Too Little Too Late

It's about time someone in the traditional media finally admitted this publicly:

Our political system works best when a president faces checks on his power. But the main checks on Obama are modest. They come from congressional Democrats, who largely share his goals if not always his means. The leaderless and confused Republicans don't provide effective opposition. And the press -- on domestic, if not foreign, policy -- has so far largely abdicated its role as skeptical observer.

Obama has inspired a collective fawning. [...] The infatuation matters because Obama's ambitions are so grand. He wants to expand health-care subsidies, tightly control energy use and overhaul immigration. He envisions the greatest growth of government since Lyndon Johnson. The Congressional Budget Office estimates federal spending in 2019 at nearly 25 percent of the economy (gross domestic product). That's well up from the 21 percent in 2008, and far above the post-World War II average; it would also occur before many baby boomers retire.

Are his proposals practical, even if desirable? Maybe they're neither? What might be the unintended consequences?

Go read the whole thing.

Sadly, I don't think this revealing commentary will change anything. Democratic favoritism is a systemic problem in the collective American media. For the past eight years, reporting anything that cast a favorable light on the Bush Administration (except for the few months after 9/11) was anathema. Reporters who covered such stories were deemed by their professional colleagues to be "carrying water" for Mr. Bush and the Republican Party. A reporter's badge of authenticity seemed to come from intentionally undermining public confidence in the government as long as Republicans were at the helm. (Not that the Republicans didn't gave them plenty of material to work with)

Contemporary journalism isn't really about relaying the news. It's about shaping world opinion. There are aspects to each story that the news producers want the consumers to focus on, and things they don't want them to focus on. This is part of an an underlying theme (or "meta-narrative" as Ace like to put it) that permeates so many news stories and ties them together. For instance, the Attorney General firings scandal wasn't all about improper manipulation of the Justice Department; it was mostly about embarrassing George Bush. Otherwise, this news would be huge. The apocryphal warnings over the previous administration's use of signing statements weren't all about executive overreach; it was mostly about embarrassing George Bush. Otherwise, the topic would still pop up on all the Sunday news shows. Investigations into Republican corruption wasn't just about spotlighting ethics violations, it was mostly about embarrassing George Bush. Otherwise, corrupt Democrats would be hounded by reporters until they resigned in disgrace. The firestorm over the use of military tribunals wasn't all about a growing constitutional crisis; it was mostly about embarrassing George Bush. Otherwise, this news would be outrageous to the self-styled defenders of freedom and civility and would dominate the headlines. To hammer this point home, try to remember if you've seen or read about any anti-war protests since the election. No? Now ask yourself, have the concerns of the perpetually-outraged finally been assuaged, or have reporters simply stopped using anti-Iraq fervor to bludgeon the President?

The only thing that has changed since the election is the President. The meta-narrative is the same. Unfortunately, now that the Democrats control the government, the left/media have had to focus the public's attention on non-elected, hard-right conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. The narrative is the same: you can't trust the right... you're stupid/uncool/selfish if you're republican... conservatism equals racism/sexism/whateverism... The bias is so brazen, yet reporters can't understand why their objectivity and credibility are being questioned among the public? What fools.

Even the writer of the excerpted piece above seems oblivious to the underlying problem. When trying to ascertain why the media is uncritical of Obama, he writes:

The press sometimes follows opinion polls; popular presidents get good coverage, and Obama is enormously popular.

Isn't this a chicken or the egg argument? Wouldn't Obama be less popular if the media reported news suggesting the emperor might not have any clothes? What if Obama had been subjected to the same vetting process as Gov. Sarah Palin? With his inexperience and fringe-left ties, would he even have won the Democratic nomination, much less the presidency?

The estimable Jay Rosen once argued in the comments section of this blog that the press corps are not biased as much as they are adversarial. Well, the double-standard at play with the media and the Obama administration belies that argument. They're only adversarial in the sense that their emotions, interest, instincts and opinions run contrary to those of the stereotypical conservative bloc. For evidence, consider the media's vehement hatred of Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean and the condescension that permeated their coverage of the right-leaning tea party protests.

If you doubt the systemic bias in the press, then take this challenge: Make a mental note of how, for the past eight years, questioning someone's "patriotism" was treated as the worst possible smear. The left/media went as far as to misattribute a quote to Thomas Jefferson that "dissent is the highest form of patriotism." Then pay attention as all of that unravels over the next four years. By the time the next election rolls around, the patriotism of Republicans will be routinely questioned by the left/media. Patriotism will evolve to mean "doing the things proposed by Obama," which will range from buying GM cars to endorsing cap and trade as the only way to make a better America. Anyone on the 'wrong side' of the issues will be branded as traitors and unfit for our brave new society.\

Click Here To Read The Rest....

On Obama & Empathy

Thanks to the Sotomayor appointment, everyone now knows about Barack Obama's so-called empathy standard:

“We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom,’’ then-candidate Obama said in a widely quoted speech to Planned Parenthood in 2007. "The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."

This is, to be blunt, ridiculous pandering to identity politics that borders on the criminal. You realize just how absurd it is when you realize that appointments to the Supreme Court must make the following oath:

I, __________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as (name of position) under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.”

There's simply no way to square Obama's "criteria" for judicial temperament with the duties that a supreme court justice must swear to uphold. They are in direct contradiction to one another.

It's like suggesting that baseball umpires, who have sworn to be impartial arbiters of the rules, should then step behind the plate and call more strikes if the pitcher grew up poor, or call more fouls if the batter is black, or eject a temperamental player because he's wealthy and white.

There's a reason why justice is "blind." The President wants to remove that blindfold, and he's shown his commitment to undermining the rule of law by selecting a nominee that's so well versed in judicial activism and identity politics, which is little more than the school of sexism/racism that's fashionable at the moment.

Click Here To Read The Rest....

Unemployment in SC

South Carolina has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. Luckily, my county has the lowest in the region. And I can't help but laugh at the odd coincidence that the one with the highest unemployment, at 20.5%, is Union County.

Coincidence or causality?

You decide.

Click Here To Read The Rest....

Praising Dear Leader

This is unbelievable. It's the literary equivalent of a Riefenstahl film.

And "journalists" wonder why they trail used car salesmen in popular trust.

Click Here To Read The Rest....

Sad, But True

Click Here To Read The Rest....

Earth Day

In honor of Earth Day, Ronald Bailey posed the question, "Why don't environmentalists celebrate modern farming on Earth Day?" It's a good question:

Since 1960 global crop yields have more than doubled, with the benefit that the area of land devoted to producing food has not increased very much. If farmers were still producing food at 1960 levels of productivity, agriculture would have had to expand from 38 percent of the earth's land to 82 percent to feed the world's current population. This enormous increase in yields is the result of applying more artificial fertilizers, breeding higher yielding crops, a wider use of pesticides and herbicides, and expanding irrigation. More recently, advances in modern biotechnology have also contributed to boosting yields. However, last week, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a new report, Failure to Yield: Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops, by its senior scientist Doug Gurian-Sherman that tries to make the case that modern crop biotechnology should be largely abandoned because it has failed to increase agricultural yields.

Read the whole thing. Genetically Modified (GM) crops could save millions of starving and malnutritioned people per year; however, the knee-jerk rejection of GM crops is prevalent in Europe and, unfortunately, is growing here in the US.

---

European and North American governments and nonprofits exert great influence over agricultural engineering in the poorest regions of the world. In their slow and comfortable pursuit of perfect crops, they're essentially withholding the good crops from the people who need them today. Millions are suffering as a result. This bias against GM crops is based on nothing more than fear of the unknown, and it's emblematic of so many irrational superstitions that have stalled innovation throughout human history.

I'll let Penn & Teller explain more on the topic:



(ht: Instapundit)

Click Here To Read The Rest....

Nick Kristof Sees, Hears & Speaks No Evil

Nick Kristof opined today about how people tend to gravitate and lend credence to ideas with which they already agree. That’s undoubtedly true for the majority, and he’s right to say it’s troublesome as it pertains to the level of discourse in this country:

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about. Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves. That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

I agree with this so far; Nick has the facts right, but he errs when he suggests that what we need is more "traditional" media coverage to maintain the proper perspective:

The decline of traditional news media will accelerate the rise of The Daily Me, and we’ll be irritated less by what we read and find our wisdom confirmed more often. The danger is that this self-selected “news” acts as a narcotic, lulling us into a self-confident stupor through which we will perceive in blacks and whites a world that typically unfolds in grays.

If the news is delivered in a straightforward way, then there’s nothing to really agree or disagree with. How do you argue with facts? Sure, people will always self-select opinion pieces for either reverence or wrath, but that’s an entirely different animal than straight news as it's delivered by the "traditional media." What does he expect news consumers to do when they feel like the product is flawed? They’re bound to go looking not just for like-minded news outlets, as people like Mr. Kristof like to put it, but for more accurate reporting, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

In a perfect world, writers and editors at traditional media outlets would in some way correlate their loss of readership with poor product quality. But there are so many factors at play in the decline of dead-tree papers that they take the easy road and blame Craigslist.com and "The Daily Me" for their financial woes. That kind of rationalization is just easier on the ego.

People who already lean to the left make the mistake of thinking that traditional outlets like The New York Times are, to quote Dan Rather from Bernard Goldberg’s Bias, “middle of road.” Those people are already in an echo chamber, and they see everything that doesn’t fall into their sphere of interest or opinion as biased to the right. Since traditional newsrooms are populated by one overpowering ideological group, they’re all interested in similar stories, which means they’re not covering countless others. Naturally some stories merit more attention, but after a while it starts to look like a report’s reputation within his or her industry is built on never being afraid to ask the really tough questions… of republicans. When news consumers don’t see their news outlets playing the watchdog with equal vigor, they recognize the prejudice and reject the product.

I think what Nick fails to realize is that he’s actually lamenting the fact that the traditional media is losing its ability to filter the news, and thus shape the national conversation. We’ll see more of this in the next few years as the blogosphere (particularly the rightosphere) becomes more successful at thrusting news into the national conversation. Armies of self-rightous journalists will blabber on and on about how everyone has an opinion nowadays, and we're in dire need of federal legislation to establish a uniform credentialing process so news consumers can properly distinguish between those who have the proper perspective to cover the news responsibly, and those who are mere amateurs frothing at the keyboard.

By then, government intervention in journalism will evolve into a good thing for the profession, as ludicrous as it sounds. But, sadly, those feats of logical and moral gymnastics are easy when you think like the Times’ editorial board.

Click Here To Read The Rest....

The Ways Of Washington

The Other McCain went off on an odd rant about how people and social movements grow and are sustained by their mere influence, and it included this gem:

In Washington, reputation, image, status and prestige are everything, for these are the means by which one acquires that most precious of commodities, influence. Here, a man can be a clueless fool, a two-faced liar and/or a porn-addicted closet homosexual in a sham marriage, yet as long as he has influence, he will be praised and treated with courtesy as if he were a gentleman.

The all-important factor of influence in D.C. means that the smart operator carefully calculates everything he says or does. He learns to be circumspect and obsequious, to fawn and flatter with those who can help him, to backstab and undermine his potential rivals, to ignore those who are inconsequential to his ambitions, and to carefully accumulate a curriculum vitae of senior fellowships, contributing editorships, board memberships, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

Ordinary Americans do not operate by such methods, nor even attempt to understand them, because the Ordinary American happily lacks the quality essential to success in Washington, namely the ambition to be a success in Washington. And the reason the successful Washington operative is so insulting arrogant is because he is consumed by his pursuit of influence to such an extent that he cannot distinguish between ambition and ability.

I can’t begin to express how true this is. If the nail had been hit any more squarely on the head, it would have split an atom.

---

I just moved to SC after 5 years on the Hill. Down here, few people obsess about getting "face time" with the right people, name-dropping in every sentence, and changing jobs every two years. Of course, you will find some obsessed social climbers in every city, and I don’t fault them for their ambitions; it’s the preponderance of insincerity that I can’t stand, and DC has that in spades. As a matter of fact, vainglory is practically a virtue in our nation’s capital. Some people thrive in it, and others can only take so much – which is part of the reason DC is like a large hostel for highly educated transients.

DC is different from every other town in America. Washington is Rome on the Potomac. Well-educated people come from all over the world to work there. When you factor in the army of slave labor in the form of interns that occupies the city (and all the drink specials – bastards!), you have a situation where the supply of qualified workers far exceeds the demand. So everyone is competing for entry-level positions, and the ivy leaguers can't understand why they're having to compete with the (gasp!) state school grads. But there’s an election every two years, so jobs inevitably open up, and the career carousel goes round and round. The problem is, a hoard of people apply for every open position, so ‘who you know’ plays a big part in getting a higher paying gig. Sometimes it not just who you know, but who the people that you know, know. If that makes sense.

For example, my first (paying) job in town came from an interview set up by a person I met through a friend while attending a junket put on by a PR firm in the name of another company that preceded the annual Drag Race in DuPont Circle, which, for the uninitiated, has nothing to do with cars. It’s a footrace that evolves into a street parade for flamboyantly-dressed homosexual men. The event is just another excuse for straight people to go out drinking and networking, and for companies to rent “prime viewing areas” that show off their prestige. That’s DC. Everything is an opportunity to show off and advance oneself, and everyone takes advantage of every opportunity.

People assume that because the cost of living is high in DC, the jobs pay more. But that’s only true once a worker gets past what I call "the invisible ceiling." That ceiling is probably best described as a level of experience and/or education where a worker can’t be quickly replaced by a swimmer in the teeming pool of relative newcomers. Once you get past the ceiling, it stands to reason that you can stop with the ass kissing and chest pounding. But there’s always a higher position that might open up, and more influence to be gained. So people keep playing the game, spending money they don’t have and going to places they shouldn't go, just so they can casually drop that they went there and did that when they’re talking to their professional betters. It takes “dressing for the job you want instead of the job you have” to a whole new level.

I remember a time when one of my bosses mentioned to the top boss that his family was thinking about adopting a cat. The top boss swooned about Dolittle’s, an elitist little pet shop in Eastern Market where they do the equivalent of an FBI background check before allowing you to start your closely-supervised trial adoption period. I interjected that shelters in the suburbs hold adoptions at big box pet stores on the weekends, and he’d be able to adopt a cat with no fuss on any given Saturday. You know, a cat is a cat is a cat and all that. Being that he lived closer to College Park than DC, it made perfect sense to me. But what do you think he did? He went through all the fuss of dealing with Doolittle’s just so he could demonstrate his fealty to the top boss. That’s par for the course in DC.

That kind of asskissery served him well, I should add. We was relatively young (in DC-terms), making a boatload of money, and on track to take over the company one day. So being an unabashed, brownnosing namedropper works, even if it does make a lot of people laugh at you behind your back. And sadly, his tendency to sandbag the other bosses didn't hurt his reputation with the the top boss. After all, he knew everyone in town. He had influence.

People like him who manage to successfully navigate the social ladders of DC for years inevitably watch as their less successful friends leave the city for more family-friendly towns or for the better-paying private sector. They see themselves as the tournament champions, if you will -- the ordained who were successful where others failed, and as worthy to have the ear of the Senators of New Rome. They ride others’ coattails and bask in the shadows of more famous power-wielders. And when they finally get their own small moment in the spotlight, they project an image of themselves and their own influence that bares little resemblance to reality.

As an example, Senators and Congressmen promise to speak at countless junkets, forums and conferences around the country (which are usually at warm, plush resorts in the middle of winter). When work or a better speaking opportunity gets in the way, they usually send their Legislative or Administrative Assistant. If you want to see an unjustified ego on display, spend ten minutes alone with one of these people. They see themselves as modern day oracles, offering riddled pearls of wisdom to the unwashed and uneducated masses. That’s one point of The Other McCain’s piece:

The press secretary to a Senator vainly imagines that he holds that job because he possesses such vast intelligence and skill that there is no one else in this nation of 300 million who could possibly do it so well.

Of course, not everyone in DC is as shallow as a puddle. For every person you see sipping a fashionably overpriced, hand-crushed mohito near the window at the bar at Charlie Palmer’s, there’s someone having a bucket of MGDs around the corner and down the alley at My Brother’s Place. And for everyone you see running on the National Mall at lunchtime in their designer Oakleys and the latest fitness fashion, there’s someone playing drunken bocce after work at Garfield Park.

The town is what you make of it, just like you are what you make of yourself.

Now go and read the whole thing over at McCain's place.

---

UPDATE:

I wrote, "there’s always a higher position that might open up, and more influence to be gained. So people keep playing the game, spending money they don’t have and going to places they shouldn't go, just so they can casually drop that they went there and did that when they’re talking to their professional betters. It takes “dressing for the job you want instead of the job you have” to a whole new level."

To further illustrate that point, take a look at this map of foreclosures:


You see that colorful blot in between Virginia and Maryland?

Also, take a look at the whole country. Which way do the dark areas usually vote?

Click Here To Read The Rest....

The Obama Adminstration Sweeps The Leg

Thanks to Politico.com, the only media outlet seemingly willing to cover the dark side of President Obama's message machine, we get this story. It conjures an image of Obama as Sensei Kreese, instructing his dojo of ambitious students to "sweep the leg" on a daily basis.


Obama's supporters would argue that it's unfair to connect him with the actions of these supposedly independent groups. Maybe they'd be right. But then again, these are the same people arguing that Rush Limbaugh is the new Republican Minority Leader, and he's never even been elected to office. So I'm comfortable with a much smaller degree of separation, considering what we already know. (HT: Hot Air)

Click Here To Read The Rest....

Rand Was Right

"One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary." -- Ayn Rand

It's been noted that sales of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged are currently through the roof, which is amazing when you consider the age and size of the book. But that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone familiar with Rand's principles of individualism versus collectivism, especially in light of the short-sighted ambitions of the current political majority. And her philosophy about the "Virtue of Selfishness" seems more prescient than ever.

Click Here To Read The Rest....

Spin Class

Over the years, The New York Times’ editorial board has held an evolving opinion about the use of the Senate filibuster:

The New York Times editorialized in 1995, "Now is the perfect moment...to get rid of an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose." Nine years later the Times discovered that useful purpose: "The filibuster...is a rough instrument that should be used with caution. But its existence goes to the center of the peculiar but effective form of government America cherishes."

Today, they have this to say:

[…] the use of the filibuster as an everyday tool of legislation stands the idea of democratic government on its head. Instead of majority rule in the Senate, the tyranny of the minority prevails. If the ability of the British House of Lords to prevent passage of legislation has been curtailed, surely it is time to permit a simple majority of the United States Senate to close off debate.

In the great legislative reapportionment cases of the 1960s, the Supreme Court defined democratic government as majority rule based on the principle of one person, one vote. It is time to apply that standard to the Senate.

So the editorial board of The New York Times was against the filibuster, then for it, and now is against it again.

It might sound like they’re being inconsistent, but there’s one constant in each scenario.

I’ll let you guess what it is.

Click Here To Read The Rest....

In Which I Wish The Best Of Luck To My New President

Congratulations are in order. I'm not very conservative, so I don't feel as though my ideological views have been repudiated by Obama's victory. I'm actually dreading the inevitable conservative pessimism and conspiracy mongering more than the Democratic-led government. (I live in the bible belt, so it's like being surrounded by an army of Mike Gallaghers) But who could blame some people for refusing to recognize Obama as their president? Unbridled hate for one's political opponents served the left well over the past eight years, so the hard right would be foolish not to emulate their tactics. But I personally abhor people that rely on lies and illogical attacks to show their disagreement with political figures and/or public policy. Or, to put it more simply, I don't believe you have to hate chocolate to show how much you like vanilla.

Now that my political party has been marginalized by popular demand, I'll set to work on a center-right version of the Euston Manifesto. I'll post it below the fold when I get a chance.

Click Here To Read The Rest....

Election Day, 2008

Election Day updates are below the fold:

---

To quote Yogi Berra, "I'm having déjà vu all over again." Like I said a few days ago:

The Democrats and the press (I repeat myself) are giddy with excitement about forecasted victories, and Republicans are once again putting all their eggs in the “all the polls are biased and we're really winning" basket. We all know how that election [in 2006] turned out.

How could anyone forget? It was a day filled with cries of "everyone out there is either wrong or in the tank," and it was embarrassing to many. I'm all for pep talks and optimism, but not at the expense of reasoned thought. I hope I'm wrong, but I think everyone in the rightosphere needs to stop chugging the red kool-aid for a moment. This frenzy is going to last all day, all night, and maybe in to the rest of the week.

For a momentary distraction, let's revisit Frank J's editorial on voting from 2006: This Election Is Extremely Important, But Your Own Vote Is Meaningless

Click Here To Read The Rest....