Category Archives: Media
Political Class and Law
The law doesn’t apply to big business or the political class when it comes to the Affordable Care Act.
The employer mandate requires companies with 50 or more employees to provide comprehensive health care. However, the reporting requirements were just too complex for the government to figure out, so the mandate was delayed for a year.
As a show of good will, while ramming the bill through the Senate the night before Christmas, the politicians agreed to impose Obama Care requirements on themselves. Once they passed the bill and found out what was in it they were shocked to learn it would cost them, and their staffs, huge hunks of cash. No problem. The White House helped tweak the law and our betters were unburdened.
Who’s the Law For?
Now big labor wants Obama to twerk er tweak for them.
Who will the law apply to? Just us serfs.
Miley Cyrus
Miley Cyrus’ remains a leader in family entertainment. Her performance at the MTV Video Music Awards introduced American parents to a new power word for the day – twerking.
As usual, I missed the VMA show but, thanks to the web, still got to see Miley’s performance – and build my vocabulary. Her dance was weird. It reminded me of the guy in the creepy teddy bear suit in The Shining. But the full shock value was lost on me because, shockingly, I’ve never seen Hannah Montana.
So, for the choreographical merits I defer to the experts. Two of them Camile Paglia and Kathleen Parker, were not amused. But for different reasons.
Paglia found the perky twerky one’s attempted lewdness to be, “clumsy, flat-footed and cringingly unsexy, an effect heightened by her manic grin”. She considers Madonna, not Montana, to be the gold standard in this area:
“The greatest performers, like Madonna … know how to use suggestion and mystery to project the magic of sexual allure. Pop is suffering from the same malady as the art world, which is stuck on the tired old rubric that shock automatically confers value.”
Parker agrees with the mystery part:
“Provocation for the sake of provocation is rarely provocative. And sex in the hands of a Cyrus-gone-wild has all the appeal of rutting season at the zoo.
Whither mystery?”
What’s it all Mean?
The writer ladies part company on where this all leads.
Paglia laments, “Unfortunately, the media spotlight so cheaply won by Cyrus will inevitably spur repeats of her silly stunt, by her and others.”
But Parker hopes, “This time may be different. This time, even the young are offended…Just possibly, America has had enough. When all things are permissible, then permissiveness loses its allure.”
Here’s what a disillusioned and anonymous 11 year old Hannah Montana fan had to say, “I bet her dad is sorry he got her into music”.
Oprah
Oprah wishes she had never mentioned her five figure handbag shopping incident in Jim Crow Switzerland. She didn’t buy the handbag but she did buy plenty of buzz. Her just released movie, The Butler, is number one.
War on Women
Democrats created the “war on women” as a campaign issue against Republicans who didn’t want to pay for abortion and contraceptive coverage. Something fully supported by The Weiner The World Awaited and Filthy Filner.
In fact, Michelle Malkin notes on Twitchy that Planned Parenthood endorsed Filner in 2012 as a “long time defender of women”.
Of course, there is a history of women supporting bad boys.
Al Qaeda on the Run
After retreating from Iraq, Afghanistan, and US embassies around the Muslim world, the president called in the marines – as background props for a Camp Pendleton speech – to announce that the “United States is never going to retreat from the world”. “We don’t get terrorized,” he said.
He also repeated his claim that “the core of Al Qaeda is on the way to defeat”.
Or as the late Osama bin Laden put it, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse they like the strong horse”.
