He shall bring da funk no more. Bass player for the fabulous Isley Brothers, dead of diabetes, age 56.
News, Weak
The bidding for Newsweek hasn’t been exactly eager:
[S]ome Newsweek staffers . . . describe the mood as ranging from stunned to funereal to angry — the latter emotion fueled by a sense that Editor Jon Meacham erred badly by transforming the newsweekly into an upscale, left-leaning opinion magazine. Meacham has said that in the face of mounting losses — $44 million since 2007 — he had no choice but to seek fewer subscribers who would be willing to pay more.
On one level, the situation is a paradox. Here you have a magazine loaded with talent . . . and few seem willing to bet on its financial future. That amounts to a no-confidence vote not just on the category of newsweeklies, which have long been squeezed between daily papers and in-depth monthlies, but on print journalism itself. The lucrative properties these days are digital, and Newsweek’s Web site has long been a flop, both creatively and commercially. . . .
The result is a conventional wisdom, to use a phrase popularized by Newsweek, that the magazine smells like a loser.
Brilliant — losing $44 million to produce a liberal opinion magazine. Because, according to Meacham’s theory, people would pay more for liberal opinions than for news.
It takes a special kind of stupid to think that way — if you can call that “thinking.”
When A Man Claims To Be ‘Sooooo Over Woman X‘, He Is Really A Beta Male Going On Gamma
by Smitty
Dan Riehl is looking even more hapless than the TrogloPundit.
Look at the forced bravado on display:
I draw the line of hotness around sammiches. I mean, she does say she’d bring them if asked. But truly hot wimmens intuit such things.
‘Lines of hotness’? ‘Sammiches’?
Also, he says he’s so hot as to make tongues wag. The species joke is left as an exercise for the reader.
Watching the testosterone drain out of a once great blogger like Dan Riehl is just a shame, a shame’s shame, and a reference shame for the calibration of shame-measurement equipment.
Expect Dan to be hired by Newsweek any day now.
Obamanomics: Still Not Working
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost another 115 points Monday, after losing 324 points on Friday, for a two-day loss of 439 points (4.3%) — and a cumulative loss of 1,389 points (12.4%) since April 26. In short, if your 401(k) is mainly in stocks, you’ve lost about 1/8th of that money in about six weeks. The net gain of the typical stock portfolio since November? A big, fat zero:
Stocks slumped Monday, with the Dow and S&P 500 ending at 7-month lows, after the euro hit a fresh four-year low, adding to worries about the global economy.
The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) lost 115 points, or 1.2%, closing at the lowest point since Nov. 4.
The S&P 500 index (SPX) lost 14 points, or 1.4%, and closed at its lowest point since Nov. 4. . . .
“Last Friday’s jobs report inspired very little confidence in terms of the economic recovery,” said Erick Maronak, senior portfolio manager at Victory Capital Management. “Add to that the anxiety about Europe and investors are very skittish.” . . .
Worries that the United States could be in danger of falling into a so-called double-dip recession have plagued markets for the last month, sending the major stock indexes down more than 10% each.
Wait, did somebody say the magic words?
Neil McKinnon of VTB Capital said: “Eurozone debt and banking problems remain paramount.”
He said worries about a “double-dip” recession were rising. “Are we moving from a V to the downleg of the W?” he asked.
Let me remind you once more what I wrote on June 1:
“What investors must wonder is whether the past month’s declining trend on Wall Street is merely a short-term correction . . . or the onset of the second wave in a W-shaped (‘double dip’) recession.”
But this was predictable long much earlier, as I reported March 4:
The United States is currently suffering from “a capital-starved economy,” syndicated columnist Donald Lambro told George Washington University students Wednesday. “We’re in for a very long period of very high unemployment.”
Noting several forecasts of “anemic” economic growth in coming years, Lambro called President Obama’s deficit spending agenda “unsustainable.”
“Government stimulus programs have never worked and they’re not going to work now,” Lambro said . . .
And guess what? It’s going to get even worse next year:
On or about Jan. 1, 2011, federal, state and local tax rates are scheduled to rise quite sharply. President George W. Bush’s tax cuts expire on that date . . .
When we pass the tax boundary of Jan. 1, 2011, my best guess is that the train goes off the tracks and we get our worst nightmare of a severe “double dip” recession.
That’s from Art Laffer. Maybe you’ve heard of him. And maybe you’ve also heard of liberal idiots like Matthew Yglesias, who think that more Keynesian “stimulus” deficit spending is the answer. On Oct. 8, 2008, Yglesias was mocking some guy who told people to invest in gold. What if you’d ignored Yglesias and taken that other guy’s advice?
Gold rallied to within inches of its U.S.-dollar record and beat its all-time high in euros Monday as investors increasingly buy the metal as a hedge against financial deterioration in the euro-zone.
Most-actively traded gold, for August delivery, rose $23.10, or 1.9%, to settle at $1,240.80 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. That just missed the $1,243.10 record close for a most-active contract set in mid-May. Nearby futures had their largest one-day dollar and percentage gain since Feb. 16. . . .
“The global tensions are at a pinnacle,” said Mike Daly, gold specialist at PFGBest in Chicago. “People are saying, ‘We don’t have any confidence in these fiat currencies, and we need to move our money into tangible, safer assets.'”
Let’s just compare and contrast, shall we?
Who was that guy saying you should buy gold? Glenn Beck. Maybe you’ve heard of him.
Stimulus We Can Support: Paying The Piper
by Smitty
Although Stacy and I are still Waiting for O-Dough, an alternate revenue stream may become available, as reported by CNSNews:
Forget the astronomical joke bill, and focus on the bottom line.
I’ve been a piper for nearly twenty years:
Right now I’m working to get my pudgy body back into shape and also learning how to use my Ubuntu Studio distribution, and goodies like Kino, to edit some YouTube clips.
So hit the tip jar, follow the links, and keep up the encouragement, readers!
Helen Thomas Retires
Veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas announced Monday that she is retiring, effective immediately, in the wake of a controversy over her comments on Israel, according to a report from her employer, Hearst News Service.
Thomas told a rabbi at a White House event last week that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Germany and Poland.
(Via Memeorandum.) Rumors that Ms. Thomas plans to spend her retirement in Gaza serving as a “comfort woman” for Hamas terrorists could not be immediately confirmed.
Meanwhile, Reason magazine editor Matt Welch — who is not a stupid dopehead — notes that Helen Thomas certainly isn’t the only “objective” reporter who has opinions:
[S]ome of the most politically opinionated people you’ll ever meet are newspaper reporters a couple drinks in out yakking with their colleagues. . . .
[T]he partisanship-averse journos haven’t bothered to construct their own self-conscious political philosophy, beyond identifying Bad Guys and wanting to Fix Problems. Show me the world’s most intractable problems — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the inability to produce mass amounts of energy without negatively impacting the environment, the search for a beer that tastes great and is less filling — and I’ll show you reporters in bars having conversations worthy of the Alex Jones show. It’s not that they’re all Helen Thomases — she is truly one of a kind — but that in the absence of subjecting their own beliefs to journalistic rigor, they are more likely than many would expect to quietly nurture beliefs that outsiders would find surprisingly slanted and even extreme.
You should read the whole thing.
Officer, Arrest That Dopehead
When a guy thinks he can dictate to the Tea Party movement . . . Well, obviously, Jeffrey Miron is on drugs:
[D]rug prohibition is hopelessly inconsistent with allegiance to free markets, regardless of the level of government. Free markets should mean both that businesses can operate as they please and that individuals can purchase and consume whatever they want, so long as these actions do not harm others, even when such decisions seem unwise. Drug prohibition interferes with precisely these activities.
Thus, if the tea-party believes in its principles, it must choose the libertarian path on drug prohibition.
He’s on the faculty of Harvard, so he is an expert, who is qualified to tell you mouth-breathing morons in the Tea Party what to think.
Yeah. That’s what we need. Because it’s worked so well in the past.
UPDATE: Miron’s article was Tweeted to me by Joe Marier, who got it from Brian Lehman — who lives in Philadelphia, just in case any narcotics detectives are looking to make a bust. But seriously . . .
My Libertarian Argument
for The War on Drugs
- If drugs are legal, they will be taxed, which will provide more revenue for government. More revenue for government is a bad thing.
- If drugs are legal, they will be regulated, which will provide more jobs for bureaucrats — also a bad thing.
- If drugs are legal, Big Business will take it over and squeeze out the small entrepreneur, lobbying government to create regulatory “barriers to entry.” As an example, consider how legalized gambling has killed the floating crap game, backroom poker, and the numbers racket. Used to be, somebody who wanted to play the numbers just dealt with their neighborhood hoodlum. Now, they’re standing in front of me in line at the convenience store, buying lottery tickets. This is not “progress.”
- The black market for illegal drugs is one of the last bastions of genuinely free enterprise in which young poor people can become entrepreneurs. The ghetto homie hustling dime bags on the corner? That dude is a stone-cold capitalist, and yet “libertarian” intellectuals like Jeffrey Miron want to eliminate the only structure (i.e., illegality) under which ghetto dudes can practice unlicensed, unregulated, untaxed capitalism.
- The War on Drugs serves a valuable social purpose, by ensuring that lots of stupid people go to prison. There are some people so stupid that they don’t need to be on the street. And if you’re a dopehead who can’t outsmart a narc, that’s an intense kind of stupid.
Back in the day, when I was a young Democrat — which is to say, a hellbound fool — I dealt dope in what we used to call “felony weight” and never once got busted. And yet all these so-called libertarians want me to sing the blues about stupid crackheads doing time for minor possession because they got pulled over for a broken turn signal and had a couple of rocks in their pocket?
Screw those losers. They’re in prison because they’re stupid. I’d rather have them in prison than standing in line for lottery tickets in front of me at the convenience store.
And we certainly don’t have a shortage of stupid people in the world, as I’m reminded every time I have to drive in D.C. traffic. Crackheads should take the bus.
UPDATE II: A dopehead libertarian in the comments — if you guys at the FBI want his ISP, just hit the tip jar, OK? — cites the alleged “failure” of Prohibition as an argument for legalizing drugs.
Prohibition was not repealed because it failed. Prohibition was repealed because the feds wanted whiskey tax revenue to pay for the New Deal. Compare and contrast:
- Prohibition — Speakeasies, jazz, flappers, Calvin Coolidge, gangsters in cool pinstriped suits wih fedoras driving V-8 roadsters.
- New Deal — Alger Hiss.
Any questions? Pay attention, class — this stuff might be on the final.
UPDATE III: Will Cain vs. Jacob Sullum:
Is Jacob Sullum on drugs? I’m not sure. But he must be a smart dopehead, otherwise he’d be in prison. Or buying lottery tickets.
Any narcotics officers in D.C. ever want to make an easy bust, I think you’d have no trouble arguing “probable cause” to frisk everyone at the Connecticut Avenue offices of Reason magazine. I mean, really, Matt Welch might be clean and Mike Moynihan is usually sober — at least during working hours — but any trained narc would spot Nick Gillespie for a stoner:
The glazed eyes? The slurred speech? The sideburns, the hipster mannerisms, the omnipresent leather jacket?
Your honor, I rest my case.
Where’s Sergeant Stadanko, now that we really need him?
We’re All Inside Roy Edroso’s Head
It’s actually started to get a bit crowded inside the cranium of the Village Voice‘s designated monitor of the right-wing blogosphere. In writing about reaction to the Flotilla of Fools, Roy Edroso links me thus:
“Obama vs. Israel,” headlined Robert Stacy McCain. He never explained this headline — except poetically, or psychedelically, with an unsupported assertion that whenever any U.S. Administration tries to “push Israel into a peace deal, the result is more dead Jews.”
The assertion is “unsupported” by anything — except history, of course. The Camp David conference of July 2000 was followed by the Second Intifada in September 2000, and the connection between these two events was more than mere chronological proximity.
As for the headline, simple answer: Wishing to link Professor William Jacobson’s post, I needed a headline that — as headlines tend to do — boiled the subject down to its essence. As a characterization of Professor Jacobson’s argument, I think the headline was quite accurate, which doesn’t mean that I expect Roy Edroso to agree with Professor Jacobson.
Nevertheless, hits is hits, and we didn’t get to 4 million hits by complaining about getting hate-linked. I am, after all, a four-time nominee for Andrew Sullivan’s “Malkin Award,” and placed second only to Glenn Beck in balloting for the 2009 Malkin.
So if I’m not going to complain about Sullivan’s linkage, why should I object to Edroso? He may be an Enemy of All That Is True, Good and Holy — which is to say, a liberal — but at least Edroso isn’t pathologically obsessed with Sarah Palin’s uterus.