“WELL, NO WONDER!” DEPT.

22 May 2013

Writing for The Washington Post on Monday (Austerity and Keynes Can Coexist), Post editorial writer Charles Lane asserted the following:

“Nobelists may be better qualified to describe the issues than the average voter, but they are no better qualified to decide them.”

____________________

Here in America, we live by the belief that any amateur’s opinion (especially one’s own) is equal in all qualities to that of any expert’s knowledge-based views. But did Mr. Lane truly mean to assert this belief? Or was it an byproduct of flattering his readers? One does not usually expect to read such a limited point of view from the staff of one of America’s leading daily newspapers.
____________________  

Most Americans agree that our educational system is challenged to keep up with others throughout the world. Our educational challenges are supported by this belief that my opinion beats your expert knowledge. Any nation that does not value learning and education—and facts—is not likely to do to well at teaching its children how to excel in those regards. When even the bulk of our school teachers read no challenging books in their off time, is it any wonder American education is suffering?
____________________  

If a paid-professional writer such as Charles Lane asserts that his readers opinions are valid equally to his or anyone else’s, why would any of us want to be reading newspapers in the first place? Especially The Washington Post.

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

Hurricanes, Massacres, and Other Conservative-Converting Disasters

18 January 2013

Time Magazine’s Recent cover feature about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie once again reminds us of the key limitation of the American Conservative’s political views. Until the American Conservative experiences a need or disaster first- or second-hand, he doesn’t believe that it exists.

In the Christie case, the Governor’s embrace of Democratic President Obama and the Federal Government’s FEMA services made a big-spending Liberal out of this candid, big-hearted guy.

 ____________________ 

From the Perspective of the American political Center, we are of course familiar with this tendency: if all it takes to turn an American Liberal into a Conservative is a single case of being wrongfully sued, all it takes to turn an American Conservative the opposite direction is one first-rate disaster. 

For superlative example, why do so many elderly, otherwise-Conservative Americans support Medicare and Social Security? Because they know first-hand how essential this social “safety net” is to keeping them on solid ground. 

____________________  

Our Favorite Big-Hearted Cynic, columnist Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, takes to task both sides of the current assault-rifle-control controversy—the National Rifle Association and the President—for their use of kids in the discussion. 

The National Rifle Association [NRA] has come out big, as we all know by now, with its questionable-taste ad, holding President Obama responsible for the armed-guard protection that his two daughters get at their private school. But Mr. Milbank also accuses the President himself of using children as props, in his address seeking to garner public support for his various proposals for bringing down body counts when it comes to mass murder in America. To this point, Mr. Milbank writes:

“There’s an argument to be made that the horrific nature of the carnage justifies reminding the public that children are vulnerable, but partisans on each side will only dig in deeper if they perceive that the other side is using kids as props.”†

____________________

If It Takes a Disaster to turn an ideologically constrained Conservative into a Moderate American— reasonable-enough to realize that the Federal Government plays an essential role in modern American life—then it makes sense for Barack Obama to show what an innocent child—at risk of assault-rifle attack at school or movie theater or mall—looks like, while as President, he speaks to the American people in this disturbing debate.

____________________  

Does Either Side, Left or Right, have any substantive answers to the epidemic of mass murder in America? Well, maybe yes, and maybe no. Vice-President Joe Biden, at the behest of the President, recently sounded out a lot of different sides about this issue. The President, surrounded by his innocent-kid props, put forth his findings from the Vice-President’s efforts. The NRA fired back. While some of us debate the regulation of gun-ownership and the use of kids as political props, every one of us awaits to learn the news of the next mass murder.

Regards,  

(($; -)}  

Gozo! 

P.S.: To put a nice wrap around this, Governor Christie has now spoken out against the NRA ad, as CNN reports here: TRENDING: Chris Christie Rails Against NRA, Calls Ad ‘Reprehensible’

__________ 

*See the NRA’s ad here: When His Kids Are Protected by Armed...

† Read Dana Milbank’s Washington Post essay here: The Gun Debate Is Nothing to Kid About

@GozoTweets 

American “Entitlement” or “Self-Made” in America:

We Americans—Right, Left, or Center—harbor a sense of entitlement: we feel entitled to a share of the sum total of what “we, the people” have built together over the past 216 years. But the Right’s sense of entitlement is unusual:

The Right would have us believe that what makes America great is something that just lies here. As if our condition of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were something that we just find here, lying on the ground, free for us to pick up and use, to enrich ourselves independent of anything that anyone else contributes around us.

Of course, this is foolishness: the idea that any of us manage to create our great wealth entirely by the sweat of our own brow is absurd.

America’s greatness derives from what we have cobbled together here, and from how we maintain it. Our greatness also derives from the extent that we continue making  access to the resources of America available to all, so that any among us may realize the American Dream.

The following reaction to the Republican candidates’ speeches at last week’s political convention was posted to a “Comments” page of  The Washington Post. Absent our ability to contact the author for permission, it is posted in its entirety.
____________________

Another Warmly Human Person and Self-Made Businessman:

by Bill Weston (8/31/2012 5:22 PM CDT)

My mother and father loved me too. Unfortunately, they couldn’t raise me with the absence of insecurity Romney enjoyed because I was a Depression baby.

At first my father, a “catcher” on a steel rolling mill, kept us going by often working 16 hours straight, but he was injured when a runaway strip of hot steel cooked a stripe on his back (there was no Republican-despised OSHA in the early Thirties).

Then the mill was shut down, and he worked at odd jobs; my mother took in laundry. A furniture merchant brought the sheriff to repossess our furniture, as if we were conservative gun-lovers, but all that happened was that my mother cried.

We didn’t lose our house because Roosevelt’s WPA gave my father steady work at $48 a month. Then World War II opened the steel mill with jobs.

But catching up with debt is slow, and conservative-despised Social Security couldn’t pay for me as it did for Paul Ryan until he was 18 years old.

So when I was twelve, I began working every other evening 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. at a drug store as a dish washer, furnace stoker, prescription drug deliverer, soda jerk, sweeper and mopper. I shed no Boehner tears about that, and until I retired at 63, I was never unemployed.

At sixteen, I had to leave high school to work at a bank, where I rose from check sorter to bookkeeper to the city’s youngest teller. After three years, I quit to make $60 a month more as a laborer in the steel mill. I hated every workday, so I was not sorry the Korean War drew me into the Air Force for four years. I learned a lot, especially on Guam’s bomber base, where I served as a Staff Sergeant and Special Assistant to a Group Commander. 

Then I entered the University of Illinois with $110 a month from the GI Bill, $36 a month for Air Force Reserve service and pay for working 20 hours a week.

In 2 ½ years, I was graduated as the top student in my class. With my journalism degree I got a position as a copywriter for large accounts at a large agency. After five years, I was writing both print ads and high-budget television commercials, which I also produced.

After 18 years, I had won 500 international awards and held the unusual position of Sr. VP, Account Director & Creative Director for several large accounts. Even so, I continued writing and producing television commercials, corporate films and multi-media presentations.

To do more of that I started my own communications company, which I headed as President and Chief Creative Officer. Then I was lured to one of America’s top five ad agencies by the position of VP/Associate Creative Director for Marlboro cigarettes. And until my retirement, I held that position for several other large accounts such as McDonald’s. 

What I didn’t do was consider my rise from the working class, the way Romney and Ryan do as they strive to deceive the middle class, a top qualification to be president or vice president. 

Should they? Should you?

____________________ 

 The above essay is taken in full from the “comments” pages of Conservative Washington Post columnist, Kathleen Parker’s essay, “Romney and Ryan, Running Against Themselves,” following last week’s Republican convention in Florida.

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

What Good Are Other People’s Opinions, Really?

It Seems Most of Us Forget that all of the columnists and commentators in all of the papers and on all of the networks make their living by putting out their opinions according to schedule.

Keith Olberman and Bill O’Reilly and Glen Beck and George F. Will and Maureen Dowd all make their living by how well they express their opinions. Not from the factual value of the opinions themselves.

Of Course, We Should All Know This, without saying. But judging by the verbal badinage flying back and forth over the Net, sadly, we don’t. It’s all pretty much “news” to us.

Our Responsibility as Readers is to filter those opinions through the prism of what we know about each commentator. When we listen to Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post, we must look for any break in the Right-leaning perspective, and if to Eugene Robinson in the same paper, we should look for the same kind of break from the Left.

That Is, Mr. Krauthammer’s Praise of President Obama means more than Mr. Robinson’s. But Mr. Krauthammer’s condemnations may be taken as just “more of the same”: noisy opinions from a guy just writing to deadline.

Likewise, When Mr. Robinson takes the Left to task, it teaches more than when he lambastes the Right.

The Washington Post

Of Course, We Can Continue getting our “news” from these commentators—from the editorial pages and from MSNBC® and from FoxNEWS® and the like. We just need to put it to constructive use.

FoxNews®

MSNBC®

The One Objective We All Share—everybody who comes to comment pages such as those online, and everybody who writes letters to the editor anywhere—is the desire to make the world a better place. Or at least to see it become one.

Not Much of This Happens when we just keep cheering those we agree with and hurling insults at those we don’t—on “Letters to the Editor” pages. Or on “Comment” forums all across the WorldWideWeb.

Regards,
(($;-)}
Gozo!