Christopher Beam asked some professional media trainers what kind of advice they would give Sarah Palin on how she can improve her interview skills. The bottom line:
The No. 1 piece of advice for interviewees, as with all things, was, practice. But aside from her friendly chat with Hannity, Palin hasn’t been able to warm up. And giving fewer interviews all but guarantees that each one will get analyzed down to the molecular level. “They’re doing a tremendous disservice by not putting her out there.”
While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08, for the first time, the major media consciously are covering for one candidate for president and consciously are knifing the other. This is no longer journalism; it is simply propaganda.
The split between rural and urban voting patterns has deepened in recent elections, providing the margin of victory for Republicans. This split is the result of a gradual shift in living patterns over the last couple of generations.
People made choices about how and where they wanted to live. We sorted. Some people gravitated to cities. Others moved to where there was a bit more space. The two political parties came to represent people who had a kind of lifestyle that was represented in where they lived.
Will that split play a role in this election, too? Stay tuned . . . .
Whether we are in a recession or not depends on where you live — specifically, the political climate that dominates your state.
If there is indeed a recession taking place, blame it on the blue states and blue regions, with their high-tax, high-regulation, high-giveaway environments. The lower-tax, more economically free red states and the red regions within otherwise blue states are certainly not the culprits.
The Dems, of course, want to make the entire country blue, which means . . . .
Or more like, Houston vs. New Orleans. At the state, local, and neighborhood level, the spirit of the people involved in these two disasters couldn’t be more different. Which would explain the dearth of shocking news stories coming out of Texas.
According to an outside disaster relief specialist working in Baytown, “I’ve never been a place where the city was so helpful.” I’m proud to call Baytown my hometown.
Gateway Pundit has the latest details on the hacker who gained access to Sarah Palin’s personal email account and distributed addresses, phone numbers, and other private information around the internet.
It appears the culprit is the son of a Tennessee state representative (a Democrat, in case you couldn’t figure it out).
Of course, you won’t read about any of this in the mainstream media. They’re too busy dumpster diving in Alaska trying to find dirt on Palin.
It’s no secret that daily newspapers across the country are facing horrendous losses, both in revenues and in circulation figures. Jonathan Yardley, himself a lifelong newspaper man, takes a look at how newspapers will have to reinvent themselves in order to stay viable — smaller, but meatier.
We may already be moving toward the daily magazine model even as we struggle to find the most workable and economically viable relationship between our print and Internet editions.
Of course, no amount of jiggering the format can overcome the effects of content that insults the readers.
When the lights come on, the cockroaches scatter. That’s why Congress will adjourn this year without addressing the financial crisis that has hit Wall Street.
As more details emerge about who was in bed with who, it’s becoming increasingly obvious who bears significant, if not primary, responsibility for this mess.
President Bush in 2003 tried desperately to stop Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from metastasizing into the problem they have since become.
Here’s the lead of a New York Times story on Sept. 11, 2003: “The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.”
Bush tried to act. Who stopped him? Congress, especially Democrats with their deep financial and patronage ties to the two government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie and Freddie.
And Bush was not the only one who tried to warn the country of what was coming.
Just two years after Bush’s plan, McCain also called for badly needed reforms to prevent a crisis like the one we’re now in.
“If Congress does not act,” McCain said in 2005, “American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole.”
Sounds like McCain was spot on.
But his warnings, too, were ignored by Congress.
Of course, with the media now a bona fide adjunct to the Democratic Party, the public likely will not hear much of these details until after the election — or maybe never.
UPDATE: Okay, Congress is not entirely passive. Barney Frank’s House Financial Services Committee just voted to overturn a ban on seller-financed down payments for some government-backed loans. According to Nicole Gelinas, this move perpetuates the very high-risk atmosphere that got us in the mess we’re in now.
It seems that Frank and his colleagues remain keen on coddling the tenacious bad-lending lobby (including the National Association of Homebuilders and what’s left of the banking industry), which desperately needs suckers to buy newly built homes at inflated prices so that builders can pay back at least some of their construction debt to the banks and investors. Frank is certainly not looking out for average-Joe home buyers and sellers with this action.
One of the fright tricks used by AGW believers to gin up fear of global warming is the claim that rising temperatures will melt the arctic permafrost, thus releasing even more carbon into the atmosphere. But that prediction appears to be a stretch, at best.
According to a recent field study of ice wedges conducted by researchers at the University of Alberta, the permafrost has survived numerous warming spells in past millenia that were far worse than what we are supposed to be facing.
“The general view is that everything would have melted out back then,” Dr. [Duane] Froese said. The new finding suggests that wasn’t the case, and that models of future melting need to be rethought.
Of course, Dr. Froese is then quick to throw a sop to the AGW crowd, acknowledging that global warming is still a serious threat, yada, yada. But it’s another case of hard science casting doubt on the prevailing paradigm.
Just as Captain Ahab’s obsession with getting the white whale finally destroyed him, the media’s obsession with getting Sarah Palin is dragging them under.
Millions of Americans, not all of them conservative, instinctively identify with Palin. That is why the left’s scorching assault, so ugly and unhinged, is backfiring. The longer it goes on, the more it undermines the Democratic ticket – and the more support it builds for McCain, and his refreshingly normal running mate.
Wait until they get elected and have the full power of the federal government to play with. This is frightening.
Yeah, I know, Obama will probably disown this criminal act. But don’t forget, this is the kind of people who got him where he’s at today. He owes them big-time. Do you really think they’re not going to demand payback when he gets elected?
Joe Lieberman has new company. A key Hillary supporter and fund-raiser has publicly renounced the Obama ticket and supports McCain-Palin. And she argues her case eloquently.
Samuelson explains three fundamental changes in how the giant Wall Street firms did business over the last twenty years that has contributed to the current mess. What does the future hold?
It’s hard to know, because financial crises resemble wars in one crucial respect: They result from miscalculation.
I thought Joe Biden’s job was to help draw voters to Obama’s candidacy. But watch this video, and tell me how many average, ordinary Americans will be drawn to the ticket by this kind of talk.
Sheesh, if I didn’t know better, I’d think Biden is a McCain mole.
The media meltdown over Sarah Palin’s candidacy for the vice presidency has exposed the not-unsuspected truth that, when it comes to historical ignorance and political amnesia, our cultural panjandrums are in a class by themselves.
It was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions.
Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.
The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but “predatory.”
Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the ’90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck.
And what is Obama’s solution to the problem? Why, more government manipulation, of course.
UPDATE: And who put Clinton in office? The voting public, that’s who:
The American people . . . want the impossible: home ownership for those who cannot afford homes, credit for those who are not creditworthy, old-age pensions for those who have not saved, health care for those who make no attempt to keep themselves healthy, and college educations for those who lack the wit to finish high school. Moreover, they want it now, and they want somebody else to pay for it.
If you think that Fannie and Freddie’s bust is a big deal, just wait until Medicare comes crashing down. Then, the wailing and gnashing of teeth will be truly unbearable. As that day rapidly approaches, however, you’ll notice that the politicians are doing utterly nothing to forestall it.
Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, argues in an essay this month, “What Makes People Vote Republican?”, that it’s liberals, in fact, who are dangerously blind.
Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. “Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” he told me in a phone interview.
Scott Loginbill has an interesting piece on the (ever-so-slowly) emerging HTML 5.0 standard. If its more prominent features become standard across the major browser platforms, it will revolutionize the web.
I was especially intrigued by this perspective from Mozilla engineering VP Mike Shaver regarding the impact of HTML 5.0 on XML, a markup language that has taken the information world by storm in recent years.
Shaver says the HTML 5 movement was born out of impatience. Many sensed activity around web standards was stagnating as the W3C started directing its attention away from HTML and to another emerging technology, XML.
“A lot of new architectures — XML based work — were designed to replace HTML in the web,” says Shaver. “We were really not convinced that was the way it should go forward. We don’t think people should be throwing (web technology) away to get (the web) to go forward.”
If HTML 5.0 really does take off, this could set up a showdown between the two markup languages.
Dee Dee Myers (former Clinton press secretary), on Palin’s appeal to mainstream women:
I think that there are more women who identify with Sarah Palin than Gloria Steinem right now. Even if they don’t agree with 100 percent of her agenda, her life looks more like their lives.
For many years, the mainstream media sought to portray an aura of objectivity. They were (they claimed) highly trained professionals who had mastered the art of maintaining a balance between their private beliefs and journalistic endeavors.
No more. The Palin candidacy has stripped away the last vestiges of that pretension, and the media are now openly choosing sides in this election.
The dripping condescension that some of Palin’s critics are demonstrating toward her is boomeranging. She is becoming a heroine to many Republicans, who are as energized as I can remember in defense of Palin. And in attacking Palin, many Democrats and liberal commentators are mocking her faith, worldview, and life experiences. In that sense, a great unmasking is taking place. A wide swath of liberals are revealing their arrogance, their cultural elitism, and even their ugliness. It may be therapeutic. And it may also cost them the election.
Ever wonder why most of the photographs of Obama in the mainstream media always seem to capture him as pleasant, dignified, or even saintly, while photographs of McCain seem to show him as sinister, frail, or even evil?
I’m watching a live web feed of KHOU-TV as they follow Hurricane Ike moving ashore over the next few hours. Riveting story.
Especially riveting for personal reasons: I learned earlier today that a cousin of mine who lives in Galveston elected to ride out the storm. I’m praying for Becky and her husband.
UPDATE: 11:00 am Saturday: Just heard that Becky and her husband rode out the storm just fine. They were on the third floor of an old building that had survived the 1900 hurricane, so they felt safe. Apparently their confidence was well-placed.
James Lewis tries to analyze a twisted piece of logic in a recent New Scientist article that blames the growing ice fields of Antarctica on global warming — but he finally gives up:
When it gets hotter it proves global warming. And when it gets colder it also proves global warming. . . . . And these people think creationism is unscientific?
On this seventh anniversary of the most horrible day in America’s history, the usual memorials will be posted to remember those we lost on that day. It’s fitting that we should do so.
But there is a deeper issue this event should force us to grapple with, one that is rarely addressed. The depth and intensity of the raw evil that was displayed that day raises the disturbing question, Where was God? If God exists, and if He is so kind and good and compassionate, how could He possibly have allowed such a demonic crime to be committed?
The answer is really quite simple: He was where He’s always been — on His throne in heaven, grieving over the fallen state of His creatures.
God did not create robots. He created free moral agents who have the capacity for great evil as well as great good. What we do with that freedom is our choice. And some people, as we witness all too often, choose to use their freedom in nefarious ways. That’s not God’s fault.
As a believer, 9/11 did not shake my confidence in God. On the contrary, it further strengthens my conviction that there is a God who will someday sit in final judgment on the entire human race. On that day, the villians of 9/11 — and of every other despicable act of evil throughout history — will receive their just reward.
In the meantime, it remains our duty to do what is right, no matter the cost.
“Though a sinner does evil a hundred times, and his days are prolonged, yet I surely know that it will be well with those who fear God, who fear before Him. But it will not be well with the wicked; nor will he prolong his days, which are as a shadow, because he does not fear before God” (Ecclesiastes 8:12-13).
Yesterday marked the second anniversary of the passing of new age musician Richard Burmer.
I first came across Burmer’s music on the original version of the Western Spaces CD, a collaboration among Steve Roach, Kevin Braheny, and Burmer. His contribution to that album, “Across the View,” is still my favorite Burmer tune.
He released a series of solo CDs in the late 80s and early 90s, but never achieved the fame of other artists in the new age genre. I never understood that, because Burmer’s music was in a class all by itself. Following his death, the Hearts of Space radio show devoted an entire episode to his music, entitled appropriately, “Across the View” (#794). A fitting tribute.
Burmer was just shy of 51 years old when he died. His musical genius will be missed.
You have, no doubt, by now heard the uproar over Obama’s comment yesterday about putting lipstick on a pig. Here’s my take on the incident.
First, Obama would not be so stupid as to deliberately equate Palin with a pig. That would have marked the end of his campaign. The expression “lipstick on a pig” is a figure of speech that’s as old as the hills, used to describe a cheap attempt to mask an ugly truth. I’m confident that’s all Obama had in mind when he used it.
However . . . .
Palin’s joke about the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull (lipstick) has become the defining metaphor of the McCain campaign in the last week. Obama should have known that ANY use of the word “lipstick” would instantly be attached to Palin’s joke, ergo, to Palin. Certainly the partisan audience who heard Obama’s remarks caught that connection.
No, Obama did not intentionally smear Palin by inferring that she is a pig. (And the McCain campaign should not try to force that message.) His only sin was to — once again — clumsily stumble into an embarassing verbal gaffe.
And once again I ask: Why isn’t the press using Obama’s malapropisms to impugn his competence, the same way they have been doing to Bush for the last eight years?
The fact that there is an old expression isn’t enough. What if Obama opponents took to saying “pot calling the kettle black” or “call a spade a spade.” There would be no end to the outrage… and rightly so. I don’t what to hear the “old expression” argument from anyone who won’t say they’d make the same argument if the tables were turned.
