From the AP today:

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) – College students from Missouri to Oregon are urging their schools to stop using coal-based electricity in favor of cleaner energy sources ranging from wood chips to geothermal power.

On Wednesday, students at the University of Missouri and other schools nationwide mounted a Sierra Club-led campaign targeting coal-based power at colleges, whether generated at on-campus plants or purchased from private utilities. The campaign began the same day a group of college presidents rallied in Washington in support of clean energy legislation.

Student organizers said colleges have a societal obligation to reduce and eventually eliminate coal use in favor of renewable energy. At Missouri, the school used more than 48,000 tons of coal to generate electricity in 2007, accounting for 80 percent of campus energy use.

via College students protest coal use on campuses.

Wood chips and paper pellets. I’ll bet they’re at least as efficient as coal, right? Probably lots cheaper too.

And what’s this about “societal obligation[s] to reduce…coal use”. What does that mean? Where did this obligation come from?

Go ahead, click through and read that entire article. In it, you’ll find:

1. no mention of any opposing viewpoint anywhere in the piece. It is taken as gospel that coal use IS BAD and that OF COURSE these students are correct and noble for boycotting their own schools. Schools, by the way, which are costing their parents upwards of $30k per year.

2. no mention anywhere in the article as to WHY coal is so bad in the first place. They say COAL IS BAD and then they say GLOBAL WARMING, but nowhere is the connection made. Anywhere in the piece.

From today’s AP report:

PRAGUE (AP) – The Czech prime minister says President Barack Obama has told him that the U.S. is abandoning plans to put a missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland.

Czech Premier Jan Fischer told reporters in Prague on Thursday that Obama phoned him to say that Washington has decided to scrap the plan that had deeply angered Russia.

Fischer says Obama confirmed that Washington no longer intends to put 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar system in the Czech Republic.

The Bush administration had said the missile shield was a strategic way to counter a threat from Iran or another rogue state in the Middle East. But Russia was deeply angered by the prospect of having U.S. interceptor rockets in countries so close to its territory.

via Obama scrapping missile shield for Czech, Poland.

First of all, Obama chooses September 17 as the day he announces that he’s not going to defend Poland against rogue aggression? He couldn’t have picked another day? Did he purposefully try to insult free nations everywhere and place himself on the wrong side of history by choosing this date? After all, it isn’t like this isn’t the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland to help kick off the festivities of WWII, is it?

Oh yeah, that’s right, it is.

This guy couldn’t be more of a jackass if he tried.

Second, a hat tip to our intrepid betters at the AP who attempt to balance the debate by reporting that, in defense of weapon placement in Poland, the Bush administration said it was a good idea. And you know, if the Bush administration said it, it must be bad. To present the counterpoint, does the AP say that Russia “says” it was angered over the placement? No, of course not. The Russians’ anger we are supposed to take at face value.

Russia WAS deeply angered, and for proof that the placement was a good idea, all we have is Bush SAYING it was a good idea, which , you know, means it was a terrible idea.

Why can’t they say that Russia SAID it was angered by the placement?

No, these AP writers choose their words very carefully. Russia’s anger is to be taken for granted. The legitimacy of the placement of the missiles, however, is to be viewed at through the skeptical lens of the AP’s Bush hatred.

Unbelievable. Read it again. This is no small thing.

What side is the AP on? If NO side (what we’d expect from an ‘objective’ news organization) why not say that Russia SAYS it was angered? Then we can judge for ourselves whether to believe that anger to be legitimate. No. Russia IS angry. Which we are to take at face value.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve been tied to the whipping post, and oh Lord I feel like I’m dying.

Here’s another daft NY Times reporter who thinks that the entire history of the world began on the day she graduated J-school.

Countering criticism of another Jewish building project planned for Sheik Jarrah, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said recently that Jerusalem residents had the right to live anywhere in the city and that Israel’s sovereignty over the capital “cannot be challenged.”

Separately, in Tel Aviv, the police continued hunting for a gunman who fled a gay community center after killing 2 Israelis and wounding at least 10 others on Saturday night. The shock over the attack was felt far beyond the gay community, jolting a society that largely values tolerance and has hardly been exposed to the specter of hate crimes.

via Israel Evicts Palestinians From Homes – NYTimes.com.

Israel as having hardly been exposed to hate crimes? Does she honestly expect us to swallow that whopper without choking on our tongues? Are we honestly supposed to come away from this stink nugget of an article believing that Jews in Tel Aviv are unfamiliar with the notion of a hate crime?

Either Isabel Kershner doesn’t know the first thing about Israel or she doesn’t know what a hate crime is. Likely a heavy dollop of both. Here’s a hate crime for you, Isabel–the Holocaust. Got your attention yet? No? Well here’s a list of the most deadliest hate crimes perpetrated against the Jewish citizens of Israel since 2000 alone:

Oct. 4, 2003

29-year-old female suicide bomber from Jenin explodes in a Haifa restaurant, co-owned by Israeli Arabs, two days before Yom Kippur. 19 murdered, including several children. A newborn and 4 Israeli-Arabs were among those killed. 60 injured.

Sept. 9, 2003
Twin homocide bomb attacks take place near the Zerifin Military Base and at a Jerusalem cafe. 15 murdered. Among the dead in the cafe attack were Dr. David Applebaum, head of the emergency room of a Jerusalem hospital, and his daughter Nava, a bride to be married the next day.

Aug. 19, 2003 – The attack takes place in the midst of a “cease-fire” declared by Palestinian terror groups and on the eve of a planned transfer of several West Bank cities to Palestinian Authority control. A Palestinian suicide bomber, dressed as an Orthodox Jew, strikes on a Jerusalem bus. 23 murdered, including several children. More than 100 are injured.

June 11, 2003 – The attack comes a week after the “road map” peace process is launched at a summit in Aqaba, Jordan, with the leaders of Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the United States.
A Palestinian suicide bomber, dressed as an Orthodox Jew, blows himself up on a bus. 17 murdered.

March 5, 2003
A Palestinian suicide bomber strikes on a bus en route to Haifa University. 17 murdered, most of them teenagers. 53 injured.

Jan. 5, 2003
Two Palestinian suicide bombers strike in crowded Tel Aviv shopping district. 23 murdered, including 8 foreign nationals. More than 120 injured.

Nov. 21, 2002
A Palestinian suicide bomber detonates on a commuter bus during morning rush hour in Jerusalem. 11 murdered, many of them schoolchildren. More than 50 injured.

Oct. 22, 2002
An explosives-laden sport utility vehicle driven by a Palestinian suicide bomber rammed into a bus near Hadera in northern Israel. 14 murdered. More than 45 injured.

July 31, 2002
A Palestinian terrorist plants and detonates a bomb in a backpack in a Hebrew University cafeteria. 9 murdered, including 5 Americans. More than 80 injured.

June 18-19, 2002
A Palestinian suicide bomber strikes on a rush-hour bus in Jerusalem, carrying many children on their way to school.
19 murdered. 74 injured – 6 seriously. A Palestinian suicide bomber strikes at a hitchhiking post in Jerusalem’s French Hill.
7 murdered. 50 injured – 3 critically.

June 5, 2002
A car packed with a large quantity of explosives struck a bus traveling from Tel-Aviv to Tiberias. 17 murdered. 38 injured.

May 8, 2002
A Palestinian suicide bomber strikes at a crowded billiard hall in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon le-Zion. 15 murdered. 55 injured.

March 31, 2002
A Palestinian suicide bomber strikes a restaurant in Haifa frequented by both Arabs and Jews. The bombing follows suicide attacks on each of the previous two days, one at a Jerusalem supermarket and one at a café in Tel Aviv. 15 murdered. Over 40 injured.

March 27, 2002
A Palestinian suicide bomber (Hamas) strikes at Netanya’s Park hotel during a Passover seder. 29 murdered, mostly senior citizens. 140 injured – 20 seriously.

March 9, 2002
Palestinian terrorists bomb Jerusalem’s popular Moment Café, around the corner from the prime minister’s residence. 11 murdered.

March 2-3, 2002
Attacks occur during talk of a Saudi Arabian peace initiative.
A suicide bomber blows himself up in a crowd of mothers and children walking home from synagogue after the Sabbath in an ultra-orthodox Jerusalem neighbourhood. 9 murdered, including 6 children, and an entire family is wiped out. A Palestinian sniper shoots an Israeli policeman riding on a motorcycle. 1 murdered. A Palestinian sniper attacks at a West Bank checkpoint. 10 murdered, including 7 soldiers. Palestinian attack in Gaza. 1 murdered. 4 injured.

Dec. 2, 2001
Palestinian terrorists attack three times in 24 hours – at a pedestrian mall in downtown Jerusalem, in a car in downtown Jerusalem and on a Haifa bus. 25 murdered. Over 200 injured.

Oct. 17, 2001
Palestinian gunmen assassinate Israel’s tourism minister, Rehavam Ze’evi, in a Jerusalem hotel.

Aug. 9, 2001
A Palestinian suicide bomber attacks the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem at lunchtime. 15 murdered – including several children and nearly an entire family. 130 injured.

June 1, 2001
The attack comes days after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced a unilateral Israeli cease-fire. A Palestinian suicide bomber attacks a Tel Aviv beachside disco filled with teenaged immigrants from the former Soviet Union. 21 murdered. More than 100 injured.

May 9, 2001
Ya’acov (Kobi) Mandell (14) and Yossi Ish-Ran (14) were stoned to death by Palestinians while hiking near their home of Tekoa, south of Jerusalem.

Feb. 14, 2001
A Palestinian bus driver mows down a group of Israelis at a bus stop near Tel Aviv. 8 murdered.

October 12, 2000
Two Israeli reservists, Yesef Avrahami and Vadim Novesche, took a wrong turn on the highway and were stopped by Arafat’s Palestinian Authority policemen. A Palestinian policeman and other Palestinians later lynched and murdered the two Israelis.

Murdered for being Jewish. How do you spell “hate crime” again, Isabel?

Someone PLEASE wire Ms. Kershner with the news–Jews have been the victims of hate crimes for THOUSANDS of years, and for the past 60, as Israelis. If any other non-Jewish group had to endure what the Jews have been forced to endure, the world would have tilted on its axis and spun helplessly into space. For the “crime” of being Jewish in the middle east and having the the audacity to sustain a democracy in the hell of Islamic radicalism, Israelis have been made to suffer ridiculous and inhuman torments for decades.

The craziest thing is that the AP is attempting to appear even handed and open minded…which is great….except when the topic is the Holocaust….in which case anyone who “argues” that it didn’t happen isn’t really “arguing”…but “ranting”…and should be treated with the “respect” any sane person would ordinarily accord a slug…or an empty beer can…or a hang nail.

RABAT, Morocco (AP) – From the western edge of the Muslim world, the King of Morocco has dared to tackle one of the most inflammatory issues in the Middle East conflict—the Holocaust.

At a time when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s dismissal of the Holocaust has made the biggest headlines, King Mohammed VI has called the Nazi destruction of the Jews “one of the most tragic chapters of modern history,” and has endorsed a Paris-based program aimed at spreading the word among fellow Muslims.

Many in the Islamic world still ignore or know little about the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jews during World War II. Some disbelieve it outright. Others argue that it was a European crime and imagine it to be the reason Israel exists and the Palestinians are stateless.

The sentiment was starkly illustrated in March after a Palestinian youth orchestra performed for Israeli Holocaust survivors, only to be shut down by angry leaders of the West Bank refugee camp where they live.

“The Holocaust happened, but we are facing a similar massacre by the Jews themselves,” a community leader named Adnan Hindi said at the time. “We lost our land and we were forced to flee.”

via Morocco challenges Mideast Holocaust mind-set.

Lest anyone forget, there’s nothing “similar” to the Holocaust. That’s why they call it the “Holocaust”. It pretty much is the be-all and end-all of human tragedies. That “Palestinians” can no longer squat on land that was never theirs to begin with is not akin to mass murder. Not even a close call here, people.

But thank you AP for making it appear to be so.

Dipshits.

From the “if we don’t want it, what are our elected officials doing pushing for it” file, comes this latest Rasmussen report:

The health care reform legislation working its way through Congress has lost support over the past month. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 44% of U.S. voters are at least somewhat in favor of the reform effort while 53% are at least somewhat opposed.

Today’s 44% level of support is down from 46% two weeks ago, and 50% in late June.

Opposition has grown from 45% in late June to 49% two weeks ago and 53% today.

As in earlier surveys, those with strong opinions are more likely to oppose the plan rather than support it. The current numbers: 24% strongly favor and 37% strongly oppose.

[ . . . ]

There is a huge partisan divide on the health care plan. Sixty-eight percent (68%) of Democrats favor it. However, the plan is opposed by 80% of Republicans and 60% of those not affiliated with either major party.

via Rasmussen Reports™: The Most Comprehensive Public Opinion Data Anywhere.

It’s what the Tea Party movement is actually about, isn’t it? Taxation without representation. Sure, those are our elected officials inhabiting Washington, but are they representing our wishes? Are they doing what the majority of the population wants them to do on issues such as health care? Well, the answer is surely ‘no’ if they succeed in cramming this rotten apple of a health care ‘fix’ down our throats. And if our officials are no longer representing us?

Who are they representing?

Our officials MUST be sent the message that they serve in Washington at OUR sufferance. They are not elected to go be ‘avant gard’  and to enact the pipe dream fantasies of their socialist forbears.  Inasmuch as they’re doing that, they’re doing so without the approval of the people, and without that approval, they should be bounced when their terms are up.

Will we do it? Will we hold these people accountable? Not if the press has any say about it (and they most certainly do). They know that what these officials are doing is counter to the wishes of a large majority of the country, so they won’t DARE let you know about it in their daily newspapers and television shows. If you knew, you’d of course bounce them, and the pipe dreams will die….which is a bad thing when you’re a 14 year old trapped in the body of an adult news professional. Don’t you know that the world stopped when they turned 14 and we owe it to them to give birth to their adolescent fantasies?

Turn on, tune in, drop out. That’s the advice I’m giving you (in the spirit of the counterculture still unfortunately so relevant to many of our press and elected officials). Turn in to the new wave of citizens taking back their government. Tune in to the message being broadcast load and clear beneath the frothy veneer of “acceptable” political commentary at the NYT, the WaPO and MSNBC. Drop out from the zombie rank and file.

Cancel your subscriptions.

The NY Times doing its’ usual cheerleading:

WASHINGTON — Badly outnumbered and months behind in the debate on energy and climate change, House Republicans plan to introduce an energy bill on Wednesday as an alternative to the Democratic plan barreling toward a House vote this month.

How’s that for a lede? The Republicans have a plan, but they’re SO behind the times that nobody should really take them seriously.

The Republican proposal, drafted by a group led by Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, leans heavily on nuclear power, setting a goal of building 100 reactors over the next 20 years. No new nuclear plants have been ordered in the United States since 1978 because of the high cost of construction and uncertainty about regulatory approval.

Silly Republicans…they don’t realize that we don’t DO nuclear here in the US. Didn’t they hear? They’re expensive and the government won’t allow them anyway! Expensive…maybe. But relative to the Obama plan of cap and trade? Not so much. Obama is talking freely about his plan bankrupting the coal industry. Nuclear energy is clean and building and maintaining plants will create thousands of jobs. No go. Didn’t you see China Syndrome? Silkwood? There’s “uncertainty” about regulatory approval of new plants because the government passed these regulations in the 1970’s during the hysteria evidenced by these 2 movies. More people are at risk of dying by cigarettes than were ever at risk of being contaminated by a “meltdown” at a nuclear power plant. Those sure were good movies, though.

The bill also provides incentives for increased oil and gas production on public and private lands and offshore. It would also authorize oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, a focus of 30 years of controversy in Congress.

The Republican measure does not include any mandatory cap on emissions of heat-trapping gases, relying instead on nuclear energy, natural gas and renewable fuels like wind, solar and biomass power to reduce production of the gases, which have been linked to global warming.

No cap and trade? Will it must be half-cocked then. Said the buggy driver to the car dealer, “nice vehicle, but where do you put the horse?”. Cap and trade is the problem. That’s the very motivating factor behind the Republican proposal. The logjam in Congress these past 30 years prohibiting the exploration and recovery of our own natural resources has been caused almost completely by the Democrats being beholden to their environmental lobbyists and NOT to the American people.

“This is an alternative that takes us in the direction of energy independence and a clean environment without the national energy tax being offered by the Democrats,” Mr. Pence said.

Amen.

Here’s Jonathan Weisman from the Wall Street Journal this past Saturday:

WASHINGTON — Republicans launched a political offensive against President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy after weeks of reticence, emboldened by Friday’s report of a surging unemployment rate.

Political strategists have been pushing GOP lawmakers to attack Mr. Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan and to challenge how the Democratic Congress has handled everything from taxes to unions to energy policy. At the same time, Republicans have worried such attacks would backfire in the event of a recovery.

With Friday’s report that the unemployment rate had jumped to 9.4%, the highest monthly reading since September 1983, Republicans put aside those qualms.

If I’ve accomplished anything with my little blog, I hope I’ve gotten some folks to understand that journalists intentionally play games with their writing in order for you to be left with one particular impression or another. Any halfway careful reading of just about any news story will show this to be true. Take the above, for example.

Why doesn’t he tell us how he really feels? This article paints the Republicans in a completely negative light–as if there was something wrong with waiting to see how a plan works out before criticizing it. Imagine!

Check this out—pretend you’re at a basketball game, and a player hoists up a shot from mid-court at the buzzer to win the game. When the ball leaves his hands, you can’t tell at all whether it will go in. All you know is that it’s a low percentage shot, it’s too soon to tell and depending on whether you root for the guy’s team or not, you’re either in favor of it going in or you’re not. How would you describe yourself as the ball arcs away from the player’s hand?

Very good. You’d be “reticent”. Reserved. Restrained. Holding back your opinions until you get a better idea of the likelihood of the shot succeeding or not.

And then when the ball begins to arc down and toward the basket and it becomes more and more likely that a particular result will be realized, what does that do to you?

Exactly. You become “emboldened” by the facts. You reserve your opinion while the facts are unknown, and then pronounce your opinion once the facts are in.

So here are these “reticent” Republicans rubbing their hands and grinning in the corner waiting for Obama’s plan to fail suddenly becoming “emboldened” by facts demonstrating such failure and losing their “qualms” about speaking before knowing those facts. Outrageous!! And to think they were “worried” that attacking something as a failure before facts were in would “backfire”. The louts!

When you unpack that little nugget above, it’s clear that the Republicans were entirely reasonable in their approach to Obama’s plan, despite the nugget’s obvious intent to paint the Republicans as sadistic little gremlins playing political games. They disagreed with the Stimulus from the beginning (voting nearly unanimously against it) because they thought it would increase unemployment. In order to claim they were right on this prediction, they sort of had to wait until the unemployment numbers came out, didn’t they? Would Weisman have been happier had the Republicans gone out and claimed victory on false or incomplete numbers? Apparently.

Who is Jonathan Weisman? Good question. Here’s a good piece on him (and his kind) written in 2004 after he was discovered to be up to his old tricks by Donald Luskin at National Review. It’s good reading and you should check it out if you’ve got a spare minute this afternoon.

From NRO:

The memos tell a different story from the one the Obama administration and the press are pushing. Detailed and carefully reasoned, they make it clear that neither the CIA nor the Justice Department was trying to “define torture down,” but were instead determined to locate and avoid crossing the legal line at which coercive interrogation becomes torture. Congress itself has not drawn this line with great clarity. The memos discuss a number of harsh interrogation methods, but these were carefully circumscribed and monitored so as not to inflict the “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” that would constitute torture.

[ . . . ]

As the Justice Department acknowledges in its memos, training exercises are obviously not identical to live interrogations. Detainees such as Khalid Sheik Muhammed faced a more intense and extensive application of these methods than any trainee. Nevertheless, so many years of experience certainly permitted the CIA to project the likely impact of the proposed interrogation methods on detainees and to calibrate them to stay within the law. None of this could have been lost on senior members of Congress, in the leadership and on the intelligence committees, who were repeatedly briefed about the enhanced-interrogation program and who encouraged the CIA to make sure they were doing what needed to be done to prevent a reprise of 9/11.

And that was the point of it all, wasn’t it? To acquire intelligence on possible new attacks within our country by members of a terrorist group whom had already employed a devastating attack (what was back then only recently) in 2001 which killed 3,000 Americans. Further, these techniques WORKED and plots by these killers were discovered and prevented (not that Obama released any of the equally enlightening memos describing any of that, though they do exist).

All without harming a soul.

The Left is an unserious, cabal which is moved to tears at the mere suggestion that Khalid Sheik Mohammed might be frightened for a few minutes but gleefully cheers for a woman’s right to kill the unborn human being inside her body–sometimes during the process of its being born–with instruments so crude and inhumane as a vacuum which sucks the baby’s brains from its nascent skull.

In one sense, I’m glad that our attention is back on security, because like anything the left lays into, it gets it wrong in such a fabulous and sparkling way that intelligent, sober minded Americans can’t hope but understand the type of threat that these people pose to American values. In times past, this was more difficult. But with the internet and the decline of the MSM, accurate word is getting out and about much more quickly. This is a good thing.

So keep talking, President Obama. There’s an old saying that occurred to me recently which I think is apt here. “Better to be silent and thought the fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.” Keep apologizing for America and Americans on your world Grovel Tour to foreign despots eager to see us brought low. Keep blabbing about the methods we used in the past on detainees to prevent terror attacks. Not only did they ultimately not have anything to fear (which they didn’t know at the time), but we won’t be doing anything remotely close to that ever again, so feel free to plan and conspire against us with a clear conscience! Keep talking. Because although terrorists and despots and the worst people in the world are listening (at our great peril), your fellow countrymen are listening too.

With God’s grace, the latter group will put an end to your folly before the former gets its chance.

It seems that the NY Times is retiring its stand-alone “City” section–an event which inspired a sentimental retrospective in yesterday’s NY Observer.

Last week New York Times executive editor Bill Keller announced that the paper would be restructuring its Sunday Metro section to incorporate pieces that previously would have appeared in the stand-alone City section, and many of the section’s contributors found themselves suddenly bereft.

The entire piece is itself worth reading as a testament to just what’s wrong with mainstream media outlets like the NY Times (and the Observer for that matter) and how clueless they are to the advancing reality of their own demise.

Did the Observer think to query, you know, any actual readers (not counting the writers themselves) of the City section who would be (ostensibly) saddened to see the section go? Nope. The entire piece is dedicated to how awfully all the writers feel about it. You know, as if they actually bought papers.

Which, as you know, is the core business of newspapers—selling papers. When people stop READING, they stop buying papers, and without those paper sales, advertising revenue will shrivel and blow away.

It would have been nice for the Observer to see if there were any readers out there who cared one way or the other whether the Times kept the City section. The fact that they didn’t sort of answers that question, I guess, right?

And as if you needed any more evidence of how few people actually care what the NY Times prints between its covers these days, there’s this from the AP today:

NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Times Co. fell into a deeper financial hole during the first quarter as the newspaper publisher’s advertising revenue plunged 27 percent in an industrywide slump that is reshaping the print media. Its shares dived after the results were released Tuesday.

The owner of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune and 15 other daily newspapers lost $74.5 million, or 52 cents per share, in the opening three months of the year. That compared with a loss of $335,000 at the same time last year, which was break-even on a per-share basis.

[ . . . ]

Chief Executive Janet Robinson painted a bleak picture for the spring too, predicting ad revenue will fall in the 20 percent to 30 percent range in the current quarter. The company is being hurt most by lower spending on real estate, automotive, help-wanted and movie ads.

[ . . . ]

The disappointing first-quarter performance was driven by a nearly $124 million decline in the Times Co.’s ad revenue from the same time last year. While most of the erosion was concentrated in the Times Co.’s newspapers, its Internet ad revenue sagged by 8 percent, or $3.6 million.

Why do you think people are no longer reading the NY Times?

I have no idea. What about you?

Variations on the anti-establishment theme that seems to be obsessing me a bit today. This from Bob Krumm:

This is the speed of the modern internet.  Instead of needing the establishment to give credibility to a movement–be it political or cultural–the establishment needs those movements to keep them relevant.

Let’s be bipartisan here.  Before there were Tea Parties and unknown divas, there was Barack.  He, himself, is a new media creation–a man, who only five years ago was a back-bench state senator, who was thrust upon a stage long before the establishment would have ever deemed him ready.  But the internet didn’t wait for the establishment to lead.  The establishment followed them–eventually dumping Hillary, the one on whom all their bets were originally placed.

This is a new era.  No more do Susan Boyles need Oprahs to give them an American introduction, and no longer do Americans themselves need political parties to make a political movement.  The days when movements require an  imprimatur are past.  Water cooler talk, which not too long ago, followed where the establishment wished to lead, now leads where the establishment has no choice but to follow.

If there’s one thing that Susan Boyle and Barack Obama can both teach us, it is that the speed with which the Internet can shuttle a galvanized nugget to the front of the line is astonishing. The Establishment became the establishment by plopping itself at the head of the line and charging tolls. Not so anymore. Now there’s a way around all that, but it’s troubling still because we’re not quite there yet. The Press still sits there, oblivious to its own obsolescence, and there are many out there who still look to it for guidance (a reverence the Press is very eager to cling to bitterly). Information is whizzing around it unfettered, stopping to laugh as it goes, but still It sits. Until the press is exploded and wiped clean from the matrix, it will still distort things (as it did with Obama). The idea of an “Obama” (one who jets to the front of the line on the speedy wings of the new age of information) is a good one. That we got “this” Obama is testament to 2 things. First, we’re not there yet with the internet. We’re closer than we were 4 years ago and we’ll be closer still in 4 more years, but we’re not there yet. Second, as long as we’re not there yet, the legacy media won’t graciously exit the stage. It will continue to sit (shrinking as it does so, but protective of its remaining bulk) like Jabba the Hutt, pronouncing its jibberish and poisoning those still willing to be poisoned.

Remaining uninformed is a choice to be ignorant. A choice to swallow poison.