Herein, the glass half-full

Here is a rosy portrait of American life a third through '09, and I want to agree with it. Yet, while agreeing with it, I tend to be bearish on the author's sentiments. From what I see not only in the national media, but in the local media and the unscientific petri dishes like my Facebook feed, I think Capitalism as it can and should be is becoming a lost cause. 

My first concern was how many intelligent, college-educated, high-earners I know who were so enthusiastic about The Dear Leader's campaign, his innauguration, and currently, his regi- er, Administration. If we can't rely on private sector earners to watch out for their own self-interest, then I'd say we're fuct. I know several Obamacons who now regret their brush with dystopic idealism, but that cat's already shat the bed, to mix a few metas and run them round the old oak tree. 

I'm pessimistic about the outlook of the author. I think if people who earn their coin in the free-market find anything - and I mean absoultely anything - appealing about a Statist like Obama, then the wall's already been written upon. My politics are on the margins, this I freely admit. Yet I make no apologies for Capitalism or free-market Conservatism, and to see so many people who make their living from it abandon it for notions of Hope is not only distressing, it is epistemologically catastrophic. Put another way, the narrowing majority of us who actually pay Federal Income Taxes have reaped what we've sown. We've elected a Sexiest Man Alive when a Pragmatically Acceptable Living Person would have sufficed. 

Before getting to the blood, I will admit this: Arthur C. Brooks is dead-on when it comes to defining the "battle" regarding what it is and what it ain't - it's not abortion or gay marriage or immigration, it's about money and what we who've earned it can and cannot do with it; in short, the culture war was, is and remains about the fate of Capitalism. It will perish not with a bang, but with the thousand whimpers of those who thought there was a better way. The bed is made, now we can rot in it. 

Enough of the negativity. Here's what the author had to say in the WSJ:

Still, the tea parties are not based on the cold wonkery of budget data. They are based on an "ethical populism." The protesters are homeowners who didn't walk away from their mortgages, small business owners who don't want corporate welfare and bankers who kept their heads during the frenzy and don't need bailouts. They were the people who were doing the important things right -- and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong.

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Hell yeah - the tour is finally close. 

The Dear Leader notices things

Funny. 

Laying his plan for a President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Obama began to name the members of PCAST listed in his prepared remarks – before realizing he’d already introduced them, earlier in his speech. 

“In addition to John – sorry, the – I just noticed I jumped the gun here,” Obama said, pausing for several seconds as he looked at the prompter. “Go ahead. Move it up. I had already introduced all you guys.” 

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My latest is on the decline and fall of Conde Naste Portfolio. 

PJ O'Rourke goodness

PJ O'Rourke is the rare treasure of modern American letters - the great wit and thinker who only shares his thoughts on occasion as opposed to occasionally each day. Like Hitchens and Paglia, he sees no need to keep us updated on his every thought - as a man who does update whomever wants to know on his latest thought, I admire this. PJ is what Hunter Thompson could have been. Oh well.  His latest is wonderful. My favorite passage?

t's going to be hard to do a worse job running America than the Republicans did, but the Democrats can do it if anyone can.The Left is the party of government activism - the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, slimmer, taller, and take a dozen strokes off your golf game.The Right is the party that says government doesn't work. And then they get elected and prove it.

Excellent essay

Another find at Big Hollywood leading to elsewhere. The salient passage:

Our enemies bomb restaurants, shopping malls and night clubs, shoot their own citizens in soccer stadiums, behead Americans on the internet, fly planes into buildings, imprison or shoot their citizens who speak out against the government, threaten to vaporize Israel off the planet and who knows what else. Yet we have these 4 pompous freaks wanting to criminalize sticking a guy's head under water in a bathtub?

Funny

John Nolte over at Big Hollywood posted this hysterical review of Earth, another piece of Greenuism propaganda. My favorite line is the first:

Anyone who’s figured out that Global Warming is socialism disguised as nonsense will immediately understand why DisneyNature’s “Earth” was dropped into theatres and aimed at your children on Earth Day. 

In civil rights news...

I don't remember The Dear Leader campaigning on a platform of not allowing suspects in a crime access to an attorney until the trial begins. Wonder how I missed that? 

In other news, Democrats still hate children

This kerfuffle has been brewing for some time, and if it actually happens, I expect to see Obama fiddle while Washington burns. Of the 200 children who will be directly affected, consider that three of them attend school with his two props/daughters at the Quaker snobatorium, Sidwell Friends. Fear not for those girls - rest assured that headline-grabbers like Hitchens or gazillionaire limosouine liberals who despise bad publicity will pay for the three girls all the way through their Womyn's Studies grad courses at Brown. 

School vouchers are, frankly, almost frivolous in budgetary terms. More astonishing, they are supported by the vast swaths of voters who are not linked by syringe to a union. But after the debt he owes to Planned Parenthood, The Dear Leader's blood pact with the NEA is the strongest. Nobody raised more grassroots money for him, and there is nothing that disturbs the NEA more than children getting a decent education, especially if that education takes place outside the walls of a public education prison. There are several premises to this theory of children not being educated in public schools; one presumes that the NEA's strongest argument lay in that it makes it much more difficult for their female teachers to rape the male children. Anyway, Juan Williams unloads:

And all along the administration indicated that pending evidence that this voucher program or any other produces better test scores for students they were willing to fight for it. The president has said that when it comes to better schools he is open to supporting “what works for kids.” That looked like a level playing field on which to evaluate the program and even possibly expanding the program.

But last week Secretary Duncan announced that he will not allow any new students to enter the D.C. voucher program. In fact, he had to take back the government’s offer of scholarships to 200 students who had won a lottery to get into the program starting next year. His rationale is that if the program does not win new funding from Congress then those students might have to go back to public school in a year.

He does not want to give the students a chance for a year in a better school? That does not make sense if the students and their families want that life-line of hope. It does not make sense if there is a real chance that the program might win new funding as parents, educators and politicians rally to undo the “bigotry of low expectations” and open doors of opportunity — wherever they exist — for more low-income students.

This actually is change I can beleive in

Found this over at HotAir. One thing I'd like to see out of The Dear Leader's four-year stay in the White House is a drastic relaxation of American drug laws. I'm not a drug user, but frankly, the prohibition of many illegal drugs - especially marijuana - is absurd. 

Where do I sign up? 

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Regarding the tenth anniversary of the Columbine massacre. 

Well, you have to admit it's change

I wonder if Phil Connors is now working for The AP. I have made my disgust for the MSM and the AP known, but this is one dilly of a pickle that made it across the wire:

While historic analogies are never perfect, Obama's stark efforts to change the U.S. image abroad are reminiscent of the stunning realignments sought by former Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev. During his short—by Soviet standards—tenure, he scrambled incessantly to shed the ideological entanglements that were leading the communist empire toward ruin.

But Obama is outpacing even Gorbachev. After just three months in power, the new American leader has, among many other things:

—Admitted to Europeans that America deserves at least part of the blame for the world's financial crisis because it did not regulate high-flying and greedy Wall Street gamblers.

—Told the Russians he wants to reset relations that fell to Cold War-style levels under his predecessor, George W. Bush.

—Asked NATO for more help in the fight in Afghanistan, and, not getting much, did not castigate alliance partners.

—Lifted some restrictions on Cuban Americans' travel to their communist homeland and eased rules on sending wages back to families there.

—Shook hands with, more than once, and accepted a book from Hugo Chavez, the virulently anti-American leader of oil-richVenezuela.

—Said America's appetite for illegal drugs and its lax control of the flow of guns and cash to Mexico were partly to blame for the drug-lord-inspired violence that is rattling the southern U.S. neighbor.

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Regarding Susan Boyle. 

Steyn's latest on the Tea Parties

As always, quite fun. 

Amid his scattershot pronouncements on everything from global nuclear disarmament to high-speed rail, President Obama said something almost interesting the other day. Decrying a “monstrous tax code that is far too complicated for most Americans to understand,” the Tax-Collector-in-Chief pledged: “I want every American to know that we will rewrite the tax code so that it puts your interests over any special interests.”

That shouldn’t be hard. A tax code that put my interests over any special interests would read: “How much did you earn last year? [Insert number here] thousand dollars? Hey, feel free to keep it. You know your interests better than we do!”

Okay, to be less absolutist about it, my interests include finding a road at the end of my drive every morning, and modern equipment for the (volunteer) fire department, and a functioning military to deter the many predators out there, and maybe one or two other things. But 95 percent of the rest is not just “special interests” but social engineering — a $400 tax credit for falling into line with Barack Obama and Susan Roesgen. That’s why these are Tea Parties — because the heart of the matter is the same question posed two-and-a-third centuries ago: Are Americans subjects or citizens? If the latter, then a benign sovereign should not be determining “your interests” and then announcing that he’s giving you a “tax credit” as your pocket money.

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You can read my latest column about Igor and animal rights here. 

Gotta love Ann

I wrote about this in my recap of the OKC Tea Party, and Ann Coulter picks up on it in her weekly column today.

Coulter zeroes in on the "tea bagging" humor that has wafted dandelion spores from MSNBC to pretty much everyone who watches MSNBC, including too many people on my Facebook feed. What is so funny about the stupidity of the terms "teabag, tea-baggers and tea-bagging" is that it is is the perfect watermark to indicate, in person or online, you are hearing commentary from the hosts at MSNBC (and that includes you, Mr. A Cooper), only retold without credit by a person far less clever, which isn't saying much. Read it here. 

On MSNBC, hosts Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have been tittering over the similarity of the name "tea parties" to an obscure homosexual sexual practice known as "tea bagging." Night after night, they sneer at Republicans for being so stupid as to call their rallies "tea bagging." 

Every host on Air America and every unbathed, basement-dwelling loser on the left wing blogosphere has spent the last week making jokes about tea bagging, a practice they show a surprising degree of familiarity with. 

Except no one is calling the tea parties "tea bagging" -- except Olbermann and Maddow. Republicans call them "tea parties." 

But if the Republicans were calling them "tea-bagging parties," the MSNBC hosts would have a fantastically hilarious segment for viewers in San Francisco and the West Village and not anyplace else in the rest of the country. On the other hand, they're not called "tea-bagging parties." (That, of course refers to the cocktail hour at Barney Frank's condo in Georgetown.) 

VIDEO: OKC TEA PARTY

Here is a quick video the OKC Tea Party right before it got started taken from the steps of the Capitol. Sorry for the shaky-cam feel, but it was the first time I've used my Flip camera. I don't have a stake in the company, but it's quite easy to use and you can see, the quality is good. 

I posted my first column about going to the Tea Party here. I'm sure there'll be more. 

Just to be clear...

Like many, I was ambivalent about abortion throghout my college years, and like most, I'd made up my mind by the end of said years. I know the debate from both sides, but - and this is no way to win an argument - I'm forever creeped out by the arguments pro-abortion people make. They fetishize and ethicize the ending of human life, and that's rather creepy. A widely circulated piece regarding the same:

We all frequently experience ambivalence when faced with a deep and life-changing crossroads in our lives, and the choice of an abortion is an example of that. Women can feel initial sadness, but simultaneously know what she needs to do, that the abortion is the absolute best choice, and ultimately feel resolution, peace, and pride. In fact, many women do feel goodness, empowerment, increased self-esteem, and pride in the wisdom and the awareness that they took control of a frequently chaotic situation - unwanted pregnancy - and made a moral and ethical decision that was beneficial for their lives, their futures, and, ultimately, was also good for society.

Human kindness

I'm not a touchy-feely person, and I'm not moved when people are surprised that animals demonstrate many human-like qualities such as empathy, fear, pain, rage, intelligence and deductive reasoning. As a defender of a wide range of animal rights, I'm always surprised that people had never noticed these qualities before. 

I am forever surprised by human kindness that is either immaterial or irrational. 

Here is a link to a social experiment. It's making the rounds at HotAir, and it is fascinating. An arts student assembled a 10-inch tall cardboard robot and filmed it with a hidden camera as it made its way through Washington Square Park in NYC. It is fascinating to watch one person after another help it out of a jam (pothole, immovable object etc).  The robot is crude and cute. It is a couple of cardboard boxes, and for its face we have the classic "smiley face." It also has a pennant attached to a staff that comes out of its back. 

What interests me - and I just watched this - is what is it that compels the people to help? Except to its maker, there would be little cruel about either leaving it be or, for that matter, destroying it (again, except to its maker). I'm quite surprised it wasn't stolen. Anyway, it's quite interesting. 

Don't do it!

Hong Kong has been the freest economy in the world for more than a decade (probably longer, but most surveys on the subject don't go back a long way). The Index of Economic Freedom has listed it as the freest for 14 consecutive years. A must-read piece by John C. Goodman over at NRO discusses what the Adminsitrative State is doing to kill capitalism's paradise by "death from a thousand cuts." Goodman describes a Hong Kong that few people hear about - the large government benefits, especially in health care - but most chilling for me is the institution of a minimum wage, that is coming soon. No free economy can survive wage controls on one end and collective bargaining on the other and stay free for long. 

Ironically, the biggest problem is: The people of Hong Kong are just like us! They don’t understand free enterprise any more than Americans understand it. They are no more dedicated to it than we are. They do not think of free-market capitalism as a moral and ethical ideal any more than Americans or Europeans think of it that way.

True enough, people in Hong Kong are aware that theirs has been named the freest economy in the world, and they are proud of that fact — even though capitalism was handed to them by a colonial government that no one in Hong Kong ever voted for. But from what I can tell, they would be perfectly willing to let it die a death of a thousand cuts — just as the rest of the developed world has done.

All signs point in the wrong direction. The government is about to impose Hong Kong’s first minimum-wage law. It is pushing for expansion of the public sector in health care. And when the welfare cash allowances described above were reduced recently, almost all the members of the elected Legislative Council (which acts in an advisory role) protested the move.

Now, for some good news

About damn time, and good for him, if the report is accurate.

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama twice authorized the military to rescue a U.S. captain held by Somali pirates and whose life appeared to be at risk.

Atlas is shrugging

I wonder if Gov. Patterson is happy to see these people leave? 

“After 10 years, I did not see a future for myself,” said Mr. Jung, 42, who quit to parlay his sales expertise into a career at Aladdin Capital, a small but rising investment firm run by others who had also left some of the most venerable names in finance.

There is an air of exodus on Wall Street — and not just among those being fired. As Washington cracks down on compensation and tightens regulation of banks, a brain drain is occurring at some of the biggest ones. They are some of the same banks blamed for setting off the worst downturn since the Depression.

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Sunday morning jam session: bags, Kanye, South Park and Lohan

Meghan McCain and stuff

6000 words about taxes, Taylor Swift and Game Theory

Yeah, it's CBK.com update fun. 

Read my take on Taylor Swift's remarkable album here. 

Read my take on Dollhouse and its embrace and manipulation of Game Theory here. 

Read about why I'm taking off work and attending the Tax Day Tea Party here. 

Blogging Atlas Shrugged returns with a Danneskjoldian vengance tomorrow. To the observers, Happy Easter. 

Ragnaar is screaming

Here's an excerpt of Mark Steyn's latest at NRO. Before getting to it, though, a word about the pirates, who have now taken a second American vessel, this time a tugboat with 16 people on board. 

I was not aware that merchant ships, due to one treaty or another, have been completely unarmed for some time. This seems rather, um, insane to me, chugging across the Indian or the Pacific with millions of dollars worth of merchandise without a couple of guns, or, I dunno, bazookas. If you want to know the dangers of bad people knowing you are unarmed, you need only to witness the Great Pirate Outbreak of '08-'09. Small vessels carrying savages from a third-world hell-hole are taking over massive ships using, you guessed it, guns. 

The lesson isn't difficult. People with guns, no matter how unrefined, uncivilized and disenfranchised, tell people who don't have guns what to do. This is zero sum. As The Dear Leader dreams of a world without nukes, those of us who are not categorically batshit recognize that nukes did not exist when Adolf Hitler came to power, but it took only two of them to make the Empire of Japan rethink its position. The People's Republic of Korea and Iran certainly seem to understand the joys of nukes, as they are both moving as quickly as possible to get them. 

Weapons keep dishonest people honest, and the absence of guns in the hands of some but not others orders a two-class system: those who prey, and those upon whom they prey. It's quite simple. 

Now, from Steyn:

As it happens, Somali piracy is not a distraction, but a glimpse of the world the day after tomorrow. In my book America Alone, I quote Robert D. Kaplan referring to the lawless fringes of the map as “Indian Territory.” It’s a droll jest but a misleading one, since the very phrase presumes that the badlands will one day be brought within the bounds of the ordered world. In fact, a lot of today’s badlands were relatively ordered not so long ago, and many of them are getting badder and badder by the day. Half a century back, Somaliland was a couple of sleepy colonies, British and Italian, poor but functioning. Then it became a state, and then a failed state, and now the husk of a nation is a convenient squat from which to make mischief. According to Chatham House in London, Somali pirates made about $30 million in ransom and booty last year. Thirty mil goes a long way in Somalia, making piracy a very attractive proposition.

Great piece by Andrew McCarthy at NRO

An exceptional column, and the link in the except below goes to a great WSJ piece. 

That’s not our position anymore. The scourge of piracy was virtually wiped out in 19th century because its practitioners were regarded as barbarians — enemies of the human race (hostis humani generis, as Bret Stephens recently reminded us in a brilliant Wall Street Journal essay). They derived no comfort from the rule of law, for it was not a mark of civilization to give them comfort. The same is true of unlawful enemy combatants, terrorists who scoffed at the customs of civilized warfare. To regard them as mere criminals, to assume the duty of trying to understand why they would brutalize innocents, to arm them with rights against civilized society, was not civilized.

Atlas is shrugging

Want to know how to empty a city's braindump and watch it crumble? Like Detroit, you can allow organized labor to collectively bargain itself out of a baron to rob, or like New York, you can tax people to the point that the joys of city life are no longer fiscally responsible.

Much ado was made about Rush Limbaugh's decision to sell his properties in New York and not spend another day there (he only spent three weeks a year there - he lives in Florida, which has no state tax). What will be interesting is how many other mega-earners will follow suit. New York is trickle-down taxation - fewer and fewer high earners are paying for services for low- or non-earners, and now, with the highest tax rate in the country, expect to see the brainpower flee. 

Enough is enough. 

But who and where are all these millionaires to pluck? More than any other state, New York has been hurt by the financial meltdown, and its $132 billion budget is now $17.7 billion in deficit. The days of high-roller Wall Street bonuses that finance 20% of the New York budget are long gone. The richest 1% of New Yorkers already pay almost 40% of the income tax, and the top 0.5% pay 30%.

Well said, from another fan of the Austrian school

Long, but beautiful. 

I would note that the same people Robert Stacy McCain cites (Hayek, Mises, Friedman and Rand) are the same people who have influenced so much of my thinking (as a freedom-loving libertine, I'd be remiss if I didn't note that de Sade, Dostoevsky and Paglia have also influenced said thinking). I would venture that most people are intimidated by their work because - frankly - they have unusual names. 

Yet - to use a favorite method of devout Christians, and no disrespect is intended by that remark - one can open "The Road to Serfdom" to any page and find wisdom that is breathtaking. Forget the Limbaugh Challenge, I would ask anyone who despises free markets and how people behave when participating in them to read "The Road to Serfdom" or Friedman's "Free to Choose" (or, for a more modern take, Norberg's "In Defense of Global Capitalism" or Sowell's "Basic Economics" or "Black Rednecks and White Liberals") and see if they still think the same way. 

By virtue of going to college, I've been exposed to the most lauded progressive thinkers, and by virtue of intellectual curiosity, I've read many more on my own. Strangely, it's reading the thinkers to the left of me that have cemented my views on the right. A severe problem on the Left when it comes to thinking is that it believes by listening to Ann Coulter on Hannity while chewing on five minutes of a three-hour Rush Limbaugh they've found some missing link to understanding Conservatives. I love both, but Conservatism in America - especially in economics - blossomed around the thinkers mentioned herein, and oh so many more that came before them. 

What Mises, Hayek and others of the Austrian school patiently demonstrated was that socialism (Marxian or otherwise) is based on a fundamental fallacy that ultimately makes socialism unworkable in practice. Socialism -- the "planned economy," as Hayek often described it -- neglects the function of prices as information by which individuals make their own economic decisions.

Krauthammer goodness

Nice read here. Excerpt:

When Austria is mocking you, you're having a bad week. Yet who can blame Frau Fekter, considering the disdain Obama showed his own country while on foreign soil, acting the philosopher-king who hovers above the fray mediating between his renegade homeland and an otherwise warm and welcoming world?

After all, it was Obama, not some envious anti-American leader, who noted with satisfaction that a new financial order is being created today by 20 countries, rather than by "just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy." 

To be a fly on the, er, picnic table at this brainstorming session

Nothing to see hear people, just the POTUS and the SOS sifting through the rules of Chinese Freeze Tag to see if a boy freeing a girl by crawling through her legs is gender-neutral or constitutes sexual harassment. No word yet if the POTUS's daughters are allowed to play pirate. 

New one at the flagship

Regarding that POTUS bow and other addictions here...

Atlas casting once more

Notes from a pro...

#1: Since the book already a has a following and is now back on the bestseller list, the movie has a built in audience. You don’t really need to cast the Hollywood heavyweights. So, let’s forget about Angelina and mainstream Hollywood for a moment and cast it with no names. OK, maybe the talented lesser known named Hollywooders. Then let’s go to Broadway where the cream of the crop actor’s are, as well as regionally where you’d be sure to find some amazing undiscovered talent. Assuming the screenplay follows the book and the director respects the material, casting stage actors is the cherry on top of this scenario. 

Linguistial fortitude

Nice:

 We know boiling frogs we cannot by frogs dropped in water that's hot--  They'll jump from the pan, but boil them we can when water's first cold 'stead of hot.  Succeeding in ways Machiavellian without causing leaps to rebellion requires cool linguistics so languages transfixes perceptions that might cause rebellion.

Mystics and Skeptics collide again!

Sounds like an interesting debate - look forward to watching the video...

While most of us are familiar with Christopher Hitchens, many people may not know of his opponent Dr. William Lane Craig. I simply call him, “The smartest living Christian.” Like Hitchens, Dr. Craig makes a good living at debate. Dr. Craig is a brilliant logician and eloquent advocate of the faith. He is an “evidentialist” in that he argues for the existence of God based on evidence not presupposition (which is another popular form used in debate).

The anti-Black Swan?

Some practical wisdom, not even hindsight.

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

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Watched Twilight last night. Yeah, this oughta be good. 

Still shrugging

It's disturbing and revelatory that the most coherent writing, speaking and thinking about these times is coming directly from Westerners who are being suffocated in the very type of society The Dear Leader is attempting to create. From Jeff Randall at the UK Telegraph:

This Government, I accept, is not solely responsible for the diminution of decency, but it has played a significant role. It promised much and delivered little. In doing so, it fostered a wrath among those who cling on to the hope that sanity can be restored to high office. These voters will not be found hurling rocks at the Bank of England or setting fire to RBS's head office. But, make no mistake, their yearning for fulsome retribution is palpable.

Be very afraid

Chilling, yes. 

Bloomberg News has tallied Washington’s spending and promises as it props up banks, insurers, automakers, and seemingly everyone except hardworking taxpayers who promptly pay their bills. Bloomberg deserves great credit for focusing on this constantly moving target. In its latest estimate, Bloomberg correspondents Mark Pittman and Bob Ivry reported on March 31 that the Federal Reserve, Treasury, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Department of Housing and Urban Development have saddled taxpayers with $12.8 trillion so far. America’s 2008 gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion. Hence, the federal bailout now equals 90.14 percent of GDP.

A new kind of politics? Yes it is

Dad and I have been exchanging the same meme about The Dear Leader, his people and his plans, taken from Apocalypse Now: the shit piles up so fast you need wings to stay above it:

Lawrence Summers, a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, pulled in more than $2.7 million in speaking fees paid by firms at the heart of the financial crisis, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America Corp. and the now-defunct Lehman Brothers.

He pulled in another $5.2 million from D.E. Shaw, a hedge fund for which he served as managing director from October 2006 until joining the administration. 

Unions are evil. What else needs to be said?

Just strange to hear it coming from one of collective bargaining's biggest cheerleaders. Guess Pub and Ed aren't on the same page:

In a striking example of corporate hardball, the New York Times Co. has threatened to shut down one of its journalistic jewels, the Boston Globe, unless the New England paper's unions agree to sweeping concessions.

Blogging Atlas Shrugged 1.6

Wherein Dagny trades diamonds for metal ... here. 

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Dollhouse rockin' like Dokken.

20 Great Poly-Incor statements from Hollywood

My favorite from the American Thinker list? 

"The thing that I resent most is that they [the communists] are able to get into the union, take them over... I feel, that they really ought to be smoked out and shown up for what they are, so that all good, free causes in this country, all the liberalisms that really are American, can go out without the taint of communism." --Walt Disney

Still Shrugging....

Oft-mocked in J-schools, USA Today was the last great innovation in newspapers. The paper, a creation of Gannett and founder Al Neuhart, realized that papers were getting left behind by Americans increasing addiction to television. USA Today was often referred to as "McPaper," proving that the smugness of newspaper people knew no bounds even then. It was and remains a four-section (News, Life, Sports, Money) five-day-a-week national paper, and for the most part, has been as good a way as any to get the pulse of the nation through a newspaper. Like most papers, it skewed/s to the Left, but regularly publishes Conservative commentary, and regardless of its daily editorial view, always publishes an opposition view. 

I was an avid reader of USA Today for years. I called it dessert, and that's not meant as a putdown. Before wi-fi was everywhere, it was the fastest way to get a taste of what's going on in the country. I began to get hesitant when the paper invited Michael Moore to cover the 2004 GOP National Convention and Ann Coulter to cover the Dem convention. Moore's work was printed, Coulter's was not. 

Neuharth is a Lib, but his 300-word column every Friday tended to stay away from partisan politics. Beginning with our invasion of Iraq, that changed, and noticeably too did the letter printed, the tone of the editorials, and the growing imbalance on the Viewpoints page. 

Going Galt means many things to many people, but the last movement of my first act in the Going Galt game was to quit buying USA Today everyday. I'd quit buying and subscribing to newspapers in 2007, but the coverage of the POTUS race in '08 - particularly with the paper's coverage of then-Sen. Obama - did me in. I was not alone, and the news grows bleaker for America's largest newspaper. Give them credit: they earned their demise by openly, flagrantly backing an anti-business Leftist when the primary consumers of their rag are business travelers. As someone who actually a business traveler, I won't even pick up the free copy anymore when I'm staying at a hotel, although I do still sneak a peak at its Friday Travel section, at least if it's free.

From WSJ:

USA Today President and Publisher Craig Moon announced his sudden retirement Tuesday, leaving the country's largest newspaper with its top two jobs unfilled during perhaps the most difficult stretch in its 27-year history. He also said the newspaper has lost about 100,000 subscribers just from the slowdown in travel.

Mr. Moon said in an interview that the slowdown has resulted in a reduction of more than 7% in the number of copies of USA Today distributed through partnerships with hotel chains such as Marriott, which account for more than half of its circulation.

Renewed vigor to bring Atlas to the screen

It looks like we might be getting closer to seeing Atlas onscreen. Like everyone who likes the novel, I have my thoughts. 

I would like to see the same visual techniques that made Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow so effective used in it - the green glow of Rearden metal would be particularly compelling. Atlas, like LoTR, deserves to be a three-parter. If producers don't think there's an audience for it, they're out of their minds, and the book is broken into three parts. I don't think it would be an effective representation of the book or Rand's ideas to jam it into a three- or even four-hour production.

Casting will be key for many reasons. If big money gets behind the production - and I get the sense that it is - Atlasphiles and Objectivists will go berzerk if left-wingers fill the roles. I've always been happy with Angelina Jolie as Dagny Taggart, because Jolie has stated her admiration for the novel before. Some of the names batted around as Dagny - especially Julia Roberts (old and left-wingy) and Anne Hathaway (left-wingy) would infuriate fans. As for the other key characters, a star will be made if a relatively unknown Latin actor is cast as Frisco; Hank Rearden's tough, because people think of him as older (I think most people think of Harrison Ford) but he's only in his 40s and is described as "looking younger."). I don't think the actors have to all be conservatives or libertarians, but the producers better proceed with caution if they consider actors with loudly-voiced leftist views playing anyone other than looters and moochers (Alec Baldwin would be perfect as James Taggart - a great lefty actor with a great screen presence). 

Anyway, from the story:

Rand’s popular but polarizing book — it’s derided by many literary critics but has a huge public following — tells the story of Dagny Taggart, a railroad executive trying to keep her corporation competitive in the face of what she perceives as a lack of innovation and individual responsibility

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