Despite self-serving doomsday prognostications by President Obama, and a skewed unemployment chart produced by Nancy Pelosi and promoted by Andrew Sullivan, Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, reminds us that "It's A Recession Not A 'Catastrophe'".

In the interim however, Brett Joshpe has a modest proposal for Big Hollywood:

Unlike the greedy Wall Street executives though, who have torpedoed our economy by allowing federal bureaucrats to bludgeon them into making bad loans, Hollywood would surely understand the merit of pay caps. After all, it would enable the entertainment world to fulfill its pledge "to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other." (Cut for laughter and gagging and take two!)

But seriously, for the people who are leading the environmental movement and spearheading efforts to turn the Academy Awards green, cut back on the number of SUV's in their entourage, and demonstrate frugality to Al Gore, this is such a great opportunity to demonstrate restraint and help out the new President. What better way to show solidarity with Democrats who want to impose a command and control economy and to confiscate wealth from the rich. Especially since everyone needs to make sacrifices right now. Not to worry though, Steven Spielberg and crew, it will feel patriotic.

As such, we should cap the compensation that movie studios and Silver Screen stars make, particularly given the wealth disparities between the actors and actresses and the grips, stagehands, and extras. While there will be times for profits, this is not that time, especially when people are losing jobs and the Golden State's $40 billion budget deficit is bigger than most countries' total economic GDP.

It so refreshing to see Hollywood stars embracing this new America. They are just in time to put their dollars where their mouths are and to start fulfilling their pledge.

What say you, Ashton and Demi?

What caused the meltdown of the banking system? Was it Texas-Hold'em Poker? According to those new puritans at New York magazine it was--gasp!--television! Worse, horror-of-horrors, it was cable television, and they want this sort of smut and financial pornography banished from the airways:

The real villains here, the truly bad seeds at the heart of this crisis, have gone unpunished thus far and are still in operation. They are Jeff Lewis and Ryan Brown of Bravo's Flipping Out, Armando and Veronica Montelongo of TLC's Flip This House, Kristen Kemp of TLC's The Property Ladder, Kendra Todd of HGTV's My House Is Worth WHAT?, and the TLC, Bravo, HGTV, and Fine Living networks in general. All of them encouraged people to take out massive loans in order to buy and renovate homes and sell them at a profit when, really, most people have terrible taste, and furthermore, are bad at laying tile. These shows are still on! WHY?

But then, there are all sorts of reasons for those on the left to avoid examining some of these root causes:



Back in late December, we noted that the Connecticut Post refused to print emails from readers if they delved too heavily into a particular hometown topic:

"All letters are welcome. But there are code words hidden in some that are signals to stop paying close attention -- "Chris Dodd" and "Barney Frank."

All of which points to a word that the New York Times simply can't bring itself to speak, Ed Morrissey writes:

The Times wants to sell Dodd as a victim of the "moneyed Washington subculture where powerful incumbents are invited to get something wholesale," but that's poppycock. The man who accepts a bribe is no more of a victim than the man who offers it. It takes both to create corruption, and it's hard to find a more bald example of it than this. Dodd oversaw Countrywide as part of his committee chairmanship and understood that when he accepted the two loans for below-market rates and no-points acceptance. Countrywide later went belly-up, costing the nation billions of dollars for its easy-terms lending practices, and Dodd has been among the voices blaming the collapse of the lending markets on poor oversight. Well, he ought to know that firsthand, oughtn't he?

There's more at stake in this refusal to acknowledge corruption, and we have seen it in Barack Obama's Cabinet appointments. He and Congress have excused wrongdoing for Tim Geithner that would likely have resulted in criminal prosecution for others because Geithner supposedly belongs to a rarified elite group of technocrats that the nation can't do without. That stands the rule of law on its head, and put Geithner, Dodd, and others like them beyond the same responsibilities as the rest of us plebes. Dodd, Geithner, and other DC insiders now get a pass from responsibility for their actions simply because of who they know.

Taking sweetheart deals from the industry Dodd oversaw is corruption, regardless of the circumstances. Refusing to pay taxes even after getting reimbursements from one's employer is tax evasion. When we start making up new names for old crimes based on the relative power of the person who committed them, we have ended the rule of law and created an aristocracy.

Exactly. As G.K. Chesterton noted a century ago, "It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem"--or where it began.

As South Carolina's Governor Mark Sanford noted on CNN today, "A lot of people who've made some very stupid decisions are being bailed out by the population at large":

"A problem that was created by building up of too much debt will not be solved with yet more debt," Gov. Mark Sanford said Sunday, making a reference to the federal deficit spending that will likely finance the federal stimulus package.

"We're moving precipitously close to what I would call a savior-based economy," Sanford also said Sunday on CNN's State of the Union.

The South Carolina Republican said such an economy is "what you see in Russia or Venezuela or Zimbabwe or places like that where it matters not how good your product is to the consumer but what your political connection is to those in power."

The "savior-based economy"? What could go wrong?

Update: Welcome Insta-readers. Feel free to look around the site, and if you like what see...Read The Whole Thing™, to coin a phrase.

Samizdata.net notes:

In a recent New York Times column, Paul Krugman wrote about what he called the bad faith of the opponents of President Obama's economic stimulus plan. Krugman is apparently labouring under the view that his side has a monopoly of virtue in the current debate and that the Obama plan can not possibly be attacked on the merits.

Apparently?

(HT: I/P)

Jonah Goldberg's latest essay begins, "The stimulus bill has failed:"

Barack Obama has failed. The Trojan Horse of Hope and Change crashed into the guardrail of reality, revealing an army of ideologues and activists inside.

Now, before I continue, let me say that Barack Obama will still be popular, he will still get things done, and he will declare victory after signing a stimulus bill.

But Obama's moment is gone, and politics is about nothing if not moments.

Read the whole thing; follow the links here.

Jennifer Rubin writes that when Tom Daschle backed out, "the conventional wisdom was that Geithner had gotten 'lucky' since he slipped through before the firestorm":

But that might not be right and, in fact, he may now be a never-ending source of angst for the Obama team. When we get to the inevitable Obama tax hike on the "rich" will Geithner be the one trying to sell the proposition to the voters and Congress? You can hear the Republican retort already. ("Yeah, not a problem since you don't pay all your taxes!") Even now, is he capable of performing PR for the administration on the news show circuit while the first question would be whether he too should step down?

Plus some thoughts on who in Obama's cabinet benefits from a hobbled Geithner.

No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women--but ladles of endless pork. Something to be avoided like a cyclone ranger, lest it cause The Vapors: "Lessons From A Stimulus That Failed."

That's the headline from the Financial Times, which notes:

The US economy is suffering its steepest downturn since at least the 1970s and could descend into a depression, Jeff Immelt, General Electric's chief executive, warned on Thursday.

Far from warning about a devastating economic slowdown, most of GE's other spokesmen are surprisingly copacetic with the idea.

"Have we had a more incompetent vetting process in the White House over such a short period of time? When we criticized Barack Obama's lack of executive experience, even we didn't think it was going to be this bad."

Update: "It's easier to list the Obama-nees who aren't tax cheats than those who are."

More: "Two thoughts: (1) Don't any of these people pay their taxes? And (2) Is this, like, some kind of karmic payback for all the Joe-the-plumber tax business?"

Sorry to recycle one of our more popular recent headlines so quickly, but it certainly seemed to fit Mary Katharine Ham's latest video:

Manolo for the Men sadly reports, "the economic downturn has led to a true casual-ty: 21, the famed Manhattan restaurant, is no longer requiring that male diners wear ties, as it had for the prior 79 years."

"It is the final victory of Los Angeles," Tim Zagat of the popular eponymously named restaurant wry noted.

There really are two Americas, Glenn Reynolds writes:

So in a way we have found a new kind of politics. We've gone from a "culture of corruption" in which people who figured in scandals (can you say "Duke Cunningham"?) faced actual consequences, to a culture of impunity, in which it's taken for granted that the rules for big shots are different.

Don't pay your taxes? If you run a dry cleaning shop in Cincinnati, the IRS will come down on you like a ton of bricks. But if you're a congressman or a former senator or a Treasury nominee, you can just sheepishly pay up, perhaps even , as in Daschle's case, without being assessed any penalties.

For that matter, an IRS field agent with these tax problems would have been cashiered, but Geithner, who will have the IRS under his supervision, gets the job anyway.

Ordinary Americans can be excused for thinking that there are two sets of rules: One for the bigshots, the connected, the Made Men of Washington D.C., and another for everyone else.

The Obama Administration may well ride out these particular scandals, and get its chosen nominees into office. Republicans may even let them, on the theory that an admitted tax-evader will probably find it harder to back tax increases on the rest of us.

And, besides, the Republicans in Congress who would be asking the questions are Made Men themselves. But the damage to the polity will remain.

Indeed. Read the whole thing^TM.

In his best-selling Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Like the editors of the old Soviet encyclopedias who would send out updates to instruct which pages should be torn out, American liberalism has repeatedly censored and rewritten its own history so that the "bad guys" were always conservatives and the good guys always liberals.

In The American Spectator W. James Antle III writes that you can see this phenomenon at work in Sam Tanenhaus' latest article:

I've been prodded to read and comment on this Sam Tanenhaus essay pronouncing conservatism dead. Tanenhaus is a smart guy who knows quite a bit about the conservative movement, much more than most liberal writers. But I'm not terribly impressed by his eulogy for the right. Uncharacteristically, Tanenhaus makes little effort to understand conservatives on their own terms. Instead we get embarrassingly tendentious liberal cliches like this:

Today, the situation is much bleaker. After George W. Bush's two terms, conservatives must reckon with the consequences of a presidency that failed, in large part, because of its fervent commitment to movement ideology: the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy; the blind faith in a deregulated, Wall Street-centric market; the harshly punitive "culture war" waged against liberal "elites."

This completely airbrushes out the "responsible" center-left's initial support for the Iraq war, the fact that the biggest "deregulation" relevant to banking was signed into law by Bill Clinton, the left's own role in the "harshly punitive 'culture war'" (which side imposed their will on the electorate via the courts?), and of course any distinctions between Bush's crony capitalism meets Sarbanes-Oxley meets bailouts and the laisezz faire wild west of Tanenhaus' fevered imagination.

Read the rest here; related thoughts from Orrin Judd.

What is it with the New York Times' ads lately? Last month, Galley Slaves linked to their incredibly lame Bobos In Paradise On Park Ave. themed Web video ads, noted (accurately, I think) "Whatever was spent on this 'Conversations' project might as well have been flushed down a drain. Just ridiculous", and asked, "Do Newspapers Deserve to Die?"

Today, Steve Green looks at the Times' latest online ad featuring a glowing photo of The One Who Pinch Has Been Waiting For and asks:

Is it just me, or has the NYT ad department just given the President a ringing endorsement? It's one thing when the editorial page makes an endorsement, but a banner ad? Really?

My favorite is the recent theme featuring the headline, "Subscribe To History," which has a remarkably ironic unintended subtext.

Speaking of boomer-era flashbacks, Glenn Reynolds dubs this "Chris Dodd's Modified Limited Hangout"; Mark Tapscott writes that "There are two kinds of journalists in the world":

those who have been been given the idiot's treatment by public officials on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for public documents, and those who will be.

Believe me, I know because I didn't get inducted into the Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame for nothing (no, really, I am not making that up. Go here if you think only liberals get such honors.).

Now Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen, Chris Dodd, D-CN, has pulled what has to be an all-time classic evasion stunt against journalists covering Congress and the economic crisis concerning his promise six months ago to make public all of the documents about his sweetheart loan deal with Countrywide Mortgage.

Dodd invited a select few Connecticut reporters to his office in Hartford Monday and gave them a few minutes to view - but not copy - a small selection of documents that he claims proves he did nothing wrong in accepting special treatment from Countrywide that saved him a reported $75,000 in refinancing a couple of loans worth a total of $800,000. The Wall Street Journal called it Dodd's "Peek-A-Boo Disclosure."

How will Beltway journalists respond? Tapscott predicts that they'll happily play along:

My guess is that they will do nothing because Dodd is a Democrat and he will be protected just as they have protected House Financial Services Committee Chairman Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), Clinton administration officials like former OMB Director Franklin Raines, and the many Democrat donors and operators like Mozilo who made millions through their associations with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They forced lenders to lend billions to unqualified buyers, shielded the process from public exposure and accountability and then cried "Wall Street greed" when their Ponzi scheme exploded and the economy tanked.

In other words...

Charles Platt was a senior writer for Wired, whom much like Michael Lewis, George Plimpton, George Orwell, and other journalists, decides to go to work in an industry reviled by, or otherwise unknown to elites--in Platt's case, Wal-Mart:

The picture above is of me, finishing my shift at the world's largest retailer. How did I move from being a senior writer at Wired magazine to an entry-level position in a company that is reviled by almost all living journalists?

It started when I read Nickel and Dimed, in which Atlantic contributor Barbara Ehrenreich denounces the exploitation of minimum-wage workers in America. Somehow her book didn't ring true to me, and I wondered to what extent a preconceived agenda might have biased her reporting. Hence my application for a job at the nearest Wal-Mart.

Getting in was not easy, as more than 100 applicants were competing for fewer than 10 job openings. Still, I made it through a very clever screening quiz, then through a series of three interviews, followed by two days of training. I felt ambivalent about taking advantage of the company's resources in this way, but I was certainly willing to do my part by working hard at the store, at least for a limited period.

The job was as dull as I expected, but I was stunned to discover how benign the workplace turned out to be.

Platt writes, "As for all those Wal-Mart horror stories--when I went home and checked the web sites that attack the company, I found that many of them are subsidized with union money." Of course, anti-capitalist forces demonizing department stores is hardly a new trend, and certainly not limited to America.

Read the whole thing, which concludes with a reference to Adam Shepard, the author of Scratch Beginnings, whom Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith interviewed for one of their podcasts last year.

(Via Walter Olsen and John Hawkins.)

The L.A. Times is shedding jobs; it will soon have 300 fewer people employed not to publish the news.

Meanwhile, CNN isn't afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve, and its biases on its chest, though sadly, it doesn't appear that a "Wright-Free Zone" T-shirt is yet for sale.

In his review of Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man for the Claremont Institute, Jonah Goldberg summarized the New Dealers' attempt to deploy military methods and central planning to nationalize America's economy thusly:

When liberals speak of unity and hope, what they really mean is success. The 1930s and 1960s, unlike the '20s and '50s, were decades when liberals, broadly speaking, were "winning." When you hear liberals bemoaning divisiveness and insisting that we must "get beyond" "labels" and "ideological" differences, what they are really saying is that their opponents should shut up and get with the program. The New Deal's appeal lies in the fact that it was the first time when progressive social engineers had real power without the galvanizing dynamic of a war. The Brains Trusters had spent much of the 1920s complaining "we planned in war," i.e., during World War I; they insisted that they should be allowed to plan in peace as well. The Depression gave them their shot. And that in a nutshell is why supposedly empirically minded and "reality-based" liberals still genuflect to the myth of the New Deal. It is the ne plus ultra of liberal power. Defending the New Deal is the first requirement of liberal power-worship.

Rusty Weiss spots a newspaper cartoonist so close and yet so far from this point, as he equates the passing of the so-called stimulus bill with the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima:

In one of the more insulting comparisons seen in recent memory, Albany Times Union editorial cartoonist John de Rosier does a major disservice to the honorable men who served during the Battle of Iwo Jima, by depicting recent efforts of Democrats to pass a non-stimulating 'economic stimulus plan' as equally heroic.

The cartoon shows Democrats in the role of the Marines featured in the Iwo Jima Memorial, a sculpture based on the famous photo by Joe Rosenthal entitled Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. The exception to this replication lies in the flag being raised - the Dem's are trying to hoist a 'bailout flag' as opposed to a flag of the United States.

If that weren't insulting enough, the cartoon also shows the Republican Party mascot, the elephant, trying desperately to pull the flag down.

In short, the Democrats are trying to save our nation by heroically raising up the Obama bailout flag, while the villainous Republicans are trying to destroy our nation by stopping their efforts.

Meanwhile, in a brief item on Jonah's own Liberal Fascism book, Frank Wilson, the book editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes:

I downloaded Goldberg's book on my Kindle because I was curious about a book that had made it on to the NYT best-seller list without ever being reviewing in the Times or most other papers and because I didn't want to pay the full price for what I suspected might be a screed. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a well-written historical survey of a set of ideas and how they grew. I was also surprised by what I learned about Mussolini.

As I wrote in my own review of Jonah's book:

Mussolini similarly invented the word "totalitarianism" as a way to describe a cradle-to-grave socialism that would bind all aspects of his nation together. "Mussolini meant it to be appealing to people," Goldberg said. "It was a sales pitch for his kind of government. He meant it as we would use words like 'holistic' today, as sort of covering every aspect of life; everyone's going to be included, everyone's going to be part of the community. No child is going to be left behind. That was the meaning of totalitarianism in its original conception."

Concurrently, the Philadelphia Inquirer seeks to get itself even deeper into bed with government, requesting a bailout from the state's Democratic governor. Needless to say, Il Duce would approve.

Related: The Illustrated Stimulus.

Steve Green writes, "They Don't Like Profits Anyway":

Via Melissa Clouthier comes this tasty little item from Gawker:

...today the NYT runs an op-ed from Yale's hallowed money manager David Swensen, in which he recommends that newspapers turn themselves into non-profits with endowments (we agree, philosophically at least). "As long as newspapers remain for-profit enterprises, they will find no refuge from their financial problems." He's talking to you, NYT!

The NYT is already headed towards zero profits for as far as the eye can see -- so why not make it official?

Even as yet another east coast paper begs for a federal bailout, there's hope yet for another legacy media: "Snuggie Sales Prove TV isn't Dead"!

Well, that's a relief.

Infidels Are Cool has the video of CNBC calling Rush to harangue him over his Wall Street Journal op-ed. It's been a while since I've watched the ostensibly business-oriented CNBC; when did their hosts start sounding like they're auditioning for the even further leftwing MSNBC?

Related: Roger Kimball suggests that maybe President Smoot "should listen to Rush Limbaugh after all."

Everyone knows what email is--but what is this..."Post Office" you speak of?

(H/T: Matthew Sheffield)

The New York Times: for show trials before they were for them. Maureen Dowd writes:

It's psychopathic to spend a million redoing your office when the folks outside it are losing jobs, homes, pensions and savings.

Thain should never rise above the level of stocking the money in A.T.M.'s again. Just think: This guy could well have been Treasury secretary if John McCain had won.

Bartiromo pressed: What was wrong with the office of his predecessor, Stanley O'Neal?

"Well -- his office was very different -- than -- the -- the general decor of -- Merrill's offices," Thain replied. "It really would have been -- very difficult -- for -- me to use it in the form that it was in."

Did it have a desk and a phone?

How are these ruthless, careless ghouls who murdered the economy still walking around (not to mention that sociopathic sadist Bernie Madoff?) -- and not as perps?

Bring on the shackles. Let the show trials begin.

Just as long as we start with the management who plowed this firm's stock price into the ground over the last five years.

There's a marvelous scene in Lawrence of Arabia in which Col. Brighton (played by Anthony Quayle) says to his superior officer, "Look, sir, we can't just do nothing", who replies, "Why not? It's usually best."

The Politico explains the economic "Case For Doing Nothing." It's the best way to prevent "totally impractical" stimulus plans from causing the fat lady to sing...

Victor Davis Hanson writes, "If anyone wished to know what the baby-boomer generation would do when, in its full maturity, it hit its first self-created, big-time recession, I think we are seeing the hysterical results":

After two decades of unprecedented economic growth, rampant consumer spending, and unimaginable borrowing to satisfy our insatiable appetites, we are suddenly going into even larger debt and printing trillions of dollars in paper money to ensure that someone else after we are gone pays the debt. As if the permanent solution to a financial panic and years of spending wealth we didn't create were a government take-over of the economy in the manner we currently witness in Spain, Italy, and Greece--or the high-tax, high-spend ethos of a bankrupt California.

The reaction to the economic panic was sort of analogous to the call to 'charge it!' after 9/11 (cf. Ike's fights about the surtax to pay for Korea), or to the Iraq 2006 upsurge in violence, when suddenly our leaders declared the war lost, blamed the nebulous "they" for tricking them into voting for the war, and calling for immediate withdrawals and retreats. Ditto the Stalag-Gulag Guantanamo that, by January 19, had ruined the Constitution, shredded the Bill of Rights, and forever tarnished our reputation. Yet, on the 20th, it was suddenly complex and problematic, and required a "task force" to do a year-long inquiry into the bad and worse choices confronting us. At some point in all this serial hysteria, we are beginning to see the problem is not in the stars of the economy or of the war, but in ourselves--a weird generation that, when it finally came of age, proved to be just about what we could expect of it from what we saw in its youth.

California's already reached the tipping point, and the rest of the nation isn't that far behind it--which is why James Pethokoukis proffers "10 Reasons to Whack Obama's Stimulus Plan."

An ABC morning show host in 2007: American morale is at an all time low because 9/11 couldn't have happened without massive government help.

An ABC morning show host in 2009: "Consumer confidence has to rebound, which won't happen without massive government help."

As President Obama and his fellow Democrats in Congress attempt to ladle copious amount of pork to their cronies disguised as a "stimulus package", it's worth reading Bruce Bartlett's thorough exploration in Forbes of "the role of government in economic recovery", beginning with a short, sharp primer on the makings of the Depression, and then a look at today's economy. Here's a sample:

No one today believes that the Great Depression just happened or dragged on as long as it did because the private sector kept making mistake after mistake after mistake. It only made them and continued to do so because government interfered with the normal operations of the market and prevented readjustment from taking place.

The Great Depression resulted from a confluence of governmental errors--the Fed was too easy for too long in the 1920s, tightened too much in 1928-29 and then failed to fix its mistake, thus bringing on a general deflation that was very difficult to arrest once downward momentum had set in. Herbert Hoover compounded the problem by signing into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and sharply raising taxes in 1932.

Unfortunately, Franklin D. Roosevelt misunderstood the nature of the economy's problem and tried to fix prices to keep them from falling--thus preventing the very readjustment that would have brought about recovery. (See this paper by UCLA economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian.) He doesn't seem to have ever understood the critical role of Fed policy and mistakenly thought that arbitrarily raising the price of gold would make money easier.

Then, in 1937, just as the economy was starting to build some upward momentum, Roosevelt decided to raise taxes and cut spending, and the Fed suddenly concluded that inflation, rather than deflation, was the main problem and tightened monetary policy. (Note: According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Great Depression was basically two severe recessions--one from August 1929 to March 1933, and another from May 1937 to June 1938--not a continuous downturn.)

The result was an economic setback that didn't really end until both monetary and fiscal policy became expansive with the onset of World War II. At that point, no one worried any more about budget deficits, and the Fed pegged interest rates to ensure that they stayed low, increasing the money supply as necessary to achieve this goal.

It was then and only then that the Great Depression truly ended. As a consequence, economists concluded that an expansive monetary and fiscal policy, which had been advocated by economist John Maynard Keynes throughout the 1930s, was the key to getting out of a depression.

Keynes was right, but many of his followers weren't. They thought that budget deficits would stimulate growth under all circumstances, not just those of a deflationary depression. When this medicine was applied inappropriately, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s, the result was inflation.

Read the rest.

(Via Jonah Goldberg.)

Forget Timothy Geithner--check out Philip J. Heinker. He's taken the Hip Accountants' Oath!

AP reports:

In a discouraging report for the American economy, General Electric Co. posted a 46 percent drop in fourth-quarter earnings on Friday and warned of a "tough environment" this year as it struggles with its ailing finance business.

To quote Mark Steyn's brilliant essay on previous reports of fresh disaster, "Hey, that's great news, isn't it?"

It is according to what GE's more public representatives have told us.

In November of 2007, one of the conglomerate's television networks urged us to turn off our lights (manufactured by GE) for the environment. Six months later, Barack Obama surely gave a tingle up the collective leg of one of their other television networks when he told told voters:

"We can't just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world's resources with just 4 percent of the world's population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead, we'll be fine."

And at the start of 2008, the spouse of his leading opponent in the Democratic primaries was quoted as saying:

We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions 'cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.

Mission accomplished!

"Which is worse: Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and Nancy Pelosi controlling your doctor--or controlling your bank?"

Someone on Fleet Street is a lad insane, as "Agent Bedhead" writes, if they think David Bowie(!) set in motion our current financial maelstrom.

Personally, I blame these cracked actors.

(Via Colorado's thin white vodka-swilling duke.)

Update: Problem solved--evidently, "Kate Moss Will Fix That Dreadful 'David Bowie Recession'". Let's dance!

The Obama administration time machine continues to explore recent history--as we (and CNN) noted in the previous post, yesterday was a revisit to Woodstock; will their economic policy send them--and the rest of us--Back to the Thirties?

Jonah Goldberg posts his initial thoughts on President Obama's speech and notes, "I agree with most of the folks here that it wasn't as well-written as I expected. There were some awfully clunky cliches in there", after listing a few, he hits upon a great observation regarding freedom versus collectivism:

One last point, for now. There was also a great deal of nonsense in there. Ramesh already mentioned the bit about harnessing the sun and whatnot to power our factories (why not distill energy from our strategic unicorn manure stockpile). But the line that grated on me most came from the bit about service and sacrifice. He said:

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

No, "they" didn't. Slaves certainly didn't endure the lash of the whip out of a sense of service and sacrifice for us. That is one of the reasons slavery is so evil; it isn't voluntary. Suffice it to say that if that line had come out of a different man's mouth it would not be nearly so well-received. Nor did those immigrants make their sacrifices for "us." They made them for themselves, for their own pursuit of happiness, for their families.

This is not to say we do not benefit from the sweat of their brows and the shedding of their blood, but Obama's rhetorical ambition seems broader than that insight. He wants to forge a new sense of collective identity. There are aspects of that effort that are admirable or defensible, to be sure. Don't we conservatives lament a lost sense of citizenship and the erosion of a common culture? But too often he comes across as wanting to take that collective vision and drape it over individualism and enterprise like a wet blanket. The pursuit of individual prosperity is not selfish and the effort to defend it is neither a tired dogma nor a childish thing. I often get the sense that President Obama doesn't see it that way, never more so than today.

Which may be one of the reasons why one of the most visible scorecards for that prosperity was so off today.

One leading economic indicator wasn't impressed by today's festivities, as Reuters notes:

U.S. stock indexes extended losses and hit session lows on Tuesday after President Barack Obama's inauguration speech provided few new details about measures to tackle the growing economic crisis.

"I think people were looking for something, new plans, new hopes," said Joe Saluzzi, co-manager of trading at Themis Trading in Chatam, New Jersey.

"They didn't hear something new."

To be fair, an inauguration speech isn't exactly the place to lay out a new administration's fiscal agenda, but still, between this, Ted Kennedy passing out, the racially charged benediction from Rev. Joseph Lowery, whatever caused Rahm to flip the Emanuel, and the jeering of the incoming president's supporters at the outgoing commander-in-chief, there were lots of fumbles during the ecstasy.

Update: Perhaps this (via the Professor) helps to explain today's market swoon: "In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian."

More" The temperature wasn't the only thing icy in DC today. Witness: "The awesomely awesome Carter/Clinton snub"--complete with video!

Backwards ran the logic until reeled the mind--where it all ends knows Weimar.

(HT: I/P)

Kathy Shaidle writes that Ayn Rand is slowly being embraced in one of the nations that needs her the most: France.

Meanwhile, England, on permanent recessional since about the 30 seconds after Kiplings' poem/warning in 1897 (save for a timeout in WWII) is taking grudging steps to re-enter the late 19th century as well: "In Britain, the slowly dawning realization that burglary is a serious crime." The Great Relearning continues apace.

As Jonah Goldberg writes in the L.A. Times, on the campaign trail, Barack Obama was every candidate you wanted him to be. But that's about to change once he actually takes office and begins to govern:

Presidential inaugurations are in many ways the high-water marks of any presidency because they're so full of hope. All things seem possible. The rivalries and backbiting haven't set in yet, at least not publicly. Even the inevitable disappointments over Cabinet picks and White House staffing are tempered by the wide-eyed dreams of an ambitious agenda. Everyone -- or at least everyone who backed the guy -- has that "we can make this the best yearbook ever!" feeling.

Then comes the letdown. No, I don't mean Barack Obama will be a failed president. But even the most successful presidents bitterly disappoint some people, usually some of their biggest supporters. Indeed, they can only disappoint supporters because disappointment first requires confidence and hope. Those who voted against Obama can either have their low expectations fulfilled or be pleasantly surprised.

Many conservatives, for example, had hoped that George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was simply a marketing slogan. They were dismayed to discover he really meant it. In the 1980s, Republican factions were deeply divided in the "let Reagan be Reagan" debates. Everyone heard what they wanted to hear during the campaign and expected the man's presidency to jibe perfectly with their expectations.

Obama's ideological compass is far more difficult to discern than Reagan's or Bush's were. This is why his conservative detractors often called him a cipher. Obama's supporters rolled their eyes despite producing often-contradictory evidence to rebut the charge.

This raises perhaps the most interesting question of the Obama presidency: "What wasn't Barack Obama lying about?"

I don't mean this to be as harsh as it sounds. I'm not talking about what his conservative critics said he was lying about -- say, the true nature of his relationship with William Ayers. I'm talking about issues where his own supporters seem to have just assumed he had his fingers crossed.

Not the least of which is Obama's infamous statement on bankrupting the coal industry, uttered a year ago in the midst of an hour long conversation the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle and then unnearthed by a blogger in the last weekend of the election; the closest anyone remotely associated with the feckless McCain campaign came to delivering an October surprise. After The One's latest flip-flop on this issue, Ed Morrissey wonders if the freshness dating has expired on that statement--but concludes, don't be too sure.

Orrin Judd looks at a bitter clinging (but certainly not a sweetie) Nancy Pelosi at odds with the incoming president and quips, "At some point over the next two years, he's gonna find that labradoodle boiling away in a pot on the White House stove...."

Surprisingly harsh words from Obama's friends at AP to The One:

Unemployment is up. The stock market is down. Let's party.

The price tag for President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration gala is expected to break records, with some estimates reaching as high as $150 million. Despite the bleak economy, however, Democrats who called on President George W. Bush to be frugal four years ago are issuing no such demands now that an inaugural weekend of rock concerts and star-studded parties has begun.

Obama's inaugural committee has raised more than $41 million to cover events ranging from a Philadelphia-to-Washington train ride to a megastar concert with Beyonce, U2 and Bruce Springsteen to 10 official inaugural balls. Add to that the massive costs of security and transportation - costs absorbed by U.S. taxpayers - and the historic inauguration will produce an equally historic bill.

In 2005, Reps. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., and Jim McDermott, D-Wash., asked Bush to show a little less pomp and be a little more circumspect at his party.

"President Roosevelt held his 1945 inaugural at the White House, making a short speech and serving guests cold chicken salad and plain pound cake," the two lawmakers wrote in a letter. "During World War I, President Wilson did not have any parties at his 1917 inaugural, saying that such festivities would be undignified."

The thinking was that, with the nation at war, excessive celebration was inappropriate. Four years later, the nation is still at war. Unemployment has risen sharply. And Obama pressed Congress to release the second half of a $700 billion bailout package in hopes of rescuing a faltering banking industry.

Obama's inauguration committee says it is mindful of the times and is not worried people will see the four days of festivities as excessive.

Merely a disaster area, as Mark Steyn notes.

Via the Liberal Fascism blog, some thoughts from Byron York and Jay Nordlinger on all-enveloping corporate Obama worship. And much more from Debbie Schlussel, who calls into yesterday's B-Cast on Breitbart.tv to discuss Obama taking central command of the internecine battles in the cola wars--and getting his own trading cards as a result:

Related thoughts from Hot Air's Allahpundit.

Update: "Everybody remembers those pro-Bush celebrity videos sponsored by major corporations, right? Right?"

Media Bistro's "AgencySpy" blog explains "why it's vitally important to watch what you say on Twitter":

A representative from Ketchum New York (a PR and Marketing firm) heads to Memphis to give a big presentation to their big client, FedEx, and totally offends everyone who works there before even stepping foot in the building.

Upon landing in Memphis and getting a lay of the land he tweets:

"True confession but I'm in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, 'I would die if I had to live here.'"

Someone from inside FedEx was following Capt. Footinmouth, whose Twitter name is 'keyinfluencer' -- quite possibly the douchiest nickname of all history -- and that person sent the letter we posted below. You'll want to read it, because not only is it amazingly poignant, but because it was copied to "the FedEx Coporate Vice President, Vice President, Directors and all management of FedEx's communication department AND the chain of command at Ketchum." Thank you Peter Shankman for sharing this story.

"Mr. Andrews,

If I interpret your post correctly, these are your comments about Memphis a few hours after arriving in the global headquarters city of one of your key and lucrative clients, and the home of arguably one of the most important entrepreneurs in the history of business, FedEx founder Fred Smith.

Many of my peers and I feel this is inappropriate. We do not know the total millions of dollars FedEx Corporation pays Ketchum annually for the valuable and important work your company does for us around the globe. We are confident however, it is enough to expect a greater level of respect and awareness from someone in your position as a vice president at a major global player in your industry. A hazard of social networking is people will read what you write."

Now that you know what not to do, John Hawkins has assembled "The Super Awesome Right Wing News Twitter Guide For Newbies."

(Main story originally found, naturally enough, here.)

Related: Via Melissa Clouthier, helpful new media definitions--like, um "Twitter!"--are defined definitively, here.

Currently up on the Drudge Report is the headline, "BANK OWNED BY AMERICA; FEDS BECOME LARGEST SHAREHOLDER."

Talk about burying the lede--Drudge's headline is real story of this article from the New York Times' spinoff the International Herald Tribune. Which is why, naturally, it's buried five paragraphs in.

But as Frank Martin wrote last month:

This is how it ends. As of right now, the Senate IS the banking system. You just try prying the banking system from the hands of the Senate now. You want a loan? Sure, lets just check your voting record, lets see what kind of car you want to buy, oh darn its not a certified government "greenmobile", well sorry Mr. Consumer, we cant give you a loan for that new Toyota Dual Axle truck for your ranch, but how about a new Chevy Cobalt Hybrid? Sure thing. Sign right here Mr. Consumer.

SNAP! That's just how easy it is for you to find that you no longer have any economic choices. No banks - then no bank loans. No bank loans - then no economy. In point of fact, your entire economy is now run by just 100 people. 100 people that if most of us were in an elevator and any one of them got on, we would then get off and walk up the rest of the building rather than risk our well being by exposed to their close proximity.

Or as I asked last month:


And for some other video looks on how we got here, click here and here.

Update: Am I blue? You'll be, too:

Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital Blog mentions a new buzz word in energy policy discussions--blue jobs--jobs associated with oil and natural gas industries. The industry is pushing to keep the oil and natural gas energy relevant in America's discussion of energy policy to force policy makers to keep them in mind in the formulating of new policies and programs. The gas lobby wants to keep "blue jobs" in demand, jobs that total 5.8 million nationwide--in both direct and (sometimes very) indirect jobs that the gas lobby says are dependent on natural-gas related activities.

In today's "POR economy" (centrally planned to perfection and/or perdition by the bluest of the Blue Staters, Pelosi, Obama, and Reid) aren't all jobs blue jobs?

Dr. Melissa Clouthier takes the pulse of the MSM, with some assistance from Charlie Martin of Pajamas Media's "Edgelings" tech blog, and a little video help from your humble narrator himself.

And speaking of a troubled MSM, Newsbusters reports that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has declared Chapter 11. Its best-known journalist in the new world of the Blogosphere and Satellite Radio directs us to this piece in the Minnesota Post for some additional details of the Strib's bankruptcy and what may be to come. (But not before including a sublime screen capture from A Night To Remember, taken at the apex between iceberg and eternity.)

Related: "Your MSM Moment of Zen."

The mere existence of this headline--"CBS says ratings success proves network TV viable"--is proof that the clock is ticking on the model, at least in its current form. Imagine such a headline running 10, 20, 40 or 50 years ago.

Meanwhile, Galley Slaves notes that the clock may be ticking slightly faster for one of CBS' competitors.

Of course, the viable lifespan of the original big three is likely to exceed a far older component of the legacy media.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger asks, "Are we done with green?"

Now that money is tight, will environmentalism turn out to have been just a passing trend -- the political equivalent of the pet rock?

Probably not, say the experts. While some consumers may have to put their concern for the planet on the back burner for now, they will likely resume their new-found green habits once the economy improves.

"It was all about the environment last year. But it's all about the economy this year. It's like we can't think about more than one thing at a time. It's either one or the other -- almost as if we can't do both," said Ann Mack, who forecasts trends for the advertising firm JWT, formerly J. Walter Thompson.

Actually, the two are remarkably intertwined, as Mark Steyn noted at the end of last year, and Bill Clinton at its start. And presumably these fellows are getting quite a chuckle out the current economy.

In the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Ralph R. Reiland has this classic quote from a representative of the union that made General Motors the automaker it is today--the one we're all paying to keep in business:

"No one wants to see GM go down the tubes," said picketing Jim Brown. "But we have to keep our standard of living, and GM is going to have to cooperate."

Reiland concludes:

And so, at last count, GM has lost $70 billion since 2004, the number of UAW members has been cut in half since 2004 at GM, Chrysler and Ford, from 300,000 to 150,000, and the rest of us are now stuck with the tab for the rescue.

Meanwhile, the city of Detroit finally has a bond rating to match its sterling quality of life.

The great Walter Williams writes:

Congress and the White House aren't finished with the taxpayers yet. Once a bailout parade gets started, it has a momentum of its own. President Bush, citing danger to the economy, signed a $17 billion bailout for the auto industry. According to the Wall Street Journal article "Shovel-Ready on Campus" (December 17, 2008), presidents of 36 state government universities have called for bailouts; they call it a "federal infusion of capital." Soon, if not already, state governors and city mayors will descend on Washington seeking bailouts. California is $15 billion in the hole, Florida $5 billion and things are so bad in Michigan that the governor has shut down one prison to save money.

What kind of assumptions do politicians and news media make about the intelligence of Americans to expect us to buy the idea that our current mess results from deregulation and free markets? I do not find that assumption flattering.

As P.J. O'Rourke surveys the leftwing lethargy and concludes, "we may speak without compunction of the failed Obama presidency:

What a blessing that it's a failure. Things are bad enough the way they are. There's already a huge ongoing government intervention in
the economy. Bringing the government in to run Wall Street is like saying, "Dad burned dinner, let's get the dog to cook." Now the government's going to take over the auto industry. I can predict the result--a light-weight, compact, sustainable vehicle using alternative energy. When I was a kid we called it a Schwinn.

These days, we call it this.

(HT: CG)

As Mark Steyn wrote in 2005, "It's the Demography, Stupid"--or the lack thereof: "Shaky economy means 'bye-bye baby' for some."

James Pethokoukis notes that "Big Media Distorts Bush Economic Record."

It's a mixed-bag of course--just not the one being peddled on the 6:30 Evening News.

Pethokoukis writes:

The past four months have been terrible. You had the money-sucking leviathan that is the poorly implemented Paulson Plan -- and Bush's failure to push better alternatives. You had the Detroit bailout. You had a failure to vigorously defend the free-market approach that, when implemented 25 year ago, saved the imploding economies of the West and helped win the Cold War. We really needed the Explainer-in-Chief to bring his A-game. Didn't happen.

He had an A-game as a speaker? Of President Bush's attributes as a leader (the best of which I'll cheerfully acknowledge), explaining anything was not his strong suit.

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg writes that his successor "is interested in any idea, as long as its peddler starts from the same 'non-ideological' assumption that government experts know best":

The current climate reminds former Freddie Mac economist Arnold Kling of the battle of the Somme in World War I (a war everyone knew would be over in six months). "Having experienced nothing but failure using offensive tactics up to that point, the Allies decided that what they needed to try was ... a really big offensive," Kling writes. "My guess is that in 1916, anyone who doubted his own ability to direct an enormous offensive involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers would never have made it to general. Similarly, today, anyone who doubts the ability of a handful of technocrats to sensibly allocate $800 billion would never make it into government or the mainstream media."

Read the rest.

"A source of mine called to say that Obama's reached out to some newspaper publishers about giving papers a tax break in the stimulus package."

Man, from P.J. O'Rourke's fingers to the Connecticut papers' mouths, to Obama's ears. If this story actually is true, it's yet another example of reality invariably trumping fiction.

"This is a federal building and he doesn't pay federal taxes so he can't come in."

If only that worked for prospective treasury secretaries being vetted, in addition to cats.

Forbes posits that "The Most Intense Period Of The Recession Is Behind Us"--hope they're right and the worst is over.

Though that won't stop incoming President Obama, his pliant new Congress, and the Jeff Gannon-ish legacy media for calling for ever-higher taxes and tossing around trillion dollar (wait--two trillion dollars!) spending packages.

As this AP article notes, 2008 was "the fourth consecutive year that more residents decamped from California for other states than arrived here from within the U.S.":

The number of people leaving California for another state outstripped the number moving in from another state during the year ending on July 1, 2008. California lost a net total of 144,000 people during that period--more than any other state, according to census estimates. That is about equal to the population of Syracuse, N.Y.

The state with the next-highest net loss through migration between states was New York, which lost about 125,000 residents.

California's loss is extremely small in a state of 38 million. And, in fact, the state's population continues to increase overall because of births and immigration, legal and illegal. But it is the fourth consecutive year that more residents decamped from California for other states than arrived here from within the U.S.

A losing streak that long hasn't happened in California since the recession of the early 1990s, when departures outstripped arrivals from other states by 362,000 in 1994 alone.

In part because of the boom in population in other Western states, California could lose a congressional seat for the first time in its history.

Why are so many looking for an exit?

Among other things: California's unemployment rate hit 8.4 percent in November, the third-highest in the nation, and it is expected to get worse. A record 236,000 foreclosures are projected for 2008, more than the prior nine years combined, according to research firm MDA DataQuick. Personal income was about flat last year.

With state government facing a $41.6 billion budget hole over 18 months, residents are bracing for higher taxes, cuts in education and postponed tax rebates. A multibillion-dollar plan to remake downtown Los Angeles has stalled, and office vacancy rates there and in San Diego and San Jose surpass the 10.2 percent national average.

Median housing prices have nose-dived one-third from a 2006 peak, but many homes are still out of reach for middle-class families. Some small towns are on the brink of bankruptcy. Normally recession-proof Hollywood has been hit by layoffs.

"You see wages go down and the cost of living go up," Reilly says. His property taxes will be $1,300 in Colorado, down from $4,300 on his three-bedroom house in Nipomo, about 80 miles up the coast from Santa Barbara.

California's obituary has been written before--"California: The Endangered Dream" was the title of a 1991 Time magazine cover story. The Golden State and its huge economy--by itself, the eighth-largest in the world--have shown resilience, weathering the aerospace bust, the dot-com crash and an energy crunch in recent years.

But this time, the news just keeps getting worse.

As the AP article noted, "The state with the next-highest net loss through migration between states was New York, which lost about 125,000 residents."

New York's governor got a sense of his state's outward migration patterns when he took office last year:

Paterson cited a number of personal friends, all former New Yorkers, who have contacted him from out of state since his ascent to the governorship. "A friend from primary school, Randy San Antonio, told me he moved to Dallas 20 years ago," Paterson began. "Another friend, Randy Watts, had moved to Reno. A friend from Syracuse, Marvin Lee Simons, said he's working in Lower Manhattan. I said we should get together . . . and he said, 'Well, I don't live in New York. I live in western Pennsylvania.' Jeff and Stacey Stackhouse wanted to start a business on Long Island. They moved two years ago--they're trying to start their business in Charlotte, North Carolina. They couldn't pay the taxes here."

Shannon Love (H/T: IP) writes that California is following "the grim path of the Great Lakes states":

Those states where once the industrial dynamo for the entire Earth, yet they destroyed that enormous economic dominance by political policies hostile to economic creativity. Likewise, California had a golden era as an economic and cultural dynamo. Well up until the late 1980s California was the place to go to make it big. People moved from other states to California. Now, internal migration has reversed. California looks less like a dreamland and more like basket case waiting to happen.

It seems that in post-New Deal America, economic and civil success sow their own seeds of destruction. When things are going good, socialist experimentation seems harmless. A booming economy can pay for increased government spending and an ever-increasing scope of government power. Eventually, however, socialism strangles the economic engine and destroys civil society.

I think Texas may be the next boom state and I hope we escape this trap. One would think that socialism would not gain a foothold in independent minded Texas, but California was once a land of rugged individualists too.

Can't say I blame people for wanting to decamp to redder ground. Or as Glenn Reynolds wrote yesterday, "It's like the whole high-tax, high-regulation thing isn't working for them."

Theodore Dalrymple is currently enraging his fellow MDs by writing that "addicts do not need any medical assistance to stop taking heroin."But to challenge Sacramento and Albany's addictions, a cultural sea change is needed--one that I can't imagine arriving to either of what Tom Wolfe once dubbed "the Parentheses States" anytime soon.

Fortunately, The One was careful to under-promise during the campaign in the event of just such a contingency.

The Charlie Foxtrot blog looks at one possible upcoming charlie foxtrot--"The Coming Obama Bubble."

Meanwhile, James Pethokoukis explains "Why Obama is Causing a Liberal Freakout."

Finally, James Piereson notes that those on the left who are calling for a New New Deal are focusing on the half of the New Deal that largely failed, while ignoring, and in some cases condemning, the early portions that more or less worked:

Some of the most constructive and long-lasting features of the New Deal are those that today's would-be reformers ignore when calculating its achievements--most particularly, the broad financial reforms that FDR engineered during his first 100 days. FDR moved quickly in 1933 to address the failures in the financial system that were obvious sources of the continuing deflation and downward spiral in the economy, immediately declaring a bank "holiday" (to stop bank panics) and removing the United States from the gold standard to free the Federal Reserve from its deflationary restrictions. In short order, Congress approved a series of reforms that created a system of deposit insurance, brought more banks under the supervision of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, established standards of transparency in the public sale of securities, and built the wall of separation between commercial and investment banks (in part to curtail the speculation with bank deposits that many saw as a cause of bank failures). In combination, these measures stopped the slide and reestablished the banking system on stronger and more stable foundations. Most continue to function today as pillars of the financial system (save for the split between commercial and investment banks which was repealed in 1999) and, indeed, they have been called into action recently to deal with the current financial crisis.

At the same time, many of the New Deal measures most favored by reformers today were either unhelpful or counter-productive in addressing the economic crisis. FDR's farm programs, designed to raise prices by cutting agricultural production, may have helped some farmers, but they did not promote farm exports nor did they help consumers with tight family budgets. In a misguided effort to raise prices, New Deal functionaries destroyed meat and produce and took cropland out of production even as hungry Americans stood in bread lines. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), designed to bring unions and corporations together to set prices, production levels, and working conditions, proved to be a bureaucratic tangle as businessmen tried to use it to guarantee profits, unions to drive up wages, and government officials to expand public power. Through its complex codes, NIRA succeeded not only in raising prices--a dubious achievement--but also in sowing confusion throughout the economy as to what business practices were and were not permitted. It was soon declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and never revived.

The pillars of the so-called Second New Deal (the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Revenue Act of 1935) added new burdens to business in the form of payroll taxes, higher corporate taxes, and collective bargaining for labor unions. Whatever their long-term benefits, these measures did not improve the climate for investment and job creation in the 1930s. The NLRA, predictably, led to greater union organization and to a spike in industrial strikes. The passage of these measures was accompanied by a good deal of anti-business rhetoric, which was not helpful either. Indeed, the Revenue Act, because it raised the highest marginal tax rate to 78 percent, was sometimes called the "soak the rich tax." When a severe recession followed in 1937 and 1938 that sent the unemployment rate from 14 percent to 19 percent, FDR attributed the crisis to a "capital strike" engineered by business leaders exercising "monopoly power." Such demagoguery may have succeeded as a political strategy in deflecting blame from the administration to the business community, but it failed miserably as an approach to economic growth, as Amity Shlaes argued in The Forgotten Man, her fine history of the Depression era. Unemployment remained high throughout Roosevelt's second term, never going below 14 percent until 1941 when the nation began to mobilize for war.

Definitely RTWT.™

Paul Mirengoff writes that "The leaders of Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, have for years pledged not to enforce the nation's immigration laws. Any jurisdiction that elects such leaders deserves the consequences."

It's always curious what laws local districts arbitrarily choose to ignore. Funny, there don't seem to be any that pledge not enforce the federal tax code--otherwise, welcome to the boom town!

With the news of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer spotting icebergs off the port bow, this edition of Breitbart.tv's B-Cast from last month on the topic of the rocky future of newspapers in general is well worth your time:

As is our recent video on the topic if you've missed it:

As Don Surber writes, "Dude, here's our recession."

Unemployment hits historically high levels not seen in years--but perhaps not as many years as the Associated Press wishes.

As Ed Morrissey wrote yesterday:

Employers shed over a half-million jobs in December as the year ended in the grips of a full-blown recession. The total job loss for 2008 went over 2.6 million, mostly in the latter half of the year, as prospects for growth look dim indeed. Even with all of that truly bad news, the AP manages to add a little hyperbole:

The U.S. unemployment rate bolted to 7.2 percent in December, the highest since early 1993, as nervous employers slashed 524,000 jobs.

The Labor Department's report, released Friday, underscored the terrible toll the deepening recession is having on workers and companies, and highlights the hard task President-elect Barack Obama faces in resuscitating the flat-lined economy.

For all of 2008, the economy lost a net total of 2.6 million jobs. That was the most since 1945, when nearly 2.8 million jobs were lost. Although the number of jobs in the U.S. has more than tripled since then, losses of this magnitude are still being painfully felt.

Uh, okay, thanks for the no-context context. Job losses in 1945 were catastrophic for a nation of 132 million people. We have over 300 million today, and we have increased the workforce by a much larger factor as women have entered the workplace. Total employment in December 1945 was 39.111 million Americans. Total employment in December 2008 was 138.078 million Americans.

In other words, break out your Stone Temple Pilots, Coverdale-Page, and Pearl Jam CDs and drink in deeply the vibe of 1993.

But give incoming President Obama a few years, and Artie Shaw will safely be back in vogue.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

For the past few years, I've seen a number of blogs, and particularly Ace of Spades refer to the legacy media as "The Deciders." I didn't realize its origin was this quote from David McCumber, managing editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

"I understand that people have a hard time with the concept that we get to decide what is news and what isn't, and what is fair and what isn't."

Robert places that quote into sharp context--and reminds the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who the real deciders are: consumers, i.e., the readers--or the lack thereof.

Summon the meteors--because, "Sometimes, the future shows up way sooner than anyone expected."

As Clemenceau (or maybe Stanley Kubrick) once said, the allies won the first World War because our generals were marginally less stupid than their generals. That meme still very much resonates, as Arnold Kling writes:

I was reminded of the Battle of the Somme, one of the worst policy blunders of all time. Having experienced nothing but failure using offensive tactics up to that point, the Allies decided that what they needed to try was....a really big offensive. Just as Feldstein and Stiglitz pay no attention to the on-the-ground the housing market, the British generals ignored the impact of machine guns on men advancing over open fields.

My guess is that in 1916, anyone who doubted his own ability to direct an enormous offensive involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers would never have made it to general. Similarly, today, anyone who doubts the ability of a handful of technocrats to sensibly allocate $800 billion would never make it into government or the mainstream media.

How many people will have meaningful input in determining the overall allocation of the billion stimulus? 10? 20? It won't be more than 1000. These people--let's say that in the end 500 technocrats will play a meaningful role in writing the bill--will have unimaginable power. Remember that what they are doing is taking our money and deciding for us how to spend it. Presumably, that is because they are wiser at spending our money than we are at spending it ourselves.

Lets hope today's leftwing economists are marginally less stupid than their 1930s predecessors.

Back in 2005, I wrote up my thoughts on the dreadful mid-'70s Robert Redford/Mia Farrow version of F. Scott's Fitzgerald's epochal novel thusly:

I think Tom Wolfe (piqued at the unauthorized usurpation of his trademark white suit by Redford's Gatsby) once dismissed the movie as "Fitzgerald as interpreted by the Garment District", and while the film did put Ralph Lauren on the map, most of the duds the actors are wearing, with their fat ties and wide lapels, seem much more 1970s than 1920s.

But that's the least of Gatsby's problems. I can't quite figure out if Mia Farrow works or not, but Redford, who's far too cinematically pretty to play the self-made Gatsby, and who sort of sleepwalks through his role, seems wildly miscast. As does Bruce Dern, who can't escape his Roger Corman-era psycho biker roles (his Freeman Lowell in Silent Running was merely an interstellar variation on that persona).

But what really sinks Gatsby is a self-conscious pacing that makes Stanley Kubrick's stately Barry Lyndon seem like an MTV video in comparison. That's also the same problem that plagues 1976's The Last Tycoon, Elia Kazan's last movie, with a young Robert DeNiro in a thinly disguised portrayal as doomed Hollywood wunderkind Irving Thalberg.

So will there ever be a decent cinematic Fitzgerald? This article on the various cinematic portrayals of Gatsby says don't bet on it.

And as the made for TV version of Gatsby a few years ago demonstrated, attempting to film Fitzgerald these days presents an additional problem.

But much like Obama reliving ancient failed history with the New New Deal, that's not going to prevent Hollywood from trying again, Tom Shillue writes over at Big Hollywood.

Found via the Corner, the Heritage Institute has produced an eye-opening graphic on unemployment in the 1930s, which notes that FDR's New Deal programs never drove unemployment under 20 percent until the US geared up for WWII. The left have been calling for a New New Deal since at least the spring of 2008 before the economic turbulence of the fall, and Obama is more than happy to oblige and spend a lot more taxpayer funds. It's never worked, but why let history stop you?

Update: It's also worth noting that the economy was "pre-socialized" by President Bush in the last months of his administration. There's often much more continuity in presidents with seemingly disparate policies than first meets the eye.

The above quote from 1962's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance certainly explains how the legacy media operates. Which is why, when James Pethokoukis explains "Why Obama Will 'Own' the Recession", I'm not at all sure that will ultimately be true. If James is right, it will be because a majority voters understand at least the fundamentals of the financial history that Karl Rove outlines in his latest Wall Street Journal column:

Fannie and Freddie are "government-sponsored enterprises" (GSEs), chartered by Congress. As such, they had an implicit promise of taxpayer backing and could borrow money at rates well below competitors.

Because of this, the Bush administration warned in the budget it issued in April 2001 that Fannie and Freddie were too large and overleveraged. Their failure "could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting federally insured entities and economic activity" well beyond housing.

Mr. Bush wanted to limit systemic risk by raising the GSEs' capital requirements, compelling preapproval of new activities, and limiting the size of their portfolios. Why should government regulate banks, credit unions and savings and loans, but not GSEs? Mr. Bush wanted the GSEs to be treated just like their private-sector competitors.

But the GSEs fought back. They didn't want to see the Bush reforms enacted, because that would level the playing field for their competitors. Congress finally did pass the Bush reforms, but in 2008, after Fannie and Freddie collapsed.

The largely unreported story is that to fend off regulation, the GSEs engaged in a lobbying frenzy. They hired high-profile Democrats and Republicans and spent $170 million on lobbying over the past decade. They also constructed an elaborate network of state and local lobbyists to pressure members of Congress.

When Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama, then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, pushed for comprehensive GSE reform in 2005, Democrat Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut successfully threatened a filibuster. Later, after Fannie and Freddie collapsed, Mr. Dodd asked, "Why weren't we doing more?" He then voted for the Bush reforms that he once called "ill-advised."

But Mr. Dodd wasn't the only Democrat to heap abuse on the Bush reforms. Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts defended Fannie and Freddie as "fundamentally sound" and labeled the president's proposals as "inane." He later voted for the reforms. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York dismissed Mr. Bush's "safety and soundness concerns" as "a straw man." "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," was the helpful advice of both Sen. Thomas Carper of Delaware and Rep. Maxine Waters of California. Rep. Kendrick Meeks of Florida berated a Bush official at a hearing, saying, "I am just pissed off" at the administration for raising the issue.

Read the rest, and check out my recent "In Dodd We Trust?" video if you haven't seen it yet, for some further thoughts and links.

Update: More from Gateway Pundit, including video.

The Anchoress' new post is your one-stop shop for linkage across the Blogosphere--though don't miss Michelle Malkin's post on the latest industry gone flaccid that's seeking a Viagra-like injection of federal capital to thrust itself back to prominence....

Blair's Law (named after the Bard Down Under, of course) refers to "the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force."

See also this: "CBS Buys First Front-Page Ad On New York Times":

An advertisement for CBS has become the first display ad ever to appear on the front page of the New York Times. In its own article about the appearance of the ad, the newspaper called it the "latest concession to the worst revenue slide since the Depression." It conceded that the move is "regarded by traditionalists as a commercial incursion into the most important news space in the paper." Oddly the newspaper indicated that it could not learn how much CBS had paid for the ad.

Presumably it was more than this earlier sweetheart deal demonstrating yet another example of Blair's Law in action. But yes, it's amazing how quickly aphasia affects the media when reporting on itself.

Having blogged quite a bit--in both print and video form--on the media's "Red Queen's Race" to bottom, it's only fair that I link to Michael Hirschorn's piece on the final lap of the race: "End Times":

Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame for the end of print--the moment when, amid a panoply of flashing lights, press conferences, and elegiac reminiscences, the newspaper presses stop rolling and news goes entirely digital. . . . But what if the old media dies much more quickly? What if a hurricane comes along and obliterates the dunes entirely? Specifically, what if The New York Times goes out of business--like, this May?

But as Steven Den Beste notes:

Michael Hirschorn writes (regarding the impending demise of the NYT):

If you're hearing few howls and seeing little rending of garments over the impending death of institutional, high-quality journalism, it's because the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism.

Ah, several things spring to mind in response to this. "Undervalue"? A thing is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, and if "the public at large" considers journalism to be worth very little, then pretty much by definition they're right, because they're the ones doing the paying. The problem here is not that the public is undervaluing journalism, but that journalists have gotten into the habit of thinking that their work is worth more than it really is.

Which brings up the other point: "high-quality journalism"? It's been a hell of a long time since any of that has appeared in the NYT. And that's another reason why the NYT (and the Chicago Tribune, and the LA Times, etc.) are losing circulation and money: they abandoned any pretense to "high-quality journalism" years ago, and the public increasingly won't pay for what they're offering instead. (That being "agenda journalism" aka "propaganda".)

The big reason you aren't seeing the public shedding many tears over the demise of the NYT is that we all know that they've dug their own grave. The impending demise of the NYT isn't tragedy, it's justice.

Fortunately, the media's estate planning at least was remarkably prescient: their newly built mausoleum awaits them.

(H/T: IP)

Don Surber proffers a modest cost-cutting proposal to the Gray Lady.

(The only downside: It would wreak havoc with the denouement of the EPIC 2014 forecast.)

Just as Virginia Postrel spotted several journalists hot for "Depression Porn", Ezra Levant reminds us that it's "Not quite the 1930s":

So we're in for another Great Depression, are we? Don't believe it.

Now that the epic U. S. presidential race is over, a caffeinated press corps is in withdrawal, so hyperventilating about a new Depression is their new fix. Just to pick one newspaper at random, Toronto's Globe and Mail used the phrase "Great Depression" over 300 times in December alone -- or about a dozen times each edition. And that's restrained compared to U. S. cable news shows.

Read the whole thing--as the aforementioned Postrel puts it, along with a link to historic annual unemployment rates, "Oh My God, It's 1993 Again!":

The recession is bad and probably will get worse, but historical context doesn't scream Great Depression. Journalists, who are like steelworkers in the 1980s, can be forgiven for thinking the economy is collapsing--we're all afraid of losing our jobs--but the rest of you should know better.

Finally, some thoughts on the media and the economy from the Blogfather, including a quote from one blogger who writes, "Compare the last 6 years (or so) of unremitting (and largely unwarranted- until recently) doom-and-gloom economic coverage, against the press' bend-over-backward efforts to avoid riling the American public after 9/11."

Glenn adds that journalists "know how to be exquisitely sensitive, when they're protecting something they care about", but it's a remarkably situational sensitivity.

Update: Why are journalists so hot for Depression Porn (and consequently led the cheers for Hoover '08)? Because of charts like this.

"Auto sales likely dropped a breathtaking 3 million vehicles in 2008, the largest decline since 1974, said Ford Motor's head of sales analysis Friday", according to Knoxville's WBIR.com.

As Mark Steyn wrote last week, "Hey, that's great news, isn't it?"

What was it that then Senator Obama said on the subject? "We can't just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world's resources with just 4 percent of the world's population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead, we'll be fine."

And boy, we took the great man's words to heart. SUV sales have nosedived, and 72 is no longer your home's thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand then Senator Obama's logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume a fair and reasonable 4 percent of the world's resources. And in these last few months we've made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans are driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, President-Elect Obama doesn't seem terribly happy about the Obamafication of the American economy. He's proposing some 5.7 bazillion dollar "stimulus" package or whatever it is now to "stimulate" it back into its bad old ways.

And how does the rest of the world, of whose tender sensibilities then Senator Obama was so mindful, feel about the collapse of American consumer excess? They're aghast, they're terrified, they're on a one-way express elevator down to Sub-Basement Level 37 of the abyss with no hope of putting on the brakes unless the global economy can restore aggregate demand. What does all that mumbo-jumbo about "aggregate demand" mean? Well, that's a fancy term for you -- yes, you, Joe Lardbutt, the bloated disgusting embodiment of American excess, driving around in your Chevy Behemoth, getting two blocks to the gallon as you shear the roof off the drive-thru lane to pick up your $7.93 decaf gingersnap-mocha-pepperoni-zebra mussel frappuccino, which makes for a wonderful cool refreshing thirst-quencher after you've been working up a sweat watching the plasma TV in your rec room all morning with the thermostat set to 87. The message from the European political class couldn't be more straightforward: If you crass, vulgar Americans don't ramp up the demand, we're kaput. Unless you get back to previous levels of planet-devastating consumption, the planet is screwed.

Staggeringly, the Huffington Post actually has an essay that begins:

You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore.

Al's gaseous rhetoric did much to fuel the calls from Obama and numerous others on the left for fewer cars, higher gas prices and reduced domestic energy production. Along with Democratic tampering with the mortgage laws of the 1990s which also set the current economic slowdown in motion, the environmentally correct left should receive a fair chunk of the blame for today's economic woes.

Not to mention Red Queen's Races: At the main Pajamas site, Ronnie Schreiber writes, "California Will Be Bankrupt Before General Motors:

General Motors owes billions of dollars. If GM fails and is liquidated, those creditors will end up with pennies on the dollar, but at least the automaker has assets that can be sold to fund those payouts. If California and its cities default on their obligations will they sell off the Golden Gate Bridge or Big Sur to satisfy holders of municipal and state bonds? The first installment of the loan package for GM and Chrysler crafted by the Bush administration will tide them over until March. Interestingly, March is also when California will run out of money if Sacramento can't agree on tax hikes and spending cuts. It's entirely possible that California will go bankrupt before GM.

Incoming President Obama's lucky in one sense: all of these train wrecks will be occurring very early on his watch. If he's lucky--and like Bill Clinton, has enough Republicans in Congress working to mute his craziest plans--he just might be in good shape for re-election, as the legacy media will helpfully forget all of the bad news of 2008 and 2009.

Which means of course, that taxpayers are funding GMAC's sponsorship of a sporting event with what was sold to the public as desperately-needed emergency cash:

GMAC may be in financial trouble, but that isn't stopping the auto lender-turned-bank holding company from maintaining its corporate sponsorships. The question is - will anyone notice?

In October, GMAC (NYSE:GKM) changed its legal status so that it would be eligible for TARP funds passed by Congress. Late last month, GMAC was approved to receive a $5 billion lifeline from the U.S. government. However, the company is still maintaining its sponsorship of a collegiate bowl game set for Jan. 6 in Mobile, Ala.

"There's about 34 bowl games, 30 of which are sponsored in one way or the other," Fox Business Network's Jenna Lee said Jan. 2 on the Fox News Channel's "Happening Now." "The lower-level, the mid-level games pull in about six figures to have your name attached to one of the games - that's the estimate. And the big games, let's say the Rose Bowl for example, or the Sugar Bowl, or the Orange Bowl - those figures go upwards of $5 to $6 million for some sort of sponsorship."

I'm pretty sure this isn't one of the ads they'll be running:





There's quite an interesting story behind the making of this mock commercial, if you haven't read it, over at Iowahawk HQ.

In Reason magazine, Veronique de Rugy notes that--as usual--conventional leftwing wisdom regarding President Bush is wrong:

When Barack Obama was running for president, he made no secret about his plan to "restore common-sense regulation"--read: increase regulation--by closing the regulatory loopholes he thought the Republicans had opened. Deregulation, he argued repeatedly, is the source of evil. Much like Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression, Obama offered a sweeping, ambitious agenda: new financial regulations, new labor regulations, new energy regulations, and more.

Today Obama is the president-elect of the United States. With Democratic majorities in Congress, he will have tremendous power to push his "reforms." And unlike FDR before him, President Obama won't have to create a regulatory system from scratch in order to increase government control of people's lives. His groundwork was laid by George W. Bush.

Some people still seem to think Republicans take a hands-off approach to regulation, probably because the party is always quick to criticize the burdens regulations place on businesses. But Republican rhetoric doesn't always match Republican policy. In 2007, according to Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, roughly 50 regulatory agencies issued 3,595 final rules, ranging from boosting fuel economy standards for light trucks to continuing a ban on bringing torch lighters into airplane cabins. Five departments (Commerce, Agriculture, Homeland Security, Treasury, and the Environmental Protection Agency) accounted for 45 percent of the new regulations.

Since Bush took office in 2001, there has been a 13 percent decrease in the annual number of new rules. But the new regulations' cost to the economy will be much higher than it was before 2001. Of the new rules, 159 are "economically significant," meaning they will cost at least $100 million a year. That's a 10 percent increase in the number of high-cost rules since 2006, and a 70 percent increase since 2001. And at the end of 2007, another 3,882 rules were already at different stages of implementation, 757 of them targeting small businesses.

Overall, the final outcome of this Republican regulation has been a significant increase in regulatory activity and cost since 2001. The number of pages added to the Federal Register, which lists all new regulations, reached an all-time high of 78,090 in 2007, up from 64,438 in 2001.

Meanwhile, a push for deregulation comes from a surprising source--Brian Lowry of the ancient show-biz bible, Variety magazine, who writes in an essay titled, "Reevaluating media regulations" that "Tough times may call for lax restrictions":

If it takes a big man to admit he was wrong, said man needn't be quite so magnanimous to concede that changing circumstances have altered his outlook.

The perils of media consolidation have been a longstanding concern. Even during a stint working for Tribune Co. as they futilely attempted to squeeze synergies out of TV-print combinations, I banged the drum against allowing TV, radio stations and newspapers coagulate in too few hands, fearing ethical abuses or the nagging appearance of them, as well as the loss of independent voices to watchdog government and the media itself.

Today, though, amid daily waves of depressing economic news, conflicted voices sound preferable to neutered or, worse, deceased ones.

It's not a given that further relaxing restrictions on media consolidation would significantly benefit ailing broadcasters and newspapers at this late stage. Economies of scale certainly haven't kept Time Warner from shedding staff at its magazines or Tribune out of bankruptcy.

Even so, the incoming Obama administration faces difficult choices involving big media nearly as nettlesome, in their own way, as the mess it's grappling with regarding the Big Three automakers.

Jules Crittenden and Robert Stacy McCain spot one key way that regulations have significantly harmed multiple legacy media; the latter writes:

The absurd idea that a Connecticut newspaper might get a government bailout prompts Jules Crittenden to one of the few useful suggestions for saving print journalism:

Throwing out the FCC's cross-ownership ban once and for all might also help.

The FCC's obsolete prohibition on newspaper publishers owning broadcast franchises in the same markets has been bent, over the years, for a few politically-connected conglomerates -- for instance, Cox owns both the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and WSB TV/radio in Atlanta.

There was a time when, if the ban had been repealed, newspapers would have purchased broadcasting outlets. If the ban were lifted now, the buyout pattern would be the other way around. But too little attention has been paid to how the FCC, by preventing consolidation between print and broadcast media, undermined the economic viability of print journalism.

The rise of cable television in the 1980s changed the game. Cable is not "broadcast" and thus is exempt from FCC regulation, and anyone who was paying attention should have realized how the growth of this new technology invalidated the FCC's original rationale in banning cross-ownership. Newspapers could have benefitted by sharing editorial staff between print and broadcast, and using the broadcast outlet to promote the print product. But the entrenched New Deal-era mentality among regulators stifled such insights, and so the absurd wall between broadcast and print remained -- with strategic exceptions, of course, for the big conglomorates that could curry favor in Washington.

As the Red Queen's Race accelerates its velocity, newspapers lost $64 billion in share value in 2008. Which helps to explain why, as this poll notes, "Seventy-seven percent of Americans believe that the U.S. media is making the economic situation worse by projecting fear into people's minds."

The idea of newspapers being bailed out began as a post-election joke by P.J. O'Rourke, but since satire can never compete with reality for pure absurdity, it's rapidly gaining steam in the real world, thanks to an insane request by some Connecticut newspapers to a would-be government benefactor:

Connecticut lawmaker Frank Nicastro sees saving the local newspaper as his duty. But others think he and his colleagues are setting a worrisome precedent for government involvement in the U.S. press.

Nicastro represents Connecticut's 79th assembly district, which includes Bristol, a city of about 61,000 people outside Hartford, the state capital. Its paper, The Bristol Press, may fold within days, along with The Herald in nearby New Britain.

That is because publisher Journal Register, in danger of being crushed under hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, says it cannot afford to keep them open anymore.

Nicastro and fellow legislators want the papers to survive, and petitioned the state government to do something about it. "The media is a vitally important part of America," he said, particularly local papers that cover news ignored by big papers and television and radio stations.

To some experts, that sounds like a bailout, a word that resurfaced this year after the U.S. government agreed to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the automobile and financial sectors.

Ed Morrissey responds:

The only reason -- the only reason -- that news media is vital to a democracy is its independence from government. Think about this. Is The National Enquirer vital to democracy? [Actually, increasingly so--Ed] Will the Republic fall if Entertainment Weekly suddenly closed its doors? Not at all, not even if the entire paparazzi industry suddenly collapsed.

The need for a truly independent media is to make sure that the citizenry is fully informed of government activity and policy, and not just relying on the self-serving communications from elected officials. Without independence, newspapers and other media have as much value as press releases from Congressional offices.

Now, what happens when government suddenly takes a stake in newspapers and other media? Can they remain independent -- or will they cater themselves to those politicians who support those subsidies and target politicians who don't? In fact, the very act of asking for those bailouts has destroyed their independence and credibility on political matters, the very core of what makes a free media necessary for a democracy.

At this point, the best possible outcome would be to let the newspapers crash and burn. They're worthless now as an independent voice in Connecticut. If the market demand remains for print-and-deliver newspapers, then we will see private capital form to meet the demand. If not, then all the taxpayer subsidies in the world would not have saved them anyway.

We already know of one Connecticut newspaper that's announced publicly that it's in the tank to its region's politicians, and in the new spirit of old media -- "Comforting the Comfortable" -- it appears it will soon be joined by others.

Related thoughts from Roger Kimball, here.

Tim Graham of Newsbusters looks at the letter that was missing from most media reports of political scandal.

Perhaps the legacy media simply didn't want to risk hurting their chance to be collectivized into a sort of uber-PBS network.

Meanwhile, Tom Blumer explores the other story which quietly dropped off the legacy media's vacuum tube radar: "A Toast to Old Media's--and Old Medea's--Defeat in Iraq."

Related: "Judicial Watch Announces List of Washington's 'Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians' for 2008"

Found via Maggie's Farm, more on New Jersey's woes, from long-time resident TigerHawk.

Is it better to give or to receive? Tim Blair spots Bank of America investing tens of billions of dollars in the summer "to make their operation sustainable [and] reduce greenhouse gas emissions"--before receiving $115 billion only a few months later from the ultimate source of gaseous emissions--Congress.

Related: Definition of insanity defined, here.

Had dinner at the Four Seasons tonight, on the drive down from New York State to visit my mom in NJ before heading back to California. Three observations:

1. If the New York economy is hurting, you couldn't tell it tonight, as the Pool Room was nearly packed.

2. The filet of bison with foie gras and Perigord truffle sauce main course was pretty amazing.

3. The older, salt and pepper-haired gentleman and his wife sitting opposite us were a seriously class act, picking up the tab for a young Marine in his dress blues having dinner with a young woman in a strapless dress that I can only assume was his girlfriend, fiancee or wife at the other end of our row of tables. When the Marine walked over to thank him, the older gentleman and his wife both replied, "No, thank you for everything you're doing to keep us safe."

Which is an awesome note to end the year on, all around.

Mickey Kaus writes, "Enjoy your daily print newspaper. It's later than you think", as the "Web Blows By Papers as News Source."

So with the Red Queen's Race marching on, will the New York Times have the money to pay off--or at least settle--on this lawsuit?

Update: Roger L. Simon: "Vicki Iseman vs. the NYT could spell Big Trouble for the Grey Lady."

"When Barack Obama makes his New Year's resolutions, at the top of his list ought to be the following: 'I will not allow America to become New Jersey.'"

Last year, when New York's incoming governor David Paterson replaced disgraced fellow Democrat Elliot Spitzer, I quoted this passage from Nicole Gelinas of City Journal:

To lay out his goals, Paterson gave a speech last week similar to the one that Codey delivered nearly three years ago. "We need to take a realistic view of New York State's budget," he said, which is "too big and too bloated." He gently warned the legislature against its usual budget-balancing tricks: overestimating revenues, issuing long-term debt or hiking taxes to cover one-year shortfalls, and trying to use "gimmicks to solve real problems." He added that the legislature's modest cuts to Spitzer's budget proposal would be eaten up by April as tax revenues continue to fall. "We have got to address these issues," he said, "and not by taxing anybody."

Paterson could have recited facts and figures from census reports on how New York ranked dead last, in both raw numbers and percentages, in net domestic population losses between 2000 and 2004, with nearly 183,000 residents leaving the state annually. While immigration from other countries more than made up for these losses, New York still lost some ground in its percentage of the nation's population. And immigration could slow precipitously with the economy's woes, as a protracted credit slowdown will lessen the state's need for Parisian investment bankers as well as Salvadoran construction workers. The governor could also have cited numbers from the Tax Foundation showing that New York's state and local tax burden is a full one-fourth higher than the national average, and significantly higher than the burden in some of the states competing most fiercely with it for jobs and residents: Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas, and most of the states in the new South.

Instead, Paterson cited a number of personal friends, all former New Yorkers, who have contacted him from out of state since his ascent to the governorship. "A friend from primary school, Randy San Antonio, told me he moved to Dallas 20 years ago," Paterson began. "Another friend, Randy Watts, had moved to Reno. A friend from Syracuse, Marvin Lee Simons, said he's working in Lower Manhattan. I said we should get together . . . and he said, 'Well, I don't live in New York. I live in western Pennsylvania.' Jeff and Stacey Stackhouse wanted to start a business on Long Island. They moved two years ago--they're trying to start their business in Charlotte, North Carolina. They couldn't pay the taxes here."

Which helps to explain one particularly bloated and malicious area of the state's government:

Without question, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance has the most advanced residency audit program in the nation. We would hazard to guess that the department, whether out of necessity -- because so many taxpayers in the New York region have, at least allegedly, questionable residency issues -- or sheer force of will, does more auditing of taxpayers on residency issues than does any other state, and perhaps more than all states combined.

I would hazard a guess that California, the other big blue parenthesis state, is pretty effective in this department as well.

(H/T: IP, who notes sadly, "Adrienne Barbeau not included" from this particular Escape.)

John Hinderaker of Power Line asks:

If you seriously believe that the Earth is threatened with destruction by global warming, then the current global economic slowdown is providential. Reduced economic activity equals less energy consumption equals less carbon emitted into the atmosphere. Environmentalists have been telling us we need to reduce our energy consumption, and live more modestly, for years. Now we're doing it. So where's the celebration of the world's sharp turn Greenward?

For that, we turn to the renowned economist, Jamie Lee Curtis...

When I created my recent Silicon Graffiti video on the various and sundry financial meltdowns of the past few months, I titled it "In Dodd We Trust?" It was too good a pun not to use, even though it really wasn't about the Democratic senator from Connecticut per se, but Congressional meddling in economic matters in general.

But get a load of this recent story from Dodd's hometown house organ: as one of Ace of Spades' guest bloggers writes, "Connecticut Post: we're not interested in readers bitching about Chris Dodd or Barney Frank." The paper, evidently being buried with letters from readers regarding their hometown Friend of Angelo and his race-baiting friend from Boston, actually wrote:

...All letters are welcome. But there are code words hidden in some that are signals to stop paying close attention -- "Chris Dodd" and "Barney Frank." ...

On the other hand, it's nice of the paper to let us know who they're running interference for, and dropping the increasingly outdated 20th century perception of "objectivity."

(Via Gateway Pundit.)

As a candidate, Barack Obama was but one of many of the left in recent years who scolded Americans on their economic largesse--until they seemingly took his advice and drastically curtailed their spending, Mark Steyn writes in his newest column:

"Retail Sales Plummet," read the Christmas headline in The Wall Street Journal. "Sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending."

Hey, that's great news, isn't it? After all, everyone knows Americans consume too much. What was it that then Sen. Obama said on the subject? "We can't just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world's resources with just 4 percent of the world's population, and expect the rest of the world to say, 'You just go ahead, we'll be fine.'"

And boy, we took the great man's words to heart. SUV sales have nose-dived, and 72 is no longer your home's thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand then Sen. Obama's logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume 4 percent of the world's resources. And in these past few months we've made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans are driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, President-elect Barack Obama doesn't seem terribly happy about the Obamafication of the U.S. economy. He's proposing some 5.7 bazillion dollar "stimulus" package or whatever it is now to "stimulate" it back into its bad old ways.

On the other hand, as Tom Blumer writes, "If a recovery begins too soon, a massive 'stimulus' package might not be needed. Democrats consider that a bad thing."--hence even more negative jawboning from the incoming administration.

Hey, glad to see that I wasn't the only one releasing previously unseen and all-too-brief material involving senatorial financial relations two days before Christmas...

Glenn Reynolds links to James Surowiecki in the New Yorker, who asks, "Are Newspapers Doomed?"

"There's no mystery as to the source of all the trouble: advertising revenue has dried up. In the third quarter alone, it dropped eighteen per cent, or almost two billion dollars, from last year."

He also suggests something that I've noted in the past -- we may have been getting more news than we (that is, the market) actually wanted (that is, was willing to pay for) due to cross-subsidies from things like classified advertising. With those gone, we may wind up with less news. I hope not, but it's a plausible scenario.

Another reason why is that errors such as this are becoming increasingly easier for readers to spot.

To invert The Who, the Gray Lady will get fooled again, as Roger L. Simon writes:

No doubt most of you remember the Jayson Blair affair at the New York Times, when the paper jettisoned the reporter for publishing several plagiarized and, at least partially, fabricated stories on its front page. The ensuing brouhaha caused an editorial shake-up at the onetime "newspaper of record."

Well, what's the old saying about the "second time as farce"? [I think it's from Marx.-ed. So it is.] This time the paper has outdone itself by publishing a putative letter from the mayor of Paris, attacking the potential elevation of Caroline Kennedy to the US Senate:

The tipoff that it's a phony should be obvious, Allahpundit adds:

In the Times's defense, the letter does have a decidedly Frenchy tone ("Can we speak of American decline?"), but I ask you: Would the mayor of Paris, of all people, be likely to object to a big break for Jackie Kennedy's daughter?

Heh, indeed.™

Couldn't the Times have run the email past the ghost of Walter Duranty? That man knows a thing or two about phonying up foreign stories--and he's even got a blog, to boot. (Although, to be fair, it's about as quiet at the moment as the real Duranty is.)

Finally, Dan Riehl spots a giant iceberg looming off the port bow of the S.S. Sulzberger:

From 24/7 Wall St - based upon background and financials, ten major companies predicted to go away in 2009. Number 6 on the list? The New York Times. h/t An email from Pundita.

24/7 Wall St. looked at some of the largest and most well-known companies, reviewed their SEC filings if they are public, analyst reports, and media observations about their businesses and picked ten that probably won't be around at the end of next year.

6) The New York Times (NYT) has to repay $400 million in debt in the first half of 2009. It does not have the money. It plans to mortgage its headquarters, but it is uncertain what that will bring in an uncertain real estate market. The firm's Boston Globe and regional newspaper operations lose money, so they will be hard to sell. NYT is controlled by the Sulzberger family which has super-majority voting shares. That won't matter much when the company runs out of money. Another big media operation, perhaps News Corp (NWS) which owns The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, will come in and auction off what it can and keep the flagship New York Times newspaper and NYTimes.com website.

If so, that will be one helluva an exit lap for this ever-accelerating race to the bottom:

In his 2001 book, The CEO of the Sofa, P.J. O'Rourke wrote:

The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take 100 of its most prominent numskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.

But of course, with every new bailout, the Senate is becoming further and further intertwined with the public sector, and doing increasing harm. As Frank Martin noted in a recent post on his Varifrank blog, "This is how it ends. As of right now, the Senate IS the banking system":

You just try prying the banking system from the hands of the Senate now. You want a loan? Sure, lets just check your voting record, lets see what kind of car you want to buy, oh darn its not a certified government "greenmobile", well sorry Mr. Consumer, we can't give you a loan for that new Toyota Dual Axle truck for your ranch, but how about a new Chevy Cobalt Hybrid? Sure thing. Sign right here Mr. Consumer.

SNAP! That's just how easy it is for you to find that you no longer have any economic choices. No banks - then no bank loans. No bank loans - then no economy. In point of fact, your entire economy is now run by just 100 people. 100 people that if most of us were in an elevator and any one of them got on, we would then get off and walk up the rest of the building rather than risk our well being by exposed to their close proximity.

Hence the subject of my newest Silicon Graffiti, which begins with a parody of Charles Schwab's 2007 ad campaign (with a little help from the cartoon plug-in from After Effects CS4) before exploring the auto bailout, and the banking bailout. And the good old days (by comparison), when Congress would look at a giant corporation and decide the best way to break it up, not prop it up. When it was wasn't defaulting on its own debts, of course.

And along the way, a look back at some early warnings from the 1990s, and going even further back, a flashback from Vice President Elect Joe Biden to President Abraham Roosevelt Franklin Washington's early televised fireside chats from the 1860s. And a timely paraphrase of the Bard of Springfield.

This is our 23rd edition of Silicon Graffiti ,which began in January of this year--you can explore the back catalog by starting here and scrolling through. It's a mixed lot, but on the average, we hope our approval rating is on the north side of these numbers.

(Also posted at Right Wing News, where I'm one of several guest bloggers this week.)

Congress has less than a week to act on the latest economic crisis impacting the manufacturing sector...

(Though check the photo--is that any way for a man to dress when appearing before the Senate?)

Plenty of economic gloom in this forecast from Wall Street Journal senior economics writer Steve Moore:

We mentioned AP's "Byline Strike" on Tuesday, but Dan Riehl does a great job of reading between the bylines:

The real kicker is that while the journalists are busy writing about the collapse of the Global economy, or the newspaper industry looking like it's going away, all in times so bad we need a new, New Deal - they went to the table asking for a 10% raise.

As Dan writes, it's obvious that even AP doesn't believe the endlessly catastrophic news they've been reading via AP.

Well, can't fault them there.

Even as newspapers are shedding staff and hemorrhaging money, Roger L. Simon spots "The Great Byline Strike Of '08" amongst journalists at the Associated Press:

I read with amusement that reporters and photographers for the Associated Press are staging (via the Newspaper Guild) a 'byline strike.' Say what? To stage a such a strike people have to have heard of you, but practically no one is more anonymous than a writer for a news service. It almost comes with the job description. You are the "Associated Press," not yourself. The AP is not exactly where you find the next Norman Mailer. News service reporters are not even as well known as bloggers. I mean whose names are more famous to the general public at his point -- Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin and (yikes) Markos Moulitsas or [insert any Associated Press writer here]?

Not that I don't have some sympathy for my AP colleagues. These are trying times for all in the media. But they made a choice by joining a news service and that choice was for a form of literary facelessness. Also, they opted for a form of homogenization, since the AP and other news services are by mission supposed to be uniform in style and content.

And therein lies the rub. Of recent years the uniformity of the Associated Press in publishing a kind of bland, accepted liberalism of the most uninspired (and sometimes distorted) sort may be the root of their business woes - not the presence (or not) of bylines or even the current economic situation, although the latter certainly plays a part. I would suggest to the writers and owners of the AP that they consider opening up their company to people of different biases and opinions. They are supposed to be a news service, after all, not a ideological distribution center. People on the more extreme right love to compare them to Tass. That's not fair. The AP is nowhere near as bad as that. But they are pretty bad. And they are failing economically. And when you're failing economically, you're supposed to do something. [Maybe they're waiting for a TARP bailout.--ed. I'd rather drive a Buick.]

As that sage philosopher of Springfield, H. J. Simpson once told his daughter, "Lisa, if you don't like your job you don't strike. You just go in every day, and do it really half-assed. That's the American way."

And from that perspective, the staff at AP have been doing an exceptional job of alerting readers of poor working conditions there for years.

James Pethokoukis rounds up "The 10 Dopiest Business and Economy Leaders of 2008."

It makes a nice double-feature with this recent economic-themed top ten list.

As Jonah Goldberg once quipped, "those who cannot learn from history are condemned to hear George Santayana quoted to them for the rest of their lives"--or this time around, Robert Tracinski from Real Clear Politics:

It looks as if we are going to have to relive all of the mistakes of the 20th century one more time--let's hope it is one last time--before we relearn the big lesson of that century: the moral and material superiority of capitalism and the disastrous consequences of socialism in all its forms.

I thought we had learned that lesson well enough already, but it turns out I was wrong. Given a few decades to recover from the collapse of the Soviet Union--and given an opportunity to take advantage of the ideological confusion and muddled pragmatism of the pro-free-market right--the left is making a serious attempt to reconstitute itself.

And it is not just any variant of the left. It is the Old Left, the mid-20th-century left of public-works giantism, ham-fisted labor union protests, and command-and-control central planning.

By the end of the 20th century, the failure of all of these policies had caused the Old Left to splinter into two groups. The New Left hippies rejected industrial socialism in favor of anti-industrial socialism, adopting environmentalism and holding up a neo-primitive lifestyle as the ideal, while the New Democrat centrists sought a "Third Way" compromise between capitalism and socialism.

But now the discredited Old Left seems to be making a roaring comeback. We can see the signs all around us.

Consider Barack Obama's plan for up to $700 billion in New-Deal-style "public works" boondoggles. It is a good old-fashioned Keynesian "stimulus" based on the premise that you can revive the economy by spreading paper money around at random.

Yet it is now widely acknowledged that the original New Deal did not actually revive the Depression-era economy. Even under Keynes's failed theory, the amount of FDR's spending was not enough to stimulate the economy--and neither is the amount proposed by Obama. But that hasn't fazed the revived Old Left.

Which is why, as early as May, long before the September financial meltdown that paved the way for Obama's victory in November, leftwing politicians were calling for a "New, New Deal": But, as Tracinski notes above, what if the conventional wisdom is wrong about the Old New Deal, and that Risky Tax Scheme, to borrow one of Algore's catch phrases, prolonged the Depression?

The Business & Media Institute rounds them up; a Tech Central Station column by Arnold Kling from 2006 explains their origins.

In a related vein, Ronnie Schreiber explores "Myths of Organized Labor", memes which also derive from a similar ancestry.

If you enjoyed my Red Queen's Race video last week, Jon Stewart (found via Jeff Jarvis and Glenn Reynolds) has a fun clip summing up the newspapers' endgame in about two minutes:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - Final Edition Edition

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Meanwhile, Investor's Business Daily notes that "Some journalists out there seem to be actually rooting for a new economic depression--the very thing that will hurt them more than it will hurt many others":

The blogosphere has a name for this syndrome: "depression lust." Virginia Postrel, an Atlantic Monthly columnist who invented the phrase, contributed to a Boston Globe story published in November that collected ideas from various people to (allegedly) give readers some insight into what a 2009 depression would look like.

The conditions "sounded pretty damned good to some people," Postrel writes on her Dynamist blog, "a sure sign of an affluent society, or at least affluent commentators," who, we should add, appear to be operating under the illusion that things would still be rosy for them in a depression because they always have been.

Journalists "seem positively giddy with anticipation at the prospect of a return to '30s-style hardship -- without, of course, the real hardship of the 1930s," Postrel blogs.

Jim Miller, who writes a political blog, has made a similar observation. "I can't count the number of times I read hopeful pieces in the New York Times saying that a recession might be coming soon, so now that one is actually here those people have to be pleased."

Did any of those New York Times stories come from David Carr, whose "Stoking Fear Everywhere You Look" appeared Monday?

"Every modern recession includes a media seance about how horrible things are and how much worse they will be," noted Carr, who did a bit of his own communicating with the dead spirits of the Great Depression.

As Postrel notes, journalists, whose industry is teetering and "who are already the equivalent of 1980s steelworkers," should be among the most fearful of a depression.

But they can't help themselves. Their contempt for the capitalism and free markets that have made so many of them comfortable is strong enough to make them wish for economic conditions not in their best interests -- and it comes through loud and clear almost every time they report.

And of course, with the economy slowing, the AP feverishly wishes that Obama will bring it to a stop with tons of business-choking global warming regulations.

Dissent: It's the highest form of patriotism. But patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

As others have pointed out, two of the most popular cliches among the left form quite a paradox. The Hill reports that Jennifer Granholm, Michigan's Democratic governor called the Senate "un-American" for voting against the auto bailout. (AKA further socialization of the automobile industry.)

Back in late September, during that week's Federal bailout, Rich Lowry wrote:

Pelosi unloads on House Republicans. Why is it always OK for Democrats to call Republicans "unpatriotic"?

Ramesh Ponnuru had the perfect reply: "Because it has no sting."

Or, "Journalism--The Unknown Ideal", to paraphrase a lesser known, but equally appropriate title.

...At least until next year, according to John Hawkins.

Just to follow up on our link earlier today to Virginia Postrel's post on "Depression Porn", Culture11 explores "Recession Chic" in the fashion magazine industry--"Who knew an economic collapse could be so fabulous?"

Meanwhile over at Ace of Spades, "U.S. Economy In Recession; Women, Minorities, and [B.S.] Artists Hardest Hit."

Warner Todd Huston compares and contrasts 2008 and 2001:

Jonathan Alter was an early accuser of new President George W. Bush when he and VP Cheney began to try to warn the country that an economic downturn was well underway as he was taking office. As Bush tried to warn the nation, the media jumped all over him for "talking down the economy." Yet, as we watch the reporting of Obama's current down talking of the economy, the media has said nothing similar to the condemnation reigned upon Bush.

The myth that people like Alter was pushing in 2001 was that Clinton bequeathed a good economy to Bush, but the reality was that the spiral had already begun to fall into negative territory months before Bush took office. Despite that obvious downturn, the media formed a chorus of attacking Bush for being too negative in the face of the American people. On March 26, Alter unleashed his Newsweek piece headlined "Thanks Ever So Much, President Poor-Mouth." Alter called Bush's warnings "risky and unusual," and made the pronouncement that Bush was wrong to do so. "Even if Bush turns out to be right in his predictions of gloom," Alter wrote, "that doesn't mean he was right to make them."

On CNN, Lou Waters needled Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer on January 12, 2001 about the "politicalization " of the economy. "President Clinton, sort of, answered that as well today. He's talking up the economy. There are economists who say you guys are talking down the economy. What's happening here in this transition period, the whole, sort of, politicalization [of the economy]...," Waters said.

On March 19, The New York Times scolded Bush that presidents were supposed to be "cheerleaders for the nation's economy."

Yet, has anyone seen any similar scolding of the new "cheerleader" in chief, Obama? Has anyone seen an Alter sternly scolding Obama for "poor-mouthing" the economy? Has there been any hectoring from CNN over Obama's grave warnings? Where is The New York Times beating up that downcast Obama?

Why would the media complain about Obama, when they're doing a remarkable job of talking down the economy themselves, as Virginia Postrel notes:

If anyone should fear a Depression, it should be journalists, who are already the equivalent of 1980s steelworkers. But instead, they seem positively giddy with anticipation at the prospect of a return to '30s-style hardship--without, of course, the real hardship of the 1930s. (We're all yuppies now.)

Read the whole thing.

Back at the Republican Convention in Minneapolis, Steve Green handed me one of these bumper stickers, which Joe the Plumber sounds like he's in full agreement with:

I'm not going to speak for the Democrats but I mean, the Republicans didn't put out a candidate for us to really vote for. It's the lesser of two evils.

As Ace's co-blogger Drew M. writes, "Ah poor Maverick, no one really liked him. Alas, I'm sure he'll spend the next 4 years getting even with those of us who voted for him."

(H/T: TV)

"A new bull market? By one yardstick, it's here."

What he said! A collection of soundbites from Daniel J. Ikenson of the CATO Institute on the poor financial health of the domestic auto industry, and why bailing 37 years of bad decisions (by both the automakers and Federal regulators) is a terrible idea:

Meanwhile, the 2012 Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition is looking more and more like it will be a reality--thus guaranteeing even lower domestic auto sales post-bailout.

Update: The Brutal Truth.

As that hoary old newspaper cliche goes, the goal of journalism is "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable", a statement that makes a hash of any mid-20th century claims to "objectivity." But in the past, most journalists, print or video, paid lip service to the idea of being a champion of the little guy, the working man, Joe Six Pack, or whatever that particular week's fabulously outdated and only mildly paternalistic reference to Middle America was.

But that was a long time ago. On Sunday, Tom Brokaw suggested that President Elect Obama tank the economy even more, by sticking it to commuters' wallets:

Let's talk for a moment about consumer responsibility when it comes to the auto industries. As soon as gas prices dropped, consumers moved back to the larger cars once again. The SUVs are the big gas consumers. Why not take this opportunity to put a tax on gasoline, bump it back up to $4 a gallon where people were prepared to pay for that, and use that revenue for alternative energy and as a signal to the consumers: "Those days are gone. We're not going to have gasoline that you could just fill up your tank for 20 bucks anymore."

And of course, the Washington Post is also pretty cool with that idea.

Meanwhile, rather than letting the marketplace decide who sells books and who doesn't, New York Times columnist Timothy Egan doesn't want anyone infringing on his turf:

The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?

I didn't think so. And I don't want you writing books.

Gosh, there's a shocker; Tim Blair makes quick work of Egan's arrogance--but it's merely the latest reminder that newspapers in general really don't want any competition for their territory.

Of course, they're not alone in that department.

Update: Not surprisingly, Iowahawk has a few japes at Egan's expense: "Silly Plumber, Lit Is For Crits!"

Wow, I really wish I had seen this 2007 clip from McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt, before I shot my "Red Queen's Race" video over the weekend.

As P.J. Gladnick of Newsbusters notes, Pruitt does a terrific Baghdad Bob impersonation--but only before invoking his heartfelt commitment to "philosophers and rock 'n' roll songs. Sometimes it's one and the same as with Lenny Kravitz's song from a few years ago, 'Dig In.'"

Hugh Hewitt notes that President Elect Obama's desire to emulate enormous 1930s-style FDR public works projects may be thwarted by very 1970s-style environmental regulations designed to ensure that nothing gets built anywhere--even if it's by the state.

And it looks like the perfect go-between who spans both worlds may not be joining Team Barack.

I hadn't planned it this way when I started working on the new video late last week, but the timing of Monday's news of fresh disaster from old media makes the latest Silicon Graffiti remarkably timely.

But first, let's define the title.

From Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass:

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Back in early 2007, I started wondering if the accelerating decline of print newspaper readership, media advertising revenues, and the upcoming election year were creating a strange new tone in the media. And near the tail-end of an election year in which the media weren't afraid to let you know who to vote for--and who they were voting for--Michael Malone of ABC and Pajamas Media wrote:

Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power . . . only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway - all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself: an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career. With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country . . .

So here's a look at how the media got there, beginning in sepia toned 1926 when mass media was born with the first radio networks, all the way to the days of the Web, the Blogosphere, and the surprising impact Craigslist has had on classified advertising revenue--and a look at declining newspaper advertising in general.

This accelerating downward spiral has completed unnerved much of old media--to the point where a newspaper in a city once known 160 years ago for its residents' spectacular success at mining for gold completely overlooked the solid gold story dropped into their laps, helping to create a remarkably holographic presidential candidate.

(For 21 or so older Silicon Graffiti videos, click here and keep scrolling. And a special thanks to my friend Jenifer Toksvig for doing such a terrific job of recording the opening narration.)

"New York Times Baffled How a Conservative, Oil-Drilling State Isn't in Recession."

(H/T: RSM)

2009: A Smoot-Hawley Odyssey: As we've noted before, two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse could gearing up for quite a ride.

Related: I'm pretty sure this is a sign of the apocalypse as well.

Also Related: " Obama as Lincoln? Obama as FDR? How about Obama as Hoover? Now there's a real story."

Exploring the horrific death of Long Island Wal-Mart employee Jdimytai Damour, Kirsten Powers writes, "Incivility isn't just accepted these days--from celebrity news to TV shows--it's glorified:"

Last week, the Oxygen Network debuted the third season of "The Bad Girls Club" - like seemingly all reality shows, a toxic celebration of rude, mentally unbalanced people shrieking at each other.

Oxygen's Web site features a section hailing these "Destructive Divas": "From home break-ins to club toss-outs, these girls are bad. The girls get kicked out of three clubs - all in the premier episode!"

The show is the most-watched Oxygen original series ever.

One "bad girl" brags on the premiere: "I like to push people's buttons. I have jealousy issues, I'm very rude, conniving, and opinionated . . . I'm just a bad person to know. If someone was picking on me because I was, like, a cute blonde girl, my first instinct would be to tell them they are ugly."

I would plow over someone at a Wal-Mart to get my hands on discounted lip gloss.

P.M. Forni co-founded the Johns Hopkins Civility Project in 1997, and has rung the alarm bells on the collapse of civility. While Americans still have manners, he says, we've lost "the manners of past generations."

Big deal, some will say - those "manners" are just outdated customs. No, Forni argues in his book "Choosing Civility": They're the glue that holds society together.

Compare Long Island 2008 with Manhattan in 1939.

(Found via Kathy Shaidle, who has some thoughts on both Powers' essay and the misremembered legend of Kitty Genovese. For my own recent video look at anger in America, click here.)

"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the Democrats' plan to tap the Wall Street rescue fund to save U.S. automakers doesn't have the votes to pass."

As Steve Green adds, "Keep your fingers crossed. Chapter 11 is the only way to save GM, and probably Ford. Chrysler (except for Jeep and maybe Dodge Trucks) is a goner."

As John Stossel writes, "Government Sets Us Up for the Next Bust":

We are in the mess we're in precisely because of earlier government interference. Easy mortgage terms and guarantees contrived a housing boom and irresponsible lending that could not be sustained. The consequences have shaken the foundation of the financial industry. But instead of freeing the market and allowing the errors to be corrected, the government is seducing the economy into a whole new set of errors. That will lead to the next bust.

"But doesn't the government have to act?" people ask. "We can't just let financial companies fail!"

I say, Why not?

Jim Rogers, the successful investor and author, puts it well: "Why are we bailing out Citibank? Why are 300 million Americans having to pay for Citibank's mistakes? The way the system is supposed to work [is this]: People fail. And then the competent people take over the assets from the failed people, and then you start again with a new stronger base. What we're doing this time is ... taking the assets from the competent people, giving them to the incompetent people, and saying, "OK, now you can compete with the competent people." So everybody's weakened: The whole nation is weakened, the whole economy is weakened. That's not the way it's supposed to work."

Bill Gates must have whiplash after what he went through in the late 1990s. Government and big business have devolved into quite a dysfunctional relationship--when government isn't seeking to punish businesses (marketing consultant Dan Kennedy believes he's spotted the next soft target for the same sort of raping the tobacco industry received in the mid-1990s), its representatives are literally telling another that bankruptcy is "not an option."

As Stossel writes, why the heck not?

(H/T: CG)

Related: "Poll: 61% oppose auto bailout."

With Jude Wanniski and Bob Bartley having gone off to the great accounting school in the sky, it's left to Fred Thompson to sardonically explain why the bailout, or bailouts, or whatever is the catchall name for the overall enormous reaming being applied to those same taxpayers that so offend Harry Reid won't work:

Jennifer Rubin adds:

Republicans have been struggling to find their political bearings. The Democrats are about to embark on a Keynesian spending spree the likes of which we have never seen. How to respond? How can Republicans possibly oppose the political juggernaut coming their way? They could do much worse than to send this short film by Fred Thompson to every voter in America. As political theater, it is brilliant. As economic education, it is indispensable.

The film demonstrates that Thompson is head and shoulders above the current crop of party functionaries in the essential task of communicating and educating voters about our current predicament and the course which the Democrats are pursuing. As they contemplate their political predicament, the Republicans might think about finding Thompson some permanent role as Party Explainer.

Fred may not be the Gipper, but compared to most in the GOP, he's a great communicator.

Found via a link in the comments of Ron Rosenbaum's rather vicious attack on Jeff Jarvis, Alan D. Mutter, a Silicon Valley CEO and newspaper consultant has a don't-miss-it graph of how severely newspaper advertising revenues have declined since 2006. How severely? Here's the chart in video form:

But Mutter spots the one upside: "Buyout Sex, the other severance benefit":

Mary F. Pols, a movie critic who accepted one of the scores of buyouts at the Contra Costa Times, made the best of a traumatic situation by having an affair with a fellow scribe at the California paper, she revealed in Modern Love, the most consistently delectable feature in the Sunday New York Times.

"Buyout Sex," as Mary (left) dubbed it, affords a journalist the rare opportunity to get up close and personal with a colleague without having to worry about "postcoital workplace awkwardness."

In Mary's case, the affair began with drinks with a guy from the office who also was thinking about forfeiting his position in exchange for an enriched severance benefit. After an initial, vodka-propelled rumble in the cramped back seat of the colleague's car, Mr. Buyout Sex and Mary embarked on a months-long relationship.

"In the following weeks, we continued to meet for long nights of sex and conversation, both of which were more naked than I would have expected," wrote Mary. "After years of knowing each other, we were finally getting to know each other. He didn't take the buyout after all, so he could fill me in what was going on at the paper, and the connection felt warm and cozy, especially as I confronted my own undefined future."

Of course, donning fetishwear while engaged in newspaper buyout sex is purely optional. And sheep shagging? Don't even think about it...unless you follow the apparently carefully researched advice found within the Ayatollah Khomeini's "Blue Book."

Update: Blue Crab Boulevard adds, "They confused reporting the news with editorializing on the news. These are two, very different, things. People can tell the difference, despite the media's blindness to this. I think it is coming home for them now."

Victor Davis Hanson writes, "I think Obama may do more for George Bush's reputation than anyone thinks":

Obama is a masterful politician who never has had any real ideology or persona other than his own diversity story and history, youth, and charisma that together allow him to be whatever is politically expedient at the time.

That is, there is a pattern here: public campaign financing, FISA, NAFTA, drilling, nuclear power, coal, guns, capital punishment, abortion, Iran, Iraq, the surge, etc. all were repackaged as the primary and general elections evolved. A community organizing past that once welcomed in a Wright, Pfleger, Ayers, Khalidi, became inoperative lest he meet a McGovern-like fate.

And rather than assess carefully the Bush policies, it made better sense to lump them altogether under the general rubric that Bush shredded the Constitution and, as a unilateral preemptivist, ruined the American brand over seas (while knowing privately that when Obama himself assumed office he would leave alone the homeland-security measures, Patriot Act, FISA, etc. to ensure the continuance of the 7-year hiatus from a major attack, and follow Bush/Petraeus in getting out of Iraq to preserve the unexpected victory).

Likewise, privately Obama knew the meltdown was not Bush's fault per se but a bipartisan miasma a decade in the making, fueled by Wall Street greed, wrongheaded utopian politics, and corruption at Freddie and Fannie--and thus the Bush response was largely to be followed (and this apparently may even extend to not tampering immediately with the existing tax rates.)

The result of all this?

I think we are slowly (and things of course could change) beginning in retrospect to look back at the outline of one of most profound bait-and-switch campaigns in our political history, predicated on the mass appeal of a magnetic leader rather than any principles per se.

No, there is another...

In the latest Weekly Standard, P.J. O'Rourke says, show me the money:

The government is bailing out Wall Street for being evil and the car companies for being stupid. But print journalism brings you Paul Krugman and Anna Quindlen. Also, in 1898 Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal started the Spanish-American War. All of the Lehman Brothers put together couldn't cause as much evil stupidity as that.

Moreover, rescuing print journalism is a "two-fer." Not only will America's principal source of Sudoku puzzles and Doonesbury be preserved but so will an endangered species--the hard-bitten, cynical, heavy-drinking news hound with a press card in his hatband, a cigarette stub dangling from his lip, and free ringside prize fight tickets tucked into his vest pocket. These guys don't reproduce in captivity. And there are hardly any of them left in the wild. I checked the bar. Just Mike Barnicle, as usual. How's tricks, Mike? Where'd everybody go? Sun's over the yardarm. Time to pour lunch.

And right on cue, "Connecticut Legislators Want State To Subsidize Newspapers."

As the Great One (Reagan, not Jackie Gleason) said in 1986, "Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

Well, now we know what happened to Mike Nesmith's wool hat from The Monkees.

Related: Another cheerful furry friend from a bygone era makes his own wistfully nostalgic federal bailout-related appearance here.

Or at least the man who, along the Gipper's tax cuts, brought you Morning In America in the early 1980s: As John Hinderaker of Power Line notes, Obama has gone "Back to the Future":

Today Barack Obama named former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to head Obama's newly-created Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Volcker served as Chairman of the Fed from 1979 through 1987. As such, he worked closely with Ronald Reagan to tame the inflation that ravaged the American economy in the late 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. Reagan reappointed Volcker in 1983.

Change you can believe in!

I'm flipping my polo collar up and popping on my Wayfarers to celebrate the retro goodness!

Glenn Reynolds writes:

ONLY 30-DAY STOCKPILES OF COAL? "A new report from the University of Minnesota warns that an influenza pandemic could disrupt the coal industry, thereby endangering the nation's significantly coal-dependent electric power system and everything that depends on it. . . . The authors, CIDRAP research assistant Nicholas Kelley, MSPH, and CIDRAP Director Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, recommend that power plants stockpile coal to last much longer than the average 30-day supply they have now and that the nation prepare now for disruptions in the coal-supply chain and electrical service. They also urge that coal industry workers be put in the highest priority group for pandemic vaccines and antivirals."

Doesn't that work out about right? At the start of his pre-election cruise through all of America's 57 states, President-To-be Obama said he'd bankrupt the coal industry, so they really just need enough to make it through until his inauguration in January, when they can start the paper on Chapter 11.

And then once bankrupted by Obama, they can apply for their own federal bailout like every other industry.

Mark Hemingway links to Barry Ritzholtz, who has crunched the numbers, adjusted for inflation of the financial bailout:

Whenever I discussed the current bailout situation with people, I find they have a hard time comprehending the actual numbers involved. That became a problem while doing the research for the Bailout Nation book. I needed some way to put this into proper historical perspective.

If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let's give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Mark adds, "The only expenditure that comes close is WWII, and even that cost less."

And speaking of WWII, Jonah Goldberg notes the success of Amity Shlaes and others in reminding the public that the long grind of the Great Depression was made longer by the New Deal. So what's the rhetorical solution? Jonah writes:

As the work of Amity Shlaes and others starts to make much of the "new New Deal" propagandizing ever more difficult, many liberals are now switching to the argument that what we really need is another World War Two, minus the war part of course. Paul Krugman said a few weeks ago that WWII was just a big jobs program. And here's Robert Kuttner on ABC's This Week:

Now, on the question of whether the New Deal worked, Doris Goodwin said to me the other day, don't look at the Roosevelt of 1933, look at the Roosevelt of 1941, 1942.

The New Deal got us halfway out of the Depression, and it was Roosevelt's effort to balance the budget in 1937 that caused the downturn. But in 1941-42, we converted to a wartime footing and unemployment disappeared. And the deficit went as high as 28 percent of GDP. Now, I'm not saying the deficit has to go that high.

But Doris' point was, look at the auto conversion in 1941, 1942, when they shut the lines, they retooled, they started making planes and tanks and produced aircraft and weaponry at a rate the world had never seen. We could do that with fuel-efficient cars as the price of the auto bailout.

This is at best misleading -- and it's also an enormous "never mind" for liberals who've been worshiping the New Deal for 70s years. As Tyler Cowen noted this weekend, much of the gains from the war economy occured before we actually went to war but after we started selling all sorts of materiel to Europe. And the big gains that came after World War II were the result of the fact that Europe had been flattened and needed to buy pretty much everything from America. Investments in green technology are secondary, historical analogies are rationalizations. Kuttner simply wants a massive new industrial policy.

In the Robert Stacy McCain post I linked to over the weekend, in addition to media criticism, he suggested that "conservative spokesmen and Republican leaders in Washington need to find a safe line of attack against the new regime." Comparing the bailout to WWII offers a big ready-made talking point, for whatever few conservatives (if any) left in DC who aren't prepared to sign off on WWII Mark II.

Hey, a trillion here, a trillion there, and sooner or later you're talking about real money.

Jerry Pournelle writes, "It is probably irrelevant given the election results, but my remedy is simple: any company that is too large to be allowed to fail is too large, and ought to be subject to anti-trust regulation."

Remember when the government actually used to attempt to break up behemoth corporations such as Bell Telephone, IBM, Microsoft and other business leviathans rather than prop them up, Weekend At Bernie's style with taxpayer dollars? Hard to believe we'd look back on that period as more benign than today's, but to paraphrase William Goldman, every election year you look back and realize that this year was the worst year in the history of the Federal government.

Where have you gone Senator Sherman? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you!

Man, when Orson Welles said that a film studio was the biggest electric train set a boy could own, he never saw this!

(Via Megan McCardle and the Blogfather, who have some thoughts on Christmas shopping. That's the next holiday the left gets the vapors over, once they've recovered from Thanksgiving.)

In 1988, Teddy Kennedy famously shouted "Where was George" during the Democrat's National Convention. (To which I think it was P.J. O'Rourke who brilliantly responded: At home, in bed, with his wife, sober.) To the question of "Where is Obama" during the market's current turbulence, David Frum explains "Why Obama is AWOL on the market meltdown":

As happened in 1932, the incoming administration in 2008 has two very immediate and obvious messaging goals:

-Think how many histories of the New Deal open with the nightmare situation prevailing on Inauguration Day 1933: banks closed, breadlines extending around corners, etc. What if FDR had worked with Herbert Hoover to improve conditions starting in December? Would the "coming of the New Deal" (to borrow the title of a famous book) have resonated nearly so dramatically in March?

The persistence of emergency into January will enable the incoming Obama administration to easily enact all its legislation, including legislation unrelated to the crisis --like a big new healthcare plan.

-The worse things look in November and December, the more indelibly the new team can stamp the outgoing team with the stigma of failure. It's urgent for Barack Obama that the Republican brand remain discredited not just for a season or two, but until November 2012.

Times may remain tough for some months to come. The worse Bush looks in 2008, the longer Obama can blame him for the problems of 2009, 2010, 2011... who knows how long?

Democrats campaigned against Herbert Hoover into the 1960s. John McCain campaigned against Jimmy Carter 28 years after the failure of that presidency. George W. Bush will be a Democratic byword for a generation to come -- and if it takes one unnecessarily nasty winter to maximize the impact of the byword, that seems a price that Democrats are more than prepared to pay. Or more exactly: to have Americans and the world pay.

As Mark Steyn is fond of saying:

When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: "Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life."

Obama has simply taken that aphorism to its logical conclusion.

Read More »

Gateway Pundit: "Obama Plans to Revive Economy With Tax Hikes & Socialized Medicine."

Related: "Can we afford all this? I guess we're going to find out. Here's the good part: There might be some pretty good poster art [We've already gotten plenty of 1930s-style poster art from Obama--Ed] and some interesting architecture. For all our sakes, I hope this pans out."

Victor Davis Hanson writes that California "is now a valuable touchstone to the country, a warning of what not to do":

Rarely has a single generation inherited so much natural wealth and bounty from the investment and hard work of those more noble now resting in our cemeteries--and squandered that gift within a generation. Compare the vast gulf from old Governor Pat Brown to Gray Davis or Arnold Schwarzenegger. We did not invest in many dams, canals, rails, and airports (though we use them all to excess); we sued each other rather than planned; wrote impact statements rather than left behind infrastructure; we redistributed, indulged, blamed, and so managed all at once to create a state with about the highest income and sales taxes and the worst schools, roads, hospitals, and airports. A walk through downtown San Francisco, a stroll up the Fresno downtown mall, a drive along highway 101 (yes, in many places it is still a four-lane, pot-holed highway), an afternoon at LAX, a glance at the catalogue of Cal State Monterey, a visit to the park in Parlier--all that would make our forefathers weep. We can't build a new nuclear plant; can't drill a new offshore oil well; can't build an all-weather road across the Sierra; can't build a few tracts of new affordable houses in the Bay Area; can't build a dam for a water-short state; and can't create even a mediocre passenger rail system. Everything else--well, we do that well.

California's unemployment has just risen to 8.2 percent, the third highest in the nation.

Meanwhile, Patterico asks, "Is Arnold Risking a Recall?"

Update: Silicon Valley journalist Michael Malone explores the positive benefits of corporate euthanasia as a way of jumpstarting the moribund economy.

While those toffee noses at the Daily Mail are busy bitching about when their futuristic cars will arrive, Iowahawk delivers.

But does the Congressional Motors Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition come in Ackerman blue?

John Agresto writes, "In trying to resurrect conservatism and the Republican party, I fear there's a whole segment of our country we can never reach. These people, whether rich or poor, are not our natural constituents. These are the people to whom things are owed:"

We saw it after the Katrina debacle, at the other end of the socioeconomic scale: "Why are you so slow to help us? Where is our money and food? Why haven't you been here, government, rebuilding my house? I know my rights, and my rights include welfare, subsidies, support, and attention. We're not to be treated like those victims of tornadoes in the Midwest who pull themselves together, help their friends, patrol their communities, and rebuild their neighborhoods. No, life is supposed to be easy, big and easy; why aren't you here right now with the support I deserve?" And we hear it from the fat financial community who want the bailout check left at their door while they go on rich retreats to celebrate their good fortune.

This, by the way, is why Sarah Palin was so refreshing and, to be clear, so exotic to all the elites: a woman who could raise herself up by dint of hard work and self-sacrifice to be a wife, mother, mayor, and governor. She didn't do it by set-asides, by birth, by quotas, or by handouts. She did it as a woman and she did it by her efforts. She exemplified what we all once saw as America--a land of opportunity, where you could be anything you set your mind to be so long as you worked for it. She showed us something about both her character and ours, our old-fashioned American character. For all this, she had to be ridiculed--she represented a kind of American virtue that shames the privileged, whether they be rich or poor.

Meanwhile, Ramesh Ponnuru expects an "overlapping series of Republican civil wars, each with its own theme," on the painful road to 2012.

Found via Power Line, Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal notes that Obama's first job will be bailing out FDR:

His friends advise Barack Obama to launch a "New" New Deal. Maybe that's because the old New Deal is sinking fast.

Mr. Obama's one deeply false note during the campaign was his harping on "deregulation" as if that were the source of current troubles. His real problem is the crack-up of the world FDR built.

Fannie Mae was a New Deal creation, subsidizing the securitization of mortgage debt. FDR's successors piled on the subsidies for housing debt and incentives directed at low-income borrowers. Kaboom.

Then there's the UAW, born in 1935. For decades the UAW steadily traded away domestic auto market-share to imports and transplants to keep its aging membership toiling away toward their golden pensions and collecting wages and benefits twice those of their competitors. It worked for a while . . .

Mr. Obama must be looking around and beginning to suspect he will be pouring his political capital, along with considerable taxpayer capital, down bottomless holes for the next four years. He won't be building a legacy as the new FDR, but cleaning up after the last one.

In contrast, Jonah Goldberg channels Paul McCartney, and suggests that Obama simply Let It Be:

By all means, let's hope President Obama will project confidence. But maybe he should express less confidence in the government's ability to get people working again, and more in the ability of regular Americans to rise from the ashes of any hardship. In short, don't just do something, President Obama, stand there.

Read the whole thing.

Mark Finkelstein of Newsbusters:

Barney Frank favors bailing out the Detroit automakers over letting them go into bankruptcy. Chief among his concerns is that bankruptcy might "bust" the unions. You know, those organizations whose contract demands have put Detroit on the brink of extinction.

Exactly. In contrast, Mitt Romney recommends harsher medicine: "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt."

As a proponent of the Airplane school of laissez faire economics, I concur.

George Will's question is directed at America's automobile manufacturers, but it could just as soon be applied to another sclerotic triptych of dinosaurs from the mass production age: the over-the-air television networks--or at least their kultursmog-spewing news divisions.

The Onion: "Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?"

Meanwhile, in a story that both indirectly involves The Onion and seems tailor made for it, a college professor has sued students who've slandered him:

After you've been called racist by some students, can you sue to get your reputation back?

Richard J. Peltz, who teaches law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, tried. The idea of suing students intrigued and worried many observers of the professoriate, and Peltz's case prompted much discussion about free speech and the respect that should be accorded both professors and students. Peltz has now dropped his suit -- but he did so only after the law school agreed to fully investigate the charges against him and after he received a letter affirming that, based on that investigation, he had done nothing racist or inappropriate.

The university has also agreed to discuss allowing Peltz to again teach required courses, which he was barred from offering once the complaints against him were filed.

* * *

The demands for Peltz to be punished and removed from teaching required courses came from the Black Law Student Association at Little Rock and from a local group of black lawyers -- groups whose leaders Peltz sued and who did not respond to requests for comment either now or when the suit was filed. The complaints concerned a series of class discussions in his constitutional law course that touched in some way or another on race or affirmative action. The complaints started after Peltz participated in a campus debate on affirmative action -- at the invitation of the black law students' group -- and argued against it.

The various accusations against Peltz were circulated to people at the law school in memos that Peltz cited in his defamation suit. In his own detailed accounting of the charges, now backed by the university, he answers the charges against him point by point.

One of the examples of his alleged racial insensitivity was that he used an article on the death of Rosa Parks from The Onion to prompt class discussion. The black students' memo called The Onion "a conservative based medium that uses satire" and said that the article "poked fun at the contribution Rosa Parks made" to the civil rights movement. As Peltz has noted, The Onion is not seen by most people as conservative and in fact regularly makes fun of conservatives (as well as liberals), and the article in question appears to mock, not Parks, but Republicans who think that racial discrimination is all in the past.

(Via Glenn Reynolds.)

"Fashion Magazines Bear Brunt Of Economic Meltdown."

Hugh Hewitt writes:

On Friday night's Hannity & Colmes, I noted that markets had been "pricing in" the consequences of sending President-elect Obama and strong Democratic majorities, and my e-mail box filled up with outrage at the idea that the president-elect caused the market collapse.

Which goes to show that the president-elect's partisans aren't going to be listening very closely when anyone criticizes the new president. Of course the president-elect didn't cause the market collapse. But the numbers post-11/4 are tough to ignore.

With the polls still open on election day, the Dow closed at 9,625, the NASDAQ at 1,780 and the S&P 500 at 1005.

By comparison, yesterday the markets closed at 8,497, 1,516, and 873 respectively.

That's the bad news. The good news is that more and more voices are being heard noting the absurdity of the panic the economy is gripped by, and predicting that while there is a recession which will be as difficult as any recession, the underlying fundamentals are very strong indeed and that stock and commodities markets are oversold, real estate fairly priced, and bonds too rich for the real data.

As Hugh concludes, "The election of Obama didn't cause the market collapse. But worries about his policies have certainly taken it lower than it needed to go and will continue to act as an anchor on stocks until some clarity emerges about the direction he intends to head. The sooner the better on that."

As is obvious to many new car shoppers, Michael Barone notes that "Detroit Automakers a Relic of the Past":

The Detroit Three are taking advantage of the passage of the $700 billion financial bailout to argue that they, too, need government money to go on. But as Megan McArdle of The Atlantic argues, the finance firms are different. If credit coagulates, everyone suffers, while if the Detroit Three go bankrupt, their shareholders lose their stake, employee and retiree pay and benefits are cut, and real estate values go down in areas where the companies and their suppliers operate -- but life for most of us goes on.

McArdle, native of a similarly bedraggled industrial area (Upstate New York) and an Obama supporter, further argues that the capital invested in keeping the hulk of the Detroit Three operating pretty much as they are, unprofitably, will not be available to those whose startups could morph into the Microsofts and FedExes of the future. We don't know who today's Bill Gateses and Fred Smiths are, but markets sure have a better chance of finding them than the federal government.

My take? When in doubt, let Airplane be your guide:





Update: The governor of South Carolina also appears to espouse the epistemology of Airplane.

Sorry to further invert Bill Moyers' infamous shot at Barry Goldwater, but Jim Geraghty and Ace of Spades describe a huge weakness of John McCain that proved fatal to his electoral viability. Ace writes:

There is no "McCainism" as there was a "Bushism" or "Reaganism." Those men offered fairly clear visions (well, Reagan particularly so). Not McCain. Everything with him is just his personal gut, principle-free, just an instinct, an impulse, which often takes him in wildly contradictory places (but he's always haughty about the moral superiority of his decisions).

For example, he's pro-drilling... but not in ANWR. Um, why? He's forever undercutting himself with unexplained hedges and caveats.

He's pro-business... Kinda. Except when he's making his distaste for anyone working in the private sector "for profit not patriotism" so glaringly evident.

He wants to lower taxes. Sorta. Sometimes. Maybe. In election years.

We must regard Obama as suspect because of his association with the terrorist Bill Ayers... but it's racist to mention his membership in Jeremiah Wright's Church of Hate.

Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty has perhaps the definitive example of how McCain's gut led him to the moment that cost him the election: temporarily suspending his campaign--in service of the ultimately unpopular fiscal bailout. As Karl Rove noted a couple of weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, McCain's poll numbers never recovered.

We shared our immediate election thoughts last night on PJM Political, and Ed Morrissey has his own lengthy election postmortem, which concludes:

If the GOP wants to win 60 million votes in future national elections, it has to stand for something other than being Democrat Lite. The Republican Party needs clarity, purpose, and most importantly, an end to the hypocrisy of talking smaller government while porking up their districts. When given only a choice between real Democrats and fake Democrats, Americans will choose the former, which we found out in 2006.

Meanwhile, Dr. Helen adds, "It's the economy, stupid":

I was just watching numerous young Obama fans celebrating on the Fox News channel and read the stats scrolling across the bottom of the page. They stated that over 60% of voters who were worried about the economy voted for Obama. That, for me, summed it up in a nutshell. So many right-leaning types are trying hard to figure out what they did, what the Republicans did, and why they lost. Each election cycle, there's always a theme. For the last two elections, it was Iraq and national security.

Now those issues are in the background and this time around, it's the economic crisis, with a little (or a lot) of help from the media in pushing it to the forefront in people's minds.

Since Good News Is No News, consider this an unintentional thank you from the New York Times to the man who helped pushed the economic issue to the forefront in the media, via his success in Iraq and elsewhere in the War On Terror.

Update: With Steve Green likely recovering from the Mother Of All Hangovers, the election postmortem by Will Collier, his partner in Stoli at Vodkapundit is also well worth your time.

AP: "Stocks fall as investors ponder Obama presidency."

Related: Here's another leading indicator: "Party on, dudes!"

Glenn Reynolds notes that "Obama is already preparing his transition, and having his aides read books about FDR in the hope of another 100 days."--but it's worth noting that the cries of a New New Deal came several months before the financial crisis this fall.

In "A Date With Scarcity", his latest op-ed, David Brooks writes:

Nov. 4, 2008, is a historic day because it marks the end of an economic era, a political era and a generational era all at once.

Economically, it marks the end of the Long Boom, which began in 1983. Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance, which began in 1980. Generationally, it marks the end of baby boomer supremacy, which began in 1968. For the past 16 years, baby boomers, who were formed by the tumult of the 1960s, occupied the White House. By Tuesday night, if the polls are to be believed, a member of a new generation will become president-elect.

So today is not only a pivot, but a confluence of pivots.

It certainly is--and I explored several of those pivots in video form, last week.

Update: Shannon Love asks, "If Obama's economic policies work so well, why isn't Detroit a paradise?" and notes, "We may soon be living in a repeat of '70s and looking back at the years 1984-2007 as a golden era."

Whoops--sorry, that's, "I want m************ Joe the plumber dead", apparently caught on an open mic during a newsbreak at San Francisco's KGO-AM talk radio station. More Plumber Derangement Syndrome spotted here.

James Pethokoukis explains "Why Democrats Will Target the Investor Class in 2009":

If Barack Obama is elected president next week, 2009 may well bring a concerted and all-out effort by the Obama administration and a Democratically dominated Congress to turn the generally pro-Republican Investor Class into an endangered class by, among other tactics, raising investment taxes and ending the tax preferences for 401(k)'s, IRAs, and other retirement accounts.

Via Betsy Newmark, who writes, "watch for it. Don't say you weren't warned."

Update: More via the Professor.

Amity Shlaes reminds us that yes indeed, FDR's policies prolonged the Depression--or as Mark Steyn wrote at the start of the month:

"Lots of other places -- from Britain to Australia -- took a hit in 1929 but, alas, they lacked an FDR to keep it going till the end of the Thirties. That's why in other countries they refer to it as "the Depression," but only in the U.S. is it 'Great.'"

For most of the 1970s, Archie and Edith sang, "Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again." It took a few decades, but at long last, their wish finally comes true.

Meanwhile, Charles Johnson spots one huge budget-busting proposal from Obama, which is troubling not just for its fiscal excess.

That's a youthful, if momentarily glazed-looking Bill O'Reilly in the above YouTube clip from a news update twenty years ago (and about five years before this now-viral moment referenced in the above headline). Note the position of the Dow at the end of the segment, which provides some surprisingly reassuring contrast for where it stands today.

Amanda Carpenter catches a sly moment of numerical slight-of-hand as well in the Obamamercial, for those thinking of going John Galt next year.

Biggest celebrity in the world already known for his faux-presidential seal and other self-reverential campaign graphics produces infomercial on mock-White House set. Chris Matthews' take? "It was romance. It was realism."

More human than human is our motto. But like another product of the Tyrell Corporation, does Obama see unicorns when he dreams?

Larry Kudlow talks presidential economics on this week's edition of PJM Political, also featuring James Lileks' warm remembrance of Dean Barnett, and a round-table pre-postmortem of next week's election featuring Steve Green, Lileks, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air and myself.

And you'll never look at Five Easy Pieces the same way again!

Sarbanes-Oxley? That's strictly for those Joe the Plumber-type suckers in the private sector, writes TigerHawk:

Mark Steyn has more on the hilarious and probably intentional failure of internal controls at the Obama campaign. If it were a public company it would have to disclose a material weakness, and its auditors would wonder whether its "tone from the top" had actually encouraged the practices in question. Fortunately for politicians of all parties, we do not hold government to anything like the same standard of accountability that applies to private businesses with public stockholders.

Reviewing the last weeks of a campaign that seems like it commenced "sometime during your first child's initial year in primary school", Tim Blairadds, "this is just a guess, but it could be that the rules are different for Democrats."

(Video found via Little Green Footballs.)

Certainly in terms of their collective mental health, we know that to be true from the yin and yang of the Michael Malone and Mary Mapes posts we linked to yesterday, but the Professor also spots, as he calls it, more media retrenchment:

"The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., will reduce its newsroom staff by nearly half through voluntary buyouts as New Jersey's largest newspaper seeks to return to profitability." Whatever happens to the rest of the world, the news business is already in a depression.

And just as it did with the economic slowdowns in the early 1990s and the period surrounding 9/11, there's little doubt the media's own woes are coloring how they report the business news outside of their industry.

Echoing the slogan of the 1930s National Recovery Administration, Mickey Kaus writes that even "Baskin-Robbins is doing its part" to get their man elected.

The NRA (no relation to this NRA) gave corporations that "did their part" a blue eagle logo to display--and woe betide those who didn't cooperate. Presumably, Baskin-Robbins is hoping to be rewarded with the official "Patriot Employer" symbol for their more recent efforts.

Kathy Shaidle connects the dots and illustrates why the Gray Lady is in more than a Pinch of trouble.

As Nicole Gelinas noted back in April, when New York's Governor David Paterson was inaugurated, he heard from a number of his old friends, now living out of state:

Paterson cited a number of personal friends, all former New Yorkers, who have contacted him from out of state since his ascent to the governorship. "A friend from primary school, Randy San Antonio, told me he moved to Dallas 20 years ago," Paterson began. "Another friend, Randy Watts, had moved to Reno. A friend from Syracuse, Marvin Lee Simons, said he's working in Lower Manhattan. I said we should get together . . . and he said, 'Well, I don't live in New York. I live in western Pennsylvania.' Jeff and Stacey Stackhouse wanted to start a business on Long Island. They moved two years ago--they're trying to start their business in Charlotte, North Carolina. They couldn't pay the taxes here."

Gov. Paterson's chief of staff has his own idiosyncratic, remarkably psychosomatic solution to the issue--a severe case of "non-filer syndrome."

(John Derbyshire writes about it here, just before being overcome with a terrible case of "non-blogger syndrome.")

I've always thought socialism was an oft-used legitimate phrase to describe a wealth-distribution scheme involving high taxes and a command and control economy that placed onerous burdens on entrepreneurs and businesses, but was considered, particularly in the first half of the 20th century, much less bloody than the alternatives further towards the left. But lately, it's apparently become a codeword--but is socialism code for being black or being Muslim?

Let me know the definitive answer and get back to me, fellas.

Update: "Biden advises GOP to focus on economy, not attacks"--and yet when they do, they're smeared by Obama's surrogates, which makes for quite a Mobius loop.

Back in April, Obama discussed Reverend Wright with Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: Did you talk to reverend Wright recently about his decision to make a series of public appearances at this particular point?

OBAMA: You know, I didn't talk to him about that. I had talked to him after all this had happened, partly because I regretted -- I always regret people who are civilians, essentially, being dragged into these political fights.

And I expressed to him -- I said, "Look, we have very strong differences. I do not agree with the comments that you made. On the other hand, I regret that you have drawn so much attention."

Obama talking about his wife, back in July:

And I've said this before: I would never have my campaign engage in a concerted effort to make Cindy McCain an issue, and I would not expect the Democratic National Committee or people who were allied with me to do it. Because essentially, spouses are civilians. They didn't sign up for this. They're supporting their spouse.

I guess once you move beyond the inner circle, the definition of "civilian" becomes slightly hazier.

In the Weekly Standard, Sam Schulman asks, "Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible?"

Pour yourself a Johnnie Walker Black and remember. The presidential campaign was going to be about sex--the sex of the inevitable winning candidate. Then it was going to be about race. We dreamed we would atone for slavery and the Berlin Airlift, impress Europe and charm the Arab world. But the undecided voters who will determine the winner are no longer interested in race or sex. They are looking at social class. Which ticket best expresses the values and tastes of the upper-middle-class--and captivates the rest of us who follow the lead of the upper-middles?

The class argument is why the Bill Ayers strategy won't do. In the sex and race eras, it would have worked nicely. Obama's longtime working collaboration with the radical educational theorist and retired terrorist would dramatize his carefully but hastily discarded political radicalism. But no longer. The anti-Ayers publicists are quite right about Ayers's malignity and Obama's connivance. But when they try to explain what Ayers has done in the past and still wants to do--turn schools into nurseries of revolution, make leftist views a condition for becoming a teacher, promote dictatorship, and glorify violence--they injure not help their cause. Class will always trump politics. Being the first in one's family to adopt liberal political sentiments or move to New York City means a step into the middle class, for most Americans, and an increase in social status. More extreme political radicalism lifts one a step or two higher.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn became Sixties royalty not because of the status of the Ayers family in Chicago, but because of their relish for violence. They attempted to kill, and celebrated the killings of others (like Charles Manson's victims and the murder of any number of cops), to set an example for the less privileged. "We've known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution. . . . Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don't do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way," said the future Mrs. Ayers in 1970. On the other hand, there were the masses of students who merely marched and flashed the peace sign. Socially, they were nowhere. That was the shock of the Kent State massacre--the veteran martyrs of Harvard's University Hall and Columbia's Low Library wondered that such a terrible and authentic event could have taken place at a far-away state school to people of whom we knew nothing.

Now mainstream Chicago regards Ayers as rehabilitated--but why?

Schulman's piece appears to have written before a certain Ohio tradesman became a household name. But the blowback caused by Joe's walk-on part in the cold civil war reminds us that it is very much a class war--and specifically, the left's attempts to eviscerate the middle and working classes.

Related: Jennifer Rubin writes, "Suddenly, the race card doesn't look as important as the class warfare card."

Dave Burge of Iowahawk has a rare non-satiric post in which he writes:

We've all witnessed a lot of insanity in American politics over the last few years. Up until the last few days, none of it has seriously bothered me; hey, just more grist for the satire mill. But after witnessing the media's blitzkreig on Joe 'the Plumber' Wurzelbacher, I can only muster anger, and no small amount of fear.

Politicians -- Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton, et al. -- obviously have to put up with some rude, nasty shit, but it's right there in the jobs description. Joe the Plumber is different. He was a guy tossing a football with his kid in the front yard of his $125,000 house when a politician picked him out as a prop for a 30 second newsbite for the cable news cameras. Joe simply had the temerity to speak truth (or, if you prefer, an uninformed opinion) to power, for which the politico-media axis apparently determined that he must be humiliated, harassed, smashed, destroyed. The viciousness and glee with which they set about the task ought to concern anyone who still cares about citizen participation, and freedom of speech, and all that old crap they taught in Civics class before politics turned into Narrative Deathrace 3000, and Web 2.0 turned into Berlin 1932.0.

Godwin's Law! you say? if the jackboot fits, wear it.

Or as Jim Treacher notes:

The whole "He's not a licensed plumber!" non sequitur is really fantastic. So, if you happen to be standing in front of Obama when he publicly reveals his socialism, what does the media do? Demands to see your papers. That's just delicious, is what that is.

Of course, at Matt Drudge once said:

"Roger Ailes told me early on, you don't need a license to report. You need a license to do hair".

Or be a plumber. But which job gets your hands dirtier?

(Meanwhile, Jim Lindgren spots a tax issue that doesn't involve Joe the Plumber, but an actual presidential candidate. Which is why the issue will never be raised by the media.)

That's Betsy Newmark's take on Joe Wurzelbacher, though it's happening in a slightly reverse fashion from George Allen's seminal gaffe in 2006. The establishment liberal media magnified Allen's own mistake a thousandfold. In this case, Obama's Kinsley-esque gaffe that demonstrates his soft socialism is undergoing a far more intense scrutiny than it otherwise would have as a byproduct of the media's declaring war on somebody who was approached by Obama to ask the candidate a question. In any case, it's a reminder that once the Two-Minute Warning sounds, strange things begin to happen:

Meanwhile, in his own video series with fellow-NRO-er Mark Hemingway, Jim Geraghty posits:

I contend we've passed a threshold in the way the media perceives their jobs; they'll never go back to paying any attention to news that is bad for their preferred candidates, and they'll never again worry about accuracy in stories that are critical of the candidates they hate.

Fortunately though, even when the media wiffs a story, the truth occasionally still wins out.

While he maybe the 21st century's answer to Amity Shlaes' Forgotten Man of the 1930s, as Robert Stacy McCain writes, "Frankly, I'm not worried about Joe, who can obviously take care of himself. I'll be surprised if he doesn't have a book deal and his own talk radio show by Election Day."

Say, I hear there's going to be an opening over at CNN pretty soon...

Chris Muir reminds us that plumbers often perform a pretty healthy reality check:

I've already linked to Glenn Reynolds' post on Joe Wurzelbacher, but this quote from one his readers is worth highlighting:

The harassment of Joe the plumber is the singular biggest mistake of the Obama campaign. The MSM is making Joe a martyr. Heck, DKos just published Joe's home address. Obama is now not only a Marxist but a Marxist bully - just another Chicago thug. America roots for the underdog and they will not take this action kindly. If Joe were a hero yesterday, wait a few days.

Obi Wan's line in Star Wars when fighting Darth Vader comes to mind - "Strike me down and I will return more powerful than you can possibly imagine." Americans will realize what happened to Joe could easily happen to them. And they will remember this come November.

Well, some will, but whether or not the politics of plumber destruction will be a game changer remains to be seen, of course. But the dynamics of the story do seem vaguely similar to the memorial for Paul Wellstone in late October of 2002. It was initially planned as a bipartisan memorial to an earnest Minnesota politician tragically killed when his private campaign plane crashed. The "memorial" became in the end, a hugely partisan pep rally, demonstrating for millions the most rapacious aspects of the far left in an election year. The back-to-back attacks by the establishment liberal press and their candidates on two conservative-appearing middle Americans, first Sarah Palin, and now Joe Wurzelbacher similarly demonstrate how craven the left can act when they smell blood in the water.

At least American blood. Terrorist blood should never be shed, of course.

Noel Sheppard writes:

Somehow I get the feeling we're going to be hearing much more from Joe...how 'bout you?

Post facto exit question: is Joe the Plumber this election's October surprise? Could he single-handedly change this entire campaign?

Think about it: regular guy wanting to advance himself without the shackles of a socialist tax plan.

Could this be a game-changer?

Not in the slightest.

As Glenn Reynolds writes, the legacy media have done "more investigations into Joe the Plumber in 24 hours than they've done on Barack Obama in two years." The media have internalized Joseph Conrad's famous aphorism from The Heart of Darkness and they're in the process of completely destroying Joe the Plumber, as an object lesson for anyone else who dares Think Different, just as they've already successfully done with Sarah Palin, just as they did 20 years ago with Dan Quayle. Occasionally, an apostate such as Ronald Reagan, Clarance Thomas, Rush Limbaugh or George W. Bush is able to survive such exposure and go on to powerful accomplishments, which is all the more reason why the media must destroy the Other, the Alien, before his message becomes too powerful.

Update: And just like that, a meme is born! Ed Morrissey (with a memetic assist from Jim Treacher) goes inside "The Tanning Bed Media."

As we've discussed numerous times around here, when states go from red, or even purple, to hard core blue--residents and businesses vote with their feet. (Even in the big blue states overseas.)

Ed Morrissey's latest post explores similar ground--and it focuses on a state (New Jersey) whose fiscal and gubernatorial woes were the subject of one of our very first podcasts.

Update: This comment underneath Ed's post crystallizes the opinions I've heard from several of my friends and family still in New Jersey.

Tim Blair looks on the bright side of the financial crisis: "Considering that greenish economic policies would have delivered similar financial setbacks, but over a much longer period, we're ahead here. Just."

Update: If the Green Bubble has burst, the pork bubble is, as always, indestructible. But here's some good news here, more or less.

Breaking financial news just in from The New York Daily News: "Prostitution has not suffered drop-off despite economic meltdown."

But is the world's oldest profession considered a leading or lagging economic indicator?

"It seems odd that the people of Minnesota would infer from an economic crisis that they should send a baggy pants comedian to the Senate, but I suppose a panic consists, in part, of irrational behavior on a large scale."

Didn't they learn their lesson from the 1980s? Is it a coincidence that the economy took off the moment that Al Franken was off network TV?

(Of course. But why take chances?)

Mike Huckabee and blogger Frank Martin each question the timing of the markets' current meltdown.

Oracle's Larry Ellison has the right business mindset for a time like this, and as far as conspiracy theories, for the moment, I agree with one of Frank's commenters, who quotes one of Charles Krauthammer's aphorisms:

Krauthammer's razor (with apologies to Occam): In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.

I agree--but I also reserve the right to revise and extend my remarks at a later date, once everything shakes out, as it inevitably will.

Christopher Buckley (yes, Bill's son) breathes deep the cult of Obama, endorsing him, and adding:

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren't going to get us out of this pit we've dug for ourselves.

Jennifer Rubin asks, "Oh, my--where to begin?"

A first-class temperament does not consort with terrorists or lie about his affiliation with the same. A first-class temperament does not invoke the race card when presented with legitimate criticism. A first-class temperament does not seek to shed his Leftist skin for political expediency. To conclude otherwise is confuse calm with deceit.

And as for the hope that his first-class intellect will lead him away from more extreme ideas, I am not sure what biography Mr. Buckley has been reading. But Obama's is replete with identification with Left-wing causes and their practitioners. What would possibly lead him now to rethink a lifetime of political thought and action? Certainly a smashing political victory and a compliant Democratic Congress will be confirmation, if any was needed, that he has been on the correct ideological track.

On the other hand, considering how closely McCain's fortunes have tracked the S&P 500, it may all be academic, sort of like a course taught by Bill Ayers.

Jonah Goldberg writes, "The simple, relevant fact is that the more detailed and extensive a plan a president proposes, the less likely it is that it will be enacted":

One basic reason for this -- often overlooked by politicians and the journalists who cover them -- is that presidents don't make laws in our system. Congress does. And Congress usually has plans of its own. Bill Clinton promised health-care reform, and his wife had a plan thicker than the New York City Yellow Pages. Congress never even voted on it.

Much like Obama, Bill Clinton barnstormed the country promising a middle-class tax cut. Once he got into the White House, that got filed under "never gonna happen." George H.W. Bush said "read my lips" about his plan to never, ever, ever raise taxes. It turned out that "never" is a term open to many interpretations.

As Jonah concludes:

I'm not saying that candidates shouldn't have platforms. But voters -- and journalists -- should look at them as mission statements, not the political equivalent of instructions that come with a disassembled bicycle.

The real hints for how to choose a candidate, at least in a general election (as opposed to a primary), reside in the realm of judgment, philosophy, track record and temperament. And, using those criteria, the choice shouldn't be hard at all.

It's also worth revisting Jesse Walker's article from this past April in Reason, which listed FDR's campaign promises as a candidate in 1932. As Jesse notes, what FDR proposed is a far cry from the monstrosities of the New Deal which wound up prolonging the Depression for seven agonizing years. (And would ultimately require something even more torturous--World War II--to jump start the American economy.)

Related: "Who Killed 'Reality'? Who But The Media?"

As Jonah Goldberg writes, "The specter of Herbert Hoover is conjured every time there's an economic calamity, large or small":

But you know what? Specters are ghosts. And ghosts aren't real.

The Herbert Hoover of popular imagination was a laissez-faire lickspittle of Adam Smith. But this idea began as Rooseveltian propaganda and endures as the creation myth of modern liberalism.

William Leuchtenburg, possibly the greatest authority on the FDR era, wrote some time ago, "Almost every historian now recognizes that the image of Hoover as a 'do-nothing' president is inaccurate."

After the stock market crash of 1929, Hoover browbeat business leaders to keep wages and prices high. He invested heavily in public works projects. He pushed for an international moratorium on debts. He created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which later became a home for many of FDR's Brain Trusters. Hoover increased farm subsidies enormously.

Some of Hoover's interventions were good but ineffectual. A few were very, very bad and very effective.

In 1932, Hoover in effect repealed Calvin Coolidge's tax cuts, increasing the rates for the poorest taxpayers by more than 100 percent and hiking the top rate from 25 percent to 63 percent. Worse, contrary to his own better instincts, Hoover signed the disastrous Smoot-Hawley trade bill that raised protectionist walls at precisely the moment the world needed trade the most.

Then there's this idea that FDR rode to the rescue, saving the day by untying the American people from the railroad tracks of runaway capitalism. Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, now a surrogate for Barack Obama, recently said on NPR: "It's very tempting to always think that the government should just stand back and let the private sector sort these problems out. That's the kind of thinking that made the Depression 'Great.'"

Summers should know better (in fact, I'm sure he does). The Great Depression was not made "Great" by government inaction. Indeed, FDR's New Deal may have been wonderful in some mytho-poetic sense, and maybe some of its reforms can be defended in some broader context, but as an effort to end the Great Depression, the New Deal was a failure. As my colleague Mark Steyn writes, "Lots of other places -- from Britain to Australia -- took a hit in 1929 but, alas, they lacked an FDR to keep it going till the end of the Thirties. That's why in other countries they refer to it as "the Depression," but only in the U.S. is it 'Great.'"

Which is why the great Amity Shlaes reminds us in her recent column that "The stock market crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression were not the same thing". The late Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal titled a nifty economic history of the 1980s The Seven Fat Years. FDR turned the Depression into seven very, very lean years:

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

Read the rest, here.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt brings it all up to date with the omnious-sounding, "President Barack Hoover."

Michelle Malkin posits why NBC has yanked one of the few Saturday Night Live sketches that's both funny (at times) and actually pokes fun at the left. (Given the overt biases of both SNL and NBC as a whole, that's no doubt a big part of the reason in and of itself that the clip was pulled from NBC's video site.) And Pat Dollard has uploaded his own copy of the video, here.

Somebody doesn't want you to watch it--isn't that reason enough to click over?

A couple of weeks ago, Tom Blumer wrote at Pajamas, "Very Different Economic Times in Red vs. Blue States"; certainly the very blue "parentheses states", as Tom Wolfe described them, have been having a tough time making a go of it, as these two headlines on the Drudge Report indicate:

• SCHWARZENEGGER: CALIFORNIA MAY NEED EMERGENCY LOAN...
• New York Deficit Swells...

Or as a recent City Journal article put it, "Houston, New York Has a Problem."

Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin asks, "What's The Matter With Harry?"

One of the more curious -- but not unprecedented -- incidents in the last couple of weeks involved Harry Reid. The Wall Street Journal explains:

Just as U.S. credit markets this week were close to the edge of the cliff, threatening capital-starved businesses large and small, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stepped in front of reporters and offhandedly announced:

"One of the individuals in the caucus today talked about a major insurance company. A major insurance company -- one with a name that everyone knows that's on the verge of going bankrupt. That's what this is all about." The next day, share prices fell sharply across the insurance industry. Let us stipulate we do not think it necessary for even U.S. Senators to understand the internal mechanics of credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. But if we have learned anything amid the panic over Bear, Lehman, Merrill and adventures in naked short-selling, it is that rumors can obliterate economic value, instantly.

But this wasn't the only such incident:

It calls to mind Senator Chuck Schumer's public suggestion in July that troubled IndyMac Bank "could face collapse." It did, after a deposit run. Senator Schumer said criticizing his action was akin to blaming "the fire on the guy who called 911." The nation's shareholders would sleep better at night if some Members of Congress enrolled in Arsonists Anonymous.

All of this raises the question: are they trying to make things worse in the hopes of furthering their party's election prospects? Similar suspicions were raised when Nancy Pelosi seemed to inflame her partisan opponents and resist any effort to whip her own caucus on the first failed bailout bill vote. Certainly as the financial crisis has intensified their electoral prospects have brightened.

But if we assume that they "meant no harm" we are left with an equally troubling conclusion: they are reckless and ignorant about the ways in which their words and actions may impact a fragile economy. Or to put it differently, their first consideration is invariably "How do we maximize the public's perception that things are rotten?" rather than "What can we do to contain the conflagration?"

While he may lead the self-described "world's greatest deliberative body", anybody who says this...

"Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It's global warming. It's ruining our country, it's ruining our world. We've got to stop using fossil fuel."

...isn't going to get high scores in the thoughtful rhetoric department.

Related Blue State Blues: Roger Kimball plots "Data points from the Windy City".

Over at the The New Criterion, James Bowman writes:

Whenever I hear anyone use the expression, "trickle-down economics," I want to reply -- though I rarely get the chance to, as it is mainly on TV or in the papers that one hears or reads the people who are using it -- "As opposed to what? Trickle-up economics?"

Much more from Michael Malone at Pajamas HQ.

Live on stage--it's the return of Derek and the Domino Effect!

In case viewers did not understand the concept of a domino effect caused by the financial crisis, on Wednesday's CBS Early Show, co-host Julie Chen offered a visual representation as she declared: "What happens on Wall Street affects all of us on Main Street. It's the classic domino effect." At that point, six giant dominos where displayed in the studio, each one labeled with a different phase of the economic crisis.

Of course, in the early 1970s, when the real Derek and the Dominos were on tour, the media was telling us that domino effects were silly and outdated.

I remember reading a book on Stanley Kubrick that said that the great director wanted a large circular table in the middle of Dr. Strangelove's war room set, so that it would symbolically appear to audiences that the generals and the president were playing a very high stakes game of poker.

Here's a bluff of another sort:

You know where that very important $700-billion figure came from?

Here's a quote from that Forbes story:

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

They made it up to be sufficiently ginormous to frighten everyone into rapid action.

And it worked.

Not yet.

Allah Pundit has the gory details here:

House Republicans weren't willing to swallow a bitter pill today so they'll swallow a more bitter pill later this week. And guess what? They'll still get killed at the polls in November. Bill Kristol thinks McCain's only chance now is to stop campaigning (again) and come back to D.C. to try to drive through a compromise. If he succeeds, it'll prove his leadership and calm the markets. I don't see how he's supposed to pull that off, though, when the entire Democratic leadership will be primed to whine about how he's only making things worse by being there, is ruining delicate negotiations, etc. If Kristol's serious about solving the crisis and willing to sacrifice electoral gain to do so, there's an easy compromise solution: Have McCain and Obama do some sort of joint appearance, maybe a presser, urging support for a bailout. That'll swing public opinion sufficiently to remove the political incentives to voting no and give Pelosi the 10 votes she needs to pass it now. There's no gain for McCain at the polls in doing so, admittedly, but he's the guy who preaches "country first." Here's his chance.

Howard Fineman of the Obama-cheerleading Newsweek writes, "The Obama Administration began at midnight Sunday"--and at the moment, it's tough to argue with him; though hopefully Obama won't prolong the current financial malaise as long as FDR and Carter did theirs.

"They told me if I voted for John Kerry we'd end up with socialism. They were right!"

So Bill Clinton let Osama bin Laden go, but captured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now there's an awesome rep for the history books.

For those insomniacs checking in with us in the wee wee hours, be warned--here's a little something from Gateway Pundit guaranteed not to generate sweet dreams:

The financial crisis is real. Most people don't realize it yet, but banks, investment managers and corporate treasurers around the world all know what is going on. It started with the Freddie - Fannie collapse. They wrote loans to individuals who they shouldn't have. Government policies encouraged loans to minorities and the underwriting function of banks was no longer approving loans upon an individual's creditworthiness but their race was now a factor in the loan decision. In 1997 President Clinton's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, claimed Fannie Mae had exhibited "racial discrimination" and proposed that 50 percent of the GSEs' (Fannie and Freddie) loan portfolio be made up of loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers by 2001. When individuals are given loans based on race and not their ability to pay, it is inevitable that bad loans would be written and foreclosures would come. That's what happened and in a big way.

This caused ripple effects throughout the financial services industry. Firms who consolidated loan packages or guaranteed their creditworthiness were caught in the middle. Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers and others went under. The largest insurance company in the US by some measurements was one of the casualties (AIG). With insurance companies around the globe, AIG is hoping to have some business left when all is over. The government stepped in to rescue this giant by providing capital for the firm while it liquidates portions of its business to pay off the investment derivatives which caused it trouble and then pay off the government loan. The investments became bad when the mortgages went south.

The ripple affect continues. Putnam funds, the largest money market fund in the US and rated AAA, had to close its doors since money managers began to realize that Putnam's assets were not guaranteed by the Federal Government (unlike cash in banks and savings and loans) and began to ask for their money. Putnam had to sell securities in order to meet the demand. Although they have begun to pay their account holders, their reputation and money market accounts in general have been severely damaged.

And it only gets worse from there.

The Washington Post says, "Congressional Leaders Announce Breakthrough in Bailout Bill Negotiations":

Congressional leaders and the Bush administration last night struck a historic accord to insert the government deeply into the nation's financial markets, agreeing to spend up to $700 billion to relieve Wall Street of troubled assets backed by faltering home mortgages.

Shouldn't that be "more deeply into the nation's financial markets"? Especially since inserting the government deeply into the nation's financial markets caused all the trouble in the first place.

Rich Lowry:

Pelosi unloads on House Republicans. Why is it always OK for Democrats to call Republicans "unpatriotic"?

Ramesh Ponnuru:

Because it has no sting.

But I thought dissent itself was patriotic.

Update: "We're staring down the barrel of the worst disaster since Katrina or maybe even 9/11 and these people are playing douchebag psych-out games with each other."

Greg Pollowitz writes, "In the debate, Senator Obama laid out his four conditions for passing the bailout bill", "Yet 48 hours earlier, he had five conditions:"

Fifth, we both agree that this financial rescue package should move on its own without any earmarks or other measures. We have different views about the need for other action, but this must be a clean bill.

As Greg writes, "Yeah. . .can't have a clean bill now, can we? Not when there are billions for ACORN at stake."

Or as Glenn Reynolds puts it, "You know, it would be easier for me to believe this was a crisis, if the people in charge were acting like it was a crisis, instead of just an opportunity for graft. Then again, to some of these people, everything is just an opportunity for graft."

Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler has the change spam we need today:

Dear Sirs,

Please do not be alarmed at the way I am contacting you, and I trust God you will see your way to assisting me.

I am Mr. Henry Paulson, and I currently serve as Secretary of Treasury in a North American country, the US of A. I am due to be receiving the sum of USD700 billion (seven hundred billions), only the money seems to be held up. I got your name from the girl who runs the computer. This is where I need your help.

As soon as you can, God willing, I will need you to give me the number of your American account where I can wire this sum. For your trouble, as part of the settlement, I will give you the sum of exactly nothing.

Please be well, and I trust in God you will assist me honestly and without delay.

Yours, truly,

Mr. Henry Paulson
USA Secretary of Treasure

Via Steve Green, who also spots a New York Times parody (yes, there is a difference, believe it or not) that hits the mark quite well.

As the headline on Jim DeMint's blog says, "What Caused The Economic Crisis? Watch This!"

Kevin D. Williamson writes, "We've heard much from the media about CDOs, CDSs, and other previously obscure abbreviations. But we should be hearing more about this acronym: ACORN":

Imagine if the housing bubble hadn't burst, but there hadn't been all those dodgy subprime loans made and then securitized. We'd be reading stories about how America is having a wonderful housing boom but the poor and minorities are being left out. There's lots of greed and stupidity in this story, but we shouldn't ignore the fact that a big part of what is wrong comes from bad public policy designed to encourage homeownership, particularly among the poor. Unintended consequences are not to be denied.

But we're not going to hear much about ACORN's role in all this, or, by extension, Senator Obama's.

Or as Robert Stowe England wrote in 1993:

QUIETLY, behind the scenes, the Clinton Administration is preparing for the biggest regulatory crackdown of recent years. Attorney General Janet Reno is linking up with banking regulators and with HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros to end the supposed epidemic of discrimination against minorities in making home loans. The implications for society at large are ominous.

Paging Cassandra. Miss Cassandra to the red courtesy phone, please.

Update: Robert Bidinotto has a recent post chockablock with links, quotes, and updates titled, "Why the Bubble Burst."

Kathryn Jean Lopez posts an update from Sen. Jim DeMint's office:

We've just been alerted that despite House Democrats relenting on extending bans on offshore drilling and oil shale in the continuing resolution (CR) appropriations bill, Democrat Senate Leader Harry Reid has decided to sneak an extension of the oil shale ban through as Congress fights over the financial bailout. Oil shale in America's West is estimated to hold be between 800 billion and 2 trillion barrels of oil -- that is more than three times the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia alone.

Here is the text of Reid's proposed new ban on oil shale, that he is trying to add as an amendment to the CR or move seperately as a "stimulus" package, or we should say an anti-stimulus package if this is included.

Sec 1602 continues ban on oil shale. The language follows:

SEC. 1602. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, including section 152 of division A of H.R. 2638 (110th Congress), the Consolidated Security, Disaster Assistance, and Continuing Appropriations Act, 2009, the terms and conditions contained in section 433 of division F of Public Law 110-161 shall remain in effect for the 19 fiscal year ending September 30, 2009.

It would be an insult to all Americans if Senate Democrats worked to bailout Wall Street while damaging our future prosperity by banning development of vast energy reserves in oil shale.

Which may help to explain this headline:

Liberal Democrats vow moratorium on offshore drilling to return in '09

Meanwhile, as Glenn Reynolds notes:

AND YOU THOUGHT JOE BIDEN WAS UNFRIENDLY TO COAL: "Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmental crusader Al Gore urged young people on Wednesday to engage in civil disobedience to stop the construction of coal plants without the ability to store carbon."

Will he be advising Obama on energy policy?

Certainly in spirit.

The Northeast Corridor is one giant blue state, so presumably they'll be OK with paying high energy prices come the winter.

Newsbusters' Brent Baker writes, "Couric Scolds McCain for Palin's 'Great Depression' Scare -- Which Couric Proposed to Palin."

And meanwhile, Joe Biden's Pangea of gaffes this week continues to pay dividends--as blogger "Right Wing Professor" noted, Katie never batted an eye during Joe Biden's wacky Depression-era-flashback on Monday.

Mark Levin writes, "I hope McCain and his advisors have thought this through beyond today and tomorrow, gimmick or no gimmick":

Ok, let's say the debate is suspended by both camps. Then what? Bush is pushing hard for some kind of massive bailout deal, and will do so in his speech tonight. The conservatives in Congress are resisting all of this - and good for them. McCain says we have to get something done and work together, which means some kind of massive deal that is unlikely to satisfy conservatives. I hope McCain and his advisors have thought this through beyond today and tomorrow, gimmick or no gimmick.

Jonah Goldberg adds, "Mark makes a good point. If McCain does go to Congress and helps rally reluctant Republicans (and they really are reluctant). It will in effect become the McCain bailout, at least as far as conservatives are concerned."

Meanwhile, Dan Riehl has some advice--and who amongst us doesn't, these days?--for McCain:

Let the Left laugh, with Obama saying he wants to continue campaigning and debating, I'd do two things were I McCain.

1) Say you can understand Obama's point of view as he has never been engaged in anything this serious on Capitol Hill, or anywhere else.

and 2) Volunteer to let his VP nominee sit in for him against Obama on Friday.

Yes, I realize the media is still all about Palin - who cares. I'd make the offer.

Maybe Palin would be better off debating this bitter resident of Pennsylvania.

Update: Welcome Riehl World View readers; check out this interesting chess game being played out in the Senate, with Harry Reid being forgainst John McCain returning to the Senate within the space of 24 hours, as Ed Morrissey of Hot Air notes:

[Reid] wanted McCain on the hook so that Reid could blame McCain for the political fallout. When McCain called Reid's bluff -- and that's what appears to have happened here -- Reid did what Reid always does: retreat.

I think Reid fears more than just the idea that McCain will "risk injecting presidential politics into this process or distract important talks about the future of our nation's economy." What Reid fears is that McCain will return to lead the Republican effort to reach a compromise, and the Senate and House GOP will let him do it. If McCain takes ownership of the bailout effort and manages to get his suggestions on limiting executive compensation and so on as part of the finished product, he will be able to trot McCain-Dodd on the campaign trail as yet another reform he's accomplished by working across the aisle. And in a time of crisis, no less.

And what will Obama be able to say? He gave a couple of speeches and raised cash for himself while McCain went to work for the nation.

If that's what McCain and the Republicans have in mind, this could be the coup of the entire campaign. While Obama went out and sucked up to fundraisers, McCain built the bipartisan compromise that saved the American financial system. If he succeeds, McCain will have trumped Obama on what should have been the Democrats' best issue.

This post started with a quote from Mark Levin hoping that "McCain and his advisors have thought this through beyond today and tomorrow, gimmick or no gimmick." It seems--at least to some extent--that they most certainly have.

Richard Miniter calls McCain's campaign suspension "a shrewd move for the McCain campaign", if not necessarily an example of "country first."--Read the whole thing.

Details at Hot Air; politically, it seems like an interesting move, somewhat reminiscent of this earlier time out. But how will voters--not to mention the junior senator from Illinois--respond?

Update: Well, that was fast:

However a senior Obama campaign official said Obama "intends to debate. The debate is on."

An Obama campaign official said the Democratic presidential candidate called McCain this morning to suggest a joint statement of principles.

McCain called back this afternoon and suggested returning to Washington.

Obama is willing to return to Washington "if it would be helpful." But Obama intends to debate on Friday, an official said.

And thus McCain's next YouTube ad writes itself.

With a bailout plan costing--cue the Dr. Evil voice--700 bee-llion dollars in the works (designed to prevent a meltdown that would in the neighborhood "north of $30 trillion"), The Gormogons write, "So maybe Bush is a fascist after all--Just not in the way the frothing lefties allege."

Meanwhile, (also found via Jonah's Liberal Fascism blog), Roderick Long reminds us:

There never was anything remotely like a period of laissez-faire in American history (at least not if "laissez-faire" means "let the market operate freely" as opposed to "let the rich and powerful help themselves to other people's property"). The regulatory state was deeply involved from the start, particularly in the banking and currency industries and in the assignment of property titles to land.

I think it's also worth comparing the bailout to the period in the first half of the 1970s when the Democrat-controlled Congress attempted to make the trains run on time--or at least keep them running at all--by creating Amtrak in 1971 and Conrail in 1976:

Amtrak was designed to take over passenger railroading, which was essentially rendered superfluous by commercial jet aviation almost everywhere in the US except the sprawling Northeast Corridor, where passenger trains are still viable. Conrail was designed to merge the failed Penn Central and a half dozen other smaller but also bankrupt railroads.

Amtrak is still in existence and still relying upon taxpayer dollars to survive. It may very likely never be financially independent. Conrail was designed from the start to be a profitable company, and eventually did turn a profit by the mid-1980s, when it also went went public, and was eventually merged into two different railroads in 1999. Fortunately, the federal government hasn't gone into the railroad bailout business since the 1970s, and in fact passed sweeping railroad deregulation bills in the late 1970s that helped make Conrail financially viable in the first place.

So hopefully, like the railroad bailouts of the 1970s, this is a once in a lifetime event involving the investment community.

Until the next sector of the Mentos economy fails, of course.

Update: Nick Schulz has "The Acronym We Need."

From the Obama's campaign's latest email to his supporters:

More than 600,000 Americans have lost their jobs since January. Home foreclosures are skyrocketing, and home values are plunging. Gas prices are at an all-time high, and we're still spending more than $10 billion every month on a war in Iraq that should never have been waged.

Obama, back in June:

CNBC's John Harwood: So could the (high) oil prices help us?

Barack Obama: I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment. The fact that this is such a shock to American pocketbooks is not a good thing. But if we take some steps right now to help people make the adjustment, first of all by putting more money in their pockets, but also by encouraging the market to adapt to these new circumstances more rapidly, particularly U.S. automakers...

Or as the president of Fredonia once said, "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."

(Video of Obama being foregainst high gas prices, here.)

Perception:

Percentage of Americans, according to Gallup, who believe we're in a recession: 38 percent.

Percentage of Americans, according to Gallup, who believe we're in an economic depression: 23 percent.

Reality:

"The second-quarter growth rate for the U.S. economy was revised upward, to 3.3 percent."

Were the preceding two quarters pretty lousy? Yeah, .9 percent in 2008's first quarter and -.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007. But the preceding two quarters, the economy grew 4.8 percent each.

Of course, in politics, as with the legacy media (but I repeat myself), perception invariably trumps reality.

Meanwhile, James Pethokoukis lists four ways to make bad news worse. So invariably, watch for these to begin to be implemented. Obama/Smoot '08!

Yesterday, Roger L. Simon asked, "Is Obama the most conservative presidential candidate of our time?" Certainly the most reactionary, and his veep nominee wants to set the Wayback Machine to about 1934. But then, the day after "Markets Crash, Media Hysterical, Democrats Thrilled", Joe's far from the only person on the left who's longing for the days of FDR and breadlines. Or maybe Schumervilles.

As I mentioned on PJTV earlier today, as much I love having 500 channels to choose from via my satellite dish and, according to Technorati, 113 million blogs out there, the amount of information and opinion and the unending pace at which it's cranked out, makes it very easy to lose perspective. In a sense, a cable channel like CNBC, as great as it can be, puts an emphasis on the rapid speed of the financial markets, when for most individual investors, they're far better off (NOTE: THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. CONSULT YOUR OWN FINANCIAL ADVISOR. INSERT OBLIGATORY SEC WARNINGS HERE. POST NO BILLS. DO NOT EAT PASTE, DO NOT RUN WITH SCISSORS.) essentially buying a few decent mutual funds and hanging onto them for a decade or so, rather than buying, selling, and trading like mad.

The above headline comes from a 1979 Business Week cover story which electroplated then current trends and assumed that they would run indefinitely into the future. At the time of its writing, the Dow closed at about 975, in the midst of the last days of the Jimmy Carter administration's stagflation, culminating in double digit unemployment, interest rates, and inflation, as the above ad from that era highlights.

When I was preparing for PJTV today, I came across this PBS article, which quoted from its coverage of "Black Monday", the stock market correction of October 1987. At the time, the Dow was at 2,200, and the dropped 500 points. Note the end-of-the-world tone from 20 years ago, as PBS attempted to attack the economic policies of Ronald Reagan, and perhaps in its collective subconscious, longed for the days of Jimmy Carter--if their writers even remembered the gloom of that period at all. (Of course, a decade later, President Clinton was following the basic concepts of Reaganomics--and essentially bragging about it ("We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn't that great?", presumably much to PBS's chagrin.)

How long will today's economic woes last? Well, check out this CNN article quoting from Alan Greenspan, who goes from stating that Wall Street is in the midst of "a once-in-a-century type of financial crisis"--but then adds:

"Indeed, it will continue to be a corrosive force until the price of homes in the United States stabilizes," Greenspan said. He predicted that would not happen until early 2009, and said the odds of U.S. recession have gone up in recent months.

So despite the doom and destruction tone of the MSM (but then, when is it otherwise, when the GOP is in the White House, particularly during an election year?), I wouldn't start heading for the ledge just yet.

Update: Well, here's one way to liven up an otherwise gloomy day of financial reporting!

Elsewhere: "See me after class."

Over at City Journal, Edward L. Glaeser has a tail of two cities--one whose fiscal policies invite middle class growth, another whose punitive liberalism discourages it. And of course, both cities are microcosms of the states that contain them; as Nicole Gelinas wrote in April when she profiled New York Governor David Paterson's early days in office, replacing the disgraced Eliot Spitzer:

To lay out his goals, Paterson gave a speech last week similar to the one that Codey delivered nearly three years ago. "We need to take a realistic view of New York State's budget," he said, which is "too big and too bloated." He gently warned the legislature against its usual budget-balancing tricks: overestimating revenues, issuing long-term debt or hiking taxes to cover one-year shortfalls, and trying to use "gimmicks to solve real problems." He added that the legislature's modest cuts to Spitzer's budget proposal would be eaten up by April as tax revenues continue to fall. "We have got to address these issues," he said, "and not by taxing anybody."

Paterson could have recited facts and figures from census reports on how New York ranked dead last, in both raw numbers and percentages, in net domestic population losses between 2000 and 2004, with nearly 183,000 residents leaving the state annually. While immigration from other countries more than made up for these losses, New York still lost some ground in its percentage of the nation's population. And immigration could slow precipitously with the economy's woes, as a protracted credit slowdown will lessen the state's need for Parisian investment bankers as well as Salvadoran construction workers. The governor could also have cited numbers from the Tax Foundation showing that New York's state and local tax burden is a full one-fourth higher than the national average, and significantly higher than the burden in some of the states competing most fiercely with it for jobs and residents: Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas, and most of the states in the new South.

Instead, Paterson cited a number of personal friends, all former New Yorkers, who have contacted him from out of state since his ascent to the governorship. "A friend from primary school, Randy San Antonio, told me he moved to Dallas 20 years ago," Paterson began. "Another friend, Randy Watts, had moved to Reno. A friend from Syracuse, Marvin Lee Simons, said he's working in Lower Manhattan. I said we should get together . . . and he said, 'Well, I don't live in New York. I live in western Pennsylvania.' Jeff and Stacey Stackhouse wanted to start a business on Long Island. They moved two years ago--they're trying to start their business in Charlotte, North Carolina. They couldn't pay the taxes here."

Socialism: if you build it, they will leave.

In 1946, Whittaker Chamber managed to sum up the entire history of the 20th century in 16 perfectly chosen words:

The dominant problem of the 20th Century is the reconciliation of economic security with political liberty.

Absolutely spot on.

Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine writes:

If even Bill Clinton, the gold standard of "third way" politicians, is trading in classic Democratic Party populism, it really is over for the what used to be called New Democrats.

Which is bad news for everyone, as the Democrats shifting further left in the post-Clinton years shifts the American political center of gravity with them. Read the whole thing.

"Practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started"--Peter Robinson, quoting FDR crony Rex Tugwell, in the latest edition of his Uncommon Knowledge video series. This week with Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man.

Barron's: "It's Almost as if Obama Wants to Repeat the Mistakes of Herbert Hoover."

They're not the first to notice--Orrin Judd sounded three (Bronx) cheers for Obama/Smoot '08! last month, and Amity Shlaes made the connection in March.

Speaking of Shlaes, the author of the brilliant The Forgotten Man is featured on this week's edition of Peter Robinson's "Uncommon Knowledge" video series at NRO--don't miss it.

As I noted on Friday, I'm not sure if Jennifer Rubin's description of Joe Biden, whom she described as "old school as they come and as familiar as a worn-out shoe", was an intentional reference to Adlai Stevenson--a similarly follicle-challenged Democratic senator who 50 years ago would have thought his IQ even bigger than Joe's--even if he couldn't remember to have a campaign aide pick him up a new pair of Florsheims.

Likely it isn't, if only because it's an unfair comparison to Stevenson. Peter Seller's President Muffley, clearly a Stevensonian parody, was, after all, the nominal adult voice of reason in the midst of the chaos of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. But this description from Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism of the late 1950s, complete with its own Stevenson cameo is a reminder that while Obama was originally packaged as some sort of new and novel politician, while conservatives are thought to be old-fashioned, very little actually changes amongst so-called "progressives" and their political goals:

Kennedy's political fortune also stemmed from the fact that he seemed to be riding the waves of history. Once again, the forces of progressivism had been returned to power after a period of peace and prosperity. And despite the unprecedented wealth and leisure of the postwar years--indeed largely because of them--there was a palpable desire among the ambitious, the upwardly mobile, the intellectuals, and, above all, the activists of the progressive-liberal establishment to get "America moving again." "More than anything else", the conservative publisher Henry Luce wrote in 1960, "the people of America are asking for a clear sense of National Purpose."

* * *

Perhaps the best expression of this bipartisan-elite clamor for "social change" came in a series of essays on "the national purpose" co-published by the New York Times and Life magazine. Adlai Stevenson wrote that Americans needed to transcend the "mystique of privacy" and turn away from the "supermarket temple." Charles F. Darlington, a leading corporate executive and former State Department official, explained that America needed to recapture the collective spirit of national purpose it had enjoyed "during parts of the Administrations of Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts" (you can guess which parts). Above all, a reborn America needed to stop seeing itself as a nation of individuals. Once again, "collective action" was the cure. Darlington's call for a "decreased emphasis on private enterprise" amounted to a revival of the corporatism and war socialism of the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations.

"We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we're asking young people to do--don't go into corporate America."

Reuters reports, "Polo Ralph Lauren to launch shopping by cell phone."

I wrote several articles for various electronics magazines about online retailers attempting to sell via cell back around 1999; if it didn't take off then, I'm not sure why it will today, though perhaps the iPhone-style platform is more conducive to shopping than the cell phones of the past. But hey, good luck, Ralph!

Thomas Frank feverishly lets it all hang out:

The most cherished dream of conservative Washington is that liberalism can somehow be defeated, finally and irreversibly, in the way that armies are beaten and pests are exterminated. Electoral victories by Republicans are just part of the story. The larger vision is of a future in which liberalism is physically barred from the control room--of an "end of history" in which taxes and onerous regulation will never be allowed to threaten the fortunes private individuals make for themselves. This is the longing behind the former White House aide Karl Rove's talk of "permanent majority" and, 20 years previously, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff's declaration to the Republican convention that it's "the job of all revolutions to make permanent their gains".

When I first moved to contemplate this peculiar utopian vision, I was struck by its apparent futility. What I did not understand was that beating liberal ideas was not the goal. The Washington conservatives aim to make liberalism irrelevant not by debating, but by erasing it. Building a majority coalition has always been a part of the programme, and conservatives have enjoyed remarkable success at it for more than 30 years. But winning elections was not a bid for permanence by itself. It was only a means.

The end was capturing the state, and using it to destroy liberalism as a practical alternative. The pattern was set by Margaret Thatcher, who used state power of the heaviest-handed sort to implant permanently the anti-state ideology.

"Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul," she said, echoing Stalin. In the 34 years before she became prime minister, Britain rode a see-saw of nationalisation, privatisation and renationalisation; Thatcher set out to end the game for good. Her plan for privatising council housing was designed not only to enthrone the market, but to encourage an ownership mentality and "change the soul" of an entire class of voters. When she sold off nationally owned industries, she took steps to ensure that workers received shares at below-market rates, leading hopefully to the same soul transformation. Her brutal suppression of the miners' strike in 1984 showed what now awaited those who resisted the new order. As a Business Week reporter summarised it in 1987: "She sees her mission as nothing less than eradicating Labour Party socialism as a political alternative."

That's the stuff! Every time I think that the right is just bumbling around in the dark and rapidly losing ground to the left, something like this from the other side truly warms my heart. As one of Charles Johnson's rotating metatags says, "please more print and distribute and get blessing!"

Brian Fitzpatrick writes that America has a "New Newspaper of Record: the National Enquirer."

The old one seems more obsessed these days with keeping the news away from the public than actually reporting it. Which is increasingly reflected in its bottom line.

Which is why the legacy media keeps rockin'!, on both coasts.

"Nothing would have more impact on the economy and the price of oil than his election as president," former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young (no relation to this Andrew Young) said. "There would be a boost of 1,000 points on the stock market the first week after he's elected. This would be better than a chicken in every pot."

Thus ushering in a decade of blazing 1.5 percent annual growth!

By the way, note this line from Young:

More importantly, Young strongly believes that the economic future for the United States is inextricably connected to the rest of the world.

"It's technically impossible to be self-sufficient," Young said. "In order to maintain our leadership in a global economy we have to work with the rest of the world. With the transfer of technology, we either lead the world or we get trampled by it."

Obama agrees of course--depending upon which day you ask him.

Over at Pajamas Media, Bridget Johnson tolls the death knell for L.A.'s newspaper industry.

We looked at the technological reasons why the newspaper industry is sinking in a recent Silicon Graffiti video. But L.A.'s a unique situation: if only the town's chief industry lended itself better to big, juicy stories that sold newspapers--or if only there was a big hot breaking scandal going on in the town that the town's biggest paper could sink its teeth into!

Oh well--clearly, it must be hard generating news in such a sleepy, backwater locale.

"Hi, Nancy! Do you really want to play chicken over energy policy?"

Let me just note something here, Madam Speaker: you have twenty or so seats that were ours in 2006. Every single one of those seats is held by a freshman Representative who will have to go home in August and campaign. Do you really want to send them out there to explain to their constituents why gas prices have doubled under their watch? Because we're planning to bring up the topic, in precisely the ways that you really, really don't want us to. And there's no reason whatsoever to assume that the above 20 point deficit can't be shrunk. A lot.

So let's dance.

Moe Lane

Nancy's response--at least for the moment--is summarized by this bumper sticker.

Lewis Black, in the above clip, witnesses the eschaton immanentized--and now with extra decaf caramel macchiato flavoring!

But as with all of man's previous attempts to build heaven on earth, the eschaton cannot sustain itself indefinitely. Sadly, the Wall Street Journal has published a list of upcoming Starbucks closings (and none in my town. So there!), and James Lileks explores the plight of the suddenly Starbucks deprived coffee drinker:

We have been bracing for the list of closings, and it was finally revealed: 27 Starbucks outlets will be shuttered in Minnesota, leaving only 45,234. Hasta barista, baby.

The effect on the Twin Cities will be light -- the average citizen will still be within six minutes of a $4 cup of coffee at all times. Productivity will not suffer as people slump over at their desks from lack of jitter-juice. The people you have to pity -- aside from the employees, who probably can't fill a bathtub now without thinking "room for cream?" and won't soon find another job requiring that question -- are the folks in the small towns who will lose a piece of the outside world.

A Strib story last week by Emma Carew told the plight of Albert Lea teens mourning the loss of their coffee shop.

And you can understand why: Starbucks was like an embassy of a country where people sat around and read foreign newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, and discussed things.

Geez, isn't that what they invented the Internet for?

House Republican Leader John Boehner on Fox News: "All We're Asking is for Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama to Allow Congress to Vote."

Tim Blair looks at the Midas Muffler school of economics:

2001:

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., dramatized his objections [to the Bush tax cut] ...he held up a spare part and said, "If you're a typical working person, you get $227, and that's enough to buy this muffler."

2008:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's wife, Michelle, complained the government's $600 economic stimulus check was only enough to buy "a pair of earrings" ...

Or nearly three mufflers. Which, for the sake of her husband's campaign, Ms Tiffany Cartier Michelle DeBeers Obama might consider using.

No word yet on President Merkin Muffley's tax-cutting proposals, though.

That's the question that David Frum asks:

During the Enron collapse of 2002, the public and the media were persuaded that Enron was somehow a Republican scandal, based on little more than senior management's history of contributions to the Republican party.

The ties between the Fannie Mae debacle and the Democratic party are much more intimate than that. Senior Democrats chosen for their political connections - James Johnson, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick - took tens of millions of dollars in compensation out of the company. The ties between the Obama campaign and Fannie Mae are especially intimate: not only did Johnson head Obama's veep-vetting operation, but we learn in this Washington Post article that the campaign that Raines is advising Obama on the mortgage crisis! Well, he should know. Let's just hope the Obama operation is able to keep Raines away from the accounting side of things. Even the amazing Obama fundraising operation could not afford that!

More seriously: Here is potentially the largest financial disaster in American history. The American taxpayer stands to lose billions; Democratic insiders have extracted tens of millions. If Enron was a party scandal ... what is this?

The offramp to Schumerville?

In his latest op-ed, Hugh Hewitt writes:

The environmental lobby owns Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and Barack Obama –the brave new leader—doesn’t dare take it or them on. That lobby is applauding the deindustrialization underway, and their attitude is that a depression wouldn’t be such a bad thing as a lesson in learning how to live within our environmental means. Their jobs aren’t on the line, after all, and their disdain for the impacted industries is complete.

What they and the Triple D Democrats hasn’t counted on, though, was America making the connection between the deteriorating economy and their anti-energy agenda.

Energy is freedom. Energy is prosperity. Every Democrat on the fall ballot is part of the anti-energy party which is wrecking havoc on the economy and every family’s budget. A vote for any Democrat is a vote for shortages, rising gas prices, rising unemployment, and falling production. A vote for any democrat is a vote for failing airlines and collapsing financial institutions and for the shuttering of car plants and large manufacturing.

A growing, vibrant economy needs energy. The Democrats are anti-energy.

It is that simple.

Read the whole thing, then sign the petition.

Update: Found via Instapundit, Jack Kelly writes, "it takes mighty, repeated blows" to knock through the general public's inattention and apathy towards politics. Kelly adds, "As Ronald Reagan put it, a successful candidate must paint 'with bold colors, not pale pastels'":

But Mr. McCain has been Hamlet when he needs to be Henry V. He is discarding a strong hand through mixed messages and equivocation. He supports drilling on the outer continental shelf, but opposes it in ANWR. He backs a "cap and trade" program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that would devastate our economy. Nuance is important in policy-making, but can be disastrous in political campaigning. If the trumpet be uncertain …

Mr. McCain needs to decide, pronto, which is more important to him: Winning the election or receiving an occasional kind word from liberal pundits who will vote against him.

If he wants to win, Mr. McCain needs to demonstrate in a dramatic way he'll take every reasonable step to increase energy supplies - including drilling in ANWR.

And he needs to do it soon. The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin, who is from Barack Obama's home state of Illinois, said Wednesday: "I'm open to drilling and responsible production." Mr. Obama has altered his position on virtually every issue he campaigned on during the primaries. Could another flip-flop be in the offing?

"Durbin's comment may be a signal that Obama will pivot soon," said the Wall Street Journal's Jim Taranto.

As I wrote last month, the first man who stands up on a podium in the middle of America's Vast Pestilential Wasteland and says the equivalent of this post's headline wins the election.

I can't say for certain, but I'd wager a bet that Jonathan Last is mildly pumped about the upcoming new Batman movie. I'll keep hacking the Internet until I know for certain.

Another post at Galley Slaves begs the obvious question: has Starbucks announced any store closings in Gotham City yet?

It's safe to say that Jesse Jackson isn't Senator Barack Obama's biggest fan right at the moment. And I think it's equally safe to assume that Tom Blumer isn't enjoying Obama's preemptive strike on the economy:

Remember the grief Dick Cheney received in late 2000, and then President Bush in early 2001, when they were accused of “talking down the economy”?

In summer of 2008, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, presidential candidate Barack Obama, and Senate majority leader Harry Reid aren’t merely talking the economy down; they’re taking it down.

They have created what I am calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy. Businesses and investors are responding to their total lack of seriousness by battening down the hatches and preparing for the worst.

Meanwhile, the more rarefied quadrants of the leftwing also seem to lack a universal appreciation for Obama's triangulation efforts, as he seeks to move from the far left to somewhere closer to nearby to within shouting distance of the center left:

Hope.

Change.

It was all you talked about.

Then the FISA bill you gave the telecom companies retroactive immunity - something you said you were against - and voted FOR it on the senate floor.

Third party candidates, here I come. You’re no different than McCain.

Man, can Obama's inclusiveness bring everyone together, or what?

Ed Morrissey writes:

The Weather Channel has been a major advocate for global-warming policies. Combining it with the Keith Olbermann/Chris Matthews network will probably result in a major release of greenhouse gases on its own. Given NBC’s inability to impose even a modicum of balance and objectivity at MS-NBC, we can expect Jeff Zucker to use this new outfit as a platform on which to push even harder for statist policies on energy production and use.

But will the lights stay on in the studio?

Isolationism you can believe in: Obama/Smoot in '08!

Matt Drudge notes:

While newspapers and traditional broadcast media are experiencing declining revenues, Limbaugh's golden microphone has turned diamond-laced:

Earnings now pace him ahead of the annual salaries for network news anchors: Katie Couric, Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer — combined!

And this is obviously true for Matt as well:

The deal represents a stunning triumph over the establishment by an outsider who connected with and captured the spirit of the nation's heartland.

And both are absolutely hated by those still toiling exclusively in the predecessor medias.

I quoted James Lileks' take on AP's feverish doomsday piece yesterday, and James Pethokoukis describes AP's screed thusly:

"I know you're just a reporter, but you used to be a person, right?" is a quote from the film Deep Impact and immediately came to mind after I read this article from the Associated Press. (It actually took two people to write it.) The "article" made me weep for my chosen profession. The absolutely disgraceful lead:

Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism. Horatio Alger, twist in your grave. The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

I dunno, maybe contributing to our low national morale are media that 1) compare a weak economy—although one that has yet to suffer even a single negative quarter—to the disastrous economies of the 1930s and 1970s; 2) forget to mention that the average person buying a home in, say, January 2000, is still sitting on a 66 percent gain; 3) ignore the economy's sky-high productivity, which helps make it the most competitive in the world; 4) ignore a global economic boom that is pushing up gas prices but also raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty; and 5) for the heck of it, perpetuate the myth that college is unaffordable. (Oh, and since the authors of the article brought it up, it sure looks to this Soviet politics major that Iraq is turning into a situation for al Qaeda that is exactly the reverse of Afghanistan in the 1980s: Militants take on superpower. Get annihilated along with their global brand.)

America's "can-do" attitude? We are coming off a record year for initial public offerings. I mean, I could go on and on here. I don't know anyone who is giving up, other than the AP.

As Andy McCarthy writes:

Rush talked about that article this afternoon and made the excellent observation that the AP could have just said "Vote Obama" — it would have saved them several hundred words and spared the rest of us a lot of wasted time!

But at least it's giving the Blogosphere a chance to expose the can't-do spirit that seems to permeate AP.

At least until the bill arrives.

Meanwhile, as the AP tells the nation as a whole, "Yes We Can't!", the media as a whole have gone equally silent reporting on another nation's progress.

I had meaning to comment on that ridiculous AP doomsday story that Drudge linked to recently, but there's no way I can top the fine demolition that James Lileks performs:

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL.

That’s the headline. First line:

Is everything spinning out of control?

No. But they go on:

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.

The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

Previous generations rolled up their sleeves and swam out there and saved those polar bears. As for “abysmal” home values, it depends where you are; I’ll admit that people who sank everything in Miami condo markets are finding their psyches chipped and dinged, but A) lower home prices mean people who want to buy one but couldn’t afford it now are sitting better – B) the authors can take heart in this story about San Francisco being unaffordable for the middle class. Thank God! There’s hope!

Cue the obligatory heartland can’t-do fella with busted bootstraps:

"It is pretty scary," said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester, Minn. "People are thinking things are going to get better, and they haven't been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about things, you have very little power to make it change.

Rochester has had zero tornados this year, if I recall correctly. Even if they do get one, it probably won't be as bad as the 1883 example, which was bad enough to have its own wikipedia page. But again: what has happened to America that your optimism is insufficient to turn away rotating clouds? In the old days, by jiminey-crackers, we’d hold up pictures of Roosevelt and the twisters would just melt away.

The guy’s 64 years old, and he hasn’t figured out that some things get better, some things get worse, some things stay the same, and some things to which no one’s paying attention will shape the news much more than the panic du jour in the news today? He’s 64, and can’t figure out that grown men don’t say “scary” unless describing how they felt about the Wolfman when they were nine?

It is amusing, really – after sticking people’s heads in the muck every day for years, promoting every faddish scare, fluffing the pillow beneath every yuppie worry, swapping the straight-forward adult approach to news with presenters who emote the copy with the sad face of a day-care worker telling the children that Barney is dead – in short, after decades of presenting the world through the peculiar prism that finds in every day more evidence of our rot and our failures, they wonder why people are depressed. Hang the banner, guys: Mission Accomplished.

Of course, not everyone feels this way; I’d guess that people who watch television news are more inclined to pessimism. But there’s another side to this: the pessimism among some may not stem from some impotent feeling that one is a cork toss’d in a sea of cruel destiny, that you can’t do anything, that nothing will get better – no, the pessimism may arise from the suspicion that there’s something abroad in the land that’s had a good hardy larf about “Horatio Alger” and all the other manifestations of individual initiative for 30 years. The cool kids and the clever set have always smirked at that sort of stuff. You can get them going if you make a speech about our ability to solve things, but you’d better phrase it in the form of a government initiative, or brows furrow: well, then, how do you propose to do it?

The bottom of the page says “Average rating: two out of five stars.” Our confidence in the media to undermine our happiness is being chipped away, too. We’re in worse shape than we thought.

Remember when AP helped its readers make sense of the news, instead of describing life as one long unfathomable horror? Of course, that was when AP was actually in business to report, instead of "changing the world", or these days, sending dunning notices to bloggers.

Of course, one reason why wire services might be shaking down the Blogosphere is that they could use the money:

For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.

Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.

Sort of like a Red Queen's Race, you might say.

But then, as Michael Crichton wrote 15 years ago, the newspapers brought a lot of this upon themselves:

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

Just read the AP story at the of the post. And the media is cranking out that junk during a period when they can least afford to, as a technological sea change is devouring them:

And as I said, fortunately, their own Jurassic Park awaits:

Following up on our post featuring a strangely vegetating Lou Dobbs yesterday, here's Lou, then and now:

(From Eyeblast.TV.)

Recently, I linked to Jack Shafer's article in Slate, declaring Advantage: Michael Crichton:

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled "Mediasaurus," in which he prophesied the death of the mass media--specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. "Vanished, without a trace," he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances--"artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page"--swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

* * *

As we pass his prediction's 15-year anniversary, I've got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It's gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren't going extinct tomorrow, Crichton's original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

Ever since dreaming up the "Silicon Graffiti" series last year, I had wanted to do a segment on Alvin & Heidi Toffler's "Third Wave" thesis; particularly since I had taped their segment on C-Span's Booknotes program in 1995. As I attempt to illustrate in the above video, the clashing of a Second Wave, industrial-era institution like Big Media with the Blogosphere, a purely Third Wave phenomenon, is one of the reasons why Old Media are slowly going the way the dinosaurs (and this is but one of many death rattles).

Fortunately, as I noted in an earlier segment, they've already built their own Jurassic Park!

(And speaking of earlier segments, click here for older editions of the show.)

Glenn Reynolds excerpts this passage by John Hinderaker of Power Line on Eric Holder, who's been tasked by the Obama campaign to the help in their veep search:

Holder is a legitimate target because of the Rich affair, I guess, but frankly I have little or no interest in who helps Obama choose a V-P. What bothers me most about these battles is the implicit assumption by some that just about any involvement in the business world is somehow suspect. . . . This is frankly stupid. Covington & Burling and O'Melveny & Myers are top-notch law firms that have represented a vast array of clients. The idea that there is something wrong with associations with companies like UBS, Exxon Mobil and Hewlitt Packard is absurd. If any connection with a top law firm or a large corporation is somehow taken as a black mark, pretty soon those who advise our Presidential candidates, or serve in their administrations, will be as inexperienced as, say, Barack Obama himself. That would be a sad outcome.

Indeed^TM, as Glenn would say; we should be happy that people are still willing to ride the train into Manhattan and other major cities every day, even if their candidate considers it a scary, going through the motions existence, while his wife is advising her husbands' supporters, "Don’t go into corporate America."

Or represent them in court, apparently.

Glenn Reynolds quotes Gregg Easterbrook:

Democratic attacks on Mr. McCain and Republican attacks on Mr. Obama both seek to punish impermissibly positive thoughts. At a time when there exists a sense of crisis over the economy, fuel prices and many other issues, this reinforces the odd, two realities of life in the United States today: The way we are, and the way we think we are. The way we are could use some work, but overall, is pretty good. The way we think we are is terrible, horrible, awful. Possibly worse.

Well, yeah. Check out this recent doomsday riff from David Letterman, who, during the 1980s, despite the equally eeeeevil Reagan being in charge was far too cool and ironic to be this morose about life:

Guys talking about the President really can't do anything about the economy. I don't know if that's true or not, but let's give them that one, let's just say “okay, the President can't do anything about the economy.” Everything else has gone so lousy in the last eight years. I mean – and I'm a guy who doesn't pay attention to much, as long as I got wresting and a TV dinner I'm fine – but even I am perceiving now that things are horrible in ways they shouldn't be horrible. Now, we're not going to impeach the guy. Could we get our money back? Honest to God, what, I mean [audience applause], just at least something.

Dave's clinging bitterness is enough to make you change the channel...And if it's to ABC, you're confronted with more doomsday, as James Lileks notes:

"Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse?

"According to many of the world's top scientists, the answer is yes, unless we take action now."

They’re asking for readers to submit their own dystopian nightmares.

What is it with the pessimism of the overclass? If it wasn’t for doom and gloom, they wouldn’t have a reason to live. The latest example comes from ABC News, and suggests that this century may be the last one for civilization. Who says? Scientists! Ah, well, if it’s scientists, we’d best pay heed. Or perhaps you disagree; the century’s still fresh and young. It still has that new century smell. Warranty’s good for another few years, and besides, we haven’t dumped the trunk-junk accumulated in the previous century. We’ll figure something out. We always do.

But you don’t get publicity by suggesting this century might be better than its predecessor, or by asking people to envision how cool the future might be. There are dozens of websites and Flickr sets devoted to retrofuturism, to the art of describing what things might be like. If you grew up in the 60s, you’ll remember all the paintings of space – useful space full of gleaming silver ships. That all ended with “2001: A Space Odyssey” which suggested that the future of space was long, dull, and lonely, punctuated with homicidal computers, trippy FX and enormous wise space-fetuses. Great film, but from then on, something seemed different about the future. Did we really want to live there?

I'm not sure how much of a role Stanley Kubrick's opus played in causing liberalism's turn towards nihilism, but the timing is certainly right; as I noted a couple of years ago in a post titled, "1969: The Shattering of the Modernist Dream".

So is there reason to be optimistic today? Of course. But just don't expect much help in that department from the media, at least until November. They've got the double-whammy of their own industry in dire straits, and an economy to keep talking down, at least until--somehow, miraculously--it begins to turn on a dime the day after the election. (Provided the appropriate audacity and hope and change occurs, of course.)

Over at my wife's business law blog, she looks at something called "B Corporations":

A colleague brought the concept of B Corporations to my attention. For those of you not wanting to follow the link, the idea is that corporations should benefit all "stakeholders" and actually society as a whole, not merely shareholders. And a company has been formed to not only provide road maps to being a being a better company, but also to test and approve companies with the B corporation stamp of approval.

Personally, and in the words of some teenager somewhere, this just creeps me out.

I think it's great for corporations to both make money for their shareholders AND contribute to a better society.

But I'm always a little concerned about a small (7 person) group deciding who's creating "benefit for all" and who isn't. I don't think creating benefit is something that can be objectively tested, nor should it be. And without seeing all of the testing criteria for becoming an official B Corporation, I can only guess that the founders ideas of societal benefit are going to flavor the testing criteria.

For example, nuclear power is not terribly PC among certain groups. But it could also be argued that in this day and age, it should be re-visited as a concept. Would a start up devoted to developing small, localized nuclear plants to municipalities pass the B Corporation test? As I said, i don't know, I haven't seen the test. But somehow I'm not sure it would.

Another example pops up on the B Corporation website. They offer a legal road map to becoming a B Corporation. You simply enter your type of entity and your state. I entered C Corporation and California.

I was told I should reincorporate in another state and amazingly enough their attorney will graciously help do so.

Here's what the busy little Bs say:

Your state of incorporation is among 20 states that do NOT currently have corporate statutes that explicitly allow Directors to consider the interests of Stakeholders. A team of attorneys is currently in the process of evaluating case law to determine if there are specific rulings that would support the consideration of the interests of Stakeholders by Directors.

For many prospective B Corporations, reincorporating in a state offering greater protection for B Corporations will be the best option to maximize enforceability. Though more involved than simply amending your articles, reincorporating is also a relatively straight-forward process.

The reincorporation process includes forming a "New" corporation in a stakeholder friendly state, and merging the "Old" corporation into the "New" corporation.

For further information on the status of your state, please contact us at thelab@bcorporation.net or call us at xxx-xxx-xxxx. Our attorney will be happy to speak with you.

What they don't say is that California does not DISALLOW statements of societal benefit. Furthermore, Articles of Incorporation are easily changed, so to say that putting the benefit to stakeholders in the articles ensures that the goals will survive is just incorrect.

Corporations can be encouraged to "do good" without an elitist screening panel. And people, I believe, should make their own decisions as to what sort of doing good they want to support. There are also various ways to "do good" and any group that specifies a corporation: "must amend their corporate governing documents" [emphasis added] is not talking about doing good, but doing good their way.

Hey, it takes a village to bring you the audacity of hope and change.

As spotted by Jim Geraghty, David Mendell in Obama: From Promise to Power writes:

"[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn't want to be on one of those trains every day," said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. "The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions... that was scary to him."

And as scared as he is about the daily Metro-North commuter train, we know he's not very happy about commuters driving into work.

But Obama's not too crazy about people further out in the exurbs, either, as he mentioned in April when he was talking to, as Jean Kirkpatrick would say, San Francisco Democrats:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

And then there was this classic bit by Michelle Obama back in February:

“We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

Geez, remember when Democratic presidential candidates and their spouses actually bothered to go through the motions of appearing to support the working man?

Related: "Ludwig von Mises v. Obama??"

Back in the summer of 2001, Jonah Goldberg did something that almost no one who utters the acronym ANWR in hushed, reverent tones has actually done. He visited there:

I suspect that the majority of Americans who oppose oil exploration in ANWR would agree with me if they saw it firsthand. Indeed, they would probably agree that if America had to be struck by an asteroid, this would be the ideal impact point. Of course, I am not talking about ANWR's beautiful mountain vistas, the ones cooed over by cable-news hostesses. Not only is that stuff legally protected from oil exploration, it is far, far away from anywhere the oil companies want to drill-i.e., the thousands of football fields' worth of bog and marsh.

Today, he reminds us that it's still waiting to be put to use:

Sen. John McCain said this week he would not drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the same reason he “would not drill in the Grand Canyon ... I believe this area should be kept pristine.”

Pristine means unspoiled, virginal, in an original state.

One wonders how pristine the Grand Canyon can be if it has roughly 5 million visitors every year, rafting, hiking, picnicking, and riding mules up one side and down the other. Campfires, RVs, and motels that do not conjure the word “virginal” ring around large swaths of it.

This isn’t to say that the Grand Canyon isn’t a beautiful place; it inspires awe among those who visit it. ANWR (pronounced “AN-wahr”) inspires awe almost entirely in those who haven’t been there. It is an environmental Brigadoon or Shangri-La, a fabled land almost no one will ever see. That is its appeal. People like the idea that there are still Edens “out there” even if they will never, ever see them.

Indeed, if Americans could visit the north coast of Alaska, as I have, as easily as they can visit the Grand Canyon, the oil would be flowing by now.

ANWR is roughly the size of South Carolina, and it is spectacular. However, the area where, according to Department of Interior estimates, some 5.7 billion to 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil reside is much smaller and not necessarily as awe-inspiring. It would amount to the size of Dulles airport.

Question for McCain: Has South Carolina been ruined because it has an airport?

Most of the images of the proposed drilling area that people see on the evening news are misleading precisely because they tend to show the glorious parts of ANWR, even though that’s not where the drilling would take place. Even when they position their cameras in the right location, producers tend to point them in the wrong direction. They point them south, toward the Brooks mountain range, rather than north, across the coastal plain where the drilling would be.

As James Lileks notes, who'd have thought that, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that America would remain in such stasis when it comes to energy independence:

It’s not that we cannot produce any more oil; you suspect that some are motivated by the belief, perverse as it sounds, that we should not. We should not drill 50 miles off shore on the chance someone in Malibu takes a hot-air balloon up 1000 feet and uses a telephoto lens to scan the horizon for oil platforms. Also, there are ecological concerns. (The ocean is a wee place, easily disturbed.) There’s something else that may well be my imagination, but I can’t quite shake the feeling: high gas prices and shortages of oil make some people feel good. This is the way it has to be. Oil is bad. Cars are bad. Cars make suburbs possible. Suburbs are the antithesis of the way we should live, which is stacked upon one another in dense blocks tied together by happy whirring trains. So some guy who drives to work alone has to spend more money for the privilege of being alone in his car listening to hate radio?

Good.

Yes, I know, projection and demonizaton and oversimplification. But this is true: there’s a side of the domestic political structure that opposes expansion of domestic energy production, be it drilling or nukes or more refineries.

And speaking of that "hate radio":

[The MSM] called you the maverick! But guess what? Now you're not a maverick. Why, you're Bush 3! That's like the worst thing a maverick could be called, is Bush 3. Get ready, Senator. This is only the tip of the iceberg of all the ammo they have aimed and trained on you. Here's what I'm hoping, ladies and gentlemen. I'm hoping at some point relatively soon McCain gets ticked off enough about this that he comes to his senses on the issue of energy independence in this country. Do you realize that if you look at any poll out there taken of the American people, they want energy independence? They want drilling for our own energy supplies. They want nuclear. They don't want all of this Kyoto stuff. They don't want taxes to go up. They don't want the price of gas to go up even a penny by 60 some odd percent, if the purpose of the increase is to fight global warming. They want cheaper gasoline, and they know how to get it. This is an issue. It is an issue made to order.
Now, McCain has changed his mind on a couple things. This would be a goody. This would be a huge one. Somebody could get to Senator McCain and say, Senator, you want to win this election? You want to contrast who you are with Senator Obama and the leftists in the Democrat Party? Here's your issue. "Drill here. Drill now. Energy independence." Start now and get on this, and I'm telling you, he would see a miraculous thing happen in his campaign. But I don't know who can tell him these things. It's just a sitting duck.

And it's one that another senator, who may be looking to overcome what Ace accurately described as a Kinsley-esque gaffe of the first order might also be looking to exploit if he wanted to (a) get to the right of McCain on one key issue very quickly, JFK-style (Mr. President, we cannot afford a domestic oil gap!), and (b) simultaneously generate a pretty nifty Sister Souljah moment with his enviro-stasis base.

Will it happen? Probably not, but the first man who heads north to Alaska and hops on a podium in front of a phalanx of legacy journalists and an armada of cable and network cameramen in the middle of that Vast Pestilential Wasteland and does an about-face on the issue has a damn good chance of winning it all in November.*

Who wants it bad enough that he's actually willing to accede to the wishes of the American public?

Read More »

Just as the San Francisco Chronicle op-ed writer who dubbed him a "Lightworker" also previous admitted (and he's not the only media figure to do so), Obama is also for higher gas prices. He just wishes they arrived more slowly than the Pelosi Premium did.

As John Steele Gordon noted in Commentary a few days ago, "This would seem to be an opening the size of the Grand Canyon for McCain, and Republican candidates for Congress, to exploit this year."

The latter group already has. McCain? Don't bet on it, sadly.

Update: More more at Ace of Spades.

More: Mike Bloomberg, Manhattan's favorite nanny who has been named as a potential veep to both candidates, is also cool with higher gas prices. Note this bit of Orwellian doubletalk from the mayor and his aide:

"Reducing taxes on energy consumption is the wrong way to go. We should be raising taxes on energy consumption dramatically because it's the only way you're going to force people to use less."

An aide said Bloomberg's comments shouldn't be taken as "a call to action to increase gas taxes," which would be politically explosive.

On the other hand, WWCD?

Dianne Feinstein, bold senatorial leadership at work! Jonah Goldberg writes:

As befits a government-run commissary, the Senate cafeteria has a decidedly Soviet attitude toward variety. It has averaged only two new menu items a year over the last decade. The food is so bad, every lunch hour Senate staffers rush to the House side of the Capitol like starving New Yorkers of the future storming the last Soylent Green vendor.

According to auditors, the chain of restaurants run by the Senate food service, including the snooty Senate Dining Room, has almost never been in the black. It’s lost more than $18 million since 1993 and has dropped about $2 million this year alone. If the food service doesn’t get an emergency bridge loan of a quarter-million dollars, it won’t be able to make payroll.

So how will the Senate fix the problem? Well, with California Sen. Dianne Feinstein taking the lead, the Democrats — that’s right, the Democrats — have called a classic Republican play: Privatize it.

The House of Representatives made the switch in the 1980s, and its food service is now better. And profitable: The House has made $1.2 million in commissions since 2003. True to the Founders’ vision of the Senate as the more slow-moving branch of government, the Senate has taken 20 years to follow suit.

This was a painful decision for many Democrats who believe that privatization cannot be justified simply because it delivers better service and higher quality for less money. “What about the workers?” they cried. Apparently, some Democrats feel that the top priority in the restaurant business is to generate paychecks for people who are bad at their jobs.

Feinstein, head of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, was forced to deal with reality. “It’s cratering,” the Washington Post quoted Feinstein as saying. “Candidly, I don’t think the taxpayers should be subsidizing something that doesn’t need to be. There are parts of government that can be run like a business and should be run like businesses.”

Yes, yes, go on, Dianne. Run with that thought. Explore it, as the therapists say.

Meanwhile, while Dianne has privatized the nation's most exclusive restaurant, John McCain has bigger fish to fry, Megan McArdle writes:

The campaign policy blogging starts now: apparently, McCain wants to shut down Amtrak. Liberals are predictibly (and understandably) outraged. I'm not sure, however, that this is such a terrible idea, even environmentally. The lines that actually run at a profit--those in the Virginia-Massachussetts corridor--would still be profitable, and presumably operated by some private company. The other lines are a mixed bag, environmentally; it isn't really good for the environment to run trains at low capacity. And the federal government, because of the EIS process, other procedural barriers, and a great deal of logrolling, has so far not succeeded in making sensible upgrades to the system. The Acela was announced in 1994, actually went live six years later despite the really rather minor infrastructure improvements required, and at lavish expense now gets passengers to Boston one half-hour quicker in slightly comfier seats.

Moreover, if oil prices stay high, the math changes substantially for passenger rail, making new routes more profitable. People will probably never take the train en masse from New York to Los Angeles, but a direct train from New York to Chicago could start looking good, particularly when you factor in the drive to out-of-the way airports, delays, and time spent removing your shoes in security lines.

America's freight rail system, while it needs a lot of work, is world-class. Its passenger rail should be too. But it's so far proven pretty much impossible for the government to make it that way--and not merely because we don't have enough liberal politicians who like rail. Most politicians like rail. But they like a lot of other things better, like getting re-elected.

It will never happen (if the Congressional GOP couldn't privatize PBS at the height of their powers in the mid-'90s, I doubt this will), but McCain's heart, or at least his campaign rhetoric, is certainly in the right place.

Good Morning America's Chris Cuomo equates so-far non-existent recession with the Great Depression, sees rising suicides(!) on the horizon:

Elsewhere in the legacy media, Tom Brokaw talks David Letterman back from his own ledge:

DAVID LETTERMAN: Guys talking about the President really can't do anything about the economy. I don't know if that's true or not, but let's give them that one, let's just say “okay, the President can't do anything about the economy.” Everything else has gone so lousy in the last eight years. I mean – and I'm a guy who doesn't pay attention to much, as long as I got wresting and a TV dinner I'm fine – but even I am perceiving now that things are horrible in ways they shouldn't be horrible. Now, we're not going to impeach the guy. Could we get our money back? Honest to God, what, I mean [audience applause], just at least something.

TOM BROKAW: David, that's why we have elections and we're about to have an election and on January 20th he'll be out of office. In this book, I write about 1968. Let me remind you that forty years ago this year, Doctor King was killed, Bobby Kennedy was killed, we had the Chicago riots, 16,000 people were killed in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for re-election, the Kerner Commission said we are two societies – one white, one black, separate and unequal – we had urban riots and in the fall we had as cantankerous and as contentious and in many way as mentally violent an election as we've ever had – with George Wallace who was part of it.

So, we've been through these difficult times before and the way you work your way out of them is you get the two parties to nominate their best candidates and then everybody re-enlists as citizens and say to themselves and their family and their friends: “Hey, it's time for us to get involved.” So that's how I feel about it.

Meanwhile, even as "The Economy Is Better Than You Think", "Adam Smith's invisible hand coldly touches its next victim."

And boy, is he in for a shock!

(Sorry, couldn't resist that last link.)

Betsy Newmark points readers towards Mark Hemmingway's column in NRO today:

Mark Hemingway dissects the latest effort by Newsweek to campaign for Obama in their totally unsourced Obama-friendly attempt to show that he shouldn't have any problem with Jewish voters. Newsweek thus continues their trend of pumping for Obama's campaign. If they can't put him on the cover, they'll slant stories inside. As I noted last week, they have put Obama on the cover more than any other subject in the past year. Jim Geraghty notes some more examples that are, as he puts it, allowing Newsweek to give Olbermann a run for his money. US News' James Pethokoukis ridicules their cover this week about how the recession is worse than we think.

For another example, here's a story about the U.S. economy from the latest issue of Newsweek, "Why It's Worse Than You Think." Not a surprising piece, given that the magazine made its recession call back in February, though the economy has stubbornly refused to roll over.

Newsweek is not bothered by such economic technicalities as the fact that we still aren't experiencing a recession according to the data. They'll just tell us we're in a recession and that we should be darned scared about it. Subtext: vote Democratic.

That's also the subtext of these TV network stars here and here.

Jim Geraghty spots some more fun from the folks who put the Koran in the Can, and this is an unintentional riot as well:

"Obama's Official Blog is Boring. McCain's is Enjoyable. Why That's Bad News for the GOP."

I dunno--I find the Indiana Jones-style archaeological explorations of the former pretty fascinating myself.

Back in February of 2007, as old media seemed to be peddling faster and faster to stay afloat and its tone seemed to quickly become even more hysteric than usual, I asked if the media's Red Queen's Race had begun--and indeed it had. In Slate, Jack Shafer writes that Michael Crichton--who knows a thing or two about dinosaurs facing extinction--predicted its death rattle 15 years ago:

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled "Mediasaurus," in which he prophesied the death of the mass media—specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. "Vanished, without a trace," he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances—"artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page"—swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

* * *

As we pass his prediction's 15-year anniversary, I've got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It's gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren't going extinct tomorrow, Crichton's original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

Read the whole thing.

Then, much like a visit to Westworld or Jurassic Park, let's hit the museum!

See Dubya has a nifty new video on change...that's not so much of a change, with a soundtrack courtesy of Shirley Bassey (hence the above title). Someone should redo her Goldfinger theme:

Ohbaaaahma.....He's the man, the man with the radical friends!

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey spots some more history repeating, with someone infinitely less exciting than a SPECTRE villain: Mario Cuomo, whom Obama may have borrowed the boilerplate for his latest speech. And speaking of which, James Lileks writes:

“John McCain has spent a lot of time talking about trips to Iraq in the last few weeks, but maybe if he spent some time taking trips to the cities and towns that have been hardest hit by this economy -- cities in Michigan, and Ohio, and right here in Minnesota -- he'd understand the kind of change that people are looking for."

Right here in Minnesota? Hardest hit by this economy? What is he talking about, exactly? Is this a specific reference to a specific plight faced by specific towns, or a boilerplate remark about the dire lives of people trapped in the Bittervilles that dot the strange outlands?

Read the rest--and tune in tomorrow to PJM Political on XM, where James will have further thoughts on the topic.

At least in terms of energy policy, as Victor Davis Hanson notes:

I don't quite understand why one party or the other doesn't campaign on delivering more energy to the American people to lower costs, keep the world price down, and money out of the hands of terrorists, and to address U.S. debt and the falling dollar. There seems no contradiction between wanting nuclear power, clean coal, tar and shale, more drilling off our coasts and Alaska — and more conservation, more money for hydrogen, biofuels, more solar, wind, etc.

But unfortunately the former seems to be the more conservative position, the latter the more liberal, when in fact they hardly are incompatible, since the first is the short-term solution that ensures we don't go bankrupt and empower our enemies as we evolve toward the long-term answers. Nothing could be more populist than trying to deliver affordable energy; but it's a position that so far neither candidate is addressing — maybe because Obama's base is still anti-nuclear and against drilling; and McCain is almost indistinguishable from him on the coasts and ANWR. One otherwise would have thought that energy would be the critical issue of the campaign, and instead — relative silence from both on stump?

Related thoughts from James Pethokoukis.

"Media Coverage [Of Economy] Was More Upbeat at Start of the Great Depression"--Of course, that was right around the time that FDR was campaigning as a sort of Jurassic libertarian, which illustrates how radically narratives can change over time.

But then economic coverage is far from the only example of old media's having undergone a post-1960s hardening of the attitudes. As Orrin Judd recently wrote, "What Actually Remains Of Nixonland...is just a press corps that treats everyone like the enemy and, therefore, fails at the basics of its profession."

With apologies to Jack Benny for the above headline; while I'm not in the market for a new car at the moment, the timing of Honda's new sales pitch makes it an awfully appealing proposition...

Certainly better than this gaffe (at least I hope it's a gaffe--never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity) by Dunkin' Donuts' latest spokesperson. In any case, mister, they could use a pitchman like Michael Vale again!

James Lileks explores the exciting, convenient world of 21st century commercial aviation, and contrasts it with the stone knives, bearskins, and Boeing 707s of our forefathers:

"Airport" was shot during the glamorous days of air travel, when all the men wore suits and the women wore dresses and tiaras and spike heels. No one plodded down the jetway like cows on the way to the butcher's nail gun; you strolled across the tarmac, flicked your cigarette into the whirling blades of the propeller for luck, and settled down for a civilized, nine-hour flight from Chicago to Milwaukee, with a full meal service that included prime rib carved from a cart that rolled right down the aisle.

It probably wasn't that good. For one thing, people smoked on the old planes, and smoked a lot. Even the stews who knew they were flying in a pressurized tube at 25,000 feet were tempted to crack a window. The planes were loud and in-flight entertainment consisted of a Bob Newhart comedy LP, passed around from seat to seat so you could read the liner notes. But it seemed more civilized.

Ideally it was this Newhart album. To paraphrase Steven Den Beste: The Mrs. Grace L. Ferguson Airline & Storm Door Company: a user manual for cost-conscious airlines, a sneak preview of the future for the rest of us.

Related: This is probably as good a place as any to hang a link to this--Kyle Smith spots a TV viewer in England who seems to just slightly miss the point of AMC's Mad Men series, set during the New Frontier-era buttondown days of the aforementioned Mr. Newhart. Perhaps a link to my initial review of the show from last July will help ease the current delicate state of transatlantic relations.

(Or, perhaps not...)

In over your head with too large a mortgage? Just toss the keys to the mansion in the mail, and return it to the bank. From baseball great Jose Canseco to freshman California Democrat congresswoman Laura Richardson, Michelle Malkin looks at the growing trend of "jinglemail".

Michelle Obama in February: "Don't Go Into Corporate America".

Larry Kudlow, today: "Stocks Don’t Like Obama".

While we're promised that we'll wake up in 2015 to Obamatopia, it sounds like there will be lots of recurring reruns of Carter Country in the interim.

Father Coughlin could not be reached for comment:

"All we're doing is going into the basket and saying, 'Damn, what did they do in '32, what did they do in '34, what did they do in '36,' and we're pulling them out, dusting them off, giving them a paint job, correcting the fenders a bit, and we're using them," Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) said. "To get us through the horrendous problems we may have over the next several years, we've got to make these old programs work, and we've got to be as inventive as hell."

Nice to know that with the Dow Jones about 12,700 points higher than it was in 1932, the left still sees nothing but Hoovervilles into eternity.

James Pethokoukis notes that the economy grew 0.6 percent in the first quarter of 2008, even with the drag of the Pelosi Premium around its neck:

Now that's not a robust number by any means, but it's not so bad given all the worry out there that the economy is headed off a cliff. Before you declare a recession, as many economic pundits have, shouldn't the economy, well, actually recess a bit—if only for a quarter?

But what about those rice shortages, eh?

Standard & Poor's cuts the bond ratings of the New York Times:

Credit-ratings agency Standard & Poor's Ratings Services on Tuesday cut its long-term rating on newspaper publisher The New York Times Co., as its advertising revenue continues to fall.

S&P cut its corporate credit rating and senior unsecured debt rating to "BBB-" from "BBB."

"BBB-" is one notch above "junk bond" status. The ratings were removed from CreditWatch, but the outlook is negative, meaning another downgrade could occur.

"The rating downgrade reflects a worsening pace of decline in advertising revenue at the company's newspaper publications," said S&P credit analyst Emile Courtney in a statement.

Despite weakening ad revenue, The New York Times has a diversified and quickly growing online revenue base. S&P expects online revenue will begin to offset print revenue declines over the next few years.

Shares fell 35 cents to $19.96 during midday trading.

In 2002, NYT stock was worth over $50 a share.

And I as mentioned in a recent video, just wait until 2014...

Amity Shlaes, the author of The Forgotten Man, a terrific history of the Depression, brings a reminder of forgotten recent history as well, as she deflates so much recent economic doomsaying:

The gloom is so thick that it feels positively German. And that’s just our domestic press. The Brits have long since decided that doom is around the American corner. Covering Bear Stearns Cos., a reporter from the Independent wrote, “Wall Street traders said they had never experienced such fear.”

The suggestion behind such talk is that the current situation isn’t merely depressing. It is that the slowdown is like the Great Depression of the 1930s. You almost expect Senators Obama and Clinton to repeat the lines from President Roosevelt’s inaugural address of 75 years ago: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The analogy is absurd. This economy is to the Great Depression what an April drizzle is to Hurricane Katrina. So far, the Dow has declined about 12% from its record high of last fall. In the Depression, it dropped more than 80%. Unemployment is about 5%. In the Depression it was 25%.

Maybe 2% of mortgages are in trouble, and abandoned homes line some parts of Cleveland Heights. During the Depression, more than half of Cleveland was underwater. Today, one big bank has collapsed. In 1931, 1,400 banks collapsed.

Even a comparison with more recent periods is a stretch.

Today, everyone is concerned about the consequences of the Bear Stearns rescue. On the right, critics argue that the Federal Reserve’s decision to make funds available to Bear created moral hazard on a scale that can bring down our markets. These critics forget that in 1984 Washington actually nationalized a big bank. That bank was the nation’s seventh largest, Continental Illinois. Yet the Reagan Revolution didn’t stall.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Dow languished in the 800s for a period longer than it takes to collect a college degree. Unemployment in 1982 was close to 10%. Yet you didn’t hear too much talk about the New Deal or FDR’s speeches.

No--and FDR was smart enough not to suggest that a malaise had come over the nation, but you did hear his 1970s' would-be equivalent use very New Dealer-ish language when he equated reduction of foreign energy reliance with "the moral equivalent of war". And Business Week's infamous "Death Of Equities" cover in 1979 certainly had a Depression-era ring to it--only a year or two before the Dow began its rise to its current high of near 13,000.

More Shlaes:

So why so dark this time?

One reason is that last year and the year before felt so bubbly. As John Lipsky, then of JPMorgan Chase & Co., said, the market was so confident that “the only thing we have to fear is the lack of fear itself.”

Another reason for the current gloom is U.S. susceptibility to foreign wisdom. Americans tend to believe that if the Brits say something and it’s reported on Drudgereport.com, it must be so. But the Great Britain press derives some pleasure in seeing misfortune in America, and often hypes that misfortune.

Yet another problem is our addiction to Markets TV, which bears more similarity than any of us like to acknowledge to the Weather Channel. Lacking a truly dramatic winter to report, the anchors will yap about wind chill. Hear enough about wind chill, and eventually you begin to believe in it.

The most important reason for the current mood is demography. Our trouble isn’t that we have it so bad. It is that we have had it so good. Anyone who graduated college after that early 1980s’ snap hasn’t seen the Dow do much but go up.

That last point is debatable--16 years ago, another Democratic presidential nominee was also able to make great strides by transforming a temporary pause in the Dow's ascension into The Worst Economy Of 50 Years--which miraculously righted its course the very minute in November of 1992 he won the election.

This is a riot:

"Three guys in a garage create YouTube, and we've got 800 people in Chicago who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground!"

Sam Zell, owner of the Tribune Company, which publishes the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, and other Jurassic-era publications your grandmother still reads because the thought of turning on a computer makes her knees shake.

The NPR article on Zell also includes a subhead titled, "Journalists as 'Overhead'". Which illustrates that the author can't comprehend that unlike a government-subsidized operation, the owner can't force taxpayers to bail him out if readers aren't footing the bill:

"This is the first unit of Tribune that I've talked to that doesn't generate any revenue. So all of you are overhead," Zell said during the late February meeting with editors and reporters for the company's Washington bureau.

Most reporters and editors who cover the government don't consider themselves overhead — they describe themselves as fulfilling a key role newspapers play in a democratic society.

No, reporting the news is a key function in a democratic society. But the medium in which consumers receive that news is subject to change, as other dinosaur media conglomerates are discovering the hard way.

And as that YouTube allusion from Zell highlights, news isn't exclusively a top-down business anymore.

Related: "Will there always be print newspapers? The editor of The Washington Post said he thought so, though others might think he's in denial:

In November 2007, former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw predicted the print edition of The Washington Post would “probably” be dead in 10 years. But Downie disagreed.

“I can’t see that,” Downie said. “Obviously I’m of an age where I can’t see so far out into the future, but I can’t see that.

Arthur C. Clarke could...41 years ago:

Newspapers will, I think, receive their final body blow from these new communications techniques. I take a dim view of staggering home every Sunday with five pounds of wood pulp on my arm, when what I really want is information, not wastepaper. How I look forward to the day when I can press a button and get any type of news, editorials, book and theater reviews, etc., merely by dialing the right channel.

Electronic “mail” delivery is another exciting prospect of the very near future. Letters, typed or written on special forms like wartime V—mail, will be automatically read and flashed from continent to continent and reproduced at receiving stations within a few minutes of transmission.

Meanwhile, this rather less exploratory prediction from Downie is definitely a two-edged sword:

Mid-size market newspapers may be in trouble, according to Downie. The small community newspapers and the newspaper titans – like the Post and The New York Times – will in some part be immune to the evolution of media, as it makes it way in a digital age.

Yes, it seems quite reasonable to assume that the Times will be immune to the evolution of news--that was one of the predictions made in this classic multimedia presentation beamed back from 2014.

The Internet Movie Database reports:

The current economic downturn is drying up traditional financing for many film producers -- from those turning out low-budget indies to those making big-star vehicles, the Hollywood Reporter reported today (Thursday). "Projects that would have sailed through easily a year ago are stalled in development. Movies that are practically in preproduction are falling apart at the eleventh hour," the trade publication observed. It cited a number of projects that had been in development by established producers that have fallen apart for lack of financing, including an Oliver Stone-Antoine Fuqua biopic about Colombian drugs overlord Pablo Éscobar and a Tim Robbins-directed feature called The Heretic. William Morris agent Cassian Elwes, one of the top agents among independent filmmakers, told the Reporter: "I think as we go into a tougher economy some films won't get made." He added: "And probably shouldn't get made."

Gee, you don't think Hollywood brought any of its current bad times on itself, huh? Naaaahh.

Kate of Small Dead Animals compares the glories of the economy under Bill Clinton with the dank Hoovervilles of Dubya.

Jesse Walker lists FDR's 1932 campaign promises, which makes the father of centralized government sound remarkably laissez faire (sorry to use a possibly NSFW word if you're working for Starbucks):

In 1932, a classical liberal could easily conclude that Roosevelt was closer to his views than Hoover, an old progressive who had displayed a lifelong love of central planning and government-enforced cartels, a man who bragged during the campaign that he had responded to the Depression with "the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic." Among other things, President Hoover had jacked up spending, installed agricultural price-support programs, pressured businesses to follow Washington's wage dictates, and created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But by the time a cerebral hemorrhage cut short FDR's fourth term, the federal bureaucracy's power had grown so enormously that Hoover was widely remembered as the last apostle of laissez faire.

As Jesse writes, "A candidate's campaign persona: There's the true Forgotten Man.", a reference to Amity Shlaes' seminal book on the period. And as Shlaes recently wrote, with an eye towards November of 2008, "the 1930s have plenty to tell us, yes. But the real challenge isn't deciding who resembles Hoover. The challenge is for both parties to figure out how to avoid a whole era of mistakes."

Tim Blair's aphorism defines "the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force."

In the Jurassic world of the dinosaur media, that definition exquisitely summarizes the proposal by CBS to outsource its news gathering operation to CNN, thus bringing together the news division which brought you the biggest trainwreck moment of 2004 (not to mention 1968!) with the news division that, prior to 2003, brought you long-running coverage of Iraq personally approved by Saddam Hussein and his apparatchiks.

(And note the story was broken by the New York Times, which isn't in the best of health in its dotage, either.)

Mark Steyn writes:

Jeepers, will all business during the Clinton Administration be transacted at 3 AM? Is it some union-negotiated flex-time deal? “Home foreclosures mounting”? We’d better wake the President.

As Jim Geraghty, or possibly someone else at NRO recently noted, the ideal response from a prospective President McCain would be to seriously ream anyone on his staff who wakes him at 3:00 AM over a domestic financial "crisis"--there's a reason why they call the time when the sun is visible "bankers' hours". (The acceptable alternative response would be, "Call Kudlow, dammit!", but that's a whole 'nother story.)

But hey, like I said, it's always 3:00 AM somewhere...

Let's see: original Depression: Dow Jones Industrial Average bottoms out at 40 as huge unemployed swatches of the country live in Dickensian hardship. Men in breadlines wear suits and ties, largely because they have no other clothes.

The 21st century New American Depression that England's Independent has stumbled across? The Dow closed today at 12,654.36, unemployment is at 4.8 percent, and Nike's stock is doing quite nicely as the firm makes a comfortable profit selling $150 basketball shoes to parents and their kids across the country who have the disposable income to afford them.

But why is a British newspaper trying to muscle in on territory that's traditionally exclusive terrain for American journalists during an election year? Shouldn't they be investigating a protracted economic malaise that's far closer to home?

Steven Malanga writes, "Barack Obama’s much-discussed speech in Philadelphia earlier this week was not only about race":

It was also about economics and, specifically, about poverty. Measures of group wealth, or the lack of it, are often used to support claims that our society is racist. Obama’s speech revealed that though he may be, to many people, a refreshingly new kind of post-racial politician and a healer, when it comes to notions of poverty and economic advancement, his ideas are right out of the 1960s and 1970s.

At one point in his speech, for instance, Obama suggested that some black poverty today can be attributed to the “legalized discrimination” that existed in America prior to the civil rights laws of the 1960s, which, in his telling, prevented black families from accumulating “wealth to bequeath to future generations.” Obama seemed to suggest that families in America escape poverty by patiently accumulating wealth and passing it on to future generations—when in fact millions of Americans of all races leap out of poverty within a single lifetime through their own initiative, not their inheritances. We are long past the time when the legacy of Jim Crow laws and other forms of official discrimination can explain black poverty rates.

* * *

Researchers estimate that the entire rise in poverty in America since the late 1970s can be attributed to “changes in family formation,” a euphemism for the decline of families headed by two married parents. The latest Census data illustrate the problem. Only one out of ten American kids living in two-married-parent families is in poverty—and about one-third of these families are recent immigrants whose poverty is temporary. By contrast, 37 percent of children living with single mothers are impoverished.

Marriage seems to be the defining characteristic of economically successful families. With out-of-wedlock birth rates in America soaring, so that many traditional families aren’t so much breaking up as never getting started, the percentage of children living with cohabiting parents is growing. Yet these kids are three times more likely to be in poverty than the children of married parents. The data actually demonstrate that poverty rates for families headed by two unmarried parents more closely resemble the poverty rates of single-parent families than those of two-married-parent ones.

Part of this shocking difference owes to what City Journal contributing editor Kay S. Hymowitz has called the “marriage gap” in America (“Marriage and Caste,” Winter 2006). Hymowitz describes how better-educated, higher-income men and women are now more likely to delay having children until they’re married, while lower-income, less-educated men and women are more likely to cohabit and have children out of wedlock.

But even these demographic facts don’t completely explain the widely varying poverty rate between married and cohabiting parents. Studies that adjust for parents’ educational levels still find that a family headed by two unmarried parents is twice as likely to wind up in poverty as one that married parents head. Something about the marriage certificate—a sense of long-term commitment, family stability, perhaps—makes an economic difference. Research shows that married workers exhibit more job stability and make greater wage gains than cohabiting parents, a sort of “marriage wage premium,” as some economists dub it.

Such factors also help to illuminate economic disparities along racial lines in America. As the latest Census statistics illustrate, family formation differs widely by race. Nearly nine in ten Asian children, for instance, live with two parents, as do 78 percent of white kids. By contrast, 68 percent of Hispanic children and only 38 percent of black children in America reside in two-parent families. A black child living with a single mother is nearly three times more likely to live in poverty than a black child living with two parents, the Census data show, yet 50 percent more black children are living with single mothers than in two-parent married families.

Given that a significant body of research now shows that children raised in two-parent, married families do better in school, are less likely to wind up in jail, and are less likely to end up on welfare, the startling racial divide in marriage tells us that a new generation of children, especially blacks, are growing up destined to struggle academically, in the job market, and in forming their own families. And policy prescriptions like a higher minimum wage or tax credits are unlikely to help many of these kids. What they mostly need is another parent—usually a father.

In contrast, as Mark Steyn noted, if you believe, as Rev. Wright clearly does, that all of life's negative forces are part of a massive conspiracy invented by The Man to keep blacks down, what incentive is there--to coin a phrase--to do the right thing?

Talk about a blown opportunity for Obama, as Mickey Kaus wrote early last week before The Speech itself:

There are plenty of potential Souljahs still around: Race preferences. Out-of-wedlock births. Three strike laws! But most of all the victim mentality that tells African Americans (in the fashion of Rev. Wright's most infamous sermons) that the important forces shaping their lives are the evil actions of others, of other races.

But then, the reason we remember the original Sister Souljah moment is because of the astounding infrequency of reoccurrence since.

Glenn Reynolds satirically suggests "a lucrative spokesperson gig" is possibly in the Dark Lord's future from Apple; but if this even more famous Mac head--with the nation's single largest audience of listeners--couldn't get signed, Karl probably shouldn't hold his breath.

Amity Shlaes, the author of The Forgotten Man, her exceptional 2007 look at the Depression, writes, "the 1930s have plenty to tell us, yes. But the real challenge isn't deciding who resembles Hoover. The challenge is for both parties to figure out how to avoid a whole era of mistakes":

Hoover knew free trade was beneficial. But his party, the Grand Old Party, was the tariff party. So in spite of himself, he signed a big new tariff, the Smoot-Hawley act, triggering retaliation from U.S. trading partners.

For many decades now, Democrats have contrasted Hoover's concession to protectionists unfavorably with free-trade legislation written by Roosevelt and his globalization guru, Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

Today it is the Democrats who are doing wrong, and they know better. Candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both internationalists by temperament, yet they seem to be in a race to see who can repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement first.

Read the whole thing.

While it lacks the staggering production values and stentorian dialogue readings of the finest Fred Spencer Productions, the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, our in-house video blog, is online. It analyzes and breaks down the creepy 9/11-ish vibe of a couple of advertisements, the first a Starbucks ad that actually ran in Manhattan less than a year after September 11th (here's our concurrent blog post from our first year). And the second, a much more recent viral video for a (possibly fictitious?) Dutch travel agency with close to a million and half views on YouTube and at least one appearance on the cable news channels, which is where I first saw it at the start of this month.

(Past episodes of Silicon Graffiti can be found here.)

David Weidner of Dow Jones' Market Watch writes, "The real Eliot was always there. We just averted our eyes." We, white man? Plenty of conservative and libertarian writers expressed their concerns about Spitzer's Giuliani versus Drexel Burnham with the Marshall stacks turned up to 11 approach. But in contrast, the liberal New York media were typically more than happy to roll over for someone like Spitzer, Weidner notes:

It's the editors and reporters who stepped out of their roles when it came to making Spitzer too good to be true. Big papers dutifully leaked embarrassing details about Spitzer's targets, generated by the attorney general's office, while protecting the source of the information. In most cases, reporters put careerism ahead of fairness or, at least, questioning the tactics of one of the state's leading law-enforcement officials.

At the height of his power, Spitzer was in control, and instead of challenging him, the media was part of his machine.

Doesn't this sound identical to the New York press's see-no-evil approach to Hillary Clinton, particularly when she first ran for the Senate in 2000?

One of the media's Folk Marxist tropes is a century-old line that's still trotted out to this day: "The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." (Gee, that's the very definition of objective and clinical, huh?) No wonder the press saw Spitzer as a kindred spirit.

In Canada's National Post, Robert Fulford asks what to many is a fairly straightforward rhetorical question:

Why aren't the Vietnamese more grateful to Tom Hayden? Recently, he returned for the first time in 36 years to the country that he and his then-wife Jane Fonda tried to save from American domination in the Vietnam war. The trip disappointed him. As he writes in the March 10 issue of The Nation, Vietnam has turned capitalist. Was that what he fought for? Absolutely not. He remains capitalism's enemy, still the same lefty who helped found 1960s student radicalism.

In the San Jose suburb of Milpitas, the large Vietnamese population is so enamored with the current communist regime that they've gone back to flying the flag of the free former South Vietnam. And they're not alone.

Via Small Dead Animals, which notes:

Ah yes, those ungrateful Vietnamese. After Hollywood cleared their path for a worker's paradise they've decided they don't like it much after all and are abandoning it. Oh well, Hollywood still has Cuba and there's always Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to embrace.

And possibly, eventually, not even the former:

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news the official state media try to suppress.

Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly. Alarcón seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Alarcón's reputation in some circles.

Something similar happened in late January when officials tried to impose a tax on the tips and wages of employees of foreign companies.

Workers erupted in jeers and shouts when told about the new tax, a moment caught on a cellphone camera and passed along by memory sticks.

"It passes from flash drive to flash drive," said Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who, like almost everyone else interviewed for this article, asked that his last name not be used for fear of political persecution. "This is going to get out of the government's hands because the technology is moving so rapidly."

This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and Cuba has the benefit of much more modern techology, to boot.

As the Cato Institute, among many others has noted, in the 1980s:

Fax machines and photocopiers, video recorders and personal computers outside the government were no longer exotica but a sprawling, living nervous system that linked the Russian political opposition, the republican independence movements, and the burgeoning private sector. Tied informally together, this equipment constituted a network of considerable scale.

During that period, those same tools had a similar, if sadly less revolutionary impact in China. So the decision to allow possession of computers in Cuba by the new regime after Castro's six year PC blockade could have suprisingly remarkable long term consequences for that currently still-imprisoned Island.

The great Victor Davis Hanson wonders why none of the candidates will get serious about discussing America's energy needs:

In terms of energy, we continue to delay coal plants despite our vast reserves, we dither on nuclear power, we won’t drill off the California coast or in tiny parcels in a vast Alaska, while we talk grandly of wind and solar and hydrogen and all the other solutions that are decades away from contributing in major ways to our energy needs—while our enemies in the Middle East are building trillion dollar reserves that will find their way into the hands of those who want to kill us. Do we think Nigeria or Russia is easier on the environment than we are when drilling oil, or that the Chinese have cleaner coal plants? If we really live on planet Earth, then isn’t it incumbent on us to exploit our own resources safely to ensure others less careful do less damage to our shared globe?

Can’t we find a single Presidential candidate who says: ‘Hang on. We are going to get serious. We our going to build coal, nuclear, more hydro-electric plants. We want as many Americans as possible to buy a second electric plug-in car for urban driving; we want more efficient gas and diesel engines; we are going to cut spending, radically so, to balance the budget, pay down the debt, pay off our foreign debt, and raise the value of our currency. Tighten your belts: federal spending is frozen for five years; we are going to raise the Social Security retirement age and reform the system. The borders are going to close, and citizenship is going to mean something again.’

Should McCain say that, it would trump ‘hope’ and ‘change’ and the 1960s tired old agenda, adopted by both parties, that got us in the mess we’re in.

What's really fascinating is that even a sclerotic leftwing organization such as this one is willing to engage in a more sensible conversation about America's energy needs than any of the remaining candidates on either side of the aisle.

Glenn Reynolds is back to blogging after a week on vacation. (So am I!) He has some thoughts on Barack Obama's "Naftaquiddick" moment:

And reader Matt Szekely observes: "If Obama can't handle a goody two shoes country like Canada how the heck is he going to deal with Iran, Syria, China, Russia, France and other countries that have a somewhat higher level of difficulty? . . . This is like watching someone get bucked off one of the coin op kiddies horses they have at the supermarket."

And reader Mike Riger comments: "The interesting thing to me about this whole episode seems to be that both the Obama and Clinton comments are, in essence, saying that they absolutely DO intend to be protectionist, anti-trade presidents if elected. And both seem to be more stridently painting themselves into this corner as the charges and counter-charges are thrown around."

Messrs. Smoot and Hawley could not be reached for comment.

James Lileks links to one of the saddest videos you'll watch.

Elsewhere in the global snack food war, are Doritos next in the crosshairs?

(Or is Roger Kimball's quiet crusade being implemented incrementally?)

Product placements in novels? It could be a coming thing, writes Stefan Beck in the New Criterion's Armavirumque blog.

"You want to save the earth? Here’s a little hint. Don’t. Buy. S***."

That's pretty much Bill's plan.

Wow, this proposal by Barack Obama sounds like it's straight out of FDR's--ultimately unconstitutional--National Recovery Act of the 1930s:

So the Democrats who constantly carp that their patriotism isn’t to be questioned because they’re consistently making it easier for terrorists to plan and carry out attacks against us, want to have the legal right and authority to question the patriotism of US corporations now? Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) says that he and Barack Obama want to do exactly that.

I’ve talked to Barack a lot about his Patriot Corporation Act, which is not trade per se, but it’s certainly part of the economic package around globalization. The Patriot Corporation Act has not gotten the attention that I would hope it would. But, basically it says that if you play by the rules, if you pay decent wages, health benefits, pension; do your production here; don’t resist unionization on neutral card check, then you will be designated a “Patriot Corporation” and you will get tax advantages and some [preference] on government contracts.

Here’s the bill, S.1945. Set aside the fact that so many big Democrats, including the Kennedy clan with their offshore accounts, are total hypocrites on this. They’re total hypocrites on this. And obviously they’ll exempt themselves from this as Congresscritters always do.

Setting that aside, by defining some corporations as patriotic, you’re necessarily defining others as unpatriotic, and based on economic decisions they’re making and often being forced into making by the tax and legal environment that’s forced on them by the idiots in Washington.

What gives people like Obama and Brown the idea that they have the right to do this? Certainly not the Constitution.
As the post over at the NAM says, this is a terrible, terrible idea. It has Hugo Chavez statist anti-freedom tactics written all over it.

Somebody should write a book about this stuff! Maybe two!

Some of our younger readers might be astonished to learn that many years ago, these tips used to be called, in less enlightened, less obssessed with counterknowledge times, common sense.

(Via the H.R. department at Maggie's Farm.)

Photo technology is rapidly changing, with analog formats quickly going by the wayside: back at the start of 2006, "Nikon UK has posted a press release here indicating that they are all but ending production of their 35mm film cameras, medium- and large-format lenses and enlarging equipment", Slashdot noted.

Another shoe dropped yesterday; the AP reported, "Polaroid Corp. is dropping the technology it pioneered long before digital photography rendered instant film obsolete to all but a few nostalgia buffs."

James Garner and Mariette Hartley could not be reached for comment.

Transatlantic Politics looks at "German protectionism against Nokia":

German protectionism at its best: Nokia is a "subsidy locust" and promotes "caravan capitalism" for having decided to move its 2,300 emplyees-factory from the Germany to Romania, where workers cost 10 times less - claim German politicians and trade unions.

Even the European Commission promised some help from "anti-globalization" funds for the angry German workers, backed by influential trade unions and populist politicians, while the European Parliament launched an investigation into alleged abuse of EU funds in relocating to Romania. Everyone seems to forget that Nokia is the LAST mobile phone manufacturer to leave Germany, after Motorola and BenQ Siemens did the same last year and two years ago. And Nokia is not moving to China, like everyone else, but stays in the EU and gives a fair chance of development to Romania, the poorest member of the club after Bulgaria.

Yet principles such as "freedom of goods, labor and services" within the EU are easily forgotten when it comes to German protectionism.

Socialism: if you build it, they will leave. Which is why, back in 2002, Steven Den Beste wrote, "Europe is a high-tech disaster area"; policies such as this indicate that little has changed to alter that perception.

As a follow-up to my earlier post, which quoted a Washington Post journalist liberally (but of course) when he forlornly pondered, "Does the news matter to anyone anymore?", Kevin D. Williamson writes:

To acquire Yahoo, Microsoft is offering nine times what News Corp paid for Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. If you want an indicator of just how much the media business has changed in the past decade or so, that's a good one. And 500 million sets of eyeballs for a struggling No. 2? That's nearly three times the audience of the major network news programs combined.

For more on the merger, don't miss this Jeff Jarvis post, in which he perceptively notes that Yahoo is "the last old media company."

Anne Applebaum asks, "Where Did All Those Gorgeous Russian Women Come From?":

There was a particular historical moment, round about 1995 or so, when anyone entering a well-appointed drawing room, dining room, or restaurant in London was sure to encounter a beautiful Russian woman. Though the word beautiful doesn't really capture the phenomenon. The women I'm remembering were extraordinarily, unbelievably, stunningly gorgeous.

These women were half-Kazakh or half-Tartar with Mongolian ancestors and perfect skin; dressed in the most tasteful, most expensive clothes; shod in soft leather boots; and perfectly coiffed. They were usually accompanied by an older man, sometimes much older, to whom they were perhaps married, or more likely not. They spoke in low, alluringly accented voices and towered over the lesser mortals in the room. I distinctly remember gazing upon one such creature while in the company of a friend, an old Russia hand who'd spent much of the previous decade in the Soviet Union. He stared, shook his head, and whispered, "But where were they all before?"

In the aftermath of the Australian Open, a tennis tournament whose final rounds featured a parade of notably stunning ex-Soviet-bloc players, it is perhaps time to make a stab at answering my friend's question. Whatever you may say about the Soviet Union in the 1970s and '80s, it was not widely known for feminine pulchritude. Whatever you may say about women's professional tennis in the 1970s or '80s, it did not feature many players who looked like Maria Sharapova, the latest Australian Open victor.

Where were they all before?

Though this is a fairly frivolous question (OK, extremely frivolous), I am convinced it has an interesting answer. To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren't any ratings. There weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn't get the right sort of visa. There were a few film stars, of course, but some of the most famous—I'm thinking of Lyubov Orlova, alleged to be Stalin's favorite actress—were wholesome and cheerful rather than sultry and stunning. Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite people's republics.

This doesn't mean there weren't any beautiful women, of course, just that they didn't have the clothes or cosmetics to enhance their looks, and, far more important, they couldn't use their faces to launch international careers. Instead of gracing London drawing rooms, they stayed in Minsk, Omsk, or Alma Ata. Instead of couture, they wore cheap polyester. They could become assembly-line forewomen, Communist Party bosses, even local femmes fatales, but not Vogue cover girls. They didn't even dream of becoming Vogue cover girls, since very few had ever seen an edition of Vogue.

As Applebaum concludes, "Beauty is a matter of luck, but the same could be said of many other talents. And what open markets do for beautiful women they also do for other sorts of genius."

"A U.S. study suggests marketing plays a role in how often parents buy fast food for their children."

I need a study to tell me this?

"Obesity now a 'lifestyle' choice for Americans, expert says":

"Obesity is a natural extension of an advancing economy. As you become a First World economy and you get all these labor-saving devices and low-cost, easily accessible foods, people are going to eat more and exercise less," health economist Eric Finkelstein told AFP.

I need a "health economist" to tell me this? Fifty years ago, in those less enlightened times, less obssessed with counterknowledge, this was called "common sense."

Flip Pidot notes a huge milestone in the automotive industry:

For the first time since the Great Depression, Ford Motor Company (F) is not the second-largest automaker in the country.

* * *

In 2007, Toyota (TM) sold roughly 2.62 million cars in the U.S., compared to Ford's 2.54 million. The company is also poised to snatch the dominant global share from long-time global share dominator General Motors (GM).

Coincidentally, Toyota is unburdened by the crippling legacy costs wrought by decades of powerful union influence on America's shrinking, unprofitable auto industry. You'd be losing share to Toyota too if you were saddled with a $1,500 per car union handicap (slightly less than Toyota's profit per car).

The good news is that as the domestic auto industry bleeds out and is forced (despite threats of massive strikes) to trim its bloated health care and pension payouts, Congress will likely step in and force the Big 3 into keeping the veins open. As additional losses force additional layoffs and the ratio of employees to pensioners continues to decline, the industry's ensuing death spiral should be mercifully swift.

In Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg writes, "There's a reason liberal economists joke that General Motors is a health care provider that makes cars as an industrial byproduct."

Evidently, Toyota hasn't forgotten what business it's in.

Via Copious Dissent, Milton Friedman debates far left Canadian author and econocrank Naomi Klein:

More here.

Rob Port writes that retail sales were up 3.6 percent, or 2.4 if you discount fuel sales:

(though it seems to me that those should be included; the economic health of our gas stations is every bit as important as the economic health of our retail stores).

* * *

The New York Times is calling these retail numbers “bleak,” but I’d be willing to wager that the folks at the Times would be dancing in the streets if their stock prices had seen 3.6% growth instead of the negative growth their stock has seen for most of the year.

Indeed.^TM And speaking of which, Glenn Reynolds notes that online sales were up over 22 percent. And don't miss this email from one of his readers:

The same schmuck, Michael Barbaro, wrote a similar story in 2005. He also wrote a story back in September of his year trying to say back to school sales only looked good, but really weren't:

Why do we care what the some schmuck at the New York Times writes anymore, anyway?

It's like reading something Andrew Sullivan writes and instead of saying, "Sullivan thinks....." we write, "The Blogosphere today announced that...."

Bologne. We need to get out of the habit of saying, "The New York Times....." and giving backing to these folks. Instead, we should say, "Michael Barbaro wrote....." and treat him just like we'd treat anyone in the blogosphere.

But the Times has layers of gatekeepers: Editors! Researchers! They wouldn't let an error or anything that smacks of an agenda creep into their paper, or its reporting on economic conditions, both here and abroad.

(And despite the best efforts of the MSM to throw cold water on it, we hope your Christmas was as enjoyable as ours. Watch for intermittent posting from us the rest of the week.)

Update: "Seven Year American Recession Watch Remains On High Alert", and it will for another 11 months--and maybe even another four years after that.

Reuters reports:

President George W. Bush is expected to outline on Thursday a plan to freeze mortgage rates for five years for many U.S. homeowners facing sharp increases in their monthly payments, industry sources said on Wednesday.

Steve Green opines:

What the "sources" didn't say is that loan-wary banks are going to become even warier, as their expected high-risk rewards vanish in a puff of unintended consequences. Now that's how you tank an economy, you big giant dummy head. I haven't seen a Republican pull an economic move this stupid since Nixon's wage/price freeze back in '72.

It's not the first time that President Bush has dipped into the 37th president's economic playbook, of course. Here's a flashback to a post written in the first week of this blog's existence, back in March of 2002.

And White House economic tinkering may only get worse in '09.

In 1997, Lawrence Kudlow gave a keynote speech which began:

In terms of defending President Reagan and the economic policies he started 15 years ago, and to which I contributed, I knew I was on to something last autumn during the presidential campaign of ‘96. A lot of people in this room probably felt it was a fairly lackluster campaign and I suspect from the Republican perspective it was. For me, however, probably the most interesting aspect of it was that candidate Clinton essentially ran on a platform that emphasized smaller government, lower taxes, and traditional family values. And just like the politician who made these three issues winning issues, namely Ronald Reagan, Clinton won easily.

A lot of conservatives in Washington and other places are very resentful and angry and cranky and even pessimistic over the current state of affairs. I am not, and I am glad that Mr. Clinton continues to run and govern on what are essentially Reagan principles (admittedly Clinton's own interpretation of those principles, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery). It shows the power and force of Reagan's ideas and vision.

Don't expect the next President Clinton, if elected, to govern in the same fashion.

Read More »

Glenn Reynolds quotes this passage from a recent Politco article:

"Congressional Democrats are reporting a striking change in districts across the country: Voters are shifting their attention away from the Iraq war. . . . One House Democratic aide summed up the challenge for the leadership, and admitted that it may be a smart move for Democrats to focus on the economy since they haven't been able to deliver on Iraq."

Translation: it's time to really start talking the economy down even more before next November.

Found via Glenn Reynolds, John Redwood asks, "Why are so many people leaving the UK?"

Probably for many of the same reasons we explored here, here and here.

It's time to thaw McLean Stevenson out of cryogenic suspension--because Fred Silverman's back, and he's running NBC again. That's the only way to explain these two mind-numbingly stupid peacock network fumbles occurring back-to-back.

Well, it's not the only way, but it is the only explanation that makes some sense, isn't it?

Found via Instapundit, the New York Times' spin-off paper, The International Herald Tribune notes that the "Hollywood strike underlines bleak outlook for movie business":

As Hollywood digs in for a second week of a strike, the screenwriters might want to send a few angry picketers over to Will Smith's place. Or Steven Spielberg's.

And maybe the studio executives should think about joining them on the line.

As it turns out, the pot of money that the producers and writers are fighting over may have already been pocketed by the entertainment industry's biggest talent.

That is the conclusion of a surprisingly bleak new assessment of financial dynamics in the movie industry titled "Do Movies Make Money?" The researchers' answer: not any more.

Why, it's like The Era of Big Cinema Is Over, or something...

The Financial Times writes that the Democrats "wake up to being the party of the rich":

A legislative proposal that was once on the fast track is suddenly dead. The Senate will not consider a plan to extract billions in extra taxes from megamillionaire hedge fund managers.

The decision by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat, surprised many Washington insiders, who saw the plan as appealing to the spirit of class warfare that infuses the Democratic party. Liberal disappointment in Mr Reid was palpable at media outlets such as USA Today, where an editorial chastised: "The Democrats, who control Congress and claim to represent the middle and lower classes, ought to be embarrassed."

Far from embarrassing, this episode may reflect a dawning Democratic awareness of whom they really represent. For the demographic reality is that, in America, the Democratic party is the new "party of the rich". More and more Democrats represent areas with a high concentration of wealthy households. Using Internal Revenue Service data, the Heritage Foundation identified two categories of taxpayers - single filers with incomes of more than $100,000 and married filers with incomes of more than $200,000 - and combined them to discern where the wealthiest Americans live and who represents them.

Democrats now control the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional jurisdictions. More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats control both Senate seats.

We wrote about this trend and some of its implications over three years ago, during the 2004 presidential election:

In many TV sit-coms and comedy movies from the 1960s through the early 1980s, you'll see the cliché of the wealthy country club Republican, ala Nelson Rockefeller. Jim Backus' blue double-breasted blazer-wearing Thurston Howell III character was an example of this; David Ogden Stiers' Major Charles Emerson Winchester on M*A*S*H (ironically, Winchester was a Boston Brahmin, like Senator Kerry) was another.

George H.W. Bush's image was very much in that mold. But he interrupted a flip-over that began with President Reagan's self-made aw-shucks folksy style and continued with George W. Bush's cowboy boots-wearing, BBQ-loving manner and the Texas twang of his voice.

It highlights an interesting trend in politics over the last 25 years:

The shift of the Republican party as now being associated with "the little guy", the average man--who might be a blue collar guy, or he might be a self-employed high tech entrepreneur. But either case, he's working hard to get by and better himself. In contrast, the Democrats are now very much the party of the elite: ambulance chasing trial lawyers (including John Edwards himself), often big business, foreign interests, the media, academia, and most dramatically, Hollywood.

Writing in the L.A. Times, Thomas Frank, himself a self-professed liberal, bemoans the Democrats' close association with Hollywood and fears (quite rightly so) that it's hurting the Democrats' image.

In a way, it's irresistible: most people wouldn't resist a chance to meet a larger-than-life celebrity, particularly when he's gushing about your political party. But the attendees at Democrats' convention last week also dropped by "lavish soirees thrown by regional telecom giants, consumed the free lunch proffered by other regional telecom giants and gotten word of '60s heroes feted by weapons manufacturers". This is an image far removed indeed from the FDR through LBJ-era Democrats, who tried to project an image of being the scrappy party of the underdog.

Of course, it also highlights the elites' love of stasis: if you're on top of the world, who wants radical change? Why bother reforming the Middle East? Why clean up Social Security or education?

As Ace writes:

It's nice to be rich enough to not care much about taxes and the economy. But it's not nice for the plutocrats to pull up the ladder of opportunity and thus protect their privileged positions.

One of many ways Blue States do just that is by city governments making it virtually impossible to build on or otherwise develop property, dramatically ratcheting up existing property values. That's a topic Virginia Postrel has been exploring in depth recently on her pioneering Dynamist blog. Start here, then just keep scrolling.

While styles of advertising have changed radically over the decades, its structures rarely do. In print, many of today's most successful direct response ads are based on concepts that date back to at least the 1920s. And regarding TV ads, Slate's ad critic Seth Stevenson has assembled the 12 "master formats" of television commercials:

Update: And speaking of advertising....

As Jon Ham has pointed out, “Except for the advertising, a newspaper reader from another planet would never know there was a private sector,” as we are subjected mostly to the daily activities of the President, Congress, and groups claiming victimhood seeking government action. Emerging New Media initiatives like Fox Business Channel, Conde Nast Portfolio, and Slate’s new venture are now rushing to fill this century-old void. Finally, news outlets will be making our business their business.

On the other hand, this is an industry-themed TV channel I could live without.

Last week, Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart had quite an interesting video debate on whether or not the US should have entered WWI. The joys of hyperinflation was one of its byproducts, and a Bauhaus-designed 1,000,000 Reichmark note from the Weimar Republic in 1923 is currently up for sale on eBay.

An exasperated Betsy Newmark declares, "It's enough...almost...to make one a libertarian":

Thomas Sowell puts his finger on a central cause of so many of the problems we face today.

It is remarkable how many political “solutions” today are dealing with problems created by previous political “solutions.” Three examples that come to mind immediately are the housing -market crisis, the wildfires in southern California, and the water shortages in the west.

Add in our problems with people not being able to afford health insurance, the quality of our schools, AMT bracket creep, and fears for Social Security. And, I'm sure, a whole host of other issues that I don't have the time to think of. When you trace back to the origins of the problem, there is some well-meant government decision there in the beginning that started the whole mess.

And rather than reversing that original decision, the choice always seems to be to pile on more government solutions to fix the problem that some choice decades ago created.

The history of politics post New Deal and Great Society is pretty much an endless laundry list of trying to fix, tinker with, or add onto the programs of the New Deal and Great Society, isn't it?

Err, "except those plastic discs", writes Chris Anderson of Wired and The Long Tail in a good follow-up to our earlier post here.

Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes that the format war between competing high definition DVD formats has slowed the acceptance of the successor to the DVD, which is now in its tenth year of existence. And the film studios are shooting themselves in the foot, since the money isn't in the player, but the back catalog.

A format war merely slows--or stops--Hollywood's efforts to resell its back catalog yet again, which is where the real long term money is, anway. When I go high-def DVD, I'll be on my fourth or fith copies of some movies, having gone from VHS to 12-inch laser disc (remember those?!), to DVD. And along the way, having bought pan & scan and letterboxed LDs, and original issue and remastered DVDs of some of the titles I was more obsessive about.

Meanwhile, I just downloaded my first MP3-only only album off Amazon.com. It's a complete win-win for both consumer and Amazon: there's no physical product to be inventoried, packaged and shipped, and it downloads so quickly over broadband that it's near-instantaneous consumer gratification. The individual tunes are MP3s so there's complete portability amongst the PC and iPod-style player. It's been licensed by the record company, so there are no Napster legal issues. And the MP3s are rendered in 256 kbps format, which is, I believe the second highest quality format available via MP3. (Per XM's request, we do PJM Political as a 320 kbps MP3, which is the highest quality MP3 format.)

There's little doubt that as broadband speeds increase--and they will--video will be soon be added to the download mix, and not just teeny YouTube clips. Eventually DVD collections such as these will be a download away. I don't think bricks and morter stores will fade away anytime soon, but the Long Tail is becoming increasingly easier for savvy online retailers to implement.

Oh, what album did I buy? This.

No, really! Fooling around with Roland's new VG-99 guitar modeling system and its built-in recreation of their classic original GR-300 guitar synthesizer got me in the mood to hear 1984's version of "The Future of Guitar." (Would that that future came true, as compared to what passes for pop music on the radio today.) And speaking of the VG-99, if you're a guitar aficionado, you may enjoy my review of Roland's latest guitar modeling system, which I knocked out for Blogcritics over the weekend.

Don Surber (by way of Forbes) is speculating the New York Times, much like the Wall Street Journal only a short time ago this year, might be on the market--and if it isn't, it's merely a matter of time:

I was told a long time ago what the purpose of a newspaper is by Adam Kelly, who once was the only conservative columnist in West Virginia.

The purpose of a newspaper is to make money for its publisher.

For a while their, Pinch Sulzberger understood this. He was nicknamed Pinch because that’s what he did with pennies. Then I guess he attended too many cocktail parties or whatever they have in Upper Manhattan — gallery openings? — and decided to use his newspaper to educated us dummies in America.

NYT had to sell off its TV stations to keep the newspaper going. I used this analogy before, but it is like tossing the life jackets overboard to keep the Titanic afloat.

Reported Elizabeth Corcoran of Forbes: “Beverly Hills, CA -
Dow Jones changed hands faster than anyone might have imagined. Could The New York Times be next on the takeover list?

“Forbes editor Matt Miller asked the four investors on the private equity panel at Forbes 2nd annual MEET conference whether they felt that The New York Times Co. was ripe for a takeover. Three out of four said yes.”

Knight-Ridder wasted the 1980s and 1990s chasing Pulitzers. It is now out of the newspaper business.

Someone will buy the NYT and preach local, local, local, which is the mantra of the newspaper consultants in this decade. It may work.

I doubt it.

"The purpose of a newspaper is to make money for its publisher"--I know someone who seems to understand that.

Oh--and note whom Forbes is suggesting as a possible buyer. Name ring a bell?

(For much more on the Times' woes, tune in here.)

Remember the crash of 1987? Apparently, it was all Donald Luskin's fault:

Now it can be told! Twenty years after the great stock market crash of October 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by more than 22% in a single day, the truth about why it happened can now be revealed.

And believe me, I know what really happened. Because I caused the crash myself. Yep, it was me. With a little help from some market manipulation, a lot of bad judgment and some colossal mistakes.

Back then I ran portfolio management and trading for Wells Fargo Investment Advisors. With $69 billion under management, we were then the world's largest institutional investment manager. The company is now called Barclays Global Investors, and with almost $2 trillion under management, it's still the world's largest.

In 1987 Wells Fargo was by far the largest player in the two strategies that caused the crash. One was "program trading," the simultaneous execution of hundreds of stock trades with a single electronic order. The other was "portfolio insurance," a hedging strategy that used program trading and stock index futures to hedge the downside risk in institutional stock portfolios.

According to official government reports issued in the aftermath of the crash, program trading and portfolio insurance combined to cause the crash. The portfolio insurance strategy required that Wells Fargo execute program trades, selling all 500 stocks in the S&P 500, over and over as the market declined. With every execution, the market declined even more. And that triggered the next execution.

Wells managed portfolio insurance strategies for America's largest pension plans. But other giant pension plans just used us to manage their S&P 500 index funds, managing the portfolio insurance part themselves. On the day of the crash, we were executing plenty of sell programs for our own portfolio insurance strategies all day. At the same time, clients called to say, "Sell a billion S&P, right now" -- and we did. Then they called again. And we sold again. And again.

That's why I say I caused the crash. It was my team's finger that was on the sell button. It was our job to push it, and we pushed it.

Read the whole thing.

Stephen Spruiell interviews Neil Cavuto on the launch of the new Fox Business Channel:

Cavuto adds, however, that sometimes the controversy works in his favor. “I’ve heard it said that, particularly at Fox News Channel, a lot of people watch simply because they hate us. My response to that is, ‘Do they have a Nielson Box?’”

“So I don’t really care,” Cavuto says, “but I do think that any impartial observer would look at how we’re presenting business information on Fox Business Network and come away with [the impression that] this isn’t about elephants or donkeys. This isn’t about red or blue. This is about green, and helping people make more of it.”

Cavuto says that one reason that Fox News and now Fox Business have drawn so much scrutiny is that both networks are often willing to break from the media consensus. Of the biggest story in the business world right now, the trouble in the subprime mortgage market, he says most of the media’s hysterical coverage isn’t justified by the facts.

“I do think the media have way, way, way overstated the severity of this situation,” he says. “To hear most of the media tell it, you’d think that every mortgage was melting down. In fact, that’s a popular term, to call it ‘the mortgage meltdown.’ It’s an expression I’ve forbidden to use here at FBN, because if you’re going to say ‘meltdown,’ you’d better damn well tell me that every house in America is under lava.

In-farging-deed. More from Cavuto:

“The statistics are quite the opposite,” he says. “Ninety-six percent of all mortgages are still being paid on time. Now, I’m not saying there isn’t a great deal of pain out there. There are a lot of folks in trouble, but not all folks. The same thing applies to the subprime mortgage situation. You’d think that everyone who has a subprime mortgage is a delinquent, yet close to 9 out of 10 of them are paying their mortgages back on time. And subprime mortgages, which is a bad name for them, gave young people opportunities to buy homes that, when I was a young guy, would never have been afforded to me in my life.

“So it’s not all bad,” he says, “but the media leave that little part out, because that little inconvenient truth doesn’t fit in with the one that they want to push, which is that we’re going to hell in a handbasket… but that’s the kind of stuff I want to elicit out of my guests. I want to get a timetable of where they see things going, how big a problem this is. I let it be known that I think this issue has been overstated, but guests can come on and argue it with me. Many have. But that’s how the network serves viewers. We want to debate these issues, to get beyond the consensus views and be a little contrarian.”

And as we've seen from the overwrought reaction to its predecessor news channel, even a little contrarianism is too much for many free thinkers to stomach.

Don Surber notes that "NYT won’t talk to its own reporters".

But hey, would you?

Update: The layers and layers of editors and fact-checkers at the Times produce their own very special remake of Three Kings.

Just in time to sway the 2008 election, Steve Green looks at a case of "Wrong Facts, Right Narrative":

It only took six years of constant, strong growth, record-low unemployment, low interest rates, several years of a housing boom, and new stock market records... for the MSM to finally convince almost half the population that we're in a recession.

Well done, guys.

To be fair though, if I worked in the MSM, I'd be pretty depressed right now, too.

In related posts, Rick Moran notes that "It’s 1980 all over again, at least if the malaise felt by Americans today is any indication". And Orrin Judd looks at the lessons from the 1987 stock market correction, a historical blip in the Dow that the MSM presented at the time as the Next Great Depression. Until the remarkably mild 1990-'91 recession, that is.

Michael Malone has a great piece on how the New York Times went off the rails in the age of the Web and the Blogosphere, culminating in Morgan Stanley metaphorically telling the Times to "DROP DEAD". (Gerald Ford could not be reached for comment.)

Michael concludes:

If you surfed the Web yesterday you couldn't miss the fact that millions of folks out there were cheering the impending End of Times. I didn't. I want the Gray Lady to straighten out, clean herself up, and regain her old dignity. America needs an honest woman as its newspaper of record.

That's a nice sentiment, but frankly, I can't ever see that happening. Her old dignity was clouded by a lot of original sin.

Fortunately though, the Times' last, best hope has emerged, as it sees the light, and enters the 21st century. About 2001, or 2002, to be exact, as they've finally discovered the blog.

Update: Across the pond, an even grayer lady, Auntie Beeb, isn't in the best of health, either.

Rob Port makes a great observation: America's high standard of living changes the definition of "poverty"; he links to a post by Philip Brewer, who writes:

In the 1950s and 1960s, a working man could support a family at a middle-class standard of living with just one income. It might surprise you to learn that one person working full-time, even at minimum wage, can still support a family of four at that standard of living. Nowadays we call that “living in poverty.”

Rob adds:

I’m sure that will surprise a lot of people, but it’s all a trick that has been played upon us by the politicians. After all, it’s sort of hard for them to levy more taxes and expand the size and power of government unless they convince a significant chunk of us that we’re victims and cannot possibly get by without government assistance.

In the 1930s, as Amity Shlaes discusses in The Forgotten Man, it was logical to assume that poverty was partially a result of geography. But these days, as Orrin Judd and Kathy Shaidle each note (and from across the pond, so does Theodore Dalrymple in vast tracts of his back catalog), it's very often much more a function of mindset than anything else.

James Lileks has some advice for Home Depot, and their ad agency:

Let us repeat the idea, in case any marketers are tuning in: it is not necessary to denigrate one sex in order to appeal to the other.

Your cooperation is appreciated.

But, really, not expected.

The modern CEO covers all the bases, knows all the angles. He's got one eye on the bottom-line, and another looking towards the expansive globe--or globes--yet to be surveyed and conquered.

I've been swamped recently (for reasons which will hopefully be obvious later today or early tomorrow), but Ace has a great link and write-up to a post from Newbusters catching Good Morning America's Chris Cuomo and media critic Howard Kurtz talking rather openly about bias and the role of a media that once claimed to be objective in shaping recent events. Ace writes:

From context I'm not sure if Kurtz is saying this is a good thing or merely noting an inescapable fact, but we now have two of the MSM admitting it was news coverage, and specifically how it was "shaped," that turned the public against the war.

On Tuesday's "Good Morning America,"co-host Chris Cuomo and media critic Howard Kurtz ignored the role that liberal bias has played in the decline of ratings for the network evening newscasts. At the same time, Cuomo and the "Washington Post" reporter seemed to be proud of the media's ability to turn Americans against the war in Iraq. Kurtz, who has written a book on the subject, asserted, "I believe that these newscasts in 2005 and 2006 played the biggest single role in helping to turn public opinion against the war."

Cuomo agreed and complimented the journalist's analysis. He enthused, "It's easy to say, 'Oh, well. The war was unpopular. People were looking for the unpopularity of it. At some point, the networks gave that to them.' But you have a more penetrating look at it. You take a look at it in terms of the role of the nightly newscasts in shaping the ideas about the news..."According to Kurtz, the top three network anchors kept "framing the story in such a way" that the bad news finally had an impact. And while the two reporters wondered about the effect the iPod and internet are having on network low ratings, at no time did they discuss liberal bias or salient facts such as that journalists backed John Kerry over George Bush by a two-to-one margin.

Meanwhile, as Maria Bartiromo reminded us last night, two thirds of Americans think the country is either about to enter a recession or is already in a recession, despite 22 quarters of consecutive growth, low unemployment, surging tax receipts, and record stock prices.

I wonder if Howie and Chris have any idea how the public got this very counter-factual idea stuck in their heads.

And don't forget this moment as well; as Amity Shlaes reminded me recently in an interview regarding her exceptional book on the Depression, The Forgotten Man, floods can dramatically change political histories.

15 years ago, the battlefield in the cold civil war was prepped by the media's turning a mild recession into The Worst Economy In 50 Years. So it certainly makes sense for them to prepare for next year by talking down the current economy as much as possible. Legacy media advertising revenues have cratered in certain quarters; I'm sure they think the rest of us should suffer as well. And if enough Americans believe and delay big purchases, sell stock, et al, and we actually do go into recession, so much the better. As we saw in 1992, the economy doesn't need much of a dip before television in particular launches into dire warnings of impending Hoovervilles.

Gee, this progress only took self-identified "Progressives" about twenty years:

It’s progressives vs. libs in Babylon by the Bay, where they’ve finally figured out that encouraging aggressive panhandlers, squatters and junkies to come to your city is a “quality of life” problem. Warning: Graphic references to drug use, “human poop,” “throwing up,” “George Bush,” ”the Iraq war” and “law enforcement.” SF Chron:

San Francisco - the liberal, left-coast city conservatives love to mock - could be undergoing a transformation when it comes to homeless people. Although the city would still be a poor choice for a pep rally for the war in Iraq, indications are that residents have had it with aggressive panhandlers, street squatters and drug users.

“Maybe there has been an epiphany,” says David Latterman, president of Fall Line Analytics, a local market research firm. “People have realized they can hate George Bush but still not want people crapping in their doorway.”

That’s deep. But maybe people crapping in your doorway is Gaia’s way of telling you George Bush is right.

Heh. Someone alert Maria Bartiromo:

Forgive my grumpiness and general depression this morning. I still haven’t recovered from yesterday’s Republican debate. That is, I haven’t recovered from the questions CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo asked during the debate.

A sample of the sadness that’s sweeping America, as indicated by her questions:

“Two-thirds of the American people said that we are either in a recession or headed toward one. Do you agree with that?”

“Senator, you painted a very nice picture. The Dow and the S&P 500 today at new highs — tonight — record numbers. And, yet, two-thirds of the people surveyed said we are either in a recession or headed for one. Why the angst?”

“Here in Detroit, Michigan, alone, one in every 29 homes went into foreclosure in the first six months of the year. Whose job is it to fix this problem? The government or private enterprise?”

“Is London going to replace New York as the financial capital of the world?”

“What is the greatest, long-term threat to the U.S. economy?”

“Wall Street executives are making millions of dollars every year, paying tax rates of 15 percent, while the average guy out there is paying 30 percent in taxes. Is this system fair?”

After hearing all that, I need something to make me feel better about what’s happening in America. Maybe I’ll watch a film by Michael Moore.

Best avoid a film produced Warner Brothers. That's twice now that they can't even say America.

"Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"

Tech Central Station's Andrew Och discusses America's tech and real estate bubbles of the last decade with Daniel Gross, the author of Pop: Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy, and asks what next bubble is likely to burst:

GROSS: When you look back at history, you can see these early stages to a bubble. People say there's a new technology and a new set of economic assumptions behind it. You tend to get government subsidies behind a new sector. You tend to get investor enthusiasm.

TCS: And where do you see those things happening now?

GROSS: We are seeing all those elements right now in alternative energy. People are saying that there are a new set of economic assumptions surrounding energy use. Oil prices are very high. There's all the concern about global warming. Therefore, they say, we need to invest more in this area.

There's been fantastic growth in wind, solar, ethanol. We have government subsidies for all of these things, which encourages people to invest in them even at high levels. And you can see it crossing over into the popular culture. It's not just business publications. It's everywhere you look - TV, radio, newspapers, company's websites. Everybody is talking about producing alternative energy, using alternative energy.

So, I think the stars are aligning for a bubble in alternative energy.

It will be fun to watch the media report--or not--on that when and if it happens.

"Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt"--Reason's David Boaz reviews Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and explores, "What FDR had in common with the other charismatic collectivists of the 30s".

Related thoughts here, here, and here.

Bloomberg (the liberal news service, not the liberal nanny service):

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan criticized President George W. Bush for pursuing an economic agenda driven by politics rather than sound policy, with little concern for future consequences.

F.D.R. could not be reached for comment.

And in California, everything old really is new again!

This just in: Jonathan Chait is not a trained economist; and other New Republic-related fun from Donald Luskin.

In addition to understanding that they're attempting to gin-up support for their favorite candidate(s), keep this in mind when representatives of the legacy media trash the economy.

(Earlier thoughts here; H/T: SDA.)

Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review interviews "city guru Joel Kotkin":

Hail the working man. Another Labor Day is upon us/has come and gone. But are we still celebrating a blue-collar, industrial work force that barely exists anymore? Lots of people think so, but not city guru Joel Kotkin. As he wrote earlier this month in The Wall Street Journal, the death of manufacturing in America is a myth. In fact, in parts of the South, the Great Plains and Pacific Northwest, high-skilled workers are fueling vibrant local economies and helping America make $1.6 trillion worth of industrial stuff -- 42 percent more than in 1982. I talked to Kotkin (joelkotkin.com) Aug. 29 by phone from his home in the Los Angeles area.

Many of the points that Kotkin makes will be somewhat old news to our regular readers (not the least of which is this), but it's great hearing them confirmed and summarized by a self-professed "Pat Brown-Harry Truman Democrat", who sounds like he's having enormous difficulty coming to grips with the fact that that version of the Democratic Party is very much in the past.

ABC reports, "The Future of the Workplace: No Office, Headquarters in Cyberspace--Some Companies Don't Care Where Workers Are as Long as They Get the Job Done".

Geez, Toffler wrote about telecommuting in The Third Wave in 1980. Numerous businesses (not the least of which is Pajamas) rely heavily on it. Wall Street firms used telecommuting to stay afloat immediately after 9/11. Why such a breathless headline from ABC?

James Pethokoukis lists a number of reasons why President Bush bailing out homeowners would be an incredibly unfortunate idea.

(Incidentally, at least America's housing issues don't slice the nation apart anywhere near as painfully as those in Russia.)

In US News & World Report, James Pethokoukis writes:

"More Americans making ends meet with less money," was the headline atop a Boston Globe story Tuesday morning. The newspaper went on to tell its readers that Americans in 2005 earned a smaller average income, when adjusted for inflation, than in 2000, $55,238 vs. $55, 714.

What the story notably failed to tell readers is that incomes have been on the rise since 2002, a fact I gleaned from a different version of the story on the New York Times website. (The original version of the Times story had a misleading headline "Average Incomes Fell for Most in 2000-05," but it was later changed to "2005 Incomes, on Average, Still Below 2000 Peak." The Globe story also said that Americans' total income in 2005 was $7.43 billion. I'm pretty sure it's "trillion," not "billion.")

It might have also been nice had either story mentioned the great likelihood that the Internal Revenue Service data the newspapers relied on will show further income gains for 2006 and 2007, given the state of the economy and the continuing rise in real wages. I would have also liked to have the seen the two stories give a nod to the fact that government numbers tend to overstate inflation, and thus real incomes probably did even better than the official numbers show. How about this for a fair headline: "Incomes Grow for Third Straight Year, Though Still Below 2000 Peak"?

More at Bizzyblog.

Some thoughts on the Fed and the economy from U.S. News & World Report's James Pethokoukis.

US News & World Report's James Pethokoukis: "Mortgage Meltdown May Hand 2008 to Democrats".

(Or it may not--read the whole thing.)

CNBC's Jim Cramer goes insane on Friday; the Dow responds today. Of course, it's not the first time that the media have predicted financial armegeddon. Note the date of this classic overreach, and compare the value of the Dow then and now.

In an unfortunately all-too-rare piece of non-fiction these days, Tom Wolfe spots a new status pyramid to explore: nouveau mega-riche hedge fund managers. "Everybody who cares at all knows their occupations, but what’s their problem?"

The hedge fund managers who hold meetings with their shirttails hanging outside their jeans, like college boys—

The former manager of Tremont Capital Group who came to meetings with the fund’s investors barefoot—

The twinkie wives of these people who arrive at real estate offices seeking to-die-for houses and apartments wearing jeans and stiletto-heel boots, with gotta-be-blond hair streaming down to their shoulder blades, holding a baby on a cocked hip with one hand and a cell phone to the ear with the other while a limousine waits outside, motor running—

The twinkies who have their eggs fertilized by their husbands’ sperm in a laboratory, creating embryos for implantation in the wombs of surrogate mothers who are paid to manufacture children for delivery in nine months, since why on earth should any wife whose husband is worth a billion or even $500 million have to endure the distended belly, bilious mornings, back cramps, not to mention a cramped social life, to end up with her perfect personal-trainer-sculpted boy-with-breasts body she has spent thousands of sweaty hours attaining, ruined … tempting her husband to survey all the little man-eaters out there, including those former wives who used to meet regularly at the Boxing Cat Grill until it burned down, whereas the current wives leave their husbands catatonic before the plasma TV and meet three or four times a week at one local bar or another and drive home in their Hummers and bobtail Mercedes S.U.V.’s, bombed out of their minds, while waiting for the baby to come from the factory—

Whenever such rich gossip is repeated, somebody invariably says, “Who are these people?”

Read the rest to find out.

(And for a flashback to our profile of Wolfe's meeting with "the Dieter Democrats" of San Francisco shortly after the presidential election in November of 2004, click here.)

In the Philadelphia Inquirer Claudia Rosett writes, "Free men and free markets have just combined to produce a buyout by Rupert Murdoch of the Wall Street Journal":

We're now seeing a lot of hand-wringing over what might happen to a newspaper that has been for decades an American icon. Will it change?

Sure. But the imperatives have less to do with Murdoch per se than with the ways of a fast-changing marketplace. What so often gets downplayed in discussions of the news trade is that even the fourth estate is a business, serving customers - and trying to discern what they want to buy. And both journalists and their readers inhabit a world in some ways quite different from what it was even 25 years ago.

This is a terrific anecdote about the slow old days:

This sale has stirred memories of the whopping changes I've witnessed since walking into the Journal's Chicago bureau in 1980 to serve a brief stint as a lowly intern.

In those days, we banged out stories on manual typewriters, and revised them with scissors and tape (not paste). If you had an urge to communicate with people in Mali or Mongolia, you pretty much had to hope that someday you'd become a correspondent important enough that the paper would buy you a ticket. By the time I arrived at the Journal's New York headquarters, in 1984, there were computers to write on, but if you wanted to look up old news stories, you went to the in-house library - once known in news jargon as the "morgue" - and paged through folders of yellowing clips.

In those days, whatever the scoops from Wall Street, global business news moved to a slower beat. There was no weekend edition, let alone online updates. I still prize the memory of a lunchtime conversation in 1986, when one of my colleagues leaned across the table to ask a Page One editor - it was a Friday - "So, what stories are you keeping cryogenically alive till Monday?"

Heh. On the day of his radio show's 19th anniversary yesterday, I thought Rush Limbaugh made a surprisingly good observation about the MSM's overblown reaction to the Journal's future:

The New York Times are having a cow. The rest of the Drive-Bys are having a cow. I'll give you some examples here as the program unfolds, some of the headlines, some of the stories. They're all worried what he's going to do to this venerable institution. Oh, no! How will he destroy it? And, of course, if these people were honest, if they really think he's going to destroy the Journal, they'd be happy, wouldn't they?

As Rush notes, "the New York Times set the agenda" for much of the rest of the legacy media:

in an interview in 2005, Rupert Murdoch was the asked about the New York Times, and he said, you know, the problem with the New York Times is not really the New York Times. It's the rest of the media. The rest of the media adopts the New York Times agenda. Whatever is on the front page of the New York Times is what television cable news networks decide is news -- at least the networks, CBS, NBC, CBS, the liberal networks. The New York Times always was called "the paper of record." Stories on the front page throughout the front section ,determine what the agenda is in the press. In fact, when I moved to Sacramento is the first time I learned this. When I moved to Sacramento in 1984 to begin the program there that eventually became this program, the news director out there -- consultant, actually, who had hired me, was also consulting the station. I remember my first day there, he went strolling through the newsroom one morning, and all he found was the Los Angeles Times, the Sacramento Bee, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He blew up. He started shouting, "Where's the New York Times? You can't do news anymore without the New York Times!"

The newsroom had to have the New York Times because the New York Times set the agenda. So Murdoch was making this point. He said that means that there is a whole market out there for a different way to do news and treat news, and he started talk in this interview in 2005 about the Wall Street Journal having the infrastructure in place to do that.

Sounds like a great way to reset the Parliament of Clocks.

In The Know: Is Our Wealth Hurting Africa's Feelings?

Back in 2006, I wrote up some thoughts on what blogger Val Prieto dubbed "Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome":

Matt Welch described a similar sentiment amongst equally leftwing and reactionary tourists to Cuba:

this common sentiment has always irritated the hell out of me. Oh, the crumbling, no-longer-beautiful houses! Ah, the lovely two-feet-deep potholes, and rickety Chinese bicycles (because the 50-year-old Chevys and 30-year-old Ladas don't work, and at any rate there's no gas). How people can derive pleasure from evidence of the suffering of innocents is beyond me, and few sights are more unseemly to my eyes than seeing a Lonely Planet-waving travel snob whine about how some current or formerly misgoverned hellhole has been "ruined" by all that yucky reconstruction, material success, and (worst of all!) tourism. Oh how pretty! The baseball players make $20 a month, and they live on a prison, but at least there's no annoying electronic scoreboard!

Val Prieto, who frequently blogs on Cuban issues at his own Babalu Blog dubs it "Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome".

Sort of like the propagation of SARS, it appears to be spreading beyond travelers to one nation, into a global meme. And it's worth noting that a variation of it was the dominant theme of the 2002 U.N. Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, where numerous Gulfstream Transnationalists such as California's own Jerry Brown urged--for the sake of the global environment, if not local civilizational ruins--that the Third World remain as backward and shackled as possible.

Found via Small Dead Animals, the Onion does a surprisingly dead-on parody of that worldview in one of their Weekend Update/Daily Show-style mock news videos, in which their panelists debate, "Would it be mean to tell Africa about the global economy?"

Reuters: "News Corp board OKs deal to buy Dow Jones: source":

News Corp's (NWSa.N) board of directors has approved a deal to buy Dow Jones & Co Inc (DJ.N) for $5 billion, a source familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

The board met on Tuesday to consider its $60 per share offer.

Or as the Journal itself puts it:

A century of Bancroft-family ownership at Dow Jones & Co. is over.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. sealed a $5 billion agreement to purchase the publisher of The Wall Street Journal after three months of drama in the controlling family and public debate about journalistic values.

Maybe that explains why this synergistic partnership is being formed concurrently in the lefthand side of the news world.

Update: And away we go!

Though many journalists impose their views regularly in biased political coverage, and last year the New York Times publisher made clear his left-wing world view, on Tuesday night the broadcast networks framed Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of the Wall Street Journal around what agenda the “controversial” Murdoch will “impose.” That matches the “fear” expressed in online journalism forums and media magazines about Murdoch's “conservative” agenda. Leading into pro and con soundbites, CBS's Kelly Wallace described Murdoch as “a conservative who put his imprint on the New York Post and brought topless women to the Sun in London. His critics say he may not impose tabloid on the Journal, but will impose his point of view.”

No word yet though on whether or not Maria Bartiromo will be the newspaper's first Page Three girl (in traditional Journal woodcut illustration style, of course).

More: The Journal itself weighs in, via its editorial page:

Editorial independence enhances the prospects for business success. The more credible a publication is, especially one that specializes in financial and economic reporting, the more readers and advertisers it is likely to have. We like to think our readers buy the Journal because of the credibility built over a century, and we believe this is the heart of the "value proposition" that Mr. Murdoch is willing to pay $5 billion to purchase. No sane businessman pays a premium of 67% over the market price for an asset he intends to ruin.

There are nonetheless critics, especially in the journalism world, who claim this is precisely what Mr. Murdoch will proceed to do. And they have certainly had a merry time bashing him and the Journal these past few months. Some of these voices, however, are commercial or ideological competitors who have their own interest in undermining the Journal's credibility.

Both the New York Times and the Financial Times have been especially aggressive in assailing the potential News Corp. purchase of the Journal. These also happen to be the two publications that Mr. Murdoch has explicitly said he might invest more to compete against. Readers can judge if the tears these papers and their writers claim to shed for the Journal's future are real, or of the crocodile variety.

The nastiest attacks have come from our friends on the political left. They can't decide whose views they hate most--ours, or Mr. Murdoch's. We're especially amused by those who say Mr. Murdoch might tug us to the political left. Don't count on it. More than one liberal commentator has actually rejoiced at the takeover bid, on the perverse grounds that this will ruin the Journal's news coverage, which in turn will reduce the audience for the editorial page. Don't count on that either.

In "1980s Redux: Hillary Clinton and Industrial Policy", James Pethokoukis of US News & World Report writes:

Quick quiz: What does Hillary Clinton think is a "great organizing principle" for the American economy? Increasing our standard of living? Maximizing economic growth and economic freedom, maybe? Putting a chicken in every pot, perhaps? Nope, none of those. In a speech to the Chicago Economic Club last spring, she suggested that climate change would be a cool concept to organize an economy around.

And if government is going to make climate change or energy independence or whatever an explicit "organizing principle" for an economy, it means a return to a once edgy concept from the 1980s: industrial policy—government favor and aid to certain "strategic" industries, whether through subsidies or trade barriers—in pursuit of some national goal. Democrats used to be all hot over this as their "big idea" to counter Reaganomics.

John Kenneth Galbraith is still dead, and his top down economic policies, which date from the era of Andy Williams, should be relagated to the Branson oldies circuit alongside him.

And breaks up Dr. Evil's underground lair, apparently:

The news reports that the billionaire founder of Broadcom is alleged to have built a secret underground suite on the grounds of his mansion, which he is alleged to have stocked with prostitutes and drugs is a titillating rumor, and obviously bad news for the man himself and his family (I won't add to the Google hits by naming him).

But riding home from dinner tonight, it occurred to me that true or not, it is actually great news for America.

Because today when that news broke, millions of teenage boys went "an underground lair stocked with hookers, Ecstasy and blow!! I'm gonna be a tech billionaire!!" and immediately drank a Coke, sat down and cracked their textbooks.

Twenty years from now, there will be whole industries founded by those kids, and all of us will benefit.

But what will happen to Scott Evil?

(Via Pajamas HQ.)

Pigs fly on the Today show regarding the US economy; the Dow briefly entered uncharted 14,000 territory today before closing at 13,971.55.

Glenn Reynolds writes, "Kudlow will be saying 'I told you so' again today", and he already is.

Meanwhile, for perspective, Amity Shlaes looks back at a decade of voodoo economics at their worst, in an audio interview with Hugh Hewitt.

I'd love to be proven wrong, but given its name alone, AMC's new Mad Men miniseries will probably be a sanctimonious ant-capitalist mess. And yet its 1960-era Madison Avenue production design may make it fun to watch, if you can tune out the plots.

(Via TVCriticism.com, which was kind enough to include us in their Blogroll. Thanks!)

Related: While there have been numerous movies, and now a TV series about advertising, sales, and the PR world, Daniel Drezner explains "Why There Will Never Be A Reality Show About Academia".

Update: An anti-smoking episode. Ugh--who didn't see that coming?!

Jonah Goldberg writes that "our wealth is really all in our heads. Literally":

In the United States, for example, less than a fifth of our wealth exists as material stuff like minerals, crops, and factories. In Switzerland, cuckoo clocks, ski chalets, cheese, Rolex watches, timber and every other tangible asset amount to a mere 16 percent of that country’s wealth. The rest is captured by the expertise, culture, laws, and traditions of the Swiss themselves.

These numbers come from Kirk Hamilton, a World Bank environmental economist and lead author of a new study, “Where is the Wealth of Nations?” In a fascinating interview in Reason magazine, Hamilton explains how, when measured properly, “natural capital” (croplands, oil, etc.) and “produced capital” (factories, iPods, roads, etc.) are the smallest slices of the economic pie. What Hamilton calls “intangible capital,” which includes the rule of law, education and the like, is by far the biggest slice. The entire planet’s “natural capital accounts for 5 percent of total wealth, produced capital 18 percent and intangible capital 77 percent.

This makes some intuitive sense. We’d all rather be the man who knows how to fish than the man given a fish. Or think of it this way: The Malthusian thinks only about hardware, when the money is in software and design. China makes America’s iPods; America collects the profits.

Also, the richer a country gets, the less it needs to live off its natural resources. Therefore, it becomes cheaper — and more popular — to protect the environment. This has been the trend in Europe and America, and hopefully it will be around the world.

This sea change in economic thinking doesn’t cut easily along the left-right political axis, and its implications could be profound. “Root-causes” liberals can find a great deal of satisfaction in the emphasis “Where is the Wealth of Nations?” places on education. According to Hamilton, education explains about 36 percent of a country’s intangible wealth. Conservatives can find solace in the importance of property rights and, moreover, in the confirmation that not all cultures are equal — at least when measured on their ability to produce and sustain wealth. And both right and left will agree that the rule of law — including fair courts and government transparency — is the single most important contributor to a nation’s wealth.

A potential lesson for the World Bank may be that building roads, dams, and factories in the third world is a fool’s errand until those nations have the intangible capital required to maintain such things. The Marshall Plan’s success in rebuilding Europe after World War II stemmed not from the U.S. footing the bill for concrete and bulldozers but from the intangible capital locked in the hearts and minds of everyday Europeans.

In an odd way, I think this complements Weisman’s depiction of a post-human future. The greatest symbols of our civilization — from skyscrapers to libraries — not only count for a mere fraction of our wealth, they would turn to dust and rubble if we disappeared. The hardware is nothing; the software, everything. All that civilization is and can become exists within us. If we forget that, we forget literally everything.

Read the whole thing, and for more Fourth of July Jonah, don't miss his thoughts on preserving a national identity.

Update: Speaking of the role that brain power plays in building wealth and national greatness, City Journal asks, "Why have we stopped naming schools after great public figures?"

In a recent "Happy Warrior" essay on the back page of National Review, Mark Steyn wrote (subscription required):

When I first came to America on my own, as a teenager, I thought the airports were the height of supersonic cool. Now the planes are dingy and decrepit. Have you had that exchange where the stewardess asks you to bring your seat to its full upright position and you say unfortunately the button’s not working and you’re trying not to lean on it because every time you do it falls straight back on the guy behind you and she looks at you as if it’s your fault?

When those Guyanans and Trinidadians were interrupted in their plot to blow up JFK, they understood something very basic: that the transportation network is one of the most potent symbols of national health. If freedom of movement is a basic right, then the ease with which one can move around says something about the health of the nation. (Britain’s choked roads are instructive in this regard.) But we seem to have accepted the idea that the seized-up air-traffic system is some kind of unrepresentative outlier of no broader significance.

National Journal had one of those big cover stories the other week that’s designed to get everyone buzzing around the big question, Is America over? Nobody did get buzzing about it, because it was mostly a lame roundup of the usual experts — Fukuyama, Brzezinski, Scowcroft — bemoaning the passing of their own heyday.

National decline is always inconceivable because the illusion of permanence is so strong: It would have seemed incredible to any five-year-old English boy watching Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee parade that he would be passing his twilight years in a strike-ridden basketcase shorn of empire and reduced to begging from the IMF.

But it seems to me that the state of the air-travel network is symbolic of something. So is America’s decision to surrender to the illegal immigrants — to say that the undocumented insurgents have ensnared us in a quagmire in which victory is not an option. In different ways, both are revealing of structural decay. Not yet fatal, but decay nonetheless.

It's a staggeringly safe bet that after his flight from hell on Delta (following Glenn Reynolds' similar experience in March) Dean Barnett agrees.

Update: Full text of Steyn's "Happy Warrior" column here.

In City Journal, Nicole Gelinas reviews Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, by Benjamin R. Barber:

Somewhere in Consumed, Benjamin Barber, a civil-society professor at the University of Maryland and the author of the 1995 book Jihad vs. McWorld, has a serious point to make: many Americans have opted out of a common civic culture based on shared values and have turned inward instead, to a relentless, infantile narcissism that free markets only encourage. But Barber can never quite grasp this point in his own book, or make practical suggestions on how to deal with the problem. Instead, he wildly overreaches and couches everything he writes in apocalyptic terms.

For the flipside of Barber's argument, one that has been made frequently by a surprisingly puritanical left probably even before Peter Seeger and Malvina Reynolds' ticky-tacky-screedy "Little Boxes" singalong, it's worth rereading Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style.

The bad news is that the superb article by Amity Shlaes on the New Deal (don't miss her new book on the topic, it's also a terrific read) that Jonah Goldberg linked to here is unfortunately behind the Wall Street Journal's pay-to-play firewall. The good news is that it's also available for free on the American Enterprise Institute's Website.

Thomas Lifeson has some thoughts on the Times' business model, such as it is:

Like some robber baron capitalist of yore, the New York Times is telling the remaining full price readers of its print product that they will pay more and get less, the same message it has been sending advertisers for years. But far from a sign of strength, this move is an indicator that the slow motion business collapse of the New York Times Company may be picking up its pace.

Yet another sign of the industry's Red Queen's Race?

And speaking of the Red Queen's Race:

All the attention paid to Couric's tough start at CBS has overshadowed what's been going on at NBC. In Couric's first 39 weeks at CBS, she's lost 287,000 viewers from the average of a year ago, a drop of 4 percent from predecessor Bob Schieffer's audience. At the same time, "Nightly News" lost 533,000 viewers, or 5 percent, Nielsen said.

In [anchorman Brian Williams'] first three months after taking over from Tom Brokaw in December 2004, "Nightly News" averaged 10.79 million viewers. In the past three months, it's been 7.66 million. To be fair, the nightly news audience traditionally drops when warm weather arrives, and it has been a slow news period.

Still, that's a lot of missing viewers.

Or as Drudge breathlessly puts it: "NBC Brian Williams loses more viewers than CBS Couric!"

That's not the sort of comparison that Brian is used to--this sort of equivalence is much more his pace. And curiously, the AP piece that Drudge links to doesn't suggest that perhaps the two stories back April in which NBC personalities played a pivotal role might also be impacting their current ratings: the Imus scandal and, much more significantly, NBC's dreadfully ill-conceived decision to run photos mailed in by the horrific VT gunman, Cho Seung-Hui. As Mickey Kaus said back then, "Who Did More Damage, Brian Williams Or Don Imus?"

Update: Welcome InstaReaders! Glenn Reynolds writes that there may be a further connection (which actually ties both of the above items together) to be found here, and I'm inclined to agree.

More: Greg Pollowitz of NRO's media blog concurs:

What the AP leaves out as a possible reason for the lost audience is the Virginia Tech shooting and NBC's horrible pimping and airing of the gunman's video suicide note. The Tech massacre, like NBC's ratings slump, happened about two months ago.

I wonder if this (a) never occurred to AP's writer or (B) the idea was cut from the article by his editor? In any case, it's certainly a curious omission.

Also, welcome readers of TV Week, tuning from the site's "Buzztracker" page!

Austin Bay was particularly keen to interview Daniel Drezner on his new book All Politics is Global for the latest Blog Week In Review podcast. You can hear the results here--as Pajamas HQ notes, "Get out your notebooks and pay close attention to this one. There’s a lot to learn".

Arnold Kling reviews Amity Shlaes' new book, The Forgotten Man (which sounds like something I really need to pick up), and ponders, "How Depressing Was the Depression?"

I would have thought that 1929 should have looked pretty good to people living in the depths of the Depression. But one of the many interesting lessons of Amity Shlaes' new history of the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal is that many Americans, both inside and outside the Roosevelt Administration, thought of prosperity as an aberration. Instead, they saw hard times as the new norm.

The Forgotten Man (TFM for short) is not a polemic. It is not an argument for a particular theory or economic interpretation of the Depression. Instead, the author steps back and lets the story tell itself. She has sifted through memoirs and contemporaneous accounts in order to carry the reader back into the mindset of the 1930's. She focuses on a diverse selection of protagonists from that period, including opponents of Roosevelt like Andrew Mellon and Wendell Wilkie as well as members of Roosevelt's "brain trust" like Paul Douglas and Rexford Tugwell. Note that in the context of that time, "trust" meant the same thing as cartel (as in anti-trust laws). Roosevelt was claiming that with his advisers he had cornered the market on brains. If so, then after reading TFM, my sense is that there was not much value in this particular monopoly.

I came away with three major conclusions.

1. For better or worse, much of the country saw the Depression as something akin to a natural disaster, and people accordingly lowered their expectations for their standard of living.

2. Economic ignorance among policymakers was much worse than I had realized. I was steeped in the myth that the reason the Depression was so bad was that only Keynes had the answer, and he had to overcome the resistance of "the classical economists," such as Irving Fisher. But the differences between Fisher and Keynes seem small when compared to the differences between the policymakers and both economists. In physics, it would be like watching an academic debate over the meaning of quantum mechanics while policymakers are unable to grasp the simple concept of gravity.

3. The struggle over economic policy in the 1930's was really an episode in the long, historical conflict between business participants in the market and anti-business academics. Roosevelt gave free rein to the professors, until the start of the Second World War led him to realize that he would need the tycoons to help mobilize to defeat Hitler. I suspect that one reason that Roosevelt and the New Deal come off so well in the conventional wisdom is that history books are written by professors, not by entrepreneurs.

Don't miss Kling's charts of the unemployment rates and Dow Jones Industrial Average closings from 1927 to 1940. And for a revisionist look at the Roosevelt administration's imperfect handling of the events of 1941 to 1945, check out Thomas Fleming's The New Dealers' War, which is also a fascinating read.

“Terrorist financing is much trickier to crack down on than conventional money laundering. Because conventional money laundering is when you’re trying to take illicit assets and convert them into assets that are clean, that can be exchanged throughout the financial system. Whereas terrorist financing is often taking thoroughly legal assets and then using them for illegal purposes.”

--Daniel Drezner, on the next Blog Week In Review, coming soon to PJ HQ.

As President Bush taps Robert Zoellick to be president of the World Bank, Larry Kudlow writes, "both the IMF and the World Bank are unnecessary artifacts from a bygone, post-WWII reconstruction era", and asks, "do we really need the World Bank?"

Meanwhile, Wired's "Danger Room" blog wonders why the U.S. needs embassies in the Middle East, noting that they're essentially hardened concrete bunkers, designed much more to keep terrorists out, than to foster goodwill with the people at large of those countries.

Over on my wife's Bizlawblog, some potentially significant business news:

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in McNamee v. IRS, No. 05-6151 just affirmed a federal trial courts determination that the owner of an LLC (limited liability company) can be held personally liable for unpaid payroll taxes. This is a significant decision, which may well be appealed to the Supreme Court. But meanwhile, let's look at its significance.

Read the rest.

Like I said on Sunday:

What's especially fun is watching members of "Big Recreation" tie themselves up in knots when they feel the need for self-persecution over the eeeeevils of so-called manmade Gerbil Worming or Glowball Warmening, as Tim Blair is wont to malaprop.

"Air Canada offers carbon-offset ticket".

(Via Relapsed Catholic.)

The poor get richer--and the rich become more numerous.

But who will get credit?

The Red Queen's Race continues to march on.

Spring is normally a lovely time to be in Manhattan, but it couldn't have been much fun inside the Grey Lady's offices last month--reader Dart Montgomery writes in with a link to an AP report that notes, "New York Times Revenue Slips 2.2 Percent in April on Weakness in Print Media Groups".

So when will the inevitable reshuffling occur that reassigns Maureen Dowd to covering the Jets and Giants, and puts Paul Krugman on Con-Ed hearings?

Newsbusters reports:

Katie Couric, was not warning parents about sexual predators when she said "They're after your children and grandchildren." No, the “Evening News” anchor was talking about corporations “spending nearly $17 billion a year trying to sell their products to our kids.”

The one-sided May 14 segment blamed “far-reaching tentacles” of business for obesity and youth sexual activity, among other problems.

CBS Corporation, which has revenues estimated to be $14.536 billion, saw its share price close at 32.04 on the New York Stock Exchange today.

Related: "Dan Rather Makes Acting Debut". Umm, didn't he do that around 1959?

Years ago, I remember hearing about an up-and-coming business consultant who would call his clients back on his cell phone--from the parking lot of his local airport, so that they would hear all the jet noise, and think he was incredibly in-demand, and about to parachute in to troubleshoot a business halfway across the globe.

TechCrunch has an even simpler idea to make your business sound like it's thriving, and you don't even need to leave your office, or rev up Laurie David's private plane.

(Via Pajamas HQ, where the joint's jumping enough, even without this CD.)

Over at TCS Daily, Jerry Bowyer explores "Apocalypse Not"--the doomsday-obsessed segment of financial forecasters and journalists who constantly predict that the stock market is just this close to near-total collapse.

Ilya Somin of The Volokh Conspiracy sees several libertarian themes intertwined in Mario Puzo's original novel of The Godfather.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

While this is cold comfort for the people who work there, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's downsizing, particularly since, hopefully, this fellow will be documenting it, affords a unique opportunity to observe the reshaping of a mid-sized newspaper to meet 21st century demands. And if that doesn't work, its "Eardrum-Shattering Death Rattles", as Dean Barnett writes:

The print media has been endurably clueless regarding the advent of the new media. Business schools of the future will someday devote endless symposia to studying how an entire industry could be so hidebound, paralyzed, arrogant and clueless.

Don’t get me wrong – even if capitalistic geniuses led the old media, they’d still be up the creek. The advent of new technologies has whipped up a perfect storm that even good businessmen would have trouble handling. The biggest problem the newspapers face, and the least talked about, is the hit the internet has made on their classified revenues. Craig’s List works better and costs less than the classifieds. This stream of revenue, which was huge, is gone and won’t be coming back. Even if the newspapers revamped their classified departments to go virtual and battle Craig’s List on their home turf, they still couldn’t come out even.

And then there are the more widely noted problems. A couple of decades ago, you got your news from the morning paper. For a large and rapidly growing segment of society, that’s no longer the case. For reasons everyone reading this site knows, the best way to stay informed is not to cloister yourself in ignorance until tomorrow morning and then get ink all over your fingers while you read headlines that have already grown stale.

Lastly, we have clueless management. Newspapers are a dying industry. There’s a gold rush afoot to create the virtual enterprise that will take their place. Some entities like the Politico, Pajamas Media and Townhall have seized a head start in becoming the mainstream media of the future, but no one yet knows what the MSM of the future will look like. Some us think we know, but the precise formula remains unhatched.

The weird thing about the newspapers is they’ve decided not to play. Other than putting an exact replica of their dying product out there on the internet, they’ve shown nothing but intellectual paralysis. We all know the virtual edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is not the MSM portal of the future, but the people running papers like the Strib have apparently quit trying. Other than commissioning the occasional blog (which virtually no one reads), their efforts to boldly step into the future have been lackluster and decrepit.

The Red Queen's Race marches on, something that this possible media consolidation also illustrates.

In The New York Sun, Mark Steyn asks, "Is the French election a belated acknowledgment of reality or the latest attempt to dodge it?"

In other words, is it Britain voting for Mrs. Thatcher in 1979 and America for Ronald Reagan the following year? That's to say, the electorate understands the status quo is exhausted and unsustainable and that unless catastrophe is to be avoided radical course correction is required. Or is it Germany voting tepidly and tentatively to give Angela Merkel the narrowest of victories in 2005? In other words, the electorate was irritated with the incumbents but recoiled from any meaningful change, with the result that Frau Merkel found herself presiding over a nominally fresh government with no agenda and no mandate for reform.

I'd bet on the latter. Just as Frau Merkel proved not to be Germany's Thatcher, I would be surprised if Nicolas Sarkozy turned out to be France's Reagan. Not because he doesn't have Reaganite tendencies but because the French electorate, like the Germans, aren't there yet.

It may or may not be time to pass around the Friendship Fries, but it's rare, positive news coming out of France, and that's something, at least.

Kathryn Jean Lopez puts five years of the New York Times into perspective with a single image, and Don Surber has some thoughts on the Napoleonic Time magazine:

The 1,363rd most visited Web site in the world tried to diss the president of the United States as not being among the world’s 100 most influential people.

The AP reported that No. 1363 thinks that the lives of the people of Afghanistan are more influenced by an heiress who starred in Blue Movies (OK, peagreen) than they are by the president of the United States.

No. 1363 also asserted that an actress in an American sitcom about an American TV show that is not shown outside the United States is more influential than the leader of the free world.

No. 1363 also said a woman best known for her feud with a billionaire landlord who has bad hair is more influential on the lives of Africans than the man who had Congress appropriate more money to fight AIDS on that continent.

Apparently, this is No. 1363’s entire world.

Don't miss the map that follows Don's post--it's quite a tight little cocoon that Time exists in.

This story broke yesterday, so I'll cut directly to the denouement, but after praising Southwest recently for understanding their clientele, but all I can ask at this point, what was Virgin thinking?

If Virgin is smart (well, smarter than doing this in the first place), they'll blame it on some low level employee in Sector 7-G who rents in-flight entertainment who truly screwed up. But shouldn't one of his higher-ups have thought, "Hey, this doesn't sound like enjoyable transatlantic in-flight entertainment to me"?

Henry Kissinger is reported to have once said, "Academic politics is so vicious because the stakes are so small".

As the legacy media continues to bleed readers, watch for stories like this (via Hugh Hewitt) to become more and more common.

Meanwhile, as the L.A. Timesmen fight over who's in charge of the deckchairs as the icebergs approach, Rupert Murdoch sees a Big Picture acquisition in his sights.

Update: Well, that didn't long:

ABC News reports that Murdoch's offer has been rejected. Nevertheless, the deal brought up some serious issues that Americans should paying more attention to. A small but vocal cadre in Congress does want to use the FCC and the Fairness Doctrine to target conservative influence in the media, most especially in the medium of talk radio.

As Stephen Spruiell notes, "The News Corp.-Dow Jones deal might be off the table, but left-wing efforts to curtail media freedom aren't going anywhere."

Ed Morrissey explores the gloomy numbers for traditional (i.e. hard copy) newspapers:

How badly have newspapers declined? The Dallas Morning News suffered a catastrophic collapse, losing more than 14% of its subscribers during the reporting period. The Miami Herald lost 10% of its Sunday subscribers and 5.5% of its daily readers. Its competitor, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Ft. Lauderdale, didn't fare any better, losing 8.6% of its subscribers. Many newspapers found themselves in the 4-5% loss range, including the LA Times and its chief competitor, the Orange County Register; the Minneapolis Star-Tribune; the San Jose Mercury News; and the Washington Post lost 3.4%.

As he notes:

In a growing economy, entire industries should not show such consistent decline. In the case of newspapers, though, they have never benefitted from the economic boom that started in 2003 and continues to this day. Perhaps that might account for the coverage, or lack thereof, that the expansion has received.

Indeed it could--back in December of 2002, Virginia Postrel noted the disconnect between a remarkably mild (considering what had just happened in September of 2001) recession and how it was being reported by the legacy media:

In today's NYT, Dan Akst puts the current economic gloominess in perspective, reminding us that even in the current slump the economy looks more like an earlier era's dream than the nightmare too often portrayed in media account. By historical standards, things are looking awfully good: "low interest rates, affordable energy, full employment without inflation and broad access to home ownership." We've even learned to compete with the Japanese. Why the disconnect? One reason "may be the sharp advertising downturn that started in early 2001. The resulting media recession, including layoffs and other cutbacks, has produced a grimmer-than-usual attitude in the perennially gloomy fourth estate. The industry's concentration in New York and Washington, both of which were struck by terrorists last year, has further darkened the industry's outlook." Dan is no outsider taking cheap shots at reporters. He's a long-time journalist acknowledging a psychological truth: We all grant more salience to facts we experience directly. And journalists know lots and lots of people who've lost jobs in this recession.

That also helps to explain why journalists were so eager to nod their heads and report as a fact when their candidate in 1992 described what was also a mild recession by historical standards as "The worst economy in 50 years".

To borrow from the Apple campaign of a few years ago, Southwest proves that it's possible to "Think Different", even in a field as staid and heavily-regulated as domestic commercial aviation. They’re not only sympathetic to their core market’s Red State sensibilities; the airline understands the Blogosphere as well. And in an age of increasingly morose stewardesses, their flight crews are some the friendliest I've encountered.

As Hugh Hewitt suggests, perhaps a much older mass industry could learn something from Southwest's ability to prosper in a tightly competitive marketplace.

AP: "Newspaper Circulation Falls 2.1 Percent"

NY Post: "Network Execs Face Hard Sell After Dismal Year"

Some thoughts from NRO's Matthew Sheffield, from whose post our title derives, and Stephen Spruiell.

Meanwhile, based upon the old ioke about the Gray Lady, this New York Times piece could easily have been titled, "Hollywood Box Office Flat, Women Hardest Hit".

Update: Hugh Hewitt spots "The Los Angeles Times and The Minneapolis Star Tribune Bleeding Out".

With the Dow topping 13,000 yesterday, Larry Kudlow writes:

We are in the midst of the longest uninterrupted bull market run in memory. We have record low tax rates on capital, a benign inflation rate, and recent economic releases suggesting the Goldilocks soft landing scenario remains very much in place.

But in the end, it all boils down to two simple things—two stock market locomotives that have created enormous, still untapped, value in equities. Viewers have heard talk about them night after night:

High earnings, low interest rates.

Mark my words, it ain't over yet.

Will George W. Bush ever get any credit for this?

I would tend to doubt it. At least, not while he's in office.

Robert Bidinotto, editor of the Objectivist New Individualist magazine agrees with my take from Saturday on Michael Bloomberg and (original inner circle member) Nathaniel Branden's "Stolen Concept" concept.

Speaking of Bloomberg, I was going to comment on his recent fashion faux pas, but the photo of Val Kilmer that Tammy Bruce found today makes Mayor Mike seem like the very definition of sybaritic elegance.

Update: City Journal's Nicole Gelinas has more on Bloomberg's public and private transportation woes.

Here's the latest proposal to overtax New Yorkers from Nurse Mayor Bloomberg, who says he'll "fight like heck" to pass it before leaving office:

Mayor Bloomberg defended his plan to charge motorists $8 to enter the most congested parts of Manhattan - laying the groundwork yesterday for a fierce battle with Albany.

"You know, it sounds like a lot of money, but you go to a movie, it's $12," Bloomberg said on his weekly WABC-AM radio show. "So, let's, you know, put some of this stuff in perspective here."

[Gee, I'm not I'd want to compare the city I govern to an industry in longterm decline--Ed]

Bloomberg said motorists who drive into Manhattan tend to be the "people who can afford it," and he suggested he would "fight like heck" to get the Legislature to approve the plan before he leaves office in December 2009.

"Using economics to influence public behavior is something this country is built on," he declared. "It's called capitalism."

That last quote sounds like a textbook example of what Nathaniel Branden dubbed "The Stolen Concept" forty years ago: in this case using capitalism, which describes a voluntary exchange of money for goods and services in a wide-open free market. They'll be nothing voluntary for motorists who wish to enter the Big Apple if Mayor Bloomberg's proposal becomes law.

You will know Synchronicity! Reader Stephen Shields sends this amusing juxtaposition on Memeorandum earlier today.

We do know Hillary's take on Circuit City.

"Super-rich population surges in 2006: survey", Reuters reports:

The survey by Chicago-based Spectrem Group found that the number of U.S. households with more than $5 million rose from 930,000 in 2005. In 1996, there were only 250,000 U.S. households in the "ultra-rich" category, Spectrem said.

"The past few years have been nothing but astounding for wealthy Americans," said Catherine McBreen, managing director of Spectrem, a consulting group that researches the affluent and retirement markets.

McBreen said the surge in household growth is underpinned by economic growth in recent years, which has fueled both stock market gains and also the market for private companies. She also ascribed gains to rising real estate valuations and favorable tax policies.

"The wealthiest households are the business owners," said McBreen. She also said broader ownership of stocks has helped overall household wealth.

Shocka!* I need Reuters to tell me that broad stock and business ownership has helped to grow the economy?

Read More »

Glenn Reynolds writes that space is "the next frontier for advertising", linking to this Wall Street Journal report:

California Rep. Ken Calvert, ranking Republican on a House Science subcommittee overseeing NASA programs, surprised an industry conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., by announcing plans to introduce a bill that would make “NASA space assets available for commercial advertising and marketing opportunities.” If that ever becomes law, companies and universities might be able to market themselves by plastering logos on equipment or sponsoring equipment such as cameras on the International Space Station.

The revenues, ultimately reaching perhaps $100 million, would be used to build up a self-sustaining prize fund to honor space innovations by entrepreneurs. Calvert said his aim is to increase public awareness of manned space exploration programs without spending taxpayer money. The congressman suggested it could evolve into “an advertising system” similar to those used by public radio and the Smithsonian Institution “which have long-term, dedicated and tasteful sponsorship” arrangements.

Why worry about tasteful? Like the side of a stock car, there's plenty of room for advertising on the Space Shuttle's booster tank, and it's disposable.

Right from the start, Star Trek always has had plenty of commercials, hasn't it? And there were numerous brand names visible in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Don Surber writes:

Irony alert. The Washington Examiner pointed out: Under Bush, unemployment dropped to numbers seldom seen — far below the Clinton years. Clinton’s people counter with well, the stock market took off when he was prez. Wait a second, aren’t Republicans supposed to be the Wall Street guys while Democrats are the blue collar guys?

Not necessarily; just ask John Kerry and Elizabeth Edwards.

"The Gawker report notes that the share price of the New York Times Co. has slipped a whopping 54.56% since June of 2002 from its high of $51.50 to Tuesday's close of $23.40."

Chart here, for those who aren't afraid of vertigo during the roller coaster-like supersonic drop.

Mark Krikorian ponders mathematically challenged journalists:

At a time when more and more policy advocacy and policymaking is based on the assessment of data, the English majors who become reporters and editors are as bad as ever at discussing numbers. The WaPost had some cute stories on teenage entrepreneurs with a couple real howlers: "Last year, he sold 10 of his photographs, netting about $1,000 in gross sales." (Last time I checked, "net" and "gross" were different concepts.)

And this one in a story about a girl who bakes gourmet dog treats: "According to a survey by the American Pet Products Manufacturing Association, people in the United States spent $34.4 billion on their pets in 2004. The bulk of that — $14.2 billion — was spent on food." (How can the "bulk" be less than half of something?) And then a graphic in the Business section, of all places, (it accompanied this story, but isn't online) had a caption saying the volume of first-class mail has been declining since 1999, when the graph clearly shows volume declining since 1990.

Sure, these are trivial examples, but if newspapers can't get "net" and "gross" right, how are they going to write about the federal budget intelligently?

God is in the details, as Mies is always quoted as saying, and it’s these little things that demonstrate the superiority of elite journalists over the pajama-clad masses. Thankfully, unlike bloggers, they have an army of editors just offstage to help them get these crucial details right.

In business journalism, these skills are even more crucial, risking The Death of Equities.

The parent companies of Fox and NBC are teaming up to battle YouTube.

During his interview with "the irrelevant Rush Limbaugh", Gov. Schwarzenegger said, "I would say a huge amount of businesses are coming back here because we are creating a much better business atmosphere".

For all sorts of reasons, I find that rather hard to believe. And certainly, individuals continue to vote with their feet, according to this December report from the Pacific Research Institute:

Last week, the California Department of Finance released figures showing that the number of California residents moving out of the state exceeded the number of individuals moving in. While the overall population increased due to foreign immigration, domestic migrants on net left the Golden State. This is hardly a surprise given that California continues to foster an economic climate that’s unfriendly to entrepreneurship.

"I heard Humphrey saying things that sounded like socialism, which I had just left..."

Betsy Newmark writes that socialism's last gasp is rapidly coming to an end:

When Israel was founded, socialists idealists thought that founding collective farms - kibbutzim - would be a foundation on which to build their economies. Now, decades later, they're finding that socialism just didn't work out. One by one, those kibbutzim are being privatized.

As Betsy writes, "They can't reform human nature. People found that they didn't like it that they got the same financial reward as people who worked less and so they worked less. Adam Smith wins again".

As he always does--but sometimes it takes longer than others.

CBS does, as Reuters notes:

CBS Corp. will invest in virtual world content developer Electric Sheep Co., the U.S. television broadcaster said on Monday. hoping to expand its reach beyond the living room.

CBS will participate in a $7 million round of financing, which includes existing investors Gladwyne Partners.

Electric Sheep develops 3-D properties in virtual worlds like Second Life, an online society that allows players to create characters that exist in a world they help create.

"We believe that all these virtual worlds represent next generation communications platforms," CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith said in a phone interview last week.

Corporate interest in tapping virtual worlds to market brands and products have surged in recent months as marketers test new technologies to reach consumers who now split their leisure TV-viewing time with the Internet.

Electric Sheep, consultants and designers of properties in 3-dimensional virtual worlds such as Linden Lab's Second Life, have accumulated a portfolio of Fortune 500 clients that include Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, General Electric's NBC and Viacom Inc..

Reuters Group Plc is an Electric Sheep client.

Of course. How could they not be?

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz writes:

The reason these two [satellite radio] companies have 13 million subscribers willing to cough up $12.95 a month for something we all grew up thinking should be free is that commercial radio has self-destructed. . . . Really, can you think of an industry (okay, maybe American automakers) that has frittered away such huge advantages and sent its customers scrambling for alternatives?

Give me a second...it'll come to me...oh yeah, that industry!

Update: Hugh Hewitt agrees: "Howard is writing about radio but his critique is really applicable to all old media companies".

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin and Tony Snow each note that new media formats have some inherent pitfalls as well.

Jacob Sullum writes:

"The days of Congress doing the bidding of the tobacco industry are over," Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., recently declared. "This long overdue legislation would give FDA broad powers to regulate tobacco products and protect Philip Morris."

Actually, Waxman said "protect public health," but I've taken the liberty of decoding the phrase for you.

Read the whole thing.

Steve Frank writes, "I would not be surprised if the stores had a special surcharge for having real people check you out for your bread and milk":

A few years ago the grocery industry [in California] went on a 20 week strike. It was a lose for everybody, most especially for the strikers, some of whom went into bankruptcy and many others who still work in the industry, but get fewer hours and less pay and benefits.

It was inevitable, before reality set in.

Since then Albertsons have been installing self check out stands, with one employee helping 4-8 counters at the same time—fewer workers. There was no way Von’s, Ralph’s and Albertson’s could pay the high wages and benefits, without raising prices. Even today, there is resentment by customers for the slashed tires, the yelling and name calling by the union strikers.

Last November, the people of California voted $10 billion for schools. LAUSD just gave a 6% raise to the teachers—so most of the money for new facilities is actually going to go in wages, in the end, The grocers don’t have the luxury of raising taxes or bonding to pay for increased pay or benefits.

Should there be another grocery strike, they will lose even more customers, workers will have even fewer hours to work, and those self check out stands will be in the majority. I would not be surprised if the stores had a special surcharge for having real people check you out for your bread and milk. The day of the grocery clerk is over, the union murdered them.

My local Albertson's supermarket has an aisle consisting of four self-serve machines, which each combine a barcode scanner, credit/debit card processing machine, and bagging dispenser. It seems to work reasonably well, despite the inevitable 20-point IQ drop that each customer faces when confronted by the self-serve's GUI (even here in bleeding-edge high tech Silicon Valley). As the programming of these relatively new machines improves over time and they become increasingly user-friendly, I think Frank is right: more and more, clerks will become the province of both higher-end boutique stores, and smaller, non-union businesses.

Ed Morrissey writes:

Imagine my surprise when the New York Times ran an op-ed yesterday on the evils of an overly large federal government and the wisdom of following the Constitutional framework for sovereign states united in common defense.

Given the trends amongst the left over the last decade, I'm not as surprised as Ed seems to be. Of course, the federalism of early America was also combined with a remarkably laissez faire approach to the markets and capitalism, which began to ebb with the development of the first truly big businesses, the railroads. That half of the equation will of course be completely ignored by a left that wants to strangle business growth--and if the snail darter (remember him?) couldn't do it, they can only pray--seemingly almost literally--that "another 30 Kyotos" will.

AP reports that "Newspapers start $75 million campaign to fight image of decline". Gee, whatever led to that impression?

The newspaper industry this week announced a $75 million marketing campaign to declare its relevance in the Internet age as advertising revenues were flat, buffeted by major mergers and a wounded domestic auto industry.

It's the second year in a row that the Newspaper Association of America has advertised directly to its advertisers, trying to change the perception that the industry is on the decline, executives said.

"I am sick and tired of all the doom and gloom reports out there about the death of this industry," said Earl Cox, chief strategic officer of The Martin Agency, the marketing group in charge of the campaign. The perception is "inaccurate and it's unfair and it's unacceptable." [If you say so--Ed]

Ad revenue at its member papers in the third quarter of last year declined 1.5 percent from a year earlier to $11.79 billion, according to the NAA. Traditional print ads fell 2.6 percent to about $11.2 billion while online ads rose 23 percent to $638 million. Total ad revenues were slightly up for the first two quarters of the year.

The campaign attempts to attack the notion that newspapers are being left behind in the battle to attract consumer "eyeballs."

One campaign slogan reads: "The Internet is the best thing to happen to newspapers since the paper boy."

As James Lileks told Hugh Hewitt yesterday:

That's great--you want to reduce the greatest technological achievement of our age down to some seven year old urchin from the orphanage shouting "Wuxtry! Wuxtry!" on the corner. You know, there aren't any paper boys anymore, and the things are being delivered by 45-year old guys who are now delivering the newspaper because they've lost their jobs at the newspaper!

Personally, I think Lileks contributed a far better--or at least far hipper--slogan in 2005:

The Newspaper. A Viable Alternative to Staring Into Space.

When jet aviation took off (so to speak) in the mid-1950s, railroads began numerous ad campaigns to remind all those former rail passengers that train travel was still around, and still equally viable, until Congress created Amtrak in 1972 to stop the hemorrhaging--or at least pass it off from the shareholder to the taxpayer. Perhaps a half century prior, advertising extolled the leisurely pace of horse and buggies over that new-fangled horseless carriage. Of course, like the railroads themselves, that doesn't mean that any of the legacy information sources are going away anytime soon.

In theory though, they could be morphing into something new. As I wrote about another media once declared past its prime last fall in a profile of David Sarnoff:

After a century that has seen the rise of motion pictures, radio, television, the Internet, and other media, we now know that no media fully destroys another. While most believed that the one-two punch of first television and then FM radio would bulldoze AM into obsolescence, it didn’t quite happen, did it? Just ask Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken and the other talkers making their own fortunes from a technology that David Sarnoff popularized nearly a century ago, and still going strong.

But something tells me that this massive newspaper ad campaign, coupled with the equally massive meltdowns in journalistic credibility that accompany it, portends an increasing amount of turbulence in the newspaper world.

Here's one possible way it might shake out. Something tells me that the real future of the news industry will less dramatic, if even stranger.

In the early 1990s, Hillarycare attempted to give America all of the benefits of England's socialized medicine--and cripple the healthcare industry in the process. Now she's proposing to confiscate oil industry profits and put them in “strategic energy fund”, ala Hugo Chavez.

Or as she said in 2004, “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

One possible reason that Hillary's presidential efforts might be doomed? Dick Morris says it's in the bag.

Mickey Kaus writes:

Is it really an accident that all the UAW-organized auto companies are in deep trouble while all the non-union Japanese "transplants" building cars in America are doing fine? Detroit's designs are inferior for a reason, even when they're well built. And that reason probably as more to do with the impediments to productivity imposed by the UAW--or, rather, by legalistic, Wagner-Act unionism--than with slick and unhip Detroit corporate "culture."

P.S.: If Detroit can only be competititive when the UAW makes grudging concessions, isn't it likely the UAW will only concede enough to make GM and Ford survive, but never enough to let them actually beat the Japanese manufactures? I try to make this point here.

Read, and/or watch the whole thing; related thoughts here.

Larry Kudlow notes that the markets have reacted quite favorably to yesterday's speech. (The DJIA ended today up 72.82 points to close at 12,514.98.)

To add to former Times-ombudsman Daniel Okrent's famous 2004 article opening:

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?

Of course it is.

Just ask Blue Investment Management, which the Times notes is "a New York fund company that is less than a year old, will limit their holdings to companies that donate the majority of their political contributions to Democrats", including--wait for it--the New York Times!

Update: Bill Hobbs has further thoughts.