NPR: Challenge: Recession Haiku

We’re assigning you a challenge: Write a haiku for the recession and drop it in the comments. It’s 17 syllables, in three lines, with a pattern of five syllables, seven syllables, and five more.

[From NPR: Challenge: Recession Haiku]

if you push paper
you won the big lottery
push a broom? you lost

how could a handful
make so much money themselves
many more went broke

modern investing
nice work if you can get it
who understands it?

a rump party of stupid god-botherers

Republicans have gradually been losing the egghead vote. I wonder how that translates into their ability to recruit strategists and “thought-leaders” who can work on the campaign, policy and media sides and help to lead them out of their current slump.

[From FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: The Decline of The Conservative Intellectual]

If you need any evidence, here’s something from something that calls itself “American Thinker:”

One image alone was released from the expensive photo op that terrified New Yorkers last month. Out of God only knows how many images taken during the mission, only one was chosen. It speaks powerfully to the American public — in symbolic language.

wingedvictory.jpg

The ominous and imposing aircraft dominates the scene in such a way that, in gestalt parlance, no one could mistake the figure for the ground. The figure is an aircraft that serves as Air Force One, representing the Messianic omnipotence of the Obama presidency. Below it, part of the background — a small and less relevant thing in comparison to the aircraft — stands the Statue of Liberty, representing the individual freedoms that Americans have come to treasure and enjoy.

[From American Thinker: The Visual Subtext of the Statue of Liberty Fly-by Photo]

via

responsibility ignored, opportunity lost

Read the Whole Thing, as they say. I can’t excerpt it in any meaningful way. But the arguments he makes — that a lust for celebrity, a la Woodward and Bernstein; an obsession with fairness (or not being called unfair by the subjects of critical stories); and a failure to exercise the responsibility enshrined in the First Amendment — have all added up to a real risk of losing a source of critical oversight over government.

We have already seen in the broadcast media how, in some small radio markets, the stations are automated to the point where their responsibility to inform the local population of emergencies is compromised. Local TV stations slice up the news into meaninglessly small segments, fact-free and lurid. Newspapers, the physical medium, bought and sold by people, with bylines and editorial boards you can easily access, have failed to differentiate themselves, relying on wire services to fill a lot of their pages, and gutting the local information that their readers want and need.