Some meditations on mugshots. Of course, without them, one of the most popular features of Iowahawk’s web site would disappear.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
No More Ken Burns For GM
Apparently, GM has been underwriting Ken Burns’ documentaries for years. It is no longer doing so.
I supposed the gut response is a big “Duhhhh…” The company is going broke, and can’t afford it, right?
Well, maybe. This seems to me akin to the stupid, stupid demagoguery about corporate jets (from people who ride them themselves at taxpayer expense).
Look, is the company in business, or is it out of business? If it’s in business, it has a CEO with great responsibilities, and only so many hours in a day, and it doesn’t make sense for him to waste time with TSA and sitting in Dallas for layovers (or stupider still, driving from Detroit), despite how bad it appears when he shows up in Washington with his hand out.
And if it’s in business, it is presumably (at least theoretically, even if it looks more like a finance company, pension and health-care provider that just does it on the side) in the business of manufacturing and selling cars. In order to sell cars, one has to market them. One of the traditional ways one does this is by sponsorships, to provide brand recognition.
Now one can argue that perhaps this is an ineffective form of marketing, particularly for a company that has been around as long as General Motors, but one could have argued that during boom times as well. Unless it was purely viewed as philanthropic (in which case they certainly should cut back, since they have no available funds for pure do-goodery), it was presumably previously justified as part of their marketing budget. If it was justified then, why wouldn’t it be now, when marketing is more critical than ever? The problem with marketing, as the old saw on Madison Avenue goes, is that only half of it is effective, but no one knows which half.
My question is, does this mean that, after all these years, some analyst did an analysis and said, “Hey guys, it turns out that the Ken Burns stuff doesn’t sell cars! Sorry I didn’t let you know twenty years ago — I could have saved the company a lot of money.” Or is it just one more sign that the company is bankrupt, but won’t admit it?
Feel The Love
Why can’t I get fun emails like this one? I particularly liked the berating of the evil “CAPITOLISM.” I’m always a little surprised when I hear conservative bloggers talk about the vitriol in their email, because I just don’t see it.
I suppose that it’s partly, or largely because I have a comments section where unhappy customers can vent (and demand their money back). But even there, I rarely get this kind of stuff, other than from Elifritz.
It’s Not Just Flint
Here’s a blog that tracks businesses closing in Saginaw, thirty miles up the road.
Now here you have functional commercial real estate, at bargain prices, close to scenery and abundant recreation just to the north, and a work force looking for work. Why aren’t businesses flocking there from other parts of the country?
Might the problem be fifty miles to the southwest, in Lansing? The state is spending a lot of Michigan taxpayers’ money trying to attract them — I’ve seen the television ads. What the ads don’t say is that in order to pay for the ads, it’s got high taxes, particularly on businesses, and that it’s not a right-to-work state. But Jennifer and the legislature will no doubt continue to point fingers everywhere else.
“They’re All Bill Ayers Now”
Thoughts on the decrepit state of the teaching “profession.” Like the commentator, I find the notion of a “graphic novel” of the teachings of the terrorist sadly ironic. As one commenter notes, in a sane world, holding a teaching certificate would bar you from the classroom. And there would be no federal support for colleges of “education.”
Watchmen Watched
I have pretty close to zero interest in and, prior to the current movie hype, zero knowledge of The Watchmen. But for those less apathetic than me, WIll Collier has a review. He’s not impressed.
[Early afternoon update]
Heh.
Deconstructing Rush
Jeff Goldstein, on how he learned to stop worrying and love the f-bomb:
if, as I’ve argued, political realism as a strategy is doomed — not because we can’t be more careful with our words, but rather because it is not always rhetorically effective to do so, nor does such care prevent us from being misrepresented, no matter how precise we try to be — what is the alternative? As many pundits will patiently explain to you, ideological purity and idealism doesn’t win elections, so if not pragmatism, what?
To which I reply, pragmatism is fine. But why not use our idealism pragmatically — which is to say, why not make it our strategy to use idealism as our cudgel against the media and the left in such a way that their tactic of misrepresentation and outrage no longer pays dividends? Why not make it our strategy to destroy their tactics — and in so doing, reaffirm the very principles at the heart of classical liberalism?
The fact of the matter is, for all of Limbaugh’s provocation, his statement, having been carefully and purposely misrepresented by the media as a way to demonize him and drive a divide between conservatives and more moderates within the party, has had the rather happy effect of getting us talking and arguing about what we as a movement should do next. And it was precisely his choice of language that baited the press and the left (and, more frightening even, the White House) to engage him, and to force the ideas of conservatism center stage.
We have to continue to fight to take back the media, and the language, regardless of the demagogues, semioticians and word twisters.
[Tuesday morning update]
More lies about Limbaugh. This is as stupid as Harry Reid’s continuing moronic accusations that he disrespected the troops. Kaus offers some advice, which they’ll be too stupid to take:
The whole Begala-Carville coordinated campaign against Limbaugh seems misguided when Obama is supposed to be leading the nation out of crisis (see Warren Buffett’s comments, below). Quite apart from whether it’s a good idea to take one of your smarter opponents and build him up, the campaign seems petty, partisan and poll-driven — not designed to produce any kind of national pulling-together. If Begala weren’t around I’d suspect Chris Lehane of thinking it up.
I too am shocked, shocked, that when Warren Buffet is critical of The One, suddenly no one in the media is interested.
Logical Disconnect
Some of my commenters attempt to make the illogical argument that because the top marginal income tax rate was almost forty percent during the Clinton era that there is no harm in raising it back to that now. Jim Manzi dissects this foolishness. I doubt if they’ll understand it, though.
[Update a few minutes later]
Victor Davis Hanson — Oh What Debts We Will See:
Athens in the fourth century B.C. chose to mint “redheads”, silver coins with bronze cores that were quickly exposed once the patina around the coins’ imprinted busts wore off. Rome did the same thing, and by the fourth century AD simply flooded its provinces with money of little real value. Germany paid off its war debts to France in the 1920s, with deliberately inflated German marks. I lived in Greece during the oil-embargo hyperinflation of 1973, and remember buying individual eggs with three or four inked-in price figures crossed out, as the store-keeper kept upping the price each day. (And I remember farming in the early 1980s when full-strength Roundup herbicide seemed to go from $60 to $70 to $100 a gallon in a single year).
I don’t think any one knows what is quite going on. I recently gave a lecture, and a Wall Street grandee afterwards approached the dais, asking me for advice (me, who could not even turn a profit growing raisins, and was a lousy peddler of family fruit for years at Farmers’ Markets), saying in effect something like the following: “Mr. Hanson—Consider: Real estate bad—not going to put money there when I’m not sure where the bottom is. Stocks worse—had I got out at New Year’s, I’d have thousands more than I do now. Cash pathetic—the interest doesn’t even cover what’s lost to inflation. So what’s left—the dole?”
I had no advice, of course, other than some vague warning that we are in a war against capital, sort of similar to what Sallust and Cicero claim that Catiline and his band of dissolute and broke aristocrats were planning, with his calls for cancellation of debts and redistribution of property.
It seems less than vague to me.
[Evening update]
How to wage a war on business. Any resemblance to current administration policies are purely coincidental, of course.
“There’s Nothing Special About Britain”
I guess this is the kind of smarter diplomacy, and “reengaging with the world” that we were promised in the campaign. Of course, we were promised a lot of things in the campaign.
[Update Sunday night]
More smart diplomacy, with Russia.
[Monday morning update]
Gee, just what we want in an American Secretary of State:
Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering was effusive in his praise, saying that with the new administration, the United States and Europe once again “share the same values.”
“What you said mostly could have been said by a European,” he told Clinton after she fielded questions ranging from climate change to energy security and aid to Africa and one on gay rights from a participant wearing an “I love Hillary” t-shirt.
I suspect that, even more than is usually the case, she’s going to represent the world to America, rather than the other way around.
[Bumped]
[Monday afternoon update]
Gift-giving advice from Barack Obama:
With my busy schedule of entertaining foreign dignitaries and celebrities at the White House, I know how important a well chosen gift can be. Two weeks ago, for example, we received a visit from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister brought a few housewarming gag gifts including a pen set made from a boat, a framed paper thing from another boat, and some old books by Churchill (not Ward, but that English guy). Obviously we wanted to return the nice gesture so I sent my interns out on a scavenger hunt for an appropriate present. They couldn’t find anything in the West Wing, but luckily Costco was open and was running a 25-for-the-price-of-10 clearance sale in the DVD department. You should have seen Mr. Brown light up when he opened that sack of classic titles like “Wizard of Oz” and “Baby Geniuses 2.” I like to think those DVDs helped cement our Anglo-American “special relationship” even if, as he mentioned to me, they probably wouldn’t work in his European player. Thinking quickly, I told the PM I would send him an American DVD player as soon as I earned enough cash-back points on my Costco card. Crisis averted, but that episode taught me a valuable lesson: always keep a stock of gifts handy in case some foreign poobah or supreme religious figure or failing industry pops by for coffee. As a result, I make sure the Oval Office closet is filled with pre-wrapped Sham-Wows and Snuggle blankets and trillion dollar bailout packages for whatever emergency might arise.
Why not? It makes as much sense as taking market advice from someone who doesn’t know what a P/E ratio is.
[Update late afternoon]
Here’s a completely plausible thesis on why the Obama administration dissed the UK:
The alliance that Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt crafted to win World War Two was more than just good strategy. They forged it in order to assert and defend an ideal which had fallen on hard times in the dark days of 1941, that of individual human liberty.
Originally born in Britain, this common ideal holds that human beings have a God-given natural right to arrange their lives as they see fit without interference from any authority, whether pope or king or government bureaucrat. The belief has always been America’s most precious historical legacy, and the rock on which our friendship with Great Britain is built.
It was that ideal which the Founding Fathers inherited from Britain, expressed as the rights of freeborn Englishmen. Our founders fought and nearly lost a war of independence against the British crown, and devised their own Constitution, to preserve the same ideal.
… Perhaps the president simply believes some other nation should replace Britain as our closest friend. (For a while, the Clinton administration meant to put Germany ahead of the UK.) Or perhaps Obama has a different view of the special relationship – one held by the likes of his onetime mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
These critics don’t see a legacy of freedom going back to Magna Carta. They see a historical procession of self-serving white males. And Churchill is not the man who singlehandedly stood up against Hitler and who warned us all about the Soviet Union’s iron curtain, but a white supremacist.
In this view (which also sees an America steeped in racism, colonialism and greed, rather than a nation dedicated to the proposition of liberty under law), there is no need to preserve any precious British-born legacy.
Including that fuddy-duddy English common law, and particularly contract law. After all, dead white guys came up with it. And that Churchill guy was on the wrong side in Kenya.
I wonder if Barack and Michelle Obama know who it was who freed the slaves? And who it was who originally sold them into slavery? I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of actual historical knowledge from either of them.
Tax Rates, Not Taxes
Even Alec Baldwin gets it. So why doesn’t Barack Obama?
Well, as he revealed explicitly in the debate, to him, taxes are not about revenue. They are about “fairness” and “social justice.” Which is why his tax policies will be disastrous for the economy.