January 15, 2005
IN MY VIEW 15 years is not enough for
Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr. This man has cost us lives, he's cost us honor, and he may have cost us peace. His defense has been nothing less than a disgrace. No mercy should be shown to this man -- nor to the officers who lost control of the soldiers under their command. Is hard labor still an option in the military prisons?LARRY SCHWEIKART
gives a preview of his new book A Patriots History Of The United States. My guess is that this will become the standard American history text for homeschoolers. I saw a large stack at the local Barnes & Noble this week -- right next to a pile of Hugh Hewitt's BLOG. And yes, I do make the pages of BLOG -- Hugh quotes from this posting on BLOGIC 101, my first big spash in the blogosphere, linked by Instapundit and others. That was back before I knew how to put a site meter on my individual page archives. I must have had a million hits those first few months leading up to the California Recall before I ever figured that one out. What does Hugh say -- when it comes to blogging it really doesn't matter if you know an RSS from a CSS? (Of course, it doesn't hurt -- it was certainly a great day when Hugh finally managed to set up archive links to his blog. Look for an RSS feed sometime in 2007.)I FINALLY had the time to read Hugh Hewitt's fisking of
Howard Kurtz's defense of pressroom Democrats against the charge of bias. I particularly liked this:[the partisan press corp] act like the home town referee in the big game with the cross state rival. The refs will call most of the flagrant fouls committed by the home team, but they'll miss the close calls, or they will see the out-of-towners holding whenever they really need to. Dems get the home-field advantage -- all the time, in every game, and even on some flagrant calls.
CAPTAIN ED has lots of good stuff on
Charles Graner Jr.'s conviction in the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, Rathergate, Bush's "bring it on statement", and more. Go take a look.DANIEL WEINTRAUB considers Hugh Hewitt's
argument for gerrymandering as a healthy ingredient in partisan politics. I tend to side with Weintraub on this one.DAVID BROOKS
reviews Malcolm Gladwell's Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. This caught my attention:''Blink'' is part of a wave of books on brain function that are sweeping over us as we learn more about the action inside our own heads. This literature is going to have a powerful effect on our culture, maybe as powerful as the effect Freudianism had on our grandparents' time .. [But] we should be a little wary of surrendering this field to the scientists. Philosophers ranging from Vico to Michael Oakeshott to Isaiah Berlin were writing about thin-slicing .. long before the scientists started picking apart our neurons, and long before psychologists started showing people snippets of videotape. And much of what they observe is more profound than anything you can capture with some ginned-up control group test in a psychology lab.So did this:I'm sure Gladwell knows all this. Perhaps it's unfair to expect him to write a book that encompasses Isaiah Berlin and the ''love lab.'' It's just that in the general culture the psychiatrists and neuroscientists are eclipsing the philosophers, and that's horrible.
Gladwell has us flying around the world and across disciplines at hectic speed, and he's always dazzling us with fascinating information and phenomena. Take priming, for example. Two Dutch scientists asked their subjects to play a demanding game of Trivial Pursuit. They asked one group to think beforehand about what it would be like to be a professor and the other group to think about what it would be like to be a soccer hooligan. The people who were in a professorial frame of mind did much better than the ''hooligans.'' One group of African-Americans was asked to take a test without identifying their race on the pretest questionnaire. Another group was asked their race and ''that simple act,'' Gladwell writes, ''was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African-Americans and academic achievement.'' The African- Americans who identified their race did much worse than the people who didn't. The number of questions they got right was cut in half.You can read chapter one of the book here.
January 14, 2005
THE LAST commercial airliner built in California
will roll off the production line at the historic Douglas Aircraft plant in Long Beach sometime next year. Boeing has announced that it's haulting production of the 717 -- the most recent incarnation of the old DC-9.I've had the pleasure of talking with a long time Douglas engineer about the glory days back when the company was run by founder Donald Douglas. Evidently things where never the same once the "suits" took over -- the business ethic of the company declined and a man's word and a handshake were no longer something to rely on. A common enough story, I'm sure.
ALEX SINGLETON at the ASI blog
brings attention to a new book by Philippe Legrain, Open World : The Truth about Globalisation. Booklist says, "This book offers what might be called the sweetness-and-light view of globalization, written by a former correspondent for The Economist .. Nevertheless, a well-argued book that should serve as balance to current negative accounts."You might have noticed that this blog supports a liberal world order -- democracy, free markets, the rule of law. That is, globalization. But it does not support open borders, nor does it support unsecured borders. There is no contradiction here. A liberal world order assumes nation states and national sovereignty within states. It also assumes the notion of citizenship within a nation -- and the defense of the citizens and their rights under the rule of law by the institutions of the nation.
Now, I am well aware that many on the left ("multiculturalists") are hostile to the whole idea of the American nation and the U.S.A. as a unique social compact with a precious tradition of its own. And it also isn't lost on me that many "libertarians" are in reality anarchists who advance policy objectives based on the assumptions of a fictional realm where national sovereignty does not exist. But as you might have gathered, I'm neither a leftist nor a libertarian -- I'm a classical liberal (in the Adam Smith sense). And I find the fantasies of the anarchist libertarians and the multicultural left to be anything but helpful when thinking about how to make the world we live in a better place.
A BUSHIE from Texas favoring open borders will chair the Senate's
Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship. God help us.NO, IT'S NOT a free country, and no you can't decide for yourself
whether to take cholesterol medication. The nanny state marches on."Liberty is powerful, and freedom is peace."-- An interview with President George Bush.
There's actually a lot of evidence backing up the President's statement -- check out for example R.J. Rummel's Freedom, Democracy, Peace site.
SCALIA VS. BREYER -- should America be ruled
by the personal views of foreign judges creating laws out of non-American morals, principles and statutes? Perhaps you've already guessed where I come out on this one.
USATODAY founder Al Neuharth calls on Dan Rather
to resign. Maybe Neuharth should have been on that commission.WILL "60 Minutes Wednesday"
get the axe, leaving Dan Rather in limbo?Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS .. said in a telephone interview that Mr. Rather was expected to continue his career at CBS on the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes" .. "provided the show continues."
"CLUELESS, uncomprehending .. disgraceful" -- Charles Krauthammer on
the Rathergate Report. Krauthammer on media bias: "All that is missing is a signed confession."UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds:
in retrospect, the things that we've learned about the media in the past couple of years have caused me to reassess any number of previous Big Stories, and wonder just how much truth they contained ..Reynolds points to a piece by journalism professor Philip Meyer who says journalism standards were never that high. In my experience that conclusion applies more to big media than it does to hometown newspapers and broadcasters. Big News has cranked out agenda driven politics mixed with sensationalism for years (everything is a crisis, everything is a scandal). This is not true of most local papers.Big Media can no longer stand on their credentials; it's track record that matters, and the track record doesn't look that great.
A CLINTON speechwriter dismantles
George Lakoff.By reducing American politics to language, Lakoff ignores the context that gives meaning to those words. Language only motivates people if the ideas and policies it's connected [are] consistent with the realities of American history and the American national character. Throughout his book, Lakoff ignores this context ..Take the debate over �tax relief.� Lakoff notes that this is an archetypal example of how Republicans have framed an issue successfully: Taxes are a burden on a society, and the GOP will relieve you of this burden. It's a simple and powerful argument. Progressives, in response, have to offer a different frame that allows people to see taxes as the necessary investments to fund our society, and repeat this frame �until they take their rightful place in our synapses.� This is hopeful but ignorant of the long history of American politics and political thought. America is a nation born out of a tax revolt, with an anti-statist strain that extends from Shays's Rebellion to Proposition 13. This is one important thing that distinguishes America from Canada or Western Europe .. In fact, there is a whole sub-genre in the political science literature about the roots of �American exceptionalism.� Lakoff may wish that Americans will embrace higher taxes .. but to suggest that simply modifying the language will accomplish this ignores the ideas that animate our politics.
It's a shame that Lakoff is too preoccupied with justifying his own political biases to get the facts right .. Democrats looking for answers won't find them in the recycled New Left ideas printed [in] Don't Think of an Elephant.
STUDENTS vs.
the propaganda factories:Katherine Ernst, a perky, blond and diminutive recent New York University grad, confirms the point. Like many students I queried, Miss Ernst already leaned right when she arrived on campus. But the left-wing propagandizing of her professors made her conservatism rock-solid. "One professor, right after September 11, gave a terrorist-sympathy speech that went, you know: 'Oil, oil, oil, they're poor, we take advantage of them, it's really complicated, blah, blah, blah.' It was something that I and many other students living in our financial-district dorm really enjoyed," Miss Ernst says acidly. "The worst professor I ever had, though, was for a course in administrative law," she recalls. "Every class--no exaggeration--included at least five references to 'Bush was selected.' " A final straw for Miss Ernst came when a professor--"a for-real communist"--walked out of a class he was teaching "to take part in some stupid protest march." So there you have it, says Miss Ernst: "You pay thousands and thousands and the prof takes off to carry a 'no justice, no peace' sign around Union Square Park. How could anybody exposed to this kind of stuff not become a raging right-winger?"
January 13, 2005
TED "OPEN BORDERS" KENNEDY on how to protect American workers
from wage competition from the tidalwave of foreign immigration:QUESTION: Why did Congress add 20,000 more H1B visas into the omnibus budget bill when American middle-level engineers need those jobs? And what do you think should be the Democratic position about massive illegal immigration, which takes low-income Americans' jobs and outsourcing, which takes middle-class American jobs?Blah, blah, blah. In fact, if truth be told, Ted is for a cradle-to-grave Rolls-Royce welfare state, sky high minimum wage rates, Federalized education, inflated early retirements without capital investment, and a massive foreign labor population taking advantage of all this while driving U.S. wages to the pavement.KENNEDY: Well, first of all, I think we should put the whole issue of immigration on the table, and we ought to deal with it, rather than in piecemeal, which we have in the past, even as we try to, in a bipartisan way, on the Ag jobs issue, in the last Congress, and how we tinkered with various numbers in the past. We ought to recognize that it isn't open borders or closed borders; it's smart borders. It's smart borders. And we ought to try to find a way to deal with that issue. We can do our part, but I think Mexico and the countries of Central America have to do their part, and to date there hasn't been their willingness. But I think if we were able to have their willingness for President Fox, the countries of Central America, to work with us, particularly with regards to, one, the whole border issues, and secondly, with regards to development -- there's about $14 billion or $15 billion that are repatriated every year -- there's been some willingness with some of the repatriation to help in economic development along borders areas. We could take ideas like that and see what kind of expansion (ph) would be. We're going to need a partnership in Mexico to be able to do it. But we ought to be willing to do it. It's not only because I think it's the right thing to do, because it's a national security issue as well. We have the southern border. It's a tragedy. We had more than 530 people that died there last year. And the idea for those that say about a temporary work group, we already have 8 million undocumented here. We already have workers in this country. I see that the president has announced his interest in doing this. John McCain has indicated a strong interest. I think there is the framework for bipartisan movement on the issue, and we ought to try and take advantage, but that will be a very difficult, emotional fight about it.
If you don't think any of this adds up you should have explained all that to Teddy in 1965.
FORMER CBS News President
Van Gordon Sauter:What's the big problem at CBS News?Or better yet, just fake it. It's worked before.Well, for one thing, it has no credibility. And no audience, no morale, no long-term emblematic anchorperson and no cohesive management structure .. I stopped watching it some time ago. The unremitting liberal orientation finally became too much for me ..
This week, when CBS News announced that four employees would lose their jobs in connection with the George Bush National Guard story, I was struck by how the network had become representative of a far larger, far more troubling problem: A large swath of the society doesn't trust the news media ..
If it's not stopped, the erosion of a centrist organizing principle for the media will soon become a commercial issue. Partisans will increasingly seek their news from blogs and websites and advocacy publications. And the majority � those readers and viewers most comfortable in the center � will try to find something � in the center ..
But my guess is that CBS Chairman Les Moonves .. will try to use the current frailty of CBS News to reshape it. The insufferable hubris and self-righteousness of the organization have been replaced by apprehension. Although himself a [leftist], Moonves will mandate a clear and defensible center for the news organization ..
Much of that disaffected audience must be restored if CBS News is to be resurrected. Flavored news, of the right or left, won't work. Networks must offer nonpartisan, objective news ..
I do, after all, think it quite likely that the U.S. government is leaving some money on the sidewalk by not investing part of the Social Security Trust Fund in equities. I do believe that Social Security has long-run financing problems, and that the sooner these are fixed, the better. I do see merit in giving Social Security beneficiaries more secure property rights in the prefunded portion of their Social Security benefits, so that it is theirs by more than the Grace of a future Congress.-- partisan Democrat / part-time economist Brad DeLong.
THE NATIONAL Council of Churches
Leftists. Quotable:
Founded in 1950, the New York City-based NCC has, for more than half a century, remained faithful to the legacy of its forerunner, the Communist front-group known as the Federal Council of Churches. At one time an unabashed apostle of the Communist cause the NCC has today recast itself as a leading representative of the so-called religious Left ..
MONA CHAREN'S new book
Do Gooders gets a notice from John Frum:"The story of six-year-old Elisa Isquierdo made headlines in New York in 1996. A dark-haired, large-eyed little beauty, Elisa was born crack-addicted. Custody was granted to her father at birth, but he died when the child was five. Though his family fought to gain custody of the little girl, the court granted custody instead to the mother - still crack-addicted, unmarried, and the mother of five other children. Social workers, court officials, and teachers all noticed signs of abuse. Yet Elisa remained with her mother, who reportedly believed her daughter was 'possessed by the devil.' When Elisa was six and a half, she was beaten to death. Her body was found to be covered with wounds from cigarette burns and other injuries, some old, some new. Her hair was almost completely gone."That is just one horrific story from Mona Charen's Do Gooders .. In this new work, Charen turns her extraordinary memory and her remorseless pen to the home front. Do Gooders is a book about ideas, terrible ideas, and the real people who suffered as a result of them - people like little Elisa. Elisa was sacrificed to the child welfare establishment's over-riding concern for "family preservation." As Charen notes, however, "The term 'family preservation' is bitterly ironic. ... In every other context - parental notification laws for abortions, waiting periods for divorce, the debate over gay marriage - liberals tend to disdain the idea that families are in any way sacred. Yet when it comes to mothers who are drug-addicted, irresponsible, and abusive, liberals suddenly decide that in the words of Robert Little, head of the Child Welfare Administration of New York under former mayor David Dinkins, 'All families have strengths as well as weaknesses.'"
CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS throws cold water on George Bush's
push for open borders for illegal aliens. Quotable:"There are a lot of ambitious plans, a lot of necessary reforms that need to take place [in Social Security, the tax code, etc.], but this rush toward amnesty-light should not be one of the priorities," said Rep. J.D. Hayworth, Arizona Republican, who .. said Mr. Bush's immigration proposal would hurt his broader legislative agenda. "It would just be sad for the president to tie his shoelaces together right out of the starting block." ..Also this:Rep. John Hostettler of Indiana, chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, who controls which bills reach the floor, all oppose granting legal status to illegal immigrants in the United States. "And then you come to the rank-and-file guys," Mr. Hayworth said, "who, on nine out of 10 items agree with the administration, this is the 10th item. And now, if it goes to number one on the priority list, it is the item where there will be serious debate and discussion and ultimately rejection of this initiative."
One complication for the president is the Mexican government's decision last month to publish a comic-book-style pamphlet giving pointers for how to cross the U.S. border and live illegally and undetected in the United States. [English translation here].
"THE THORNBURGH Memogate report proves that
.. CBS misrepresented information it already knew, and knowingly broadcast false and misleading statements to its viewers. To take just a few examples .. [more Patterico]."REMEMBER how Greenspan and the Fed
hyped record low interest rates with phony worries about the "deflation" bogey-man? Well, the Fed has done its job, turning the interest rate dial to "inflate" -- giving us a 9.77% rise in prices in four years. And this in a period when prices rightly should have dropped dramatically due to record gains in productivity (i.e. more goods at lower cost). So real inflation was much higher than 9.77% in the last four years. Way to go, Alan.More on the health of the U.S. economy during the Bush years here -- if the news catches you by surprise, you've listened much too credulously to the political spin of Dan Rather, John Kerry, and the New York Times over the past few years.
HUGH HEWITT -- The Rathergate
cover-up. Hugh hits one into the benches:[CBS] apologists are citing the Thornburgh- Boccardi report as "detailed," "exhaustive," and "comprehensive." It is, of course, nothing of the sort. It is, in fact, a whitewash that can be summed up this way: "Blah, blah, blah, blah. We cannot conclude there is a political agenda at CBS and we cannot conclude that the documents are forgeries. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah." .. The trouble is that the central issue -- agenda journalism as practiced by stark partisans operating within Big Media -- has not only been sidestepped by the panel, it has been denied by [CBS head] Les Moonves. The key question is how many more Mapeses there are, how many more "Lucy Ramirezes" will surface in the out years, and how many more partisan attacks dressed up as reporting will be seen in future election cycles.
January 12, 2005
TED KENNEDY says that Iraq is
"Bush's Vietnam" and that America is bogged down in "an endless quagmire." Note in the story how the WaPo buries the lead and goes instead with a headline right out of Ted Kennedy's talking points memo. Also note that Ted seems always to be pretending it's still 1971, he didn't kill that woman, and he's entitled to retake the Presidency by running against his brother's botched war.GLENN REYNOLDS --
RATHERGATE CONTINUES. Quotable:RatherGate doesn't mean the end of neutral and objective reporting. It means that even the shammers can see that the sham isn't working any more.
IT'S
World Relief Day in the blogosphere, a fundraiser for tsunami relief organized by Captain Ed. Please consider a donation. I'm guessing some will be matching Captain Ed's own $250 contribution."THE WHITEWASH SOUNDBITE" --Lorie Byrd point out that
every "commission report" seems to have one, and the Rathergate report is no exception.JAMES LILEKS ON
RATHERGATE. A morsel:The CBS report can't bring itself, even now, to say the documents were unquestionably bogus. Rather himself told the panel that "no one had provided persuasive evidence that the documents were not authentic." This is like floating in the North Atlantic, clinging to a White Star Line life preserver, asking for proof that the Titanic ever existed in the first place. Dan, please. Be grateful the report went as far as it did, because it ended the story for all practical purposes. Be grateful it didn't go further, lest CBS News be seen as the entertainment wing of the Democratic National Committee. Remember the heading on those damning memos? SUBJECT: CYA. "A" stands for "anchor."
"AN ABDICATION of responsibility by the [Rathergate] panel
.. so startling that it legitimately calls into question .. everything else in the report."A SLATE DISCUSSION between and Malcolm Gladwell
and James Surowiecki can be found here. The two discuss their respective books:Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinkingand
CONGRESSMAN Rob Simmons (R-Conn.) on
the reform of our unsustainable Social Security system:Why stir up a political hornet's nest .. when there is no urgency? When does the program go belly up? 2042. I will be dead by then.Via Right Side of the Rainbow.
HAYEK FOR THE 21ST CENTURY -- An interview
with Bruce Caldwell, author of PrestoPundit/HayekCenter bestseller Hayek's Challenge : An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek.
RED MEAT consumption increases the likelihood of
colorectal cancer -- and so do processed meats. This is a new study, but I've been aware of this statistical correlation for some years -- colorectal cancer rates are low in countries such as Japan which have a low red meat diet. However, I have yet to see an account of the causal chain which takes you from processed red meat to colorectal cancer. My own guess is that the fat found in red meat is the culprit, but that guess isn't based on any deep understanding of the microbiology involved.I have a family history of colon cancer. I'm calling tomorrow to set up my colon exam -- which is pass due. (An uncle died at 36 from colon cancer, so it was recommended that I start early in getting these.)
BUSH predicts he'll get
open borders for illegal aliens from the Republican Congress. I think Bush is smoking pot on this one -- and his pledge to "burn capital" on the open borders initiative will only inflame Congress and burn up goodwill within the Republican base. In my judgment it's suicidal for the Republican party to aim a nuclear warhead at the income of lower middleclass working parents with the promise of limitless wage competition from the labor pool of the whole globe. If the lower middle class figure out what is happening they'll never vote Repubican again in their lives. And make no mistake -- polls show a majority of hispanic Americans are against this sort of open-borders wage competition. If this is suppose to be a strategy for winning hispanic votes, the President's Defense of Marriage Amendment must be a White House strategy for winning gay votes.RALLY FOR DEMOCRACY in Washington State.
More photos here. Blogger Stephan Sharkansky spoke to the rally. Here's a taste:
My name is Stefan Sharkansky and .. I�ve never given a speech to this large of a crowd before. Unlike most of the people up here who really are distinguished in their fields, I�m just an ordinary citizen; a husband, a father, a small business owner; a citizen with a computer and some opinions. But that can be pretty powerful, can�t it.UPDATE: Stefan Sharkansky gets profiled in the P.I.!!Because we really are in the middle of a kind of citizen�s revolution, aren�t we. No, it�s not of the scale of the American Revolution of 1776, or the current revolution in Ukraine. But if you use the word revolution to describe any exceptional change to the established order of things, then yes, this is something of a revolution. Because the established order of things is broken and we�re changing it. We can all see how our elections process, the core of our democracy, has broken down ..
it�s only fitting that this citizen�s revolution for clean elections and a legitimate government is playing out not in the mainstream media, but in the alternative media. Not the one-way media of the big-haired pontificators of network TV news or the cocooned editorial boards. But the citizen�s media. Talk radio .. And the blogs. And of course it�s not just me and .. the other local bloggers .. It�s our readers, who post comments and send us tips. You know it was our readers who helped us break the story of double voting. A �freeper� who uses the nickname Hanna sent us that tip. She also sent us the tip that found the first documented case of a ballot cast in the name of a deceased person ..
Because our establishment media has grown partisan and credulous and as lazy and complacent as the local government it�s supposed to be watching. �It�s in the P-I� .. When was the last time you looked in the P-I expecting to find something you both needed to know and didn�t know already? There�s very little in the P-I about how badly botched this election was, only how we should accept the result and move on. But we Americans are a resourceful people, an inventive people, a self-reliant people. When our institutions stop serving us well, we fix the ones we can and must fix, and create new institutions to supplant the ones we can�t fix.
And that�s where these two revolutions converge. The citizen�s revolution for clean elections and legitimate government and the revolution of citizen�s media. And each and every one of us is part of both. And we�re going to continue to work for election reform. And I don�t mean trusting Sam Reed, Frank Chopp and the Seattle Democrats to bring us some girly-man symbolic gesture they call election reform. I�m talking about a citizen�s initiative for real reforms. Like you can only register to vote if you have proof of citizenship. You can�t vote unless you have both a photo ID and a pulse. And you can�t certify an election unless the number of votes equals the number of voters.
GET the latest on Rathergate from RatherBiased.com
here. RatherBiased.com took a million hits yesterday, and has re-arranged things a bit to handle the load.UPDATE: The Daily Blogster also has great coverage.
See also this, this, this and this. Quotable:
I .. don't think the people at CBS understand why they are in a tailspin, and have been for some years. The fundamental problem, I think, has been a willingness to sacrifice accuracy in order to serve political objectives ..the fundamental problem that led to the downfall of 60 Minutes and, perhaps, CBS News, was the fact that no one involved in the reportorial or editorial process was a Republican or a conservative. If there had been anyone in the organization who did not share Mary Mapes's politics, who was not desperate to counteract the Swift Boat Vets and deliver the election to the Democrats, then certain obvious questions would have been asked ..
because virtually everyone in the CBS News organization shared Mary Mapes's politics and objective .. skeptical questions were not asked. If there is a single overriding explanation for how a fake story, intended to influence a Presidential election through the use of forged documents, could have been promulgated by 60 Minutes, it is the lack of diversity at CBS News.
WOULDN'T you Rather be blogging
with an "I'd Rather be blogging" mousepad?
Or, if you'd prefer, do your blogging in an "I'd Rather be blogging" T-shirts or with an "I'd Rather be blogging" mug, or while driving in a car with an "I'd Rather be blogging" bumper sticker.
APOLOGIES for the limited blogging. We've been waylaid
by a stomach bug here at the Ransom household. Things should be back to normal by tomorrow.January 11, 2005
YES, VIRGINIA
A WHITEWASH. PRESTOPUNDIT FLASHBACK:A whitewash? According to the AP, "The independent investigators .. said they could find no evidence to conclude the report was fueled by a political agenda."
January 10, 2005
POWERLINE
takes a closer look at the Rathergate report. Some well-considered thoughts from one of folks who helped expose CBS News and it's fraudulent documents."WHITEWASH" -- that's the general consensus among bloggers on the report:
Lorie Byrd --
I have skimmed through the report and found the �political agenda� section particularly amusing. Evidently the panel found certain actions that could support a charge of political motivation, but could not conclude that political motivation drove the September 8 segment. Read that entire section and then try to resist the urge to say, �Duh. Have you never watched 60 Minutes before? Did you not just see the entire election year�s worth of unpaid Kerry-Edwards advertising there?�[UPDATE: Lorie has more on the whitewash here.]
Hugh Hewitt --
By far the most important issue for the panel to investigate was the attempted manipulation of "prestige" media to influence a presidential election. Now CBS has a report that says "mistakes were made" but not because its employees were attempting to bring down a president. Had the Panel exonerated Rather and Mapes, et al., at least the Panel would not have dogged the central question. But of course, no one would have believed such an obviously absurd conclusion. So the Panel provided CBS the next best thing -- a plausible cover for its political hackery. Unless and until MSM owns up to its deep seeded agenda journalism, it will never reform. This was the opportunity to help CBS and through CBS all of legacy media recognize the partisan pit into which it has fallen .. It was a pass/fail test and the Panel failed.Charles Johnson --
The report explicitly denies that political bias was a factor in the pattern of lying and covering up that followed the initial 60 Minutes II segment, but it's quite obvious this is another obfuscation.Patterico --
CBS had all sorts of information contrary to its story line, and didn't report it. This is a common failing in Big Media, and I'd like to see it given more prominence in this report. The report makes a number of technical recommendations .. [t]hese recommendations may be helpful, but they don't get to the root of the problem. The report's primary recommendation should have been: Report the truth, whether it supports your story line or not.Betsy Newmark --
How lame is this explanation of the Rathergate story? ... They had a "zealous belief in the truth of ths segment" but that didn't mean that there was a political agenda. Yeah, sure. They totally threw their ethics out the window ..Captain Ed --
most [of my commentors] see the report as a whitewash. I agree in part with this analysis, mostly on the question of motivation. The report gives way too much credence to the notion that the only motivating factor involved in Mapes' and CBS' decision to run a story without ever checking its central "evidence" was competitive pressure .. [On the otherhand, in the report] we have CBS producers lying, management AWOL, and the entire enterprise embarassing itself. These aren't minor points, and admitting them doesn't make this a whitewash .. The Thornburgh-Boccardi panel has done some good work here, but they punted on the political-bias issue.UPDATE: Howard Kurtz discovers the blogosphere storyline:
If there is one line in the 224-page report on CBS News that has set critics aflame, it is that there is no "basis" for concluding that Dan Rather and his colleagues had a "political bias" in pursuing their badly botched story about President Bush's National Guard service. What, they say? No evidence?Oddly, as Hugh Hewitt notes, Kurtz neglects the bloggers on all this, although he did quote two or three in an earlier column."In any fair-minded assessment of how CBS performed and why they so badly butchered their own standards, that has to be part of the explanation," said former New York Times reporter Steve Roberts, now a professor at George Washington University. "It's not just that they wanted to be first, they wanted to be first with a story that was critical of the president."
UPDATE II: Charles Johnson is calling the report a greywash because, "it�s more insidious than an outright whitewash."
And don't miss this photoshop.
RATHERGATE REPORT RELEASED -- MAPES FIRED AT CBS NEWS.
THE AP story is here. CBS News has it's own story here.The complete CBS commission report is here (pdf).
Blog reactions here.
Note well -- CBS News is still running its political campaign against George Bush's National Guard service in the right hand column of their "apology" for all this!!
A whitewash? According to the AP, "The independent investigators .. said they could find no evidence to conclude the report was fueled by a political agenda."
"From the section of the report on the suggestion that the Memogate story was attributable to any political agenda:
The Panel is aware that some have ascribed political motivations to 60 Minutes Wednesday�s decision to air the September 8 Segment just two months before the presidential election, while others further found political bias in the program itself. The Panel reviewed this issue and found certain actions that could support such charges. However, the Panel cannot conclude that a political agenda at 60 Minutes Wednesday drove either the timing of the airing of the Segment or its content.Translation: Because we cannot do a conclusive Vulcan mind-meld with Dan Rather and Ms. Mapes to prove they were motivated in part by partisan lust and anti-Bush fervor we must conclude that they were not."Given that the Panel does not believe that political motivations drove the September 8 Segment, questions likely will be raised as to why these massive breakdowns occurred on this story at an organization like CBS News with its heritage and stated commitment to the highest standards of journalism. The Panel heard from many that the Rather/Mapes team was a formidable force at 60 Minutes Wednesday. Great trust was placed in Mapes, a highly respected producer who had just produced a widely acclaimed segment on the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, and vast deference was given to Rather, the �face� of CBS News. These factors, along with the �crash� of the production, contributed greatly to the failures of the September 8 Segment and the Aftermath.
Others fired:
Josh Howard, executive producer of "60 Minutes Wednesday".More on Rathergate here, here and here.Betsy West, senior vice president.
Mary Murphy, Josh Howard's chief deputy.
RATHBIASED.COM is preparing for the release
of the CBS commission report on Dan Rather's fraudulent Texas "National Guard" documents. The big hold up? CBS is bracing itself for another massive lawsuit it seems certain to lose. CBS has lost a lot of these, hasn't it?
THE NEW
DODGE CHARGER. The front of it looks a bit like one of those cartoon cars with an animated face drawn into the headlights and grill. The designer is interviewed here.UPDATE: Billy Beck remembers the 1968 Charger and his 1972 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu and can't help but say, "That's why I think this is just sad."
THE NY TIMES goes after Bush aide
Peter Wehner, accusing Wehner and the President of an effort to "sow ignorance" [From their web page: "It appears that the president and his aides are trying to sow ignorance to gain support for their flawed plan to privatize Social Security."] The NY Times complains, "Hey, that's our job!" Quotable:the true dimensions of the administration's proposed ploy .. were made painfully clear in a memo that was leaked to the press last week. Written in early January by Peter Wehner .. the memo states unequivocally that under a privatized system, only drastic benefit cuts - not borrowing - would relieve Social Security's financial problem.Actually -- no surprise -- the NY Times just lied. Under the current set up (or any other), unless either taxes are raise or benefits are cut, the system will fail. It's a typical NY Times lie to imply something else.
Wehner's original memo is here.
For a reality check on Social Security read Right Side of the Rainbow, and then go here and find out how much the politicians are thieving from you with the Social Security scam.
THROW OUT the corn oil, stock up on
olive oil -- the oleic acid in olive oil blocks one of the elements which generate breast cancer. Quotable:Scientists have discovered why eating a Mediterranean diet rich in fruits, vegetables and particularly olive oil can help to protect women from developing breast cancer. The key is oleic acid, the main component of olive oil. Dr Javier Menendez, of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, said oleic acid blocks the action of a cancer-causing oncogene called HER-2/neu which is found in about 30 percent of breast cancer patients."We have something now that is able to explain why the Mediterranean diet is so healthy," Menendez told Reuters.
SAVING DEMOCRACY IN WASHINGTON STATE -- John Fund
reports on bloggers vs. the stealing of the Governorship in Seattle's King County:Much of the evidence uncovered on King County's flouting of election laws first appeared on Soundpolitics.com, a blog run by computer consultant Stefan Sharkansky. A former liberal who worked for Michael Dukakis in 1988, Mr. Sharkansky calls himself a "9/11 conservative mugged by reality." He uses his knowledge of statistics and probability to illustrate how unlikely some of the reported vote count changes are. He also uncovered the fact that in Precinct 1823 in downtown Seattle, 527, or 70%, of the 763 registered voters used 500 Fourth Avenue--the King County administration building--as their residential address. A full 61% of the precinct's voters only registered in the last year, and nearly all of them "live" at 500 Fourth Avenue. By contrast, only 13% of all of King County voters registered in 2004.Hey, cheer up. Things aren't as bad as they use to be in the Seattle-Tacoma area. In the old days U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy would call up my mobster uncle to ask him who the mob wanted on the Federal bench. My understanding is that those days are long past.Not all of the voters at the county building are homeless or hard to find. A noted local judge and her husband have been registered at the county building for years. When I called her to ask why, she became flustered and said it was because of security concerns, specifically because "the Mexican mafia are out to get me." When I pointed out that her home address and phone number were easily found on the Internet and in property records, she ended the conversation by refusing to answer a question about whether she had improperly voted for state legislative candidates who would represent the county building but not her residence.
Even liberal officeholders in Seattle privately acknowledge that the combination of bloggers, talk radio and local think tanks like the Evergreen Freedom Foundation have helped skeptics of the election's validity win the public relations war. Evergreen president Bob Williams says his group isn't focused on overturning Ms. Gregoire's election so much as on highlighting the obvious problems in the vote count that cry out for permanent legislative fixes. He notes the public is paying attention: A poll taken last week by Seattle's KING-TV found that by a 20-point margin state residents back a new election, and by 53% to 36% they don't think Mr. Rossi should concede.
"I mean, it certainly appears to me that water boarding, with all its descriptions about drowning someone to that kind of a point, would come awfully close to getting over the border, and that you'd be able to at least say today, 'There were some that were recommended or suggested on that, but I certainly wouldn't have had a part of that, as a human being.'" -- Sen. Ted Kennedy questioning Alberto Gonzales
JILL STEWART on the new robber barrons --
the government workers. Stewart quotes Ken Mandler editor of Capital Weekly:The average state employee working as a secretary will have a pension worth nearly $1 million when [he or she retires] after 20 years.By the time I and my wife retire, the Federal government will have pushed retirement age past 70, and retirements will have been slashed. In California public workers retire at an earlier age every year -- right now at age 50, at either 90 or 100 percent pay.[And state workers get government matching funds] equal to more than 10 times what IBM just offered its employees as a pension match.
And -- it should be no surprise -- public services are being slashed in Bakersfield and across the state to free up funds for 50 year olds going out on retirement. Police rolls have been slashed, fire protection has been slashed. It's an outrage few Californians yet know about.
My thought for the day:
Government = crimean equation you can take to the bank in in Africa .. and in California.
January 09, 2005
THE MOOSE in the room at the NY Times --
people don't trust the paper. It's a paper in documented decline, and no one at the paper seems willing or able to say why. Just SAY IT folks. Constant bias means bad journalism, and the NY Times is chock full of political bias. When Sulzberger starts charging for the online version of the Times the wake-up call will come when readers won't pay for demonstrably bad journalism, from the news pages to the book reviews to the editorial pages. A bit of good stuff here and there (science, business) doesn't make up for the overall stinko smell of the paper.Sidenote. I completely disagree with Kathryn Jean Lopez who suggests everything would be fine if newspapers like the NY Times would simply admit their partisan bias. If they did that, everything wouldn't be fine. Actually, no, it wouldn't. Partisan papers turn out bad journalism. Take this example. The British press is openly partisan and it produces famously bad journalism. Or read the press releases of the Democrat and Republican party -- it just isn't journalism. Please, just give me good journalism -- without the bias. I'm not sure a big city newspaper in the country is capable of that. But I'd like to see at least a few of them try.
UPDATE: Scott Campbell (Blithering Bunny) thinks I'm missing the full story on the British press:
.. it's noticeable that the bad broadsheet journalism [in Britain] that results from bias (in contrast to the bad journalism that simply comes from the tabloid mentality) is almost always from the left, i.e The Guardian and the Independent. The Times and The Daily Telegraph are clearly right-wing, yet they produce some of the best journalism and analysis in the world.UPDATE II: InstaPundit -- "the Bush Administration -- and Republicans generally -- should be overjoyed to hear that the NYT is considering turning its web edition into a pay-only site, a sort of oversized Salon.com." Heh.
GEORGE WILL has
a good one on Social Security. Quotable:it has been said that economists use decimal points only to prove that they have a sense of humor.
TODAY'S must read -- "Mover Mike" on
Hugh Hewitt's book "BLOG". You can buy Hugh's book from Amazon here.January 08, 2005
Brad DeLong has
a copy of Peter Wehner's memo on Social Security reform. I'm usually on Pete's email list for this sort of thing but didn't receive this one -- maybe it got buried under all the email from Pottery Barn, Target, Jackie and Jane, The GAP etc. I get in the family box.Via Tom Maguire who has more, including some remarks on my reaction to Wehner's memo.
UPDATE: The Wehner Social Security memo is also available here.
January 07, 2005
DAVID SCHMIDTZ debuts in the blogosphere
with a posting on egalitarian scholarship. A teaser:Recent developments in egalitarian scholarship are promising in two ways. First, egalitarians like Michael Walzer, Iris Marion Young, and Elizabeth Anderson seem to be regrouping under the banner of an egalitarianism that has roots in a 19th century rebellion against oppression, when egalitarianism was a genuinely liberal movement, allied with 19th century utilitarianism in opposing authoritarian aristocracy.He also has a second posting on equality and meritocracy.
Via CafeHayek.
David Schmidtz is the author of The Limits of Government: An Essay on the Public Goods Argument among other books.
CAPTAIN ED is fundraising for World Vision's
tsunami relief effort -- a few more donations and Captain Ed will hit his fundraising goal.SOUND POLITICS has some tips for flat-footed
2.2 MILLION JOBS added in
2004. The unemployment rate remains below the 30 year average at 5.4 percent.AN INTERVIEW with
Dore Gold author of Tower of Babble : How the United Nations Has Fueled Global ChaosTIME-WARNER
HATES AMERICA:A friend who just returned from a Mexico cruise told me that she could not believe the anti-American vitriol spewing forth from CNN International, which beats the constant drum that America is not doing enough [in South Asia].
IF YOU get your news from the old media,
everything you think you know about Abu Ghraib is probably false. Take this Abu Ghraib quiz to find out what really happened. Never count on the old media to tell you the honest story. (via InstaPundit).
"Island of Sumatra, Indonesia (Jan. 5, 2005) - Indonesian children smile and cheer as U.S. Navy helicopters from USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) fly-in purified water and relief supplies to a small village on the Island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Helicopters and aircraft assigned to Carrier Air Wing Two (CVW-2) and Sailors from Abraham Lincoln are supporting Operation Unified Assistance, the humanitarian operation effort in the wake of the Tsunami that struck South East Asia. The Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group is currently operating in the Indian Ocean off the waters of Indonesia and Thailand. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer�s Mate 3rd Class Benjamin D. Glass."
THOMAS SOWELL --
what lies ahead. Quotable:Vacancies on the federal courts, including new vacancies expected on the aging Supreme Court, offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to turn around the drift toward judicial despotism. Those who favor judicial activism have long appreciated how high the stakes are with nominees to the federal bench in general and the Supreme Court in particular. After the orchestrated character assassinations of Judge Robert Bork and Judge Clarence Thomas, there is no excuse for those who want to end judicial activism to be unaware of what a brutal fight lies ahead if they mean to restore the rule of law instead of the rule of judges.
WEHNER'S Social Security memo
gets coverage in the Washington Post. The article contains this additional bit from the memo:If we borrow one to two trillion dollars to cover transition costs for personal savings accounts and make no change to wage indexing, we will have borrowed trillions and will still confront more than $10 trillion in unfunded liabilities.That really hits the nail on the head, doesn't it? But the bouncing pool-ball economics assumed in the next sentence strikes me as fantastical:
This could easily cause an economic chain-reaction: the markets go south, interest rates go up, and the economy stalls out.The more likely scenario is continually falling relative income for working Americans as taxes shoot up and inflation is used to address the gross budgetary mismanagement of the Federal government. There may be no sudden economic "stalls" or "markets going south". The gyrations in the economy will be caused by jolts in fiscal policy, tax rates and the money supply as the government reacts to the massive tidal wave of boomer entitlement claims. The best bet is massive inflation and enormous new taxation as the United States moves to the Western European model of endless social welfare crisis and native population decline.
This won't be an iceberg, this will be the rushing tide of a progressively rising tsunami.
UPDATE: Tom Maguire weighs in:
I will say this - if the choice is between [big] personal accounts plus kicking the solvency question down the road versus tiny personal accounts and all the pain of cutting future benefits, sign me up for the big accounts.Maguire is reacting to this article in the NY Times, which also mentions the Wehner memo.
UPDATE: See also this from Arnold Kling (via InstaPundit).
SOUND POLITICS on
The Double Standard Democrats:It seems that everywhere but Washington State there are calls by Democrat leaders for �minimum standards in the voting method throughout the United States.�In all of the pompous gas from Barbara Boxer and the rest we didn't hear a word about the now well documented vote fraud and irregularity in Washington state, did we?
SCHWARZENEGGER TAKES THE NUCLEAR OPTION --
some reactions:Daniel Weintraub -- Schwarzenegger proposes radical reforms - at last:
More than a year after he was elected governor in a historic recall that reflected the voice of California voters crying out for change, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has laid out an agenda that, in many ways, begins to live up to his potential.Shaking Spears:
In addition to the radioactivity of playing with the legislature�s safe districts, Schwarzenegger proposed 1) radically reforming the massive state employee pension fund from a traditional pension plan into an employee-directed program similar to a 401K where employees contribute out of their paychecks, 2) changing the state constitution to trigger automatic spending cuts if state spending outpaced revenues, and 3) instituting a merit-based performance pay for teachers.InstaPundit: "You know, it really is too bad that he's not eligible to run for President."Given the perpetual sclerosis of the California legislature, these proposals are beyond bold, and define Schwarzenegger as one of the most audacious reformers of the modern political era.
January 06, 2005
ROVE AID Peter Wehner on Social Security --
the system is "heading for an iceberg". From the AP:The success of President Bush's push to remake Social Security depends on convincing the public that the system is "heading for an iceberg," according to a White House strategy e-mail that makes the case for cutting benefits promised for the future. Calling the effort "one of the most important conservative undertakings of modern times," Karl Rove deputy Peter Wehner says in the e-mail that "the Social Security battle is one we can win." Doing so would advance the idea of limited government and could transform the nation's political landscape, he said.Here's the Reuters version of the story."We have it within our grasp to move away from dependency on government and toward giving greater power and responsibility to individuals," Wehner, director of White House Strategic Initiatives, said in the e-mail. He called the Democratic Party the "party of obstruction and opposition. It is the Party of the Past."
Wehner's e-mail urged cuts in future promised benefits as the best approach to overhaul the system to private investment accounts. Not doing so would cause "short-term economic consequences." .. "At the end of the day, we want to promote both an ownership society and advance the idea of limited government," the e-mail said. "It seems to me our plan will do so." But to achieve the overhaul, the administration must "establish an important premise: the current system is heading toward an iceberg," Wehner said .. "We need to establish in the public mind a key fiscal fact: right now we are on an unsustainable course," the e-mail said. "That reality needs to be seared into the public consciousness; it is the precondition to authentic reform." ..
Social Security is projected to start paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes in 2018, according to Social Security trustees. It can pay full promised benefits until 2042. Then, it can cover about 73 percent of promised benefits. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts solvency until 2052. The administration may be forced to borrow $1 trillion to $2 trillion to continue paying benefits to current retirees if tax revenue is diverted into personal accounts.
If future promised benefits are not cut and the government has borrowed "trillions," an economic disaster could occur: "the markets go south, interest rates go up, and the economy stalls out," the e-mail said. "To ignore the structural fiscal issues - to wholly ignore the matter of the current system's benefit formula - would be irresponsible." The message said that implementing the accounts and avoiding the benefit cuts would require tax increases or raising the retirement age, which is already moving to 67.
AMERICA'S $1 TRILLION
UNDERGROUND ECONOMY. One half of that underground economy is the illegal alien economy. Count that as $1/2 trillion reasons why George Bush and the Congress will do nothing to protect the country from illegal foreign labor. Political contributors are avoiding regulations and saving hundreds of billions on taxes using illegal labor, and they want to keep it that way.The best estimate of the illegal alien population in American -- 20 million. Read the whole thing. This is just unbelievable stuff. (The piece is a reprint of a Barron's article).
January 05, 2005
More U.S. Navy photos here.
UPDATE: Get your disaster relief news right here -- from the U.S. Navy. Why get your news second-hand and full of bias from the Washington Post, the AP or the New York Times?
WASHINGTON RESIDENTS
WANT A NEW ELECTION. A strong majority believe Dino Rossi won the election -- and that the election was stolen in Kind county due to massive electorial irregularities. According to John Fund of the WSJ there is "strong evidence that one person may have signed over 300 provisional ballots."Much more at Sound Politics -- which has the goods on King county votes from beyond the grave.
NICHOLAS KRISTOF --
"Americans are heartless Scrooges." I'm guessing Kristof is completely ignorant of the works of this man.UPDATE: Captain Ed has Kristof's number. See also Tom Maguire.
2005 INDEX OF ECONOMIC FREEDOM --
NATION BY NATION DETAILS.Quick scores for the United States:
* Trade Policy 2.0
* Fiscal Burden 4.0
* Government Intervention 2.0
* Monetary Policy 1.0
* Foreign Investment 2.0
* Banking and Finance 1.0
* Wages and Prices 2.0
* Property Rights 1.0
* Regulation 2.0
* Informal Market 1.5
January 04, 2005
HOME SCHOOLERS might want to check out
A Patriots History Of The United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery To The War On Terror by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. But perhaps parents and students won't be the only ones interested in this book.I'M LIVE BLOGGING the installation of WordPress
and the move of PrestoPundit to a new domain right here. This might take a few days.PRESTOPUNDIT'S most memorable blog moments of 2004:
1. A letter to PrestoPundit -- Subject: making a difference -- sent by Lori from Texas regarding "Rathergate".
2. I was interviewed by Daniel Weintraub ("The California Insider") on morning talk radio on KION in Salinas/Monterey. We talked for 10 minutes about blogging and the mainsteam media. What fun it was chatting with a man I've long admired and whom I'd interacted with online during the California Recall excitement. It turns out this was Weintraub's first time behind the mike as an interviewer and I still remember how comfortable Dan made me feel. A true highlight of the year.
3. On the day the Rathergate story broke on Powerline, I was the first blog breaking the news that the son of Lt. Col. Jerry Killian was challenging the authenticity of the CBS "National Guard" memos. I sent out emails to several other bloggers and took a link from The Corner, then from InstaPundit, and finally from Lucianne.com. A wall of traffic hit and my sitemeter went spinning. I continued updating that posting throughout the next day or two, breaking several other "blogosphere" scoops. I was off and rolling as a major source of constantly updated Rathergate material.
4. Monday night May 4th just after 12 A.M. Eastern I posted John O'Neill's Wall Street Journal piece attacking the war record of Sen. John Kerry -- launching the national Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against John Kerry. This was only the first salvo, but PrestoPundit's "Wall-to-Wall Coverage of Kerry In Cambodia" was underway. On July 28 I noted that the Swift Boat Vet web site was finally back up. By August, things had really gotten hot.
UPDATE: Other highlights: -- The California Bear Flag League election night party.
-- Getting rebound traffic from Drudge.
-- Being read on a regular basis by Bruce Bartlett, Daniel Weintraub, Hugh Hewitt, InstaPundit and more TV and radio show producers than you can shake a stick at.
-- Getting mentioned on national TV and radio by Hugh Hewitt and getting press in World magazine's "The Year of the Blog" story as one of the significant Rathergate bloggers.
January 03, 2005
MY APOLOGIES for the service outage
here at PrestoPundit. Karen Lopes at The Corner kindly linked to my U.S. Navy disaster relief pictures, and my site was temporarily knocked off the Internet. The problem has now been fixed. I sent InstaPundit an email telling him of the pictures, and it looks like he's decided to post them himself (who can blame him with my site being down), so more folks than I ever imaged will be seeing these great pictures.
Guess what. These are not Norwegian ships. These are not French sailors. These are not U.N. choppers. And these are not Washington Post photographers. This is the United States Navy -- on the front lines of disaster relief in Sumatra.
More photos here.
Google News search, "U.S. Navy + tsunami".
Go Navy.
UPDATE: Here come the Marines. (Hat tip Annika's Journal).
THE AMAZING TAIL of a Zipf distribution
wags the Internet economy -- Arnold Kling explains. Quotable:[the] significance of the long tail [of small Internet and technology businesses] represents a subtle but significant economic change. The industrial economy was characterized by concentrated industries, in media as well as heavy manufacturing. There is no "long tail" in the steel industry .. The reduced significance of capital means that the cost of entry is lowered in many industries. Today, we see this in the shops that people have set up on eBay or in the blogs that compete with traditional pundits.Another characteristic of capitalism "without capital" is less bureaucracy .. corporate bureaucracy emerges to regulate risk-taking in an environment in which new projects are very expensive .. When a new project can be hatched in a basement on a small budget, fast failure is more efficient than organized planning. Galbraith, writing in an era when the economy was dominated by heavy industry and oligopolies, saw entrepreneurship as little more than a quaint myth. Bhide, writing more recently, sees the entrepreneur as thriving in circumstances of high ambiguity and low capital intensity -- situations that have become increasingly prevalent in the computer age ..
The industrial economy required planning and bureaucracy. The Internet economy instead is better described by Friedrich Hayek's terms spontaneous order and competition as a discovery procedure.
January 02, 2005
A BBC VIDEO captures a house of grace amidst
raging horrors -- Joe Gandelman describes this as among "the most shocking" tsunami videos which have surfaced so far. The video was taken at Aceh, among the locations closest to ground zero. It is quite simply the most horrendous scene I have ever witnessed. An island of miraculous grace -- the site of a family party -- in a sea of crushing violence and death. Trust me, you've never seen anything like this in your life. I couldn't but think how every day of safety and health is fateful blessing after seeing this.PETER SINGER has a timely
review of Richard Posner's Catastrophe: Risk and Response. Quotable:we would be well advised to set aside such minor discontents and take the message of this book seriously.I might also recommend the Becker-Posner Blog.
"I WISH I had kicked Susan Sontag"
If ever a single person was living proof that intelligence is a meaningless quality without modest common sense, it was Susan Sontag .. (more)
THE NY TIMES is taking Hugh Hewitt's advice,
and they are providing tsunami reports and missing person searches from the blogs as part of the news on their web site -- with links! A major news gathering revolution is underway, and the NY Times is hopping on board.WASHINGTON'S STOLEN ELECTION?
The opportunity for the hijacking of a political office via voter fraud has been widely known by the citizens of the state since the Democrats opened the voting booth to anyone and everyone on election day, no questions asked. It's no exaggeration to say that there is a much more rigorous validation system at a Chuck E. Cheese or a roller rink than there is at the ballot box in Washington state. How else but voter fraud to explain Seattle's Precinct 1823? Quotable:Seattle's Precinct 1823 counted 343 ballots, which is 71 more ballots than the 272 voters who cast them. This is the single largest discrepancy between ballots and voters in all of King County. Nearly all of the discrepancy is due to "provisional ballots" ..In Seattle's King county there are a total of 3,539 more ballots for Governor counted than there are registered voters who voted in the county. King county is a Democrat ruled county, which managed to discover enough new ballots in the course of the second and third recounts to finally put Democrat Christine Gregoire in the Governor's office.There may well be an explanation why the numbers of voters and ballots are still so far apart two months after the election -- especially in a precinct full of transients, unknowable overseas voters and illegal registrants. But the explanation will have to be a very good one. The canvassing board certified the vote count three times, with the countywide ballot total increasing every time without explanation. At none of these certifications did the canvassing board seem to care whether or not the number of voters reconciled with the number of ballots. This would seem to be willful ignorance, perhaps criminal negligence. If that is what happened, a number of "public servants" need to be fired, recalled and/or prosecuted.
UPDATE: A solution to this foul smelling mess may have been found -- ReVoteWA.com. It worked in the Ukraine.
January 01, 2005
LOTS of New Years Day blogging at
Betsy's Page.DJ Drummond at PoliPundit calls Betsy's Page the "Wall Street Journal of blogs".
With donations as small as $10 and as large as the $35 million pledge of cash and medicine from pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc., people across the United States are finding a variety of ways to give. An 11-year-old boy stood in the rain in a Seattle suburb selling hot chocolate. A Trinidadian cabdriver in New York handed $150 in cash to the director of a Jewish relief agency. Employees of a Burbank production company started out collecting blankets, and now expect to donate as much as $20,000 in cash and checks. A haircut marathon is scheduled for Monday at an Alhambra beauty school. A company that owns thoroughbred racehorses in Kentucky, Australia and Ireland is trying to raise $1 million by auctioning stud services for some of the world's fastest horses.World Vision is taking donations here. The American Red Cross is taking donations here.
BOOK BESTSELLERS OF 2004 -- The PrestoPundit/HayekCenter Top Ten:
#1. The Road to Serfdom. 70 copies.
#2. Unfit for Command. 37 copies.
#3. Hayek's Challenge. 27 copies.
#4. Capitalism and Freedom. 18 copies.
#5. The Constitution of Liberty. 17 copies.
#6. The Fatal Conceit. 15 copies.
#7. Economics for Real People. 9 copies.
#8. Individualism and Economic Order. 9 copies.
#9. Free to Choose. 8 copies.
#10. The Wealth of Nations. 8 copies.
Honorable Mention: Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media; Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy; FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression; The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America's Economic Future; Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek; Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One; Human Action: A Treatise on Economics; The Counter- Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason; Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World; The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology.
IN 2004 Michael Kinsley took over the opinion page
at the LA Times, and as Patterico reports the results were massively unimpressive. Here's Patterico (from part 2 of LA Times review):Kinsley's lack of courage is evidenced by his failure to get rid of "Sneering Bob" Scheer. Scheer is the Maureen Dowd of the L.A. Times: an author of contemptuous, poisonous, content-free columns that make silly people chuckle, but which are ignored by most. Scheer generally tries to avoid making factual assertions, since any attempt to do so runs a serious risk of leading to a correction. His continued presence on the L.A. Times op-ed page is a source of embarrassment for any serious person who hopes to see the Times become a great newspaper. Kinsley's new voices on the op-ed page, while not as arrogant and fatuous as Scheer, are rarely thought-provoking. They include Jonathan Chait, the fact-challenged columnist who claims that Republicans are scarce in academia because they are poorly informed and educated, as opposed to the "complex thinkers" of the left. Thanks to Kinsley, readers of the op-ed page are also routinely subjected to the columns of Margaret Carlson ..As far as I can tell, Patterico is in fact calling for the firing of Michael Kinsley. It's hard to imagine any replacement doing worse than Kinsley's botched job. A true disappointment for those who had hoped Kinsley would fix a stinker of an opinion page with some of the bright light he'd brought to the New Republic and Slate. We're still waiting.Editorials certainly haven't improved under Kinsley. The editorial writers at the Los Angeles Times are typical of editorial writers all across the country: they pretend to be experts on virtually everything, but in fact are stunningly ignorant on many topics. They also routinely make baseless factual assertions and get simple facts wrong .. But the shoddy editorial work product at the L.A. Times doesn't stop with the editors' inaccuracies. It's far worse than that. There is some person on the editorial board of the Times who writes maddeningly cutesy editorials. This person must go ..
Here's an idea for Kinsley -- add Patterico to you stable of writers. You have nothing to lose but the sheer boredom of your opinion page. My fear, however, is that Kinsley has hardened into an rather inflexable leftie who cares for little besides the hidebound verities wispered to him by long-held political sentiments. This is certainly not the Kinsley I admired as a young man.
