Real People Get Hurt When MSM Misfires

Our beloved media enjoy a special privilege. They don’t get to pay damages for
journalistic negligence as a physician or an engineer has to. They are special.
Unfortunately, as many elites have mistakenly imagined over the centuries, that doesn’t
mean that they are specially blessed by God (or history, or the people, or the wretched of the earth)
to minister to the great unwashed.
It means that they have special responsibilities. As Spidey learned, with great power comes
great responsibility.
Michelle Malkin reminds her media colleagues just how much damage they do when their
negligence wounds the men and women of America’s armed forces. And they do need reminding.

Experts Shocked by Public's Optimism

Americans are astonishingly optimistic, according to a new
poll reported by Jennifer Harper.

82 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 feel optimistic about their futures; 82 percent of those ages 25 to 44 do so as well; and 75 percent of those ages 45 to 64 and 64 percent of those 65 or older agree.

The experts are worried. What would happen if Americans stopped being optimistic? “`We believe this personal optimism is sort of a last barricade,’ [the expert] said, and could prove `shaky.’”
You can find a summary of the report (here).

Warning: Egalitarians are At It Again

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. It’s the center
of the left’s argument. In Marx, it surfaced as the “immiseration” theory, that
the workers would get poorer and poorer over time—because of capitalism.

Now Bruce Bartlett detects a new line from the left
as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (news division) report, in the same week, on
class mobility stalling out. Yes, everyone is
getting richer, yes there is social mobility. But look, the social mobility
is not as great as it used to be. Oh no!

It’s a glorious thing to be a liberal and to know that all the evils in the
world are the other guy’s fault. But liberals, have you never stopped to
think that it is your favorite cultural change and government policies that hinder social mobility,
from the sexual revolution to
monopoly government education, to occupational licensing, to widespread
tenure in the public sector? Social mobility is a two-way street, and for over
a century, liberals have done everything they can to jam the up escalator with their
attack on middle-class values, and jam the down escalator with their income support programs and
market interventions.

Don’t push this one too far, old chum. You won’t like where it leads.

Solar Tower of Power

The Aussies are going to build a 3,000 ft high solar power generator.
according to Dr. Roy W. Spencer.
No doubt you liberal environmentalist chappies are ecstatic. Why, think
of the potential for arresting global warming! But somehow, I don’t see,
say, Senator Reid (D, NV) rushing up to propose a Tower of Power in the
Nevada desert flanked by representatives of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and
the Wilderness Society.

Anyway, here’s the officical Tower of Power
web site.

Steyn: RU1-2? John Bolton Isn't, and That's His Problem

Remember the tsunami relief effort? You do? Then you’ll probably be shocked
to learn that containers full of aid are sitting on the dock in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, while
customs inspectors riffle through the paperwork. Canada pledged $425 million
in aid, and so far has dispatched $0.05 million. Yes, that’s forty thousand out
of four hundred million.

It all makes sense, writes
Mark Steyn.
As long as you fill out your form RU1-2 to show
you are part of the international floating crap game of the “global community,”
you’ll get the kid glove treatment. But if you are John Bolton, who scorns
the polite fictions, you could be in real trouble.

European Death Spiral

Here in the US the mainstream media is tut-tutting about an economic pause as
growth declines to 3.1 percent on an annual rate. But in their favorite global
region, Europe, growth is really pausing, down at 0.4 percent, and in Italy, they are
having a real recession.

So what could be the problem in good old Europe? Could it be taxes? Could
it be government spending? Could it be restrictive labor markets? Or could
it be all three? In fact, to stretch a point, could the problem
be that the Europeans have exactly the economic policy that Democrats
want to create in the United States?
Brian Carney
has the details.

Snapshot of the American People

Here’s a look at the American people in 2005, courtesy of
The Pew Research Center.
Dividing us up into three blocs, Left, Right, and Center, we look
like this:

Registered Voters CENTER   Upbeats 13%   Disaffecteds 10% Total:   23% RIGHT   Enterprisers 11%   Social Conservatives 13%   Pro-Government Conservatives 10% Total:   34% LEFT   Liberals 19%   Disadvantaged Democrats 10%   Conservative Democrats 15% Total:   44%

So there we all are. The question is: what do we do about it?