Category: New York Times

Shorter Krugman: ‘Kool-Aid, Anyone?’

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Delusional partisan cheerleading:

Several times in recent weeks I’ve found myself in conversations with liberals who shake their heads sadly and express their disappointment with President Obama. Why? I suspect that they’re being influenced, often without realizing it, by the prevailing media narrative.
The truth is that these days much of the commentary you see on the Obama administration — and a lot of the reporting too — emphasizes the negative: the contrast between the extravagant hopes of 2008 and the prosaic realities of political trench warfare, the troubles at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the mess in Iraq, and so on. The accepted thing, it seems, is to portray Mr. Obama as floundering, his presidency as troubled if not failed.
But this is all wrong. You should judge leaders by their achievements, not their press, and in terms of policy substance Mr. Obama is having a seriously good year. In fact, there’s a very good chance that 2014 will go down in the record books as one of those years when America took a major turn in the right direction.

A major turn in the right direction? Krugman isn’t just drinking the Kool-Aid, he’s huffing the glue and smoking the meth.

 

Dateline: Fort Leavenworth

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If you believe that federal prisoners serving time for multiple felonies are fit to deliver moralistic sermons to law-abiding American citizens, you should apply for a job as an editor at the New York Times, where the traitor Bradley “Chelsea” Manning is considered deserving of status as an op-ed columnist about “media freedom.”

Al-Qaeda doesn’t hate America as much as the New York Times does. Most of their columnists should probably be in Fort Leavenworth.

 

White (Liberal) Male Privilege

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The Left is willing to suspend judgment and waive all standards when it comes to their allies. Feminists nowadays are up in arms about “rape culture,” but 15 years ago they were defending accused rapist Bill Clinton in no uncertain terms: “I would be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”

Liberalism is simply a set of prejudices, a collection of syllogisms all of which end, “ergo, vote Democrat.” Their smug presumption of their own  moral and intellectual superiority makes liberals the most easily deceived people in the world. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is the latest example:

Now Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of The New York Times, is calling on Kristof to “give readers a full explanation” of his reporting on Somaly Mam, the celebrated Cambodian anti-sex-trafficking activist who, according to a recent Newsweek expose, fabricated parts of her story and those of some of the alleged victims she advocated for. The revelations have disillusioned many of Mam’s loyal supporters and left the press looking gullible. Just as importantly, they’ve highlighted the public’s seemingly insatiable desire for heroic narratives — and the willingness of many in the media to provide them.

As Instapundit remarks, Kristof was engaged in “white knighting” — posing as the courageous and enlightened rescuer — and was thus easily played for a chump by “the James Frey of anti–sex trafficking activism.” Liberals fall for this kind of hoax because (a) they overestimate the value of their own intelligence, (b) they naïvely underestimate the ability of cynical manipulators to wrap themselves in the mantle of victimhood, and (c) they are themselves  utterly unscrupulous in exploiting any narrative that advances the liberal cause.

Nicholas Kristoff’s status as a privileged white male, with a six-figure paycheck from the world’s most prestigious newspaper, might make him a natural target of identity-politics activists. His crusading on behalf of impoverished and exploited Third World women could thus be seen as a noblesse oblige gesture. This led to him being scammed by a hoaxer, so that he was publishing lies, but hey: It’s the New York Times.

If liberals cared about facts, they wouldn’t be liberals, would they?

 

Fret Not: The Clinton/Warren 2016 Ticket Will Fix The VA Health Care Problem

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by Smitty

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has long touted the VA system as the epitome of government-run healthcare. “Exhibit A for the advantages of government provision [of healthcare] is the veterans administration, which runs its own hospitals and clinics, and provides some of the best-quality healthcare in America at far lower cost than the private sector,” Krugman claims.


It’s just kinda zany how all of these Socialized programs seem to effect the opposite of their stated intent, shifting from health care to the War on Poverty:

Between 1959 and 1966 — before the War on Poverty was implemented — the percentage of Americans living in poverty plunged by about one-third, from 22.4 to 14.7, slightly lower than in 2012. But, Eberstadt cautions, the poverty rate is “incorrigibly misleading” because government transfer payments have made income levels and consumption levels significantly different. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, disability payments, heating assistance and other entitlements have, Eberstadt says, made income “a poor predictor of spending power for lower-income groups.” Stark material deprivation is now rare:

“By 2011 .?.?. average per capita housing space for people in poverty was higher than the U.S. average for 1980. .?.?. [Many] appliances were more common in officially impoverished homes in 2011 than in the typical American home of 1980. .?.?. DVD players, personal computers, and home Internet access are now typical in them — amenities not even the richest U.S. households could avail themselves of at the start of the War on Poverty.”

But the institutionalization of anti-poverty policy has been, Eberstadt says carefully, “attended” by the dramatic spread of a “tangle of pathologies.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined that phrase in his 1965 report calling attention to family disintegration among African Americans. The tangle, which now ensnares all races and ethnicities, includes welfare dependency and “flight from work.”

So, clearly we need MOAR Programs, until the remaining conservative deadweight falls off and the sun can stagger the Progressive Dawn fully over the horizon.

via Hot Air headlines

Was She Too … Bossy?

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Gossip swirls after New York Times publisher Pinch Sulzberger fires the paper’s top editor Jill Abramson:

Sulzberger and Abramson had a fraught relationship almost from the start of her tenure as executive editor, nearly three years ago. He saw her as difficult, high-handed, and lacking in finesse in her management of people at the paper. She, in turn, was increasingly resentful of his intrusions into her command of editorial operations, and of his increasingly close relationship with Mark Thompson, the company’s C.E.O., who came from England and the BBC to run the business side.
It is always hard to say what causes a final break—a firing, a divorce—but, clearly, a last straw came a few weeks ago, when Abramson, who made little secret of her displeasure with Sulzberger, decided to hire a lawyer to complain that her salary was not equal to that of her predecessor, Bill Keller. She had also been told by reliable sources at the paper that, as managing editor, she had once earned less than the managing editor of news operations, John Geddes. Abramson’s attempt to raise the salary issue at a time when tempers were already frayed seemed wrongheaded to Sulzberger and Thompson, both on its merits and in terms of her approach. Bringing in a lawyer, in particular, seems to have struck them as especially combative. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, argued that there was no real compensation gap, but conceded to me that “this incident was a contributing factor” to the firing of Abramson, because “it was part of a pattern. . . .
Another episode that added to the characterization of Abramson as hard to deal with came after a decision was made to hire a second managing editor to oversee the Times’ digital endeavors. Abramson led that hiring effort. The Times, in its story on Abramson’s dismissal, said that Abramson had offered the job to Janine Gibson, the editor of Guardian U.S., “without consulting” Dean Baquet, then the managing editor and now Abramson’s successor. This implies that Abramson was operating more or less in a vacuum, without consistent consultations with her colleagues, particularly Baquet. Gibson met separately with Sulzberger and Thompson on May 5th, and had lunch with Baquet that same day. What Baquet did not know, until Gibson herself mentioned it to him at lunch, I’m told, is that she was offered a managing-editor job comparable to his own. . . .

Abramson offended the patriarchy! The New York Times is sexist! Has Amanda Marcotte reacted to this news yet?

UPDATE: Haven’t found Marcotte’s reaction yet, but the headline at the feminist blog Jezebel is: “Jill Abramson and Those Goddamn Pushy Female Bosses”:

Abramson had been a staunch advocate for women at the Times, but it was clear that gender imbalance remained an issue at the paper , and not only on the masthead. In a piece about the gap in byline counts this week, Times ombudsman Margaret Sullivan lamented that, “After three decades in journalism, I find it hard to believe that — while things have changed radically in some ways — there’s still such a gender imbalance.”

Yeah, baby! Patriarchy wins again!

 

New York Times: Not Fit to Line the Cage of Any Self-Respecting Parakeet

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What associations of a mass murderer are most important? In the case of the Boston Marathon bombers, the New York Times didn’t seem to think Islamic extremism was very important, but in the case of the Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooter . . .

The New York Times resolutely refused to see a pattern of jihad on the part of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in its sympathetic front-page Tuesday profile of his prison conditions. Yet on Wednesday the Times ran an op-ed that used an anti-Semitic killer in Kansas to represent the hidden domestic terror threat of military veterans. . . .
Kathleen Belew’s op-ed on anti-Semitic killer Frazier Glenn Miller appeared Wednesday under an offensive headline and illustration, “Veterans and White Supremacy.”

When Frazier Glenn Miller shot and killed three people in Overland Park, Kan., on Sunday, he did so as a soldier of the white power movement: a groundswell that united Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other fringe elements after the Vietnam War, crested with the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, and remains a diminished but potent threat today.
Mr. Miller, the 73-year-old man charged in the killings, had been outspoken about his hatred of Jews, blacks, Communists and immigrants, but it would be a mistake to dismiss him as a crazed outlier. The shootings were consistent with his three decades of participation in organized hate groups. His violence was framed by a clear worldview. . . .
The number of Vietnam veterans in that movement was small — a tiny proportion of those who served — but Vietnam veterans forged the first links between Klansmen and Nazis since World War II. They were central in leading Klan and neo-Nazi groups past the anti-civil rights backlash of the 1960s and toward paramilitary violence. . . . Its members carried weapons like those they had used in Vietnam, and used boot-camp rhetoric to frame their pursuit of domestic enemies. . . .
Before his 1979 discharge for distributing racist literature, Mr. Miller served for 20 years in the Arm, including two tours in Vietnam and service as a Green Beret. . . .

Belew backtracked two decades to bring up Tim McVeigh — make that “Army veteran” Tim McVeigh, before concluding that veterans don’t get sufficient scrutiny as domestic terror threats.

Read the whole thing at Newsbusters. The 9/11 hijackers who killed nearly 3,000 people and took down the World Trade Center? To blame their religion for that act of terrorism would be unfairly prejudicial, you see. But smearing military veterans for the act of a hateful criminal? That’s perfectly acceptable to the New York Times.

Exit Question One: Has the New York Times ever examined Jared Loughner’s obsession with the conspiracy video Zeitgeist?

Exit Question Two: What about terroristic violence — such as the 1981 Nyack armored car robbery — committed by those associated with 1960s left-wing radicals like the Weather Underground?

 

Take Paul Krugman’s Money

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Paul Krugman tediously rehashes his “economic inequality” gripes:

The reality of rising American inequality is stark. Since the late 1970s real wages for the bottom half of the work force have stagnated or fallen, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled (and the incomes of the top 0.1 percent have risen even more). While we can and should have a serious debate about what to do about this situation, the simple fact — American capitalism as currently constituted is undermining the foundations of middle-class society — shouldn’t be up for argument.

Why the generalization, Dr. Krugman?

Why do you pin the blame so vaguely on “American capitalism,” when clearly the cause of economic inequality is you?

As the Smartest Economist in the Whole World™  it was your job to fix this  problem. Obviously you’ve been goofing off — phoning it in, going through the motions — and here you are again, recycling the same arguments you’ve been making for decades.

So we’re coming to take it back, Dr. Krugman. The middle class will be showing up to collect The People’s Refund. That three-bedroom $1.7-million Riverside Drive apartment you bought in 2009? It’s got enough square footage to house a dozen struggling grad students from Columbia and NYU. They’ll be moving in next week.

What’s your salary at Princeton University, professor? Last time I checked, the average Princeton professor made $190,000 a year and you’re clearly above average, so let’s say $250,000. We’re going to let you keep $60,000 of that — “incomes of the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled” — and redistribute the other $190,000 to the janitorial staff at Princeton, because . . . fairness.

Now, how to redistribute your New York Times income? If they’re paying you $300,000 a year (which is Tom Friedman’s reported salary, and certainly they wouldn’t pay a Nobel Prize winner less) then I figure we’ll cut you back to $75,000, re-distributing $225,000 in $25,000 increments to nine struggling young writers to be chosen annually for what will be known as The Krugman Fellowships.

See, Dr. Krugman, this is why your “economic inequality” arguments haven’t been fixing the problem. By dwelling on general categories — “the top 1 percent” and the “middle class” — you have failed to make it personal. If you break it down to individual cases, people can relate a lot more directly to the issue, deciding on how they’ll divvy up the wealth of specific rich people, like you.

Even after we re-distribute three-quarters of your income, Professor, you’ll still be making more than $100,000 a year.

That money will come in handy when you’re buying pizza for all those grad students sleeping on the floor of your apartment.

Social justice, eh?

 

New York Times Plays the Koch Card, Reporting Democrat ObamaCare Panic

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The free market group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) opened the 2014 campaign early, running ads targeting vulnerable senators who voted for ObamaCare, as I have previously reported:

AFP is one of the largest grassroots organizations in America, with thousands of supporters and contributors, but notice how the New York Times emphasizes a certain name in this article:

Democrats are increasingly anxious about an onslaught of television ads hitting vulnerable Senate and House candidates for their support of the new health law, since many lack the resources to fight back in the early stages of the midterm campaign.
Since September, Americans for Prosperity, a group financed in part by the billionaire Koch brothers, has spent an estimated $20 million on television advertising that calls out House and Senate Democrats by name for their support of the Affordable Care Act. . . .
Some Democrats are open about calling for help from allies and supporters of the health care law who may be biding their time.
“Democrats need money at this early stage in order to fight back against the limitless spending from the Kochs,” said Guy Cecil, the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “As we get closer to the election, we will have the resources to introduce their Tea Party candidates before they have an opportunity to define themselves for voters, but right now the limitless spending from the Kochs means we need Democratic donors to step up in a bigger way immediately.”

Why do the Koch brothers deserve mention in the second paragraph of this article, whereas the word “ObamaCare” does not appear until the 19th paragraph? The article doesn’t even name President Obama, who is thereby a sort of ghost haunting this article which is, after all, about the failures of his signature legislation.

The status of the New York Times as a Democrat Party propaganda organ has never really been in doubt, so it’s very encouraging to see this evidence that Harry Reid has hit the panic button. Meanwhile, AFP has launched new ads targeting vulnerable House members who voted for ObamaCare, including this one against Rep. Gary Peters (D-Michigan):

You Can Click Here to Contribute to
AMERICANS FOR PROSPERITY

What a bargain: For $25, you’re like an honorary Koch brother.