Midnight Cowboy

Watched it last night, on Cinemax — Rob Thomas was watching too!

Wyalusing State Park, Wisconsin

At Althouse:

Ana de la Reguera

At Esquire's "Women We Love":

Protesters Raise Mexican Flag Outside Phoenix Jailhouse

At The Hot Joints, "Mexican Flag Waving Protesters Gather Outside Arizona Jail":

See also, "Arizona immigration protesters hit the streets," and "Hundreds protest Ariz. immigration law in Phoenix."

Obama Slurs Blacks as 'Mongrels' on 'The View'‎

If you're a black Democratic President of the United States with a slobbering media class and radical blogosphere stifling the opposition, it's totally cool to slur black Americans as "mongrels." Of course, according to Wikipedia, "Among humans, mongrel and mongrelize are derogatory terms for the mixing of "races", known as miscegenation." If any single figure on the right had even remotely implied blacks were "mongrels" in the context of Barack Obama, we'd be having another weeks-long media extravaganza on "racism" in America. Personally, as one who is mixed, like the president, I'm having a hard time finding what's appropriate about his discussion. Yeah, I can see the context, but this isn't a classroom lecture. It's an appearance on a daytime talk show. Most people wouldn't speak of blacks as "all kinds of mixed up" historically. There's simply too many painful connotations for this to be a useful primer on race.

And rightfully, this is the kind of thing that makes folks angry, for example, Bruce at Gay Patriot, "Was Obama Channeling Robert Byrd on The View?"(via Memeorandum):

I initially was going to resist posting on this because I really despise racial politics. But since we are getting some new readership from the Left (and they have no clue about American history), I thought it was important.

Does President Obama have any idea what he just put out there on the table? Perhaps the most incendiary language in American history.

From the article ‘D. W. Griffith and “The Birth of A Monster“‘: [Reference: Who Is D. W. Griffith?]

D.W. Griffith’s 1915 motion picture The Birth of a Nation — originally titled The Clansman — a film which presented a re-writing of the actual history of post Civil War Reconstruction by the same Confederate traitors aginst whom the war had to be fought. It portrayed African-Americans in the post-Civil War South as depraved, lascivious beasts whose rampant lawlessness and alleged domination of the South — through military force and control of the state legislatures — threatened to destroy “Southern civilization” and “mongrelize the races”. The film asserts that this could only be stopped by the glorified lynchings and reign of terror carried out by the “honorable” new, secret order of the “chivalrous” Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

<…>

In most of the Northern cities where the The Birth of a Nation was scheduled to be shown, political fights exploded, and some small riots did occur in Philadelphia and elsewhere where the film was shown. The NAACP and others attempted to seek either a banning of the film completely, or to force the editing-out of the most egregious racist scenes. For the most part, those attempts were futile. Endless hearings were held before mayors, state legislatures, city councils, and state and city censorship boards across the country. The Illinois legislature voted 111-2 to ban the showing in that state, but eventually lost on judicial appeals filed by the film’s promoters.

Those hearings became platforms for the pro-Griffith lobby to pronounce the alleged virtues of eugenics. In New York City, Griffith’s lawyer Martin W. Littleton told Mayor Mitchell that the film was a “protest against the mongrel mixture of black and white.”

It is disgusting and putrid that a President of the United States bring this kind of filth language into the public discourse when our nation has moved so far past it. Laura Ingraham is correct, Obama is not “post-racial” — he is the most racial and divisive President we have ever had.

Scott Eric Kaufman — An English Professor Who Doesn't Know Sh*t About English

One of the most interesting things about Scott Eric Kaufman is that he doesn't seem to know anything about the things in which he writes. Oh sure, the prick's good at laying down the demonic snark while surfing the conservative 'sphere for tidbits of attack material, but when it actually comes to writing quality content ... well, the guy's pure fail. I was already thinking about this when I noticed SEK's stuffy mini-"review" of Leo DiCaprio's Inception — the most noteworthy thing of which is that SEK and his wife actually walked out on the film. I'm planning to see the movie this weekend, so I wasn't going to offer my comments on whether it merited that kind of antipathy, although I was tempted to just post a snarky piece hammering Scott Erik Kaufman for his hopelessly effete left-wing university-ish elitism.

But now I'm glad I held off. It turns out SEK's initial review didn't go over so well with some like-minded effete types, and he's written an update, "Bit more on Inception." And while I might be persuaded that one of SEK's critics is on the money when he implies that Scott's an unsympathetic childless asshole, I'm content to simply indicate SEK's non-typo completely FUBAR ignorance of the word "flak."

As you can see at the first sentence of the post: "I’ve taken a lot of interesting flack for my non-review of Inception ..."

Actually, SEK means to say, "flak." It's a word that leftists apparently have a hard time using, which is easy to explain, given the left's ideological hostility to the military. In context, you might say I'm "giving him a lot of flak" for his stupidity — and boomerang smears, since he likes to attack opponents as "functionally illiterate." It's too good, really, for nearly every time SEK's trolled my site for some jollies, he's ended up making himself look lame with massive errors at the original post. And like clockwork he always comes back with some lame excuse for why an English professor shouldn't actually be required to write proper English, but in the case of "flack" I imagine he'll just have to take his lumps. And since Ann Althouse is a frequent target of SEK's idiotic trolling, I'll let her take him to the woodshed.

See, "Flak" (where Ann hammers Josh Marshall, another Ph.D. know-it-all, who misused "flack" in 2007):

From me, you're going to first catch flak for writing "catch flack."

“Flak” is WW II airman’s slang for shells being fired at you in the air, so to catch a lot of flak is to feel in danger of being shot down. However, most civilians these days have never heard of “flak,” so they use “flack” instead, which originally meant “salesman” or “huckster.” You need to worry about this only if you’re among old-time veterans.

When you're showing off your expertise about fighting a war, you ought to get your war imagery right. A flack is a press agent. Hacks -- "writer[s] hired to produce routine or commercial writing" -- know more about flacks and not so much about flak, but they need to try not to let it show.

Gotta love it. A law professor schooling a history Ph.D.

But even better is schooling an alleged professor of English on English language usage. Can you say epic fail? And the references to teaching "English" are quite loose, since SEK's apparently teaching courses on "Manga" and the literary origins of films like The Last Airbender. My kids could probably lecture on that stuff, although they aren't stuffy Ph.D.s who write half-baked movie reviews on films on which they've walked out on.

Well, at least SEK's no longer claiming to have a "Doctorate of Philosophy of English."

RELATED: "Scott Eric Kaufman, Self-Hating Skankwad, Does It Again!"

Eyes Without a Face

Billy Idol plays the Hollywood Palladium on August 14th. I'm not going, LOL!

I saw Idol in concert twice at The Roxy in Hollywood, circa 1981. In any case, Triple Play Thursday played Idol this morning, so enjoy "Eyes Without a Face":

I'm all out of hope
One more bad break
could bring a fall
When I'm far from home
Don't call me on the phone
To tell me your alone
It's easy to deceive
It's easy to tease
But hard to get release
Les yeux sans visage eyes without a face
Les yeux sans visage eyes without a face
Les yeux sans visage eyes without a face
Got no human grace your eyes without a face.
I spend so much time
Believing all the lies
To keep the dream alive
Now it makes me sad
It makes me mad at truth
For lovin' what was you.
Les yeux sans visage eyes without a face
Les yeux sans visage eyes without a face
Les yeux sans visage eyes without a face
Got no human grace your eyes without a face ...

Erin Andrews Vanity Fair Photo Shoot

Some midweek hotness with Erin Andrews.

PREVIOUSLY: "Erin Andrews in the News."

BONUS: Looking forward to some FMRA at The Other McCain this weekend. Bob Belvedere wasn't waiting, however: "A Little Hump Day Rule 5: Margaret Nolan." And at Washington Rebel: "Irreverent?"

True/Slant Shuts Down — Charles Johnson, E.D. Kain Looking for New Digital Media Bones to Suck Dry

A belated follow-up to last year's entry, "Sleaze-Blogger E.D. Kain Interviews Despicable Libel-Blogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs."

Both of these bozos were sucking the guts out of the digital media beta site True/Slant, cross-posting material from their own digs for an extra couple of bucks in slimeball blogging.

Background at Neil Ungerleider, "Last post on True/Slant."

This is probably no big deal for most readers, although it's interesting to me that the Internet publishing gods weren't smiling down on these two libel-blogging bloviators. Maybe they'll actually hafta get jobs, you know, like most people of good moral standing. That said, Barret Brown is on True/Slant and I've found him to be a fairly decent guy after going a few rounds in the flamewars (and Barret's at Vanity Fair, so he has something of a viable inside thing going already). And I hope Kashmir Hill's social networking blog lands quickly on its feet at another location, and I'm confident it will (she's good).

Added: Dan Riehl links, "Conor Friedersdorf: Angel Of Death In Web Publishing." I forgot about that idiot Conor Friedersdorf, but he's right up there with E.D. Kain and Charles Johnson.

Insurgent Stinger MANPADS in Afghanistan

The keys news, in last week's WikiLeaks "bombshell" exposé, that Taliban insurgents armed with shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles have raised that stakes in Afghanistan, wasn't actually surprising. What's interesting to me is the supply origins of the missiles, for example, whether these were in fact the "Stinger" missiles the U.S. introduced against the Soviet Army in the late-1970s? Don't know for sure, although the Times of London reported last fall that Iran was shipping SA-14 Gremlins to the Taliban to help defeat allied forces in the region. Despite this, MSM press outlets are going wild with stories on the threat. See CNN for example, "Shoulder-fired missiles a threat to US troops in Afghanistan." The piece indicates that the threat could be from old Stingers supplied to the mujaheddin: "Perhaps the best known and most effective MANPADs are American-made Stingers, which the United States supplied to Afghan militia to fight the Soviets."

In any case, check the front-pager at today's Los Angeles Times (FWIW), "Reference to missile-downed helicopter in leaked Afghanistan reports highlights a threat."

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Washington — Wherever there are Western troops in Afghanistan, the clatter-thump of helicopter rotors serves as the soundtrack. Choppers are the workhorses of this war, with hundreds of them moving soldiers and supplies daily across a rugged landscape.

Because of the NATO force's heavy reliance on them, one of the most eye-catching revelations in a trove of classified documents posted on the Internet this week was that insurgents apparently used a portable heat-seeking surface-to-air missile to shoot down a twin-rotor CH-47 Chinook in Helmand province in May 2007, killing seven Western service members.

If the Taliban and other insurgent groups possessed large numbers of these weapons, it could dramatically alter the dynamics of a war effort that already is struggling. Shoulder-launched missiles downed scores of Soviet helicopters in the 1980s, helping ragtag Afghan rebels prevail against a vastly superior force.

Most experts believe that the antiaircraft threat currently posed by the insurgents is relatively limited, and that they don't have significant stocks of surface-to-air missiles, at least for now.

The shooting down of choppers remains a relative rarity in the Afghan conflict, and heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades are almost always found to have been used.

"After nine years, if they had a lot of them, we would have seen them by now," said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the subject on the record. Sporadic reports of attacks with surface-to-air missiles have often turned out to involve other weapons, the official said.

But portable surface-to-air missiles can be procured from many illicit sources in the region. Afghanistan's neighbors include Iran, Pakistan and China. NATO said this month that an intercepted memo from Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar suggested that the insurgents were redoubling efforts to obtain a variety of sophisticated armaments.

"It's wartime, and our warriors are searching for new weapons," said Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid, reached by telephone.

So that pretty much answers the question. Insurgent forces are simply shopping the global arms bazaar, and no doubt rogue regimes from Damascus to Tehran and beyond are all too willing to pump up the supply as the arc of terror stretches to South Asia. I guess the irony is lost on America's antiwar foes, but all of this demonstrates that American interest in AfPAK are as large as ever. (And the media's going to hype the threat, despite expert analysis to the contrary: "Stop Panicking About the Stingers.")

RELATED NON-SURPRISE: At USA Today, "More Dems oppose new war funding."

BONUS LEFT-WING FAIL: At NYT (FWIW), "U.S. Military Scrutinizes Leaks for Risks to Afghans."

Rangel to Stand Trial on Ethics Charges

At LAT (FWIW), "House charges Rep. Charles Rangel with ethics violations":

Rep. Charles Rangel of New York was charged Thursday with 13 counts of violating House ethics rules, placing the Democrat's storied, 40-year political career in jeopardy.

A House ethics panel outlined the alleged violations in a meeting that set the stage for a full-blown proceeding that could take place as early as September.

The charges stem from Rangel's alleged use of rent-controlled apartments for campaign purposes, his alleged solicitation of corporate donors for a public-policy center at a New York City college using office letterhead, the alleged failure to disclose $600,000 in income on financial-disclosure statements and the alleged failure to disclose income and pay taxes on a Caribbean rental property.

Until the moment the committee convened Thursday afternoon, talk was filtering through congressional corridors that Rangel's attorneys had struck a deal to avoid the hearing.

But Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the subcommittee that will try Rangel, suggested the time for a settlement had passed, saying Rangel, a Democrat from Harlem, had been given an "opportunity to negotiate a settlement in the investigation phase."

"The American people need to hear the truth," McCaul said.

A settlement could still occur, and reports indicate that the principles of a deal were in place. But it would require the approval of at least one Republican on the Ethics Committee, which may be difficult to secure in the highly charged partisan atmosphere on Capitol Hill.

Rangel did not appear at the hearing.

Also at The Hill and CNN.

Plus, from Outside the Beltway, "Charles Rangel Hit With 13 Charges Of Ethics Violations." (Via Memeorandum.)

Cartoon Credit: No Sheeples Here!

Obama on 'The View'

At ABC News, "Obama Ticks Off Highs and Lows of Presidency on 'The View': Appearing on The View, Obama Makes Family a Theme."

Not going over too well, actually, at least among those outside the presidential cult:

What's So Strange About Socialism?

From Stanley Kurtz. He describes the phenomenon of "boring from within":

What is so strange about the idea that President Obama might be a socialist? True, it would be a big deal if the president of the United States considered himself an opponent of the capitalist system, especially when he’s consistently dismissed and denied the socialism charge. On the other hand, the idea that a committed socialist might play a prominent part in everyday American politics is not particularly surprising.

Have a look at today’s piece on umemployment by regular Washington Post columnist, Harold Meyerson. Meyerson is a prominent public figure, and a Vice-Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. Can you spot the socialism in his column? Meyerson criticizes big business, attacks across-the-board tax cuts, and advocates government-directed infrastructure investment as a solution to unemployment. Meyerson also supports initiatives along these lines by the Obama administration and congressional Democrats.

Now some might say, what’s so socialist about all that? Meyerson hasn’t advocated a total government takeover of the economy. He’s even spoken out in favor of initiatives by conventional Democrats.

Yet we could just as easily look at things in reverse. Meyerson’s support for these Democratic initiatives could be taken as a sign that some socialists agree with conservatives. That is, sophisticated socialists and conservatives alike believe that America can be pushed into socialism by degrees. In fact, this is exactly how Meyerson’s group, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), understands its task. Actual existing American socialists (of the sophisticated "non-sectarian" variety typified by the DSA) don’t go around demanding full nationalization of the economy at a blow. On the contrary, they offer support to those Democratic Party initiatives most likely to bring about a socialist transformation in the long term. That is, the DSA thinks of itself as working within the Democratic Party, as a force to steer the party onto an incrementally socialist path.

As I’ll show in my forthcoming book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, this vision of socialism has long shaped President Obama. (I announced the book yesterday. You can see the cover and a description of the book’s argument here.) The point is that the notion that Barack Obama is a socialist is too often dismissed as a lurid and impossibly extreme scenario, as if being a socialist had to mean throwing Molotov cocktails and demanding instant revolution. On the contrary, Harold Meyerson’s regular columns in The Washington Post show us that, even if their long-term goals are radical, it’s entirely possible for sophisticated socialists to participate in the everyday back-and-forth of American politics. This is the way to think about Obama.

See also, Pundit & Pundette, "Stanley Kurtz is back, with a book: Radical-in-Chief."

14 Weeks

At Nice Deb, "Republican Governors Association Releases Great New Ad":

Americans Cut Back on Visits to Doctor

At WSJ:

Insured Americans are using fewer medical services, raising questions about whether patients are consuming less health care as they pick up a greater share of the costs.

The drop in usage is showing up as health-care companies report financial results. Insurers, lab-testing companies, hospitals and doctor-billing concerns say that patient visits, drug prescriptions and procedures were down in the second quarter from year-ago levels.

"People just aren't using health-care like they have," said Wayne DeVeydt, WellPoint Inc.'s chief financial officer, in an interview Wednesday. "Utilization is lower than we expected, and it's unusual."

Others say that consumers are beginning to forgo elective procedures like knee replacements. "We have a very weak economy and it's just a different environment for the elective parts of health care," said Paul Ginsburg, a health economist who runs the Center for Studying Health System Change and has been analyzing health-company earnings. But "this could go beyond the recession. Being a less aggressive consumer of health care is here to stay."

Continued weak demand could eventually put downward pressure on spiralling health-care costs, a long-sought goal of policy makers. It could also force insurers to lower premiums.

The new trend comes amid a broader drop in health-care use as more Americans lose their jobs and their health insurance. Such cutbacks have happened before in recessions, but the drop seems to be more pronounced this time, industry analysts say.

More Americans also are buying high-deductible health plans that force them to bear more of the upfront costs for health services. Some 18 million Americans bought high-deductible plans this year, compared with 13 million last year, according to Paul Mango, a director at consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

And this passage in particular needs to be fleshed out:

All this raises the question of whether, after a year of national attention on out-of-control health costs before the federal health overhaul passed in March, the trend portends a lasting change in the way Americans use the medical system.

For example, if market incentives are allowed to work, a more rationalize regime of health provision would develop absent heavy-handed government control. RTWT in any case.

WikiLeaks Collaborated With Mainstream Media on Afghan Leaks After Previous Scoops Failed to Win Enough Attention

I mentioned Julian Assange's TED interview previously. It's about 20 minutes long, so grab a cup of coffee if you're up for it (the last few minutes are the most intriguing, so if pressed for time, scroll ahead toward the end). By now it's no longer a mystery the kind of agenda Mr. Assange is working. Interesting is that he sees himself as a "journalist," although clearly not of the old school "objective" kind (if there ever was one). The boys and girls on JournoList would no doubt welcome the likes of Assange into their ranks.

Also, at Wall Street Journal, "WikiLeaks Rolled Dice to Raise Its Profile":

WikiLeaks, frustrated at the lack of splash of recent leaks on its whistle-blowing website, has rolled the dice to try to raise its profile by teaming up with news organizations in its latest dump of classified documents.

The site's secretive founder Julian Assange surfaced in London on Monday to give a rare news conference as part of that new strategy. The white-haired Australian computer hacker schooled a packed room of reporters on how to navigate the 76,000 documents just released, arguing they contained evidence of war crimes and could work as "deterrents" to further abuses.

WikiLeaks was launched in 2007 by self-described Chinese dissidents and Internet hackers as a warehouse of leaked documents. Through its bare-bones site Wikileaks.org, it has landed big scoops, including its most infamous disclosure—video footage of American soldiers shooting down a group of people in Iraq in 2007. Representatives for the site have repeatedly declined to say how they obtain their material and their activities have prompted investigations by federal authorities

People familiar with the matter say Mr. Assange is frustrated that some of the site's other disclosures, such as a database of military procurements in Iraq and Afghanistan, didn't garner more attention. Some senior members of the group also want to combat the perception that the site is veering into the realm of opinion, one of the people said. The site took flak from some commentators for editing the 2007 Iraq video and for dubbing the video "Collateral Murder."

Mr. Assange launched a new plan this summer in a Brussels cafe. He offered a U.K. newspaper, the Guardian, advance access to documents the site planned to release about the war in Afghanistan, according to the Guardian's account. They came up with a password for accessing the trove based on the logo on the cafe's napkins.

Monday, the Guardian, along with the New York Times and German weekly Der Spiegel, published a flood of stories based on mostly raw field reports, citing WikiLeaks as the source. They say they weren't told how the site obtained them but tried to verify them independently.

A spokesman for WikiLeaks said the group didn't pay for the leaked documents.

Mr. Assange told reporters on Monday that he limited his outreach to these three organizations out of expediency and that more collaborations with traditional media are on the horizon. "We had hoped to partner with a network to do a more significant investigation, but limited time and resources eclipsed that," he said. "We do hope to do that next time."

RTWT.

Readers know my position. Assange and his media cohorts are way past any "good government" or "transparency" motives. These actions put lives at risk, no matter what your thoughts are on the continuing rationale for our fight against the Taliban.

RELATED: At Sister Toldjah, "The Definitive Smack Down of WikiLeaker Julian Assange" (via Memeorandum).

BONUS EXTRA: Boston Globe, "Pentagon Studies Possible Risks to Afghans From Leaked Documents."

24 Hours of Le Mans

From Kurt Muehmel:

Jennifer Keeton Expelled From Graduate School for Christian Beliefs on Homosexuality

At Astute Blogggers, "JENNIFER KEETON TOSSED OUT OF GRAD SCHOOL BECAUSE SHE'S A CHRISTIAN.

Also, at Fox News, "Lawsuit Claims College Ordered Student to Alter Religious Views on Homosexuality, Or Be Dismissed."

Reason.TV — Protest in Bell

Via Instapundit:

Reading The Post-American Presidency

I'm getting into this book: The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America. More blogging later...