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A Canadian comments on the American media. This from their National Post
As the bad economic news continues to emanate from the United States — with a double-dip recession now all but certain — a reckoning is overdue. American journalism will have to look back at the period starting with Barrack Obama’s rise, his assumption of the presidency and his conduct in it to the present, and ask itself how it came to cast aside so many of its vital functions. In the main, the establishment American media abandoned its critical faculties during the Obama campaign — and it hasn’t reclaimed them since.
Much of the Obama coverage was orchestrated sychophancy. They glided past his pretensions — when did a presidential candidate before “address the world” from the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin? They ignored his arrogance — “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” And they averted their eyes from his every gaffe — such as the admission that he didn’t speak “Austrian.”
Alana Goodman catches Axelrod complaining about Obama’s press coverage.
… Let’s see. Obama’s approval ratings are crashing and burning, new scandals are popping up daily, and his jobs plan is being widely panned by members of his own party. All that, and Axelrod still expects flattering coverage?
More than anything, the memo is a sign the media culture is beginning to change. Obama still gets far better coverage than a Republican politician would. But the rise of right-leaning media outlets and the competition for web traffic has made it much harder for mainstream outlets to ignore legitimate stories that reflect poorly on Democrats. That’s not to say the coverage of Obama’s campaign will be as fair and balanced as it should be, but he’s not going to get as much of a free pass as he did in 2008.
Mark Steyn thinks we’re pretty awesome when it comes to creating green jobs.
… On Thursday night, the president told a Democratic fundraiser in Washington that the Pass My Jobs Bill bill would create 1.9 million new jobs. What kind of jobs are created by this kind of magical thinking? Well, they’re “green jobs” – and, if we know anything about “green jobs,” it’s that they take a lot of green. German taxpayers subsidize “green jobs” in their wind-power industry to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars per worker per year: $250,000 per “green job” would pay for a lot of real jobs, even in the European Union. Last year, it was revealed that the Spanish government paid $800,000 for every “green job” on a solar panel assembly line. I had assumed carelessly that this must be a world record in terms of taxpayer subsidy per fraudulent “green job.” But it turns out those cheapskate Spaniards with their lousy nickel-and-dime “green jobs” subsidy just weren’t thinking big. The Obama administration’s $38.6 billion “clean technology” program was supposed to “create or save” 65,000 jobs. Half the money has been spent – $17.2 billion – and we have 3,545 jobs to show for it. That works out to an impressive $4,851,904.09 per “green job.” A world record! Take that, you loser Spaniards! USA! USA!
So, based on previous form, Obama’s prediction of 1.9 million new jobs will result in the creation of 92,000 new jobs, mostly in the Federal Department of Green Jobs Grant Applications. …
James Pethokoukis says Solyndra is the logical end of Obamanomics.
The bankruptcy of solar-panel maker Solyndra neatly encapsulates the economic, political and intellectual bankruptcy of Barack Obama’s Big Idea. It was the president’s intention back in 2009 to begin centrally reorganizing the U.S. economy around the supposed climate-change crisis.
To what end? Well, Obama claimed his election would mark “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” But that was just the cover story. At its core, Obamanomics is about the top-down redistribution of wealth and income. Government spending on various “green” subsidies and programs, along with a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions, would enrich key Democrat constituencies: lawyers, public sector unions, academia and non-profits.
Oh, and Wall Street, too. Who was the exclusive financial adviser to Solyndra when it was trying to secure the $535 million loan from Washington? Goldman Sachs. And had the cap-and-trade scheme been enacted, big banks stood ready to reap billions from the trading of carbon emission credits. …
Corner Post notes the political interests of a career “civil servant.”
… Today’s Washington Post has a story about how an OMB career official warned in an e-mail on January 31, 2011, that they needed “to flag to DOE at the highest levels the stakes involved” in Solyndra’s looming financial collapse. The e-mail does not show much concern over the potential loss to taxpayers of half a billion dollars. No, what concerns the supposedly nonpartisan career civil servant is the “optics” of such a loss due to the “PR and policy attention Solyndra has received since 2009.” The bureaucrat writes, “If Solyndra defaults down the road, the optics will arguably be worse later than they would be today.”
In fact, “the timing will likely coincide with the 2012 campaign season heating up, whereas a default today could be put in the context of (and perhaps even get some credit for) fiscal discipline/good government because the Administration would be limiting further taxpayer exposure letting bad projects go, and could make public steps it is taking to learn lessons and improve/limit future lending.” …
Jonah Goldberg reviews Obama’s weak week.
In Nevada, the Republican crushed a top-flight female Democratic candidate by 22 points. In New York, the seat that once belonged to Geraldine Ferraro, Chuck Schumer and Anthony Weiner went to Republican Bob Turner — the first time the seat since has gone Republican since 1923. A liberal strategist put a rosy spin on it: “The mine hasn’t collapsed, but the loss in New York is definitely a dead canary.”
In both races, the Democrats used their trump card: scaring seniors by telling them the GOP wants to take away their Medicare and Social Security. It didn’t work.
This came against a backdrop of abysmal poll numbers showing Obama’s approval falling with every constituency, including Democrats, Independents, Hispanics and African-Americans. That might be why congressional Democrats are openly balking at his must-pass stimulus do-over.
Corner Post quotes George Will.
“He went to Massachusetts to campaign against Scott Brown; Brown is now a senator. He went to New Jersey to campaign against Chris Christie, who’s now governor. He went to Virginia to campaign against Bob McDonnell, who’s now governor. He campaigned for the health-care plan extensively, it became less popular. He campaigned in 2010 for the Democrats, they were shellacked. He began, in a sense, his presidency flying to Copenhagen to get Chicago the Olympics; Chicago was the first city eliminated. There is no evidence that the man has the rhetorical powers that he is relying on.”
Another Corner Post quotes Karl Rove.
“President Obama has himself backwards,” Rove says. “His problem is not that he was a policy wonk: it’s that he wasn’t. He refused to get his hands dirty writing a good stimulus bill, drafting bipartisan health-care reform, or negotiating with Republicans. He found it easier to tell them ‘I won, so get lost.’”
“The president is comfortable with a technocratic approach because he is an imperious, arrogant, know-it-all left wing technocrat who leaves the details to his congressional Democratic allies, like Congressman Dave Obey with the stimulus bill,” Rove adds. “He is content to check the box on his list of achievements and tour the country with his teleprompter giving speeches.”
Peter Wehner comments on Obama’s claim to wonkishness.
There are two other things worth noting in what Obama said. The first is that he’s employing the old (and transparent) trick of criticizing himself by praising himself. The“disease” Obama suffers from, you see, is that he’s a “policy wonk.” The message the president is trying to send is he’s been too intellectual, too serious-minded, and too involved in mastering the depths of complicated policy issues; as a result, he just hasn’t paid enough attention to providing a “narrative” for his presidency. This is akin to the person who says his chief failure is that he hasn’t spent enough hosting Bible studies because he devotes a night a week to serving at the soup kitchen.
Maureen Dowd is doing her best beltway snobbery with comments on Rick Perry’s college and grades. Victor Davis Hanson says if grades are so important, why don’t the folks in the media go after the college grades of The One.
When Dowd trashes Perry and Bush (why not quote the hardly impressive Kerry record?), she is arguing that long ago college records and scores are a good barometer of presidential success (that is dubious if one were to compare a Lincoln or Truman to Wilson or Carter), and, by inference, that the current president is also apparent proof. But does she have inside information about the Obama undergraduate record at Occidental and Columbia? If not, why not, given the supposed importance of undergraduate grades to liberal observers? I suppose we are to conclude that supposedly poor students like a Perry or Bush released their grades or had them leaked, but brilliant undergraduates earning top slots at Harvard Law have no need to release obviously straight-A transcripts and no worry that anyone would care?
David (Miltonovich)* Friedman asks what’s so bad about global warming. *That would be “son of Milton.”
… the global warming controversy involves changes over not a year or a decade but a century. Over a century, most farmers will change the crop they find it most profitable to grow multiple times; if average temperatures are trending up, those changes will include a shift towards crops better suited to slightly warmer weather. Over a century, most houses will be torn down and replaced; if sea level is rising, houses currently built on low lying coastal ground will be rebuilt a little farther inland—not much farther if we are talking, as the IPCC estimates suggest we should be, about a rise of a foot or two. Hence the presumption that change is bad is a very weak one for changes as slow as those we have good reason to expect from global warming.
It is hard to see any other reason to expect global warming to make us, on net, worse off. The earth and its climate were not, after all, designed for our convenience, so there is no good reason to believe that their current state is optimal for us. It is true that our species evolved to survive under then existing climatic conditions but, over the period for which humans have existed, climate has varied by considerably more than the changes being predicted for global warming. And, for the past many thousands of years, humans have lived and prospered over a range of climates much larger than the range that we expect the climate at any particular location to change by.
If we have no good reason to believe that humans will be substantially worse off after global warming than before, we have no good reason to believe that it is worth bearing sizable costs to prevent global warming.