We'll Follow The Snow

Rain is for sissies. Kathy and I are going to Lake Arrowhead for a couple of days. See you when there's wireless.
Photo by Dual Ravens

You Can Always Count On The Nixon Guy

Evangelist and former Nixon aide Chuck Colson complains that iTunes banned a "gay cure" app.

Michele, Nobel

The voice of sober Nixonian realism on Libya is Rep. Michele Bachmann, who said in an interview tonight with Fox News' Greta Van Susteren that the U.S. shouldn't have intervened because we're overextended internationally and don't know enough about the anti-Qaddafi rebels or the war's likely outcome.

Internet=Information?

Historian Maarja Krusten gently chides Watergate reporter Bob Woodward (who's coming to the Nixon library on April 18, or, as we say at St. John's, the Monday in Holy Week) for his confused and curmudgeonly critique of Google and Facebook:

Google and Facebook just aren’t the problems Woodward seems to paint them as being. And it isn’t Google that killed newspapers. The problem is in the newspapers providing free content at the start of the Internet age and then having no way to go paywall once everyone was accustomed to reading what they wanted. As Bob Haldeman once observed, there’s no point in trying to put the toothpase back into the tube once you squeezed it out. Ain’t gonna work.

As shown by the mixed reaction the New York Times received last week when it decided to charge non-subscribers for more than 20 visits a month to its web site. Hundreds wrote and said that they'd just get their content at Yahoo, as if they don't understand what would happen to the content (also the top source of information for the networks and ten thousand bloggers whose shoe leather carries them no further than Starbucks) if the Times went broke.

You'd think Woodward, famous for his deliberate, ingratiating methods, would be the first to say, "Google can't find it if I don't report it, and I'm not going to report it for free." Yet people, especially younger people, have gotten it into their heads that Internet=Information. Last night, rewatching Roman Polanski's flawed anti-Tony Blair thriller "The Ghost Writer," I laughed out loud when the hero broke the case wide open by Googling another character's name and uncovering his status as a CIA agent. As if.

It's Sleazy Being Green

Did Hamas bomb Jerusalem to distract attention from its own thuggery against fellow Palestinians?

Madison, California

An Orange County city lays off half its workforce.

Fickle Bill

Dan Quayle's ex-chief of staff brought Sarah Palin to the dance in 2008 and then split. Now who's going to take her home?:

Even founder of the conservative "Weekly Standard" magazine Bill Kristol, who helped push Palin into the spotlight in 2007, said this week he does not think she should be the GOP standard-bearer.

"She has a very shrewd judgment about politics and policy and very good instincts -- but she hasn't done what Reagan ... did, which is really educate himself over a number of years," Kristol said. “I think she's unlikely to be the Republican nominee, and to be honest I think she probably shouldn't be the Republican nominee for president.”

Aw, My First Retweet!

Here's the National Archives and Records Administration's tweet about the Nixon library's new Watergate exhibit:

Want the REAL story behind Watergate? Groundbreaking new exhibit to open at the Nixon Library in CA this April! http://go.usa.gov/2bf

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

The Puleeze Process

Sarah Palin came back from Jerusalem with the insight that West Bank settlement construction is a "zoning issue."

A "Groundbreaking" Exhibit

From the National Archives web site, details about the March 31 media opening of the Nixon library's new Watergate exhibit.