Category Archives: Media Criticism

The Academic Bubble

Is it about to burst? Given the degree to which it’s been driven by government money, and the coming fiscal meltdown, I’d say so.

…consumers seem to be reading the cues in the marketplace.

An increasing number of students are spending their first two years after high school in low-cost community colleges and then transferring to four-year schools.

A recent Wall Street Journal story reported that out-of-staters are flocking to low-tuition North Dakota State in frigid Fargo.

I went to community college my first two years before transferring to Ann Arbor, where I picked up all the basics for engineering — calculus, physics, chemistry, etc. I’m convinced that I got both a cheaper and better education there than those who were freshman and sophomores at Michigan, based on their descriptions of their classes (giant lecture halls taught by grad students for whom English was a second language). But I missed out on a couple years of the “college experience.”

[Update early evening]

The bubble will pop this decade, and here’s one reason why.

[Bumped]

More Denigration Of American Entrepreneurs And Industry

…by so-called conservatives:

Let’s look at what the Obama budget proposes. It ends our manned moon and space exploration, but it proposes a total NASA spending increase by $1 billion. So NASA won’t be totally out of business. His FY2011 budget proposed $19 billion, with emphasis on science, not on manned space flight. He wants to end NASA’s manned space flight program and rent space on Russian spacecraft. He wants to turn space transportation over to private, commercial companies, such as Space X, United Launch Alliance, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, Bigelow Aerospace and others. There is only one problem with privatization with space flight – it does not work. Space X is where NASA was in 1960 with Project Mercury. The ability to put humans into orbit exists only on paper.

Really? The Falcon 9, which has had two successful flights with no failures, and the Dragon capsule, which flew into orbit and returned safely last year, “exists only on paper”? And a capsule that can carry seven crew is “where NASA was in 1960 with Project Mercury,” which could only carry a single person? Really?

Whence comes this compulsion from many supposed anti-government and free-market types to deliberately slander private industry? Do they really hate Barack Obama that much?

The Homers In The Media

Mark Tapscott:

…why is it a foregone conclusion that CCB can’t pass the Senate? By uncritically reporting that claim, journalists are in effect giving senators a pass on the balanced budget issue specifically and more generally of whether their previous declarations are worth anything at all.

And is it too much to ask our esteemed lions of the Fourth Estate toiling in the White House Press Corps to at least ask the president why he opposes a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget and a supermajority in both chambers of Congress to raise taxes?

No doubt he has a logical case to support vetoing such a measure, but why not just ask him to state it for the record? Don’t our readers deserve to know at least that much?

This is an illustration of why so many journalists covering the White House, Congress and national politics so frequently end up functioning like “Homers.” No, I’m not referring to the ancient author, but rather the derisive term for sports reporters who never write anything critical of the home professional teams.

Whether they intend to or not, too many journalists are little more than Homers for the Big Government team. And then they wonder why their credibility is in tatters.

They may also be Homers as in “Simpson.” D’oh!

More Rubes Self Identifying

I think that these GOP donors are an excellent example of the old saying about the rapid separation of fools and their money:

Cry me a river. They looked at Obama’s Harvard law degree and that sharp pant crease and thought he was one of them, or at least more so than that uncredentialed piece of Wasilla trash, with all her vulgar “you betchas” and excessive children, including that embarrassing baby she doted on. And these snobs, instead of apologizing for contributing to the downfall of America, have the nerve to complain about “class warfare.”

It’s people like them that help make class warfare look attractive.