Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Who Smeared Sarah Palin?

27 Comments

Rusty Shackleford has been doing a lot of research. If this can be traced to the Obama campaign, the FEC should be interested. But they probably won’t be. And neither will the MSM.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Dan Riehl has more. And like roaches fleeing when the lights come on, the perps have pulled down the sites. Not in time, though–they’ve been cached.

You know, this could be a really big story for an enterprising investigative reporter at someplace like the New York Times. Unfortunately, when it comes to Barack Obama, such creatures don’t seem to exist.

[Update mid morning]

Ace has more:

Tomorrow they will claim this was all inadvertent, etc. They’ll say they did produce the ad, and sent it to Winner and Associates to, um, focus-group or something, then decided not to run it, but that dirty Winner family and its employees attempted to get it to go viral without their authorization.

Whatever.

If this is all so innocent, why are the videos being yanked even as we speak?

Just about one hour after the post went up, “cnwinner,” “eswinner” and the rest of the winner gang are yanking their videos.

Almost as if… I don’t know, some kind of major campaign organization was patrolling the internet 24/7.

Can we believe “cnwinner,” “eswinner,” and etc. just all suddenly were monitoring the internet and decided to take their videos down simultaneously?

No, we cannot.

Can we believe Winner & Associates scours the internet 24 hours a day for derogatory stories about them?

No, we cannot.

But — can we believe the Obama campaign has people watching the internet 24/7 and just sent out the call to Winner & Associates to bury the evidence?

Yes we can, friends.

Yes we can, even if the Gray Lady can’t.

Political Commentary

Thoughts On Wisdom

2 Comments

And whether Sarah Palin or Barack Obama have it, from Victor Davis Hanson:

For most of you readers, all this is trite and self-evident. But apparently not for hundreds in politics, the media, the universities, Hollywood, and the foundations who seem to think that a fumbling nervous Obama in interviews, who grasps for a word and utters vacuous platitudes is “really” contemplative, like his Harvard Law professors; but when a Sarah Palin seems nervous under scrutiny from a pseudo-professorial, glasses-on-the-lower-nose Charlie Gibson, she is clearly an empty head with an Idaho BA.

A Ronald Reagan knew more about human nature, and thus what drives the Soviet Union than did all the Ivy-League Soviet specialists that surrounded Jimmy Carter-much less the Sally Quins and Maureen Dowds of that age. We in America, unlike the Europeans, know this intuitively, grasp that a Harry Truman figured out the Russian communists far better than did the Harvard-educated aristocrat FDR.

And the inevitable comparisons between the top of the Democrat ticket and bottom of the Republican one continue, which is part of the genius in picking her on McCain’s part.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Four Questions

8 Comments

Newt Gingrich says not so fast to Paulson’s bailout plan. I particularly agree with this:

Four reform steps will have capital flowing with no government bureaucracy and no taxpayer burden.

First, suspend the mark-to-market rule which is insanely driving companies to unnecessary bankruptcy. If short selling can be suspended on 799 stocks (an arbitrary number and a warning of the rule by bureaucrats which is coming under the Paulson plan), the mark-to-market rule can be suspended for six months and then replaced with a more accurate three year rolling average mark-to-market.

Second, repeal Sarbanes-Oxley. It failed with Freddy Mac. It failed with Fannie Mae. It failed with Bear Stearns. It failed with Lehman Brothers. It failed with AIG. It is crippling our entrepreneurial economy. I spent three days this week in Silicon Valley. Everyone agreed Sarbanes-Oxley was crippling the economy. One firm told me they would bring more than 20 companies public in the next year if the law was repealed. Its Sarbanes-Oxley’s $3 million per startup annual accounting fee that is keeping these companies private.

Third, match our competitors in China and Singapore by going to a zero capital gains tax. Private capital will flood into Wall Street with zero capital gains and it will come at no cost to the taxpayer. Even if you believe in a static analytical model in which lower capital gains taxes mean lower revenues for the Treasury, a zero capital gains tax costs much less than the Paulson plan. And if you believe in a historic model (as I do), a zero capital gains tax would lead to a dramatic increase in federal revenue through a larger, more competitive and more prosperous economy.

Fourth, immediately pass an “all of the above” energy plan designed to bring home $500 billion of the $700 billion a year we are sending overseas. With that much energy income the American economy would boom and government revenues would grow.

Also, SOX was the disastrous result of the last time Congress decided that it had to “do something.”

Political Commentary

You Say You Want A Revolution?

2 Comments

Well, you know…

I love the pith of Gerard van der Leun’s comment at Connecticut Yankee:

Given the Huffpos lack of training, weapons, ammunition, and general knowledge of when to duck, I say bring it on.

It will be a short revolution but a merry one for those left standing.

Yes, the idiot leftists always forget that (at least for now) we still have most of the guns. Which is why they hate the Second Amendment so much.

Well, there is at least one exception. But if Joe Biden shoots off his Beretta with the same uncontrolled abandon with which he shoots off his mouth, we don’t have much to worry about.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

A Blast From The Past

4 Comments

Ben Bova has a piece in the Naples News that could have been written thirty years ago. In fact, it’s exactly like stuff that he (and I) wrote thirty years ago. The only difference is that I have experienced the past thirty years, whereas he seems to be stuck in a seventies time warp, and I’ve gotten a lot more sober about the prospects for a lot of the orbital activities that were always just around the corner, and probably always will be:

An orbital habitat needn’t be a retirement center, though. Space offers some interesting advantages for manufacturing metal alloys, pharmaceuticals, electronics components and other products. For example, in zero-gravity it’s much easier to mix liquids.

Think of mixing a salad dressing. On Earth, no matter how hard you stir, the heavier elements sink to the bottom of the bowl. In zero G there are no heavier elements: they’re all weightless. And you don’t even need a bowl! Liquids form spherical shapes, whether they’re droplets of water or industrial-sized balls of molten metals.

Metallurgists have predicted that it should be possible in orbit to produce steel alloys that are much stronger, yet much lighter, than any alloys produced on Earth. This is because the molten elements can mix much more thoroughly, and gaseous impurities in the mix can percolate out and into space.

Imagine automobiles built of orbital steel. They’d be much stronger than ordinary cars, yet lighter and more fuel-efficient. There’s a market to aim for.

Moreover, in space you get energy practically for free. Sunlight can be focused with mirrors to produce furnace-hot temperatures. Or electricity, from solarvoltaic cells. Without spending a penny for fuel.

The clean, “containerless” environment of orbital space could allow production of ultrapure pharmaceuticals and electronics components, among other things.

Orbital facilities, then, would probably consist of zero-G sections where manufacturing work is done, and low-G areas where people live.

There would also be a good deal of scientific research done in orbital facilities. For one thing, an orbiting habitat would be an ideal place to conduct long-term studies of how the human body reacts to prolonged living in low gravity. Industrial researchers will seek new ways to utilize the low gravity, clean environment and free energy to produce new products, preferably products that cannot be manufactured on Earth, with its heavy gravity, germ-laden environment and high energy costs.

Cars made of “orbital steel”?

Please.

But I guess there’s always a fresh market for this kind of overhyped boosterism. I think that it actively hurts the cause of space activism, because people in the know know how unrealistic a lot of it is, and it just hurts the credibility of proponents like Ben Bova.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

The New Hollywood Blacklist

4 Comments

Here’s an interesting extended look at the secret lives of conservatives in tinsel town:

Zucker gave Farley the script and, concerned that Farley’s agent would advise him against accepting the role because of the film’s politics, told the actor not to show it to anyone. Farley, best known for his recurring role in a series of Hertz commercials, read the script and called back the next day to accept.

When he met Zucker and Sokoloff on the set as shooting on the film began, he told them that he, too, had long considered himself a conservative. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Sokoloff. “We were afraid that he would not want to be involved in something that was so directly taking on the left and that he would not want to play the Michael Moore character.”

Farley told me this story during a break in filming at the Daniel Webster Elementary School in Pasadena, last April, with Steve McEveety, the film’s producer, listening in.

“I thought that the minute we started talking about politics that would be the end,” Farley recalls. “There was this dance that we did–a dance familiar to conservative actors in Hollywood. Lots of actors have done it.”

“All three of you,” said McEveety.

“Yeah, all three of us.”

…On one of the days I was on set, McEveety had invited Vivendi Entertainment president Tom O’Malley to meet Zucker. Vivendi had just agreed to distribute the film and had promised wide release–news that had the cast and crew of An American Carol in particularly good spirits.

O’Malley and Zucker chatted about the fact that O’Malley is the nephew of Candid Camera’s Tom O’Malley and that they are both from the Midwest, among other things. Zucker thanked him for picking up the movie, which will be one of the first for Vivendi’s new distribution arm. O’Malley told Zucker that he was particularly interested in this film in part because he, too, leans right.

Such revelations are common occurrences at the periodic meetings of the secret society of Hollywood conservatives known as the “Friends of Abe.” The group, with no official membership list and no formal mission, has been meeting under the leadership of Gary Sinise (CSI New York, Forrest Gump) for four years. Zucker had spent a year working on a film with Christopher McDonald without learning anything about his politics. Shortly after the film wrapped, he ran into McDonald, best known as Shooter McGavin from Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore, at one of these informal meetings.

“It’s almost like people who are gay, show up at the baths and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were gay!’ ” Zucker says…

Let’s hope that they can come out of the closet some day.