Category: Blithe Spirit

Doom for Dems?

For all you Repubs and other objectors to the Harry-and-Barack legislation and feeling low about it, this fellow at Commentary depicts Obamacare as Obamascare:

The collateral damage to Obama from this bill is enormous. More than any candidate in our lifetime, Obama won based on the aesthetics of politics. It wasn’t because of his record; he barely had one. And it wasn’t because of his command of policy; few people knew what his top three policy priorities were. It was based instead on the sense that he was something novel, the embodiment of a “new politics” – mature, high-minded and gracious, intellectually serious. That was the core of his speeches and his candidacy.

He was supposed to be something different, fresh and appealing.

In less than a year, that core has been devoured, most of all by this health-care process. Mr. Obama has shown himself to be a deeply partisan and polarizing figure. (“I have never been asked to engage in a single serious negotiation on any issue, nor has any other Republican,” Senator McCain reported over the weekend.) The lack of transparency in this process has been unprecedented and bordering on criminal. The president has been deeply misleading in selling this plan. Lobbyists, a bane of Obama during the campaign, are having a field day.

Comes the revolution, but not the one Obama has in mind, says this fellow, Peter Wehner, who

served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations prior to becoming deputy director of speechwriting for President George W. Bush in 2001. In 2002, he was asked to head the Office of Strategic Initiatives, where he generated policy ideas . . .

He argues well, I hope he’s right.

As is often the case, Instapundit sent me there.

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Bizarro!

Wow.  Chi Trib is on its way to bigger and better things, as is clear from this Steve Rhodes piece for the NBC Chicago blog which was deleted by its high muck-a-mucks after Chi Trib complained, after which Rhodes quit, after which he wrote about it.

The offending item, deleted but Google-cached, remains for all to see, and let this be a lesson to legacy media moguls coast to coast: You get more bad publicity by pulling strings than by ignoring things.

It’s for all to see at the cached site, but here ‘tis in toto as a public service:

Tribune’s New CEO Has a Shocking Past

Zell steps aside for old friend

By STEVE RHODES
Updated 12:54 PM CST, Thu, Dec 3, 2009

Sam Zell is leaving control of Tribune Company in the hands of a former shock jock who used to tell jokes about gay people on the air and reportedly roamed the offices of a past employer with a rubber penis tied around his neck.

That would be Randy Michaels, Zell’s chief lieutenant at Tribune and now the once-staid media institution’s CEO, a post Zell abdicated on Wednesday. Zell will remain chairman of the company to provide, you know, a strategic vision until Tribune gets out of bankruptcy. Then Zell will probably be gone.

Michaels, however, reportedly wants to stay. What a nice gift that would be for Zell to leave behind.

Michaels is known for, among other things, believing he is the first to measure reporters’ productivity by the number of words they produce and actually believing that is a legitimate way to measure a reporter’s productivity. That and a lawsuit that once alleged – among other things – that he roamed his old Clear Channel offices with a “flexible rubber penis” tied around his neck as well as a host of other crude rituals. The suit was settled.

As an executive with Clear Channel, Michaels was “an effective but tasteless programmer,” according to Salon.

“Behind the mike he made a name for himself back in the ’70s and ’80s farting on the air, cracking jokes about gays and tantalizing listeners with descriptions of ‘incredibly horny, wet and ready’ naked in-studio guests,” the Salon account reports.

Michaels is “well regarded by the creditors who are expected to control Tribune when it emerges from bankruptcy protection next year,” the New York Times reports.

Michaels, whose real name is Benjamin Homel, was once described as the AntiChrist of radio. He told Radio Ink magazine that “We’d all prefer to be liked, so of course it bothers me. I think I personify uncomfortable change in our business for a lot of people.”

Or at least a certain kind of change.

Steve Rhodes is the proprietor of The Beachwood Reporter, a Chicago-centric news and culture review.

Copyright NBC Local Media
First Published: Dec 3, 2009 9:09 AM CST

See also

* WBEZ blog, which has an interview with Rhodes

* “With Both Hands” on the same subject.

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Harry, we think we know you by now

He out-Herods Herod?

It’s more than a bit ironic that Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is threatening to work right up until Christmas to pass legislation that could allow federal dollars to pay for the deaths of untold numbers of unborn children.

In the days before Jesus Christ was born in a manger in Bethlehem, another bureaucrat, King Herod, was responsible for what would be called the Massacre of the Innocents, after he ordered all male infants to be killed to prevent the prophesied King of the Jews from replacing him on the throne.

From Penny Starr, at CNS News-dot-com.

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Chicago Tribune watchdog given once-over: kill the lobbyists

Wiser if not better self warns me: Do not read Chi Trib’s page one hard copy stories carefully, take in the heads and let it to.  Let it go, you fool, you have church to go to and kind, wonderful thoughts to think.  It’s 7:30 on a Sunday morning!  Let it go!

Oh come on, I tell the wiser if not better self, just this one look, this one shot at analysis why the lede sucks, the head is tendentious and meant to soothe the fevered left, no more, I swear, I swear, I swear . . .

WASHINGTON – David Nexon had a big problem. [Look, I hear once more about David Nexon and his problems, I will scream.] An early version of national health care legislation contained a $40 billion tax aimed squarely at members of the medical device trade association he represents. [Wow.  Medical device trade assciation?  Wow.]

The head:

How health lobbyists influenced reform bill: Ex-lawmakers, ex-staffers push industry agenda

OK. This is more like it.  We hate lobbyists, so the story has our attention.  I don’t hate them, I try to put myself into the supposed left-wing reader whom Chi Trib editors and college-educated reporters etc. assume are out there.  I mean, who knows free-market people anyhow?  Hey, Pauline Kael didn’t know anyone who did not vote for McGovern in ‘72 and couldn’t figure out how Nixon won.

Thank you, Andrew Zajac, of new, improved Tribune Newspapers, and thank your tenured-radical college teachers for doing so much to program you.

But another story idea:

Suggested head: How big government spawns hated lobbyists.  Capitalists use legislative moxy and muscle to defend private property against punitive taxation, regulation.

Suggested lede: Senator Claghorne (D.-Chicago) had a problem.  The latest flood of rules and regs had not flushed out enough high-priced lobbyists who might help his war chest along for the coming campaign.

O.K.  Done with Sunday Trib, off to church, conscience relatively clear (never completely), waiting to hear from God what my next move should be.  Thanks for listening . . .

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Carolyn socks it to Sassone

Oak and Forest Leaves longtime columnist Paul Sassone

needs a lesson in patience, humanity and environmentalism. Perhaps the next time he’s in the checkout line behind a responsible person who brought reusable bags to the store, he should worry less about his melting ice cream and more about the melting polar ice caps.

Says letter writer Carolyn James, complaining about his column [not available on-line] in which he makes fun of people bringing their own bags to the checkout counter for environmental reasons and making him wait.

Yahoo! Melting ice cream vs. melting polar caps!  No contest!

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We’re keeping score, you know

What do you know?  We’re supposed to talk nice to people and not throw our weight around, and see how Obama-diplomacy worked in Cope-‘n-hang-in-there:

UK diplomatic sources . . . confirmed that China had taken huge offence at remarks by President Obama over the need to independently monitor every country[’s] carbon emissions.

In his speech President Obama said: “Without any accountability, any agreement would be empty words on a page”.

The Chinese delegation interpreted these comments as an attempt to humiliate them. It prompted Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to return to his hotel and send low level delegates to take his place in the talks. [Italics added]

But what’s a kid from the South Side supposed to do when faced with inscrutable people?

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Out of the mouth of the beast

Embedded in a NY Times story about buying TV sets this season is this capsule statement of why the market, not the Fed, not the Congress, not a federal czardom, knows best:

“There was the assumption that fewer 32-inch LCD TVs would be sold,” said Bob Perry, Panasonic’s senior vice president for marketing, “but more were sold and that drove down prices.”

Econ 101, folks.  It’s why the best motto for a president facing economic decline (apart from “cut the taxes”) is “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

(Hat-tip News Alert.)

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FBOP-FDIC-Park National debate, continued

Further commentary in Wednesday Journal on FBOP’s shutdown by FDIC and subsequent acquisition by US Bank:

Banks are judged both by the soundness of their banking decisions and by their impact on communities. They are not just fly-by-night visitors; they are also crucial institutions.

So FBOP, parent of Park National, deserves to stay open because it made more loans to low-income people, argue Bill Barclay & Peg Strobel, ignoring the non-sustainability of Park N’s policy, which endangered depositors’ money, FDIC claimed.

Park N got praise from B&S and others, but FDIC is in the business of protecting depositors’ money, and it’s a good thing too, because if it didn’t, there would be no loans to anybody, including low-income people.  Judged by whom? is the pertinent question.

Otherwise, what is for them “the larger, crucial issue,” the doling of TARP money is unwisely kept from small banks in favor of ones too big to fail.  I’m with them on pursuit of that issue, indeed of the TARP concept in itself — TARP having become arguably a slush fund which Obama wants to use to goose the economy, so much of it is left over.

Can o’ worms here, folks.  Let’s open it.

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National alert escapes Homeland Security, story escapes Chi newspapers

Things I find out about on the Internet that I don’t, so far anyhow, in Chicago newspapers, first of a series:

From Instapundit, which led to Reason Mag, which had found this in the Star-Ledger of New Jersey, this:

A New Jersey fugitive wanted on insurance fraud charges since 2007 was working for the immigration division of the Department of Homeland Security in Georgia, despite a nationwide alert for her arrest, Essex County prosecutors said yesterday.

It’s a New Jersey story, yes, and we are in Illinois, but that dept of homeland se-what? is a national organization, I believe, and this story exposes bureaucratic f-up.  I think it does. 

So does the law:

“We found it surprising, alarming that an employee of the Department of Homeland Security is a fraudster, and we do not understand how she could have remained employed there with an open criminal warrant for her arrest remaining on the interstate system without being discovered,” said [Essex County Assistant Prosecutor Michael] Morris.

It’s worth an item in Chi Trib or Sun-Times?

It is the sort of item that lends spunk to the lineup, has an edge to it, and we jaded readers like edgy stuff.

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