Posts By Author » Ed Driscoll

Sulzberger, Coordinate! Sulzberger, Coordinate!
31 Jan 2010 4:35 pm

Frank Rich describes John McCain as “the unpatriotic opposition” in the US Senate. But since when is that a bad thing in the eyes of your average Timesman?

New Silicon Graffiti Video: Barack To The Future!
25 Jan 2010 1:00 am

The latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog is coming to you in glorious black & white this week, as a reminder that despite the hip, sleek high tech Internet campaign that Senator Barack Obama ran in 2008, President Obama has governed to date very much like a boring, mid century old fogy…

Begun, The Late Night Wars Have…
24 Jan 2010 4:57 am

A new video explores NBC’s late night imbroglio with the style of Ken Burns’ epic, if portentous Civil War miniseries.

The Revolutions Finally Got Televised
24 Jan 2010 2:36 am

While some of the music and (especially) the sound effects chosen by Glenn Beck and his production crew are bit melodramatic, the video from his “Revolutionary Holocaust” segment from Friday night is a must-watch program, placing Hitler’s National Socialism, and International Communism in its various forms — and the European intellectuals of the early 20th century who championed both forms of barbarism into context.

A League of Her Own
16 Jan 2010 5:47 pm

The gaffetastic Martha Coakley steps up to the plate — and strikes out hard…

Video: Silicon Graffiti — “The Pinchurian Candidate”
16 Jan 2010 5:42 pm

The weekend before November’s elections, Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote a curious column titled, “The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York.”

On the other hand, it was rather refreshing to see a journalist with the New York Times use the word pejoratively. Needless to say, that hasn’t always been the case, as we’ll explore in the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog…

Springtime For Roosevelt
16 Jan 2010 5:21 pm

At one press conference, FDR displayed a Nazi Iron Cross and said it should be presented to a columnist of the New York Daily News who was one of the president’s most bitter critics. It is enough to make the Obama administration’s treatment of Fox News look timid.

Video: Hide The Decline!
10 Jan 2010 7:39 pm

I couldn’t let the spot of bother at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit go without doing a video on how climate change has changed over the years. In six and a half minutes, look back at…

Looking For Trumbo: California’s Basket-Case Economy
10 Jan 2010 4:40 pm

George Will crafts quite a descriptive metaphor for California’s failing economy, comparing it to the titular ultimate basket-case soldier in Dalton Trumbo’s infamous 1939 anti-war novel “Johnny Got His Gun.” As Trumbo writes, if Johnny got his gun, then most certainly, “Berkeley Got Its Liberalism.”

Guido Beach Meets The Great Relearning
10 Jan 2010 4:43 am

Tom Wolfe once wrote that “The Great Relearning” — recalling the forgotten common sense that every cultural revolution believes is anathema, “seems to me to be the leitmotif of the twenty-first century in America.”

If so, 21st century America certainly has its work cut out for itself, judging by MTV’s “Jersey Shore” reality show…

The Ultra-Flexible WMD Definition
10 Jan 2010 3:41 am

Despite finding saarin, mustard gas, and other chemical weapons, and despite various prison sentences for those who used them in Iraq or those who sold them, apparently, the only thing that would have satisfied the left that Saddam had WMDs would have been discovering a giant SPECTRE-sized Ken Adam-styled laboratory with men in white lab coats hard at work caught in the act. But as Elizabeth Blackney, AKA “Media Lizzy” notes on her Facebook page, my how the definition of WMDs has changed…

The Alpha And The Omega Of Liberal Fascism
9 Jan 2010 8:03 pm

A British news site reports that elderly pensioners have taken to burning books for warmth during the brutal English winter, in a story that ties together not just Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″, but multiple chapters of Jonah Goldberg’s best-selling “Liberal Fascism”, which celebrates its second year in print this month, and more timely than ever…

The Sensitive, Nuanced Verbal Stylings of Senator Harry Reid
9 Jan 2010 7:20 pm

The top Democrat in the U.S. Senate apologized on Saturday for comments he made about Barack Obama’s race during the 2008 presidential bid.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada described then-Sen. Barack Obama as “light skinned” and “with no Negro dialect.” Obama is the nation’s first African-American president.

Video: Sex, Lies, And Golf Magazines
9 Jan 2010 7:05 pm

The cover of Golf Digest’s now-infamous “10 Tips Obama Can Take From Tiger” issue was announced on the Web about five minutes before Woods’ career-altering misadventures at the end of November. But when I finally saw the issue on the newsstand around Christmastime, it occurred to me that it may be a miniature — albeit entirely unintended — version of “Bobos In Paradise”, “The Preppie Handbook”, and other books that marked mammoth elite overreach and smugness…

To The Memory Hole And Back
25 Dec 2008 11:28 pm

I originally produced the above clip, “Mugging For The Camera,” back in early April as part of my Silicon Graffiti series of videoblogs, and uploaded it first to my primary video server, where I posted it here and it got a fair chunk of traffic in the Blogosphere. I then uploaded it to YouTube for hosting on my page there.
Last year, one of the subjects of the video, television reporter Rebecca Aguilar, then with Dallas-based KDFW, received a firestorm of attention (here’s our post, which links to others) …

The Emperor’s Wardrobe Is Out For Dry Cleaning
25 Dec 2008 11:15 pm

CNN’s John Roberts can be witnessed between 6:50 and 7:30 point in the above edition of Silicon Graffiti doing an amazing aerial 180 worthy of both Tony Hawk and Joseph Stalin–and here with the very definition of a Freudian slip. And yet, he seems surprisingly incredulous when one of October’s chief hit and run victims of the drive-by media mocks his objectivity.
Update: Kathy Shaidle observes a revolving door revolving at the White House, as the upcoming Obama administration continues to take shape.
More: “That’s a great thing about E. …

Political Jujitsu, Then And Now
23 Dec 2008 2:13 am

In his profile of Paul Weyrich for the DC Examiner, Lee Edwards writes:
He was born on October 7, 1942, in Racine, Wisconsin, the son of working-class German Catholics. His father tended the boilers of St. Mary’s Catholic Hospital for 50 years. He was politically active from an early age: at 19, he and his friends took over the Racine Republican party.
He worked for a local daily newspaper and then as a radio-television journalist before coming to Washington in 1967 as press secretary to Senator Gordon Allott (R-CO).
He learned how …

Layers And Layers Of Fact Checkers
23 Dec 2008 2:09 am

Glenn Reynolds links to James Surowiecki in the New Yorker, who asks, “Are Newspapers Doomed?“
“There’s no mystery as to the source of all the trouble: advertising revenue has dried up. In the third quarter alone, it dropped eighteen per cent, or almost two billion dollars, from last year.”
He also suggests something that I’ve noted in the past — we may have been getting more news than we (that is, the market) actually wanted (that is, was willing to pay for) due to cross-subsidies from things like classified advertising. With …

New Video: “In Dodd We Trust?”
22 Dec 2008 1:17 pm

In his 2001 book, The CEO of the Sofa, P.J. O’Rourke wrote:
The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take 100 of its most prominent numskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.
But of course, with every new bailout, the Senate is becoming further and further intertwined with the public sector, and doing increasing harm. As Frank Martin noted in a recent post on his Varifrank blog, “This is how it ends. As of right now, the …

When Waves Collide
3 Jul 2008 11:05 pm

Last month on my blog, I linked to Jack Shafer’s article in Slate, declaring Advantage: Michael Crichton:
In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled “Mediasaurus,” in which he prophesied the death of the mass media–specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. “Vanished, without a trace,” he wrote.
The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances–”artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page”–swept them under. Shedding no …

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