Citizen Kane

Tell Little Emily (Malcolm) that Baucus ain’t willin’.

Stephanie Schriok on deck?
 

On April 2, the AP reported that “the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved an arms [trade] Treaty [ATT] intended to keep weapons out of the hands of ‘terrorists, insurgents, organized crime figures, and human rights violators.’”

Arriving in good time to make it onto my personal “Best Parodies of the 20th Century” list, came Ian Frazier’s incomparable 1997 Atlantic Monthly essay, “Lamentations of the Father”.

The self-proclaimed “American Military’s Most-Trusted News Source”, The Duffle Blog, has scooped the MSM with its chilling revelation that the military has been drawing up plans for nation-wide gun confiscation.

We are reminded by The New York Times that it was 70 years ago this month that Soviet troops finished wiping up the last remaining pocket of Nazi resistance at Stalingrad (now Volgograd). The Germans had lost over a half-million men killed, wounded or captured, along with staggering quantities of materiel.

If there is any sentient person out there who retains even the slightest illusions about the greed, cronyism, and self-interest of all too many of our politicians, he/she needs only to read this article in the McClatchy newspapers about the deplorable state of the nationwide roads and bridges infrastructure to be disabused of any such Panglossian view.

“…we’re expecting over the next 22 months to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to annihilate the Republican Party.

“And let me just tell you, I do believe that is their goal — to just shove us into the dustbin of history.”

An ironic testimony to the bi-partisan moral perfidy of the current Congress is that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had to name Montana’s Democratic Senator (and chairman of the Senate finance committee) Max Baucus (NRA RATING: A+) to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. Talk about the fox in the henhouse! Baucus has been on Big Pharma’s payroll since early in his Senate career, having taken in almost $4,000,000 in contributions from it and other healthcare interests before declaring a moratorium (out of shame?) in 2009.

Dan Kennedy, in his blog, Media Nation, chortlingly cited this truthy maxim from an old book on newspaper design:

Research indicates that readers classify information in the paper into two areas: information that is interesting and/or useful; and information that is not interesting and/or useful.

To this old TV newsmonger, the problem with cable news is way too little of the former and far too much of the latter.
 

Not sure whether to file this under Consumerism Run Amok or Capitalism Triumphant, but I just stumbled across the stat that on a single day -- Cyber Monday -- Amazon sold 26.5 million items; a rate of 306 items per second. 2012 was their best year ever; walking away.