LIVE AT FIVE – 05.14.12

It’s pathetic, and embarrassing. And yet they still pretend they belong to some sort of learned profession with special privileges and responsibilities, when really they’re just PR flacks without the honesty.

Look, if the disgrace of the WaPo discredits journalism in toto — which is what Professor Reynolds seems to be implying — then why doesn’t the disgrace of John Edwards discredit all lawyers? Why this apparently all-encompassing disparagement of journalism, a contempt vast enough to include even journalists who have helped to expose the WaPo’s disgrace?

UPDATE: OK, at least he linked me:

My response to Stacy McCain is the lack of counterexamples. I had a girlfriend from college who quit journalism for PR because, as she said, “it’s more ethical.” Indeed.

And to whom does the ex-girlfriend PR flack send her press releases?

Ah, journalists — who are actually paid less than flacks who write press releases. Once you figure this out, as a journalist, it’s pretty demoralizing, but if you can’t handle demoralization, don’t go into journalism. Try TV news, where even Shep Smith gets $8 million a year.

UPDATE II: Feeling somehow more demoralized than ever — guess I should’ve stuck with that forklift-driver job I had before disgracing myself by becoming a reporter — I was tempted to ask that readers hit my tip jar. Instead, I’ll ask that you go hit Joe Fein’s tip jar.

Don’t hate Joe just because he once let me crash on his sofa. It’s not his fault he’s forever tainted by this association with a journalist.

Category: Instapundit, Journalism

From the Home for Elderly Bloggers: Disrespectful Young Whippersnappers! UPDATE: Ten Cents a Column Inch

Posted on | May 13, 2012 | 49 Comments

Of course, I refer to Jonah Goldberg who, at the tender age of 43, is a callow parvenu — a mere stripling! a rookie! — by comparison to my superannuated 52-year-old self. Nevertheless, Goldberg is old enough to resent the pretensions of still younger punks:

“It is a simple fact of science that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity more than youth,” the National Review Online editor said in an interview. “We’re all born idiots, and we only get over that condition as we get less young.” . . .
“My view is, they’re going to run the country some day, so we should really explain why they’re so frickin’ stupid about so many things,” he said.

Via Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, who is a few years older than Goldberg, but still not as old as me. In fact, I didn’t realize how old Ed was (I’m guessing 48 or 49) until I started researching and discovered that he’d been working for four years as a tech writer in Southern California before losing that gig in a 1988 downsizing. “Peace dividend” and all that.

Rather than go the Michael Douglas Falling Down route — we can picture Ed rampaging across L.A. with a 9-mm — he first drove a cab for a couple months before landing a job in a call center, which “accidental career” he pursued for 18 years before his success with Captain’s Quarters finally landed him a full-time political communications gig.

All of which is to say, Ed paid his dues.

These young punks nowadays? They ain’t paid no dues. Act like they invented the dadgum Internet! Them and their Tweetdecks and “social networking” and what-have you. By cracky, when I was their age, a computer had punch-cards and was the size of a Buick! Dang smart-alecky upstarts want to tell me about this here “blogging” stuff, do they?

GET OFF MY LAWN!

Excuse this geezerly outburst. Here at the Home for Elderly Bloggers, they’re understaffed on Sundays, and I get a mite cranky when the nurse doesn’t show up for my daily sponge-bath . . .

ADDENDUM:
JOURNALISM IS NOT
A POPULARITY CONTEST

I find myself accused of having “waged a war on young bloggers,” which was not at all my intent. The problem is the “flattening” effect of the Internet, which is both an opportunity and a trap.

The opportunity, of course, is that self-publishing permits anyone to put their stuff out there on the Internet and, potentially, reach a worldwide audience. Thus, if this post gets linked at Instapundit — which I certainly hope it will — then little ol’ me can reach a readership as large as anything else linked at Instapundit. Similarly, I could Tweet this to Ann Coulter and, if she re-Tweets it, then I reach her vast readership.

However, this “flattening” of hierarchy is somewhat of an illusion. Any random bozo can get up in my face on Twitter, but if this random bozo has only a couple hundred followers, so what? Ignore ’em. And just because I’m linked by Instapundit or re-Tweeted by Ann Coulter, this does not make me a law professor or a best-selling author.

The “flattening” effect of the Internet is therefore a potential trap, in that people can become confused about a virtual world that is somewhat chaotic and apparently egalitarian.

Ace of Spades, who has craploads more traffic than me, has talked about the absurdity of being “blog-famous,” which no one should ever confuse with actual fame. At any gathering of conservative bloggers, Ace is the coolest guy in the room, whom eveyrbody wants to hang out with. But when he goes to the store to buy a Diet Coke, he’s just another guy at the cash register.

Our little niche of the online world — conservative politics — is small enough that getting to that Big Fish/Small Pond point, where you are kind of fairly well-known, isn’t really all that difficult. But being fairly well-known among conservative bloggers won’t buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks, let alone pay the rent, and finding some way to parlay this trip into an actual job that pays the rent . . .

Well, it’s a mighty hard dollar. The point of my rant (which was what the young lady first asked me about) was mainly just to continue a bit of shtick I always do, riffing on how old I am and how I was hitting deadlines for a living when these kids — and to me, Jonah Goldberg is still a kid — were still in high school, or grade school, or not even born yet, depending what they were up to in 1986.

But there is truth in humor, and there is here a point to be made about the “flattening” effect of the Internet: It used to be, if you wanted to write for a living, you had to apply for a job and get hired at a newspaper or magazine or whatever. You would be hired in at the very lowest level, and assigned to do scutwork, and if you didn’t like it, tough — your boss had a stack of resumés in his desk drawer, and more arriving every day, and your low-level young self was certainly not irreplaceable.

Remember, I was born two years after the peak of the Baby Boom; ambitious and inexperienced young people were a dime a dozen when I was starting out. So you took a lot of crap from your bosses, and hustled your butt off just trying to hold on to that low-level job.

There were no online job banks, no Craiglist, no e-mail, no Facebook, no free self-publishing software or cheap laptops to enable young writers to reach a mass readership sitting in their parent’s basements. My daily traffic at this blog exceeds the circulation of the weekly newspaper where I started out as a $4.50-an-hour staff writer, and it took me more than 11 hard years in the newspaper business before I made it to The Washington Times as an assistant national editor, by which time I was a 38-year-old married father of three.

In the Old School, there was a clear hierarchy in journalism, and very few ways to circumvent that hierarchy, so if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work your butt off, and nobody was going to do you any favors: Get the damned job done, or get the hell out.

The whole concept of “bosses” and “employees,” it seems, has been undermined by the Internet. Your resumé is now more or less constantly “in the mail,” as it were, because you can post it on one of those job-search sites and be reached by anyone looking for someone with your particular skill-set. And it is amazing to me how young people in the political world change jobs so rapidly. You see a 20-something at CPAC one year, and they’re working for Think-Tank X. You bump into them at the next CPAC, and they’re working for Lobbying Outfit Y. The next year, they’ve hired on as a staffer for Senator Z.

Evidently in 21st-century D.C., if you haven’t changed jobs three times by the time you’re 26, you’re considered sluggish and lacking ambition.

This rapid churning is enabled by the Internet, and when you talk about “young bloggers,” this returns us to how the Internet undermines hierarchy. “Young bloggers,” for the most part, have never had the experience I had, grinding it out on deadline, writing about a bunch of crappy local news of interest only to a relative handful of readers, under the direct supervisory authority of an editor who might fire you if you screwed up. The collapse of the Old School publishing environment is not your fault, but it has deprived you of the immense value of that experience, and there’s not even anybody who will bother to try to explain to you why that experience matters, for fear of being laughed off as an obsolete fuddy-duddy.

Being young and ambitious and impatient for success — hey, I can relate. Been there, done that, and still as ambitious and impatient as ever. But you have no right to accuse me of having “waged a war on young bloggers,” when I’ve always done everything I could to encourage anybody who does good work.

The “flattening” effect of the Internet is in large measure an illusion, and you’ve got to focus on what’s real. You can try to jump to the head of the line, but if you get to the head of the line that way, you’d damned well better be able to show you deserve to be there.

Finally: You’ll note that I’ve linked Robert Novak’s memoir Prince of Darkness. Why? Because if you’ll read that book — and you really should — you’ll find that Novak remarks that when he made it to the Washington bureau of the Associated Press, he was the only man under 30 in the bureau, and most of his colleagues were over 40. By that point, Novak was 26 had been a working journalist since he was a teenage stringer covering high-school sports for the Joliet Herald-News at ten cents a column-inch.

On page 25, Novak makes an important revelation of self-awareness: “I am not a person who is easy for a lot of people to like. No stirrer-up of strife is ever popular.” Indeed. Blogging is a form of journalism, and it is unfortunate that it is more difficult for kids to get those entry-level jobs, even at 10 cents a column inch, so that they might have the kind of experience Novak had. But fortunately, one thing hasn’t changed: Journalism isn’t a popularity contest, and even unlikeable people — stirrers-up of strife — can succeed if they do good work.

P.S.: In case you never heard of this Novak guy, he was kinda important. Ask @TPCarney.

Category: Blogging, Ed Morrissey, Jonah Goldberg

Germans Don’t Grasp Separation Of Church & State, Federalism

Posted on | May 13, 2012 | 24 Comments

by Smitty

Mrs. Other Smitty sends a Der Spiegel link that offers an external view of what remains one of the signature issues of this country, ObamaCare:

Germans Can’t Fathom US Aversion to Obama’s Healthcare Reform

Read the whole thing, but let me answer their section headings:

System Only Works if Everyone Takes Part The U.S. has a Constitutional system, with a limited federal government. Health care, as a SCOTUS ruling next month could well show (or not) is not a federal concern. Miriam Widman in Spiegel may also think that the EU is a swell, in contrast to Nigel Farage:
Competitive Advantage

“A healthy workforce is a more productive workforce and recent German statistics would back that up. The country has relatively low unemployment and in many sectors the economy is booming.”

Perhaps Widman is in the south of Germany, around Munich or Stuttgart. Those booms are the sounds of the Mediterranean economies imploding. OK, that’s a cheap shot. The correct answer here is what I’ll call the Global Warming Rule: you cannot make any comparative statistical assertions without making all source data, algorithms, and studies used to support the assertions available. Otherwise, the suspicion is that you’re engaged in what is crudely known as the “rectal pluck”. In a court of law, you’re innocent until proven guilty. In the court of trying to push a stochastic point, it’s the other way around.
Don’t Religious Americans Love Their Neighbors?

“For me the US is a very religious country. It doesn’t matter which religion I look at — love thy neighbor is a very, very important point in religion,” health insurance spokesperson Marini says. For her, the apparent deep religiousness of many Americans doesn’t jibe with their unwillingness to be part of a healthcare community.

While there is much faith in God amongst Americans, the Golden Calf of Progress isn’t getting much veneration in the U.S. As somebody who demonstrated against the evil 111^th Congress, led by the Wicked Witch of the West* I can tell you that ObamaCare was as illegitimate in this country as that Treaty of Lisbon was in Europe. Anyone who thinks that good ends can come of governments disenfranchising the people they purportedly represent is a servant of Hell.

That somebody likes the German system is a swell thing. My German wife also cautions that if you’re going to get sick, better do it at the start of the quarter, while the system has money to treat you.

As the EU unwinds, hopefully the notion of liberty will abound there, and the Socialists won’t be too ungracious about admitting how daft they were.

Had a call from the John Dennis campaign today. Support him. He’s the guy who can demote Nancy from House Minority Leader to Retired, Anti-Communist Parable.

John Dennis for Congress!

Category: Germany, John Denniss

Really, Mr. Quick?

Posted on | May 13, 2012 | 26 Comments

by Smitty

Really, Mr. Quick?

Smitty is running a Gay Obama item a day, more or less. I know he’s trying to hurt Obama by playing up Obama’s support of gay rights with those who think gays should have no rights at all.

Hm. I can’t parse this in any meaningful way. Homosexuality, as an idea, argues its own societal utility as well as it can. I hope that we retain the right to disagree with ideas. If we have any free will, that is.

You can still be summarily fired simply for being gay in 29 states – a problem I think is of considerably more significance than being unable to marry – but herein lies my quandary.

Can you? I don’t mean “Do antiquated laws exist?”; rather “Is any private sector work termination occuring based solely upon sexual preference?” Let’s see some cases before we go throwing up our hands in despair over the medieval state of affairs. The lesson we need to get to is that we can’t legislate morality.

I support general civil rights for gays and their relationships, just as Obama does. I further regard most who oppose them as doing so almost entirely out of bigotry of one sort or another.

Does my commitment to a “form follows function” analysis of genitalia render me hopelessly bigoted? Sorry, I’m just an engineer. Systems have their design, work well, and prosper, or not. If something is in the “or not” category, then no amount of Postmodern, emotional stabbing of rationality is going to move it out of the “or not” category.

So, much as I hate Obama, and am even willing to trash my own libertarian conservative principles by voting for the execrable Mitt Romney for the sake of destroying his political career, even I can’t so soil my own beliefs as to join in the mass gay-bashing being used against Obama.
Sorry.

Bill, I’ll fall short of connecting your response with the adjective “sanctimonious”. I thought my post took as libertarian a tack as possible, prior to juxtaposing a link about Rand Paul and a link about John Travolta’s accuser. The context was that of making a joke about improving the spin of BHO’s rhetoric.

This is the internet, and I have to take the hit here for trying to trade clarity for humor.

What I’d like to get from you, Bill, in all seriousness, is some thought on the relationship between Political Correctness and bigotry.

Is PC, itself, the ultimate bigotry?
Will calls for tolerance eventually hit a crescendo where, in order to disprove bigotry, everone has to go on a local reality TV show and engage in ritualized acts of sodomy?

Update: Collins linked the preceding post in this thread.

Category: Bill Quick, Gays

The Dots Get Connected: Soros Ally Teaches Democrats Cloward-Piven?

Posted on | May 13, 2012 | 23 Comments

Could we get Fox News to bring back Glenn Beck and his chalkboard for a two-hour special? Because what began with a seemingly minor item Friday in the Washington Examiner has exposed a direct connection between congressional Democrats and the radical network Beck so vividly described, involving George Soros, ACORN, SEIU and, yes, the notorious “Cloward-Piven Strategy.”

Before we get to the exclusive breaking news part of the story, let me recount how these dots got connected: Yesterday, I linked Joel Gerhke’s Examiner story in a post titled “Great: Corporate America Now Paying Democrats to Call Americans Racist,” which mentioned that the 2010 annual report for Maya Wiley’s Center for Social Inclusion (PDF, see Page 13) “lists many of the usual suspects, including George Soros’s Open Society Institute and the Soros-funded Tides Foundation.”

Operating in “file-and-forget” mode, I moved on to other stories until last night, when I was having fun on Twitter with the #ObamaBedtimeStories meme, and one of my jokes got re-Tweeted by my friend, investigative reporter Matthew Vadum. Because Matthew is perhaps the nation’s leading expert on the ACORN/SEIU/Soros connection, it occurred to me he might be able to get some data on the Soros connection to what Gehrke had reported. So I sent him a couple of Tweets about it. By the time I got up about 7 a.m. today, Vadum had sent me a spreadsheet listing foundation contributions to Wiley’s outfit. Quickly adding up the numbers and doing additional research online, within two-and-a-half hours I’d filed this brief report for The American Spectator:

A non-profit organization that provided training last week to House Democrats, portraying Republican opponents as racially motivated, has received significant funding from foundations linked to controversial left-wing multibillionaire George Soros.
Soros’s Open Society Institute has given $75,000 to the Center for Social Inclusion, which has also received more than $850,000 from the Soros-connected Tides Foundation/Tides Center since 2005, according to documents obtained by The American Spectator.
In a training session for House Democrats and their congressional staffers last week, Center for Social Inclusion founder and president Maya Wiley described “conservative messages” as being “racially coded,” and suggested that Democrats “raise racial disparities” in public policy discussions, Joel Gerhke of the Washington Examiner reported. . . .
The Soros-Wiley connection was noted by Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center. Vadum, an investigative reporter and American Spectator contributor, is author of the widely-praised recent book Subversion, Inc., an exhaustive exposé of ACORN. Wiley’s background also drew attention from Michelle Horstman of PJ Media, who noted that Maya Wiley is the daughter of 1960s radical George Wiley, founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization.

Please read the whole thing. Connecting the dots to the National Welfare Rights Organization links the Center for Social Inclusion to the “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” a 1960s left-wing effort to foment economic crisis and social revolution. This direct connection between the Soros-funded radical network and congressional Democrats could prove to be a major story, if Gerhke follows up on his original scoop and other reporters begin asking questions about why Democrats are getting election-year advice from such a controversial source.

UPDATE: This connection between Democrats and the Soros radical network has already drawn considerable attention from conservative bloggers, including The Lonely Conservative, The Blaze, Rio Norte Line, Moose and Squirrel and Blazing Cat Fur.

UPDATE II: In a recent investigative report on the Left’s election fraud tactics, James Simpson of Accuracy in Media provides a brief historical synopsis of the Cloward-Piven Strategy:

ACORN is the face of vote fraud, but its intellectual foundation is the Cloward Piven Strategy. Sociology professors Richard Cloward (Columbia University) and Frances Fox Piven (CUNY) were founding members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Cloward died in 2001 but Piven lives on.
In 1966 Cloward and Piven penned an article for The Nation magazine titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” They posited that if the poor were organized into street armies to demand all welfare benefits available to them, they could overwhelm and crash the system.
It became known as the “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” and is credited with expanding welfare rolls 151 percent between 1965 and 1974 and bringing New York City to the brink of bankruptcy in 1975.

It is important to mention the Cloward-Piven connection to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement: Six months before the first “Occupy” protests, socialists scholars met to discuss their plan for “redistributing wealth and power in the country,” and as I reported last year:

Professor Frances Fox Piven is an active supporter of the movement and told a public-radio interviewer: “I think we desperately need a popular uprising in the United States.” Piven also denounced the financial industry at a Sept. 29 rally in New York where, in a bizarre call-and-response speech, she told the crowd: “You’ve heard people say they’re greedy, and they are greedy. You’ve heard people say that they are thieves, and they are thieves. But they’re also cannibals, because they are eating their own.”

Here’s the video of Pivens’s “mike check” with the Occupiers:

UPDATE III: Why would Democrats be willing to resort to such desperate — indeed, dangerous — tactics as smearing Republicans as racist, as this Maya Wiley training session would seem to suggest?

Well, when Obama became America’s “first gay president” (thanks, Newsweek!), some polls indicated a sharp shift toward Mitt Romney. We can expect a dirty, desperate and deeply divisive campaign from Democrats this year.

UPDATE IV: Linked by Curt at Flopping Aces, by That Mr. G Guy and by Mike Rogers at Granite Grok — thanks!

UPDATE V: Linked by Doug at the Daley Gator — thanks!

Category: ACORN, Congress, Democrats, Election 2012, Progressivism, Racism, Scandal

Perfect Bailout Metaphor Achieved

Posted on | May 13, 2012 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

Daniel Hannan on Twitter points to The Telegraph with a story of classical, titanic impact:

Maiden voyage of Bronze Age boat founders
The crew of a half-sized replica of a 3,500-year-old Bronze Age boat had to abort the vessel’s maiden voyage after it sank as soon as it entered the water.

Hannan relates an oversight in the Telegraph story within the Tweet:

Ah, so the Muscles in Brussels are blowing money from the rest of Europe on perhaps interesting, but ill-fated, projects. Vasa up with that?

Category: Europe, Foreigners, Great Britain, Uncategorized

‘. . .The President Is Required To Do His Day Job’

Posted on | May 12, 2012 | 14 Comments

by Smitty

Mark Halperin, how could you possibly write that? #OccupyResoluteDesk is on the fourth year of a phone-in so vast as to invite the question: does he secretly own Verizon?

This election is summarized in a Sun Tzu quote:

“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Romney has played a masterful milquetoast hand thus far, and the bluster of Halperin in Time picks up the other end. Next month’s floggings at the Supreme Court are going to beat BHO down even further. Presumably, BHO will run against the SCOTUS and the GOP House. Alas, that will underscore the notion that Obama can only run against things; he really has no accomplishments or goals to stand for*. As a President, that’s tantamount to admitting you’ve been blowing your job right the heck off all along. Like Billy Jeff is purported to have said: amateur.

via Instapundit

*Oh, sure, Yet Another Victory Lap (YAVL) on Osama. Right. As though that wouldn’t underscore BHO’s jackwagon-hood.

Category: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton

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The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

LIVE AT FIVE – 05.14.12

Much Like Professor Glenn Reynolds,
John Edwards Has a Law Degree

From the Home for Elderly Bloggers: Disrespectful Young Whippersnappers! UPDATE: Ten Cents a Column Inch

Germans Don’t Grasp Separation Of Church & State, Federalism

John Dennis for Congress!

Really, Mr. Quick?

The Dots Get Connected: Soros Ally Teaches Democrats Cloward-Piven?

Perfect Bailout Metaphor Achieved

‘. . .The President Is Required To Do His Day Job’

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

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