I’d like to see a poll of how many people who voted for Obama wouldn’t have if they’d known he was lying about Benghazi. As he repeatedly lied about ObamaCare.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
The New Benghazi Emails
Obama won’t be impeached and removed (at least not before the election), for the reasons Glenn writes. But in a sane world, he would be. Of course, in a sane world, he’d have never been president.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the story. That’s being ignored because of an octogenarian racist team owner in the NBA.
“Get A Trampoline”
Rogozin is threatening to cut off US access to the ISS, on the same day that the House space subcommittee marks up a bill declaring that “safety is the highest priority.”
Idiots.
The War On Men
The White House joins it.
I wouldn’t send my son to public schools, and I’d think twice about paying for a college education, at this point.
[Update a couple minutes later]
And then there’s all the politically correct absurdity.
Salt
Why it may not be bad for you.
I have had some success in blood pressure reduction since not just cutting back, but switching to sea salt.
The Climate Skeptics
“How I know they will win.”
The Media And Obama
If they’re finally turning on him, it’s six years too late:
A king is no king without a court, and Obama has not lacked for lackeys. The system of checks and balances is written into the Constitution, but it is the everyday behavior of Americans of good will that makes the system work.
That system broke down under Obama, and the blame starts with the media. By giving the president the benefit of the doubt at every turn, by making excuses to explain away fiascos, by ignoring corruption, by buying the White House line that his critics were motivated by pure politics or racism, the Times and other organizations played the role of bartender to a man on a bender.
Even worse, they joined the party, forgetting the lessons of history as well as their own responsibilities to put a check on power. A purpose of a free press is to hold government accountable, but there is no fallback when the watchdog voluntarily chooses to be a lapdog.
Apparently, as we saw in the nineties, the only way to get the press to do its job is to put a Republican in the White House.
The Mann Suit And Free Expression
I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but Charles Cooke has a long essay in the latest issue of National Review:
The law of defamation is useful for awarding civil damages against those who peddle outright lies — that is, against those who do real damage to a person’s reputation by abusing plain facts that can be easily verified and adjudicated in court. In such cases as it is claimed that Jones beats his wife or Smith is a drug addict, the relevant facts fall easily within the competence of a civil tribunal, and litigation does not threaten to impose a chill on the public discourse. But when a plaintiff files a libel suit involving a matter of political or scientific controversy, the calculus is quite different indeed. When the merits of a libel claim implicate contested questions of science and statistical methodology, judges and juries are so ill suited to pronounce a verdict that allowing the public authority to have the final say is inconsistent with the very concept of free inquiry. The whole point of the scientific enterprise is to resolve controversies through open debate, not through the final decree of government officials.
Even where no verdict of guilt is ultimately pronounced, allowing litigation over criticisms of the validity of scientific research has a deleterious effect on the public discourse. It prompts critics to trim their sails in order to avoid the cost and headache of a lawsuit, thus establishing a climate of fear and quiet rather than of boisterous agitation and open discussion. Hanging the prospect of punishment above the heads of participants in scientific disputes serves not to yield greater accuracy but to invite censorship, the toning down of rhetoric, and the avoidance of hyperbole — of anything, indeed, that could invite a libel complaint. Which is to say that it shuts up the dissenters.
Which is, of course, the entire point.
Chipotle’s Calorie Labels
No, Vox, they’re not a lie.
But the very notion of counting calories is junk nutrition (and weight loss) science. @Instapundit
Is The World Running Out Of Resources?
Matt Ridley says “no”:
I have lived among both tribes. I studied various forms of ecology in an academic setting for seven years and then worked at the Economist magazine for eight years. When I was an ecologist (in the academic sense of the word, not the political one, though I also had antinuclear stickers on my car), I very much espoused the carrying-capacity viewpoint—that there were limits to growth. I nowadays lean to the view that there are no limits because we can invent new ways of doing more with less.
This disagreement goes to the heart of many current political issues and explains much about why people disagree about environmental policy. In the climate debate, for example, pessimists see a limit to the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with extra carbon dioxide without rapid warming. So a continuing increase in emissions if economic growth continues will eventually accelerate warming to dangerous rates. But optimists see economic growth leading to technological change that would result in the use of lower-carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long before it does much harm.
I made a similar point about nine years ago:
The only hope for the planet is to get more of it to operate on the principles of the market, and individual choice. There are two competing approaches. The first is responding hysterically to problems that won’t occur for many decades (Kyoto being a prime example) which will reduce current wealth to the point that if and when those problems actually occur, we won’t have the financial wherewithal to be able to deal with them. The second is to use those resources wisely, per their most productive uses (i.e., responding to market pricing) to create the wealth necessary to create new resources.
There are many things wrong with our current approach to such things (e.g., the fishery problem), but the nostrums proposed by most “environmentalists” (who tend to be socialists and command economists in green clothing, even if many don’t recognize that) would make things worse, not better. Headlines like that in the Guardian article, implying that resources are a static quantity, of which we’ve already used two thirds, are just the kinds of misinformation that lead to flawed policy decisions, and reduction of wealth, and ultimately reductions of “resources.”
The problem is that the environmental movement has been hijacked by socialists and others completely ignorant of technology and economics.