Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Out Of Touch

11 Comments

Does Steny Hoyer have any idea how comments like this come across to normal people?

“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.

Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.

In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.

So, therefore, it’s not reasonable to expect people to read it. Right.

I have an radical idea. How about shorter bills?

[Update a few minutes later]

I think that this would be an item for a new Republican Contract with America.

[Update mid afternoon]

Read the bill!

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

About Those Green Shoots In The Economy

27 Comments

It would help a lot of the government wouldn’t keep stomping them down.

But you can’t waste a crisis, and if you haven’t accomplished everything you want with it yet politically, you have to sustain it, just as the Roosevelt administration did, for years. Let’s hope that we’ll be on to them this time around.

[Update a few minutes later]

Will we be saved by California?

The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat…

…The federal picture is so bleak because the Obama administration is the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of the U.S. I would imagine that he would be the intergalactic champion as well, if we could gather the data on deficits on other worlds. Obama has taken George W. Bush’s inattention to deficits and elevated it to an art form.

The Obama administration has no shame, and is willing to abandon reason altogether to achieve its short-term political goals. Ronald Reagan ran up big deficits in part because he believed that his tax cuts would produce economic growth, and ultimately pay for themselves. He may well have been excessively optimistic about the merits of tax cuts, but at least he had a story.

Obama has no story. Nobody believes that his unprecedented expansion of the welfare state will lead to enough economic growth. Nobody believes that it will pay for itself. Everyone understands that higher spending today begets higher spending tomorrow. That means that his economic strategy simply doesn’t add up.

Well, it does to some of the economic illiterati in my comments section. As I said, let’s hope the rest of us figure it out by next November.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Fort Lauderdale

2 Comments

We went downtown this morning to the tea party by the federal building on Broward. It wasn’t a huge turnout (my guess is that there were not more than three or four hundred people at any given time) but the crowd was enthusiastic, and creative with their signs, with a lot of cars driving up and down the street with their own signs, bullhorns and car horns. It was mostly a fiscal protest. I saw only one “Choose Life” sign, and a couple related to foreign policy. There was no obvious news coverage.

I shot video of this band playing some Dixieland. I may Youtube it later.

A little street theater.

The other Barry.

This guy say’s he’s running for Senator as an Independent. He doesn’t have a web site yet, but he’s got a few months to get started. He’s Jewish, born in Brooklyn during the war, and claims to have known Jack Kennedy, who he said wouldn’t recognize the Democrats today. “The Chicago machine has taken over the country. Obama is a Stalinist, and knows exactly where he wants to go. I’ve known a lot like him in my day.”

Can’t accuse him of not being a straight talker.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Think Waxman-Markey Won’t Kill Jobs?

10 Comments

Ask the manufacturers:

More than 17 percent of those who answered said they would have to shut down their business because there is no way they could handle the kinds of increases being predicted.

The unscientific poll taken of Manufacturing & Technology eJournal readers from June 28th through July 1st drew 943 responses.

OTHER CHOICES INCLUDED:

Would raise the price of my product or service to customers (22 percent);

A combination of price increases, personnel cuts and reductions in pay and benefits (20 percent);

Switch to a 4-day workweek (15 percent);

Layoff workers (14.5 percent).

But hey, what do they know?