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NYT: All the News Unfit for Informed Readers

July 12, 2010 By Trey Garrison 6 Comments

In one story we see everything wrong with the sheltered, uninformed readership of the New York Times.

Behold.

And in one paragraph within that one story, we see what lies at the heart of everything wrong with the New York Times.

But one day it occurred to me: how would they know? All of these buzzy social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter sort of crept up on us. The government never mailed fliers to every household explaining what it’s all about.

Emphasis mine. As if I really needed to add that.

I mean, just, wow.

Filed Under FAIL, I Kan Rede, Meddlesome Scolds, Media

Econ 101 Epic Fail

June 23, 2010 By Trey Garrison 8 Comments

The New York Times has an illustrious history of employing some of the worst columnists ever to put fingers to keyboard. Frank Rich, Tom Friedman, ad nauseum. With every new column they reach new heights of cluelessness. These columnists serve to protect the readership of the New York Times from the real world, and provide talking points for people with little intelligence and less imagination.

Bob Herbert is only remarkable because he’s so forgettable. Everything he writes is mundane, shallow, paint-by-numbers liberalism. He’s the left wing, print version of the Fox & Friends morning hosts.

But today, with a straight face, Herbert serves up a most classic example of how the left is wholly ignorant of economics.

The collapse of the economy in the Great Recession gave us the starkest, most painful evidence imaginable of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans.

Full column here.

Bob, it’s not laissez-faire economics if government works in alliance with business. The two things are mutually exclusive.

Filed Under Capitalist Superheroes, FAIL, Media

Awesome: A Card That John Wiley Price Would Love

June 11, 2010 By Trey Garrison 3 Comments

As my friend Tim Rogers once said: not every black person is brilliant.

Behold.

Blast from the past

Filed Under Boob Tube, Culture Jamming, FAIL

Resident Obama Boxes Libertarian Strawmen

June 7, 2010 By Trey Garrison 6 Comments

But to be fair, a good deal of the other party’s opposition to our agenda has also been rooted in their sincere and fundamental belief about the role of government.  It’s a belief that government has little or no role to play in helping this nation meet our collective challenges.  It’s an agenda that basically offers two answers to every problem we face:  more tax breaks for the wealthy and fewer rules for corporations.

The last administration called this recycled idea “the Ownership Society.”  But what it essentially means is that everyone is on their own.  No matter how hard you work, if your paycheck isn’t enough to pay for college or health care or childcare, well, you’re on your own.  If misfortune causes you to lose your job or your home, you’re on your own.  And if you’re a Wall Street bank or an insurance company or an oil company, you pretty much get to play by your own rules, regardless of the consequences for everybody else.

June 2 address

Powerful stuff. (emphasis mine)

Total horse hockey, but great for the kabuki theater crowd.

The last administration and the GOP from 2000-2006 grew government spending and government regulation by more than any administration since Nixon, it turns out.

Figure_1

And while we watch BP and Obama scramble to get one up on each other over the continued oil spill, let’s just remember that a $75 million maximum liability that BP faces for the oil spill is a product of regulation, not the free market.

(h/t Hit n Run)

Filed Under FAIL, I Kan Rede, Politics

Concluded: The Stimulus is an Epic Fail

May 27, 2010 By Trey Garrison 20 Comments

It’s been proven time and again that FDR’s New Deal actually worsened the Great Depression. Keynesian economics just don’t work, not matter what trollish hacks like Paul Krugman preach.

Now a study from Harvard Business School shocks its very authors, who are surprised to find that increased government spending results in increased unemployment.

Recent eesearch at Harvard Business School began with the premise that as a state’s congressional delegation grew in stature and power in Washington, D.C., local businesses would benefit from the increased federal spending sure to come their way.

It turned out quite the opposite. In fact, professors Lauren Cohen, Joshua Coval, and Christopher Malloy discovered to their surprise that companies experienced lower sales and retrenched by cutting payroll, R&D, and other expenses. Indeed, in the years that followed a congressman’s ascendancy to the chairmanship of a powerful committee, the average firm in his state cut back capital expenditures by roughly 15 percent, according to their working paper, “Do Powerful Politicians Cause Corporate Downsizing?”

“It was an enormous surprise, at least to us, to learn that the average firm in the chairman’s state did not benefit at all from the unanticipated increase in spending,” Coval reports.

So, you wonder why unemployment is so high and this recession has lasted twice as long as normal recessions?

Here’s why.

Did I do that?

Did I do that?

Filed Under Capitalist Superheroes, FAIL, Galt's Gulch, Mickey Maoist, National Socialization of Industry

Um, No, Not Really, Mr. Mayor

May 26, 2010 By Trey Garrison 4 Comments

Look, let me say first I love downtown Dallas as much as anyone else. I live in the DFW because I love the DFW*.

And then today I read this little platitude from Mayor Leppert.

You all have understood, that so goes downtown, so goes Dallas, and so goes North Texas.

Um, not really. In fact, hard statistics for the past 30 years show otherwise. Despite decades of valiant efforts, downtown Dallas consistently has the worst rate of occupancy for both commercial and residential real estate.

This has been true consistently despite both booms and busts everywhere else in the DFW area. During several periods of massive population, retail, spending and business growth all over DFW, downtown Dallas has still just plodded along well behind the rest of the pack.

Downtown Dallas may be important to our hearts, but what happens to downtown Dallas has almost zero impact on the rest of the Dallas-Fort Worth economy. Downtown is not the core of Dallas-Fort Worth — it’s just one more submarket in a huge metropolitan area that has no center.

* (offer void in Garland)

Filed Under FAIL, Media, The DFW

Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You, Dallas

March 17, 2010 By Trey Garrison 4 Comments

Last year I told you that the People’s Hotel — the planned half a billion dollar city-owned convention center hotel — was a financial quagmire in the making, supported by people who don’t know the first thing about business and don’t care how much money they waste since it’s not their money.

The convention center hotel is a project for which there is no demand, and it’s the taxpayers of Dallas who will be on the hook when it tanks. Meanwhile, Convention & Visitors Bureau Philip Jones will be cashing his checks and skipping on out of town like Robert Preston.

Guess what? The house of cards is beginning to tumble.

In January the U.S. Treasurer, Rosie Rios, traveled to Dallas to join local officials at the construction site of a new convention hotel being built with money raised through Build America Bonds. The purpose was to celebrate the success of the so-called BABs, which are federally-subsidized bonds created by the 2009 stimulus package.

Of course, what no one at the Dallas “celebration” pointed out is that the $388 million in BABs that the city floated with federal aid were necessary because no private developer would cough up the money for the risky project. In fact, local officials wanted to build the controversial hotel because years of frenetic, publicly financed convention center construction by cities had saddled the country with much more meeting space than it needs, and now meeting planners are telling cities they must to ante up money for additional amenities, like new subsidized hotels, or risk losing business.

This is what passes for success in Washington these days, where apparently any level and manner of publicly subsidized debt for any kind of dubious project is considered a home run.

Full piece here.

Filed Under City Owned Boondoggle, FAIL, Novelty Cake Toppers

The Man-Made Climate Change Hoax, By the Numbers

March 2, 2010 By Trey Garrison 42 Comments

global_warming_hoax_button-p145048047397663977t5sj_400Courtesy Ed Morrissey, here’s a roundup of how the “settled science” behind anthropogenic climate change has been torn down, exposing that it’s nothing more than hoax designed to steer power and funding towards the very people sounding the alarms.

He writes:

In the past four months, media outlets like the Times of London, the Telegraph, the Australian Herald-Sun, and even the Left-leaning paper The Guardian have broken important stories (along with bloggers) exposing the fraud, mismanagement, and unscientific behavior of the core group of AGW advocates:

Filed Under FAIL, Global Warming Scam, Green Weenies

The Fix Is In: Toyota To Get Kangaroo Court

February 23, 2010 By Trey Garrison 6 Comments

So whatever legitimate problems that Toyota models have, they’re about to get the union thug treatment, courtesy the majority owner of General Motors, also known as the Federal Government.

The U.S. House has issued its conclusions in advance of hearings – saying here’s the verdict, now let’s have the trial.

WASHINGTON — Leading Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee said Monday that Toyota relied on a flawed study in dismissing the notion that computer issues could be at fault for sticking accelerator pedals, and then made misleading statements about the repairs.

The comments, from Henry A. Waxman, chairman of the committee, and Bart Stupak, a subcommittee chairman, were made in an 11-page letter to James E. Lentz III, the president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. The letter was released Monday on the eve of the committee’s hearing on the Toyota recalls, one of three scheduled.

Kowtowing to union lobbyists, their own vested interest in GM outperforming Toyota, and the fact that Toyota has spent only $24.9 million lobbying versus GM’s $50 million over the last five years — it’s not hard to see why key members of the House committee would embark on a smear campaign. And I’m sorry, but that’s the only way to describe what you’re going to get when you issue your conclusions before you have hearings.

Here’s the best part — even if Toyota presents evidence that vindicates itself, and that shows they were targeted for a public tarring despite the fact that other manufacturers have as many as 10 times as many safety complaints — they won’t be able to do jack or squat about it.

The damage to their reputation among buyers will be done.

Why no recourse? Sovereign immunity.

Seriously — I know American history inside and out, and we’re approaching a level of federal corruption and crony capitalism that eclipses anything short of Tammany Hall. No, this is worse. Boss Tweed was a piker compared to this lot.

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. -P.J. O’Rourke

Filed Under FAIL, Mickey Maoist, National Socialization of Industry, Novelty Cake Toppers, Politics

The Party of No Has Too Many Saying Yes, Please

February 22, 2010 By Trey Garrison 7 Comments

zodiac-pig-picIf Dallas people want a streetcar, we should pay for it. We shouldn’t stick our nose in the troth trough and ask the rest of America to support our pet projects. Thanks, Pete. You have a little slop on your collar, there.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, led by Texas Representative Pete Sessions, released a video montage of clips edited to show a series of news anchors and commentators asking “Where are the jobs?”

Sessions, who called the stimulus “a massive spending binge by the Democrat-controlled Congress,” wrote LaHood three times last September and October. Sessions promoted four projects, including a Dallas streetcar line he said “will create jobs in the region and improve the quality of life for North Texans.” The project got $23 million.

Sessions, in an e-mail, called the stimulus an “abject failure” and said he’d vote against it again if he could.

The lawmaker said his objections don’t keep him “from asking federal agencies for their full consideration of critical infrastructure and competitive grant projects for North Texas when asked to do so by my constituents.” Sessions has written agencies supporting six other grants, spokeswoman Emily Davis said.

Filed Under FAIL, Mickey Maoist, Politics
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