You know, when they were casting Atlas Shrugged, they should have seen if Henry Waxman would do a cameo. He’d be a perfect fit.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Tiny Cuts
The cuts represent less than 2 percent of the total budget, less than 4 percent of the deficit, and less than 5 percent of discretionary spending, which rose in real terms by 75 percent from 2000 to 2010 and by about 9 percent in each of the last two fiscal years. If the House-approved reductions would be “the largest one-year cuts in history,” as the folks at Every Child Matters say, that is a sad commentary not on Republican cold-heartedness but on the fiscal incontinence of both parties.
They squeal like stuck pigs at pinpricks.
More On The War Against Science
Really, they only like science when it gives them the “correct” answers.
The Coming Violence
And if it happens, even on a large scale, look for the same media that has been in an uproar for the past couple years over imagined violence at Tea Parties to minimize it, if they are unable to continue to ignore it.
[Update a while later]
Or of course, they won’t minimize it, but will instead maximize it and blame it on the “violent right-wing rhetoric.” Somehow.
The Climate-Change Gravy Train
How well paid are the warm-mongers? Looks like nice work to me, if you can get it, and all you have to do is go along with the politically correct status quo. I don’t know of anyone who’s done as well by scepticism. But then, the latter are being true to standards of science.
[Update a few minutes later]
The EPA person responsibility for regulating CO2 levels doesn’t know what the current level is. The country’s in the very best of hands.
A Harsh Assessment Of The Past Half Century
…in space. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that we’ve pi**ed away fifty years — we did lay a foundation for what’s to come, but we certainly could have been a lot further along with smarter policy, actually focused on opening up space (something that US space policy has never been). Several people at the suborbital conference here have commented (as I often do) that there is very little happening today in the newspace world, at least suborbitally, that we couldn’t have been doing twenty, or even thirty years ago (though modern computer and manufacturing technology has certainly made things cheaper and faster). But we have another half century to start getting it right. I hope.
Because He’s Not Stupid?
Why a prominent CEO doesn’t buy the “pro-business” Obama.
What A Government Shut Down Wouldn’t Be
A train wreck:
We’re in a different political environment now in two important respects. The first is the media. There was no Internet or blogosphere in 1995; Fox News Channel did not start until October 1996; talk radio was in its infancy, with Rush Limbaugh already an important national voice but with few other conservative hosts on the air.
In that environment, liberal-inclined media were able to tell the story and frame the issue the way they liked without much dissent. ABC’s Peter Jennings could compare voters who supported Gingrich Republicans to infants having a tantrum. Such voices don’t have a monopoly today.
The second significant difference is that in the mid-1990s the economy was growing and it was not clear why we needed to limit government spending. We could afford more for this, that and the other thing.
Now we’re in straitened circumstances, just out of a severe recession (though many voters don’t think it’s over just yet) and in a very restrained and anemic recovery. We’ve seen that a substantial increase in government spending — from 21 percent to 25 percent of gross domestic product — hasn’t done much to stimulate economic growth. And we’ve seen that government kept growing even as the private sector suffered.
As I’ve said in the past, I don’t think that Bill Clinton would have won in 1992 with today’s media.
The “New” Ideas Of The Reactionary Left
Thoughts from Frank J.
Left-Wing Fantasies
…about the Koch brothers. These people are truly deranged.