Ed Driscoll.com

We've Moved! Please Adjust Your Bookmarks And RSS Feeds

2009-02-11T00:00:16-08:00

Please note that as of February 9th 2009, this blog has been incorporated into the main Pajamas Media site and new posts can be found here. While the main Ed Driscoll.com URL will automatically redirect there, the old RSS feed won't; but its successor can be found here, as well as the new URL. Please adjust your bookmarks and aggregation pages accordingly.

Thank you for your continued readership,

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Love In The Age Of Starting From Zero

2009-02-09T13:27:48-08:00

FuturePundit explores "Mate Preference Trends" in the era of, as Tom Wolfe one called it, "Starting from Zero":

Strip away tradition. Strip away religious beliefs. What happens? Men and women are looking at each other in ways that seem even more influenced by their evolutionary heritage. The mating market looks like it is becoming more competitive.

Or as Kay Hymowitz described it last year in City Journal, "Love in the Time of Darwinism."

(HT: I/P)

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The Stone Age Alec Baldwin

2009-02-09T11:38:14-08:00

Yawn--another day, another Alec Baldwin meltdown--although give him credit; at least this time it's merely in print, and he's not doing his Christian Bale impersonation (or is it the other way around?) while screaming at his daughter:

To John McCain. You need to keep quiet, John McCain. You lost and more importantly you are to blame for your loss. You ran a lousy campaign. In terms of message, logistics, ideas. Now you can't seem to shut up about the stimulus package. Another rich Republican market shill who can only deal with spending bills that stimulate the Dow. You gotta shut up, John McCain. We can never go back to the Stone Age ideas that the likes of you and Paulson and Cheney (re: fighting terrorism) have tried to force down our throats.

Of course, Alec has a few Stone Age ideas of his own that he'd be happy to force down the throat of anyone who he disagrees with.

Update: Welcome Big Hollywood readers! Please look around the whole blog, or at least scroll through the archive category named after an earlier Breitbartian Tinseltown expose: Hollywood, Interrupted.

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A Recession, Not A "Catastrophe"

2009-02-09T09:50:15-08:00

Despite self-serving doomsday prognostications by President Obama, and a skewed unemployment chart produced by Nancy Pelosi and promoted by Andrew Sullivan, Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, reminds us that "It's A Recession Not A 'Catastrophe'".

In the interim however, Brett Joshpe has a modest proposal for Big Hollywood:

Unlike the greedy Wall Street executives though, who have torpedoed our economy by allowing federal bureaucrats to bludgeon them into making bad loans, Hollywood would surely understand the merit of pay caps. After all, it would enable the entertainment world to fulfill its pledge "to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other." (Cut for laughter and gagging and take two!)

But seriously, for the people who are leading the environmental movement and spearheading efforts to turn the Academy Awards green, cut back on the number of SUV's in their entourage, and demonstrate frugality to Al Gore, this is such a great opportunity to demonstrate restraint and help out the new President. What better way to show solidarity with Democrats who want to impose a command and control economy and to confiscate wealth from the rich. Especially since everyone needs to make sacrifices right now. Not to worry though, Steven Spielberg and crew, it will feel patriotic.

As such, we should cap the compensation that movie studios and Silver Screen stars make, particularly given the wealth disparities between the actors and actresses and the grips, stagehands, and extras. While there will be times for profits, this is not that time, especially when people are losing jobs and the Golden State's $40 billion budget deficit is bigger than most countries' total economic GDP.

It so refreshing to see Hollywood stars embracing this new America. They are just in time to put their dollars where their mouths are and to start fulfilling their pledge.

What say you, Ashton and Demi?

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Wait, I Thought Looking For Root Causes Was Important

2009-02-09T08:40:07-08:00

What caused the meltdown of the banking system? Was it Texas-Hold'em Poker? According to those new puritans at New York magazine it was--gasp!--television! Worse, horror-of-horrors, it was cable television, and they want this sort of smut and financial pornography banished from the airways:

The real villains here, the truly bad seeds at the heart of this crisis, have gone unpunished thus far and are still in operation. They are Jeff Lewis and Ryan Brown of Bravo's Flipping Out, Armando and Veronica Montelongo of TLC's Flip This House, Kristen Kemp of TLC's The Property Ladder, Kendra Todd of HGTV's My House Is Worth WHAT?, and the TLC, Bravo, HGTV, and Fine Living networks in general. All of them encouraged people to take out massive loans in order to buy and renovate homes and sell them at a profit when, really, most people have terrible taste, and furthermore, are bad at laying tile. These shows are still on! WHY?

But then, there are all sorts of reasons for those on the left to avoid examining some of these root causes:

Back in late December, we noted that the Connecticut Post refused to print emails from readers if they delved too heavily into a particular hometown topic:

"All letters are welcome. But there are code words hidden in some that are signals to stop paying close attention -- "Chris Dodd" and "Barney Frank."

All of which points to a word that the New York Times simply can't bring itself to speak, Ed Morrissey writes:

The Times wants to sell Dodd as a victim of the "moneyed Washington subculture where powerful incumbents are invited to get something wholesale," but that's poppycock. The man who accepts a bribe is no more of a victim than the man who offers it. It takes both to create corruption, and it's hard to find a more bald example of it than this. Dodd oversaw Countrywide as part of his committee chairmanship and understood that when he accepted the two loans for below-market rates and no-points acceptance. Countrywide later went belly-up, costing the nation billions of dollars for its easy-terms lending practices, and Dodd has been among the voices blaming the collapse of the lending markets on poor oversight. Well, he ought to know that firsthand, oughtn't he?

There's more at stake in this refusal to acknowledge corruption, and we have seen it in Barack Obama's Cabinet appointments. He and Congress have excused wrongdoing for Tim Geithner that would likely have resulted in criminal prosecution for others because Geithner supposedly belongs to a rarified elite group of technocrats that the nation can't do without. That stands the rule of law on its head, and put Geithner, Dodd, and others like them beyond the same responsibilities as the rest of us plebes. Dodd, Geithner, and other DC insiders now get a pass from responsibility for their actions simply because of who they know.

Taking sweetheart deals from the industry Dodd oversaw is corruption, regardless of the circumstances. Refusing to pay taxes even after getting reimbursements from one's employer is tax evasion. When we start making up new names for old crimes based on the relative power of the person who committed them, we have ended the rule of law and created an aristocracy.

Exactly. As G.K. Chesterton noted a century ago, "It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem"--or where it began.

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Can Our Government Be Competent?

2009-02-08T20:40:22-08:00

Candidate Jimmy Carter said yes on the campaign trail, but history remembers his actual presidential administration with much more of a gimlet eye. And President Obama is having more than a few Carteresque moments of his own.

Found via Steve Green's weekly roundup of Blogs at PJTV.com, Barbara Curtis writes:

On Tuesday, as press secretary Gibbs fielded questions from the press regarding Daschle's dropping out as HHS secretary, Obama and Michelle "escaped" to read a book to second graders at a DC public school:

[Click for video]

There's certainly the irony that his own girls are going to the most elite school in DC while the Obamas grandstand among the common kids in a public school.

But ponder the significance of a man who spent only several months in the Senate and then campaigned for almost two years to get to the White House, who now spends two weeks flubbing administratively while entertaining lavishly, then together with his wife acts like it's such a terrible burden they have to "cut loose" and "break out."

And just imagine if Bush had done something similarly shallow in the midst of constantly crying "Crisis!" to the citizens of this country.

"Who is this guy? Where is the Barack Obama who charmed the country and challenged it to greatness?" is New York Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin's cri de coeur.

Over at his American Spectator blog, Robert Stacy McCain responds:

Campaigning is tough, but governing is infinitely harder. Remember when first Hillary Clinton, and then Republicans, tried to point out that Obama had no executive experience, had never really shown leadership in his legislative jobs, et cetera? Now his deficiencies are hurting him every day. The White House has many advantages, but it's not a very good place to hide.

Orrin Judd looks into distance and observes: "Somewhere, a killer rabbit licks its chops."

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The Dawn Of The "Savior-Based Economy"

2009-02-08T17:03:15-08:00

As South Carolina's Governor Mark Sanford noted on CNN today, "A lot of people who've made some very stupid decisions are being bailed out by the population at large":

"A problem that was created by building up of too much debt will not be solved with yet more debt," Gov. Mark Sanford said Sunday, making a reference to the federal deficit spending that will likely finance the federal stimulus package.

"We're moving precipitously close to what I would call a savior-based economy," Sanford also said Sunday on CNN's State of the Union.

The South Carolina Republican said such an economy is "what you see in Russia or Venezuela or Zimbabwe or places like that where it matters not how good your product is to the consumer but what your political connection is to those in power."

The "savior-based economy"? What could go wrong?

Update: Welcome Insta-readers. Feel free to look around the site, and if you like what see...Read The Whole Thing™, to coin a phrase.

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"NYT: We Do the Thinkin' For Ya..."

2009-02-08T15:45:57-08:00

As an adjunct to Kathy Shaidle's recent Examiner piece titled, "The Vietnam War: everything you know is wrong", Indy Jane and The People's Cube graphically illustrate what the New York Times would have looked liked in 1943 if it was Pinch Sulzberger running the show in 1943, and not his grandfather.

(And for some thoughts on how legacy mass journalism's collective tone changed dramatically during the course of Vietnam, ultimately becoming bifurcated from a wide swatch of its readers and country, follow the links here.)

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He's Wasn't For It In 1971, Either

2009-02-08T09:45:33-08:00

Mary Katharine Ham checks in on the Winter Soldier In Winter, and writes, "John Kerry: You Know What's the Problem With Stimulus Tax Cuts? All That Freedom."

(Andrew Sullivan could not be reached for comment.)

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The Audacity Of Freud

2009-02-08T09:34:07-08:00

Robert Stacy McCain and Donald Douglas weigh in on Judith Warner's New York Times-approved Freudian fantasies of a shack-up with Barack, or as Douglas calls it, the "Sexual Subtext in Obamessianism."

Update: The Skepticrats are appropriately skeptical about those seeking a Last Tango In Washington, and note that "It's worth checking out Gawker's post about this just for the illustration they use", which brings new meaning to the phrase "Unicorn Rider."

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They Told Me If I Voted For John McCain

2009-02-07T15:17:48-08:00

We'd get at least another four years of Clint Eastwood-inspired tough guy comparisons--and they were right!

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The Vietnam War: Everything You Know Is Wrong

2009-02-07T14:51:16-08:00

If you enjoyed the recent "Picture Kill" edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, which looked at a series of deliberately botched or manipulated stories by the MSM designed to drive a particular agenda or worldview, don't miss Kathy Shaidle's latest piece in the Examiner. Kathy sets the Wayback Machine and the B.S. detector (also known as the A.P. detector) to 1968 for part one of her series debunking the MSM myths of the Only War In History for the boomer era and their journalists.

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Truth? Fiction? Who Can Tell These Days

2009-02-07T14:24:34-08:00

Submitted for your approval--two opening paragraphs. First up, this is Iowahawk:

WASHINGTON - U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu announced his resignation this morning amid new reports that Alameda County workers had unearthed more than a dozen additional dead hobo bodies at his former home in Berkeley, California. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist had been the subject of a week-long controversy after he amended his White House application form to declare "3 or 4" hobo corpses in his crawl space, but after this morning's discovery, Chu said he felt he could no longer serve as an effective spokesman for Administration energy policy.

Next, this is Agence France Presse:

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's office moved on Friday to quash claims he attended a mystery concert featuring ABBA lookalikes singing to him from behind a veil at a military-style compound.

Which one is real and which one is satire? You make the call!

(HT: SG)

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Only In The Sense Of Not Consummating Dan's Man Crush

2009-02-07T11:10:54-08:00

"Did Saddam Hussein Bug Dan Rather Before the Iraq War?"

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Latest PJM Political Now Online

2009-02-07T10:55:39-08:00

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com and myself for a troika of interviews with best-selling authors:

Roger L. Simon, the CEO of Pajamas Media.com and PJTV.com, on his new book, which looks at forty years inside Hollywood, Blacklisting Myself.

Bernard Goldberg, formerly of CBS, now with HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, and a frequent commentator on Fox News, for his look at A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.

And veteran talk radio host Hugh Hewitt provides a sneak preview of GOP 5.0.

Tune in here to listen! Incidentally, the interview with Roger L. Simon is available online separately, here.

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