…that don’t ask the right questions. It’s pretty clear that the agenda of these pollsters is to try to persuade us that we actually support the monstrosity that the Dems seem to remain determined to foist on us.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Name Names, Governator
I’m getting more than a little tired of Arnold the RINO decrying hypocrites in his ostensible party, who supposedly rail about the Porkustimulus bill, while going out to cut ribbons at events funded by it and taking credit for them. And yet somehow, he never provides an actual example.
I’m willing to believe that such people exist (Republicans do have some repugnant people in the party, Scharzenegger being quite prominent among them), but if you’re going to damn the party to which you claim to belong in such a way, it would seem that, at a minimum, one should offer some evidence for it. Or admit that one is just blowing it out his…abs. And of course, the press (in this case Greta) never calls him on it.
An Invitation
…to the white people at MSNBC…
If Dramatic Praire Dog doesn’t show, he’ll be the Worst Person In The World.
The President Lying About ACORN?
Like the rest of you, I’m shocked, of course. But I’m sure that this will be front-page news at the New York Times. Not.
There Seems To Be A Step Missing
In all the media discussion over Iran’s incipient nuclear capabilities, two phrases seem to be intermingled. The headline on Fox News uses the word “warhead,” while Jamie Colby is talking to John Bolton, who continues to use the phrase “nuclear weapons.” While Iran having nuclear weapons is obviously nothing to sneeze at (though the White House seems to have a different view), nuclear weapons are not warheads. A warhead is a specific kind of nuclear weapon — one that not only works, but is light enough to be delivered on a missile, and has reentry and guidance systems to deliver it to its target. One does not go from enriching uranium to building warheads in a single step, but I hear no discussion of this. I wish I did.
Dramatic
I think that MSNBC should consider Dramatic Chipmunk as a replacement for Olby. The commentary would be much more intelligent.
[Via Nick Gillespie, who has a lot more, if you enjoy seeing Olby rhetorically beaten to a thin pulp.]
Any chance that comment will get me honored as the Worst Person In The World?
Probably not.
Speaking of Olbermann, so much for his “racist” tea parties.
Up yours too, Janeane.
Going Post-Doctoral
One line stuck out to me in this piece about Professor Amy Bishop:
“You have to talk about Amy Bishop’s mental health in this situation as one of the variables, but being denied tenure when you’re in your mid-40s at an out-of-the-way obscure rural campus in the deep South is a catastrophic loss, and people don’t understand that,” says Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.
This looks like northeastern Ivy bigotry to me, and it seems to be driven by ignorance. I think that most people at UAH would be surprised to learn that their university is “out-of-the-way,” “obscure,” or “rural.” Huntsville is a non-trivial city (it has a major NASA center, and Army R&D facility, and a vast aerospace contractor industrial base), and UAH has an excellent engineering school, particularly for aerospace (despite their having picked up Mike Griffin as a professor, though it’s probably a job to which he’s much better suited than running NASA). I suspect that, to Mr. Levin, its real crime is being in the “deep” south (just below the Tennessee border). And he probably thinks that for someone with a post-graduate degree from Harvard, her willingness to subject herself to such a benighted place is just one more sign of a mental disorder.
A Perfect Storm
…of ignorance. The amazing (and frightening) thing is how alien the concept of moral hazard is to people running this country.
The Cure
…is worse than the disease. You wonder why more of the media doesn’t point out this logical disconnect. And then you think back to the 2008 campaign, and you remember.
The Problem With First-Dollar Coverage
Thoughts from Megan McArdle. One of the big problems with health care is that people have come to see every-day costs as an entitlement that someone else should pay, instead of the old days (and not that old — within my lifetime) when you paid for doctor’s visits (and they would even make house calls) out of pocket, with insurance reserved for catastrophe. We’ll take our car to the shop, our pet to the vet, but the current mess has accustomed many of us to thinking that we somehow shouldn’t have to pay for a doctor visit. As Megan notes, when you’re not spending your own money, you’re going to use the service a lot more, and you won’t care about the price. This is the key point of how screwed up the market is as a result of employer-provided insurance:
With all the layers in between consumers and the providers in the ordinary market, the natural battle between consumers seeking better value and producers seeking higher prices is terribly distorted in ways that don’t make us healthier.
That market disconnect is what we need to fix, rather than finding some other peoples’ money to keep doing the same crazy things. And the way to fix it is to end the preferential tax treatment of employer-provided insurance versus personally purchased policies, and to allow purchase across state lines for real competition. If I hear one more moron saying that the way to provide competition for private insurers is with a government option, I’m going to plotz. Just make them compete with each other.