Saturday, August 25, 2012

Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., August 25 & 26, 2012


My America, folks... 

(Ya almost expect Frank to stroll on stage; now wouldn't that have been something?!)

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5 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-5-wounded-in-shootings-across-the-city-20120825,0,7823757.story

* HERE'S THE HEADLINE FROM THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE: 1 dead, 16 wounded in shootings across the city: 5 teens among shooting victims

* THAT'S AFTER WHAT... 19 SHOOTING "VICTIMS" ON FRIDAY NIGHT IN CHICAGO? (I BELIEVE I COVERED THIS IN FRIDAY'S NEWSBITES.)

A man was killed and at least 16 others were shot across the city Saturday evening and this morning, continuing a streak of violence that has left dozens wounded in recent days.

* FOLKS... CHICAGO IS NO LONGER AN AMERICAN CITY. IT REALLY IS THAT SIMPLE... THAT STARK.

Authorities suspected most of the shootings of being gang-related...

(*PURSED LIPS*)

At an afternoon news conference announcing the arrests of a dozen reputed gang members, Police Supt. Garry McCarthy said that closing open-air drug markets and busting the street gang members who run them was a critical part of stopping the violence.

* SO... DOESN'T THE PHRASE "CLOSING OPEN-AIR DRUG MARKETS" IMPLY THE... er... EXISTENCE OF... er... OPEN-AIR DRUG MARKETS?

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

August 26, 2012 at 11:01 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/245479-fcc-eyes-tax-on-internet-service

The Federal Communications Commission is eyeing a proposal to tax broadband Internet service.

The move would funnel money to the Connect America Fund, a subsidy the agency created last year to expand Internet access.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

* I'VE GOT A BETTER IDEA. LET'S CLOSE DOWN THE CONNECT AMERICA FUND AND NOT ADD A NEW TAX TO INTERNET SERVICE!

* FOLKS... THIS IS THE OBAMA FCC!

Numerous companies, including AT&T, Sprint and even Google have expressed support for the idea.

* WELL OF COURSE THEY HAVE! WHY WOULDN'T THEY WANT THEIR BUSINESS EXPANSION SUBSIDIZED BY YOU AND ME...?!?!

"If members of Congress understood that the FCC is contemplating a broadband tax, they'd sit up and take notice," said Derek Turner, research director for Free Press, a consumer advocacy group that opposes the tax.

* MIGHTY BIG "IF."

(*SIGH*)

Consumers already pay a fee on their landline and cellular phone bills to support the FCC's Universal Service Fund.

* YEP. THAT'S WHY UP ABOVE I WRONG "NOT ADD A NEW TAX."

Last year, the FCC overhauled a $4.5 billion portion of the Universal Service Fund and converted it into a broadband Internet subsidy, called the Connect America Fund. The new fund aims to subsidize the construction of high-speed Internet networks to the estimated 19 million Americans who currently lack access.

* LET 'EM PAY FOR THEIR OWN ACCESS! I'M SICK OF SUBSIDIZING EVERYONE AND HIS BROTHER! ENOUGH!

The FCC floated a number of ideas for "reforming" the USF's contribution system.

* OH, CHRIST... BUCKLE UP, FOLKS...

In addition to the broadband fee, the commission also sought comments on taxing text messages, as well as levying a flat fee on each phone line, instead of the current system, which is based on a portion of the revenue from interstate phone calls.

* TAXING... TEXT... MESSAGES...?!?!

* FOLKS... THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION IS CONSIDERING TAXING EMAILS!

August 26, 2012 at 11:22 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/314936/war-children-mark-steyn

* YOU SHOULD READ THE WHOLE COLUMN (STYNE IS MY IDOL IN TERMS OF WRITING STYLE!) BUT IF YOU'RE PRESSED FOR TIME...

We’ve rehearsed the fiscal stuff in this space before: China becoming the world’s biggest economy, another American downgrade, total U.S. liabilities equivalent to about three times the entire planet’s GDP.

A “non-partisan” Pew Research study says the American middle class faces its “worst decade in modern history” — and the first bump down starts on January 1: The equally “non-partisan” Congressional Budget Office now says that the tax and budget changes due to take effect at the beginning of 2013 will put the country back in recession and increase unemployment. This is a revision of their prediction earlier this year that in 2013 the economy would contract by 1.3%.

Now they say 2.9%.

These days, CBO revisions only go one way — down. They’re gonna need steeper graph paper. In a global economy, atrophy goes around like syphilis in the Gay Nineties: A moribund U.S. economy further mires Europe, and both slow growth in China, which means fewer orders for resource-rich nations. . . . Four wheels spinning in the mud, and none with a firm-enough grip to pull the vehicle back on to solid ground.

Oh, well, it was like that in the Thirties and then, as the ever-optimistic Paul Krugman likes to trill, the Second World War came along to "stimulate" the economy.

(Given that in Afghanistan the U.S. and its allies have just taken eleven years to lose to goatherds with fertilizer, I’m not sure I’d want to bet on the global-conflagration chips falling our way next time round.)

But don’t worry, ObamaCare will “lower costs.”

(*SNORT*)

Since passage of the bill in 2010, the CBO has revised its estimate of ObamaCare's gross costs over ten years.

Can you guess in which direction, boys and girls?

Yes, up from $944 billion to $1.856 trillion. (That’s some “revision.” I wonder where it’ll be in another two years.)

Well, I’m not the CBO, but I’ll take a wild guess: ObamaCare is going to be expensive on a scale unknown to European health systems.

* AND WHY WOULD THAT BE...? (KEEP READING!)

Look around you. Americans are not Swedes. Obesity rate in the United States: 36%; Sweden: 9.7%; Japan: 3.2%; China: 2.9%India: 0.7%.

(*TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP*)

Ours is a country where 78 million people (or about the entire population of Germany) are classified by the Centers for Disease Control as “obese”... It’s the first thing the average American of, say, 1950 would notice if you catapulted him forward from his mid-century Main Street to today: not how amazing all these computer gizmos are, but how large and sick today’s Americans look.

* SERIOUSLY, FOLKS... READ THE ENTIRE COLUMN.

August 26, 2012 at 12:23 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://reason.com/archives/2012/08/24/2016-obamas-america

Imagine how much chatter you'd be hearing about Dinesh D'Souza and John Sullivan's documentary 2016 if it were about George W. Bush's America rather than Barack Obama's.

(*NOD*)

I'm not just talking about Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which was lauded as "potent and infuriating" by Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman and praised for its large "scope" and skillful "means" by the New Yorker's David Denby.

Countless "Bush's Brains" and "Outfoxeds" and "Bush Family Fortunes" got wide distribution and rave reviews during the eight corpse-strewn and impoverishing years of the George W. Bush's administration.

* UMM... NO... NOT REALLY. FAHRENHEIT 9/11 IS THE REAL EXAMPLE.

"2016" is made at a higher level of production than any of those films.

It treats its subject with much greater fairness than any of those films.

It is arguably a bigger box office draw than any of them: Entertainment Weekly reports that "2016: Obama's America" is earning $6,326.50 per screen in limited release, but that's only half the story. You can do better than that per screen and still not get a wide release. "2016," however, enjoys an excellent distribution and PR network and has opened in major media markets (The New York Times' review focused on the audience reaction at a screening.) Today "2016: Obama's America" expands to 1,075 theaters around the country.

The film is compelling because it aims not to entertain but to educate.

What they lack in the way of Michael Moore's wit, D'Souza and Sullivan (who co-wrote and co-directed) make up for through confidence in their own story.

D'Souza and Sullivan's crew travels the world to trace President Obama's journey through youth.

D'Souza, the author of The Roots of Obama's Rage (on which this film is based) and a Dartmouth-educated public intellectual with family roots in India, twines his own life path around Obama's. Two actors play younger versions of D'Souza.

The film draws with great skill on Obama's autobiography "Dreams From My Father," and it should be considered a vital supplement to that book, enriching Obama's childhood observations of Lolo Soetoro (Obama's Indonesian stepfather) and Frank Marshall Davis (a Hawaii-based pro-Soviet journalist friend of Obama's maternal grandfather).

In addition to complicating Obama's narrative (some captured footage of Obama going off-teleprompter while trying to make a tricky point about one of his bloated budgets is particularly rich), D'Souza aims to tell a counter-narrative.

What D'Souza calls his "explanatory framework" holds that the president is still possessed by his late father's anti-colonial radicalism and to a lesser extent by his grandfather's mid-century-vintage Leftism. (This was the attention-getting premise behind D'Souza's book, and he doesn't lack for evidence.)

Of course, every president is a threat. D'Souza's argument is that Obama is a uniquely dangerous and insidious one. He may be right about that, but when he tries to make the case the film departs from my reality.

(If you believe the biggest problems with Obama are that he has not invaded Iran, attacked the Alawite regime in Syria and sufficiently supported the Queen's dominion over the Falkland Islands, this is the movie for you.)

* HMM... NO... I'D DEFINITELY BE IN THE "ANTI-D'SOUZA" CAMP ON AT FRONT...

* TO BE CONTINUED...

August 26, 2012 at 2:41 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

Although "2016" does treat Obama's devastating fiscal legacy, D'Souza and Sullivan's real passion is for crimes like Obama's removal of a bust of Winston Churchill from the oval office.

(*SHRUG*)

* I MYSELF FOCUS ON THE "DEVASTATING FISCAL LEGACY," BUT FRANKLY THE REMOVAL OF THE CHURCHILL BUST FROM THE OVAL OFFICE DOES INDEED MERIT ATTENTION FOR WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT THE MINDSET OF THIS PRESIDENT.

(D'Souza fondly recalls his own young adulthood at the knee of President Reagan, and that archetype – the president as steward of a strong dollar and bulwark against an expansive collectivist empire – colors his assessment of the sitting president.)

But this construction just doesn't fit into the hole Obama has dug. D'Souza floats the term "Debt as a weapon of mass destruction," but even the talking head he chooses to illustrate this point, former Comptroller General David Walker (1998-2008), carefully notes that the near-tripling of the national debt (from $5.6 trillion debt accumulated from George Washington through Bill Clinton to more than $15 trillion today) took place "under George Walker Bush 43 and President Barack Obama."

* NO. WE'VE GONE OVER THIS BEFORE, FOLKS.

* HEY... I HATED BUSH IN MANY WAYS. HIS SECOND TERM WAS A DISASTER. BUT AS FOR THE SPENDING IN 2008... WELL... THAT WAS AN ABBERATION - AN ABBERATION THEN-SENATORS OBAMA AND CLINTON FULLY SUPPORTED (ONLY MORESO!)... AND LET'S NOT FORGET THAT STARTING IN JANUARY 2007 THE DEMS HELD THE NATION'S PURSE STRINGS FIRMLY IN THEIR HANDS VIA ABSOLUTE CONTROL OF BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS - NANCY PELOSI AND HARRY REID IN CHARGE! (AND HARRY'S STILL IN CHARGE OF THE SENATE!)

The theme of Obama's radical anti-Americanism is even less useful in explaining what has been (so far) his most poisonous legacy: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 (a.k.a. ObamaCare), which indentures the people not to any politburo or warlord but to insurance companies.

The act has now been deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court.

* BY A ROGUE MAJORITY SUPREME COURT. THE DECISION WAS - AND IS - ILLEGITIMATE.

Mitt Romney, Obama's opponent in the coming election, pioneered the individual mandate that forms the core of ObamaCare while he was governor of Massachusetts.

* TRUE. NO ONE DISPUTES THIS.

ObamaCare (treated very briefly in the film) in fact argues against D'Souza's biographical thesis: As a candidate Obama opposed the individual mandate, and nothing from Ayers or Barack Obama, Sr. suggests any source for this cockamamie scheme. The awfulness of ObamaCare is not that it is radical but that it is precisely in the middle of the contemporary mainstream.

* NONSENSE. OBAMA SAID WHAT HE HAD TO WHEN BATTLING HRC FOR THE DEM NOD IN THE NOMINATION FIGHT. PERIOD.

(*SHRUG*)

But the job of a film is not to have a consistently logical argument. It is to make that argument persuasively, and "2016" does so with emotional and narrative power.

* I HAVEN'T SEEN THE FILM YET. I HOPE TO FIT A VIEWING IN. A FRIEND WHO SAW IT SAID THERE WAS NOTHING "NEW" IN IT - BUT HE WAS TALKING FROM A PERSPECTIVE OF BEING ALREADY WELL-INFORMED. FOR THE AVERAGE AMERICAN I'M GUESSING THE FILM WOULD BE A REAL EYE-OPENER!

August 26, 2012 at 2:46 PM

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