“The trailer for the new film produced by Citizens United and directed by Stephen K. Bannon. ‘Occupy Unmasked’ goes deep into the ‘Occupy’ movement and exposes its origins as well as the radical ideas behind ‘income inequality’ that has become the centerpiece of the Obama re-election effort.”
“Rick Santorum Is Right: Gas Prices Caused the Great Recession,” Derek Thompson writes at the Atlantic, though he cautions high gasoline prices were but one of several factors. It’s a fascinating post, especially considering the pro-Obama publication running it. It was, not coincidentally, home to the MSM’s uterus detective during his most manic phase, obsessed with destroying a vice-presidential candidate who had the obvious solution to reducing energy prices — and thus jump-starting the economy:
In 2009, economist James Hamilton published a paper that retroactively forecast what an oil shock, like the one we experienced in 2007-08, would do to GDP. And guess what? His model accurately predicated much of the collapse in GDP that resulted from the Great Recession — as if there had been no housing bubble or financial crisis! The oil spike was that bad.
Still, there was a housing bubble. And there was a financial crisis. How do we account for them and still hold onto the gas story? Here’s a one-paragraph theory of the Great Recession that begins with gasoline. Cheap gas ruled in the 1990s. This encouraged families to settle down farther from the cities where they worked. In the 2000s, super-low interest rates, declining lending standards, and an appetite for mortgages on Wall Street (among other factors) further encouraged sprawl and residential development in the ‘burbs. As the price of gas went up, families stopped buying homes 30 minutes from the city. For folks shacking up in the exurbs, higher gas bills ate into mortgage money. For companies, higher energy bills shocked productivity. Classic oil-shock + housing development arrested + financial crisis = Great Recession.
There appears to be pretty strong correlation (if not causation) between national gas prices, which accelerated after 2005, and housing starts, which declined after 2005.
Say, what was different about America in 2005?
The video above provides the answer. And how did the entire elite media react in late 2008 when gas prices had temporarily cratered? NBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post all begged the Office of the President Elect in lockstep unison to tax the daylights out of energy and get those prices back into the stratosphere — and the economy stuck in the mud of Obamaville.
(Update: Video moved to top of post to avoid positioning conflict with our advertisement.)
The weekend before the election of 2004: Walter Cronkite tells Larry King* that George Bush and Karl Rove had captured Osama bin Laden and were evidently holding him in cryogenic storage at the Ministry of Defense alongside Austin Powers, Evel Knievel and Vanilla Ice.
Flash-forward to election year 2012: “Current TV** host Cenk Uygur claimed President George W. Bush had no interest in finding Osama bin Laden,” adding that Bush was “sitting on his ass.”
Bill Clinton could not be reached for comment.
Related: “Oh my: Majorities of liberal Democrats now support drone strikes, keeping Gitmo open.” Fancy that.
* The Piers Morgan of your parents’ generation.
** No, we’re not sure what that refers to, either.
“Do Aliens Go Invisible by ‘Going Green,’” the Discovery Channel asks for reasons unknown, other than perhaps it being a slow news day:
Canadian science fiction writer Karl Schroeder has come upon a novel solution to the failure of astronomical observations to solve the Fermi Paradox. He proposes: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.” (This is a takeoff on Arthur C. Clarke’s posit: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”)
In other words, smart aliens have “gone green” and generate no waste products that we could detect. They therefore blend into the galaxy. Therefore, “artificial and natural systems are indistinguishable,” writes Schroeder.
Our response is in video form at the top of the post.
Beyond that rebuttal, the Discovery Channel doesn’t appear to be any hurry to do their part to accelerate this process by discontinuing their cable TV channel and deactivating their Web server, but it is a reminder of the end game of radical environmentalism: putting the toothpaste of western civilization and technological progress back into the tube and returning mankind to a primitive pre-industrial state.
Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Democrat Governor, appears to be particularly eager to help.
We already know about the JournoList, and the Obama administration emailing MSNBC to “correct” them mid-show. And the Washington Post’s then-ombudsman admitted immediately after the 2008 election how deeply in the tank her paper was (and is) for the then-president elect. Now a new article at the Washington Beacon notes that the New York Times’ angel investor dropped by the Obama White House this week for a chat, which his admittedly liberal paper “unexpectedly” chose not to disclose:
The world’s richest man quietly slipped into Washington, D.C., this week for a series of powwows with top Obama administration officials – but you would not know it if you read the New York Times.
Univision’s Jordan Fabian reports that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim held a series of closed-door meetings with senior Obama officials such as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.
Slim is worth an estimated $63 billion, and owns more than seven percent of the New York Times Company – though the eponymous newspaper of record didn’t deem it necessary to report on its partial owners’ D.C. trip. (Slim also loaned the Times $250 million last year, which earned him warrants to bump his holding in the company to nearly 16 percent.)
Often referred to as “Mexico’s Mr. Monopoly,” Slim has been accused of employing mafia-esque tactics to retain control of his 70 percent stake in the country’s telecom industry. Last week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development accused Slim’s telecommunications companies of overcharging customers and stymieing economic growth in Mexico.
Overcharging customers and stymieing economic growth? No wonder he feels so close to Mr. Obama.
“In New York City alone, there’s about $70 billion worth of commercial mortgages — some of which have been sold off as mortgage-backed securities, naturally — coming due this year,” Kevin D. Williamson writes at National Review Online. “The national total is more than $150 billion, or a bit more than 1 percent of U.S. GDP:”
Trepp [a commercial mortgage-backed securities analysis firm] gets to the real concern here, which is that these mortgages and mortgage-backed securities are sitting on the balance sheets of a bunch of still-wobbly banks. How wobbly? About 100 banks went under last year, and about 250 are expected to go under this year. Trepp finds that, of the banks that went toes-up in 2011, bad commercial real estate accounted for two-thirds of their failing loans.
This is a textbook case for the Austrian business-cycle theory: Artificially low interest rates and loose money produce overinvestment, by both bankers and builders, in a bubble — this time, offices, apartment buildings, and retail space — that can’t be sustained once the artificial stimulation comes to an end, as it must. In this case, that malinvestment has to be worked out at two levels: At the financial level, among the lenders and borrowers, but also at the physical level: There’s going to be a lot of dark storefronts out there, with serious long-term consequences for nearby neighbors and for local real-estate markets: Foreclosures will put more property onto the market, driving down rents and subsequently making existing loans less tenable as the cashflow of commercial properties is diminished. They called the Depression-era tent cities “Hoovervilles.” The next time you see a mile of half-abandoned strip malls, think “Obamaville.”
Not as bad as 2008? Probably not — and let’s hope it is not even close. But there’s a $3 trillion commercial-mortgage market lurking out there, and a lot of CMBS investors — banks and insurance companies in particular — that Washington thinks are “too big to fail,” a problem we persistently refuse to address.
Related: “Shipping Rates Go… Negative.” I’ve seen this movie before.
More: James Lileks kicks off a new section of his sprawling Website titled “Malls of Yore.” There coming years will provide the opportunity for far too many potential additions.
Meanwhile at Ricochet, George Savage explores how brutal — and brutally slow — it can be to get a retail business off the ground in über-blue San Francisco. Satirizing the warped priorities of the “mostly violent” Occumutants he asks, “Why Not Occupy City Hall Instead?”
In Time — which is careful to remind its delicate readers that “the views expressed are solely his own” — Charles Murray outlines some of the material in his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010:
What makes the new upper class new is that its members not only have power and influence but also increasingly share a common culture that separates them from the rest of the country. Fifty years ago, the people who rose to the most influential positions overwhelmingly had Hank’s kind of background, thoroughly grounded in the American mainstream. Today, people of influence are characterized by college education, often from elite colleges. The men are married not to the girl next door but to highly educated women socialized at the same elite schools who are often as professionally successful as their husbands. They were admitted to this path by a combination of high IQ and personality strengths. They are often the children — and, increasingly, grandchildren — of the upper-middle class and have never known any other kind of life.
As adults, they have distinctive tastes and preferences and seek out enclaves of others who share them. Their culture incorporates little of the lifestyle or the popular culture of the rest of the nation; in fact, members of the new upper class increasingly look down on that mainstream lifestyle and culture. Meanwhile, their children are so sheltered from the rest of the nation that they barely know what life is like outside Georgetown, Scarsdale, Kenilworth or Atherton. If this divide continues to widen, it will completely destroy what has made America’s national civic culture exceptional: a fluid, mobile society where people from different backgrounds live side by side and come together for the common good.
Much truth in Murray’s diagnosis, but I can’t say much for his prescription for a cure though, as Kathy Shaidle writes, paraphrasing Murray’s solution. “Competent, responsible rich people should move next door to incompetent, irresponsible poor people, who will then supposedly be inspired by the former’s example to pull themselves up by their own Air Jordan laces:”
Murray’s startling reverse-Beverly Hillbillies “solution” to the great divide’s “problem” is his new book’s biggest “takeaway,” and not always in a good way.
Writing in The American Conservative, Rod Dreher remarked dryly:
But why, concretely, should a particular family choose to do that? Murray, a libertarian, suggests that it would make life more interesting for them. I bet it would….
Yes, no doubt life was terribly “interesting” for Helen Hill, Susan Poff, and Robert Kamin—right up to the second they were killed by the “underprivileged” ingrates they’d stooped to embrace.
(Naturally, The New York Times’ David Brooks thinks Murray’s idea is just dandy and would be even better if it was turned into a federal government program.)
Charles Murray has forgotten more about race, class, education, and intelligence than I could ever learn, so I feel deeply sheepish issuing the same challenge to him (and to David Brooks) that I would to any semi-anonymous, upper-class, bumper-stickered do-gooder preaching “zero population growth,” state-sponsored solar-powered homes, and a ban on the internal-combustion engine:
After you, sir.
Immediately after the 2004 election, Rush Limbaugh was fond of quoting this exchange between David Westin, then the president of ABC News (the initial reporting on 9/11 certainly proved a challenge to Westin, you may recall), and Tina Brown, now the editor of the Daily Beastweek, then the host of a long-since-canceled CNBC show.
RUSH: So, anyway, she’s got David Westin on the program, and she says, “David, would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities?” She’s talking about the red states of America here, folks. “Would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities and saturate themselves in these cultures so that they get more stories from those communities?”
WESTIN: I think we don’t do that enough, and I’m not just talking religious communities. I’m talking all sorts of communities across the country. I think that… You understand this, Tina, living in New York or in Los Angeles, we have busy jobs. We go into the office every day. We tend to socialize with the same people, or the same types of people, and I think it’s terribly important for journalists to get out whether it’s overseas or domestically and try to understand.
RUSH: We need more foreign correspondents in Alabama! We need more foreign correspondents north of Palm Beach County in Florida! We need embeds to go to church, find out what’s going on with these holy rollers! Ah, folks, you can’t know how much I love this.
Instead of dispatching foreign correspondents to red state Alabama, what Murray is calling for is wealthy coastal elites to “Occupy” less fortunate neighborhoods mostly in their own blue states. Living in Silicon Valley, adjacent to Palo Alto, Marin, and the aforementioned Atherton, I can’t see that happening, well, ever. Can you?
Update: “Mitt did it all wrong” Don Surber writes, in a very much related post:
No matter who you support this year, you have to admit Mitt Romney went about becoming president the wrong way. Instead of wasting his time learning how business works and building a multi-billion-dollar company that really did save or create hundreds of thousands of jobs, Mitt should have lived off his daddy’s fortune like Jack Kennedy. Chasing skirts and molesting teenage virgin is a lot more fun than figuring out how to revive an old business.
Instead, Mitt Romney gave his inheritance to charity. Who does that anymore?
The press loves the kids of privilege — Bobby Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller and the rest of the trust fund babies — but only if they support huge government programs that transfer wealth from workers to non-workers. Remember, the press says liberals win despite their wealth while the press says conservatives win because of their wealth. The press never inquires into the manipulation of the tax code that allows wealth to transfer on to the fifth generation of a 19th century robber baron or 20th century bootlegger.
As the Professor writes, read the whole thing.™
Deadline Hollywood reports that AMC Entertainment had a rough 2011:
The exhibition chain reports this morning in an SEC filing that it had a $72.8M loss in the last three months of 2011 — more than double its $32.8M loss in the quarter a year ago — on revenues of $557.3M, down 7.6%. Attendance fell 8.7%. With a decline in the number of 3D and Imax films which come with higher ticket prices, patrons on average paid 1.4% less to get in than they did a year ago.
From Hollywood and the White House’s perspective, that’s nothing but good news, right? If, as President Obama said last fall, America has “gotten a little soft,” less movie watching should help ameliorate some of the national flab he perceives, right? Robert Redford is anti-energy, and less movie attendance should help reduce our energy consumption a little bit. Less toilet paper being consumed in the restrooms should make Laurie David and Sheryl Crow happy. Then there’s the main consumer product that movie theaters distribute. If, as James Cameron said in 2010, “DVDs are wasteful…It’s a consumer product like any consumer product.” If DVD are a wasteful consumer product, isn’t movie watching as well? It sets the Hollywood cycle of selling consumer products in motion — and sells plenty of non-Michelle Obama-approved junk food in the process.
And speaking of eco-puritans at the intersection of DC and LA, “Al Gore’s Current TV Could Go Belly-Up If Keith F’n’ Olbermann Doesn’t Start Delivering Big Ratings,” Ace writes.
If, as Al claims, we have less than four years left to save the planet, shouldn’t he eliminate his channel voluntarily to help reduce his carbon footprint?
Flashback: “Prominent Environmentalist Finally Discovers His Religion’s Catch-22.”
I have no idea whether or not Matthew Continetti’s new Washington Beacon will ultimately succeed, but he kicks it off with one helluva manifesto, which promises a little political jiu-jitsu. “What would happen,” Continetti asks, “if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right?”
After hours listening to the drone of Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, or Scott Pelley, one might conclude that America is a one-party state ruled by the GOP. But in fact the Republicans have controlled just one chamber of Congress for just one year, have been outspent by Democrats in the two most recent election cycles and are likely to be outspent in the current cycle, have drawn the ire and opposition of the 10 richest zip codes in the country, and have been so inept at shaping public opinion that one of America’s premier anti-cancer organizations had to backtrack when it decided to part ways with the country’s largest abortion provider.
Meanwhile, rather than tease out the connections between the big banks, unions, alternative energy companies, entrenched market incumbents, institutions such as the Center for American Progress and its Action Fund, and the policy apparatus of the Democratic Party, the press is far happier to mock Republicans as rubes and incompetents and to cover with relish Mitt Romney’s latest gaffe.
What would happen, though, if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right? What picture of the world would one have in mind if the morning paper read like the New York Times—but with the subjects of the stories and the assumptions built into the text changed to reflect a conservative, not liberal, worldview? What would happen if the media wolf pack suddenly had to worry about an aerial hunting operation?
You are about to find out. The Washington Free Beacon is here to enter the arena of combat journalism. Our talented staff will add to the chorus of enterprising conservative reporters, publishing original stories, seeking out scoops, and focusing on the myriad connections between money and power in the progressive movement and Obama’s Washington. Our research and war room divisions will supplement that reporting with context, additional materials, and breaking video. At the Beacon, you will find the other half of the story, the half that the elite media have taken such pains to ignore: the inside deals, cronyism cloaked in the public interest, and far-out nostrums of contemporary progressivism and the Democratic Party. At the Beacon, all friends of freedom will find an alternative to the hackneyed spin, routine misstatements, paranoid hyperbole, and insipid folderol of Democratic officials and the liberal gasbags on MSNBC and talk radio. At the Beacon, we follow only one commandment: Do unto them.
Hey remember all that hypocritical BS a year ago by an MSM railing against war and gun-related imagery? I think Continetti just told the MSM to shove it all up their lavalier mics.
And the timing of his new Website couldn’t be better, as an otherwise unrelated post by Peter Robinson makes clear today at Ricochet:
As recently as this past Friday, I would still have said that the single, overriding issue in this election year would be the economy. Yet in the past 100 hours, Planned Parenthood and its pro-choice supporters in the press have savaged the Komen Foundation; the Obama administration, which might easily have backed down from its regulations forcing Catholic health care institutions to provide contraceptives in direct violation of Catholic teaching, has instead mounted a public relations offensive to insist upon its position; and the Ninth Circuit has ruled unconstitutional California’s Proposition 8, issuing its decision in language so self-righteous and so bald that it could only have been intended to insult the millions of Californians who supported the ballot measure.
As Peter writes, “Already the highest in a generation, the stakes in this election have just risen.” It would nice if the right had anything approaching parity with old media and the establishment left. Perhaps a more pugilistic tone might be a good first start.
Related: “And what is true of liberal politics is also true of liberal public policy, Jonah Goldberg writes in USA Today. “As the Obama administration has made clear to the Catholic Church, there is no neutrality, no safe harbor from liberalism’s moral vision. You’re either with us, or against us — which means we shall be against you.”
Another illustration of presidential hubris involved the Bush family. The White House put out a picture of a private meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 27 that included former President George H.W. Bush and his son, Jeb, the former governor of Florida.
The Bushes were in town for the annual black tie dinner the next night at the Alfalfa Club, a gathering of business and political elites. The two featured speakers, both intended to be brief and humorous, were Obama and Jeb Bush. The president spoke to good reviews. He left before Bush spoke.
Obama hates such dinners. Some of his aides, in particular his political adviser David Plouffe, urged him not to spend an evening mingling with the 1 percent. Yet he chose to go, and attendees said it was the first time they could recall a speaker leaving before the other side had its fun. In addition, Obama’s 87-year-old predecessor was present.
Imagine the criticism five years ago if President George W. Bush had walked out on a dinner before Hillary Clinton spoke, with Bill Clinton in the audience.
“We would have to imagine it,” Ed Morrissey writes, “because the Bushes have too much class to have pulled this stunt.”
(Headline above by this Hot Air commenter.)
Member of mostly peaceful Occupy Newfoundland accused of stabbing 22-year old woman; “Occupy NL movement shocked by charges,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports, in an article written by Claude Rains’ Louis Renault character from Casablanca:
David Harrington, 19, was calm as he was led into court. Harrington will remain in custody until he enters a plea later this month.
He is charged with stabbing a woman as she walked to her job at McDonald’s on Torbay Road.
Harrington is a familiar face to many in the downtown. He has no fixed address, and recently spent time in Harbourside Park, with the Occupy NL movement.
“Absolutely surprised, because from what I know of Dave, this is not something Dave would do — he has no reason to be up into the east end,” Canning told CBC News. “It doesn’t make fricking sense.”
Nice epitaph for the entire Occupy movement, which has had plenty of violence swirling about it. I’m sure all of this is purely a coincidence.
(Via the Corner.)
Ann Coulter goes all-in for Mitt Romney:
“you owe me and you’d better be as right-wing a President as I tell people you will be!”
– Ann Coulter on Hannity last night recounting her exchange with Mitt Romney
That’s the quote The Blaze and Mediaite are jumping on to highlight — a pundit who has taken a lot of hits for her defense of Romneycare insisting to the candidate that he really does pursue a conservative course once in government. One dares even imagine how sharp Coulter’s barbs would be for a President Romney devolving back into Massachusetts Moderation.
Another one that’s more important though is the quote I chose for the headline. “We’ve killed off Rockefeller Republicans” Coulter declares, pointing out that Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum have little ideological differences and juxtaposed with John McCain are much more conservative.
I missed the memo — Romney is in many ways a good man, and would be a far better president than Barack Obama — but then that’s not setting the baseline very high. But if only by way of RomneyCare, isn’t he the very definition of a Rockefeller Republican?
Related: Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades on “Mitt Romney and the Tea Party Pundit.”
Just a reminder that South Park’s “Smug Alert!” episode was a warning, not a user’s guide.
Related: “‘An Inconsistent Truth’ Debunks Gore’s Global Warming Hysteria.”
“There’s nothing better than being able to do the right thing and the politically savvy thing,” Kurt Schlichter writes at Big Hollywood, “ while simultaneously paying back a long-time abuser in spades:”
And that’s just what the Republicans in Congress did to Hollywood when it abandoned the rush to pass SOPA and regulate the Internet for the benefit of Tinseltown. Astonishingly, considering its usual inability to perform competently at even the most basic level, the GOP not only managed to embrace good policy but drove a wedge into the Democratic coalition that may well have dramatic consequences down the road. And, best of all, it provided a bit of long overdue payback to the smug oligarchs of LA’s West Side who have spent the last couple decades treating Republicans like something you’d hasten to flush.
Hey, suckers, how do ya like us now?
Read the whole thing.
Whether it was on the field…
Eli Manning and the New York Giants, all but given up on mid-December, saved their best for the last, pulling out a dramatic fourth-quarter comeback against the New England Patriots to finish off a brilliant stretch of play with a 21-17 victory Sunday for the franchises’ fourth Super Bowl title.
Manning delivered a 78-touchdown drive, capped by six-yard Ahmad Bradshaw touchdown run against an uncontested Patriots defense with 1:04 left. New England tried to give Tom Brady as much time for a comeback as possible, but the Giants defense stopped them to seal the victory.
It was Manning’s seventh fourth-quarter winning drive of the season for the Giants, who seemed to court disaster and play their best with everything hanging in the balance. It also signaled another late-game, Super Bowl outdueling of Brady, considered among the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. Manning previously won a duel between the two in Super Bowl XLII.
The Giants took over at their own 12-yard line, trailing 17-15 with just 3:46 remaining. Manning started with a pass to Mario Manningham, who made a circus 38-yard grab down the sideline. The Giants moved methodically the rest of the way, both killing the clock, burning New England timeouts and eventually forcing the Patriots to concede the winning points rather than allow a field goal with no time left.
While sharing the stage with Madonna and Nicki Minaj during the song “Give Me All Your Luvin,” M.I.A. — in Cleaopatra gear and black stiletto boots — gave the middle-finger insult directly to a camera for a full second.
Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction” in which her breast, with a nipple guard, became exposed during her halftime show with Justin Timberlake has been a difficult-to-top moment in TV history.
Jackson’s indiscretion resulted in a $550,000 fine levied by the FCC against CBS for airing the uncensored, highly controversial moment.
…This Super Bowl had a distinct sense of deja vu about it, right down to yet another Government Motors, Chrysler division commercial praising the joys of bombed out, government stimulus-ed out Detroit, this time with Clint Eastwood — once a self-professed libertarian — playing the role of Eminem:
And once again, presumably Mark Steyn’s next weekly column or Corner post writes itself.
Update: “Would Dirty Harry ask for a handout? Hell no, he wouldn’t.” In contrast, the attendees at the Super Bowl have a bit more common sense than Clint: “#Occupy Protesters Heckled Outside Super Bowl.”
Heathrow’s flight controllers would never cut it at O’Hare or Minneapolis:
Heathrow Airport faced questions last night as to why half of all flights were cancelled hours after it stopped snowing.
BAA, the Spanish-owned airport operator, incurred the wrath of passengers after 600 flights were grounded at Heathrow despite just three inches of snowfall, disrupting the plans of as many as 18,000 travellers.
The disruption was in stark contrast to airports across Europe where, despite record low temperatures, flights took off as normal.
But why wouldn’t Heathrow’s flight controllers be unnerved at the thought of any snow, based on the stories that their hometown newspapers were running a decade ago?
Related: “Global Warming Engine Unexpectedly Slows,” Walter Russell Mead writes. Though not before England’s James Delingpole writes at Ricochet.com, “Memo to the Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven’t had quite enough death threats yet…”
At the DC Examiner, Charlie Spiering writes:
An obvious victim of CNN’s graphic-heavy election presentation, news anchor John King called Mitt Romney “Governor Mormon” last night, during coverage of the Nevada election results.
“If you look here among faith, obviously Governor Mormon is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” King said. “He’s a Mormon and he also won big among Mormons.”
Romney won the vote of 9 out of 10 Mormons in Nevada.
“Bigotry will slip out,” Glenn Reynolds writes, clearly in nowhere near as charitable a mood as Spiering. Nor should he be. A year ago, King apologized on-air for a guest using the word “crosshairs,” which for a time was a temporarily-loaded word amongst King’s fellow left-leaning members of old media — even on one that for years hosted a show with an almost identical title:
On Tuesday’s John King USA, CNN’s John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term “crosshairs” during a segment: “We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language” (audio available here). This action stands in stark contrast to an incident over a year earlier where former anchor Rick Sanchez took four days to apologize for using a unconfirmed quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh.
Since King himself set the standard, clearly, he must apologize for using his own similarly potentially inflammatory language or risk being called a hypocrite.
Well, again, especially given his network’s repeated penchant for religious bigotry.
Update: As a commenter asks below, does King ever refer to Harry Reid as “Senator Mormon?”
It’s no coincidence that SF stands for both “science fiction” and “San Francisco” — terms that are increasingly interchangeable as a once great city continues to collectively go further off a cliff:
Above the Law may need to hire a full-time legal bathroombeat reporter.
A few days ago, we learned that Harvard Law School named a bathroom after an alumnus with an, umm, unusual last name.
Last night, we received a tip about the San Francisco branch of a national law firm that delivered an office-wide email concerning “restroom etiquette.” The email is hilarious, and if nothing else, impressively thorough. They thought of everything. The missive covered tips for masking awkward bathroom noises, suggestions for choosing a urinal, and an emphasis on the ways bathroom behavior can affect your professional reputation.
Let’s see which firm has (toilet) water on the brain, and take a look at the memo after the jump….
Without further ado, the hygienically minded firm is Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith.
I prefer the video version, myself:
Related: In Florida, an “environmentally-friendly” restroom goes “unexpectedly” horrifically wrong.
– Headline, Investor’s Business Daily, yesterday.
– Lede of Joel Kotkin’s Thursday article at Forbes, titled, “Who Stands The Most To Win – And Lose – From A Second Obama Term.”
Not surprisingly, I find the first scenario much more interesting to contemplate, but your mileage may vary.
“Politico: Enough of the ‘Indignation Industry,’” Ace writes:
I wish they were serious about this. I’d sure like an end to the left’s incessant “He said a dirty word” childish tattletaling and, even worse, the silly crap we on the right respond with in kind, to make the point.
I get the reason to make the point, to notify the left of what the same rules feel like when used as a weapon against them. But despite that defensible point, I feel silly about doing it. It doesn’t feel like us. It feels like them. It feels like imbeciles who shriek at the sight of a mouse.
Jonathan Martin of Politico recently referred to the “cracker counties” of Florida (those bordering Georgia and Alabama), and the right has taken him to task for his very own Macacca Moment.
After he complained how silly that all was, now a fellow writer at Politico writes about how silly the game is, generally.
I agree. But let’s remember that going forward, huh? Let’s not just realize it’s silly when applied against a co-worker, eh?
* * * * *
Back to Politico’s point: It’s a great point. I’m glad someone in the liberal media made it.
And I expect they’ll drop what they know about the essential falseness and triviality of the Indignation Industry the next time the Democratic Party and Obama for America needs them to.
Especially given that it’s Politico, which makes its living pitting various American political factions against each other — invariably, given the Website’s liberal allegiances, using conservatives as punching bags. It’s awfully rich of them to pretend to get offended when someone calls them on their shtick.
(And don’t miss Ace’s thoughts in the same post on why Romney is running. Romney’s reasoning as a candidate is a sort of Reader’s Digest condensed version 0f the decisions Bush #43 made in office, determined to avoid the mistakes his father made as president.)
