THE FERMATA

Well, folks. Looks like Armed Prophet is going to call it a year. In 48 hours time I'll be headed back to the West Coast to celebrate Christmas and New Year's with family and friends. Between haunting old haunts, catching up with old friends, watching one of them marry himself off, and fighting with wrapping paper (more wrapping than unwrapping, these days), the chances of me getting around to post anything are fairly low. So, the best to you and yours, and I'll see you in 2005.

THE PERFECT WORD

According to Donnie Darko — apparently via Tolkien — the most beautiful phrase in the English language is "cellar door." I don't know if I buy such a notion, but I bet there is such thing as a "perfect word" (maybe something like perfect numbers, but I don't know enough to say. Via Dictionary.com's Word of the Day, I think I've found such a one in the French borrowing, "recherche":

recherche \ruh-sher-SHAY\, adjective:
1. Uncommon; exotic; rare.
2. Exquisite; choice.
3. Excessively refined; affected.
4. Pretentious; overblown.

Recherche is indeed uncommon, exotic and rare. I hold a bachelor's degree in English, yet I don't know that I've ever seen this word before. It is certainly exquisite. It is a word one would only use in an affected, overly refined manner. That's because it's French. And because it's so obviously French, it is almostnecessarily pretentious. The word is precisely what it describes. If anybody knows of any other such "perfect words," send them this way.

P.S. — But my favorite word is still "Zing!"

GOOGLEZON, OR: HOW I WASTED MY EVENING

We don't really surf anymore, not like in the mid-to-late 1990s when we had time to simply explore the Internet (at least for those of us who didn't sign on until 1997). I remember a classroom debate with the proprietor of the panoply of peculiarities at laurabush.info about whether this Internet thing would "catch on." That debate, of course, isn't over &mdash as I'll get to shortly.

So, here's the result of some deliberate surfing of Google, technology news sites and web-head blogs -- not to mention taking up some recommendations via instant messenger:

1] I haven't said so before, but I really like these "Listed on NASDAQ" commercials. I first remember seeing them almost exactly on September 11, 2001. At a time when I needed something that celebrated the American ideals of forward-thinking, enterprise and originality, there it was. And it features an iconic symbol of New York, too boot. A good deal of this appreciation owes to the score: an inspiring, compellingly tempoed composition that complements well the theme of visionaries and their innovative companies. Appreciation for the other half is mostly deserved, though I certainly have my complaints about all of them. They're not as good now as the earliest ones — I presume "Starbucks! Dell! Microsoft!" was the first — but I'm glad they're still around.

2] Mahir Cagri, Hamster Dance, All Your Base Are Belong To Us, Jib Jab, We Like The Moon and countless others¹ have passed by link-of-email and glimpse-of-television (and even word-of-mouth) since the Internet showed up, and now here's something I found on an English-language Scandanavian blog: a history of the Internet from the future in the form of a Flash movie. I haven't seen it linked to on the popular blogs (assuming we assume those are the same blogs) but I wouldn't be surprised if it did. It leads with the somewhat misleading teaser: "In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What has happened to the news? And What is EPIC?"

Not mentioned in there is the central conceit — Google and Amazon merge, they use exensive search technology to create personalized news and information (the term not used, but apt is "narrowcasting") — at first seems like a commercial for Google (and other companies) but then clearly reveals itself to be a message to the company itself: it would be really awesome if you did THIS.

In fact, at times it sounds an awful lot like those NASDAQ ads, mentioning Amazon, Google, Blogger, Friendster, Microsoft, Sony, Philips, and others in quick succession. The first prognostication is that Google, "awash in cash" after going public, buys TiVo. Then they team up with Amazon and create something approximating what Adam Smith described as "perfect information." Eventually it renders human-written news organizations irrelevant, as everyone receives news and information personalized. The climax is when the NYT takes their case to the Supreme Court, and loses.

Not mentioned is what really becomes of the Times afterward. I suppose it becomes a second-tier media source, only read by an aging demographic. It also doesn't say what happens to newspapers' opinion sections, which in the face of all this Whigish futurism I must say could surely not be created by algorithms … or is at least unlikely by 2014. It is implied that their influence wanes — and if you read the Times' opinion columns, you'd probably guess that it would. And of course Blogger is a big part of the story — everyone who wants to be is a creator of information. And in according to this vision, they get paid for it, too (where's Soulseek and BitTorrent in all this?).

Plus, as regular readers of this blog know, I think Google News needs a lot of work. And in this context, so does Amazon's recommendation scheme. For its current uses I don't have much complaint, but if it's supposed to do all that's predicted, it needs a lot of work.

And if we're going to talk about the collective wisdom of the Internet, we still have to realize that organized interests not everybody agrees with will continue to leverage influence beyond what critics of the mainstream media thinks will be alleviated by the freer flow of information. Citing the most benign example I can think of, do all three "Lord of The Rings" movies really belong in the top ten all-tim movies, as the members of the IMDb would have it?

It's clearly written by someone(s) with libertarian leanings — two California journalists, it turns out — who probably have Virginia Postrel's "The Future And Its Enemies" on their bookshelves². At Poynter, one apparently describes his education as having "majored in economics and minored in Nintendo." If he hasn't read any Neal Stephenson, he probably should.

As for the dubious identities of the writers/editors of the movie, this blog post (get some permalinks, it's the 2000s already!) identifies the video's director/producer, "Evan Emerson." as a collective pseudonym:

[T]wo California-based journalists, Robin Sloan (Sacramento Bee) and Matt Thompson (INdTV) did the piece. INdTV is the San Francisco based start up network headed by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt. The Evan Emerson piece talks about the obsolescence of news, but INdTV has strong connections to and is funded by people and groups including Rob Glaser of Real Networks, Steve Jobs of Apple, and the Googleoids. They're planning to ride the media obsolescence tsunami, not get swept under by it.

If the "they" of the final sentence refers to Sloan and Thompson, I certainly agree. If they mean Glaser, Jobs and myriad "Googleoids," I think I'd like some evidence before making the assumption that this is their brainchild.

That said, "GoogleZon" and its combination logo is pretty funny. So is "Newsbotster." And the anti-NYT humor is dry (if intended) and snicker-worthy. It does sort of forget about Microsoft at the end (also probably intended). Having already mentioned originality, I must add that I like the EPIC logo, the shadow of which reads E[PI]C³. And this blog post is probably correct about the more-realistic impact of such technologies (though it does the "GoogleZon" joke wrong). It also links to some real-life projects that point in the same direction. (Speaking of future technologies, here are a couple WMVs (what else?) showcasing Microsoft's long-awaited "Longhorn" project. Based on what I saw elsewhere (thanks to Google, of course), it seems to be a big improvement on XP, but I hope you can turn off the jiggling windows.)

Also not mentioned: Skynet! When this thing becomes self-aware, it might make computers at the Pentagon launch our nukes on the Russkies! (Or in the future where this takes place, maybe North Korea or Iran!)

3] God, this thing is weird. At the very least someone should get Toxic the Machine AKA Bob Barker to do album covers.

As a testament to the aforementioned media revolution — which anyway doesn't appear to be televised — I copied, pasted and translated the introductory text from the German-language message board I found it on:

zur abwechslung mal widder was sinnloses, wobei misch die Musik langsam gefällt

Or, as Babelfish attempts:

to the alternation times more widder which senseless, whereby mix the music slowly pleases

Which doesn't make literal sense but actually is a much better summary than I could write. Thanks, algorithms!

4] As I started to pound out the first draft of this post, I was watching two of General Electric's top news personalities conduct an interview — Tom Brokaw asking Tim Russert a lot of questions about "Big Russ." If you follow Washington-based news, you've certainly heard about "Big Russ" — viz., Russert's putatively insightful, good-natured and beloved father. Frankly, either one of these two could interview the other. Sort of like James Spader and Rob Lowe trading parts before shooting "Bad Influence."

5] If you ask me, Boobah Zone is the trippiest website on the whole World Wide Web. It's not like being on acid; it's like what you were always told acid would be like.

Hey, that was fun!
_____
¹Speaking of countless others, here is the hypnotic "We Love The Chocolate." Honest to God, the first time I looked at this, I let it run. In fact, as of this late evening posting time, it's still playing in the background.

² Among said others, Reason Magazine.

³ Am I wrong or is there no special character for the symbol representing 3.14159265…?

STEEEEERIKE!

I'm too upset to write about politics right now. I explain why here. Oh, and I'm busy writing something else. But for the real reason, you'll have to follow that link.

FOOLISH ELECTORS

Yesterday I wrote: "The electoral college meets today to cast their votes for president." On that I was correct. But the immediate next line turns out to be wrong: " We all know what's going to happen..." Oops. The Star Tribune reports:

Defeated Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry likely is going to get one less electoral vote nationally than he should have -- 251 instead of 252 -- because of an apparent mistake Monday by one of Minnesota's 10 DFL electors.

One of the 10 handwritten ballots cast for president carried the name of vice presidential candidate John Edwards (actually spelled "Ewards" on the ballot) rather than Kerry.

Ha! And they say the Republicans are stupid?

THE SPOT

Memo to Jim Geraghty: I like what you write at your blog and all, but isn't it already past time to consider a title change?

WHAT UNCLE NOAM WANTS


When Master Chomsky he steals his lady from her father's chateau in the stormy night, brings her down to the horse stable and ravishes her — without so much as a word passing between them — is that what he means by "manufacturing consent"?

Via BlameBush!, another concept blog that I've been enjoying a lot.

ARE WE THERE YET?

The electoral college meets today to cast their votes for president. We all know what's going to happen, but in Ohio a number of groups — one calling itself "We Do Not Concede" — are still contesting the outcome. Democrats have even fallen in line behind a recount sponsored by the Libertarian and Green parties. How embarrassing. This, even though Bush won Ohio by at least 119,000 votes. Meanwhile, Kerry won Pennsylvania by almost the exact same margin, yet mysteriously there is no clamor for a recount there. I'm all for finding out exactly how the votes went down, but what's good for the Buckeye is good for the Keystone, right? (Meanwhile in the Evergreen State, it's starting to dawn on them that manual hand recounts aren't always the best.)

The plaintiffs in Ohio fear, or claim to fear, that the Republican party stole the election just as they surely did in 2000. Jesse Jackson has even taken to using his Chicago Sun-Times column as a platform from which to slander libel Ohio Attorney General Ken Blackwell, a conservative rising star in the Republican party, who just happens to be black. Jackson has nothing but a litany of imagined or irrelevant grievances that had gone stale weeks before Election Day (e.g. Diebold rigged all their machines). Don't forget that 16 percent of Ohio's African-Americans voted for Bush; that's not a lot in absolutes, but it's almost double the black vote Bush got in the state last time and well above the national average. Jackson is being dinosaured, and he knows it. (Speaking of PA, both it and Ohio could conceivably have black Republican governors in two year's time.)

Anyway, amid all this fuss about whether the GOP is stealing elections or not, I find it very amusing that one of the county Democratic chairmen in next door Indiana has — get this — just been arrested for vote fraud. If this was a Republican, you can be sure the chattering classes of Washington would be all over it. Liberal columnists would be raising their eyebrows and Chris Matthews would be lining up guests. Then again, that doesn't sound too different from what's been happening already.

P.S. — I should also mention this terrific USA Today article on race and the Bush White House. Bush is the first president to nominate a Hispanic to one of the top four Cabinet positions, and he is the first president to have women and minorities (and in Condi, both at once) among his closest advisers. Not that you've heard much about it, though:

One reason it has gotten little attention is because Bush himself rarely talks about it. At a convention of minority journalists in August, Bush declared, "If you look at my administration, it's diverse, and I'm proud of that." But he doesn't cite numbers. Bartlett and other Bush aides sounded surprised when told that Bush's record on diversity in top jobs matched that of Clinton, who was praised for expanding opportunities for women, blacks and Hispanics.

If Clinton was the first black president, then surely Bush is the second.

Update, 5:42 p.m. — I wrote the first draft of this almost 12 hours ago, in a pre-caffeinated state. The many, many grammatical errors have now been fixed. Even if you don't care, I do.

DAZED AND CONFUSED, ALL RIGHT

"Dazed and Confused" actor (and blogger) Wiley Wiggins has a comment on the suit against Universal Pictures and Richard Linklater two posts down that's worth expanding on:

These guys are really wrapped up in believing that the characters in the movie are "them", and not that Rick just used a couple of last names that stuck in his head from childhood. Seems like they're actually kind of secretly thrilled by the idea.

I was really dismayed about that quote of mine that they used. I didn't "tell" the Daily Texan anything. They scraped my blog for a story. When the Washington Post uses a college newspaper that is using Google to get info for a story, it's time to write the whole thing off. I just hope these lunatics don't try to subpoena me for making fun of them.

Obviously Wiggins isn't a disinterested party, but his take sounds very plausible. I'm sure Slater, Wooderson and "Pink" Floyd are having a great time with the attention they're getting. In that Post article, their thrill doesn't sound all that secretive.

He's also right on the second point -- about UT-Austin's Daily Texan misrepresenting his communication with them -- and it relates to a point I recently made about journalistic laziness. But it's worse than that. I found the original Daily Texan article, which claims the quotes from Wiggins were in an "e-mail" to them. But all the quotes attributed to him are to be found right here on his blog. Way to go Daily Texan, and way to go Andrew Tran, writer of the story in question. One can forgive the Washington Post's Peter Carlson for not digging deeper, but Tran should know the difference between a "blog" and an "e-mail."

You know, this is how Jayson Blair started. I look forward to Mr. Tran's future misrepresentations.

P.S. -- Via Wiggins' blog, this is one of the most inspired concept blogs I've ever seen. I think it's worth a bookmark.

THE MIRACLE WORKER

Charles Krauthammer, in this morning's Post:

For almost a decade before Sept. 11, we did absolutely nothing about Afghanistan. A few cruise missiles hurled into empty tents, followed by expressions of satisfaction about the "message" we had sent. It was, in fact, a message of utter passivity and unseriousness.

Then comes our Pearl Harbor, and the sleeping giant awakens. Within 100 days, al Qaeda is routed and the Taliban overthrown. Then the first election in Afghanistan's history. Now the inauguration of a deeply respected democrat who, upon being sworn in as the legitimate president of his country, thanks America for its liberation.

This in Afghanistan, which only three years ago was not just hostile but untouchable. What do liberals have to say about this singular achievement by the Bush administration? That Afghanistan is growing poppies.

Indeed. I'm just starting in on Robert Kaplan's "Soldiers of God," mostly written during the Soviet invasion of the 1980s. Karzai himself puts in a brief appearance as the "most moderate and Westernized of the mujahidin," and he cuts a slim but interesting — and promising — figure as a son of privilege who came around late to responsibility and political leadership. Hmmm, why does that sound familiar?

SAY MAN, YOU GOT A JOINT?

Am I ever glad the Washington Post decided to put its resources into following up the recently-reported lawsuit against Universal Studios and director Richard Linklater — by a trio of Texans named Floyd, Slater and Wooderson. Reporter Peter Carlson, in a highly readable if somewhat fanboy-ish feature story, is appropriately skeptical of their claims. Specifically, they're suing for defamation, violation of privacy and causing severe emotional distress and mental anguish. Here's Slater-san himself, sounding something less than anguished:

When Andy Slater saw "Dazed and Confused," he was peeved about the character named Ron Slater, played by Rory Cochrane -- a stoner in a pot-leaf T-shirt who makes bongs and inhales deeply and launches into a stoned rap about how George Washington used to toke up, smoking righteous weed in pipes packed by our first first lady, Martha Washington.

"Who knows? I might have said that," says Slater, a bachelor and a building contractor in Huntsville. "I said a lot of things. I was quite outspoken back then. That's probably why Rick Linklater might have chosen me as a character -- because I disagreed with marijuana laws and I was vocal about that even in high school. But I was never walking around with a marijuana leaf on my shirt or handing out joints. I was not that character in that movie."

I'm certainly inclined to be sympathetic, because I sure would hate for my reputation as an adult to be that of my reputation as a teenager. Then again, as much as they protest, Carlson catches them laughing about the situation:

"I was skiing in Colorado one time," says Wooderson, "and I turned in my skis and said, 'Wooderson,' and the kid goes, 'Wooderson? Like in "Dazed and Confused"?' I didn't say anything, but somebody with me says, 'Yeah! This is him!' And the kid says, 'Dude, you need to come party with us!'"

I seem to have misplaced my subatomic Stradivarius. Yet lawyers they have found and suits they have filed. And it looks like they're going for the gold:

["Dazed" actor Wiley] Wiggins told the Daily Texan that he and Linklater had previously discussed making a "Dazed" sequel that would show how the characters had degenerated into "gas-pumping hungry ghosts of their former selves."

The lawyers find that comment very interesting.

I'm not sure that I do. For one, that movie was never made (and almost certainly shouldn't be.) Two, as mentioned, Slater is a building contractor. It turns out Wooderson is a computer systems engineer whose son goes to Harvard. And Floyd is the service manager at a Dodge dealership. Perhaps they would have been astronauts but for Linklater's slander against them, but I doubt it. Under what circumstances can a non-famous person contest the use of their identity, or use of the likeness of their identity? Maybe FLOG™ has a better-informed take on all this. I don't know, but it would seem that this case could set an absurd precedent. Is it more relevant that these characters are similar to the real-life individuals, or that the characters are not literally about these individuals? The line here seems very thin:

"Like, for example, the scene that shows me showing somebody how to make a bong in shop class," says Andy Slater, now 45. "I did not do that. I never did that. But they used my name and they show me making a bong in shop class." ... Well, of course. Making bongs in shop class -- that is a tad far-fetched.

"Oh, no, they did that," says Slater. "But it wasn't me."

It'd be a lot cooler if you did.

TEARS FOR FEARS?

Mary Frances Berry is definitely gone from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, but the Washington Post's Darryl Fears has apparently bought her side of the story:

But after Berry, the liberal chairman, who is black, and Reynoso, the liberal vice chairman, who is Latino, stepped down Tuesday, the composition of the commission changed.

Sure, if by "stepped down" you mean "told to clean out your desk."

NOW HIRING

I've had a bad week. But not like this:

This newspaper, in a decision that was not wildly cheered by all concerned, has decided to end this column and my affiliation with USA TODAY.

So writes Walter Shapiro in "Hype & Glory," his long-running column for America's widest-circulated newspaper. If that doesn't sound bitter enough, check out Shapiro's you're-gonna-miss-me headline:

Ideas, not agendas, drove column

Subtle, huh? Actually, Shapiro's column was one of the better things in the sometimes unfairly maligned daily. I'd say he's marginally more insightful than your average news analysis columnist. A choice between the New York Times' Adam Nagourney and Shapiro at McPaper (what can I say, maligning is fun) is no choice at all. I wouldn't put him up there with Newsweek's Howard Fineman or Los Angeles Times' Ron Brownstein, but as I said -- marginally more insightful than the Dick Polmans and Dana Milbanks (shudder).

So what happened? Editor & Publisher hits on the most obvious reason -- the editors who gave him so much access to so much prime real estate -- nearly a thousand words (and sometimes more) every Wednesday and Friday -- left or were replaced. But there are at least two more that E&P were too polite to broach. Luckily, this sometimes-in-the-know blogger, is not.

The first other explanation, it's been suggested to me, is that Shapiro didn't do as much for USA Today (look Gannett, I'll defend your flagship up to a point, but I won't capitalize the whole thing) as they'd wanted. He's rarely on TV (the last I saw him was on C-SPAN in mid-2003) and it's even rarer when a Shapiro column is used as the basis for a cable talk segment. For what it's worth, in two years I haven't mentioned him once.

The other, I hear, is that the column has been particularly lucrative for at least one entity: Walter Shapiro. Gannett, USA Today's parent, isn't a charity. And Shapiro lost his benefactors.

Anyway, let us shed no tears for him. Shapiro is bound to get picked up by another outlet before long, so I can go back to reading and enjoying his words and never thinking to mention it to anyone.

NICE TRY

Wait, what's this? More controversy at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights? Apparently you-know-who doesn't plan to go quietly just yet:

Mary Frances Berry, blunt-spoken chairwoman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, resigned Tuesday after more than two decades of criticizing the governments, both Democratic and Republican, that she served.

Berry, an independent, and Democratic Vice Chairman Cruz Reynoso sent resignation letters to President Bush a day after the White House moved to replace the two. Both had resisted leaving Monday, arguing their terms wouldn't expire until midnight Jan. 21, 2005.

The White House maintained that their six-year terms expired Sunday, and Berry and Reynoso had been replaced.

In brief letters to Bush, Berry and Reynoso said they believed they still had more time to serve but it wasn't worth the fight.

"Given that the conclusion of my tenure is only a few weeks away, a legal challenge [Note: Remember, that's how she got her job back when Reagan tried to dump her.] would be an unwise expenditure of resources," wrote Berry, a civil rights history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "Therefore, I am resigning my position as commissioner on the United States Commission on Civil Rights effective immediately."

Okay, now she's gone. I think.

DING DONG, THE WITCH IS DEAD

Yesterday the president did something that should have been done a long time ago:

President Bush on Monday moved to replace Mary Frances Berry, the outspoken chairwoman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission who has argued with every president since Jimmy Carter appointed her to the panel a quarter century ago.

Remember, "outspoken" is journalist-speak for "disagreeable":

But Berry balked at leaving now, arguing through a spokesman that she and vice chairman Cruz Reynoso, who also is being replaced, have terms that run until midnight Jan. 21, 2005. The White House maintained that their six-year terms expired Sunday and that Berry and Reynoso had been replaced.

Actually, it turns out Reagan did try to sack her back in the 1980s, but litigation saved her. This inexcusably long tenure would make her the J. Edgar Hoover of the race racket. Larry Elder points out:

[W]hen President George W. Bush attempted to appoint a black man to the commission, Peter Kirsanow, Mary Frances Berry filed suit to prevent Kirsanow from joining the commission. She unsuccessfully argued that the current occupant on the board still had several years left in her term.

I'm not familiar with the commission's tenure rules, but apparently this is a recurring theme. Clinton made her chair in 1993 and reappointed her in 1999, one (technically, two) of his many ill-advised picks in the name of diversity (think Janet Reno and Jocelyn Elders, just to name a few who got through). President Bush has been assembling a Cabinet that "looks like America" too, but somehow he's managed to avoid his party's malcontents.

Anyway, whatever happened to "I serve at the president's pleasure"? What is she, a federal judge? No, but she does seem to be the jury and executioner. In her role at the commission, she doesn't have any actual power -- she can't put anyone away -- but she can cry racism at the drop of a hat. And so she has, most recently, and notably, at Jeb Bush over the 2000 election.

Yet it would be a mistake to think her legacy is simply one of clashes with conservatives. Before Florida, Berry nearly destroyed the lefter-than-NPR radio network Pacifica (which she then chaired) when she insisted on throwing out the white guys. And a decade before that, the Washington Monthly noted her "bitter single-mindedness" and concurrent tendency to cause problems for those in her corner.

In fact, the most prominent anti-Berry web presence comes not from the right, but from the left. So I assume my liberal readers can join with me and say: Good riddance.

UPDATE, 5:33 p.m. -- It turns out that Kirsanow himself has had a commentary on the current situation at NRO since yesterday morning. It doesn't sound like he'll be missing Ms. Berry, either.

YOUNG REPUBLIC-ANS

Noam Scheiber is one of TNR's young turks, and today he's got a thoroughly defensible slight dissent from not-much-older editor Peter Beinart's cover story (which argues well that Democrats beyond the leadership need to take foreign policy seriously (this would seem obvious to me, but then I'm not a Democrat)). But then Scheiber goes and writes something that is rather distressing, especially to someone (me) who thinks the Democrats should take foreign policy seriously. Here it is:

Had John Kerry won in November, he would have eventually had to choose between opening firehouses in Baghdad and opening those firehouses in Detroit, and that decision could have provoked a nasty intramural fight.

No, no, no. Christopher Hitchens explained this fallacy (and ugliness) of this particular Kerry attack in July. For one, a better Iraq is in our best interest (and everyone else's but al-Qaeda's). For two -- though I'm not sure it's in Hitch's piece -- no such choice ever arises because fire departments are funded at the local level whereas nation-building is done by the federal government. For three, as Hitchens writes, it's short on principle:

So, why not just say that the Republicans are squandering "our" money on a bunch of foreigners? … Solidarity and internationalism, indeed, used to be the cement of the democratic Left.

Scheiber's wrong -- it was nasty already. And he also loses it elsewhere in the article, for entirely different reasons:

The sudden change in the dynamics of the primary race was probably best epitomized by the unofficial Kerry campaign slogan at the time: "Dated Dean, married Kerry." The flirtation with Dean had been a highly satisfying fling, but, when it came time to vote, Democrats wanted someone who could win, not someone who touched them in their Bush-hating erogenous zones.

Ick! What John Kerry does to you in your own home is none Meanwhile, Scheiber's fellow young Republic-an (yes, I realize how tortured a construction that is) Jon Chait is perfectly capable of stimulating his own anti-Bush erogenous zone in his own web piece, "Mad About Me," which you can already tell is masturbatory for yet another reason.

Oh, those crazy kids. At least they're not making up stories about Alan Greenspan investment bank cults and the First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ.

THE TROUBLE WITH GOOGLE NEWS II

Earlier this year I pointed out how Google News' algorithms create something much less than a satisfactory newsreading experience, in part by putting disreputable news outlets on an even footing with legitimate ones. To my knowledge, Opinion Journal's James Taranto was the first to note an egregious example -- earlier this month, Google News made a satirical piece about Bush getting arrested for war crimes in Canada its top story -- and now Jack Shafer is on the story as well. Unfortunately, it seems he wasn't able to get anything out of them, either. I know Google wants to keep its algorithms a secret, but there's no excuse for treating the Associated Press the same as WorldNetDaily, or in this case, some left-wing conspiracy zone called Axis of Logic. Google News can be useful, but it's at least as frustrating as it is enlightening.