Category Archives: Media

UPDATED: Yes, Bachmann’s Brainy

Elections, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Journalism, Media

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann has all the brain power poor Sarah Palin is without. Chris Matthews says she looks like she’s dazed, hypnotized, irrational. I think this is because to Matthews, a fully engaged female is someone like Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida), who talks up a storm in promoting Obama’s statist schemes. Simpletons perceive a fulminating statism as “good,” “caring,” and certainly “smart.”

Bachmann is in the news for a change as she is “mulling a presidential bid.” As you know, I do quite like this woman. She is quick and cannot be rattled.

Very little has been said in the muck-raking media about Bachmann’s background. You can just imagine what publicity Wasserman Schultz (of the double-barreled, affectatious surname) would receive had she provided foster care for 23 children in addition to raising five of her own.

Most women lawyers, moreover, do not go into tax law; family law is more like it. Michelle has a Master of Laws in tax law from the William & Mary Law School. Now let’s not go off on a tangent about the evils of tax law and its enforcement. We’re agreed; The Sixteenth is the Number of the Beast (and Bachmann is forever tainted for having enforced the law). The point made here is that tax law is quite a bit more cerebrally taxing than immigration or family law. Not that you’d know it from the manner in which she is portrayed, but Bachmann is clearly very clever.

Indeed, from the media scrum one hears very little about Michelle Bachmann’s undeniable intellectual aptitude, as they hate her with a purple passion.

In any event, it is this rational, steely quality that drives Chris Matthews crazy. After all, he is the emotional wreck who regularly experiences daytime nocturnal emissions over Obama and genuinely believes that the president is an intellectual of the highest order.

UPDATE (Jan. 6): According to her foes over at Hardball, “Michele Bachmann (R-MN) introduced the first bill of the 112th Congress today, and she’s landed a prime spot on the Intelligence Committee.” Somewhat vapidly, the WSJ characterizes Bachmann’s challenge to the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul as “an interesting strategy to gain more attention.”

Could it be that the financial bill, in all its 2,300 pristine, unread pages and the 500 odd new regulations it imposed simply needs to go? Bachmann has been consistent in her vehement opposition to a bill that will “further increase in the overweening powers of the Executive branch, which will now be able to seize a firm it designates as systemically risky.”

UPDATED: The Republican Tart Trust (Mercer Mainstream?)

Feminism, Free Speech, Ilana Mercer, Law, Media, Republicans, Sex

Where do the Republicans find their woman commentators? A fulminating female named Jedediah Bila, who bills herself as a conservative, called Julian Assange of the WikiLeaks notoriety a rapist. (Bobbing head S.E. Cupp, also a “conservative,” backed her up with vigorous … nods.) The two dim bulbs appeared on David Asman’s “America’s Nightly Scorecard.” As I mentioned in “Condomned by Law,” Swedish sexual harassment law is more diabolical than anything the radical American feminist jurist Catharine Mackinnon could dream up in her sweetest dreams—Mackinnon’s baleful influence on American and Canadian jurisprudence cannot be underestimated.

But if Bila and her conservative cohort agree that having consensual sex without a condom is tantamount to rape—Mackinnon’s work is done.

I do not wish to hear these imbeciles’ views on Assange’s free press and due process rights, do you?

UPDATE: What makes a reader of this site imagine that I decide on which TV news programs I will appear (none, so far, except one PBS program)? Guess what? The producers and writers of the cable news programs decide who to ask on their more-or-less conformist shows. That this is so unintuitive to readers implies an optimistic faith in the cognoscenti to whom they look up; they really believe that the chicks whose words they lap up are indeed cutting-edge thinkers, and that by mere chance ilana mercer is not among them.

“WE ARE [indeed] DOOMED.”

The reader should let the producers and anchors of his favorite shows know about his preferences. Telling this marginalized writer to free up her busy schedule and, presumably, stop rejecting invites to join mainstream TV Talkers is worse than ridiculous.

Again: I’m floored to find-out that readers of this space believe an-out-of-the-mainstream writer, who has never echoed the mob, can pick and choose the forums she frequents to showcase her work. That someone holds such a naive, optimistic impression about the mainstream media (and Fox is a bastion of banality, for the most), and the power of the ousted individual in American society knocks my socks off.

If readers entertain the notion that I’ve been shunning all those invitations I get to appear on Fox Business and News—I’ll repeat the gloomy mantra with which I’ve been sealing each post these days:

“WE ARE DOOMED.”

This is, however, a good opportunity to ask you to fully comprehend the degree to which truth-tellers and original thinkers are sidelined in your society and to support this site. My new book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, is currently under consideration, but I fear that promoting it will ultimately fall to me alone (as has been the case for almost a decade). The work is simply too explosive. So kindly spare a thought, first, to the degree to which this writer’s voice is marginalized. And, second, to the need to support her mission.













As for S. E. Cupp: there is no accounting for aesthetic taste. Other than youth, however, I see no aesthetic merit in little Lolita’s vacant visage. As for this Fox-panel staple’s smarts: She is a studiously dumb chick, whose contribution to ideas is to gesture wildly and grimace, while portentously parroting mind-numbing banalities.

UPDATE II: News You Missed (Taxpayers Vs. Tax Consumers)

America, China, Debt, Media, Uncategorized

The ostrich press, “Bloomberg, CNN, New York Times or anywhere in the US print or TV media,” did not report it. VDARE did:

“On Thanksgiving eve the English language China Daily and People’s Daily Online reported that Russia and China have concluded an agreement to abandon the use of the US dollar in their bilateral trade and to use their own currencies in its place. The Russians and Chinese said that they had taken this step in order to insulate their economies from the risks that have undermined their confidence in the US dollar as world reserve currency.” …

“The American financial press finds solace in the episodes when sovereign debt scares in the EU send the dollar up against the euro and UK pound. But these currency movements are just measures of financial players shorting troubled EU-denominated debt. They are not a measure of dollar strength.”

MORE.

UPDATE I: The custodians of the Irish state are still better than the filth that gathers to rule us from DC. The American governing class has been unique in working against the economic interests of its countrymen and their country. (Treason?)

News comes that, “Ireland [will] endure the toughest cuts and tax hikes in its history as an unavoidable price for saving the debt-burdened nation from bankruptcy, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan told lawmakers as they prepared to vote on a brutal 2011 budget.”

“Lenihan’s plan — the harshest yet of four emergency budgets unveiled since 2008 to combat a runaway deficit — contains euro4.5 billion ($6 billion) in spending cuts and euro1.5 billion ($2 billion) in tax rises.”

Lenihan said income taxes would be broadened to bring tens of thousands of low-salaried workers into the tax net for the first time, while welfare payments would be cut across the board. Spending on capital projects — chiefly jobs-intensive building of roads and public transportation networks — would be cut by euro1.8 billion ($2.4 billion).

“Lenihan said Ireland had no choice but to slash spending and raise taxes immediately because the country this year is spending more than euro50 billion on regular government and at least euro45 billion to bail out its banks — yet collecting just euro19 billion this year in taxes. The staggering imbalance means an underlying deficit this year of 11.6 percent that, when bank-bailout costs are included, balloons to a modern European record of 32 percent of GDP.”

[SNIP]

I like the Irish idea of tax hikes on the poor a lot. Really. The cost of the welfare state must be felt by those who demand its spoils. Making the rich bleed for creating wealth will not ween the poor off welfare.

UPDATE II: The state has bifurcated the population into taxpayers and tax consumers. The so-called poor don’t really pay taxes as they receive in the form of assorted transfer payments from the government more than they contribute. They are net tax consumers.

The so-called rich pay all the taxes. Making the poor pay might just turn them against all the stuff they believe they are owed.