Category Archives: Media Criticism

That Didn’t Take Long

It hasn’t been twelve hours since the latest massacre, and people in the media are already using it to call for gun control that would be very unlikely to have prevented it. And of course, it goes without saying that it’s Rush Limbaugh’s and the Tea Party’s fault. I predict that Sarah Palin will be fingered by the end of the day.

Idiot demagogues and rhetorical ambulance chasers.

I will say that it might be useful not to allow costumes in movie theaters, though. Something like this was inevitable.

[Update a while later]

ABC News: “Oops, sorry about that.”

Note that their first instinct is always to blame “right wingers” and (more recently) the Tea Party, whereas they always go to ridiculous lengths to downplay any possible connection to jihad. And if the guy turns out to have connections to the Occumorons, we’ll never hear about it. Most likely, though, it will just turn out to be a nut, like Jarred Loughner.

Credentialed, Not Educated

Employers have finally caught wise to the academic scam:

Employers, because they realize that many college graduates aren’t really educated, now routinely quiz job seekers on what they majored in and what courses they took, a practice virtually unknown a generation ago. Good luck if you majored in gender studies, communications, art history, pop culture, or (really) the history of dancing in Montana in the 1850s.

They themselves got scammed by con artists like Barack Obama, who told them that they had to get a degree, even if they have to go into unaffordable debt undischargable in a bankruptcy, while not bothering to tell them that what they get a degree in matters out in the real world.

[Update a while later]

“This is a terrible social policy. It is deeply destructive.”

Unfortunately, that’s been true of many, if not most of our social policies over the past eighty years, and particularly over the past twenty. And we’re starting to reap the whirlwind.

“You Didn’t Build That”

Obama’s latest plagiarism from Atlas Shrugged is providing a lot of graphical fodder. And he did earn that. More devastating, I think, was Romney’s response.

[Update a while later]

The ultimate takedown of Obama’s speech:

When Obama implied at the Roanoke, Virginia rally that some businessmen refuse to pay for public works from which they benefit, he presented a thesis which, like a three-legged stool, relies on three assumptions that must all be true for the argument to remain standing:

1. That the public programs he mentioned in his speech constitute a significant portion of the federal budget;
2. That business owners don’t already pay far more than their fair share of these expenses; and
3. That these specific public benefits are a federal issue, rather than a local issue.

If any of these legs fails, then the whole argument collapses.

And all of them fail. As he notes, it’s significant because it really was revealing, and an Atlas Shrugged moment.

[Update late morning]

It’s a miracle!

Killing California

with green energy bias:

Destroying the economic hopes of low income people in order to stoke the self esteem of entitled Boomers is not Via Meadia’s idea of progressive politics, but that just goes to show how backwards we are by the exalted moral standards of the California elites.

The destruction of California isn’t a victimless crime. Millions of low income California residents are trapped in decaying cities where, thanks in large part to narcissistic green unicorn chasers, the manufacturing base has withered away. And anything that blights California, blights us all. America and the world need California back on line; the Golden State has too much to offer for anyone to remain indifferent to its fate.

Unfortunately, for now, the lunatics continue to run the asylum in Sacramento.