Nancy Pelosi on spending: “Tax cuts are spending. "Tax expenditures," they are called. Subsidies for Big Oil, subsidies to send jobs overseas, breaks to send jobs overseas, breaks for corporate jets, they are called tax expenditures. Spending money on tax breaks. And that's the spending that we must curtail as well.”{1}
It appears as if the only spending federal Democrats are willing to cut in the 2.9 trillion dollar budget requested are those expenditures most likely to be restored. If it came down to cutting the millions of taxpayer's dollars currently being used to study why lesbians are obese and the money devoted vaccines for children, Democrats would be most likely to cut vaccines for children. Those cuts would, of course, cause the most harm, and they would be the expenditures most likely to be restored after the politicians, and the media, haunted and taunted the Republicans into acquiescing. For this reason, and others, we probably shouldn't expect any actual cuts to be made in the federal budget's waste, redundancies, and frivolous spending from this generation's set of politicians.
In 2003, Britney Spears said something dumb about then President George W. Bush:
“Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens.” {2}
Ms. Spears got massive amounts of flak from every in-the-know commentator on TV for this dumb comment. She was naïvely trusting, they said, and representative of the naïve people in this country. She was also called dumb, and representative of the dumb in America. Although I found Bill Maher’s show on HBO unwatchable by that point, I’m sure he devoted an entire episode to it. It was a foolish comment that elicited as much laughter from Republicans as it did from everyone else. Republicans agreed with the premise of the jokes that suggested that it’s almost un-American to blindly trust what any of our representative leaders say or do. Even though Republicans found it funny, they also considered it a little embarrassing, and most of us attempted to distance ourselves from this mindset in every way possible.
Democrats, to my knowledge, did not make any of the same attempts to distance themselves from Chris Rock’s comments.
When Chris Rock was asked for a comment on President Barack Obama, last month, he said:
“The President of the United States is, you know, our boss. But he is also, you know, the president and the first lady are kinda like the Mom and Dad of the country,” Rock said. “And when your Dad says something, you listen. And when you don’t, it will usually bite you in the ass later on. So, I’m here to support the president.” {3}
I’m sure that Maher, Jon Stewart, and every late-night talk show host imitated Ms. Spears annoying habit of using “you know” to separate clauses in 2003, but in this particular quote she only “you know’ed” once, and Chris Rock “you know’ed” twice to separate clauses. Rock also confused tenses in the second sentence of his idolatry. If Ms. Spears had committed this faux pas that would've been added atop the pie. When Rock did it, we couldn't even hear crickets chirping about it. The two celebrities offered similarly blind, loyalty statements of their respective presidents, but only one said that the president and his wife are “kinda like our Mom and Dad”, and yet I’m quite sure that none of those listed above said a word about Rock’s naïve, blind trust of his favored, elected leader. Rock, you see, is considered an in-the-know commentator, and Britney Spears is considered a blonde bimbo, ditz by in-the-know commentators. Rock is a cool kid, and Britney is a joke. As a result of their relative standings in the “in-the-know”, cool-kid community, Republicans were the only ones consistently laughing at both “naïvely trusting, and representative of the naïve, and dumb, and representative of the dumb” comments.
Washington State Representative Ed Orcutt (Republican from Kalama) said that riding a bike is bad for the environment. As a result of this, he said that bike riders should have to pay a tax to help maintain the state's roads.
“My point,” Orcutt tried to clarify, “was that by not driving a car, a cyclist was not necessarily having a zero-carbon footprint.” Orcutt claims that he was attempting to defend car drivers that are forced to pay for bicycle paths. He wrote that bike riders have an “increased heart rate and respiration," and that the act of riding a bike “results in greater emissions of carbon dioxide from the rider. Since CO2 is deemed to be a greenhouse gas and a pollutant, bicyclists are actually polluting when they ride.” {4}
Orcutt’s point was presumably to illustrate the dumb taxes passed on automobiles by proposing dumb taxes on bike riders, but with Obamacare and other legislative behemoths on the horizon, local legislators probably shouldn’t give federal legislators any ideas on how to raise enough revenue to pay for their legislative disasters, because they will pursue the dumb if they have to.
On Alec Baldwin's radio show, NBC News host Brian Williams said that he believes his political opinions have been “cleansed” from his reporting.{5}
Fawning, celebrity magazines can't help but write dumb things when they review a high profile celebrity’s work. These magazines trip all over themselves to fawn over that person in a manner that makes objective readers cringe. The fawning, celebrity periodical, called Rolling Stone, recently reviewed Thom Yorke’s new project Atoms for Peace. Atoms for Peace's album Amok is yet another electronica piece of laptop schlock that Yorke/Radiohead fans have come to expect from Yorke lately. While I’ve only listened to samples of the Atoms for Peace album, it appears to be as relatively boring and largely forgettable as the last few Radiohead albums...and Yorke's solo effort. Amok appears to be so forgettable that if Yorke decides to do another Atoms for Peace album, you can bet that that album’s reviewer will say that it’s much better than Amok. The reviewer from Rolling Stone decided to give this relatively boring, and largely forgettable, project four stars to provide further evidence of the magazine's irrelevance in this regard. While reading this review, one has to imagine that Yorke, and his people, got final approval on the review. One also has to imagine that any reviewer that dares to review a Thom Yorke album gets an explicit, or implied, threat: “Give him a negative review and you’ll likely not see Mr. Yorke providing your periodical an interview any time soon.”
That having been said, the reason Simon Vozick-Levinson’s review qualifies for this dumb list is that it's just loaded with sycophantic sentences. Thom Yorke is a forty-four year old rock star. I write the word “rock star” here, because we’ve all grown accustomed to the fact that rock stars have to have long hair to fulfill the image of being a rock star. If Yorke, for instance, decided to go with a more clean-cut, Lance Armstrong style haircut, he would probably get laughed out of the business, and we probably wouldn’t take his music serious any more. If Yorke, or any avant garde rock star, were to go with a short hair look—as Yorke has—he had better go with a non-bathing, unshaven, “street bum that looks like he just rolled-out-of-bed” look, if he wants us to take him seriously as an artiste. For this album, Yorke opted for what Levinson terms a “long-hair-don't-care ponytail” hairdo to increase his rock star image. As I said though, Yorke is forty-four now, and the “long-hair-don't-care ponytail” hairdo now makes him look like an old man in the midst of a middle-aged crisis, clinging to whatever vestige of youth is available to him. An objective, non-fawning reviewer might even say that a ponytail on a forty-four year old is equivalent to a comb over or a poor dye job, but to the piglets at Rolling Stone it's a hip, young, and "still relevant" statement. Let's just hope HOPE! that Yorke gave Simon some kind of thumbs up for his effort here.
Another line that causes objective readers to think that Yorke, and his publicist, got final approval on the album’s review that Mr. Levinson wrote is:
“(Yorke) hates being predictable more than anything except maybe climate change.”{6}
This line recalls, for older readers, the lines that used to be used to introduce corporate sponsorships of cartoons. "If there's one thing Superman hates more than crime it's tooth decay, and to fight tooth decay Superman uses Crest."
One has to imagine that even an apparent sycophant like Mr. Levinson loathed writing such a line, but that he was compelled by Yorke's people, or the Rolling Stone editor, in a memo that stated something along the lines of: “Mr. Yorke wants it known how socially conscious he is. He doesn’t want to simply, or only, be considered a rock star. He wants your readers to perceive him as a high-minded and socially conscious intellectual, so if you could find a way to work one of his causes into your review that would be much appreciated.”
These are but a few, relatively inconsequential statements that you will not hear challenged in most places, other than in special pockets of the media, because most of the people listed here are sacred cows that slaughter all the right sacred cows. The people listed above can get away with saying the dumbest things imaginable and very few in the mainstream media will even raise an eyebrow publicly. Those of us that have been waiting for the other shoe to drop on these people, and for the media to turn around and do some objective, noble reporting to enlighten the people, will probably never be served a satisfactory meal in our lifetimes.
{1} http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/03/08/nancy_pelosi_tax_cuts_are_s...
{2}http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/03/cnna.spears/
{3}http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/06/chris-rock-obama-is-our-boss-...
{4}http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/04/ed-orcutt-bike-riders-pollute-e...
{5}http://www.mediaite.com/tv/brian-williams-tells-alec-baldwin-i-have-prof...
{6}http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/amok-20130218#ixzz2MsKcbxvN
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