End Times Chronicles

Minnesota Senator-elect Al Franken

He will serve Minnesotans for six years.

Good luck with that.

Barack Obrundlefly

Barack Obrundlefly: "What am I working on? Uhh... I'm working on something that will change the world, and human life as we know it."



We can only hope along comes a spider.



SBD Note: This is a deliberate mashup of the 1958 The Fly and the 1986 The Fly, both horror masterpieces.

This Week's Nutshell

WSJ's James Taranto provides this week's "In a Nutshell" on the Obama administration's plans for health care:

The Associated Press reports on what it gently calls a "quirk" in the
so-called stimulus law:

When President Barack Obama increased unemployment benefits as part of his economic stimulus, he also made some Americans ineligible for hundreds of dollars a month in food stamps.

Under the economic recovery plan, laid-off workers have seen a $25 weekly bump in their unemployment checks as part of a broad expansion of benefits for the poor. But the law did not raise the income cap for food stamp eligibility, so the extra money has pushed some people over the limit. Laid-off workers and state officials are only now realizing the quirk, a consequence of pushing a $787 billion, 400-page bill through Congress and into law in three weeks.

And for people hurt by the change, there's no way around it.

This is why it's so important to give these genuises control over our health care right this second!

In this example, the government promises help, delivers that help, then promises more help, delivers that help and in the process makes those people worse off.

So the question is posed: will a gigantic government bureaucracy forcing the provision of health care insurance on an alleged 40-50 million uninsured Americans (more likely ruin the health care insurance now provided by scores of corporate bureaucracies held to the other 255 million Americans?

Another question is posed: given that the government already controls almost half of America's health care spending, and costs are declared to be out of control, then why is giving more power to Washington to set costs going to reduce costs when they already can't control a huge portion of the health care landscape?

And a third question is posed: What will Americans . . . ah, fuck it! Americans elected this Ice Cream Man and there's not a damn thing to be done to stop him. We are a nation of children screaming with delight at hearing the sprightly jingle and pling plong bell and running to the curb to pay three times as much for a frozen treat paid for by mom and dad, and if we don't get out there right away the Ice Cream Man will pass by our house and he might never come back!

Wait, Mr. Ice Cream Man, wait!

Well, Our Numbers Don't Lie; They Don't Tell The Truth Either

With the table below, Political Math demonstrates how the Obama administration has been "horrifically, disastrously wrong" in the effectiveness of its "stimulus" policies.

Unemployment Rate	Unemployed Population
Predicted Unemployment without the Stimulus	8.7%	13,492,000
Predicted Unemployment with the Stimulus	7.9%	12,251,000
Actual Unemployment with the Stimulus	9.4%	14,511,000

So, in effect, the "stimulus" has resulted in the loss of 1,019,000 jobs than if there had been no stimulus, at least if we use the President's promise, which was based on a hopeful army of nerds running all sorts of impressive calculations in this new age of scientific inquiry and soulless application of reason and Keynesian quantification, all of it so unlike that crafty bastard George Bush, who used old Atari 64 bit computers to run his budgets and used his complete control of the mainstream media to drown a willing populace in his Deatheater lies. Now, other eggheads will argue that we can't predict what actual unemployment without the stimulus would have been, so why take Obama to task for being rosy about government manipulation of the economy. Oh, right, he's pointing us in the right direction with his government largesse. He promised to save or create 3 million jobs with his stimulus and while the bald facts seem to suggest a complete failure to create jobs and there's no way to actually claim they "save" any jobs, let alone a paltry 150,000 and not including any additions to government worker rolls, we just have to believe the government will take care of it sooner or later. But he really means it now and we can expect 600,000 jobs to be saved or created this summer. After all, the economy can't be allowed to work these problems out on its own. That's never worked, even though it's never really been tried.

As Keith Hennessey points out:

Less than 5% of the $787 B [stimulus] is out the door, and the bulk of the cash flow will not happen until mid-2010. The administration would like to claim credit for the so-called green shoots of good news, and they deserve some praise for the stress tests, but they cannot plausibly claim that stimulus spending is helping the economy now in any significant way. No made up calculation of jobs saved can obscure that the money is not yet flowing into the economy.

[...]

In addition to being inefficient and wasteful, the stimulus was poorly timed. By deferring to congressional desires to shovel taxpayer funds to slow-spending infrastructure projects, the administration got a stimulus law that isn’t helping GDP growth now, and won’t have a quantitatively significant effect until 2010. The administration is in a tough spot — if the economy is not healing, then at some point the president will take the blame. If instead the economy is healing before the stimulus takes effect, then maybe the stimulus was unnecessary or even counterproductive.

Well, what the hell does some right wing economist know? Let's ask the people on whose behalf all this rubbing and stimulating is being done.

According to Rasmussen Reports:

(f)orty-five percent (45%) of Americans say the rest of the new government spending authorized in the $787-billion economic stimulus plan should now be canceled.

Rasmussen has some other interesting tidbits about Hope and Change in your wallet:

• Only 31% of Americans believe the new government spending in the stimulus package creates new jobs.
• Forty-eight percent (48%) say the stimulus spending does not create jobs, and 21% are not sure
• Thirty-nine percent (39%) say the increased spending will be good for the economy, but 44% say it will be bad. Eight percent (8%) think it will have no impact
• A plurality of government employees believe speeding up the stimulus will be good for the economy. [SURPRISE!] However, those who work in the private sector strongly disagree. [Really?]
• Only 31% of U.S. voters believe the economic stimulus package has helped the economy. That's down from 38% when it first passed in February.
• For the first time in years, voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on the handling of the economy.
• Fifty-three percent (53%) of Americans believe that increases in government spending are generally bad for the economy.
  
• For nearly four-out-of-five U.S. voters, the unwillingness of politicians to control government spending is a bigger problem than the public’s resistance to more taxes.
• Most voters [52%] continue to worry that the federal government will do too much in reacting to the country’s current economic problems.

The chances are that Obama will review all of these bellwethers and decide that the best course of action will be to demonstrate his man of the street cred by gathering up Michelle and the kids and flying on Air Force One to a Costco in flyover country (maybe Nebraska where his buddy Warren Buffett lives) to try out the new Kirkland Signature Hot Dog in the Costco food court. He can buy a giant sized Grey Poupon Mustard to go along with it.

Har Har

David Letterman describes Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as a slut and jokes about her 14 year old daughter being raped by baseball players and Elliot Spitzer.

First Wave at Omaha Beach:

To the right of where Tidrick's boat is drifting with the tide, its coxswain lying dead next to the shell-shattered wheel, the seventh craft, carrying a medical section with one officer and sixteen men, noses toward the beach. The ramp drops. In that instant, two machine guns concentrate their fire on the opening. Not a man is given time to jump. All aboard are cut down where they stand.

R.I.P. Asshopper

At a time when the 70s resurgence is in full swing, with unemployment, environmental doomsaying, industrial failure, Big Government ascendance, cultural rot, and speeches by the leader of the free world seeking accommodation with its sworn and implacable enemies, a little bit of the 70s dies at the same time. And thus today we learn of the passing of David Carradine, the zen master of eastern religious schlock, as represented by his tour de force performance as Kwai Chang Caine, a Chinese-American Shaolin monk loosed upon a mythological American west, a proto Mad Max, clad in homespun hemp instead of biker leathers, hobbled by a mumble mouth instead of a shotgunned bum knee, and driven by experiential revelation by sitting on his ass whenever possible as opposed to a gas fueled vigilante hatred for post-nuclear mutants.

Carradine played Caine - some might say became Caine in the end - as a man seeking only to be left in peace in the middle of the 110 degree desert, but he often found himself at the whip end of some malignant synthesis of modern America's ills, some white cracker sheriff or former Confederate racist or a Chicago carpetbagger with his leering eye on a handsome lady of the plains sitting on a fortune of gold. The white man was ill, we were told, then and now in the lost 70s, and he needed his ass kicked by a quiet, long haired monk seeking truth, justice and the Chinese-American Way. Every episode centered around some corrupted stereotype of Western decadence, each story a giant ostrich egg, like the ones they ate on that other multicultural trip through hell, The Land of the Lost, to be broken open, scrambled and reformed into a lecture on eastern jurisprudence.

For Sydney Brillo Duodenum, being raised a Catholic in the 70s, to once a week watch Caine open a door of philosophical madness with his hippy dippy Arizona heat induced flashbacks to his training among the Shaolin monks, principally the frighteningly blind Master Kan, as he searches for an excuse to unleash a wraith-thin sinuous ass kicking on foul disgusting inhabits of the western landscape, is perhaps one of the many reasons he walks outside the fold to this day. The whole Old West setting for a Shaolin monk did not compute alongside Saturday reviews of Clint Eastwood spaghetti hoedowns. It was a constant tug of war whether to emulate The High Plains Drifter or the High Plains hobo.

What American child's psyche could withstand an episode of Kung Fu with the following exchange:

Master Kan: Deal with evil through strength-but affirm the Good in man through trust. In this way we are prepared for evil, but we encourage Good.

Young Caine: And is Good our great reward for trusting?

Master Kan: In striving for an ideal, we do not seek rewards; yet trust does sometimes bring with it great reward-even greater than Good.

Young Caine: What is greater than Good?

Master Kan: Love.

So, while David Carradine is partially responsible for the fall of western civilization for bringing Caine into the homes of millions of bell-bottom wearing, tube sock clad, bowl hair coiffed, malaise afflicted American children - children who would have been better served a steady diet of Eastwoods homicidal angel of death - we cannot be too harsh in our assessment of David Carradine, for as Caine's murdered Master Po said, "if a man dwells in the past, then he robs the present, but if a man ignores the past, he may rob the future. The seeds of our destiny are nurtured by the roots of our past."

Well, on second thought, fuck you David Caine Carradine. Fuck you to hell.

Wild Ass Prediction

GM proudly announced today that they had found a secret buyer of the Hummer division. They were so smug and satisfied with themselves at having discharged the company's supposedly worst symbol of excess and selfishness and environmental depredation. Talking all about the future and retooling and moving forward. Oh, GM certainly has been retooled, with chief screw driver being Fritzy Henderson. Word on the street is that some Chicom firm has picked it up. How ironic that Obama would allow GM to sell its most loathed and despised brand to the biggest polluters on the planet.

And who is it exactly that loathes and despises the HUMMER? No vehicle has caused more diarrhea among the environmental wackjob community than the HUMMER. Whereas receiving a hummer in the confines of the sacred Oval of the People is really none of anyone’s business, driving a HUMMER is an international crime against humanity. Receiving a hummer in a HUMMER would constitute a rip in the space time continuum.

Which brings us to today’s wild ass prediction. It is SBD’s fervent belief, founded entirely on his own imagination and highly questionable understanding of the car, truck, light truck, pick-up truck, SUV, smart car business, that the only company with a legitimate claim on the HUMMER assets is none other than Navistar International Corporation. Americans cross paths every day with Navistar products. They make school buses, delivery trucks, moving trucks, rental trucks, and they make diesel engines for trucks, SUVs and pickups. Navistar is a forward looking American company, making a diesel-electric hybrid. Also, Navistar makes the MRAP, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected big ass MoFo armored fighting vehicle, which is responsible for a drastic decline in roadside bombing fatalities among US service personnel in Iraq.

“Well, that’s a grand guess,” the smug assholes among you might say, “but just what the hell does Navistar have to do with owning big ass, nearly impractical, poseur sport utility vehicles such as the HUMMER?” What claim on the offering of four independently operated wheels for the average American does Navistar have?

Well, Navistar used to be called International Harvester and International Harvester used to make some of the iconic American workhorse wagons. Maker of the Travelall, the Travellete, the Scout, the Scout II, the Dana, the Scout Traveller, and the Terra, IH established a firm foundation for solid, no nonsense, four wheel drive workhorses. Designed to haul stuff from one shitty location to another, they offered no pretension of status other than that you probably worked your ass off for the better part of seven days of a week.

SBD is himself a Jeep man. Former owner of a Wrangler, lost to the chastisement of a new wife, and present owner of a low mileage Cherokee Sport 2 Door, another terribly impractical vehicle (unless one finds himself in snow, mud, sand, slush, a field, a mountain road, a creek, a gigantic potholed strewn stretch of roadway in Washington, D.C.), but a keeper for life, regardless of the wifely sighs. Now, Jeep used to hold a similar status to the IH workhorses, in fact competed with them, as well as mother of SUVs - the group of Chevy trucks generally known as the Suburban. Jeeps status has fallen considerably since Chrysler executives began to ask why urban women weren’t buying Jeeps, which has resulted in an embarrassing stable of pussy mobiles such as the Liberty, the Patriot and the Compass. Shameful vehicles all, most definitely meeting needs of urban women, but that’s not what Jeep is supposed to do. Jeep was not ever supposed to give a rat’s ass about urbanites. It was always a fuck you statement, declaring “I don’t belong here and neither does my owner and we are ready to drive over your ass to get out if we have to.” You couldn’t drive over an ant’s ass in a Compass. And Chrysler has wildly confused an entire generation of men, leading them far down a path of personal embarrassment, as they pimp out their second hands with low profile tires and low boy suspension. And despite a few rough years, only the Wrangler stays true to the Jeep brand. The newly styled Liberty attempts to reclaim the hard work of the Cherokee name plate and the Commander is trying desperately to be a Land Rover, causing the old Grand Wagoneer to roll over in the junk yard. Whatever – the whole Jeep mark will probably be relegated to some kind of car Gitmo, as no Chrysler/Fiat executive will know what judgment to pass on it for fear of being visited by Obama’s civilian patrol in the dead of night.

The HUMMER has a lingering credibility because its grandfather is the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or HMMWV, or Humvee, produced by AM General, which was created the commercial version the Hummer. Sold in 1999 to GM, AM General continued to make the Hummer, or H1, as well as the horrendous and laughable H2, but GM took responsibility for manufacturing the H3 and H3T, which now has a decent reputation overseas. Anyway, there’s enough seriousness and utility to be found in the brand and the trucks.

There is a huge market of four wheel drive enthusiasts in this country and they are certainly sick and tired of being lectured by non-child bearing, Ivy League plastic and glass parsers seeking to martyr you and SBD on America’s highways in clown cars so Gaia can focus on destroying humanity with natural disasters. There’s a backlash coming and the company that can take advantage of it by boldly and proudly selling big ass utility to those who need it and who harbor an inner Galt, ready to drive into the mountains, will be solidly positioned and will be doing God's work.

GM and Chrysler are now owned by a government whose mission is to rob Americans of their pleasures and force them into purchasing goods based on how good they make other people feel about themselves. Navistar makes things people need to work efficiently and to support their livelihood. Owning Hummer would give them an opportunity to lay claim to a heritage of serving the individual with solid, no nonsense engineering and simplicity. Many people may be like SBD, unwilling to ever consider buying any product owned in part by the government. As much as he loves Jeeps, it will be a long time before he considers buying one. Same for GM products. There’s great potential in the HUMMER brand. Great opportunity to allow a fair number of Americans to say fuck you to Obama and his army of fun crushers and scolds. SBD hopes that Navistar climbs that hill.

First Taste - the Hop-Ocalypse

Living as we all do now in the New Magic Kingdom, there is the distinct possibility that you will find yourself in the Fast Pass lane teetering at the edge of the Chasm of Hope and Fantasy, a deeply shadowed canyon of financial imagineering conjured by craftsmen exponentially more talented, yet no less criminal, than the talented Mr. Madoff. A key feature of this attraction is that, as you constantly step back from the brink, you immediately find yourself stepping up to the brink again, such that eventually you enter a catatonic state. You may stand gob smacked for hours on end, mouth agape, a pasty film turning your tongue white, dry and malodorous. A lucky few with have the necessary medicine at hand: the Hop-Ocalypse.

The Hop-Ocalypse India Pale Ale

Brewer: Clay Pipe Brewing Company, Westminster, MD

Marketing BS: "Hop-Ocalypse IPA . . . Change your world!"

Marketing Translation: We've oversold the hoppiness of our brew, but it's too late because you already bought the six pack and now you're drunk but for a few hours you'll feel like you could change the world. What do you want for $10? Now get the hell out of here!

Bottle/Label: A soft hued image of the end of the world.

The Pull: As quiet as the turning of two keys deep in a bunker.

Alcohol Content: 6%

Method of Imbibation: Mouth riding the bottle like Major Kong

First Swig: Not so much Little Man as Fat Boy. A definite radiation like scrubbing of the palate from the hops, but the carbonation provides for a controlled detonation across the tongue.

Competition: None. An exhaustive query to Wolfram/Alpha, specifically, "How many beers feature a picture of the Apocalypse on their label?" resulted in no results.

Recommendation: When standing gob smacked on the edge of financial and societal collapse, this little bottle of doom will ease your pain. Definitely keep a stockpile in your bunker.

Appliance Analogy

The Federal Budget

Today's Gratuitous Attack on Progress

We should all take a step back from the doorway onto the express jet of substantive gratuitous attacks against the first racist radical Hispanic womyn to be nominated for the Supreme Court.

We simply do not yet know whether she has paid her taxes. The odds are that she hasn't.

So everyone just calm the fuck down.

Also, you white people - not so much you white women, really just you white men - no one cares what you think about this because you simply don't have the life experience to make a reasonable judgement about it.

Imagine

Yes, those tardy kindergartners from Virginia were turned away from the White House gates - the gates to the People's House, the Locus (locust?) of all Hope in the Universe, the Seat of The New Democracy - in order to acommodate Mr. Obama's lunch with the Pittsburgh Steelers, in Washington for some reason no one recalls. They are of course just a bunch of cry babies; just a large group of impressionable little Obamots, FruitLooped up on the national hysteria that is the Obama administration. Thought they would come to Washington and just barge into the Presidential Palace like Kelly's Heroes and steal the Gold. A glorious day of touching every possible antique surface and bulletproof window in that house that looks sort of like Graceland where Mom and that guy "Dad" keep talking about you like they took you home from there somehow after they snuck into a bathroom with gold toilet fixtures. They have been taught a valuable lesson in not wasting the Great One's precious time working on behalf of the people in the country who do manage to show up on time to the welfare offices, methodone clinics, and tasting bins at Whole Foods at lunch time. Their self-esteem paved over by some 23 year old White House scheduler, they will return home to their cabins in the woods where they live with their Mom who is also their cousin and they will sit under the chicken coop or on the stoop of their double wide cleaning their Airsoft semi-automatics and reciting phrases from the Book of Job while picking dog excrement from their Payless Sketcher knockoffs and naming the bits after the foreigners who clogged the Beltway and made them late for their minute under the bio-luminescence that is The One. What rubes. What little tiny rubettes and rubins. Shame is their middle name. Shane and Wayne, too, probably.

They and their "parents" will spend the better part of Memorial Day Weekend imagining how Mr. Magnifico could have bent the rules for them, particularly since they had traveled what in their tiny little provincial minds was at least as far as Uncle Cletus walked with his shine after his old Ford 150 cracked an axle up on Hollow Rd. near the old lynching tree. Imagine, they'll slur under the hot Virginia sun, if Mr. Presidente's people had said to the group, you know what, you might be late because you're slow, but since you traveled as far outside your town as you ever will, we have a big surprise for you, the future, - you're going to have hot dogs and macaroni and cheese not only with the man who has single handedly saved our Great Ongoing Experiment, but also with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Imagine if the President had put those two groups together. Imagine the fawning press coverage and the most bestest feelingest story ever, created by the only man capable of salvaging our hope for mankind and daily personal justice. Imagine The Magic Man forcing 6 foot 7 football hero millionaires onto his personal basketball court outside the Oval Office to shoot hoops against tiny little kids. National security debate with Darth Cheney? Puhleese. Cheney can't dunk.

Oh, well, maybe next year.

Rigid Ideobamology

With the news that four men, who attempted to procure high explosives in order to destroy two temples in New York City, were fairly recent converts to radical Islam through their brief exposure to radical Islamist prisoners in US jails, The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto poses a simple test of the Obama administration:

In his speech yesterday, Obama declared that "the American people are not absolutist, and they don't elect us to impose a rigid ideology." Importing hard-core Islamic supremacists [Guantanamo prisoners] into U.S. prisons is an insane policy. If Obama's proposing it is not an example of an official being driven by rigid ideology, then the phrase has no meaning.

Minitrue

It is time to rant and rave and stream some consciousness about the building progressive assault on the distribution of information and opinion. Be warned, this one is incoherent.

The Communications Daily [subscription only, so no link], a telecommunications a media industry daily, reports the following taking place at a conference in Washington:

[Interim FCC Chairman Michael] Copps criticized broadcasters and papers over news coverage and other issues. He said there’s too much “infotainment” and not enough investigative journalism. “We are skating perilously close of depriving our fellow citizens” of information they need “to make intelligent decisions about the future of their country,” Copps told the conference audience.

[…]

The U.S. ought to consider PBSS -- “a public broadcasting system on steroids,” acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps said at the conference, alluding to the Public Broadcasting Service. “Other nations find ways to support such things” and it can’t “be done on the cheap,” he said. There should be a “permanent trust fund” for public broadcasting, instead of annual appropriations, Free Press Communications Director Craig Aaron said. “We need new policies to support media and I hate to break it to some of you, but the government is going to have to be involved.”

Well there you have it. The cozy, nonchalant, matter of fact belief among the Beltway nomenclatura that “the government” is the answer to the nation’s “media” problem. And once again the soft fascism of the American left is revealed.

In the first instance, we observe Interim FCC Chairman Copps, more recently known as Commissioner Eeyore, always warning that our democracy (never our Constitutional Republic) was but one banana peel of criminal policy from the precipice of corporate fascism and dictatorship of the airwaves and the Intertubes, calling for the injection of massive quantities of anabolic tax dollars directly into that bleeding heart of the liberal corpus – public television. He believes this will save public television, which by his definition is journalism. In other words, government will save journalism by funding the one entity guaranteed to serve the purpose of always making government’s case for more government action. Almost all PBS programming is one constant call for government action.

This is part and parcel of Copps’ other hobbyhorse - “localism.” In short, broadcasters are licensed by the FCC on a local basis and, due to scarcity of spectrum, they have certain public interest responsibilities to the community in which they are licensed. Thus, most local broadcast and radio stations do not continuously broadcast Gilligan’s Island or Stairway to Heaven, but also offer a medley of local news, talk, sports and such. They do this for the very simple reason that you can make money on distributing other people’s creative juices, which is as it should be. They spend unconscionable sums of money researching what people want to see and hear. Critics, scolds, and intellectuals who want to control what people hear and see more often than not call it dreck and pine for content that no research has ever proven to be a long term viable business case. More fantastical is that businesses spend huge sums of money (albeit less so and in more discriminating fashion these days) to position their products and services alongside that crap. Now, broadcasters have some very real public responsibilities, such as conveying emergency alerts and ensuring the uninterrupted presentation of SBD’s sacred primetime network programming. Under the “localism” rubric, broadcasters’ continuing license to operate will be judged against the extent to which they serve the interests of their local markets. This almost always translates into serving a phalanx of special interests, community activists, and minority shake down venture capitalists that claim they are not being heard by the community, are being ignored by broadcasters and in compensation need free government mandated access to the airwaves. There’s always the accusation of institutional racism of broadcasters as they supposedly ignore a diversity of voices by blocking it with crap that people actually want to see and hear. Or broadcasters are not recognizing America’s diversity by segregating the airwaves. Around election time, it means liberal and progressive candidates aren’t monopolizing local news coverage. Perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but what are blogs for. In any event, localism in application is a taking, plain and simple. The Tea Party people could make a compelling argument that they are local and every time they show up at some park in the thousands with their terrible hand lettered bad punning signs they are summarily dismissed by local broadcasters, who already peddle a constant stream of concerned progressivism, as anyone who suffers through local evening news knows all too well. But the Tea Partiers aren’t a bunch of whiny pussies for the most part and will find other means of getting their message across, which is the way it should be.

Now that the left/liberal elite are running the studio as it were, they have a whole new slate of programming they intend to cram into viewers and listeners brains. Now that they own the big advertisers – Banks and Car Manufacturers – they can position their crappy content and have those failing industries buy ad time on it. Perfect statism all around. Copps will get them there as quickly as he can with localism. In order to softly compel broadcasters to beef up their local, i.e., progressive content, he is pushing for stations to undergo license review every three years now, as opposed to eight. The effect of this is that every leftcrank organization n the country will file thousands of “showings” against stations “proving” they do not meet their localism mandate and thus the station will have to promise al sorts of freebies to oppressed. Al Sharpton, call your office.

Copps also said:

If old media is going to be with us a while still, what implications does this have for us? It means we still need to get serious about defining broadcasters' public interest obligations and reinvigorating our license renewal process. Since we still need broadcasters to contribute to the democratic dialogue, we need clear standards that can be fairly but vigorously enforced. It is time to say good-bye to postcard renewal every eight years and hello to license renewals every three years with some public interest teeth.

And when he says “democratic dialogue” he really means Democrat Talking Points.

I understand that many thoughtful people are ready to give up on the public interest. They would rather just impose a spectrum fee on broadcasters and be done with it. I'm not ready to throw in the towel. The public interest standard is like a grand old theater that has been badly neglected over the years. The structure is sound, and with a little imagination and a lot of hard work we can make it a showplace once again.

Right. In other words, now that we are control of the studio, it’s time to bring back the Petey Green Show (which SBD would not mind as Petey Green was a great entertainer). Copps is such a grandpa – “Let’s fix up the old crack den theater and turn it into show place for retread silent movies, because that’s clearly what The People are demanding. Of course, we’ll need a massive tax break and subsidized building funds and special favors with respect to the zoning and we’ll have to condemn the cleaners and Laundromat and the car parts supply business on the block because movie goers are going to need to eat before and after the shows at restaurants and bistros offering locally grown foods, but the community of retired hippies is certainly behind it and, dammit, it’s for the children!

As of this writing, the purpose of the FCC’s “Localism Proceedings is to gather information from consumers, industry, civic organizations, and others on broadcasters’ service to their local communities. Along with competition and diversity, promoting localism is a key goal of the Commission’s media ownership rules.”

Copps talks about “clear standards” for promoting that “democratic dialogue” and what he’s talking about is the present state of mainstream journalism: reporting that government is doing X when it should (of course) be doing Y. We know that it never reports that it probably shouldn't be doing either. It always amazes how people like Copps make these broad claims that journalism is on the rocks because there actually people out there promoting ideas and policy diametrically opposed to the progressive agenda. It’s shocking to them that it’s can be allowed and was allowed under the Bush Junta. They hope to change that.

Copps’ other fatal flaw is to always project his opinion of what’s newsworthy or the source of what’s newsworthy, thus Fox News, the libtard bogeyman of the 21st Century, but which sages like Copps never openly name, is never a legitimate voice or source of information, despite its gargantuan ratings year in and year out. Copps should have nothing to say about what is newsworthy or what advances the "democratic dialogue" other than that he understands his job is to ensure that a multiplicty of avenues free of government inspection, toll, and gating are there to allow it. It vexes liberals like Copps that “consumers” consume Fox. If they had but more access to the highfalutin offerings of the publicly funded media, it would be so much easier to have the government get things done in their name. Two ways to do this is to ensure constant and huge funding for public television and, two, use the bullying power of government regulation and sanction to threaten local broadcasters into feeding your agenda to control media by imposing opinion on it.

Working hand in hand with Copps are people like Mr. Craig Aaron, as quoted above. This man is the “Communications Director” for a group called “Free Press,” a Washington “public interest” lobbying power house. Mr. Aaron suggests that only government intervention can save media, which in Free Press' mind is always journalism, because all media (must) have a journalistic (e.g., teaching and indoctrinating) angle. This “Free Press” employee, without reservation, hesitation, caution, or a sense of irony, declaims that “media” needs new policies and they can only come from and be supported by government.

At the height of their power, liberals/progressives are mewling about the sorry state of journalism, as evidenced in their minds by the failing newspaper industry. We know that two things are screwing the newspaper industry. Journalists and the economy.

With respect to journalists, when newspapermen, who really were business men, relinquished their business to the journalists and allowed editors to inject their progressive socialist beliefs in to the gathering and presentation of hard news – the who, what, where, when, and how – but moved the why from the OpEd page to the news page, they made a fatal mistake. Editors by nature think their readership are idiots and have to have to have everything explained to them; have to interpret what happened for them; have to bend it some preconceived meme or paradigm or some other geek word. People aren’t stupid and they can figure things out for themselves. They allowed opinion and manipulation to take over the newsroom floor. It was not until the full scale availability of the blessed World Wide Web that their unhindered bias was fully exposed. In other words, regular people started to fact check their asses. The LA Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post and a dozen other self-declared benchmarkers of what constitutes news have been exposed as charlatans and their shameless malpractice and agenda driven journalism, all conducted on the pretense of non-biased reporting, has brought them low.

The major urban dailies are cesspools of liberal twaddle and everyone knows it, which is why subscribership is cratering. And the fact remains that people want news and they will form their own damn opinions about it. Unfortunately, they now have to spend half the time they read the news to work through reporters’ bias, judging the use of words and syntax and wondering if the facts have been massaged or some mitigating bit left out. It’s too much work, frankly, and exhausting to read a paper like the Washington Post or the New York Times. The manipulation is constant and unbearable.

And now that the economy is in the crapper, already weakened papers are more susceptible to debacle. With Obama Motors Conglomerate shutting down wide swathes of dealerships, imagine the deep divot to be gouged out of the newspapers’ advertising revenues. There’s more suffering to be had. More papers to be closed. More business plans for the archives. Some of these papers will dump the presses and live only online but if they do not change the manner in which they gather and present the news, they will still fail. Who will pay for bull shit? Ask the New York Times how that worked out for them. And this scares the crap out of liberal/progressives because they rely on that bias to keep them 5 or 10 points ahead. That’s why intellectual cretins like SBD’s Senator Ben Cardin feel no shame in cobbling together legislation designed to make newspapers a slave of government by giving them tax exempt status on their advertising and subscription revenue, and allowing other non-profits to invest in them (like Acorn, the giant government funded community organizer!), and, although still allowing them to report on political issues, in exchange for the tax exemption, they could not make political endorsements. Is Sydney Brillo Duodenum to believe that in its regular news reporting the Washington Post or the New York Times or any dozen second tier rags do not make political endorsements in their decisions on what to cover in its reporting? They do and that is part of why they fail. And now Cardin and others want to subsidize that bias with tax dollars.

The point is that all of this is messy and there’s obvious bias across the journalistic landscape and we must be grown-ups and parse and read between the lines and draw educated opinions and not be lazy citizens and seek out multiple sources of news and opinion, or we don’t have to do any of that because we have a right to be busy people going about our lives and not giving a goddamned fig about what’s going on in the world or down the street. And you can hold the latter view as long as you accept that while you are doing so, people like Copps and Aaron are working to diminish and manipulate what you will read and hear – what you will know - if and when you take your head out of your ass and pick up a paper or turn on the local news.

UPDATE 05-20-09:

Matt Welch at the brotherhood of Reason provides crystal clear evidence of the disconnect between journalists/media and the electorate. In the wake of California voters rejecting a number of ballot initiatives that would have raised taxes, extended others and increased state borrowing power, California's major newspapers up and down the state, most of which endorsed most of the initiatives intheir editorials and in their news reporting of the effect of those initiatives, heap mounds of scorn and derision on upon the silly, ignorant, shortsighted, selfish, myopic voters, who are also presumably their readers. Those editors must be ashamed that they failed to teach the voters why all of it was good for them. It seems most voters did the hard work of parsing the articles and isolating the facts from their massaging adjectives. Others will analyse the minds of Californians hoping to devine some kind of rejection of big government, big spending, big taxes, in other words Big Obama, but in the end, Obama will probably bail out the state and none of the problems afflicting California will be addressed, as it will be another wing of the Federal Morass and its citizens welfare recipients, paid for by the rest of the country.

Corruption

George Will:

Anyone, said T.S. Eliot, could carve a goose, were it not for the bones. And anyone could govern as boldly as his whims decreed, were it not for the skeletal structure that keeps civil society civil -- the rule of law. The Obama administration is bold. It also is careless regarding constitutional values and is acquiring a tincture of lawlessness.

[...]

The Obama administration's agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of "economic planning" and "social justice" that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration's central activity -- the political allocation of wealth and opportunity -- is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.

Scott Ott: The Funniest Man in the Blogosphere!

Scrappleface:

CIA Offers to Determine When Pelosi Knew

(2009-05-12) — In an effort to clarify exactly when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew that the U.S. employed enhanced interrogation techniques, like waterboarding, on terrorists, the CIA today offered to question the California Democrat.

“With the passage of time, memory gets clouded,” said a CIA source who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But we have learned how to clear away the clouds, and bring into sharp focus the relevant details.”

Snark on the Plane

New York Post:

A top White House aide resigned today for his role in Air Force One's $328,835 photo-op flyover above New York City that sparked panic and flashbacks to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. His resignation was made public at the same time the photo of the flyover was released by the White House.

Excuse, SBD?

The photo? The photo?

For $328, 835, one would expect an album of photos, a montage of photos, at the very least a triptych of photos.

Not the photo. We're to believe all that business was over a photo. The little button wasn't pushed until just the right moment of glorious airship righteousness was caught on the SD card?

Which means that the true story behind the photo op remains undeveloped. Where are the photos taken as the plane cruised over lower Manhattan, with little tiny ants below running and screaming and pointing in terror?

Where is the video taken of the plane on its Big Apple tour? There must be video. Perhaps the video remains with George Lucas' Tuskeegee Airmen film production team.

Implausable Deniability

Washington Post:

Intelligence officials released documents this evening saying that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was briefed in September 2002 about the use of harsh interrogation tactics against al-Qaeda prisoners, seemingly contradicting her repeated statements over the past 18 months that she was never told that these techniques were actually being used.

In a 10-page memo outlining an almost seven-year history of classified briefings, intelligence officials said that Pelosi and then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.) were the first two members of Congress ever briefed on the interrogation tactics. Then the ranking member and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, respectively, Pelosi and Goss were briefed Sept. 4, 2002, one week before the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Now, Sydney Brillo Duodenum wishes his shaddenfraude could be saved for this loathsome bitch on some other national scandal. He doesn't enjoy seeing the politicization and hobbilation of our intelligence gathering, but to the extent that one side seeks to politicize matters directly tied to the enhanced interrogation techniques necessary to save American lives, then it's a necessary evil to lay everything and everyone out on the table. You want a conversation? OK, let's have it. Pelosi is one of the self-righteous, emo-teenagers presently running the country. She, Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, the senile Patrick Leahy, President Poseur, and a bovine herd of other idiots and morons have inflicted serious damage on this country in a very short time.

Say what you will, but this country was strong for eight years - it defended itself, tracked down its enemies, cowed some here, and destroyed some there - but in three short months Democrats have conducted a shameful witch hunt, have diminished and attempted to criminalize the serious and legal efforts of patriots who exposed plots that would have murdered children very similar to the two that now reside peacefully in their beds chez SBD, and have simply lied to the American people about their own duplicitous participation. They are disgusting yellow cowards and need to be hounded from office.

We are to believe that we - America - are more of a threat to liberty and freedom than the maniacs gathering on the other side of a mountain range 60 miles from Islamabad. Those bastards are no different than the bastards that took over Iran in 1979 and bombed the barracks in Beirut and murdered Americans in foreign capitals and blew up the USS Cole and bombed airliners in flight at Christmastime and bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and destroyed it in 2001 and slaughtered thousands of Iraqis and talk of annihilating the Jews and scores and scores of other atrocities, stabbings, prickings and affronts to our western way. We are to stand down now. We are to have a national conversation of our so-called crimes in defense of ourselves because that will somehow make us stronger and make our enemies love us and talk to us.

They hate us still and laugh at us. They see a Nancy Pelosi lying to the American people, denying that she bought into the defense of the country - and they just laugh at us. Three months into the Obama administration and our enemies are now laughing at us. Beheaders sixty miles from Islamabad and our enemies are now laughing at us. Refusing to use the phrase Islamic terrorist and our enemies are now laughing at us. Promising to leave Iraq, come hell or highwater, on a specific date and our enemies are now laughing at us. Sending happy greeting videos to the Iranians and our enemies are now laughing at us. Bowing before a Saudi Muslim king and our enemies are now laughing at us. Releasing barely literate domestic terrorist analysis identifying regular Americans as rightwing, America hating extremists and our enemies are now laughing at us. Depositing hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza (and then Swiss) bank accounts and our enemies are now laughing at us.

It's not funny.

Barone's Nutshell

Michael Barone on the Theft of Chrysler:

Think carefully about what’s happening here. The White House, presumably car czar Steven Rattner and deputy Ron Bloom, is seeking to transfer the property of one group of people to another group that is politically favored. In the process, it is setting aside basic property rights in favor of rewarding the United Auto Workers for the support the union has given the Democratic Party. The only possible limit on the White House’s power is the bankruptcy judge, who might not go along.

[..]

Obama’s attitude toward the rule of law is apparent in the words he used to describe what he is looking for in a nominee to replace Justice David Souter. He wants “someone who understands justice is not just about some abstract legal theory,” he said, but someone who has “empathy.” In other words, judges should decide cases so that the right people win, not according to the rule of law.

Don't forget . . .

A government big enough

to give you everything you want

is a government big enough

to take from you everything you have.

President Gerald R. Ford