Clipping blog

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Clearing the Browser Tabs – The Mundane Wednesday Edition Posted: 09 Mar 2011 03:10 AM PST There isn’t much to be said today. It’s Wednesday, there’s nothing particularly exciting going on in my world (except perhaps the release of a new episode of The Delivery later today), and the weather is supposed to turn foul later. ON the good side, I have a three-day weekend to which to look forward and the projects on which I’ve been working are getting much closer to completion. Hooray for that! And now, links. Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth. As I predicted more than two years ago, President Obama has not only not closed Guantanamo Bay, but he’s going back to pretty much the way things worked when George Bush was President. How did I know that? Sometimes there’s only one good answer to a problem. I honestly don’t know of a potential GOP candidate for 2012 that gets the kind of pop from audiences that Herman Cain does on a consistent basis. He’s not getting the media or establishment love right now, but if he continues to get the enthusiasm from the grassroots he’s building right now, he will. In his State of the Union Address, President Obama promised to move quickly on three important free trade deals. Since then, he’s done little to nothing to move them to Congress, even though Colombia is practically begging us to finish the deal we started negotiating four years ago. Par for the course with this President, I’m afraid. In Harry Reid’s world, Cowboy Poetry subsidies are a necessary expense. On a related note, the deficit we racked up from all Reid’s wonderful spending in just the month of February exceeded the debt from the entire year of 2007 under the guy whom Barack Obama blames for all his problems. Remember the Guillermo del Toro movie adaptation of At the Mountans of Madness that so excited me yesterday? Well, never mind. Fantasy magazine will relaunch this week with a new look, new stories (some of which will be free), and a new electronic subscription model that looks pretty appealing. Here’s an interesting story about e-book pricing and the ethics of piracy. I’m convinced that book publishers are doing with e-book prices what movie distributors did with video tapes back when rentals were the new thing: keep them prohibitively high to force people to make the purchases you want them to make then drop them when you’ve run that well mostly dry. The problem is, that no longer works, especially with a wholly-digital product. Eventually, they’ll learn.

New Media Scores Again, Exposes the Rot Inside NPR Posted: 08 Mar 2011 01:46 PM PST Today’s lesson in How New Media Has Changed Everything comes to us via the fine, non-partisan, journalistically-pure folks over at NPR. James O’Keefe’s ambush video rangers at Project Veritas sent a couple folks, under the guise of front men for an Islamist group, to meet with NPR’s head fundraiser Ron Schiller. Their goal was to find out how much integrity a $5 million donation could purchase. As it turned out, Mr. Schiller was more than happy to give away most of his integrity and professionalism for free. Here’s what we learned, thanks to his informed opinion of NPR’s operation. NPR doesn’t need public funding at all. They’d do better off, long-term, without any taxpayer money at all. Juan Williams, the man hired by NPR to (in part) express his opinions, lost all credibility when he expressed his opinions. The Tea Parties are packed full of angry, racist, gun-toting savages from “middle America”. If you don’t believe in global warming, you’re nuts. Save for a few precious educated elites, America is a stupid nation full of stupid and xenophobic people. NPR has since declared itself “appalled” by Schiller’s comments and wants us to know that he left the network a week ago of his own volition. That’s all well and good, but I can’t help but wonder what sort of workplace environment NPR has created that would give Mr. Schiller the confidence to speak so boldly to potential donors. NPR’s CEO, Vivian Schiller (no relation) recently went behind the mic and declared her network so unbiased that it gets all sorts of criticism for being conservative, but if that’s true, then why did her head of fundraising say all that crazy stuff? What gave him the idea that it would be perfectly fine to spout boilerplate progressive venom at two people with (for all he knew) a humongous check to give him? Obviously he felt he was on safe ground in front of two Islamists. Where else in NPR did he feel safe to say all the things he said? Schiller did not strike me as the sort of man who is very familiar with professional discretion. I’d be willing to bet that his co-workers and CEO have heard these opinions from him a time or three. It makes me wonder who else at NPR has such casually bigoted beliefs about well over half the country. It also makes me wonder how anyone who is even moderately conservative, of Christian, or a gun owner, not not a graduate of an elite university, could ever feel comfortable while surrounded by such people. Ron Schiller’s comments fairly scream “hostile work environment” to me. Perhaps a few more hidden cameras would tell us just how hostile a place it is to anyone who has not drunk the left-wing hippie juice. CORRECTION: Ron Schiller has not left NPR. He told management, a week before he sweet-talked his new Islamic friends, that he would be leaving in May, but is still an employee of the network. NPR has suspended him, pending an investigation into his statement.

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