We haven’t had much to say recently of a partisan nature, because really, it’s just awful out there, and boring too. Here’s a change of pace, however, with some cleverness added into the mix. The little sub-messages are a nice touch. HT: Ace

Columbia University is offering a new course on Occupy Wall Street next semester — sending upperclassmen and grad students into the field for full course credit. The class is taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, who boasts about her nights camped out in Zuccotti Park. As many as 30 students will be expected to get involved in ongoing OWS projects outside the classroom, the syllabus says. The class will be in the anthropology department and called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement.” It will be divided between seminars at the Morningside Heights campus and fieldwork.

From the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University:

Hannah Appel earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. With research interests in the daily life of capitalism and the private sector in Africa, in particular, Hannah’s work draws on critical development studies, economic anthropology, and political economy. Her current project — Futures — is baded on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the transnational oil and gas industry in Equatorial Guinea. The project explores the considerable work required to lubricate the passage of oil to market – not only of labor (whether manual, managerial, or domestic,) but also of material infratstructures, contracting regimes, and forms of governance and regulation. What combinations of technopolitics, labor, infrastructure, contracts and subcontracts, corporate enclaves and corporate social responsibility programs are required to convert Equatorial Guinea’s hydrocarbon from subsea deposit to spot price on the New York Mercantile Exchange? And to what effect?

Is this guy, a Columbia grad student, going to help teach the course?

as the Founders knew, it is unwise to give people more powers than you would like them to use. There ought to be a law, I think, that in order to regulate something you have to have some understanding of it. And when people are saying things like, “This is just the rogue foreign Web sites” and “This only targets the bad actors” and “So you want universities to host illegal pirated versions of copyrighted content?,” it’s enough to make you claw out large fistfuls of your hair. No! No! Nobody is hosting anything.

This bill would require service providers to cut off access to entire Web sites where users are deemed to be engaging in copyright infringement, not take down stolen content they posted themselves. That’s already against the law. But no one seemed to be able to express this. When you have a signed letter from the engineers responsible for creating the Internet pointing out that this bill would jeopardize our cybersecurity, balkanize the Internet and create a climate of uncertainty that would stifle innovation, it seems odd to ignore it.

As a general rule, when the people saying that this will have a horrible, chilling impact on something are the ones who created that thing in the first place, and the people who are saying, “Oh, no, it’ll be fine, it only targets the bad actors” are members of the Motion Picture Association of America, it seems obvious whose opinion you should heed.

The bill has now been amended to exclude .com, .net, and .org and only target those darned foreigners, which of course illustrates just how idiotic the bill is. Pirate Bay, anyone? Our question is this: why, after the horrible overreach of government during the past three years, is there a potential majority in Congress to give even more power to the government? Have these people learned nothing at all?

Meanwhile, in what used to be the good ol’ USA, the Department of Homeland Security (the third largest cabinet department) has a Thanksgiving warning from a fellow in a hardhat that turkeys must be cooked properly lest they explode. Perhaps hardhats will soon be mandatory in kitchens throughout the land. (BTW, we don’t think this strange and willful decline will go on indefinitely. But the snapback, when it comes, will more than likely be pretty ugly in our view.)

the media and Cain’s detractors have over-played their hand. By Friday night, Politico, which broke the original story, had published 94 articles on the allegations in under six days. Every other major publication had followed suit. Every time he stepped out of a room, Cain was mobbed by reporters. Yet despite the maelstrom, Cain’s accusers remain anonymous and the details of the allegations oddly vague. With many conservatives believing that sexual harassment lawsuits are an industry and that frivolous cases are often settled to avoid more expensive litigation, there was a growing sense that Cain was being treated unfairly. Cain’s very amateurishness became almost endearing. Rather than mouthing slick talking points, Cain got angry with the journalists (a profession loathed by most Republican activists) and claimed that he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching”…Those who leaked the details of the 1990s sexual harassment cases might have thought that they’d destroy Herman Cain and leave his campaign dangling from a tree. But, as befits this strange and unpredictable election campaign, a funny thing happened on the way to the lynching.

We haven’t commented on this pig-pile, because we’ve had nothing useful to say. However, it seems clear enough that a substantial portion of the electorate has revolted against — what exactly?

On the Thursday before election day in 2000, the Bush DUI’s were leaked to Fox and hit the airwaves. On election day, we seem to recall that some early predictions suppressed turnout in the Florida panhandle. In 2004, CBS and the NYT collaborated on a scandal story a couple of weeks before the election about a vast number of weapons that had dissappeared in Iraq. This was the same CBS that used obvious forgeries of documents from a troubled guy in an attempt to sink the Bush re-election campaign against a guy with some more fact-based problems. And Bush wasn’t very much of a conservative. In 2008 the 12-to-1 media fell all over themselves to praise their candidate, and couldn’t be bothered with his scandals and strange, outlandish rhetoric. The legacy media now seem to be paying the price for this behavior.

It would appear that a substantial portion of the electorate has adopted as a default position that a partisan narrative chosen by the establishment media is a lie until proven otherwise. That’s quite a big change in a short span of years.

Many in our generation should be very grateful that this technology did not exist in our college days, as this student at Columbia amply demonstrates.

Don’t hate the rich, be one of them — Despite the turmoil in financial markets and global economic downtrend, the rich will go on accumulating wealth faster than ever anticipated. According to the private wealth report released some time ago that the number of high net worth individuals is growing by leaps and bounds on a year-on-year basis. The concept of so-called high net worth individuals refers to those with net assets of at least US$1m excluding their main home.

The survey conducted by Merchants Bank and Bain & Company indicates that as many as 320,000 individuals will possess at a minimum US$1.46m each in disposal assets…it is quite desirable to cultivate a wealth culture, which can, for one thing, gradually change people’s thought process and make them believe everybody can escape poverty and get rich through efforts…

a sound atmosphere in which wealth creation is encouraged will also help people retrain their mind, pushing out the old ‘poverty mentality,’ and replacing it with a ‘wealth mentality.’ If more people are devising ways to create wealth, in a long run, it will contribute to building a harmonious and mass affluent society, as more people will have the ability to help the less fortunate.

A society without producing wealthy people is never progressing on the healthy track. Indeed, even the Bible says ‘money is the root of all evils.’ In this light, a highly commercialized society is not a noble one, either. But it is noteworthy that wealth in itself has nothing to do with guilt or innocence, and what matters most is how to manage it. Nevertheless, it will be beneficial to the general good of a society that, instead of bitterly envying the rich, more people are learning to become one of them.

Oops. That was Communist China. This is America.

We didn’t show the first picture from the Return to 1968 Festival in NYC. It kind of sums things up, however. Maybe this does too: “God bless them for their spontaneity,” Pelosi told reporters. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.” Yeah, good luck with that. How effective? Just watch this scene from Atlanta’s dramatization of Orwell’s Animal Farm:

How creepy is all that chanting in unison? Ginning this up was a terrible idea on the part of those who wanted to create an anti-tea-party. We’d say Go For It! — but there’s something a little scary about the behavior of these mind-numbed robots. HT: Powerline

In 2008, Lawrence O’Donnell wrote a flattering teleplay about a certain Democratic candidate. The candidate was bold, clever, relentless and heroic. How times change. Imagine O’Donnell treating that candidate the way he treated Hermen Cain. Can’t imagine that? We can’t either. But the really interesting change is that some of the GOP field are not cowering before the hostile Democrat media. For decades the legacy media have acted as though their viewpoint is that of a majority of the country, when it’s simply untrue. Is it just us, or is the 30% beginning to sound like the 30% they are? HT: Wretchard

In 2005, Republicans’ and Democrats’ views of their own parties dovetailed with the perceptions of the electorate as a whole. Today, while voters as a whole agree with Republicans’ evaluation of their party as conservative, they disagree with Democrats, who on average see their party as moderate rather than liberal.

So when Independents, who see themselves as modestly right of center, say that Democrats are too liberal, average Democrats can’t imagine what they’re talking about.

Compounding the problem, the American people are gradually polarizing. According to Gallup, twenty years ago, as Bill Clinton began his presidential campaign, self-described moderates formed the plurality of the electorate — 43 percent; conservatives were 36 percent, liberals 17 percent.

By the summer of 2011, the conservative share had risen to 41 percent and liberals to 21 percent, while moderates declined to 36 percent, surrendering their plurality status to conservatives. Because nearly all conservatives now vote for Republicans and liberals for Democrats, the share of the shrinking pool of moderates that Democrats need to build a majority is now larger than ever.

Another Gallup finding that should alert Democrats is the ongoing collapse of public confidence in government. A survey released earlier this week found that Americans now believe that the federal government wastes 51 cents of every dollar it spends, the highest estimate ever recorded. Twenty-five years ago, that figure stood at only 38 cents…

Tellingly, a number of at-risk Democratic senators up for reelection in 2012 have already refused to go along with key elements of the president’s recent proposals.

The beltway media are almost unanimously Democrats. They live in an echo chamber where, as Galston says, “they can’t imagine what independents are talking about” when they say that the Party has become too liberal.

21% of the country may be a small sliver, but it’s still a lot of people and they have a disproportionate influence on politics, even with the ascension of the New Media. Blue voters and donors are highly concentrated in places like New York, LA, DC, Boston, the Bay area, and Chicago, but they have the media megaphone as well as the campaign dollars.

On issue after issue over the last two years, from the GZM to the 2010 election and on and on, we have seen that the opinion shapers of the Beltway media and the NYT have been losing, sometimes by 70-30 margins. They’ve often explained this by saying that the majority is stupid and hateful. That is a bad strategy.

Mr. Galston has performed a valuable service for his party and particularly its opinion shapers. But honestly, does anyone expect the writers at the Times or the Post to change their opinions after so many years? If anything, we expect the shouting to get louder and the accusations more absurd.

The speed of light is the Universe’s ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics — as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity — depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it. Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.

But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.

Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another. The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.

In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up a few billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance. The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance

Lots of theories in the comments section here; we blame global warming for the anomaly. Time for the another look at the amusing LHC video again.

It’s also part of Governor Perry’s branding strategy for the base. Ponzi scheme, president zero, etc. Quick: name a phrase or quote made famous by Governor Romney. Waiting. Still waiting. We’re not claiming that it’s going to be an ultimately successful strategy. Mr. Perry may not perform well, and there certainly are a lot of influential people who don’t like him. Time will tell.

From thorninaz: “Hey #attackwatch, I saw 6 ATM’s in an alley, killing a Job. It looked like a hate crime!”

From chuckdevore (Republican state legislator in California): “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean a big majority of us isn’t out to get you…”

From EddieRobbins: “My neighbor removed his Obama bumper sticker. I think he’s a racist.”

From DickMeyers: “Bless me #AttackWatch for I have sinned. I have muttered naughty words about our Dear Leader 9 times & have doubted his divinity a few times”

From joaniekensil: “Ate refried beans & chips for breakfast which is sort of racist foodist – Carbon emissions to follow.”

From PoliticalGravity: “Saw a kid with a lemonade stand and she didn’t have a permit.”

From DrFreeLance: “I saw a werewolf drinkin a pina colada at Trader Vic’s, and his hair was perfect.”

Funny stuff. (More amusing things here and here.) But as the twitter revolution demonstrated, you don’t actually have to be using twitter to make a fool of yourself.

74% of voters throughout the country believe that businesses and consumers are over-regulated. Further, another 67% believe that regulations have increased over the past few years. These percentages include majorities of all partisan affiliations, with 91% of Republicans, 75% of Independents and 58% of Democrats saying businesses/consumers are over-regulated…

70% believe increasing the number of regulations on American businesses will result in more jobs moving overseas. Also, majorities agree that the increasing number of regulations have created uncertainty for large and small businesses (66%), and that agencies who enforce regulations fail to consider how their decisions lead to increased prices for consumers and job losses (69%).

Every voter has seen wasteful and ridiculous regulatory creep in his lifetime. It should be an easy issue to exploit, and a powerful issue too, given the large majorities of D-R-I that agree. But what would be the best way to do so for maximum visual impact?

The kids’ lemonade stands that cops and bureaucrats now shut down? The TSA-ing of America in a video that fast-forwards from 1972, when there was no airport screening at all, to today’s long lines for intrusive body searches? Maybe you have an idea.

Watch the video before it disappears. The punchline is at 1:10. It won’t be any surprise to you who made the statement above. BTW, the video above only cost the taxpayers $550 million to produce. Chump change.

A rabid Doberman Pinscher jumped on stage at a Tea Party rally in Missouri on Labor Day and barked at the crowd for nearly twenty minutes before people realized he was not a candidate. The dog, later identified by its owner as “Mister Buster,” held the crowd spellbound as he barked, growled, and frothed at the mouth, eventually receiving a standing ovation for his exertions. Gwendolene Thomason, 42, a Tea Party supporter from Jefferson City, was one of the hundreds on hand who were convinced that the Doberman was a Tea Party candidate

Maybe this is a tea party candidate too.

They’ve really gone nuts. It’s almost inconceivable that this will get far worse before November 2012, yet it will somehow.

“His work as governor is unparalleled in its frontal assault on women,” said Siobhan Bennett, the president of the Women’s Campaign Forum, citing statistics on women living in poverty and without health care in Texas and Perry’s active opposition to abortion. “He has gone farther out on a limb legislatively in his capacity as governor and has been expressly anti-woman in the legislation he has done.”

“He is beyond what we expect from conservative Republicans on the gun issue,” said Dennis Henigan, the acting president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, who cited Perry’s support for gun rights on college campuses and said it was a sharp contrast with Romney’s “moderate” record. Perry’s rise, he said, had already become “a strong mobilizing force” for gun control activists, whose agenda has been largely ignored by the Obama administration. “People are perceiving a very real threat that he could be the Republican nominee,” said Henigan, calling the prospect “quite frightening.”

Barry Lynn, whose Americans United for Separation of Church and State is on the front lines of keeping religion out of public life, also labeled Perry an extreme figure. “He doesn’t just go to religious right gatherings — he creates religious right gatherings, and that’s a big difference,” he said, citing The Response, a 30,000-person event Perry led in Houston in early August.

The response to all this may be found at 1:10 of this video.

Suitz Movie
by: dinocrat

We decided to make this movie (it took about 20 minutes to do so) after the previous week’s media stories about one potential Republican presidential candidate began to sound just like the dialogue in our little vignette. Imagine how much worse it’s going to get if Perry actually turns out to be the GOP candidate.

If America’s predicament was a work of fiction, we could imagine all sorts of lurid plot twists, evil-cracker-plots, peasant uprisings and so forth. But it’s not a work of fiction, though the attempt to paint nice people who want to cut the budget as extremists does have its humorous elements. So what’s the next plot twist? We can’t go on reading this dreary book month after month after month without something to break the monotony.

(Of course treating every business in the country like Gibson Guitar could create a series of diversions, but it’s very hard to see a happy ending for the authors of that plot line in November 2012.)

The trendline is clear on the economy’s improvement, it’s dramatically up as the dark green line indicates! Oops, wrong graph. HT: Wretchard

President Obama sought to reassure jittery investors Monday following a credit rating downgrade, declaring that the United States “will always be a triple-A country” regardless of an agency’s grade…Immediately following Obama’s remarks, U.S. markets continued to lose ground. As he began speaking, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 426, or 3.7 percent, to 11,018, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index had declined 58 points, or 4.8 percent, to 1,141. Half an hour later, the Dow was down 474 points…At day’s end, the Dow had plunged 635 points

The faculty lounge has no new ideas, and needs a new teleprompter to boot. How embarrassing is this “will always be a triple-A country” business? Hard to see how this goes on unabated for another 18 months. The satire now writes itself, yes it does.

One of the things that’s been floating around the Web over the past week is a video clip from 1953. It’s a short film produced by the motion picture industry, seeking the end of a 20 percent excise tax on movie theaters’ gross revenues that had been imposed at the end of World War II as a deficit-cutting measure…In the film, figures ranging from industry big shots to humble ticket collectors talk about how the tax is hurting their industry and killing jobs…

I would be agitating to repeal the “Eisenhower tax cut” on the movie industry and restore the excise tax. I think I would also look at imposing similar taxes on sales of DVDs, pay-per-view movies, CDs, downloadable music, and related products. I’d also look at the tax and accounting treatment of these industries to see if they were taking advantage of any special “loopholes” that could be closed as a means of reducing “tax expenditures.”…

I note that FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, who approved the Comcast merger, left the commission to take a lucrative job at Comcast…Because much of their value to their employers comes from their prior government service, I think that the taxpayers deserve a share of the return, say in the form of a 50 percent surtax on any earnings by political appointees in excess of their prior government salaries

Gee, maybe the media would form their own tea party. But what then would they say about themselves?

I think Obama is easily the winner and currently stupidly under-rated – and drowned out by all the noise in the conservative-media-industrial-complex.

Here are the political accomplishments: defeating the most heavily favored party machine in decades (the Clintons) while actually bringing his biggest rival into his cabinet, where she has performed extraordinarily well; helping to cement the GOP’s broad identity as extremists opposed to compromise; entrenching black and Hispanic loyalty to his party; retaining solid favorables and not-too-shabby approval ratings during the worst recession since the 1930s. 44 percent of the country still (rightly) blame Bush for this mess, only 15 percent blame Obama.

On policy: ending the US torture regime; prevention of a second Great Depression; enacting universal healthcare; taking the first serious steps toward reining in healthcare costs; two new female Supreme Court Justices; ending the gay ban in the military; ending the Iraq war; justifying his Afghan Surge by killing bin Laden and now disentangling with face saved; firming up alliances with India, Indonesia and Japan as counter-weights to China; bailing out the banks and auto companies without massive losses (and surging GM profits); advancing (slowly) balanced debt reduction without drastic cuts during the recession; and financial re-regulation.

Yes, there have been failures. The election of Scott Brown; the 2010 mid-terms; the surrender to Netanyahu and AIPAC; the botched and ill-conceived war in Libya; the failure to embrace Bowles Simpson up-front; the collapse of cap and trade (maybe not such a bad thing anyway). But notice what hasn’t happened. Where are all the scandals promised by Michelle Malkin? Where are his Katrinas?

Well, there’s that “unprecedented blow to the world’s largest economy.” But maybe we’re nitpicking.

If Khan’s formula is an excellent replacement for the college lecture, Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy Labs offers something of a replacement for the college seminar. Laporte broadcasts a technology radio program for six hours on the weekend, and offers all sorts of other tech programming live and on podcasts. One of the interesting features is his seminar — really, it’s a chatroom — with a thousand participants or more online during the broadcasts. In those instances when the highly knowledgeable Laporte doesn’t know the answer to a particularly arcane question, the hive often provides real-time answers to questions that come in live over the phone lines. We’ve never encountered a more well-informed group of seminar participants.

There’s one other improvement over current college practices that both Khan and Laporte offer — participation is free. College education in most cases does not deliver good value for the money. Expanding educational opportunities in this country by expanding scholarships is clearly a vastly inferior policy approach to lowering delivery costs. But politicians prattle on, do they not?

tens of thousands of Egyptians poured into Tahrir Square on Friday for a day that had been billed as one of unified protest against the interim military government. But the turnout was lopsided, dominated by members of religious movements, ranging from the most conservative, the Salafists, to the relatively moderate Muslim Brotherhood…demonstrators called out, “The people want to implement Sharia,” a strict code of Islamic law…blogger and activist Nora Shalaby wrote on Twitter that the Salafists were “diverting us from the real demands of the revolution bc of their selfishness.”

Yeah, right. As we noted back in February when the media found its latest fleeting Utopia, Egypt is a country where 84% of the population thinks apostates should face the death penalty. Twitter indeed.

We noted below that Rick Santelli and Glenn Reynolds are apparently American Taliban. Probably we have to add Salman Khan of the amazing Khan Academy to the list. Just watch as he explains that the obligations of the federal government are unsustainable. Why, that’s just like setting off bombs in Afghanistan, isn’t it?

It was 1983. HT: PJM

It is genuinely hard for us to imagine the moral universe that these men inhabit — and not just them, but all the businessmen around them, the producers and record company executives, the companies buying product placement in such music, etc. How long can such a downward spiral continue? Perhaps that’s the subject for a different day; let’s move on to more pleasant things.

We’re writing this because Scott Johnson just took note of the birthday of Alison Krauss, a happy occasion for American music. We’ll also pause to remember that the wunderkind Bob Dylan will turn 70(!) this year, and that Keith Jarrett’s Köln concert is 36 years old now. Ebb and flow.

We recently caught a glimpse of some of the posturing that goes on in the budget negotiations. Now Jonathan Chait of TNR discusses what happens when the Gang of Six present their proposal to the House:

The Senate “Gang Of Six” today made a final push for its deficit reduction proposal…How do they think this plan will get through the House of Representatives?…The thing to understand about the House Republican caucus is that it’s riven between anti-government fanatics and anti-tax fanatics.

Perhaps the video above is a meeting of the House and Senate subcommittees. Sadly, the crooks still got away with some money. However, it’s a start. (Pete Ferrara has a more serious treatment of the issues in play today.)

you learn how James Johnson, the erstwhile CEO of Fannie Mae built it into a colossus that gradually jettisoned all prudence in lending and vastly enriched himself and a bunch of cronies. He also suborned powerful legislators like Barney Frank, the powerful Massachusetts Democrat. And, lastly, he looked on and encouraged Wall Street firms to do the same and used that as justification to increase the scale of his own operations. And, Oh! I almost forgot, he also admonished fresh graduates to pursue their careers with “honesty and integrity”. When Johnson left Fannie Mae, a senior executive recalled “…we always won, we took no prisoners and we faced little organized political opposition.” He continued to be politically influential and was an adviser to the current president until forced to resign because it surfaced that he had received sweetheart loans from a leading purveyor of toxic financial junk.

Did you ever feel that “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” is the norm on Wall Street? Consider this: Stephen Friedman, former CEO of Goldman Sachs was a director of Fannie Mae when the directors improperly allowed company executives to set earnings targets that they could meet. Federal investigators concluded that “As a direct result, senior management reaped ongoing and extensive financial rewards through accounting manipulation.” Johnson was then inducted to the board of Goldman Sachs — when Hank Paulson became CEO — and promptly made chair of the compensation committee. He dispensed some of the richest paychecks on Wall Street and these became the norm as other firms played catch-up. In fact, Johnson chaired the compensation committees of every board he sat on.

Angelo Mozilo, founder and CEO of Countrywide, was a good friend of Johnson’s and used his methods to grow the cancer that was Countrywide. The company made it a policy to give sweetheart loans to persons in power — these VIP loans were informally known as Friends of Angelo loans. Richard Holbrooke got such a loan. So did Senators Chris Dodd, Kent Conrad and Barbara Boxer. So did Donna Shalala, former head of Health and Human Services and Alfonso Jackson, secretary of HUD. And Countrywide hired sons and daughters and relatives of the influential and made sure that they were not fired during mass layoffs.

Round about Christmas Eve 2008 the NYT did a 5000 word piece that blamed the mortgage disaster on the “White House Philosophy” of that era. Of course it was obvious even then that this looked like the greatest bi-partisan heist of all time, and that appears to be been proven out, since nobody has gone to jail. Silly us! We thought No Income Verification meant that the banks had very clever computer data bases, and not that everyone and his brother were being invited to participate in the fraud.

1. In The Mood – Glenn Miller
2. When You Wish Upon a Star – Cliff Edwards
3. I’ll Never Smile Again – Tommy Dorsey w/Frank Sinatra
4. Only Forever – Bing Crosby
5. Body & Soul – Coleman Hawkins
6. When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano – The Ink Spots
7. The Breeze and I – Jimmy Dorsey w/Bob Eberly
8. You Are My Sunshine – Jimmie Davis
9. When You Wish Upon a Star – Glenn Miller
10. Tuxedo Junction – Glenn Miller…

one-fourth of the top hits sold or listened to by the majority of Americans in 1940 were performed by Glenn Miller…Frank Sinatra jumped ship to the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in January. Together they recorded some 40 songs during the next 12 months, the most successful of which was I’ll Never Smile Again which became one of the most important chart toppers of all time, spending almost three months at the number one spot.

A simpler time, and in the world of contemporary music and popular culture, a better time.

News organizations mobilized teams of reporters and even recruited online volunteers to scan more than 24,000 pages of e-mails…MSNBC.com deputized 40 volunteers, chosen with the help of the League of Women Voters and the Retired Public Employees…

The New York Times and The Guardian sent reporters armed with scanners and then solicited readers’ assistance. Politico enlisted a dozen editors, reporters and interns who worked as a team from their Northern Virginia newsroom “plowing through” the documents, as one editor described it. The Washington Post initially asked for 100 volunteers to sift through the documents. They were quickly overwhelmed…

“This is not a witch hunt,” said Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor at The Times. “There are 25,000 documents here, and we can use all the eyeballs we can get.” The Times, like The Post and others, uploaded the e-mails onto its Web site and invited readers to sift through them…“From our perspective, we’re just providing the public records to the public, who own them,” said Bill Dedman, a reporter for MSNBC

Question: when they say “this is not a witch hunt,” what is it? (A convoy?)

The song above dates from 1926, so it’s not quite a century old. This enjoyable rendition is by Whispering Jack Smith, though it only became a #1 hit on the Billboard Charts in the Al Jolson version. (We could spend a lot of time on Billboard #1′s. The year after this song, Hoagy Carmichael wrote Stardust which became a hit multiple times over. The 1940′s featured some great songs. In 1942 a few #1 hits ruled the charts for months at a time. In 1960 a Billboard #1 hit became the highest ranking instrumental in its history.)

AT40 debuted in 1970 and featured a countdown to the Billboard #1 hit record. The source for calculating #1 changed over the years but the concept stayed the same. The #1 hit from a couple of weeks ago, and a Grammy Award nominee for best song to boot, is a catchy little ditty by Mr. Cee Lo Green whose title might have landed you in jail not so long ago if you were to repeat it on the radio the number of times that Mr. Green does in his song (16 times or so). And there’s much even worse out there from Enrique Inglesias, for example.

Hey, that gives us an idea for a contemporary song. You can sing along if you like. It’s a mashup of the old and the new. “When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin along, F…” Take it away, Cee Lo! America in 2011.

A new national alert system is set to begin in New York City that will alert the public to emergencies via cell phones. Presidential and local emergency messages as well as Amber Alerts would appear on cell phones…Verizon and AT&T, the nation’s largest cell phone carriers, are already on board. Consumers would be able to opt out of all but those presidential messages.

Life imitates art. Lily Tomlin was right all along. HT: GP

We are at war with violent extremists who would kill Americans. And some of those people might be Muslim, they might be white supremacists, they might be people who would kill at abortion clinics. They might be of any description…We don’t stop at one particular group. We are trying to stop Americans from any extremist group; Muslim, Christian, Jewish, any kind

A presidential advisor said this to high school and college students in Washington: “The entire planet, the children of all species, are counting on you.”

And another politician said this: “There are climate change deniers in Congress and when the economy gets tough, sometimes environmental issues drop from people’s radar screens…But I don’t think there’s any doubt that unless we are able to move forward in a serious way on clean energy, that we’re putting our children and our grandchildren at risk.”

It is not surprising that those interested in political power are often knaves and fools and the lowest of the low. It continues to surprise us (though it shouldn’t) that there are so few adults of sound judgment in the media establishment that nonsense and pipedreams go forever unchallenged. Imagine the US with a 50/50 media instead of a 12-to-1 media. Nice thought.

A leading NYT columnist said this in 1999:

if you really want to be ”concerned” about the levels of some of these profitless Internet stocks, such as Amazon.com, you should pay…attention to what’s going on in a small house in Cedar Falls, Iowa. There, a single Iowa family, headed by Lyle Bowlin, is re-creating Amazon.com in a spare bedroom. I tell you this…to underscore just how easy it is to compete against Amazon.com, and why therefore I’m dubious that Amazon and many other Internet retailers will ever generate the huge profit…

the next time your broker tells you that this or that Internet retailing stock is actually worth some crazy multiples, just think for a moment about how many Lyle Bowlins there already are out there, and how many more there will be, to eat away at the profit margins of whatever Internet retailer you can imagine. It only costs them $150 a month and they can do it as a hobby! Or think about it like this: For about the cost of one share of Amazon.com, you can be Amazon.com

The blue line above is Amazon’s stock price, which has soared 100x since just before this column was written. The green line above is the dismal relative performance of the stock of the NYT company, for which this Pulitzer Prize winning commentator works. One company went up 10000%; one company fell 50%. Our question is this: why would anyone ever pay attention to the views on business and the economy so categorically proffered by people with no business knowledge or experience? HT’s: Powerline, Ace

Ross Perot addressed the question of NAFTA in a way that establishment Republicans and the not-wanting-to-give-offense-to-anything-they-teach-at-Harvard-and-Berkeley-media wouldn’t go near. His question was simple: “how can the result of NAFTA be good for America if free trade means that it is far cheaper to produce a product in Mexico? Won’t there be a giant sucking sound as all those good American jobs head south of the border?” Now, maybe free trade is a good idea and maybe it isn’t, but Perot found a clever way to ask a common sense question that the media and the GOP largely turned away from.

Donald Trump is onto the same thing. Establishment GOP candidates and a media machine that is much more overtly partisan than it was in 1992 aren’t going anywhere near the areas that Trump wants to discuss. There’s much tut-tutting from the bien-pensants. But they’re missing the point. The birth certificate business is the entrepreneur’s shorthand. What Trump is giving voice to is a deeper question that many Americans feel in their gut about the president. Why does this guy seem “off”? What’s wrong? Something is not right here. His strange behavior is openly whispered about by White House insiders, so why shouldn’t average Amercans be able to find out what’s going on with this guy?

Experienced entrepreneurs and showmen will step in where cautious politicians and a compliant media fear to tread, and the entrepreneurs will likely figure out how to turn a tidy profit on the trade. But they didn’t create the problem; they are responding to it.

The Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs needs someone to run the Facebook page for the Dept. of the Interior and they’ll pay up to $115,000 a year. Over at the Dept. of Defense, they’ll drop nearly 50k a year for a new mail room clerk, plus the glorious benefits that comes with government work.

In Washington, D.C., there are more than 1,000 openings this month alone. These include a “student internship” program at the Federal Housing Finance Agency that pays the equivalent of $48,304 a year; a $155,000-a-year gig at the Peace Corps to ensure the agency is complying with Equal Opportunity Employment standards; and a similar job at the Dept. of Transportation that promises nearly $180,000 a year.

HT: Mickey Kaus

As of this writing, an incredible 80 million people have viewed this video. Above is a version, possibly as interpreted by lip-reading software. Below is one from late night television.

Andy Warhol was right, and the internet hadn’t even been invented at the time. HT: Leo Laporte

Gallup conducted a national survey for CNN and USA Today that showed nearly twice as many Americans blaming Republican leaders in Congress for the shutdown (49 percent) rather than Clinton (26 percent) or both equally (19 percent). Gallup also found a 49 percent to 36 percent plurality said they preferred Democrats to Republicans in “dealing with the tough choices”

Now:

57% of Likely U.S. Voters think making deeper spending cuts in the federal budget for 2011 is more important than avoiding a partial government shutdown. Thirty-one percent (31%) disagree…36% of voters think it would be better to avoid a government shutdown by authorizing spending at a level most Democrats will agree to. Fifty-seven percent (57%) would rather have a shutdown until Democrats and Republicans can agree on deeper spending cuts.

There are reasons to believe that 2011 is not 1995 (even though the 1995 poll is adults and the recent poll is likely voters). We all know that the media will have a field day with a government shutdown, and we all know where they will lay the blame. (How many times can you use the word “extreme” in a single paragraph?) But it really doesn’t matter who wins the media war of 2011. The issue is too important and too urgent.

By the time the dollar loses its reserve currency status and the US its AAA rating, it will be far too late. The debt being piled upon generations of Americans yet unborn is not only theft, it is, as Mark Steyn said, the greatest example of taxation without representation in the nation’s history. Stop the madness!

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms

Remind you of anyone?

I believe there is a Western veneer of rebels and these are good hearted and brave reformers. And I believe most don’t know an RPG from an IED. Those that do are not pro-Western and not about to remove Qaddafi and his odious bunch in order to foster republican government.

The truth is that in the Arab Middle East constitutional government works mostly 1) in Israel; or 2) when the U.S. (in Germany, Italy, Japan fashion) removes a tyrant, destroys his government, occupies the country, writes the Constitution, and puts tens of thousands of troops on the ground to rebuild the society and shoot those who would hijack the reform — as in Iraq. Oddly, these are the two countries Obama has most criticized.

So the chance of a lasting Libyan consensual state arising from the ashes of Qaddafi are rather slim without such Western tutelage and expense. I fear the removal of tyrants is not the end of the Middle East war, but merely stage I, in Iranian 1979-1981 fashion, followed by stage II when the Islamists either liquidate the Google executives or co-opt the military.

Niall Ferguson said pretty much the same thing. Bummer. What happened to this sentiment: “to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege…It was started by youth and enabled by Facebook and Twitter. It was completely non-violent.”

When New York Times reporter John Tierney surveyed reporters covering the Democratic National Convention last month, the results were striking. “We got anonymous answers from 153 journalists, about a third of them based in Washington,” he wrote on Aug. 1. “When asked who would be a better president, the journalists from outside the Beltway picked Mr. Kerry 3 to 1, and the ones from Washington favored him 12 to 1.”

And Evan Thomas of Newsweek said this in 2004:

The media, I think, wants Kerry to win and I think they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards I’m talking about the establishment media, not Fox. They’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there’s going to be this glow about them, collective glow, the two of them, that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.

Questions: (a) have things gotten better or worse for the media since 2004? (b) what does this presage for 2011-2012?

It’s an open question as to whether this stealth strategy could be long-term effective for a politician; after all, actions eventually speak louder than words. Our point is a different one: what a dreadful way to live a life, to passionately believe certain things but know you must never directly give voice to them. Instead, you must deflect, obfuscate or often say precisely the opposite of what you hold dearest. It’s enough to make you want to tune out completely — you know, play a lot of golf, take vacations and watch ESPN as much as possible.

police and bullying experts are concerned by the video’s publication on Facebook and the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the older boy’s retaliation against his attacker. “We don’t believe that violence is ever the answer,” Mr Dalgleish says…Police are trying today to speak to the parents of both boys.

Almost everything is wrong with the paragraph above: (a) the police should have better things to do; (b) violence is often the answer; and (c) in an age of unemployment, no one should get a paycheck as a “bullying expert.” Can you imagine this article in any newspaper on December 6, 1941?

What happened to (a) those demands for civility at the beginning of the year? (b) the twitter revolutions? (c) the tsunami? and, coming next month (d) Libya? Answer: something happens, the media arrive, mess things up and take a lot of pictures, then leave when they see something they view as new, exciting, and (usually) ideologically useful. There’ll be a new meltdown, war, or flower revolution somewhere next month.

But in the case of the Middle East, it’s not just or even especially the US media. As Marc Lynch noted in January, Al Jazeera is “by far the most watched and most influential single media outlet in the Arab world. It has also embraced the new media environment, creatively and rapidly adopting user generated content to overcome official crackdowns on its coverage of various countries — a practice perfected in Iraq, where it had to rely on locally-generated content after its office was closed down in 2004.” So YouTube videos and such are apparently an important part of its content.

The US media have well-known policy preferences, and they are not shy about sharing them, consciously or not. Much of their ability to shape narratives derives from the emotional power of visual images. This is true the world over. As an observer wrote in February in the HuffPo, the “Arab revolution is without a doubt the poster child of Al Jazeera.” Yes, but what is the agenda of Al Jazeera? What sorts of new governments would its owners, management and newspeople like to see emerge in a transformed Middle East?

Young people with smartphones and the media can certainly start some things, but they are not well-positioned to end them. The young are know-nothings and powerless, and the media move on to the next adrenaline jolt. Into the void come the long-organized and ruthless. This may not be a 100% case, but it is certainly a majority. We agree with those who say that some degree of chaos, and rule by the nastier elements are the likely outcomes in most instances.

Serious countries develop and practice national policies that come from pursuing national interests. It’s bad enough when US policy seems to resemble the fashion of the day on TV. Much worse when the TV station isn’t even American. One of the most disturbing elements of the US’s recent foreign policy pronouncements and actions, particularly the Libyan military action, is that government officials routinely make wildly contradictory statements, and the ultimate (?) policy often seems improvised and scattershot.

Here’s a suggestion (and we’re only joking a little bit): at the beginning of each new media crisis or twitter uprising, a senior government official of sober mien and sound judgement should be required to not watch TV, and forego the internet. His counsel should be sought and particularly valued before any US government pronouncement or action. A major power cannot long endure as such if it looks like it makes its policy by following cable TV, tweets and postings on Facebook.