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Steven Soderburgh spent $58 million to film Che, a biopic of a murderous thug that clocks in at four-and-a-half hours."I know that some are skeptical about the size and scale of this recovery plan. . . . We won't just throw money at our problems - we'll invest in what works.""What works"? Apparently not highway construction. Despite all the yadda-yadda-yadda about fixing America's infrastructure, only 3% of the stimulus is targeted for roads and bridges.
What's the flaw? The theory (a simple Keynesian macroeconomic model) implicitly assumes that the government is better than the private market at marshaling idle resources to produce useful stuff. Unemployed labor and capital can be utilized at essentially zero social cost, but the private market is somehow unable to figure any of this out. In other words, there is something wrong with the price system.As I've said, it's neo-Keynesianism: The basic misconceptions of Keynes, sprinkled with the magic pixie dust of Hope. My hope is that ordinary Americans are capable of understanding why it won't work.
This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily by complicated credit instruments that it took a while for the market to rumble. Now a prosperity that always baffled ordinary citizens has collapsed. The collapse of confidence is not irrational; it's the correction to a long run of irrational confidence.Or, as Michelle Malkin put it back in September, the fundamentals suck. Parris rightly warns against heeding those who promise a "new economic model." As for the neo-Keynesian reaction, Glenn Reynolds says:
This is not so much a stimulus, as a massive transfer of wealth from the politically unconnected to the politically connected.Mark Steyn has more. You know what I'm tired of? I'm tired of St. Hopey telling me that "the creation of a clean energy economy" is going to mean X-number of new jobs. OK, Mr. Harvard Law, riddle me this: "Who's buying?"
Urinary-tract infection leads to septic shock, necrosis, amputation, organ failure and death:Brazilian model Mariana Bridi da Costa, whose hands and feet were amputated in a bid to save her from a deadly and little-known illness, died early Saturday, two friends of the model told CNN. . . .(Via Ann Althouse.)
Da Costa, 20, had fought a pernicious disease that has ravaged her body and forced doctors to perform the amputations and extract part of her stomach as well as both kidneys. . . .
Da Costa suffered from necrosis, or the fast deadening of tissue, caused by septicemia. Septicemia, triggered by a bacterial infection, causes insufficient blood flow that can lead to organ failure.
It’s not like prices have outrun inflation because of easy credit that people can’t afford anymore. That’s what it takes to have a bubble. So, no worries.Will UT Law suffer in the meltdown? To some extent, I'm sure, although you're unlikely to spot Professor Reynolds standing by a freeway interchange with a cardboard sign, "Will Blog for Food." Expect that a drop in enrollment will cause state schools to cut back on adjuncts, institute pay and hiring freezes, offer some early retirements, and scale back their incidental budgets. But tenure is tenure, and the flagship state schools are likely to weather the storm with relatively minor damage, as are the elite private schools -- the Ivys, Stanford, Duke, Vanderbilt, etc.
I had neither planned nor expected to cry.While I don't claim to speak for all zombies, I'm reminded of Matthew Archbold's comment on Stephanopoulos: "[W]e're supposed to believe that he's objective. I'm not sure I can get there unless he cried when Clarence Thomas was sworn onto the Supreme Court."
I was amazed at how many times, watching the all-day spectacle, I lost it. . . .
"Historic" and "historic moment" and "historic day" were repeated mercilessly, but remained true. Only a zombie could fail to feel the truth of it.
Ask your Democratic friends if they've been thoughtful enough to send a thank-you note to Jeri Lynn Zimmerman, the woman most responsible for the presidency of Barack Obama.I was one of thousands of people who did not make it in to the Inauguration despite the fact that we were holding tickets -- well-made, embossed, beautiful tickets, complete with a little map on the back telling us where to go (in theory).Heh. I could have told you where to go, Andrew. But I think Obama will get us there soon enough.
Barack Obama is many things to many people. Among the groups claiming a special resonance with him are mothers like me. . . . Obama says that his mother "was the single constant in my life" and that "what is best in me I owe to her." She brought him up largely on her own.Excuse me, how did Washington lawyer Susan Benda become a mother? Have police apprehended and prosecuted the rapist? Or did Benda's husband die tragically? Because she writes as if the "invisible burden" of fatherlessness on her son's "little shoulders" was the result of her being victimized in some way. Benda (a former ACLU lawyer) omits from her narrative any reference to the circumstances that resulted in her son's fatherless, but if we may assume that she is neither a rape victim nor a widow -- surely she would have mentioned that -- then she was in some way responsible for her son's plight.
This is significant for me as an unmarried mother of a preteen son, and it surely resonates for other mothers raising their children without dads. Growing up without a father, my son has at times struggled to feel "normal." . . .
For my son, the issue is fatherlessness. Not having a father has been an impediment to "fitting in." . . . [I]n some intangible way he carries an invisible burden on his little shoulders. . . .
For these young people, the election to the presidency of a man who grew up without a dad signifies a seismic shift. . . . For my son, Obama's inauguration this week felt like a personal embrace.
For example, my son's tae kwon do teacher had the habit of talking to the students about their "moms and dads." I took him aside one day and suggested that the term "parents" might do the trick, with no child left behind. But there is a limit to how much a mother can protect her son from the word "dad." A mother can repeat to her child that there is no model "normal" family, but the world reflected and projected by television tells another story.The very word "dad" is a menace from which Benda feels obligated to "protect" the boy? And note the hostility to tradition evidenced by her scare-quotes around "normal." Contrary to Benda's assertion, there very much is a "model 'normal' family," a father, mother and their children having been recognized as such throughout human history, no matter how much modern revisionists try to tell us otherwise.
President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration.I remember when Bill Clinton used to try this tactic of demonizing Limbaugh. It doesn't work. Given the choice of listening to Obama or listening to Rush, any Republican in Congress who needs to think twice is useless and doomed.
"You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done," he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.
One White House official confirmed the comment but said he was simply trying to make a larger point about bipartisan efforts.
"There are big things that unify Republicans and Democrats," the official said. "We shouldn't let partisan politics derail what are very important things that need to get done."
It will be the second daughter and first son for Ringwald, 40, and husband Panio Gianopoulos, 33. They have a 5-year-old daughter Mathilda Ereni. The babies are due in August.
Secret Life's second season airs on Monday nights on ABC Family. A spokeswoman for the show says Ringwald's pregnancy will be written into the storyline.
Ah, Molly! Going back to 1985, when I attended a sneak-preview showing of The Breakfast Club, there was something about her stuck-up ice-princess character that was . . . well, it was hot. Generally speaking, when it comes to Brat Pack chicks, guys name Demi Moore or Diane Lane as their favorites, but there was something about Claire Standish that spoke to my inner John Bender: John Bender: I like those earrings, Claire.Back in 2007, I reviewed Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes:
Claire Standish: Shut up.
John Bender: Are those real diamonds, Claire?
Claire Standish: Shut up.
John Bender: I bet they are. Did you work for the money to buy those earrings?
Claire Standish: Shut your mouth.
John Bender: Or did your Daddy buy those for you?
Claire Standish: Shut up!
John Bender: I'll bet he bought those for you. I bet those were a Christmas gift. You know what I got for Christmas? Oh, it was a banner f***ing year at the old Bender family. I got a carton of cigarettes. The old man grabbed me and said, "Hey, smoke up Johnny." All right? So go home and cry to your Daddy. Don't cry here, OK?
The cliques and geeks, the jocks and princesses, the stoners, loners and losers -- did anyone ever capture the cultural essence of high-school the way writer/director John Hughes did in his 1980s teen films?There is an uncanny timeless quality to those films. When our daughter turned 16, one of the things we did to celebrate the occasion was to watch Sixteen Candles together. It's odd how, despite two decades of changes in fashion and music, she could completely relate to the movie.
Though widely dismissed two decades ago as shallow, commercial multiplex fodder, Hughes' films are now viewed as coming-of-age classics by Gen Xers who grew up relating to the Reagan-era teen misfits in "Sixteen Candles," "The Breakfast Club," "Pretty in Pink" and "Some Kind of Wonderful."
I think a threshold or tipping point exists in the ratio between the political power of those who pay taxes and those who consume taxes directly. After that tipping point is reached, those who pay taxes become the economic slaves of those who consume taxes. . . .(H/T: Instapundit.) Another hat-tip is due:
Tax consumers now control the [California] state government and can vote themselves almost any level of personal income and benefits they wish while taxpayers cannot muster the political capital to defend themselves.
The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is, to divide the community into two great classes; one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the taxes, and, of course, bear exclusively the burthen of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds, through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.Ah, if only they had listened . . .
"She would call McCall up and go, 'Can you come and sit with me? I'm cold,' " she said. "She would drag him on the set and then pout and they'd fight. Mainly, it was her needing something from him: 'Can you say you love me?' "Not only a liberal ditz, but a needy and immature liberal ditz. Or is that redundant?
By a vote of 289 to 139, with 40 Republicans joining the majority, the House, in the process of reauthorizing the State Children's Health Insurance Program, doubled the funding, thereby transforming it through "mission creep." SCHIP's purpose, when it was enacted by a Republican-controlled Congress in 1997, was to subsidize state governments as they subsidize health care for families too affluent to be eligible for Medicaid but not affluent enough to afford health insurance. Because any measure acquires momentum when it is identified as for "the children," SCHIP was said to be for "poor children" or children of "the working poor." . . .Welcome to the Obama Age: Massive budget-busting giveaways, and nobody notices or cares.
The new expansion, which is vengeance for Bush's [2007] veto [of a proposed $35 billion increase in the program], is mission gallop: It will make it much easier for some states to extend SCHIP eligibility to children from families earning up to $84,800. Furthermore, to make "poor" an extremely elastic concept, generous "income disregards" are allowed. Families can, depending on their state's policies, subtract from their income calculation what they spend on rent or mortgage or heating or food or transportation or some combination of these. So children in some families with incomes well over $100,000 will be eligible.
College opened my eyes.You see? Feminist dogma is so immune to challenge on American campuses this kind of ahistorical absurdity is now taught as gospel in every college "women's studies" program. I'm sure "Natalie Dylan" (it's a pseudonym) actually believes this stuff -- a sort of "creation myth" of the sisterhood, a feminist equivalent of the bizarre racialist fictions of Leonard Jeffries and the Afrocentrists.
Like most little girls, I was raised to believe that virginity is a sacred gift a woman should reserve for just the right man. But college taught me that this concept is just a tool to keep the status quo intact. Deflowering is historically oppressive -- early European marriages began with a dowry, in which a father would sell his virginal daughter to the man whose family could offer the most agricultural wealth. Dads were basically their daughters' pimps.
When I learned this, it became apparent to me that idealized virginity is just a tool to keep women in their place.
The recent proposal distributed by congressional Democrats will provide only an additional $15 billion in 2009 and 2010 for road construction and repair. And of that $30 billion total provided, some funds are earmarked for narrow uses such as technology training or construction of roads on Indian reservations and in national parks.
According to those calculations, that’s just a little more than 3 percent meant to be spent on actual road and bridge construction.
In a conference call on Jan. 23, House Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor and [Texas Rep. Jeb] Hensarling pointed out some of the more egregious spending provisions in the House Democrat proposal:"How any of this fits under the banner of economic stimulus is beyond me," Hensarling said. "I think it would prove to be beyond the American people as well."
- For every dollar that is spent for small business tax relief, $4 are being spent for the maintenance and new grass in Washington, D.C.
- $360 million for sexually transmitted disease education
- $50 million for the National Endowment of Arts
- $726 million for an afterschool snack program
- Office furniture for the public health service
- More money for Amtrak
". . . she's gonna make some money," says Chris Matthews, talking about Sarah Palin's rumored book deal and stirring ire at Conservatives for Palin. The tingly-legged twerp, whose idiotic chatter during MSNBC's inauguration coverage prompted even liberals to complain, has about as much right to question Palin's erudition as Glenn Greenwald has to accuse others of "abject ignorance." UPDATE: Moe Lane: . . . and in the final analysis I don’t see where there’s much difference whether the talking head is malicious, or whether it is simply a fool.Split the difference: He's a malicious fool.
Matthews repeated his suggestion that Palin could not write the book later in the show. "The question is who actually will write the Palin book," he said. "The only politician I know who can write is Barack Obama."Perhaps it is time that Authors Against Obama issues its first official press release . . .
Despite the Republican National Committee's promise to donate Sarah Palin's $180,000 campaign wardrobe to charity, word has it the Alaska governor's clothes remain stuffed in trash bags at RNC headquarters, NewMajority has learned.Gee, how does Moira Bagley get her tips?
The Kentucky native with porcelain skin came to Washington as a journalist but joined the Republican National Committee (RNC) after realizing "I couldn't hide my light under a bushel anymore," she said.
Before becoming an RNC press secretary, Bagley was a copy editor at Roll Call, where she once had a run-in with the IT department for using 80 percent of the office's Internet bandwidth to watch the National Zoo's Web cam of its newborn pandas.
The left within the Republican Party has launched a full scale assault against the conservative base.Erick lives in Georgia, where Sarah Palin recently helped save Saxby Chambliss's Senate seat. Whose Senate seat has Moira Bagley saved lately? If the Republican elite wants to start a war with the Republican base, my money is on the base.
Mac is back -- back to his moral preening about how bipartisan he is, back to his reflexive demonization of his own party, back to his refusal to recognize any legitimate concerns raised by those who disagree with him. If we're going to have Democratic agenda enacted, better it be by a Democrat than a Republican obsessed with avoiding the "partisan" label in the White House.
The Hudson Institute had a forum last week entitled "A Post Racial America?" and one of the speakers was Robert Woodson of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, who made an interesting point:In Cincinnati, Ohio, you had a thug who was shot to death by a white police officer, and there was a boycott of the whole city by black middle-class people. And then there was police nullification; the white police said, well, since we’re going to get accused of racism, we're not going to make any more arrests in that community. The murder rate went up 800 percent in that community. But it was not the sons and daughters of those pastors or those civil rights leaders who were killed, because they don’t live there. And this is what we have to be able to confront if we're going to change the rules of the game and move toward a post-racial America. We should not allow people to come in and build their careers on mobilizing people to protest when the perpetrator of evil wears a white face. It redounds against the interests of poor people -- and that's what I hope Obama’s election will help us move beyond -- race.The grievance-mongering approach of self-serving "leaders" who swoop in, make headlines, then fly off to the next "incident" tends to destroy the basic foundation of society: good will.
Alas, too many of these "rebuilding" enterprises share a misguided focus that's also bound to be the seed of their own undoing: that is, an obsession with "winning elections."Shaidle (who blogs at Five Feet of Fury) somewhat inflates Schlafly's role in the '64 Goldwater movement -- which was built by Young Americans for Freedom, Cliff White, William Middendorf, Bill Buckley and many others -- although there is no doubt that "A Choice Not an Echo" was a major factor in galvanizing grassroots support. As to the larger point, Kathy's correct that the GOP in recent years has tended toward a top-down method of operation that drained enthusiasm from the grassroots.
NewMajority's slogan, for example, is "Building a conservatism that can win again."
But what good is "winning" if the "conservatism" that "wins" is faddish, unprincipled and unmoored from traditional American, Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism?
[B]ack in the early sixties, it was grassroots activist and housewife Phyllis Schlafly's self-published, million-selling anti-GOP Establishment book, A Choice Not An Echo, that led to Goldwater, who led to Reagan.
Not bad for a small-town mom running an accidental movement from her kitchen table, without email, the web -- or any support from Party bigshots.
Unless the "new GOP" is run bottom up, by the grass/net roots, it is doomed to fail.
If Time magazine, tomorrow, said to me, you know, "Hey, would love for you to come and write for our magazine, and we'll quadruple what you're being paid now, and we'll give you all kinds of promotional value, and get behind you that way." Unless they were willing to say to me, "You can come and write about anything you want, exactly the way you want to write about it," I would never ever do it. Why? Because I do want to do the kind of journalism that Time isn't doing, and I know that if I went and became a reporter or a pundit for Time, I would have to do the kind of things that they talk about, and not the kind of things that I talk about.
Wow. Is what Greenwald does really so important that he'd turn down a quadrupling of his income rather than to answer to the corporate suits at Time? Methinks not.
His hypothesis is completely detached from the reality of what goes on at Time -- or Newsweek or Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone. Assuming that they were in the market for someone like Greenwald, they would hire him to do something a lot like what he's already doing. "Send clips and resume": They see your stuff, they like your stuff, they make you an offer. They're not going to hire you on the basis of, "Hey, what you're doing is crap, but we'll hire you anyway, so long as you agree to do it our way."
On the other hand, if Greenwald were hired as a "pundit" -- by which he means, "columnist" -- then he'd be expected to file 750 words a week, and there would be some kind of expectation that he'd be writing for a general audience. And this is where his posture as the Gibraltar of journalistic integrity becomes ridiculous, because Greenwald never has written for a general audience and I'm not sure he could if he wanted to.
Greenwald is a niche writer, whose ouevre is the allegation of heinous misconduct by the Bush administration, by the U.S. military, by our intelligence agencies, and by Republicans in general. Well, OK, fine. Let the connoisseurs of such things debate the merits of his work. I claim no expertise, but will gladly stipulate that Greenwald is to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and the Patriot Act what George Noory is to UFOs and the paranormal, which is to say he is the past master of his niche.
Which brings us back around to the original subject Greenwald and McArdle were arguing about in April. Greenwald asserted that the media were ignoring the John Yoo memo (which had been recently made public) because they were fixated on "mindless, stupid, vapid chatter" about . . . the Democratic presidential primary.
Full stop. Given that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were then in the midst of a titanic struggle likely to decide who the next president would be, it does not even remotely surprise me that Greenwald would find Nexis database searches clogged with references to "Obama+Wright," "Obama+bowling," et cetera. However "mindless" those stories might be, this was during the Pennsylvania primary. Obama had a bad photo-op at a bowling alley and the rantings of Jeremiah Wright had become a big issue.
A presidential election is always big news, and people want to read about it. The release of a seven-year-old Justice Department memo . . . eh, not so much. If it had occurred to some of the reporters on the campaign trail to ask Barack Obama about the Yoo memo, or if Obama himself (who is a Harvard Law grad, after all) had decided to make a major issue of it, well, there would have been a lot more Nexis hits for "Yoo+torture."
Why did neither Obama nor the political press corps want to talk about the Yoo memo during the Pennsylvania primary campaign? I could speculate, but the point is that it was up to Obama whether he did a bowling-alley photo-op or gave a press conference to denounce the Yoo memo, and he decided to go bowling. If Greenwald wants to question that decision, he can take it up with David Axelrod.
A presidential campaign is important, per se. The news-consuming public is not to be blamed for wanting to read about the campaign, and journalists are not to be condemned for covering the campaign, even if -- in the finite time and space available for news -- this means that other important events get less coverage than they would under normal circumstances. A general audience cannot be expected to react to a Justice Department memo the way that Greenwald does, for several reasons:
Greenwald can no more understand that some Americans disagree with his view of presidential wartime authority than he can understand why the editors of Time magazine considered the Pennsylvania primary more important than the Yoo memo. As Greenwald wrote in April:
Needless to say, these serious and accomplished political journalists are only focusing on these stupid and trivial matters because this is what the Regular Folk care about. . . . Our nation's coddled, insulated journalist class reaches these conclusions about what Regular Folk think using the most self-referential, self-absorbed thought process imaginable.Pot. Kettle. Black. Who's being "self-referential" and "self-absorbed" here? The constitutional lawyer who wants the news to dwell on his own speciality, or the editors and reporters who think that whatever Obama does during the Pennsylvania campaign -- even a photo-op at a bowling alley -- is important news?
Americans care more about [Obama] than John Yoo because, well, John Yoo isn't running for president. Indeed, if one in ten Americans had even heard of John Yoo, I would be shocked, because most people don't care about minor government functionaries, no matter how pivotal their role may be in screwing up the world. . . .Right. So tough noogies for Greenwald who (self-referentially, you might say) was trying to promote his book in April, and obviously would have loved to be all over TV talking about the Yoo memo, but instead everybody wanted news about the Pennsylvania primary.
But voters can't do much about John Yoo now, other than choose a different type of president.
"More a partisan screed than a reasoned argument meant to persuade undecided readers, this repetitive text frequently devolves into personal attacks and vast generalizations."You don't say! "Coddled" and "insulated" though they may be, most journalists understand that the money's where the action is. And being the George Noory of Guantanamo Bay ain't it.
-- Publisher's Weekly, reviewing Glenn Greenwald's book, Great American Hypocrites
It might be a kamikaze mission, but the Club for Growth ought to support primary challengers against some of these go-along Republicans. What's the point of voting Republican if they're not going to fight? If the NRSC is looking for a fund-raising idea, maybe they can sell Republican doormats.Here are the five who need to be looking over their shoulders for the re-election challengers:
- Orrin Hatch (UT)
- John Ensign (NV)
- Olympia Snowe (ME)
- Mike Crapo (ID)
- John Cornyn (TX)
The somber, elegiac tones before President Obama’s oath of office at the inauguration on Tuesday came from the instruments of Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and two colleagues. But what the millions on the Mall and watching on television heard was in fact a recording, made two days earlier by the quartet and matched tone for tone by the musicians playing along.Maybe they should have tried that with the oath.
Kennedy was "mired in some potentially embarrassing personal issues," the source said, citing tax liabilities and worker compensation liabilities connected to the employment of a nanny.Hmmm. First of all, why can't these rich people hire a personal manager to deal with things like making sure all the paperwork is in order for their nannies? I mean, low six figures, say about $200,000 a year, to have a good accounting firm on contract to handle all that kind of stuff, soup to nuts. She's a freaking Kennedy, and she can't do that?
The source also said the state of her marriage may have presented a problem as well. "She has a tax problem that came up in the vetting and a potential nanny issue," the source said. "And reporters are starting to look at her marriage more closely," the source continued, refusing to provide any specifics.
Kennedy denied any issue over her marriage in an interview with The Post last month.
"We watched everything and George was still doing all the anchoring for ABC and as soon Beyonce said 'At Last...' George called me at home and he went, 'Honey?' and I said 'I know!' and we both started crying."
You know, Keith, this country is not as monarchical as it sometimes seems to the outsiders. I was at the shoe store the other day to get my shoes fixed, and sitting next to me -- standing next to me at the cobbler was Jane Roberts, the wife of the Supreme Court justice. I was at a Georgetown game the other day, watching them beat Providence, and sitting next to me is the chief justice. I keep saying to myself, That's the chief justice of the United States sitting there next to me. He's a sports fan. There is some measure of democracy that comes to mind here.OK, and your point would be . . .? I mean, if you hang around D.C. enough, you're going to bump into famous people from time to time. But does the fact that Justice Roberts likes basketball and Jane Roberts sometimes needs to get a broken heel repaired really illustrate "some measure of democracy," as Matthews suggests? Or is he just bumping his gums and filling the airwaves with random idiocy?
The word "p***y-whipped" wasn't invented out of thin air. It describes a real condition.Is it a word or a phrase? The hyphen makes me think of it as a phrase, but maybe that's just me. After all, I'm a moron.
Such temptation is especially difficult to resist when the object of Greenwald's ire is not, say, Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney, but rather the mild-mannered libertarian blogger, Megan McArdle, whose Crimes Against Humanity are (a) to ask a very sensible question about Gitmo detainees, and (b) to get linked by Instapundit for doing so. (Reynolds is to Greenwald as Moriarity was to Holmes.) [P]lease identify a single instance where, either in that video or anywhere else, I've ever advocated that the state impose obligations on journalists. I don't and haven't.All righty, then. I don't want to transcribe the entire video, but here are a couple of sentences of what Greenwald said to Megan about "public interest" in journalism:
"I see journalism as a profession like the medical profession or the legal profession, where going into work every day and thinking about, 'How do I maximize my profits? How do I feed my readers whatever they want so I can charge as much as I want for commercials?' is not the only concern. There are other concerns that conflict with that, and I think the law gives privileges, special privileges, to journalism, to journalists, in every single possible realm that's based upon the assumption, the premise that journalism owes a duty to the public interest besides maximizing profit."OK, the medical and legal professions are both licensed by the state, correct? Not just anyone can hang up a shingle and declare himself a surgeon. And what, pray tell, are these "special privileges . . . in every possible realm" accorded to journalists? If I get a speeding ticket on my way to an assignment (it happens), can I go to court and say, "Your honor, I am a journalist," and expect the charge to be dismissed? No.
Megan Cox Gurdon: In some [Washington, D.C. area] schools, adult enthusiasm for the new president has come perilously close to indoctrination.I'm not deranged, honest I'm not.
That's what a friend of mine encountered at the private elementary school her child attends. Stopping by the school one day not long ago, she happened to run into the music teacher.
"I'm so excited," the teacher bubbled, “I've just composed a song for the children!" The purpose of the song, the teacher explained, was to celebrate the results of a school wide mock election in which – surprise! -- Barack Obama had come out victorious.
"And the chorus goes, 'Yes We Can!' " the teacher enthused. My friend was stunned. What was the school thinking, getting children to sing political campaign slogans?
She took her concerns to the school principal, fearful that her objections would be taken the wrong way. . . .
In the principal’s office, my friend gently pointed out that when we see schoolchildren in foreign countries chanting government slogans we call it political indoctrination.
Istook announced yesterday that the group has added five new target states -- Georgia, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and North Dakota -- to its list, which already included Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, Nevada and Utah.Please read the rest. Istook has also written a column about the issue at Human Events.
SOS Ballot aims to take the issue to voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, asking approval for state constitutional amendments that would read: "The right of individuals to vote by secret ballot is fundamental. Where state or federal law requires elections for public office or public votes on initiatives or referenda, or designations or authorizations of employee representation, the right of individuals to vote by secret ballot shall be guaranteed."
