Today’s New York Times piece by John Branch on big American flags belongs to a genre perhaps invented by the Grey Lady (see, e.g., the paper’s elitist coverage of suburban chain restaurants), in which the paper attempts to explain the alien culture of the United States to its core readership:

Once the gaudy lure of attention-seeking car dealerships or other roadside attractions, big flags have found a comfortable home inside the ballparks, arenas and raceways of American sporting events.

***

The trend began nearly 25 years ago, spiked after 9/11 and now seems simply part of the cultural backdrop in American sports. Where there is a big game, there is a big flag, often the size of the playing field itself.

Far too big for a pole, the flags raise something else — the question of whether a bigger flag is a more patriotic one, or just a bigger one.

Ummm… not really.  That is a “question” posed by the sort who finds a large American flag to be a “gaudy lure” and is made uncomfortable by any display that might “elicit a sense of awe and nationalism in the surrounding crowd.”  The proper term there would be “patriotism,” which is something most Americans like.  Most Americans probably prefer a big display when viewed from a stadium seat, for that matter.  That such is a matter of a thinly disguised contempt dressed up as hipster anthropology tends to explain why the paper’s circulation and influence is increasingly limited to those who enjoy that type of deadpan snark on Independence Day.

As Karl and Allah note, we’ve got Obama!

I mean, who needs more than the quintessence of nuance? That’s the pharmaceutical grade stuff.

I’ve been out to see the sky anemones with the younger Monsterlings and Mrs. Horrible up in Bristol on a chilly Vermont evening with temps in the mid-fifties, probably, and I’ll be working tomorrow and Saturday to buy a little breathing space for some co-workers. My buddy Bob is taking Brendan to see Cheap Trick at Summerfest in Milwaukee, while he’s got a little time off from the summer Arabic program at Beloit. I hope you have a great 4th.

For that reason, I’m dumping a couple of atrocities right now, before midnight. The first is the story that’s been in the national news from here in Vermont about a 12-year-old girl who went missing May 25th from the Randolph area. Attention soon focused on her uncle, a registered sex offender who showed up on store security camera images with her the day she went missing. Her ex-stepfather also is implicated, though he lives in Florida, I think Texas, for having altered some MySpace pages belonging to her to make it seem as though she had had a rendezvous arranged. Testimony of a 14-year-old girl placed the 12-year-old at her uncle’s residence on the day she disappeared. The 14-year-old stated that she watched tv with the missing girl until the uncle took her upstairs, asking her and her boyfriend to leave. The 14-year-old states further that she has been having sex with the uncle since she was nine, and that the uncle intended to initiate the missing girl into sexual relations with adults. The body of the missing girl was found in a shallow grave near the uncle’s residence yesterday.

Pat Riotic also sends this link about a case in the Florida panhandle of a kidnapped Mexican girl who was beheaded in front of other intended sex-slaves to set an example of what happens to those who are unco-operative.

I’m not a death penalty advocate, and I’m not an advocate of torture, but crimes such as these and individuals such as KSM deserve special treatment, in my view. All the people who are stating that the right blogosphere is being silent about the US utilizing methods previously used by the ChiComs ought to tell me: 1) how many people are we talking about? They know, but they won’t say because it doesn’t fit their equivalency argument. 2) Was the point to extract false confessions for propaganda value, do they think? Was actionable evidence obtained? 3) Where’s the outrage about the non-combatants summarily executed by these thugs? Where’s the outrage about the civilian dead? Did they shed as much heartache over the Embassy Bombings? Are they as outraged by the fact that the “International Community’s” failure to do anything about Saddam resulted in many more American dead than otherwise there would have been had he not been able to rearm?

Not me, baby, I’m too precious. You’d better fuck off.

UPDATE: Yay, internationalists! What a way to celebrate Mandela’s 90th birthday!

Long accused by critics of a timid approach to the crisis in Zimbabwe, the government of neighboring South Africa is now leading opposition in the U.N. Security Council to U.S.-led efforts to impose sanctions against Robert Mugabe’s regime. South Africa has the support of three other elected members of the Security Council — Libya, Vietnam and Indonesia — as well as permanent members China and Russia.

Yesterday, I posted a link to an article about scientific research indicating that men’s and lesbian’s brains are similarly asymmetrical, with a preponderance of development in the right hemisphere, whereas women’s and gay men’s brains are more symmetrical. I jovially suggested in the title that lesbians were “men with breasts.” After I’d retired for the evening, Dr. Caric appeared in the comments and stated that my post was homophobic.

What I’d like to know from Dr. Caric is by what feats of intellectual contortion he arrives at that verdict. It seems to me on its face, as McGehee responded last night, “incoherent”, and indeed when I posted it, I thought of including a joke along the lines of memomachine’s quip that, to the contrary, he considered himself a “bulldyke with a sprinkler.”

There are some interesting links from other commenters on the theorized spatial functions of some of this right-hemispheric hypertrophy, and I can state from experience that I’d rather receive driving directions from another straight man or a lesbian than from most women or gay men. In fact, if I’m driving about and am subject to some insult of stupidity or inattention on the road, I tend to get angry unless I determine that the driver is a woman, at which time I shrug my shoulders. So, I think in fact that I’m liable to prove a bit of a gendrist in this respect, as a result of my own empirical observations, rather than a homophobe, but, as always, YMMV.

But I do await the good doctor’s enlightenment.

Barack Obama now says he would be open to “refine” his policies about a timeline for withdrawing troops from Iraq after meeting with US military commanders in Iraq later this month.  This statement follows three different versions of his Iraq policy floated by Obama’s advisers and surrogates over the past two days.

As Rick Klein of ABC News puts it:

There will be only one relevant question now out of Obama’s trip now: Do you stand by your plan? Obama is unlikely to give a direct, yes-or-no answer — and that’s where Sen. John McCain and his allies can and will pounce.

That is probably correct, as noted here on Tuesday:

Accordingly, following his planned trip to Iraq, I would not be surprised if, instead of an outright shift on Iraq, Obama ends up with a position not unlike that he now has regarding unconditional, direct diplomacy with Iran, i.e., a somewhat internally contradictory Rube Goldberg contraption, from which he will pull pieces for whichever audience is facing at the moment.

HotAir’s Allahpundit is cutting Obama slack because he believes Obama is moving in the right direction.  That is far from clear.  Arguably, Obama will be doing the exact opposite of “refining” his policy on Iraq.  Instead, he will be further obfuscating his position on Iraq and raising the issue of whether he has a position on Iraq –  or whether he is simply trying to remain enough of a “blank screen” to cobble together an electoral majority. 

Allahpundit also suggests that if Obama shifts for cynical political reasons, those same reasons will continue to steer him right.  That is also far from clear.  Allah himself notes that the polling numbers on Iraq are not good in some respects.*  Moreover, if we believe that, we would also believe that Obama is fully committed to cutting taxes for the middle class, despite having voted this year to raise taxes on people making as little as $31,850 annually.  Should Iraq suffer any sort of setback under an Obama administration, there is no guarantee that Obama would not shove the Iraqis and our national security interests under the same bus as Samantha Power — the Obama adviser who got the boot shortly after suggesting that Obama had some wiggle room on Iraq.

* I have a running friendly dispute with Allah over the way his general pessimism causes him to interpret poll data out of context. In this case, Allah has difficulty figuring out why Obama would be shifting his position now, based on the most recent poll on Iraq.  First, I would suggest that the 3% shift in the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll Allah notes is within the poll’s margin of error.  Second, I would note that — to take one example — the most recent Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg Poll shows that the numbers for withdrawing from Iraq in any given timeframe have not changed significantly in the past year.  One might ask: ”If 43% wanted to withdraw within a year in June 2007, why haven’t they moved into the ‘withdraw right away’ column in June 2008? ” It cannot be explained by the 10% swing in people who think we are making progress in the past year.  Thus, the answer is that the answers to poll questions cannot be read as literally as people like Allah read them.

Head to the nearest Home Depot and ask if maybe you can give one of their industrial belt sanders a little test drive. Then, while the clerk in the unpressed orange apron stands frozen in horror, run that fucker along your forehead and temple until hairclumps and pressurized skull dust create a kind of chalky-smelling mist that settles on the wood plank like some gruesome sandstorm.

– After which, turn the thing off and, in your best diplomatic voice, thank the clerk and tell him that you’ll have to go home and think on it.

Hilarity ensues.

Dark Lord Karl Rove and RCP’s Jay Cost both look at Barack Obama’s bold general election ad campaign.  Rove questions the whether spending nearly $20 million in early TV advertising is prudent.  Cost argues that the buy is more about framing Obama’s campaign in an aggressive posture than the actual expectations of the campaign.

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s PowerPoint presentation to fundraisers tends to support Cost’s argument, as it suggested that Obama is more serious about targeting a much smaller group of states than the early ad buy encompasses.

Rove’s skepticism is more debatable, particularly as he also notes that “Obama’s ads show he’s aware of his vulnerability on two fronts: his liberal values and his meager achievements.”  Obama is almost certainly aware that a politician rarely gets a second chance to make a first impression with the general electorate.  Thus, it is probably no coincidence that Obama’s biographical ad (and a quick follow-up ad on welfare reform) was accompanied by a week of campaigning devoted to the themes of “patriotism, faith and service.”  Rove’s skepticism is based on part on the much larger role free media plays in a general election campaign, but Obama seems to have sought a synergy of paid and free media that will position him in the mainstream on character issues at the same time that he is flip-flopping his way toward the center on policy issues.

Rove does highlight (as ABC News and others have noticed) that Obama’s ads portray him as having supported welfare reform when in truth he was against the 1996 law, even calling it “disturbing.”  If John McCain had not decided to go to Columbia the week before Independence Day and his campaign was not going through a major shake-up (noted here yesterday and by the New York Times and others today), perhaps he could have seized on this misrepresentation to paint Obama as not only out of the mainstream on welfare but also dishonest about his record.  But I digress.

Cost writes that the ad buy also reinforces his general impression of Obama’s candidacy:

I see him going in one of two directions. He could be electoral dynamite, exploding the old categories and forging a voting coalition that we have never seen before. However, he could fail to do this, and underperform in a year when the macro conditions unequivocally favor his party.

He implies that there is a warning sign (albeit a predictable one) in the fact that Obama is not advertising in states Clinton won in 1996 (Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Arkansas), preferring longer shots (North Dakota, Alaska, Montana, Indiana, and Georgia).  A similar sign can be seen in RCP’s own averages.  The current head-to-head match-up has Obama leading McCain by 5.4% (an average that still includes the likely outlier from the L.A. Times).  Meanwhile, the current generic Congressional ballot has the unnamed Democrat leading by 11.5% — more than twice that of the Obama margin.  That gap is the most likely explanation for Obama’s decision to spend $20 million on ads this early and to spend a week campaigning on “patriotism, faith and service.”

CNBC’s Michael Wolff having a case of the vapors over Rush Limbaugh.

Wolff mocked Clear Channel’s (NYSE:CCU) decision to sign Limbaugh to the long-term agreement on CNBC’s June 2 “Street Signs.”

“I think it’s a monster error,” Wolff said. “I know – I’m sitting here saying, ‘What are these people smoking?’ You know, the truth is that Rush Limbaugh has been – he’s ridden the rise of conservatism for 25 years and I don’t, maybe nobody quite, quite has been following the news, but that’s coming to an end.”

“It’s going to be over and Rush Limbaugh in a relatively short period of time is going to look like a really kind of out-of-it kind of oddity.” [...]

Even though eight of the top 10 talk show hosts on Talker’s magazine “2008 Heavy Hundred” list are conservative hosts, Wolff asserted the era of conservative talk radio is drawing to an end.

“I mean, I think that there’s another underlying thing here and this is talk radio has been the province of conservatives, if that’s going away then there’s going to be a big problem – not just for Rush, but obviously for Sean Hannity, too.”

Either Wolff is totally ignorant of the history of why conservatives and moderates are so successful on radio, or Wolff believes O!’s coronation will have the government shutting down non-left radio.

Things change and when they change, they change in a big way. And we are now looking at that kind of change. It’s the kind of change, which if you run a large public corporation, you’re supposed to look at and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. There is something here and this is something that we have to take into consideration.’ When change comes, it is going to be devastating and absolute.”

Wolff sure has internalized Barry’s Change-flavored Kool-aid.

Mark Steyn likes to call himself the Right’s resident demography bore. His book America Alone sounded the alarm about the pervasive European birth dearth, and the influx of Muslim immigrants brought in to do the manual labor, and who are on track to Islamify the continent within a few generations. (Sidebar: Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept is actually a superior piece of reportage on the same subject, thanks to Bawer’s having lived and worked in northern Europe for years, and being able to speak several of the languages.) This meme has ranged widely throughout the Right, from racist nativists like those European blokes that Charles has been denouncing for months, to the rest of us, who can tell the difference between ideology and race. The issue has remained mostly verboten for liberals and proggs, who have had to contort themselves to avoid mentioning, let alone confronting it. When you believe that people are essentially the same but for headgear and cuisine, it’s hard to make sense of honor killing, female subjugation, household slaves, and violence against Jews. (Okay, maybe the Europeans can relate to that last one, a little.)

But now here is this thinkpiece in the New York Times Magazine, on the very self-same subject of declining birth rates in Europe. Not only that, it mentions Steyn, and concerns over unbridled Muslim immigration, and does not poo-poo them. Not entirely, at least.

(more…)

Inasmuch as people here seemed interested in the upcoming bat-flick, there is a pretty high-quality bootleg of the first few minutes I saw in IMAX a while ago online… until the WB notices.  It’s a little spoilery, as you might imagine.