Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
I simply cannot believe my eyes when I see all of this faux outrage being hurled at the participants of the online progressive chat-forum formerly known as JournoList. I cannot believe the attention this non-story is receiving by the wingnut contingent that makes up the American media, nor can I believe that Ezra Klein -- an astounding young man -- was compelled to shut down such an intellectual venture.
Big deal, a couple hundred journalist and academics openly supported the first African-American presidential candidate who had an actual shot at the presidency and an even more shot at possessing the political capital needed to fix a thing or two wrong in our country. What I simply cannot fathom now is how venomous the right is in this McCarthyite witch hunt of theirs which is manifestly turning into an angry racist lynch mob.
Scores of angry, hate-filled white male fascist are swarming upon the noble, gentle Ezra Klein in their frothing desperate effort to ruin his career, livelihood and even his existence. All the while, mind you, Tucker Carlson sits in his giant Southern plantation house like that jackbooted racist that he and his co-conspirators really claim not to be. You aren't fooling us, Tucker -- that bowtie of racism might be gone, but we know all too well your necktie is just as racist if not super racist, you racist! I am really fed up with these racist NASCAR retards and their retarded hatred for the first African-American president (because we all know it is about the first African-American president and his skin color. All these people do is dwell on skin color. That darkish color. The color of the skin of the first black president. Those racist.)
Some of my moderate friends -- who I suspect are closet racist and close to becoming de-friended on Facebook -- would argue that some comments on JournoList, like the Limbaugh death fantasies, went a little bit too far. Pish posh, you closet racist! Rush Limbaugh is solely responsible for single mothers on welfare continuing their dependence on welfare. How would you feel if Rush Limbaugh talked about your struggle being single, a mother, and on welfare? Why, you would feel demoralized and would stay on that welfare! I know I would, I love me some welfare -- well, I love it to the extent that I am forced to love it when Limbaugh & Co. (including Tucker Carlson) berate me to the point that I feel obligated on asking for continual government assistance.
These same moderate friends, who I think are racist, go on to lambaste JournoList participants for suggesting that the government should revoke Fox News' broadcasting license. I see no controversy in this matter and would go further to say it is a nontroversy (my word) and a matter that should be explored. I mean, honestly, hate-speech is hate-speech and Fox News is the premier trafficker in all things hate. They even hate the first African-American president solely because of his color. These people at Fox News are obsessed with skin color and race and the fact the first African-American president is African-American and Glenn Beck and O'Reilly and Greta all just focus intently and rant on and on they rant about his skin color, and race, and his wife and her color and how they feel about color just racist and, and, I'm losing track just thinking about color and how Fox News thinks of color all day, every day, twenty-four seven. Racist. These people are racist and we need to discredit them as such -- for political purposes, the children, and the like, of course.
To get through his latest batch of bad times, Mel Gibson may be seeking comfort from an unlikely source:
Britney Spears.
According to In Touch Weekly, the 28-year-old pop singer has been counseling the 54-year-old Academy Award winner as his custody battle with ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva grows ever more ugly.
"Mel has been talking to her a lot," In Touch quoted a friend of Spears as saying. "They speak on the phone all the time, usually late at night."
Gibson came to Spears' side during her 2008 breakdown, taking her to dinner and reportedly flying her to his estate in Costa Rica. Now she apparently wants to return the favor.
"Mel was one of the only people who reached out to help Britney when she was at her lowest point, and she believes that demonstrates what a loving and wonderful man he is," In Touch quoted the friend saying. "She wants people to give him a second chance -- just like he gave her one when everyone else turned away."
Gibson's publicist declined to comment on the report. A representative for Spears did not immediately respond to ABCNews.com's requests for comment.
It's been exactly one year since President Obama addressed the nation in a press conference discussing Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates' arrest outside his own home in Cambridge, MA. How are we doing as a nation one year on? Not good, obviously. As one who did not vote for Obama, I nevertheless hoped that for as much as I opposed him, he would indeed provide leadership on race in America, and especially on the question of family disintegration in the black community. He has failed at this miserably, and I resent getting my hopes up for this mountebank agent of racial uplift. He's been a disaster on all counts, and the Democratic Party/Media Industrial Complex has turned race-baiting into a national pastime. I don't emote, but frankly this kind of lost promise is indeed heartbreaking. In any case, at NYT (FWIW), "Persistent Issue of Race Is in the Spotlight, Again" (via Memeorandum):
It was exactly one year ago on Thursday that President Obama plunged into a thicket of racial politics by declaring that a white police officer in Cambridge, Mass., had “acted stupidly” in arresting a black Harvard University professor in his own home. Suddenly, the president whose election suggested the promise of a postracial future was thrust into the wounds of the past.
Not much has changed.
Mr. Obama sought Thursday to tamp down yet another racial uproar, this one over his administration’s mishandling of the case of Shirley Sherrod, a black Agriculture Department official who was dismissed based on a video clip of remarks — taken out of context — that appeared to suggest she had discriminated against white farmers. One day after Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized profusely to Ms. Sherrod and offered her a new job working on race relations for the agency, Mr. Obama offered his own apology.
During a seven-minute telephone call, White House officials said, the president shared some of his own personal experiences, and urged Ms. Sherrod to “continue her hard work on behalf of those in need.”
Later, in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Mr. Obama weighed in publicly for the first time. “He jumped the gun,” the president said, referring to Mr. Vilsack, “partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.”
That, however, is unlikely to be the end of it for Mr. Obama, who has struggled since the beginning of his presidency with whether, when and how to deal with volatile matters of race. No matter how hard his White House tries to keep the issue from defining his presidency, it keeps popping back up, fueled in part by high expectations from the left for the first black president, and in part by tactical opposition politics on the right.
The Sherrod flap spotlighted how Mr. Obama is caught between these competing political forces, and renewed criticism from some of his supporters, especially prominent African-Americans, that he has been too defensive in dealing with matters of race — and too quick to react to criticism from the right.
For many liberals, Ms. Sherrod’s hasty dismissal carried strong echoes of the ouster of Van Jones, an environmental adviser to the president who was forced to resign after Fox News focused attention on some of his past work and statements, and his decision to sign a petition in 2004 questioning whether the Bush administration had allowed the terrorist attacks of September 2001 to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East.
“I think what you see in this White House is a hypersensitivity about issues of race, that has them often leaning too far to avoid confronting these issues, and in so doing lays the foundation for the very problem they would like to avoid,” said Wade Henderson, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an advocacy group here.
As a single mother in a terrible job market, Leisa Jones had been doing everything she could to hold things together, working part time as a department store security guard during the holidays and, more recently, attending beauty school. Her neighbors said she had made the second-floor apartment on Staten Island where she lived with her four children — two boys and two girls — a place where good manners and good behavior mattered.
On Thursday, after firefighters had picked through the ruins of what they initially believed had been an early-morning fire that killed Ms. Jones and all four children, they uncovered evidence that was even more troubling: Ms. Jones’s oldest child, C. J. Jones, 14, had apparently started the blaze after slitting his sisters’ throats.
Then, investigators said, he slit his own.
“It ranks up there in some of the more heinous acts we’ve seen,” said a longtime Fire Department investigator, who insisted on anonymity because the investigation was continuing. “It’s pretty horrific.”
The slash wounds on the three bodies were discovered as investigators worked their way through the charred remains of the house, where four families lived, on Nicholas Avenue in the Port Richmond section, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman.
Investigators found Ms. Jones’s body and the bodies of the two girls — Brittney, 10, and Melonie, 7 — in the living room.
C. J.’s body was close by, slumped over a bed in a back bedroom. A straight razor was under his arm.
The boy, C.J., had been suspended from school. A woman at the day care where his sisters attended told him he had to behave better. "You're the man of the house." So, my sense is that in trouble, he shouldered the responsibility to "help" his family by putting them all out of their misery. I can't say anything beyond that, except to ask if this would have happened had the real man of the house --- the childrens' father --- been at home providing stability?
In fact, I have to apologize on behalf of my entire profession for how you have been treated by a few bloggers, whom I’ll have the tact to not name here. There are bloggers who know and care nothing about real journalism, who see this profession as an opportunity for short-term gain at anyone’s expense, who find no joy in it and who dream only of fame in the now and a lucrative exit thereafter. These people are not journalists; they are self-serving scum. And they’ve royally fucked up how a lot of people see my profession.
Bold is in the original at the quote, but I want to highlight the last two sentences again, with reference to JournoList: "These people are not journalists; they are self-serving scum. And they’ve royally fucked up how a lot of people see my profession."
Objectivity is a word oft-repeated in journalistic circles. The journalist strives for this: Neutrality, freedom from bias, absolute truth, facts unsullied by emotion. We cannot settle for “both sides of the story.” We must tell all sides of the story, and we must represent each side fairly regardless of our individual beliefs and views.
Yeah. Right.
I wonder what planet Ms. O'Dell lives on? And this was written yesterday to boot. Maybe this journalist should actually look around and see the utter collapse of "objective" journalism before writing such complete bull. (And I write this not as a "blogger," but as a "political scientist," and by that I mean my professional title that allows me to stand on a freaking pedestal and make a damned fool out of myself as does Ms. O'Dell in her sublime idiocy of journalistic conceit.)
Shirley Sherrod is a racist, classist, Marxist bigot. She told the NAACP a story of discriminating against whites as a USAD official to which the NAACP crowd drooled all over themselves. She then said that she reformed her bigotry to discriminate by class rather than race, but somehow suggested that those that oppose Obama's unconstitutional takeover of healthcare is racist. So much for her purported reformation.
We reiterate our view that substantial Republican gains are inevitable and are increasing our target for most likely GOP gains from 25-30 seats to 28-33 seats. However, it is important to note that considerably larger Republican gains in excess of 39 seats are quite possible.
Here are our latest House ratings: # = moved benefiting Democrats * = moved benefiting Republicans
88 Total Seats in Play 12 Republican seats 76 Democratic seats
When I'm talking to people from outside Washington, one question inevitably comes up: Why is the media so liberal? The question often reflects a suspicion that members of the press get together and decide on a story line that favors liberals and Democrats and denigrates conservatives and Republicans.
My response has usually been to say, yes, there's liberal bias in the media, but there's no conspiracy. The liberal tilt is an accident of nature. The media disproportionately attracts people from a liberal arts background who tend, quite innocently, to be politically liberal. If they came from West Point or engineering school, this wouldn't be the case.
Now, after learning I'd been targeted for a smear attack by a member of an online clique of liberal journalists, I'm inclined to amend my response. Not to say there's a media conspiracy, but at least to note that hundreds of journalists have gotten together, on an online listserv called JournoList, to promote liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism.
My guess is that this and other revelations about JournoList will deepen the distrust of the national press. True, participants in the online clubhouse appear to hail chiefly from the media's self-identified left wing. But its founder, Ezra Klein, is a prominent writer for the Washington Post. Mr. Klein shut down JournoList last month—a wise decision.
It's thanks to Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller website that we know something about JournoList, though the emails among the liberal journalists were meant to be private. (Mr. Carlson hasn't revealed how he obtained the emails.) In June, the Daily Caller disclosed a series of JournoList musings by David Weigel, then a Washington Post blogger assigned to cover conservatives. His emails showed he loathes conservatives, and he was subsequently fired.
This week, Mr. Carlson produced a series of JournoList emails from April 2008, when Barack Obama's presidential bid was in serious jeopardy. Videos of the antiwhite, anti-American sermons of his Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, had surfaced, first on ABC and then other networks.
In this year of American voter anger and discontent, Andrew Breitbart has found his moment.
"I get to be me right now," he said. "That's the best part of this entire thing. This, to me, is the beginning of the beginning."
And what is beginning is, he hopes, the age of Breitbart.
He's everywhere. On Fox News -- a lot. Hobnobbing with Republican leaders in New Orleans. Rallying the Tea Party faithful in appearances across the country. Launching the websites Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Hollywood.
He's also lobbing grenades of controversy -- like his most recent revelation this week of an old speech by Obama Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod, in which she confessed that she once, decades ago, was deeply reluctant to help a white farmer who needed her aid.
"I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with helping a white person save their land," Sherrod said in the video.
Sherrod resigned under pressure -- and then it turned out Breitbart had released only a clip of her speech that distorted her real meaning: that she had been wrong and learned from her error.
The controversy continues -- to Breitbart's delight. He says he considers it a victory to have panicked the Obama administration and precipitated a public apology from the White House.
If this is Andrew Breitbart's moment, there are good reasons for it.
I should probably start a new series, a daily "Racism Roundup." I'm mostly kidding, but the way things are going, the Democrats will be working the race card tables all the way to the election, and then some.
Think the list should be dismissed as irrelevant? Mark Levin published a list. I'm including them all here:
1. Ezra Klein
2. Dave Weigel
3. Matthew Yglesias
4. David Dayen
5. Spencer Ackerman
6. Jeffrey Toobin
7. Eric Alterman
8. Paul Krugman
9. John Judis
10. Eve Fairbanks
11. Mike Allen
12. Ben Smith
13. Lisa Lerer
14. Joe Klein
15. Brad DeLong
16. Chris Hayes
17. Matt Duss
18. Jonathan Chait
19. Jesse Singal
20. Michael Cohen
21. Isaac Chotiner
22. Katha Pollitt
23. Alyssa Rosenberg
24. Rick Perlstein
25. Alex Rossmiller
26. Ed Kilgore
27. Walter Shapiro
28. Noam Scheiber
29. Michael Tomasky
30. Rich Yesels
31. Tim Fernholz
32. Dana Goldstein
33. Jonathan Cohn
34. Scott Winship
35. David Roberts
36. Luke Mitchell
37. John Blevins
38. Moira Whelan
39. Henry Farrell
40. Josh Bearman
41. Alec McGillis
42. Greg Anrig
43. Adele Stan
44. Steven Teles
45. Harold Pollack
46. Adam Serwer
47. Ryan Donmoyer
48. Seth Michaels
49. Kate Steadman
50. Matt Duss
51. Laura Rozen
52. Jesse Taylor
53. Michael Hirsh
54. Daniel Davies
55. Jonathan Zasloff
56. Richard Kim
57. Thomas Schaller
58. Jared Bernstein
59. Holly Yeager
60. Joe Conason
61. David Greenberg
62. Todd Gitlin
63. Mark Schmitt
64. Kevin Drum
65. Sarah Spitz
Let's see, folks from the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time and Newsweek magazine. These are not children. These are people we're supposed to respect as objective, "smart" (a friend said this about the whole notion of "smart": I do get weary of the left needing to apply the word "smart" to themselves all the time. To make that distinction, "a smart...conversation" as opposed to all the stupid ones that don't involve them; because if they don't involve them, they are by definition stupid...), and fair.
In the beginning, women had to be protected, because they were the only way to propagate the species. Since men can't nurse, the dynamic was born – men hunted, women tended the home fires. Tended them extensively, since myths show that early hunters spent several days in seclusion following a kill in order to thank the Gods, and show respect for the animal's spirit through reflection and prayer. Someone had to cure the meat, and that fell to the women.
RTWT. Quite a feminist treatise, actually. For example:
Our divergent social roles aside, in recent modern societies, women were cherished, protected, treated with the utmost respect. Men rose when a woman entered the room. They scrabbled for a chance to share a dance. Duels were fought over their honor and attentions. Men were courtly, refined, intelligent, witty and, when in the presence of a woman, watched their mouths, their actions and their dress. Can you imagine a chevalier in jeans that hang off his ass and oversize sunglasses, calling you "be-atch" when he ends his text message? Sigh.
The election of Barack Obama, America’s first black president, was supposed to be a sign of our national maturity, a chance to transform the charged, stilted “national conversation” about race into a smarter and more authentic dialogue, led by a president who was also one of the nation's subtlest thinkers and writers on the topic.
Instead, the conversation just got dumber.
The America of 2010 is dominated by racial images out of farce and parody, caricatures not seen since the glory days of Shaft. Fox News often stars a leather-clad New Black Panther, while MSNBC scours the tea party movement for racist elements, which one could probably find in any mass organization in America. Obama’s own, sole foray into the issue of race involved calling a police officer “stupid,” and regretting his own words. Conservative leaders and the NAACP, the venerable civil-rights group, recently engaged in a round of bitter name-calling that left both groups wounded and crying foul. Political correctness continues to reign in parts of the left, and now has a match in the belligerent grievance of conservatives demanding that hair-trigger allegations of racism be proven.
I made poorly considered remarks about Rush Limbaugh to what I believed was a private email discussion group from my personal email account. As a publicist, I realize more than anyone that is no excuse for irresponsible behavior. I apologize to anyone I may have offended and I regret these comments greatly; they do not reflect the values by which I conduct my life.
I've said previously that I have mixed emotions on reading through the JournoList files being dribbled out at Daily Caller. Like everyone else, I'm pissed that reporters who hold a public trust are not just so blatantly left-wing (which we know), but that they feel so empowered by what's clearly an unchecked demonism among this body of supposed professionals. One reporter, Sarah Spitz of NPR affiliate KCRW, reveled in her ability to watch and standby cheering as Rush Limbaugh (hypothetically) died of a heart attack.
And while I've long known that Spencer Ackerman is pure evil (something I've chronicled at this blog), I'm increasingly astounded at the depths of depravity he reaches. Here's Ackerman at "Obama wins! And Journolisters rejoice" (via Memeorandum):
Let’s just throw Ledeen against a wall. Or, pace Dr. Alterman, throw him through a plate glass window. I’ll bet a little spot of violence would shut him right the fuck up, as with most bullies.
"Ledeen" refers to Michael Ledeen, a Iraq regime change proponent and neoconservative writer on the Middle East. A "little spot of violence" ought to take care of him for some obviously implied "war crimes" on top of the alleged "bullying."
Also quoted on JournoList is Henry Farrell, a GWU political scientist and blogger at Crooked Timber and The Monkey Cage. Farrell's a soft-and-squishy leftist, apparently:
I had to close my office door yesterday because I was watching YouTube videos of elderly African Americans saying what this meant to them and tearing up.
Yeah. Jeez.
That was pretty moving, I know, but what gets me is that while MSM journalists are prone to tilting their news stories as part of an inherently unscientific endeavor, political scientists genuinely aspire to scholarly objectivity --- they're supposed to be "scientific." Farrell, for example, co-authored "Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics" in the March issue of the American Political Science Association's Perspectives on Politics. Now more than ever, it's hard to take this research seriously --- research on "blog polarization". It's hard to expect even a modicum of impartiality in the discussion when the very subjects of the analysis are identified by JournoList members as political enemies who should STFU and be hurled through plate glass windows. Note too that there are a number of other university professors on JournoList as well. All the participants seem so energized in their ribald excoriations. And it's not so much that they shouldn't feel the way they do, but that both journalists and scholars are writing and producing in expectation of even-handedness. Thus, we're seeing the veil pulled back on an intellectual violence perpetrated against citizens and fellow scholars consuming "professional" works in the hope of enlightened understanding. As such, there's a totalitarianism that's fundamental here, which taps into the larger STFU culture we've endured since "The One's" ascension.
I'll have more later. Meanwhile, folks can read more along these lines at John Guardiano essay, "JournoList Equals Liberal Fascism." He notes:
We always knew that most liberal journalists were biased. Now we know that many of them are dishonest -- and that, like their leftist forbearers in the Soviet Union, they reserve unto themselves the right to lie and to cheat to further their political ends.
Well, liberal journalists AND the political scientists and professors.
Both of my legs are covered in ghastly, purple bruises. I'm not a soccer player, and I don't have an abusive boyfriend. You might say I'm a party girl.
My bruises come from clumsily crashing onto a concrete New York City sidewalk. I'd been out with some girlfriends, was wearing too-tall stilettos and a few glasses of champagne had disturbed my sense of balance.
After taking that tumble, I laughed a little too loudly, reassured some good Samaritans that I was okay, hopped right back up and continued on with my night. It was a fun evening with my girls—there was no alcohol poisoning, no random hookups, no brushes with the law. I made it home safely and into work on time the next morning.
Aside from a friend's Twitter posting about my fall, there was no evidence of the trouble I'd been up to the night before. There were no viral videos of me hitting the pavement, no photographs of me flipping off aggressive paparazzi, and no hearsay reports of how "wasted" I had been at the club.
But I'm not Lindsay Lohan, the actress who yesterday began a 90-day jail sentence for violating the terms of her probation, set in 2007 after she pleaded no contest to charges of drunk driving and being under the influence of cocaine.
I didn't star in a feature film when I was 11 years old, or support my family financially before I'd even hit puberty. I don't have a father who talks publicly about my intimate struggles in order to make a few bucks. Paparazzi don't stalk me 24 hours a day to capture my every mistake. And tabloids don't dominate newsstands by exaggerating my wild partying. In other words, there's not a cruel cultural obsession with rejoicing in the apparent unraveling of my life and career.
Of course, my behaviors are not nearly as extreme as Ms. Lohan's ...
Here's the full video. I'm still reviewing the clip, but skip ahead to around 16:00 minutes and counting to get the Saint Shirley story on helpin' out dem po' white folk.
Days before she was appointed to the USDA post last year, her group reportedly won a $13 million settlement in a longstanding discrimination suit against the USDA known commonly as the Pigford case.
The Rural Development Leadership Network announced last summer that New Communities Inc. -- a group Sherrod formed with husband Charles, who is a civil rights activist, and with other black farmers -- had reached the agreement. The RDLN said the USDA had "refused" to offer new loans or restructure old loans to members of New Communities, leading to the discrimination claim ....
Sherrod's settlement was a drop in the bucket in terms of the money the federal government has paid out in Pigford claims to other black farmers over the years. The suit claimed the USDA racially discriminated against black farmers by not giving them fair treatment when they applied for loans or assistance. The case was first settled in 1999, resulting to date in more than $1 billion in compensation payments from the federal government.
In addition, the Obama administration has called for another $1.15 billion to settle claims for other black farmers -- Congress has not yet granted the money.
However, the case has attracted some scrutiny.
Former Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer told Fox News that while those who were discriminated against "should be reimbursed," there are other hangers-on trying to game the system.
Interesting (RTWT). But note what else Secretary Schafer had to say:
"The problem you have with the class-action lawsuits is a lot of people jump in that may be on the fringe, that maybe don't deserve it, that sounded good because their neighbor got a check ... (It) is very expensive, very time consuming ... It probably in the long run is going to be cheaper just to settle the whole thing -- so some people will get paid that probably don't deserve it. And to me, I don't like that kind of thing. I like to settle it on merit."
Look, this is a massive social justice payday. The feds have been doling out enormous wads of money in a modern agricultural racial reparations regime. And it's basically totally off the radar. Who needs 40 acres and a mule when you got the "Minority Farm Settlement" program?
Justice Achieved - Congratulations to Shirley and Charles Sherrod!
We have wonderful news regarding the case of New Communities, Inc., the land trust that Shirley and Charles Sherrod established, with other black farm families in the 1960's. At the time, with holdings of almost 6,000 acres, this was the largest tract of black-owned land in the country. Now with a cash award of historic proportions, the group will be able to begin again ....
In 1985, as the land was being lost, Shirley entered the RDLN program. Previously, she had worked behind the scenes, but as she participated in RDLN, she began to realize her capacity as an up-front leader. She invited the Federation of Southern Cooperatives to sponsor her in the RDLN program, earned her master's degree with a thesis that continues to provide a blueprint for her ongoing work with black farmers and others, helped orient all succeeding groups of RDLN Leaders, and became vice chair of RDLN's Board of Directors. As you all know, Shirley is Georgia Lead for both the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund and the Southern Rural Black Women's Initiative. She has also chaired the board of the Farmers Legal Action Group, which has been active in the minority farmers law suit, along with the Federation and other groups. FSC and SRBWI hosted RDLN's National Network Assembly in 2006, during which Network members had a chance to immerse themselves in Civil Rights history, with the guidance of Shirley and Charles (the first field director of SNCC), Albany singers and others, and to visit the economic development projects that have grown out of that Civil Rights history.
The Federation’s Shirley Sherrod Now Heads USDA's Rural Development in Georgia — Sherrod is the first African American to hold this position in Georgia.
Presidents typically invite Americans to appear at Rose Garden press conferences to trumpet their policy successes, but yesterday we saw what may have been a first. President Obama introduced three Americans—an auto worker, a fitness center employee and a woman in real estate—who've been out of work so long they underscore the failure of his economic program. Where are his spinmeisters when he really needs them?
Sure, Mr. Obama's ostensible purpose was to lobby Congress for the eighth extension of jobless benefits since the recession began, to a record 99 weeks, or nearly two years. And he whacked Senate Republicans for blocking the extension, though Republicans are merely asking that the extension be offset by cuts in other federal spending.
But Mr. Obama was nonetheless obliged to concede that, 18 months after his $862 billion stimulus, there are still five job seekers for every job opening and that 2.5 million Americans will soon run out of unemployment benefits. What happens when the 99 weeks of benefits run out? Will the President demand that they be extended to three years, or four? ...
In the immediate policy case, Democrats are going so far as to subsidize more unemployment. If you subsidize something, you get more of it. So if you pay people not to work, they often decide . . . not to work. Or at least to delay looking or decline a less than perfect job offer, holding out for something else that may or may not materialize.
The economic consensus—which includes Obama Administration economists in their previous lives—couldn't be clearer on this. In a 1990 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, labor economist Lawrence Katz found that "The results indicate that a one week increase in potential benefit duration increases the average duration of the unemployment spells of UI recipients by 0.16 to 0.20 weeks."
A March 2010 economic report by Michael Feroli of J.P. Morgan Chase examined several studies and concluded that "lengthened availability of jobless benefits has raised the unemployment rate by 1.5% points."
A 2006 NBER study by Raj Chetty of UC Berkeley on a related subject begins, "It is well known that unemployment benefits raise unemployment durations."
The current recession is bearing this out, as a record 6.7 million Americans have now been out of work for at least six months. That's 45.5% of the total jobless, close to the highest share ever recorded. The number was 23.4% in February 2009. Americans tend to support jobless benefits on compassion grounds, but at some point such a policy becomes the false compassion of welfare by keeping people out of the job market and thus not learning new skills.
Theories of ideology are off the mark when they indicate that leftists are libertarian on social issues. Well, perhaps classical liberals are (recall my problem with the bastardization of the word "liberal"), but progressive leftists are totalitarian, and for our purposes here, I refer to all the recent controversy over AmPow's hotness blogging. Comrade Repsac3 has issues with it, surprise!
I agree with SEK's earlier post that it's a bad idea for a professor to even give the appearance of being a letch, and that regardless of legalities and first amendment freedoms, having posts/posters of hot chicks who're about the same age as your students doesn't present a professional appearance, and may make some of his female students uncomfortable. Legal or not, the phrase "a girl half his age..." seldom puts forth the appearance of decency and high moral values that many professions call for... ...even if it's just pictures on your blog.)
Political correctness sucks bigtime. My biggest objection to it is that the focus on the proper language and rectifying "power imbalances" and shit like that gets in the way of reasonable communication, especially if you're white, because anything you say can be interpreted as having a white privilege male power racist sexist subtext. And subtexts suck, even though I have a lot of fun with them.
Yet reasonable people and people of good faith try to be polite, and they have always tried to be polite. Politeness existed long before political correctness was invented, and of course that supplies the foot in the door for petty tyrants who inject their leftist poison into dialogue.
It goes off a bit from a hotness blogging perspective, but it's right on the control factor of cultural Marxist totalitarianism.
*******
UPDATE: RepmasterHateMasterSponsor has responded to this post by calling me stupid and lazy. So, to note, (1) I mainly like CV's idea of "poison," which perfectly refers to the obsessive hatred that eminates from American Nihilist. And (2) I think there's more need to unpack the requisites of cultural Marxism than we find at CV. For example:
Americans who like pot, porn, or unapproved sex are all victim of the sinister manipulations of Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, and Alinsky. Plus the evil, Darwin-inspired Alfred Kinsey, the sinister John Dewey (whose ideas about education have been responsible for every incompetent teacher since) and of course the ultimate precursor to Cultural Marxism -- the Satanic Charles Darwin himself!
The linchpin of Cultural Marxism is cultural determinism, the parent of identity politics and group solidarity. In its turn, cultural determinism was birthed by the Darwinian idea that man is but a soulless animal and therefore his identity is determined by for example, his skin color or his sexual and/or erotic preferences. This proposition rejects the concepts of the human spirit, individuality, free will, and morally informed conscience (paired with personal accountability and responsibility) because it emphatically denies the existence of the God of the Bible.
Everything that has followed these evil men is their creation, and we are all their victims. Never mind that homosexuality has been practiced since at least the Greeks, and pornography pre-dates Alfred Kinsey.
And never mind that sex, drugs, rock and roll are as American as apple pie and helped bring down the Soviet Union. The fact is that by introducing the meme of "Democracy! Sexy! Whiskey!" our American GIs were actually sinister dupes of the Frankfurt School plot -- which they foisted off onto innocent and naive Iraqis.
Fine, overall.
But obviously, if I'm being attacked as a juvenile offending "lech" for blogging Sports Illustrated models I hardly expect to criticize radical leftists for their libertarian proclivities on enjoying a bit of sexy hottness. And that's the thing. The end stage of Marxist thought is total control, as all history has shown, so this idea of a social libertarianism leading to a "cultural" Marxist program is not the whole story. Gays may not be necessarily Marxist, but as we saw in 2008 the most active groups leading the NoOnH8 agenda were overwhelming radical left-wing extremists. More recently, Toronto's Queers Against Israeli Apartheid is allied with the most implacable Jew-bashing leftist totalitarian commies, and it's not hard to notice that the same Middle Eastern regimes they work to prop up turn around and excute gays and lesbians with increasing frequency and abandon. That's totalitarian. So RepMasterHateCommissar is shooting blanks, and I've left a few comments at the post illustrating his freak-nozzle idiocy.
And check commenter Jan's remarks at my earlier post:
This is just about one of the most disgusting things I've ever heard! Racism is racism. Period.
The old "we are victims" mentality is getting a little old, and I, for one, am sick of it.
I'm white, and I was born, and brought up, in the South. My stepfather was a sharecropper, working for what amounted to a few commodities, and about enough money for shoes for us kids when school started.
We all worked in the fields, planting, hoeing, and then picking cotton, along with all the other work that goes into surviving another day.
We didn't have any handouts, nor did we ask for any. And guess what? When my stepfather found a regular job, and we moved away, nobody gave us forty acres and a mule. None of us kids got a free education, paid for by taxpayers, and none of us ever got a job handed to us on a silver platter, because of the color of our skin, or because of anything that happened to our relatives a hundred years ago.
It's about time that we all were treated equally, and fairly, no matter what our skin color happens to be, nor how badly any of our ancestors may have been treated in the past ...
But the larger issue is the mosque itself. My long-time blogging pal Wordsmith left a comment this morning at an earlier entry:
Sorry Donald, but I am NOT ok with the National Republican Trust ad. It is nothing short of religious bigotry and a win-win for the global jihad movement.
Wish I had time to go into more details on how I've arrived at this position, but right now, I don't have the patience. Just a lot of anger at the conservative blogosphere.
That got me thinking, naturally, and I posted on the issue this morning. And that entry garnered some excellent comments, fromStogie, for example:
I've thought about this quite a bit, and I don't think the 1st Amendment should protect Islam. It is not just harmless worship, but a totalitarian ideology that seeks to violently overthrow our Constitution and democracy and replace them with Sharia law. The extensive cultural disruption and non-assimilable nature of Islam in Europe has already been clearly noted. Do we want the same problems over here? I think not.
The Constitution, as someone has said, is not a suicide pact. In the 1950s, when we were being undermined by communists "boring from within," would we have allowed communist training centers throughout America? And if they had called themselves "a religion," would that have made it all okay?
As an American, raised with American values and beliefs in freedom of religion, I am uncomfortable with even having this debate. BUT...after what we have witnessed of islam in the last ten years, I don't want it anywhere near me or mine. I've become very intolerant of islam - I despise islam's influence in the world and in America. It's a hateful, nasty, intolerant political system. In no way should the Cordoba mosque be allowed anywhere near ground zero. As for Temecula - not sure what to say except that a vast majority of Americans will not be dhimmified and the fight appears to be on. Bring it on. I would hate to see what happened to large swaths of Philly happen to Temecula. Parts of Philly are nasty with radical islam. It's disgusting, and it won't take much for the fuse on this culture war to be lit.
Dana at CSPT commented as well (mostly snark however).
I'm not personally thrilled about Ground Zero, and I join those in protesting it. Seems a slap in the face to those who died and to the living who are still mourning and recovering the dead. I won't personally go so far as banning Islam in America, however, which is what both Stogie and Grizzly are supporting, basically. I'm not sure how we're going to do it, but we've got to find a way to separate jihadi Muslims from those of the faith who reject the Islam's fundamentalist literalism in favor of liberalized version of the religion. (And I'm skeptical that's possible, given my knowledge of Islam as a religion of victory and conquest.)
Particularly hilarious is the assumption that "government" has absolutely no influence on whether "insurers and employers" limit "choice of doctors." Or another way to put it: The government's here to help.
As the Obama administration begins to enact the new national health care law, the country’s biggest insurers are promoting affordable plans with reduced premiums that require participants to use a narrower selection of doctors or hospitals.
The plans, being tested in places like San Diego, New York and Chicago, are likely to appeal especially to small businesses that already provide insurance to their employees, but are concerned about the ever-spiraling cost of coverage. But large employers, as well, are starting to show some interest, and insurers and consultants expect that, over time, businesses of all sizes will gravitate toward these plans in an effort to cut costs.
The tradeoff, they say, is that more Americans will be asked to pay higher prices for the privilege of choosing or keeping their own doctors if they are outside the new networks.
That could come as a surprise to many who remember the repeated assurances from President Obama and other officials that consumers would retain a variety of health-care choices.
And while it's true that of course insurers and employers "limit" coverage, it's the government's "mandate" that's making them do so --- at an increasingly accelerated rate since the ObamaCare monstrosity passed.
It's bad law. Crooks and Liars is reduced to near-senility in trying to defend it.
The clip is pretty astounding, listening to this woman, Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, confess she would be less likely to help a man --- a white man who needed help for his farm --- on account of his race. In fact, this makes me sick to my stomach. I'll let readers make what they want out of the rest of the entry, from Andrew Breitbart, "Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism–2010." (Via Memeorandum.) I'll simply note that this is a devastating indictment of what appears to be a professional woman in what appears to be a professional context (NAACP Freedom Fund dinner). Are we not a country whereby now we define people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin? What did a 21st century white farmer do to deserve this kind of disparate treatment? I could not live with myself if I said to myself "I can't help this student. She's a migrant daughter, and her parents are undocumented. I refuse to help her. I hate her for who she is." But that's exactly what Shirley Sherrod is doing. Blacks were sharecroppers, sure. Maybe this white man's parents and grandparents were contract farmers as well. The South is historically the poorest region in the country. I can't imagine some post-bellum landed gentry-man going to some USDA office looking for farm support, but for too many blacks in the country today, this guy needing help is a "cracker," so screw him. We be lookin' out for our own, ya'll!
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. Thank you for shopping through my links.
