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.