Fausta’s Blog

At Rolling Stone:
Inside ‘Mad Men’: On Set and Behind the Scenes of the Emmy- Winning Show

The caption for the above photo?

Flying Low
“I fly very low on the radar,” says Hamm. “Mark Twain said it: ‘I’d rather say nothing and be thought an idiot than open my mouth and remove all doubt.’ Another Missouri boy, Mark Twain. The petulant, shitty movie-star mentality – that burns out pretty quick.”

Amen!

I was at the supermarket the other day and Vanity Fair has Hamm on the cover surrounded by the gorgeous ladies of Mad Men, but so far the Vanity Fair website is not showing it.

I’m liking how the ads are tying-in with the show; here’s a Behind the Scenes of Unilever’s Retro ‘Mad Men’ Ads

Here’s one of their ads (which was preceded by a Purdue Chicken ad. Young Mr. Purdue’s looking more like Old Mr. Purdue every day.),

Recap of last week’s episode at the Wall Street Journal,
‘Mad Men,’ Season 4, Episode 6, ‘Waldorf Stories’: TV Recap

Preview of tonight’s episode,

This season’s question:

The more concrete Draper becomes—and the more he asserts himself as a character, the more problematic he becomes for the audience. Can we continue to be enthralled if Draper is no longer our hero/anti-hero?

Staying tuned…

Day By Day poses a question today,

Click to enlarge.

Fearing for image, First Lady’s aides warned against Spain vacation

The New York Times reports First Lady Michelle Obama’s aides cautioned against her going on the early August European vacation in which she stayed at a 5-star resort in Spain

taking up sixty rooms

and mingled with royalty. The lavish trip, the aides reportedly argued, could result in harm to her image. “Aides say privately that they warned her there would be a cost to the trip, but she overruled them, insisting it was a rare chance to spend time with Sasha and with a friend whose father had died,” the paper reports. “But the intensity of the uproar — including accusations that she was a ‘modern-day Marie Antoinette’ — caught the White House and Mrs. Obama off guard.”

The trip resulted in the first extended negative press of the First Lady’s time in the White House. Critics questioned why Mrs. Obama chose to go to a glitzy, high-priced resort at a time when unemployment is high and many Americans are suffering economically.

Paul Mirengoff:

The First Lady decided to take the trip nonetheless. Afterwards, she reportedly was surprised by the intensity of the uproar her posh vacation on the Spanish Riviera caused.

The White House had first said it was a mother-daughter trip, and when that failed, they said it was to visit with a friend whose father had died a few months earlier and whose funeral Michelle did not attend (was she on vacation then?).

Paul continues

It is difficult to say whether the affair, including her reaction to the uproar, speaks more to Michelle Obama’s arrogance or her cluelessness. Perhaps the unifying theme is her sense of entitlement.

The White House notes, however, that despite her falling approval numbers, the First Lady remains in demand among Democrats who want her to campaign for them. I guess when one’s own number is south of 40 percent, 50 percent looks pretty good.

But David Axelrod says that Ms. Obama is not “eager to jump into the fray in a very political way, and I don’t think she will.” Perhaps she and her husband realize that, other than another vacation at an international hot-spot, the surest way to blow what remains of her popularity is to campaign for Democratic members of Congress.

Is she baaack? Axelrod says one thing, the NY Times says another. Who do you believe?

Class: Don’t leave home without it.

On the Oval Office rug:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Oval Office rug gets history wrong

President Obama’s new presidential rug seemed beyond reproach, with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. woven along its curved edge.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.

Except it’s not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.

For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama.
…
Parker said in 1853: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one. . . . But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

Please, No More “Arc of History” (h/t Just One Minute)

It’s not the long arc/arch of history that protects and engenders freedom — it is the hard work, wisdom and courage of individuals, of which there has been precious little on display in the Oval Office this past year. Enough with the arc, already.

Then there’s the other quote:
“The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally on the welfare of all of us.”

Obama’s rug gets Roosevelt wrong

Over at the Huffington Post, the quote is considered an endorsement of socialism.

But Susan Shelley at America Wants To Know said the quote is taken out of context. Great detective work by a great thinking American.

We know the speech today as the The Square Deal speech. Readers may decide for themselves:

Unfortunately, in this world the innocent frequently find themselves obliged to pay some of the penalty for the misdeeds of the guilty; and so if hard times come, whether they be due to our own fault or to our misfortune, whether they be due to some burst of speculative frenzy that has caused a portion of the business world to lose its head -a loss which no legislation can possibly supply– or whether they be due to any lack of wisdom in a portion of the world of labor — in each case, the trouble once started is felt more or less in every walk of life.

It is all-essential to the continuance of our healthy national life that we should recognize this community of interest among our people. The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us, and therefore in public life that man is the best representative of each of us who seeks to do good to each by doing good to all; in other words, whose endeavor it is not to represent any special class and promote merely that class’s selfish interests, but to represent all true and honest men of all sections and all classes and to work for their interests by working for our common country.

We can keep our government on a sane and healthy basis, we can make and keep our social system what it should be, only on condition of judging each man, not as a member of a class, but on his worth as a man. It is an infamous thing in our American life, and fundamentally treacherous to our institutions, to apply to any man any test save that of his personal worth, or to draw between two sets of men any distinction save the distinction of conduct, the distinction that marks off those who do well and wisely from those who do ill and foolishly. There are good citizens and bad citizens in every class as in every locality, and the attitude of decent people toward great public and social questions should be determined, not by the accidental questions of employment or locality, but by those deep-set principles which represent the innermost souls of men.

The failure in public and in private life thus to treat each man on his own merits, the recognition of this government as being either for the poor as such or for the rich as such, would prove fatal to our Republic, as such failure and such recognition have always proved fatal in the past to other republics. A healthy republican government must rest upon individuals, not upon classes or sections. As soon as it becomes government by a class or by a section, it departs from the old American ideal.

More at Don Surber’s post, who concludes,

It is that last line, “The death-knell of the Republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others,” that should be on the rug.

Sadly, TR’s words have proved prophetic.

The entire speech is here.

Odd how a president whose supporters decry quotes as being “out of context” would miss something like this. Far from an endorsement of having El Presidente take over industry upon industry. TR called for self-government, the antithesis of Obamacare

What I want to know, why bother put quotes on beige carpeting anyway?

(h/t Larwyn)

Seven if we’re lucky:

Broader U-6 Jobless Rate up to 16.7%: Why the Jump?

The U.S. jobless rate rose to 9.6% in August, but the government’s broader measure of unemployment rose even more to 16.7%, the highest rate since April.

The comprehensive gauge of labor underutilization, known as the “U-6″ for its data classification by the Labor Department, accounts for people who have stopped looking for work or who can’t find full-time jobs.

Peter Whener looks at what the numbers mean,

During our supposed “Recovery Summer,” we have lost 283,000 jobs (54,000 in June, 171,000 in July, and 54,000 in August). And for August, the employment-population ratio — the percentage of Americans with jobs — was 58.5 percent. We haven’t seen figures this low in nearly three decades. As Henry Olson of the American Enterprise Institute points out, “Since the start of this summer, nearly 400,000 Americans have entered the labor force, but only 130,000 have found jobs. … America’s adult population has risen by 2 million people since [August 2009], but the number of adults with jobs has dropped by 180,000. The unemployment rate declined slightly despite these numbers, from 9.7 percent to 9.6 percent, because over 2.3 million people have left the labor force entirely, so discouraged they are no longer even looking for work. ”Keep in mind that all this is occurring during a period when job growth should be considerably higher, at least based on past post-recession recoveries. Former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Michael Boskin points out that “compared to the 6.2% first-year Ford recovery and 7.7% Reagan recovery, the Obama recovery at 3% is less than half speed.” Bear in mind, too, that today’s jobs report comes a week after the GDP for the second quarter was revised downward, from 2.4 percent to 1.6 percent. Economists generally agree that the economy needs to grow 2.5 percent to keep unemployment from going up, and a good deal better than that to begin to bring it substantially down.

What all this means, I think, is that we’re not in a recovery at all, at least not in any meaningful sense.

Indeed.

El baile del perrito means the doggy dance.
Thanks to GM Roper for brightening our day!

Fidel Castro is not only alive, he’s back wearing green fatigue shirts roomy enough for his colostomy bags. Yesterday he gave a totally incoherent speech on Middle East nuclear war, world peace, reversing climate change and planting trees to students at his former alma mater, the University of Havana.

Here’s the video,

WTF?

By the way, this is the same guy who was telling Nikita Khrushev to nuke the USA during the Cuban missile crisis.

I wonder if Barbara Walters will now want to show up by his bedside and boink him, like she did in the 1960s. After all, groupies never die.

Who’s behind the money for the Ground Zero mosque?

Mosque Investor Was Terror Contributor, but he says he thought it was a “harmless charity.”

One of the key players in Sharif El-Gamal’s Mosque near Ground Zero is Egyptian born businessman, Hisham Elzanaty. Fox 5 News has learned exclusively and confirmed with Mr. Elzanaty’s attorney that Elzanaty made a “significant investment” in the development of the mosque near Ground Zero.

Fox 5 has also uncovered Elzanaty has teamed up with El-Gamal on at least two real estate deals: the controversial mosque site and another deal involving a commercial property in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.

In the Chelsea deal, mortgage documents show Elzanaty played a major role signing off as the guarantor on El-Gamal’s $39 million mortgage.

When Fox 5 News reporter Charles Leaf tracked down Elzanaty outside his Long Island home in Roslyn Heights last week Elzanaty avoided the camera and did not answer a single question about his business dealings with El-Gamal.

Fox 5 News has also learned that in 1999 Hisham Elzanaty sent money to an organization that would later be deemed by the U.S. government to be a terrorist group.

The organization was the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, also known as HLF. The now defunct group’s 1999 tax records show Elzanaty contributed more than $6,000 to HLF.

Two years later, in 2001, HLF was shut down by the federal government and designated as a global terrorist. After a mistrial in 2007, in 2008 five HLF leaders were convicted of providing material support to Hamas.

In case you forgot,

In 2001 the HLF was shut down by the U.S. government and designated as a global terrorist. After a mistrial in 2007, in 2008 five HLF leaders were convicted of providing material support to Hamas, a group on the U.S. governments List of Foreign Terrorists.

Hisham Elzanaty donated $6,050 to the HLF in 1999.

In another subject, I wonder where Obama will be on September 11?

The Small Business The 97% Fallacy
The president’s plan to raise top marginal rates is holding back the very people who should be leading the economic recovery.

According to IRS data, fully 48% of the net income of sole proprietorships, partnerships, and S corporations reported on tax returns went to households with incomes above $200,000 in 2007. That’s the number to look at, not the 3%. Would Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Biden deny that the more successful firms owned by individuals in the top income-tax bracket are disproportionately responsible for investment and job creation?

It’s clear that business income for large and small firms will be hit by the higher tax rates. And in point of fact, firms of all sizes contribute to the nation’s prosperity. So it’s a mistake to focus only on the impact of increased tax rates on small business. But will the higher rates actually cause a significant reduction in business activity?

Economic research supports a large impact. A pair of papers by economists Robert Carroll, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Harvey Rosen and Mark Rider that were published in 1998 and 2000 by the National Bureau of Economic Research analyzed tax return data and uncovered high responsiveness of sole proprietors’ business activity to tax rates. Their estimates imply that increasing the top rate to 40.8% from 35% (an official rate of 39.6% plus another 1.2 percentage points from the restoration of a stealth provision that phases out deductions), as in Mr. Obama’s plan, would reduce gross receipts by more than 7% for sole proprietors subject to the higher rate.

These results imply a similar effect on proprietors’ investment expenditures. A paper published by R. Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University and William M. Gentry of Williams College in the American Economic Review in 2000 also found that increasing progressivity of the tax code discourages entrepreneurs from starting new businesses.

In a recession, businesses suffer from a decrease in sales. What is the businesses’ next worry?

When the National Federation of Independent Business asked small business owners in June to list the most important problem they faced, 20% named taxes, making that the second most cited concern after weak sales. The expectation of tax increases, such as those in Mr. Obama’s plan, is on the minds of the people who should be leading the recovery.

The Obama administration talks about the deficit, but they forget the deficit is caused by their outrageous spending.

Until the Dems in the White House and in both houses of Congress (which they control) figure that one out, the economy will continue to tank.

Update,
The Audacity of Failure

[Former chair of Obama's Economic Advisors Christina]Romer first admits that her magic Keynesian formulas were completely useless in predicting how bad the recession would be, and then she turns right around and uses those exact same formulas to justify the success of the stimulus. If that bootstrapping weren’t audacious enough, Romer then went on to claim that “the United States still faces a substantial shortfall of aggregate demand” and that “structural changes in the composition of our output or a mismatch between worker skills and jobs” having nothing to do with continued high unemployment. So instead of changing course, Romer wants us to double down with a second round of economic stimulus.How much more stimulus does the Obama administration want to spend? Romer wouldn’t say, and the White House is desperate to avoid calling any new action “stimulus,” but The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle has crunched the numbers and come up with a ballpark size of how big the original economic stimulus package would have to have been if we take the left’s Keynesian economics as gospel: “Full employment is perhaps 4.5-5%. If we assume that stimulus benefits increase linearly, that means we would have needed a stimulus of, on the low end, $2.5 trillion. On the high end, it would have been in the $4-5 trillion range.”

Even the Obama administration doesn’t want to add another $5 trillion to our $13.5 trillion national debt. That is why the Obama administration is pushing a $921 billion tax hike set to take effect on January 1, 2011. There is only one word for proposing $981 billion in taxes to pay for trillions in failed stimulus spending in the midst of 9.6% unemployment: audacity.

UPDATE 2:
PLEASE, Vote For The Name of the Next Stimulus Plan

As reported by France 24, 0:30 into the video,

Richard Fernandez has the details of Gaddafi (he of the multiple spellings) and his latest proselitizing stunt.

In the comments, Richard explains,

Symbols matter. At least they matter to some. Those who laugh at Potemkin villages should remember how many of the pre-World War 2 British intelligensia were hoodwinked by them. The 19th century Raj had not yet found pomp and ceremony distasteful. They overawed the locals with grand spectacles, bombastic titles and above all, a manner of effortless superiority. Perhaps Europeans, never having had the colonial experience in relatively modern times, with exception of the German occupation, don’t know what it is like to be treated like a “native”.

Well it’s like this. You are constantly praising the other person’s culture, making room for his cultural symbols. You are continuously apologizing for your religion as the superstition of mere rustics. You are made to stamp on your own traditions and deities. It becomes cool to wear articles of clothing of the conquering civilization. If you have a perfectly good English name you make haste to change it something fashionably Arabic, or ethnic at least. Finally you let a potentate parade women recruited from the local population in a public place. And then you say, “it’s good, I like it”.

What you don’t realize is that, far from obtaining the respect of your betters, you have actually earned his eternal contempt. He regards you as subhuman. He has a special term for you, like “whore” if you are the First Lady of France. And once again you bob your head and say, “it’s good, I like it”. And you cast your eyes around and notice who’s not bowing. Is that Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck over there? For shame! They are bigots. Mere rubes. For nothing is more sophisticated than to slavishly ape the manners of the Other.

That’s what it feels like to be conquered. The feeling is novel to Europe; perhaps even strange. Don’t worry. They’ll get used to it.

They’ll even provide the “hostess” agencies.

Related:
We Are All Prostitutes Today.