To be sung to the tune of “Raspberry Beret”. Felix Salmon, Reuter’s official finance blogger, is unkind to “Conspiracy Jack” Welch:
…When someone of Welch’s stature accuses a sitting president of deliberately manipulating economic statistics for political purposes, just a month before an election, you have to live in a pretty astonishing bubble of flattery and denial not to know exactly what’s going to come next. The thing about Twitter is that it has a way of piercing such bubbles…
A humble man, in such a situation, might have backtracked, realizing that he had gone way too far. But Jack Welch is not a humble man, and so instead he decided to bluster his way through. Hence the bizarre references to Soviet Russia and Communist China, and the way in which he describes his critics as “mobs of administration sympathizers”. (In fact, of course, only in highly autocratic societies could a business leader expect respectful agreement at all times, no matter how stupid his statements.) Hence the brazen — and clearly false — declaration that the reference to “these Chicago guys” in his tweet was in no way about the Obama administration or the White House. And hence his decision to depart the reality-based outlets of Fortune and Reuters, and move instead to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, where he can offer up his opinions to the right-wing echo chamber rather than to the public at large. Welch’s choice to appear on the WSJ editorial page — underscored by a declaration that he’ll get better “traction” that way — is a demonstration that Welch is embarking on a new career as a mascot of the right, rather than trying to stretch out his fading post-retirement career as would-be management guru. Welch has chosen the WSJ editorial page much in the way that he hand-picked the Office of Thrift Supervision to supervise GE Capital back in the day: it’s the place where he’ll get maximum adulation and minimum pushback…
Both Wonkette‘s Jesse Taylor and Salon‘s Alex Pareene take foul-mouthed delight in mocking the Daily Caller’s lament about “Hollywood elite liberal MPAA censorship” of the upcoming Breitbart hagiography. Wonkette:
Sorry, kids, but Pixar’s newest release, Hating Breitbart, will be rated R, so you will have to either sneak in with fake IDs or wait for it to appear on Encore in, oh, three months. The Daily Caller smells a conspiracy!…
Marcus told TheDC that a significant anticipated audience for his film, religious and social conservatives, would be turned off by an R-rated movie that would otherwise reinforce their core beliefs.
“They just won’t organize groups to go see it,” he said.
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If you would go see the exact same movie with the exact same number of “fucks” in it if the movie were PG-13, a word of advice to you: get the fuck over your fucking self, you fucking fucks.
Pareene:
… It is good to know that while Breitbart may be gone, his impossible to parse, stream-of-consciousness style of rhetoric lives on. If you’re going to give this film an R, it should be because of reverse-racism from black members of Congress, and not because almost every other sentence Andrew Breitbart said was “fuck you.”
Anyway the film originally had nine swears, and now it has four, but the MPAA thinks that is still too many… One “fuck” is an automatic PG-13. Any additional “fucks” are an automatic R. This is why “Waiting for Guffman” and “Once” are both oddly rated R. (Not even “The Pat Tillman Story” — a documentary about a much more interesting and worthy figure than Andrew Breitbart — won its ratings appeal.)
Finally, remember that proposed Randroid-wetdream “liberty city” in Honduras? Barely a week later, the NYTimes reported that the proud Galtian independents were already turning on each other:
Plan for Charter City to Fight Honduras Poverty Loses Its Initiator
MEXICO CITY — Paul Romer is a respected economist with an unconventional plan to lift people out of poverty. And in Honduras, he thought he had found a government eager to put his ideas into practice. But now, Mr. Romer, an expert on economic growth, is out of his own project, tripped up by the sort of opaque decision making that his plan was supposed to change…The tipping point came with the announcement a few weeks ago that the Honduran agency set up to oversee the project had signed a memorandum of understanding with its first investor group. The news came as surprise to Mr. Romer. He believed that a temporary transparency commission he had formed with a group of well-known experts should have been consulted. He withdrew from the project….
The investor group is led by Michael Strong, an activist who has worked in the past with libertarians like John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods. He promises that his investors include Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Central American investors, but when pressed for details, named only one Guatemalan businessman….
With so few details made public, even the normally pro-government newspapers in Honduras have begun to question whether there is any real money behind the project.
Opponents on the left have been filing challenges with the Honduran Supreme Court against the charter cities plan. The news of the investment deal brought more…
If it weren’t for the poor Hondurans who’ll probably be dispossessed even if this Randroid turkey never lurches past the bribes’n’blueprints stage, it would be thoroughly enjoyable to watch a bunch of Social Darwinists demonstrate the flaws in their philosophy on such a real-world scale.
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Apart from this evening’s debate, what’s on the agenda today?