Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Eliminating Private Insurance

13 Comments

Was Barack Obama lying then, or is he lying now? And why isn’t the mainstream press pointing this out?

Oh, right.

[Update a few minutes later]

Thoughts on the unprincipled toads who claim to represent our interests:

In the one exchange I’ve seen, Specter tried to explain how he goes about learning what’s in a 1,000 page piece of legislation. Specter said that, because of time constraints, his practice is to divide responsibility for reading the bill among his staffers. This explanation brought boos from the crowd.

The Senate fancies itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Senate is not a deliberative body at all — not when Senators concede that they would vote on legislation to overhaul one-sixth of our economy, and arguably the most important sixth, without having read the legislation. Specter’s defense that there’s not enough time for him to read it all himself simply raises the problem in a more acute from: why would the world’s greatest deliberative body consider legislation on a timetable that leaves Senators with insufficient to see for themselves exactly what’s in the bill?

Americans inevitably will disagree over how our health care system should operate. But nearly every American would agree that Senators should know what’s in major health care legislation before they vote on it, and that such legislation should not be enacted in a rush.

No, there are Americans like commenter “Jim” who thinks this setup is just dandy, as long as it gives him the socialist system that he wishes to impose by stealth on the rest of us.

[Early afternoon update]

Thoughts from Kevin Hassett:

Here’s how it works. Democrats propose something radical and unpopular, like President Barack Obama’s health-care plan. Then the Blue Dog Democrats traipse onto the public stage claiming to carry the banner of fiscal responsibility and moderation.

The show is covered the same way by the media every time. The virtuous, “centrist” Blue Dogs share the concerns of the American people, the story goes, and have enough votes to stop Nancy Pelosi and the fringe from radicalizing American policy. After “tough” negotiating sessions, the Democrats cave in to Blue Dog demands, producing a bill that is moderate and reasonable.

Except that it’s all just nonsense, meant to create the illusion that Pelosi isn’t dictating the details of Democratic bills in the House. In fact, she is.

Take the health bill. For any moderate and sensible individual, the key problem with Obama’s approach is that it calls for a public insurance plan, run by the government, that will compete with private plans.

…Make no mistake. If a public plan is enacted, it will move us swiftly toward socialized medicine with a single government payer, an objective Obama has endorsed in the past.

I agree that the Blue Dogs are not the friends of either the Republicans or the American people, but I also agree with Ramesh that there are other reasons to oppose this bill.

And as an aside, I hate the phrase “make no mistake.” It’s usually a bit of political rhetoric (like Obama’s verbal fetishes of “…as I’ve said before,” and “Let me be clear”) and throat clearing to indicate a massive whopper to come. I don’t think that Hassett is wrong, but I wish that he’d avoid that cliche.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The God Who Bleeds

10 Comments

Jonah Goldberg says that the public is starting to see the man behind the curtain of the great Ozbama:

Obama undoubtedly has major accomplishments ahead of him, but in a real way the Obama presidency is over. His messianic hopey-changiness has been exposed for what it was, and what it could only be: a rich cocktail of pie-eyed idealism, campaign sloganeering, and profound arrogance.

As president, he’s tried to apply the post-partisan gloss of his campaign rhetoric to the hyper-partisan dross of his agenda. And he’s fooling fewer people every day.

Indeed, the one unifying theme of his presidency so far has been Obama’s relentless campaigning for a job he already has. That makes sense, because that’s really all Obama knows how to do. He’s had no significant experience crafting major legislation. He has next to no experience governing at all.

But he’s great at giving speeches, holding town halls, and chitchatting with reporters. So that’s largely what he does as president. The problem is that campaigning is different from governing. The former requires convincing promises about what you will do; the latter requires convincing arguments for what you are doing. He’s good at the former, not so good at the latter. Or as columnist Michael Barone puts it, he’s good at aura, bad at argument.

It’s revealing that liberals suddenly want Obama to spare the god and use the rod. Specifically, as Dick Polman notes in the Philadelphia Inquirer, they want Obama to channel Lyndon Johnson (whom no one confused for a quantum leap in our consciousness). Liberal historian Doris Kearns Goodwin says she wants BHO to go LBJ: “to take charge, to draw lines, to pressure, to threaten, to cajole.” Liberal activist Dean Baker says Obama should “get the list of every hardball nasty political ploy” that Johnson ever deployed.

As Polman rightly notes, this is crazy talk for the simple reason that Obama has nothing like LBJ’s experience, skill set, or treasure trove of chits and political IOUs. Obama can no more decide to become LBJ than Carrot Top can decide to become Laurence Olivier.

I guess that some people continue to avoid looking behind the curtain.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

An Upcoming Space Debate

3 Comments

This looks ilke it might be interesting. It might even be interesting in a way unanticipated by the folks at The Economist.

If you read the summary, it sounds like the standard media template — humans to the moon versus robots. But I’m pretty sure that Mike Gold is all in favor of sending humans to the moon — he’s probably just opposed to NASA doing it the way they propose to do it. I suspect that the debate will not be at all about humans versus robots, but about the best way to get people back to the moon. Which is a much more useful debate, but it may not be the one that the people who are putting it together intended. I wonder how the debaters were chosen?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

If I Forget Thee

9 Comments

Jerusalem. Next thing I expect they’ll have one of those maps of “Palestine,” that doesn’t include Israel, on the State Department web site. And then there’s this:

Robinson’s record is well known to most Jews with even a passing familiarity with the Jewish media. It cannot be a surprise that honoring Robinson in this way would be anathema to the Jewish community. In addition, I know from having worked in the White House that these selections go through extremely careful vetting of public and non-public databases to make sure that they would not embarrass the president in any way. The staff secretary’s office, which clears all paperwork that goes to the president, would also make sure that all of the relevant offices sign off on important selections before they happen. The two most important sign offs on something like the Medal of Freedom would be the chief of staff’s office, now headed by Rahm Emanuel, and the senior advisor’s office, now run by David Axelrod. For the Obama White House to have made this selection could mean one of only two possibilities: that they did not vet and clear the candidates, which suggests a level of incompetence beyond even missing tax evasions by cabinet nominees. Uncaught tax evasion does not come up on Google; Robinson’s record does. The other, more likely, possibility is that they knew and did not care.

It’s almost like they’re on the other side. And American Jews continue to play the sucker.

[Update a few minuts later]

But wait! There’s more:

Israel has a less favorable view of the United States now than it did in 2007 — by 6 points. Aren’t you glad we’ve appeased places like Syria and Venezuela and Cuba and Burma, though?

But a few other interesting data points come from the Pew survey as well: The Palestinian territories — run by Hamas and Fatah — do have a better opinion of the United States. So our chief ally in the Middle East is more nervous, and Yasser Arafat’s legatees are more happy.

But now get this from the survey: There is little evidence that support for suicide bombing in the Muslim world has decreased.

You don’t say.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Unseen Costs

5 Comments

…of the minimum wage:

Several years ago, the city council of Santa Monica, Calif., decided to make the town a workers’ paradise by passing a union-backed law requiring everyone to be paid at least $12.25 an hour.

At the time, restaurant owner Jeff King complained to me that that law would “dry up the entry-level jobs for just the people they’re trying to help.”

He was right. It’s why gas stations no longer hire teenagers to wash your windshield. Wage minimums tell employers: “Don’t give a beginner a chance.”

Such losses are hard to see, but they are widespread. One company closes because it can’t afford to pay higher wages. Another decides to produce its product with fewer workers, and another never expands. Perhaps most importantly, there’s the business that never opens. The people who were never hired don’t complain—they wouldn’t know whom to blame—they don’t even know that they were harmed. They are the unseen victims.

And many of them are black, and the people that the economic ignorami, including the African-American one in the White House, falsely purport to be helping.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The President’s “Science” Advisor

25 Comments

The more we learn about John Holdren, the more of a whack job he seems to be:

Holdren’s harebrained endorsement of the arboreal legal rights comes on the heels of learning he had previously advocated:

Laws requiring the abortion or adoption of illegitimate children; sterilizing women after having two children; legally requiring “reproductive responsibility” to those deemed by pointy-headed eugenicists to “contribute to general social deterioration”; and incredibly, putting sterilizing agents in the drinking water.

All this in the name of dealing with an impending overpopulation crisis that never materialized. When the news broke about Holdren’s troubling views, I thought it was particularly telling that despite the fact that Holdren thinks that Dr. Strangelove is a how-to manual, the New York Times ignored the revelations about Holdren’s past writings.

But as Mark Hemingway points out, at least he’s not a Christian.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

More “Acting Stupidly” By White People

18 Comments

Obama administration political operatives overruled DoJ career professionals in the decision to not prosecute Black Panther voting intimidators. I guess that means that it would be OK for KKK members in hoods to hang around voting places with guns, too. Right?

[Friday morning update, with a bump]

More thoughts from Andrew McCarthy:

Republicans…are pressing for details about internal DOJ deliberations on the case, particularly the role played by Obama political appointees in the dismissal. Holder, Mr. Transparency, is naturally stonewalling. Obviously, the enforcement of the civil rights laws is not as important as the discretionary firing of U.S. attorneys (regarding which congressional Democrats demanded, and got, reams of DOJ documents and testimony). Nor is transparent law-enforcement as critical as the top-secret prisoner photos that Holder wanted disclosed to the world despite warnings from military and intel officials that disclosure would endanger our troops.

Seper recaps the sordid facts: “Two NBPP members, wearing black berets, black combat boots, black dress shirts and black jackets with military-style markings, were charged with intimidating voters, including brandishing a nightstick and issuing racial threats and racial insults. A third was accused of managing, directing and endorsing their behavior. The incident was captured on videotape…. Witnesses said [Minister King] Samir Shabazz, armed with the nightstick, and [Jerry] Jackson used racial slurs and made threats as they stood at the door of the polling place.”

I’m sure you’ll be stunned to learn that the sweetheart settlement Holder’s Department gave these defendants does not require them to refrain from election activities. So of course Jackson, the alleged menacing racist who is also — surprise! — a Democrat Party operative, is right back in business again…

Change! But not much hope.

[Update mid morning]

Clarice Feldman has more:

The attorney general who engaged in this inexplicable act was appointed by President Barack Obama, who was sold to the voters as a post-racial figure and a constitutional law scholar.

In 2004, the misnamed left-wing outfit People for the American Way (PFAW) put forth a report entitled “The Shadow of Jim Crow,” which risibly confused efforts to prevent obvious voter fraud with intimidation and suppression. It concluded on this pot-banging note:

Robbing voters of their right to vote and to have their vote counted undermines the very foundations of our democratic society. Politicians, political strategists, and party officials who may consider voter intimidation and suppression efforts as part of their tactical arsenal should prepare to be exposed and prosecuted. State and federal officials, including Justice Department and national political party officials, should publicly repudiate such tactics and make clear that those who engage in them will face severe punishment.

So when I read this story from the Washington Times yesterday, I checked to see if PFAW had anything about it at all. I could find not one word.

Maybe PFAW missed the story, so I checked the NAACP website. I didn’t see a single thing criticizing the politicization of the Department of Justice in a way which undermines every citizen’s right to fair and free elections without intimidation.

Shocking. But expect commenter “Jim” to continue to shill and lie for this fascist and his (now) state-sanctioned black shirts. It’s what he does.

And she has a suggestion:

Perhaps in honor of the cop Obama unfairly maligned we ought to call this kind of racial discrimination “Jim Crowley.”

I like it.

[Update a few minutes later]

And more, from Heritage:

The Department’s spokeswoman says that “the facts and the law did not support pursuing the claims.” Really? Then why is the Department refusing to allow the trial team who actually investigated the “facts and the law” or the chief of the Voting Section who supervised the investigation to brief members of Congress? We all know why – because those lawyers would dispute the spurious claim being made by their political superiors.

Justice even sent a letter to Cong. Lamar Smith claiming that one of the defendants was dismissed because he was a resident of the building in which the polling place was located, a “fact” that is completely false. The Department’s own pleadings publicly filed in court in Philadelphia, as well as a poll watcher certificate issued to the defendant by the Democratic Party, show that that this defendant did not live at the polling place (a senior living center). This basic factual error shows just how unimportant the real facts were to those dismissing the case. And that defendant, whose MySpace page lists one of his general interests as “Killing Crakkkas,” was dismissed just in time to be reappointed as a poll watcher for the May 19 primary in Philadelphia!

When the facts don’t fit the narrative, the facts have to be ignored.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Space

FUD

5 Comments

Commercial space advocates have often complained that NASA tends to put a stick in the spokes of attempts to raise money and get ventures off the ground. Critics claim that this is a fantasy, and that NASA is both uninterested in, and incapable of doing such a thing. Jeff Foust points out the latest example of the “fantasy”:

[Here’s] a passage in a Wall Street Journal article this week (subscription required) about Virgin Galactic’s deal to sell a stake to an Abu Dhabi fund:

However, a NASA official cautioned that venturing into space is extremely costly, dangerous and difficult.

“Everyone has the opinion ‘we can do this’ but I’ve seen so many fail,” he said, adding that running a shuttle costs at least $3 billion a year.

All this is true: spaceflight is difficult and not cheap, and many ventures who have tried it before have failed. But what does the operating cost of the shuttle have to do with a suborbital space tourism system?

Absolutely nothing, of course. But it helps sow the seeds of doubt in the mind of an investor who might not know any better. And of course, the clueless reporter doesn’t challenge the comment, but simply stenographs it as though it’s not a complete non sequitur. Because he or she got the valuable opinion of an unnamed NASA official, which is all that matters.