Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
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Hat tip to blogger friend Rick.
Greg Plum has gotten hold of a memo from the DCCC leadership that says no. No matter how bad our product is, there’s no revolution coming.
Republicans will need to win 39 seats to take back the House. Democrats will win at least four Republican seats (the best opportunities include: LA-02, HI-01, IL-10, DE-AL, FL-25). As a result, the real number of seats Republicans will have to pick up to win a majority is at least 43. To win 43 seats, the NRCC would need to put 70 to 80 seats in play. The NRCC have simply not put that many Republicans seats in play and do not have the resources or caliber of candidates to do so.
They still have a lot to worry about, IMO. Exhibit A: They’re worried! Now, why are they worried? Supposedly we had a revolution back in ‘08, and put some wise, benevolent spiritual leaders in place who have been toppling the old ways and erecting a government that works for “everybody.” The Death Star is all exploded and there’s nothing left to do but dance with the Ewoks on the Endor forest moon.
How could we ever back away from that? Who’d want to? If the policies are the best ones that work “for everybody.”
Well, it seems there is a feeling in the air that the Obama delivery is not equal to the Obama promise:
Last month Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, warned America that without more care being taken it could have a Greece-style debt problem. The president seemed to regard this warning as so self-evidently absurd that he quickly asked Congress for another $50 billion for various social projects. Last week, benefits for the long-term unemployed were extended for another six months at a cost of $34 billion. The health care programme is forecast to cost at least $863 billion. The total deficit this year is to be $1.47 trillion. America’s debt is likely to be $18.5 trillion by 2020, though it will be so low as that only if growth is maintained at 4 per cent: it is currently 3 per cent, and rocky.
Unemployment is 9.5 per cent and forecast to stay there for the time being. There are three million more jobless than when Mr Obama came to power, and unemployment among teenagers is around 25 per cent. The very constituencies to which he made his greatest appeal – the young and the disadvantaged – still suffer. This is despite the $787 billion stimulus programme last year, much of which was sucked into America’s corrupt and inefficient local government system, or did favours for congressmen and senators, or provided wonderful pay days for trade unionists, or in some cases all three at once. The President sought the stimulus on the grounds that it would stop unemployment rising above 8 per cent; so that has been an expensive failure. All Mr Obama appears to have done is wave the money goodbye. Last week, trying not to sound provoked, Mr Bernanke announced that there was “unusual uncertainty” about economic recovery. The dollar fell against sterling and even the euro.
Mr Bernanke wants a renewal of Bush-era tax cuts for people earning over $250,000 a year, which are due to expire on December 31. So do many Democrats, who fear that removing incentives and purchasing power from the better-off will harm recovery by reducing consumption and employment. These are arguments familiar from Britain, about the equally damaging and pointless 50 per cent rate. The response, by Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, is familiar too – the “rich” must take their share of the burden. It is equally specious here; the political importance of bashing the (presumably Republican) wealthy plainly exceeds what is good for the US economy.
What we’re seeing is not so much a discredit to liberal politics, or Mr. Obama, or Keynesian economics — but rather to the idea that government needs to be in the equalization business. Remember the comments to Joe the Plumber? “I just think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody”?
Government cannot do this because government doesn’t have an off switch. It inherently lacks the ability to say “Okay that’s it, you’re not a bad dude anymore because you’ve paid your fair share. You’re not rich anymore, you’re no longer evil, we’ve hired enough women that men no longer enjoy an opprobrious statistical advantage, we can stop subtracting test points from Asian students now.”
The task of equalizing something carries with it an implicit expectation of the ability to monitor; to measure. The story of “civilized” governments identifying specific demographics for a run of gettin’-even-with-em-ism, is much older than the American republic herself. This monitoring, spotting, declaring the equalization to be all fine & good mission-accomplished, is something that has never taken place. In short: All we’ve seen these governments do is identify good guys and bad guys. Assume a comfortable position and let the pummeling begin.
I remember from thirty-two years ago that this is how Carter lost his job. It wasn’t a fiery rage, and it isn’t that in the here & now, against Obama. At least, the feelings are not nearly as inflamed as they were four years ago against George Bush, on the other side.
Rather, there’s just a muted, but palpable, feeling of what can best be described as fatigue. The shopping spree is over. We can’t afford any more of it. And maybe the reason we can’t afford any more of it isn’t quite so much that it’s an overindulgence of a good thing…but that it was just a stupid idea from the very start. We’re waking up. Believing in ourselves. It’s always the first step to really solving a problem, you know.
And you can’t support Obama if you believe in yourself. He’s worked hard for a long time to make Himself the perfect walking incarnation of paternalistic government, the feeling of co-dependency that goes with it, helplessness, and truckloads and truckloads of guilt.
Time to move on.
Blogger friend Phil relates a tale about the Thriller From Wasiller:
Had a conversation with a woman at work today. Apparently she forgot my answer the first time she asked several months ago, but she asked “why is there a picture of Sarah Palin on your wall?”
:
I’m a supporter, I told her. She couldn’t believe it…[She] says she’s not into politics at all and she never voted before she got married…but now she does…get this…to cancel her husband’s vote.She said “I won’t send you my cartoon of her then. You wouldn’t appreciate it.” Then she described it to me. It said something about we didn’t go through X number of years of women’s suffrage to put Sarah Palin in the White House.
I said “I don’t get it, anyway. Is it because if she doesn’t agree with you then she’s not a real woman?” She looked puzzled for a second and replied “Let me think of another way to put it.” and fumbled around for a few seconds.
I said “You can’t, because that’s exactly what they meant.”
What it really, of course, boils down [to] is that [Palin] doesn’t believe in abortion as birth control, she doesn’t sound like most people they know, and she’s way too pretty — and she’s everything women’s suffrage was really about (she was the Governor of a State for crying out loud!) and that pisses them off. She’s supposed to be agnostic…demand a woman’s right to kill her baby at any point during a pregnancy, think that being a wife and a mother is somehow a form of slavery…oh, and she’s supposed to look like Helen Thomas.
I’ve had my own experience dealing with these bitter, crusty females. who are part of the Palin Hater Brigade. And my experiences lead me to believe that last item in Phil’s list is the most important one.
It isn’t political ideology. Not quite so much. Think about it…a man who is aspiring for high public office, or has maybe achieved it, holds opinions about things that do not like. How do they feel about this? If that man is George W. Bush and they happen to be really excited about liberal politics, maybe they’ll launch their blood pressure into the stratosphere at the mention of his name, just as they do at the mention of Palin’s. But other than that, no. If they’re not that much into politics, just leaning left, receiving the newsletters from the DNC at home, feeling somewhat strongly about “woman’s right to choose” but regretting that abortion has to happen anyway…just another white straight conservative Christian male isn’t going to launch them into a frenzy. He’ll just be a dick, as far as they’re concerned. He will be a mild irritation. He won’t turn their faces purple. He won’t make veins stick out of their necks. He won’t send them into a sputtering fit.
Not like Sarah Palin.
In fact, I venture to guess given enough time, I can find a few conservative, Christian, Republican people who agree with Sarah Palin…I’m talking here about women, mind you…who are just as angry with her as the Birkenstock-wearing liberal hippie flower-child women. Angry over nothing. Political opinions have very little to do with this.
There is a large, and perhaps still growing, contingent of mostly females who believe it’s quite alright for some among their sisters to be prettier than they are. And more powerful. Just not both.
Our current President has had an opportunity to nominate replacements for, what, two Supreme Court vacancies now? And both nominees are ugly toad-like women. You only have to analyze the statistics so long before there is an ugly truth revealed to you: Someone is being satisfied with this unbroken trend. It has to be the case. If you sent me out to find women this homely and unappealing, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I wouldn’t know how to start. Two out of two of our vacant seats on the Supreme Court have to go to homely women? This is what “best qualified” looks like, huh. Yeah. Tell me another.
It shouldn’t come as news to anybody who’s been around the block, that women are jealous creatures. My theory about this is that there is a curvalinear relationship. It’s rather like children pushing miniaturized shopper-in-training grocery carts when you run in to the store to buy a gallon of milk: Two unattended children pushing these wagons from hell into your ankles, are together four times as obnoxious as just one. Three such children would leave your ankles nine times as bruised.
My thinking is that among women reviewing the situation, another woman who possesses both authority and beauty is like mixing the rocket fuel and liquid oxygen together. The situation becomes much more explosive than it would be if she had one of these qualities but was missing the other.
There’s a code-of-honor taking place to reinforce this, which Palin is violating it seems. And for better or for worse, it seems this leaves me without other data points I can use to test my theory — I don’t know of any other women accepting or pursuiing positions of real authority, who are gorgeous and strutting around. So I cannot make a comparison there. But I can make a comparison to men. There is something going on with the fellas.
They have a different curve. Like I said over at Phil’s place:
Males, on the liberal side of the fence, can be as pretty or as homely as they like. It does seem that if you want to run for President, you have to be somewhat pleasing to the eye. Henry Waxman won’t be running for President.
So with real power, among liberals, men have to be at least as handsome as John Kerry, and women have to be at least as homely looking as Hillary. Outside of that, you need to accept some constraints on your power, as must we all really. Unless you are in a position to provide indeterminate benefit to the progressive cause, like Barry & His pals. Then, you can be a sultan, with a nation assembled solely for your pleasure. Tell the lesser mortals to conserve on their carbon emissions and vacation in the gulf, then take off for Maine, with your family dog in a separate jet. The sky’s the limit. It’s all good.
Now let’s just get one thing clear here: I cannot explain any of this. I’m just making observations, gathering data, plotting points, trying to make sense of it all. You’ll have to look to our collectivist-minded and our left-wingers to figure out what’s really going on here.
But I do think we should get it straight who’s keeping women under a “glass ceiling” here. It isn’t the political right. And it isn’t men, for the most part.
Patrick H. Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal:
President Obama’s Inaugural was a hopeful day, with an estimated 1.8 million people on the National Mall celebrating the election of America’s first African-American president. The level of enthusiasm, the anticipation and the promise of something better could not have been more palpable.
And yet, it has not been realized. Not at all.
Rather than being a unifier, Mr. Obama has divided America on the basis of race, class and partisanship. Moreover, his cynical approach to governance has encouraged his allies to pursue a similar strategy of racially divisive politics on his behalf.
:
The first hint that as president Mr. Obama would be willing to interject race into the political dialogue came last July, when he jumped to conclusions about the confrontation between Harvard Prof. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates and the Cambridge police.During a press conference, the president said that the “Cambridge police acted stupidly,” and he went on to link the arrest with the “long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”
In truth, the Gates incident appears to have had nothing to do with race—a Cambridge review committee that investigated the incident ruled on June 30 that there was fault on both sides.
Well, the review committee got it half right.
They were playing to a modern mindset that says when persons of disparate race are involved in a disagreement that spirals out of control in any way, the person with darker skin must be found unconditionally blameless. These mobsters are being manipulated, in turn, by a swaggering elite that seeks to enslave the melanin-enhanced as well as the melanin-challenged, with a dysfunctional protocol that says skin color decides guilt & innocence. “Fault on both sides” was a concession to this anarchy, and it brought the anarchists an important victory: If you’re a white cop, avoid these confrontations in the first place. It’s the only way you can come out ahead. Pretend something’s wrong with your radio and you can’t hear the dispatcher.
But back to the President, since it’s a much more serious charge that this racial division goes all the way to the top.
It isn’t accidental. Listen to Obama talk about something that doesn’t have to do with race: I, I, I, Me, Me, I, I, Me, I just think, seems to Me, Michelle & I, I, I, I, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me. The subject shifts to race, and all of a sudden it’s we, we, we, we, America, Ms. Sherrod, bloggers, talk shows, Cambridge police, we. He stops talking about Himself, because He’s cataloging sins…things that have been done wrong. When that happens, He isn’t part of us anymore. Suddenly, He can grind out entire paragraphs without mentioning Himself one single time. He’ll re-join us when the lecturing is done. Then He’ll be happy to tell us, once again, what He thinks about things.
So our President is a divisive agent, a willfully divisive one, and not only does he see race as part of the division He seeks to deploy, but He has a carefully laid-out and executed strategy in place for dividing us along racial lines. He seeks to remedy & heal nothing. But it isn’t just about race. It’s also about money. Have you listened to this “full” video clip of Shirley Sherrod’s speech to the NAACP? I’m using scare quotes because there’s still some editing that’s been going on. But the point is this: It started out being about race, how a woman of color found herself approached for her legal assistance by a farmer of pallor. She didn’t apply the full force of what she could do for him, feeling that he should be helped but only by his own kind. The longer, 43-minute version becomes relevant because the speech is revealed as a “Grinch” story; the protagonist realizes her way of thinking about things is wrong, she reforms, and she does things she would not have done if she had not reformed. The speech was about this reformation, which is why there is such anger about the posting of the abridged version.
But why did she reform? I’ve seen lots of leftists subjected to this spiritual awakening, and it isn’t permanent, one-way, or spiritual. In my case, they’ve gone back and forth, and with the wisdom of hindsight I’ve come to realize something: What they were trying to decide, was whether or not I was a “mark.” Was I desperate enough yet that, if they short-circuited some rules to “help” me, would I give them my soul. This is the true face of the progressive movement: Put the non-producers in charge of figuring out how the goods and services are allocated, and if enough people are in desperate circumstances & stand to benefit from your little modern Bolshevik revolution, they will help you do this and you will succeed. You cannot succeed without them. This is how Shirley Sherrod saw that white farmer. She changed her mind about him. As his plight became more and more desperate, she figured out how he would come in handy.
This is a perfect illustration of Obama’s agenda. He is not a unifier because He cannot ever be one. He’s had a long time to enhance, rather than diminish, the control exerted over the production of things by those who do the producing; He hasn’t taken advantage of that opportunity one single time. Every move He has made has been to put the non-producers in charge. And ultimately, you have to drive wedges in order to do that. You have to have class envy. If we all have the feeling that we’re in the same boat, then our natural inclination is going to be to let the producers have the control that belongs to them, so the rest of us can benefit. To shift the wealth to the non-producers, you need to subvert the natural order of things, and you need to achieve broad interest in altering that natural course. Get the message out that the non-producers are the only ones interested in bringing a benefit to others across class lines. You need to spread a myth: Money makes a person naturally mean and selfish, unless the money a person has is money that came from somebody else, then that person becomes virtuous, egalitarian and civilized. Our poor, and the thieves who steal what they give to the poor, are the only enlightened beings in our society, or in any other. That is the Obama agenda and that is the Obama propaganda drive.
So anybody waiting for Obama to be any kind of unifier, is in for a long wait.
Partial hat tip to Irish Cicero, since I already had this in my “stack” when I was following a trackback to his place where he was talking about me…when I scrolled down I saw he already did a decent write-up about this.
You know, it would make a decent bumper sticker wouldn’t it:
Can We Elect a Black President Who’s Not Quite So Communist-ey?
We got Boortzlanched this morning sometime between 5:30 and 6:00.
Our all-time record of daily hits, before this, was 14,650 or something in that neighborhood. February 2009, right after the first State of the Union speech by His Holy Eminence, we had put together a handy Venn Diagram to show what we thought of it. Which caught an Instalanche.
Today’s results, in web page hits and page views, compared to the month previous, look like this:
That’s a new record: 16,266 hits as of now, it’s 11:30 and I’m going to bed. My ass has been hurting me all day.
Not really caring too much about the traffic, but looking forward to making the new friends.
Update 7/28/10: Irish Cicero sends congratulations for reaching this milestone.
There are currently only 232 million IP addresses left — enough for about 340 days — thanks to the explosion in smartphones and other web-enabled devices.
“When the IPv4 protocol was developed 30 years ago, it seemed to be a reasonable attempt at providing enough addresses,” carrier relations manager at Australian internet service provider (ISP) Internode John Lindsay told the Herald.
“Bearing in mind that at that point personal computers didn’t really exist, the idea that mobile phones might want an IP address hadn’t occurred to anybody because mobile phones hadn’t been invented [and] the idea that air-conditioners and refrigerators might want them was utterly ludicrous.”
Nothing sells quite like the next Apocalypse.
Up until late summer of ‘05, I put in a recurring headline called “Look At Me, I Can’t Park For Shit“. Back in those days, The Blog That Nobody Reads really was exactly that, so it was probably harmless to put one of George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words right in the large-font headline.
Nowadays, there are more nobodies, so in a spirit of consideration and cooperation, we make a point of keeping the headlines clean…and pulling the spicy language down in the small-font body of the post where it fucking belongs.
And we haven’t had any “Look At Me I Can’t Park For Shit” posts in all these years. Almost five years now. Why is that? Because it was a passing phase? No…here is the spooky part. We’ve been out there with our little cell-phone camera looking for transgressions. Not as a primary purpose in our peregrinations mind you. But we have been looking. Something’s happened. People aren’t parking like fucking morons anymore. Maybe, just maybe, they’re trembling in fear of The Blog That Nobody Reads. Minding their P’s and Q’s.
Until this weekend that is.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Just so brazen and in-your-face.
For the record: You can sort of tell in this shot, but I’ll clue you in anyway. There was not plenty of parking to go around. It was a scarce commodity. People were having to park way far away, and walk & walk & walk some more, and you could tell they were pissed about it and not just a little bit desperate.
Wasn’t my problem, I already had my spot. But in my mind’s eye, this scene replayed…
Blogger friend Daphne loves her all to pieces.
We all have stories to tell, hers are peculiarly Southern and like most of our mixed racial tales told south of the Maxon-Dixon line, they’re tinged with a streak regrettable sadness. Black people didn’t get anywhere near a fair shake under Southern skies before the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, admitting that fact means nothing more than acknowledging the truth of the times.
:
I think Andrew Breitbart is a self-aggrandizing, corner cutting, race baiting, money chasing, media whore. Jeffrey Lord is an illiterate asshole and Shirley Sherrod doesn’t deserve a single day she’s spent under this ugly conservative sun.
Sonic Charmer has a different opinion.
I’m vaguely aware that there’s a controversy surrounding some government employee named Sherrod who was fired because she’s a racist but then she turned out to be not. But I didn’t know the details so I decided to Wiki it.
Reading about the controversy itself, it does seem as if this particular rap against her was unfair.
However, reading about the rest of Shirley Sherrod’s “career”, I think there are much worse things to charge her with:
She and her husband lost their farm when they were unable to secure USDA loans. Sherrod along with other activists sued the USDA in Pigford v. Glickman in order to protect the remaining black farms which were in danger of becoming shut down. The Department agreed to compensation which was to be paid between January 1, 1981 and December 31, 1999. The event was considered as “the largest civil rights settlement in history, with nearly $1 billion being paid to more than 16,000 victims.”
Translation: She wanted the taxpayers to chip in to give her a below-market-rate loan to buy her and her husband a farm. They didn’t. So she sued the taxpayers. She won and got the money from taxpayers. $1 billion distributed among 16,000 people (oh sorry “victims”) equals some $60k per person. Although what do you want to bet that her share was more than the arithmetic mean?
I’m seeing things more Sonic’s way than Daphne’s. Partly because of things like this video (h/t Riehl World View)…
…and partly because I’m sick of being told what to think about people. I’m sick of the sophistry. Yes, Ms. Sherrod’s speech was the polar opposite of what it appeared to be, and her boss Mr. Vilsack — not Andrew Breitbart, not Fox News, but the Secretary himself — overreacted.
Does this mean Shirley Sherrod is a decent person? No. It means Tom Vilsack is a spineless jerk.
More and more, it looks to me like this: Shirley Sherrod spent 43 minutes lying about her motives and what she’s been learning on the job, and Brietbart unfairly played a few bits out of context, the ones where she told the truth about herself.
I’m tired of the duplicity. I’m tired of being told Sarah Palin is malicious because some stalking pervert moved in next door to her. I’m tired of being told just because someone can be called a victim of something and she happens to have dark skin, and a chestless jackal for a former boss, that her motives must be pure.
In fact, there are other crackpots and nutjobs in the mix as well. I’ve had it to here with the “because”-es. I’m fed up with being told Elena Kagan will be a great Associate Justice because she’s funny. Rush Limbaugh is evil because he’s rich. Dick Cheney deserves to die because he ran Halliburton. The Gulf oil spill is in good hands because Stephen Chu has a Nobel prize.
I’m at the Popeye stage with the sophistry; I’ve had all me can stands, and me can’t stands no more.
You put something out there that’s incorrect, or misleading, and there are only two possibilities after that’s found out: You were hoodwinked by someone, or you’re a liar yourself. Well, Brietbart has an iron-clad alibi about the edited video he received. If he was lying about that — if he was in fact the person responsible for whittling this thing down, and giving it an appearance so strikingly at odds with the real intent of Sherrod’s speech — there’s been plenty enough time for that to have been borne out. It hasn’t happened. There isn’t a shred of evidence that Breitbart was complicit in this.
Sherrod, meanwhile, has been helping to spread the word around that Fox News deliberately brought about her dismissal, and she knows better.
She was treated unfairly.
Only those who are withholding the intellectual vigor, or are coming up empty in an attempt to supply it, would infer from that that she’s a nice person. Just because you get the shaft, doesn’t make you a sweetie-pie.
I’ll keep an open mind, but this woman is really setting off a lot of alarms in my head. She fits a profile, and it’s not a skin-color profile. It’s one I would call “Play Dirty But Act Like You’re Playing Nice.”
Because, above all, I’m sick to death of liberals getting caught doing sneaky underhanded things, and then claiming someone conservative was responsible for making them do it. Enough of this. Obama and Vilsack overreacted, Obama and Vilsack can own the problem. For once. Even if Sherrod wants it to work out some other way. It’s their fuck-up.
Wow, don’t go feeling sorry for Marina Orlova. Girl’s got it made.
So much eye candy. Lady in the bikini…boat…lady…boat…lady…boat. I was trying to figure out if this was a private yacht or some kind of small cruise ship she had to share. Doesn’t look to me like she’s sharing it in any way. So she’s doing alright, or else has a sugar daddy in which case she’s doing alright.
This looks exactly like the beginning of Tomb Raider: Underworld. Except I think Lara Croft’s boat was diminutive by comparison.
And is that a picture of Bowser stuck on a Mac PowerBook?
In Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg makes the point that the word “fascism” is actually credited with very little by way of useful definition, and when one seeks to imbue the word with such a useful definition one runs into the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle — the object of study changes in its properties, either in reality or in measurement, as it is studied.
Nevertheless, on page 23 he offers a definition so that the discussion can commence:
Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the “problem” and therefore defined as the enemy.
As I continued onward with the book, I thought back on this definition exactly as Goldberg intended, but I had another thought that he perhaps did not intend for me to have. The definition is slightly inadequate.
I see a mostly uninterrupted pattern, in which each fascist movement is an offering by one particular charismatic individual, usually a male. His wit, speechifying, masculinity, drive and flair are thrown in to every discussion about his ideas, as replacements for any logical demonstration that his ideas might make sense. To put it another way — nobody can construct a rational argument that his ideas have potential to bring about the desired results, and so wherever his apologists enjoy any representation at all, the discourse dissolves into a sloppy, childish exchange of observations about how good he is at talking to large numbers of people. This seems to be a constant in all fascist governments, the charisma of the dictator.
A few months ago we called it Obamalarkey:
Rhetorical defense of a dumbass idea, offered by subtly re-directing the discourse from the merits and weaknesses of the idea itself, toward the appealing but meaningless attributes of the personality most prominently associated with it.
As Goldberg points out, as this particular subject is poked and prodded a little bit more, it loses composition and becomes more difficult to define. But like I said, I wish he covered this part of it since it seems to be an integral component. Fascist leaders, generally, are not boring & dull. To achieve the minimal requirements of the dictator gig, they must demonstrate an ability to sell things contrary to the long-term interests of the buyer.
It seems almost medieval. King’s counselors rush up to him and say, Your Majesty! The royal coffers are nearly empty! Whaddya talking about, says the King, my country is very wealthy. All those farms with all those crops…they’re mine. I Am The State.
You know, I thought we had some kind of a revolution to do away with that kind of thinking.
I find it rather ominous: The one sequence of words you can string together to prove to your kids and grandkids that you’re senile, and have probably been batshit crazy for a good long time, is the one truth that has become more and more obvious to me as I get older: The commies are takin’ over. I’m now reaching the point where it is becoming undeniable, so maybe the time has come to check into assisted living facilities. Because from my point of view it seems the evidence is rock-hard and accumulating all around us.
Hat tip again to Smitty.
Cheryl Ladd.
Just because.
Something pretty interesting happened Friday when Neal Boortz made a reference to the November, 2009 “study by J.P. Morgan” that found only seven percent of President Barack Obama’s cabinet has experience in the private sector. You may recall this thing went viral. And, as is usually the case when things go viral, there is much misinformation making its way in, from both the right and the left.
Well, the study itself doesn’t interest me too much. Obama’s cabinet doesn’t know what it’s doing; you don’t need a study telling you that. The evidence is all around us. And common sense should tell you that if there are some smarts in that cabinet, they aren’t going to be of very much use are they? How on earth could they be? Imagine yourself as a high ranking official in the Obama administration. A decision comes along, and what do you do? Answer: You don’t. If you say “peanut butter and jelly” and the Little Emperor says “roast beef on rye” you look like a complete dork. You’ll be backpedaling like crazy, claiming that your remarks were taken out of context — and that’s among your friends, before word even gets out. So no, this isn’t a relevant statistic. For all practical purposes, the experience of this cabinet must be zero percent.
Their Special Guy at the top is just too big and important. With or without Secretary Chu’s coveted Nobel prize, the “Me Too” people don’t count. They are indicators of Chairman Zero’s priorities, nothing more than that.
But I do wish to inspect the debunking. Oh goodness gracious, do read that from top to bottom. It is a fascinating portal into how dedicated liberals “debunk” things.
First of all: The study is bogus, and if you weren’t a simpering moron you’d immediately see the study is bogus, because the math doesn’t work.
Vice President, plus 15 executive department heads, plus six others: 22 people.
If only 10% had private sector experience, that would be 2.2 of them. Each of the 22 people comprises about 4.5% of the cabinet. Two of them with private experience would be 9% of the cabinet. Three with private experience would reveal the chart to be in error. Would it be possible to create a cabinet of 22 people and have only two of them with private experience?
The bullshit detectors in the bloggers’ minds should have been clanging like crazy when they saw that chart. [emphasis in original]
Secondly: J.P. Morgan is a bank. What is a bank doing conducting a study into the resumes of cabinet members?
Well, the article about the study is here.
Michael Cembalest is chief investment officer for JPMorgan Private Bank. The views expressed herein are Cembalest’s and may not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of JPMorgan Private Bank or any of its affiliates.
There is a serious effort here to gather data according to a consistent methodology, and extrapolate meaningful statistics from them. Careless, casual statements like “the chart is a hoax” are, quite plain and simply, wrong.
A hoax is a deliberate attempt to deceive or trick people into believing or accepting something which the hoaxer (the person or group creating the hoax) knows is false.
It is true that the study has been recalled by those who linked it in haste, with perhaps the most representative and thoughtful example provided by Eugene Volokh. The chart could be regarded as misleading, not so much because of bad data or malicious intentions behind it, but because of a strong potential among the readers to misinterpret it.
The rules applied are consistent, but subjective. The headline chosen for Cembalest’s column is “Obama’s Business Blind Spot” and the data support the point Cembalest set out to make: Here we have these real-world problems with our nation’s unemployment situation, and Obama’s tackling them with a bunch of damn professors, P.R. people and lawyers. Their hands are soft. And it is a superlative situation. Cembalest chose a methodology by which each administration could be measured, and was able to produce a data series showing something remarkable about this current one, and indicative of how the administration would view the problem. Therefore, indicative of how it would choose to solve it.
How a bank might be interested in such a thing, should be obvious.
But let’s go on to the debunking blogger’s most pivotal and often-mentioned point, for this is my favorite, and it is probably the most important one in “debunking” the study:
I figure, Rahm Emanuel was a spectacular success at investing. He made roughly $4 million a year, his clients presumably much more. Most people work a lifetime for less than $2 million — so can we credit Emanuel with 8 lifetimes of experience? Why not?
If these bozos don’t want to deal with the facts, they can offer their methodologies, I figure. And if they don’t, it’s probably because their methodologies are unfair and indefensible, so must be hidden.
In any case, a rational person looking for “private sector experience” wouldn’t discount a lawyer’s representation of an historically on-the-border of corrupt company like Chiquita Brands.
:
Geithner was president of one of the largest and most important branches of the Federal Reserve Banking System, in New York. Working with the highest ranking and best recognized foreign economic consulting firm isn’t toothpaste. His time with Kissinger and Associates was golden, not deserving in any way of the denigration you lend to it. It’s like going from college to a team that includes at their peak, Michael Jordon, LeBron James, and Bill Russell — and getting at least significant playing time.I didn’t redefine anything I had. I merely looked at the bios of the people Cembalest claimed didn’t have private sector experience.
:
Chu, who…won a Nobel for his private sector experience, is acknowledged as a genius in the field his department covers, and has more than a decade managing some of the most demanding groups imaginable, including the physics department at Stanford and the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, one of the best-respected masses of 4,000 bright people ever created.
:
Attempts to denigrate the experience of this, one of the best qualified cabinets, tell us more about the size of the critics, than about the qualifications of people like Steven Chu or Hilda Solis. Or, maybe I should say more accurately, the lack of size of the critics.
His argument mostly hinges on this: Lawyers are hard workers because practicing law is really, really tough. And don’t dare contradict him or else he’ll demand your experience practicing law, and discount whatever that experience is rest assured, so you don’t know what you’re talking about. In the comments section you see him coming back to this point again and again and again. Lawyers are golden. Every lawyer in Obama’s cabinet represents lots and lots of “private sector” experience, even if he didn’t work in the private sector. Maybe we should count that guy multiple times. I see it this way, therefore it is Truth.
Well, my own experience practicing law is as short as it can get. But as a voting citizen, when I go through his painstaking summaries of the experience of each cabinet member, nose-by-nose, my confidence in the Obama administration is not bolstered or even recovered. It is diminished. This idea that practicing law should count as private experience — maybe it should count even more than the other stuff! — think of it what you will, but the “debunking” relies almost completely on this.
And that’s the observation I’d like to make here about liberals “debunking” things. Based on the meandering of the presented argument, and their analysis of it, they see things a certain way. And that way of seeing things is local, not global. There is no guarantee of consistency across time with it. For example, if the Republicans put up a couple of experienced lawyers against Obama in 2012, I don’t know that this liberal blogger will go on thinking law experience is all-that-and-a-bag-o-chips. I expect he’d do a hairpin turn, something to the effect of “Yeah, but Obama has grown into the job of President! President beats Lawyer any day!” Or something to that effect.
But even if that doesn’t come to pass, here the weakness in the debunker’s argument becomes a philosophical one. You m-u-s-t see things the debunker’s way. You m-u-s-t agree that practicing law counts as private sector experience…and it must count exactly the way the debunker says it counts. Agree to that, or else you’re just a big ol’ dummy.
That they think this is a solid argument, let alone a debunking, exposes the fact that they really don’t know truth or falsehood when they see it. And it worries me mightily when these are the people who say we need to “sit down with our enemies and talk out our differences with them.” Look how they do the talking. It’s all point…counterpoint…value system…value system…THE VALUE SYSTEMS FACE OFF AND ONE DEVOURS THE OTHER NOW WE MUST MARCH IN COMPLETE LOCKSTEP ON THE VALUE SYSTEM. And then when we get past that, it’s on to the next point. As opposed to point…counterpoint…value system…value system…now since those value systems are not going to change, let’s try to find some real common ground. The latter is the thinking method of reasonable, rational people. The former is the thinking method of tyrants. And small children.
I recognize that when we’re trying to figure out how lawyering counts as private business experience, some number has to be produced and that number has to win, so that it can be applied consistently across the administrations across the generations. But a rational person would have pointed this out and exposed the real weakness with this study — that it is inherently subjective, although it might be reasonably viewed by a casual observer as something different.
Liberals never seem to want to service the casual observer, to give him the benefit of the wisdom he would pick up himself if he were not a casual observer. They always seem to want to write a headline that offers a different twist to the casual observer, and keep him casual. And so they end up writing garbage. The study is a “hoax”…which the casual observer would infer to mean, it didn’t happen, or there’s nuthin’-to-it. That is not the case.
Their world is one in which everyone must value everything and see everything in a uniform way, and those who value things or see things any differently have to be somehow neutralized. I do not want people who think this way, to represent me as they “sit down and talk with” that I’m-A-Dinner-Jacket guy in Iran, or the Gargoyle in North Korea. Because let’s face it, when the “discussion” gets to that one-value-system-gobbles-up-the-other thumb-wrestling contest — I don’t know they’re gonna win.
This makes them the vastly inferior choice for managing both foreign policy and domestic issues. It is their way of seeing the world and all the things within it. It is immature. Nobel prize or not, it is a worldview inadequate for making real decisions.
Yes, way to go Paul.
That would be a good bumper sticker slogan. The motto in Washington already seems to be Rahm Emmanuel’s “never let a crisis go to waste” — if it’s gotta go that way, might as well operate from a real crisis instead of a made-up one.
Greece brought down the Euro. Now, just ponder that. The European Union was chartered and they came up with a currency so they could compete against the dollar as a foreign investment vehicle. (Any kind of a “union” always has a central target in mind, which the union desires to surround horseshoe-style, and destroy; in this case it was us.) The EU achieved a competitive foothold against our currency, with much better results than any single country within could have netted by itself. It worked great, and then Greece tripped it up. That’s our future if we don’t change something. All of the evidence says so.
It’s a powerful argument.
Another thing: Congressman Ryan makes reference to our nation’s founding principles, our founding documents. If you read through Article I of the Constitution where it lays out the responsibilities and authorities of Congress, what you see there is an essay on what a legislative body is supposed to do. From a thirty-thousand-foot level, it is to pass laws and disburse money.
You’ve probably done this yourself. You might sit on some non-profit organization, maybe a band or orchestra for your kids’ school, the PTA…if you haven’t had such an experience, there is your own household. A new expense comes up and if it’s a low priority you’ll probably smack it down. If it’s a high priority, then you go back to these other places where you’ve allocated money, and you change the plans.
And then if someone comes up with more places to spend money, you start to get pissed. You go, waitaminnit…you saw what we just got done doing with this other thing over here. How come you didn’t say a single word about this new thing, then? We could have prioritized it.
And then they do it three more times. Each time waiting for the fancy new plans to be laid in, and then dong their cute little ambush…eventually you have enough and there’s some smack-down. You lay down a moratorium. Something to the effect of, if it isn’t mentioned right here right now, you don’t care enough about it so why should we. There’s no point trying to figure out what has priority over what, if your list isn’t complete.
Now look how this Congress has been operating. It’s going to go down in history in disgrace…and it’s going to go down that way, compared to other congresses, which really says something. Every new expense isn’t greeted with “Goddammit, why didn’t you say something while we were funding Cash for Clunkers? Or Recovery & Reinvestment? Or S&L Bailout?” Nobody has to face the music on any of that…it’s just “Ooh! There’s a way we can pick up some more voters!”
This isn’t going to fly, and it’s not the way the country was set up. Congress is supposed to make decisions on allocating money. That means they are supposed to prioritize, and that means they need to do this in big batches, not one little sales pitch at a time shouting “yes yes yes” at the tops of their lungs like Meg Ryan in the diner scene.
And that is a point that should resonate on both the left and the right. If you see value in some of what the Congress has been funding, you, too, should want it to work this way. Congress should be saying no to some things so that they can say yes to other things.
Hat tip to Smitty.
Very magnanimous and thoughtful of this punkweasel to give that little nod to the First Amendment, as he waxes lyrically about this “gatekeeper” idea.
You knew it was coming, folks. Shirley Sherrod is a perfect wonderful human being now, don’t dare say a word against her — call her “Saint Shirley” — and now that this horrible, dreadful nightmare has descended upon her, we need to go back and do something about these bad, bad bloggers. The “Internet is like this giant bathroom wall” upon which anybody can write anything about anybody. Something must be done! Need a “gatekeeper”!
We’re gearing up for a giant Architects-and-Medicators battle.
I’m putting it in that growing file, because Architects…and we are not a fringe group, we are a goodly sized half of humanity or something approaching half…see it as people doing things, and those things having an effect on other things. Like, DUH. That’s the way the entire universe works.
Just because someone’s late catching on to this, is that a necessity for creating more rules? Well, Architects see it like this; it’s a pretty short discourse. If you’re out-and-out lying you can bring someone some harm, and that is troubling — but we have libel laws, we have slander laws. Okay then. We already have laws. Conversation over.
Medicators, on the other hand, have this primal urge toward more and more regulation and they don’t really care who’s doing the regulating. I’ve often thought maybe they care a lot about not knowing. They want it done by a stranger. There has to be this system of elites and commoners, and most of the Medicators want to be on a first-name basis only with the commoners. They don’t want the responsibility.
So they want all of human activity to go into a great big bell housing, and then everything in the bell housing is affected by some magical focusing lens…which is someone they’ll never actually meet. They’re constantly doing this. All of humankind needs to be arranged into a giant “V”, like a big flock of birds.
We go ahead and do it and the results aren’t any better than they were before — the Medicator does not care.
They just want the ranking system. They care about the process, not about the results. So now I expect they’ll all rally behind this “gatekeeper” idea or something like it. Regulated is better. Until it isn’t. And then, somehow, it still is.
So that’s how I see it. There are people who will support this idea, not because they care about bloggers slandering people but because they absolutely loathe the idea of ordinary people being allowed to influence things. They aren’t terrified of ordinary flawed people like themselves making things worse; they’re terrified of their peers and compatriots of equal stature & rank making things better. That absolutely fills them with dread.
The character of the Medicator really comes out after some massive regulation scheme or social program has already been passed, and its deleterious effects on our lives begins to be felt. And then they invite you in on the massive bitch-fest. We’re sharing an experience, so let’s bitch about it. That’s how they do the medicating. Bitch about the weather, bitch about social security, bitch about the bus not showing up on time.
Mark Steyn commented once about a new slang that has developed in the UK: “It’s health-n-safety gone mad, mate; health-n-safety gone mad!” This is how it works. A new bureaucracy extends its tendrils into our lives, we’re all affected in the same way, life becomes less joyous and we get together and start medicating/bitching. Then come up with some new ideas about the next thing that has to be regulated.
The truth is, these people don’t care about progress, or damage for that matter. All they care about is escape, and what they’re trying to escape is a sense of identity. They want to be part of a comfortably large mass, each man within indistinguishable from the next one, and everything anybody does anywhere is attributable to some all-knowing regulatory busybody that is managed by magical strangers whom they don’t know.
This is not to say we will not find anybody who wants to be the gatekeeper. We will. We’ll find someone just chomping at the bit to become the gatekeeper. That’s the most frightening part of it.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News.
Wise, wise man this is. I can see why they named him after me.
Here, as in all walks of life, the low-drama answer is the only one that works.
Hat tip to blogger friend Rick.
I liked it a lot. But when my girlfriend sent me a text message asking how it was, I had to reply that I liked it just as much as The Pacifier, Big Momma’s House, The Spy Next Door and Tooth Fairy. That would be my one reservation against it; creativity is being short-changed again.
Something is happening to the Doofus Dad movie; it is transforming into the Doofus Stepdad movie. The loner is talented in his own way, fun to watch, and selfish. An “instant family” happens along and hijinks ensue.
There is much more, because this genre is becoming extravagant, complicated and rigid. Something is happening to the children — or rather, to the configuration of children. It is solidifying. Three is becoming a popular number. The oldest is a girl, and there’s a side subplot wrapped up in here because the oldest is coping with the most daunting abandonment issues and she comes ’round last to the idea that New Daddy might be a cool guy. The middle child is more of an incorporation of the entire set, sort of a “straight man.” This could be a male, it really isn’t that important. And then the baby of the family is just plain adorable.
Maybe the three are supposed to be representing something from Freud’s Id, Ego and Superego?
As far as events, well we have New Daddy meeting up with adorable moppets while doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. This juxtaposition, seemingly innocent at first, brings on trouble and then a separation. The story of the separation is intertwined with some performance the little tykes are putting on, and they’ll be just devastated if New Daddy doesn’t show up to watch it. The separation happens before, during or after the performance…to which New Daddy is on time, late, or doesn’t show at all.
So the drama involving the performance takes on all kinds of forms, but it’s gotta be in there somewhere. And that means New Daddy’s attendance has to be an open question.
Be that as it may, it is also a constant that New Daddy’s life seems to be incompatible with the moppets, and/or he does something abysmally stupid that shows his selfish streak. The kids all decide the New Daddy sucks, especially the oldest one (the youngest accepts this only reluctantly or not at all). New Daddy is mad at himself and lonely. But he continues on with his mission, and there’s some madcap adventure at the end during which they’re all pushed back into each other’s arms while the adrenaline is pumping hard, and at the absolute climax the oldest one has to make a choice-that-isn’t-a-choice, finally overcoming her distrust and bonding with New Daddy.
The villain is a complete jackass. He isn’t killed, just badly humiliated. Oh, and also he kidnapped the kids about halfway through. That’s a given. New Daddy has to scowl at the camera and intone something to the effect that nobody but nobody messes with his kids!
Sorry, did I just review this movie or a whole bunch of other ones? I sorta lost track.
We need a word for this. “Trope” doesn’t do it, because a trope is a character trope or a plot trope or a theme trope — this is all three. Let’s call it a “template.” The “How I Became A Family Man” template. Because nobody can pay attention to a story that takes place across nine months anymore.
So now you know what the template is. This one implemented it extremely well. I’d like to see the template retired for good…but since it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, if you have to see one this is probably as good as any.
What makes it superior? The jokes that are aimed at the grown-ups are funnier than usual.
Also, it’s a little tougher for me to beat up on it. The constant in the “How I Became a Family Man” template, and in the Doofus-Dad template as well, is that whatever the father figure is doing when the kids are not, around he needs to stop doing right now. He needs to take on a new life that involves having the kids up his butt all the time, since Lord knows the women have been making do with that for thousands of years. So he needs to cease & desist all non-kid things. Even if that’s working at a job to provide for the family.
In this one, they went out of their way to make the non-kid activity bad stuff. Indeed, the entire project seems to be built around this objective. New Daddy has to stop doing his bad stuff. This is a message to little kids I can support. Although, at the end of the movie, it remains an open question what the world they’re all going to live on…but…that’s the part where you have to say hey, it’s a kid’s movie, don’t sweat the details.
It was with considerable reservation that I conceded the point the 43-minute version of Sherrod’s “unedited” speech (which was in fact edited) delivered a completely different sentiment from the much shorter one that was aired earlier. In view of that, and some other things, I came down hard on Tom Vilsack, the Secretary of Agriculture who fired her.
I stopped short of saying anything good about her character though, and this video makes me glad of that.
Somewhere out there is a democrat talking point that says this: Talk these things up at your heart’s content, make money on your book deals, that’s all fine & good — but make sure at the end of the day that the character of conservatives is impugned. In fact, make sure that’s the case every time you end a sentence and come to a (.) dot.
Had Sherrod taken the time to think this thing out…or if she wasn’t making an effort to talk to morons…she would have seen the strategy runs into some real problems here. Andrew Breitbart received a video. The NAACP saw the same video. They both came to the same conclusion, as did Vilsack. This makes Breitbart a terrible person and the other two parties innocent pawns. How’s that work? Breitbart has gone on the record to say the video was whittled down before it got to him, and I know of no evidence to suggest anything different.
A blogger jumped to a conclusion. A cabinet-level official jumped to the same conclusion, as did an organized advocacy group. Only the blogger is a reprehensible monster. He fooled everybody.
I saw this before, recently. Yes, a number of democrat legislators voted for the AUMF, the Authorization of Use of Military Force in Iraq, so they could look all tough. And then, as if someone said “go!” it was time to be all dovish and anti-war. (Maybe someone really did say it.) Suddenly, it was George W. Bush’s war. He fooled us all. We’re still saying “Somewhere in Texas a village is missing an idiot,” but the idiot fooled us. Those right-wingers. So stupid, and yet successfully fooling everybody. And they never get fooled, oh no. They’re just evil.
Liberals would be able to connect with people so much better if they’d just allow us to make up our own minds about who’s a monster. They must have figured out somewhere they cannot afford to do this.
I took Sherrod’s side in this thing…at least, so far as agreeing the context is changed when you watch the entire video, which is true. Her speech had a point to it, and the point was that we’re all in the same boat when it comes to issues like losing farms and livelihoods, regardless of the color of our skin. Her speech had this point from beginning to end, so in that sense I think she got a raw deal. It’s really undeniable.
However, from about Wednesday on there has arisen a sense that Sherrod, personally, doesn’t really feel this way. She really does see issues as race-based even if they don’t need to be. She’s as racist as anybody else. From that point in time two days ago, I would have characterized this as likely-but-irrelevant. I left it unaddressed because it was not germane to the point, and it was idle speculation. Granting it the benefit of the doubt — Shirley Sherrod is giving a speech saying when we help people we should be race-blind, and she doesn’t personally believe this so she’s standing up there lying. Then her comments are taken out of context and she’s fired. Alright, you may say that’s poetic justice. But it’s still a raw deal, and not just for Sherrod. The people who saw the chopped-down version should still understand what was in the longer version.
But if that’s part of the story, it’s also part of the story that the woman is a liar and a manipulator. To me, we can’t even make it to the question of whether she’s a racist or not. We don’t make it that far, because she’s a democrat party activist and she’s read & chosen to practice this talking point about make-all-conservatives-look-like-monsters. Because her mouth moves faster than her brain, it’s extraordinarily blatant in this case.
One other thing. If you listen to her speech from beginning to end, it is a classic parable. Which means, among other things, there is some learning going on and the learning is worked into the story by having the protagonist practice values at the end diametrically opposed from what was practiced at the beginning. Think of Ebenezer Scrooge. Or Return of the Jedi. It is a tale of redemption.
Well, here is a problem encountered by the faithful left-wingers when they practice their “we’re wonderful because we’re liberals, conservatives are terrible monsters, even if the facts say we all did exactly the same thing” snake-oil. They don’t even know they ran into it, but they ran into it hard.
For forty years or more, they have used this cudgel called “political correctness” to transform our office workplaces into battle fields. During this time, it has been quite accepted, even tragically commonplace, to “Sherrod” innocent people whose remarks really were taken out of context. Breitbart, or whoever edited the video, was working entirely according to these rules. And I believe that was Breitbart’s original point. The underlying premise that validates this is, and I am turning on the bold font here on purpose, that bigotry in any form, even in appearance without substance, is a sin beyond any possible redemption.
I call it the impossible-to-achieve “Could Be Construed As” standard.
Sherrod told a tale of redemption. And it was about real bigotry. Even according to her own words, granting her every benefit of the doubt, it was ancient bigotry but just as real as the screen upon which you’re reading these words.
Is it possible to be redeemed after committing such a sin? This is not a question that can be settled on a case-by-case basis. There has to be a single unified answer handed down that applies equally to everybody.
And if the answer is a yes…or even just a possible yes…then the “Could Be Construed As” standard has to die. Right. Now. If a lucrative legal profession has to die with it, then that’s just too bad but it’s going to have to happen.
Immediately. Everywhere. In the offices, on the campaign trails, in the newsrooms…and in Don Imus’ recording studio. Sorry, Al. You’ll have to go get yourself a real job now.
“Could Be Construed As” has to be taken out. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I insist on it. We may civilly disagree about what Shirley Sherrod does & does not deserve, but we should all agree, without any reservation or any need for additional discussion, that she doesn’t deserve her own set of rules.
Hat tip to blogger friend Daphne.
When liberals start to think about those who would oppose their agenda, they start to illustrate for the rest of us the things they say about conservatives.
Deroy Murdock, National Review:
As the Obama administration marks 18 months in power today, no one should be terribly surprised that it is the hardest-Left U.S. government since that of FDR. For those who paid attention, Obama’s hyperliberal U.S. Senate record pierced like a dive light through the squid ink of Hope and Change that Obama squirted at anyone who demanded programmatic specifics. (At 95.5 percent in 2007, according to the National Journal, Obama was the Senate’s No. 1 Left-liberal.)
However, after Obama’s nearly flawless campaign, the big surprise one and a half years after Obama’s momentous and truly moving inauguration is the staggering incompetence of his government. Like some Americans, I expected a nanny-state, socialist agenda from Obama & Co. However, I thought that at least they would manage things smoothly and professionally, in somewhat refreshing contrast to the general ineptitude of the detached, tongue-tied Bush-Rove years. Instead, what America and the world have witnessed is an extravaganza of frequent gaffes, blunders, and catastrophes…
Racist.
I’m thinking the last attempt we put out to stay up-to-date on this was here, when it was a completely different cast & production crew. Not sure what happened to that effort, but now things have been all ripped apart and pieced back together yet one more time.
If there’s a production with a longer and more colorful history behind its troubled march to the silver screen than Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” the story of that particular episode of development hell has not yet been told. Published in 1957 and a perennial bestseller ever since (the novel sold a half-million copies just last year), the struggle to realize Rand’s sprawling and epic dramatization of her theory of Objectivism as told through a dystopian tale of the world’s best and brightest, feeling they’ve been exploited by an ungrateful society, putting their talent on strike, eluded even the author herself.
Throughout the decades, stars from Barbara Stanwyck to Angelina Jolie have expressed interest in bringing the novel to life, but it’s going to be producers Harmon Kaslow and John Aglialoro who finally break the curse. Directed by Paul Johansson, who also stars as John Galt, and co-starring Taylor Schilling as Dagny Taggart and Matthew Marsden as James Taggart, principal photography wrapped this very day. Which means…
Yes, there will be an “Atlas Shrugged” movie. Well, at least a part one.
Pictured at right is Taylor Schilling, who is cast as Dagny Taggart. I had Dagny pegged as brunette — a studious, anal-retentive, details-oriented, sexually-repressed, Madam Librarian brunette.
Hey, when the goddamn thing is 1,100 pages long these mental images are important.
I always pegged Mel Gibson for Hank Rearden. No way in hell is that going to happen at this point.
This stopping-and-starting, so many times around the same silly loop, is disconcerting I’ll have to admit. But in all seriousness my tentative opinion is that the story is un-film-able. I’m not willing to swear to that; I’d say exactly the same thing about Lord of the Rings.
So as far as what’s possible, I’d say yes you can do a decent job with this, maybe even a job remembered fondly by most Atlas Shrugged fans. But I’ll say this much: Things would have to be dropped out, even in a trilogy. Sideplots will have to be jettisoned, ignored. Someone, somewhere, is gonna be pissed.
On that, I’ll bet some real money.
Regarding Ms. Schilling, I’m undecided. I can certainly see the potential.
“Have you ever seen such a bunch of self-righteous, ass-covering prigs? They don’t care what we do; they care what we get photographed doing.”
– M.
So the armies of humility are lining up on the left & right of the blogosphere, as well as cable-teevee-pundit-land and Planet Newspaper, to apologize for driving Shirley Sherrod out of a job. I’ve reviewed the forty-three minutes myself, and although the seamy footage makes it clear this is still less than what actually took place, it’s undeniable that the spirit of her remarks is different than what I thought. So do I have some crow to eat?
Perhaps just a smidgen. A wing. A foot, maybe. Well, let’s get it choked down. Clean your plate when crow is on it, for if you leave leftovers you should expect a steady diet of it.
The wasp is dead, the nest remains.
Ms. Sherrod, according to her own words, was a Little Hitler. Check that chart; third column, fourth row, the Petty Tyrant.
Can there be any doubt we still have some petty tyrants?
The nest does remain. Sherrod’s wasp is dead, but it has been dead for a very long time now. That was the point of her speech. The edited version makes it seem that there is something very different going on. My assumption that no context could leverage the spirit into something different, was somewhat rash. Partly correct, partly incorrect. Ultimately, I have to admit I placed an excessive abundance of faith in the edited version. Got snookered. Might as well admit it.
So now Breitbart has some ’splainin’ to do? No, not at all. In fact, his point stands, and rather solidly. The whole point to showing it in the first place was to examine this claim that the Tea Party has racism in its ranks, and needs to do a more forceful job of policing its own. It is an argument of “don’t criticize your brother for the splijter in his eye when you have a beam in your own.” This point is actually strengthened by the events of the last 48 hours. The NAACP was able to confront its accuser, release the footage, use the media to entice the public to pay attention while the iron was still hot. And as frosting on the cake, they were able get another lie out there about Fox News being responsible for Sherrod’s sacking.
Such a dizzying, dazzling assortment of privileges for the NAACP! I wonder, if the footage had been about a Tea Party member saying equally racist things, would that informal coalition have been similarly indulged? Do I even need to ask the question.
So yes, I was “snookered” about Ms. Sherrod as a person. My crow-eating begins and ends there. Her comments about her own behavior stand, monument-like, as a testament to institutionalized racism. And how reformed is she, anyway? As John Hawkins points out, this is open to question. From all the evidence we have about her, there really isn’t much to indicate she’s ready for a post-racial world. It remains an unsettled issue, one to which I do not assign much weight, but one that is besieged with suggestive noise on all sides. There is doubt, and I’m not inclined to grant her much benefit of the doubt.
But let’s grant it all anyway. She realized she was being a horse’s ass, cleaned up her act, and that’s what happens to all the racists in these agencies? The entire story is kaput because of Ms. Sherrod’s Scrooge-like conversion? I don’t think so.
And this gets into the actual point that I don’t see anyone making anywhere. It has to do with the two halves of that part of humanity that thinks about these things.
My half says that individuals have rights, and these rights are regularly violated by institutions like the NAACP.
The other half, which has all of the voice, all of the time, says the institutions are the ones with the rights. People just gum things up. The institutions are perfect, or can be made that way by means of identifying the contaminating people and tossing ‘em overboard. Let’s call this the Vilsack Doctrine.
This is why I’m being somewhat stingy with my apology. To me, it was never about Shirley Sherrod. Firing her was just a bizarre, wrong-headed move, and it would remain that even if the footage was exactly what it appeared to be. Adam and Eve bit into the apple, humanity has been corrupted and corruptible ever since, and institutions that are made out of humanity are no better than the people who build them and work in them.
If I’ve got a terrible problem with keeping my farm, and I’m describing my plight to some pencil-pushing bureaucrat who decides I’m acting superior to him just because my skin is white — that black bureaucrat is well within his rights to think such a thing. You get to think mistaken things. We don’t have a government that regulates that.
So President Jealous of the NAACP can grandstand and spread more lies, and Vilsack and Obama can apologize…all they want. These fine gentlemen still miss the point. The point is that the “Could Be Construed As” standard is unattainable and irrelevant. It is not impropriety, it is not the appearance of impropriety — we’re never going to solve a single problem by ending the careers of people who become tainted by it, no matter what the color of their skin happens to be.
I am thankful that the heyday of this risible ritual has now passed, or at least I think it has. Today, if you asked most people about it and had an honest discussion about it, a consensus would emerge that agrees with my notion: You don’t fire bigots. You prove them wrong. Even if they have supervisory authority; we do not sentence people to losing their livelihoods and becoming wards of the state because of the appearance of the thoughts in their heads — this is not the way America was supposed to work. If you find your career is heading into a cul de sac because you happen to be working for a sexist or a bigot or a homophobe, that means you have a boss that hates you. It’s unfortunate, but welcome to the real world. It’s gonna happen to you again. It’s happened to me. It happens to everyone. Go work for someone else.
I’m not trying to be insensitive with that remark. What I’m pointing out is that we’ve tried the other method…the Vilsack method. Gave it a good go for a few decades. It has been a net loss, a failed experiment. It’s made people fearful for their jobs and their careers, and this has given them motivation to do all kinds of whacky, stupid, free-market-killing stuff.
Know how bad that can get? Last “sexual harassment training” I was forced to attend, they said something I found interesting and it’s probably the same thing they said at yours: The intent of the offender doesn’t matter, it’s the perception of the accuser that decides everything — and “these rules are put in place to provide a workplace that is comfortable for everyone.” SAME BREATH.
So a whack-job paranoid stranger with a random vendetta can end your career at any second. By bitching, the easiest thing in the world to do. Boy that really makes me feel comfortable. How ’bout you?
Worst of all, people don’t worry too much anymore about getting fired for genuinely screwing things up.
It’s called political correctness. And future generations will look back on it, I’m convinced, the same way we see fourteenth-century bedside-bloodletting.
Update: Andrew Breibart’s comment on it:
All I’m seeing is people right now seeing blood in the water and coming after me. And the amount of half-truths and falsehoods that are out there in the pursuit of taking me down because they perceive that I’m a threat, it’s astounding.
:
I believe that I’m held to a higher standard. If this video showed a picture of a Caucasian talking in the exact same way but talking about a black person with an audience affirming and clapping that behavior, the reporter would be getting a Pulitzer Prize right now.
Say what you want about the man, but he’s right about this. All of it; every word.
And it isn’t defensible.
As the Hopenchange Presidential administration was still new, and impressing and bewildering us all as they unleashed one wild scheme after another, I struggled to find a way to comprehend what was happening. Who are these people who believe in “stimulus”? And do they, really? How come our new President continues to campaign for a job He’s already got?
And then I figured it out: They have an “underpants gnome” mentality. I suppose all good salesmen do. Step One, we make you do what I want you to do, or I do what I would ordinarily do anyway; Step Two, ??? — and Step Three Profit.
I have not looked back on this theory of mine with any regret or doubt. In the one-year-plus since I wrote that, pretty much everything Obama and His apologists have done, falls into this. Step One, pass a health care plan that puts Obama’s buddies in charge of all the decisions…Step Two, ??? — Step Three Profit. Step One, pass cap and trade, Step Two ??? — Step Three, the damn hole will somehow be plugged.
Now, I don’t know if James Taranto reads my blog. I’ve always operated from the assumption that hardly anybody ever does. But how then do you explain this gem which appeared in the “Best of the Web” column yesterday:
The vice president’s description of the administration’s political strategy reminds us of the business plan of the Underpants Gnomes from “South Park”:
Phase 1: Legislation
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Victory
I’ve been robbed, but I’m not calling the police. I’m quite flattered.
Of course, today the administration has been ensconced for exactly a year and a half, and it has become cumulatively difficult to figure out what might be the best example of Underpants Gnome thinking in the eighteen months.
It’s a tough call, but I think I’d nominate the beer summit.
1 – The three of us sit down at a table and drink beer together
2 – ?
3 – Racial animosity healed forever throughout the land
Hat tip to Gateway Pundit.
It’s the 30th anniversary of the comedy classic “Airplane!”. So why not spend the holiday weekend celebrating the quotable lines that influenced generations of comedies and filmmakers. We admit it — there are plenty of great lines that didn’t make the cut. But the overabundance of amazing lines actually overloaded my brain and knocked me out. Hell, when I came to, I thought I was Ethel Merman. Anyway, pick your favorite quote and feel free to leave any forgotten quotes in the comments!
Yeah, I’m thinking slide #3 is gonna take this one.
The economic recovery has been helped in large part by the spending of the most affluent. Now, even the rich appear to be tightening their belts.
Late last year, the highest-income households started spending more confidently, while other consumers held back. But their confidence has since ebbed, according to retail sales reports and some economic analysis.
“One of the reasons that the recovery has lost momentum is that high-end consumers have become more jittery and more cautious,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics.
That cautious attitude stems in part from concerns about global instability, especially in Europe, and in part from the volatility of the stock market in recent months. Major stock indexes fell sharply on Friday, after several big companies announced disappointing earnings. Bank stocks were the biggest losers as investors wrestled with the twin issues of lower trading profits from Citibank and Bank of America and the prospect that new financial regulation would further crimp their businesses.
Though stock performance has a bigger psychological and financial impact on high-income households, consumers of all income levels are fretting more about their financial future, perhaps bracing for the possibility of another economic contraction. Consumer confidence slumped in July to its lowest point since August 2009 in the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan index released on Friday.
The Dow Jones industrial average slipped 261.41 points to 10,097.9 on Friday, for a loss of 2.52 percent. For the year, broad-based stock indexes in the United States all show losses of more than 3 percent.
Huh, well maybe the poor people will get us over the hump.
Picked up any paychecks from poor people lately?
Here are the two videos. From Breitbart. I have nothing to add and I’m almost certain you’ve seen them before; just doing my bit to get ‘em out there. It’s important.
But by all means, continue to make the unceasing demands for the Tea Party people to purge racism from their ranks. </sarcasm>
Update: Via Cassy, just returned from her vacation, we see over at Hot Air that Ms. Sherrod has resigned over the comments. The wasp is dead, the nest remains.
Is President Obama going to get started sometime soon on healing America’s racial divide and starting this glorious, post-racial-animosity period of our nation’s history? Like, any week now? Or is that still a ways off? Because lately, the people in positions of power don’t seem to be very much dedicated to the vision.
Every now and then I’ll get a compliment on blogging that is something to the effect of “I’ve been trying to find the words to express something and I haven’t been able to find them, but you managed to find them and string ‘em together for me.”
Well, I have that reaction to some things, too. Scott Payne, writing in the Washington Examiner, speaks for my optimistic side in predicting that we are nearing “The End of the Popularity Contest” in national politics.
This is one of two good things about the presidency of Barack Obama. They’re both lessons for young people: One, you can achieve power and authority by speaking as if you are worthy of it; and two, “fun” people tend to make wretched decisions. The second of those two lessons requires repetition before people will really get it, but we have over nine hundred more days for it to be repeated. My belief is that it’s going to get learned, but good.
…[T]here is this pervasive notion within the Washington bubble, a notion that is particularly strong in the White House, is that the opposition to the administration’s agenda is merely a matter of confusion and that all it will take to flip voters is to have the President explain the measures and reassure Americans that he has everything well in hand. That notion is rapidly coming to and end…
It’s not so much that Americans don’t understand the President’s legislative victories, as it is that those victories are, almost by design, destined to disappoint a majority of voters.
:
No amount of glad handing and photo oping will overcome real and sincere divisions of opinion on public policy. And that is the road block against which the Obama administration is starting to bump up — with a vengeance.
This has been going on for over a year by now: Barack Obama’s popularity rating is drastically different from His approval rating. In poll after poll after poll, respondents assert that they really “like Him as a person” but “disapprove of His policies” and think we as a nation are “heading in the wrong direction.”
Recent blogroll addition Stephen Browne, writing about something else altogether, has nailed it I believe. And the fault doesn’t go to Obama, it goes to the people who voted for Him and are so slow to catch on to what’s happening:
So how does a reasonably intelligent person guard against the temptations of self-deception? The insidious desire to bend our perception of reality to what is comfortable, rather than what is needed to cope with an often uncomfortable reality?
A number of things have been recommended by the wise: studying logic and in particular the informal fallacies, studying rhetoric to learn to recognize the tropes of persuasion, and studying history — which is, after all, the record of other people’s experience.
What I came up with was a series of questions, to try and keep myself intellectually honest:
1. How often have you changed or abandoned a deeply held belief because of either (a) personal experience or (b) a persuasive argument backed by compelling evidence?
2. How often have you, after examining the evidence reached a conclusion that was uncomfortable, unsettling, or profoundly disturbing to you, i.e., reached a conclusion you did not like and wished weren’t true?
3. How often have you admitted honest confusion about an issue that was important to you and decided to defer judgment — or simply live with the uncertainty?
4. How often have you realized while listening to someone speak for a position you agreed with, that it was nonetheless being supported by a weak or invalid argument?
5. How often have you listened to two sides of an issue and concluded that you agreed with someone you disliked and disagreed with someone you liked?
If you answered “never” to all or most of them, you might ask yourself whether you are thinking at all. You almost certainly won’t, though.
Now, my ego is about as bloated and tender as anybody else’s, and perhaps if my life’s circumstances allowed me to I could’ve answered “never” to all five of these questions. As it happens, my answer is “Where the hell do you want me to start listing them Mr. Browne?” for all of them…but this is not a testament to my wisdom or my saintly Spock-like handling of logic. I just don’t have the luxury of straying too far from reality. If I believe in a whole bunch of bullshit, I can’t fix stuff, and then I have no skills I can bring to market. If you’re any kind of a farmer, you’re in the same boat. Or an architect or a construction worker or a surgeon.
But most people aren’t kept on this kind of a leash. Most people can believe in silly false things, and never meet up with any consequences for having wrong opinions. If they want to be able to answer in the affirmative about Mr. Browne’s questions, they must rely on their own internal discipline in order to do so, and most people do not have this discipline. I would not so quickly count myself among the ones who do, either, let’s be clear on that. I like to think I’m perfect in every conceivable way just like anybody else does. But I know I’m mortal and flawed.
I think I like Questions #4 and #5 the best. Combine those together, really, and you can dispense with the other three and administer a single test: A person for whom you have positive feelings, on a personal level, and want to please — articulates a position with which you happen to agree, but arrives there by means of a logical process you know is flawed. Does the flaw make an impression on you or does it not?
This is the sin that was committed by young Obama voters two years ago. Holy Man made an impression on them as warm, friendly, personable, and He said a lot of stuff that seemed to be agreeable. They lowered their guard. Now the rest of us have to pay the consequences for it.
Don’t blame me. I voted for the non-lawyers.
Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, the atrocities perpetrated by a few brutal women have always stood out, like aberrations of nature.
There were notorious camp guards like Ilse Koch and Irma Grese. And lesser known killers like Erna Petri, the wife of an SS officer and a mother who was convicted of shooting to death six Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Poland; or Johanna Altvater Zelle, a German secretary accused of child murder in the Volodymyr-Volynskyy ghetto in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.
The Nazi killing machine was undoubtedly a male-dominated affair. But according to new research, the participation of German women in the genocide, as perpetrators, accomplices or passive witnesses, was far greater than previously thought.
The researcher, Wendy Lower, an American historian now living in Munich, has drawn attention to the number of seemingly ordinary German women who willingly went out to the Nazi-occupied eastern territories as part of the war effort, to areas where genocide was openly occurring.
“Thousands would be a conservative estimate,” Ms. Lower said in an interview in Jerusalem last week.
:
Only 1 or 2 percent of the perpetrators were women, according to Ms. Lower. But in many cases where genocide was taking place, German women were very close by. Several witnesses have described festive banquets near mass shooting sites in the Ukrainian forests, with German women providing refreshments for the shooting squads whose work often went on for days.Ms. Petri was married to an SS officer who ran an agricultural estate, complete with a colonial-style manor house and slave laborers, in Galicia, in occupied Poland. She later confessed to having murdered six Jewish children, aged 6 to 12. She came across them while out riding in her carriage. She was the mother of two young children, and was 25 at the time. Near naked, the Jewish children had apparently escaped from a railroad car bound for the Sobibor camp. She took them home, fed them, then led them into the woods and shot them one by one.
She told her interrogators that she had done so, in part, because she wanted to prove herself to the men.
She was tried in East Germany and served a life sentence.
Just wow. Insane times. I can see why people would show some reticence about writing it down.