. . . on a shoot:
The girl gets around. (Maggie B., that is, #3 Daughter)
Tag: Blithe Spirit
Birthday presents for the president
See Ken. See Ken Trainor. See Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest columnist with great idea for the Obama camp: Blame Bush!
Why didn’t they think of that before?
Auto bailouts played it safe
Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek writes letters to newspapers, copying them to the site he and other economists from George Mason U. operate. His latest, to Wall Street Journal, demurs from WSJ auto-industry writer Paul Ingrassia’s joy in what he says is the successful bailout of GM and Chrysler.
A year and a half is not long enough to draw such a conclusion, says Boudreaux.
Second – and more importantly – the chief economic case against the bailout was not that huge infusions of taxpayer funds and special exemptions from bankruptcy rules could not make G.M. and Chrysler profitable. Of course they could.
Yes, throw money at a money-shortage program and you get results.
Instead, the heart of the case against the bailout is that it saps the life-blood of entrepreneurial capitalism. The bailout reinforces the debilitating precedent of protecting firms deemed ‘too big to fail.’
How so?
Capital and other resources are thus kept glued by politics to familiar lines of production, thus impeding entrepreneurial initiative that would have otherwise redeployed these resources into newer, more-dynamic, and more productive industries. [italics added]
It’s a play-it-safe solution, a conservative one, as opposed to a classical liberal one that respects and encourages ingenuity. One that Friedrich Hayek would recommend.
In short:
The ‘success’ of the bailout is all too easy to engineer and to see. The cost of the bailout – the industries, the jobs, and the outputs that are never created – is impossible to see, but nevertheless real.
What can be seen, on the other hand, is continued high pension and benefits for members of the United Auto Workers, a union that loves Dems because they protect their (narrow) interests.
Protecting assets
Incorporate, advises commenter Benjamin, at Carpe Diem, where the talk is the Americans With Disabilities Act, now 20 years old, as foolish, expensive, and dictatorial, thanks, says Benjamin, to judges and lawyers with “no concept [of] costs, or the costs they are imposing on society”:
[Y]ou can almost always avoid any personal liability by forming a corporation. The corporate shield is a marvelous fiction, and ensconced behind it, you are nearly impervious. Just keep few assets in the corporation, and declare bankruptcy if met with untoward judgments.
A word to the wise, to be sure.
(HT News Alert)
Eighty and out, says Big O.
President Barack Obama has kept mum on the fate of Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) for days — but he tells CBS News that it’s time for the embattled 80-year-old former Ways and Means Chairman to end his career “with dignity.”
Why, besides “troubling” allegations?
[H]e’s somebody who’s at the end of his career. Eighty years old. I’m sure that– what he wants is to be able to– end his career with dignity. And my hope is that– it happens. “
What the hell, what is he a one-man death panel?
Kenneth Howell back at work
Alliance Defense Fund, one. Hate speech, nothing.
An adjunct religion instructor barred from teaching by the University of Illinois after defending the Roman Catholic stance on homosexuality has been invited back to teach this fall.
Adjunct associate professor Kenneth Howell was reinstated on Thursday — a day after the deadline when his lawyers said they would sue the university for violating his academic freedom if administrators failed to reinstate him.
Faculty investigators soldier on.
But the reinstatement is temporary. It does not affect an ongoing faculty review, which has been investigating whether Howell’s immediate removal violated his academic freedom or right to due process.
Another faculty committee appointed to examine the circumstances of Howell’s compensation concluded that the university’s relationship with St. John’s Catholic Newman Center, the Catholic ministry on campus, was improper.
Though Howell taught Introduction to Catholicism and Modern Catholic Thought in university classrooms, he served on the payroll of the Newman Center funded by the Diocese of Peoria — an agreement that remained in place despite scholars’ objections when a religious studies program was established in 1971.
Longstanding objections, therefore? Reported at the time? Known by how many even now? Chi Trib’s Brachear is slipping something in here: It’s what interests her.
Question: Any names to go with the Howell decision to reinstate? Passive voice irritates: “has been invited . . . was reinstated.” By whom? Weak reportage, I fear, all that’s available for now maybe.
The king of trite
We pick on Obama for his statist policies, but do we pick on him for his regular use of bromides and nostrums? We should. Just today on The View, where a gaggle of admirers were joined by their usual conservative Hasselbeck, he came up with these that flash across his TelePrompter mind:
So why did Obama decide to go on the daytime chatfest? “I was trying to find a show that [First Lady] Michelle [Obama] actually watched,” the President said on the show.
Here’s a case of playing to the expected, or expecting. It’s what the old boy says deprecatingly of the lady of the house, you know, accompanied by boyish grin. He has the moves, yes.
. . . he talks about the economy, the oil spill and a “whole host of other issues.” He says the economy has started to stabilize and grow again.
Passing over what he says the economy is doing, how about that “whole host” business?
“Politics is a contact sport,” says Obama. But he says “We shouldn’t be campaigning all the time.”
Passing over the second part, at which coming from him many would gag, “contact sport” is sure telling.
Told (by Hasselbeck) we’re “very divided,” he said,
“My hope is that I try to set a tone” that we can disagree without being disaggreable. He says the media loves conflict, and doesn’t report on agreements.
Can’t say enough for this trifecta of “my hope is” (vs. “I hope”), “disagree without” etc., and media as loving conflict. At least he didn’t blame it on Bush.
That’s all for now. more more more to come . . .
Barack, we hardly knew you . . .
During the election campaign, Barack Obama sought to appeal to the best instincts of the electorate, to a post-partisan sentiment that he said would reinvigorate our democracy. He ran on a platform of reconciliation—of getting beyond “old labels” of right and left, red and blue states, and forging compromises based on shared values.
They know what sells
Gang of leakers going for broke:
WikiLeaks, frustrated at the lack of splash of recent leaks on its whistle-blowing website, has rolled the dice to try to raise its profile by teaming up with news organizations in its latest dump of classified documents.
And they know the expose of Chinese torture of Tibetans, N. Korean, Russian stuff, etc. will never have the legs of an expose of the U.S. Or of madrassas indoctrinating kids, Islamists plotting terror (another man’s name for freedom-fighting), flabby willingness of Western sell-outs to paper over and mollify-by-any-means Islamists in their midst. (Chi Trib still respectfully quotes CAIR — in this case, TribCo-owned Sentinel — stuck in fear of Islamaphobia.)
Some places they can’t get into (they depend on U.S. intelligence for that), others they can but aren’t interested. Atrocities by Americans! There we go. (Or by Israelis, pretty much the same thing.)
In releasing a “War Diary” of 76,000 secret U.S. military reports from the war in Afghanistan , the web site was unapologetic about its agenda. “We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary to change its course,” the authors said.
That’s in Chi Trib about WikiLeaks, where a fellow with an intriguing organization predicts more of the same:
That [extreme difficulty in finding leakers] means that more partnerships between WikiLeaks and the mainstream media could be on the horizon, said Tom Rosenstiel, founder and director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Intriguing, and very wise. Who can object to excellence? Realizing that, I am on the verge of announcing my new organization, Project for Excellence in Everything (PEE), which is bound to take off. Motto? “Everyone PEEs.”
Clarence Page on Sherrod, Breitbart et al.
Only the black Ag Dept. official who talked to an NAACP group last March and the white farmers she really did help emerged with “grace and dignity intact” from the recent brouhaha, says Chi Trib’s Clarence Page.
The culprits included the Obama White House, Ag Secy. Vilsack, NAACP’s Jealous, and Fox host O’Reilly, who at least draws a major media pay check. But the one Page concentrates on is the “blogger . . . defiant dope,” shame-lacking, guilty-hand-washing Andrew Breitbart, who ran a video clip out of context and set off a panic among Obama aides, the Ag Secy, and the NAACP leadership, all of whom responded like scared kittens and ultimately blamed other people. “We now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles,” said President Obama, for instance.
Naturally, Page concentrates on Breitbart. Besides nailing ACORN some months back, he “was [this time] after the NAACP,” because of its “recent call for the tea party movement to rid itself of ‘racist elements.’” Breitbart said running the Sherrod clip was “about tarring . . . the tea party movement with the false charge of racism,” to which Page, in full sardonic mode: “Right.” Moreover, Breitbart runs “willfully conservative Web sites” — the worst kind, we might add.
“Bring it on,” says Page. “There’s plenty of room on the Web,” adding, as if we were not in at least the second decade of Internet warfare: “Let the consumers decide whose version of journalism is worth their time.” You’d think he’d go light with that sort of talk.
For consumers he had straight-from-the-shoulder advice: “Keep a healthy skepticism.” For practitioners of “citizen journalism,” he had “Remember the old school lesson . . .: Getting the story right is better than getting it first.” That old-school wisdom, from a seasoned practitioner.
And then another nostrum that an old-school practitioner might just hesitate to pronounce in a time of widespread plunging mainstream circulation and plummeting reader and viewer confidence: “Bad journalism eventually produces its own punishment.” Bankruptcy, for instance.
In any case, readers can now (at last) view Breitbart’s work “with [again] the healthy skepticism that it deserves.” Thank heaven.
As for the other culprits, “the folks in the White House and the NAACP,” he has this: “Don’t let fear of a charge of racism from the right impair your common sense. . . . Don’t take the bait.” Thing never to forget is you’re not the racists. It’s the other guys.
Blithe Spirit 