The photo of John Edwards’s home has not been removed, as I thought it had been when I wrote this post. I’m not sure why I wasn’t able to find it this morning, and I’m too tired to look into it. The photo is available here.

Roger L. Simon, who linked to the photo, isn’t a fan of the ostentatious lifestyle, but he’s got a tip for Edwards:

He should do what the Hollywood stars do when people start to criticize their private jets and multi-million dollar residences in Malibu, Vail, etc. He should buy a Prius!

Are you allowed to nap in a mosque?

Why, yes, if you’re the president of Iran. How sweet.
The Sandmonkey has something to say about this, though:

Of course, you might look like a hobo, and some smart people might ask why you would need to sleep there when you are the freakin President, but who said Propaganda was for the smart amongst us?

The competition is getting fierce in the blogosphere:

Oh, and if you don’t link to this, you’re dead to us.

(And, no, I’m not talking about the Clinton blog ad wars.)

It’s been two years since I was here.

Hot off the presses. According to two different representatives of Hamas, the targeting and murder of innocent civilians inside Israel via suicide bombing is A-okay. It’s “resistance.” And resistance is legitimate.

[A] spokesman for Hamas praised the bombing as a natural response to Israeli military policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as its ongoing boycott of the Hamas-led Palestinian government - a position likely to complicate the group’s current efforts to end a crippling aid boycott imposed by the international community.

“So long as there is occupation, resistance is legitimate,” said Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza.

Barhoum also said attacks on Israel were preferable to the recent bout of Palestinian infighting in Gaza between his group and the more moderate Fatah. “The right thing is for Fatah weapons to be directed toward the occupation not toward Hamas,” he said.

The Hamas statement echoed a declaration by Khaled al-Batsh, a senior Islamic Jihad leader, who called the attack “a natural response to the continued crimes by the Zionist enemy.”

Fatah sees things differently (today anyway; that was not always the case. But people—and political movements—mature. Or they should.):

Fatah spokesman Ahmad Abdul Rahman condemned it, saying, “We are against any operation that targets civilians, Israelis or Palestinians.”

This is just in case you’re wondering why the United States and Israel have decided to support Fatah’s Abbas. He, unlike Hamas, has come around. It’s a sad day when the faction we have to choose as our ally merely condemns the heinous act of suicide bombing out of political expediency. But there you have it.

And a reminder from British writer Nick Cohen:

Political seriousness lies in stating which Palestine you are for and which Palestinians you support.

What choice do we have but to support Fatah and condemn Hamas?

Going where Jack Shafer refused (for some inexplicable reason) to go before (see this post), Isaac Chotiner names “evil genius” pollster  and “message guru” Frank Luntz “the architect of the [1994] GOP takeover.”

In TNR, Chotiner also reports that a “disappointed” Luntz (actually, he sounds enraged, not disappointed, by the idiots in Congress) is “fleeing” D.C. for “the beach.”

In Luntz’s telling, what was once a visionary movement of bold ideas has been consumed by the nasty and anti-intellectual culture that dominates Washington. “I read these blogs,” he says, his voice downbeat. “They are so bitter. So bitter and so angry. … It’s not my style.” And later: “I think Washington, D.C., is intellectually tired.”

It’s hard to argue with Luntz’s take on the state of intellectual debate in Washington. But Luntz’s career has been about nothing so much as cheapening language and obscuring honest discussion. During the debate over tort reform in 2005, a memo written by Luntz, which eventually leaked to the press, classily counseled Republicans with the following: “It is tempting to counter-attack using facts and figures. Resist the temptation. … The President’s language works because it speaks to a series of individual proposals that common sense suggests will lead to job creation.” When House Republicans wanted to gut Medicare in 1995, Luntz advised them to be, well, blatantly dishonest about what they were doing: If the cuts would be perceived as long-term savings, he said, then the public would go along with benefit cuts. “We want a solution that preserves and protects Medicare,” Gingrich said at the time, echoing Luntz’s advice. Luntz’s most notorious memo may be the one he sent out in 2003 about the threat of global warming: “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue”–even though no such “lack of scientific certainty” exists. [emphasis mine]

Luntz is getting a bad rap: because he perfected spin for the Republicans. Even Kos has called him “formerly evil but now just a mercenary.” [In the world of the coldhearted coldblooded, a "mercenary" is a values-neutral term. I think Kos got a bad rap way back when, too.]

Anyway, it’s more than a little disingenuous to blame Luntz for the fact that our entire political culture sounds as empy and hollow as it does. For one thing, he used to work for people who were passionate about the ideas he helped them shape. For another, it’s hardly Luntz’s fault that his techniques have been mimicked by Democrats—and everyone else trying to sell ideas.

No wonder Luntz is “circumspect” in response to some of Chotiner’s questions:

And, yet, if you ask Luntz about his role in Washington over the last decade, he has no regrets. “I wouldn’t change anything,” he says. Pushed on whether his snappy and often misleading slogans hurt political debate, he is circumspect, saying only that sloganeering has been going on for 150 years.

So if Luntz is fed up with Washington, perhaps he should work for an outsider. Someone who’s got mojo but no clear message?

Apparently, important people don’t agree with my take on the John Edwards story. (I thought publishing the photo was no big deal, because everyone already knows that Edwards is rich.) The photograph has been removed from my post, however. It has also been removed from the Internet, as far as I can tell from a quick search.

The other day, TigerHawk’s link led me here. As you can see, where there was once a photo, there is now none. The note from Carolina Journal is still there at the top of the page:

Due to the extraordinary traffic generated by the link from the Drudge Report website, the main carolinajournal.com website is temporarily unavailable. The main carolinajournal.com will be available again once traffic levels return to normal.

If you do a Google News search for “Edwards estate” now, what you get are a bunch of articles that point up the hypocrisy of a guy calling himself a man of the people while living on a huge estate.

“To Some, Edward’s Grand Estate sybolizes inequity he pledges to fight”

But you no longer get to see a picture of that estate—which takes the sting out of the stories. In my original post, I wrote that the indelible image of Edwards’s wealth that you get from pictures of his estate are much more powerful than the words “rich trial lawyer.” I also opined that, because class resentment is not a huge political issue in America, seeing a picture of Edwards’s wealth will not be a turn-off to potential voters. I still believe that. (In America, we all want to be rich, and we all believe we could be rich if only we put our minds to it—it’s the essential American myth.)

The Edwards campaign obviously doesn’t agree, however. And they’ve got a point: just look at those negative stories as a result of one photograph!

To bend over backwards to be fair, however, I will say that the easy availability of such a photograph on the Internet also presents a huge potential security risk for Edwards and his family, so it could have been taken down for that reason. I absolutely agree that the privacy and personal lives of public servants, potential public servants, and their families should be protected from such unnecessary security risks, so if the photo was taken down for that reason, I understand.

However: it’s also very convenient for Edwards, who happens to be on CNN live talking to Miles O’Brien as I write and who hasn’t been asked word one about this matter. Why not? Whether the photo posed a security risk or was simply a political embarrassment, it is undoubtedly a news story.

My early conclusion for 2008 is that the MSM—and CNN in particular—is totally in bed with the Democratic candidates.