We shouldn’t do this, but we should get our elected representatives to say so, not unelected judges. And it should be our elected representatives, not judges, who decide how much people should be compensated in cases like this. Unfortunately, by choosing to lobby the judiciary the New York Times is taking pressure off of where it needs to be — Congress.
According to James Fallows, an Atlantic correspondent who’s been in China for the past three or four news, Fox News has a striking resemblance to the Chinese media propaganda machine:
I didn’t see anything on Fox from mid-2006 through mid-2009; for better or worse, it’s not carried in China. (The English TV news channels you can get there are BBC, CNN International, CNBC, sometimes Bloomberg.) I have seen it since coming back this summer. And in a way, I realize that I had been seeing it all along: except for more modern production values, it’s the closest thing America offers to what it’s like to be exposed to the Chinese government’s 24/7 internal propaganda machine. When I saw the clip below from Media Matters, as highlighted by Andrew Sullivan, I thought: make it a little more boring, put it in Mandarin, and substitute “splittists” etc for the people Fox is talking about (maybe the Dalai Lama in place of Van Jones), and I could be right back in Beijing.
Are Maddow and Olbermann on MSNBC comparably relentless and “biased”? Of course they are. But no one pretends their shows are “real” news operations or are “fair and balanced.” And certainly they have become what they are as a market and political response to Fox’s success. Indeed, the general polarization and spectacle-mindedness of the news ecology in part is homage to what Fox has figured out as a business and political model.
Frederic Mitterrand, the French culture minister who created a row by vociferously protesting the arrest of Roman Polanski, apparently has a penchant for young boys. The source? A book he wrote:
In his 2005 book The Bad Life, he wrote: “I got into the habit of paying for boys,” saying his attraction to young male prostitutes was not dimmed despite knowing “the sordid details of this traffic”.
“All these rituals of the market for youths, the slave market excited me enormously… the abundance of very attractive and immediately available young boys put me in a state of desire.”
Until a few days ago, I was under the delusion that the civilized world unanimously recognized the rape of a 13 year old child as a crime worthy of punishment. Then along came the overdue arrest of Roman Polanski. Financial penalties, when avoided, compound with interest over time; apparently many seem to believe that the opposite should be true for criminal penalties, that fleeing from justice should be rewarded, at least as long as you’re rich enough and perhaps enough of a “genius.”
For those unfamiliar with the case, let’s recap: Polanski brought a 13 year old girl in on the false pretense of a modeling shoot, he fed her champagne and Quaaludes (a barbiturate that acts as an aphrodisiac and a sedative), and then had anal intercourse with her. And here’s what he had to say several years later:
If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”
Was there judicial misconduct? Maybe. Has the victim said she forgives him? Yes. Does any of this matter? No. There is no doubt as to his guilt and he has already pled guilty. Furthermore, victims don’t prosecute criminals: criminals are prosecuted by the state on behalf of the people of the state, in accordance with public policy designed to advance the public good. In this case, the law exists to protect children.
For those who are still tempted to forgive Polanski, I’d close by asking you to have a conversation with a 13 year old. Set aside the images of sassy young teenagers you see on TV (played by actors many years older) – these are children in 7th or 8th grade, and they are not capable of intelligently making a choice in cases like this (especially when they have been drugged).
The FDA has decided to ban flavored cigarettes. The question many are asking is does the ban cover flavored cigars too? Here’s how the FDA handled that question:
The distinction between cigarettes and cigars has long revolved around the wrapping. Cigarettes are made of tobacco wrapped in paper, and cigars are made of tobacco wrapped in tobacco or paper constituted from tobacco. The tobacco inside the products also generally differs.
…
Dr. Deyton was asked several times if Tuesday’s ban applied to any little cigars or cigarillos. “According to the law, if something is wrapped in a tobacco leaf, that would not be considered,” he said and then stopped and added: “Hold on just a second.”
After a delay, Catherine Lorraine, a lawyer in the agency’s tobacco center, got on the call and said that if consumers believe a product is a cigarette, then the law defines it as a cigarette no matter how it is wrapped or labeled.
“We will be looking at products on an individual basis to determine if it meets that aspect of the legislation,” Ms. Lorraine said.
That’s right folks: the FDA lawyers are saying that subjective consumer impressions — and not the objective characteristics of the product — determine whether sale is legal.
It really is whiplash inducing to go from reading the Wall Street Journal as my daily paper to occasionally picking up the New York Times at the BART station.
From a Times story on Acorn:
WASHINGTON — The House voted Thursday to deny federal money to the community-organizing group Acorn after a video emerged in which employees of the gro
up gave advice to two conservative activists posing as a prostitute and a pimp who said they wanted buy a house in Baltimore and start a brothel.
…
Bolstered by conservative media outlets, Republicans have been on a crusade against the organization for months, accusing it of improperly influencing elections and being protected by Democrats who were the beneficiaries of the group’s political activities. Matters came to a head in the past week after the Acorn workers were videotaped.
Of course, the article contains no mention of the fact that the Baltimore Acorn office continued to provide advice even after it became clear that the “pimp” was looking to house child prostitutes.
From an article on a new Marine recruiting ad:
[The ad] also makes no effort to show the emotional or mental challenges involved in being a Marine, like coping with combat stress or death.
I guess you just couldn’t resist, could you?
The piece is unnecessarily sympathetic to the Administration’s case, but it’s still encouraging to see the Times come out against their union buddies.
Folks, you can start calling me Nostradamus now. From the NYTimes, the U. S. reaps the fruit of Obama’s short-sighted tariffs on Chinese tires:
China said it was investigating whether the U.S. is subsidizing and dumping automotive and chicken meat exports, two days after President Obama put tariffs on Chinese tires.
Global trade wars are bad — they harm everyone involved. We’ve known this for a long time, and we had it proved in no uncertain terms during the Great Depression. And yet here we are having fired the first shot, just like we did with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff act.
Don’t read the New York Times article in too much detail — it takes a pretty protectionist stance towards our trade imbalance with China, while ignoring economic fundamentals. In particular it ignores that 1) trade relations aren’t simply two sided, they are like a triangle or other multi-sided flow diagram; and 2) our trade imbalance with China primarily results from our large deficit (they have to get dollars somehow to buy our t-bills, and the only way they can do that is by selling us stuff).
If you’re like me, you woke up one day and discovered that your Windows XP search function no longer worked as it used to. Wh
en you tried to search a folder, instead your helpful file search box popping up, you saw something that asked you questions about indexing and searching the internet. “But I don’t want to search the internet” you thought to yourself, “That’s why I’m not in a web browser. And do I really have the time to sit here while my computer indexes itself?”
Well, here’s a link to a fine gentlemen who comes to the rescue and helps you undo Microsoft’s most unhelpful mandatory update to your computer.
President Obama, at the behest of the United Steelworkers union, will be adding a 35 percent tariff on tires imported from China.
The basic idea behind trade is that certain countries are better at certain things; international trade allows each country to specialize in what it’s best at. Alternately — and this is what we’re choosing here — you can prop up industries where your nation is non-competitive instead of trying to spread into industries where you have a competitive advantage.
Here’s a great quote from the article:
Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat who had pressed for the tariffs, also praised the decision.
He said in a statement, “If American workers and manufacturers are going to compete in the global market, they need to have a government that uses trade enforcement tools.”
Allow me to translate: “Because American companies and workers are inherently inferior to foreign companies and foreign workers, they require a crutch from their government.”
Thanks guys! Now not only will my tires cost more, but China will likely impose retaliatory tariffs that target an industry where we do have a competitive advantage. Those guys, of course, don’t deserve protection because they didn’t pay their congressman enough money.