Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, General, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Other Michigan

23 Comments

Amid all the talk of bankruptcy of the auto companies, it’s easy to forget that there is another, very desirable part of the Great Lake State. The family of a friend of mine in high school had a cabin on the Au Sable River, and I remember how peaceful it was myself, in both summer and winter.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of bankrupt auto companies, Kaus has some good questions:

How many of the UAW’s members are skilled workers? I thought one of the big virtues [of] assembly line work is that it can be done by unskilled workers. Even with all the fancy computer-assisted quality control systems, does most auto assembly work really require skills that can’t be learned fairly quickly?

The unnamed “task force official” implies that Chrysler’s work force (and GM’s) is so precious that it must be protected from sharing in the sacrifice of bankruptcy. Is it? If UAW workers are so distinctly productive then why do virtually all auto manufacturers starting production in the U.S. try to get as far away from the union as possible? Is there any doubt that if all Chrysler’s workers quit tomorrow they could fairly quickly be replaced by workers–from local communities–who were a) cheaper and b) just as good or better?…

Gee, you’d almost think that they were just favoring a Democrat political constituency that gives them lots of campaign donations. Here’s another one:

Why should the government tax unskilled workers making $18 an hour, who haven’t bankrupted their employers, in order to protect unskilled workers making $28 an hour, and who have bankrupted their employers, from having to take a pay cut?

Why indeed? Someone should ask that question of Bob Gibbs. It would be amusing to watch the logical somersaults, to the limited degree that he’s capable of logic at all.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

History Revealed

5 Comments

The “fascist cop” who martyred a left-wing German student in the sixties, and created the German left-wing terrorist movement, including Baader-Meinhoff, and helped turn the German nation to the left, has turned out to be a Stasi agent:

Ohnesorg galvanized a generation of left-wing students and activists who rose up in the iconic year of 1968. What was a fringe soon turned to terrorism.

To them his killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was the “fascist cop” at the service of a capitalist, pro-American “latent fascist state.” “The post-fascist system has become a pre-fascist one,” the German Socialist Student Union declared in their indictment hours after the killing. The ensuing movement drew its legitimacy and fervor from the Ohnesorg killing. Further enraging righteous passions, Mr. Kurras was acquitted by a court and returned to the police force.

Now all that’s being turned on its head. Last week, a pair of German historians unearthed the truth about Mr. Kurras. Since 1955, he had worked for the Stasi, East Germany’s dreaded secret police. According to voluminous Stasi archives, his code name was Otto Bohl. The files don’t say whether the Stasi ordered him to do what he did in 1967. But that only fuels speculation about a Stasi hand behind one of postwar Germany’s transformative events.

Mr. Kurras, who is 81 and lives in Berlin, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that he belonged to the East German Communist Party. “Should I be ashamed of that or something?” He denied he was paid to spy for the Stasi, but asked, “What if I did work for them? What does it matter? It doesn’t change anything.” Mr. Kurras may be the monster of the leftist imagination — albeit now it turns out he is one of their own.

Hey, fascist, communist, it’s all good.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

How The “Stimulus” Is Working

27 Comments

It isn’t:

As we know, most of the stimulus spending does not take place until next year and beyond, so the short-run gains are puny. On the other hand, the big increase in the projected deficit creates the expectation of higher interest rates, which raises interest rates now. These higher interest rates serve to weaken the economy.

According to this standard analysis, the stimulus is going to hurt GDP now, when we could use the most help. Much of the spending will kick in a year or more from now, with multiplier effects following afterward, when the economy will need little, if any, stimulus.

This is the flaw with using spending rather than tax cuts as a stimulus. The lags are longer when you use spending.

Of course, if the real goal is to promote government at the expense of civil society and to create a one-party state in which business success is based on political favoritism, then the stimulus is working exactly as intended.

Yup. But it’s a misnomer to call it “stimulus.”

[Update mid afternoon]

The “reality-based community” has a collision with reality:

Cohn reports how former CBO director and current OMB chief Peter Orszag pressured careerists to assume sizable savings due to proposed reforms. The problem is the bean counters did not believe the alleged savings were justified according to the available evidence…it is interesting that the reality-based Obama crowd, which promised to roll back the “Republican War on Science” is now arguing against what Cohn calls “a super-strict reading of the evidence.”

Well, there’s science, and then there’s, you know, “scientific socialism.” Or maybe they’re just waging a war on math.

[Update late afternoon]

Wishful thinking, not a plan:

Congress is working on a health-care bill to expand coverage mainly by subsidizing insurance for tens of millions of households. This new entitlement is likely to cost $150 billion per year initially and grow, on a per capita basis, at a rate that is about 2 percentage points above GDP growth each year going forward. In other words, the cost of this new program will rise just as rapidly as Medicare and Medicaid spending has for decades now.

Orszag and others are saying, don’t worry, health-information technology, comparative-effectiveness research, more attention to prevention and wellness, and some very modest provider payment reforms in Medicare will make all of this governmental spending — on Medicare, Medicaid, and the new subsidy program — grow much more slowly in the future than it has in the past.

But this is an assertion — not a fact. Where’s the evidence to back it up?

“Wishful thinking” is a pretty good summary of Democrat policies in general, both domestic and foreign.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Liberals,” Then And Now

8 Comments

When did they become Archie Bunker?

Like Sotomayor, Archie is not propounding a theory of racial or ethnic supremacy but describing the world in terms of culturally contingent stereotypes. He is engaging in identity politics.
Podcast

James Taranto on Sotomayor and Archie Bunker.

What’s fascinating about this is that the Meathead (played by Rob Reiner) is a peer of La Jueza Empática: She was born in 1954; Reiner, in 1947. But the liberalism of “All in the Family” is not the liberalism of the baby boomers. It is that of an earlier generation–Archie Bunker’s generation. Series creator Norman Lear and Carroll O’Connor, who played Archie, were born in 1922 and 1924, respectively.

Today, you can easily imagine a conservative uttering the Meathead’s earnest query: “Why do you always have to label people by nationality?” But somewhere along the line, liberalism lost its ideals and adopted Archie Bunker’s theory of representative government.

Actually, I think they’ve just reverted to type from the early twentieth century, when “progressives” were all in favor of eugenics. In both cases, Lear and a “conservative” would be acting as the true liberals. The classical ones, before the word was hijacked by the left.

[Update in the early afternoon]

If I were a Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I’d have the All In The Family clip played in lieu of some of my time. It’s a lot more effective than most of Senatorial bloviating.

[Update a while later]

Would Sotomayor qualify as a juror?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Debunking Durbin

5 Comments

I didn’t watch, but reportedly Newt dismantled Dick Durbin on Meet the Press yesterday on the subject of the disingenuity (if not outright mendacity) of the Obama administration claims to be breaking from the Bush administration on military commissions and Guantanamo. Andy McCarthy makes him into rubble today.

2. Durbin’s “right of counsel” claim is a joke — and one you’d think Democrats would be too embarrassed to keep repeating given the number of Obama administration lawyers who, along with their former firms, spent the last eight years volunteering their services to America’s enemies. Under the Bush commission system, the terrorists already had U.S. taxpayer-funded military lawyers and were, in addition, permitted to retain private counsel — and there was no shortage of American private lawyers (such as several at Attorney General Eric Holder’s firm) who have taken up these cases. If there’s anything these terrorists have gotten plenty of, it’s top-flight legal representation.

3. The claim that “in seven years in Guantanamo there were exactly three [detainees] who were convicted by military commissions” is another screamer. The main reason for delay in the commissions process has been the aforementioned legion of volunteer American defense attorneys who ground the system to a halt by various court challenges. At the end of this legal barrage, the only real change in the commissions was a formal one — they are now authorized by Congress rather than by presidential directive (as Bush, like FDR, had used). As a practical matter (and Obama is all about being practical, right?), they operate exactly the same way. Moreover, the current delay — now in its fifth month, with several more months to go — is because President Obama himself stopped the pending commissions against 21 terrorists (when trial was imminent in several of them) so he could first “study” them and, now, propose these illusory “changes.

There’s a lot more. These people must think that we’re as stupid as they are.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

More Bolden Commentary

5 Comments

There’s a story at the LA Times. Not much new, but I thought that this was worth a comment:

Logsdon said he believed the skepticism about Obama’s support for manned flight was “misguided” from the first. The comment about taking money from NASA was made by a junior campaign aide, he said.

I’m disappointed in Professor Logsdon. His own comment is more than “misguided.” It’s disingenuous, and in fact false, though I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and just assume that he’s unfamiliar with what actually happened, and was told this by someone else (though he should be following it closely, being a premier expert on space policy and all…).

It wasn’t merely a “comment” from a “junior campaign aide.” He says this as though it was just an aside on background. No. It was the official position in a white paper at the campaign web site. Jeff Foust described the history of the Obama space-policy shifts, and their ongoing nebulosity, back in August.

If Senator Obama didn’t pay any attention to it at the time (we know how much trouble he has getting good help) and he’s since reversed it (and he seems to have) that’s great, but I see no point in whitewashing the history of what happened. It was an area of legitimate concern for space (or at least NASA) enthusiasts at the time, and it does provide legitimate cause to question how deep his enthusiasm is now. His supporters might claim that he had a road-to-Damascus moment, and now talks about how excited he was by Apollo growing up in Hawaii, but he was talking about that prior to the “funding education by delaying Constellation” time period as well.

I remain an agnostic on the degree of support of this president for either space, or NASA. Only the future will tell.