INSTAVISION: I talk with science fiction writer Sarah Hoyt, author of Darkship Thieves, about space aliens, human nature, and dictatorship in literature and real life.
Archive for 2011
January 13, 2011
WHERE’S THAT SERIOUSNESS ABOUT ALTERNATIVE ENERGY? Cape Wind Bogged Down In Lawsuits.
TAX DEATH SPIRAL: Tax increase has Illinois businesses looking across borders.
DANIEL HENNINGER: Why The Left Lost It: The accusation that the tea parties were linked to the Tucson murders is the product of calculation and genuine belief. Though not necessarily both in the same individuals.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Initial Jobless Claims Up Sharply. “Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance rose by 35,000 last week to 445,000 (last week was also revised up by 1,000, so one could see it as a 36,000 increase). This was much worse than the expected level of 415,000.”
Also: “The number of Americans filing unemployment claims unexpectedly rose last week, the Labor Department said early Thursday.”
AT THE PENTAGON, screening troops’ DNA to see who’s suitable for combat operations?
PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE ASKS: Do the pro-Obamacare Constitutional Lawyers See Any Limit on Government Power?
REALLY, don’t discuss confidential business matters on a crowded train.
UPDATE: Ed Driscoll emails with a reminder that talking campaign strategy on a crowded airplane is a bad idea, too. Ah, the pre-Hurricane Gustav gloating.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What is the plural of “Prius?”
“It might be Prii, Priuses, Prium, Prien or just Prius.” I’m going with “Prii” just to be pedantic.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Using nanoparticles to lessen prostate cancer drug side effects.
PREDICTION: Antitrust Policy Between Now and 2025.
TEXAS GOV. RICK PERRY has joined the blogging crew at the PJ Tatler.
IN THE MAIL: From my colleague Ben Barton, The Lawyer-Judge Bias in the American Legal System.
NICK GILLESPIE: Palin’s Not Complicit in Loughner Shooting, but She Sure Ain’t Presidential, Either. Has any other public figure ever had to try to act “Presidential,” though, while being accused of complicity in mass murder?
On the other hand, if (as isn’t clear to me) she actually wants to be President, she’ll have to learn to be Presidential. Barack Obama has had his problems in that department, too, and unlike Palin, he’s had the benefit of a desperately supportive and eager-to-please mainstream media.
Palin, on the other hand, has been royally screwed-over by that same media, and has managed to come back and beat them out again and again, from “death panels” to “blood libel.” And that engenders considerable sympathy. A musician friend of mine who’s not especially political emailed me the other day: “I don’t particularly care for Palin, but every time they do this to her, I find myself hoping she becomes President, out of pure spite.”
I understand the sentiment, but being screwed over by the media, while it may breed sympathy, isn’t a qualification for being President. Richard Jewell was royally screwed over by the media, too, but he didn’t belong in the White House because of it. if Palin is to be elected President, it’s not going to be on a sympathy vote.
But here’s what’s going on in the dance between Palin and what she calls the “lamestream” media: Every time they attack her, they wind up doing something that hurts them worse than it hurts her. She may not become President, and she may not even want to be President — though, regardless, it’s in her interest to keep everyone guessing as long as possible — but with little more than an Internet connection and Facebook she’s done more lasting harm to their position than anybody else. Last night Barack Obama threw them under the bus over the whole “rhetoric” question, just hours after she had managed to work them into a snarling frenzy with an Internet video. Even though it’s hurting them, they can’t — and I mean, literally, psychologically can’t — leave her alone. And she’s getting rich the whole time.
So I don’t know about “Presidential,” but who’s dumb, here?
DEAR DEFAMED: Trust Us, We’re The Government. “With the release of a new report analyzing a quietly amended Government Accountability Office study that’s been used to club for-profit colleges, fear of GAO bias has reached a fever pitch. Sadly, the GAO’s response to the report does anything but assuage that fear. To get a decent sense for the government abuse both surrounding, and possibly perpetrated by, the GAO study in question, it’s worth a quick rehash of events. . . . You don’t have to suffer from tinfoil-hat paranoia to see real and potential government abuse all over this sorry episode. First, opportunist politicians and others misused the initial GAO report to smear the whole for-profit sector. Then, once the damage was done, the GAO made significant changes to their report without even so much as issuing a press release. And now, as even the amended report is being ripped to shreds, the GAO’s response is basically ‘you can’t have access to the evidence being used against you, and you don’t need it: We’ve already decided we’re right and you’re wrong.'”
CIVILITY: Jay Weiser: The Golden No-Vitriol Age Wasn’t So Golden.
Denunciations of media vitriol in the wake of the Tucson shootings look back to an age of civil media discourse. That golden age existed in living memory: the 1960s and 1970s, when the mainstream media almost universally hewed to a belief in professional, objective, neutral journalism. The news industry could enforce this line, since it was more oligopolistic than at any time before or since. Most cities had only a few dominant newspapers. Television penetrated about 90% of American homes by the late 1950s, and the classic era of network television news began in September 1963, when the Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC and the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite expanded from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. These newscasts rapidly became the primary news source for most Americans. No cable news, no internet.
The result? Two decades of assassinations and assassination attempts against major political figures, starting with JFK just two months after the 30-minute newscasts started, and continuing through Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, George Wallace and Gerald Ford, until culminating with the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt in 1981. The no-vitriol news age featured widespread civil unrest, often politically motivated, including Southern white violence against African-Americans during the Civil Rights era, African-American riots destroying neighborhoods in major cities, and leftist political violence including future Barack Obama associate Bill Ayers’ Weather Underground bombing campaign.
You could even argue that the golden age mainstream media made violence more likely by shutting out marginal voices; but it’s more likely that the tone of the media has little to do with the violent actions of radicals and crazies.
Good point.
PATRICK MCILHERAN: This Time, The People Stood Up. “What’s telling is that these two activists, whipped into frenzy by the prevailing political winds, were moved to run for office. In office, they sought change by seeking to strengthen checks and balances. This is the true tenor of the tea party era.”
TODAY ONLY: 40″ Toshiba LCD TV for $439.
PROF. JACOBSON ON PALIN DEATH-TWEETS: “Why do these people, many of whom are professionals, feel no fear in expressing such death wishes in the open?”
JEFFREY IMMELT’S EFFORTS PAY OFF: Export Assistance for G.E.: “The US is going to match Chinese terms with cut-price export financing for the first time to help General Electric win an order for 150 diesel-electric locomotives from Pakistan.”
WHY THEY’D RATHER TALK ABOUT SARAH PALIN (CONT’D): U.S. On The Way To Losing AAA Credit Rating.
ANALYSIS: What The left Did Wrong:
Why were the last four days a mini-disaster for the swampland of the left? It boils down to: facts, response and time.
Members of the left pounced first and didn’t much care about the facts. Before it was clear just how crazy Jared Loughner is, the left blogosphere and their more high-minded print compatriots were ready to affix blame on their opponents. As the facts emerged, more quickly and thoroughly than ever before in the 24/7, twitter-driven media environment, the narrative fell apart. . . .
The response was unlike anything I have seen since the emergence of the new media. It wasn’t just conservatives that rebutted the left’s narrative, but diligent reporters. We think of “rapid response” as a campaign skill, but in reality that is how pundits, activists, reporters and politicians now react. Because the left’s narrative was so noxious — Sarah Palin or a floating cloud of conservative meanness caused a mass murder — the right was filled with indignation and responded passionately, quickly and effectively. And, meanwhile, in the race to report on the biggest story of the year, the working press furiously disclosed the facts, which, as I noted above, undercut the left’s storyline.
And then there is time. The reason I believe that Obama entirely avoided politics, indeed rebuked the Krugman-Daily Kos narrative, is because he saw the pushing and shoving, read the polls, figured which way the wind was blowing, and steered clear of associating himself with the tone-deaf left. Conversely, because the left couldn’t restrain themselves, they pounced immediately and left a trail of inanity on twitter and websites.
The final lesson for the left is this: for the sake of a second term, the president is willing to throw liberals under the bus. He’s going to undo their economic mantra (by supporting the Bush tax cuts). He is going to undermine their approach to their war on terror (with drones, a long-term commitment to Afghanistan). And he is even going to make the liberal icons — Krugman, the New York Times editorial board, Keith Olbermann and the rest — look like fools. The “paper of record” has revealed, for any doubters, that the truth is the first casualty of its op-ed page.
Ouch.