Found via the #TCOT Report, AOL’s Daily Finance Website claims a bit of chicanery may have been involved in how Newsweek obtained its latest cover image:

What on earth was Sarah Palin thinking when she posed in a pair of teeny-tiny gym shorts for a photograph that ended up on the cover of Newsweek — a cover she has called “sexist”? Perhaps she was thinking that her image would only appear in the magazine she was posing for, Runner’s World, and nowhere else, at least not for months and months. If so, she had good reason — since, as DailyFinance has learned, the photographer who shot the picture violated his contract by reselling them to Newsweek.

That photographer, Brian Adams, could not immediately be reached, and his agent, Kelly Price, declined to comment, saying, “I keep all of my clients’ business private.” But a spokeswoman for Runner’s World confirms that Adams’s contract contained a clause stipulating that his photos of Palin would be under embargo for a period of one year following publication — meaning until August 2010. “Runner’s World did not provide Newsweek with its cover image,” the spokeswoman said. “It was provided to Newsweek by the photographer’s stock agency, without Runner’s World’s knowledge or permission.” The spokeswoman declined to say whether Runner’s World intends to respond to Adams’s breach of contract with legal action.

I guess Jill Greenberg had another assignment that week.

In addition to the sexism of the cover, as a couple of Blogospheric Photoshop parodies of the Newsweek cover highlight, one of the problems that the legacy media faces, as it continues to push liberal narrative journalism over anything even approaching objective reporting is that it’s entirely predictable. Republicans are inevitably the bad guys; Democrats are invariably smart and cool (and Newsweek really made itself look even sillier than usual last month trying to defend Joe Biden), and since the reader knows exactly what to expect, there’s no real reason to buy the magazine. Or as Andrew Ferguson wrote earlier this year:

While flipping the pages of the new Newsweek, it began to occur to everybody that, hey, this is a pretty stupid idea for a magazine. Are there really 1.5 million magazine readers–the number of subscribers Jon has promised advertisers–who want a liberal opinion magazine written by liberals who don’t want to admit they’re liberals? Last week everybody looked at one another and pondered a world without Newsweek.

This sort of approach is fine, and understandable, for political magazines such as the New Republic, National Review, and Ferguson’s own Weekly Standard, where the reader expects to find partisan worldviews that match his own, but when applied to what once thought of as news, commits a cardinal sin of journalism:

It’s boring.

In the mid-1970s, liberals were outraged over Tom Wolfe’s book, The Painted Word for deflating the pretensions of one of the left’s then-most sacred institutions: modern art. Traditional painting and sculpture were based on two millenia of aesthetic assumptions, meaning that anyone could instantly understand the art they were looking at. Modern art eventually jettisoned traditional aesthetics to turn itself into a sort of insular game where the theory behind the art was far more important than the actual work of art itself. (Hence the title of Wolfe’s book.)

Or as Wolfe himself wrote in The Painted Word:

And there, at last, it was!  No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a “receiver” that may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just “the artist”, in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode–and in the moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperature…and came out the other side as Art Theory!…Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.

In the Washington Times, Sonny Bunch reviews (Untitled), which sounds like the indy motion picture equivalent of Wolfe’s book — and only 35 years later!

“(Untitled)” isn’t a conservative film in any narrowly doctrinaire sense of the word. It isn’t a Randian broadside against “the looters” trying to implement socialized medicine. It isn’t a rousing war epic in the vein of “300″ or “The Longest Day.” It isn’t a terrible parody film that takes cheap shots against easy targets such as Michael Moore.

Instead, “(Untitled)” goes after postmodernism — specifically, postmodern art.

Brothers Adrian and Josh Jacobs (Adam Goldberg and Eion Bailey, respectively) are artists of different temperaments. Adrian’s a sound artist whose musical arrangements include bucket-kicking and vinyl-squeaking; Josh is more successful, a painter whose compositions are less challenging than his brother’s cacophonous noise but far more popular.

Josh’s popularity with corporate types doesn’t win him what he desires, however: a showing in the avant-garde art gallery owned by Madeleine Gray (Marley Shelton). Madeleine has been content to sell his art — it keeps her afloat financially, in fact — but she refuses to show his work because it will diminish her credibility with the artiste set.

Instead, she shows art that can only be described as hideous. One exhibited artist is Ray Barko (Vinnie Jones), whose work resembles a taxidermist’s office by way of Derrida: Animals are stuffed and put into odd positions and splashed with makeup as a “comment” on society.

Another show consists of little more than items from a home placed onto a wall. A thumb tack (”Pushpin Stuck Into Wall”), for example, or a flickering lightbulb. In the world of New York’s hipster pomo set, this is what passes for art.

As Josh becomes more and more frustrated by Madeleine’s sensibilities, he finally blows his stack, yelling out, “When did beauty become so… ugly?”

“(Untitled)” is by no means a defense of banality in art, and Josh’s art is nothing if not banal — his painted canvases of soothing colors dotted with the occasional sphere line the hallways of corporate meeting rooms and hospitals. Instead, “(Untitled)” searches for the midpoint between banality and absurdity, doing so in a way that is likely to please lovers of both modern and classical art.

Again, this isn’t a fire-breathing conservative tract. It’s far more subtle than that. But it is a celebration of art and, in large part, a rejection of the turn the artistic avant-garde has taken over the last few decades.

It’s a relatively brave rejection at that: Those who argue that Hollywood is uniformly too timid to attack its own sacred cows would do well to recognize it. We shall see if they do.

Well, count me in — Bunch certainly makes it sound like a picture well worth checking out, unlike most of the post-1960s art at MOMA.

The boys at the office loved filming it, but Donald Draper finds he could really lose his head over the repercussions of this ill-conceived campaign:

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Found via Mark Steyn, who dubs the ad “Fatima’s Secret”:

This German lingerie ad (warning: contains soft-focus footage of the female form in all its pulchritude — don’t stampede all at once) has a cool superficial smartness with what is intended to be an O. Henry switcheroo at the tail.

I think it’s more like wishful thinking. For one thing, if the actress were truly a believer as opposed to a jobbing actress, taking this underdressed gig would earn her an honor killing. Enjoy the multiculti sophisticated jests while you can, lads.

Geez, did Naomi Wolf come up with the idea for this? As Phyllis Chesler recently in late August:

Women in chadors are really feminist ninja warriors. Rather than allow themselves to be gawked at by male strangers, they choose to defeat the “male gaze” by hiding from it in plain view.

But don’t you worry: Beneath that chador, abaya, burqa, or veil, there is a sexy courtesan wearing “Victoria Secret, elegant fashion, and skin care lotion,” just waiting for her husband to come home for a night of wild and sensuous marital lovemaking.

Obviously, these are not my ideas. I am quoting from a piece by Naomi Wolf that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days ago. Yes, Wolf is the bubbly, feminist author who once advised Vice President Al “The Climate” Gore on what colors he should wear while campaigning and who is or was friendly with Gore’s daughter. Full disclosure: I have casually known Wolf and her parents for more than a quarter-century.

Wolf recently traveled to Morocco, Jordan, and Eygpt, where she found the women “as interested in allure, seduction, and pleasure as women anywhere in the world.” Whew! What a relief. She writes:

“Many Muslim women I spoke with did not feel at all subjugated by the chador or the headscarf. On the contrary, they felt liberated from what they experienced as the intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualizing Western gaze. … Many women said something like this: …’how tiring it can be to be on display all the time. When I wear my headscarf or chador, people relate to me as an individual, not an object; I feel respected.’ This may not be expressed in a traditional Western feminist set of images, but it is a recognizably Western feminist set of feelings.”

“Really? If so, I’m the Queen of England”, Chesler joked.

(Yes, I downloaded a copy in case this one gets pulled from YouTube. Follow the links here for our earlier examples of 21st Century Mad Men and their very strange cocktail that mixes leftwing politics and advertising.)

A couple of weeks ago, I did the “Earn Big $$$ The NEA Way” edition of Silicon Graffiti, based this post by Iowahawk (and used with permission):

In the 1980s, I loved the images in Ralph Lauren’s advertising — you too could be Gatsby, just by buying Lauren’s clothes. (And it didn’t hurt of course, that designing the anachronistic costumes for the surprisingly inert Robert Redford movie version of the Great Gatsby in the mid-1970s helped to put Lauren on the map.) But as Virginia Postrel notes in an exceptional piece on Forbes, “glamour is a delicate illusion. Anything discordant can break the spell. Lately, Ralph Lauren the brand seems determined to puncture its audience’s reverie:”

First, the blog Photoshop Disasters caught the company using a freakishly retouched image in a Tokyo ad. The model had been digitally slimmed down so much that her head was bigger than her pelvis. The item was picked up by the much larger blog BoingBoing, whose readers reacted with mockery and condemnation. “I had no idea Pez had a ‘Fashion Week’ dispenser line,” quipped one. Another called the ad “pornography for anorexia.”

Instead of ignoring the ridicule, the company foolishly threatened the sites with legal action, alleging that reproducing the ad violated its copyright. (Illustrating criticism is, in fact, a classic example of “fair use” of copyrighted imagery.) What had been an amusing critique instantly became an Internet cause célèbre. Site after site reproduced the ad, portraying Ralph Lauren as a bully with bad taste. The company eventually apologized for the “poor imaging and retouching,” but not for the threats.

Compounding the public-relations disaster, model Filippa Hamilton then appeared on The Today Show, claiming that the company had dismissed her in April for being too big. (She is 5′10″ and weighs 120 pounds.) The company denies the allegation and says she couldn’t meet her contract obligations. Whatever the truth, much of the public now believes that Ralph Lauren fired a thin, beautiful model for not looking like a Photoshopped freak. And now a second example of digital hip removal has turned up. A brand once known for wholesome images of the good life is becoming a symbol of concentration-camp chic.

So much for glamour.

As for timelessness, Ralph Lauren’s most recent runway collection was unfortunately historical. Prompted by the economic downturn, he presented Depression-inspired looks: Dust Bowl cotton house dresses, tattered jeans, ripped overalls, newsboy caps. Ripped jeans are trendy, but this brand isn’t about trends; instead of patina, the collection glamorized rags. “The Grapes of Ralph,” Women’s Wear Daily called the collection. A Boston Globe columnist condemned it as a “fashion faux pas” that romanticized “Depression-era starvation and despair.”

In a way, it’s a vicious cycle: last year around this time, the editors of the magazines that Lauren advertised in, and the newspapers he likely read, were, as Postrel noted, trapped in their “Depression Porn” fantasies of their own, as they awaited the man they pictured (literally so, in Time magazine’s case) as the next FDR to do what the old FDR did 75 years ago. So perhaps it’s easy to understand why Lauren would want to ride that trend.

In contrast, Brooks Brothers looked back upon a more optimistic time — if ultimately fraught with perils of its own — for their own recent blast of nostalgia.

(more…)

Glinda, a contributor to the vast Manolo empire, ponders manners and morals in post-feminist America:

I really do want my son to be the kind of person that opens doors for ladies and pushes in his girlfriend’s chair when they go to a nice restaurant.

But how to do that without sending the message that girls are deserving of special treatment, which many feminists say ain’t so?

Talk about mixed messages.

Any thoughts?

Or am I just overthinking this whole thing?

For a look back at how decorum functioned in the era of stone knives and bear skins, click here.

A few years ago, James Lileks summed up the archetypal Ikea shopping experience thusly:

The final step of the Great Reorganizing involved shelves, but since they’re in the closet I had no desire to spend a lot of monie on them. So I got in my car and drove to IKEA, where all the furniture has vaguely familiar names like Char, or Desq, or Bedd. When I reached the parking lot my jaww fell: what the fuug? It’s a Wednesday night and there are more people heading into this place than you’d see streaming into a Beatles reunion tour. The place is paqued. You enter from the parking level, take an escalator up to the next, then take another tall esky to the main floor. It’s all arranged so you follow a path through the endless maze, and at the end the Minotaur eats your head.

Well, if you’re going to Start From Zero, you might as well end there as well.

Mental Floss explores the checkered past of IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad:

While we’ve written about IKEA cloaking itself as a charitable institution, that isn’t the blue and yellow über-store’s only dirty secret. While Kamprad today is known as a frugal billionaire who drives a ‘93 Volvo, eats at middle-class restaurants, and outfits his home entirely in affordable IKEA products, his legacy is tainted by his past involvement with pro-Nazi organizations. Between 1942 and 1945, Kamprad joined, fund-raised, and recruited members for a fascist, Nazi-sympathizing group in Sweden.

All the more reason why Philip Johnson would have loved the Bahaus style throughout the stores, and likely, so would Ingmar Bergman, curiously enough.

(H/T: Judith Weiss of Kesher Talk.)

Jesse Walker of Reason travels down “The Way to Sesame Street” to explore the surprisingly multifaceted “politics of children’s television:”

It’s hard to fathom just how unusual Sesame Street must have seemed when it debuted 40 years ago this month. The children’s TV show didn’t just mix entertainment with education: It was a full-blown collaboration between commercial showmen and social engineers. On one hand you had a team of educators, experts in child development, and officials at the Carnegie and Ford foundations trying to create a televised preschool. On the other hand you had veterans of projects ranging from Captain Kangaroo to The Jimmy Dean Show, including a gang of puppeteers best known for making strange and funny ads. The program itself reflected both an antipathy to commercialism and a fascination with commercials, which served not just as a source for its parodies but as a model for its programming.

The show emerged from the same Great Society milieu that had produced the Head Start preschool program. That guaranteed it would be a magnet for controversy. In his 2006 book Sesame Street and the Reform of Children’s Television, the historian Robert Morrow notes that preschool in the ’60s was frequently framed as a project for the impoverished, who were presumed to suffer from “cultural deprivation.” Not surprisingly, many poor people found this attitude haughty and high-handed. The middle class, meanwhile, often saw the home as “a haven to be protected from intrusions by educators as well as by television.”

Walker writes above that Sesame Street “was a full-blown collaboration between commercial showmen and social engineers.” You can get a sense of how much the latter have accomplished by going back to the earliest episodes and seeing what those engineers of the soul are uncomfortable with today. As I asked in 2007, when today’s incarnation of the show is being issued forty years from now in super-holographic ultra-HD-DVD, direct injections into the cerebral cortex, or however video will be distributed, what else will they look askance at?

The L.A. Times‘ “Culture Monster” column is takes on an ironic meaning today, as they note, “Shepard Fairey admits to wrongdoing in Associated Press lawsuit.”

Ann Althouse adds:

To make the poster he needed to “reference” — his verb — a photo of Obama, and now he wants to defend that use under the Copyright Law. To promote the acceptance of a broad definition of “fair use,” it would help if he were thought of as a good guy — the artist, who should be supported in his creative endeavors and given access to the raw materials that he uses for the general benefit of society. And now we see that he has infected his repution with wrongdoing:

“Throughout the case, there has been a question as to which Mannie Garcia photo I used as a reference to design the HOPE image,” Fairey said. “The AP claimed it was one photo, and I claimed it was another.”

New filings to the court, he said, “state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used…and that I was mistaken. While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong. In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images.”

In February, the AP claimed that Fairey violated copyright laws when he used one of their images as the basis for the poster.  In response, the artist filed a lawsuit against the AP, claiming that he was protected under fair use. Fairey also claimed that he used a different photo as the inspiration for his poster.

The copyright issue itself should remain the same, and it’s an important one indeed. It’s a damned shame that the banner for expansive fair use is being carried by someone who was dishonest and who tried to play the legal system. Why is he admitting his deception now? Presumably, he knew the manipulations would come to light one way or the other, and it was a strategic decision to reveal it this way.

But like the invented Rush Limbaugh quotes, and RatherGate, if Rather hadn’t been caught so quickly, Fairey’s work is done — he took a calculated risk that legal issues — if any — would befall him long after the election, or long after his image went viral.

But hey, it’s just another way you too can earn big money the NEA Way…

…Or maybe the Twilight Zone. In any case — duuuude:

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(Via)

You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… The Outer Limits of Big Government, as these headlines on Drudge illustrate:

• LEAKED MEMO: 'ORGANICALLY' PRODUCE NETWORK TV TO PROMOTE GOVERNMENT 'SERVICE' AGENDA...
• ...THEN WEBSITES POINT VIEWERS TO PLANNED PARENTHOOD, OTHER LEFT-WING ADVOCACY GROUPS
• FLASHBACK: SALON 2000: Prime-time propaganda; How the [Clinton] White House secretly hooked network TV on its anti-drug message...

The NRA (no, the other one) could not be reached for comment:

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Talk about green shoots! My wife saw this ad for Chia Obama(!) at the end of a Two & Half Men rerun tonight. As the person who uploaded a clip of the ad to YouTube on April 2nd wrote, “This is not an April Fools Day prank. This is a real product:”

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And not surprisingly, the cries of the product being raaaaaacist (instead of merely silly and tacky, the 21st century equivalent of Billy Beer) are emerging from the HuffPo.

Fortunately though, rumors that Obama isn’t just the president, he’s also a client are just that.

At least to the best of my knowledge.

Incidentally, wouldn’t Chia Biden have been a more appropriate product? Or do the folks at Collateral Victory have the exclusive on Biden tchotchkes?

Dr. Strangecrib, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the idea of a nuclear missile silo turned into a swinging bachelor pad. Secrets of Austin Powers’ (or maybe Gen. Jack D. Ripper’s) hidden love nest revealed!

The New York Post spots President Obama rolling out the red carpet and handing out “doctors’ white coats as well, just so nobody missed his hard-sell health-care message:”

In a heavy-handed attempt at reviving support for health-care reform, the White House orchestrated a massive photo op to buttress its claim that front-line physicians support Obama.

A sea of 150 white-coated doctors, all enthusiastically supportive of the president and representing all 50 states, looked as if they were at a costume party as they posed in the Rose Garden before hearing Obama’s pitch for the Democratic overhaul bills moving through Congress.The physicians, all invited guests, were told to bring their white lab coats to make sure that TV cameras captured the image.

But some docs apparently forgot, failing to meet the White House dress code by showing up in business suits or dresses.

So the White House rustled up white coats for them and handed them to the suited physicians who had taken seats in the sun-splashed lawn area.

Bolding in above passage by Cuffy Meigs, who spots flashbacks to the plastic turkey that wasn’t. Meanwhile, the Media Research Center notes the astroturfed nature of the men in the Good Humor jackets.

Ann Althouse adds:

A sea of health-care-reform-supporting doctors was assembled to be photographed listening to Obama tell them what a sea of health-care-reform-supporting doctors they are, and they were supposed to all be wearing white lab coats — so they’d look like a sea of health-care-reform-supporting doctors.

But some of them — despite getting the memo to wear their lab coats — came dressed, well, appropriately. They wore business suits/dresses for their audience with a President.  Oh, no!

White House staff had to scramble to get a bunch of lab coats, and the photo-op of the staffers passing out lab coats to the doctors was much more amusing than the a sea of health-care-reform-supporting doctors the White House wanted.

Come on, people! Obama’s in trouble. You need to help.

No word yet from Tom Wolfe on this, though.

Reason magazine links to Nick Gillespie’s review of two new biographies of the Mother of Objectivism:

In The Wilson Quarterly, Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie reviews two brand-spankin’ new (and largely sympathetic) biographies of Ayn Rand. A snippet:

Has any major postwar American author taken as much critical abuse as Ayn Rand? Her best-known novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, have sold more than 12 million copies in the United States alone and were ranked first and second in a 1998 Modern Library reader survey of the “greatest books” of the 20th century. Yet over the years, Rand’s writing has been routinely dismissed as juvenile and subliterate when it has been considered at all. During the height of the Cold War, she managed to alienate leftists by insisting that capitalism was not simply more productive but more moral than socialism or a mixed economy because it allowed the individual to express himself most fully. And she angered the anticommunist Right with her thoroughgoing materialism, lack of respect for tradition, and atheism. (She once told William F. Buckley he was “too intelligent” to believe in God.)

The publication of Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market indicates that a belated but timely reconsideration of Rand’s place in American cases for Rand’s importance to the past 80 years of American intellectual and cultural life all the more convincing. That Rand’s life story is in many ways more melodramatic, unbelievable, and conflicted than one of her own plots certainly helps to keep the reader’s attention. As Burns puts it, “The clash between her romantic and rational sides makes [her life] not a tale of triumph, but a tragedy of sorts.”

Read the whole thing here.

Accompanying the post is a reprint of one of Reason’s 1973-era covers featuring a posterized version of Ayn Rand, prompting a commenter to note how much she’d love a Che-style T-shirt featuring Rand. Should take you about ten minutes in Photoshop to put the art together for that one, as the quick mock-up above illustrates.

Girls, the Dallas Cowboys’ Cheerleaders just called. They’d like their boots back:

Or, where Ed Straker from Gerry Anderson’s UFO, or Dave Bowman from Kubrick’s 2001 would go when they were on leave.

Someone uploaded to Flickr an incredible collection of Syd Mead’s mid-1960s illustrations for US Steel. Much like the aforementioned productions by Kubrick and Anderson, these represent the last gasp of optimistic mid-century American modernism projected a few decades into the future. (In other words, now.)

The full-screen slideshow version is just awesome. Click here and let the Jetsons-meets-Mies vibe wash over you.

(Via Paleo-Future; for my 2001 interview with Mead regarding his design work on a far darker look at the future, click here.)

After escaping from Dessau Germany in the mid-1920s, (with a little assist from America’s Philip Johnson), it apparently established a toehold in the kitchen at some point in the 1930s, as James Lileks illustrates in the latest addition to his sprawling Website. Overall, a number of the designs (more “moderne” than Bauhaus-style modern, to be fully accurate) seem remarkably fresh, even 70 years later. But the busy patterns on the linoleum floor covering (then considered a surprisingly breakthrough product) are pretty frightening. Or as James writes:

Oh yeah. I’d live here, for several reasons: the color. The porthole. The machine-for-living aesthetic. The linoleum!

Well, maybe not the linoleum. You take a look at that some morning when you have a hangover and dropped your eggs on the floor, it would be trouble with a capital Puke.

Heh. As Lileks adds, these are “ultra-modern kitchens you could afford, as soon as they finished up with the Depression and Hitler.” And once they did, modernism would become, for better or worse (and often worse), the mid-century design aesthetic.

As the Hollywood knew in its golden days, it’s what you don’t talk about that makes it intriguing. In other words, this is a pretty *$#*@#-ing good parody of an otherwise staggeringly lame advertisement:

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(VodkaPundit and James Lileks will debate this and the dreadful original version of this ad on the upcoming edition of PJM Political this Saturday.)

Update: Proof that at Microsoft, some things never change. Found in the comments section of Lileks’ post is a much earlier Microsoft promo video, designed to explain the miracles of Windows 386 to nascent computer retailers. As the comment below it suggests, click on the button below the video that advances it to the 7:00 minute mark when the decent into ‘80 Hell is complete.

Chalk up another victory for Andrew Bretbart’s Big Government/Big Hollywood franchise: NEA Spokesman Yosi Sargent goes under the bus:

Embattled former National Endowment for the Arts communications director Yosi Sergant is out of a job. Late this afternoon, the NEA released a short statement saying, “This afternoon Yosi Sergant submitted his resignation from the National Endowment for the Arts. His resignation has been accepted and is effective immediately.” The agency provided no further details.

Sergant had been under scrutiny after leading a controversial conference call on August 10, where he encouraged artists to create work to promote the Obama administration’s agenda. Sergant was initially removed from his post as communications director, but continued to work at the NEA.

Just two days ago, NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman defended the conference call, saying it “was not a means to promote any legislative agenda and any suggestions to that end are simply false.”

Uh-huh. Still, why take chances?

(Via the Professor.)

And speaking of Breitbart and his team of heroic muckrakers (hey, remember when old media used to do that sort of stuff?), Allahpundit writes, “Dig deep: Hannah Giles defense fund launches.”