The left has been moaning and groaning recently a great deal about how terrible it is that the billionaire Koch brothers financially support a number of conservative and libertarian think tanks and provide funding for conservative forums and seminars.
You don’t hear them complain, on the other hand, about George Soros’s personal network of political advocacy organizations or his extensive ties to prominent members of the establishment media.
When liberal investor George Soros gave $1.8 million to National Public Radio , it became part of the firestorm of controversy that jeopardized NPR’s federal funding. But that gift only hints at the widespread influence the controversial billionaire has on the mainstream media. Soros, who spent $27 million trying to defeat President Bush in 2004, has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets – including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, NBC and ABC.
Prominent journalists like ABC’s Christiane Amanpour and former Washington Post editor and now Vice President Len Downie serve on boards of operations that take Soros cash. This despite the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethical code stating: “avoid all conflicts real or perceived.”
This information is part of an upcoming report by the Media Research Centers Business & Media Institute which has been looking into George Soros and his influence on the media.
I commented yesterday on how much the photograph of the Administration’s security team released by the White House appeared to me to make the president look like an irrelevant spectator watching from the background.
I was clearly not the only one who noticed, and you can see that the left’s commentariat is on the job spinning this photograph into proof of precisely the opposite.
Why amazing? Because the President seems so small and peripheral to the action. He is hunched down, seated on the margins of the meeting, seemingly trying not to take up space. It appears as if he couldn’t even find a place to put his jacket. By contrast, Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, practically bestrides the room like a Colossus (an affable Colossus, if you know him). I was struck, when I saw this photo, that the Bush White House would have ever released a similar photograph. This is not to cast aspersions on Bush, but could you seriously imagine his public relations releasing an image of him leading from behind, as it were?
I was just talking to David Brooks, and he, too, was struck by this photo. He noted that the President most likely had to move seats to see the screen, but he did not move to a central seat, but to a small chair against the wall. The negative interpretation of this, of course, is that the President wasn’t running the meeting, but both of us found this impossible to believe. The positive interpretation is that the President is so confident in his power that he is comfortable even in a corner. This speaks well of him, to my mind; a president who kills America’s enemies without swagger is better than a swaggerer who doesn’t kill America’s enemies. (Maybe here I’m casting a few aspersions on Bush.)
Only 30 months after the November 2008 election which won him the presidency, Barack Hussein Obama II, stung by repeated criticism by Donald Trump, suddenly abandoned the dogged struggle he had fought in the courts of at least 8 states at a cost estimated to approach close to $2 million and finally released a copy of his long-form birth certificate from the state of Hawaii.
When one glances over the fabled and mysterious document, alleged recently not even to exist as a form of Hawaiian document, on the one hand, one is comforted with the knowledge that the occupant of the chief magistracy of the United States is actually apparently eligible to hold the office he currently occupies. But, on the other hand, one remains perplexed as to why he did not simply release this bland and uncontroversial document long ago.
I think the country is still due a rational explanation of why it was that the president wanted to avoid releasing this.
Nonetheless, NYM congratulates the President of the United States on this bold gesture in the direction of transparency.
Special thanks are obviously due to Mr. Donald Trump, who personally assumed the responsibility for articulating public concern and forcing the disclosure of a fundamentally significant source of data.
Hank and Dagny ride in the engine on the first train run on the newly constructed John Galt Line.
Filming a classic novel with an intense following inevitably presents a formidable challenge. The mind’s eye of every reader has formed its own images of the key characters. Its readers will have read and re-read it again and again, and will remember the plot in intimate detail and will feel ill-used if any key scene, important event, or powerful line of dialogue should be omitted.
For an old-time right-wing Rand aficionado like myself, attending the film version of Atlas Shrugged in 2011 combined the sensation of attending church services on Christmas Eve with dropping by the kind of in-group convention one might attend in one’s capacity as a Science Fiction reader or war gamer, to take part in an event simultaneously providing the powerful and intense gratification of witnessing the cultural apotheosis of a book one deeply loves while also keeping one on the edge of one’s seat in suspense over the quality and accuracy of the re-creation.
Yesterday, we defied torrential rainstorms and drove over 40 miles into (what is referred to out here as) “occupied Virginia,” the New Jersey-like suburbs of the District, to a multiplex theater in Fairfax to see the film version of Atlas Shrugged on its second day.
The first issue, in the case of this kind of film, is inevitably casting. The two key roles in the first portion of Atlas Shrugged are Dagny Taggart and Henry Reardon, and in both cases I think the casting choices were superb.
Ayn Rand would have loved, one imagines, the choice of the blonde, angular, and intense Taylor Schilling for Dagny. Schilling is along the lines of a younger, American version of Kristin Scott-Thomas: beautiful in a decidedly challenging, aristocratic, and intelligent manner. I thought she portrayed Dagny Taggart’s Über-female combination of polished glamour and hoydenish tomboy indifference impeccably.
I have always had personal difficulties with picturing, or empathizing very successfully with, the great businessman Hank Reardon. Grant Bowler’s performance added the perfect note of ironic contempt in his interactions with the numerous villains surrounding him, which made the character work and come alive for me.
Michael Marsden’s James Taggart seemed perhaps a bit too young, and the choice of Iranian Navid Negahban for the nefarious Dr. Robert Stadler seemed peculiar, but in general the character actors playing the Rand villains did a bang up job. Michael Lerner’s Wesley Mouch and Armin Shimerman’s Dr. Potter were particularly fine.
The writer and production team all deserve a gold lighter and a life-time supply of dollar-sign cigarettes for plot accuracy and ideological fidelity. I was mentally comparing how faithful they were to the original here with Peter Jackson & company in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, who felt no diffidence in “improving” on Tolkien with a less upright and chivalrous Faramir, a crude and slobbering Denethor, an extra near-death experience for Aragorn, and so on.
Working on an extremely limited independent production budget (rumored to have been as little as $7 million, the kind of money it takes to make a television documentary), Paul Johansson did a remarkable job. Hostile mainstream media critics were quick to notice, and snark over, the absence of James Cameron-level production values and a big name cast; but, let’s face it, there is an awfully big difference in what you can do with $200 million in 1997 and what you do with $7 million in 2010. I’d say that Johansson and company turned in results that were downright miraculous considering the limitations of their budget.
Ayn Rand directly challenged the established consensus of values of modern society, and struck at the heart of the ruling political ideologies of her time and ours. Naturally, the media establishment has always treated her work with hostility. 2011 has not been very different from 1957 in that respect.
Roger Ebert has not read the book, and obviously wouldn’t like if if he did.
I am faced with this movie, the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone’s vault. I suspect only someone very familiar with Rand’s 1957 novel could understand the film at all, and I doubt they will be happy with it. For the rest of us, it involves a series of business meetings in luxurious retro leather-and-brass board rooms and offices, and restaurants and bedrooms that look borrowed from a hotel no doubt known as the Robber Baron Arms.
During these meetings, everybody drinks. More wine is poured and sipped in this film than at a convention of oenophiliacs. There are conversations in English after which I sometimes found myself asking, “What did they just say?” The dialogue seems to have been ripped throbbing with passion from the pages of Investors’ Business Daily. Much of the excitement centers on the tensile strength of steel.
Maureen Dowd trashed the film for not having A-list stars, without even bothering to pretend to have seen it.
Tea Party groups are helping to market part one of a low-budget film version of “Atlas Shrugged,” with no stars and none of the campy panache of the Gary Cooper-Patricia Neal movie of “The Fountainhead.” “Atlas Shrugged” aptly opened on Tax Day, getting a rave from Sean Hannity, who said it wouldn’t have been released “had Hollywood liberals gotten their way,” and a dismissive shrug from most critics, even conservatives.
Personally, I would take Taylor Schilling over Angelina Jolie for Dagny any day. Brad Pitt ought to see if he can’t talk to the producers about trying out for the role of Ragnar Danneskjöld in Part 3.
Meanwhile, on Rotten Tomatoes, polling is currently running 85% to 10% in favor, an extremely positive rating.
Anthony Kaufman, in the Wall Street Journal, spoke to Executive Producer Harmon Kaslow, who thinks that the opinion of MSM critics will not prevent the film from making its own way.
Despite the dreadful weather, the new-fangled stadium theater was nearly full, and the audience applauded vigorously at the film’s close.
We expected that the critics would have a fear of embracing this film,” says Kaslow. “We knew that there was a substantial likelihood that they would not view the film as to whether we got the message right, but would look at it comparing it to what Hollywood would have done. I don’t think our audience is persuaded at all by those reviews.”
“It’s somewhat analogous to the family-based film market,” he continues. “Most family based films are not subject to review, because they know that that audience is all about the message. And if the message is right, they’ll give you a hall pass if the production values weren’t as high. And if we get criticized for the dialogue, most of it has been taken right out of the book. So, in a sense, they’re criticizing the literary nature of the work.”
Reason has a celebratory opening day article and link collection.
A 7-year-old child allegedly shot a Nerf-style toy gun in his Hammonton, N.J., school Jan. 18. No one was hurt, but the pint-size softshooter now faces misdemeanor criminal charges.
Hammonton Police began an investigation into the “suspicious activity” at the Hammonton Early Childhood Education Center Jan. 18 after school officials alerted them to the incident.
The “gun” the child brought to school was a $5 toy gun, similar to a Nerf gun, that shoots soft ping pong type balls, according to the school’s superintendent.
Officials also say that there was no evidence of anyone being threatened. The child’s mother told school officials that she didn’t know her son brought the toy to school.
Dr. Dan Blachford, the Hammonton Board of Education superintendent, said the school has a zero tolerance policy.
“We are just very vigilant and we feel that if we draw a very strict line then we have much less worry about someone bringing in something dangerous,” said Blachford. ...
Police charged the 7-year-old with possessing an imitation firearm in or on an education institution – a misdemeanor and a minor juvenile offense in New Jersey.
A&E’s cancellation of the high-budget historical drama “The Kennedys,” in response to protests from members of the Kennedy family, was bound to fail to keep the series off the air. It has probably already been shown in Europe, but American audiences will have an opportunity soon to see it, too. ReelzChannel purchased US broadcast rights, and will begin airing the series on April 3rd.
Charles Lane was moved by a bad commuting experience to reflect on the insanity of governmental efforts to promote less efficient and impractical automotive technologies in the name of environmentalism.
Count me among the many thousands of Washington area residents who spent Wednesday night stuck in traffic as a snowstorm sowed chaos all around us. Being car-bound in sub-freezing weather for six hours can make a guy think. I counted my blessings. The situation could have been worse, I realized: My fellow commuters and I could have been trying to make it home in electric cars, like the ones President Obama is constantly promoting, most recently in his State of the Union address. ...
This subsidized market niche is just one well-publicized malfunction away from disaster. Perhaps a Volt battery will overheat and burst into flames, as some computer batteries have been known to do. Or maybe a Leaf driver will suffer frostbite while stuck in the next blizzard. Let’s just hope one of his neighbors pulls over to help him out.
Modern efforts by government to promote the use and adoption of inefficient and uneconomic technologies by cash subsidies in pursuit of newer, tidier means of doing things we can do perfectly well and much more cheaply already resemble the obsessive efforts of pre-modern European princes to create gold by funding alchemical experiments. Throwing money in the direction of superstition does not actually create new industries and technologies. It just wastes money.
Security forces at Gatwick Airport recently detected an assault rifle concealed in hand luggage and prevented it being smuggled aboard a departing aircraft.
The crouching, camouflaged figure is most certainly armed. But few would say he was dangerous.
Security officials disagreed however when he passed through a scanner at Gatwick Airport.
His three-inch, plastic toy gun was branded a ‘firearm’ and banned from a transatlantic flight.
model soldier
The plastic Royal Signaller was bought by tourist Julie Lloyd as a present to take home to her husband Ken, a recently retired policeman in Toronto, Canada.
Mrs Lloyd, 59, who regularly visits Britain to see her mother, said: ‘I took it to the airport still in its wrapping, but they discovered the little gun when it was scanned.
‘It is only about three inches long and there are no moving parts. There isn’t even a trigger.
‘But they wouldn’t let me take it with me. I had it in my hand luggage. I just didn’t think it would cause a problem. They said rules were rules. There was no flexibility or common sense.’
It started out, a few days ago, when an inattentive woman walking and texting in a mall near Reading, Pennsylvania obliviously proceeded to walk into the side of a decorative fountain and fell in. Her minor, but embarrassing, mishap, recorded on security cameras, was posted on YouTube and became the viral humor item of the week. At that point, it was simply mildly funny.
————————————————
But add the mainstream media, represented by George Stephanopolous and ABC News, and a local lawyer talking about investigating who is responsible, and we have a sad commentary on today’s America.
The inattentive woman eagerly embraces victim status, her lawyer pompously promises to investigate who exactly was responsible (as if that was not perfectly evident from the video itself), and finally George Stephanopolous, having listened to all this, proceeds to congratulate her for being a good sport. If she is a good sport, you certainly wouldn’t want to run into a whining idiot.
Recovering liberal was reminded of a scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four by the way the liberal mainstream media devotes a special kind of attention to Sarah Palin.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Sarah Palin, the Enemy of the Democratic Party and the Main Stream Media and especially leftist bloggers, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. A little red-haired woman journalist gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Palin was the renegade, one of the leading figures of the Republican Party, almost on a level with the near mythological figure “Reagan”, and had engaged in counter-liberal activities, had been condemned to irrelevancy, but had mysteriously escaped from liberal media attacks and gained a mass following. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Palin was not the principal figure. She was the primal enemy, the defiler of the Party’s plans including the Death Panels. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of her teaching. She was still active and hatching her conspiracies: perhaps under the protection of secret paymasters, perhaps even—so it was occasionally rumoured, the mysterious Koch brothers and the equally mysterious Fox Murdoch.
William Tucker responds to Harvard American History Professor Jill Lepore’s prolix rant in the New Yorker, attempting to trivialize the Constitution and bury Originalism beneath an avalanche of anecdotes.
During the First Congress’s debates over the Bill of Rights, one wise Congressman noted that someone better include a right of men to “wear hats, go to bed and get up when they please,” because someone was sure to come along and say if it wasn’t a “right” specified in the Constitution, it wasn’t allowed. The Congress recognized this problem and attempted to avoid it with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments:
IX. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people.
Conservatives have rightly seized upon the Ninth and Tenth Amendment as the basic concepts underlying the Constitution. It is a document in which the people grant rights to the government, not one in which the government grants rights to the people. Liberals never stop misinterpreting this formula. Bill Moyers once asked a Supreme Court Justice, “When are you going to grant us more rights?” as if we were all beggars huddled outside some royal palace petitioning for an extra slice of bread or another holiday. But liberals like it that way because a “Living Constitution” allows them to write their own preferences into stone as “constitutional rights” rather than achieving them through legislation. Abortion is a constitutional right, the death penalty is unconstitutional, and on and on. In some states the right of public employees to collect their pensions has been written into the constitution. Now how did that ever happen?
When conservatives argue that the Constitution is silent on such issues, they are accused of “Originalism” and forcing us to live in the past. How could a bunch of 18th century white men have possibly anticipated all the problems of the 21st century? But the Founding Fathers weren’t trying to solve our problems for us. They were simply giving us a set of ground rules that would allow us to solve problems ourselves. So far the system has worked magnificently. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Gallup poll results show that pinning the blame on conservatives failed.
Most Americans reject that theory, with 53% agreeing that commentators who allege conservative rhetoric was responsible were mostly attempting to use the tragedy to make conservatives look bad.
And efforts to drum up support for more control on the basis of the tragedy in Tuscon are really going nowhere.
Most Americans… do not believe tougher gun laws in Arizona would have prevented these shootings. One in five say stricter laws would have prevented the tragedy, while 72% disagree.
