…from people who think they’re saving Hayek.
Actually, I don’t think that even they think that’s what they’re trying to do.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Freudian Slip?
I don’t have any good way to grab the video, but I reran the segment several times on the DVR. On the “All-Star Panel” of Special Report tonight, in the second segment, A. B. Stoddard bit off the word “Teabaggers” when describing the affiliation of many incoming members of Congress. Just so you know where her head is. Color me unsurprised…
I hope someone will come up with video.
Billion-Wise, Ten-Billion Foolish
I agree with Clark Lindsey’s post title on the stunningly stupid news that the Deficit Commission has recommended axing Commercial Crew, except it will end up costing a lot more than ten billion. It’s pretty clear from the announcement that they don’t even understand the purpose, and that it would save NASA billions. In fact, they are unwittingly recommending ending NASA human spaceflight, and consigning us to continuing to be held hostage by the Russians for years. More thoughts later, here or elsewhere. All of the nonsense about this in the media over the past many months hasn’t helped, of course.
[Evening update on the Left Coast]
I have more extensive thoughts over at National Review On-Line.
Update: The Free Speech Crisis At Iowahawk Blog
During the ongoing Iowahawk suspension / unsuspension / disunsuspension / strike crisis, I suspected that I and the other corporate “suits” at Iowahawk would pull out all stops to discredit me. But I never thought that I would stoop as low as to engage in a whispering campaign accusing me of treason against the United States of America. Sadly, this now appears to be the case. As we all know by now, a mysterious rocket powered missile was spotted over California today. Just as mysteriously, a new meme is appearing on Twitter, somehow linking this event with my recent alleged trip to California and subsequent suspension of myself.
Let me be clear. Yes, I was in California recently. And yes, during my visit I did spend last Thursday at XCOR Aerospace, a manufacturer of suborbital rocket vehicles in Mojave, at the invitation of renowned controversial science space blogger Rand Simberg.
And yes, okay, I sometimes enjoy playing with and/or driving rocket-propelled items. What of it? I have never sought to hide any of this from the public. But for anyone to somehow string these completely unrelated “facts” as evidence of some sort of bizarre master plan on my part to steal a rocket from XCOR and use it in a botched hold up of a Malibu liquor store, well, I mean, come on. That’s just crazy talk. The so-called “facts” being shopped around by Iowahawk’s corporate goons are as coincidental as the unexplained weekend break in and missing equipment at XCOR. If you ask me, the so-called “mystery rocket” was almost certainly fired by UN ships, seeking to enforce war crime sanctions against California for “The Kardashians,” “The Hills,” and “Real Housewives of Orange County.”
I am shocked that myself would suggest that I would be involved in a brazen military attack on what is arguably still part of the United States. At long last, me, have I no shame?
Not that I’ve ever noticed. Neither he nor him would last two minutes if either of them had any shame. And now he’s dragging me in as an accessory. At this point, a suspension without pay is far too lenient. He should be forced to start blogging again without pay.
Wise Up, Conservatives
Time to realize that the Apollo era is over. Iain Murray and I have a piece up at The American Spectator in response to that dumb blog post at Forbes last week. Many of the comments seem to utterly miss the point, though. And I have to say, I hadn’t previously been aware that I was a “committed leftist.” Though if I were a leftist, committing me would probably be the appropriate thing to do.
[Late morning update]
I am reliably informed that Loren Thompson, the guy who wrote that thing at Forbes, is bought and paid for by Lockmart. I would have mentioned that in the AmSpec piece had I known earlier.
And Mark Whittington has a hilarious comment, though (as always) completely inadvertently.
Another Media Suspension Over Ethics
Who knew that Iowahawk had ethics?
Dear Me:
Effective 8 am this morning, you have been relieved from your duties as Chief Executive Senior Anchor at Iowahawk. The Iowahawk Code of Ethics clearly states (Section 3c[11.05]) that:
Employees of Iowahawk shall, during critical election seasons, remain at their assigned posts and think of cheap blog stunts to suck in the big internet traffic. During the seven days immediately preceding and seven days immediately following a national election, prohibited employee activities include, but are not limited to:
1. Partying with Tim Blair.
2. Driving about aimlessly in a hot rod.
3. Flying to the coast and getting drunk.
4. Moonlighting as a fire insurance ‘consultant’It has been brought to my attention that during the recent election season you were engaged in at least three of these prohibited activities. Therefore I have no other recourse but to suspend me indefinitely pending my thorough investigation and review into this matter.
As someone partially involved in one of his recent ethical breaches on the coast, I feel some responsibility for this horrific turn in his fate, though I think that Blair should bear the brunt of it. He needs to find a more reasonable employer. And a smarter one. What kind of idiot would suspend Iowahawk? We should start a protest, and a legal defense fund.
A Feature, Not A Bug
Privatizing liquor would increase revenue and decrease consumer costs, but it would result in government layoffs:
As I noted in August, privatization advocates also have been known to argue, with a logic familiar to fans and foes of President Obama’s stimulus package, that the business of distributing alcoholic beverages should be designed to maximize jobs—i.e., to be as inefficient as possible.
Why do we have to be ruled by economic ignorami? And why is it that only places like Reason point things like this out? Why can’t the lame-stream media think, just a little, when they report this stuff?
On Conservative Skepticism Of Climate Policy
I’m pretty much on the same page as Jonathan Adler:
Hendricks’ effort to scare conservatives into supporting big government now to avoid bigger government later rings particularly hollow. Why is it that everything requires bigger government? Climate change is a threat? Extend government tentacles throughout the economy. Climate change is already happening? Ditto. Adaptation is necessary? More of the same. Were climate change not happening at all, I suspect Hendricks would still endorse a substantial expansion in government power.
Admittedly some on the right are equally reflexive, assert government is never the answer, and go to lengths to deny climate change poses any threat whatsoever. Yet there are also plenty of conservatives and libertarians who are deeply skeptical of government intervention, but are nonetheless willing to believe global warming might be a problem. It’s perfectly reasonable to believe that reducing greenhouse gas emissions does not require the enactment of monstrous, pork-laden, regulatory statutes like Waxman-Markey. And it’s not at all clear that climate adaptation necessitates a massive expansion of government power. In many areas, such as water, climate adaptation requires more reliance on markets, not less. Climatopolis author Matthew Kahn also blogged here about how successful climate adaptation will be driven by market forces, not government planners.
I share Hendricks’ and Farber’s frustration that more conservatives don’t take climate change or other environmental concerns seriously. But I also believe some of this is the environmentalist movement’s own doing. If everything calls for the same big government solution, why does it matter what the problem is?
Concern about the environment has always been hijacked by socialists, going all the way back to the early “progressive” movement, and the trend just got worse with the end of the Cold War, and socialism discredited, after which they changed brands and became watermelons. Policy has to be based on a rational calculation of the costs and benefits
What’s So Great About America?
Some thoughts about American exceptionalism, and the apparent allergy to the notion from the Left:
Republicans must take care that “exceptionalism” doesn’t collapse through thoughtless repetition into a mere slogan, another bit of political cant like “Take Our Country Back” or “Move America Forward,” losing all meaning even as it wows the focus groups. For the line of argument that Rubio pursues, his way of framing the choice that voters face in the Obama era, is uncommonly—you might say, exceptionally—useful, for three reasons.
First, the idea of American exceptionalism has the benefit of being true. The United States is fundamentally and demonstrably different from other countries. It is bound together by a founding proposition, and properly applied the proposition has brought freedom and prosperity to more people, and more kinds of people, than any other. Second, a large majority of Americans believe American exceptionalism to be true. And third, it drives Democrats right around the bend.
It’s not clear why. Maybe liberal polemicists don’t quite understand what the phrase means, and so they pummel it into a caricature. In Politico last week, under the oddly truncated headline “U.S. Is Not Greatest Country Ever,” the columnist Michael Kinsley wrote that exceptionalism is “the theory that Americans are better than everybody else.” The next day, on a well-trafficked liberal website, another columnist said much the same thing—they tend to run in packs, these guys. Other countries, this columnist wrote, are “investing in infrastructure,” unlike the United States, which apparently just spent $780 billion in stimulus on chopped liver. At the same time, he went on, “the Republicans have taken refuge in an antigovernment ideology premised on the lunatic notion that America is the only truly free and successful country in the world.”
Assuming they were offered in good faith, these characterizations are hopelessly confused, conflating exceptionalism with jingoism or xenophobia or mere self-aggrandizement. (He got the antigovernment part right, though.) But even if they do understand what the term means, we can’t be sure that professional Democrats really believe it. Liberalism in its present degenerate form is reactionary—a gesture of irritation at the backward quality of ordinary American life, at its culture, its food and dress and amusements and politics, and especially at the mindless and sentimental patriotism that unsophisticated Americans are so quick to embrace.
Read all.
It strikes me that a lot of the hysteria about the change in direction of space policy this year arose from a knee-jerk assumption that it was just one more way in which the president was trying to make America unexceptional. But in fact, the Apollo program and paradigm is an exception to exceptionalism in its big-government, central-planning approach, and ironically, the new plans are much more in keeping with traditional American values. I think I’m going to do an essay on this to at least convince those Republicans who sincerely oppose it on what they mistakenly imagine are conservative ideological grounds, and aren’t driven by the pork considerations.
Radical-In-Chief
An interview with Stanley Kurtz, on Barack Obama’s socialism:
Obama was a socialist even before he reached Columbia. But it was in April of 1983, in his senior year, that Obama walked into an off-campus Socialist Scholars Conference. That conference changed the future president’s life and gave him a program he’s been following for his entire political career, right up to this day.
It was in the early eighties that American socialists turned in force to community organizing as a long-term strategy for transforming American society. With Reagan as president, conventional socialist nationalization of America’s businesses was impossible. So instead the focus turned to grassroots strategies for creating socialism “from below.” Community organizations like ACORN would take hold of the capitalist system from the ground up, forcing banks to make risky subprime loans, for example. The idea was to create de facto public control of businesses through community organizations, rather than through formal government ownership.
The symbol of all this was Chicago’s Mayor Harold Washington, who worked closely with Chicago’s small but influential collection of socialists, many of whom brought the community organizations they controlled onto the Washington bandwagon. The buzz at that 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference was that minority-led political coalitions would work in tandem with community organizations to swing the Democratic Party left. This would incrementally move America toward socialism. Harold Washington became Obama’s political idol, and Obama was swept up in plans to create a partnership between quietly-socialist community organizers and left-leaning minority politicians to reshape the American system.
Amazingly, the Socialist Scholars Conferences Obama attended in New York in the mid-eighties even put him on the path that led to Reverend Wright. The Democratic Socialists of America, which sponsored those conferences, had just formed an alliance with the black liberation theologians who were Reverend Wright’s mentors. Obama would have learned all about the ties between black liberation theology and socialism at those conferences.
It’s a shame that the media was too busy sending reporters to go through the dumpsters in Wasilla, Alaska, to do this kind of research. But there are only so many resources, and priorities have to be made.