The term “Social Gospel” has been considered a dirty phrase by conservatives for a while now. But if that’s what Beck meant, he has quickly learned the consequences of sloppy language. And in any event, he has certainly discovered the dangers of publicly practicing theology without a license.
I think Beck is likely safe, other than the occasional rhetorical bomb tossed his way by someone on the payroll of his former employer. After all, Time has managed to stay in business for almost 45 years since they first attempted to practice theology without a license.
Meanwhile, the Sierra Club tries to guilt beer drinkers into chugging “tasty, eco-friendly ales” for St. Patrick’s Day. (Which of course, begs the question: are you celebrating Christianity or its successor religion?)
And if you’re thinking of switching to the hard stuff, forgetaboutit: “Cocaine users were last night accused” by the British government of “helping to make global warming worse.”
So no bright lights, no coke, no beer. That would leave the characters in Pete Gent’s classic sports novel and film North Dallas Fortywith very little to do.
John Hawkins of Right Wing News (where I guest post on weekends) has a new interview with Karl Rove. At one one point, Rove tells John that the Bush administration not punching back hard against the “Bush lied about WMDs” solipsism was, as Rove claims, “principally my responsibility because I should have seen it for what it was, which was a corrosive dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush Administration.”
Rove did not realize that the daily pounding about WMD was “a corrosive knife aimed at the heart” of Bush’s presidency? How could he not, when the rest of us saw it so clearly, did battle over it, and still — to this day — find ourselves having to answer the mindless, specious charge “Bush lied about WMD!” that has become so entrenched in our national narrative?
There are other interesting parts. Rove talks a little about minding the fact that while the press and the democrats had a free-for-all about him, his family and kids had to hear it. Politics is a rough game, but it has always surprised me, how viciously the press can let loose about politicians, without considering what it does to spouses and children -until they have to consider what their own kids are hearing about them. No one’s kids should have to be victims of politically expedient hate, but Rove actually helped a journalist not have to see his child upset, at one point. That journalist did not return the favor.
I am also struck by Rove’s defense of Bush’s run against John Kerry in ‘04:
. . .the Democratic Party was united, the country was in an unpopular war, and I repeat, the Democrats outspent us by $124 million. Six or seven million dollars came from George Soros and an equal amount came from five of his friends. That’s the kind of disadvantage that we faced and we won.
Rove forgot something. He forgot that the Democrats not only outspent the GOP, they also had the press promising (by way of Newsweek’s Evan Thomas) to deliver 10-15% of the vote Kerry’s way, and the MSM did manage to do something like that. They carried Kerry’s water, called him “brilliant” while neglecting to look at his college transcripts (after the election, it was revealed Kerry’s grades were worse than Bush’s “gentleman’s ‘C’”) or demand to see his military records (even as they went through Bush’s with a fine-toothed comb and even made stuff up). They demonized the Swift Boat Vets who questioned Kerry’s fitness for office, and in all ways protected the Democrat candidate while beating daily on Bush.
Taken singly, it was sound and fury, signifying nothing, but taken all together, the daily pounding was effective.
The press understood how successfully they had enhanced the Kerry campaign, and I believe it is one of the reasons they were so bold about going “all in” with Obama. They repeated the strategy of protection; of not asking the candidate any tough questions, or looking at his history or his associates, all while administering daily beatings to the opposition. Admittedly, they had a more difficult time beating on McCain, who was a weak candidate, because they’d spent the last 8 years calling him the “good” sort of conservative, when doing so could hurt Bush. But then McCain brought Sarah Palin into the picture, and the press managed to savage her in an unprecedented manner, even before she made her own mistakes, to excellent effect. The press did not manage to win the presidency for John Kerry; they made sure they could deliver it to the “sort of God”, Barack Obama, using the lessons they learned during the Bush-Kerry campaigns.
But note what not punching back against the left wrought: The Iraq war and Bush’s handling thereof initially had very high poll numbers; even Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment was not initially spun negatively by the press. CBS would go to town against Bush in the fall of 2004, but in May of 2003, Bob Schieffer told Larry King:
“We saw some very powerful pictures,” reported CBS’s Bob Schieffer. “I think this was a remarkable moment. I mean, it really was…. [H]ere you have the president flying onto the aircraft carrier. The first president to fly on to an aircraft carrier in a fixed wing jet like he did, climbing out in that flight suit, looking very dashing. This whole day was quite an event…. We saw a little spontaneity today. We saw a little showmanship that we haven’t seen in a long time in politics, and frankly, I think that’s kind of good.”
After quoting additional praise for that moment from some equally unlikely sources, in the American Thinkerback in 2008, Paul Kengor added:
Yet, aside from those accolades — a natural, honest response — something else was stirring. In the New York Times, the angry Frank Rich dismissed the landing as Hollywood hype: “The Bush presidency,” growled Rich, “might well be the Jerry Bruckheimer presidency,” referring to the producer of Hollywood features like “Top Gun,” “Black Hawk Down,” and “Armageddon.”
Of course, it is hard to take Rich seriously on anything, including references to the dramatic arts – his specialty. Rich observed the scourging of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ and literally thought about gay porn. (Don’t believe me? Click here.) Nonetheless, the op-ed page of The Times has a Scripture-like influence on liberals, and this salvo by Rich was the start of something: Much of the left, for the first time since the Iraq invasion a few weeks earlier, now began to descend on Bush, especially those who had predicted a bloodbath in Iraq and didn’t get one. They would excoriate the landing, from its message to its symbolism, and they would not cease and desist for the next five years.
From the Senate, Robert Byrd (D-WV), who had harshly criticized Bush war policy, called the Lincoln landing a “spectacle” that was an “affront to the Americans killed or injured in Iraq.” At the House, Henry Waxman (D-CA) lost his mind, actually demanding a Congressional investigation of the landing.
Liberals were lunging, reaching, grasping for something to criticize. They had been shown up. They would wait stubbornly until something bad developed in Iraq, and got just what the doctor ordered once the body bags began piling up in Iraq from 2005-7 in the occupation/reconstruction that followed. They would incessantly, mercilessly pound the “Mission Accomplished” episode as an example of a brazenly, arrogantly premature celebration by George W. Bush.
In point of fact, Bush had been correct in that the mission had been accomplished. The military effort to remove Saddam Hussein and liberate Iraq was over. That was Phase 1, a separate, successful mission, altogether different from the much more treacherous, difficult period when the United States sought to stabilize Iraq, fighting Al-Qaeda on a daily basis, and seeking to establish a rare oasis of sustainable democracy in the sick powder keg that is the Arab-Muslim Middle East. In its typical lack of sophistication on matters military, the left simplified the whole thing-Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, Phase 15-as “The War.”
But here’s what everyone seemed to miss: a crucial marker was indeed laid on the deck of the Lincoln that day. In retrospect, the landing provided a profound example of the major, ultimately most destructive liability of the two-term Bush presidency: the utter failure of the president and his administration to respond to critics, to fight back, to engage not Al-Qaeda but domestic detractors on the left.
And once the WMD argument was raised by the legacy media, and once they encountered no pushback from the Bush administration, poll numbers began to move south. Why the Bush administration didn’t trot out clips such as this to remind voters of Democrats’ duplicity on regime change in Iraq in 2004 versus their 1998 stance has to be considered another enormous mistake in retrospect.
Of course, the Obama administration can demonize its opponents because the news media and the administration share the same ideology. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Rove and former President Bush could not have fired back at their opponents with anywhere near their severity. and But somewhere between the antics of Anita Dunn, Van Jones, Robert Gibbs, and Obama himself, and not fighting back at all, there has to be, if not a happy medium, at least a functional one.
It seems that John Edwards’ mistress Rielle Hunter had no idea that her photoshoot with GQ would make her look straight-up crazy. On “The View” today, Barbara Walters discussed a phone call with Hunter in which she asked the videographer about the GQ photoshoot:
“She was in tears when she called and said that when she saw the pictures in GQ, she screamed for two hours.” Rielle, who had previously met with Barbara last June in preparation for an interview that never transpired, told Barbara “she found the photographs repulsive. When I asked if that was the case, why did she pose the way she did, she said she trusted Mark Seliger, whom she said is a brilliant photographer, and quote, ‘I went with the flow.’”
I’m not sure which is more naive of Hunter: trusting John Edwards to be honest, or trusting a legacy media photographer to make his or her subject look good when there’s a narrative that needs to be illustrated.
Voters of North Carolina need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask how it is that they completely fell for a man — electing him a United States senator — so flawed as John Edwards, a man who would so completely fall for a shambles like Rielle Hunter.
And that goes double for the boys and girls at McClatchy who allowed themselves to get swept up in John Edwards fever simply because he punched all their liberal do-gooder buttons.
Not that the man who ultimately punched all their liberal do-gooder buttons has been much of an improvement, of course.
Ed Morrissey writes, “For the first time, the Social Security Administration will start cashing in its IOUs from the Treasury in order to meet its benefits obligations”:
We’ve noticed the cash shortfalls at Social Security for more than a year, and now they appear to be permanent. For the first time, the Social Security Administration will start cashing in its IOUs from the Treasury in order to meet its benefits obligations. Unfortunately, the Treasury doesn’t have the cash, either:
The retirement nest egg of an entire generation is stashed away in this small town along the Ohio River: $2.5 trillion in IOUs from the federal government, payable to the Social Security Administration.
It’s time to start cashing them in. … Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds — which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg’s municipal offices.
Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The government is projected to post a record $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, followed by trillion dollar deficits for years to come.
Social Security’s shortfall will not affect current benefits. As long as the IOUs last, benefits will keep flowing. But experts say it is a warning sign that the program’s finances are deteriorating. Social Security is projected to drain its trust funds by 2037 unless Congress acts, and there’s concern that the looming crisis will lead to reduced benefits.
The IOUs won’t last. Technically, they’re worthless now. The Treasury doesn’t have the cash to reimburse Social Security, and we’ll have to sell more debt on the lending markets in order to finance the benefits in the short run.
And as Ed adds, the Moody’s bond rating service is considering lowing America’s debt rating, which will jack up interest rates and make borrowing more expensive.
At National Review, Walter Olson writes, “You know those unseen and undetectable gremlins that hide in Toyota’s electronic throttle controls? Turns out they have it in for elderly drivers:”
You know those unseen and undetectable gremlins that hide in Toyota’s electronic throttle controls? Turns out they have it in for elderly drivers. The Los Angeles Timeshas compiled a list of 56 fatal incidents over 19 years purportedly involving unintended Toyota acceleration, and according to my Overlawyered co-blogger Ted Frank — in a Thursday analysisrefined and extended the next day by Megan McArdle of The Atlantic — the age of the driver can be publicly ascertained in a little more than half the instances. That median age turns out to be 60 — that is to say, half the drivers were that old or older. By contrast, only 16 percent of general auto fatalities in 2008 occurred with a driver 60 or older behind the wheel. Whatever is causing Avalons, Highlanders, and Tundras to misbehave is largely bypassing drivers in their twenties and thirties and instead homing in on drivers old enough to remember the Eisenhower era.
For those who’ve been setting up the Japanese automaker as the latest symbol of heartless capitalism, it’s been a bewildering few days. On Wednesday the media jumped hard for the story of a man who frantically called 911 while his Prius ran away on a San Diego freeway (outstandingly gullible CBS News coverage here). Before long observers had begunpokingholes in the story, and colorfuldetails on the man’s earlier doings have been emerging all weekend. On Thursday, meanwhile, the New York Times — whose news columns had helped set the tone for the panic with accusatory coverage — ran what was actually a surprisingly good op-ed advancing the possibility that most of the Toyota cases will turn out to be the result of . . . driver error.
Driver error? You could have spent hours watching the stacked congressional hearings, or the breathless, America-in-crisis coverage on NBC, with no inkling that hitting the gas pedal instead of the brake was any sort of major factor. Certainly the impresarios of the Great Toyota Panic — the members of Congress and their staffs, the TV producers, and above all the consumer advocates with their close trial-lawyer ties — were not at all keen to explore that topic.
Through weeks of Toyota-flaying coverage, these voices — united in Demanding That Action Be Taken even if no one could quite say what was wrong with the cars — seldom acknowledged that unintended acceleration in automobiles is a subject with a long history. Each year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration receives complaints of this sort from owners of all brands of cars; big makers other than Toyota get a goodly share. The volume of complaints ebbs and flows from year to year for reasons that seem to have less to do with cars’ technical features than with media coverage and mass psychology; thus a scare over a given model that grips one country may never reach a second country in which an identical model is sold.
By far the most famous episode of sudden-acceleration panic is the 1986Audiepisode, which took years to fizzle out: Regulators in the United States, Japan, and Canada pronounced that they could find no explanation for the accidents other than “pedal misapplication” or, more bluntly, driver error. The parallels with the Toyota affair — starting, but not ending, with the tendency of acceleration incidents to hit older drivers — are numerous and continue to multiply.
Found via Fausta Wertz, here’ s Michael Fumento discussing the topic on with Neil Cavuto on the Fox Business Channel:
At the start of the month, Rush Limbaugh dubbed ObamaCare as something akin to the Terminator. As Rush quipped, “It starts out looking like it’s just what we need, and then it’s exposed for what it really is. It’s nothing at all like we see it or imagine it. But every time you kill it, every way you kill it, it keeps coming back in a new form.”
And speaking of Rush, Mark Steyn sits in for him later today, for some early thoughts on what will likely bethe story of the week, no matter what happens in Congress.
At the Corner, Jonah Goldberg writes, “As anyone who’s read my book knows, I am a member in good standing of the Woodrow Wilson Haters Club:”
The exciting news is that almost everyone wants to be a member these days. Glenn Beck — partly influenced by my book — has been on a jihad against Wilson for a while now. At CPAC, he pretty much opened with “I hate Woodrow Wilson with everything in me.” (If you want to read a pretty unpersuasive rejoinder to Beck’s Wilson hatred, see Thomas Frank’s latest weird column.)This is a fascinating (to me) turn of events, because it’s been a long time in coming. If you go back and look through the archives of National Review, there really isn’t all that much anti-Wilson sentiment outside the topic of Versailles. This, I think, can be partly explained by the prism of Cold War anti-Communism (we can discuss that more later if you want!). Ditto if you search through WFB’s columns for stuff about Wilson. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was no fan of Wilson’s and the Rothbardian libertarians had him, and the progressive era, pegged better than most.
* * *
I should have seen some of this coming when my book came out. I had expected my Wilson chapter to attract some very pointed and defensive attacks from his defenders and from liberals generally. But most reviewers simply ignored or conceded the bulk of my anti-Wilsonism. If memory serves, Matt Yglesias tried to disown Wilson, going so far as to whine that you can’t even call Wilson a liberal (tell that to TNR). Meanwhile, even as this was going on, the Left was proving itself much more eager to fully embrace the Progressive Era. During the Democratic primaries, both Obama and Hillary Clinton explicitly, boldly, and proudly associated themselves with Wilson-era Progressivism.
This is all very exciting because it suggests that after a very, very, long postponement a real argument about the Progressive Revolution might actually commence.
Meanwhile, in an article at Commentary titled “Smearing Theodore Roosevelt,” Jonathan Tobin notes that Wilson’s predecessor Progressive, who has long been second only to Abraham Lincoln as every liberal’s favorite Republican, has recently been the subject of curious revisionist attacks from the “modern” left.
Last fall, we linked to this San Diego Union-Tribune cartoon describing California, then and now:
At the True/Slant Website, Michael Roston reached the same conclusion last week: “California unemployment and Oklahoma’s growth – it’s the ‘Grapes of Wrath’ in reverse:”
The Los Angeles Timespublished some really devastating unemployment numbers today – not only is unemployment rising in the California generally, but in 8 of the Golden State’s counties, the rate is above 20%:
New county-by-county figures released by the state Wednesday showed that in eight counties, more than 1 in 5 people were out of work. Moreover, revised numbers for last year show that fewer people were employed than was previously believed.
The state was one of five, along with Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, that reached their highest unemployment rates since the government began keeping track in 1976, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. California’s was 12.5% in January, up from 12.3% in December.
[...]
Most counties were still struggling under the burden of joblessness, especially the eight counties where rates were higher than 20%. Merced County, for instance, had an unemployment rate of 21.7% in January, and Imperial County’s rate was 27.3%.
These numbers also got me thinking about the more triumphalist reports we’ve heard about how some states are bucking the scary unemployment trends that places like California are facing. Oklahoma was on my mind in particular. I remember when my cousin Penelope Trunk was plotting her family’s flight from their tiny tenement in Brooklyn’s Park Slope a couple of years ago, and we joked around about moving to Oklahoma City because the cost of living was so low there.
Turns out it’s not such a joke!
In fact, a lot of people are making this choice. The Tulsa World noted in December:
The state added 43,025 residents from July 2008 to July 2009, the largest annual increase this decade.
The annual increase also reverses the one-year dip when the population failed to increase more than it did the previous year.
Overall, the Census Bureau estimates the Oklahoma population was 3,687,050 in July 2009 compared to 3,644,025 in July 2008. The annual population increase was 39,780 in 2007 and 34,238 in 2008.
Most of the overall population increase was fueled by persons moving to Oklahoma from other states, defined as domestic migration.
Domestic migration accounted for 18,345 new residents to the state with international migrants accounting for 5,340 additional people.
It’s not quite gangbusters, but it shows that the state known more for the Dust Bowl than for economic opportunity has turned itself around in a lot of ways. The Oklahoman’s crack Database Editor Paul Monies put together some visualizations of the differences in population between the Oklahoma of the Great Depression and the the Oklahoma of the Great Recession. His newspaper went on some months later to reflect triumphantly in an editorial:
Time was when Oklahomans fled to California in great numbers, so much so that the Golden State tried to put a stop to it. Now Californians are moving east; some of them are landing in Oklahoma. Cox says that in every year during the 2000s, Oklahoma gained net domestic migrants from California.
So I guess it’s like The Grapes of Wrath in reverse. The Joads have spent a few generations in California and may be wondering if they left a little too much behind on that dusty farmland that their Okie forebears squatted. And with more than 1 in 4 people jobless in Imperial, the county that abuts San Diego County in southern California, the ones going east to destinations like Oklahoma City just might be making the right bet.
People don’t just blame technology for social problems, they idealize living without it. The more high-tech and complex our world gets, the more people tend to romanticize “the simple life.” Now, maybe you’re a better person if you live in a cabin in the woods with no TV, electricity, or running water — or maybe you’re Ted Kaczynski. Kacynzski, a.k.a. “The Unabomber,” now lives in more modern surroundings — a federal prison where he’s serving a life sentence for maiming and murdering numerous people to sound the alarm about the “tyranny” of a high-tech society.
We have a tendency to get all misty-eyed about early men and women, painting them as “noble savages,” living in Bambi-like harmony with nature while selflessly looking out for each other. The reality? They had the same genetically programmed tendencies to lie, sneak, steal, cheat and behave like thoughtless buttwads that we do today. But, back then, being seen as greedy or narcissistic or being caught scamming another member of your band could get you voted out of the cave and forced to go it alone — very likely a death sentence in an environment not exactly rife with Motel 6’s and 7-Elevens.
Amy links to a video of Steven Pinker at the TED conference discussing this point further. It’s also worth flashing back to “Dances With Myths” a 1997 article at Reason that reminds us that the American Indians’ historically less-than-perfect environmentalism. And at PJTV Andrew Klavan explores how Hollywood — an industry that’s constantly pushing the technological envelope simultaneously perpetuates the myth of the primitive noble savage as part of its “Liberal Fantasies v. Reality.”
A video made by three cousins from Hayward charged with an alleged anti-gay shooting with a BB rifle last month in San Francisco shows 11 other attacks in a single night, authorities said Friday.
The men have been charged in San Francisco with a hate crime and assault for allegedly firing a BB rifle Feb. 26 at the face of a man they believed was gay. The man, who was walking on 16th Street near Guerrero Street, was not badly hurt and later identified the three suspects.
The three were freed on $50,000 bail soon after their arrest. But on Friday, Mohammad Habibzada, Shafiq Hashemi and Sayed Bassam, all 24, appeared in court and were immediately rearrested. They were all being held late Friday on $450,000 bail.
They were returned to custody after prosecutors viewed a video that police found in the three men’s car when they were arrested.
Brian Buckelew, spokesman for District Attorney Kamala Harris, said the video showed the 16th Street attack and BB rifle shootings aimed at 11 other men. Police say the video depicts the suspects laughing as they fire.
Investigators say they have been unable to find any of the additional alleged victims. Still, Buckelew said prosecutors may file additional charges against each of the three defendants.
The defendants’ attorneys would not comment outside court Friday. The defendants, who have not entered pleas, are scheduled to return to court April 8.
Rove and his book are yesterday. Keep America Safe is on the march. Liz Cheney’s crackpot hit squad achieved instant notoriety with its viral video demanding the names of Obama Justice Department officials who had served as pro bono defense lawyers for Guantánamo Bay detainees. The video branded these government lawyers as “the Al Qaeda Seven” and juxtaposed their supposed un-American activities with a photo of Osama bin Laden. As if to underline the McCarthyism implicit in this smear campaign, the Cheney ally Marc Thiessen (one of the two former Bush speechwriters now serving as Washington Post columnists) started spreading these charges on television with a giggly, repressed hysteria uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn.
So Republicans to Frank Rich, and presumably most of the rest of the cast of characters at the Gray Lady are both Stalinists and anti-communist McCarthyites. I knew the GOP prided itself on being a big tent, but I had no idea just how inclusive they could be!
And on the flip side, never let it be said that the melodramatic former drama critic doesn’t cover all the bases himself.
At the Corner, Andrew McCarthy explores the L.A. Times’ hit-piece on Clarence Thomas’ wife, Ginni:
So let me make sure I have this straight. If you’re a “progressive” lawyer who volunteers to represent America’s enemies for free in offensive lawsuits brought against the American people during wartime, and then you are placed in a policy-making position in the Justice Department, we’re not allowed even to suggest that you be identified, much less to infer that the sympathies that impelled you to donate your talents to al Qaeda might affect your decision-making at DOJ.
If you’re a hard-Left ideologue and pro-abortion zealot like Dawn Johnsen, who has analogized unwanted pregnancy to slavery, we’re supposed to avert our eyes from your record and put you in charge of DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, an influential government position that calls more than any other for even-handed, non-partisan, non-ideological scholarship.
But if you are the wife of a Supreme Court justice — not the Supreme Court justice himself, mind you, but the justice’s wife — and you dare to have your own career and further dare to be a public conservative who defends core American principles of individual liberty against the Leftist onslaught, we are supposed to assume that the impartiality of the Supreme Court (on which the wife of the justice does not sit) has been compromised.
That’s the upshot of the Los Angeles Timeshit job this morning by Kathleen Hennessey on Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. It’s an unmitigated disgrace.
I’ve looked through other articles by Ms. Hennessey, searching for one about whether she thought the high court would be compromised by the appointment of Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Prior to her appointment, Justice Sotomayor herself — not her spouse, herself — was a Leftist activist (board member and top policy maker at the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education fund) who infamously opined that a “wise Latina” is more apt to make good decisions that a mere “white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Doesn’t seem to have troubled Ms. Hennessey, though.
Nor did the journalist fret about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg also had an extensive pre-Supreme Court career in Leftist causes (e.g., co-director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project in the 1970s) — and on while on the Court she has been a reliable Leftist vote who, for example, champions resort to international law to interpret the U.S. Constitution and, in a bizarre extrajudicial comment, favorably linked abortion with eugenics (“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion” (emphasis added)).
No, none of that bothers the media. The Court’s ballyhooed “impartiality” is only threatened because a conservative male justice is married to a conservative woman who has a life and career of her own, which was once thought to be the feminist ideal.
Read the whole thing, and then check out Ed Morrissey’s take, along with his interview with Mrs. Thomas. To get a sense of the mindset that drives the L.A. Times, and much of the legacy media, don’t miss Hugh Hewitt’s interview last month with James Rainey of the L.A. Times, as transcribed on Hugh’s site.
Layers and layers of editors, producers, and fact-checkers hard at work: “TV Reporter: Coffee Party ‘Is Loosely Based on Smaller Government and Lower Taxes.’” Mike Bates spots this howler, at Newsbusters:
It’s incredible what you can learn from television these days. On Saturday, Brent Frazier of Nashville’s CBS affiliate reported on a local Coffee Party. He made no mention of the attendance, but at about 2:06 of the video says:
The Coffee Party, though very much still in the organizing phase, is loosely based on smaller government and lower taxes.
I have to wonder how the newshound came to that conclusion. Was it because the group’s founder, as noted by NewsBuster Matthew Balan, worked as a volunteer for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign? Or maybe it was the Reuters acknowledgment that “America’s conservative Tea Party movement may be on the boil, but the left is brewing up its own version in The Coffee Party USA.” Or perhaps it was the Coffee Party participant Frazier interviewed who volunteered for Obama but is now disillusioned because “they (Democrats) speak an agenda, but as soon as it’s challenged they back down.” Obama’s just not pushing left hard enough.
With reporting skills like that, one thing is clear. Brent has a very bright future in the mainstream media.
The Coffee Party is also based on much smaller numbers, Michael Barone writes:
On Wednesday, the day of Barack Obama’s appearance in St. Louis, 2,225 showed up for a tea party rally in St. Charles County and 2,300 participated in a protest outside a Democratic fundraiser in downtown St. Louis. In contrast, 30 people attended a coffee party gathering in St. Louis on Saturday.
The numbers tell you something. Something that the CNN producers might want to take note of.
As Glenn Reynolds notes, “Actually, I think it’s something they’re trying very hard to ignore . . . .”
Meanwhile, the supposed group that’s “loosely based on smaller government and lower taxes” is doing its damndest to avoid the one TV network that actually pays lip service to the concept.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the healthcare bill will pass by next weekend.
“We’ll have the votes when the House votes, I think, within the next week,” Gibbs said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Gibbs added that those on next week’s Sunday talk shows “will be talking about healthcare not as a presidential proposal but I think as the law of the land.”
Gibbs is making clear that the vote House Democrats face next weekend is whether or not to make the Senate bill–with its tax on union health care plans and special deals for Nebraska, Florida, and Louisiana–”law of the land.” And then why would the Senate need to pass reconciliation fixes when its own national health care bill is already “law of the land”? Is this the message the White House wants to be sending to wavering House Democrats–that the Senate’s monstrosity will become law of the land and additional changes through reconciliation will just be icing on the cake?
Meanwhile, it looks like Gibbs’s prediction may be some high-level bluster. Majority Whip Jim Clyburn says that as of today they don’t have the votes.
More long-term, strategic bluster spotted from David Axelrod, along with a response from Moe Lane.
I’m sure Dan Rather would love to. It might get him off HD-Net and onto MSNBC. Though in terms of ratings, that might be more of a lateral move.
I’d like to think there’s an editor at the Washington Post who had some fun writing this headline, because the answer immediately recalls Raines’ worst moments at the New York Times: because “honest” journalists like Jayson Blair (whom Raines hired because, as he said, his priorities were to make his newspaper and its staff better and “more importantly, more diverse”, were busy cranking out stories such as the 95 articles they generated about the Augusta Country Club from 2002 until 2003, a period when 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq were still very much fresh, breaking stories.)
Raines writes, “For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party.”
Meanwhile, back at the Times, the Gray Ladycan happily compare small government Republicans to Stalinists. But to have some fun with the Eric Massa scandal? That’s “somewhat subtle homophobia,” baby!
(Of course, this is the same paper that recently heard racism in Jason Mattera’s Brooklyn accent, so perhaps their Duranty-era radar systems might need a recalibration or two for the 21st century.)
Taken from his weekly Instavision series on PJTV.com, Glenn Reynolds is joined by his wife, Dr. Helen Smith, for a rare joint interview, with Walter Sinott Armstrong of Duke University. Will neuroscience become our judge, jury, and executioner? Think of it as Tech, Lies, & Videotape…
From PJTV’s Poliwood, Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon, and Lionel Chetwynd, his fellow Academy Award-winning screenwriter, explore what The Hurt Locker directed by Kathryn Bigelow, and Sandra Bullock’s win for The Blind Side at last week’s Oscars says about Hollywood.
In a move seemingly ripped from the pages of an Ayn Rand novel, the University of Tennessee flatters Al Gore and itself by presenting Gore with an honorary doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology. PJTV.com’s Allen Barton, Terry Jones of Investor’s Business Daily, and Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Center discuss.
The George W. Bush years were good for more than just oilfield-services companies and waterboard manufacturers. They were also a boon for liberal political magazines, whose circulation soared on the wings of the Bush hatred that swept much of the country. The paid circulation (subscriptions plus newsstand sales) of The Nation nearly doubled from 2001 to 2005, that of Mother Jones rose by 37 percent, and that of Harper’s Magazine by 7 percent.So how have those magazines fared now that they don’t have W to kick around anymore? And have their ideological opposites on the newsstand enjoyed a boost from the anti-government, tea party-led fervor that has taken off since President Obama’s inauguration? I crunched the numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) and BPA Worldwide in order to find out.
The year 2009 was a tough one for magazines in general, with circulation down 2.23 percent overall, according to ABC (the decline in advertising revenue was far greater and more detrimental, but that’s another story). The three leading liberal political magazines, however, fared particularly badly. The Nation’s circulation in 2009 was down 7.4 percent from 2008, Mother Jones was down 6.7 percent, and Harper’s was down 5 percent.
Of course, there was another magazine that proudly wore its Bush-bashing politics on its well-tailored sleeves during most of the previous decade, whose numbers Pressman overlooked. I wonder why?
