Read it.

Just for fun, I compared the performance of the Times’ stock against some of the Wall Street banks that have been among the paper’s favorite whipping boys. The following numbers show common stock performance from December 2004 to the present:

Citigroup: -94.62%
Bank of America: -87.39%
New York Times: -81.45%
Morgan Stanley: -72.96%
Wells Fargo: -17.59
JP Morgan Chase: -17.12
Goldman Sachs: -11.67

An unbiased observer might wonder: why isn’t the CEO of the NY Times Company going to jail? Or why, in any event, is she leaving with a multi-million dollar payoff? If what happened on Wall Street was bad, why isn’t what happened in the newspaper industry worse?

Read it.

Of course they were! EVERYBODY knows THAT!

Yeah, well, at one time ‘everybody’ knew that the world was flat, too. ‘Everybody’ can be wrong, and frequently is.

It is common to see history rewritten before our eyes. Still, even in that context, the myth of the Wall Street bailout is remarkable.

And depressing. As Some Famous Person once said, nobody every lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

Banks in a fractional reserve system are uniquely fragile. They don’t actually “have” any of their “own” money, of course; they have mostly other people’s money–deposits, CDs and wholesale funds (interbank loans and other debts) on a relatively small capital or equity base to fund their assets (loans). NO bank is or can be solvent if the public thinks it is not. That’s why a run is a self fulfilling prophecy.

This applies to governments, too, a fact that Greece and Italy are having their noses rubbed in even now.

Read it.

Last October, when Bush traveled to British Columbia, the group demanded that Canada arrest him as well. At the time, Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney blasted Amnesty, declaring, “This kind of stunt helps explain why so many respected human rights advocates have abandoned Amnesty International.”

One of the chief problems with advocacy groups is that they are obsessed with ‘raising consciousness’, even when it works against their nominal ‘mission’. Couple this with the degree of self-righteousness needed to devote considerable amounts of one’s time to hectoring others about how they ought to behave, plus a noticeable degree of narcissism reflected in their constant need for public attention, and one has a very disgusting conjunction of some of the ugliest aspects of the human personality. One might forgive them their sins if they were effective, but chiefly they aren’t — I know of no case where Amnesty International (or any similar group) has had any positive effect on human rights in the countries where it is most at risk; a moment’s though is sufficient to figure out why. Pretty sad, really.

Read it.

Or he will taunt you a second time.

Ouch.

Andrew Rossi’s Page One (2011), a sleek, self-important infomercial for The New York Times, largely involves Times partisans whining that the dinosaur carcass of the Gray Lady is being picked clean by the mammalian swarms of the new media. There are cursory nods to the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller scandals, but essentially nothing in the way of real introspection or self-criticism. The Times‘ complaint largely goes like this: “What kind of world fails to recognize the inherent nobility of our enterprise! O fallen mankind, repent your shallowness!”

Let the whining begin.

“If approximately 75 percent of your workforce disappears, what are you to do?” the Florida Grower trade monthly asks in its current issue.

Oh, let me think — raise wages, maybe? Until you get people who are here legally? It’s called a free market. You might try it some time.

With unemployment near record highs, “these jobs should go to legal workers,” he said June 14 when he introduced the bill.

What an extremist!

Farmers could hire legal guest workers under a U.S. H-2A visa program, which provides entry for temporary or seasonal agricultural work.

But these workers must be covered by U.S. wage laws, workers’ compensation and other standards farmers say they can’t afford, the Post says.

Welcome to our world of massive government over-regulation.

Freeberg contrasts a selection of pro-Obama headlines now with corresponding anti-Bush headlines then.

Situation’s pretty much the same…except the unemployment rate being talked about seven years ago was 5.7%. How sweet would that be now.

Read it

The central myth of the JFK assassination was that a climate of hate inspired by the far right created the conditions for President Kennedy’s murder. A single assassin may have pulled the trigger, but he was put up to it by an undercurrent of hatred and bigotry that President Kennedy tried but failed to subdue. On this view President Kennedy was a martyr, somewhat like Abraham Lincoln, to the causes of civil rights, racial justice, and an elevated liberalism. JFK’s assassination was a tragic but richly symbolic event for many Americans who saw it as a vivid expression of an ongoing battle in American life between the forces of light and darkness.

This explanation for the assassination did not drop out of thin air but was circulated immediately after the event by influential leaders, journalists, and journalistic outlets, including Mrs. Kennedy, President Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, James Reston, Russell Baker, and the editorial page of the New York Times, columnist Drew Pearson, and any number of other liberal spokesmen. Mrs. Kennedy took the lead in insisting that her husband was martyred by agents of hatred and bigotry. Within days of the assassination, she elaborated the symbolism of Camelot and King Arthur’s court to frame the Kennedy presidency as a special and near-magical enterprise guided by the highest ideals. The eternal flame she placed on his grave site invokes King Arthur’s candle in the wind as imagined by T. H. White in his Arthurian novel, The Once and Future King, later the basis of a Broadway musical that was popular during the Kennedy years.

These were the myths, illusions, and outright fabrications in which the Kennedy assassination came to be encrusted. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they are still widely believed. In fact, the Kennedy legend, incorporating the myths about his assassination, is closely intertwined with the history of modern liberalism: JFK has come to represent a liberal ideal and his assassination the threat posed to it by the forces of the far right.

Read it.

Which eliminates him as a possible Republican nominee. Glad to have that out of the way.

Now, let’s see him justify pretending to be a Republican. (Not impossible … look at Arlen Specter and Lindsey Graham … but guaranteed to be somewhat amusing.)

It’s hard to argue with Johnson here if you dig liberty.

And that’s the kind of ‘reason’ you get at ‘Reason magazine’, a name that is about as oxymoronic as those of most left-liberal think tanks. The fact that ‘marriage’ is a term with an ancient established meaning that has never included homosexual relationships, and has nothing to do with ‘liberty’, is, apparently, not even on the radar with these soi-disant ‘libertarians’.

Read it.

They say they believe in freedom and share our values. They say a few bad apples shouldn’t bring down judgment on their entire kind. Don’t be fooled. Though they walk among us with impunity, they are, in the words of Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, “a group that is notoriously associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs.”

They are engineers.

Yet another politically unfashionable group to worry about. Note that the guy raising the alarm is not an engineer.

Actually, this isn’t hard to figure out: Engineers are just as permeated by their cultures as anybody else; unlike Queer Studies majors, though, they actually build stuff that works.

Read it.

This is somewhat untimely, but still worth pondering.

I have never understood the bleeding-heart whiners who sob and moan over the fact that people convicted of murder get terminated.

This is not tragedy, such as people who contract fatal diseases or die in freak car accidents. This is not (popular mythology to the contrary notwithstanding) oppression, like Christians run over by Muslim tanks in Cairo. This is not even obvious miscarriage of justice, like some poor black kid getting lynched by a mob of Democrats because he kissed a white girl, as happened far too often in the South. This is a long-established system (granted, less than perfect) for removing from society people who have demonstrated that they do not choose to live by the same rules as everyone else, rules that are objectively demonstrable as necessary for society to exist at all. Who could have a problem with that, except someone who has become so totally detached from reality that his judgment is suspect in every realm of life?

Certainly, there are people on death row who don’t belong there. There isn’t, however, anyone on death row who doesn’t belong somewhere other than wandering around loose where he (and it’s almost always a he) can bother innocent citizens — Pat Boone doesn’t wind up on death row. Considering the number of murders who happen every year, and the number of people who are executed for murder every year, one could almost say that it’s more likely somebody in prison will die of food poisoning than of deliberate execution.

There is a very good case to be made (certainly from a Christian perspective) against capital punishment, but there is no good case to be made for letting these people out on the street. I’m curious how these armchair judges would feel about hosting such convicts for five or ten years in their spare bedrooms, just to prove their sincerity?

Mickey Kaus is always worth reading.

Let’s just suppose, as a thought experiment, that the New York Times is a liberal conspiracy.  In this hypothetical alternate reality, the paper’s editors would like the government to do more to redress the material disparities generated by our version of capitalism, and they commission stories designed to bring this better world closer. They might think it a brilliant idea to get the U.S. Census Bureau to calculate, not just how many people are poor according to the government’s fancy new Supplemental Poverty Measure (which takes into account regional cost of living, and government benefits like food stamps, plus medical expenses and taxes**) but how many are under 150%of this new poverty line. Not poor, but “near poor.” Bet there are a lot of them!

I’ll just bet there are.

So the NYT piece notes, in its lede graf, that within this “near poor” category “many own homes.” Some 20 percent of the “near poor,” it turns out, own their homes mortgage-free. One reason they don’t earn much income may be because they don’t need it to pay the rent! And DeParle contacts Robert Rector of the Heritage Institute, who notes that “near poor” is a loaded term designed to “suggest to most people a level of material hardship that doesn’t exist.”

Imagine that. ‘Poor’ people who really aren’t all that poor after all. Where have we seen that before?

…unlike the old poverty line, it doesn’t measure Americans’ absolute level of material well-being or destitution, but their relative measure of well being. It’s pegged to the expenditures of the 33d percentile rather than a fixed amount of purchasing power (set, under the old poverty line, at three times the cost of a “minimum food diet” in 1963). Under the old poverty line, “poverty” could be eliminated as society got richer–an achievable and widely shared goal. But the new poverty line will rise as society gets richer (“adjust for rising levels and standards of living”). The newly measured poor will always be with us in substantial numbers, just as there will always be a third of the American population trapped in the bottom third of the income char

ts.  That will yield a permanent, inextinguishable stream of NYT front page “poverty” stat stories–even if  “poverty” no longer means ”poverty” in the sense we now understand the term.

The ‘poor’ you have always with you, by definition. Funny how that works.

If I were inclined to be paranoid–-and I am–-I’d say it’s an audacious, slimy bait-and-switch by liberal activists inside the government anti-poverty bureacracy.

Naw, that couldn’t happen. Could it?

Read it.

Christensen retells the story of how  Dell [DELL] progressively lopped off low-value segments of its PC operation to the Taiwan-based firm ASUSTek [LSE: ASKD]—the motherboard, the assembly of the computer, the management of the supply chain and finally the design of the computer. In each case Dell accepted the proposal because in each case its profitability improved: its costs declined and its revenues stayed the same. At the end of the process, however, Dell was little more than a brand, while ASUSTeK can—and does—now offer a cheaper, better computer to Best Buy at lower cost.

Christensen also describes the impact of foreign outsourcing on many other companies, including the steel companies, the automakers, the oil companies, the pharmaceuticals, and now even software development. These firms are steadily becoming primarily marketing agencies and brands: they are lopping off the expertise that is needed to make anything anymore.  In the process, major segments of the US economy have been lost, in some cases, forever.

Of course, it’s not the pursuit of profit per se that causes the problem, but the pursuit of insanely short-term profit, a distinction that Christensen doesn’t care to make and which the author of the article appears delighted to avoid.

Christensen recalls an interesting talk he had with the Morris Chang the chairman and founder of one of the firms, TSMC [TSM], who said:

“You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.”

Chang, who is Chinese and therefore sensible about business, obviously understands the necessary distinction, and assumes that his listener understands it as well, which I suspect is not the case.

Yet another case of smart people asking the right questions but unfortunately grabbing a not-quite-right answer and running with it. (Cf. the ‘cult of the shoe’ in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.)

Read it. And watch the video.

Two dozen “patriotic millionaires” traveled to the national’s capital on Wednesday to demand that Congress raise taxes on wealthy Americans.

The Daily Caller attended their press conference with an iPad, which displayed the Treasury Department’s donation page, to find out if any of the “patriotic millionaires” were willing to put their money where their mouth is.

As everyone who is paying attention (alas, a minority of the voting-age population) knows, the reason these ‘patriotic millionaires’ (or ‘buffets’, as I call them) push for higher taxes but don’t care to give on their own is not because they think that they’re taxes are too low, but rather that they think that the taxes of the people below them are too low. Raising rates will increase their relative advantage, and they’re all for that. If Hector makes $200, 000 a year, and Algernon makes $200,000,000 a year, raising the tax rate to 50% will certainly make Algernon pay more than Hector — but Algernon will still be making $100,000,000 a year, and Hector will only be making $100,000 a year, and guess which one is closer to not being able to make ends meet, especially if (say) they’ve got kids in college? Not to mention the fact that Algernon can hire a lot of fancy lawyers and accountants with that $100,000,000 that he would otherwise pay in taxes, and I’ll bet you a healthy chunk of $100,000 that those lawyers and accountants will make sure that Algernon won’t be paying any 50%.

This is all political posturing on the part of the Crust, a show put on for the rubes.

Read it.

In a sane world, the news media would disseminate information about which states are most successful and what policies they pursue, so that other states can emulate them. That is a pipe dream, of course: we all know that in the world we actually inhabit, our media have an entirely different agenda.

Which leads me to the three-part hit-piece that NPR recently did on South Dakota.

Read it.

Presidential candidate Ron Paul said Sunday that the CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan was making the U.S. less safe.

“It makes things worse,” said Mr. Paul, the Texas congressman running for the Republican presidential nomination. “Sometimes they miss. Sometimes there is collateral damage. And every time we do that, we make more enemies.”

I like Ron Paul’s domestic policies, but in foreign policy he’s still off in batshit-crazy land where live the radical libertarians and Pat Buchananites.

1. Every drone strike targets an enemy of the United States. I fail to see how killing enemies of the United States is a bad thing.

2. Hey, Ron, wake up and smell the hummus — they’re Muslims. Muslims are already our enemies, either in esse or in posse — read the Koran if you don’t believe me. To the extent that drone strikes convert passive enemies into active enemies, it helps us identify them … and kill them. The only good enemy is a dead enemy, and it’s better to kill them on somebody else’s turf than here at home.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to run for President, apparently.

Read it.

Doing well by doing good. (Hey, compassion like that don’t come cheap.)

Attending the event required a donation of between $1,000 and $5,000, continuing Warren’s trend of raising money outside the state where she is actually running.

The Boston Globe reported in late October that, according to Warren’s campaign filings, nearly 70 percent of the $3.14 million Warren raised last quarter to unseat Republican Sen. Scott Brown was from out-of-state donors.

The Crust is nothing if not cosmopolitan. Hillary Clinton blazed that trail.

The Other McCain has the scoop.

My response is: If that’s what’s going on, he’s not doing a very good job.

Just sayin’.

Read it.

Just as Microsoft in the 90s didn’t realize that you had to spread some cash around Washington to keep the jackals off your back, and wound up in a ten-year bogus anti-trust lawsuit, so Michael Arrington didn’t realize that you can’t say anything about race anywhere anytime without the Dogs of the Crust piling on your unworthy carcass, and so is the subject of the latest Two-Minute Hate.

The problems with the interview:

– I was told by CNN it was about startup accelerators, not minorites.
– CNN then created a clip that highlighted me saying I didn’t know any black entrepreneurs, even though later in the conversation I corrected myself.
– CNN then wrote two articles, one of which was the top story on CNN last week, focusing on my race problems.
– Only a very few people have seen it. I haven’t, and I’m in the absurd position of not having seen it myself (to know how they edited the long version) and defending myself from people who also haven’t seen my interview.

And that’s the way these people (using the term loosely) work. They control the horizontal, they control the vertical, and most especially they control the sound, so the only way not to be misquoted is just not to talk to them at all — a difficult program for somebody whose job is talking about tech.

It was a “gotcha” and that’s that.

Yup. Welcome to the jungle.

Read it. And watch the slideshow .

Representatives of “the 99 percent” have been camping out in lower Manhattan to protest economic inequality since late September, but the riches on display at some of their home addresses clearly came from “1 percent” families.

We searched Google Maps and the real estate Multiple Listing Service for the home addresses police collected during the arrests of less-than-law-abiding New York City “occupiers,” and found dream homes aplenty. These opulent houses include in-ground swimming pools, manicured lawns, and golf course access.

As I’ve always said, this is merely an internal dispute among the Crust, in a Clever Plastic Disguise.

Read it.

Remember the U.S. government report report five years ago that polar bears were drowning? Kassie Siegel, director of the U.S.-based Center for Biological Diversity, cited the report in her call to place the polar bear on the endangered species list.  Never mind that we now have 5 times as many polar bears today than we did 50 years ago. We must take action immediately. Based on one report. Because that’s how science works. One report is all it takes to leap to a conclusion that may cost society billions.

I still have yet to see any explanation of how ‘scientists’ can measure the temperature of the entire globe to the precision of 1/10 of a degree Celcius, much less any explanation of how that measurement escapes the Aggregation Fallacy.

David Frum progresses on his career as a contra-conservative. I can see why CNN continues to publish his drivel, but I can’t see any reason for people to continue to read it.

Read it.

Two weeks into Occupy Wall Street’s takeover of Zuccotti Park, a group of Bronx community organizers and friends rode the subway down to Lower Manhattan to check out a movement they supported in principle.

When they got there, they recalled, they found what they had suspected: a largely white and middle-class crowd that claimed to represent “the 99 percent” but bore little resemblance to most of the people in the group’s own community. That community, the South Bronx, is one of the poorest areas of the country and home almost exclusively to blacks and Hispanics.

“Nobody looked like us,” said Rodrigo Venegas, 31, co-founder of Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, a center for political activism and hip-hop run out of a warehouse in Mott Haven. “It was white, liberal, young people who for the first time in their life are feeling a small percentage of what black and brown communities have been feeling for hundreds of years.

One of the signal hypocrisies of progressivism is that they claim to speak for ‘the people’ but wind up speaking only for their own preconceptions.

Read it.

Well, not exactly.

A new survey from Spectrem Group found that 68% of millionaires (those with investments of $1 million or more)  support raising taxes on those with $1 million or more in income. Fully 61% of those with net worths of $5 million or more support the tax on million-plus earners.

So it’s actually semi-rich people supporting higher taxes — not on themselves — but rather people who are maybe twenty or thirty times richer than they are.

I see.

Still no word on why these public-spirited people don’t just send in a check to the Treasury. They could do that right now — if they really wanted to.

Read it.

What if David Frum quite pretending to be a conservative?

We may never know….

Read it.

You, too, can be a liberal wonk.

Steve Sailer has some fun laughing at the New York Times.

Almost every harvest season, we read stories in the New York Times about how some crop somewhere is rotting in the fields which proves that civilization will grind to a halt unless we import lots more illegal immigrant stoop laborers stat. Could it be, however, that NYT staffers are not quite as sophisticated in their understanding of farm labor economics as they think they are after spending a half hour on the phone with noted agriculture expert Tamar Jacoby?

Timothy Egan is one of the more entertaining columnists from the Times — his blurb says ‘Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.’ Of course, in this context ‘the West’ apparently means the Upper West Side of Noo Yawk, since Mr Egan’s attitudes are conventional ones characteristic of somebody who has only crossed the Hudson River when he was paid to do so.

Pretty white.

And so far, according to the survey, Occupy Wall Street would qualify as stuff white people like. The sample of non-white people, according to Schultz, is too small to even analyze. One thing he noticed, however, is that some people identify with nationality, rather than race–another item to keep in mind for target marketing. And in the vein, the organizers have been discussing doing a “non-white media day,” in which everyone who speaks to the media is of another ethnic background. They have also discussed doing an over-40 day.

Gotta have them tokens — anything to keep people from knowing the truth.

Steven Landsburg, a Real Economist, spanks RINO Romney.

I interpret Romney’s answer to mean that he wants to cut capital gains rates not on efficiency grounds, not on supply side grounds, and not on philosophical grounds, but on redistributionist grounds. Well, okay, I myself don’t think very much of redistribution as a primary driver of tax policy, but Romney and I can disagree on that one. But where the incoherence comes in is this: If your goal is to redistribute from the rich to the middle class, why on earth would you do it by cutting the capital gains tax, as opposed to lowering income tax rates in the middle and raising them at the top?

To put this another way: If you care about efficiency, you’ll want to cut the capital gains rate to zero for everyone. If you care about fairness, and if you believe fairness mitigates against double/triple/quadruple taxation, you’ll still want to cut the capital gains rate to zero for everyone. If you care about redistribution, you’ll want to juggle the tax brackets. But I can’t think of a single thing you could care about that would lead you to laser in on cutting capital gains rates for middle income taxpayers only.

In other words, Romney is either pandering to the redistribution crowd or doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to economics. (Or both, which is my guess.)

Read it.

The world’s oldest marathon runner, 100-year-old Briton Fauja Singh, has achieved another feat – completing the Scotiabank Toronto Marathon in Canada.

Yeah, can’t get much more ‘British’ than Fauja Singh. The beard and turban are dead giveaways.

(Wonder what it would be like in a world where ‘journalist’ wasn’t a joke term?)

Read it.

Not long ago The Huffington Post reported that roughly 170,000 U.S. families are living in homeless shelters. Who set up those shelters? Elves? No, countless caring individuals and charitable groups did. There probably isn’t a decent-sized church in America that doesn’t have a program to help the poor. Countless more Americans contribute to secular anti-poverty nonprofits, from well-known ones such as Habitat for Humanity and the Children’s Defense Fund to more obscure ones such as Hopelink and the Food Not Bombs movement.

And still we are told that “nobody cares about the poor.”

The other day Cornel West showed up at the Occupy Wall Street protest with a sign reading, “If only the war on poverty was a real war, then we would actually be putting money into it.” Funny. But the premise is flat-out wrong. In 2009 alone Washington spent $591 billion  on means-tested anti-poverty programs. (Others, such as Medicare and Social Security, are not means-tested.) By comparison, 2009 federal appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were $130 billion. Since the War on Poverty began, Americans have shelled out more than $13 trillion to fight it.

Steve Landsburg spanks Paul Krugman, who seems (for a Nobel Laureate in Economics) to be remarkably ignorant of the basic elements of his field. Perhaps the Nobel Prize isn’t the guarantee of excellence that everyone takes it to be. Just sayin’. (Remember Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize? I’m sure the people of Iraq and Afghanistan would agree that the Nobel committee really nailed that one.)

Read it.

Couple of thousand demonstrators dead? Yeah, that sorta looks like ‘near violence’ to me.

Once-peaceful Syrian protesters are increasingly taking up arms to fight a six-month military crackdown, frustrated that President Bashar Assad remains in control while more than 2,700 demonstrators are dead, analysts and witnesses say.

Guess this Kumbaya-hippie-peace-love-dope process doesn’t work against a government that isn’t a Craven Western Government. Gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way.

The growing signs of armed resistance may accelerate the cycle of violence gripping the country by giving the government a pretext to use even greater firepower against its opponents.

Yeah, looks as if they really need a pretext to take it to the next level. Although it’s not clear what that ‘greater firepower’ might mean….

Authorities already have used tanks, snipers and mafialike gunmen known as “shabiha” who operate as hired guns for the regime.

What’s left? Nuclear weapons?

I can’t believe that people get paid for writing this stuff. I’m in the wrong line of work, obviously.

Read it.

The autopsy results from the death of Kelly Thomas, a schizophrenic drifter who was allegedy beaten to death by Fullerton, California police will be announced today by Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. Rackauckas will also announce whether he will file charges against the officers involved in Thomas’ death, following the office’s investigation. The confrontation with police took place at a municipal bus station on July 5, with Thomas dying in the hospital five days later. This press conference comes weeks after the Fullerton police  refused to answer questions about the case.

Of course, if this had happened in a Red State (Texas, say), the Lamestream Media would be wall-to-wall with hand-wringing about those red-necked, cousin-screwin’, cigar-chompin’, KKK-robe-wearin’, firehose and police dog deployin’ barbarians in whatever Wide Spot Police Department was responsible.

Have you heard anything about this case other than here? Anywhere? I thought not.

Of course, the Left Coast suburb of Fullerton couldn’t possibly have anything like that happen.

Read it.

Every election season, a variety of newspapers and other entities set themselves up as arbiters of the accuracy of politicians’ statements. These “fact-checkers” nearly always turn out to be liberal apologists who don a false mantle of objectivity in order to advance the cause of the Democratic Party. Maybe there are exceptions, but I can’t think of one offhand.

A quick review of the media will reveal that these self-styled ‘fact checkers’ check only those on the right, never those on the left. And yet this is what passes for journalism these days.

Mike Masnick at TechDirt does a spit-take.

While I definitely don’t agree with famed 7th Circuit appeals court judge Richard Posner on everything, he’s generally recognized as a smart judge with a strong libertarian belief and a recognition and understanding of real economic issues. However, there are a few times when he seems to just reach a weird conclusion.

I like Judge Posner more than Mike does, apparently, but I have to agree with him this time.

We’re talking about recording public officials who are paid with taxpayer dollarsdoing a job in public, and Posner is worried about their privacy rights? Wouldn’t it be a goodthing for reporters and bloggers to be “snooping around” police if it turns up problems or corruption?

Well, yeah….

Read it.

Perry told the students, “God uses broken people to reach a broken world.” What does that even mean?

Well, Maureen, for Christians, of which I realize you are not one, it means that people are broken and the world is broken but nevertheless God uses the one to attempt to improve the other.

It would probably help if you used as much effort to understand the people you cover as you do to keep up with What’s Happenin’ Now on the Upper West Side.

Read it.

Over 46 million people are living in poverty, 2.6 million more than in 2009 and the poverty rate has reached 15.1 percent.

This is the sort of drivel that gets you tenure at Princeton. One would think that a professor of history and public policy at the third best university in the country could look behind the numbers from the Census Bureau and realize that 46 million people are not living in poverty, but merely qualify for the Census Bureau’s rather fanciful notion of ‘living below the poverty line’, i.e. prior to accounting for government benefits. Having failed that threshold, the rest of his article is dreck — and tendentious dreck, at that; it’s obvious what agenda he’s pushing.

Which makes this particular paragraph especially ludicrous:

Despite the enormity of this social problem, American politicians in either party rarely discuss the subject. Since the poor don’t tend to vote in high rates or contribute much in campaign funds, they don’t get a place at the table in Washington, D.C. Yet with the U.S. poverty rate being the highest in the developed world according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, this statistic marks a terrible failure for the nation as a whole.

Funny, you can’t spit on a page of the New York Times without hitting a Democrat politician wringing his hands (or a leftist professor wringing his hands) about the problem of poverty in the U.S. Perhaps the poor don’t tend to vote in high rates — although, with ACORN, those who do get an opportunity to make up for the ones who don’t — or contribute much in campaign funds, they nevertheless seem to be a very handy excuse for politicians looking for every new and clever ways to dip their hands in the wallets of working people.

And this is despite there being a ‘war on poverty’ in this country since the Johnson administration, a war that has cost to date multiple trillions of dollars. It would seem that the failure is not one for the ‘nation as a whole’, but rather a failure on the part of politicians who keep spending money without anything to show for it.

Read it.

An excellent example of how the Aggregation Fallacy can infect even the Wall Street Journal.

Read it.

One of the politicians instrumental in creating the TSA, Rep. John Mica, who wrote the legislation that established the TSA, has apparently decided that the whole thing has been a failure and should be dismantled. He notes that “the whole program has been hijacked by bureaucrats.”

‘Unexpectedly’. Don’t forget to include ‘unexepectedly’ before ‘hijacked’, to fit in with the Democrat narrative.

Read it.

Some grubby details: the US poverty line is calculated as being three times the food bill of a family in the early 1960s, upgraded over time for inflation. Doesn’t matter whether that’s a good definition or not, that’s just what it is.

When we calculate who is in poverty, who is below the poverty line, we include in the income said person or family gets their market income (of course) and also any cash that they get given directly by the government to alleviate their poverty. This seems sensible enough really, if you’ve got more cash you’re less poor than if you don’t have more cash.

However, we do not include in that household’s income all of the other things we do to alleviate poverty. We don’t include free medical care, or maybe help with the rent of an apartment or house. We don’t include any help that comes through the tax system nor do we include any vouchers: like Food Stamps for example.

In other words, it’s all bogus. Your tax dollars at work.

Andrew Ferguson is rather dyspeptic today.

Here’s how the go-to guy works. Let’s say you’re a reporter on a deadline and you need a quote right this minute about how Republicans have rendered Congress dysfunctional. Well then, your go-to guy is Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Perhaps you want to give readers a little historical perspective, something eggheady about, say, how smoothly leaders of both parties used to work together before the lunatics (you know who they are) started running the asylum on Capitol Hill? Quick: get “presidential historian” Douglas Brinkley on the phone before he goes live on the NewsHour! He’ll be sure to tell you, with a wistful air, that Tip O’Neill and President Reagan were always friends after five o’clock.

If it’s the economy you’re writing about, it’s Mark Zandi. He has all the qualities that go into making a go-to guy of the very first rank. He is fluent on television and keeps his sentences short. His demeanor is pleasant. He uses the word “narrative” with abandon—“narrative” being the hottest word in journalism since “transparency”; it’s this year’s “accountability.” And he’s a liberal. All go-to guys are liberals. They can’t be identified as such, lest their authority as disinterested observers be undermined and the reader or viewer begin to get ideas. Ideological fuzziness is good; ideological hermaphroditism is better.

Boy, that sure sounds familiar.

You will notice that these statements share two prominent features. First, they’re predictions and, second, they’re wrong. More frequently than most go-to guys, Zandi volunteers not merely subtly shaded opinions, not merely Ornsteinian “context” and Brinklean “perspective,” but bald predictions about how matters will lie a year or two or three from now. Over time, Zandi’s predictions are tested by reality. In August 2006, he told Newsweek that housing prices would bottom out in August 2007. In October 2007, he told the National Association of Home Builders that the bottom would come in late 2008. In April 2009, he told Time magazine that housing prices would bottom out by the end of the year. (“I feel very confident about this,” he said.) Three months later, he told NPR that “by this time next year, the market will have hit bottom.” The market is still looking for its bottom, and so is Zandi, with both hands.

Read it.

Boy, there’s a shocker.

Now, since the Obamassiah, Smartest Guy in the Room, would naturally have known that any plan including taxes is not going to pass the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and hence has no chance of passing into law, what could his motive be for introducing it and demanding that WE MUST PASS THIS NOW? Surely it couldn’t be politics; after all, he explicitly called for an end to ‘political games’. So there must be some other motive — what could it be? what could it be?

Read it.

But it has to be passed RIGHT NOW, even though it doesn’t exist.

“Congress should pass this bill right now,” Jarrett said on MSNBC. No more than one minute later, Jarrett said the White House is still writing the bill and it will be submitted to Congress next week.

Well, let’s not get into some picky little squabble about what exists and what doesn’t exist — WE HAVE TO PASS THE BILL NOW so that we can find out what’s in it. (This is the Pelosi Method.)

The Other McCain points out that Obama’s ‘jobs plan’ has about as much chance of seeing life as a Democrat’s unwanted baby.

It’s dead on arrival in Congress, so all the hype about his jobs plan was just sound and fury signifying nothing. Like everything else Obama says or does, the Big Speech was a complete waste of time.

Read it.

Hoffa’s comments were much worse than Biden’s, though the vice-president’s demeanour suggests he could be a liability on the campaign trail (I’d wager there’s a campaign plan for him to be used only in “rev up the base” type events). Put together, they are embarrassing enough to require an apology from Obama.

But will Obama have the political and moral courage to repudiate a powerful union boss and his own vice-president?

Hint: No.

Read it.

It’s the Guardian, so it’s a hit piece — not really news, that — but it shows that Perry has the Crust in a tizzy.

Never mind that it’s far and away better than any other state in the country, and that most of its problems are caused by Washington; no, it’s somehow Perry’s fault that Texas isn’t a paradise … and the fact that it isn’t a paradise after all means that Perry sucks, and Texas sucks, and Republicans suck, and Obama’s the answer even though he’s failed at everything he couldn’t affirmative-action himself through.

Megan McArdle looks at her own profession.

While it’s undoubtedly true that some reporters consciously repress facts which threaten their ideological priors, I don’t think that’s really the issue in most cases.  What bias does–in science, in media, in any situation where information is gathered–is affect what questions you ask.

Smitty at The Other McCain gets some PT in.

Fisking a Maureen Dowd column. It’s the blogger version of calisthenics, really.

Read it.

During the George W. Bush administration, liberals became so unhinged that a psychological condition called Bush Derangement Syndrome was diagnosed. Years later, some on the Left still suffer from it. The phrase has been turned to other uses, but W. has been the undisputed champion when it comes to bringing out the insanity in political opponents.

Until now. We saw it here in Minnesota, and now we are experiencing it on the national stage: there is something about Michele Bachmann that causes liberals to make fools of themselves. I can’t explain it, but it’s true.

I can explain it. They’re deranged, hypocritical, intellectually dishonest haters. That’s their whole life. Without that, they’ve got nothing.