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I do declare: Tweeting the Declaration of Independence for fun and profit

"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do," Slate quotes Thomas Jefferson — a man after our own less-is-more writer's heart — in "All Men Are Tweeted Equal," an invitation to fellow freedom lovers to "condense the Declaration of Independence to one tweet":

It took Thomas Jefferson only 17 days to write the Declaration of Independence. Pretty impressive work for what one historian famously described as "American Scripture" and what the National Archives calls "the nation's most cherished symbol of liberty." Then again, it's only 1,300 words or so, approximately 8,000 characters. In other words, three-and-a-half tweets a day …

So here is our challenge to Slate readers: Condense the Declaration of Independence to one tweet. For example: "All men should be equal, happy and free. Suck it, King George. We quit. Love, the U.S. of A." Or maybe: "All men are free. Also: No more quartering of troops." Reduce the document to what you see as its essence. The most recent tweets, and the most popular, will be collected below. After three days, we'll collect the best and publish them the weekend of July Fourth.

As usual with this Internet stuff, there are some crucial details. The most important is that each tweet contain the hashtag #TinyDeclaration. That will allow us to collect all the entries, but it also means that you really have only 124 characters left to summarize Mr. Jefferson. (Sorry.) Feel free to tweet as often as you like — there's no limit on the number of times you can enter — but remember that we won't count any tweets made after Wednesday at midnight. If you like a tweet, retweet it — that will help us see which ones are most popular.

We invite our readers to jump in. Like Bill Whittle's exercise of writing out the Declaration long hand, it's a great way to reinhabit one of our precious founding documents. Here's a fave we just retweeted from @davidkomatar:

Dear king, perhaps it would be better if we were "just friends" #TinyDeclaration

And our own tiny masterpiece:

@kinggeorge3: We're tired of your abuse of our God-given rights. After careful consideration we declare our independence #TinyDeclaration

And while we're in a patriotic mood on this Fourth-of-July Eve, a sampling of Declaration-inspired blogposts from the archives:

King George III 2.0, meet Declaration of Independence 2.0

A Declaration of Independence: Art for freedom's sake

Too Late to Apologize: Music video as history lesson

God's "almost chosen people"

Oh, say, can you see?

Update: Opinionated Catholic links.

Update II: Bird Dog at Maggie's links.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

DNC's Accountability Project: Obama 2008 warmed over?

"Democrats want you to catch Republicans in awkward moments," says Bret Baier in the teaser before a break on Special Report this evening, catching the spirit of the post that follows.

"Don't misrepresent who you are or why you are there. Always tell the truth. Never state that you are an employee or agent of the Democratic National Committee or any campaign or that you are working on their behalf," read the instructions at the DNC's hopenchangey "Accountability Project," protesting too much gushing that their cynical scheme to enlist you — "because it's about YOU" — gratis as a dirt-digging DNC agent is a "grassroots, volunteer project to hold Republican candidates accountable for their claims." We signed on to see what they were up to. More about that below.

We first heard about the Accountability Project from our go-to source inside the Beltway, Dan Riehl, way ahead of the curve as usual in an early-morning post tearing his hair out over the GOP's cluelessness when it comes to new media:

I thought they [the Democrats] disliked this kind of thing when Etheridge was recently caught on tape? Actually it's something I've been expecting and why I continue to insist that the DNC gets new media in ways the GOP still refuses to embrace. It's intent on controlling the narrative, while the DNC is more interested in fueling constituent and blog-based activism from the Left.

"For too long, our politics has been poisoned with misinformation, lies and double-speak," keens The Accountability Project introduction with a wink and a nod, projecting the DNC's own modus operandi onto the opposition: "The most powerful way to combat these tactics is to drag them into the light of public scrutiny."

A little background from The Huffington Post's excellent coverage and then our critique of Dan's take and a few more thoughts:

In a move that could add a broad new element of accountability to elections — or simply make the political process even more gaffe-centric — the DNC is encouraging its followers to upload video, mail pieces or audio recordings of GOP officials to a DNC-run site.

If carried out as planned, the new online tool could drastically alter the landscape of the 2010 elections, with campaign functions contracted out to hundreds of free volunteers. At a minimum, it is a vivid illustration of the modern-day campaign, where a slip-up by a candidate caught on video could have profound impacts on his or her electoral prospects. Aides freely admit that the goal is to create another "Macaca moment" — in which former Senator George Allen (R-Va.) famously doomed his reelection hopes by belittling an opposition videographer with a racial slur — or at least to unearth a viral nugget such as those that changed the course of the health care debate at town halls last summer.

We signed on and quickly found a potential target more or less in our neck of the woods, a Strafford County Republican Committee summer picnic with Tim Pawlenty scheduled in Dover, NH at noon on Saturday, July 10. Hey, that might be fun. We could post some insidiously innocuous footage to foil the DNC's nefarious plotting.

Access to The Accountability Project site's inner functions and imperatives was a piece of cake and also a revelation for a mole like us. Once you get past the disingenuously plain-Jane "grassroots" gateway page, you're right back into President Obama's ultra-sophisticated Organizing-for-America territory, all smiling, politically correct victim-group faces and hope-and-change red, white and blue.

Now a friendly but firm critique of blogbuddy Dan's take. We agree with Riehl and Glenn Reynolds that the GOP establishment's "afraid of losing control" to us tea partiers and grass-roots types, but not to be upset about the Democrats' being so far ahead of us in exploiting new media. Our delvings suggest the sophistical new-media machinations of our friends on the left side of the aisle are just retreads of old stuff from campaign 2008. Whether there's still a beating heart in their moldering email lists is unknown. We placed ourselves there way back when, again, just to keep an eye on what the opposition was up to and got this pathetic piece, obviously timed to coincide with the debut of "Accountability," today:

Dear Sissy, I'm Ann Marie Habershaw — and as the chief operating officer here, I know you don't normally hear from me.

But this election season, we're putting together one of the most ambitious midterm campaign programs in American political history!

We've never had this much staff on the ground in a non-presidential election, and we're doing everything we can to reach out to the 15 million folks who voted for the first time in 2008 to get them back to the polls this fall.

Good luck, Ann Marie. Meanwhile Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform (above) is on the case.

Update: Michelle Malkin "Buzzworthy" link.

Update II: Retriever links. Thanks, dear friend!

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Scott Brown "has listened to his constituents" and will definitely vote "no" on financial reform

"It's as if Tony Hayward of BP were allowed to write new rules on deep water drilling," the WSJ editors analogize in "Triumph of the Regulators." Above, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, chief architects of the "sweeping" financial "reform" bill careening through the halls of Congress, beam at the thought of the latest bit of legislative handiwork they are preparing to impose on the American people. Associated Press photo.

Scott Brown "has listened to his constituents," an aide in our junior Senator's office just told us, and will definitely vote "no" on the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform bill should it come to the floor. ABC explains why that may not happen soon:

The Senate was expected to vote on the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform bill this week, giving the President the opportunity to sign the most sweeping overhaul of Wall Street regulations since the Great Depression before Congress's July 4 recess.

But …

Without Robert Byrd — or a Democratic replacement to fill Byrd's seat — they may not have the votes to pass it. On the critical procedural vote that enabled the bill to pass the Senate on May 20, Democrats prevailed 60-40. Senator Byrd's vote was essential; the bill had exactly the number of votes needed to pass.

And there's this: Democrats seem to have lost another vote. Sen. Scott Brown, one of just four Republicans in the Senate who voted for the Senate's version of the bill, is now suggesting he may oppose it because it now includes $18 billion in taxes and fees.

"I've said repeatedly that I cannot support any bill that raises taxes," Brown had told reporters Friday, raising our hopes:

While I'm still reviewing the bill's details, my fear is that these costs would be passed onto consumers in the form of higher bank, ATM and credit card fees and put a strain on lending at the worst possible time for our economy.

Nor was he amused that $18 billion in new assessments and fees had been "added in the wee hours of the morning by the conference committee." Our Mr. Brown, now outpolling senior Senator Kerry and President Obama here in Massachusetts, is proving to be a quick study in the ways of Washington, a fact that isn't going over well with the folks at Daily Kos, who snarked "So much for the wisdom of negotiating with Scott Brown to give him his big bank carve-out on the Volcker Rule." Nyah, nyah, nyah. Meanwhile, Senate Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd blithely acknowledged that "No one will know until this is actually in place how it works." As an eye-rolling WSJ explains, the system will be built "not around clear parameters of what institutions can and cannot do, but instead entirely on regulator discretion":

President Obama hailed the financial bill that House-Senate negotiators finally vouchsafed at 5:40 a.m. Friday, and no wonder. The bill represents the triumph of the very regulators and Congressmen who did so much to foment the financial panic, giving them vast new discretion over every corner of American financial markets.

Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, those Fannie Mae cheerleaders, played the largest role in writing the bill. Congressman Paul Kanjorski even offered a motion to memorialize it as the Dodd-Frank Act. It's as if Tony Hayward of BP were allowed to write new rules on deep water drilling.

The Federal Reserve, which promoted the housing mania and failed utterly in its core mission of monitoring Citigroup, will now have more power to regulate more financial institutions and more ability to dictate the allocation of credit …

Oh,and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? They aren't touched at all, even as they continue to lose billions of taxpayer dollars each quarter.

Where is Friedrich Hayek when you need him?

Update: Michelle Malkin "Buzzworthy" link!

Update II: Kinda fun: NYT Politics "From around the web" link.

Update III: Instalanche! Thank you, Professor Reynolds. 'Hope Scott Brown is still listening. We didn't like the sound of this morning's WaPo headline:

Scott Brown reconsidering support of financial regulation bill.

Update IV: Christine Varley's Greater Boston Tea Party is sponsoring a Senator Brown, Just Vote NO! Rally in front of Brown's Boston office today at noon.

Update V: Woohoo! Professor Jacobson's Post of the Day!

Cross-posted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Beyond Weigel: While the legacy media sleeps, new-media sleuths get the scoop

The fresh face of the new-media sleuths, left to right: Avatars of blogger/twitterers Cubachi, trscoop and Sister Toldjah.

"@sistertoldjah I am already sick of Weigel. We have a big expose on MSM bias, and it gets little attention" twittered rising blog star Cubachi a few minutes ago. We checked out her story and Sister Toldjah's on-the-scent post, and eureka! Those two new-media woman warriors and a handful of nightowls (see below) were witness in the wee hours to a Weigel-like revelation as unidentified "newsmen" covering Sarah Palin's controversial California State University Stanislaus speech felt free to spew the Palin's-a-Pinhead party line into the ether when they didn't realize the microphone was still on. Here's Sister Toldjah:

Just got done watching the speech Sarah Palin gave at California State University, Stanislaus – the one that generated so much controversy from “concerned” students to the point they were digging in trash dumpsters looking for contract info.

Anyway, she gave a great speech as always (commentary/live Tweets are here) but at times the Fox40 live feed was hard to hear – they were having audio issues. But at the end of the speech is where it got interesting. Here’s what some of the audio/camera guys** were saying:

“The dumbness doesn’t just come from soundbites.”

“I can’t believe she quoted Kennedy – twice."

“How am I going to write about this-there’s nothing there-answer well there’s your story”

It's downright Weigelesque. A few excepts from Cubachi's report reveal the dynamics of this new model of getting the scoop while the world sleeps:

I watched the video of supposedly FOX40 crew, techies behind the scenes on hot mike speak ill of Sarah Palin as if she is a buffoon and all sorts of nonsense the left spews out at effective conservatives (i.e. Ronald Reagan). You can check out the video at The Right Scoop.

All of us on twitter, including Tammy Bruce, Melissa Tweets, Sister Toldjah, Rachelle Friberg, TwittoNande, trscoop, and StephenKruiser all heard what these two men were spewing about Sarah Palin. We all tweeted about it, searched for contact numbers, and contacted FOX40 through twitter and other means. Sister Toldjah has a fantastic rundown of what happened last night. I don’t think all of us suddenly were hallucinating the same thing after we heard those insulting terms at Sarah Palin. It was more evidence of the MSM and their liberal bias… Maybe some conservatives will come to their defense. *ahem*

As we twittered this afternoon once we'd picked up the trail:

@Cubachi: Your Palin-bashing story ties in perfectly with the whole @DaveWeigel / Journolist fiasco. Like the Gulf oil spill it is uncontainable!

Twitter update from Sister Toldjah:

Update to "journo-dudes dis Palin" story: @Fox40 has responded at my blog: http://3.ly/BRtB I believe them. Next Q.: Who said remarks?

Update II: Michelle Malkin "Buzzworthy" link!

Update III: Memeorandum has picked up the scent.

Update IV: Dan links with a rousing call to arms.

Update V: Riehl-lanche via Dan's Instalanche:

IS THERE A "NEW MEDIA WAR?"

Update VI: "Amplify'd" by Melissa Clouthier:

Unguarded Moments: When the Press Gets Their Own Medicine

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Nikki Haley's Big Win: "The race and gender cards can't and won't work anymore"

Sunrise over Eastern Point, York Harbor, Maine, day before yesterday: The summer solstice, when the sun reaches its northernmost point in our firmament (left in image).

"Not a shocker at all," writes Lightwave in the comments to our "Nikki Haley For the Win!" crossposted at Riehl World View, a fresh, insightful reading of the tea leaves:

The real story is that this should be a permanent end to all Liberal and Lamestream Media noise about the Tea Party being a racist, sexist, Caucasians-only movement too.

It's an AMERICAN REVOLUTION. Emphasis on American. Always has been. Now there's ironclad proof. The race and gender cards can't and won't work anymore.

The Dems are doomed as a party to irrelevance after just four years in power.

Nikki Haley's big win is a big win at Memeorandum this morning too, second among equals to the entrail-rich Inside-the-Beltway chatter about "Why McChrystal Has to Go." We're heading over there now to feast on the corpse.

Update: "The way for Haley to disarm the media and beat back the political attacks is, of course, to be at the top of her game," writes Jennifer Rubin in "Nikki Fever," another fresh, insightful analysis on this morning after:

She was endorsed and greatly aided by Sarah Palin, whose treatment by the media should serve as a warning. Beautiful conservative women are not treated well by the mainstream media. And Haley should keep in mind that liberals and their mainstream-media allies generally treat minorities who are conservative especially roughly. If they happen to be devout Christians, well then, they really need to watch out …

Although Chris Christie may be the un-Haley in outward appearance, his  approach is the right one: be the happy warrior, apply conservative values, reject the entreaties to “get along” with the political establishment, and avoid even the appearance of impropriety.

Update II: Michelle Malkin "Buzzworthy" link. See also, for the sheer, cathartic joy of it, her Lead Story: Ken Salazar gets an ass-kickingl Over to you, Capitol Hill."

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Nikki Haley For the Win!

"Nikki Haley, center, along with friends and family, reacted as the runoff election was called in her favor in Columbia, S.C., on Tuesday," the NYT captioned this Brett Flashnick/Associated Press photo.

"Poor Scott Brown. Haley hasn't even won and she's the next great GOP hope," twittered Teresa Kopec about an hour ago in response to Ben Smith's retweet of this bit from CNN Political Producer Peter Hamby:

Nikki Haley's stage at the SC state museum is right next to the "Confederate relic room." Hard to avoid history here.

Now early birds like ourselves are twittering the election results from the highest hill:

OH FRABJOUS DAY! RT @allahpundit: RT @BreakingNews: Nikki Haley wins Republican nomination for governor in South Carolina

The first-generation golden-girl daughter of Indian Sikh immigrants who left their native land to pursue the American Dream, rising political star Nikki Haley has weathered the slings and arrows of outrageous South Carolina political opponents' "raghead" slurs and unsubstantiated accusations of extramarital affairs, capturing the hearts and minds not only of South Carolina conservatives, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and the Republican Governors Association, but of small-government, free-market tea-party types like ourselves from across the nation. As we blogged a couple of weeks back:

This newly energized conservative army of woman warriors, their hearts and minds not hobbled by postmodern feminism's identity-politics imperative, is unafraid to boldly go where too few women in this land of the free and home of the brave have gone before.

We haven't felt this good about an election result since our own Mushy Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown won the "People's Seat" long squatted upon by the seemingly immovable late Senator Teddy Kennedy in last January's special election. Unlike Brown, whose election we fervently promulgated, even as we are not always happy with his RINO-esque votes, Nikki Haley is a true fiscal conservative who gets our Shining-City-Upon-a-Hill juices flowing.

Update: Richard Viguerie FTW:

The Tea Party steamroller is rolling big government Republicans right out of town.

Update II: It's the territorial imperative, stupid:

Females are usually let go, but their babies will be eaten.

Update III: Michell Malkin "Buzzworthy" link!

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits

Hayek: In social evolution nothing is inevitable but thinking makes it so

  
Father's Day 2010 Down East at Camelot-by-the-Sea with an ambiguous sunrise that could go either way.

The "little people." The "small people." The "folks." When did the rugged individualism that is our American birthright get sucked down into the Gramscian cesspool that is the marxist meme of "the masses"? The term is used unthinkingly even by some of our admired allies on this side of the aisle. Then there's BP Chair Carl-Henric Svanberg, who bowed down to politically correct pressure to issue the usual "apology" for speaking truth to powerlessness:

"I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies or don't care, but that is not the case with BP. We care about the small people." He later said he was sorry for speaking "clumsily."

Opinionators tried to make it okay due to a loss in translation. But frankly, we see little difference between the "little" and the "small" people. It all comes down to a self-appointed elite's disdain for tea party "folks" like ourselves who aren't buying their statist utopia. We've started rereading F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, and we're getting revved up with the frenzied underlining and margin scribbling — which we still totally agree with! — of our first reading, perhaps twenty years ago. Loaded for bear. A taste:

In social evolution nothing is inevitable but thinking makes it so.

Thanks to Glenn Beck's promulgation, Hayek's brilliant insight is now #1 on Amazon. Maybe it's not too late for the masses our fellow Americans to wake up from our long national nightmare.

Update: The Divine Little Miss Attila links this post and our previous one with transcendent insight:

To put it in Christian terms light without darkness is Christ without the cross: a sad, vapid character.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Creeping socialism has transmogrified into galloping statism

Now you see her … Her lustrous, silky Chelsea Gray coat caressed by the sun, Tiny animates the landscape, her radiant warmth and golden eye aglow against the cool green of the pleasantly shaded Silver Maple Court on a "typical summerish" 84-degree day here in Chelsea-by-the-Sea.

It was lying there in plain sight all along, but most of our fellow Americans were distracted, too busy living their lives to pick it out from the background noise. Like Tiny camouflaged by the shifting visual dynamics of her surroundings in the image below, "Creeping socialism" was so disingenuously promulgated to the American public by progressives convinced they knew what was best for us "small people" that most of us didn't notice our freedoms ebbing away, the "forgotten man" ceding his autonomy — and hard-earned livelihood — to foot the bill for his betters' utopian, feel-good social-engineering schemes.

… Now you don't. "You can't hit what you can't see," we quoted Defense Review re digitized camouflage four years back, noting that "Digitized camo is impressive, but nobody does it better than the animals, as Tiny demonstrates, the pattern of light and shade fooling the eye into thinking a brick terrace and a gray cat are made of the same stuff.

Thomas Sowell cleanses the palate with a little history lesson:

What the government decided to do in June 1930 — against the advice of literally a thousand economists, who took out newspaper ads warning against it — was impose higher tariffs, in order to save American jobs by reducing imported goods.

This was the first massive federal intervention to rescue the economy, under President Herbert Hoover, who took pride in being the first President of the United States to intervene to try to get the economy out of an economic downturn.

Within six months after this government intervention, unemployment shot up into double digits — and stayed in double digits in every month throughout the entire remainder of the decade of the 1930s, as the Roosevelt administration expanded federal intervention far beyond what Hoover had started.

Creeping socialism has transmogrified into galloping statism under the current "regime," whose "never let a serious crisis go to waste" imperative knows no limits and no shame. Thank you, Rahm Emanuel and company for alerting us to Obama's sledging strategy of intimidation. We Tea Partiers will be forever grateful for the rude awakening, as will the Gulf coast governors like Bobby Jindal and everyday citizens who have decided to take things into their own hands in containing and pushing back the BP oil disaster the President has dragged his feet on and demagogued for the benefit of Union allies from day one. No more waiting in line for handouts.

It's in the air:

International protest groups take up ‘Tea Party’ flag in Moscow, Tel Aviv and the Hague.

From Stacy McCain: "One Republican's Plan to Fix the Gulf Oil Spill."

And from Instapundit: SLIPPING: Quinnipiac: New Jersey Blacks' Approval Of Obama Slipping.

Governor Chris Christie is the anti-Obama. Or, as Glenn Reynolds put it yesterday:

So, a fat white guy from New Jersey vs. a skinny black guy from Hawaii … ?

As New Jersey goes, so goes the nation?

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Without the darkness there can be no light

"This is what makes Thomas Kinkade ["one of the most financially successful artists in the world" now "beset by legal troubles," but that's not our point here] exasperating: He is both a creator of some of the most inspiring [that's debatable] paintings of the past two decades and a producer of some of the worst schlock [no question] ever manufactured by a talented artist," writes Joe Carter, linked by the Anchoress.

"I took a gander at your link of his 'real' stuff (left) vs this dross (right)" as blogged by Joe Carter, we wrote in the comments at The Anchoress's latest post about self-described "painter of light" Thomas Kinkade's "saccharine little cottages on exclusive little coves in a perfect little world." We'd been vaguely aware of Kinkade's vapid motel-friendly "art" — and even been fond of some of his appropriately sugar-coated Xmas card illustrations — but would never have given it a second thought had not the Divine Miss Scalia brought it to our attention. Here's what we wrote in her comments:

Obviously sold out. Proved what I already knew in my heart, not to mention my art-educated eye. The popular stuff has no soul, no sense of space, none of the mystery of the early-morning or late-afternoon light. No contrast of values. Totally made me think of the bland dumbing down of statism, where everyone gives up one’s individuality for the “greater good of the whole.” By contrast, the individualism and yearning and Chekhovian/Bergmanesque aloneness of, for example, John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.

"Ominous use of dark and light and lengthy sequences without dialogue characterize both Tiny and Baby's and Ingmar Bergman's films," we wrote a couple of years back, comparing the cinematographic style of the Chelsea Grays' "Want your supper?" with that of the great Swedish director's "The Virgin Spring" … "in the magic light of a setting sun, Baby (left) and Tiny are at it again, inviting our camera's eye to explore the sounds of silence," we blogged years later in "Lengthy sequences without dialogue."

Greeting-card art. The last thing Kinkade's "mass-marketed" travesties are about is 'light." He takes the low road, trying to dazzle with all light all the time. The result is a bland sameness throughout. The light fantastic is revealed only by the dark that surrounds it, like the wolves that lurk just outside the campfire of civilization waiting for the light to dim. Without the darkness there can be no light.

NOT watching the Oval Office Gulf Speech: See no evil, hear no evil, tweet no evil?

 

View from the porch early morning, with Bunker Hill Monument visible through layers of bureaucracy infrastructure, the McCardle Bridge between Chelsea and East Boston in foreground and a secondary span of the Mystic River Bridge in the background.

"Couldn't watch — See no evil, hear no evil, tweet no evil?" we twittered Professor Jacobson this morning, sending our regrets in response to an invitation to join his live feed of President Obama's Oval Office Gulf oil speech last night. The professor himself watched and summarized so we didn't have to, capturing the essence with his customary brilliance and economy of means in "Obama's Gulf Speech In One Sentence":

I don't know where I'm going, but follow me anyway.

Like Sarah Palin, criticized for dissing a Newsweek cover story about herself without having read the thing — Does ANYONE still read Newsweek? — we know what we know. Fortunately or unfortunately, we've had the Conman-in-Chief's number since that cold day in December of 2006 when the presidential hopeful called us a racist:

"Are some voters not going to vote for me because I’m African-American? Those are the same voters who probably wouldn’t vote for me because of my politics," Barack Obama told ecstatic New Hampshire voters yesterday. Being one of those voters who probably wouldn't vote for him because of his politics, we were naturally offended at his suggestion that people like us are racists. Swept up in the locals' devotional hysteria, however, the media didn't seem to notice. Folks hear what they want to hear.

After three and a half years, the fawning media have begun to notice and hear what they don't want to hear, and according to reliable sources, "the reviews are not very good":

Teagan Goddard rounds up some of the inside the beltway set, aka the irrelevant to the real world young elite - Klein, Ambinder, Chait and Cillizza and Green. The reviews are not very good.

The MSNBC video via Real Clear Politics is worse - no tingle for Chris, no solutions for Keif.

More video, as Frank Luntz's focus group says thumbs down.

"The GREEN Issue. Eco-chic heats up … Laurie David Save the Planet" headlined the April 2007 issue of Elle "just in time for the fast-approaching Earth Day. Laurie David and Danny Seo are guest editors" gushed the promo.

FANTASY VERSION OF THIS POST: The Oval Office speech was pre-empted by yesterday's revelation of Al Gore's 40-year itch, with wall-to-wall coverage on all the cables:

Star has learned that Al has been having an affair with Laurie [David], who divorced Seinfeld creator and Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David [a producer of Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" ] in 2007 amidst reports she was cheating with the caretaker of their Martha's Vineyard summer home …

Laurie, 49, appears to have become infatuated with her 44-year-old building contractor, Bart Thorpe. Described as "a shirtless hunk" in one breathless account and as "a hottie but dumb", Thorpe has since been spotted holding hands with Laurie David. "Bart is so besotted he doesn't know which end is up," says a neighbour. "He thinks Laurie David is the greatest person in the world. He says she's single-handedly saving the planet.

As Dan Riehl cracked, "I guess she likes her men earthy!"

Update: Melissa Clouthier connects the dots:

If there is anything worse for a leader than rhetorical impotence, I don’t know what it is. Even a sex scandal implies some sort of virility. But empty words?

Update II: Michelle Malkin "Buzzworthy" link!

Crossposted at Riel World View and Liberty Pundits.