Something really scary here.

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.

This is a precious moment provided by MSNBC, where thrills run up the spines over Obama but sometimes the Teleprompter gets things not quite right.

Instapundit, whence this comes, has an observation to go with this moment.

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 2^nd you take in heavier food requiring digestion, at the 1^st lighter that is not so demanding on internal excretions.  At the 1^st, 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.  . . . .

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.  . . . .

This CBC-Sports lede puts the Rush Limbaugh-NFL discussion in perspective:

Limbaugh, an American radio talk-show host known for his outrageous commentary, is teaming with St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts and others in hopes of purchasing the St. Louis Rams from Chip Rosenbloom. [Italics added]

Known to whom, pray tell?

I’ve been meaning to say this for a long time, you have to believe me.

For all his flourish, President Barack Obama sure falls back on a few familiar phrases.

Make no mistake. Change isn’t easy. It won’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks and false starts.

Those who routinely listen to the president have come to expect some of those expressions to pop up in almost every speech. (That includes you, cynics and naysayers, the ones Obama mentions all the time without identifying who is saying nay.)

Yet in the portfolio of presidential phrases, none is more pervasive than Obama’s four-word favorite: Let me be clear.

So I give a begrudging cheer to ABC’s [oops, AP’s] Ben Feller, who beat me and, I’m sure, many others to the punch.

My opinion? It’s part and parcel (chestnut there, sorry) of his overall dishonesty.  (They all are dishonest, you say; but like the pigs in Animal Farm being equal, some are more so than others.)  Those catch phrases are b.s., right?

Later: Oh my, Instapundit linked this, and now my neatly graphed WordPress ups and downs of hit numbers won’t mean a thing, will look uniformly flat as today’s and tomorrow’s shoot up.  Oh well.

Later 2: Another winner, from Reader D, who hates it

when Obama says, “I said it once, and I’ll say it again . . .” Because then I don’t believe he ever said it once.

And few of us look it up at the time.  It becomes a sort of creeping disillusionment if we once believed him or are generally loathe to disbelieve people, a shock of recognition (of a gifted liar) if we hadn’t thought about it.

Reading at The Daily Beast that email is being (has been) overtaken by Facebook and Twitter, for its instant-communication factor, this man or woman spoke from the heart.

As one over 40, I’m still trying to get a handle on Facebook & Twitter. Negatives re Facebook: too many relatives have too much time on their hands and clog up my wall; relatives who send personal emails via facebook which requires me to then log on to facebook to respond [not that hard] and who knows who all will see my response.

Seems easier and more personal to send regular email [or snail mail?] when contacting one person direct. I don’t have much to say that I need to broadcast to everyone (except when I’m commenting on articles like this!)

As one friend said, facebook can be a real time suck. [Hear, hear!] 

Facebook positive: easy to see what’s going on with friends and family.

Email negative: can’t really think of any, other than you can’t really post a photo album for family to easily see whenever they want. [Huh?  I get photos, album or otherwise all the time but have to admit some are not easily accessed.]

The original story is at Wall St. Journal.

MM comments:

Facebook and Twitter: don’t we already waste enough time going through 40 emails a day of cute dog pictures and chain letters?  Now we have to get on the computer and tweat about every little thing we do, and put our entire lives on the net for all the world to see on Facebook?  Riciduluous waste of time. 

I wonder how the younger generation was conned into believing this is a good thing.  Perhaps behind the groovy facade sits the real owner of all these sites: the government!  What a great way for big brother to know everything we do, think, believe in, who we know, where we go, etc.

Team Sarah is mobilizing the ‘Net to vet the coming health care bill, asking people to read 15–20 pages of it and report back with a review of it.  This blogger is volunteering.  Great idea.

If you ask Sarah Who? you probably are not interested.  Go here for details:

http://www.teamsarah.org/group/healthcarebillreviewboard