Today marks the 46th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. Back in 2007, I interviewed James Piereson about his then-new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, which looked at the enormous cognitive dissonance that descended upon the left in its wake.
And it may be permanent: Piereson has a new article comparing the left’s inability to process who shot JFK with the motivations of Nadal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter at the Weekly Standard. Click here to read it.
James Pethokoukis writes, “Here comes Sarah Palin and the anti-Wall Street GOP:
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]
Nice of Time magazine to unwittingly prime the pump for such a campaign:
As the Gray Lady would say, climate changes*; women, children, minorities, dogs, email, and the earth’s core hardest hit.
(Headline via the cool, objective journalists at AP.)
Doing the job that the American media can no longer be bothered with, England’s Spectator sums up the president remarkably well:
Related: The president tells the troops, “You guys make a pretty good photo op.” As Tom Blumer writes, “Let’s See How This Obamism Gets Covered.”
As the TechPresident blog noted recently, Obama’s admitting that he’s never used Twitter is a reminder that his campaigned lied when it demonized John McCain for being out of touch with the Internet. (Despite the YouTube and blog-savvy nature of the McCain camp doing much to keep his campaign competitive during the summer of 2008.)
In his NRO column today, Jay Nordlinger adds:
In China, a student asked President Obama, “Should we be able to use Twitter freely?” You and I might have said, “Yes.” President Obama began, “Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.” He went on, “I should be honest. As president of the United States, there are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely, because then I wouldn’t have to listen to people criticizing me all the time.” Yet “in the United States, information is free.” And “I have a lot of critics . . . who can say all kinds of things about me.” And “I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”
You could argue that this is a clever, nuanced answer — not too brash. But isn’t the answer weirdly me-centric, Obama-centric? And doesn’t he argue from pragmatism — “It makes me a better leader”? How about principle: the principle of free speech, freedom of expression?
I really think a simple “yes” might have been better.
One more thing: Obama said, “There are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely.” Did he mean that, or was that just a matter of rhetoric?
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.
The attacks on the media perfectly encapsulate the cynical brilliance of the Nixon administration. Scripted by Pat Buchanan and Bill Safire, and vetted by President Richard Nixon, Agnew’s speeches (there were several) began in Des Moines, Iowa, on Nov. 13, 1969. They proved remarkably successful. Agnew appeared on the cover of Time and Life magazines, special features on his criticism aired on all three national broadcast networks, and invitations to speak to civic and community organizations flooded his office.
The speeches were notable for both their content and style. No successful national politician had so forthrightly attacked The New York Times or CBS News. Stylistically, the speeches were filled with insults (barely) cloaked in peppery, alliterative phrases. But hidden beneath Agnew’s name-calling was a far more serious in-dictment of media consolidation. This part of the speech — now largely forgotten — changed the American media landscape forever.
In the newsrooms and executive offices of American media organizations the attack led to a great deal of internal self-examination. At CBS News, Charles Kuralt already had been assigned (“On the Road”) to report back on rarely reported aspects of America, and shortly after Agnew’s speeches NBC News sent two reporters out to do the same thing. A survey of local television stations revealed that 115 of 123 stations had started “a serious search” for more “good news items” after Agnew’s attack. Local news turned more toward soft news and light features, beginning a move away from critical reporting that has continued to this day.
The New York Times responded by implementing the OpEd page after years of internal debate. John B. Oakes, the editorial page editor of the Times who conceived the idea of the OpEd page (basing it upon a commentary page in the old New York World called the Page Op), had tried to launch the innovation for more than a decade. The publisher agreed only after the White House’s criticism could no longer be ignored. Oakes later described Agnew as typical of the oppositional voices he wanted represented in the Times. The first edition of the OpEd page featured both a critical assessment of Agnew’s speeches and an unflattering caricature of the vice president.
Both Agnew and Oakes professed a belief in the value of a diverse marketplace of ideas, but they held divergent philosophical views on the media’s social role. Oakes believed the media should lead and teach, invigorating the public sphere with fresh perspectives and ideas. For Agnew, the media’s responsibility was to be re-sponsive to the masses. This essential question — whether the news media should lead public opinion or reflect it — remains unresolved four decades later. But with the rise of the blogosphere, Fox News, the decline of journalistic authority and the fragmentation of audiences, Agnew’s vision clearly holds the upper hand.
Were Agnew alive today, he would undoubtedly be pleased by his contribution to the current media environment. Never have the American media been bombarded by such constant criticism — from both the right and the left. The motivations, assumptions and biases of professional journalists are closely and constantly examined, and the authority of their work has correspondingly eroded.
Two observations: first, didn’t Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center say much the same thing a decade ago? And second, a generation whose elites spent the last 40 years alternately shouting “Question Authority”, “Dissent Is Patriotic”, and teaching postmodernism, multiculturalism, and the importance of diversity in all things, shouldn’t be too surprised when the rest of the American people take them up on those ideas and begin to seek out media sources that reflect their own values.
The weekend before November’s elections, Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote a curious column titled, “The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York.”
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:
Click below to watch:
As always, there’s no way a satirist can improve upon real life for the perfection of its absurdity:
In pursuit of an Eagle Scout badge, Kevin Anderson, 17, has toiled for more than 200 hours hours over several weeks to clear a walking path in an east Allentown park.
Little did the do-gooder know that his altruistic act would put him in the cross hairs of the city’s largest municipal union.
Nick Balzano, president of the local Service Employees International Union, told Allentown City Council Tuesday that the union is considering filing a grievance against the city for allowing Anderson to clear a 1,000-foot walking and biking path at Kimmets Lock Park.
“We’ll be looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails,” Balzano told the council.
Balzano said Saturday he isn’t targeting Boy Scouts. But given the city’s decision in July to lay off 39 SEIU members, Balzano said “there’s to be no volunteers.” No one except union members may pick up a hoe or shovel, plant a flower or clear a walking path.
What about bike paths? Or is only Howard Dean allowed to clear those?
Last year, when Obama and his backers were on the campaign trail portraying America as some sort of impoverished Dickensian nightmare (when not advising the huddled, starving masses to share the wealth, and cut back on how much they eat, and drive their big eeevil SUVs), Michelle Obama famously said:
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones.
You first, Nick.
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:
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Related thoughts on the above incident from Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit. And as for the other half of John’s equation, “Neo-Nazi’s Hitler Flag Triggers Scuffle at Arizona Tea Party Protest”:
The Competitive Enterprise Institute believes that it has finally come with the scratch big enough to tempt Al Gore to finally debate global “warming”:
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Say, this video, borrowing from an old Saturday Night Live sketch, seems just a tad familiar. In fact, we tried a similar approach way back in 2007:
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We didn’t have much success either, but still, at least we were playing with real money: we offered $750 a president.
So there.
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….
….Then apostates must be demonized. Keep flucking that chicken, legacy media.
At Real Clear Politics, Sean Trende writes, “You only get to elect the first black President once, and governing a coalition of suburbanites, poor blacks, and upper class liberals isn’t easy. It is hard to keep that enthusiasm up. And with the Jacksonian wing of the party gone, if that enthusiasm dissipates, or if one of the coalition groups becomes disgruntled and starts to shuffle out the door, the party isn’t left with much”:
The historical base of the Democratic Party for two centuries has long been what Jay Cost and I call Jacksonians: Culturally conservative, hawkish, and populist whites located throughout the South and Border states. They began breaking away from Democrats in the 1950s and 1960s – their reaction to the Party’s embrace of unions, blacks and liberals is a story is so well known there’s no need to rehash it here.
But this group remained at least in play for the Democrats. Clinton inherited a coalition consisting of minorities, liberals, urban voters, and a decent remnant of Jacksonian voters in the Ohio River Valley and the South, who still preferred a moderate-to-conservative Democrat to a Republican. This coalition became a majority coalition when Clinton used a combination of fiscal conservatism and social moderation to bring suburban voters on board. This was a huge innovation for Democrats; suburbs like Nassau County, NY, Orange County, CA and Fairfax County, VA had fueled the rise of the Republican parties in those states. Clinton moved them substantially toward his side. This coalition allowed him to win by eight points in 1996; absent Perot and a last-minute fundraising scandal, he probably would have won by more.
Clinton intuited that suburban voters are, generally speaking, culturally cosmopolitan – they don’t like it when you call someone “macaca,” and aren’t crazy about the religious right. But they’re generally not particularly socially liberal either, and are fans of “law and order.” They like taxes low and appreciate economic growth, but like good schools and a clean environment. Having to balance a bunch of spending priorities with somewhat limited income in their daily lives, balanced budgets are the ultimate “good government” indicator for these voters.
Clinton delivered on all of these issues, keeping tax increases fairly small, and balancing the budget for much of his term. In so doing – and this is very important – he re-branded the Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility, economic growth, moderate taxes, and smart government.
So much for that last idea, Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit writes: “Obama’s October Deficit LARGER Than Bush Deficit For ENTIRE YEAR of 2007″:
Meanwhile, Andy McCarthy writes that President Obama is playing to his radical leftwing base, not the center, with his decision to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York-based civilian trial:
Today’s announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses — intelligence sources — must expose themselves and their secrets.
Let’s take stock of where we are at this point. KSM and his confederates wanted to plead guilty and have their martyrs’ execution last December, when they were being handled by military commission. As I said at the time, we could and should have accommodated them. The Obama administration could still accommodate them. After all, the president has not pulled the plug on all military commissions: Holder is going to announce at least one commission trial (for Nashiri, the Cole bomber) today.
Moreover, KSM has no defense. He was under American indictment for terrorism for years before there ever was a 9/11, and he can’t help himself but brag about the atrocities he and his fellow barbarians have carried out.
So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America. Since that will be their “defense,” the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America’s defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.
Clinton’s first two years in office were nearly as bad as Obama’s first year has been; it was only the election of a center-right GOP to both houses of Congress that curbed his excesses. But at least he had actual executive experience as governor before winning the White House. Obama has had none, and his lack of experience, and inability to make decisions, is beginning to snowball against him, and badly.
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.”
What could go wrong?
In 2007, Bernadine Dohrn, Obama associate and former member of the Weather Underground terrorist group described living in America as being trapped in “the belly of the beast”:
We who are, as we used to say, in the belly of the beast … It again means not that we are the only purveyor of violence in the world, but that we have an extraordinary, special responsibility, not necessarily the most enviable one, of how to act here, inside the heart of the monster.
Which, while ordinarily disgusting language to describe America, seems oddly appropriate for this Obama-related story:
Despite all the evidence we have published that exposes ACORN as both corrupt and criminal, no other mainstream media organization has shown any signs of investigating ACORN despite countless angles and document trails. So I knew I had to go down to the protest on Bundy Drive to ask ACORN protesters a few questions.
With very little time I got in the car with Big Government Associate Editor Alex Marlow to meet Gary H. down at the protest. When we arrived, the protesters were fifty or so strong, monitored by a few police units standing to the side. Given that the police made me feel safe, I walked straight toward the chanting protesters while accepting an ACORN full-color single page handout entitled, “ACORN MEMBERS — MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THEIR COMMUNITIES,” which sung the praises of the organization.
As I walked toward the group I noticed a news camera was filming them, so I stood next to the camera, not only to memorialize what I was saying, but also as a further attempt to grant myself security, given that I was greatly outnumbered.
I told the group that my website, BigGovernment.com, was the website that had launched the ACORN story and that I was here to answer any questions they had about our investigation. Instead of engaging me, they backed away, pointed at their ACORN buttons, screamed and chanted. One ACORN leader, a towering African American gentleman, told the group: “‘We don’t want to hear what he has to say.” And began leading them in a group chant:
“Everywhere we go, people want to know, who we are, so we tell them: We are ACORN, mighty, might ACORN!
They also chanted, multiple times, words from the old Unidad Popular Marxist song that accompanied Salvador Allende’s successful 1970 presidential campaign in Chile: “The people united, will never be defeated” – a rallying cry for radical leftists all over the world.
I tried to draw their attention and talk as loud as I could, and asked a series of questions, “What do you think about Dale Rathke embezzling millions from your organization?” “How much are you getting paid?” “Are you aware that ACORN has been caught paying less than the minimum wage for protesters fighting for a minimum wage increase?”
And I also told them many times, “You are being used.”
As Andrew writes, “One thing was certain from this confrontation. They were not prepared for it.”
Huh. There seems to be a lot of that going on amongst the left this year. Or as Sue Esty, the assistant director of American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees Maryland was quoted as saying in September, in reference to the right having learned Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals playbook, “It’s kind of scary! They have learned all of the tricks.”
Update: Earlier today we linked to Moe Lane’s post about Missouri’s Democrat Secretary of State Robin Carnahan and her incredible ability to say absolutely nothing about her desire for PelosiCare in a three minute soundbite. Found via Glenn Reynolds, Dana Loesch notes what else she isn’t saying much about: “More on Carnahans’ Ties to ACORN”, adding, “This also makes sense as to why so many ACORN workers were present at Russ Carnahan’s summer rally for fauxcare.”
Meanwhile, Patterico tweets, “Breitbart to hit ACORN in L.A. L.A. Times columnist James Rainey to get egg on his face.”
There’s a memorable scene in Lawrence 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:
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On the other hand, you can understand her reluctance to put her cards on the table: “Pelosi: Jail time “very fair” for failing to buy your patriotic ObamaCare coverage.”
“Why did they do all this, daddy?” “To stop global warming, honey”:
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(H/T: Theo Spark; related thoughts here.)
For those who are wondering why an army base of all places is, effectively, a gun-free zone, the Washington Times notes its origins:
Among President Clinton’s first acts upon taking office in 1993 was to disarm U.S. soldiers on military bases. In March 1993, the Army imposed regulations forbidding military personnel from carrying their personal firearms and making it almost impossible for commanders to issue firearms to soldiers in the U.S. for personal protection. For the most part, only military police regularly carry firearms on base, and their presence is stretched thin by high demand for MPs in war zones.
Because of Mr. Clinton, terrorists would face more return fire if they attacked a Texas Wal-Mart than the gunman faced at Fort Hood, home of the heavily armed and feared 1st Cavalry Division. That’s why a civilian policewoman from off base was the one whose marksmanship ended Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s rampage.
Everyone wants to keep people safe – and no one denies Mr. Clinton’s good intentions. The problem is that law-abiding good citizens, not criminals, are the ones who obey those laws. Bans end up disarming potential victims and not criminals. Rather than making places safe for victims, we unintentionally make them safe for the criminal – or in this case, the terrorist.
The wife of one of the soldiers shot at Fort Hood understands all too well. In an interview on CNN Monday night, Anchor John Roberts asked Mandy Foster how she felt about her husband’s upcoming deployment to Afghanistan. Ms. Foster responded: “At least he’s safe there and he can fire back, right?”
Mayor Daley could not be reached for comment.
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!
But if it’s doublespeak you want, there’s always the General Electric-owned NBC:
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.
Umm, it hasn’t?
As I wrote in January, when GE reported a 46 percent drop in profits:
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.
Al and GE are certainly doing their best to help.
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?
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