BILL WHITTLE: Afterburner: One Small Misstep for a Man, One Giant Leap for Private Enterprise. As always with Whittle, it’s must-see PJTV. (Bumped, because this is the moon landing anniversary, and Whittle’s piece is really good).
Archive for 2010
July 20, 2010
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: The S.E.C.’s Fishy Deal With Goldman.
IN NEW JERSEY, a phony “Tea Party” candidate? I expect they’ll be trying this a lot of places.
MICHAEL CANNON: Obama FlipFlops On The Individual Mandate — Again.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Best Of Times. “Seeing Michael Totten on the Pajamas Media Express blog line-up makes me feel like I’m in good company. Yet it also carries with it a realization of how much the weblog scene has changed.”
Related: Celebrating My 10th Blogiversary.
“CALL THEM RACISTS:” JournoList Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.
In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” . . . Thomas Schaller, a columnist for the Baltimore Sun as well as a political science professor, upped the ante from there. In a post with the subject header, “why don’t we use the power of this list to do something about the debate?” Schaller proposed coordinating a “smart statement expressing disgust” at the questions Gibson and Stephanopoulos had posed to Obama.
“It would create quite a stir, I bet, and be a warning against future behavior of the sort,” Schaller wrote.
Tomasky approved. “YES. A thousand times yes,” he exclaimed. . . . Hayes urged his colleagues – especially the straight news reporters who were charged with covering the campaign in a neutral way – to bury the Wright scandal. “I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable,” Hayes said.
Read the whole thing. Those who suspected that the media was collaborating to spin the coverage in Obama’s favor were righter than they knew. . . .
UPDATE: Andrew Breitbart: “Yes, But the Reporters at Pravda Weren’t Such Insufferable Assholes.” Plus this: “The only way that the media will recover from the horrifying discoveries found in the Journolist is to investigate and investigate until every guilty reporter, professor and institution is laid bare begging America for forgiveness. Will they do it?”
LIVING ON THE MOON.
ANGELO CODEVILLA’S “GOVERNING CLASS” WON’T LIKE THIS: Now there’s a Tea Party Caucus.
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Why the Left Shouldn’t Defend the New Black Panther Dismissal.
BELLESILES UPDATE: Chronicle Review Admits Bellesiles’s Story is False — Blames Student, not Bellesiles. Bellesiles is a demonstrated scholarly fraud, and doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt that many people are giving him. Once you’ve been busted for making stuff up, you need to be sure that what you publish is reasonably accurate. Bellesiles illustrates, once again, that he cares more about the narrative than about being sure his facts are correct, though I suppose that passing on other people’s fabrications is arguably a modest improvement over creating his own.
ONE PERSON’S GUIDE TO passing the bar with minimal effort? But wait — who is the hard-studying law student in the photo? You might recognize her . . . .
Related: Emory Law Student Lament: ‘We don’t need donuts, we need jobs.’ More evidence of a higher-education bubble?
Also: Even U.S. News Suggests Law School Tuition Is Getting Ridiculous.
WHY THE HEALTHCARE MANDATE IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL, if it is a tax. “In brief, the argument is: The tax is not an excise tax, and it could not be a constitutional excise tax because it is not uniform. The tax is not an income tax, and it could not be a constitutional income tax, because it is not a tax on derived income. Accordingly, the tax must be a capitation or direct tax. Article I, section 9 provides: ‘No capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.’ The tax is not apportioned, and therefore is contrary to Article I, section 9.” That’s how it looked to me, too.
DAN CLEARY: “So here we have irrefutable video evidence of institutional racial discrimination, and it gets a round of applause from the NAACP – and also goes unreported for four months until Andrew Breitbart finally brings it to light. Yes, this is the same NAACP that cheered Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee as she smeared the Tea Party as a neo-KKK outfit.”
THE OPIATE OF THE dopamine-dependent blogger.
PETER SUDERMAN: “Sure, the big spenders running Congress and the White House have had a little too much fun with the national credit card. But is their opposition likely to be any more frugal? Occasional politically convenient bouts of deficit-intolerance aside, it’s increasingly tough to hold out much hope for the GOP on the deficit-reduction front. Not when the GOP’s top man in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, backs up fellow Republican Senator Jon Kyl in saying that tax cuts don’t reduce revenue and never need to be offset with spending cuts. And not when two other GOP Senators answer questions about how they’ll cut the deficit a lot like Lost’s producers answered questions about the four-toed statue and the smoke monster: We promise we have a plan—you’ll just have to trust us. . . . Gridlock may offer the best possible solution—the surpluses of the Clinton years came as Washington started arguing more and spending less—but if this sort of pandering and evasion is what the GOP has to offer, it’s probably worth asking: How long can you gripe about deficits without being willing to even talk about possible specific ways to reduce them? A number of Senate Republicans seem determined to help us find out.”
ONLY IF HE’S REALLY INSECURE ABOUT HIS CHEST: Should you get breast implants for your boyfriend? Oh, wait . . . .
DON SURBER: A letter from Michelle Obama.
IT’S A CLOWN SHOW: TARP Inspector General: Obama’s GM/Chrysler Moves Needlessly Accelerated Job Losses.
President Obama’s push for General Motors and Chrysler to close thousands of dealerships across the country as part of their government bailouts “may have substantially contributed to the shuttering of thousands of small businesses and thereby potentially adding tens of thousands of workers to the already lengthy unemployment rolls, all based on a theory and without sufficient consideration of the decisions’ broader economic impacts.”
Obama is a job-killer, it seems. At least when it comes to private-sector jobs.
July 19, 2010
POWER LINE: An Open Letter To Matt Bai.
ROBERT BLUEY: Bobby Jindal’s Plan.
RACIST, FIRED: USDA Official In Breitbart Video Goes Under The Bus.
Meanwhile, Breitbart promises more to come.
MOE LANE: Meet Mike Griffing. “As you recall, this guy was slapping at cameramen at a California Nurses Association (CNA) anti-Meg Whitman rally the other day. At least, this guy was until he came to the belated realization that he was getting filmed by two different people. Well, it turns out that he’s not a nurse. Or, at least, not just a nurse. Say hi to Mike Griffing. . . . Seriously, this would be bad enough if Griffing was just some rank-and-file sorehead with a head full of misplaced entitlement and an eagerness to engage in aggressively antisocial behavior in a quasi-acceptable manner. But if he’s part of the leadership cadre… well. That’s a problem. One that his organization needs to deal with, quickly. Before he lashes out again.”