Tag: New York Post

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Criticism New York City Politics The Opinionsphere

The Mayor’s Filthy Salt Habit

Mayor Bloomberg launched a health initiative last year aimed at reducing the city’s salt consumption leading to such memorable headlines as the New York Post‘s:

BLOOMY TO NYC: HOLD THE SALT

The other New York rag, the Daily News, quoted Bloomberg on the new salt initiative:

People are eating too much salt, me included. After this, we can keep going. People don’t like to have somebody come in and tell them what to do, but afterward, if it turns out to be something that’s in their interest, they sure as heck say thank you.

Michael Barbaro of the New York Times though gets the real skinny a year after this initiative is launched: the Mayor himself “dumps salt on almost everything, even saltine crackers.” Barbaro apparently has been watching the mayor in dining situations closely – even counting the number of dashes of salt applied to his pizza: 6. (Salt on pizza?! Really?). This paragraph is representative of the piece:

But Mr. Bloomberg, 67, likes his popcorn so salty that it burns others’ lips. (At Gracie Mansion, the cooks deliver it to him with a salt shaker.) He sprinkles so much salt on his morning bagel “that it’s like a pretzel,” said the manager at Viand, a Greek diner near Mr. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house.

There’s nothing wrong with a man – who admits his own faults – attempting to curb unhealthy behavior. But the many micro-initiatives to make New Yorkers healthier do end up getting on my nerves in a manner that makes me more sympathetic to Jacob Weisberg’s Slate piece.

[Image by the Center for American Progress licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Barack Obama Conservativism Criticism Domestic issues Economics Liberalism Libertarianism Political Philosophy Politics The Opinionsphere

Protests Against Liberals Running the Gov’t (cont.)

[digg-reddit-me]I should have made a bit more clear in my post yesterday that Andrew Sullivan was well aware of the contradictions within the right wing response to Obama – and had articulated a coherent response to them from his conservative, Oakshottian perspective earlier yesterday in a post I had printed out to read. He did reach a bit too far in seeing that particular silver lining to this movement though.

The main problem is that this right wing movement is still somewhat amorphous. Lydia DePillis of The New Republic had this dispatch from the D.C. protest this past weekend explaining the core complaint of the movement:

Their complaint? Hard to say, really. Some, like the contingent of coal miners in hard hats with anti-cap-and-trade signs, had a concrete beef with the administration. But for most, there was both an incredible specificity to their protestations–all those czars, and ACORN, and Obama’s missing birth certificate–and a fuzzy vagueness.

“We’re losing America,” said Kris, from Maryland. “Government is trying to take over everything.”

It’s one thing I have noticed as well – both the specificity of what they are outraged over and the sense that the tawdry specifics don’t explain the rising crescendo of outrage.

Matt Welch – editor in chief of Reason magazine – tried to defend the protestors against liberals attempts to write them off – and to defend them against charges of racism. He does so by misrepresenting two liberal responses to the protests and then knocking down the strawmen he creates – which is about par for the course in terms of New York Post op-eds, but I expect more of Welch whose work I often enjoy. Welch would have done better to explain what he found most of the protestors stood for, but I suspect he would have had the same difficulty DePillis did.

So, instead, he writes that “popular left blogger Josh Marshall reported from his armchair” that this was a “Small protest.” Welch declines to link to Marshall’s post saying such – probably because if he had, readers might have found that this was one in a series of posts by Marshall and others at the TalkingPointsMemo covering the size of the crowd, and that Marshall had concluded his post with the D.C. Fire Department’s estimate of 60,000 to 70,000 saying the protest was “smallish by big DC protest/event standards but definitely respectable.”

Welch then goes on to say that the Center for American Progress claimed that the protest was marred by “racist, radical portrayals of Obama.” Welch has this to say about the evidence presented by Think Progress:

Among the dozen or so pieces of evidence? A placard claiming, “Ayn Rand is right,” and one of President Obama with the caption, “When his lips move . . . he’s lying.”

Once again – an extremely misleading selection by Welch given the main signs focused on by the piece, including this one:

Welch could have made the argument that focusing on these people was misrepresenting the crowd – but instead he choose to made a much less defensible point.

Nothing Welch says challenges the point I made yesterday – that right wingers are fans of big government run by christianist right wingers, but wary of any type of government run by liberals, such that even pragmatic, incremental, modest Obamaism is seem as a radical assault on their children:

The protests aren’t about the size of government or its role; they are a viceral response to the fact that a liberal now runs the government. That frustration is rooted in cultural and social issues, rather than economic ones.

There are libertarians who legitimately object to big governmen (Ron Paul and Matt Welch himself come to mind), and I can respect their views even if I disagree – but they don’t seem to be well-represented in the Tea Party movement, in the Republican Party, in the bulk of the emotional resistance to Obama.

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Domestic issues Economics Politics The Opinionsphere

The Price of Panic

[digg-reddit-me]

Seeing this headline in the New York Post made me furious. The Democrats – and a number of Republicans – are insisting on some basic accountability measures and a pledge that they will be able to pass some sort of relief for those affected by the crisis who aren’t millionaires. Each of these requests is reasonable. The first request is absolutely essential. The Post‘s attempts to “stampede the herd” into accepting whatever it is Paulson wants are dangerous.

Everyone from Newt Gingrich to Paul Krugman to William Kristol to Matt Yglesias to NRO’s Yuval Levin has urged caution and some sort of oversight mechanism as the least.

The proposed bill would give Secretary Paulson authority to “take such actions as the Secretary deems necessary to carry out the authorities in this Act,” giving him extremely broad powers to unilaterally control the market in addition to the $700 billion. In addition to these dictatorial powers, Paulson would be granted legal immunity for all of his actions:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Although I doubt Paulson would use this crisis to personally profit – nothing in the law would prevent him. And if he did, no action could be taken against him. This is incredibly reckless.

This law would remain in effect for two years – which would allow Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury as well as Paulson to, in exercising authority under this law, do virtually anything and be immune from any consequences.

This is how the Patriot Act was pushed through Congress in the dead of night, with no one reading the weighty tome. This is how democracies are given away in a moment of crisis, in that Roman tradition of granting a temporary dictatorship over Rome until a crisis passes. Power is never given away easily – and so, in the end, the democracy with temporary dictators became a permanent dictatorship. In this age of terrorism and globalization, the crisis is never fully past us; and a new one is always on the horizon.

I don’t think anyone has any definite idea about what will work in this situation. And this is a time for pragmatism, not ideology. But even – and especially – in a crisis, there must be accountability and limits. This fear-mongering by the Post and other Republican puppets represents the worst impulse we can have at this time. We must act quickly but deliberately – because in our understandable haste, we might accidentally give away more than we intend.

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Criticism Humor Law

Kinky details enclosed…

Sexual harassment attorney accused of sexual harassment!!  With kinky details enclosed – it’s a perfect tabloid story. Both New York papers took a similar angle for the lede…

Jose Martinez’s lede from the New York Daily News:

The founder of a Manhattan law firm dedicated to empowering women is a chauvinist pig with pierced genitals who wore a bondage collar at work…an explosive new suit charges. [Ellipses added for dramatic effect.]

Under the headline “ANTI-BIAS CRUSADER HAS ‘KINK’ IN ARMOR“, Dan Mangan’s New York Post lede is virtually identical:

A leading lower Manhattan women’s-rights lawyer watched porn at his desk, discussed his “pierced genitalia” and wears a “slave” collar at work as part of a sadomasochistic relationship with his girlfriend…a shocking sex- harassment suit alleges. [Ellipses added for dramatic effect.]

I personally have seen how the Daily News and Post have made up bogus facts to bolster their stories, so I don’t know what to make of this.  Most important, their ledes are dishonest – while factually accurate.  From a distance – where I am, it’s kind of funny to see the detailed allegations laid out with the disclaimer briefly hanging onto the sentence at the end – but for those involved it must be infuriating.

Continue reading “Kinky details enclosed…”