Maggie's Farm

This is indeed jaw-dropping. First paragraph of piece by Rick Moran:

Executive Producer David Doss reveals that CNN not only doesn’t care if their broadcasts give aid and comfort to the enemy in Iraq, but also that there is no difference between a US sniper and an enemy sniper.

I knew there was a reason I can't watch CNN: they just aren't my kind of people. Whole thing here.

If this is true, it should be big trouble. The Ted Kennedy/KGB story. Junkyard, via Ace. More at Driscoll. As Gateway puts it, "Please don't question their patriotism."  Yes, well, but this guy can get away with murder, can't he?

Gore Vidal joins the Moonbats. It does sound like satire, but the guy means it. Blue Crab. Projection is a terrible defence mechanism.

The annual flu shot hysteria. RTLC

I keep trying to get out, but they keep pulling me back in. Junior Gotti gets a pass, sort of. "He's a very nice boy."

Evil genius Karl Rove has been blamed for rising oil prices, falling oil prices, Katrina, 9-11, warm summers, the ozone hole, and for losing my socks in the dryer. Now he is blamed for the rising stock market. Rove must be God, disguised as a pudgy bald guy.

Autism gene identified. Finally. SDA

Young Republicans at Berkeley: Update at Volokh

Annie, Get your gun. We keep reading these sorts of stories. An un-armed, or pacifist person is called a "victim," in English. Listen: especially if you have kids: don't let a low-life scum take you away from them, because they need you.

On repealing the First Amendment. If the Left (with John McCain as a useful idiot ally) wants to undo the First, and many others wish to undo the Second, then why not all the rest of 'em? If political speech (advertising) costs money, then when you restrict money, you restrict speech. Simple. I even agree that George Soros is free to spend a billion dollars for Leftist, America-hating candidates if he wants to. It's supposed to be a free country, where you can debate one person's speech with more speech. Ten Napel on George Will.

Right Wing Howler  gets a bit non-PC with the Koran. Shame on you, Vilmar. That is insensitive. Did you find these sights in your neighborhood? Very bad manners. BAD DOG!

Boston Chicken: Deval avoids debate. New England Repub

From a piece by LaShawn:

If you have an SAT score of 1240 and a grade-point average of 3.2, your chances of being admitted to the University of Michigan undergraduate school are 9 out of 10.

If you’re black.

White or Asian? One in 10.

List of the earth's civil wars since 1940. A long list. Neo-neo

The NYT's remarkable Johnny Apple dies at 71. Obit here.

How do Dems define the Middle Class? Ankle-Biting

If this is hunting, I'm the King of Spain. Dust my Broom

Juan Williams attacked as "the black Ann Coulter." What? AlphaPatriot

It's James Baker time again! Baker plans the exits from Iraq. Reason

Martin Luther King Jr was a Republican. But you're not supposed to say that, are you? Lib Leanings

Foreigners who would like to see the Dems take over Congress: And Rightly So

From a piece by Friedman, via Best of the Web yesterday:

Although the Vietcong and Hanoi were badly mauled during Tet, they delivered, through the media, such a psychological blow to U.S. hopes of "winning" in Vietnam that Tet is widely credited with eroding support for President Johnson and driving him to withdraw as a candidate for re-election.

Tet, that is, was a military victory for the U.S. that turned into a propaganda victory for the communists because American journalists presented a false picture of what had happened.

Who is rich? And who is complaining? A quote from a piece Australia's Policy, by Wilkinson, entitled Against the Politics of Relative Standing (h/t, A&L Daily):

HL Mencken once quipped that, ‘a wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife’s sister’s husband.’ Writing last April on the definition of poverty in The New Yorker, journalist John Cassidy takes the logic of Mencken’s satire of low-grade ressentiment fully seriously and plumps for its liberal application to public policy. Cassidy argues that it is indeed a hardship to make less than your wife’s sister’s husband—or your co-worker, your next door neighbour, or anyone within the same national boundaries—and proposes that for the purposes of government ‘poverty’ be defined in terms of relative rather than absolute deprivation. In particular, he suggests that the poverty line be set at half the value of the median income. ‘If poverty is a relative phenomenon,’ Cassidy writes, ‘what needs monitoring is how poor families make out compared with everybody else, not their absolute living standards.’ [1]

While capitalism does in fact produce absolutely egalitarian results—enabling the poor to own high-quality mobile phones, microwaves, and cars functionally equivalent to those of the wealthy—it cannot, critics say, manufacture more and better ‘positional goods’, to use economist Fred Hirsch’s term, because, basically, it is impossible to fit more than ten percent in the top ten percent.[2] No matter how trusty, safe, comfortable, and efficient your new Hyundai Accent may be, the fact that is within the grasp of so many will keep it from signaling that you inhabit the commanding heights of society. And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? To be king of the mountain?

Read the whole interesting thing.

Image: Nude surfing season is coming, in Australia. We hope the Imams can get comfortable with this Aussie habit. Hey Imam - quit staring and take a cold shower.

The Who are going on tour, and bring forth first new record since 1982.

27 questions for Rupert Murdoch at Dem. Project

Looks like Minnesota will elect a Hamas supporter/sympathizer to Congress. Powerline. It's damn stupid, but it's a free country.

An evolution expert predicts an "upper class" and "lower class" of humans to diverge.

Liberals are open-minded and "tolerant," but if you disagree with them, you're an idiot. Dr. Helen looks at this familiar phenomenon.  (h/t, Blue Crab Blvd)

Good lawyers can always find an argument. Here's one: Too fat to die. AOL news. Hanging is needle-free, I believe.

How many people think that this is a real disease? Sounds like a crock to me. An infrared detoxifier? I sure hope tax dollars didn't buy that joke of a gizmo. NYT Science

Bill Clinton endorses torture "for specific purposes". Where's the outrage? Ace

My precious...Where can I get me one of these slick rings? Polipundit. American medicine needs to break its chains from the big pharmaceuticals and do good simple stuff like these people do, don't you think? We sure have a lot to learn from Asian medicine.

And, speaking of Asians, may I ask why Euro journalists always refer to Moslems as "Asians"? "Hundreds of Asian youth shouted chants to Allah while bombarding Parisian police with rocks." Just wondering, because they don't look like, or act like, regular Asians to me. Can't they call them Semites, or youths of Middle-Eastern origin, or Moslems, or something a bit more descriptively-accurate?

Atlas VLOGS our hero, Paul Belien.

The elections. Damn, do I miss Reagan. Rick Moran sees some signs of hope.

Another climate change heretic.  Tim Blair suggests warming him at the stake.

The Dem strategy: Ignore the economy. Nothing to talk about there. Driscoll. No, let's talk about important things like gays in congress. As Iowahawk has it, "It's the homos, stupid." Just don't think about the economy...and, by the way, it's terrible: Captain Ed

Remember Abdul Rahman?, asks Wizbang. Well, Jihad isn't done with him yet.

There is a simple moral to this sad story about limiting cod catches in the North Sea. Worstall

Wussy CT bans running up the score. How about banning running up the GPA, too? View from the Right

And speaking of GPAs:

(2006-10-18) — A new Brookings Institution study that shows an inverse relationship between math skills and student self-esteem is “just plain wrong,” according to an overnight poll of the nation’s largest teacher’s union.

The study found that Japanese and Korean students excel in math despite their lack of confidence in their own abilities, while American kids feel great about their abilities but have much lower skills according to tests.

Full story here, of course.

And lo and behold! More on GPAs. The "No child gets ahead" program. Classical Values

Is "first to market" a failing strategy? Business Pundit

We did not give Columbia Pres. Lee Bollinger credit for these words:

“This is not complicated,” Bollinger said in an October 6 statement, released two days after student protestors disrupted a talk by the founder of the Minuteman Project, Jim Gilchrist. “Students and faculty have rights to invite speakers to the campus. Others have rights to hear them. Those who wish to protest have rights to do so. No one, however, shall have the right or the power to use the cover of protest to silence speakers. This is a sacrosanct and inviolable principle.”

However, I have heard nothing about punishment yet. Update at Inside Higher Ed

Compare state taxes with revenue growth and employment growth. Willisms

There they go again. Moslems getting excited about condemning the new Apple building in NYC: Mudville

More on real estate in NYC: A very big deal. NYT

Wally can move big things easily, and could build Stonehenge with stones and sticks. A cool find at Never Yet Melted

Environmentalism as the new fascism: Tangled Web. One quote:

I am heartily sick of the evangelical Environmentals seeking to dictate to ME how I can live my life. Worse than that, it strikes me that the former socialists and communists out there are NOW hiding behind the comfort blanket of the Green Banner, using the environmentalist cause to control and limit our lives.

Why I want my kids to play with guns. Mr. Free market

Poor Ned: The Dems have abandoned him but he's now spent yet another 2 million of his own. Plenty more where that came from, but Ex-Donk is keeping count. Man is this guy rich (Ned, not Ex-Donk).

Hahaha. For you hunters: Season Shot. Kill 'em, and season 'em, at the same time. I'm about ready to go shoot that chicken in my freezer with that stuff. Can you throw a frozen chicken with a trap machine?

Justice Scalia explains the Bill of Rights to the ACLU. YouTube

Richard Landes and the the France2 trial in a superb piece by SISU. Read it, or you will be beheaded.

New smoking laws in Iran, here. How do you smoke through a burkha? (h/t, Normblog)

Callable bonds, for beginners: Clayton Cramer

Climate change on Mars blamed on Bush and Big Oil: MarsDaily

How do you tell a Sunni from a Shiite? Sounds like the first line of a joke. Real answer at Singleton

My dinner with Ken Mehlman. Fineman at MSNBC

Observation in a piece by Melanie Phillips:

(the) basic argument that unless we are nice to Muslims we will drive moderate individuals into the arms of extremists is badly flawed. The recent Pew survey showed that, of all the countries of Europe, the British were the nicest to their Muslim minority — and yet British Muslims hated their host country, the west and the Jews more than Muslims anywhere else. Moral: Islamic extremism is not reduced by the emollience of the host nation, and it may even be exacerbated by it. That is because it feeds not on strength, but on weakness: not on hostility, but on a collapse of cultural and religious nerve.

Image: Candidate for Wife of the Year. She's a workhorse.

300 million proud and happy Americans. Here are photos of some of us: Tim Blair

Frank Trainor wasn't too fond of Modern Times. Good comments. But is "Bob running away from himself"? Who is "himself," anyway? I do not know.

PJ O'Rourke (h/t, Dr. Sanity):

LIKE OTHER DEEP-THINKING people, I'm full of principled, idealistic, high-minded indignation at the GOP. What a stampede of sleaze. Jack Abramoff is the world's best lobbyist--for the Federal Penitentiary System. Bob Ney was deep in the ethical rough at St. Andrew's. Randy "Duke" Cunningham's favorite weap ons system turned out to be the political suicide bomb. Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was breaking them. He might as well have tied quail feathers to the GOP majority in Congress and sent it hunting with Dick Cheney.

Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs. Splash! There goes Mark Foley! Now the news networks are broadcasting G.O.P.U. around the clock.

Actually, the Republicans should be grateful for their lying, thieving scum. It distracts the public from the things the Republicans have done that are honestly bad. Our postwar policy is creating Weimar Iraq. And when the Islamofascist Beer Hall Putsch comes there won't even be beer.

PJ should not be writing - he should be hunting grouse and woodcock in New Brunswick about now. Anyway, read the whole thing at the Weekly Standard.

Is the Shadow Party getting behind Wesley Clark? Am Thinker

Harry Reid has lots of ideas about how all Americans can get rich. Teach us, Harry. $700,000 profit on land he didn't own. I want to know how to do that, too.

They can save a lot of $ on shipping: Walmart with giant expansion in China. NY Sun

Harvard Prof: Immigrants are the reason blacks are in jail. There's a new theory for ya. NY Sun. Personally, I am convinced it's Bush's fault.

What do butterflies do when it rains? NYT

No way out. Europeans seek "tax harmonization" to eliminate tax competition. They call tax competition "unfair." What are they thinking? TCS

The Battleground Poll is interesting. Dino has it