Ingraham interview with Shelby Steele

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5PhTb0ADVQ

Shelby Steele says reparations is a bad deal for black Americans. It feeds on white guilt, and it a step backward.   I tried to find this in text from the Hoover site, but it required access to my data to get into Yahoo, so I had to go for the video.

Still clueless about what Obama is doing

ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" October 25.

When will our vigilant, "free" press wake up? Yes, they are nibbling around the edges, but only Laura Ingraham nails it. Where else do you see this kind of passion from the White House, except when attacking America's free speech? And this is the guy who's had a free ride to the White House from the press--yes, even from Fox News. But Laura, the ratings will make no difference when he shuts you down after shutting you out! It's all a cover so we don't focus on what's really happening.



HT David Zurawik, Baltimore Sun.

Dear Heather MacDonald

While on my walk this morning I listened to your complete interview on Laura Ingraham [your article here]. As I understand it, when you go to the polls in 3 weeks you are choosing between Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, not Obama and McCain. You think Obama has a better grasp of economic issues than Palin because he is articulate, thinks things through and has degrees from prestigious institutions (you didn't actually say that, but it was implied with typical east coast arrogance). Also, although Obama isn't staying home with his children and believes Down Syndrome babies should be aborted, you finally conceded when pushed by Ingraham that Palin should stay home with her baby, because that is the traditional conservative view.

Here are five points you overlooked.

1) Of the four people running for office (and you're right either Joe or Sarah could become president the day after the inauguration), Sarah Palin is
a) the only one with conservative credentials, and
b) the only one with balls.

2) Of the four people running for office, Sarah Palin is the only one who didn't have the opportunity in 2006 to turn this Fannie/Freddie subprime mess around and save the economy. John McCain tried for more regulation, Joe Biden and Barack Obama sided with all the other Democrats and fought it. These three Senators failed to save us.

3) Of the four people running for office, most of the Congress, the President, most of the cabinet, and most especially the Ben and Hank club, Sarah Palin is the only one who did NOT go to one of those prestigious schools like Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard or Columbia.

4) Of the four people running for office, Palin is the only one who doesn't stammer and stutter off teleprompter, who hasn't been coached to lie to us through nonsensical press interviews. Although I'm plenty sick of the phrases "Joe Six-Pack" and "Hockey-Moms" and might have preferred a ticket of say Mitt Romney and Condi Rice, conservatives didn't want a Mormon, and Democrats don't allow black women, even Republicans, to leave the plantation.

5) And read the research, Heather. It is the marriage of women to the father that reduces poverty among children, not whether she stays home or works. The idea behind welfare was a government plan to keep women at home with the children. See how well that worked out?

Tom Brokaw doesn't get it

Tom Brokaw's new book, Boom, examines the influence the baby boomers have had on our society and culture, and he includes a wide variety of well-known and non-celebrity persons born in that era. Listening to him being interviewed on Laura Ingraham this morning and then reading some excerpts from the web, I was left with the impression conservatives know a lot more about how liberals think and react than the other way around. (Just as a quick aside: the only way they know how to have an interesting conservative character on a TV series is to afflict him with dementia--Boston Legal.) Laura pointed out that the single most important boomer to impact our culture, love him or hate him, is Rush Limbaugh, who got a quick mention in a section about drugs and not the media (I'm assuming his prescription drug addiction). Brokaw defended himself, not by addressing Rush's influence on millions, but by decrying the influence of talk radio in general--that it isn't balanced, and Rush mocks people. The Democrats when in power, will continue to harp on that.

He doesn't get it. Rush (and Medved, and Hewitt, and Ingraham, etc.) ARE the balance. The radio airways are open to the liberals, but they haven't succeeded in drawing an audience that will hold the sponsors. People don't listen to talk radio because there is nothing else--they listen because they want to hear another view that they can't get on broadcast news and cable news, where liberals have a lock. During one of the news breaks on a conservative show, I get to hear Anderson Cooper, a Vanderbilt/Whitney descendant, go on and on about global warming (guilt?). Many conservatives interview people who disagree with them, and usually make them look weak. Laura nailed Tom on this point, and he wandered off into the swamp of "we're never going to resolve this. . . .so why belabor the point."

Here's something else he doesn't quite grasp--the women's movement. In writing about the women's movement that evolved at the same time his daughters were growing up, he says, "One of our daughters is now a physician; another is a vice president of a major entertainment company; and the third is a clinical therapist. They place no limits on their ambitions, but for them, those ambitions also have had to fit within the context of having children. For all the gains made by women, and the recognition within society of how important that is to a healthy body politic, we have not satisfactorily resolved the workplace consequences of having children."

Why not say, "We have not satisfactorily resolved the family and parenting consequences created by women going off to work 10-12 hours a day."

4229

Use of the word "elite"

Nonfiction Readers Anonymous (a terrific blog by the way) thought it was amusing that Laura Ingraham, a conservative talk show host who has a law degree, has clerked at the Supreme Court and graduated from Dartmouth, would use the word "elite" when writing about agenda-driven liberals who look down on the little guy in fly-over country (her audience). Perhaps she thinks Laura is a member of "the elite." Not according to the dictionary, or the way conservatives use the word.

Here's the meaning of elite, from Webster's 9th:

the choice part or segment; especially a socially superior group; a powerful minority group, as inside the government;

Today, the elite may be "new money," or "land rich, piss-poor," but they are more likely to be academics who have tenure but not much else, or Congressmen who have been strapped onto the Beltway longer than most voters have been alive, or they may be a spouse of a former President (now making millions), accustomed to a sense of entitlement, or journalists making $40,000 a year and all the turnips they can eat, or former Presidents wandering lost around the world, or fabulously rich entertainers and celebrities who believe their own press, like the Dixie Chicks or Barbra Streisand. Attending Dartmouth and being a lawyer, gets you no points at all, near as I can tell. Nor does writing a few books, even those that get to the best seller list. Nonfictionanon, a librarian, even admits she'd never heard of her.

The word elite has little to do with wealth or where you sat out your 4-6 years of undergrad work. The way conservatives use the word, the elite may have no family pedigree at all, or they may have bunches, like John Kerry a man with a genealogy who married a widow with money. Today's elite are smug, self-appointed divas and web-site owners, some immigrant millionaires or billionaires like Soros and Huffington, or place holders on boards of NGOs who are massaging their guilt because they have so much money, or formerly useful people who have outlived their usefulness.

The elite used to have class; now they are just crass.

4176

Just bought two best sellers

They aren't in the library. Clarence Thomas' My Grandfather's Son is on order at the Upper Arlington Public Library, and has 8 holds from people who want to read it; Laura Ingraham's Power to the People has one copy, checked out, and 6 holds. However, if I wanted to read about Katie the real story there are 3 copies, all available; and Maureen Dowd's Are men necessary? has 3 copies, all available, plus one for sale for $2 on the Friends shelf (hard cover, book jacket, looks unused). There were 2 DVD sets of the first 6 episodes of "30 Days." I checked Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus--they seemed to have been alerted that there might be an interest in the Thomas book, and they had circulating copies (all checked out) with multiple holds.

When I asked the tattooed, earstudded clerk at the store for the Ingraham book, he didn't seem to know of it, and looked it up on the computer. He found it, and led me to the back of the store, to a bottom shelf in the history section. "Isn't this an odd place for a #1 title?" I asked. "Oh, it's probably up front; I just didn't want to look for it," he groused. Then I asked for the Thomas book. He turned on his heel and nearly ran to the front of the store and pointed. And there it was; under the table in plain view. How could I have missed it? With my two books in hand, I carefully looked at all the tables. Laura wasn't there.

However, both rang up for 30% off even though there was no sticker on her book.

If you live in Columbus and want to read one of these, let me know. It will be a long wait for the library to take action. You know it is BBW and they are probably busy dealing with cranky conservatives.

4140

Laura proves the point

David Frum has this to say about Laura Ingraham, whose new book Power to the people came out September 11. I think it's on the best seller list.

Laura was among the very first to come out in opposition to the Harriet Miers nomination — not because she is undeliberate, but because she is one of the best-informed journalists in America on everything to do with the legal system and the courts. It's not just that she knows a lot of law (although she does). She also does the work to stay plugged into the discussions among lawyers and legal scholars.

Laura's show is truly very funny, but it is also very sophisticated and smart. For all that we are supposed to denigrate the evils of life inside the Beltway, there's no substitute for being connected and knowledgeable.

Best of all, Laura's radio persona remains remarkably untainted by ego. Radio is no medium for the bashful, of course, but when I listen to Laura, I hear the voice of someone who has much to share — but also never pretends to know all the answers.

Her new book has one copy in my public library with 4 saves (holds, requests, etc.) and one audio-book copy. If she were Michael Moore or Bob Woodruff, they'd be handing copies out with the book bags.

Tomeboy has done another survey on library bias and used Laura Ingraham (Shut up and sing) as an example. I don't know how to crunch numbers, but I know how to wait in line for a conservative title at the library.