A glimpse into Santa’s email account.
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Month: December 2008
[digg-reddit-me]Fora.tv had a great little video clip of sportscaster Jim Nantz’s role in bringing together George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton for a post-presidential social summit.
The Daily Mail reported over the weekend that a recent study found that left-handers don’t do as well as right-handers in school, but earn more than 5% more every hour once they leave school. This is Drew-bait because an acquaintance of mine who we will for the moment call Drew, but who will remain otherwise anonymous, has a burning hatred for lefties and their sinister ways.
Oddly though, to illustrate this article, The Daily Mail inexplicably chose Robert Redford in his box office bomb The Horse Whisperer.
Let me suggest instead three other prominent lefties who have been in the news recently:
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Jindal 2012 (cont.)
Compare the reactions of Ramnesh Ponnuru and Mark Krikorian to the Washington Post‘s apparently positive profile of Bobby Jindal.
Neither can quite take the article at face value. Ponnuru wonders “if this sort of swooning is really going to be helpful to Gov. Jindal in the long run.”
Krikorian, on the other hand, takes offense at the suggestion that Jindal could be an Obama-like figure. Under the headline “Clueless” which he apparently means to refer to either the Washington Post or the American people, he explains that Obama was merely “a post-American political radical who’s never held a real job and was catapulted to political success because of his race.” So much resentment packed into a single sentence – and so much misinformation. Would a “post-American political radical” choose anything like the pragmatic foreign policy team that Obama has chosen? What exactly does Krikorian consider, “a real job”? Does Krikorian really consider race to be the primary factor in Obama’s rise – or was it one factor among many that had both negative and positive consequences? And how ridicilous is it for a guy whose career is based on whipping up xenophobia to declare race to be some kind of definate asset?
Krikorian makes clear that he doesn’t have a clue.
Ponnuru may find it hard to accept media praise for one of his guys – but Krikorian manages to turn praise into an insult. There’s something so counterproductive about it – these constantly stoked resentments.
Unfortunately, the National Review and the conservative movement at large has far too many Krikorian and far too few Ponnuru’s.
I contacted Michael Pinto, the creator of the Facebook group “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for the US Senate” yesterday to follow-up my post asking who was paying to promote the group on Facebook. I had seen some ads – as had a few other people who had blogged about it. And the number of people in the group shot up significantly over a few days – which led me to presume that there was quite a lot of advertising.
But Michael Pinto assured me in a Facebook message that:
I’m paying for those ads out of my own pocket: I figured if I wasn’t willing to spend at least $100 of my own cash then it wasn’t a worthwhile cause.
Later, he offered:
PS If you need proof I’d be glad to share a screen shot of the ad campaign with you…
Pinto also tells me he was responsible for the “Red State Socialism” graph that made it onto Digg.
My key takeaway: It’s time to start advertising on Facebook.
Categories
The Kingdom of Google
“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and a former scholar in residence at Google, told me recently. “One reason they’re good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it’s over for them.” Google’s claim on our trust is a fragile thing. After all, it’s hard to be a company whose mission is to give people all the information they want and to insist at the same time on deciding what information they get…
Given their clashing and sometimes self-contradictory missions — to obey local laws, repressive or not, and to ensure that information knows no bounds; to do no evil and to be everywhere in a sometimes evil world — Wong and her colleagues at Google seem to be working impressively to put the company’s long-term commitment to free expression above its short-term financial interests. But they won’t be at Google forever, and if history is any guide, they may eventually be replaced with lawyers who are more concerned about corporate profits than about free expression.
Jeffrey Rosen in an insightful look into how Google tries to balance local censorship and its’ commitment to the freedom of information.
I am a bit of a monarchist, in the Federalist sense, as long as there are checks and balances. I’m a big fan of Google, but I realize the problems Tim Wu and Rosen point out are real – and that an organization now that takes steps to protect individuals will not necessarily continue to do so. But Google needs some well-publicized Achilles heel that can be used if it turns evil.
Wasting no time, ads are already running on Facebook promoting Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to replace Hillary Clinton as she leaves her Senate seat to become Secretary of State.
techPresident reported yesterday – before ads were running – that Michael Pinto, the creator of the Facebook group described it “an informal grassroots thing.” The group asks supporters of RFK, Jr. to write to Governor Patterson asking him to appoint the young Kennedy to his father’s seat in the Senate.
The group seems to be growing rapidly – from 17 reported as of yesterday to 135 as of this writing.
My question is: who’s paying to promote this?
And how long will it be before Andrew Cuomo and some of the other top candidates have their own Facebook groups?
[digg-reddit-me]As in the financial crisis generally, the executive branch, the media, and the Congress have all focused on the corporations whose brands are at stake rather than the people affected. This is understandable. Stalin’s famous aphorism that a million deaths are merely a statistic, while a single death is a tragedy, can be adapted to economic hardship as well. A million bankruptcies by individuals are a mere statistics, while the bankruptcy of a famous brand such as Chrysler or Citibank is a tragedy, affecting each of our lives – as signs come down, commercials stop airing, and the products and services we receive now have a different branding.
But saving a brand name should never be the business of our government. In a government intervention into the market, a brand name might be saved – but this should never be a policy goal. Yet, this is precisely the manner in which this question is presented to the public: Should the government bail out Citibank? Or Chrysler? Or Starbucks? Framed in this manner, the answer should always be, “No.”
The real issue concerns the proper role of government in a market economy.
In this crisis, the issue of how involved the government should be in the economy has largely been resolved. “Do nothing,” doesn’t seem to be a realistic option in the midst of a crisis. In times of panic, we are all Keynesians. The unwinding after the crisis promises to re-ignite a fight about the proper role of government in the economy.
The real issue at the moment then, is the follow-up question: how to balance market forces and stability in a market economy – and specifically, in the midst of this crisis. Mitt Romney, in a New York Times editorial that proved especially influential, made the case for why our current system can effectively deal with the bankruptcies of the Big Three Automakers. Paul Krugman took what has become the consensus liberal view: if only we weren’t already in a credit crisis, bankruptcy would be a good option.
For the past year, this has been the argument – with the same people sometimes switching sides depending on the particular company. Capitalism inevitably involves creative destruction – but in the midst of a crisis of confidence, any destruction becomes seen as potentially catastrophic, as the collapse of Lehman Brothers demonstrated.
But government intervention should avoid saving corporations. The government should, when it intervenes in the market, strive to change the forces at work rather than to inject money into corporations themselves.
Corporations, whose primary purpose is to amass wealth by any means available for their owners, and who always manage to simultaneously amass wealth for the managers, cannot be trusted with public money. There is no public purpose to such profit-making. The public value of a corporation comes from it’s incidental activities – the means by which it is able to amass it’s profits. By bailing out General Motors, the government would be giving it’s money away for no public purpose. But the government does serve a public purpose by keeping General Motors’ factories churning out cars.
Within that distinction lies the difference between outrageous abuse of taxpayer funds and a valid public purpose. The more difficult question is how to avoid the abuse while serving the purpose.
The Bush administration has failed to do this – which is why there is fresh outrage at every million dollar junket by AIG executives or private jet ride by auto executives.
For those of you that don’t know, I take the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan every morning to work. I always get in the first car at my station. When I take the subways, I go from Penn Station to Times Square to Grand Central Station, where I get off to go to the Chrysler Building where I work.
So, reading that a Qaeda group wanted to attack the LIRR during this holiday season hit close to home:
The FBI’s source reportedly told agents of an al Qaeda-connected group’s desire to place bombs or suicide bombers inside the first and last Long Island Rail Road commuter cars and detonate them as the train entered Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, also used by the Washington-New York-Boston Amtrak system and the New York City subway.
It’s the particulars that are chilling. That and the scare headlines – which were quickly eclipsed by the massive terrorist attack in Mumbai. But it’s not as if I am going to let such a threat change my life, my routine. The article also included a number of caveats – including a suggestion that the FBI wasn’t sure this had moved past the planning stage.
But it seems to me that making this potential means of attack public is quite a positive service, and suggests that maybe the national security infrastructure of the United States finally has figured out the lesson it had failed to learn after September 11:
The federal government cannot be everywhere. The best defense of our way of life, of our institutions, of our government, of our people is the American people themselves – properly informed.
By letting us know, the government is treating us as adults rather than children – and betting that a few million people paying extra attention is worth something.
Al Gore, in his book, Assault on Reason, described a media and political focus on “gotcha” journalism, on gaffes, on irrelevancies and personal scandals, on the Freak Show – rather than a focus on long-term issues, on character, and on principles as one of the major factors that has led to our current crises. “News” coverage is dominated by questions of whether this or that politician has a mistress (he probably does) or whether this or that entertainer is secretly going out with this or that sports star. Our news has become tabloid.
If, as the drafters of our Constitution believed, a well-informed citizenry is essential to the proper functioning of any nation, then our nation clearly cannot be functioning properly.
This lack of good information, this focus on the trivial over the significant, was evident when the CEOs of Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors went to Washington to beg for handouts. As Jon Stewart sagely observed in a pox-on-all-your-houses bit:
Unable to understand the actual problem, Congress seizes on tangential details for grandstanding purposes.
[Cue tape of various Congressmen expressing various types of outrage in semi-novel ways regarding the fact that each CEO flew to Washington in a separate private jet.]
The media coverage did manage to convey a few things:
- All these big shot CEOs travel by private jet.
- The Big Three automakers support, directly and indirectly, some 2.5 million American jobs.
- These American car companies made a big mistake by focusing on gas-guzzlers on the assumption that oil prices would remain low indefinitely.
Everything else was clouded in some confusion – not all of which is the media’s fault. Many economists asserted that they would normally want the government to avoid bailing out these automakers, but in this economy, believed the government must act. Some opinion-makers blamed the automakers troubles primarily on union-negotiated legacy costs – on the various deferred wages and other forms of deferred compensation the automakers entered into contracts to provide. But what seemed lacking from either the Congressional hearings or the media coverage was any serious and sustained attention to the problems themselves.