The Daily Telegraph reports ABC News's Barbara Walters expressing "regret" after emails surfaced showing she tried to get the daughter of Syria's United Nations ambassador an internship at CNN and admission to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. From the Telegraph:
Walters's interview in December – the first with an American television network – made headlines around the world as Mr Assad denied he was responsible for the crackdown which had already resulted in thousands of deaths in Syria. The emails show that, after the interview, Miss Jaafari and Walters stayed in close contact.
When Miss Jaafari returned to New York she reached out again to Walters, whom she referred to as her "adopted mother". In return, Walters called her "dear girl" and sometimes signed off "Hugs, Barbara".
Lovely. One wonders how much more of this favor-trading and fawning by interview-seeking journalists goes on that doesn't get disclosed.
Another government-backed solar energy company has gone bankrupt, the Boston Globe reports. As of August 2010, Lowell, Massachusetts-based Konarka "employed about 100 people and had raised more than $170 million from investors as well as another $20 million in grants from government agencies such as the Department of Energy and the Pentagon."
Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein latest weekly column defends the Constitution against a University of Texas law professor, Sanford Levinson, who called it "imbecilic." Writes Professor Epstein:
At the federal level, I have stressed over and over again that long-term tax policy should abandon progressive taxation in favor of a simpler and more stable flat tax as the sole source of revenue; the estate tax be damned. Yet, right now, every important tax rate is prey to political manipulation. Similarly, the weak protections afforded to private property and private contract allow all levels of government to use their powers of taxation and regulation to undermine private businesses for no long-term public advantage.
Mayor Bloomberg's proposal to limit the size of sugary-drink cups (okay, pails? Buckets? Delivery devices?) to 16 ounces is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out here at Reason.com.
From Michiko Kakutani's review in today's New York Times of David Maraniss's new book, Barack Obama—The Story:
what is new is largely a matter of emphasis and detail. For instance, while Mr. Obama candidly acknowledged indulging in pot and booze and "maybe a little blow" in his memoir, this biography underscores just what an enthusiastic marijuana smoker he was as a teenager. According to Mr. Maraniss he belonged to a group of boys at the elite Punahou School in Honolulu who called themselves the Choom Gang ("Choom is a verb," the author writes, "meaning 'to smoke marijuana' ") and thanked his pot dealer in his high school yearbook.
Dinesh D'Souza's take on President Obama (which was covered here back in September 2010) is being turned into a Hollywood movie to be released this summer produced by Gerald R. Molen, who produced Jurassic Park and Schindler's List.
A longer YouTube featuring Mr. D'Souza talking at the CPAC conference about the movie and about Mr. Obama is here, and also embedded below. It has 1.6 million views on YouTube, which is a lot:
Even the exercise column in Sunday's New York Times — which runs under the heading "sweat" — can't seem to avoid politics. From the latest such column:
Befitting the neighborhood's liberal climate, some of those present expressed skepticism about the Memorial Day Murph's military undertone.
Samir Chopra, 45, a professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College, was drinking a Brooklyn Summer Ale on the sidewalk after finishing a near-complete version of the Murph.
"On my blog, I've described the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika as a bunch of mass-murdering war criminals," he said. "I came here not to support the military, but to be with all my friends." Those friends, he added, included a number of Iraq war veterans.
At the risk of lowering the unemployment rate, and thereby increasing President Obama's re-election chances, FutureOfCapitalism, LLC is hiring. We are looking for an editor to spearhead the NewsTransparency.com site. The ideal candidate is entrepreneurial, self-directed, passionate about press accountability and journalistic quality, web savvy, fearless, has some investigative skills and patience for details, and is excited about the opportunity to build NewsTransparency.com into a high-profile and comprehensive database. To apply please send a resume and a letter explaining why you'd be a good fit for the job to [email protected].
In the course of an editorial about the attorney general, Eric Holder, the Wall Street Journal writes, "The two most powerful men in America are black." I mean no disrespect whatsoever to either the attorney general or the Wall Street Journal, but if by the 'two most powerful men in America" the editorialists are referring to President Obama and Mr. Holder, I think they are somewhat overstating Mr. Holder's power. Chief Justice Roberts, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Geithner, Vice President Biden, Defense Secretary Panetta, the governors of Texas and California, Rush Limbaugh, Speaker Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Reid are all probably more powerful than Mr. Holder, and none of them are black. I don't recall anyone calling Michael Mukasey the second most powerful man in America when he was attorney general.
The New York Times today follows an earlier article by Politico about Howard Milstein-controlled Emigrant Savings Bank of New York's effort to get Congress to lower its capital requirements. The Times article describes Emigrant as "a small and financially sound institution." That supports Emigrant's argument that it not be subject to higher capital requirements, but whether Emigrant's size qualifies as small or large is a judgment call. The bank's own Web site reports that "As of December 31, 2009, Emigrant Bank and its affiliated Regional Banks* have approximately $15.4 billion in assets and $1.2 billion in total equity capital." The Times may count $15.4 billion in assets as small, but it strikes me as large, or at least medium-sized.
Maybe I just have a conspiratorial mindset, but I couldn't read about the federal Department of Transportation shutting down 26 interstate bus companies — announced at a press conference with both Senator Schumer and the transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, a Republican, in attendance — without remembering that high-speed rail is a big priority of the Obama administration and of congressional Democrats. The success of the bus companies at offering cheap intercity transportation without federal subsidies other than whatever is spent on maintaining the roads helps to undercut the case for spending tens of billions of tax dollars on trains to serve the same routes. So the feds have an interest in portraying the bus companies an unsafe. Don't get me wrong — there may well be some genuine safety issues. But the fact that the federal government owns and wants to expand a competing transportation system (Amtrak) doesn't exactly boost the credibility of the regulatory actions.
Timothy Carney has an amazing dispatch at the Washington Examiner on an exchange between a drug company lobbyist and then-Obama-aide Jim Messina, as recorded in an email after Obama criticized the drug companies in a speech:
"Billy and I were at WH today," Hall wrote, referring to PhRMA President Billy Tauzin. "We raised this issue with Jim Messina. Jim said that he went into the Oval [Office] and talked to the President .... 'Why was this in the sppech [sic]?' Obama said 'I was wondering the same.' Attributed to young speechwriter."
In most administrations the presidents read the speeches and even edit them before delivering them. What a difference between "The buck stops here" and "blame the junior staff."
Mayor Bloomberg, having failed to win state approval of a soda tax and failed to win approval from the Obama administration of a ban on the use of food stamps for soda, now wants to ban the sale in New York of sugary beverages in containers of larger than 16 ounces, the New York Times reports. The mayor would still allow someone to buy two or more 12-oz. containers at a time.
This is a classic "who decides" case. Who should decide how big the soda cup is? The seller? The buyer? Michael Bloomberg thinks the mayor should decide; he knows better than the seller or the buyer what is best. It's a kind of elitist egotism that grates on even some New Yorkers, like me, who don't drink cola.
A lot of the press coverage of the battle between Ed Crane and the Koch brothers for control of the Cato Institute portrays Mr. Crane as a principled libertarian trying to prevent Cato from being swept into Republican politics. But Washingtonian is out with a long article that portrays the power struggle as originating in Mr. Crane's negative comments about Charles Koch, offered to a New Yorker reporter on condition that his name not be used:
In 2010, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, began reporting an article on the Koch brothers. Ed Crane agreed to sit for an interview.
Mayer arrived at Crane's office with an audio recorder, which she turned on at the start of the interview. Although most of their conversation was on the record, Crane asked that his name not be associated with certain comments he made, Mayer says. This method of attribution is known as "on background."
One of the leaders honored by President Obama yesterday with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, is Dolores Huerta, an honorary chair of Democratic Socialists of America.
The Democratic Socialists Web site calls for "massive redistribution of income" and sharp cuts to defense spending.
The DSA Web site's "where we stand" section explains, "We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo....The capitalist market economy not only suppresses global living standards, but also means chronic underfunding of socially necessary public goods, from research and development to preventive health care and job training."
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