This is humorous. A Byron York opinion piece spotlights NPR political editor Ken Rudin’s comments on the “almost Nixonesque” White House and his 180 degree turn around after he angered his liberal listeners.
On National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” Wednesday, NPR political editor Ken Rudin said the White House campaign against Fox News is a bad idea. “It’s not only aggressive, it’s almost Nixonesque,” Rudin said. “I mean, you think of what Nixon and Agnew did with their enemies list and their attacks on the media; certainly Vice President Agnew’s constant denunciation of the media. Of course, then it was a conservative president denouncing a liberal media, and of course, a lot of good liberals said, ‘Oh, that’s ridiculous. That’s an infringement on the freedom of press.’ And now you see a lot of liberals almost kind of applauding what the White House is doing to Fox News, which I think is distressing.”
“Almost Nixonesque” is far from a side by side comparison to Nixon! “Almost” generally means a bit like or somewhat close to, not just like or mirroring Nixon policies. But, needless to say, the left got angry, so he apologized.
“I made a boneheaded mistake yesterday,” Rudin wrote on his NPR blog. “Comparing the tactics of the Nixon administration — which bugged and intimidated and harrassed journalists — to that of the Obama administration was foolish, facile, ridiculous and, ultimately, embarrassing to me. I should have known better and, in fact, I do know better. I was around during the Nixon years. I am fully cognizant of what they did and attempted to do.”
You “should have known better” sir, you are not to anger the listeners! Did I hear your voice move up an octave when you read that news story young man, you are not to have enthusiasm on NPR or an opinion for that matter. Perhaps Rudin will get fed next week, provided he doesn’t say anything else “foolish” about the Obama administration.
I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again, it is very important that we do not allow redundancies between our state and federal government. That means we should let state government do its job, and if the federal government is not needed, let the states create laws as they see fit.
Hate crimes legislation goes beyond the federal and state redundancy problem, it is morally and ethically redundant. Do we really need the federal government to affirm that beating someone or killing someone because they are homosexual or disabled is a crime? The answer is no. It is a crime no matter what the case. If someone was beaten and killed because he had hair that was too long or eyes that were brown, would that not be equally as bad as beating a killing someone because they are gay? Yes! Please understand I only use a hyperbolic situation like that to show how inane this legislation really is.
Unfortunately we are dealing with a government and a whole host of groups that lack common sense. Common sense tells us that if someone is murdered, no matter what the reason or motive, the murder should be punished as a murder. Common sense tells us that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” If any person seeks to willingly take away those “unalienable” rights, especially life, they should be willing face the consequences.
Hate crimes legislation is in effect saying that murder is bad, but if you murder someone because they are black, gay, white, or in a wheelchair, then that is an especially bad type of murder. That mode of thinking is disgusting. Any clear thinking individual can easily understand that murder is murder, whether it is committed after a drug deal gone bad or if it is committed because of any other reason. Murder, beating or abuse has always been murder, beating and abuse, even before this legislation was passed.
Diversity czar Mark Lloyd’s FCC votes Thursday on the issue of net neutrality. Advertised as providing access to all, it will do to the information superhighway what Lloyd proposed for talk radio.
Not much was said when $7.2 billion was included in the stimulus bill “to accelerate broadband deployment in unserved and underserved areas and to strategic institutions that are likely to create jobs or provide significant public benefits.” The administration has big plans for the Internet — like controlling it.
Posted in Life with tags Blogs on October 19, 2009 by raingeg
I realize that there are a lot of bloggers our there. In an effort to connect with more people and to learn more about what is going on in the blogosphere, I am going to start interacting a lot more with other bloggers. It is important that we advance the conversation and communicate new ideas or just complement someone on their post that day.
I’ve decided that I really need to be reading more blogs. I’ve come to the conclusion that I am going to read 10 new blogs every week. The blogs will range in subject matter and they will get posted on this site every Sunday, as well as a short review and possibly addition to my blogroll. I’ve also decided that I will comment on 5 of the 10 blogs I visit.
We should always read other blogs and link to other blogs if they deserve it.
The cult of subjectivism is on the march once again. This time its coming from Anita Dunn, the White House Communications Director, in a speech to High School Students where she references Mao.
According to Jake Tapper’s Tweet, Thursday, via Hot Air, she was apparently joking “referring to an old Lee Atwater shtick.” Remember that this speech was given to High School Students, don’t you think that reference is a bit esoteric? Especially for 17-18 year old kids. I can imagine some 22 year old Political Science majors maybe picking up on the “joke,” but jokes generally garner laughter, and it seems the laughter was only directed at the juxtaposition of Mao and Mother Teresa, not some Lee Atwater shtick, a bad excuse in my opinion.
It would be different if she left it at that, but she then goes on to venerate a Mao quote that says “you fight your war and I’ll fight mine.” Not only that, she seems to cheapen what Mao did and make it into just a thing that happened, seemingly shrugging her shoulders at the fact that the thing that happened resulted in the death of over 70 million people. I have to admit that I am not a Mao expert but it doesn’t take much to find this information.
She continues, “you don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don’t have to follow other peoples choices and paths.” On the outset it seems that she might be promoting the rugged individual, but sadly the only thing we are seeing is an ideology that we’ve seen plague our culture for some time now. Sure, I agree that we shouldn’t let others direct how we live our lives, we need to recognize that we are individuals. But that is not what she is saying. She is spreading this idea that everyone must be “unique,” but not the unique that we generally think about when we here the word, it’s the new “unique” that promotes the idea that everyone must rely solely on ones own perceptions about how life should be.
If you think I’m wrong, continue reading. “You lay out your own paths. You figure out what’s right for you. You don’t let external definition define how good you are internally.” And that is the crux of the issue, right there before your eyes. According to Dunn there is nothing that is objective, it is all merely subjective. Basically, there is nothing outside of yourself that should determine or define if what you feel is “good” is actually good or not. “Good” is what your definition of good is. This is why she can use a quote from Mao and seemingly shrug it off as a mere joke, sans a reference to Atwater during the speech, while at the same time saying that Mao is one of her “favorite political philosophers.”
Perhaps the most angering thing the video is the fact that it appears she is giving the speech in a church. She is giving this speech in a place that is host to a religion that is flooded with moral absolutism and objective truth! That juxtaposition is far more humorous than that of Mao and Mother Teresa.
Not to mention a point that talk radio host Hugh Hewitt made yesterday:
“Mother Teresa was the most ardent and visible pro-life activist of the 20th century. It is simply laughable for Anita Dunn to hold up this great saint as her inspiration and advance the agenda of this White House at the same time.”
Here is the difference between Dunn and myself. I do think that we need to learn from other people’s experiences past or present, I do think we need to retain and promote our culture, I do actually believe in the individual, and I think that we need to sacrifice ourselves for others.
We need to learn from our ancestors and living peoples past mistakes and triumphs. But there is something on the left that doesn’t think we should believe anything that older generations living or dead have to say. After all these people lived in a socially repressed world, how can anything they say have any impact on this new and enlightened generation. And apparently we are all going to have to do a whole lot of things that have never been done before, an idea that I find absolutely repulsive. If only she was talking about medical or technological issues I’d agree, but no, she is talking about cultural upheaval.
Our culture is something that needs to be preserved. When Dunn speaks of all of the “new” challenges that these kids will soon have to face, she is not talking about medical or technological hurdles, but rather the social and cultural issues of the day, and how best to overturn the societal norms within each issue. She is informing the students that as the country socially progresses they will have to find new ways to fight against the conservative movement and societal norms.
I actually believe in the individual and the idea that the individual has the ability to be good or bad, rich or poor, right or wrong and unique or common. This uniqueness that they so easily speak of is not uniqueness at all, it is the mere exposure of easily known facts such as ones race or gender, and both of these factors are becoming vastly subjective. True uniqueness is humility. In a world that is vastly overtaken by greed and narcissism, humility and self-denial is what truly makes a person unique. If that is the case uniqueness is never about what you are, but rather what you do that separates you. And its not that which separates a person from their fellow humans at any given time that makes a person unique, but it is that which separates a person from the narcissistic and self-centered past of humanity that makes a person unique and an individual.
Lastly, we need to sacrifice ourselves for our fellow humans. Notice how many times Dunn says “you” in the speech. She is not promoting self-sacrifice or humility in this speech. Some might say, but look at what she is saying, she is promoting sacrifice, after all Mother Teresa as a good example of sacrifice. It might seem that way, but that is not the case. Notice how she goes on to give the example of the President and his wife’s community organizing past. I’m not talking about self-sacrifice in the way of community organizing. It almost seems that she is drawing equivalencies between Barack Obama’s community organizing and Mother Teresa’s life of sacrifice. The type of sacrifice I am talking about is miniscule to that of Dunn’s examples. I don’t think we need to be community organizers to sacrifice ourselves.
I think we need to let the guy in the grocery line go in front of us. That is how minuscule our sacrifice needs to be. We need to start sacrificing everyday situations, instead of sacrificing for the good of everyone. No one can sacrifice themselves for the good of mankind. That is a task reserved for God. A person can only sacrifice themselves for those that they directly effect. That is why when she uses the Mao quote and affirms that what you set out to do is a “war” she is giving sacrifice a grandeur that it does not inherently have. Our sacrifices should be mere battles in the larger war of life, and they should amount to a life of service in the end. But sacrifice does not have to be a gigantic action or a cultural revolution. And when people start getting the idea that true sacrifice is that of an individual sacrificing for the community or even the world, then the individual soon ceases to exist.
What will happen to radio? My prediction is that music radio will be gone within a decade if radio stations don’t start taking a new approach to music radio, well, it could be considered an old approach. The best part about old radio was the jocks, some might say that people don’t want to hear the jocks anymore, but I beg to differ. They don’t want to hear the jocks talking about useless junk. I would submit that if music radio took a highly opinionated and music savvy jock and just let him loose he would actually bring in listeners. Just let the DJ play what the DJ wants to play, and if the DJ wants to not play something or even say how much he dislikes a certain band, let him do so! I know that there are people that will disagree with this approach, but I think its the only real way that music radio can be salvaged. Pleasing everyone is a very hard thing to do, in fact its darn near impossible to do, so stop trying to do it.
The second thing that music radio can do to improve, is to start creating one to three hour long blocks out of the day and gear those blocks to certain audiences. We’re already seeing this on some stations but it is not done nearly enough. For instance, the rock hour or the hard-rock block. Just three hours of hard-rock with the same jock, playing what he wants to play, much like The Alice Cooper show. This is a very talk radio style approach to music radio, but I think it is a way to make radio more entertaining. If both of these methods, opinionated, music savvy jocks and block shows were implemented, I think music radio has a better chance of being salvaged.
If those two methods don’t get implemented, forget about listening to the radio for music, you might as well just buy an iPod or listen to Pandora on your phone. The internet and technology has ruined the old radio industry and a new type of radio is emerging in the form of pod casting and music radio is going away because people can create their own play lists of music that they want to hear.
Lets say something like what I recommended happens and music radio still dies, what happens then? I think that within a decade you will see talk radio shifting gears and completely moved over to the FM side of the dial. A trend that we are already seeing a lot of. The value of the FM radio station will go down and AM will be rendered obsolete. Something that might happen, as the value of AM radio stations drop, as a result of everything moving to FM, smaller entities might take over AM stations, possibly religious or independent groups, and use them to provide very low-fi radio, provided the FCC would let that happen.
Internet stream in cars is not far off. You can already hook up your Blackberry to an AUX port in your car while streaming Pandora. As technology like that improves and cars start connecting to the web, radio over the internet in the car will be a reality.
All in all, music radio has run its course. I am sad to see it leaving, but I am not sad about what’s on the horizon. Technology will improve and the internet will expand, and the internet will be the “transmitter” and a web based iPod or phone will be the radio. Will the jock all but disappear? That is yet to be seen.
In the coming days I will write about all of the media industries in depth and tell you what I think will happen to them. So be sure to look for these posts interspersed with my normal blog activity.
Please read my introduction to this series by clicking here.
I’m a bit upset. Today I looked on the web for a non-government health organization that accepts donations, much to my surprise I couldn’t find one. There was the VA Hospital, which is part of the government, but other than that I couldn’t find anything to donate to.
What does this tell me? It tells me that as a country we have failed to act on the behalf of those who need help. As a result of our lack of action the government is making its way into the health insurance business, and that makes for a very bad situation for any charity work done in America.
One thing that I did see, that was both inspiring and troubling, was a good number of charities that help impoverished people from other countries. This was inspiring because it showed that people have a desire to donate and to help other people. It was troubling in that I didn’t find very much of anything that would go to helping the people of the United States and local communities.
But what can one person honestly do? That is the question that I am faced with right now. We know that there is a problem. Even though we have the best health care in the world, there are some flaws, and we do need some kind of reform. But I’d like to see the people stand up and give freely of themselves instead of just telling the government that they can steal more of our money and do it how they see fit.
What would a good charity look like? First of all it could not be nationwide, unless it was all under the head of one organization that served the needs of individual communities and money that was given from a community stayed in the community it came from. It would have to be a local operation, something that could take care of the needs that certain places have.
We should really start talking about this. It is important that we take care of the people of our community and not allow the government do it instead. Please comment if you know of any charities in Tucson, that specifically address health care, that I could donate too. Otherwise comment and tell me what we can do to create an organization to remedy this problem.
All forms of media have felt the effect of the internet and the consumers gravitation to new technology. You often see writers, frightened by what they see, writing about the uncertain future of newspapers, books, radio and television. As of late I’ve been fairly laid back about the whole issue and I still am. But there is a larger point that needs to be made in regard to these mediums and their future.
Newspapers, books, radio and television might not exist in the near future, well at least as we know them today. I have a problem with people getting worked up over loosing these mediums. While I don’t want them to go, I don’t want them to stay if they’re not wanted.
Here is the main point that anyone worried about the future needs to understand. Newspapers/books, radios and televisions are all delivery methods. Outside of a newspaper or a book, the alphabet and words will still exist. Outside of the radio industry, audio recording and even transmission via the internet will continue. And moving pictures will still be around even if televisions are not the sole mode of consumption.
Something that we all need to accept is that the internet will be the distribution method for all of the media that we consume. That does not necessarily mean that the computer will be the mode of consumption, it will be a middle man. The computer will be a way for the consumer to set up what they want to read, watch, and listen too. It will become a central access point for the consumer to pick favorites, subscribe to certain feeds for all types of media, and just make basic decisions about what they want to consume. The media will then be sent out via a network or internet connection too a smart phone, gaming console, entertainment computer, or reading device, and the media will be streaming on those devices waiting to be consumed.
Why streaming? Its simple. The one advantage that the newspaper, radio, and television industries have over the consumer is the fact that they are in charge of when and where the consumer gets their product. If the consumer has to receive the product after a short ad then so be it, that’s how its always been. There is a fear on the part of the industries and advertisers that the industries will loose this element of control and they will have no way of basically forcing the consumer to see an ad. If they loose that control the advertisers don’t spend money and the industries loose money.
That is where streaming comes in. This generally only applies to radio and television, this dilemma is not as common in the world of text. If something is streamed, interrupting that stream is virtually impossible for the average consumer/user and that allows the industries to be able to force the consumer to watch an ad. This is already happening with Hulu and popular videos on Youtube.
In the coming days I will write about all of these industries in depth and tell you what I think will happen to them. So be sure to look for these posts interspersed with my normal blog activity.
When the ghost of Christmas yet to come visited Scrooge, the best part about his visit was that the future was there for him to change. President Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize is a bit like the ghost of Christmas yet to come arriving on the scene and only giving him one option. Now the bar has been set just a bit higher for the President and the expectations for his presidency are high, I would assert too high.
What happens if his presidency is like his first 9 months in office? What if all of this nothing that he is so good at accomplishing continues to be accomplished? Pop-culture and the MSM are slowly seeing the light, and the American people have already been blinded.
Even the President noted that winning the prize was not recognition of his actions but more of a “call to action.” But what if that call to action is not heeded? What if the American people don’t want to move this country in the direction that he and the leftists in congress want to move it? What if in 2010 he looses some of that power that he has so unsuccessfully wielded for his first nine months?
I can tell you right now that the ghost of Christmas that must be has arrived and the future holds a large amount of let down for the leftists in America. We saw a glimpse of what that let down might look like when Chicago was the first city voted out in last weeks bid for the 2016 Olympics.
And the sick notion that the President has worked to rid the world of nuclear weapons, thereby allowing for more peace, is one that needs serious scrutiny. He has done nothing of the sort. Under this new administration we are now seeing a stronger nuclear Iran and a stronger North Korea. Countries that, if left alone or appeased, will do something that will most definitely result in war, not peace. We are loved by the European Socialists only because we have apologized for every wrong that the United States has committed dating back to 1776. We are feared by no one, including those countries that seek to blow our allies off the map, out of purely bigoted reasons, and here I thought the left was against bigotry. We are the country that now finds it necessary to talk with Iran, even though we knew that they’ve been building nuclear facility with evil intentions. And we find it necessary to announce that we are going to give the murderous thugs known as the Taliban a stake in the future in Afghanistan, out of the hope that some pacifist Taliban might step forward. And at the same time we don’t seek to destroy the evil group known as Al Qaeda, we only want to keep them “at bay.” I’m sorry to say it, but our country has now taken on the task of being the eunuch of the world, and it sickens me.
