Done with the MSM?

First, CNN's reporter argues with the protesters. Now, NBC's executives are hammering their CNBC anchors for talking too tough about Obama! This is just pathetic:

"It was an intensive, three-hour dinner at 30 Rock which Zucker himself was behind," a source familiar with the powwow told us. "There was a long discussion about whether CNBC has become too conservative and is beating up on Obama too much. There's great concern that CNBC is now the anti-Obama network. The whole meeting was really kind of creepy."

Check out the link for another bit about how the White House reacted to the Tea Parties.

If I was on-air talent at NBC, I'd have my agent on the phone with Fox Business and Bloomberg, ASAP.

I Hope Paul Ryan Gets Egged

Or at least heavily booed. He's exhibit A of the kind of Republicans in Washington. They support heavy spending and high taxes (which are the result of deficits and spending), until people start complaining. Now he's trying to hijack the Tea Party movement and act as though he's "one of us". He isn't. On Michelle Malkin's blog, an email from one of her readers:

So now all of a sudden, picking winners and losers in the market is bad policy? But a couple month ago, when Paul Ryan was arguing to give funds to the failing auto companies, that somehow wasn’t “neo-industrial policy” and wasn’t “picking winners and losers”? We weren’t taxing Toyota to save GM then? And now Paul is suddenly concerned about executive control over funding, when he said not one word after President Bush unilaterally, and illegally used TARP funds to bail out the auto industry? He’s concerned about keeping the Fed focused on the financial industry, but he had no problem with the car czar that he proposed in his earlier legislation?

Look, I’m all for cutting off these funds, and perhaps I’m being stupid to continue to go after Paul Ryan like this. But when reading these releases, you’d think that he was against these things the entire time! But only now that a Democratic President is in office, is he all of a sudden for a more reasonable fiscal policy that didn’t bailout industrial concerns.

Well you know what, that’s what a straight partisan hack does. He ought to be apologizing for his previous votes, not pretending he was being responsible the entire time, but I don’t see one bit of regret for what he did previously. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him get away with it.

Malkin sounds the right note with her own comments:

Now is not the time to sing kumbaya with the GOP or indulge in celebrity worship. This is the chance to hold your politicians accountable for engaging in legislation without deliberation, for “sacrificing the free market to save it” to paraphrase George the pre-socializer Bush, and for abandoning their fiscal conservative principles in the mad rush to “Do something.” (Quoting Rep. Ryan from last fall: “Doing nothing is the worst thing we could do!”)

I hope someone in Madison will ask why Tea Party activists should trust him not to crumble the next time the big government juggernaut yells “emergency!”

Promoting his tea party appearance, Ryan told a local radio station:

“I think the message is people are fed up with this notion of chasing ever-higher spending with ever-higher taxes. There’s a limit to how much you can soak the taxpayer.”
Message to GOP opportunists hitching their wagons to the Tea Party movement:

Practice what you preach when it matters. Not after the fact.

Right on. These guys should walk away from these events wondering if they'll still have a job in 2010.

About Time...

Texas tells Feds to stick it.

AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry joined state Rep. Brandon Creighton and sponsors of House Concurrent Resolution (HCR) 50 in support of states’ rights under the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“I believe that our federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state,” Gov. Perry said. “That is why I am here today to express my unwavering support for efforts all across our country to reaffirm the states’ rights affirmed by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I believe that returning to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution and its essential 10th Amendment will free our state from undue regulations, and ultimately strengthen our Union.”

Perry continued: "Millions of Texans are tired of Washington, DC trying to come down here to tell us how to run Texas."

A number of recent federal proposals are not within the scope of the federal government’s constitutionally designated powers and impede the states’ right to govern themselves. HCR 50 affirms that Texas claims sovereignty under the 10th Amendment over all powers not otherwise granted to the federal government.

It also designates that all compulsory federal legislation that requires states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties, or that requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding, be prohibited or repealed.

Link.

Benedict on the Triduum

On a different note from today's other posts, Pope Benedict XVI's address to the faithful at the general audience on Wednesday, April 8, 2009:

How marvelous, and at the same time amazing, is this mystery! We can never meditate this reality sufficiently. Jesus, though being God, did not want to make of his divine prerogatives an exclusive possession; he did not want to use his being God, his glorious dignity and power, as an instrument of triumph and sign of distance from us. On the contrary, "he emptied himself" assuming our miserable and weak human condition -- in this regard, Paul uses a quite meaningful Greek verb to indicate the "kenosis", this descent of Jesus. The divine form (morphe) is hidden in Christ under the human form, namely, under our reality marked by suffering, poverty, human limitations and death. The radical and true sharing of our nature, a sharing in everything except sin, leads him to that frontier that is the sign of our finiteness -- death. But all this was not the fruit of a dark mechanism or a blind fatality: It was instead his free choice, by his generous adherence to the salvific plan of the Father. And the death which he went out to meet -- adds Paul -- was that of the cross, the most humiliating and degrading that one can imagine. The Lord of the universe did all this out of love for us: out of love he willed to "empty himself" and make himself our brother; out of love he shared our condition, that of every man and every woman. In this connection, Theodoret of Cyrus, a great witness of the Eastern tradition, writes: "Being God and God by nature and having equality with God, he did not retain this as something great, as do those who have received some honor beyond their merits, but concealing his merits, he chose the most profound humility and took the form of a human being" (Commentary on the Letter to the Philippians, 2:6-7).

The rest of the address is at Chiesa.

More Moldbuggery

The law of bankruptcy, as handed down by sages of old, abhors the zombie. If the obligations of a zombie can be restructured, handing its bondholders a haircut but converting the result into a profitable operation, the majesty of the law is there with its machete. If the zombie is an inherently unprofitable institution, the majesty brings its axe instead, and has a grave handy.

If you've seen Dead Alive, or Braindead, the Peter Jackson horror flick, or Evil Dead II, then you understand the analogy. Once the body becomes infected, one must chop off the infected part, lest the entire body succumb to the disease. Replacing your chopped off arm with a chainsaw to do battle with other undead creature is just pure awesomeness. Not that the government will announce a new AIG, with chainsaw arms and a vulture investing beak.

Bruce Campbell's character in Army of Darkness is truly a hero for our age. His investing advice was sound as well, "Gimme some sugar baby."

Eight Decades of Free Thinking & the Zombie Threat

Anne Cleveland doesn't like the sounds emanating from the G20.

If here in the United States, the centralized government takes over and Nationalizes Banks, and IF at the G-20 group meeting of heads of State from 20 countries agreed to turn over the handling of money to the IMF, then the sovereignty of this nation has been compromised, we’ve lost the farm.

I’M saying IF. IF, if, this government has forked over the money or the power to create it to a foreign entity, that’s as crazy as Caligula appointing his horse a Counsel.

There's always gold.

Now, what could be worse than Caligula appointing his horse a Counsel? How about a zombie Caligula appoints his zombie horse a Counsel!

For example, everyone knows what a zombie bank is these days. They have also heard of the shadow banking system, which the Obama administration is doing its best to resurrect. And speaking of the Obama administration, UR readers will recall that our dear President got his start as an acolyte of a philosopher who dedicated his most famous book to Lucifer, Prince of Night - which by my calculations gives us two degrees of separation between Barack Hussein Obama and Satan himself. Not that any of this bothers anyone, of course. Why should it?

If I can boil Moldbug's long post into an analogy: brains are to zombies as debt is to America.

Aim for the head.

Life discovered at Harvard

Some background at Real Clear Politics.

What the hell is this?!

April 7 UPDATE: Nobody else knows what the hell this is either. Here's Powerline:

What the Minneapolis Star Tribune is to Keith Ellison, the New York Times is to Barack Obama. Michael Goldfarb explores the irony of the Times deep-sixing the story of Obama's bow to the King of Saudi Arabia last week. Goldfarb aptly titles his post "The NYTimes bows before Obama." We still don't know why Obama bowed to the King. At least we know why the Times is bowing!

Democracy: The Enemy of Freedom

Moldbug's latest is out. Good, and long, as always.

Bryan Caplan highlights relevant passages from Lee Kuan Yew's story of Singapore.

People in Hong Kong depended not on the government but on themselves and their families... The drive to succeed was intense; family and extended family ties were strong. Long before Milton Friedman held up Hong Kong as a model of a free-enterprise economy, I had seen the advantage of having little or no safety net. It spurred Hong Kong's people to strive to succeed. There was no social contract between the colonial government and them. Unlike Singaporeans, they could not and did not defend themselves or their collective interests. They were not a nation - indeed, were not allowed to become a nation...

Caplan: During the 50s and early 60s, Lee basically saw himself as a nationalist. So you'd think that he'd see Hong Kong's unnationhood as a big handicap. Wrong!

We had to become a nation or we would cease to exist. We had to subsidize education, health, and housing even though I tried to avoid the debilitating effects of welfarism. But the Singaporean cannot match the Hong Konger in drive and motivation. In Hong Kong when people fail, they blame themselves or their bad luck, pick themselves up, and try again... Singaporeans have different attitudes to government and to life. They prefer job security and freedom from worry. When they do not succeed they blame the government since they assume its duty is to ensure that their lives get better... Singaporeans vote for their MPs and ministers and expect them to distribute whatever prizes their are. (emphasis mine)

Read it all.

Was AIG a total fraud?

This is amazing, insane, and everything else wrapped up in an enigma of fraud. There is now the claim that AIG's CDS contracts, the supposed things worth trillions of dollars that would bankrupt the whole world economy, were, in fact...fake. And the government just sent trillions of dollars to financial companies to pay for...nothing.