Back in 2011 we had lots of fun with Rachel Maddow of MSNBC cheerfully using one of the biggest pariahs of today’s “Progressive” environmentally-correct — the Hoover Dam — to promote the environmentally-correct “Progressive” channel that employs her. Here’s an amusing following up, found at Jim Geraghty’s Campaign Spot daily email:

Why Kevin Williamson Rocks, Vol. LMXVIII

You probably don’t need any more reasons to purchase Kevin Williamson’s The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure,but I just had to share this section yesterday, dismantling Rachel Maddow’s “Lean Forward” ad featuring the Hoover Dam as a symbol of future national infrastructure projects that absolutely must be funded.

Conventional political theory holds that only the state can provide public goods such as parks, sidewalks, roads, and the like. Television commentator Rachel Maddow offered a typically exaggerated expression of this view when she visited the Hoover Dam and remarked, “When you are this close to Hoover Dam, it makes you realize how small a human is in relation to this as a human project. You can’t be the guy who builds this. You can’t even be the state that builds this. You have to be the country that builds this.” (Never mind that Hoover Dam was in fact built by a consortium of private firms headed by Bechtel-Kaiser, under precisely the sort of outsourcing/private contractor arrangement that Maddow has no time for in most other contexts — in fact, she includes a chapter in one of her books denouncing this practice.) In a sense, Maddow is correct — the Hoover Dam is an economically nonviable project from the time of its conception, and the mighty installation, visually impressive as it is, produces significantly less electricity than does a typical small nuclear power plant. Which is to say, it is a majestic boondoggle. Only politics can do that — and stay in business. And, needless to say, a “guy” attempting a project with the environmental impact of Hoover Dam would never get permission from environmental regulators, given that its construction entailed wiping out an entire local ecosystem.

So the only parts Maddow got right were the points she didn’t intend to make.

The concept that Hoover Dam was not actually built by the federal government, but was ultimately built by private companies, seemed so contrary to our usual narratives that I went and looked it up:

The Hoover Dam project was too big for any one company. So W. A. Bechtel helped form a consortium calling itself Six Companies, Inc. W. A. knew the heads of the consortium companies as friends and business associates, having been in partnerships with most of them. There was tall, lean Harry Morrison, head of Morrison-Knudsen of Boise, Idaho, and the man most directly responsible for bringing the group together; and the white-haired Wattis brothers of Utah Construction Co., the region’s foremost railroad builders. They were joined by the wry Felix Kahn of MacDonald & Kahn, a premier builder of office buildings, industrial plants, and hotels, including the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco. Phil Hart ran Pacific Bridge Co., one of the oldest construction firms on the West Coast, and was justly famous for his underwater work — a critical component in dam construction. Charlie Shea, the pugnacious, acid-tongued boss of J. F. Shea Co., was the best tunnel and sewer man west of the Rockies. And finally there was the legendary Henry Kaiser, whom W. A. had long valued for his enthusiasm and vision. W. A. Bechtel served as the second president of Six Companies; his son Steve was a member of the executive committee; and sons Warren and Ken served on the board.

Kevin is also taking no prisoners a critic, helping his local theater enforce their no cell phone rules — in appropriately dramatic style.

For my recent interview with him, click here to listen.

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In attempting to explain why “Liberals Should Worry About the IRS Scandal,” Eric Liu, a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton according to his bio, seems to have a rather short memory of the past few decades:

Things got this way because from Reagan to Gingrich to Fox News and the Tea Party, right-wingers have systematically and relentlessly adopted the language and iconography of American patriotism. They’ve claimed the flag and the history of the founding of the Republic as their own.

During that time, left-wingers responded too often by walking away from the contest. They laughed off the shameless jingoism of conservatives. They made patriotism ironic, the way Colbert’s giant eagle and giant flag are meant to be ridiculous. When the Tea Party first came on the scene, progressives rolled their eyes at all the tricorner hats and colonial garb. They didn’t ask themselves how they might don the mantle of love of country. In a sense, then, those hapless IRS bureaucrats in Cincinnati were performing their questionable task in an unquestionably rational way: liberals just don’t proclaim patriotism very much any more, so it was plausible to conclude that any organization using such rhetoric while seeking tax-exempt status must be a conservative outfit.

This is trouble. When words of the nation’s creedal origins and civic identity become mere partisan code, it’s bad not only for the party that no longer has access to them; it’s bad for the nation. Anyone who cares about civic education and the integrity of democracy has to be disturbed that in the word association game of contemporary politics, “Defend the Bill of Rights” and “Respect the Constitution” sound Republican.

Yes, how did that happen? It’s not like the liberals at Time photographed themselves a couple of years ago shredding the Constitution and asking if it still matters:

Oh, right. (Err, actually, oh, left). Actually, Time magazine began thinking of conservatives as The Other even before Republican founder Henry Luce permanently left the building in 1967. In 1966, the magazine founded four decades earlier by the son of Christian missionaries killed God; at the end of 1969, it determined that “Middle America” was its collective Man of the Year, writing in utterly baffled tones at how a majority of the nation could have voted for law & order candidate Richard Nixon after witnessing the blue-on-blue horrors of 1968.

Flash-forward to the 21st century, and we find CNN, which is owned by the same conglomerate that owns Time routinely sneered at the Tea Party in 2009 and 2010. Leftwing oikophobia continued as 2012 merged into the current year; Piers Morgan, described by Jeff Zuckerman, the president of CNN (expatriated from similarly left-wing NBC) as one of the network’s “foundation brands,” sneeringly described the Constitution as “your little book,” when handed a copy on-air by Ben Shapiro of Breitbart.com in early 2013. This was only a week or so after  the New York Times ended the year by running an op-ed titled, “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution;” CBS would approvingly interview its author the following month.

If it’s true, as Liu writes, that “in the word association game of contemporary politics, ‘Defend the Bill of Rights’ and ‘Respect the Constitution,’ sound Republican,” it’s only because the left ceded those words long ago. The fact that they view their loss as merely “a game” is telling as well.

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“Only two permits have been issued for pornographic filming so far this year” in Los Angeles County, according the L.A. Times:

“It’s a steep drop,” Audley said, adding that “both of those applications came in January.”Coupled with an apparent increase in adult films being shot in nearby Ventura County — where one politician says residents have complained about “moans and groans” echoing from film sets — the permitting decrease has been seized on by porn producers who have long claimed condom regulation would cause them to leave, harming the Los Angeles economy.

“We’re not surprised by this,” said Diane Duke, chief executive of the Free Speech Coalition, a porn industry trade group. “Movie companies are beginning to look for other areas” outside of the San Fernando Valley, the longtime base for most of the industry.

Whenever Tom Wolfe writes one of his periodic essays looking back at how the US underwent its metamorphosis from Ike’s buttondown America to the freak show that followed beginning in the late ’60s and the seventies, he always mentions the seemingly overnight ubiquity of the porn industry, to the point where what would have seemed shocking as late as the mid-1960s was simply part of a background ambiance taken for granted by everyone in the neighborhood. For example, in the Great Relearning, Wolfe wrote:

The great American contribution to the twentieth century’s start from zero was in the area of manners and mores, especially in what was rather primly called “the sexual revolution.” In every hamlet, even in the erstwhile Bible Belt, may be found the village brothel, no longer hidden in a house of blue lights or red lights or behind a green door but openly advertised by the side of the road with a thousand-watt backlit plastic sign: TOTALLY ALL-NUDE GIRL SAUNA MASSAGE AND MARATHON ENCOUNTER SESSIONS INSIDE. Up until 1985 pornographic movie theaters were as ubiquitous as the 7-Eleven, including outdoor drive-ins with screens six, seven, eight stories high, the better to beam all the moistened folds and glistening nodes and stiffened giblets to a panting American countryside. In 1985 the pornographic theater began to be replaced by the pornographic videocassette, which could be brought into any home. Up on the shelf in the den, next to the World Book Encyclopedia and the Modern Library Classics, one now finds the cassettes: Sally’s Alley; Young and Hung; Yo! Rambette!; Latin Teacher: She Sucks, She Has Sucked, She Will Have Sucked.

If only Nixon could to China, then only the PC left could have killed the porn industry in Los Angeles. As P.J. O’Rourke once quipped, “You can’t get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That’s all you need to know about communism.” And all you need to know about the excoriating effects of 21st century political correctness is that you can’t shoot porn in Los Angeles. No wonder, as Richard Miniter noted in 2008, “In the 1950s, the most puritanical place in America was somewhere in Kansas. Today it is Los Angeles.”

Update: Which isn’t necessarily to say that banning porn shoots in L.A. is a bad thing; but it is something that the left would have gone nuclear over if conservatives had attempted the ban. But they surrender astonishingly quietly when it’s an internecine struggle between left and lefter.

But freedom also must be the freedom to do dumb things, which reminds me of the conversation that Adam Carolla had with the now sadly deceased Andrew Breitbart on California’s smoking bans:

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

It was undoubtedly impolitic for him to single out Las Vegas, rather than, say, Atlantic City, as a particularly wasteful destination. But as an objective matter, his broader point is correct: Americans need to tighten their belts — for quite a while, probably. During the boom, the ratio of household debt to household income reached 128 percent in 2008, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, far more than leading economic competitors such as Germany, Japan or China. This burden was concentrated most heavily on the middle class, McKinsey notes. And the proof that it was not sustainable is all around us, in the form of personal bankruptcy filings and foreclosures.

The more difficult question is whether this is a reality America should merely endure or actively embrace. For generations, we have built our economy on ever-increasing consumption, with the result (among others) that a metropolitan area of two million people has arisen over the last 40 years in the Nevada desert — based essentially on hedonism.

Far more important, perhaps, than his inconsistent observations about Vegas, is the fact that Obama seems to favor the latter option, embracing a less consumption-oriented economic future. In a speech marking the anniversary of his stimulus plan, he observed that “the jobs of the 21st century are in areas like clean energy and technology, advanced manufacturing, new infrastructure. That kind of economy requires us to consume less and produce more; to import less and export more.”

— “Obama’s hard truth: Americans must consume less,” the Washington Post, February 19, 2010.

Parker asked Zakaria if he had faith the American people could handle the fiscal discipline he advocated. Zakaria used the platform as an opportunity to attack Americans and refute the notion “the American people are wonderful.” His solution: Less consumption by the American people.

“No, I think the people are the big problem,” Zakaria said. “I mean, Americans — everybody wants to say the American people are so wonderful. You know, I think that when they come to recognize that they have to make sacrifices too that it’s not just wasteful — they need to have — they need to recognize that some of what’s going to happen here is fewer. They have to consume fewer things. They have to accept slightly higher taxes. And in the long run, you will have a much better economy.”

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

We do not yet know what prompted 22-year-old accused gunman Jared Loughner to allegedly shoot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and others, including a child and federal judge who died from their wounds.

But critics of Sarah Palin have already drawn a link between the shooting and the fact that the former Alaska governor put Giffords on a “target list” of lawmakers Palin wanted to see unseated in the midterm elections.

– “Sarah Palin Criticized Over Gabrielle Giffords [sic] Presence on ‘Target List,’” CBS News, January 8th, 2011.

Remember when liberals thought targets caused people to shoot other people with guns? Think back to the Gabby Giffords shooting when liberals in media stampeded to blame Sarah Palin’s target map.

Now they’re openly using the term target for political purposes.

From The Washington Post…

That has made the New Hampshire freshman an easy target for the gun-control groups as they seek to regroup after the loss on background checks in the Senate. As she travels the state, Ayotte has been confronted by signs that read, “We are the 90%!”

From The Politico…

Gun control activists disagree, arguing that nine out of 10 voters back the more expansive background checks that Ayotte rejected. And they warn that’ll be a problem for her in a state that has grown increasingly Democratic in the past 20 years, and where there are more female voters with liberal leanings. All of this makes Ayotte a ripe target.

From The Huffington Post…

Kelly Ayotte Targeted By Gun Control Activists

– “New Tone: Liberals in Media Call Senator Kelly Ayotte a ‘Target,’” American Glob, today.

(Headline via Kathy Shaidle.)

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In the 1920s, H.L. Mencken wrote, “It is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics.”

Modern “liberals” want nothing of the sort, and they will defend to the death the right to both ideological purity, and to be left alone to legislate a city into the ground:

Three Los Angeles City Council members — including a candidate for mayor — asked their colleagues Tuesday to consider pulling city pension money from the investment firms that own the Los Angeles Times if they sell the publication to buyers who do not support “professional and objective journalism.”

Since emerging from bankruptcy last year, Tribune Co. — which owns eight newspapers including The Times and 23 television stations — has been guided by a board of directors that include its largest creditors. It has been widely reported that the directors are interested in selling the newspapers, preferably all together.

Councilman Bill Rosendahl, who called for the council to act, said he was motivated by recent news reports that billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are among those interested in buying the newspapers. The Kochs in recent national elections have provided major financial support to libertarian candidates and causes.

“Frankly what I hear about the Koch brothers, if it’s true, it’s the end of journalism,’’ said Rosendahl, a former broadcaster. “I don’t want to see Los Angeles, the second-largest city and the biggest region in the nation, not to have a quality newspaper.”

What exactly do you “hear” about the Koch brothers? Or do you always get up in front of City Council and speak purely based on your fellow leftists’ Alinsky-style demonization of this week’s Emmanuel Goldsteins?

Beyond that, what could the L.A. City Council be hiding, since it is admitting that the Times in its current form is a paper tiger, without the claws or the inclination to investigate potential corruption amongst their fellow “Progressives?”

And why “if true,” does it represent “the end of journalism,” when, if the Koch brothers produce a product that the marketplace rejects, it will create an opening for a paper that the citizens wish to purchase?

Or as Ace writes today:

“Natural market forces” do not demand that the Chronicle be left-of-center; rather, reporters at the Chronicle demand it be left-of-center.

These reporters are not serving their client base; they’re serving themselves. They’re not reflecting the preferences of their readers, but only their own.

This is nothing but protection of a particular ideology’s power base. There is no “natural” reason that a media must be left-leaning, but leftists are goddamned determined that it remain so.

If natural market forces mean that all media must be liberal, someone should tell those California Democrats to stop using artificial, ideological state power to keep a leftist power-base in line. After all, natural market forces should take care of it on their own schedule, no?

* It occurs to me that the Founders kept the US from becoming a “city-state,” if you will, dominated by one great city, when they insisted that the political capital of the United States should not be one of its commercial, financial, and population capitals. In the early days of the fledgling Republic, the “capital” famously circulated around a whole heck of a lot before moving permanently to a converted no-man’s-land of a swamp straddling two different states.

And so the political power center of the US was kept physically separate from the financial, commercial, and media power centers. Until recently, at least, when the media-government-corporate power centers decided to merge because People Just Can’t Think For Themselves and Because Socialism Is Teh Future.

At least the socialists of the past acted like they had a bit more confidence in the future they were building than their latest incarnation. But then:

In a land of freedom we are held hostage by the tyranny of political correctness

— Robert Griffin III (@RGIII) April 30, 2013

But political correctness puts blinders on all of us, not the least of which on those who employ it themselves:

Update: In Reuters of all places, Jack Shafer, who used to write one of the better columns at the Washington Post-owned liberal Slate e-zine, adds:

Koch opponents fear they’ll turn the Los Angeles Times into a “conservative mouthpiece,” as one anonymous source put it to Media Matters’ Joe Strupp. Casting the Kochs as conservatives, which Garance Franke-Ruta (the Atlantic), Michael Wolff (USA Today) and David Horsey (Los Angeles Times) do in their recent pieces, makes them sound totally out of tune with cosmopolitan Los Angeles. Such a case can be made, of course, if you track the Kochs’ campaign donations and political philanthropy. They’ve given richly to Republican candidates and the party’s presidential nominee Mitt Romney, they’ve funded controversial climate science research and they’ve supported Tea Partiers.

But this portrait of the Kochs as proponents of smaller-than-small government and deregulation isn’t complete without a mention of their libertarian views — their long history of pairing fiscal conservatism with social liberalism. Politico acknowledged that wrinkle last year in a piece about David Koch in which he spoke in favor of gay marriage, defense cuts and military withdrawal from the Middle East. Hardly the views of a hard-core conservative. If these notions were smuggled into Los Angeles Times editorials or even (gasp!) news pages, would many of the city’s orthodox liberals reject them as propaganda? Last year, Charles Koch’s hometown newspaper, the Wichita Eagle, treated him to a soft profile in which they allowed him to espouse his opposition to corporate subsidies, high defense spending and corporate cronyism. He also accused his fellow corporate CEOs of cowardice for not espousing economic freedom. “He also never says anything about religion, abortion, immigration or gun rights,” the Eagle obliquely added.

These are the ultraconservatives the Los Angeles Times newsroom so fears? Go ahead and disqualify the Kochs from owning the Los Angeles Times because they’re too rich for their own good, but not because they’re batty conservatives or leading members of the right wing or hard right. Those labels don’t apply.

Shafer’s column is titled, “Who’s afraid of the Koch brothers?” Why, the same people at the L.A. Times whose ancient motto is “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” and then look the other way as their city crumbles to the ground in the 21st century.

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

Parker asked Zakaria if he had faith the American people could handle the fiscal discipline he advocated. Zakaria used the platform as an opportunity to attack Americans and refute the notion “the American people are wonderful.” His solution: Less consumption by the American people.

“No, I think the people are the big problem,” Zakaria said. “I mean, Americans — everybody wants to say the American people are so wonderful. You know, I think that when they come to recognize that they have to make sacrifices too that it’s not just wasteful — they need to have — they need to recognize that some of what’s going to happen here is fewer. They have to consume fewer things. They have to accept slightly higher taxes. And in the long run, you will have a much better economy.”

– Time/CNN contributor and would-be Obama advisor “Fareed Zakaria to the American people: You are ‘the big problem,’” the Daily Caller, December 15, 2010.

Pictured below: a disgorged swag bag from the Time/People pre-[White House Correspondents' Dinner] cocktail party. It weighed in at 20.6 lbs on an Post bathroom scale (very technical stuff, here).

* * * * * *

Among the brand names in the People/Times bag: Alba Botanica, Alex and Ani, California Baby, C Wonder, Demeter Fragrance, Eastern Collective, Edge Shave Gel, Georgetown Cupcake, GoGo squeeZ, GoMarco In., Good Karmal, Grooming Lounge, Happy Socks, Herban Essentials, illy issimo, Incase, JASON, John Masters Organics, Justin’s, KIND Healthy Snacks, Kusmi Tea, LeSportsac (the bag itself), L’Oreal Paris, MADHOUSE by Michael Aram, Manduka, Neuro Drinks, Peeled Snacks, Pirate’s Booty, Praim Gorup, Preserve Products, PRITI NYC, Purely Elizabeth, Quinn Popcorn, Red Bull, Revision Skincare, RUSK, SAMY FAT HAIR, Sara Kety Baby, Schick, Scholastic, Sheila G’s Brownie Brittle, Somersault Snack Co., SpaRitual, Starbucks, Stila, Supersmile, TableTopics, Taza Chocolate, Theo Chocolate, Toyota (alas, a mug, not a car), Twistband, Urbanhalo Headbands, VEGA, Weleda.Oh, and of course, copies of the latest People and Time magazines.

– “The 20-lb. swag bag from People/Time’s White House Correspondent’s [sic] party,” as inventoried by the Washington Post, which also runs Zakaria’s columns, this past Friday.

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The White House Correspondents Dinner is tonight; “an annual orgy of narcissistic self-indulgence where the biggest stars in media, Hollywood, and politics gather to become even more corrupt and insulated than they already are,” John Nolte writes at Big Journalism:

Things have gotten so bad that the E! entertainment channel is going to broadcast live from the event tomorrow night, and Tom Brokaw has felt the need to again speak out against it. Last year Brokaw surprised many when he made this statement about the event on “Meet the Press”:

What kind of image do we present to the rest of the country? Are we doing their business, or are we just a group of narcissists who are mostly interested in elevating our own profiles? And what comes through the screen on C-SPAN that night is the latter, and not the former.

This year, Brokaw doubled down with this statement to Politico:

But I think any organization… has to have a kind of self-policing instinct and what we’re doing with that dinner, as it has been constituted for the past several years, is saying, ‘We’re Versailles. The rest of you eat cake.’

Brokaw’s pretty good at telling the rest of America to eat cake himself; he very publicly defended fellow anchorman Dan Rather in the fall of 2004, when all of us crazy rubes in our pajamas in our basements were pointing out that Rather cooked the books. In December of 2008, at the perigee of the Great Recession, he begged President-Elect Obama to kick off his nascent administration by raising America’s gas taxes:
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At the start of 2013, again carrying Mr. Obama’s water on one of his pet issues, as Noel Sheppard wrote at Newsbusters, Brokaw denigrated the Bill of Rights and its supporters:

As NewsBusters reported Thursday, Tom Brokaw appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe said that not supporting gun control in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, massacre is akin to those that didn’t back the Civil Rights movement in the ’60s.

Noel linked to Mark Levin’s epic monologue, which punched back twice as hard against Brokaw’s rhetoric, as Mr. Obama is wont to say, before concluding:

LEVIN: [Brokaw] is a disgrace. I don’t care they keep putting these guys up on pedestals. They don’t deserve it. They’re a disgrace. He’s a disgrace. The history he refers to has absolutely nothing to do with what’s going on right now. But he brings it up, the same way Tim Kaine wants to interject race. Oh that word nullification, that’s a code word. The same way Colin Powell did it on Sunday. Every single issue that involves actual individual liberty, conservative principles, constitutionalism, they’re now twisting it and turning it, attacking our motives, when in fact we don’t have any motives other than to exercise our free will, and to defend others who seek to exercise their free will.Ladies and gentlemen, Washington is digging in. When I say Washington, Tom Brokaw is a creation of Washington. He may be up in New Jersey at MSNBC doing this, but he’s a creation of Washington. They’re digging in. Scarborough, little irrelevant gnat. Digging in. Schieffer, digging in. The NBC crowd, the CBS crowd, the ABC crowd, just listen to the broadcasts. CNN, and of course, MSLSD, MSLSD which would have been perfect during the times of like Brezhnev because Brezhnev and MSNBC, you know, their ideologies they’re almost like one and the same, but that for another day.

So the point is this: they’re digging in because you refuse to surrender your God-given inalienable rights and your Constitutional right to big government. And Tom Brokaw and Schieffer and all the rest of them are about big government, big government. This is why they defend Obama, this is why they defend the Democrats, this is why there’s not a federal program unless it has to do with the military, national security, law enforcement that they would support reducing then your respect. These are the phonies who are bringing news to you and are bring news to you. The absolute phonies.

As we’ll see tonight at Nerd Versailles Prom.

Oh, and speaking of Bob Schieffer, CBS and the White House Correspondents Dinner: “Courtesy of CBS News, Korean pop star Psy will be there. Because nothing qualifies you as a member of the media/Hollywood/DC elite faster than being a one-hit wonder who openly called for the death of American troops serving in Iraq.”

Update: The swells at Versailles Prom are not amused by Brokaw. “White House correspondents partiers say Tom Brokaw’s got it wrong — White House correspondents just want to have fun,” the JournoList-tainted Politico glibly notes, ironically stumbling over the precise issue of disagreement the rest of us have with those entrenched inside what Walter Russell Mead calls the “Acela Cocoon.” We know they want to have fun — carrying the presidents’ water, fighting his opponents; making America safe for socialism. And we know they’re not covering the White House to objectively report the news. Particularly in the case of anyone from NBC and its spinoffs:

“As a former White House Correspondent, it’s really nice for people in politics and media to come together and have a little weekend of fun,” MSNBC host Alex Wagner told POLITICO at a reception at the Hay Adams hotel. “I understand the idea of the ‘celebrification’ of the event but I think it’s more of a testament to how interesting and compelling Washington politics is to the outside world.”

Curiously, Wagner’s gripe against Brokaw makes him the second veteran NBC correspondent that Wagner has attacked in recent weeks from the left. At the end of January, she described a CNBC contributor as “not a very trustworthy source.” Can we assume she’s implying the same thing about Brokaw? For the sake of having almost as fun as those nutty kooky White House correspondents, I think we can.

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“There’s an economic concept known as a positional good in which an object is only valued by the possessor because it’s not possessed by others.”

– Dr. Sheldon Cooper, a character in the CBS comedy series, The Big Bang, as quoted by Steve Hayward of Power Line, who adds:

At this point I perked up my ears, because . . . no, it couldn’t be, could it? Does someone on the BBT writing staff actually know the obscure book where this term originated?  The answer, after a dramatic pause, turned out to be Yes.  Sheldon explained:

The term was coined in 1976 by economist Fred Hirsch to replace the more colloquial, but less precise “neener-neener”.

No way!  Wow.  Who says TV is a vast wasteland, anyway?  Aside from the great Fred Siegel, myself, and a small handful of other very nerdy fans, Hirsch’s Social Limits to Growth is a forgotten classic because it was way ahead of its time, but it explains a lot about why affluent people particularly on the two coasts today are not just indifferent to economic growth, but positively opposed to it in many cases.  (This book is so out of print that for some reason the Kindle version is quoted at $57.  Though this could be an inside joke that only Hirsch fans will get.  Talk about the ultimate positional good in bibliophilia.)

Sheldon’s summary that the argument is a better version of “neener-neener” is amazingly accurate; another way of summarizing Hirsch’s thesis is that our problem today is not that people want to “keep up with the Joneses,” but want to “keep ahead of the Joneses.”  And the best way to do that is to keep the other Joneses down.  Upper middle class people, Hirsch predicted, would come to see further economic growth as a threat to their well being, rather than something from which they and everyone else would benefit.  This is one reason why contemporary liberalism, which as recently as John F. Kennedy prized growth, is today indifferent to the idea, when it is not actively opposed in practice.  Cue Keystone, or just about everything California does.

And the Third World; All of which dovetails perfectly into the observation I made at the end of the previous post, on Ben Affleck posing at living on $1.50 for a day for the proverbial purpose of “raising awareness.” As I said, that’s not meant to imply however, that anyone involved actually wants to see those conditions improved.

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“Ben Affleck will live on $1.50 for a day, then go back to his real life,” the Daily Caller notes:

Oscar-winning millionaire Ben Affleck will live on just $1.50 for (at least) one day next week, all while knowing that he can go back to his regular, multi-million dollar life.

The actor will live on the meager amount for poverty awareness campaign Live Below the Line, the campaign announced on its Facebook page Monday.

Affleck will tweet his experience, as well as what he is eating, on his personal Twitter account. The goal of the campaign is to have celebrities — Sophia Bush, Josh Groban, Hunter Biden and Debi Mazaar will also do the challenge — raise awareness and funds for their chosen charities.  Affleck’s fundraising will go toward the charity he founded, Eastern Congo Initiative.

According to Live Below the Line’s website, the purpose of the project is “to give a glimpse into the lives of 1.4 billion people who have no choice but to live below the line every day — and who have to make $1.50 cover a lot more than food.”

I realize that “Progressivism” is an exhausted century-old philosophy that largely consists of spinning your wheels while going nowhere, but are they really still doing these sorts of shopworn stunts?

When I was in middle school at St. Mary’s (now Doane Academy) in the Jurassic days, some bright spark convinced the school to teach the kids about the plight of the Third World and the randomness of life by first giving us an afternoon lecture, and then giving all the kids three meals in the cafeteria. The first kid got the full First World meal, the second got a slightly lessened Second World meal, and the third kid got a Third World meal, which if I’m remembering correctly, consisted of a blob of hot rice ladled out with an ice cream scoop.

Guess which one your humble narrator received.

I silently said nuts to this stunt, didn’t eat it, and sat and conversed with the kids in the school cafeteria until my father picked me up from school and we went to Burger King afterwards.

Oh, and speaking of national hamburger chains, it’s worth flashing back to 2004 and another culinary-themed photo-op for the leftwing celebrity:

John Edwards’s campaign theme is a slice of warmed-over Disraeli: there are “two Americas”, one for the rich, one for the poor, and, even though he’s part of the former, he wants you to know that he started out in the latter. Friday was the Edwardses’ 27th anniversary, so, in keeping with tradition, they hit the Newburgh Wendy’s, along with the Kerrys, campaign mascot Ben Affleck and accompanying press crew.

The photo-op didn’t go smoothly. Kerry went over to say hi to some marines, who turned out to be Bush supporters and resented the interruption to their lunch. More telling was Teresa Heinz Kerry. She pointed to the picture of the bowl of chilli above the clerk’s head: “What’s that?” she asked. He explained that it was something called “chilli” and she said she’d like to try a bowl. The Senator also ordered a Frosty, a chocolate dessert. They toyed with them after a fashion, and then got back on the bus.

It then emerged that Wendy’s had just been an appetiser. The campaign advance team had ordered 19 five-star lunches from the Newburgh Yacht Club for Kerry, Edwards, Affleck and co to be served back on the bus: shrimp vindaloo, grilled diver sea scallops, prosciutto, wrapped stuffed chicken, etc.

I’m not sure whether Ben had the shrimp and Teresa the scallops, but, either way, it turns out John Edwards is right: there are two Americas – one America where folks eat at Wendy’s, another America where the elite pass an amusing half-hour slumming among the folks at Wendy’s and then chow down on the Newburgh Yacht Club’s specials of the day. The Elizabeth Edwards anniversary-at-Wendy’s shtick was meant to emphasise her husband’s authenticity, but it now looks as inauthentic as Kerry’s own blundering “regular guy” routine.

As the Daily Caller notes, “Affleck’s net worth is $65 million as of 2010.” He’ll be enjoying shrimp vindaloo, grilled diver sea scallops and prosciutto once again, and rather soon.

Also, as the DC writes, “the purpose of the project is ‘to give a glimpse into the lives of 1.4 billion people who have no choice but to live below the line every day — and who have to make $1.50 cover a lot more than food.’”

Which is not to imply however, that anyone involved actually wants to see those conditions improved.

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How bad a week did CNN have? Even Jon Stewart is dumping on his fellow liberal wannabe-journalists there today:

After giving credit to NBC News and giving the New York Post some gentle ribbing, Stewart moved on to his primary target. He suspected CNN may have taken some of his advice from the week before, as they notably stopped speculating as much as they had been before the suspects were identified. “It’s a much more responsible way of broadcasting than your usual ‘say it first and have Anderson Cooper correct it later.’”

Stewart reserved special disdain for CNN reporter Deborah Feyerick, who had lot to say about some barking dogs. He said something his dog just “stares out the window and barks even when there’s nothing out there. Sometimes he licks his own genitals. You can’t always read a lot into what they do… news-wise.”

But even worse was CNN correspondent Susan Candiotti, who let this gem pass her lips about Boston under lockdown: “It’s as though a bomb had dropped somewhere.”

“Yes, it does seem like that sometimes,” Stewart said with his head in his hands. “It’s not so much a metaphor as, what actually happened.”

Oh, and speaking of bombs and CNN, as Twitchy notes, CNN ran a segment today demonstrating how to build and detonate a pressure cooker bomb:

Has it really been more than 20 years since “Dateline NBC” showed us how to blow up a pickup truck using a simple model rocket engine? These days we have the Internet to show us how to build explosives, but it’s nice to know TV news is still there for us. How easy is it to make one of those pressure cooker bombs like those used in the Boston Marathon terrorist attack? It’s so simple, even CNN can do it. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

* * * * *

We’re sure CNN has a very good reason for showing how easy it is to build a weapon of mass destruction. We don’t know what that reason is, though. Kermit Gosnell’s trial was postponed today because the defense attorney called in sick, so they must have had some extra time to fill.

At least at the moment, you can find the video online fairly easily, but I’m not linking to it here. It’s sort of vaguely reminiscent of David Letterman’s late-1980s heyday, when he would drop stuff off tall buildings or place objects in industrial presses, because watching stuff go boom makes for fun goofy video. Letterman was being ironic by being deliberately stupid on television. What’s CNN’s excuse?

Besides — if you profess to believe that mere clip art and weapons-related language can kill — as CNN was pretending to believe two years ago — isn’t actually demonstrating how to build a bomb a remarkably ill-conceived idea? Or does CNN simply no internal collective memory of its past programming?

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After quoting from Ron Rosenbaum’s 1999 debunking of Hannah Arendt’s famous “banality of evil” formulation (which itself is well worth your time reading), James Taranto writes, “while Rosenbaum seems correct in rejecting “the banality of evil” as an overarching theory, surely it has some explanatory or descriptive power:”

“Faceless little men following evil orders” surely is a fitting characterization of the Pennsylvania bureaucrats who, because of a mix of indifference, incompetence and politics, failed in their oversight of Gosnell’s clinic and allowed it to keep operating for decades.

It’s also true that banality is a tactic of evil, a method it employs to make orders easier to follow. One of Gosnell’s employees might have blown the whistle on him had he expressly commanded them to slash babies to death after they was born, rather than to “snip” them after they “precipitated” to “ensure fetal demise.”

Today’s New York Times story, like the one last month, refers to the infants Gosnell is accused of murdering as “fetuses,” although it also refers to them as “babies.” This is another fascinating slip. Abortion opponents resolutely adhere to the convention of calling unborn children “fetuses” so as to conceal the similarity between (at least late-term) abortion and infanticide. By using the terms interchangeably, the Times unwittingly defeats this pro-abortion obscurantism, revealing what it means to conceal.

The Washington Post has also started covering the Gosnell trial, and in its first news story it is careful to observe the distinction between babies (the alleged murder victims) and fetuses (human remains of mostly indeterminate developmental stage that were found at the clinic). Meanwhile in the Style section an article by Paul Farhi asks: “Is Media Bias to Blame for Lack of Gosnell Coverage? Or Something Far More Banal?”

The banal “something” is simple ignorance of the story, which is executive editor Martin Baron’s explanation for the failure to cover it. “We never decide what to cover for ideological reasons, no matter what critics might claim,” he says. “Accusations of ideological motives are easy to make, even if they’re not supported by the facts.”

Margaret Sullivan, the Times’s public editor, says something similar:

The behavior of news organizations often owes more to chaos theory than conspiracy theory. I don’t think that editors and reporters got together and decided not to give the Gosnell trial a lot of attention because it would highlight the evils of abortion.

I do think that it wasn’t on their radar screen–and that it should have been. The murders of seven newborn babies, done so horrifically, would be no ordinary crime. Any suggestion, including mine on Friday, that this is just another murder trial is a miscalculation. And it’s certainly possible that journalists who were more in touch with conservative voices and causes would have picked up on the importance of this trial sooner.

Do liberal journalists really think that accusations of bias amount to a “conspiracy theory”? That seems to us a lazy assumption, and sheer laziness is surely a major element of media bias. Others are prejudice against ideological outgroups and hubris, which leads newsmen to make categorical assertions like “we never decide what to cover for ideological reasons” rather than reflect on whether that’s really true.

Laziness, prejudice and pride are ordinary human failings. As we’ve seen from the press’s treatment of the Gosnell story, they can lead those whose calling is to bear witness to avert their eyes from radical evil. Call it the banality of bias.

Curiously, Marc Lamont Hill of the Huffington Post was willing to drop the mask:

“For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left. I think it’s a bad idea, I think it’s dangerous, but I think that’s the way it is.”

“Strong words from a host on a left-leaning outlet,” adds Erik Wemple of the Washington Post — another “left-leaning outlet,” which will also admit its ideology from time to time in its more unguarded moments.

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“Coming Soon: The Summer When You’re Expected to Save Drive-In Movie Theaters,” Time claimed last week:

Later this year, movie studios are scheduled to stop distributing films in old-fashioned 35-millimeter format. Everything will go digital, which is fine for the vast majority of indoor theaters that have already upgraded to digital projectors. It’s a different story with drive-ins, however, many of which find themselves in need of handouts to pay for the upgrade. Care to cough up a $100 donation on top of the cost of popcorn?

Yes, there are still drive-in theaters in existence, though it’s rare for a state to have more a handful left. For example, there are eight drive-in theaters in Michigan, according to MichiganDriveIns.com. MLive reported that at least one of the existing theaters, the Capri Drive-In, just paid $144,000 to upgrade two of its projectors to digital. It’s unlikely that all of the other drive-ins will be able to do the same. Drive-ins are hardly big money makers; more than 150 others in the state have closed over the years.

DriveInTheater.com has a state-by-state list of operational and dead drive-ins, and for every state, the deceased list is far longer. Once, more than 4,000 drive-ins dotted the nation. More than three-quarters of them closed by the late ’80s.

I certainly don’t mind seeing a few drive-in theaters saved from extinction. But I’m rather surprised to see that someone from Time magazine is waxing nostalgic for them, because drive-in theaters they represent everything that’s anathema to the magazine since founder Henry Luce left the building in 1967. They represent suburbia and the American hinterlands, which Time has loathed as The Other since as early 1969. They represent cars and the internal combustion engine — and we all know where Time stands on the issue of global warming:

And they represent suburban sprawl. Shouldn’t Time be arguing that those last drive-in theaters be leveled so that some massive high-density apartment blocks be built there to help reduce all that inefficient land use that’s so hated by today’s socialist architectural gurus?

But Time’s homage to the drive-in movie is yet more proof that increasingly, it’s now the left who are increasingly nostalgic for a halcyon American past. As we mentioned last year, witness statist Paul Krugman’s surprising homage to Eisenhower’s America or Woody Allen’s frequent encomiums to the 1930s. Or as libertarian blogger Radley Balko wrote in 2004:

You know, you sometimes get the feeling the day after the polio vaccine was invented, today’s left would have run editorials lamenting the good ol’ days, when we were a little more cautious about what swimming pools we jumped into, and expressing sadness that we’d now have no new stories about the afflicted overcoming their disability to inspire the rest of us.

I’m not kidding. They’re that resistant to change. Every mill that shuts down is a “sign of our sad times.” No matter that the new mill will do things better, faster and cheaper than the old one. New farming techniques grow more food on less land. But dammit, if there wasn’t something romantic about the old-stye “family farm” that’s deserving of government protection. Innovation isn’t celebrated, it’s excoriated for displacing some idealized vision of the way things once were. In matters of progress and dynamism, the left is far more conservative than the conservatives are.

Then there’s matter of the sustainability of Hollywood’s own product, at least in the minds of those who believe that the earth’s days are numbered, do to man’s rapacious anti-environmental nature. For example, when Avatar was released onto DVD in 2010, James Cameron told the Washington Post that “DVDs are wasteful:”

It’s a consumer product like any consumer product. I think ultimately we’re going to bypass a physical medium and go directly to a download model and then it’s just bits moving in the system. And then the only impact to the environment is the power it takes to run the computers, run the devices. I think that we’re not there yet, but we’re moving that direction. Twentieth Century Fox has made a commitment to be carbon neutral by the end of 2010. Because of some of these practices that can’t be changed, the only way to do that is to buy carbon offsets. You know, which again, these are interim solutions. But at least it shows that there’s a consciousness that we have to be dealing with carbon pollution and sustainability. …

And speaking of consumer products, why, wasn’t it just a couple of years ago that Fareed Zakaria, one of Time’s editors at large, and a would-be advisor to the president himself was telling CNN we needed to reduce consumption?

Parker asked Zakaria if he had faith the American people could handle the fiscal discipline he advocated. Zakaria used the platform as an opportunity to attack Americans and refute the notion “the American people are wonderful.” His solution: Less consumption by the American people.

“No, I think the people are the big problem,” Zakaria said. “I mean, Americans — everybody wants to say the American people are so wonderful. You know, I think that when they come to recognize that they have to make sacrifices too that it’s not just wasteful — they need to have — they need to recognize that some of what’s going to happen here is fewer. They have to consume fewer things. They have to accept slightly higher taxes. And in the long run, you will have a much better economy.”

If that’s what Cameron and the rest of Hollywood (which includes Warner Brothers, which is part of the same conglomerate as Time) truly believe about their own product, and an editor-at-large of Time itself thinks about the American public, shouldn’t they live up to those same rules as well?

Update: Unless of course, all of Time’s theories about the impending horrors of life in the 21st century were just so much fatuous leftwing politics made up on the spot to achieve a desired socialistic outcome, and deep down inside, they never believed any of that stuff in the first place.

If so, shouldn’t they let us know they’ve changed their mind?

Related: “America’s Largest Movie Theatre Chain Cuts Worker Hours, Citing ObamaCare,” Bryan Preston writes at the Tatler.

So from Fareed Zakaria’s perspective, it’s a two-fer.

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“Friends and allies of Baroness Thatcher expressed ‘surprise and disappointment’ last night as it emerged President Obama is not planning to send any serving member of his administration to her funeral,” the London Daily Mail reports.

I wonder how “surprised” they really are, given that just about everyone should have seen this coming from a mile away:

Whitehall sources have revealed that the US delegation at tomorrow’s service in St Paul’s Cathedral will be led by two Reagan era secretaries of state: James Baker and George Shultz.

Though President Obama himself had not been expected to attend, there had been speculation that he would be represented either by Vice President Joe Biden or wife Michelle. However, the Obama administration had said it would not be attending Thatcher’s funeral before the Boston bombings.

The Queen’s decision to attend Lady Thatcher’s funeral has effectively elevated it to a state occasion unprecedented for a political figure in Britain since the death of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965.

Other world leaders, including Canada’s Stephen Harper, Mario Monti of Italy and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, are attending the service in person.

Speaking of Churchill, perhaps his bust could be interviewed to explain some of the reasons why Mr. Obama isn’t going. Or to put another way, oh, that punitive liberalism.

Ed Morrissey notes that John Boehner will be attending, along with a Congressional delegation:

Update: Just as a reminder, Congress decides separately on delegations to events such as this.  I’d expect to see both the House and Senate send small delegations to the funeral.

Update: Just received by e-mail, but it actually came out yesterday:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) today announced he will send a delegation to London this week to represent the U.S. House of Representatives at the funeral of Baroness Margaret Thatcher, former prime minister of the United Kingdom.  The delegation will be led by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN).

“Margaret Thatcher was one of the greatest champions freedom has ever known, and her funeral gives Americans and friends around the world an opportunity to pay final respects,” Boehner said. “I’m pleased that Congressman Blackburn will lead a House delegation to Baroness Thatcher’s funeral to communicate our prayers and condolences to her family and the British people.”

The House delegation to London will also include Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and George Holding (R-NC).

The House delegation will fly to London on commercial air flights, in compliance with the Speaker’s directive that Member use of military air transportation be suspended with sequestration in effect.

Also, our ambassador in London should attend the funeral, but that’s not the same as sending a delegation representing the head of state.

The White House’s excuse is that they’re busy — oh so very, very busy — crafting new gun “control” legislation and they can’t spare anyone, not even the FLOTUS, VP, or John Kerry our illustrious new secretary of state, but Moe Lane notes that with Boehner attending the funeral, not much is going to happen in Congress, thus rendering that dog-ate-my-homework excuse mute.

As Moe adds:

look.  I don’t know who, specifically, the President is going to be in 2017, but I do know this: the President will not be a petty man lashing out at the British because he’s trying to curry posthumous favor with an anti-colonial daddy who never truly loved him.  Now would be a good time for the rest of the country to make it quietly clear that the last several, and next several, years represent an aberration in Anglo-American relations, not the New Normal…

Yes, one can certainly hope for a change, to borrow from Mr. Obama’s favorite, albeit rather ironic campaign slogans.

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The key word is slowly; if you haven’t seen it yet, click over to to Hot Air for the photo of row after empty row of seats in the media section of the trial of Kermit Gosnell. But Terry Moran of ABC’s Nightline slowly awakens to the horrific Gosnell story:

As Jim Treacher responds, “Don’t tell us. Tell your viewers.” 

In contrast to Moran, Mollie Hemingway of Ricochet receives a telling response from a Washington Post reporter when asked why the Post has largely embargoed coverage of Gosnell: This is a local crime story, not a national one. This is not the story we were looking for; pay it no mind. The droids in the newsroom can go about their business. Move along.

But Erick Erickson of Red State finds another liberal Washington Post employee — and one of their known men on the Journolist (or whatever it’s called these days), which can do so much to promote or kill a story in the MSM, finally noticing Gosnell:

Last night on twitter, Dave Weigel of Slate noted he was just hearing from twitterers about the gruesome trial of Kermit Gosnell. Those who care about the story owe a tremendous debt to Kirsten Powers taking to the pages of USA Today to write about it.

It is fascinating how much of a bubble the media lives in with that bubble so DC-NYC centric. It is again one of the problems for news organizations like CNN as it tries to rebuild. With the exception of Fox News, the American news networks focus on the things people along the coast are interested in and not what people along the American river valleys are talking about.

In churches, local restaurants, and small town hair salons a lot of people across the country are talking about the terrible trial of Kermit Gosnell in Pennsylvania. It’s just not the people who interact with those who produce the news in New York City.

In fairness to CNN, unlike many other mainstream media outlets, it covered the Gosnell arrest back in 2011, but moved on. Only Fox, which is the number one news network largely because it actually cares what people outside the DC-NYC bubble care about, has stayed with the story.

The name of Erickson’s article is, “Can You Imagine the Coverage If It Were Dogs?”

Liberals, and even reporters who try to be fair minded, often complain that conservative decided to leave and go do their own media thing with Fox, talk radio, etc. Well, this is an example of why conservatives had to do that. Otherwise many stories many Americans care about would never be told.

Had Kermit Gosnell killed dogs, HLN would be giving it wall to wall coverage as they do all sorts of sensational trials. Nancy Grace would be in full outrage mode every night through the course of the trial. It’s sad that a man who engaged in horrific acts of barbarism will never be as known to the public as Casey Anthony or George Zimmerman because Gosnell’s crime is viewed as less than a crime by the vast majority of the producers of American news.

But even there, like leftwing playwright Lillian Hellman, today’s leftwing media is more than willing to cut their consciences to fit this year’s fashion. How many sportswriters — particularly in Philadelphia — were eager to welcome Michael Vick back to the NFL?

Not to mention completely erasing this moment from a best-selling presidential autobiography out their minds:

“With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”

As I wrote last year, the real story isn’t what Obama did as a kid living in Indonesia; it’s the dry, detached tone in which he brings it up, both in the 1990s when the book bearing his name was written, and when he read its text for its book on tape version a few years later — and when he read from his book at a public appearance:

So yes, I can imagine the coverage if dogs were involved. And the media looking the other way there, too, if need be. At Hot Air, Allahpundit adds that the Gosnell trial is currently in its “undernews” phase, as the MSM tries to work out the appropriate storyline to ensure that it can do the least amount of harm to the MSM-DNC overculture:

This reminds me of Mickey Kaus writing about “undernews,” stuff that people will eagerly chatter about online but which “respectable” media ignores, at least temporarily. Typically it relates to rumors like John Edwards’s affair, which people whispered about for months but which big media, because it couldn’t nail down the story and/or because it was politically “unhelpful,” refused to cover. The first suspicions about Anthony Weiner started off that way too. One of the many surreal elements of the Gosnell story is that it’s somehow ended up as undernews even though, as Moran aptly says, this degenerate may in fact be one of the worst serial killers in history. It’s not a rumor; he’s on trial by the State of Pennsylvania with a death sentence on the table. But somehow it’s not suitable for media coverage.

Which is why the story could still also be simply tossed down the Memory Hole at this point.

As Wikipedia is apparently debating right now with the Gosnell story.

“I don’t suppose I have to mention Orwell. You were already on that page,” Ace writes. “And so was Wikipedia.”

However, if there are any old media journalists who’d actually like to do their jobs and report the story, Elizabeth Scalia is offering “Easy, Logical, Fair Angles to Pursue on Gosnell Story” at her Anchoress blog.

Update: Tweet from JD Mullane of the Bucks County Courier Times with the photo of the empty seats at the Gosnell trial found via Pundit and Pundette and added to the top of the post. And note this:

From the #Gosnell grand jury report: “After playing with the baby, Williams slit its neck.” punditandpundette.com/2011/01/brief-…

— Pundette (@pundette) April 12, 2013

As Mark Steyn writes, in the MSM if it bleeds it leads (a motto that has its origins in Philadelphia-area news, incidentally) — until in this case, it doesn’t.

More: On the PJ Media homepage a Tip Line for old media:” Did Your Editor Spike Kermit Gosnell Coverage? Report It Here Anonymously. Your employer is making serial infanticide a left/right issue. You know that’s not what you signed up for.”

Margaret Sanger could not be reached for comment.

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Kentucky Democrat hangs fellow Kentucky Democrats out to dry, according to the Kentucky Democrats who likely staff WFPL, Lousville’s NPR affiliate, and are reporting:

A secret recording of a campaign strategy session between U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell and his advisors was taped by leaders of the Progress Kentucky super PAC, says a longtime local Democratic operative.

Mother Jones Magazine released the tape this week. The meeting itself took place on Feb. 2.

Jacob Conway, who is on the executive committee of the Jefferson County Democratic Party, says that day, Shawn Reilly and Curtis Morrison, who founded and volunteered for Progress Kentucky, respectively, bragged to him about how they recorded the meeting.

Moe Lane adds, “I’m not going to be cute about this:”

• Progress Kentucky is a racist organization.  We know this because they went after Mitch McConnell’s wife for being, apparently, a spy for the Chinese.
• Progress Kentucky is a crazy organization.  We know this because they thought that Ashley Judd was a viable candidate for Kentucky Senate (nobody else did, honestly).
• And, allegedly, Progress Kentucky is a stupid organization.  We suspect this because Kentucky Democrats are confessing that the organization apparently bragged about taping Mitch McConnell and staff during a strategy session:

At Commentary, Jonathan Tobin writes, “If true, and reports are now also saying that FBI are pulling surveillance tapes of the building, then what we are talking about here is nothing less than a crime:”

Far from McConnell crying wolf, as Chris Matthews claimed yesterday, the Watergate analogy may actually turn out to be entirely accurate.

The principle here is one that both parties ought to condemn not just because it is a crime to record a person without his consent in this manner but also because acts of political espionage are a direct attack on our democratic system.

For much of the last three years we’ve heard non-stop complaints about the abusive nature of Tea Party rhetoric and the way the political right has supposedly dragged political discourse in this country down. The mainstream media has played this tune often and loud in spite of numerous instances of liberal incivility. But what has happened in Kentucky isn’t merely rude; it is a sign that the left has taken political warfare to a completely new level of aggressiveness.

Progress Kentucky is, after all, the same group that made offensive and racist tweets about the ethnicity of McConnell’s wife. Now they may have engaged in the kind of political espionage that brought down the Nixon administration. Its time for the same liberal outlets that have been talking about the Tea Party’s alleged offenses to stop ignoring McConnellgate.

A Watergate analogy you say? Pshaw!, the Washington Post replies. Judging by the tone of this article, the Post thinks that Republican Mitch McConnell being illicitly recorded is pretty darn cool stuff:

David Corn and Mother Jones find themselves with another audio scoop …

And just like that, Corn and Mother Jones had their second major bombshell in seven months. The first, of course, was one of the most consequential scoops of the presidential campaign — a leaked video recording of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney saying at a small fundraiser last May that “47 percent” of voters were “dependent” on the government. (Corn will receive the prestigious Polk Award for Political Reporting for the Romney story on Thursday.)

Corn, 54, says the two career-making stories might have been linked. He guesses that his source on the McConnell recording — whom he won’t reveal — came to him because of the way he handled the Romney recording and the firestorm it ignited. But that’s just speculation: “I literally don’t know why” the source came to him, he says. “I didn’t ask.”

As John Nolte writes at Big Journalism, “That is from the Washington Post, the same once-legendary Washington Post that broke the Watergate story and brought down President Nixon:”

Watergate involved a lot of illegal wiretapping.

And now a Democrat official is claiming that the very same recording the Washington Post is celebrating might have been obtained illegally. Moreover, the Post must have known that was a very real possibility when they published this story Thursday. The Post certainly knew the recording was a secret one.

I have always believed, with the exception of Bob Woodward, that — all crimes being the same — had Nixon had been a Democrat, the Washington Post never would have pursued Watergate. Now I have yet-another example to back that theory up.

The Washington Post disgraces its own legacy on a daily basis.

They’re doing wonders to rehabilitate President’s Nixon’s legacy, however.

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Liberal Democrat Kirsten Powers writes in USA Today, “We’ve forgotten what belongs on Page One” — such as the horrors being described in the Kermit Gosnell trial:

“Chaos” isn’t really the story here. Butchering babies that were already born and were older than the state’s 24-week limit for abortions is the story. There is a reason the late Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called this procedure infanticide.

Planned Parenthood recently claimed that the possibility of infants surviving late-term abortions was “highly unusual.” The Gosnell case suggests otherwise.

Regardless of such quibbles, about whether Gosnell was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb — as in a routine late-term abortion — is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.

A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months. The exception is when Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan hijacked a segment on Meet the Press meant to foment outrage over an anti-abortion rights law in some backward red state.

The Washington Post has not published original reporting on this during the trial and The New York Times saw fit to run one original story on A-17 on the trial’s first day. They’ve been silent ever since, despite headline-worthy testimony.

Well, it’s not like the Post ran 112 items on a single story in the fall of 2006, nor the Times once specialized in “flooding the zone” or running 32 continuous front page stories on the same item in 2004.

But those stories were designed to harm Republicans. Why on earth would either of these Democrat house organs take one for their own team?

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That’s not a shutout the MSM should be proud of, but a big part of leftwing media bias is bias by omission. And you can’t spell omission without O:

The Rutgers basketball story continues to transfix the media, and why shouldn’t it? Mike Rice, the disgraced former Rutgers basketball coach allegedly killed a woman and at least seven viable, born-alive babies “by plunging scissors into their spinal cords” in his filthy, macabre “house of horrors” abortion clinic.

Oh wait, my mistake. Rice was fired last week from Rutgers over video of him shoving, kicking and yelling at his players, throwing basketballs at them and – most damning – using “homophobic slurs.” That’s made Rice the most notorious villain in America. And in one week it earned him 36 network news stories clocking in at 41 minutes, 26 seconds of air time on ABC, CBS and NBC.

Now, had Rice been accused of killing a woman and eight babies, he’d be enjoying the same anonymity as Kermit Gosnell – provided the killings were carried out in an abortion clinic. Gosnell is the West Philadelphia abortionist who ran an unimaginable charnel house of a “clinic,” for 30 years. Witnesses testified that he may have murdered over 100 babies outside the womb. Gosnell’s trial, underway for weeks, has featured wrenching testimony and horrific details. And it has received exactly zero seconds of airtime on the broadcast networks.

Let’s break it out by network.

ABC

• Rutgers: 8 min., 1 sec
• Gosnell: 0 min., 0 sec.

CBS

• Rutgers: 14 min., 27 sec.
• Gosnell: 0 min., 0 sec.

NBC

• Rutgers: 18 min., 58 sec.
• Gosnell: 0 min., 0 sec.

So why all the zeros? Because the networks are terrified of running a story like this on the Today Show or the 6:30 PM news:

A Delaware woman who worked for Kermit Gosnell testified Tuesday that she was called back to a room at his abortion clinic in Philadelphia where the bodies of aborted babies were kept on a shelf to hear one screaming amid the bodies of aborted babies kept on a shelf…

“I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” West said, telling the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas judge and jury that the body of the child was about 18 to 24 inches long and was one of the largest babies she had seen delivered during abortion procedures at the Women’s Medical Society clinic…

West, who said she called aborted babies “specimens” because “it was easier to deal with mentally,” said a co-worker had called her back to the room that night because she did not know what to do. West said the baby’s eyes and mouth were not yet completely formed and it was lying on a glass tray on a shelf and she told the co-worker to call Gosnell and fled the room…

She later made it clear that she called it “a baby” in her testimony “because that is what it is.”

At Hot Air, Allahpundit adds:

That’s not the first time a clinic worker’s resorted to Orwellian euphemisms to make her “work” more bearable. Ed e-mails to remind me that you’ll also find “Product of Conception” in usage. More on Gosnell from NBC Philadelphia, one of the precious few media outlets covering this story:

An unlicensed medical school graduate delivered graphic testimony about the chaos at a Philadelphia clinic where he helped perform late-term abortions.

Stephen Massof described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, “literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.” He testified that at times, when women were given medicine to speed up their deliveries, “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.”

The Anchoress notes correctly that, simply for reasons of sensationalism, the media should be all over this story. Dead children, body parts, harrowing testimony on the stand — even the most soulless news editor, untroubled by the horror-movie accusations against Gosnell, should be pushing heavy coverage for selfish reasons, to boost readership. (Britain’s Daily Mail, whose tabloid instincts are unerring, has posted several stories about it.)

Since 2008, the media has repeatedly submerged its instinct to push big stories (I always typed “killer stories,” before realizing how Orwellian such a euphemism would be in this case), in an effort to help the cause. I’ve long mentioned the San Francisco Chronicle burying Obama’s promise to them at the beginning of 2008 that he would bankrupt entire industries, and NBC not losing much sleep that year over his admission to their financial channel that he’s fine with raising gasoline prices, both goals that by their nature would punish lower income voters the worst, and would be examples of heartless cruelty from GOP presidents. (Or Tory prime ministers, for that matter.) Instead, the media altered their thinking on these issues to fit the president’s policies. (See also: The Wright-Free Zone, Funemployment! and ‘The Best-Looking Contraction in U.S. GDP You’ll Ever See.’) But Iraq, Afghanistan and Benghazi sure have dropped off the radar screen, haven’t they, along with Chicago area gun crimes.

Defining Deviancy Down, indeed.

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While Zhou Enlai apparently never said, “The impact of the French Revolution? Too early to say,” whoever misquoted him was certainly onto something. In February and March, we learned that Bob Woodward was now so bad a person for reporting on the current president, that some of his fellow Washington Post employees were reduced to saying things such as this:

And Bob Redford doesn’t think too highly of Bob Woodward these days, either. (He prefers his current heroes to be a bit more, umm, action-oriented.) And apparently, President Nixon is now so rehabilitated in the left’s eyes that Watergate is now a how-to guide, not a warning:

CNN reports:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaign is “working with the FBI” on how Mother Jones, a liberal magazine, obtained a recording of political aides meeting with McConnell and discussing opposition research on Ashley Judd, McConnell campaign manager Jesse Benton told CNN Tuesday….

“Obviously a recording device of some kind was placed in Senator McConnell’s campaign office without consent. By whom and how that was accomplished will presumably be the subject of a criminal investigation,” Benton said in a statement.

Either this kind of bugging is acceptable or it’s not. I’m surprised Corn went forward with it when the material isn’t even shocking. It’s actually quite bland… in comparison to what I assume is batted around within all the various campaigns as they decide how to attack opponents. Can we get transcripts of all that crap? I’d love to blog it.

Suddenly, I realize why Corn may believe this material is worth printing: These are attacks on a sweet and pretty lady. Corn’s decision to publish is — ironically — evidence of sexism.

Incidentally, the woman who was debating going up against McConnell to represent the voters of Kentucky in the US Senate has a “Psychological Support Dog.”

Which she sometimes takes on media interviews.

Apparently, this is a thing, Ace writes:

So, within two hours, I went from never having heard of a Psychological Support Dog at all to writing about it on my blog and then listening to Adam Carolla complaining about them for an extended period of time.  From zero times in all my life, to twice within 120 minutes.

And I notice this happens with some frequency.

Anyone else have this happen?

And what’s it called?  I always say the Germans must have a word for it because they have words for everything.

Update:  There is a word for it, and it turns out it is rooted in German. It’s called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

How the phenomenon came to be known as “Baader-Meinhof” is uncertain. It seems likely that some individual learned of the existence of the historic German urban guerrilla group which went by that name, and then heard the name again soon afterwards. This plucky wordsmith may then have named the phenomenon after the very subject which triggered it. But it is certainly a mouthful; a shorter name might have more hope of penetrating the lexicon.

The Germans have always been a comforting people.

Update: Right now, I’ll bet you’re asking, “What on earth could Shug the Psychological Support Dog be thinking as its being lugged from interview to interview?” Jim Treacher posits that it’s something along the lines of, “Somebody please help me. Every night I have to sit with her as she watches Kiss the Girls and eats ice cream and cries.”

But let’s get back to Mother Jones and the scandal at hand. “The whole thing reminds me of the Washington Post‘s ongoing (and rather pathetic) attempts to recreate that one, perfect fix that the WaPo had in 2006 when they destroyed George Allen’s Senate career,” Moe Lane writes. “Yes, David Corn, last year you folks got your hands on a video that harmed a Republican campaign.  Congratulations.  Have a cookie.  But it’s never as good the second time, huh?”

By the way, remember when the left pretended that they thought somebody like Donald Segretti was a bad guy?

Or to put it another way, “Mother Jones either published audio which was illegally recorded or endorsed @JamesOKeefeIII’s style of journalism.” Not to mention, “Hypocrisy: Mother Jones Writer Behind McConnell Bugging Railed Against Bush Wiretapping.”

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Dear MSNBC, if our kids belong to you, do your kids belong to us too? If so, can we take them hunting after church in our big pickup truck?

— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) April 9, 2013

Lean forward.

Related: From Rich Lowry at NRO, “Your Kids Are Not Your Own,” in the eyes of NBC:

[MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry's] statement wasn’t an aside on live television. She didn’t misspeak. The spot was shot, produced, and aired without, apparently, raising any alarm bells. No one with influence raised his or her hand and said, “Should we really broadcast something that sounds so outlandish?”

The foundation of the Harris-Perry view is that society is a large-scale kibbutz. The title of Hillary Clinton’s bestseller in the 1990s expressed the same point in comforting folk wisdom: “It Takes a Village.”

As the ultimate private institution, the family is a stubborn obstacle to the great collective effort. Insofar as people invest in their own families, they are holding out on the state and unacceptably privileging their own kids over the children of others. These parents are selfish, small-minded, and backward. “Once it’s everybody’s responsibility,” Harris-Perry said of child-rearing, “and not just the households, then we start making better investments.”

This impulse toward the state as über-parent is based on a profound fallacy and a profound truth. The fallacy is that anyone can care about someone else’s children as much as his own. The former Texas Republican senator Phil Gramm liked to illustrate the hollowness of professions to the contrary with a story. He told a woman, “My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.” She said, “No, you don’t.” Gramm replied, “Okay: What are their names?”

Read the whole thing.

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