Month: October 2009

White House as target on “30 Rock”

Just watched “30 Rock,” in which Alec Baldwin is called before a White House investigator to explain why his company is doing this and that.  The investigator-interrogator at a supposedly closed session turns out to be a man Baldwin fired a year earlier, out to get Baldwin.

He leaks Baldwin’s testimony, then threatens to destroy his company.  He’s in this position having “wormed” his way into the Obama White House by cozying up to Sasha and Malia.  His final move is to force Baldwin to take a bailout, thus making him Baldwin’s boss. 

On NBC, no less: funny stuff capitalizing on Obama policy and tactics.  And it’s only nine months since The One was inaugurated.  Are times changing?

Later: Damn! Just when I was getting my WordPress hit graph neatly settled in the 100 range, Instapundit struck again, sending thousands to this item.  Now I have to start over again, trying to bring a little neatness into my life.

Yet later: Oh boy. Then along came Breitbart’s Big Hollywood sending hundreds more. Where will all end?

Meanwhile, I have ordered Glenn Reynolds’s An army of Davids : how markets and technology empower ordinary people to beat big media, big government, and other Goliaths from the OP library. 

Then I bought it, at my Abebooks.com store, where I am advised, “Buy all your books used. Help the earth.”  Meet my thin budget, they mean.  Besides, if everyone took that advice, there would be no new books, and then where would the earth be?

I am beginning to get the idea about that army.  It’s marching right through my blog.

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Paying piper calls tune

You take their money, you do what they say:

WASHINGTON — Responding to the furor over executive pay at companies bailed out with taxpayer money, the Obama administration will order the firms that received the most aid to slash compensation to their highest-paid employees, an official involved in the decision said on Wednesday.

Furor?  Sure (we read it in the noosepapers), but what about Their Plan All Along?  The crisis too good to waste: there’s power to be gotten.  It’s the power, stupid.

And the smell of Il Duce:

Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which [divergent] interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State.

The joys of state-run coordination.

Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and economic sphere.

19th-century liberalism here, free enterprise and all that, directly the opposite of today’s so-called liberalism.

In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.

These from Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, 1935, as at Public Eye.

Also:

State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management.

Again, state decides and orders that it be done, using its POWER.

From Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Rome: ‘Ardita’ Publishers, 1935.

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The gentleman’s D

Colleen Kane has an excellent story in Chi Trib about high school athletes as non-academic.

One number won’t light up the high school scoreboard this school year: 1.0.

That’s the grade-point average on a 4.0 scale that a high school athlete could carry and still score for his or her team this fall, according to state standards.

Some schools require more than that. 

“To put out a team of athletes that are able to have five Ds and three Fs — that’s putting athletics before academics,” Evanston [HS] associate athletic director Dan Vosnos said.

Some do.

“Kids want to be involved in something. And the gangs don’t have a grade-point average,” Proviso East athletic director Andrew Johnson said.

It’s a common problem.

“To be honest, if many of the kids in our schools didn’t have something to look forward to — which in some cases is one or two sports — they wouldn’t come to school,” [nearby] Leyden athletic director Randy Conrad said.

Proviso’s Johnson tried to change things there, where the state’s minimum applies.

Within the last five years, Proviso East had a 2.0 GPA requirement, causing a stir among some parents and coaches. The administration changed back to the IHSA standard when it decided it was losing too many athletes.

“We had a 2.0, but we had no support,” Johnson said.

“Some parents and [some?] coaches” had their way, and so it goes.  Community standards prevail.  The school becomes a sort of anti-delinquency program, slipping back to a common (low) denominator.

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Fenger fighting explained

A Fenger High neighbor who subs in city schools and whose wife taught there tells “Why they fight at Fenger” in a ChiTrib letter today, explaining at one point:

At Fenger, the Altgeld Gardens area is called “the dirty 130’s.” Altgeld students came to Fenger several years ago when Carver High School in the “Gardens” was changed to a military academy.

The conflict started when Altgeld students were sent to Fenger. This tension has been going on for a very long time. But every year, many of us noticed that the feuding escalated.

There were many times my wife expressed her concern about the tension among the students. There are always fights going on in the building.

He goes on to urge that adults “instill some moral and spiritual values in our children.”

But if they don’t, isn’t it better that kids go to school in their neighborhood, where they don’t run into outlanders?

This is the school and neighborhood where a kid was beaten to death with a board (not shot, as most South Side killings occur).  Wouldn’t it be a matter of common sense not to mix the two neighborhoods? 

But someone downtown — Arne Duncan before he followed Obama to Washington? — had the bright idea of making the Altgeld Gardens area school a selective military academy, and off the Altgeld kids went to Fenger.

If anyone has mentioned this specifically as an important aspect of the Fenger problem, I haven’t read about it.

Later: I better not assume you all know about the killing.  It’s here on videotape, if you can bear to look.

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The Greising-Davis combine

How is David Greising (D.-ChiTrib) like Rep. Danny Davis (D.-IL)? 

Give up? 

Neither considers cost of national health care relevant.

Delegate Greising, who has a column:

There are some who see the problems with programs in Maine and Massachusetts and argue that is the reason the federal government cannot afford to meddle in health care.

But with health care insurance premiums eating up 18 percent of the typical family’s income, en route toward a 24 percent bite in 10 years if nothing is done to “bend” the cost curve downward, it’s not a question of whether the federal government can afford to meddle in health care more than it already does.

We already know where Rep. Davis stands.  “No price is too high for quality health care,” he said in a townhall meeting at Malcolm X College on Aug. 22.

Greising has an explanation: The high-cost Maine and Massachusetts insurance programs “show that government intervention is better than no action at all,” because “[t]he only way to bend the cost curve is to adopt national efforts, while remembering the lessons of Maine.”

Which are that if you provide health insurance, you spend more than you thought and/or run out of money.

In Mass. costs doubled in two years.  In Maine the state ran out of money after enrolling only 10% of the previously not enrolled.

Like Audrey in “Little Shop of Horrors,” Maine and Mass. want more.  Which in addition to her sense of civic responsibility may explain why Olympia Snowe voted the way she did.

Rep. Greising is all for “mandates,” as he puts it, in quotes.  Some object, but they merely

want minimal government and . . . apparently, are comfortable living in a country where people can “free ride” the system by not buying insurance, knowing all along that the taxpayers or hospitals will come to the rescue should they get terribly sick.

Apparently.

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More about breakfast reading at Not For Attribution

Now what?

The morning read has two parts, I must add to yesterday’s Breakfast Challenge, pre– and at-breakfast.  There’s coffee in both, but one is pre-walk, the other after it.  Difference is, at the 2nd you take in heavier food requiring digestion, at the 1st lighter that is not so demanding on internal excretions.  At the 1st, rather than imbibing newspaper-style stuff with coffee — one cup at most — you want what makes best use of your semiconscious state, such as poetry by Pound or, as now, criticism by Hugh Kenner.

His book on American fiction and poetry (A Homemade World, Morrow, 1975) lies now on the little reading table in the front room, far from PC and ‘Net.  . . . .

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The breakfast table challenge

Something new at Not for Attribution:

Have been groping lately for breakfast-table reading.  Nothing autocratic, you know, a la the senior Oliver Wendell Holmes (the good one).  Something to feed the mind without requiring Great Books-style concentration.

Groping, I say, because of the increasingly slim and flimsy offerings in my two daily newspapers, Chi Trib and Sun-Times, both as to interest-level (don’t care about this, don’t care about that, over and over, I say to myself), lack of imagination (dying for a good lede, even a good head), and even-handed, let-chips-fall coverage.  . . . .

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Little Jack Horner, corner, thumb, pie, I . . .

Here’s an amazing bit of Obama coverage you will never find in a U.S. sheet.  It’s in a blog at UK Telegraph, whose D.C.-based Toby Harnden got a presidential email on the day O. got the Nobel Prize — and two more since then, Nobel-dropping indicating he’s not “even faintly sheepish about the award.”

“Surprising and humbling” O. found the news, which he’d got that morning.

“To be honest,” he continued, saying he felt he didn’t deserve it (lie) and the others who got it had “inspired” him, etc. (another lie: nowhere near how Rev. Jeremiah Wright had done so).

“I’ve always thought that when someone starts a sentence with the words “to be honest . . .” it’s a signal they’re about to lie,” said Harnden parenthetically.

A few more “faux-humble paragraphs” and Harnden concluded:

Obama apparently sees the award of the prize as his biggest achievement so far, with the possible exception of his election victory. Well, it sure beats actually doing something.

“All in all,” Harnden found it “a hilarious display of vanity and self-absorption masquerading ineptly as humility and selflessness” and asked,

What does it say about Obama’s character when such an empty symbol means so much to him?

Too much, I fear.

And: Would be delinquent in my duty to humanity were I not to say Instapundit led me to this item.

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