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Howard Portnoy  An Assault on FOX News by—Howell Raines??

Howell Raines: Would you trust this man to do anything?

It sounds like something straight out of The Onion: A critique of FOX News by one of the most biased, least open-minded individuals ever to sully the profession of journalism, Howell Raines. If the name is unfamiliar, Raines (whose mugshot appears at the left) is a former executive editor at the New York Times, another bastion of journalistic fairness and honesty. His most notable achievement at this newspaper was hiring professional liar and plagiarist Jayson Blair.

Raines’s rant against Roger Ailes and FOX, which appears in today’s Washington Post, is certain to come away with honors as the decade’s unintentionally funniest commentary on the state of the modern fifth estate. Just take this quote alone: “Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II.”  Standards of fairness and objectivity? Raines couldn’t be more of a stranger to fairness and objectivity.

Raines’s disquisition on the alleged unfairness of FOX centers on one beef: its biased treatment of the current health care fiasco. In support of his claim, Raines relies on an unattributed quote he ascribes to FOX: “The American people do not want health-care reform.” Crack journalist that he is, Raines probably should name the FOX employee whom he is quoting, but remember—this is the man who gave the world Jayson Blair.

But never mind any of that. Raines, oblivious to blunt self-contradiction, shoots himself in the journalistic foot a paragraph later by noting “It is true that, after 14 months of Fox’s relentless pounding of President Obama’s idea of sweeping reform, the latest Gallup poll shows opinion running 48 to 45 percent against the current legislation.”

You have to hand it to the Washington Post for publishing this bit of self-righteous drivel and, in so doing, demonstrating that they are willing to hire, if only on a freelance basis, the handicapped.

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can also reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.
Posted 14 March 2010 † Howard Portnoy § Health Care § Media ‡ Comments (0) °  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

CK MacLeod  RECOMMENDED BROWSING

(your links should be added immediately – though you won’t see them until your next refresh)

Posted 13 March 2010 † CK MacLeod § Link Dump ‡ Comments (1) °  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

CK MacLeod  18 Long Years in the Senate: 3 Tiny Bills

In the Kali GOP Senate primary, Fiorina still trails Tom Campbell in the opinion polls, but it will be hard to take horse race numbers very seriously until late May. Additionally, the polls don’t measure whatever damage the Campbell campaign has sustained, or may still sustain, from the recent questions about the candidates’ flirtations and associations with virulent enemies of Israel.

In the meantime, Fiorina and her wonderfully insane ad team have produced a follow-up, though sadly not a sequel, to “Demon Sheep,” this time completely focused on Carly vs Senator Ma’am, the latter rendered as a Zardoz-like hot air media balloon monster:




h/t – Hot Air » Blog Archive » Finally: “Hot Air: The Movie”.

Posted 13 March 2010 † CK MacLeod § 2010 Elections ‡ Comments (8) ° Tagged: ,  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

CK MacLeod  CONTENTION OF THE DAY – DEDUCTIVE LOGIC

I think it’s clear by now that Obama does not wish to make a confrontation with Iran part of his presidency. As I’ve written before, this means that Israeli security fears become a major problem for the administration: surely Obama realizes that one of his most important jobs is therefore preventing the Israelis from attacking.

How does one do that? Typically, the way the United States has alleviated Israeli security concerns is by affirming the closeness of the strategic relationship. But doing this on the Iran issue doesn’t work, for two reasons: 1) it would undermine Obama’s mission to the Arab world, which requires pushing the Israelis away; 2) and in the context of a nuclear Iran, it doesn’t really matter how close the U.S. and Israel are. The Israeli fear of the Iranian bomb is that one nuke would destroy the Jewish state, and that even in the absence of such a strike, Israel would be confronted with an emboldened Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas axis, more wars, constant (and credible) threats of annihilation, and over time would experience the psychological, demographic, and economic attrition of the country.

When we follow this logic chain to its conclusion, we find that Obama’s only option for restraining an Israeli attack is the one that we’re seeing unfold before our eyes: a U.S. effort to methodically weaken the relationship; provoke crises; consume the Netanyahu government with managing this deterioration; and most important, create an ambiance of unpredictability by making the Israelis fear that an attack on Iran would not just be met with American disapproval but also a veto and perhaps active resistance.

Noah Pollak – Contentions – “Re: Re: A New Low”

Posted 13 March 2010 † CK MacLeod § Contention of the Day § Israel ‡ Comments (24) ° Tagged: ,  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

CK MacLeod  CARTOONTION OF THE DAY – OBAMA AKBAR!

Obama Akbar!

Michael Ramirez Cartoon.

Posted 13 March 2010 † CK MacLeod § Contention of the Day § Health Care ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

CK MacLeod  CONTENTION OF THE DAY – THE LAW OF IRONY STRIKES AGAIN

[E]even if ObamaCare passes, Democrats and President Obama will lose. Republicans have already vowed to make November a referendum on this bill and, by all auguries, Democrats are going to lose big time. The loss of one election if the larger cause succeeds wouldn’t be a big deal. But this bill has little legitimacy and for years might be tied up in constitutional challenges against its individual mandate provision–not to mention the provisions that turn insurance companies into public utilities without due process. ObamaCare could well become President Obama’s Iraq. Worst of all from the standpoint of his personal life story, it will exacerbate the crisis of the entitlement state, requiring someone else to step forward and clean up the fiscal mess he is creating.

Ironically, Obama is not only sowing the seeds for the destruction of his own legacy–but also for the creation of someone else’s.

Wrong Bill At The Wrong Time – Forbes.com.

Posted 12 March 2010 † CK MacLeod § Barack Obama § Health Care ‡ Comments (29) ° Tagged: ,  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

CK MacLeod  The Real Progressive Speaks! (replying to the critics #1)

Our opponents like to call themselves “progressive,” and they have in mind a tradition of political activism that goes back more than a century.

That tradition includes some things that have become accepted, largely uncontroversial features of American politics and culture – such as voting rights for women, the direct popular election of senators, and popular primary voting for party nominees. The tradition includes other things that most progressives would rather we all forget was their work – national income taxes, say, or prohibition of alcohol sale and consumption. And the tradition also includes immense political and economic commitments – like Medicare, Social Security, and the vast regulatory bodies of the state – that are a constant source of dispute and disagreement even among those who support their aims unreservedly.

But it’s not just or even mainly such measures – measure after measure after measure, good, bad, and indifferent, the vast majority expanding government at the expense of private initiative and investment – that progressives want to recall.  They also want to associate themselves, ahead of anyone else, with the good old very popular, very American idea of progress.

They want us to believe that they stand for progress, because they know that their fellow Americans believe in progress.  The know that America is the true home of progress, and America has welcomed and has given birth to more social, technological, economic, and political progress than any other country.

That, I believe, is what the great progressive Ronald Wilson Reagan had in mind whenever he spoke with his inimitable optimism about the American future.  It’s what made him able, in his last major political address, to respond to the Democrats’ empty calls for “change” by declaring to his fellow Republicans, “We are the change!”

Continue Reading »

Posted 12 March 2010 † CK MacLeod § Republican Party ‡ Comments (26) ° Tagged: , , ,  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

CK MacLeod  Things you can learn from Wikipedia – defining the Left

When down in the weeds of a discussion trying to remember what the words we’re using meant before we started thrashing them, I find it useful to go to Wikipedia for the plain vanilla mainstream non-controversial standard definition.  Sometimes, in the descent of the prose, you can trace archaeological levels, though, as in the excerpt below, it’s the more deeply buried levels that are closer to the present time.

In politics, left-wing, leftist and the Left are generally used to describe support for social change with a view towards creating a more egalitarian society.[1][2] The terms Left and Right were coined during the French Revolution, referring to the seating arrangement in parliament; those who sat on the left generally supported the radical changes of the revolution, including the creation of a republic and secularization.[3] The concept of a political Left became more prominent after the June Days Uprising of 1848.

The term was applied to a number of revolutionary movements in Europe, especially socialism, anarchism[4] and communism. The term is also used to describe social democracy.[5] Roderick Long, an anarcho-capitalist professor, summarises left-wing politics as “concerns for worker empowerment, worry about plutocracy, concerns about feminism and various kinds of social equality”.[6]

Left-wing politics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So there you have it – born in revolution and radicalism, behind the great political alternatives, cooling into mere social democracy, and finally, in the words of something called an “anarcho-capitalist professor,” devolving into a set of “concerns” and an element of “worry” associated with a special interest issue agenda.  It’s like the scene in Casablanca, when the assorted freedom-lovers sing their hearts out against the Nazis, except it’s “La Marseillaise” vs the Spongebob Squarepants theme song, and Spongebob wins.

How far the lowly have fallen…

Posted 12 March 2010 † CK MacLeod § Othero § Politics ‡ Comments (24) ° Tagged: , ,  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

J.E. Dyer  Buying Green Means Never Having to Be Honest Again

Some days you find something that just makes you howl, and then (probably; we’ll find out) walk around for hours afterward uttering Father Mulcahey’s mantra:  “Jocularity, jocularity!”

This article from Newsweek is one of those things.  Hat tip, with flourish:  Hot Air.

I can’t stand it.  So I’ll just commence with the block quoting. Our heroes are being asked to shop where both “green” and “less-green” products are on offer, and then, in a separate action, split $6 two ways. Continue Reading »

Posted 10 March 2010 † J.E. Dyer § Environmentalism ‡ Comments (22) ° Tagged:  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

George Jochnowitz  Iraq and Glaspie

The press is talking about the elections in Iraq. People are still debating whether it was good or bad for the United States to start the Second Gulf War. But what about the First Gulf War? To what extent was Ambassador April Glaspie following a plan laid out by President G.H.W. Bush when she spoke to Saddam Hussein in 1990 and–deliberately or accidentally–led him to believe that the United States would let him invade Kuwait?To what extent did Old Bush know what Glaspie had said? How can it be that nobody has interviewed Glaspie after all these years? Is she still available? Should somebody try to get her opinions? Is she not allowed to talk? If she refuses to be interviewed, isn’t that a news story in its own right?
Democrats and Republicans, the Left and the Right–everybody seems to respect Old Bush.

Posted 09 March 2010 † George Jochnowitz § Politics ‡ Comments (40) °  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

adam k  The Rules of the Game

Let’s say that the Democrats ultimately pass their health care bill through the reconciliation process—as I understand it, insofar as the changes made in the reconciliation process are not fairly routine changes connected to lowering the budget deficit, such a move would be “unprecedented”; let’s go further, and say that that doesn’t work, and so the Senate goes on to rewrite the rules of the Senate so as to make it possible to eliminate the filibuster as a delaying tactic (as the Republicans considered doing in order to get judicial nominees out of the Judiciary Committee for a full Senate vote) —that would most certainly be “unprecedented.” Such talk of “going nuclear” can be objected to on the grounds that these moves would involve substantially revising rules that have been in place for a long time, and one could make further arguments regarding the overturning of assumptions regarding limits on majoritarian rule that are implicit in the Constitution. We can all rehearse these arguments, and sometimes there are advantages to being the party opposing radical innovations. What if the argument fails, though—that is, what if the majority does what it wants? Even more, what if the rules, tacit and explicit, are being dramatically revised across social life so that the “game” is becoming a very different one, even if most of the players and the most explicit, formal layer of rules remains the same (and even if most of the players would it to remain the same)? At a certain point, defending the proprieties of the system becomes akin to trying to plug all the holes in the dyke with your fingers. What follows is an attempt to think through some of the ways in which the rules of the game (which flourished, say, from 1950-1980) might be in terminal decline, and some of the ways in which new rules might start to emerge. Continue Reading »

Posted 08 March 2010 † adam k § Politics ‡ Comments (47) °  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

CK MacLeod  Raskolnikov vs Nordberg

From Keith Hennessey’s latest check on the vitals of Obamacare (Health care reform CPR), a usefully useless allusion:

Doctors say that Nordberg has a 50/50 chance of living, though there’s only a 10 percent chance of that.

– George Kennedy as Ed Hocken in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad

Matthew Continetti, while linking to Hennessey’s post, alludes in a different direction:

Say they don’t get the votes before the Easter recess. Would the president and Congress declare the bill dead? Doubtful. It’s more likely they would become the peasants in Raskolnikov’s dream, flogging a dead horse and trying again and again and again to pass the bill.

Both posts are well worth reading, even if the only takeaway is that there seems to be a crime, or something crime-like, but also disease-like, going on.  Not clear whether it’s turning into a tragedy, a nightmare, or a joke, or more, or all of the above…

Posted 08 March 2010 † CK MacLeod § Health Care ‡ Comments (7) ° Tagged: , ,  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

CK MacLeod  CONTENTION OF THE DAY – PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATISM THEN AND NOW

Frustrated with his inability to control a sprawling government and anticipating a climate such as today’s, late in his second presidential term Reagan began arguing for a package of five constitutional amendments that he called his “Economic Bill of Rights.” (Once again he borrowed from FDR, who used the same label for a very different set of ideas in 1944.) Reagan’s package included two familiar standbys he’d requested in nearly every State of the Union address he delivered: a balanced budget amendment and a line-item veto. But he added three more proposals: a federal spending limit (revived a few days ago by Republican Reps. Mike Pence and Jeb Hensarling), a “supermajority” vote requirement for Congress to raise taxes, and a prohibition on wage and price controls.

Granted, seeking multiple constitutional amendments may not be the most conservative of initiatives, but if the tea party faction wishes to stand for something concrete rather than remain merely a protest movement, it might consider embracing Reagan’s Economic Bill of Rights, perhaps with the addition of term limits and an anti-earmark provision to keep the politicians away.

Steven Hayward – “Would Reagan vote for Sarah Palin?” – washingtonpost.com

Posted 07 March 2010 † CK MacLeod § Contention of the Day § Republican Party § Tea Party ‡ Comments (32) ° Tagged: , , , ,  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

CK MacLeod  Yet another global warming apocalypse

Pretty picture with arrows and blobs

Seems the world’s coming to an end, again. Seems we’re all doomed, again. It’s your fault, again. Don’t know how you can live with yourself, this time.

The Warmists are perspiring, as they do, over a report from University of Fairbanks researcher Natalia Shakhova indicating that methane has been leaking in some rather unimaginable way from certain unimaginable structures known as clathrates, located in the unimaginable seabed in the unimaginable super-Siberian arctic.

Having read a science fiction novel several years ago in which these clathrates were accidentally disturbed (an errant missile barrage, as I recall), causing a total destabilization of world weather patterns and an incidence of civilization-wrecking super-hurricanes (superduper mama hurricanes giving birth to baby super-hurricanes) and other stuff, I feel qualified to report that this isn’t that quite yet.

Some amount, possibly large, of something, but a small amount compared to other amounts of other things, is entering the atmosphere by some unimaginable process, in unimaginable quantities that may or may not lead to temperature change of some uncertain but possibly significant significance. It could very well have been caused by the action of global warming – heating the oceans, melting things that God or Darwin meant to stay frozen.
Continue Reading »

Posted 05 March 2010 † CK MacLeod § Climate Change ‡ Comments (11) ° Tagged:  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

CK MacLeod  CONTENTION OF THE DAY – New Politics

Even as [Congressman Jim] Matheson basks in the glow of presidential bribery, Eric Massa, a renegade Democrat from the Southern Tier of New York State faces his wrath. Massa’s sin was to vote against Obamacare. So Pelosi and the ethically-challenged House Ethics Committee are investigating him for “verbally abusing” a male member of his staff. In this age of more serious offenses, using “salty language” to express his displeasure with staff work would not seem to rank high on the list of indictable offenses. If it were, Lyndon Johnson would have been impeached. But Massa is being hung out to dry as an example to other would-be independent minded Democrats. The attacks on him have gotten so bad that Massa has announced his retirement after only one term in office.

But there is a reward waiting for House members who ignore the wishes and interests of their constituents and vote for Obama’s health care proposals. Alan Mollohan has had a pesky FBI investigation hanging over his head for a few years. Now, presto, right before the health care vote, it went away. The Justice Department, headed by Attorney General Eric Holder, announced that the FBI was closing the inquiry.

Mollohan’s sin? He pushed for earmarks for nonprofit enterprises in his district and then went into a real estate deal in Florida with the head of the company under financial terms that were distinctly favorable to the Congressman. But Mollohan toes the party line and is now getting his unjust reward.

With health care reform coming up for a vote in the next few days, such tactics send a message to the House where Pelosi is having trouble lining up her votes: That Obama will do anything – anything at all – to pass this bill.

OBAMA BRIBES, THREATENS, AND REWARDS CONGRESS TO PASS HEALTH CARE at DickMorris.com.

Posted 05 March 2010 † CK MacLeod § Contention of the Day § Democratic Party § Health Care ‡ Comments (42) ° Tagged: , , , , , ,  | Email This Post Email This Post  | Print This Post Print This Post

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