Lead and Gold

Emperor Romney has no clothes

2012-01-12T14:35:00.003-05:00

Why Is Romney Seen as Electable?

RINO Romney Is the Least Electable

Previously:

Numbers that should scare Mitt Romney and the tools at Fox News

The naive faith of the MSM

2012-01-12T14:19:00.001-05:00

The Chump Effect

Yet the allure of “science” is too strong for our journalists to resist: all those numbers, those equations, those fancy names (say it twice: the Self-Activation Effect), all those experts with Ph.D.’s!

To their credit, the Stapel scandal has moved a few social psychologists to self-reflection. They note the unhealthy relationship between social psychologists and the journalists who bring them attention—each using the other to fill a professional need. “Psychology,” one methodologist told the Chronicle of Higher Education, “has become addicted to surprising, counter-intuitive findings that catch the news media’s eye.”

That’s a scandal, all right. Stapel’s professional treachery is a scandal, too. But the biggest scandal is that the chumps took him seriously in the first place.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-24T20:48:00.000-05:00

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Luke 2:8-14

Good Point

2011-12-05T13:43:00.001-05:00

Tebow’s Religion, and Ours

In short, people aren’t upset at Tebow’s God talk. They’re upset that he might actually believe it.

Inexplicable

2011-11-22T15:29:00.001-05:00

Obama Admin Bans US Aircraft Maker, Favors Non-US Firm with Ties to Iran on Light Aircraft Project

Almost a half century ago

2011-11-22T13:49:00.001-05:00

The Assassination of John F. Kennedy – 48 Years On

Wisdom in 140 characters

2011-11-01T15:43:00.000-04:00

　'The Kim Kardashian definition of 'forever' is 'when the check is cashed. '

Quoted here.

Tweeted here.

Not good

2011-10-27T11:56:00.000-04:00

Secret MI6 documents warn about al-Qaeda-linked Libyan rebels

What is the lesson of Libya?

2011-10-21T11:05:00.000-04:00

Jerry Pournelle:

One lesson to be learned is, DO NOT LOSE if you are in the dictator business. The US will borrow money to furnish the Brits, French, and Italians with the means to kill you. Understand that, and be sure that you have the means for defending yourself. The more strategic your country the more important it will be to have defenses including personal defenses. Another lesson is, do not renounce your nukes. Get some. Get at least one and let it be known that it will detonate if you don’t talk to it at daily intervals.

Verum Serum made this point back in July:

Why, for instance, would Iran give up its nuclear program if the result is to wind up the focus of a Libya-style bombing spree once they’ve capitulated?

"The most tragic figure ever to wear a Major League uniform"

2011-10-21T10:47:00.000-04:00

also had one of the greatest World Series ever.

Joe Guzzardi has the story.

"Old Pete” Handcuffs the Yankees

"I never want to say the word 'I should have'"

2011-10-20T14:52:00.001-04:00

Words to live by.

Found here:

Boatlifters: The unknown story of 9/11
The captains and crew of the fleet of boats who rescued so many on 9/11 came together with no idea what they would be getting into and no idea whether Manhattan would be attacked again let alone their very own boats. All they knew were that desperate people were in need of help and they couldn’t turn their backs on them, even if that meant putting their own lives at risk.

The boatlift was larger than Dunkirk. It is a mystery to me why it is almost unknown.

History is inspiring. Bravery is inspiring. It is shameful we no longer teach this to our children.

David Gelernter, Drawing Life

Honest and astute

2011-10-20T12:12:00.000-04:00

R.I.P., America’s liberal-media elite

Someday, cultural historians will look back on the early 21st century and speculate about what killed the credibility of America’s so-called liberal-media elite.

They will ask, Were the wounds self-inflicted or the product of a methodical plot?

Make no mistake about it. We did this to ourselves.

Hmm........

2011-10-20T11:42:00.002-04:00

"What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?"

"A saint," said Father Brown.

G. K. Chesterton, "The Flying Stars"

A point that cannot be repeated too often

2011-10-20T06:16:00.002-04:00

From the Columbia Journalism Review:

The Democratic Party has had it both ways for nearly two decades since the ascendance of Rubinomics turned Wall Street into a powerful constituency for both political parties. Not coincidentally, Bill Clinton's installation of a Wall Street-friendly economic team also resulted in weakened Wall Street oversight, the actual prevention of oversight, and even an abandonment of it altogether in the case of Traveler's merger with Citigroup (which would go on to pay Robert Rubin $115 million for doing... well, not much).

A catastrophic failure of imagination

2011-10-19T16:19:00.000-04:00

Joseph Lawler makes a critical point about the October 2008 crash and Henry Paulson's handling of it:

Why did Treasury and the Fed allow Lehman Bros. to collapse after they'd bailed out Fannie and Freddie and facilitated the sale of Bear Stearns?

Paulson does not say. The line at the time was that Treasury had no legal authority to intervene, but that was the extent of the information officials gave out. Paulson tells a long story (which has its own problems) about his efforts to coax different banks into buying Lehman, and then concludes with this: "Some in the group asked if we should revisit the idea of putting public money into Lehman, but Tim said there was no authority to do that."

Again, note the reduction of an impossibly complicated issue -- whether regulators had the legal authority to bail out Lehman -- into a impromptu conversation with a first-name-basis friend.

This is one example of a recurrent theme in the financial crisis: a handful of men (in Washington and New York) grappling with the crisis on an ad hoc basis. As Lawler puts it:

huge decisions determining the fates of endlessly complex institutions are gamed out in the crudest of terms by two pals in conversations depicted with a level of detail, dramatic tension, and moral awareness that would be better suited for a Sesame Street segment about cooperation.

The common rationalization is that the mortgage and derivative meltdown was a "black swan event" that surprised the key players and caught them unprepared.

This excuse calls to mind the 9/11 Commission's words:

Across the government, there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.

The most important failure was one of imagination.

Maybe Wall Street and the Treasury accept the frenzied search for ad hoc stop gaps as the best way to hand a crisis. Not every organization shares this tolerance for hyperkinetic amateurism.

The military has a well stocked toolbox that they use to anticipate the unexpected and to build resilience for when anticipation fails. As Colin Gray put it:

General Dwight D. Eisenhower once observed, the principal value of military planning is not to produce ahead of time the perfect plan, but rather to train planners who can adjust and adapt to changing circumstances as they emerge.

I hope some one at Treasury is gaming out some of the doomsday scenarios that stalk our nightmares. I said hope, because i've not seen any reports of such proactive preparations.

2011-10-18T18:02:00.000-04:00

Gary Hamel via twitter:

Both Tea Partiers and the Occupy rabble have a point. Politicians built the debt bomb (via SEC and Fannie) & then the bankers detonated it.

Numbers that should scare Mitt Romney and the tools at Fox News (Updated)

2011-10-18T11:35:00.003-04:00

New Yorkers support anti-Wall Street protests

The relentless campaign of demonization isn't working. Even 35% of republicans in New York say they support the protesters.

These numbers also suggest that Romney could be terribly vulnerable to Obama in the general election. Big donors might like his resume, but voters might find it repellent. His personal connections to outsourcing, Wall Street, and management snake oil could prove fatal.

I think we might have seen a a preview of the problem here in Pennsylvania in 2010. At the end of the campaign, the Sestak campaign hit Pat Toomey hard on the "jobs to China" issue. It seemed to get traction. Toomey ran 3.5 percentage points behind Corbett (the Republican candidate for governor). He squeaked out a win (51%-49%) against an underfunded candidate in a profoundly Republican year.

So it looks like Pennsylvania is out of reach for Romney.

Even more scary for the GOP is the way that Toomey under-performed across the board. He trailed Corbett in blue-collar Democratic counties like Allegheny and Beaver. He also saw a similar drop-off in hard-core conservative areas like Adams and Armstrong counties.

That suggests to me that Romney might have a problem recapturing all the Bush states that flipped in 2008 (like Ohio).

UPDATE:
Ben Stein :

On the way home from the doctor today, though, on the radio news, I heard President Obama dropping the "g" sound at the end of his sentences the way he does when he thinks he's addressing working people. When he thinks he's addressing business people, he keeps in the "g" sound. That's politics. He could be a lot worse.

Just so you know, we don't have anyone who can beat him. Get used to him.

HT: Sense of Events

A one per center advises OWS

2011-10-17T10:55:00.002-04:00

Unlike the glib and stupid "get a job you dirty hippie" refrain of the professional right, Mark Cuban shares the frustrations of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. Even better, his ideas should make sense to a lot of Main Street conservatives.

Heh

2011-10-17T09:11:00.000-04:00

Insty on Herman Cain's MTP appearance:

what I noticed is that David Gregory doesn’t seem to understand the difference between state taxes and federal taxes....

If Sarah Palin made such an error, it would be seen as proof that she was unfit for the national stage. For Gregory, well . . . draw your own conclusions.

And now for something completely different

2011-10-14T14:00:00.001-04:00

Boy friends as positional goods

Steve Sailer

Similarly, the gay male writers behind Sex and the City started with Fielding's spoof of "urban families" of stylish single women who undermine each other's chances of landing a husband by constantly gathering over drinks to nitpick their boyfriends, and turned these mutually-destructive circles into a fantasy about friendship.

It was never actually about female solidarity, but about female competition for alpha males like Mr. Big. Nevertheless, women hate to be seen as competitive, so "Sex and the City" displayed the nice side of cliquishness, minus the nasty side: these social X-rays wouldn't be seen dead in the company of 99 percent of their fans.

All Dreher all the time

2011-10-14T11:43:00.000-04:00

Given my pessimism about the economy and the cynical politics that co-opts popular discontent and diverts political action into a morass of pointless food-fights, i've grown tired of most poli-blogging and conventional nano-punditry.

Actually, i've been tired of it for a long time. I wrote this five and half year ago:

There are plenty of blogs that have good traffic and run on autopilot. They start out with the premise that Rummy is always right or that Bush is the worst president in history. They make liberal use of "wingnut' and "moonbat". They link to other sites just like their own blogs. Each community of blogs has a ready-made readership of intense partisans who like shallow arguments.

In his book The Fifth Discipline Peter Senge distinguishes between discussion and dialogue. Discussion (which is linguistically related to concussion and percussion) is about scoring points, winning, having our viewpoint prevail. Dialogue is a means of learning together. The blogosphere is increasingly about discussion and not dialogue.

What was once boring is almost intolerable now given the monumental problems the nation faces.

A bright exception to this situation is Rod Dreher. In his blogging he is honestly trying to find workable solutions to the crisis that besets us. Although he is a conservative, he is willing to engage the arguments of liberal and left thinkers. Even more admirable is his willingness to understand those (like the public faces of Occupy Wall Street) whose solutions are wrong-headed but who are honestly dealing with real issues.

By all means check him out here.

Fighting the good fight

2011-10-14T11:14:00.000-04:00

W. Joseph Campbell wrote an interesting and important book: Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism. Said book demolishes many of the media stories that we all take for granted. For example, there was no widespread panic when Orson Welles broadcast War of the Worlds in 1938. Nor did Woodward and Bernstein "bring down Nixon" with their "Watergate" reporting.

A truth-seekers work is never done. Campbell has a website which catches journalists repeating these "media myths" and corrects the record.

It's kind of disheartening to see the same errors repeated over and over again. But, at least some one is trying to get the truth out.

Media Myth Alert

What hath Murdoch wrought (II)

2011-10-13T07:28:00.001-04:00

One of those eternal media puzzles. How is it that Greg Gutfeld is on Fox News three hours every day? A failed magazine editor is supposed to be FNC's answer to John Stewart?

The Five is so bad it makes me miss Glenn Beck.

Previously:

The Case for Right-Wing Tennis Elbow

Howard Kurtz as perceptive as ever

2011-10-12T19:21:00.001-04:00

Kurtz on Sunday's Reliable Sources

You had well-known commentators on the right like David Frum, Kathleen Parker, and others

David Frum on Wednesday

I have to recognize that my views are not very representative of the conservative mainstream.

Three wasted years

2011-10-12T11:50:00.000-04:00

I'm deeply pessimistic about the economy for two reasons:

1. President Obama may be re-elected.

2. President Obama may be defeated

I've already discussed the key failure of Obama's economic policies. His administration treated the financial crisis as a political opportunity rather than a grievous problem that demanded their full attention and bold action.

It is now painfully clear that the Republican candidates have no appetite to deal with the serious problems that still weigh on the economy. They are counting on Obama's unpopularity to carry them to victory in 2012. The programs they offer are little more than warmed over talking points.

Pundits on both sides spend their time attacking and mocking their opponents. Precious few voices address the critical issues in an honest fashion; everything is reduced to the thrust and parry of partisan "debate". We can already see the outlines of the 2012 campaign. Fox News will mock Occupy Wall Street as clueless dirty hippies while most of the MSM will portray the Tea Parties as ignorant fanatics who are the tools of the Koch brothers and other dangerous plutocrats.

It seems like a bizarre game. Unfortunately, the stakes are high.

I wonder, if Lincoln gave his Cooper Union speech in a media world like out own, would he have become president? Or is it the fault of the candidates? Is there a Republican in Washington who could write a speech half as good as the one that brought Abe to the White House?

Related: Megan McArdle suggests that we take an honest look at the impulse behind OWS. This was especially on point:

When the gap between the number of job openings and the number of people who are out of work is so large, there are going to be a hefty number of unemployed people. Maybe these people individually could have done more to get themselves out of their situation, but at the macro level, that would just have meant that someone else was out of work and suffering.

HT: To Rod Dreher who has an interesting discussion going in his comment thread.