Happened to notice this story on Yahoo by Lindsay Robertson: Taylor Lautner’s Shirtless Pics: A Hollywood Double Standard?

Remember the huge uproar in April 2008, when 15-year-old Miley Cyrus appeared in “Vanity Fair” wrapped in a sheet, with her right shoulder and the top of her back visible, implying that, under the sheet, she wasn’t wearing a shirt?…

Now, with the premiere of his movie, “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” less than a month away, magazines, websites, and TV are blanketed with images of 17-year-old star Taylor Lautner, shirtless and showing off the body he trained for months to perfect for the role. And yet, none of the cultural critics who turned Miley’s photos into a full-blown “scandal” have said a word about the sexualization of Taylor, who, at 17, is just two years older than Miley was during her “scandal” and is also a minor. So, does Hollywood have a double standard?

I had to check again to make sure that Taylor Lautner was a guy. He is, and I think that the clear answer is “Yes, there are definitely different standards when it comes to males and females without shirts on. Duh.”

What a shocking discovery.

Now at First Things.

Kids from the Ron Clark Academy sing a song promoting health care reform on CNN:

Should Murdoc be troubled by this or just embarrassed?

UPDATE: IRS Made Errors in Stimulus Payments to 400,000 Taxpayers

Via Instapundit who writes BUT DON’T WORRY, THEY’LL HANDLE HEALTH CARE JUST FINE

Tigerhawk:

A few clowns shout at a “tea party” and the media starts worrying about the resurgent Klan, but the left literally attacks the police at the G20 protests and nobody says anything.

Via Instapundit.

UPDATE: LOL! Get a load of this video forwarded to MO by a reader:

Nice surplus store BDUs.

UPDATE 2: More info on this HERE. Apparently these BDU guys are some sort of G-20 “tactical response team” and the guy they nabbed was accused of vandalism. Not military or police. Probably cheap contractors.

This was the lead item on my Yahoo! home page today: Why Michelle Obama’s Hair Matters

Murdoc’s initial reactions was “It doesn’t matter.”

After reading about why it does, Murdoc has revised his reaction to “It REALLY doesn’t matter.”

Without getting too deep into it, Jenee Desmond-Harris of Time thinks it matters because hair is so important to black women. And therefore it matters enough to warrant press coverage.

You know, if Murdoc wrote something like that on his little site, he’d be instantly labeled a clueless white guy with dumb stereotypes and probably a racist. But in the pages of Time it’s deep insight.

If Michelle Obama’s hair style really matters, it’s over for America. Luckily for us all, it doesn’t matter.

A couple of days back I posted a bit on how the anti-war movement has basically fallen off the radar.

At the end, I wondered how much the media had to do with the story disappearing:

One other thing, though, is that maybe the “silence” of the anti-war voices is due more to lack of coverage by the media. At one point, the anti-war types were the darlings of the newscast. Now, if there are solid anti-war types out there still making noise, decision-makers might rather that no one see or hear them.

Byron York points out this bit by ABC’s Charles Gibbons, who was a major promoter of Cindy Sheehan back in the day:

And you have to be sympathetic to her. Anybody who has given a son to this country has made an enormous sacrifice, and you have to be sympathetic. But enough already.

But enough already.

via Lex.

UPDATE: York has more:
Sheehan: Pro-Obama media want the anti-war movement to go away

Useful idiot discovers that she’s been a useful idiot.

I’ve seen a number of “I don’t like Sheehan but I’ll give her points for consistency” remarks as she heads to Martha’s Vineyard to protest, and I guess that’s a fair way to look at it.

Just don’t equate “consistent” with “right”. She’s consistently wrong.

A few comments at GunPundit. Video via Sebastian.

For the Left, war without Bush is not war at all

At one point the war was the biggest talking point on the Liberal radar.

Now, even though the United States still has roughly 130,000 troops in Iraq, and is quickly escalating the war in Afghanistan — 68,000 troops there by the end of this year, and possibly more in 2010 — anti-war voices on the Left have fallen silent.

What’s most telling is that, so far, Obama’s war policy has been pretty much a continuation of the Bush administration’s war policy. If Obama was changing things up, I guess Lefties could argue that he inherited Bush’s mess but was turning things around. But the fact that things are pretty much unchanged means, of course, that it wasn’t the war at all that they were against.

Compare this to the Conservatives’ big issue these days. Sure, few Conservatives have much love for Obama. But are they protesting the proposed health care reforms out of hate for the President? Or because they dislike the proposed health care reforms?

One other thing, though, is that maybe the “silence” of the anti-war voices is due more to lack of coverage by the media. At one point, the anti-war types were the darlings of the newscast. Now, if there are solid anti-war types out there still making noise, decision-makers might rather that no one see or hear them.

Over at GunPundit, I write a little about the “new craze” of open carrying at political events.

UPDATE: More here.

Troops could be sent to battered Iraqi region

The top U.S. commander in Iraq said Monday that he wants to deploy American soldiers to disputed territories in northern Iraq following a recent spike in bombings there.

The move would be a departure from the security pact that called for Americans to pull back from populated areas on June 30.

The U.S. soldiers would partner with Iraqi government and Kurdish troops to secure the largely unguarded villages along the fault line of land disputed between Arabs and Kurds, Gen. Ray Odierno said.

He stressed that no final decision has been made but said Iraqi and Kurdish leaders were receptive to the idea.

Everyone should realize that no one thinks things are all hunky-dory in Iraq, and if US troops need to re-enter the fight in areas they’ve pulled back from, they will. Though violence isn’t spiraling out of control and Iraq isn’t on the verge of a major civil war, things are a bit shaky in some areas.

If someone else was in the White House, I suspect that the headlines about the situation in Iraq would be slightly more alarmist. But, then, Murdoc’s a bit cynical at times.