Couldn’t Help But Notice (101507)

Inaction speaks louder than (lack of) words (HT John Stephenson at NewsBusters):

Every major daily paper in New York took note of President Bush’s decision to bestow the first Medal of Honor of Operation Enduring Freedom on Navy SEAL Lt. Michael Murphy - a Long Islander who gave his life for his country and his fellow SEALs.

Every paper but one, that is.

And it shouldn’t be particularly hard to guess which one.

Here is Newsday’s coverage (with video), and Ellis Henican’s outstanding tribute, which ends thusly:

“He carried ….. the emblem of the New York City Fire Department (on his uniform). Engine 53, Ladder Company 43. El Barrio’s Bravest. The firefighters have their own memorial to him. You can look it up on their Web site. There is a huge plaque of Michael in uniform in the firehouse. The SEALs presented it to them. The firefighters touch it every day for good luck before they go out on a call.

“It’s all very personal.”

Actually, I don’t think the Times’s failure to cover Michael Murphy is as much a deliberate slap in the face at the military as it is a reflection of a newsroom mindset that Long Island isn’t part of the paper’s core constituency any more. Manhattan moonbats, and their philosophical kin around the country, are.

The Old Grey Lady’s journey towards becoming Manhattan’s quaint little alternative newspaper has progressed further than I had thought.

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Don Luskin, on gold and inflation:

….. Today’s Fed is nearly blind to inflation risk, obsessed with bailing the economy out of the consequences of the subprime credit binge.It’s not just the Fed, either. No one seems really focused on inflation. And why should they be? Official measures like the CPI are heading down, after all. But those indicators lag reality. If I’m right about a new wave of inflation, it could take months or even years before it shows up in those statistics. Especially since inflation is being statistically masked by lucky flukes such as the flood of cheap consumer goods from China, artificially suppressing measured average prices.

….. Look at what’s happening already. At the first whiff of a housing slowdown in the U.S. last year, Ben Bernanke stopped raising interest rates. Last month, after a little bout of market volatility triggered when some subprime mortgages went into default, Bernanke cut rates. Imagine what Bernanke would do if things started to really get bad. Interest rates would be back to 1% before you know it. I think they’d be zero, or even negative, if Bernanke thought he could pull it off.

Whether that would be enough to do anything about a housing collapse I have no idea. But I know that it would ignite a wave of inflation pressures.

….. There’s no way out but up for gold now. Either the global boom continues and rising demand carries gold higher, or the boom goes bust and the consequent inflation does the job for gold.

I’m not sure I buy into Luskin’s delayed-inflation premise, but the gold bugs do. My tendency is to trust the instincts of the markets above my own in matters such as these.

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Taranto, on Al Gore’s POS Peace Prize:

When the Nobel Peace Prize was established more than a century ago, wars were largely fought between traditional nation-states over material interests. But the 20th century saw the rise of a series of aggressive ideologies–communism, Nazism, radical Islam–that render old-fashioned notions of war and peace quaint. Determined ideologues cannot be appeased; peace through strength is the only alternative to war.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee rejects strength as well as war–hence its failure to award a Nobel to Ronald Reagan for winning the Cold War (Mikhail Gorbachev got one for losing, in 1990), or, say, to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for averting armed international conflict in Europe for half a century after World War II.

But why Al Gore? Here’s one explanation: Global warmism is an all-encompassing ideology, but one that, unlike communism, Nazism and radical Islam, has yet to inspire anyone to take up arms. Maybe in defining “peace” the Norwegians have simply decided not to set their sights too high.

We can be relieved that at least Gore didn’t get awarded a science-based Nobel.

More: Consensus, conschmensus — and a BizzyBlog blast from the past.

Plus this additional BB past blast — “Settled, Schmettled.”

Still more: Judge this, why doncha?

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Rush elaborates on what should come to be known as Bull-SCHIP:

….. to send him (Graeme Frost) out there as a 12-year-old, and say that Bush wants to deny and the Republicans want to deny coverage to people like him is just incorrect. It is a falsehood and it is a lie — and they continue to use children as foils like this. This program is exactly what, as it’s currently constituted? The S-CHIP program is exactly what got Graeme Frost and his sister their coverage! Yet they send him out there to say that Bush wants to deny people like him coverage? No! Bush is for increasing the coverage to poor children by $4 billion a year.

Another alternative name for the program: ParisCare.