Too good to check: “Report: Kim Jong Un Hands Copies of ‘Mein Kampf’ to Top Officers:”

A report from New Focus International, a North Korean news organization that runs underground to avoid the scrutiny of the tyrannical government, senior government officials got copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf for Kim Jong Un’s birthday in January.

Only a few copies were handed out, since most books are banned in the country; such gifts are called “hundred-copy books” in North Korea. According to the report, the book was not intended to idolize the anti-Semitic aspects of Nazism, but to focus in on Hitler’s plans for economic recovery in the country. “Kim Jong Un gave a lecture to high-ranking officials, stressing that we must pursue the policy of Byungjin in terms of nuclear and economic development,” the government source said. “Mentioning that Hitler managed to rebuild Germany in a short time following its defeat in World War One, Kim Jong Un issued an order for the Third Reich to be studied in depth and asked that practical applications be drawn from it.”

Isn’t it a little too late to be handing out copies of Mein Kampf, when you’re already living out Downfall?

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As Dr. Floyd said of the monolith in 2001, “Its origin and purpose, still a total mystery:”

Five months into his second term, allies and enemies are as confounded as ever about who President Obama really is.

Is he the dyed-in-the-wool liberal that his biggest supporters and critics suggest? Or is he a pragmatic, even cynical, politician who cares more for his popularity than taking risks for his ideological goals or living up to his rhetoric?

Even in the short period since his reelection, Obama has provided evidence to support conflicting interpretations.

— Justin Sink in The Hill today, in a piece titled “Who is he? Obama keeps allies, enemies guessing in second term.”

Mr. Obama has certainly kept “liberal” “journalists” and their editors guessing — they’ve been submitting copy about him for six years in which, despite having the collective resources of some of the biggest journalistic enterprises behind them, and the entire Internet at their fingertips, they…just…can’t..seem…to…put..their…finger…on…who this strange and exotic Barack Obama fellow they helped push into the White House truly is.

One of the earliest examples of this genre literally used the E-word in its headline:

What Obama really thinks should be done about health care and the terrorist threat remain secrets that his book does not unlock. His two years in the Senate certainly haven’t revealed any bold policy ideas.

This leave-them-guessing strategy slips out in the book’s prologue. “I serve as a blank screen,” Obama writes, “on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He notifies readers that “my treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete.” It takes some doing for a politician to write a 364-page book, his second volume, and skate past all controversy.

— “Obama Scores as Exotic Who Says Nothing,” from the December 26, 2006 edition of Real Clear Politics, by Froma Harrop.

Almost two years later, on the eve of the 2008 presidential election, here are two senior network television journalists tacitly admitting on-air that their own news departments have utterly failed both them and millions of American voters:

CHARLIE ROSE: I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.

TOM BROKAW: No, I don’t, either.

ROSE: I don’t know how he really sees where China is.

BROKAW: We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.

ROSE: I don’t really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?

BROKAW: Yeah, it’s an interesting question.

ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.

BROKAW: Two of them! I don’t know what books he’s read.

ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?

BROKAW: There’s a lot about him we don’t know.

— Charlie Rose of PBS and NBC’s Tom Brokaw, October 30, 2008.

A CNN reporter uttered the same quiet admission of failure regarding his own TV network less than a month later:

“The Americans who are comparing him to those remarkable predecessors are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.”

— Jonathan Mann of CNN, November 28, 2008, in an article titled “Which hero do we want Obama to be?”, which compared Obama to JFK, FDR, Lincoln…and Bill Clinton.

And last year, Real Clear Politics came full circle. Despite Obama having been near the conclusion of his first term in office, the president was still scoring as an exotic who revealed nothing to left-leaning journalists with inch-thick blindfolds on:

George W. Bush was not an enigma. He had no hidden parts. His father was not mysterious. George H.W. Bush’s life was dedicated to achievement and service. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t unfathomable. Nothing in his presidency — the brilliant highs, the shocking lows — was a substantial, unpredictable departure from his past.

Barack Obama, though, is the most enigmatic president since Jimmy Carter, the most mysterious since Lyndon Johnson, the most unfathomable since Franklin Roosevelt. Political professionals sometimes say of public figures that what you see is what you get, more or less. But with Mr. Obama, what you see is both more and less than what you get. [...]

The gravest warning sign in Mr. Obama’s background wasn’t his spare record in the U.S. Senate (Johnson often ridiculed John F. Kennedy for having accomplished almost nothing in the Capitol), nor his limited experience in electoral office (Lincoln had but one term in the House). Instead, the most troubling aspect of Mr. Obama’s past were the 129 abstentions in his Illinois Senate career. They suggested that Mr. Obama was more interested in getting elected than in doing the work he had been elected to perform.

— “Even After 4 Years, Obama Remains a Mystery,” David Shribman, Real Clear Politics, August 19, 2012.

Flash-forward nearly a year later to today. Linking to the latest example in the MSM’s genre of “who is this strange and mysterious Barack Obama fellow, and what on earth could his curious agenda be?”, blogger Jammie Wearing Fool quotes the aforementioned Justin Sink of The Hill and replies:

Part of that agenda, apparently, is using the IRS to go after his political opponents. Of course they fail to even mention his targeting of tea partiers, although there’s passing mentions of his numerous scandals.

The inaugural in particular seemed to show Obama believing that “his reelection would convince Republicans that they had to deal with him, that they had to come to the table,” Jillson said. “He articulated that idea at several points during the campaign, that the fever among the Republicans will break.”

But a tsunami of scandals and controversies since then has confounded the president’s ambitions.

It probably would help if they mentioned some of the tsunami of scandals, but the readers are left to figure out what they are. Heckuva job.

And that’s the problem: to reveal who Obama is and what his agenda is, would be to a shine a light on the goals of what passes for “liberalism” and “progressivism” in the second decade of the 21st century. And no MSM journalist wants to be accused of telling the American public what those truly are.

Update: “Americans’ Confidence in Newspapers Continues to Erode,” Gallup reports. “Fewer than one in four Americans confident in newspapers, TV news.”

What on earth could be the cause of this mysterious, impossible to understand development? It’s all happened so...unexpectedly.

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Even on Father’s Day, dad can’t catch a break from “liberal” Hollywood, whether it’s TV commercials, story plots, or even the Internet Movie Database homepage today. While the article’s headline gets it right, the IMDB homepage screencapped above sure didn’t.

It’s enough to make a man want to go on strike to protest a society that’s so stacked against him; watch the space for our interview with Dr. Helen on her new book in the not-too-distant future.

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Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

CBS anchor Scott Pelley said at a speech at Quinnipiac University that journalists “are getting big stories wrong, over and over again.”

— Daniel Halper, the Weekly Standard, May 11, 2013.

In a recent interview, CBS Evening News host Scott Pelley said that he thinks that Fox News really doesn’t have very many viewers–underestimating the network’s actual ratings by about 90 percent.

Pelley told Deadline Hollywood that Fox might have perhaps as few as “200,000 viewers.”

Deadline asked Pelley what he thought of the cable news outlets that cater to “just one segment of the political spectrum in their reporting.”

“Certainly. It’s no surprise,” Pelley replied. “Fox is associated with the right and MSNBC is associated with the left and they’ve done that because it is a business model. It’s a strategy. They’ve decided to bite off one small part of the viewership and be happy with that 200,000 viewers, 300,000 viewers that they have.”

— “CBS’s Scott Pelley Underestimates Fox News Ratings by 90%,” Warner Todd Huston, Big Journalism, today.

Oh, and note this quote from Pelley in the same interview with Deadline Hollywood:

But when you are talking to 7 million viewers across the country, man you have got to represent everybody’s views and have got to give them the impression that you are being as honest as you know how to be.

As Huston noted at the conclusion of his post, Pelley overestimated his own numbers by almost a million and a half viewers. Beyond that, telling an interviewer that your goal is to give those viewers “the impression that you are being as honest as you know how to be” is veering dangerously close into the sort of sophistry that Pelley’s most infamous antecedent on CBS would approve:

Especially when far from attempting to “represent everybody’s views,” when it comes to global warming skeptics, Pelley notoriously said in a 2005 profile at CBS News.com, “If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?”

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How seriously does CNN take the important events of the day? As seriously as the above screencap from Twitter illustrates. As a commenter at William Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection blog quips, “in a hundred thousand years, an alien archeologist digging through ancient Earth civilization will come to the conclusion that Kim Kardashian was Queen of our planet at this time.”

Our alien archeologist might also conclude that this gentleman was enough of an expert on data mining, the War on Terror, and American national security as to warrant the following description on his Chyron:

Click to enlarge.

Finally, never let it be said that CNN doesn’t take seriously the notion of freedom, liberty, and the First Amendment:

On Sunday’s edition of Global Public Square, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria invited Mona Eltahawy to offer her perspective on the anti-government protests in Turkey and the rights of women in the Muslim world. It is unclear what qualifies Eltahawy as an authority on rights of any kind, since she is currently being prosecuted for defacing a poster on the New York City subway that she happened to dislike–a crime of which she is proud.

The poster, sponsored by Pam Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative, read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

Eltahawy took offense and attempted to spray-paint the word “racist” on the poster–in the process spray-painting a photographer who attempted to guard the poster. As she was being arrested, she complained: “This is non-violent protest.”

Something very strange has gotten into the water at CNN — and American viewers know it.

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Derp!

But hey, look at it from the Obama White House’s point of view. The Founding Founders produced a confusing document that’s over 100 years old and that 21st century ‘Progressives’ (in thrall to a philosophy that’s also over 100 years old) pay no attention to, when they’re not outright calling for its demise:

Plus in a town that’s so PC that homebuilders now eschew references to “The Master Bedroom,” that whole “Fathers” thing is awfully sexist sounding, isn’t it?

And besides, even Obama staffers don’t want to risk having the IRS sicced on them by their boss for using the wrong language.

Update (10:56 PM PDT): Looks like enough reverse-Alinsky shaming by the Blogosphere and Twittersphere caused them to change it. Still, I suspect the “Founding Founders” malapropism will live on for quite some time.

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Change: In July of 2008, Obama visits Germany, delivers his Day The Earth Stood Still-style Citizens of the World Unite speech.

In June of 2013: “Germany to Spymaster-in-Chief Obama: You are on some Eastern Bloc $#!+ right now,” Jim Treacher quips:

Dude? When Germany is telling you to knock it off? Maybe you should listen. I know you won’t, but you should.

Reuters:

German outrage over a U.S. Internet spying program has broken out ahead of a visit by Barack Obama, with ministers demanding the president provide a full explanation when he lands in Berlin next week and one official likening the tactics to those of the East German Stasi.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman has said she will raise the issue with Obama in talks next Wednesday, potentially casting a cloud over a visit that was designed to celebrate U.S.-German ties on the 50th anniversary John F. Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech.

Government surveillance is an extremely sensitive topic in Germany, where memories of the dreaded Stasi secret police and its extensive network of informants are still fresh in the minds of many citizens.

Yeah, Barry will need to update that classic speech a bit: “Ich bin ein Faschist Soziopath.”

Am I the only one who was reminded of the Stasi when the White House started telling us to inform on your fellow Americans who say things that “seem fishy”? Four years ago, you would’ve been called paranoid for likening that to the Stasi. Today, you’d have to be a partisan idiot not to be reminded of totalitarian Cold War tactics.

Well, as I noted in June of 2010, when the fallout from the JournoList scandal was breaking, involving the self-described “Non-Official Campaign” by leftwing journalists to elect Obama in 2008 (and 2012), JournoList member Walter Shapiro wrote an article titled “The Death of JournoList: Does Privacy End at the Edge of Your Thoughts?” I responded by noting that Shapiro’s headline “seems like a rather disingenuous question for a man of the left to ask, as this is where the terrain invariably ends up, the further and further one moves left,” adding, “You wanted East Germany on the Potomac? Might as well have all of the trappings, boys.”

Incidentally, today Politico is reporting that Obama oversaw the “Greatest Expansion of Electronic Surveillance In U.S. History.” (Link safe, goes to Big Journalism.) Without of course noting how deeply Politico was in the tank for Obama in 2008 (and 2012).

I rarely say this, but let’s return to Germany for a bit.  On Monday, Treacher linked to a German Photoshop of Shepard Fairey’s 2008-era “Hope” poster retitled, “YES WE SCAN.” As he wrote, “It took a German to do the job Americans won’t do: Calling a Democrat POTUS on his bull$#!+.”

Ahem.

Admittedly, my effort was nowhere near as cool as the German version, but Tuesday of last week, playing around with some ideas presented in this Photoshop how-to guide (pro tip: buy the hard copy book, not the bollocked up Kindle version), I cranked this out:

By the way, after Obama’s July 2008 speech in Berlin, acting as John McCain’s surrogate, Lindsey Graham joked, “There goes Germany. We’re going to have to get to 270 without Germany.”

That idea didn’t work out too well, so perhaps Graham is taking another try at winning the German vote, as we’ll explore right after the page break.

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Jesse Walker of Reason has some fun with David Brooks’ latest column in the New York Times:

In The New York Times this morning, David Brooks does the old Take A Few Facts About Somebody, Extrapolate An Entire Psychological Profile, Then Plug It Into One Of My Standard Columns trick. The small handful of facts involve NSA leaker Edward Snowden; the psychological profile claims that Snowden was a loner cut off from social bonds; the standard column claims that this is a sign of “the atomization of society,” that this alleged dissolution of civil society fuels the “distinct strands of libertarianism” which may have inspired Snowden, and, of course, that

Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.

Just to be clear: He’s talking about Snowden here. Brooks doesn’t discuss whether the surveillance state is built on distrust, whether deceiving Americans about its activities spreads cynicism, whether its intrusions into civil society fray the social fabric, and whether the officials who run it are really working toward the common good. As usual, virtually all of Brooks’ criticisms are directed at people who challenge authority, not people in authority.

But this time the columnist takes that habit to absurd new heights. Snowden, he writes,

betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed. Snowden self-indulgently short-circuited the democratic structures of accountability, putting his own preferences above everything else.

So in other words, Snowden wears khaki Dockers instead of bespoke double-bleated sidetab adjustable perfectly-creased cuffed suit trousers.

No word yet if David Brooks will be making any snap judgements about Snowden based on the aesthetics of his alleged girlfriend.

Update: At Commentary, Max Boot explores “Edward Snowden’s Parallel Universe,” which sounds eerily reminiscent of an earlier vainglorious crusader’s parallel universe:

Edward Snowden, the NSA turncoat, sounds coherent and measured at first blush, but the more he keeps talking the more he emerges as a paranoid narcissist with a messiah complex. He believes that there is a vast, overarching conspiracy within the U.S. government to abrogate the liberties of ordinary citizens, and he is the only person who has the courage and the idealism to expose this monstrous misdoing.

So a Lightworker, in other words. Speaking of which, Boot adds that alas, Snowden’s narcissism “will only be fed by all of the news coverage — some of it decidedly adulatory — he has generated.”

Say, that has an awfully familiar ring to it for some reason:

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Mark Steyn has plenty to write about in his latest weekly column, given the Barackian horrors of the past week:

If you don’t instinctively know it’s wrong to stay in $3,500-a-night hotel rooms at public expense, a revised conference-accommodations-guidelines manual isn’t going to fix the real problem.

So we know the IRS is corrupt. What happens then when an ambitious government understands it can yoke that corruption to its political needs? What’s striking as the revelations multiply and metastasize is that at no point does any IRS official appear to have raised objections. If any of them understood that what they were doing was wrong, they kept it to themselves. When Nixon tried to sic the IRS on a few powerful political enemies, the IRS told him to take a hike. When Obama’s courtiers tried to sic the IRS on thousands of ordinary American citizens, the agency went along, and very enthusiastically. This is a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States, and for that reason alone they should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed powers.

Here’s another congressional-subcommittee transcript highlight of the week. Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois asks the attorney general if he’s spying on members of Congress and thereby giving the executive branch leverage over the legislative branch. Eric Holder answers:

“With all due respect, senator, I don’t think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue.”

Senator Kirk responded that “the correct answer would be, ‘No, we stayed within our lane and I’m assuring you we did not spy on members of Congress.’” For some reason, the attorney general felt unable to say that. So I think we all know what the answer to the original question really is.

Holder had another great contribution to the epitaph of the Republic this week. He went on TV to explain that he didn’t really regard Fox News’s James Rosen as a “co-conspirator” but had to pretend he did to the judge in order to get the judge to cough up the warrant. So rest easy, America! Your chief law officer was telling the truth when he said he hadn’t lied to Congress because in fact he’d been lying when he said he told the truth to the judge.

If you lie to one of Holder’s minions, you go to jail: They tossed Martha Stewart in the slammer for being insufficiently truthful to a low-level employee of the attorney general’s. But the attorney general can apparently lie willy-nilly to judges and/or Congress.

It gets worse; read the whole thing.

By the way, with Holder, the IRS, PRISM, Benghazi, and Fast and Furious, a reminder from Gabriel Malor that “The EPA Is The Underreported Scandal.” The administration can’t have enough of them, apparently. (Which may oddly help them in a way: with so many going on, and a supine media which is reluctant to report their details, how can low-information voters keep track of the shell game?)

Related: Found via Kathy Shaidle, here’s more from Steyn at the Corner, including this:

As for Major Hasan, who needs surveillance? He put “Soldier of Allah” on his business card and gave a PowerPoint presentation to his military colleagues on what he’d like to do to infidels — and nobody said a word, lest they got tied up in sensitivity-training hell for six months.

Jack [Dunphy] will forgive me when I say this is less good cop/bad cop than no cop/bad cop. Because the formal, visible state has been neutered by political correctness, the dark, furtive shadow state has to expand massively to make, in secret, the judgment calls that can no longer be made in public. That’s not an arrangement that is likely to end well.

Steyn’s post also dovetails well with this Tweet from Iowahawk:

Govt has to scrape all your phone calls and emails because govt forgot to enforce immigration law on 20 expired visas in 2001.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 8, 2013

Perhaps they weren’t Verizon customers.

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From the “‘Can’t make this s*** up file’: Can you guess WaPo’s absurd choice for ‘Worst Week in Washington’?”

Well, you already know, given that the Post has admitted that they’re completely in tank for the current administration, who won’t be there:

Click to enlarge.

This isn’t the first time in recent weeks that the Washington Post has tweeted, “move along, nothing to see here” in regards to breaking news coming out of Washington:

Click to enlarge.

But look at it from the point of view of the poor schlub who has to write the WaPo’s Twitter Feed: Hey, somebody high up emailed the New York Times to get them to soften their op-ed this week condemning Barack Obama and his administration as having “lost all credibility.” Could have been the White House; it wouldn’t be the first time they emailed a “news” source demanding a correction. Could have been someone in the ozone layer of the Times’ management, perhaps Pinch himself. And inside the Washington Post, the juiceboxers ran roughshod over that newspaper’s best-known correspondent when he noted that the Sequester was the Obama administration’s own idea, not the GOPs. If the Post is willing to destroy Bob Woodward for the cause, what hope do I — the anonymous guy who writes their Twitter feed have if I type the wrong thing?

Best to declare then the Washington Nationals are really taking it on the chin this week. And leave the real news to somebody else. Maybe the Guardian or Fox News. (Speaking of which, perhaps the WaPo’s hapless Twitter guy said to himself, look what Holder did to James Rosen. Wouldn’t want that to happen to me, just for a frickin’ Tweet.)

Update: “Washington Post Whiffs On Obama Scandals; Investigates Fox News Supply Closet,” John Nolte writes at Big Journalism. “And while it is fun to laugh this stuff off, you have to look at the The Matrix of what is really going on — which is pure character assassination.”

Character assassination at the Post? That’s unpossible!

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

“That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen,” he added.

— Then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, May of 2008.

Speaking today in Stockholm, Sweden, John Kerry called “climate change” a “life and death” issue. And the secretary of state apologized on behalf of the United States for not doing enough to fight “climate change.”

“I also want to say that we appreciate Sweden’s partnership because these challenges in Europe and North Africa and Central Asia simply do not belong to one nation; they’re shared by all of us and they affect all of us. And at the top of that list of shared challenges which does not get enough attention, and it’s one of the principal reasons that I came here today to share bilateral meetings with the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister but also will travel on to Kiruna to take part in the Arctic Council, a principal challenge to all of us of life and death proportions is the challenge of climate change,” said Kerry.

—  Secretary of State John Kerry, May 14, 2013.

A warehouse maintained by contractors for the Environmental Protection Agency contained secret rooms full of exercise equipment, televisions and couches, according to an internal audit.

EPA’s inspector general found contractors used partitions, screens and piled up boxes to hide the rooms from security cameras in the 70,000 square-foot building located in Landover, Md. The warehouse — used for inventory storage — is owned by the General Services Administration and leased to the EPA for about $750,000 per year.

The EPA has issued a stop work order to Apex Logistics LLC, the responsible contractor, ensuring the company’s workers no longer have access to the site — EPA security officials escorted contractor personnel off the premises on May 17 — and ending all payments on the contract.

Since awarding the contract in May 2007, EPA has paid Apex Logistics about $5.3 million, most of which went to labor costs. Conditions at the facility “raise questions about time charges made by warehouse employees under the contract,” the report said.

“The warehouse contained multiple unauthorized and hidden personal spaces created by and for the workers that included televisions, refrigerators, radios, microwaves, chairs and couches,” the IG report said. “These spaces contained personal items, including photos, pin ups, calendars, clothing, books, magazines and videos.”

— “Secret Man Caves Found in EPA Warehouse,” Government Executive.com yesterday.

As the Professor likes to say, I’d be more willing to start believing that global cooling / warming / climate change / climate chaos, whatever it is this week that the left wants to use as a wedge to implement their “Moral Equivalent of War” worldview is a crisis, if the people who tell me it’s crisis act like it’s a crisis. But if the employees at the EPA aren’t taking the notion of “climate change” seriously, wasting gobs of electricity on “televisions, refrigerators, radios, microwaves, chairs and couches,” even as they and their boss are going out of their way to make electricity and oil and more and more expensive, why should anyone else?

Speaking of which, in late May, even after his secretary of state declared “climate change” is a “life and death issue,” Mr. Obama used 3600 gallons of fuel per hour to fly Air Force One into Chicago for a Democrat fundraiser in which he declared “I don’t have much patience for people who deny climate change.”

No wonder the EPA workers need their man caves — Obama’s patience, already worn gossamer-thin as a result of the fallout from his myriad scandals, must be at the very breaking point with all of his fellow recalcitrant non-environmental radical environmentalists on the government payroll.

Related: In between crashing in their man caves, “EPA accused of singling out conservative groups, amid IRS scandal.”

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…By finding a host who’s even further to the left than Morgan:

Meet your new late-night CNN host George Stroumboulopoulos, who feels the Toronto Mayor’s alleged use of a gay slur was worse than if he had a crack addiction, and thinks New York City Mayor Bloomberg is a “right-winger” whose soda ban revealed that his “heart’s in the right place” and whose support for “marriage equality” was “fantastic.”

Stroumboulopoulos, currently a nightly CBC television host, will host a weekly talk show debuting on Sunday night June 9 and airing on Friday nights at 11 p.m. ET. CNN announced his show would focus on a variety of issues from sports to pop culture to politics. In an interview with HuffPost Live, he revealed his beliefs on multiple issues including legalization of pot, guns, gay marriage, and current politicians.

* * * * * * *

Piers Morgan may not be the only international CNN host anymore who thinks America has a gun problem:

“But it’s a country built on liberty. And guns is part of the Constitution, and no one is willing to have that tough conversation with Congress and Senate and the President to say maybe that’s got to change. Maybe people talk about it, but I mean actual change.”

The CBC host is “uncomfortable” with America’s easy access to guns:

“Look at how many guns are around. Look how easy it is to get a gun. You can go to a department store and get a gun in this country. That makes me uncomfortable, because I grew up in a city where if you have a gun, you’re going to jail. We don’t have the same culture of guns. We don’t have John Wayne’s, dude. Hollywood has perpetuated this thing, and a lot of people in Hollywood go on and on about how they hate guns, but they’re the ones that make these movies that have sensationalized violence for so long. What did they think was going to happen?”

Meanwhile, back to mayors, apparently New York City’s Michael Bloomberg is a “right-winger”:

“He’s a bit nanny-statey. Which I think is really an interesting choice for a U.S. politician, especially for a right-winger. But all his nanny-state stuff is actually in a weird way to benefit the people.”

However, Bloomberg’s heart is in the right place:

“His heart’s in the right place. Because he’s actually really smart enough to understand that ultimately, you guys, the people, have to foot the bill in some way for health care, insurance costs, all that stuff. So he’s at least trying to address the root of the problem. I’m fascinated how people are like ‘Give me liberty or death!’ Well actually sometimes liberty gives you death. So I’m fascinated by the reaction that he gets.”

Can Jeff Zucker, the man who previous broke NBC before coming to CNN earlier this year pick ‘em or what?

Related: “Worse than lapdog media: While Turkey burns, CNN Turk serves up penguins:”

Particularly when it comes to the Islamic world, CNN sure does like to the keep the news to themselves, don’t they?

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Great moments in Orwellianism, and more “fun” from the intersection of Detroit and DC, as “General Motors Co. is sponsoring a two-month cross-country tour on the importance of free enterprise in the U.S. economy,” which is being put on by the US Chamber of Commerce, the Detroit News reports:

GM’s embrace of free enterprise comes as the automaker has in recent years been derided by many as “Government Motors” after it won nearly $60 billion in government bailouts, including $49.5 billion from the U.S. Treasury and $10 billion from the Ontario and Canadian governments. The government intervention in late 2008 and 2009 kept GM from liquidating.

After GM’s 2009 government-sponsored bankruptcy, the U.S. Treasury acquired a 61 percent majority stake in the Detroit automaker.

The Treasury now owns 16 percent of GM and has recouped about $30.7 billion of its bailout. At current market prices, U.S. taxpayers would lose about $10 billion on the GM bailout. GM still operates under government oversight for executive pay. In April, Treasury rejected proposed cash salary pay increases for 12 of GM’s top 25 executives.

Shortly after World War II, a very different General Motors sponsored the publication of an illustrated pamphlet-sized version of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. As I wrote last week, “If Only General Motors Had Taken General Motors’ Advice.”

This panel seems to dovetail well with both GM’s current state, and the intersection of Big Business, Big Government, and Big Journalism:

As I concluded last week, I won’t give away the pamphlet’s ending, but needless to say, like most of General Motors’ product today, it’s not pretty.

Perhaps somebody could print up a few of the pamphlets from here on their laser printer and show them to whoever’s hosting this year’s tour for GM to get their response — which I imagine would be quite astonishing to watch.

(Headline via Matt Drudge.)

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“White supremacist turns up at court in full Nazi regalia to fight for custody of his children — including one who he named Adolf,” the London Daily Mail reports, with photos too surreal to believe, except that they match up with the above video clip from Philadelphia’s NBC affiliate:

A white supremacist appeared at court on Monday dressed in full Nazi uniform as he tried to convince a judge that he was a good father — despite having named one of his children Adolf.
Heath Campbell, who had four children, asked the judge to be allowed to see his 18-month-old son Hons.

The self-proclaimed Nazi, from New Jersey, has given three of his children Nazi-inspired names but claims he is fit to be a father and has never abused them. 

The 40-year-old white supremacist appeared at a hearing in Hunterdon County Family Court in Flemington, NJ this morning. His regalia included knee-high black boots and swastika patches.

And a swastika tattoo on his neck. “Adolf Hitler Campbell, six, and his younger sisters Joycelynn Aryan Nation, five, and Honszlynn Hinler, four, were taken into custody in January 2009,” according to the Daily Mail. “The Nazi-inspired names came to light after a store refused to decorate a birthday cake reading ‘Happy birthday Adolf Hitler’ in December 2008.”

But why would someone who is that obsessed with the precepts of National Socialism question an order from a representative of The State? (Particularly when doing so rarely worked out well in das vaterland?)

(Headline via Mr. D. MacManus.)

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Clicking on this screen cap will “unexpectedly” enlarge it to full size.

And yes, once again, it’s Bloomberg News; where post-2009, bad economic news is always a surprise. This latest example was spotted by Power Line’s John Hinderaker, who writes:

The recovery of 2009 to the present is the weakest–by far–of any postwar recovery. Unemployment and poverty are sky-high because economic growth is anemic. But why is growth so sluggish? After all, there are powerful forces that should be driving the economy forward, foremost among them the North American energy boom. Take the current data on manufacturing: it has been widely reported that manufacturing is returning to the U.S. because cheap energy here, the result of the shale oil and gas revolution, balances out lower labor costs in Asia. But if this is the case–and it is–then why is domestic manufacturing declining?

America’s slow-to-nonexistent economic growth, of which today’s manufacturing data are one of many symptoms, is the result of bad government policies: out-of-control regulations, excessive and inefficient government spending, rising tax rates and the impending disaster of Obamacare, to name the most obvious ones. Until observers are willing to acknowledge the extent to which poor government drags down the economy, they will continue to be surprised by unexpected bad news.

As the Say Anything blog noted in 2011:

This end of the blogosphere has enjoyed a delicious running joke for much of Barack Obama’s presidency…the strange appearance of the word “unexpectedly” in MSM coverage of the anemic economic recovery.  Of course, many of us knew that Dear Leader’s economic policies would either amount to nothing and/or inhibit economic growth even as they were being debated, so there was nothing unexpected about the result.  Still, the joke has only gotten funnier (sadder?) as time has worn on and it becomes clearer and clearer that the man-who-has-never-had-a-real-job-yet-occupies-the-White-House has no clue what he is doing when it comes to the economy. (For our purposes here, we ignore the not-so-outlandish notion that perhaps he knows exactly what he is doing, but that robust economic growth, if it is the result of typical laissez-faire American capitalism, is not his goal.)

Anyway, this joke – and the point it reveals – has finally made it somewhat mainstream via the good offices of Michael Barone, who makes it the central theme of this Washington Examiner column.

It’s certainly not exclusive to them, but the “unexpectedly” disease seems to have hit Bloomberg News particularly hard. Despite having a reputation as a business-savvy news agency, given how its namesake founder made his bones, and that in 2009, it acquired the left-leaning economic magazine Businessweek, Bloomberg News has become notorious as the home of the “unexpectedly” bad economic news, as it carries water for Mr. Obama. Add the latest example above to these screen caps of earlier “unexpecteds,” which we spotted here and here, and in particular, our big heaping pile of “unexpectedlys,” here.

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“Nikki Finke has been fired from the blog she founded, Deadline Hollywood, and will be leaving the company as soon as this week, multiple individuals with knowledge of the situation have told The Wrap, in an article that’s also linked by the Internet Movie Database tonight: 

The scourge of Hollywood media has clashed repeatedly with her boss, who apparently has had enough.

Jay Penske, the CEO of Penske Media, which bought Deadline in 2009, told several top Hollywood executives last week that he was firing Finke, complaining she had crossed the line one too many times in sending poison-pen emails berating sources over scoops she lost to competitors.

“She’s been sending emails saying, ‘I’m going to f— you,’ and Jay says he’s had it,” said one top executive.

UPDATE: Penske emailed TheWrap to say: “Sharon, your story isn’t true and all of the “facts” that you mention are completely erroneous.”

When asked if Finke was in fact leaving Deadline, he did not respond.

Finke did not return an email or call seeking comment.

One individual said Finke has been telling executives in Hollywood that she is leaving.

The other issue that brought things to a head is a new contract. Finke’s five-year contract is up next year, and the two have not come to an agreement.

The prospect of a defanged Deadline Hollywood without its Viper-in-Chief is an interesting one. Finke has both terrorized and riveted Hollywood by shredding the reputations of executives she dislikes and heaping praise on those she does.

But recently her writing has tended to be limited to analyzing box office on the weekends. The blog has come to resemble a less-spicy trade, with industry casting scoops by Mike Fleming and Nellie Andreeva dominating the coverage.

Deadline Hollywood’s Mike Fleming strongly denies the story:

As for me, I can only say this: Nikki convinced me to leave Daily Variety after 20 years, and it was the right move and I have never enjoyed collaborating with a journalist more than I have with her. I love what the reporters and editors here have built here with her guidance, it feels memorable and important, and I think we have a lot more to say and do together. Internal stuff happens from time to time and it gets worked out, despite the sensationalized reporting that amounts to wishful thinking on the part of The Wrap, which couldn’t carry Deadline’s jockstrap.

However, as the first comment to his post asks:

No offense but that letter leaves out the key issue here. Will Nikki be writing anymore here, or, will she be on “gardening leave” while the time runs out on her contract? The text above just says she wasn’t fired, which can often be a mere technicality when someone is pushed out of a position in other ways.

Somewhere, Cathy Seipp is enjoying every minute of this kerfuffle involving her bête noire, whom she excoriated at length in a classic National Review Online article in 2004; Hedda Hopper versus Louella Parsons updated for the Internet age.

However, if the report from The Wrap does turn out to be true, I’ll be curious to see where Finke goes next, as I have enjoyed many of her posts at Deadline Hollywood.

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Sex can extend a man’s life, Men’s Journal claims…

“For men, the more the better,” he says. “The typical man who has 350 orgasms a year, versus the national average of around a quarter of that, lives about four years longer.” And more than those extra four years, Roizen says, the men will feel eight years younger than their contemporaries. Is there an optimal number of orgasms for the average man? Roizen suggests, with a straight face, that 700 a year could add up to eight years to your life. This is an ambitious prescription: The average American adult male has sex just 81 times a year.

Roizen’s formula may be new, but the benefits of sex and orgasms have been tracked for years, and there’s some compelling hard evidence to back Roizen’s claims. A Swedish study done in the ’80s found that 70-year-olds who made it to 75 were the ones still having sex, and a Duke University study that followed 252 people over 25 years concluded that “frequency of intercourse was a significant predictor of longevity.”

But the big kahuna of longevity studies was completed just 10 years ago in Wales. British scientists interviewed nearly 1,000 men in six small villages about their sexual frequency, then arranged for all death records to be forwarded so the scientists could record their life spans. Ten years later they determined that men who had two or more orgasms a week had died at a rate half that of the men who had orgasms less than once a month. “Sexual activity seems to have a protective effect on men’s health,” the researchers concluded.

…Unless you’re Michael Douglas, apparently:

Michael Douglas – the star of Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction – has revealed that his throat cancer was apparently caused by performing oral sex.

In a surprisingly frank interview with the Guardian, the actor, now winning plaudits in the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, explained the background to a condition that was thought to be nearly fatal when diagnosed three years ago. Asked whether he now regretted his years of smoking and drinking, usually thought to be the cause of the disease, Douglas replied: “No. Because without wanting to get too specific, this particular cancer is caused by HPV [human papillomavirus], which actually comes about from cunnilingus.”

Umm, ooooooooooooooohhhhhkaaaaaaaay. But if it’s actually true, Joe Jackson didn’t know the half of it when he wrote in 1982 that everything gives you cancer:

*****

Cross-posted at PJ Lifestyle with the headline “More Orgasms = Longer Life Expectancy?”

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

We’re seen too often as the bad guys. And he – he has a very different job from – Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is ‘we are above that now.’ We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial. We stand for something – I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.

— Evan Thomas, then an editor at Newsweek, on Chris Matthews’ Hardball on MSNBC, June 5th, 2009.

If President Obama, I was really struck by what he said that, you know, all politicians are just worrying about the next election and not the next generation. Huge act of hypocrisy on his part. If he really believed that, he would get off his duff and start talking to the other side, talk more to Congressmen, actually be a president, not just sit back, and he would be honest with the American people about the hard things you actually have to do to protect future generations. He’s been completely dishonest about that.

— Evan Thomas, now with the Politico, on PBS’s Inside Washington, yesterday.

(Wait ’til Evan finds out what else Obama’s been dishonest about.)

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Newsweek cover, April 19, 2010. Shortly before Obama’s first “Recovery Summer” and shortly before the magazine was sold for a dollar. Err, the first time it was sold for a dollar…

“As we’ve documented time and again, Newsweek global business editor Daniel Gross has a history of anti-business and pro-big government bias,” Ken Shepherd writes at Newsbusters:

Gross stayed true to form in his latest attack on a successful American business enterprise in his May 29 Newsweek feature, “Is Apple Too Clever By Half?” Gross’s answer, unsurprisingly, was yes, and that the company was greedy because it has followed U.S. tax law scrupulously in a manner that lessened its tax bite.

Gross began by oddly portraying Apple CEO Tim Cook’s very appearance before a Senate committee recently as evidence that his company was or should be in the doghouse:

Apple always seemed like the perfect company. Not so fast. When CEO Tim Cook testified before Congress on May 25, he didn’t come to talk about Apple’s latest amazing gadget or the need to grant more visas to computer programmers. Rather, in his maiden voyage to Capitol Hill as Steve Jobs’s successor, Cook had to defend the company’s tax-avoidance efforts. What should have been a triumph for Cook was instead an awkward encounter.

Yes, it is an awkward encounter when the CEO of a popular — the company has a 74 percent approval rating — and profitable company is lectured by a bunch of politicians — congressional approval rating clocks in at 16 percent — who would be run out of the corporate boardroom of Apple — heck, any sane corporate boardroom — on a rail had they did to the company’s books what Congress has done to the country’s finances.

Apple is insanely profitable, an excellent credit risk for bond holders, and has gobs of cash-on-hand, which is a far cry from the health of the U.S. government’s balance sheets.

Not to mention the health of Newsweek itself, or the lack thereof, considering the failed magazine is reportedly up for sale once again.

Being told that they’re doing it wrong by Newsweek is pretty much the ultimate confirmation of Apple’s business acumen.

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Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

“We’ve got a great chance of taking back the House. And I’m going to be working tirelessly wherever I get the opportunity to make the case to the American people that our ideas are the right ones,” he added.

Obama said he regretted the partisan gridlock in Washington.

“We’ve got a politics that’s stuck right now,” said the president. “And the reason it’s stuck is because people spend more time thinking about the next election than they do thinking about the next generation.”

— President Obama at a Chicago fundraiser, yesterday.

First lady Michelle Obama debuted a new motto as she hit DNC fundraisers in New York on Wednesday.

“We need you to keep on writing those checks, and if you haven’t maxed out, you know, what’s my motto?  Max out,” she told attendees at the DNC’s LGBT Gala on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “Let’s say it together: Max out. And if you’ve maxed out, get your friends to max out. It’s a very — maxing out.

“Sounds kind of baller, too — maxing out. Everyone here should be maxed out. “

— Michelle Obama at a New York fundraiser, yesterday.

Why is the first lady obsessed with fleecing voters for the next election, rather than worrying about long-term common good of the next generation?   (And on the flip side, other than massive and ever-spiraling debt, crippling regulations, and racialist paranoia, what exactly will this administration be passing on to the next generation?)

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