Thursday, June 4. 2009
The O tries to sell hopey-changey to the Middle East. Good luck.
I think the sales trick would be to give them some fresh new target for the hatred. Maybe the infidel Eskimos? Or maybe those crazy Aussie Aborigines who don't give a dang about Mohammed (pbuh)?
But hey, what's with that little mustache? Is that to look more Moslem or something? Good grief. That seems strange.
 Never a place to be outdone in the PC department, Harvard begins a Chair in Sexual Perversion Studies. But they don't call it that.
My only question is why it isn't in the Medical School, where such things could actually be seriously studied. After all, I have never met a gay or whatever person who really wanted to be like that if given the choice.
 No national sympathy for the Marines - yet the late-term baby killer is mourned and lamented. As Jammy put it:
Maybe if Private William Long performed partial-birth abortions his killing would have caught the attention of Barack Hussein Obama a little quicker.
But since he was an Army soldier murdered by a Muslim jihadist, it wasn't worth mentioning for over two days, and until after Obama left the country.
18th Century coiffure. Crazy, but good habitat for lice.
10 common misconceptions about blogs. h/t, Norm
Britain on the Brink.
Chavez: "Comrade Obama may be to the Left of me and Fidel." Related: Canadian Socialist leader visits Washington re health care.
Acting like a jerk: US one of the largest Moslim countries? That's plain stupid, worthy of "all 57 states" or Dan Quail. When will the MSM discover that there's less horsepower under that shiny hood? More at Surber
Nostalgianomics from Krugman; corrections at Reason.
A job for a Diversity and Equality Supervisor in England. Not satire.
The hatred. Now it's about hate-f-ing Palin. Against my will, I am introduced to that progressive concept.
My time working in the real West Wing. Hennessey
 Dr. Clouthier:
My biggest concern with Government Run health care is that the government will run it and run you. That is, your life will be controlled from cradle to grave. You will eat a certain way…or else. You will do certain things…or else. And the government will have every motivation to force you down a path.
Ultimately, this is a civil liberties issue. Some people say that not having health care for all is shameful in such a wealthy country. Shameful is the notion of a bureaucrat deciding whether you live or die based on the metrics of a chart. That’s shameful. And that would be our future. It is a future I don’t want to see.
Just look at the big government, totalitarian groups that are for this mess. It should give you an idea of what you’d have to look forward to in the future.
Related from Kudlow: Obamacare will bankrupt the US:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=051409A
What books should the O read? Powerline
This recession more mild that 1982. All my kids have jobs, including my youngest soon-to-be HS grad who has a summer acting job in NYC - and my dau-in-law-to-be just nailed a good one in NYC too. That makes 3 working in NYC. Good on them. All young folks need to spend some time there, I believe.
Hey parents - Leave them kids alone
From the UK re car companies: The US is committing suicide. Related: Iowahawk's take on the new green gummint cars
If the O had Jimmy Carter's fortitude
The O Admin is in permanent campaign mode. Magician in Chief
A European election? WTH? Who will vote? Who has any affinity with the "European Commission"?
Wilkinson: Repubs still the party of Nixon. Truth to that. A very good Pres, overall - if not the most likeable fellow. Too bad he didn't have the cojones to say "We screwed up."
Surber:
55% of Americans want to abolish affirmative action, while 36% support it. Given the great strides minorities have made in the last 45 years under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, most people believe it is time to take the training wheels off.
Photo on top: Vanderleun
Middle Photo: Moonbattery
Toon: Theo
Wednesday, June 3. 2009
The Maggie's Farm fun-loving and amoral fact-checking and bookkeeping staff invite you to play the ancient traditional New England festive Springtime game called Name That Tractor:
How deeply will the O grovel? Related: Romney roasts the O's posture of apology
How GM lost its way. Ingrassia Related: Brooks on The Quagmire Ahead
The Dems are the Party of Hate. Driscoll
I survived two years of Teach for America. Sex in the stairwells
How Brit hospitals try to keep their stats good
David Warren: We Canadians are stupid
Massive estimates of death are in vogue for Copenhagen
Kasich will run for Ohio gov. Good.
Not a peep from the O on the murdered soldier. Palin knows better
We told you Geithner was funny
How to discuss issues with Lefties. AVI
I had the same thought: Is this murder, or not?
Vast Right Wing Conspiracy posted a remarkable Memorial Day piece
The bloodthirsty Presbyterians are back at it
The GM bailout only delays the inevitable
California: The lunacy of the process argument. One quote:
The thing that absolutely drives me up the wall about the argument that California's biggest problem is a process problem -- the two-thirds rule to adopt budgets and raises taxes -- instead of an inability to live within its means is that the process argument implies that California has been governed in a starve-the-beast mode. In other words, that minority Republicans in the Legislature have managed to keep taxes absurdly and unrealistically low.
Instead, the truth, of course, is that California has the highest gas and sales tax; the highest- or second-highest income tax; and the highest corporate tax rates in the West. Our property taxes are about average nationally, thanks to Prop. 13.
How can anyone look at this picture and make the starve-the-beast argument? How come no one ever points this out on the news pages of the L.A. Times or Sac Bee?
It's not a tendentious, impossible-to-document claim. It's a simple fact: Whatever the barriers are to higher taxes, California has still indisputably ended up with high taxes.
Tuesday, June 2. 2009
 President Obama says that if his health care program doesn’t pass Congress by this summer, it’s dead. It’s dead already among Americans, but that hasn’t yet penetrated the heavily Democrat Congress or the liberal majority of boosters among the major media, seemingly determined to proctologically ram it in.
Rasmussen sums up the polling: (here and here)
· 50% more Americans say reducing the federal deficit is more important than a new health care scheme;
· Just 25% are willing to change their current coverage;
· 29% say a government-run health system would be better than now;
· 77% are opposed to taxing employer-provided health insurance;
· 19% believe a new health care scheme will lead to lower costs.
In poll after poll, basically, those favoring the Obamacare schemes are those at the leftmost wing of the Democrat Party. Probably progeny of former snake oil purchasers.
See Wall Street Journal: Why the health care rush? Democrats don’t think their bill can stand public inspection. “Democrats are trying to rush the largest entitlement expansion since LBJ into law with a truncated debate and as little public scrutiny as possible.”
Re our link today to John Bogle's talk about Wall Street, a young fixed-income friend (the one who warned everybody to get out of both debt and equities in Spring 08), emails me this:
You know what is ironic about the Bogle piece? It's that I spend all day every day working for the public sector coming up with really smart ideas to save states and local governments money to lower tax rates, fix their deficits, find ways that they can actually afford their capital plans and if they can't - we tell them that. We don't convince them to do fancy structures they don't understand (although they don't understand much) and we don't wait until we are paid to offer advice or analysis either. Half my time is spent working on unsolicited stuff. You know what usually happens? They pick a worse firm and a not as good a proposal because of probably some political or golf relationship or pay-to-play scheme, and they end up wasting taxpayer money. Some smart govt people get it and do the right thing, but not many. One thing I have learned over my years in fixed income is that 99% of the people in government are idiots.
"The financial-services sector subtracts value from society," he said, comparing it with gambling, law, and government as entities that simply move money around and extract a bit for themselves.
The US produces 90% of the new medicines in the world. The absence of price controls on drugs makes that possible, and the rest of the world benefits from the work done in our research labs.
It's not easy being a drug company. Most research hits dead ends; the government has endless hurdles, litigation can drive you into bankruptcy - and everybody wants the stuff for free.
The WSJ says that this bounty of new treatments will be eliminated by price controls.
 Photo of cute toes from Theo -
No wonder Liberals hate charter schools so much.
How wrong is Paul Krugman? As we have asserted many times, the guy has become little more than a partisan propagandist.
Why the EPA gives a darn about hydraulic fracturing is beyond me. Unless they simply want to restrict domestic energy supplies...and raise the price.
The vast mammalian, especially ungulate, migrations are almost extinct now. It's a damn shame. Man is a terrible steward of this earth. h/t, Jungleman
The new Under Secretary of Naivete. Sheesh. She needs to grow up.
The myth of "a Muslim world." Asia Times
For our hard-earned billions, what do we get from GM? Bupkus. Even Nader thinks it's nuts. And the kid they put in charge has no biz experience, when what is called for is an expert analyst of distressed manufacturing assets.
Samuelson on The Obama Infatuation. Of course the press hasn't reported on their own sexual fantasies. Why would they report on them when they can simply enact them with virtual oral and anal sexual activities?
Your family owes the Feds $668,000. How ya gonna pay it?
VDH tries to tackle the labyrinth of race
Bruno flying in to the MTV awards:
Monday, June 1. 2009
The sheer size of the fiscal hole that the Obama administration is digging us into, or burying us within, is mindboggling enough. But, that isn’t stopping them from purposely adding to our confusion as they try to dig the hole deeper.
Tom Blumer exposes the tomfoolery at his valuable everyday read Bizzyblog.
Until now the US Treasury has hidden the size of our deficits by including Social Security taxes, and treating them as if in a Trust Fund although there is none and the monies have been spent, so Social Security is actually in negative cash flow within the next two years.
Now Blumer finds the Treasury Department under Wall Street-import Tim Geitner bringing along the tricks that sank Wall Street. The Treasury is now reporting the deficit of receipts versus expenditures as $175-billion less between last October and March. How? The Treasury is somehow calculating a Net Present Value of its TARP bailout expenditures, in other words what they think they’re going to be worth.
As Blumer points out:
Mixing hundreds of billions of dollars of NPV into what has essentially been a cash flow report turns the Monthly Treasury Statement, and deficit reporting in general, into an exercise that will become not only become ever more difficult to comprehend, but one that will also be routinely subject to political manipulation. Judgments as to what discount rate to use, how collectible loans are, and even what should and should not be considered an “investment,” will have multi-billion dollar impacts on the publicly reported deficit. NPV might even directly affect policy. Why should Geithner or Obama allow banks chomping at the bit to get out from under TARP to do so, when their repayments will only increase the reported deficit? Already, the administration, which has projected a fiscal 2009 deficit of over $1.8 trillion, has avoided the political embarrassment of estimating a shortfall that would round off to $2 trillion using true cash-flow reporting.
Hope ‘n Change requires prestidigitation, otherwise known as quick fingers, picking our pockets.
 Mr. Sun remains on vacation. It has been pleasantly cool.
At best, government economic stimulus is just a sugar high
LAPD High. Run by the cops. Sounds good to me. I never met a cop who assumed honesty, and that seems about right, statistically speaking.
Why are Conservatives so mean? That Andrew Klavan link is superb and right to the point.
Who is going to want to buy a Chrysler or GM car now? Chrysler is now Italian, and GM is Government Motors, from the folks who brought you the DMV and the post office.
This harsh detention has to stop. Gitmo inmates get free laptops
Our friend Jules bids us summertime blog adieu with many Brit Civil War links. (I will betcha the wife and kids padlocked his machine and threw the key into Boston harbor.)
Practicing medicine in MA. One quote:
She said, “I calculated that every time I have a Medicaid patient, it’s like handing them a $20 bill when they leave;”
Where are the serious men?
..foreigners have gone from owning $1.3 trillion (of US debt) at the beginning of the decade to now owning $3.3 trillion of such securities — a $2 trillion increase. More important and interesting than that, of the $2.8 trillion in net new issuances of Treasury securities during this decade, foreigners have bought $2.0 of the $2.8 trillion, a stunning 71%. (China alone appears to have bought over one third of the total of foreign purchases.) Who will purchase the debt to fund the upcoming $10 trillion in deficits is anyone’s guess, as the bond market seems to have figured out.
Put it another way. The US government is grossly negligent in creating the conditions that necessitate America’s importing up to 70% of its oil, making the country dependent on countries that are strategic adversaries. Now we also import 70% of the financing of the US government’s budget deficits, again making America dependent on potential adversaries or enemies. This can’t end well. Where are the serious men to address these strategic vulnerabilities?
The greedy, entitled American children all have their hands out for freebies. One quote:
Epiphanies are a dime a dozen among congressional Democrats as they discover urgent new reasons to experience the almost erotic pleasure of commandeering other people's money. For example, freshman Rep. Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat whose district includes Disney World, was recently there and was inspired.
The world, he realized, would be a sweeter place if Congress mandated that all companies with 100 or more employees provide a week of paid vacation to those who work at least 25 hours a week. After three years, they would be entitled to two weeks, and companies with more than 50 employees would have to start providing a paid vacation week. Grayson would not mandate that paid vacations be spent at Disney World. With the welfare state approaching insolvency and businesses sagging, this is an odd time to augment Americans' entitlement mentality. But the travel and tourism industries think that Grayson's idea is neat.
No slobbering press in the UK:
The White House press corps is now completely supine, utterly shameless in its groveling cowardice. Stalin himself couldn't have wished for a more slobbering press corps. Rather than mailing them nice little Lipton tea bags, millions of sane Americans might consider sending air sickness bags to our Reigning Media.
But not, thank haven, across the broad Atlantic. There free speech and even laughter are still alive, among the well-lubricated scribblers of Fleet Street. The journos of Britain show little respect for American Presidents regardless of race, creed or color. They laugh hysterically at all of them. Not that it takes much imagination.
The Telegraph has done the awesome, and called Michelle's wardrobe "frumpy."
Sunday, May 31. 2009
You cannot be too cynical to understand politics. How the Dems killed Estrada's judicial nomination. A quote:
It was precisely the fact that Estrada was Hispanic that made Democrats and their activist allies want to kill his nomination. They were determined to deny a Republican White House credit, political and otherwise, for putting a first-rate Hispanic nominee on the bench.
Durbin and his colleagues did as they were instructed. But they had nothing with which to kill the nomination -- no outrageous statement by Estrada, no ethical lapse, no nothing. What to do?
They brainstormed. Estrada had once worked in the Justice Department's Office of Solicitor General, right? (Appointed under the first President Bush, Estrada stayed to serve several years under Clinton.) That office decides which cases the government will pursue in the Supreme Court, right? And that process involves confidential legal memoranda, right? Well, why don't we suggest that there might be something damaging in those memos -- we have no idea whether there is or not -- and demand that they be made public?
Durbin and his colleagues knew the Bush Justice Department would insist the internal legal memos remain confidential, as they always had been. It wasn’t just the Bush Administration that thought releasing the documents was a terrible idea; all seven living former Solicitors General, Republican and Democrat, wrote a letter to Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy begging him to back off.
But the Democrats didn't back off. They had a new, very serious question to ask: What is Miguel Estrada hiding?
The answer was nothing, of course. But the strategy worked. Democrats stonewalled Estrada's nomination, and, after losing control of the Senate in 2002, they began an unprecedented round of filibusters to block an entire slate of Bush appeals-courts nominees, Estrada among them. The confirmation process ground to a halt. More than two years after his nomination was announced, Estrada, tired of what appeared to be an endless runaround, withdrew his name from consideration. Instead of being on the federal bench, he is now in private practice in Washington.
Moonbattery notes that the photo above makes it clear that some forms of "freedom" may be preferred over others.
A look at Cuba before the socialists destroyed it and turned it into a third-world country
The O admin attempts to stifle criticism of stimulus
Related: Betsy on the Chicago Rules
Looks like a true thriller. Yikes.
The Lituus:
Bach's motet (a choral musical composition) "O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht" was one of the last pieces of music written for the Lituus.
The unreliability of eyewitnesses. h/t, Dr X
Are the O and the Dems playing a deep game or, as our Roger said on Friday, a simple game?
Makes sense to me: 82 year-old strangles 71 year-old girlfriend for loading the dishwasher wrong.
Biggest mystery in American history. A quote:
The U.S. spends a huge amount on education; more per student than anyone else; more and more every year. Simultaneously, over the last 70 years, literacy has fallen, SAT scores have fallen, American competitiveness has fallen, and the general knowledge of ordinary citizens has fallen. Teenagers graduate from high school who can't read their diplomas; the country now has 50,000,000 functional illiterates. I recently saw on television that the wealthiest, most successful country in the world--that would be us--hovers around 18th internationally on reading, and 25th in science.
I submit that all of these facts taken together are paradoxical; one might say, impossible. It's as if I told you that an ordinary man consumed 5000 calories a day and lost weight. So this, I submit, is the greatest mystery in our history.
I am past the point of doubting that the climate change hysteria is anything more than the latest excuse to grab power.
School Choice: the new civil rights struggle
The Denny's Octomom Special
A definitive, updated history of West Germany’s depraved Baader-Meinhof terroristsOpen-source software wins the day. But there is a cloud. The Incredible Shrinking Clintons. Dick Morris. That was the plan. No oxygen use, and no emissions. A quote:
Just as Lincoln buried his rivals Seward, Chase and Stanton in the Cabinet and then on the Supreme Court, and Wilson buried Bryan at the State Department, so Obama has hidden his predecessor and his rival in plain sight at the upper reaches of the government.
Saturday, May 30. 2009
I am not sure what Pravda is anymore, but Pravda opines:
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.
Via Insty:
The political class in Sacramento believes the people of California exist for the state government, not the other way around.
Via Neptunus:
“Western colonization of nearby Muslim lands lasted 130 years, from the 1830s to the 1960s. Muslim colonization of nearby European lands lasted 1300 years, from the 600s to the mid-1960s. Yet, strangely, it is the Muslims…who are the most bitter about colonialism and the humiliations to which they have been subjected; and it is the Europeans who harbor the shame and the guilt. It should be the other way around.”
The railroad cars of the old tycoons. Much more comfortable than private jets.
Keeping our kids safe from science education
Climate change already killing hundreds of thousands
McQuain:
Our problem in health care is not insurance company profit. It is the structure of the system (employer based) and the lack of competitiveness in the insurance market. As economist Arnold Kling once declared, we don’t have health insurance, we have health insulation. Compared to any other insurance product, health insurance is a definite outlier. We’d laugh if someone said car insurance should cover oil changes. That’s because we understand that car insurance is there to cover expensive and catastrophic events, not routine maintenance. We understand that to do that, we’d have to pay much more in car insurance than we now do. Yet we expect health insurance to cover that routine maintenance when it comes to our health.
A good rant at Minding the Campus. A quote:
While the mind-boggling damage done to higher education by multicultural activists, diversity-mongers, and all-around leftist jerks is a subject very much on the minds of conservatives, liberals seem truly not to care. More precisely, they actually regard it as progress. Shakespeare elbowed aside by Maya Angelou? Hey, education's got to change with the times, just like the Constitution. Mandatory sensitivity training for incoming freshmen to instill appreciation of transgendered persons? What kind of monster has a problem with sensitivity? Conservative students getting charged with hate speech for daring to take on affirmative action or women's studies zealots? Exactly - that kind of monster. Even the occasional report in the mainstream press of epidemic ideological conformity on the nation's campuses fails to elicit a reaction. So what if, as the Washington Post reports, 80 percent of faculty in America's English literature, philosophy, and political science departments describe themselves as liberal and a mere 5 percent as conservative - with ratios of eighteen to one at Brown, twenty-six to one at Cornell, and sixteen to one at UCLA - or that a study after the 2004 election showed that the Harvard faculty gave John Kerry thirty-one dollars for every dollar donated to George Bush, with the ratios rising to forty-three to one at MIT and three hundred to one at Princeton? (And you think when someone gets around to a comprehensive analysis of the 2008 campaign donations, that will be any less lopsided?) For liberals, the only important question remains what it's always been: How can I get my kid into one of those places?
Friday, May 29. 2009
 I'm not sure what to say to my Republican friends anymore.
I honestly thought all the pearl clutching paranoids pulled the lever with the D next to it, but I guess I was mistaken. You ran the least attractive candidate possible for President and lost by a little and you're ready to commit suicide in your Ayn Rand bunker after you're finished homeschooling your kids.
It's tiresome stuff. I'm going to try to explain it to you one more time. Obama, and all his accomplices in his co-prosperity sphere, are not "secret" anythings. Not secret muslims, socialists, communists, antichrists or Illuminati. He'd adore it if you spent the next eight years looking for his birth certificate, because he knows it's a colossal waste of his enemies' time, and that's a natural born fact.
It's a straight plunder economy. Why are you so confused and surprised about this? You keep talking about all sorts of ill effects that are going to appear in decades and verify your wild hypothesis about the guy. But the effects are always immediate and visible. He's not playing a deep game here.I take that back. Maybe he is. He's confused a lot of people into thinking he's confusing.
Poor Rich Moran. He's all shocked that maybe car dealership closings under the watchful eye of Democrat mandarins are going to fall along party lines, and figures it's earthshaking.
This story is about ready to explode. All the ingredients are there for a gigantic political scandal that would shake the Obama administration to its foundation and perhaps take down several high ranking officials. All that's needed is one connecting piece of evidence that would tie the White House Automotive Task Force to some political arm of the Democratic party.
Continue reading "Obama Thanks You For All The Free Advertising"
Volokh asks:
Property Rights in Web Sites:
Check out Conwell v. Gray Loon Outdoor Marketing Group, Inc., decided May 19 by the Indiana Supreme Court. Is a custom-designed and designer-hosted Web site a good or a service? Who owns the site? Can the deletion of the site by the host (for nonpayment of the bills) constitute tortious conversion of the supposed owner's property? Not the sexy sort of cyberlaw, just the practically important sort.
 Did you need the lyrics for the Pancho and Lefty YouTube we posted yesterday? Here they are.
The oxytocin receptor and prosocial behavior. It would be interesting to see whether bloggers are low in these receptors.
The shot that changed Germany. It should be a big story in Germany - and in all of Europe.
Wilkinson on Sotomayor: People going crazy on cue
The Hugging Crisis in our schools.
Are we ready for Men's Studies yet?
Iron Laws of political economics, including:
There is no form of market failure, however egregious, which is not eventually made worse by the political interventions intended to fix it.
 Maybe we should get rid of all of those terrible crosses at Arlington, too. Meanwhile in Euroland, French author faces jail for offending Islam. They are trying to re-live the Dark Ages. Thus far in the US, still no laws against offending religions.
California pols refuse to explain why their state needs hysterical spending growth
How did Socialist Nazy Germany pay for their Social Security programs?
Insty:
PEOPLE TEND TO REBEL AGAINST EXCESS NANNYING, EVEN WHEN THE NANNIES ARE RIGHT: Healthy Lifestyles On Decline In United States. Then, of course, there’s the way the advice tends to change over time.
From Gaghdad Bob (h/t Dr. Sanity's Leftism Aims Low)
Liberty is not a built in -- much less universal -- value, and I think you can see how this is a major part of understanding the motivations -- or shall we say, the deep structure -- of leftism. Classical liberals wonder why leftists don't value freedom, but they shouldn't.
Rather, the question is why we do value it, because it is an obvious aberration in the human race. Most humans value security over liberty, predictability over change, conformity over individuality, and authority over self-rule. So when we see that leftists hate freedom and progress but love authority and comformity, we shouldn't be the least bit surprised, for it is true of most rank-and-foul humans. Political correctness, statism, micromanagement of our lives -- these are all the natural consequences of a dread of liberty.
To finish up with Prager's thought, he noted that it was God who wanted humans to have freedom, not humans. For the vast majority of human beings, liberty is not a particularly important value, much less the most important one. They would just as soon barter it away for security, as they have done in western Europe.
Can you spot the billionaire? From Boudreaux:
Nora ____ e-mailed me earlier today; she was terse: "How do you sleep at night justifying policys [sic] that make incomes more unequal???"
My first response is to say "grow up." As long as Mr. Smith earns his income rather than steals it, Mr. Jones ought not care. Envy is an ugly sentiment, and becomes ghastly and dangerous whenever it is manifested in government policies.
But my more measured response is here.
Thursday, May 28. 2009
Sheesh, Obama. We just aren't that into you.
And definitely not as into you as you are into yourself.
Your Wall of Bacon brekky above brought to you by Mr. Free Market. Too bad he doesn't deliver, because I could go for some blood sausage, bacon, and runny eggs right about now.
Judicial empathy for whom?
Sotomayor is a racist. neoneo. Could be, but it's the "right kind of racism."
Sotomayor's "struggle." Private schools all the way. Nice.
More evidence on the politics of the Chrysler dealerships
There is only one current head of state who served in uniform in WW2
ACORN, Soros, and the Census
Check out some things you may have missed at the new, improved NAS site
Do you know who the Ladies of Arlington are?
The world is run by crazy people.
When a pol has nothing to lose. Betsy on Dr. Tom Coburn
Wednesday, May 27. 2009
 Websites like ours and AVI's have a deep respect for the power of tribalism in the human psyche.
For better or worse, it seems like an inevitable human force for birds of a feather to flock together regardless of our basic biological similarities.
Early Colonial America had very few tribes: The evangelical and intolerant Protestants, the crazy Dutch entrepreneurs, the various warring Indian tribes, and the small handful of welcome Jews in Rhode Island and Catholics in Maryland. And African slaves in both the South and North (and some free Africans in the North).
Today, we have all sorts of tribes all over the place, from all over the world. In a way, I can view the Sotomayor affirmative-action nomination as a nod to the tribalism that we acknowledge here as being a powerful force.
The "progressive" identity politics of the Dems meets primitive tribalism. Politics gets very strange when the shape of your genitalia and your ancestry determine your career and power. Full-circle to primitivism.
The national fusion facility will be dedicated this week. Nobody knows whether it will work. I hope it does. Endless fountains of clean energy sounds good to me, as does any free lunch.
This should be a huge scandal, if true.
It's all about me! Kristol on Obama's character and the presidency.
Related: Obama and the I word. Roger Simon
Princeton reinstates tough grading standards. Let's hope it's a trend.
MIT panics despite global cooling. Al Gore continues to panic about his investments in indulgences. Meanwhile, the Greenies are becoming subjects of humor on TV.
Seven bad ideas for medical reform: Cato
Krugman: Blame Repubs for California's mess. Huh?
Did you read the hilarious story of the Europeans who went to join the Taliban in Paki?
The tyranny of our FICO scores is just a measure of our addiction to credit.
Jules on the O:
...power hates a vacuum.
Put another way, geopolitics hates a wienie. So does history.
OK, so is Obama another Jimmy Carter? We get to watch this history unfold before our eyes, and it seems to unfold a quicker these days. My quick take. Not exactly. What we’re seeing is really a more aggressive Carterism.
Indeed, the O's manhood is being tested all over right now. Norks threaten military strike on S. Korea
Rotterdam update: It's a Muslim city now.
Phony grassroots for Health Care
The death of literary studies. Protein:
To return to my original point, where has the pleasure of the text gone? It’s been sublimated into pleasure at one’s own superior ability to wrest unauthorized meaning out of the text by passing it through an ideological meatgrinder. Congratulations! You’re now ready to deliver papers to at any number of conferences with clever titles about “firing the canon.”
What if Bush had...
Related: Media bias, golf edition:
Imagine what the media would be saying if John McCain were president and he didn’t cancel his golf game on the day North Korea launched missiles and tested a nuclear bomb. They’d roast him.
The attempt to link the recession with medical costs was everywhere last week. Makes no sense.
Quoted at Thompson:
Those who prize social unity and order will tend to believe that people’s deepest feelings and beliefs should be accorded respect. But respect for ideas is never an entitlement. It depends on their intellectual resilience in public debate. No free society can treat people’s deepest beliefs as sacrosanct. They are fair game for hostile and derisive criticism. That is how knowledge advances. […]
No one has a right to the protection of feelings. If politics concerns itself with mental states, there is no limit to how far legislation can intrude on people’s lives. The task of progressive politics is to protect liberty, not least by attacking the accumulation of bad ideas. Yet to many on the Left, the individual, inquiring mind is of far less importance than the representation of designated groups.
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