Tag: politics

A minor, but legitimate intervention

Actually, far more of this sort of thing is in order:

The Obama administration plans to order companies that received huge U.S. government bailouts last year to sharply cut the compensation of their highest paid executives, according to a person familiar with the decision. The seven companies that received the most assistance will have to cut the annual salaries of their 25 highest-paid executive by an average of about 90 percent from last year, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because it has not been announced. This person said Wednesday that the Treasury Department will announce the deep pay cuts within the next few days.

Look very closely at any commentator, so-called conservative or otherwise, who complains about this action by the White House being somehow “anti-capitalist”. If he was also a supporter of the bailouts last November, you should never, ever, consider taking him seriously again, because he’s either an untrustoworthy hypocrite or he’s too dumb to even realize his inconsistency. Once the government stepped in to socialize a corporation’s losses, that corporation lost the right to privatize its profits or even manage itself independently. From an economic perspective, the only thing more disastrous than a pure socialist system where both profits and losses are public is a fascist system where profits are private and losses are public.

No doubt this is merely a token act meant to discharge the growing public fury with Goldman and the other giant vampire squidsfinancial institutions. If Obama was serious, he’d announce a retroactive 95 percent tax on all bonuses paid in 2008 or later at institutions that received government assistance since August 2008 and accept Paul Volcker’s advice to beginning breaking up the big banks. Of course, what he should actually do is force the banks to mark the values of their assets to market, obey the law and have the FDIC initiate Prompt Corrective Actions as they are legally bound to do, and shut down every big bank that is insolvent. But he’s neither smart enough to understand the need to do this nor courageous enough to do so in the face of opposition from the influential vampire squidsfinancial institutions. And so the debt spiral continues….

A lefty contemplates his banishment

For the moral crime of questioning aspects of the AGW/CC charade:

For better or worse I have a much better sense of how the liberal slime machine works in practice, having been inside now a bit. This is all the more ironic because I consider myself to be cut from a similar political cloth to many of those who are engaged in all out war against me. Here are a few reflections.

Here is how it works. The really giant fish — public intellectuals like Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman — confer authority on the big fish of the liberal blogosphere. They do so by applauding the work of the big fish and saying that they trust them. This is a useful exchange because the big fish amplify the writings of the giant fish in the blogosphere and do the dirty work of taking down their political opponents by playing some gutter politics that the giant fish would rather not be seen playing. This has the effect of establishing the big fish as people to be listened to, not because they are necessarily right about things, but because the giant fish listen to them and the giant fish set political agendas…. The giant fish then get plausible deniability from engaging in what might seem to be less-than ethical behavior, the big fish get the ego-strokes of acknowledgment from the giant fish and the occasional top-line billing among favorable-leaning media. Similarly the minnows get to parlay inexpertise into a small role in the politics of personal destruction, and are cited by the big fish, but never by the media or the giants, which would be unbecoming.

On a tangential note, I always find it a little peculiar how often an item is published by WND, or occasionally, even posted on my blog, and then shows, completely unattributed, on one of the more nominally mainstream sites. I think Steve Sailer is probably the most surreptitiously cited but least-quoted writer on the right.

Anyhow, it shouldn’t surprise the professor that the left relies so heavily on personal attacks and appeals to authority. First, they’re authoritarians. Second, they certainly aren’t going to argue the science on the subject, because none of it supports their position. And third, if they were informed and capable of arguing logic, they wouldn’t be leftists in the first place.

In which an epidemic of pain is foreseen

Among the 18-24 black t-shirt wearing crowd. These new guidelinescould add billions to the cost of health care reform:

Federal drug agents won’t pursue pot-smoking patients or their sanctioned suppliers in states that allow medical marijuana, under new legal guidelines to be issued Monday by the Obama administration. Two Justice Department officials described the new policy to The Associated Press, saying prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state law.

It’s hardly full legalization, but the Obama administration is taking one tiny step in the right direction. One must give credit where credit is due.

Practice makes perfect

Before they go on to lose wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama figures his administration could use some practice losing one on the home front:

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, said in an interview with The New York Times. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Ah, but pretending has traditionally been a valuable part of the presidential playbook. Smiling and wearing beige even under the most withering news media assault is not only good manners, but also has generally been good politics. While there is undoubtedly a visceral thrill in finally setting out after your antagonists, the history of administrations that have successfully taken on the media and won is shorter than this sentence.

I’m not a fan of Fox News, but the thing that is so ridiculous about this is that Fox is more balanced – and has been objectively confirmed to be more balanced – than the other cable news networks and the mainstream media in general. Even liberals who doubted this couldn’t credibly do so any longer once CNN took it upon itself to fact-check an SNL skit for the crime of being insufficiently reverential.

Anyhow, the article reports that Fox’s ratings are up 20 percent. Obama’s, on the other hand, are down 38 percent since Inaugural Day. It increasingly appears that strategically besting Hilary Clinton and her team in claiming the Democratic nomination was less Julius Caesar defeating Boadicea and more the equivalent of beating Miss South Carolina at chess.

Liberal integrity

Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk desperately tries to cover his backside after the St. Louis Post-Dispatch admitted that it has no evidence that Rush Limbaugh ever made the “divisive” comments that caused him to be dropped from the ownership group bidding for the Rams.

“When posting on the matter on Monday, we made it clear that Limbaugh contends he never said the words.”

That’s Florio’s story now. But that’s also a very misleading characterization of his earlier post on the matter, to say nothing of the intervening posts made in the five days between Monday and Saturday:

During his Monday show, Limbaugh broadly claimed that 15 hours per week of radio programming covering 21 years had been reviewed. (It’s a job that would take more than 16,000 hours, so he apparently has a bunch of employees.) Said Limbaugh, “There is not even an inkling that any words in this quote are accurate.”

But here’s the key — he never directly denied saying the precise words that Burwell assigned to him. Sure, Limbaugh made vague claims of libel and slander, but there should be no ambiguity here. If Burwell attributed a concocted, made up quote to Limbaugh, Limbaugh’s lawyers should be demanding a retraction and a large bag of cash.

Though I’ve got no idea whether Limbaugh said it, Burwell says that Limbaugh said it. And if Limbaugh didn’t say it, he’s got an open-and-shut defamation claim against Burwell, the Post-Dispatch, and anyone else who has attributed that quote to Limbaugh….

Look, either he said it or he didn’t. And in referring to an item from the Post-Dispatch that troubled him because it suggested that he supports slavery, all Limbaugh had to do was read the quote that Bryan Burwell attributed to Limbaugh and say, “Folks, here are the words they say that I said. And I swear to you that I never uttered these words.”

The fact that Limbaugh didn’t do that makes us think that maybe he said it. And we’ll continue to think that maybe Limbaugh said it until Limbaugh either specifically and categorically denies making the remark or successfully sues Burwell and the Post-Dispatch for falsely claiming that Limbaugh made a statement that any fair-minded person would regard as incredibly and patently racist.

I like Pro Football Talk. It’s a good NFL-related site. But, like many of its readers, its ludicrously biased coverage of the affaire Limbaugh has forced me to concur with many other PFT readers who have concluded that its proprietor appears to have the integrity of a player’s agent and the spine of a sea slug. Everyone who knew anything about Limbaugh and the way the left obsessively tracks his show knew there was no chance that he had said anything even remotely similar to what was falsely attributed to him. Read the comments, as it’s obvious that a lot of PFT readers are not inclined to let Florio skate by on this one.

The man owes Limbaugh an unmitigated apology as does the NFL commissioner, Smith from the NFLPA, and a whole host of other media lefties who mindlessly leaped to the attack and in doing so shredded their false claims to objectivity. I rather hope Rush does as Florio originally suggested and follows through in suing those who slandered him.

Rush is right

It’s not actually about the NFL:

As I explained on my radio show, this spectacle is bigger than I am on several levels. There is a contempt in the news business, including the sportswriter community, for conservatives that reflects the blind hatred espoused by Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson. “Racism” is too often their sledgehammer. And it is being used to try to keep citizens who don’t share the left’s agenda from participating in the full array of opportunities this nation otherwise affords each of us. It was on display many years ago in an effort to smear Clarence Thomas with racist stereotypes and keep him off the Supreme Court. More recently, it was employed against patriotic citizens who attended town-hall meetings and tea-party protests.

These intimidation tactics are working and spreading, and they are a cancer on our society.

In the last two years I’ve been subjected to one successful and one unsuccessful attempt to bar me from an opportunity based solely upon my ideological beliefs, which is ironic considering that I am more often in the gatekeeper’s position than I am in the position of one attempting to pass through the gate. As an occasional acquisitions consultant for two publishers, I’ve shot down 10x more book proposals in the last three years than I ever proposed in the entire course of my writing career, let alone had rejected.

My question to those who think it is correct to bar the likes of Rush Limbaugh or me from various opportunities on the basis of our ideological beliefs is this: is it correct for us to bar those who possess ideological beliefs with which we disagree from opportunities that we control? Because if those are the new rules, I don’t have any problem playing that game.

Occam’s Razor is correct here

The reason Obama hasn’t looked that smart since taking office is because he isn’t:

Are you tired of hearing how “smart” Barack Obama is? I reached my limit over the summer, when The New York Times Magazine quoted Valerie Jarrett, the president’s liaison to Chicago City Hall, declaring, “I mean, he’s really by far smarter than anybody I know.”

Well, as any Chicago schoolboy knows, there are many different kinds of smart. And right now our commander-in-chief is not looking particularly brilliant— at least on the level of substantive politics.

As I said before the election, Obama is far from the genius he is often portrayed as being. There is an absolute ceiling on his IQ of 130, based on his attendance at a high school where students took the PSAT and his failure to achieve any National Merit recognition. I estimate his IQ to be around 116, which is one standard deviation above average, but two standard deviations short of the level loosely described as a genius-level intelligence. (I don’t agree with that definition, by the way; I think genius is far more rare than +3 SD IQs and I think IQ is only one component of genius.)

Intelligence is overrated anyhow. It’s an important factor in accomplishment, but it is by no means the most important one. Focus, determination, connections, and ambition are all more important components of achievement and it’s interesting to contemplate where Obama is probably most gifted considering his relative lack of intelligence.

NFL ownership follies

Forget NBC, Mike Florio appears to be ready for his cameo on MSNBC. Here he attempts to float the idea that Limbaugh scrubbed his transcripts:

And regardless of the debate over whether Limbaugh did or didn’t say things that have been attributed to him but that, as Limbaugh claims, don’t show up in the Limbaugh-generated tapes and transcripts of his show (in this regard, most lawyers know of at least one judges who is very adept at ensuring the official record of in-court statements never includes potentially embarrasing or controversial commens from the man or woman in black), it’s not what he has said in the past that should scare the owners — it’s what he might say in the future.

Right, one of the most popular broadcasters in the world somehow managed to eliminate every recording in which he uttered inflammatory words. This is ludicrous.

The entire episode has been interesting in that it highlights the difference between the toadying sort of individuals whose success stems from successfully crawling their way up the employee ladder versus entrepeneurs who actually create their own success. It’s no surprise that the doorknob chosen by the NFL players would flap his lips on a subject that is none of his business, but Roger Goodell, who is showing more and more signs of being a terrible NFL commissioner, should have known better than to even think about commenting on the prospective ownership of any NFL franchise.

When one considers that the Dolphins are giving away small ownership slices to former methheads in the name of diversity, it’s absurd to that one of America’s most successful businessmen should be preemptively shot down on the off chance that he is foolish enough to invest in what is nothing but a vanity investment in the first place. If the economy goes the way I expect it to, in the not-too-distant future the same people who are presently pontificating on why Limbaugh shouldn’t be permitted to buy an NFL team will be desperately seeking bids from Russian gangsters and Colombian drug lords like the NBA is already doing.

It was amusing to see Peter King lumbering about in attempting to dance around the NFL’s affiliation with Keith Olbermann, who is far more extreme and far less popular than Rush Limbaugh. With classic left-liberal illogic, he declares that it’s just fine for a league-employed commentator to be a political flamethrower who offends millions, but that the league would be damaged if he were to be an owner. This makes no sense, since the league-employed commentator is much more in the face of the public he is offending, but then, that’s par for King’s analytical abilities.

My attitude is that turnabout is fair play. If the Left can do play business thought police, so can the Right, and I’d love to see those owners, whose politics are far more similar to Limbaugh’s than Olbermann’s, take Goodell and every other league employee who was dumb enough to advocate thought-policing to task.

Shut up, she pleaded

Peggy Noonan is more concerned about fraternizing politely with the internal enemy than she is with the fate of the country:

I was once in a small joust with Roger Ailes about violence on television. I was worried about it. He responded, I paraphrase: But there’s comedy all over TV, and I don’t see people breaking out in jokes and laughter on the streets. True, I said, but depictions of violence are different. Violent images excite the unstable. Violent words do, too. This is why, I think, so many people—I include, literally, every person I know, from all walks of life, and all ages—are worried that our elected leaders are not safe, that this overheated era will end in some violent act or acts. Stop reading this and ask whoever’s nearby, “Do you find yourself worrying about President Obama’s safety?” I do not think you are going to get, “No.”

Some conservatives feel umbrage when this is said. “The left equates criticism with violence in order to squelch dissent.” In some cases that of course will be true. But this isn’t debate, it’s more like incitement. And it comes from both right and left. Democracy cannot healthily endure without free and unfettered debate. It’s our job to watch, critique and question, and, being us, to do it in colorful terms. But knowing where the line is, matters. Seeing clearly the lay of the land, knowing the facts of the country and your countrymen, matters.

Which gets us back to Safire and Cronkite and Novak and the rest. They knew where the line was. They were tough guys who got in big fights, but they had a sense of responsibility towards the country, and towards its culture. They, actually, were protective toward it. They made mistakes, but they were solid.

This is an astounding glimpse into the mind of a Washington conservative, which is to say someone who is nothing more than a left-wing accomodationist. The Washington elite actually thinks that the average American gives a damn about the lives of their elected officials, when I’ll bet that not more than a third would even bother to piss on them if they were on fire. And another third would spray gasoline instead. Like many Americans, I regret that AGW/CC is a sham, as I think the nation would be much better off with Washington and New York City deep underwater.

And citing Cronkite as some sort of defender of the country is monstrously false, considering that the man was a strong advocate of ending American sovereignty in favor of global dictatorship. I don’t know if Noonan is poorly informed or a sell-out, but either way, her call for national unity and etiquette merits nothing but a pair of silent, but eloquent fingers.