Doug Ross notes that when it comes to goreball worming, the Boston Globe’s readers are more than a few steps ahead of its writers:
As Doug writes, “Pity these nearly bankrupt lard-asses can’t bother to surf the inter-tubes like their readers. Some of the comments are priceless.” Click over to his site to read them.
Meanwhile, Newsbusters’ P.J. Gladnick spots a similar incident at the Houston Chronicle: “Climategate: MSM Writers Try to Ignore Scandal in Global Warming Stories But Readers Bring Them Back to Reality.”
Lift up a rock and another snake comes slithering out from the ongoing University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) scandal, now riding as “Climategate”.
Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU’s unfolding Climategate scandal. In fact, according to files released by a CEU hacker or whistleblower, Holdren is involved in what Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball terms “a truculent and nasty manner that provides a brief demonstration of his lack of understanding, commitment on faith and willingness to ridicule and bully people”.
Gee, does this mean Holdren likely won’t soon be launching rockets full of pollution into the upper atmosphere to stop the Phantom Menace?
It’s sort of a zen koan (or Zen Cohen, for all you Brothers Judd fans, not to mention a paraphrase of an old Lileksism): as Key Luke would have said on ABC’s old Kung Fu series, tell me, Grasshopper, where does the MSM end and the DNC begin?
NPR brass reacted negatively after veteran reporter Nina Totenberg consistently referred to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel by his first name only.
Henceforth, the White House Chief of Staff will be known only as “Rahm Emanuel.” The customary second reference using only the person’s last name is being set aside in this case because Rahm is rarely referred to as “Emanuel” in Washington circles.
Shepard said she disagreed with the special second reference for Emanuel and thinks he should simply be called by his last name on second mention, like most others referred to on NPR.
This was no rookie mistake by Totenberg and NPR reacted quickly to make it clear that all reporters need to use both the first and last name of their subjects. Even though the report wasn’t favorable towards Emanuel in this case it still calls into question why Totenberg felt comfortable enough to refer to him by his first name only. Just how chummy is Totenberg to Emanuel and the White House?
So much for reporter objectivity and credibility at NPR.
And that’s on top of the infamous “David Axelrod — well, we loved you in the HBO documentary, and umm, uhh, we’ll always have the New York-23rd” moment between NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and Axelrod earlier this month:
Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard spots Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post speaking socialized medicine samizdat:
Robinson goes there: “The honest solution,” he writes in a column on government health care spending, “is a word that cannot be spoken: rationing.”
The reason that the word “cannot be spoken,” of course, is that fiat rationing scares the daylights out of people. In a way, Robinson’s piece recalls the 2007 speech in which Robert Reich said that a “candidate [who] did not care about becoming president” would tell the American people that “‘[B]y the way, we’re going to have to, if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.”
Stuff like that doesn’t help Obamcare’s chances, does it?
Police arrested 18 SEIU Purple Shirts yesterday in San Francisco after their protest of city layoffs and budget cuts caused a traffic jam and massive headaches for other residents trying to commute to and from, you know, work:
Police arrested 18 members of the Service Employees International Union on Monday night after they blocked rush hour traffic on Market Street about a block from Civic Center Plaza to protest job cuts in the face of San Francisco’s budget deficit.
Protesters, trying to prevent 500 city workers from being laid off, reassigned or given smaller paychecks, had notified police ahead of time of their plans. Nobody was injured in the demonstration, police said. The demonstrators were cited and released with an order to appear later in court.
The SEIU also bragged about another disruptive caper in San Francisco on its blog last week:
“What does it take to get the mayor’s attention in this town?” was the question on their purple lips Thursday night (it was cold) after several dozen SEIU 1021 members and staff occupied Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office, while hundreds more cheered them on inside and outside City Hall. It was a two-pronged tactic of escalating the San Francisco campaign through civil disobedience on top of public rallies…
…How the caper went down: Like a scheme from Ocean’s 11, SEIU 1021 had a 14-foot puppet and a crowd of hundreds to draw public attention–while inside the halls of power, a joint member-staff task force prepared to occupy the mayor’s office at any cost.
After changing into purple nursing scrubs in a conference room near the supervisors’ second floor offices, members seized advantage of an opened door to charge through the hallway past Newsom’s budget director’s office and into the wood-paneled lobby of Da Mayor’s office itself. That’s where they stayed for more than two hours, chanting and discussing and demanding to see the mayor, who never showed. Outside, hundreds of SEIU 1021 members and supporters rallied outside, holding signs reading “I Am a Woman” and dancing to Bob Marley’s anthemic “Get Up, Stand Up!”
After negotiating their release from the mayor’s office (they were locked in), members were greeted with wild cheers by most of the outside supporters.
What the SEIU won’t brag about is its own increasing isolation from other workers as a result of its militancy.
How interconnected is SEIU and President Obama? Last month, a clip from January 2008 began circulating of Obama as a newly-minted presidential candidate, as transcribed by Chelsea Schilling of World Net Daily:
During his campaign, President Obama boasted of his track record of working with the Illinois-based Service Employees International Union, helping it “build more and more power” – and he promised to “paint the nation purple with SEIU.”
In the following recently surfaced video from January 2008 posted by Breitbart, Obama told a group of SEIU workers that all presidential, gubernatorial and congressional candidates claim they are pro-union when they are looking for endorsements:
“They’ll all say, ‘We love SEIU,’” he said. “But the question you’ve got to ask yourself is, do they have it in their gut? Do they have a track record of standing alongside you on picket lines? Do they have a track record of going after the companies that aren’t letting you organize? Do they have a track record of voting the right way but also helping you organize to build more and more power?”
Obama referenced his background as a community organizer and his ties to SEIU Local 880, a union for homecare workers and home childcare providers in Illinois that first mobilized through Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.
“I’ve been working with SEIU before I was elected to anything,” he said. [More on that from Sammy Benoit at Pajamas -- Ed] “When I was a community organizer, SEIU local 880 and myself, we organized people to make sure that home-care workers had the basic right to organize. We organized voting registration drives. That’s how we built political power on the south side of Chicago.”
He continued, “And now the time has come for us to do it all across this country. We are going to paint the nation purple with SEIU.”
And more and more of the nation has the purple bruises to show from it.
VIDEONETDAILY Obama: ‘We’re going to paint nation purple with SEIU’ Explains how he ‘built political power on south side of Chicago’
During his campaign, President Obama boasted of his track record of working with the Illinois-based Service Employees International Union, helping it “build more and more power” – and he promised to “paint the nation purple with SEIU.”
In the following recently surfaced video from January 2008 posted by Breitbart, Obama told a group of SEIU workers that all presidential, gubernatorial and congressional candidates claim they are pro-union when they are looking for endorsements:
“They’ll all say, ‘We love SEIU,’” he said. “But the question you’ve got to ask yourself is, do they have it in their gut? Do they have a track record of standing alongside you on picket lines? Do they have a track record of going after the companies that aren’t letting you organize? Do they have a track record of voting the right way but also helping you organize to build more and more power?”
Obama referenced his background as a community organizer and his ties to SEIU Local 880, a union for homecare workers and home childcare providers in Illinois that first mobilized through Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.
“I’ve been working with SEIU before I was elected to anything,” he said. “When I was a community organizer, SEIU local 880 and myself, we organized people to make sure that home-care workers had the basic right to organize. We organized voting registration drives. That’s how we built political power on the south side of Chicago.”
He continued, “And now the time has come for us to do it all across this country. We are going to paint the nation purple with SEIU.”
Like the Swift Vets breaking the embargo on John Kerry’s Vietnam-era radical chic past in 2004, and the National Enquirer reporting on John Edwards’ extramarital extracurricular activities last year, watch for ClimateGate to become yet another story that everyone knows, even though nobody in the traditional sense reported it.
Update: At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey notes that CBS’s Website at least is covering this story. And as Howard Kurtz adds in his latest column, which links to our Sunday blogpost on ClimateGate, the Washington Post has weighed into the story in an article that’s gotten relatively good feedback in the starboard half of the Blogosphere.
Kurtz seems to sort of dismiss the underlying story a bit, even though, as Jennifer Rubin writes about another Post item on the grudging acceptance among the left of nuclear power, it has enormous ramifications for the nation’s energy and transportation policies, and the prices consumers pay for such services.
There may be a major silver lining for conservatives and for America’s future thanks to the foreign and domestic policies of President Obama and the Democrat-controlled House and Senate: For the first time in their lives, millions of Americans are coming to understand the left.
It is difficult to overstate how important this is. For decades, the left has largely controlled the news media, the arts, the universities and the entertainment media. And vast numbers of Americans have imbibed these leftist messages and the leftist critiques of conservatives. What these Americans have never been able to do is to see what the left would actually do if in power.
Of course, all one had to do was look at California and see how a left-wing legislature brought the country’s largest state economy to near insolvency and bankruptcy, chased away many of its most productive citizens, and wasted tens of billions of dollars thanks in large measure to union domination of the state’s politics.
But most Americans do not observe other states. Most Americans are preoccupied with their lives and, unfortunately, with what is on television.
And speaking of which, Allie Duzett of Accuracy In Media notes that TV and the rest of the legacy media are doing damndest to keep the information floodgates as hermetically sealed as possible:
Leave it to the New York Times to put soccer fixing above revelations about faked global warming data. As of Monday’s edition, there has been no follow up-instead, they carried a piece on the Sunday opinion page calling for the Senate to do more about climate change.
However, to be fair, many other papers mentioned it even less.
The Express, a condensed version of the Washington Post, had this headline on the front page: “Hot Topic: Warming worse than feared, scientists say.” The article discusses how global warming “has exceeded worst fears,” and calls for more action to combat climate change. There is an inset article two sentences long about the emails-mentioning that the emails exist and that the “researchers” involved “say the emails have been taken out of context.” This is hardly giving the emails the press coverage or consideration they deserve.
ABC News and the Washington Times have chosen to run the same article from the Associated Press, apparently not finding the story worth investigating further on their own. At least they’re running the story at all: CNN’s website has yet to mention the emails.
It is not too surprising to find that many “scientists” have been strategically promoting false data when it comes to global warming; it is far more surprising that major news networks are completely ignoring one of the largest scandals the modern scientific world has ever seen.
The fact is, this information could completely destroy any credibility global warming alarmists once claimed. And with the American economy hanging in the balance with cap and trade legislation, it is dismaying, though not terribly surprising, that major news organizations are not plastering this information on every front page. It is shameful that “respectable” newspapers and networks are devoting more time to the Gosselins, Taylor Swift and Twilight than to covering the story that could make or break our constitutional republic.
Not at all — it’s only shameful to the legacy media if they believe that their most important function is to disseminate information, not withhold it. Perhaps it was an entirely unconscious collective decision, but the MSM, at least at the top of its food chain, long ago decided that their real job was the latter.
Don’t interpret passage of the watered-down Kanjorski amendment as the peak of the “break up the banks” movement. It may be about to get some new allies on the right, folks tired of Big Government, Big Money and crony capitalism.
For the moment, though, it was arguably the best that Representative Paul Kanjorski, a Pennsylvania Democrat, [and Mr. New New Deal himself -- Ed] could have gotten through the House Financial Services Committee. All the committee Republicans and even some of the Democrats voted against it. And even in its much-diminished state, the Kanjorksi amendment would likely be weakened further in the Senate. At the same time, the Obama administration seems little interested in such pre-emptive powers.
Wall Street, however, is hardly getting any more popular with Main Street. The Goldman Sachs Apology Tour is evidence of that. And there are mid-term elections in less than a year. Republican candidates will probably do well as high unemployment continues to drive voter anger at incumbents. As Gallup diplomatically puts it, “Republicans seem well-positioned to win back some of their congressional losses in 2006 and 2008.” More accurately, fear of losing the House is now running high among congressional Dems.
And all those new Republicans are likely to be infused with the ethos of the Tea Party movement: anti-TARP, anti-Fed (the House GOP is already there on this), anti-bailouts and anti-Wall Street. It could be a group of newcomers, as John McCain recently said, that is populist, protectionist when it comes to China and the yuan and pro-financial regulation.
Sarah Palin could be a harbinger. Although she diligently promotes the wonder-working power of Reaganomics in her autobiography, she also warns about “the return of corporatism – government collusion and co-option of big business.” [More on corporatism here -- Ed]
There’s liberal hypocrisy on the part of New York Times economics columnist and left-wing blog-follower Paul Krugman in his Monday nytimes.com blog post, “Proposed extensions of Godwin’s Law.”
Leading into a discussion of how he thinks people should discuss inflation and interest rates, Krugman said:
Godwin’s Law — which says that in any sufficiently long online discussion, someone will compare his opponent to Hitler — is often interpreted to mean that if you do, in fact, start making Nazi comparisons, you’ve lost the argument and can no longer be taken seriously. I’m all for that. (Does this mean that we should no longer take any significant figure in the Republican Party seriously? Yes, it does.)
Not only is that way overstated (Krugman provides no actual examples), it’s also pretty bold, given that Krugman takes seriously and often utilizes ideas from left-wing blog sites like Daily Kos, where comparing President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler was pretty much the password for entry.
And such concern for civil debate didn’t stop Krugman from comparing conservative host Rush Limbaugh to Communist dictator Joseph Stalin in an April 13 column:
Speaking of Mr. Limbaugh: the most impressive thing about his role right now is the fealty he is able to demand from the rest of the right. The abject apologies he has extracted from Republican politicians who briefly dared to criticize him have been right out of Stalinist show trials.
Apparently, in Rich’s mind, because conservatives thought — accurately as it turned out — that Dede Scozzafava, running for Congress in New York’s 23rd District was a Republican in Name Only, and they preferred a more conservative candidate, that made them…Stalinists!
On the other hand, it was rather refreshing to see a journalist with the New York Times use the word pejoratively. Needless to say, that hasn’t always been the case, as we’ll explore in the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, including:
Thomas Friedman’s love for Big Brother in China and Cuba.
At Power Line, John Hinderaker writes, “We are beginning to see way too many echoes of the 1930s, as national socialist and Marxian socialist thugs try to drive competing political views off the streets”:
The worst offenders so far have been the Service Employees’ International Union, which has repeatedly sent its members out into the streets to beat up anyone who isn’t toeing the Obama line on issues like socialized medicine.
Most recently it’s International ANSWER, a hard-core Communist group supported by shadowy funding sources that have never been made public, but appear to consist of a handful of rich people. ANSWER, notwithstanding its unabashedly Communist ideology, now feels comfortable enough to assault non-communist demonstrators who show up in the streets. In this case, the non-communists were protesting illegal immigration, seeking to uphold the nation’s laws, when they were set upon by ANSWER’s thugs:
Update: Welcome those stopping by from Instapundit — and however you’ve arrived here, don’t miss the incredible comment #6 below from “Carl Gordon”, which is that rarest of combinations: it’s both the Best. Comment. Ever. and Most-Hackneyed. Writing. Ever. all at the same time.
Or, two, two, two magazines in one! When Wolcott Gibbs coined his famous satire of the breathless tone of the early Time magazine writers of the 1930s (also parodied in the writing of the brilliant “News On The March!” faux-newsreel in Citizen Kane), he didn’t know the half of it.
On Saturday, I mentionedTime magazine’s “Why Main Street Hates Wall Street” cover. The actual article begins thusly:
Are you furious? If not, you should be. The giant financial institutions that make up Wall Street have been bailed out, thanks to trillions of dollars of our money, and are on track to hand out record-breaking multibillion-dollar bonuses while millions of regular folks are hurting. Even outside the gilded halls of Wall Street, there’s no shortage of good cheer: many economists say the Great Recession has ended, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke keeps seeing “green shoots” in the economy.
But the only green shoots that many non–Wall Street types have seen lately are the weeds sprouting in the parking lots of abandoned malls. Unemployment is marching toward 10%, and house foreclosures are still rising. If you’re a day late with your credit-card payment or overdrawn by a few bucks on your ATM card, the bank (which your tax money helped bail out) is still sticking you with obscene fees and charges. Hence the question that so many of us are asking: Where’s my bailout?
Happiness is a sappy word and a flimsy concept — more fleeting than contentment, several octaves lower than joy. But happiness is what pollsters test and economists track, however clumsily, so we’re stuck with it as the medium for measuring our mood. Not surprisingly, that mood has bounced around over the years, with the general sense of well-being hitting its lowest points in 1973, 1982, 1992 and 2001, all recession years. So why is it that at least some aspects of the Great Recession of 2009 appear to have made people feel better?
The Professor writes, “Time asks why Americans are so cheery during a recession. Well, all that positive press spin probably helps. I mean, it’s almost worth having a Democrat in the White House just to be spared all the lugubrious coverage we’d be getting with a Republican. . . .”
Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.
Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.
The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country’s sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.
Why, it’s like the difference in tone between the reporting on one progressive president and another in the early days of the Depression. Or how the difference in how the media covered two moderate southern governors turned Third Way presidents who both promoted regime change in Iraq.
It’s amazing what the letter after a president’s name can do to impact The Narrative — not to mention how it twists journalists into knots who have to bend it to their wishes.
Last week, when I was at the supermarket checkout line, I came across this cover of Time:
Main Street hates Wall Street? Isn’t such a broad “lumper” of a question rather specious to begin with? Despite the best efforts of the president, plenty of people on Main Street are still rather prudent investors, keeping their stockbroker, financial planner or Charles Schwab representative gainfully employed, if not quite as well off as he was a few years ago. But otherwise, along with Time’s helpful cover-scribbles, doesn’t the question sort of answer itself? When you demonize a group of businessmen like that, isn’t the answer obvious?
And yes, that’s an actual photo, unlike some used by Newsweek affiliates. As of this summer, Newsweek’s newsstand sales were down to about 66,000 readers an issue. (In contrast, Matt Drudge, Glenn Reynolds and the guys at Hot Air have already shot way past that number before they wake up in the morning.) But I’m not sure why I’m supposed to look at that photo of Palin and automatically assume there’s a problem — except that she’s been demonized by the MSM for the last 14 months or so. (Employing armies of “fact checkers” who otherwise apparently have been bereft of work since, oh, mid-January or so.)
Which oddly enough makes sense. For this to be true….
In the Weekly Standard, Fred and Harry Siegel take a snapshot of the Big Apple in the wake of Michael Bloomberg’s third term (Bloomberg “overturned the city’s term limits law–twice ratified by popular referendum–to remain in the spotlight”, the Siegels note) and don’t like what they see:
New York City has become France on the Hudson. Its highly centralized, highly politicized government employs one-seventh the number of federal civilian employees with less than one thirty-sixth the population of the United States at large. In New York, big government and Wall Street profits are fiscally incestuous twins. The profits enable the city to offer subsidies not only to the poor but also the middle class. It was middle class housing subsidies that triggered the 1975 New York fiscal crisis. But the cost of living keeps rising. Teachers, who’ve received a 43 percent increase in pay over these past eight years of Bloomberg, complain they’re being priced out of New York. And no wonder, it’s New York’s vast public payroll (and benefits, which since 2000 have grown twice as fast as those in the private sector) that makes the city so expensive. In other words, the public-sector middle class is increasingly chasing its own tail–even as the costs of government drive away private-sector jobs.
In its combination of an enormous public sector, and a rapidly shrinking middle class, with only the wealthy and poor remaining, the Siegels are describing a Manhattan that, at least to me, appears to have morphed into another version of California’s Sacramento (or a miniature version of Europe’s EU). In other words, a “democracy” largely in name only, with the average voter increasingly distant from his “representatives.”
“I have been a Republican my entire life, I will be a Republican until I die. I believe in the Republican party that stands for less government interference in the lives of individuals. I believe in self-sufficiency versus government dependence. I believe in lower taxes, less government regulation, I believe in less government spending.”
“Speaking with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Scozzafava warned Republicans that “you have ideology that’s really not based on any sort of substance that can move an agenda forward, that can really help people in this country.”
There’s a memorable scene inLawrence of Arabia between Omar Sharif’s character “Sherif Ali” and Arthur Kennedy, who plays “Jackson Bentley”, a thinly disguised version of one of the real-life Lawrence’s biggest promoters, American journalist Lowell Thomas:
Bentley: What are you learning from this?
Sherif Ali: Politics.
Bentley: You’ll be a democracy in this country? You gonna have a parliament?
Sherif Ali: I will tell you that when I have a country.
[BEAT]
Did I answer well?
Bentley: You answered without saying anything. That’s politics.
With that in mind, watch Robin Carnahan, a liberal secretary of state (and would-be US senator) from the centerist midwestern state of Missouri dissemble for nearly three minutes without saying anything about PelosiCare or the Stupak Amendment:
The First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” But Nancy Pelosi (D-North Pole) just blurted out that her socialized medicine proposal is her “Christmas Present to the American people.”
Obviously it’s time to bring in the ACLU to put an end to the medieval religious fantasies of the faith-based Christianist reactionaries currently running Congress. Perhaps having committed such an egregious thoughtcrime against the people of San Francisco and Berkley, Pelosi will do the deed herself.
Incidentally, does this mean that those who don’t celebrate Christmas can opt out without going to jail or receiving a lump of coal — sustainably mined for use clean coal facilities of course — in their stockings?
Yesterday, we quoted British journalist Alastair McKay transcription of a speech Al Gore gave at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in August of 2006, to launch the British premiere of an An Inconvenient Truth. McKay quoted Gore as saying:
“The information ecology defined by the printing press was displaced 40 ears ago in my country by the television, and it’s now so dominant that the average American watches television for four hours and 39 minutes a day. It has a quasi-hypnotic effect and the internet’s a great source of hope and it replicates that meritocracy of ideas but it does not have that hypnotic effect that television has.”
As I wrote yesterday, television certainly had a hypnotic effect on Al — he launched his own little-watched TV channel the year prior to that speech.
And as famed fictitious rock manager Ian Faith would say, just as Current’s viewership isn’t shrinking, it’s merely becoming more selective, so are his channel’s number of employees. Or as Gawker puts it today, “Al Gore’s TV Network Firing 80 People Due to Wild Success:”
Current Media said it would shed 80 people, confirming earlier reports, and will make its unconventional format more boringly traditional. This might sound bad. But the San Francisco cable network assures us it is evidence of amazing success!
Current announced it will eliminate 80 jobs while shifting away from its trademark short-form video packages and “towards proven 30-60 minute formats” from more outside sources. This would mean less video production in Current’s Bay Area home base, as reported previously by former Valleywagger Jackson West at NBC Bay Area.
Which means everything is totally awesome and on track, according to a Current press release:
This re-organization was not the result of a need to cut costs. Current Media will have its most profitable year. This financial stability will allow the company to re-allocate resources in order to put further emphasis on areas of the business believed to best position Current Media for continued long-term growth.
Financial stability leads to sad job layoffs glorious resource re-allocation, gotcha. More good news: Current journalists no longer have to travel all the way to North Korea to hear propagandist doublespeak!
NBC gives new meaning to the phrase “green screen” next week, spreading a pro-environmental message across five of its prime-time entertainment programs.
“30 Rock,” where Al Gore takes a cameo role, leads the way. Environmental themes were also added to the scripts of “The Biggest Loser,” “The Office,” “Heroes” and “Community.”
NBC Universal’s three-year “green” campaign has largely focused on off-camera issues like making company facilities more eco-friendly. News and information programs have also been enlisted to do stories on environmental issues, but except for one “30 Rock” episode two years ago, the campaign hasn’t touched the prime-time lineup.
To quote Mark Steyn’s brilliant essay on previous reports of fresh disaster, “Hey, that’s great news, isn’t it?”
It is according to what GE’s more public representatives have told us.
In November of 2007, one of the conglomerate’s television networks urged us to turn off our lights (manufactured by GE) for the environment. Six months later, Barack Obama surely gave a tingle up the collective leg of one of their other television networks when he told told voters:
“We can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world’s resources with just 4 percent of the world’s population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead, we’ll be fine.”
Last month, John Kerry explained how wonderful a slowed economy is for the environment:
Let me emphasize something very strongly as we begin this discussion. The United States has already this year alone achieved a 6 percent reduction in emissions simply because of the downturn in the economy, so we are effectively saying we need to go another 14 percent.
At Real Clear Politics, John Stossel writes, “No matter how honorable the central planners’ intentions, they will fail because they cannot know the needs and wishes of 300 million different people. And if they somehow did know their needs, they wouldn’t know them tomorrow”:
Proponents of so-called reform — it’s not really reform unless it makes things better — have shamefully avoided criticism of their proposals. Often they just dismiss their opponents as greedy corporate apologists or paranoid right-wing loonies. That’s easier than answering questions like these:
1) How can the government subsidize the purchase of medical services without driving up prices? Econ 101 teaches — without controversy — that when demand goes up, if other things remain equal, price goes up. The politicians want to have their cake and eat it, too.
2) How can the government promise lower medical costs without restricting choices? Medicare already does that. Once the planners’ mandatory insurance pushes prices to new heights, they must put even tougher limits on what we may buy — or their budget will be even deeper in the red than it already is. As economist Thomas Sowell points out, government cannot really reduce costs. All it can do is disguise and shift costs (through taxation) and refuse to pay for some services (rationing).
3) How does government “create choice” by imposing uniformity on insurers? Uniformity limits choice. Under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bill and the Senate versions, government would dictate to all insurers what their “minimum” coverage policy must include. Truly basic high-deductible, low-cost catastrophic policies tailored to individual needs would be forbidden.
4) How does it “create choice” by making insurance companies compete against a privileged government-sponsored program? The so-called government option, let’s call it Fannie Med, would have implicit government backing and therefore little market discipline. The resulting environment of conformity and government power is not what I mean by choice and competition. Rep. Barney Frank is at least honest enough to say that the public option will bring us a government monopoly.
So socialized medicine will be the equivilent of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? What could go wrong?
As Rand Simberg writes, Barack Obama, while on the campaign trail last year, “persuaded many small business people to pull in their horns and make plans to keep a low profile (including laying people off) in order to avoid the wealth confiscation of the populist, socialist, economic storm they saw coming with his election.” And once in office, he’s very much kept up that tone. What could he have done instead?
Though he might have caused trouble with his own party, Obama could have certainly forged a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats were he really the post-partisan, reach-across-the-aisle lightworker that we were promised in the campaign — a promise belied by his actual record in the Senate. It’s called triangulation, and Bill Clinton learned post-1994 that one could not only succeed politically with it, but that it could deliver good results for the country as well (at least until the bubble popped in 2000).
The only problem with it is that Barack Obama is incapable of doing anything so smart, either as a campaigner or a president. Unlike Bill Clinton, Obama is a committed ideologue — a man raised by Marxists and mentored as a youth by a communist, who sought out similar types in college by his own admission in the autobiography he may or may not have actually written himself. He’s a man who ran on the ticket of an avowedly socialist party in the 1990s. He’s a man who sat in the pew of a racist, anti-Semitic, America-hating demagogue for two decades with no objection, until he discovered that it was becoming inconvenient to his political goals. He’s a man who has willfully marinated his entire life in an ugly stew of socialism, racialism, victimology, class warfare, and other “progressive” tropes fashionable in academia and elite America but abhorrent to many of the rest of us.
So it should be no surprise that Obama has no sensible solutions for stimulating the economy, and will brook none. He is no more capable of stimulating an economy than was Mao Tse-tung, the hero of one of his close advisers. And for exactly the same reasons.
A commenter at my blog a few months ago made an interesting point. Clearly the people currently holding the reins of power believe that their policies comport the most with their political goals. But it’s not at all clear that growing the economy — or at least the productive, non-governmental part of it — is one of those goals.
