httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF2rEm_9KO4

Four minutes and eighteen seconds of nonsensical vocables from Sarah Palin.  On her relevant experience in foreign affairs: “Our next door neighbors are foreign countries are in the state I’m executive of [sic] . . .  Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of America.  Where do they go?”

“[W]e have to realize that the US no longer has a truly adversarial press. It has a commercial press that is entirely driven by fear of losing readers and/or viewers. Remember that the MSM allowed Palin – then a total unknown – to go an entire campaign without an open press conference. She knows they’re patsies. She’s much less afraid of them than they are of her. And rightly so.”  Andrew Sullivan

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Frye in “The Renaissance of Books” (1973) comparing the commercial interests of the “free” press with the dictatorial control of Orwell’s telescreen in 1984:

In the democracies, of course, radio and television reflect the economic anxieties of selling and making profits through consumer goods rather than the political anxieties of censorship and thought control, but the cultural consequences have many parallels.  Newspapers also become one-way streets in proportion to their preoccupation with headlines and deadlines: however, the competition of television is now forcing them to becomes something more like journals of opinion.  (CW 11, 154)

Roger Ailes, president of Fox News in January: “I’m not in politics.  I’m in ratings.  We’re winning.”

Brink Lindsey reviews the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur C. Brooks’s new book with a title too long and too silly to reproduce here.  In the paragraph below, Lindsey takes exception to Brooks’s notion of “American exceptionalism” being defined by “free markets,” as compared to the social democratic example of Europe, and, presumably, the outright communism we have here in Canada:

Plenty of European countries have markets about as free as those in the land of the free. Look at the ratings provided by the annual Economic Freedom of the World report, co-published by the Cato Institute. On four broad categories of economic freedom — legal structure and security of property rights; access to sound money; freedom to trade internationally; and regulation — the United States was slightly “freer” than Sweden, the United Kingdom, Austria, Finland, and Switzerland. Meanwhile, Ireland, the Netherlands and, by a wide margin, Denmark were found to have freer markets. Note that the two highest scorers have two of the biggest welfare states in the world — which just goes to show that blurring issues of regulation and redistribution, as Brooks tries to do, leads to intellectual confusion.

Here’s Frye in one of the late notebooks:

At present we have capitalist and socialist societies, but the old notion of socialism as the fulfilment of capitalism, so sacrosanct in my youth, I don’t believe in now.  I think that socialism as it got established was only the antithesis of capitalism, and the fulfilment is ahead of us.  The core of the fulfilment is what we call democracy, which I see, at least at present, as a tension between politico-economic and cultural rhythms.  (CW 6, 553)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYZre8kEsuw

M.C. Karl Rove “rapping” in 2007

I’ve known about this video since it emerged from the 2007 White House Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner.  But I never had the stomach to watch it.

However, David Browich’s review of Rove’s “memoir,” Courage and Consequence: My Life Yadda Yadda Yadda in the New York Review of Books, seems to signal that the time has come.  The full Rasputinian horror of the period needs to be witnessed and its implications contemplated.  For example, is that the coddled and perpetually-grinning-dipstick David Gregory of NBC News also performing as part of (vomiting  in my mouth a little) Karl Rove’s “posse”?  Maybe we all should just start referring to the inside-the-beltway press corps and the demagogues enabled by them as Romanovs:  Karl Romanov, Cokie Romanov, George F. Romanov, Glenn Romanov, Rush Romanov, Sean Romanov, Candy Romanov, Wolf Romanov, Bill O’Romanov, and so on.  It certainly befits the historical cycle they’re currently riding into the ground with their incomes, investments and retirement savings intact.  They’re done.  They’re of no use except to make a bad situation even worse in a more obviously diminishing  return.

Frye in “The View From Here”:

The intellectual seems to be aware only of the higher level of culture, just as the demagogue is aware only of the lower one.  Real political guidance, of course, is constantly aware of both.  (Writings on Education, 562)

So how is Stephen Harper’s self-declared “Canadian-led plan” to have governments slash deficits rather than spend to stimulate the economy going so far?  Recall that the plan is to have the do-no-wrong private sector take up the slack with the necessary investments.

From CNBC.com, “Dow Repeats Great Depression Pattern“:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is repeating a pattern that appeared just before markets fell during the Great Depression, Daryl Guppy, CEO at Guppytraders.com, told CNBC Monday.“Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it…there was a head and shoulders pattern that developed before the Depression in 1929, then with the recovery in 1930 we had another head and shoulders pattern that preceded a fall in the market, and in the current Dow situation we see an exact repeat of that environment,” Guppy said.

The Dow retreated 457.33 points, or 4.5 percent last week, to close at 9,686 Friday. Guppy said a Dow fall below 9,800 confirmed the head and shoulders pattern.