Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Who Smeared Sarah Palin?

27 Comments

Rusty Shackleford has been doing a lot of research. If this can be traced to the Obama campaign, the FEC should be interested. But they probably won’t be. And neither will the MSM.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Dan Riehl has more. And like roaches fleeing when the lights come on, the perps have pulled down the sites. Not in time, though–they’ve been cached.

You know, this could be a really big story for an enterprising investigative reporter at someplace like the New York Times. Unfortunately, when it comes to Barack Obama, such creatures don’t seem to exist.

[Update mid morning]

Ace has more:

Tomorrow they will claim this was all inadvertent, etc. They’ll say they did produce the ad, and sent it to Winner and Associates to, um, focus-group or something, then decided not to run it, but that dirty Winner family and its employees attempted to get it to go viral without their authorization.

Whatever.

If this is all so innocent, why are the videos being yanked even as we speak?

Just about one hour after the post went up, “cnwinner,” “eswinner” and the rest of the winner gang are yanking their videos.

Almost as if… I don’t know, some kind of major campaign organization was patrolling the internet 24/7.

Can we believe “cnwinner,” “eswinner,” and etc. just all suddenly were monitoring the internet and decided to take their videos down simultaneously?

No, we cannot.

Can we believe Winner & Associates scours the internet 24 hours a day for derogatory stories about them?

No, we cannot.

But — can we believe the Obama campaign has people watching the internet 24/7 and just sent out the call to Winner & Associates to bury the evidence?

Yes we can, friends.

Yes we can, even if the Gray Lady can’t.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

A Blast From The Past

4 Comments

Ben Bova has a piece in the Naples News that could have been written thirty years ago. In fact, it’s exactly like stuff that he (and I) wrote thirty years ago. The only difference is that I have experienced the past thirty years, whereas he seems to be stuck in a seventies time warp, and I’ve gotten a lot more sober about the prospects for a lot of the orbital activities that were always just around the corner, and probably always will be:

An orbital habitat needn’t be a retirement center, though. Space offers some interesting advantages for manufacturing metal alloys, pharmaceuticals, electronics components and other products. For example, in zero-gravity it’s much easier to mix liquids.

Think of mixing a salad dressing. On Earth, no matter how hard you stir, the heavier elements sink to the bottom of the bowl. In zero G there are no heavier elements: they’re all weightless. And you don’t even need a bowl! Liquids form spherical shapes, whether they’re droplets of water or industrial-sized balls of molten metals.

Metallurgists have predicted that it should be possible in orbit to produce steel alloys that are much stronger, yet much lighter, than any alloys produced on Earth. This is because the molten elements can mix much more thoroughly, and gaseous impurities in the mix can percolate out and into space.

Imagine automobiles built of orbital steel. They’d be much stronger than ordinary cars, yet lighter and more fuel-efficient. There’s a market to aim for.

Moreover, in space you get energy practically for free. Sunlight can be focused with mirrors to produce furnace-hot temperatures. Or electricity, from solarvoltaic cells. Without spending a penny for fuel.

The clean, “containerless” environment of orbital space could allow production of ultrapure pharmaceuticals and electronics components, among other things.

Orbital facilities, then, would probably consist of zero-G sections where manufacturing work is done, and low-G areas where people live.

There would also be a good deal of scientific research done in orbital facilities. For one thing, an orbiting habitat would be an ideal place to conduct long-term studies of how the human body reacts to prolonged living in low gravity. Industrial researchers will seek new ways to utilize the low gravity, clean environment and free energy to produce new products, preferably products that cannot be manufactured on Earth, with its heavy gravity, germ-laden environment and high energy costs.

Cars made of “orbital steel”?

Please.

But I guess there’s always a fresh market for this kind of overhyped boosterism. I think that it actively hurts the cause of space activism, because people in the know know how unrealistic a lot of it is, and it just hurts the credibility of proponents like Ben Bova.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

The New Hollywood Blacklist

4 Comments

Here’s an interesting extended look at the secret lives of conservatives in tinsel town:

Zucker gave Farley the script and, concerned that Farley’s agent would advise him against accepting the role because of the film’s politics, told the actor not to show it to anyone. Farley, best known for his recurring role in a series of Hertz commercials, read the script and called back the next day to accept.

When he met Zucker and Sokoloff on the set as shooting on the film began, he told them that he, too, had long considered himself a conservative. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Sokoloff. “We were afraid that he would not want to be involved in something that was so directly taking on the left and that he would not want to play the Michael Moore character.”

Farley told me this story during a break in filming at the Daniel Webster Elementary School in Pasadena, last April, with Steve McEveety, the film’s producer, listening in.

“I thought that the minute we started talking about politics that would be the end,” Farley recalls. “There was this dance that we did–a dance familiar to conservative actors in Hollywood. Lots of actors have done it.”

“All three of you,” said McEveety.

“Yeah, all three of us.”

…On one of the days I was on set, McEveety had invited Vivendi Entertainment president Tom O’Malley to meet Zucker. Vivendi had just agreed to distribute the film and had promised wide release–news that had the cast and crew of An American Carol in particularly good spirits.

O’Malley and Zucker chatted about the fact that O’Malley is the nephew of Candid Camera’s Tom O’Malley and that they are both from the Midwest, among other things. Zucker thanked him for picking up the movie, which will be one of the first for Vivendi’s new distribution arm. O’Malley told Zucker that he was particularly interested in this film in part because he, too, leans right.

Such revelations are common occurrences at the periodic meetings of the secret society of Hollywood conservatives known as the “Friends of Abe.” The group, with no official membership list and no formal mission, has been meeting under the leadership of Gary Sinise (CSI New York, Forrest Gump) for four years. Zucker had spent a year working on a film with Christopher McDonald without learning anything about his politics. Shortly after the film wrapped, he ran into McDonald, best known as Shooter McGavin from Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore, at one of these informal meetings.

“It’s almost like people who are gay, show up at the baths and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were gay!’ ” Zucker says…

Let’s hope that they can come out of the closet some day.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Thuggery

3 Comments

Here’s the full story of how Sarah Palin was forced out of the anti-Ahmadinejad rally:

Make no mistake that this was an Obama op and that it was Obama operatives directing the screenplay. Upon news of Palin’s invitation, it was assured that the event would garner a higher level of attention than it already commanded. And the images and footage of Palin speaking in protest (popular protest, it should be added) of Iran and the messianic Ahmadinejad upon the backdrop of the common perception of Obama’s weakness in foreign policy and national security simply could not stand. Furthermore, it would have provided endless campaign fodder with Palin shown standing against the world’s foremost state sponsor of international terrorism amid the audio-visual bites of Obama stating he would hold talks with Iran without preconditions. The effects would potentially be more than just stinging.

It had to be derailed at all costs. And the first step in the mission was to characterize it as a politicized event. Getting Clinton to step away from the invitation was easy enough – her own vanity played against her as noted above. Having her spokesmen give a ‘politicizing’ reason for withdrawing from the rally planted the seed. And the trap was laid expertly.

All that remained was Palin and the media hyper-focus on her. If she remained, the meme of a ‘politicization’ of an otherwise honorable event would be hung around her neck – and Malcolm Hoenlein’s – like an albatross. Yet she refused to rescind her acceptance as Hillary Clinton had.

Here’s where it gets a bit dirty. The Obama campaign could not publicly cajole her to stay away, yet they needed her away. Desperately. So the pressure was then applied to Malcolm Hoenlein and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.

Meryl Yourish is appropriately disgusted:

The thing that I hate the most about this? It won’t stop my liberal Jewish friends from voting Democrat in any way. It won’t even make them think twice about the tactics used by the Democrats. And it’s far, far worse than Soccer Dad wrote about the other day. CBS didn’t have the story about Jewish organizations having their tax-exempt status revoked for having Palin speak at the rally.

That’s not a political party pressuring groups to do something. That’s outright break-your-kneecap, Mafia-style blackmail threats.

In fact, those are precisely the kinds of tactics that the Jewish groups will be protesting on Monday. We just never expected them from the Democrats.

You should have. They’ve been doing it for decades. Many American Jews seem to have the same relationship with the Democrats as a woman with a wife beater that she keeps going back to.

And I wonder why the media lets them continue to promulgate the absurd notion that if Hillary! had attended by herself, it would have been non-partisan, but that if she shared the stage with Sarah, that would make it partisan.

Well, actually I don’t.

[Late morning update]

Speaking of thuggery, Iowahawk has the latest on the Obama voter outreach program.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Race Baiting

33 Comments

Limbaugh has had enough, and calls out Obama on it.

The malignant aspect of this is that Mr. Obama and his advisers know exactly what they are doing. They had to listen to both monologues or read the transcripts. They then had to pick the particular excerpts they used in order to create a commercial of distortions. Their hoped-for result is to inflame racial tensions. In doing this, Mr. Obama and his advisers have demonstrated a pernicious contempt for American society.

I’m sickened by the self righteousness and hypocrisy of the so-called compassionate left.

How long will it take for the rest of the country to see what a fraud this notion of Jerome Wright’s most famous long-time parishioner being a “post-racial” candidate is?

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Popular Culture

The Pixel Race

24 Comments

I’ve long thought that the resolution of most digital cameras has reached the point at which it’s overkill, and there are a lot of other improvements that the camera needs. Unfortunately, the marketing people at Canon don’t agree:

Canon engineers are being held back from developing new sensor technology by marketing departments in a “race for megapixels”, claims an employee of the Japanese photography company.

The employee told Tech Digest that Canon have the technology to “blow the competition away” in terms of image sensors, but are instead being asked to focus on headline figures like the number of megapixels a camera has. When asked for his opinion on the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, which we covered this morning, the employee said:

“I am hugely disappointed because once again Canon engineers are dictated by their marketing department and had to keep up with the megapixel race. They have the technology to blow the competition away by adapting the new 50D sensor tech in a full frame format and just easing off a little on the megapixels. Although no formal testing has been done on the new model yet, judging by the spec and technology used, it just seems to be as good or as bad as the competition – not beating them by a mile (which we used to).”

I’d rather have more speed and better S/N ratio myself.

There’s an amusing discussion of this, and the perennial war between marketing and engineering, including examples from Dilbert, over at Free Republic.