Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Propaganda on the news, and today’s other items

Propaganda in the news:
Voice of America or voice of Ahmadinejad?

After a Senate subcommittee hearing last summer in which an escaped Iranian dissident testified that the U.S. itself has been beaming anti-American propaganda into Iran, Sen. Tom Coburn began looking into the problem. Today, in a polite but searing letter, addressed to President Bush, Coburn spelled out his concerns that American broadcasts into Iran, via Radio Farda and Voice of America, freighted with content that sounds like the propaganda of Tehran itself, “may actually be harming American interests rather than helping.”

Global Warming Smear

political and media activists attempt to stigmatize anyone who doesn’t pay homage to their “scientific consensus.”
…
Here are the facts as we’ve been able to collect them. AEI doesn’t lobby, didn’t offer money to scientists to question global warming, and the money it did pay for climate research didn’t come from Exxon.

Speaking of “climate change”, The Economist

The other part of the report’s job is to make predictions about what will happen to the climate. In this, it illustrates a curious aspect of the science of climate change. Studying the climate reveals new, little-understood, mechanisms: as temperatures warm, they set off feedback effects that may increase, or decrease, warming. So, as understanding grows, predictions may become less, rather than more, certain. Thus the IPCC’s range of predictions of the rise in the temperature by 2100 has increased from 1.4-5.8°C in the 2001 report to 1.1-6.4°C in this report.

That the IPCC should end up with a range that vast is not surprising given the climate’s complexity. But it does leave plenty of scope for argument about whether it is worth trying to do anything about climate change.

As far as global warming goes, send me some. It’s been below 30F for an entire week here and I need to shed the Polartec and the tweeds.

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When You Tax Profits, You Tax People (emphasis added)

The prevailing 35 percent corporate tax rate takes a monster bite from all U.S. businesses. Moreover, our business taxes are far too high in relation to the rest of the world. Believe it or not,the corporate tax rate is lower in France than it is in the United States.

Along with slow-growing Japan, the U.S. has the highest marginal tax rate on corporate profits of any of the developed countries. Think of this: Germany is cutting its corporate tax rate to 15 percent from 25 percent. And if frontrunner Nicolas Sarkozy wins the French presidential election this spring, he plans to slash France’s corporate tax burden. Meanwhile, we’ll still be taking our best companies behind the barn and shooting them.

The bottom line here is that our economic system is all about free-market capitalism, and at the core of that system is profit. Profit isn’t a dirty word. From profits spring the abundance of this great country. Profits are the mother’s milk of stocks and the economy. Expanding profits provide businesses the resources to enlarge production operations and hire additional workers. This, in turn, is how incomes are created, wages that are then spent by American families.

Why can’t liberals grasp this?

Because it won’t fit their script?

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Hillary
Imagining a Triangulator-in-Chief: Hillary Rodham Clinton

P.J. O’Rourke recently said Hillary’s “Hugo Chavez in a pants suit.” Should Hillary wear skirts? Donatella thinks

They make her look too masculine

In Hillary’s mind, “and that is wrong because?”

She’ll have to lose a few pounds and wear shorter jackets, to look better in skirts. This is what she looked like in a skirt years ago.

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In a lighter mode,
Affairs to Forget. How Hollywood lost its romantic groove.
Here’s my second-favorite movie,

They don’t make them as they used to, don’t they?

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Victory lessons, and today’s items

Victory Lessons from Ronald Reagan

greatest Republican of our time, we should revisit the crucial victory lessons from President Reagan. In all his campaigns for the California governorship and for the Presidency, Reagan demonstrated the timeless value of three essential political characteristics: clarity, cheerfulness and unity. If Republicans manage to emphasize and exemplify these traits they will win in 2008 and beyond and re-enforce their status as the nation’s majority party.

1. CLARITY. Throughout his public career, Reagan associated himself with a handful of simple but profound ideas: government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem; the people deserve lower taxes and less regulation; Communism must be defeated, not accommodated. In his public pronouncements he never varied from these core principles and he never worried about repeating himself, confident in the knowledge that the truth always sounds fresh and appropriate.

Twilight zone at the border.

Sunday June 3, 2007, is ICD 7: International Capitalism Day 2007 I’ve been celebrating all along but on that day I’ll celebrate even more (h/t Maria).

Pakistani Muslim couple tied up, stoned to death – on SUSPICION of committing adultery: the woman was 40, the man, 45. Atlas has more.

Hillary is resentful, but not at Bill. Me, I resent Hillary and all her nagging.

Bruce Kesler fisks NYT theater critic Patricia Cohen: Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism. Methinks Pat’s looking for a spot on the op-ed page, like her predecessor. (h/t Larwyn)

John Kerry’s on a roll (h/t Larwyn), which segues well with Interchangeable goofballs (h/t Maria).

CatHouse Chat asks Why don’t we let them decide?

Speaking of the troops, As for the married troops, they could still get homemade lemon squares.

In praise of oil, via Maria

This is the sunset of the “Age of Aquarius.” Was about time!

Don’t sign me up for one of these, thanks: The lunchtime facelift

A popular fast face-lift is called Sculptra, a 30-minute procedure involving a series of injections (a mix of poly-L-lactic acid material mixed with water) used to stimulate the growth of collagen and provide a gradual increase in skin thickness.

You call it a facelift, I call it a callus.

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Hillary’s new fan club, and today’s items

The Daily Gut is starting a Hillary fan club. Via Pajamas Media, Hillary Clamps Down. She’s going to need all the fan clubs she can get; Gerard Baker sure isn’t a fan: The vaulting ambition of America’s Lady Macbeth

There are many reasons people think Mrs Clinton will not be elected president. She lacks warmth; she is too polarising a figure; the American people don’t want to relive the psychodrama of the eight years of the Clinton presidency.

But they all miss this essential counterpoint. As you consider her career this past 15 years or so in the public spotlight, it is impossible not to be struck, and even impressed, by the sheer ruthless, unapologetic, unshameable way in which she has pursued this ambition, and confirmed that there is literally nothing she will not do, say, think or feel to achieve it. Here, finally, is someone who has taken the black arts of the politician’s trade, the dissembling, the trimming, the pandering, all the way to their logical conclusion.

If Mr. Baker ever comes to Princeton I’ll buy him a beer.

Which brings me to Francis Porretto’s excellent essay, Broken Premises Part 3: Is It The Words Or The Tune That Matters?

Rare is the politician, on either side of the divide between the parties, who can be relied upon speak clearly and to the point, and always to call things by their right names. Porfessional pols and their staffs might not believe Sapir and Whorf’s conjecture that words have the power to shape reality, but their confidence in the power of words to shape popular convictions appears boundless.

George Orwell’s landmark essay “Politics and the English Language” is replete with piercing observations about the insidiousness of such rhetoric. Among its many powerful points is that we must know what a thing is to argue for or against it:

Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Orwell’s essay should be required reading for every American who thinks himself qualified to vote, or to hold a political opinion. Much of the damage that has been done to freedom these past eighty years has passed into law under the cover of “terms of art,” periphrases and circumlocutions of the sort it describes.

The West and Islam: “Hurray! We’re capitulating” (via Real Clear Politics)

All the events of last spring are only a foretaste of something much bigger, something still unnamed. And when it ends, those who have managed to escape will ask themselves: Why didn’t we see the handwriting on the wall when there was still time? If Muslim protests against a few harmless cartoons can cause the free world to capitulate in the face of violence, how will this free world react to something that is truly relevant? It is already difficult enough to see that Israel is not merely battling a few militants, but is facing a serious threat to its very existence from Iran. All too often it is ignored that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has already taken the first step by calling for “a world without Zionism” — a call that pro-Israel Europeans only managed to condemn with a mild, “unacceptable.” How would they react if Iran were in a position to back up its threats with nuclear weapons?

Kenneth Stein’s My Problem with Jimmy Carter’s Book (Stein was a Fellow at the Carter Center; h/t Not Exactly Rocket Science) ties in well with Jimmy Carter: Too many Jews on Holocaust council. As Stephen Pollard said,

The problem is that Carter does not provide an alternative view but the view from an alternative universe, with facts which are non-facts, events which are ignored and clear justifications for suicide terrorism.

What a disgrace Jimmy is.

Dr. Krauthammer

There are three serious things we can do now: Tax gas. Drill in the Arctic. Go nuclear

Meanwhile in Cuba,
Weekend at Fidel’s
As Taranto said yesterday,

No One Can See Him, That’s How Fast He’s Running
“No Sign of Fidel as Cubans Wait, Wonder”–headline, Associated Press, Jan. 24
“Chavez Says Castro ‘Almost Jogging’ “–headline, Associated Press, Jan. 24

The Beeb found one guy blogging from Cuba. Make no mistake, that blogger has to toe the line.

If Cuban prisoner of conscience Prospero Gainza can sew his mouth shut as a defiant and symbolic gesture of protest, we can all show solidarity by fasting every Friday for our incarcerated brothers and sisters on the island.

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Pastimes
I signed up for Twitter, where you can post updates on what you are doing during your day. Since I live a pedestrian and totally uninteresting life, I’m posting short quotes from poems I’ve read over the years.

Today’s verse is the first line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight, in keeping with this morning’s cold weather.

Look at the pink box in the sidebar for each day’s verse.

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The Mommy Party, hiding behind the children

The 2008 presidential campaign is barely starting (of course, for Hillary it never ended) and I’ve already had it up to here with the maternity pitch. I really don’t care to hear whether Grandma Nancy or Nagging Hillary want to justify their ambition for power on children – in fact I find it despicable – for a number of reasons:

For starters, my reasons are personal:
I was childless for many years. All the while I held a variety of jobs and did not use fertility as an excuse or as a motivator for my professional performance because doing so is not professional. Indeed, I didn’t bring up the matter at all, unlike many of my female coworkers, who brought up every detail of their private lives particularly but not exclusively when in the company of other women. After my son was born I chose to be a stay-at-home mom, which in this town is frowned upon by the very people (mostly women) who are staunch Hillary supporters. Now I’m in the absurd situation of hearing those same women bragging about how Nancy and Hillary are so great because of their children.

(BTW, to this day no man, no matter how liberal, has opined to me that it was wrong of me to be a stay-at-home mom. I’m sure the average guy can tell I’d verbally tear him up one side and down the other if he dared. I’m happy to say that a few men have expressed support of my decision, including two stay-at-home dads.)

Then there’s the political reason,

Strategists say that talking about motherhood is reassuring to voters, some of whom are still uncomfortable with women in powerful jobs. It also helps create a narrative for their lives that connects them to mainstream and traditionalist voters.

“Raising children is certainly something both have in common with millions of Americans, and parents everywhere worry about their kids’ future, so why not talk about it?” said Democratic strategist Stephanie Cutter. “It’s really no different than talking about a military record or experience in running a business – it gives voters a sense of who you are.”

The difference, Ms Cutter, is that those politicians are using their children for political profit. While obviously you find no problem with that, some of us find it reprehensible. As Betsy puts it,

I prefer the candidates who draw a line of privacy between their families and their political aspirations. And now when we’re at war, I’m more interested in how these candidates propose to keep us safe than I am with how they juggled motherhood and a political career.

And then there’s Hillary. As I pointed out last month, this is a woman whose marriage of convenience is a subject entirely out of the “conversation”, and whose ghost-written book proposes that the state (i.e., “village”) is responsible for children. Not that this is new tactics for the Clintons: Thinkin’bout Stuff remembers the 1992 “town hall” residential debate, (emphasis added)

I remember thinking, at the time, what a great move this was to try to move away from a real debate to an emotional discourse which clearly favored Clinton over Bush (with Perot being more entertainment value, and likely spoiler, than serious candidate). Clearly, we were not looking for a leader, we were looking for a daddy who would take care of us. Essentially this highlights the difference between the theory of Socialism (as opposed to the stark reality) and Capitalism… with Socialism (again in theory), daddy government provides for the people; with Capitalism, the people are given the opportunity to provide for themselves. So if you can frame the debate so that the only way to win is to show how much you care for us and will take care of our needs, the Socialist candidate wins. Of course this whole Socialism thing falls apart unless you have good Capitalists to grab the money from to support the Socialist agenda.

Hillary is using the children to hide the naked viciousness that lies underneath the Botox and soft-focus “conversation”. As Dr. Sanity explains

Hillary Clinton did not get where she is today by being a person of integrity, honesty and courage–she got there by riding on the coattails of her charismatic husband; and by shrewdly altering her opinions to accommodate the prevailing political winds. And, oh yes, by ruthlessly destroying whoever got in her way. And even her base is able to recognize this about her, although she is extremely careful never to dirty her own hands. Like the Hamas and Hezbollah gunmen who shield themselves with innocent women and children, Hillary and her spouse have always had a ready supply of useful fall-guys (recall Vince Foster’s suicide or Sandy Berger’s recent archival exploits, for example) to take responsibility for their misdeeds.

That is why candidates like Obama are so attractive: because this same voting base that once adored Hillary now find her too too obvious and coarse, and have swung over to the unknown, tabula rasa candidate on whom they are able to project their own fantasies without any intrusion by harsh reality.

Expect to see the lovely Hilary, whose grandiosity and ambition matches that of her philandering husband ounce for ounce, lash out unmercifully toward anyone who threatens her political ambitions; but definitely not at Islamic Jihadists–unless it happens to be politically expedient and popular to do so. As the campaign progresses, her views will move ever leftward to accommodate whomsoever she decides she needs to co-opt in order to achieve her ambitions.

Right now, it is smart for her to play both sides–to speak toughly, and carry a little stick, so to speak. (The “mommy” alternative, I suppose, to politically incorrect paternalism)

Not as an alternative – simply the other face of the same coin. Pateralism, schmaternalism, it all comes down to more government control.

Expect much more of this from the “Mommy party”.

It’s only the beginning, folks.

Update Don’t miss seejanemom’s post on Nonni Pelosi
Komrade Hillary jumps in

Awwwww, poor Hillary. Grabby husband that’s sure to be a liability one way or the other, only $14 mil in the war chest, cameras pointing away from her. And she even forgot (?) to include a flag in the background of her “annoucement” video. No flag? What’s up with that? Surely it’s not any anti-American sentiment, is it?

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‘Go to hell, gringos!’ and today’s other items

Winning hearts and minds through tact and diplomacy
Chavez to U.S.: ‘Go to hell, gringos!’
And he calls Saddam a gentleman.

Keep that in mind when you hear Joe Kennedy’s TV and radio ads talking about “my friends from Venezuela and CITGO”.

Update: My mom called after listening to Chavez’s little tirade on Spanish-language TV in Miami, she says that Chavez said the “Go home” three times, the first one pronounced as “Go home”, the two others as “cojon”, (b*lls). What a guy.

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See Hillary Run

Via Newsbusters,

Update: The Hillary Blog is holding a First Post Contest and Doug Ross has his entry ready.

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The gods are back!
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Kobayashi Maru points out that Cullen’s paycheck and career are staked to her support for global warming orthodoxy
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Tim Blair posts on how a CARING FELLOW WISHES TO PENALISE POOR
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Know your blogger rights
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Mail Order Company Insults Troops
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Obesity goes to the dogs – and I love that doggie in the photo.
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Using The Enemy’s Strength Against Them (h/t Larwyn)
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I’ve been trying Twitter and MyBlogLog. If you’d like to join, or if you already are a member, add me as a contact.

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Phallic academia, stolen ideas, and Hugh at the beach

Quackery in Academia: The Phallus and Paul Krugman

When economists claim that they have special competence to discuss the implications of income inequality toward social attitudes or progress, they are behaving as quacks. Paul Krugman apparently has done alot of this. There is no reason that anyone should take his credentials as evidence of his competence to discuss the implications of income inequality for progress. The fact that he has gotten so much media attention is but one more example of liberal media bias and incompetence.

(h/t larwyn)
Via Maria, Another Academic Shuns Carter and His Center Update A friend just emailed this, via LGF, Carter Center Board Members Resign Over Palestine Book

Fourteen members of an advisory board at the Carter Center resigned today, concluding they could “no longer in good conscience continue to serve” following publication of former President Jimmy Carter’s controversial book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

(end update)

Bremmer, Rumsfeld, and others in the Bush administration have been discussing an oil trust for years. Now Hillary’s trying out the idea.

Saddam’s Execution Causes Surge… In Iraqi Economy
Pajamas Media has a round-up on Pres. Bush’s speech.

Hardselling the Dems
From Grandma in charge of the Nanny State (h/t Larwyn)…
Changing Diapers, Serving Leftovers, and Caring for the Country in a Single Bound: Nancy Pelosi Capitalizes on Motherhood and Apple Pie
… to Obama on the beach. Betsy asks

People Magazine sports a picture of the Senator swimming in Hawaii. He’s right up there with pictures of Penelope Cruz and Hugh Jackman in their bathing suits. Does this qualify as overexposure of Obama or new method of getting the women’s vote?

Not this woman’s vote. And in any case, Hugh’s way ahead of Obama in the swimsuit issue. Way, waaay ahead. Compare and contrast:

Obama ……………….. Hugh

I blog. You decide.
I just hope we won’t be getting any more candidates playing football. Sooner or later, those candidates lose the burger vote.

Nidra Poller reports on The latest from Paris (France, not Hilton): Homeless chic

One hundred days from the presidential elections, what is on the mind of an aspiring world power like France? The nuclear threat from Iran? The Hizballah putsch fomenting in Lebanon? War between Fatah and Hamas? The defeat of Islamists in Somalia? The rise of populism in South America? The impending death of Castro in Cuba? The ongoing massacre in Darfur? The future of the European Union?

I always liked Morticia better, but Yvonne de Carlo was a wonderful actress. She was great in The Captain’s Paradise (and Alec Guinness can cut a rug – who knew?)

If you’re looking for the latest Rosie-The Donald news, you’re at the wrong blog.

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No, Hillary: it takes a mother and a father

After I mentioned yesterday that Hillary’s masterpiece on statist “parenting”, It Takes A Village, is being ressurected for the 2008 campaign, two people emailed me saying that Hillary was in The View flogging ITAV – and you know she’s running because she’s wearing pink again.

Wonder of wonders, they have it on You Tube:

(Update: A friend sent a link to YouTube’s second part of The View)
One thing about The View and Oprah, their camera lenses are filtered so heavily to disguise wrinkles that everyone’s in a haze. I bet that if I was a guest in those two programs I’d look at least ten years younger, or a great deal more blurry.

But notice the huge family photo of the disfunctional former-and-future First Family in the background.

Can we possibly believe that Hillary Clinton has any credibility in family matters? This is a woman who’s been married to a man who dragooned the country into the most public illicit affair in modern history while all the while insisting that it was all a fabrication of a “vast right-wing” conspiracy” (her words). This is a woman who in page 11 of her own book says,

Everywhere we look, children are under assault: from violence and neglect, from the break-up of families…

As Kay S. Hymowitz asked, Remember New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s apocalyptic prophecy that millions of children “would be put to the sword” if welfare reform became law? Well, Moynihan was right. The culture of dependence on government, which Hillary so proudly believes in, tore those lives apart, for generations to come.

Hillary’s book continues,

…from the temptations of alcohol, tobacco, sex

Thus speaks the wife who publicly countenanced her husband’s perverse insistence that oral sex is not sex – and allow me to remind you that back in the 1990s those of us with children gave up cable TV because we didn’t want to have to explain to the kid(s) what oral sex meant.

…from greed, materialism, and spiritual emptiness.

… and from Whitewater, commodities trading payola, and Marc Rich and his ex-wife, too.

Of course, The View would never ever raise such unpleasantness to the “next mom POTUS”. And heavens forbid that we mention the excellent Bush economy, or the existential menace from terrorism.

Mary Grabar today has an article on The girls on The View

But it’s a sign of our crumbling civilization that a bunch of girls of varying ages and ethnic backgrounds, sitting around all dressed up for a coffee klatch, some of them with cleavage spilling out of Victoria’s Secret Infinity Edge Push-Up bras, spout off opinions borrowed from disturbed teenagers and Michael Moore, and call it a talk show.

This was the danger of giving women the vote. The danger to conservatives (and the survival of this country) is the voting bloc of single women, i.e., those who lack the guidance of a man in the form of a husband or intellectual mentor.

These are women who pride themselves on being independent and empowered when they dress like prostitutes (look at the view of cleavage on the View!). These are the women who watch the View. These are the women who support Hillary Rodham Clinton. These are the women on the show who ask Senator Clinton questions like “Do you think being a mom will help you in the White House?” as they did on December 20. These are the women who think it matters that a potential presidential candidate waxes on about the same themes in her re-released book, It Takes a Village: that preschool programs need to be expanded, that working parents should have time off to take care of their kids. This is the potential presidential candidate who was applauded on the show for allowing one of her staff members to bring in her baby’s playpen.

This is a woman who started off with a discussion about how much she likes to do crafts at Christmas time.

(Let me go on the record: I don’t do crafts, and except for pies, I don’t bake. Also on the record: I don’t believe for a moment that Hillary does crafts at any time – Christmas or other – but she might have her assistants do it, just as she had Barbara Feinman write ITAV)

Yes, I can imagine: we’ll have playpens and parenting classes and crafts classes in the new Clinton White House, maybe even a special prayer room for the Muslims and breaks five times a day for them. This will bring peace to the world by setting an example, for all the terrorists will supposedly drop their weapons in awe of this “village.” Hillary’s answer to the Iraq question was that she wanted the country to have a “conversation” again. What – like the one they have on The View?

News flash: there are fanatics who want to annihilate us and Hillary Rodham Clinton is talking about crafts and “conversations.”

I agree with Mary that women need men for intellectual challenge. Men are great thinkers and doers and women have a lot to learn from men. Not all men are, and not all great thinkers and doers are men, but women need intellectual challenge from men, because men think differently from women.

And that’s one of the thousand reasons why children need a mother and a father.

No, Hillary, it doesn’t take a village to raise a child: It takes a mother and a father. And if that’s all you’re running on, it’s time to put away the pink outfits and make room for a better candidate who’s willing to face the issues of our time.

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