that President Obama is nuts and perhaps using cocaine. Her primary schtick is imputing mental illness to liberals and other people she doesn't like.

I almost missed her latest exercise. It actually starts promisingly, with a memory of her Jewish family and their mistrust of outsiders, and this analysis:

I think that the feeling of being safe in one's tribe is hardwired into most of us, immigrant or not. We think that our family, neighbors, church, or synagogue is the trustworthy one. There's an illusion of safety, a feeling of protection within our own boundaries...

But life often intervenes; it can sometimes destroy the dream of being safe in our own home, or even our country. We may feel devastated to learn the truth, to confront the unpredictable nature of this human life.

OK, sure. And as we grow, we learn to cope with negative people and environments without letting them make us mistrustful of everyone. Right?

Of course, Americans were reminded of this reality on 9/11, when this country, the only remaining superpower, became another chilling statistic.

Hmm. Well, alright, I... I suppose you could look at 9/11 as a growth experience...

We all go through it: the harsh wake-up call that things aren't as they appear to be. One of my friends has never fully recovered from the day she uncovered her husband's year-long love affair.

What?

Another friend has been broadsided by the news that a close family member has been sabotaging her. Just this week, I've been dealing with people undermining me whom I thought I could trust...

The wise Abraham Lincoln understood the menace of the Enemy Within. Lincoln stated, "America will never be destroyed from outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

Now that I've awakened from my trance, I am stunned by what I was missing all of these years. Earth to Robin -- remember those nutcases who bombed this nation in the '60s, people such as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn? Well, maybe we don't want them having influence over the president of the United States. And perhaps all of those America-haters on the Left, now in charge, aren't exactly the greatest guardians of the public trust.

I guess I was taking it wrong: Robin sees all these untoward experiences -- a bad marriage, a personal betrayal, a suicide attack killing 3,000 people -- as evidence that her family was right all along. Except for one thing: Even your family wants to kill you!

After more talk about The Enemy Within -- including "radical Islam and drug dealers invading our borders" and subversive school-teachers -- Robin tells us,

With the sabotage going on in my life, last night I couldn't sleep a wink. I lay in bed disturbed, thinking of these people who want to harm me.

I prescribe daily therapy and perhaps Ativan.

But even in my discomfort, there was a part of me that felt grateful for the reminder.

Too late -- the voices have got her.

UPDATE. Thanks, all, for great comments, with references to Poe, Jim Thompson, The Caine Mutiny, etc, and to the Guest who corrected my spelling. (How did I miss "Ativan"? It's right there on the bottle!)

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP -- my annual War on Christmas Special! I had too much stuffing for the stocking, so here for you Real People are some celebrity outtakes. First, theblogprof's statement of concern for the people of Dhimmi Britain when he learns that supermarkets in Blighty are not selling many Christ-themed holiday cards anymore:

Christmas. CHRISTmas. The day we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior of all. All don't want to acknowledge it though, and the very name of Jesus alarms their corrupted conscience...

The Brits deny Jesus at their own peril.

Especially Brits who wait until everything else is closed and have to buy their cards at supermarkets.

Also, I didn't think there could be any controversy about the White House Christmas tree, but The Daily Caller found one:

Obama’s Christmas tree takes 4 days to put up at height of economic crisis.

Federal Gummint union featherbedding, no doubt.

You might also enjoy The Liberal Claus: Socialism on a Sleigh, at least as curated by Dave Bow.

THE COMPANY MEN is the politically enlightened feel-bad movie of the year, about a bunch of laid-off workers in the New Depression. Since retail clerks, car washers, and teacher's aides would be too downbeat, our heroes are all making hundreds of thousands of dollars for a megacorp when they are brought low.

Ben Affleck (the youngish $160K salesman) is an entitled asshole who gets worse under the pressure of failure until he is spiritually transformed by a job building houses for his gold-hearted, earth-salty fatherbrother-in-law (Kevin Costner). This leaves the big-picture suffering to the big wheels: Chris Cooper, a former shipbuilder who rose with the firm and, cut loose in his 50s, takes to drink; and Tommy Lee Jones, a top exec whose longtime friendship with the CEO counts for nothing, leaving him to brood, if in high style, on the unfairness of it all.

"All" includes Jones' speech at a rotting shipyard: "We used to make something here, back before we got lost in all the paperwork…6,000 men earning an honest wage in that room, fed their kids, bought homes, made enough to send their kids to college," etc. And Costner scoffing at a CEO's salary, "is [he] working 700 times harder than the welder pounding hot rivets into a tanker hull all day?"

This is corny but not wrong, which I could say about the whole movie. Even those of us who never saw a sixth figure in our entire working lives can relate to the mood-swings, frustrations, and humiliations of long unemployment in a rotten economy, even when they are suffered by people with greens fees who are forced by cruel circumstance to sell the Porsche. And audiences would probably prefer to see Ben Affleck sliding from a McMansion to his parents' perfectly nice house, rather than from crappy apartment to shelter or street.

Whether they'll be cheering when [spoilers alert] Affleck and a bunch of other rejects gets a second chance because the rich guy with a conscience decides America will start building things again, dammit, is another matter. The Company Men is rife with Bad Hollywood earmarks. Tommy Lee Jones has an affair with Maria Bello, for one thing, fulfilling the tinseltown tradition of hot chicks nuzzling grizzled old men and no other need. Even when the situations are realistic, the dialogue is mostly formula. In fact the formula is formula; Affleck's construction-jawb buddies are all out of the file drawer (good fellas, though one is arrested for drunk and disawderly) and his Mrs. and young Bawby are still wearing their Supportive Family tags.

This might have been better directed by Oliver Stone at his most coked-up, inflating everything to cosmic scale. But Stone isn't what he used to be, as proven by Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, another disaster with an incongruously happy ending (with flashes of the old glory, like a financial collapse symbolized by actual falling dominoes). Maybe ships aren't the only thing America no longer knows how to build.

THE KING'S SPEECH. Gather round for Masterpiece Theatre in wide-screen as the stammering King (Colin Firth) is taught by an unauthorized therapist (Geoffrey Rush) to speak like a champ, but only after learning lessons about life and love.

Yeah, I know. This sort of thing gives me gas too. At times, God help me, I was reminded of Monty Python's Bigus Dickus. (Good thing I didn't see it in a theater.) But it's a big-time production and we are given enough quality ingredients to make the guff go down easy.

The Duke, later King, is treated by a charmingly unorthodox Aussie therapist, Lionel Logue, who refuses to call the HRH anything but Bertie ("In here it's better if we were equals"). If you're thinking of Dr. Willis in The Madness of King George, you're not far wrong -- the royal must be brought low before he can rise. But whereas Alan Bennett was not really concerned with democratization, King's Speech writer David Seidler is; there is much talk of this new-fangled radio and the shifting relationship of monarch to masses, and we are made to see that hacking off some of the King's imperial armor is not just a psychological intervention, but also a political one. Before the King can become the man of the hour, he must first become a man. (Also George VI doesn't send Logue away as George III sent Willis. Next stop: socialism!)

It helps enormously that the King's relationship to Logue starts with suspicion and evolves only haltingly; also that the celebrated speech is not the product of a cleansing breakthrough, but of patient, painful work which must be repeated. There's no groveling or crying about Mother. Though there are secrets and confessions, they usually come out with some decorum. (The King does engage in some coprolalia, but I assure you it's in excellent taste.) If we are to have this sort of thing, at least let it be dignified.

Rush is relaxed and funny, but also thoughtful and attentive to his man; he lets the very good dialogue do most of the work, to great effect. Colin Firth as the stammerer has to work harder, but he's up to it. He is never completely healed nor at ease, and we learn to see the strain of everything to him even at relatively victorious moments. It turns out fitting that the regent in the time of World War II turns out to be someone whose glory is to Keep Buggering On.

As is traditional there are many historical figures flitting through the film; my favorite is Michael Gambon as implacable George V, though it's also nice to see Derek Jacobi, who had some success with a speech-impaired ruler once, as the fussy Archbishop of Canterbury.

HOMAGE TO BERNIE SANDERS. So I'm listening to this socialist guy saying in a Senate filibuster some very sensible things you seldom, if ever, hear on the Senate floor -- that the country's "disastrous" trade policies have caused us to hemorrhage manufacturing jobs, which has caused a largely unremarked "blue-collar depression"; that wages have been dropping and pensions going away for years, with no end in sight; that the financial crisis was not the beginning of that crisis by any means, but just the worst contraction in it; that the last goddamn people we need to be helping out in this case are the rich, whose advantages over the rest of us have absolutely swollen in recent years, and which advantages ain't doing shit for anyone else; and so on.

And I'm wondering: That poll back in '09 that found significant support among Americans for socialism vs. capitalism -- was that just a fluke? Or was that because some people have noticed that when socialists talk about what's actually going on in this country, they're a lot more honest than are capitalists?