wall street journal

The Wall Street Journal bows to the inevitable…

…and brings back the naked women:

Reversing the highly publicized and controversial change to its pages, The Wall Street Journal announced Friday that the daily newspaper will resume featuring nude photographs after a failed yearlong experiment with nudity-free issues. “While we remain committed to updating the paper for a contemporary audience, we’ve come to realize that tasteful nudity has always been part of what makes The Wall Street Journal so beloved by our readers,” said editor-in-chief Gerard Baker, adding that beginning with the following week’s Monday edition, the Journal’s signature pictorials of topless and fully naked women will return alongside its award-winning reporting, business-focused news coverage, and weekly columns from Peggy Noonan and Holman W. Jenkins Jr.

Continue reading The Wall Street Journal bows to the inevitable…

#rsrh QotD, I Had Some Excellent BBQ once in… Middlesboro? Edition.

(H/T: @jstrevino) The Wall Street Journal is having considerable fun eviscerating some goofball named Chuck Thompson, who has apparently written a book whose thesis, writing style, and indeed favorite anecdotes can be deduced from the title (“Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Case for Southern Secession”), but I’d like to note this paragraph, just for the purposes of character assassination.

You begin to sense that something is seriously awry when the author, evidently unable to find enough cranks and simpletons to fill out a whole book on the South, keeps looking beyond the Confederacy’s borders for material. First he zings House Speaker John Boehner for some offense. Isn’t Rep. Boehner from Ohio? Yes, from Cincinnati, but that’s just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, so he counts as a Southerner. We hear about a public-school teacher who urges his students to believe the Bible infallible. This takes place in Cleveland, but because the teacher had once attended a seminary in Kentucky, it’s an instance of Southern “biblical literalism” infecting the entire country. Mr. Thompson derides U.S. Rep. John Shimkus for citing Genesis as a reason not to worry about global warming. Isn’t Mr. Shimkus from Illinois? Yes, but he is from “an area of southern Illinois settled almost entirely by farmers from Kentucky.” By the book’s halfway point, it’s clear that Mr. Thompson’s problem with Southerners isn’t that they are insular, angry or prone to illusions. It’s that, with exceptions, their political views are insufficiently left-wing.

Or else Thompson’s problem may simply be that the South includes Kentucky, which is apparently the state where the girl/boy/other* that broke Thompson’s heart originally hails from… what? I am being polite. Why, I haven’t once suggested that the situation that soured Thompson on Kentucky forever involved an aborted financial transaction…

#rsrh QotD, And From The Wall Street Journal, No Less edition.

Stephen Moore, reacting perhaps just a bit hostilely to Jay Carney’s… look, I’ll get into it after the quote:

Economic bimboism is rampant in Washington.

And Carney’s one of the bimbos, apparently. What seems to have set this off was Carney’s rather snotty response to Moore’s colleague Laura Meckler; Meckler had asked the very reasonable question about how subsidizing people to not work actually creates jobs. The problem is that it’s only a reasonable question if you’re not personally and politically invested in Keynesian economic theory… which Carney proceeded to demonstrate by rudely suggesting that Meckler’s question called her right to work at the WSJ in question. He then duckspoke the standard Keynesian line that subsidizing the unemployed gives them money to spread through the system, thus indirectly creating jobs. That this rosy model assumes that government acts as a perfect fiscal superconductor* is lost on Carney, but not on Stephen Moore** – who proceeds to go off on Carney, then macroeconomics in general.

Continue reading #rsrh QotD, And From The Wall Street Journal, No Less edition.

Quote (and Thought) of the Day, WSJ edition.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page despises the current leadership of the Democratic party as only a group of people with an iconic link to free-market capitalism can be, and said despising shines through every word of this piece sneering at the ‘accomplishments’ of the 111th Congress. Scare quotes deliberate: the WSJ opines (and I agree) that the Democrats are guessing and gambling that they can get their hideously unpopular agenda functional for long enough that people will simply start treating it as part of the landscape. I think that that is wishful thinking on the Democrats’ part, and so does the WSJ:

The difference between the work of the 111th Congress and that of either the Great Society or New Deal is that the latter were bipartisan and in the main popular. This Congress’s handiwork is profoundly unpopular and should become more so as its effects become manifest. In 2010, Americans saw liberalism in the raw and rejected it. The challenge for Republicans is to repair the damage before it becomes permanent.

So get your game faces on. 2011 is going to make 2009 look like the first Woodstock.

Moe Lane (crosspost) Continue reading Quote (and Thought) of the Day, WSJ edition.

#rsrh QotD, Not Quite Far Enough edition.

Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal, on why the NAACP is so concerned with the Tea Party (a group which is even now working to elect African-Americans to Congress – and in heavily-white districts, too*):

It’s hard to understand how an organization that says it’s devoted to “end[ing] racial disparities” finds the time to rail against tea-party populism until you grasp that the NAACP is, first and foremost, a Democratic Party organ. The NAACP is pretending that the tea party threatens the interests of blacks because the tea party in fact threatens the interests of the Democratic left. The civil rights leadership wants to discredit the movement for political reasons. And unfortunately, this partisan agenda takes priority over the many issues of consequence that confront blacks today.

[It was suggested, pre-publication, that the paragraph that was here before was just the slightest bit inflammatory – and to a point where the sheer force from the screams of outrage would probably perturb Earth’s orbit. I’ll thus just all of you work out for yourselves my opinion of the current motivations of the National Association for the Advancement of the Democratic Party. Hmm. “NAADP.” Kind of catchy.]

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh QotD, Not Quite Far Enough edition.

Sarah Palin’s Wall Street Journal Health Care Op-Ed.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

Former governor and VP candidate Sarah Palin wrote a pretty good op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on the health care situation – one where she points out, repeatedly, that we’re being asked to blindly fund a government program that will affect every aspect of our life and will not save us money in either the short or long term. As Ace of Spades notes, this is not going to cover new ground for the people already intimately familiar with the debate – but for those who aren’t, it will give a good idea of conservative objections to Obamacare, not to mention providing the alternatives that the Democrats are pretending that the Republicans aren’t providing. All in all, useful and timely.

And, as an added, special bonus, it includes the written equivalent of a smack on the nose:

Now look at one way Mr. Obama wants to eliminate inefficiency and waste: He’s asked Congress to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an unelected, largely unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. In an interview with the New York Times in April, the president suggested that such a group, working outside of “normal political channels,” should guide decisions regarding that “huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . . .”

Given such statements, is it any wonder that many of the sick and elderly are concerned that the Democrats’ proposals will ultimately lead to rationing of their health care by—dare I say it—death panels? Establishment voices dismissed that phrase, but it rang true for many Americans. Working through “normal political channels,” they made themselves heard, and as a result Congress will likely reject a wrong-headed proposal to authorize end-of-life counseling in this cost-cutting context. But the fact remains that the Democrats’ proposals would still empower unelected bureaucrats to make decisions affecting life or death health-care matters. Such government overreaching is what we’ve come to expect from this administration.

Continue reading Sarah Palin’s Wall Street Journal Health Care Op-Ed.

Thomas Frank worried about the GOP drinking his milkshake*.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) There’s a part of me that enjoys articles like this one by Thomas Frank even more than I would by somebody who didn’t hate either conservatives, or the Republican Party. You see, despite Frank’s arrogant sneering at conservatives, willful refusal to see the Democrats’ own role in our current financial mess, petulant dismissal of the burgeoning right-populist movement, hasty downplaying of a set of a bunch of social issues that his side is losing anyway, and brassy mendacity over the deep ties between corporate America (particularly Wall Street) and the Democratic Party – he still has to admit that we’re starkly dangerous as a political party.

And when we have the Democrats for lunch – which we will; Thomas Frank is quite right about that – it’s not going to be because they started acting like Clintonites (read: ‘centrists’) again. It’s going to be because the Democratic party is committed to doing its level best to make the GOP look like centrists.

Thanks!

Moe Lane

*I know that it’s not dirty. But it sounds dirty.

Crossposted to RedState.

Guy loses job, gets worse one, unhappy about it.

In which I perform an intervention.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Outside the Beltway readers. I actually didn’t even consider the tip situation…

Via @Yousefzadeh comes this tragic, tragic tale:

From Ordering Steak and Lobster, to Serving It

Carlos Araya used to order lobster, filet mignon and $200 bottles of red wine at the Palm Restaurant in midtown Manhattan.

Now, he seats customers at its Tribeca branch.

Mr. Araya, 38 years old, lost his job in 2007 as a crude oil trader on the New York Mercantile Exchange. After visiting dozens of headhunters with no luck, he applied in August 2008 to be a host at the Palm to support his wife, two young daughters and mortgage payments. His salary has plunged from $200,000 to $25,000.

Read the whole thing, so that you can properly appreciate the advice which I am about to give this fellow:

Sell the condo for pay-off-the-mortgage price (if that’s not your definition of ‘break-even’ – and I’m betting that it’s not – change your definition). If you can’t, toss the bank the keys and write it off. Yes, that will destroy your credit rating. It’ll also save you the two grand a month that you’re hemorrhaging right now. Actually, probably more like three grand.
Find an apartment in Queens. One that you can afford. Welcome back to the urban middle class; think of it as a life lesson on what disaster planning really entails.
Take the subway to work. Although I may be unfairly assuming that you don’t.
Go get a college degree. Associates will do for now.
Get a job that doesn’t let you network with potential employers but does pay more than $25K/year. What, you thought nobody would notice that? I was making more than that temping in NYC.

And, oh yes:

Start voting your freaking class interest. Because, based on context clues, I am morally certain that you don’t vote Republican.

Moe Lane

PS: Sympathy? Sympathy? Something like one-seventh of the population of the planet don’t have clean water to drink (and I don’t mean something that can be handled by this). This guy’s underemployed and trying to save his condo: I’m sure that I’d be trying to do the same thing in his circumstances, but until his kids are coming down with beriberi there’s an abrupt upper limit to how long it’ll take before I start pointing out things to him.

Crossposted to RedState.