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Media Infiltrations: Obama's Social Security Fine Print  The Wall Street Journal June 25, 2008 Commodity-Prices Scapegoats The Wall Street Journal June 3, 2008
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 7:00 pm EDTTuesday, July 1 |
| Unindicted co-counterconspirator-in-chief Donald Luskin will appear on CNBC's Kudlow & Company. Don will be talking about -- you guessed it -- politics, the economy, and the market. |
Chronicle of the Conspiracy
Join us as we discover, document, expose and challenge the bad people, the bad institutions and the bad ideas that stand in the way of wealth creation -- and show you how to fight back!
Thursday, June 29, 2006
SCAMMING THE SCAMMER "Derek Trotter" takes on another email swindler -- and swindles him right back. Hilarious stuff. Learn how you, too, can respond to clever leading questions like this, designed to separate you from your fortune and your good name:I have only but one questions after going through the sample you gave to me. Could the items on top of the chair be attached to it when doing the calving or could they be separated from the chair? Can they be calved saperately?Thanks to our "public editor" Irwin Chusid for the link.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:34 AM | link
THE JOURNAL'S EVIL BUT FORGOTTEN SPAWN The Wall Street Journal decks Ron Suskind for his new Bush-bashing book, branding him "the Michael Moore of authors":
Although Mr. Suskind's book has received attention for some apparent reportorial scoops--such as al Qaeda's aborted plan, in 2003, to attack the New York subway system with poison gas--they could easily be condensed to the length of a magazine article. The bulk of its 350 pages is given over to shoddy analysis and self-serving ventriloquism. If "The One Percent Doctrine" merits any comparison, it is certainly not to Bob Woodward's "you are there" books, though Mr. Suskind's subtitle--"Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11"--seems to suggest a Woodward approach. Rather, the book is the literary equivalent of a Michael Moore film--a didactic montage that often appears factual but edits out all the inconvenient bits.Actually, the Journal leaves out something itself. It fails to mention that Suskind was once a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.So when it comes to Iraq, all we read about is an administration determined to go to war even though, supposedly, Saddam is no threat at all. That the Clinton administration felt compelled to bomb Iraq for four days in 1998 to degrade its alleged WMD capability doesn't merit a mention. Nor does Mr. Suskind mention the fact that Saddam was in material breach of more than a dozen United Nations resolutions. He writes as if such history doesn't exist.
The same strategy of omission is evident in his treatment of the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib. Nine different courts-martial have now been held to punish the offenders there, and not one has found that the abuses had anything to do with a policy of "torture" designed to get information. Mr. Suskind doesn't dispute the evidence. He just ignores it.
And of course Mr. Suskind advances the standard left-wing criticisms of prewar Iraq intelligence--that the administration pressured analysts and deliberately distorted findings. This despite the fact two major bipartisan inquires--conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee and by the Robb-Silberman Commission--have found no evidence to support such a charge.
"The Committee," the Senate report reads, "did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities." The report was based on hundreds of interviews and has the names of Democratic senators like Carl Levin and Jay Rockefeller attached to it. Mr. Suskind is hardly required to agree with its conclusions or with those of the Robb-Silberman Commission. But he can't just pretend that such major investigations never took place.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:47 AM | link
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
AND TRADERS ARE SUPPOSED TO MAKE DECISIONS BASED ON "NEWS" LIKE THIS? Bloomberg spins a bear market. According to "Donny Baseball":Check out this TOP news story entitled, "Pessimism on U.S. Stocks at Highest Since Rally Began." Fair enough, but delve into the article and you learn this: as of the June 23rd survey results, bearishness stood at 35.6% (this you learn in the second paragraph), while bullishness stood at 35.6% (this you learn in the last paragraph). So what happened over the course of a week? Bearishness increased to 36.3%, a 1.9% increase (again, paragraph two). Bullishness increased to 37.4%, a 5.1% increase (you guessed it, last paragraph). Naturally, bearishness gets the headline.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 4:20 PM | link
THE ELECTION IS JUST FOUR MONTHS AWAY And whom, exactly, are conservatives and libertarians supposed to vote for?
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 1:53 PM | link
NOT EXACTLY A RUNAWAY HIT "An Inconvenient Truth" poops out at the box office after a strong opening (at least strong "for a documentary").
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:29 AM | link
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
BEING POLITICALLY CORRECT CAN BE VERY EXPENSIVE The PC police drove Larry Summers out of Harvard -- and it turns out they drove out a record-breaking $115 million donation at the same time.Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison has decided not to give Harvard University a planned gift of $115 million, a company spokesman said Tuesday.Thanks to reader Jill Olson for the link (and congratulations).Ellison canceled the gift because Lawrence H. Summers stepped down as Harvard's president this month after a stormy tenure at the university, Oracle spokesman Bob Wynne said.
"It was really Larry Summers' brainchild and once it looked like Larry Summers was leaving, Larry Ellison reconsidered," Wynne said...
Ellison's promise to Harvard last year created a sensation throughout the philanthropic community because it would have been the school's largest single contribution. The gift would have created a global health foundation named after Ellison.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:53 PM | link
GUESS WHO... ...is being interviewed?
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:14 PM | link
Monday, June 26, 2006
THE WHISTLE BLOWS FOR THEE The Left loves whistle-blowers, just so long as they blow their whistles on Republican politicians or greedy capitalists. But when the whistle gets blown on the Leftist media -- it's "fire the bastard." Dr. Peter Rost was hired to write for the liberal Huffington Post web site after filing a whistle-blower lawsuit against his employer, drug giant Pfizer. But Rost blew the whistle on Huffington, revealing the identity of a poster of prominent negative comments on his posts as an employee of Huffington Post. Was Rost feted for his courage? No -- he was fired."I thought that if anyone could accept being challenged, it would be The Huffington Post," he [Rost] said in an interview. "But the first time anyone even hints, the censors go into overdrive and this liberal bastion becomes something similar to the Kremlin."Thanks to Chris Masse for the link.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:41 AM | link
CORRECTED IN SEATTLE Reader David Lundry got a letter published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer calling Paul Krugman on his lie about Bush having never mentioned Social Security reform in the 2004 presidential campaign. Now if a publisher of Krugman's columns in syndication can do that, why not the New York Times?
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:35 AM | link
Sunday, June 25, 2006
ANTI LIFE II Malcolm Gladwell points out a big distortion in the New York Times business section:The New York Times led its business section today [June 21] with the headline: "Drug Prices Up Sharply." The subject of the piece was a study by AARP showing that prices of prescription drugs rose 3.9 percent in the first three months of this year, four times the rate of inflation. Outrageous!Don't hold your breath, Malcolm. You say "I have no idea" why the Times distorts things this way. But isn't it obvious? The miracles of modern medicine -- including its low cost -- is an affront to the life-hating elite that publishes the Times. They can't deny that the drugs exist. But they can do everything they can to make you feel less than delighted by that fact.But wait: it isn’t until you read a little closer that you realize that the price increase just refers to brand-name pharmaceutical prices. And what the article never mentions at all is that the AARP released a second study yesterday, showing that generic drug costs in the United States were unchanged in the first quarter and fell 0.1 percent over the past year...
The Times’ lead read: "Prices of the most widely used prescription drugs rose sharply in this year’s first quarter." Wrong, wrong, wrong. It should have read: "Prices of the most widely used prescription drugs fell last year."
Correction, anyone?
Thanks to our pseudonymous correspondent "Irrational Exuberance" for the link.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 2:46 PM | link
ANTI LIFE? George Reisman always cuts to the moral heart of things. He begins an excellent blog post today with two quotes from Friday's New York Times:
To combat climate change, we need to break our addiction to consuming oil, while developing countries need to break their addiction to selling it. We need a different lifestyle model... -- Thomas L. Friedman
The biggest problem with our bounty of coal is not what it does to our mountains or the atmosphere, but what it does to our minds. It preserves the illusion that we don't have to change our lives. Given the profound challenges we face with the end of cheap oil and the arrival of global warming, this is a dangerous fantasy. -- JEFF GOODELL
The above two quotations are from side by side op-ed pieces in The New York Times of June 23, 2006. They read like an orchestrated effort to make people feel guilty about a way of life in which man-made power eliminates most of the drudgery of life and makes possible light, heat, refrigeration, air conditioning, television, computers, and high speed travel, among many other things. This power, of course, is derived mainly from oil and coal. Much of it could be derived from atomic energy, but that is denounced even more than oil and coal. Man-made power, and the Industrial Revolution that spawned it, is what the pleasure-hating crew at The New York Times wants us to give up, along with years of our lives.
Reisman thinks that the Times, and the elite whom it represents, hates success and the American way of life. But let's cut to the moral heart of the moral heart. Success and the American way of life promote life itself -- as Reisman says, adding "years of our lives." So isn't to hate them to hate life itself?
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 2:45 PM | link