IRA STOLL: The New York Times’ Hypocrisy on Tax Loopholes: The paper goes after Ronald S. Lauder for the sins of the Sulzbergers. “What’s really galling, though, is that in nearly every instance, the ‘tax avoidance techniques’ and other supposed sins for which the Times mauls Mr. Lauder are also engaged in by the family that owns the New York Times. . . . If the Times wants to start campaigning for tax reform that would simplify the tax code, I’d be first in line, maybe second behind Ronald Lauder. But what this story seems to be about is not that, but rather an effort to single out Mr. Lauder alone, out of all the high-net-worth individuals in the entire country, for negative scrutiny. He doesn’t deserve it any more than the family that owns the New York Times does.”
Archive for 2011
November 29, 2011
VIDEO: Obama in 2006: I ‘stole’ book title ‘Audacity of Hope’ from Rev. Wright, ‘my pastor.’ Where was this stuff during the 2008 campaign?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Three Reasons Why Colleges Are Oversubscribed.
IF I HAD A COUNTRY OF MY OWN, MY EMBASSY IN IRAN WOULD STOCK FLAMETHROWERS: Iranian protesters storm UK compound in Tehran. And have an alligator-filled moat.
UPDATE: Reader Jesse Cole says you can see just the thing at about 21 seconds into this trailer for the new season of Sons of Guns. A great show!
DEATH SPIRAL? Italian Borrowing Costs Reach New Heights. “Italy paid a record euro-era yield of 7.56pc on its ten-year bonds at auction today as investors continued to question the country’s long-term solvency.”
UPDATE: Pressure builds as eurozone ponders debt solutions. “With Italy sinking rapidly into financial chaos, the eurozone’s 17 finance ministers scrambled Tuesday to find enough money to give their rescue fund a veneer of credibility and world markets some reason to believe their embattled currency won’t break up.” That’s the AP lede. . . .
SUSANNAH BRESLIN blogs about her breasts. The blogging is good. The news, not so much.
BARNEY FRANK’S EXIT sets off a scramble.
Plus: “The open secret is that, as a congressman, Barney Frank has been wrong about almost every major policy in his long public career. From Reaganomics to Obamacare, his predictions of future performance have been wildly, embarrassingly off the mark. When he’s attempted to lead, he’s almost always taken off in the worst direction.”
JOHN HINDERAKER: The Great Job Massacre.
NLRB PLANS FOR its own Zombie Apocalypse.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: New York Times Slimes Romney.
Here at Via Meadia, we have written extensively about how reports of impending American theocracy have been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, put into historical perspective, the religious forces acting upon American politics today are far gentler than those of generations past. But it appears that the New York Times remains unconvinced, as evidenced by a recent spate of alarmist editorials about the faith of Mitt Romney.
This is not about Governor Romney, and it is not about the faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS). Via Meadia takes no view at this early stage about the merits or demerits of the various candidates, and our inveterate Anglicanism gets in the way of embracing the Mormon faith. But bigotry is something that needs to be fought in all its forms; unreasonable fears and prejudices based on religion will always be with us, but such fears belong in the gutter among the wackos, the haters and the tin-foil hat brigades on both the right and the left. When they rise from the sewers and the swamps into mainstream publications and can be casually uttered in polite company by distinguished professors, something is going very wrong, and people who believe in the American way need to speak up. . . .
As far as I can make out, Professor Bloom is more elitist misanthrope than bigot; his hatred and loathing for Mormonism is part of a broader and deeper disgust with almost everything that the common people think or do in the contemporary United States. The essay drips with condescension and disdain; he hates and fears the Mormons not because they are different from most of their fellow citizens but because they are like them. . . . I say nothing about the motives of Professor Bloom or the New York Times. But so far as I know, neither has ever expressed any concern over the stout Mormon faith of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
I have a comment and a question. Comment: The New York Times would never spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about a Muslim candidate’s religion in this fashion. Question: When George Romney ran in 1968, was the New York Times fretting about his Mormonism?
UPDATE: Reader John Ward emails: “I don’t recall the NYT having a fit when Mo Udall was running for the Democrat nomination for president.” I guess only Republican Mormons are scary.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Burke writes:
I worked in Udall’s New York Presidential campaign in 1975-1976 (after my earlier choice, Birch Bayh, dropped out). Trust me when I say that no one among New York Democrats ever said, boo, about Udall being a Mormon, even though a host of candidates were competing furiously for support within the party (Udall, Bayh, Fred Harris, Scoop Jackson, Jimmy Carter). All these candidates were grilled closely and frequently about where they had stood on the war, where they stood on amnesty for draft resisters, what they had done to block Nixon’s Supreme Court nominations, and dozens of other then-current issues. This questioning took place in living rooms and Democratic clubs with small groups. I was deeply involved in all of this from mid-1975 when Bayh began to line up NY support. I must say that I don’t even recall being aware of Udall’s being a Mormon, although it is a long time ago. I certainly would recall if anyone had made an issue of it (I remember clearly the shades of differences the candidates had on other matters).
Sad to see the NYT becoming so much more bigoted than it was a generation ago.
WHO’S NEXT ON OBAMA’S HIT LIST? “Letterman: President Obama is having a pretty good year. First, he got Osama bin Laden. Then Moammar Gadhafi. Next up Robert Wagner.”
ERIC SCHEIE: The War Between the Useless and the Useful. Guess which side Obama’s taken?
Bear in mind that the group that is being jettisoned was once the backbone of the Democratic Party, just as the big business/country club sets were once the backbone of the Republican Party.
I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but from what I’ve seen around here, the white working class is quite used to feeling abandoned. Liberals are seen as the sort of people who would never get their hands dirty and who disdain blue collar jobs of any kind, instead gravitating towards elite positions at universities or jobs in government or public policy where they can tell their inferiors what to do. While the universities are filled with the latter, local community colleges are inundated with white working class kids seeking to obtain for themselves what they failed to get from the public schools: basic literacy and numeracy — and job skills which are of actual use in the real world.
Aside from the irony that anyone with a high school degree should have to go to college in order to learn to read and write, a perfect example of a valuable real-world skill is welding. Public school teachers (who reflect the view of the educrat class) tend to hold such “dirty” and “dangerous” work in disdain, and they steer kids away from it. Guidance counselors attempt to push them into universities where they go into a lifetime of debt for worthless degrees that impart zero job skills. But some of the kids are smarter than that. They realize that if you have a skill that is worth something in the real world, you can actually feed your family.
They also know something that the Occupy movement (often holders of useless degrees) has missed: that the educational system’s institutional bias against promoting real world skills has led to shortages — in some instances not of jobs, but of skilled workers to fill them. Such as welders. Jay Leno explains.
But you’ll have to follow the link to see Jay.
WITH BARNEY FRANK’S DEPARTURE, FANNIE & FREDDIE LOSE A FRIEND:
Rep. Barney Frank’s Monday decision to retire will remove one of the staunchest defenders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — and may replace the Massachusetts Democrat with an even stauncher defender, California Rep. Maxine Waters. . . . Waters, who has represented South Los Angeles since 1990, has viewed Freddie and Fannie as key to serving low-income housing needs. In a 2003 hearing, she denied that anything at all was amiss with the mortgage giants.
“We do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and in particular at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Raines,” she said. She applauded the expansion of its activities too.
In fact, the highly leveraged giants were swollen with subprime loans, which began defaulting when the housing bubble burst in 2007. By 2008, the federal government had to step in.
Technically private, the companies had long benefited from an implicit government guarantee. The housing crisis made that explicit. So far, taxpayers have had to bail out Freddie and Fannie to the tune of about $154 billion.
Waters has been the subject of an ethics probe relating to a meeting she set up with top Treasury officials to help save a minority-owned bank. Her husband was a bank director and shareholder. She has denied any wrongdoing.
I remember when “Insane Clown Posse” was just the name of a band, and not a description of our political class.
AT ZEROHEDGE, A POST ON THE FUTURE OF JOBS. Key bit: “The U.S. economy has bifurcated into a two-tiered regulatory structure. Politically powerful industries such as finance, education, health care, oil/natural gas, and defense benefit from either loophole-riddled regulation or regulation that effectively erects walls that limit smaller competitors from challenging the dominant players. Enterprises outside this politically protected circle are treated as adversaries by state and local government regulatory agencies.”
Plus this: “Delegitimization. The politically protected industries of government, education, health care, and national security are increasingly viewed as needlessly costly, top-heavy, inefficient, or failing. Supporting them with ever-increasing debt is widely viewed as irresponsible. Cultural faith in large-scale institutions as ‘solutions’ is eroding, as is the confidence that a four-year college education is a key to financial security.”
November 28, 2011
JOHN HINDERAKER: More On ClimateGate II.
YES, THIS IS SCARY: ‘Anthrax isn’t scary at all compared to this’: Man-made flu virus with potential to wipe out many millions if it ever escaped is created in research lab. “A group of scientists is pushing to publish research about how they created a man-made flu virus that could potentially wipe out civilisation. The deadly virus is a genetically tweaked version of the H5N1 bird flu strain, but is far more infectious and could pass easily between millions of people at a time.”
Years ago, I — and Sen. Bill Frist — talked about the need for a major project for rapid vaccine development to deal with these kinds of threats. So far as I know, nothing was done. This might be a wakeup call. . . .
Some background here. And here’s a column I wrote for TCS Daily. That was 5 years ago. The problem has only gotten worse.
TODAY ONLY: KitchenAid Stand Mixers for $259.99. (Bumped, because it’s a deal.)
HOW’S THAT “SMART POWER” STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? General: Worst U.S. image in Pakistan ever. “President Obama promised to restore the international image of the United States, but the recent NATO airstrike that killed Pakistani soldiers comes as a historic setback, at least in Pakistan.”
AND A CERTAIN “TRUE CONSERVATIVE” BLOGGER’S HEAD EXPLODES: Sarah Palin: I’m Thankful For Trig.
CLIMATEGATE AND Goldman, Sachs?
PROF. DONALD DOUGLAS takes a stand against bigotry.
HAS THE GAO BEEN COMPROMISED? Obama administration, GAO appear to have ignored group’s ACORN affiliation to award $700K. “The Obama administration has awarded more than $700,000 in taxpayer funds to AHCOA despite a 2010 law stipulating that no taxpayer funds could be awarded to ACORN ‘or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, or allied organizations.'”
DAVE PRICE: PIIGs and Troughs. “The problem is, no one believes the PIIGS will keep their promises.”