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Posted on 01.25.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 6:54 pm
I had trouble grasping basic economics in college when I had a professor who covered the subject slowly and tediously. Whose bright idea was it to try to explain it in a rapid-fire rap video pitting free-market capitalist Friedrich August von Hayek against John Maynard Keynes, whose economic theories gave us modern big government? Clever, yes, and mildly entertaining. I certainly enjoyed the video more than the 8:30 a.m. Econ 101 I skipped almost every day after the professor told the class that he wouldn’t be lecturing about anything we couldn’t get from the textbook and that we didn’t have to attend except on test days. But I’m no more enlightened after watching it than I was before. The video, produced by Econ Stories for George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, is at least four minutes too long to gain much traction online; the music is so loud that it distracts from the educational message; and the characters rap too fast for the intellectual message to be absorbed. That’s 7-1/2 minutes of my life I’ll never get back. The things I do for this blog! Filed under: Business and Government and History and Media and Rednecks and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.23.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 6:57 pm
I just saw a new posting for a job that I interviewed for two weeks ago. The ad boasts that the job offers “excellent salary and benefits.” I’ve always known that was a meaningless claim in theory, and now I know it in practice. This is the same company where the human resources chief was literally stunned when I quoted a salary that would have been a 10 percent pay cut for me. I know all too well how bad the media market is right now and am willing to take a pay cut for the right job. But that’s not enough for some companies. “Wow, that’s way outside the range we were looking at,” the HR woman said. In other words, “excellent salary and benefits” is in the eyes of the employer, not the job candidate with 20 years of experience. It’s all a big lie and false advertising at its worst. Filed under: Advertising and Business and Media Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.14.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 10:34 am
Politicians — and apparently their wives, too — just can’t help themselves. They don’t know how to be genuine. When even their food is fake, you know everything is phony. So it was with first lady Michelle Obama and her appearance on “Iron Chef of America,” a supposed “reality” series on the Food Network:
OK, to be fair, Michelle Obama isn’t to blame for this episode of phoniness. All vegetable decisions were made by the network to fit its schedule. But the revelation (via Michelle Malkin) doesn’t make the first lady look good. Filed under: Entertainment and Food and Human Interest and People Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.14.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 10:03 am
Before the devastating Haiti earthquake, a smaller rumbling within Earth’s core hit Northern California. Video from a newsroom in the area captured a dog sensing the quake before it was noticeable to her owner and the man’s colleagues. Here’s the clip: Filed under: News & Politics and Pets and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.14.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 9:50 am
CBS News posted to YouTube raw video footage of Tuesday’s 7.0 earthquake in Haiti as it happened. One minute there is calm, and the next, buildings collapse. Filed under: News & Politics and Video Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 01.12.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 12:35 pm
The battle for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Florida also has become a battle for the soul of the GOP. It pits grassroots conservatives who support underdog former state House Speaker Marco Rubio against establishment Republicans, including the campaign arm of Senate Republicans, who are backing “Republican in name only” Gov. Charlie Crist. One of those grassroots conservatives literally shared his two cents with the National Republican Senatorial Committee when it asked him for money. The picture of his protest is priceless:
Michelle Malkin regularly posts images of such “rejected solicitations.” Political activists surely have protested in similar fashion for decades, but their messages are reaching broader audiences thanks to the Internet. Instead of one secretary seeing the protest and tossing it in the trash, thousands of readers are hearing stories that the intended recipients don’t want told. Hopefully the bad press will awaken organizations to the reality that they had better represent the interests of their donors. Filed under: News & Politics and People and Photography and Technology Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.08.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 12:37 pm
Congress is so evil that nearly half of Americans would rather pick their representatives randomly from a phone book than let the current bunch of hooligans continue to run roughshod over the country. It’s a sad state of affairs when voters are so disenchanted with politicians that they are willing to leave governance to chance. I’m not that angry yet — but I may be soon. (Hat tip to Don Surber) Filed under: News & Politics Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 01.08.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 12:21 pm
A friendly warning to taxpayers from the Chamber of Commerce as America moves rapidly toward a government-run health-care system: [Cross-posted at Taxation With Representation] Filed under: Government and News & Politics and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.08.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 12:05 pm
You might be an enlightened redneck … if your idea of a good time is paddling a tiny kayak into close range of feeding humpback whales so you can snap pictures of them.
“I have only a split second to decide whether I should either have my camera in my hands or my paddle to take evasive action,” Duncan Murrell said of his creative whaling expeditions. See the full gallery of 10 photos at The Telegraph. Filed under: Human Interest and People and Photography and Wildlife Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.08.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 10:58 am
I’m not a fan of oats, National brand or otherwise, unless they are in cookies. But I managed to fulfill National Oats’ goal of becoming a “husky” kid just the same. That’s a good thing, right?
(Hat tip to Instapundit) Filed under: Advertising and Culture and Food Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.08.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 10:16 am
This is a first for me. As a journalist, it goes against my grain to regurgitate press releases. But the Republican National Committee issued one today that could have been — and arguably should have been — part of a good news report. The release compares the job growth during most of President Bush’s tenure with the ongoing string of job losses during President Obama’s first year in office and the first year of Democratic control of Washington. Here are the numbers:
I said the numbers could have been part of good news report because it’s obviously spinning data to the advantage of the GOP. The release doesn’t noticeably avoids mentioning less flattering jobs data during the early and later years of Bush’s presidency. But the numbers, and the words of condemnation for Bush from Democratic leaders, tell a compelling story of hypocrisy by Democrats. If life for Americans was as bad as they said under Bush, then it’s far worse now under Obama, and he should be held just as accountable. And yet Democratic leaders in Congress have uttered nary a word of criticism of Obama. Republicans surely would have just as quick to spin bad economic news if John McCain had been elected president in 2008 and the employment situation had spiraled downward under this leadership. Instead, they are in the fortunate political position of being able to expose the hypocrisy of Democrats whose knee-jerk reaction was to attack Bush even when times were good. Filed under: Government and News & Politics Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 01.07.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 2:03 pm
I appreciate the appeal of federal employment. I have applied for many government jobs, and interviewed for a few, during my two decades inside the Beltway, and I would still love to land one. Government work offers the kind of job security and loyalty to employees that have all but disappeared in the private sector. Government benefits, including pensions that are rare in the business world these days, tend to be better, too. But like Melissa Clouthier, I hate to see that the number of government workers surpassed the number of goods-producing workers in the private sector in the last decade — and the gap is widening.
The trend has paved the way for white-collar welfare. People who don’t want to lose their cushy jobs are more likely to vote in ways that secure their own futures rather than the future of the country as a whole. Filed under: Government and News & Politics Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 01.05.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 10:34 pm
Glenn Reynolds spotted a surprisingly unflattering picture of President Obama on the White House Flickr page over the weekend and posted it to Instapundit. His post sparked a heated debate about the president’s body language and, predictably for the left, which sees every criticism of Obama in black and white, whether Reynolds was racist for posting it. The blog fight was way too serious for me, so I held my tongue for once. This video, inspired by the picture that started it all, is more my speed: Filed under: Entertainment and Just For Laughs and People and Photography and Video Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 01.04.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 5:35 pm
It’s time for a bit of self-promotion: “Danny Glover is the new editor of the Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report.”
That’s the big announcement in today’s edition of the aforementioned daily newsletter, which tracks all things policy and politics on Twitter for the Beltway crowd. My friend and new media maven David All launched Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report last month, and I eagerly accepted his invitation to start the new year as its editor. Here’s a snippet from the blurb about my new gig:
While the publication is geared toward people inside the Beltway who don’t necessarily use Twitter themselves, it’s also a useful publication for anyone who wants to keep tabs on the policy and political news in the Twitterverse. If that includes you, please subscribe to the daily e-mail, follow @tweetwatch on Twitter, and spread the word about the publication. Filed under: Blogging and Government and Media and News & Politics and Technology Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.04.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 3:21 pm
A psychology professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., reached that conclusion in a study of 2,600 children, a fourth of whom had never been spanked. “The claims made for not spanking children fail to hold up. They are not consistent with the data,” said Marjorie Gunnoe, the study’s author. “I think of spanking as a dangerous tool, but there are times when there is a job big enough for a dangerous tool. You just don’t use it for all your jobs.” Her statement reflects the enlightened redneck view of physical discipline. I was particularly intrigued by the conclusion that spanking children older than 6 and into adolescence may lead to more behavioral problems. That makes sense to me. The reality is that if parents will physically discipline their toddlers when warranted, they typically won’t need to discipline their children as often as they get older, when other forms of punishment such as withholding privileges like television or videogame time are more effective. Filed under: Culture and News & Politics and Parenting and People Comments: 2 Comments |
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