Month: June 2009

Farrah Fawcett, RIP

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I was never a big fan. I liked Cheryl Ladd way better.

I paid no attention to Farrah whatsoever since the ’70s, other than noticing tabloid headlines in the grocery store, from time to time, that indicated she was having a rough go of things.

So I was surprised to find myself a little sad when I heard she died.

It took me way back to the ’70s, and made me think of all kinds of long-gone people, places and things. I don’t miss those times. But they are part of me.

I liked this video that I saw on Ann Althouse.

There is another one on there with the BeeGees singing. That is the correct decade, of course, the ’70s. But the Archies doing “Sugar Sugar” goes better, since there is something sweet about many of these images of the young Farrah that goes better with the ’60s pop song, that the ’70s disco song does not capture. I like especially where she is dancing at :31 and at :49. She looks young, normal and happy, except, of course, also being incredibly good looking. I get a kick out of seeing her with Danny Partridge, too. I grew up on the Partridge Family and the Brady Bunch, like a lot of people did.

She was only on Charlie’s Angels for one year, and made one iconic poster, and she became this massively famous person. Everyone in the world knew her name and her face … and her hair. She really was the American face of the ’70s. A very Warholesque 15 minutes.

Fame and youth and beauty and all worldly goods pass away.

Rest in peace. We will remember you as young and beautiful forever.

Sauce for the People is Sauce for the Politicians

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One of the greatest dangers of socialism is the creation of a privileged class of wealthy political insiders who live under different rules than the rest of the citizenry. 

Ed Morrisey suggests that Obama had a “Dukakis Moment” when he refused to say that he would leave his own family dependent on politically-managed health care. [h/t Instapundit]

I don’t think we should leave him any choice. 

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ABC “Only” 2/3 Biased So Far

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I haven’t watched the ABC Primetime special yet but I did read ABC’s Web summary and I find it less biased than I feared. 

Because of the way human memory and cognition work, the most important parts of any text news story are the headline, the first paragraph and the last paragraph. Indeed one of the cannons of print journalism is that you can summarize a story with just these three parts. 

So let’s try that with this story:

President Obama Defends Right to Choose Best Care 
 
President Obama struggled to explain today whether his health care reform proposals would force normal Americans to make sacrifices that wealthier, more powerful people — like the president himself — wouldn’t face.
 
“If the American people get behind this, this is going to happen,” the president said.

The headline is positive towards Obama. It says that Obama “defends the right to choose” which is obviously a positive statement. A more neutral headline would be something like, “Obama explained his ideas for health care reform.”

The first paragraph is negative in saying that Obama “struggled” and pointing out that he is a rich and powerful person who will never have to rely on the politically-managed health-care that he advocates for other people. 

The last paragraph is positive towards Obama because it gives him the final word and does so in a quote. 

So the summarized story that people will take away reads, “Obama defended people’s right to choose the best care, but he struggled to explain how that would work. The plan is going to happen.”

I was surprised by the opening paragraph. Given my dim view of ABC’s built-in bias, I can only assume that Obama really did struggle. Even so, ABC spun the story to Obama’s favor.

Obama, Liberty, and Iran

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Joshua Muravchik, writing in Commentary:

The most surprising thing about the first half-year of Barack Obama’s presidency, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been its indifference to the issues of human rights and democracy. No administration has ever made these its primary, much less its exclusive, goals overseas. But ever since Jimmy Carter spoke about human rights in his 1977 inaugural address and created a new infrastructure to give bureaucratic meaning to his words, the advancement of human rights has been one of the consistent objectives of America’s diplomats and an occasional one of its soldiers.

This tradition has been ruptured by the Obama administration. The new president signaled his intent on the eve of his inauguration, when he told editors of the Washington Post that democracy was less important than “freedom from want and freedom from fear. If people aren’t secure, if people are starving, then elections may or may not address those issues, but they are not a perfect overlay.”

There is, of course, some truth in Obama’s point. If people are starving, they are likely to care more about their next meal than about what may seem to them as the relatively abstract rights to voting, free speech, etc. But what Obama is missing here is that the cause-and-effect flows in both directions. Societies that have economic and political freedom are far more likely to develop economically–up to a point where people can think about things other than basic survival–than those that do not.

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