So the progressive spin here is that their Harvard-grad future First Lady is so oblivious that she’s capable of unknowingly using a phrase with a provocative second meaning – at least four times. In the face of what must have been a dead giveaway reaction from her audience. Uh-huh. And if she paged “Mike Hunt” four times and provoked titters and whispers, she’d still keep cluelessly calling for him.

Sorry, I’m not buying it that Michelle Obama is that unintelligent, no matter what her “defenders” want you to believe about her IQ.

Another point – note how the goalposts are again being moved in Obama’s favor. When this rumor first started, it was a scurrilous lie. Now the spin is that it’s true but inaccurate – the logical corollary to the left’s other favorite half-truth. But there’s no apology being issued to those who were accused of being liars under the former policy of stout denial. Being an Obamiac means never having to say you’re sorry.

Many fans of the “classic” years of the series (variously considered to be seasons 2 through 5, 3 through 6, or some other subset of the first half-dozen years) have felt that the series long ago ceased to be funny. The only disagreement seems to be when the single shark-jumping moment occurred. I’ve always favored the double-whammy of back-to-back preachy, unfunny episodes near the beginning of season 7: Bart Sells his Soul and Lisa the Vegetarian.

But there are many, many of viewers who deny that the show has lost anything at all, and the nearly twenty years in the waiting Simpsons movie has been eagerly anticipated by millions.

Nothing I have heard about the movie makes me very hopeful about the movie. This quote from longtime Simpsons writer Al Jean about Lisa’s environmental screed says it all:

Series writer Al Jean agreed that there were big themes in the film, particularly the environment, but that the movie's makers did not obviously take sides.

"They are big themes, especially the environmental theme, but we always like to approach it from both sides, so later in the film when Lisa's giving a lecture about the pollution, the label of the lecture is 'An Irritating Truth'."

Leaving the “Truth” of Gore’s anti-scientific screed unchallenged while paraphrasing the adjective hardly represents approaching things from both sides.

There's no great mystery as to how people living in fortified compounds in Chicago can afford to be so cavalier about illegals strolling through the properties of Texans and Arizonans. The only mystery is why anyone else bothers listening to them.

Whether Kael ever said literally what she is widely quoted as saying is beside the point. Her supposed bewilderment about the results of the 1972 election epitomizes the isolation chamber that too many leftist coastal elites exist in.

Unfortunately, the left is not alone in being less attuned to middle America than the median voter is. A very large percentage of the more prominent voices on the center right are based in the Beltway, New York City, Minneapolis, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Miami, or other blue enclaves.

This is basically a positive. It helps conservatism to have some dissenting voices embedded in blue America. And no one can question the commitment of blue state conservatives, whose political lives are significantly more challenging than their red state counterparts’.

But there are negative aspects to the situation, and one of those is a potential blind spot regarding the way the bulk of red America sees certain issues and candidates. Blue state conservatives are more likely to see in a politician such as Mitt Romney a regular guy who speaks without an accent; whereas to red state conservatives, it’s W whose English and values are standard and Romney, Giuliani, etc. who are “accented.”

I’m not saying that either side is wrong. But they are different, and as they start with different assumptions they unsurprisingly sometimes end up in different places. Thus the unexpected, to the center right punditry, results of the recent South Carolina Republican poll:

McCain        25
Giuliani        20
Thompson   16
Gingrich       12
Romney         8

Although McCain and Gingrich aren’t Southerners as Thompson is, each more than holds his own here simply by being a well-known mainstream conservative who hasn’t had to make the large number of compromises with conservative principals that the two northeastern candidates have. Recognition may be something of an issue here too, for Romney and Thompson, as they are not yet as high profile in general as they are in the blogosphere.

The problem here is not southern aversion to Mormonism or to Giuliani’s Catholicism. It is simply that Giuliani and Romney become less attractive candidates the further one moves away from the preconceptions of Boston. If one approaches things from the mindset that Bush is too southern, too religious, too unrefined, (and says nucular), then of course a candidate such as Romney looks more appealing. And since the hate Bush crowd on the left, among whom blue state conservatives live and whose exhalations they breathe second-hand, does obsess over southern and western language, religion, dress, etc., it can seem natural to try to appease their wrath by offering them a Romney instead of a Fred Thomson.

Red America is centered (electoral vote weighted wise) somewhere around Memphis. Yet its most prominent voices are located far from this center. Some of the center right perhaps needs to do a better job of truly wrapping its head around red state America, beyond just intellectually recognizing its existence. At least, if they don’t want to delude themselves about the actual appeal of a Giuliani or a Romney across 100 million Republican voters nationwide, they do.

Update: I wrote the above before reading the following by NRO’s Rich Lowry, which was written from a profoundly non-Southern point of view. I don’t say anti-Southern, or mean to imply as much.

Romney deserves to be judged as an individual, on his own merits for higher office.

Those are considerable. He is so unlike George W. Bush in his articulate, well-groomed polish that he probably should be hailed as the first-ever metrosexual candidate for president. Indeed, rather than recoiling at his Mormonism, Republican primary voters may conclude that the handsome, “golly”-exclaiming, (newly) down-the-line conservative is simply too good to be true.

The liberal use of the a-word when favorably comparing their chosen candidates to drawling southerners like W is common among blue state conservatives. I can’t help but note with amusement how much less permissible it is to refer to Obama as “articulate” (an implied slur on Sharptonese) than it is to refer to Romney as articulate compared to Bush.

That headline makes about as much sense as the claim in the London Times, in Republicans defect to the Obama camp, that Barack Obama is the black Ronald Reagan.

Apparently there is a massive trend of former Bush supporters (most notably, Robert Kagan) switching to support of Obama. Dozens of GOP voters nationwide may have may this switch, or at least considered making it. And it's not hard to see the reasons why, as the Times points out.

Kagan is an informal foreign policy adviser to the Republican senator John McCain, who remains the favoured neoconservative choice for the White House because of his backing for the troops in Iraq.

Well, for every supporter of McCain I've seen on the "neocon" side, there appear to have been ten Romney supporters and twenty Rudy ones, but stuck here in the States as I am, I'm doubtless missing something that is apparent in London.

Kagan wrote approvingly that a keynote speech by Obama at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was “pure John Kennedy”, a neocon hero of the cold war.

JFK, LBJ, FDR, Henry Wallace. Neoncon / conservative heroes all. As for JFK's actual Cold War legacy, he gets high marks for the Cuban Missile Crisis and low ones for the Bay of Pigs, so it's usually considered to be mixed at best.

For his optimism about the future, Obama has been dubbed the “black Ronald Reagan”.

I for one seldom hear him referred to in any other way - although that may start clashing with his being the black John Kennedy at some point.

Anytime I hear Americans fretting that we may be making the wrong electoral choices (as judged by our European masters), I think of articles like this one. What's realy scary isn't how clueless the most well-respected newspaper in the world is about the most basic facts concerning the most powerful nation in the world, but the fact that they're probably far less clueless than their counterparts in Paris, Berlin, Rome, etc.

As amazingly dangerous as American leftist politicians have become, things seem to be several orders of magnitude worse in France, where Socialist candidate (and likely loser in Sunday’s run-off election) Segolene Royal is desperately trying to intimidate voters from voting for her opponent, Nicolas Sarkozy.

I’m not sure whether the headline Violence feared if Sarkozy wins should read, “Violence threatened,” or “Violence suggested,” but in either case her ham-handed attempt to steal the election by insinuating that Sarkozy’s detractors will react violently if he wins, while trying to spin this as a negative about Sarkozy instead of a negative about his opponents, is an incredible example of chutzpah.

Royal noted that Sarkozy had not been able to campaign freely in the suburbs without the escort of "hundreds of police".

We’ll all have to remember that in 2008. If Obama provokes insanely violent riots when campaigning in Texas and requires hundreds of security personnel to keep him from being torn apart by crazed mobs, the GOP candidate will have to make sure to excoriate Obama for his divisive campaigning. And if despite all that, Obama still looks like the likely winner by October of 2008, Rudy or McCain should be ready to play the Riot Card..

Ann Coulter mockingly compared them to buying indulgences. Enron built up a huge fortune (on paper) simply by proposing trading in them. OTOH, apologists for the hypocritical lifestyles of talk-green, live-carbon-black enviro-nazis Al Gore and John Edwards have claimed that if you’re rich enough, you don’t actually need to behave in an environmentally responsible way; you can just dig into your pocket and pay a carbon sin tax.

Now the Financial Times has weighed in, finding that the carbon credits scam isn’t producing any real environmental benefit but instead is just allowing wily users of the system to game it for profit.

“Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.”

In dueling columns on cnn.com, Ted Nugent faces off against former LA Times editorial page editor Tom Plate.

Nugent’s sensible column speaks for itself and needs no support. Once he has pointed out that Virginia Tech actually was a “gun-free zone,” what else is left to say? But I thought that Plate’s highly disingenuous column deserved a fisking, so here goes.

The right to free speech, press, religion and assembly and so on seem to be working well, but the gun part, not so much.

Compared to what? Some alternate history without a Second Amendment, I suppose. But we don’t know what America’s past and present would look like without a Second Amendment. I’ll just point out, since comparisons to contemporary gun violence in Britain and the rest of Europe are often made in this context, that we haven’t had a North American Holocaust. We haven’t had a WWII that killed 55,000,000; a WWI that killed tens of millions; a blood- and revolution-soaked 19^th century that killed tens of millions more; or a Stalinist purge of tens of millions. We haven’t had an Armenian genocide, or a Katyn Forest Massacre. We haven’t even had the relatively low level of civil violence represented by local conflicts such as Northern Ireland or the Basque region. We haven’t had a Milosevic ethnically cleansing “undesirables” in North America within the past decade.

Could European Second Amendments have prevented some of these wars, atrocities, and crimes against humanity? Possibly. The despots in question certainly seemed to have thought so, as gun confiscation was always one of the first items on their lists. And you’ll note that the well-armed Swiss are conspicuously absent from the above roster of victims, despite their multi-lingual and multi-religious society.

Some misguided people will focus on the fact that the 23-year-old student who killed his classmates and others at Virginia Tech was ethnically Korean.

Oh, yeah? Name one. No one on the gun rights side is focusing on that at all. This is a red herring, and a lame attempt to make gun rights opponents out to be bigots. Actually, Second Amendment proponents are defending gun rights with the same arguments they used after Columbine, etc. Now I can imagine Cho’s status as a resident alien being brought up in an immigration control context, but that would be a) distinct from any gun rights context, and b) not at all the same as zeroing in on Cho’s ethnicity.

These students were not killed by a Korean, they were killed by a 9 mm handgun and a .22-caliber handgun.

Are those our only choices? He’s trying to create a false dichotomy here: if you’re not anti-gun, you must be anti-Korean. How about, the victims were killed by a person (who happened to have been born in South Korea), who used two guns. And BTW, Mr. Plate, four teachers were killed as well as 28 students.

In the nineties, the Los Angeles Times courageously endorsed an all-but-complete ban on privately owned guns, in an effort to greatly reduce their availability.

I’m assuming that that would have been during the time period when Plate himself was the editorial page editor of the LA Times. If so, I have to applaud his breathtaking lack of humility in citing his own stance so admiringly. However, what’s so “courageous” about sticking with the same leftist orthodoxy that 99% of the MSM adheres to? What truly would have been courageous would have been for Plate or the Times to express any view on any issue than ran contrary to the prevailing politically correct consensus of the day.

By the time the series of editorials had concluded, the newspaper had received more angry letters and fiery faxes from the well-armed U.S. gun lobby than on any other issue during my privileged six-year tenure as the newspaper's editorial page editor.

But the paper, by the way, also received more supportive letters than on any other issue about which it editorialized during that era. The common sense of ordinary citizens told them that whatever Americans were and are good for, carrying around guns like costume jewelry was not on our Mature List of Notable Cultural Accomplishments.

So huge amounts of pro-gun rights mail are dismissed as the efforts of the “gun lobby,” while anything anti-gun originates from “ordinary citizens.” It’s pretty easy to say the public’s overwhelmingly on your side on any issue at all when you get to toss any dissenting voices into the “lobby” pile (see Global Warming).

As for "well-armed U.S. gun lobby," what exactly is the snide implication here? That people were forced at gunpoint to right letters to the editor? Probably not even Plate wants anyone to believe that, so what does "well-armed" have to do with anything?

The dilemma that Plate or any other opponent of gun rights faces here is that their opinion is a minority one and these is powerful opposition to it. However, the “power” here comes from the collective power of 200,000,000 individually weak gun owners and those who approve of gun rights. The usual leftist trick of trying to pretend that some particular practice only benefits a tiny elite of Mayflower-descended Boston Brahmins and is therefore against the interests of the common man and woman fails laughably when it comes to self defense rights.

Far fewer guns in America would logically result in far fewer deaths from people pulling the trigger.

But that very dubious assertion is the heart of the disagreement. You can’t win an argument by restating your side of it and claiming you’ve thereby proven yourself correct. That would be begging the question!

Say there are 100 million guns in the US and that 5 million of those are illegally in the hands of criminals. Question: would getting rid of the 95 million guns legally owned by the rest of us a) increase the gun death rate, b) reduce it by a moderate amount, or c) reduce it by 95%?

You might be able to make a halfway plausible case for b) (over time), though the disastrous a) certainly seems at least as likely. As for c), it’s really the choice that Plate’s arguments tend toward, and even many gun rights opponents can see how unlikely that is.

The probability of the Virginia Tech gun massacre happening would have been greatly reduced if guns weren't so easily available to ordinary citizens.

Now he’s jumping from (misusing) logic to math. Okay, probability theory’s great if you want to calculate your odds at roulette. But does Plate really think that pure chance was the only factor at play on Monday? If his argument were that we each have an equal 0.000000001% chance of awaking and wanting to go on a major shooting spree on any given day, and that whether we do or not will be entirely controlled by the gun laws, then maybe he could gainfully invoke “probability.” But I doubt that even Plate really believes this, so why even frame the issue this way?

Last month, I was robbed at 10 in the evening in the alley behind my home. As I was carrying groceries inside, a man with a gun approached me where my car was parked. The gun he carried featured one of those red-dot laser beams, which he pointed right at my head.

Because I'm anything but a James Bond type, I quickly complied with all of his requests. Perhaps because of my rapid response (it is called surrender), he chose not to shoot me; but he just as easily could have. What was to stop him?...

A near-death experience does focus the mind. We need to get rid of our guns.

It’s depressing to realize that a mediocre thinker like this was in charge of the editorial page of one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers. I’m sure that was a terrifying experience for Plate, and I’m glad he came out of it okay, but argumentum ad anecdotum never proved anything. Yes, he didn’t have a gun, and he got out of his mugging alive. Good, but that single event is not exactly a statistic, is it?

Having a gun doesn’t obligate you to disastrously try to use it when someone already has the drop on you. That same nonviolent mugging could have gone down exactly the same way if Plate had had a gun in his pocket. The claim has never been that a gun can prevent all tragedies, but that in many circumstances a gun can increase your options. You’d think that people who have enshrined “choice” as a holy word would understand that.

Then too, most muggers don’t have much reason to want to shoot a generic victim. Mugging’s not a capital or life offense, whereas murder is. The added safety of eliminating a potential witness is more than offset by the added jeopardy of committing the much more serious crime. But certain categories of victims face other dangers than Plate wasn’t likely to face. If he’d been a 20 year-old woman instead of a 60 year-old man, his mugging might not have ended with a walk-away but with a rape. A great many rapes are crimes of opportunity that start out as muggings or burglaries. And then of course a rapist does have a stronger incentive to permanently prevent his victim from ever testifying than a garden variety mugger does.

As for James Bond, he probably wouldn’t have wandered unarmed into a dark alley at 10:00 pm in the first place. If this is your claim to being a great dispenser of wisdom, that you make a decision that no one sane would make but are then lucky enough not to pay for it, then you’ll forgive me if I look elsewhere for advice.

Does Plate think that outlawing guns could have prevented his mugging? His mugger was already willing to break the more serious law against mugging. Would he be more likely to obey a law against having a gun? The same argument applies to Cho, obviously.

Finally, although he started out talking about the Second Amendment, he never actually addressed this aspect of the whole issue. Like it or not, the Second Amendment is here to stay. Overturning it would take not only both houses of Congress, but also 38 states. That is simply never going to happen, at least not in the foreseeable future. So why even write something like this without even addressing any of the arguments on the other side?

We used to write these kinds of impotent pro-con editorials back on the junior high paper, but we had the excuse of actually being in junior high. And since we couldn’t change any laws, not even the laws that adults were allowed to vote on and not even school policies about homework, arguing over the Second Amendment was no more pointless than arguing over elections, budgets, and other issues that really are on the table (for adult voters).

Plate doesn’t have that excuse. If you’re going to seriously propose overturning the Second Amendment, don’t just regurgitate the same old reasons why; give specific ideas how.

The South Korean government has been quick to deplore the violence; that is, a hypothetical anti-Korean backlash that theoretically could but almost certainly won’t occur in the USA.

The South Korean government said it was concerned about a possible backlash against South Koreans in the United States after the shooting.

"We are working closely with our diplomatic missions and local Korean residents' associations in anticipation of any situation that may arise," a foreign ministry official said by telephone.

The blame-the-gun rush in the American media pales in comparison to the blather about swaggering Americans carrying six guns and firing them off at random which comes from across the pond.

The comment section for this piece seems to have been closed several hours ago, right after several commenters pointed out the recent revelation that the shooter was not in fact a product of American gun culture but a South Korean resident alien. Oops.

Update: Now the embarrassing comments sections seems to be gone entirely. If the facts contradict your position, just suppress them.

It’s a meaningless buzzword. Obviously if the cops or campus security had a magic Lockdown button that would actually achieve anything, they would have pushed it. But even if you could effectively “lock down” every building, how do you know who you’re locking in and who you’re locking out?

I’m reminded of the old Tony Boucher story where a guy goes around bolting all his doors and windows and finally drags a wardrobe across the doorway as a barricade. He says with satisfaction, “Now everything is nice and safe,” and a gleeful voice from inside the bed says, “Yes, now we’re all safe!”

Happy Easter!

Yahoo! News and CNN are among the doubtless many news organizations which have focused on one phrase from Pope Benedict’s Easter message:

"In the Middle East, besides some signs of hope in the dialogue between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, nothing positive comes from Iraq, torn apart by continual slaughter as the civil population flees."

The only difference is in the headlines; while CNN goes with Pope: 'Nothing positive' in Iraq, Yahoo! prefers Pope laments 'slaughter' in Iraq.

What I am left wondering is exactly what the pope said (in Italian?) The quoted passage doesn’t actually scan. It almost seems like a part in the middle has been left out and that two different sentences have been combined into one run-on.

Not that I’m suggesting anything nefarious. Translation glitches are common, especially under the pressure of looming deadlines. And it’s perfectly possible that the above really is a faithful though ungrammatical translation.

Still, I’d like to be sure of that before I zeroed in one that one comment of many as the MSM seems to have done. After all, this wouldn’t be the first time that the American media in particular has oversimplified the reservations of a pope regarding the Iraq War.

It will be interesting to see if another shoe drops and we find that the Middle East / Israel thought had its own ending and the Iraq thought had its own beginning.

Malone’s take on Drudge’s effect on the old media is basically positive, but he can’t resist the urge to get a little dig in at Drudge – even if he has to ignore the facts to make his point. Malone says:

But that's when Drudge stepped in. For no obvious reason, he decided to link to the two day old AP story. He then attached one of his classic scare headlines: "Greenspan warns of likely U.S. recession." Personally, I love stuff like that - it harkens back to the good old days of newspapering and the vastly underrated age of yellow journalism - and if the viewer chose to read the term 'imminent' into Drudge's words, and then link through to the AP story . . .well, bully for Matt.

The only problem here is that there were no “Drudge’s words,” and “his classic scare headline” was actually just the actual AP headline attached to their story.

Malone must have missed Pethokoukis pointing out as much in the very first paragraph of the entry that Malone is himself following up on:

But despite the inflammatory Drudge headline– which, in all fairness, linked to an Associated Press story with that same title – the Maestro was hardly so definitive as Drudge made him out to be.

Of course Pethokoukis managed to contradict himself within the space of that one sentence, first acknowledging that Drudge’s “inflammatory” headline was just the AP headline, but then talking about what Drudge had “made out” Greenspan to be.

The old media just can’t quite resist taking (or manufacturing) every opportunity to remind us that no matter how much more popular and influential Drudge et al may be than the MSM these days, the new media are all really just yellow journalists. The MSM is finally admitting that they’re losing the readership/viewership battle. But they can’t stop clinging to the comforting notion that unlike Drudge, they’re just to smart and fair for us troglodytes to appreciate.

Added at 3:03 EST: Malone 's timeline is a little faulty as well. Drudge didn't "for no obvious reason" decide to link to "a two day old AP story." His first link to the story seems to have been made at 17:52 GMT on Monday the 27th. The AP story seems to have first appeared at 13:34 GMT that same day. That's a four-hour lag, not a two day one.

In Why are boys struggling in school? today’s USA Today reports on a Wichita Eagle piece about the continuing slide in male college enrollment (men make up only 43% of college students).

It didn’t take the chattering classes long to find the true culprit here: males themselves. Sociologist Ron Matson of Wichita State explains that "75% of household chores" are left to women, which teaches boys "to avoid responsibility."

I somehow have trouble believing that if current trends reversed themselves, and it were females who were underrepresented in higher education by a 4:3 ratio, that Matson or any other academic would be implying that girls and young women should perform more housework in order to boost their academic prospects.

And whatever the accuracy of Matson’s 75% statistic (which I don’t credit for a moment), it’s probably safe to say that today’s males are responsible for a higher percentage of household chores than they were, say, two generations ago – when college enrollment was overwhelmingly male.

If women were (still) being educationally shortchanged, the spin would still be anti-male (though with some actual justification in that case). If you think that A or not-A would each prove your point equally well, you’re probably arguing with a predetermined conclusion in mind.

Here is yet another example of there being some ideas so dumb that only an intellectual could credit them. But if this were just an isolated instance of backward logic by one Kansas ideologue, it wouldn’t be significant. What’s somewhat troubling is how ingrained the instinct to search for an “establishment” demon has become in academia, the media, and the culture as a whole.