The word means so much to us, and we take so little trouble to define it.

Late night talk show host Jay Leno managed to connect the BP oil spill to the tea party. Lack o’ something called “regulation.”

JAY LENO: Well, to me, BP is a perfect example. BP seems to have done this on their own. They don’t pay attention. They essentially make their own rules because they pay off everybody. That’s what the Tea Party wants. That’s unregulated and look what happened.

DAVID GREGORY: Right, but in this case, right, you have a breakdown of regulations that led to getting contracts and their technology breaking down. But, right, I mean at some point, the government is the only entity that can clean up after a huge mess.

I’d sure like to know what magical power, what birth star, blood line, what is it exactly? — What’s supposed to make these government regulators so much wiser than the people they’re regulating. I’ve talked and talked and talked to these “we need more regulation” people and none of them have ever been able to tell me.

I doubt highly that Jay Leno, David Gregory, or any of the rest of ’em have ever been as close to the application of such regulations as yours truly. Trust me, if you love sausage…

In fact, what I’m reading about the regulations that were applied to BP all seem to say the same thing: There were regulations, and they were applied. The people who were in charge of applying those regulations did a shitty job. Yeeaaahh…you know what, that doesn’t look to me much like fixing or preventing a problem. That looks to me like finding a scapegoat while you’re pretending to get something constructive done, and frankly it brings back feelings of deja vu.

I’ve been there, and if I have to have brain surgery I think I’d prefer to have it unregulated. Maybe, maybe not. But I certainly wouldn’t count on regulation to prevent disasters. If it’s going to happen, it would be simple regulation. The door’s hinges are on the inside of the wall or else they’re not.

Half-wits like Leno and Gregory are talking about…and this is a well-rehearsed script by now…robust, beefed-up regulations that will really fix what was broken here.

It isn’t unlimited faith in government. It is a cowardly avoidance of specifics. Government regulators are supposed to prevent an oil rig from blowing up…how, exactly? They can’t answer. They don’t know enough about the situation. They just wanted to participate in the discussion and say something that sounds powerful.

But their plan depends on government being wise and, perhaps in some way, superhuman and perfect. That’s why it is important these people not have anything to say about anything. They lack the perceptive powers to realize that people don’t become perfect just because they manage to affix their names to an agency payroll. Too many episodes of X-Files, I suppose.

It’s exactly what we saw last year with the financial meltdown, remember that? “We need stronger oversight to check the greed that made this mess in the first place!” At least, in the case of the BP oil spill, we have yet to see strong evidence that the “oversight” actually caused “this mess in the first place.” That albatross continues to hang around the neck of the 2008/09 meltdown.

Our continuing survival may depend on finding a better definition for the R-word. Either that, or somehow stop twits like Jay Leno and David Gregory from voting. The crazy-loop whirlpool of stupid is small enough and tight enough that it is now predictable: Regulation causes a problem, blame goes flying around, people start pointing fingers, and then the intellectual lightweights come out of the woodwork to say “Goodness, what a mess, we need some more regulation.”

Word to the wise: Maybe not.

Here‘s the vision that jumps into my head when I think of “more regulation,” Jay Leno. What is it that you have in mind? And based on what exactly?

I’m just loving what Ann Althouse wrote this weekend:

If you’re going to criticize the new social studies curriculum adopted by the Texas Board of Education, you’d better quote it.

Or at least link to the text. And if you choose to paraphrase and not even link, and I have to look up the text myself, and your paraphrase is not accurate, it is my job to embarrass you by pointing that out.

“RTWT,” as they say, which is a modern-day acronym for Read The Whole Thing. Go, do it. I’ll wait.

Back already? Here’s a link to Dean Acheson. Julius Rosenberg. The Venona Project itself.

This is not the impression you got when you read the Washington Post story now is it? No, it’s not. The FACT of the matter, FACT in capital letters, is that they were communist spy fuckbags. They were guilty guilty guilty!

Something is wrong with Ms. Althouse’s permalinking, it’s probably The Good Lord’s way of telling her she needs to move her butt off of Blogger. But that which is supposed to be Comment #127, from New “Hussein” Nam, speaks for me:

No, this is the Washington Post. Except for the NY Times, this is the newspaper in the country that sets the tone. The very best journalists in the country are gathered together in these two places to create what are seen as the world’s two best newspapers.

Whenever they do something, it is deliberate. Nothing occurs in the pages of this newspaper without the express consent of its senior editors, people culled from the absolute cream of our nation’s crop.

And so you have to ask yourself … if the cream of our nation’s crop is deliberately mis-characterizing easily check-able facts … what exactly the fuck is really going on in our country?

I mean, who do these people think they’re fooling.

If some podunk fucking law professor in Wisconsin can fact-check their asses and show them to be complete fucking tools without even leaving her wine-soaked veranda, what exactly does the Washington Post think it can get away with?

And yet … they did it. They went ahead and ran this shit.

What does that tell you?

It tells me that they do so with complete fucking disregard for whether they’re caught lying or not. They don’t fucking care. They believe (whether it’s true anymore or not) that what they write BECOMES the truth. [italicized emphasis in original, bold emphasis mine]

Now, to figure out why I’m agreeing so strenuously there is a fair amount of reading for you to do. While you’re chasing off after all those links, you might want to take a breather and watch this:

It is an amateur-ish bio-pic about one Steve Benan, which I called up in order to educate myself. All you’re going to really learn is that young Mr. Benan blogs, and does it for a living. How admirable. And just for the record, although his political leanings are different from mine by a good angle, I agree with pretty much most of what he said about blogging and how it is cleaning up our discussion & thinking about current events…

However, I had to take young Master Benan out to the woodshed on his own blog. For the simplest of reasons, he’s a fucking goddamn craven pussy liar.

I’m wasn’t [whoopsie!] acquainted with the name Steve Benen before, but I am now. You’re going in my Liar File because I know I can’t depend on anything you say.

I included a link to an earlier poster, Algernon, who summarized things thusly:

Once again you state that Rand Paul “opposes the Civil Right Act” [sic]. That isn’t true. To this point, I figured you needed a short phrase, a quick restatement of the case, but this is inaccurate and misleading. He has, specifically, voiced an extreme libertarian view with respect to Title II — he does not oppose the Act in its entirety and you are continually claiming that he does.

The fact that you repeat this over and over is very disappointing. I’ve been reading your blog every day for a long time and this really bugs me.

Let us be fair, this is not exclusively Mr. Benan’s sin. For several days now the “blogosphere” has been covered with the slime and the muck and the ooze of craven lying pussy liars, intent on convincing multitudes that Rand Paul wants all the black folks drinking out of separate fountains and using separate entrances at all the fine eating establishments.

What comes next is not a representation of my fine self as a blogger, but as a consumer of blog feeds, and of news in general: I shall not be putting up with this shit anymore. These are whistle-stop lies in the age of the YouTubes, and as God is my witness I do not know what in the hell you fuckfaces are thinking. Your lies are a hundred and ten years behind the times, maybe a whole lot more than that. There are other bloggers out there.

Seriously…SERIOUSLY…how did you think you’d get away with this shit?

Yes, there is rage here. Rest assured, it is not the rage that comes from wasted time. You would be so humiliated, mortified, embarrassed, if you have one stinking shred of respect for yourselves or for the truth, if you could just catch a glimmering of what a quick and effortless chore it is to catch you at this time-honored tactic of churning out lies that used to work oh so well. Have a care and give it some thought, will you — if your intended victim has his suspicions so aroused, the entire chore is over and done with in the blink of an eye.

Using a black light to check an apartment for cat urine stains, that takes much, much longer.

No, my rage comes from having my intelligence insulted. Good gravy, how stupid you must think we all are!

Stupid, or unconcerned.

This Rand Paul thing is starting to take the form and shape of…actually, it took this form and shape a few days ago now…some good old-fashioned “classic” bigotry. Our left-wingers haven’t been so saintly about this, have they? Not now, not ever. Aw, them uppity black folks are so emotional, we’ll tell them Rand Paul wants to put them back on the plantation and they’ll just believe it. Black people are too stupid to know how to use Google!

Well, they’re not, and I’m not. You really need to drop this, like today. You aren’t planting any new thoughts in anybody’s minds at all. Except that people like you have absolutely zero respect for their readers, regardless of their skin color. Here I’d use the analogy about pissing on shoes and saying that it’s raining, but I don’t want to insult any shoe-pissers out there.

You people should be banished from Internet connections for decades at a time, right along with identity thieves and malware authors. Seriously, I really mean that. Without your “product” enriching our lives, what is the world missing?

Josh Painter says Sarah Palin is “so living inside the White House that they should be charging her rent.” Meheheh.

On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked by host Bob Schieffer to comment on Sarah Palin’s statement on “Fox News Sunday” that the Obama administration has a cozy relationship with Big Oil:

“Sarah Palin was involved in that election, but I don’t think, apparently, was paying a whole lot of attention,” Gibbs said. “I’m almost sure that the oil companies don’t consider the Obama administration a huge ally – we proposed a windfall profits tax when they jacked their oil prices up to charge for gasoline.” “My suggestion to Sarah Palin would be to get slightly more informed as to what’s going on in and around oil drilling in this country,” he added.

Gov. Palin wasted no time in firing back. She tweeted:

“Mr. Gibbs, BP gave over $3.5mill to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with with the largest amount going to Obama”

Moments later, she sent another tweet:

“During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years… Dispute these facts.”

The time has come to say it:

If the Obama administration is the picture of “sophisticated” people, and Sarah Palin is the antithesis, then nobody in their right mind should want to be what Gibbs calls “informed.” It’s obvious what he has in mind doesn’t have quite so much to do with uncovering facts, or committing them to memory, but cherry-picking them.

It isn’t that I think Palin is smarter than Gibbs. But it’s become undeniable that she is generally better prepared for reasoned, logical discussions involving those troublesome things called facts, than anybody who works in this White House on a more official basis. Cherry-picking is, lately, about all any liberal wants to have to do with the facts, and they’re hoisted by their own petard over this again and again and again.

Suggestion for the administration: If you’re going to willingly enter into an antagonistic relationship with the people who live in this country you seek to “rule,” stop living in a West Wing monologue. Put some thought into what the opposition is going to be saying about things, and prepare. Gibbs’ gaffe could only have been committed, here, by someone rigidly accustomed to living and working in a cloister, someone thoroughly unacquainted with real disagreement. It is the kind of error made only by someone surrounded by yes-men. It was a “George Lucas thinks up Jar Jar Binks” type of mistake.

Holy Man’s donations from big oil in general, and BP in particular, was hardly a low profile story. But it comes as no surprise to me at all that there may be some hardcore lefty types, perhaps even some highly placed in our nation’s executive branch, who are entirely unaware of it.

Expect more embarrassing boondoggles to take place before this drama’s done.

Okay, I may as well go ahead and acknowledge it.

The Blog That Nobody Reads has a brand new gadfly…although we don’t know if he/she/it will take on the persistence, incoherence and uselessness of the typical liberal gadfly, so for now let’s just call it a gad-maggot.

In a post called “Oh snap. You got me there,” some proud progressive guy named TBogg who may or may not be the gad-maggot in question, takes note of a provocative piece of artwork that appeared in our pages in which we acknowledged the juvenile level of discourse taking place with regard to the Tea Party movement. Points to TBogg for figuring out (roughly) the meaning behind our funny name, but you can make up your own mind how to grade his various conclusions that germinate from this.

From another one of those blogs with a fancy-schmancy name like Parmenides Surveys The American Experiment At The End of History, meant to convey to the reader that there is deep thoughts and intellectual rigor by the shit-ton to be mulled and savored … until the blogger actually posts something and then, you know: just another dumb-ass with a computer and no social life.

What a devastating attack that would be, if I were still twenty-two.

And an impressive array of likewise-thinking comments, seventeen items in total as of this writing. Not a single coherent thought behind any one of ’em.

I’ve mostly shrugged off the ankle-biting. Partly because I’m not altogether sure why I’m attracting this ridicule for the specific attempt toward thinking in a logical, mature way, like a guy who measured the diameter of the earth before the invention of satellites, planes, et al. Why does this earn scorn? Is it my achievement or lack thereof? Or for merely putting forth the effort?

I’ve maintained for awhile that some of us, a good-sized chunk of us, come from a virtual-other-world, in which one is expected not to put in the effort. My theory is that these are quasi-adults, the weird other species we see before us when children are given every little thing they need or want in life without working for it…and then they mature. You see, there is no need for responsible logical thinking when you have that kind of enviable life. And is it really enviable?

No matter. If TBogg or some among his audience thought more kindly upon this ancient and perhaps dying practice of thinking like a grown-up, perhaps one among them would have figured out the graphic was not my creation, but that of Kini Aloha Guy.

Who at last report was doing a far superior job of bringing the fight to them, compared to what I’d be doing. Well, anyway, I guess you can peruse the pages of tbogg.firedoglake.com if you want to see how people do their blogging when they have social lives…sit on the edge of your chair quivering with suspense as you read about basset hounds getting jealous of each other, and Holy shit I forgot it was Wednesday night and I’m supposed to blog about something. The rest of it us rather mundane left-wing crap. You know the drill: “Oh I do not like this thing over here. Here is a link. Help me make fun of it.” Lather, rinse, repeat.

Exit question, and it’s a rather ancient one: What is their big problem with freedom & liberty, anyway? Is that like the axe-murderer boyfriend who says “if I can’t have you no one else can have you either”?

…from the ass-end point-of-view of the train.

And how was your day?

Hat tip to Boortz.

Hat tip to Buck.

Well, good.

Terrorists are probing America for weak spots. Once they succeed, they’ll move into high gear on this. Actually, the very reason they’re checking out our weak spots is because, shark-like, they smelled blood on the water in the first place.

The estimates that 5,000 barrels per day are being let loose in the Gulf of Mexico, may be vastly understated.

A little girl told the First Lady, right out there in front of God and everybody, that her mother doesn’t have papers.

In 2009, for every three dollars in tax revenue our government collected, it spent five.

The President of another country came to our Congress and gave a speech. He singled out one of our states and unloaded a whole bunch of crap all over it. He was not boiled in oil for this. He wasn’t yanked off stage, he wasn’t even booed off stage. Quite to the contrary, one of our two major political parties — the one in power right now — cheered wildly.

Meanwhile, our Attorney General, at last report, still hasn’t read the Arizona law he so vociferously criticizes. Our Homeland Security Secretary also hasn’t “reviewed it in detail.” This is our egghead administration…our Englightened Ones. Their coronation was supposed to signal once and for all that it’s pronounced NU-CLE-AR, and their wise policies would make us all wonderful and happy. Well, how much can their opinions be worth if they aren’t based on fact?

President Obama is replacing His Director of National Intelligence.

Should I even go into the hot new “scientific” debate about whether the planet is cooking or freezing to death?

There is an awful lot of news out there. I make it a point to crack open Memeorandum at least once a day so I can stay up to date not only on what’s going on, but on what “they” think is particularly worthy of extended discussion and analysis.

In response to the natural question “who exactly is ‘they’,” I cannot provide an answer. What is ironic is that this makes the nameless faceless “they” a lot more important, not less so. Someone is grasping for a whole lot of power, and succeeding at getting it.

See, whoever this “they” is, “they” think the one thing that is truly deserving of extended analysis is this: Rand Paul’s position on the Civil Rights Act that was signed into law when he was one year old. And not the senate candidate’s real position on it, oh no: But his ostensible position. How it could be interpreted. The faceless nameless “they” is making sure we’re all up to speed on the wild, fragile, wild-ass-guess ruminations, interpretations and inferences of yet another faceless nameless “they.”

Now if you’re not a lazy, casual consumer of news, the meaning of this is unmistakable: Rand Paul has just become a threat. Once a Republican has become a threat, we have this informal tradition that all of the printing presses and all of the airwaves and all of the web servers have to be filled with whispering. He will be incompetent or he will be evil, perhaps both. Typically, the way we decide this is with the “Pearl Harbor Rule”: If the Republican was born before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he is evil incarnate like Jesse Helms or Dick Cheney; if he was born afterward he’s a dope like George W. Bush or Sarah Palin. It’s all about fear. We need to scare the brittle man-bashing females with daddy issues into thinking the country is about to be run by their parents, we need to scare the minority advocacy groups into thinking the place is about to be taken over by the KKK. Or, we need to scare the snooty, condescending, phony-baloney intellectual atheists into thinking it’s going to be transformed into a theocracy, under the tutelage of some moron who can’t even spell the word “dinosaur” — which, by the way, he’s convinced was lumbering around 4,000 years ago doing beast-of-burden work for Fred Flintstone.

Rand Paul was born well after Pearl Harbor, yet somehow the test has been twisted around. The best way to fight him is to portray him as a racist, not as a dimbulb. I guess that just goes to demonstrate the passage of time.

James Taranto opines on the non-issue:

Taken at face value, the question itself–How would you have voted if you had been in the Senate as an infant?–is silly. It is a reasonable question only if it is understood more broadly, as an inquiry into Paul’s political philosophy. The question within the question is: How uncompromising are you in your adherence to small-government principles?

Paul gave his answer: Pretty darn uncompromising–uncompromising enough to take a position that is not only politically embarrassing but morally dubious by his own lights, as evidenced by this transcript from the Courier-Journal interview, provided by the left-wing site ThinkProgress.org:

Interviewer: But under your philosophy, it would be OK for Dr. King not to be served at the counter at Woolworths?

Paul: I would not go to that Woolworths, and I would stand up in my community and say that it is abhorrent, um, but, the hard part — and this is the hard part about believing in freedom — is, if you believe in the First Amendment, for example — you have too, for example, most good defenders of the First Amendment will believe in abhorrent groups standing up and saying awful things…It’s the same way with other behaviors. In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior.

Again, Paul could have given a “straight” answer to the question–a flat “no”–that made clear his personal disapproval of discrimination while evading what was really a question about his political philosophy. Far from being evasive, Paul has shown himself to be both candid and principled to a fault.

We do mean to a fault. In this matter, Paul seems to us to be overly ideological and insufficiently mindful of the contingencies of history. Although we are in accord with his general view that government involvement in private business should be kept to a minimum, in our view the Civil Rights Act’s restrictions on private discrimination were necessary in order to break down a culture of inequality that was only partly a matter of oppressive state laws. On the other hand, he seeks merely to be one vote of 100 in the Senate. An ideologically hardheaded libertarian in the Senate surely would do the country more good than harm.

I’m not sure why it’s a fault to believe in the First Amendment, and to keep standing up for it when the establishment intelligentsia comes after you for doing so. And I’m thoroughly lost on why Paul is the one on the defensive here. Who are all these people who find fault with what he said? Don’t they believe in free speech and free enterprise? Or do they believe in it only to a certain point? They think government should interfere with how a private business is run? In what other scenarios is this permissible? Do they recognize a line, and if so, are they involved in moving that line? Do they tolerate someone else moving the line?

Half a century ago it was a Woolworth’s lunch counter, in the mid 1990’s it was breastfeeding. Does the business manager have anything to say about anything, ever? Are all businesses merely subsidiaries of the all-powerful glorious federal government?

Must all ethical conundrums be resolved through federal law? Should we keep legislating and legislating until we all think the same way about everything?

Those questions, in my view, are what we should be asking; his primary victory notwithstanding, I see Paul as less of a newsworthy item, far less of a threat, than those who seek to criticize him. After all, Rand Paul has merely won a nomination. He may very well never be seated in the United States Senate. And even if he is, as Taranto points out, he’ll be one of a hundred. If he’s rigid and uncompromising as that one-out-of a-hundred, what of it? Isn’t it a logical contradiction to insist that all hundred senators must be middle-of-the-road fair-weather-friend wafflers, for the sake of moderation?

Contrasted with the younger Paul, the people who are deciding that this is some kind of a scandal, that it is worthy of more attention than the fact that the current administration’s decisions about state laws are based on a whole-lotta-nuthin’, are making their “policies” right freakin’ now. They do this by declaring what is a scandal, what is not, and that we should all fall in line and be concerned about this thing but not that thing.

We cannot unilaterally decide as individuals whether they’ll succeed at that or not. But we can certainly decide as individuals whether they’ll be met with any resistance. It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that this faceless nameless “they” is not used to meeting up with any.

Yeah, that’s not good. Girlfriend murmured something about this to me as she came to bed last night.

A shoplifter at a Walmart store in Folsom stabbed a manager as he tried to take back the stolen merchandise, police said.

The scuffle took place Thursday afternoon at the store on the 1000 block of Riley Street.

Folsom police said the attacker ran across Glenn Drive and onto a bike trail.

The manager walked across the street to Folsom Fire Station 35, where he was treated and eventually transported with unknown injuries.

Folsom police officers were searching a landscaped area near the main entrance to the store Thursday evening.

The attacker is wanted for robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and other charges, police said.

Yeah I know, it’s Walmart where all the riff raff hang out. Nothing to see here.

That really isn’t the situation at all. I know this piece of space well. It’s 3.7 miles from my front door by bike, across the street from our local post office. Wally-World and the fire station form a sort of archway dividing a thriving business district from an upscale residential full of houses we’ve seriously prospected at one time or another. A hundred yards around the corner is the park where we took my son when he was a toddler, and across from that, the other park where I taught him to catch a ball.

No neighborhood deserves to be terrorized, of course. But at the same time it’s a real sock in the gut seeing a community like Wholesome-Folsom, which has worked so hard throughout so many years to be among the very best places you can think about raising kids, get all stabby.

Glad to see the manager went and sought medical assistance on his own. We drifted off to sleep hearing that he’d been “stabbed repeatedly” and not knowing what to think about that.

They’re suffering from a Rodney Dangerfield problem, can’t get no respect (hat tip to Cas).

When a Saudi religious policeman sauntered about an amusement park in the eastern Saudi Arabian city of Al-Mubarraz looking for unmarried couples illegally socializing, he probably wasn’t expecting much opposition.

But when he approached a young, 20-something couple meandering through the park together, he received an unprecedented whooping.

A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi religious police known locally as the Hai’a, asked the couple to confirm their identities and relationship to one another, as it is a crime in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women to mix.

For unknown reasons, the young man collapsed upon being questioned by the cop.

According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the woman then allegedly laid into the religious policeman, punching him repeatedly, and leaving him to be taken to the hospital with bruises across his body and face.

Old Iron thinks this is hilarious.

Me, I’m just waiting for the same thing to happen here. It’s just too bad we don’t have any “virtue police” who strut around begging for an ass-kicking.

Or do we (hat tip to Boortz)?

Yes I know these are kids and I shouldn’t be hoping they get beaten up, and I also see it is a parody. But we do have “virtue police” of our own.

It would seem both countries are bit overdue in the “civil disobedience” department. It would be nice if a tree hugger, at any age, started waggling a finger at someone for…not littering, I’m with ’em on the littering thing, I hate litterers…but something altogether acceptable. Like having a dorm room fridge. Or drinking out of a styrofoam cup. And then, how did Old Iron put it? Get his ass handed to him by a girl in a Ninja outfit.

It would make my day. Just sayin’.

19. Is Europe all that & a bag of chips?

That’s from my list of twenty-five questions…that, uh…well, I never did come up with a good name for that list. It’s a list of questions that, if I know how you’re going to answer one, I know with something approaching perfect certainty how you’re going to answer all of the others.

Cylarz is unequivocal:

No. What kind of stupid question is that? Before they were the continent of socialism and immorality, they were the continent of tyranny and petty grievances among one another. Our forebears came here to get away from all of the nonsense going on there.

There is something about the way European political leaders talk that just sets my teeth on edge. And it isn’t the sound of their voices (although there is that, too). There’s something in their consonant-punctuated resonance that produces a sharp pain…whereas when His Holiness President Soetoro drones on with His uhs and His ers and His “let me be clear” and His “make no mistake” and His “for far too long we have”…all I can report is a dull ache. The euro-pansy produces a special agony where Chairman Zero brings only monotony.

I think it is this: They seem to deliberately confuse the objective with the subjective. They speak of priorities as if the priorities have some timeless quality to them, as if it has always been this way and shall always be this way as long as the rivers flow and the rocks sit around; but what they really mean is “while I am in office.” And it is to be implicitly understood that the latter of those is what they really mean. It is as if they are trapped in that revolving door of proving what wonderful decent people they are, and then thirty second later, proving it all over again. European or not, that has always bugged me.

And not without reason. It leads to bad policy. Their crime is perpetuating it, ours is refusing to pay attention:

You might think that Europe’s economic turmoil would inject a note of urgency into America’s budget debate. After all, high government deficits and debt are the roots of Europe’s problems, and these same problems afflict the United States. But no. Most Americans, starting with the nation’s political leaders, dismiss what’s happening in Europe as a continental drama with little relevance to them.

What Americans resolutely avoid is a realistic debate about the desirable role of government. How big should it be? Should it favor the old or the young? Will social spending crowd out defense spending? Will larger government dampen economic growth through higher deficits or taxes? No one engages this debate, because if rigorously conducted, it would disappoint both liberals and conservatives.

Victor Davis Hanson writes of “The Other European Volcano” that has resulted from Europeans failing to rigorously conduct this debate…and we still enjoy the luxury of choosing to pay attention, or wallow in ignorance.

Over here, we were often lectured by “progressives” that almost everything Europe did was better — subsidized mass transit, free college tuition, extended maternity leave, early retirement, and “soft-power” diplomacy. Indeed, Obama’s presidential campaign was in some senses a stealthy referendum on Europeanization. And once he was elected, his moves to raise taxes, expand government, expropriate some private industries, run up exponentially increasing deficits, subsidize environmentalism, and triangulate with enemies and allies abroad were European Union to the core.

Few wanted to listen when it was pointed out — well before the Greek meltdown — that on key questions of demography and immigration, the future ofthe European Union was bleak. The very idea that, in historical terms, socialism , agnosticism, pacifism, and hedonism were not only interrelated and synergistic, but also suicidal for civilization, was considered crackpot.

Want a eulogy? One that pulls no punches? One that really lowers the boom on all the nonsense, shedding every last scintilla of diplomacy? Look no further than George Will:

“The coining of money,” said William Blackstone more than two centuries ago, “is in all states the act of the sovereign power.”

But the EU is neither a state nor sovereign enough to enforce its rules: No eurozone nation is complying with the EU requirement that deficits not exceed 3 percent of GDP.

The EU has a flag no one salutes, an anthem no one sings, a president no one can name, a parliament no one other than its members wants to have power, a capital of coagulated bureaucracy no one admires or controls, a currency that presupposes what neither does nor should nor soon will exist, and rules of fiscal behavior that no member has been penalized for ignoring. The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction — that “Europe” has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.

The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that. The bills depict nonexistent windows, gateways and bridges. They are from … nowhere, which is what “utopia” means.

That’s a-gonna leave a mark.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering which of those you should pop open and read top-to-bottom, I would recommend the last of the three, followed by the second-to-last. Messrs. Will and Hanson are writing about a grave subject, perhaps the surest destroyer of civilizations in all of human history, which is the relaxation of fiscal discipline. Europe, now several centuries into the old sport of confusing the subjective with the objective, is banishing failure, eliminating real-world consequences from the sustenance of red ink. “No nation will be allowed to sink beneath the weight of its recklessness” is how Mr. Will puts it.

But without consequences, what arresting force is there? Has any living thinking organism, be it a nation or an individual, ever called a stop to the writing of more and more checks without sparing a thought for the checkbook register? It’s just like any other measurement in mathematical theory: Without a meaningful zero point, it’s all relative. And there will always be some items dangled in front of the check-writer, begging to be bought. They’ll always be there; and we’ll always “need” every single last one of ’em.

The zero point has been banished to oblivion. And so the money will have to freely flow. It would be something tantamount to treason to suggest anything else; and without a doubt, it would place the speaker’s wonderfulness in serious question.

Failure. Universally available, and free. No person, enterprise or industry is “Too Big To Fail” — ever. Failure is regarded as something that is always possible, to be avoided at all costs, but never to be ignored or sidestepped once it is earned. Depriving a man of the failure he has justly earned, is rightfully seen as just as deplorable as depriving him of wages he has justly earned.

Item #4 on my list of 42 definitions of a strong society.

This is the problem with Europe. They are trying to eradicate failure, and in so doing, jeopardizing whatever ability they might’ve once had, to be strong.

Dr. Sowell, who is a national treasure at any age:

One of the many fashionable notions that have caught on among some of the intelligentsia is that old people have “a duty to die,” rather than become a burden to others.

This is more than just an idea discussed around a seminar table. Already the government-run medical system in Britain is restricting what medications or treatments it will authorize for the elderly. Moreover, it seems almost certain that similar attempts to contain runaway costs will lead to similar policies when American medical care is taken over by the government.

Make no mistake about it, letting old people die is a lot cheaper than spending the kind of money required to keep them alive and well. If a government-run medical system is going to save any serious amount of money, it is almost certain to do so by sacrificing the elderly.
:
Talk about “a duty to die” made me think back to my early childhood in the South, during the Great Depression of the 1930s. One day, I was told that an older lady — a relative of ours — was going to come and stay with us for a while, and I was told how to be polite and considerate towards her.

She was called “Aunt Nance Ann,” but I don’t know what her official name was or what her actual biological relationship to us was. Aunt Nance Ann had no home of her own. But she moved around from relative to relative, not spending enough time in any one home to be a real burden.

At that time, we didn’t have things like electricity or central heating or hot running water. But we had a roof over our heads and food on the table — and Aunt Nance Ann was welcome to both.

Poor as we were, I never heard anybody say, or even intimate, that Aunt Nance Ann had “a duty to die.”
:
It is today, in an age when homes have flat-panelled TVs, and most families eat in restaurants regularly or have pizzas and other meals delivered to their homes, that the elites — rather than the masses — have begun talking about “a duty to die.”

Back in the days of Aunt Nance Ann, nobody in our family had ever gone to college. Indeed, none had gone beyond elementary school. Apparently you need a lot of expensive education, sometimes including courses on ethics, before you can start talking about “a duty to die.”

Early this morning I posted a list of twenty-five questions that reveal…something. Something about the individuals that answer those questions in one way or another. I boldly asserted that if I knew how a fellow would answer one or two of these questions, I could divine with great certainty how he would respond to the others. Question #11 is “Does the inner decency of a people, or lack thereof, show through in the laws passed by their governments?”

I note, with great interest, that the people who would answer in the affirmative to this particular question — seem to unerringly support new rules for our civilization, that do not manifest or encourage anything close to what I would refer to as “inner decency.”

So I’m in the middle of a crazy day…a “No Meetings, and Thank God” day. I haul my chicken rice bowl back to my desk and, in the middle of a compile, I bring up Gerard’s page to see what’s going on. There’s this video embed I make a note of watching that evening…and then at Joan’s place I see exactly the same thing. I just glanced at a couple of comments before I realized I had to watch this right away. So out came the headphones, and I hit play.

Oh, Sweet Jesus. This happened in The Land of the Turnpike? Do tell?

Yes, let it become a trend.

Ah, props to the radio guys, or whoever picks out their “best of” cuts for the weekend. I turned on the bathroom radio not knowing for sure what I was gonna get…maybe an infommercial about some wonder herb that would flush out my colon and make my dick bigger, maybe financial advice about adjustable rate mortgages, I swear I saw a UFO back in ’53, pesticides to beat all pesticides. Well something went right, I got information I could actually use: The back-story behind what they were talking about Wednesday morning.

Might as well start there: Jack got kicked off a jury. It must be exquisitely frustrating. (I wouldn’t know, the one time I burned up an entire day on the entrance exam, I was selected as an alternate, and then the primary got kicked off, so my wasted day was a prelude to a wasted week.) He got kicked off by ONE question: That one question is #21 on the list, below, that I built up around it. He said “choices,” and the defense attorney didn’t like his answer so out he went.

I approve of the question but I disapprove of how it was used. I think it should be asked of everyone in the courtroom, regardless of what’s being heard whether it’s criminal or civil. And then the judge should kick outta there anyone who answers the opposite way. Lawyers should lose their licenses over it. And blow right on through there, every last man, right down to the bailiff.

My “D’Jever Notice?” moment has to do with all of the twenty-five questions. They, outside of #21, are my own creation…I had been doing some thinking about this after Wednesday’s show, which was quite thought provoking. My Dry Cleaning lady had heard it as well and we had quite the talk about it.

Anyway, I have learned this over a number of years about people. If you find me a complete stranger, and tell me how he answered to one of these questions, I can predict with amazing accuracy how he will respond to another of the questions. And with that prediction confirmed, I can pretty much guarantee how he will reply to the other twenty-three.

1. Should we use the tax code to punish people?
2. Should our leaders be representatives of what the rest of us are, or should they be better than the rest of us?
3. Should anyone in our country work under a salary cap? Should we perhaps have a universal salary cap?
4. Do borders matter?
5. Clarity or agreement?
6. Does the minority opinion count?
7. If “there’s just something about him” that impresses you in a positive way, do you want to figure out why before he earns your support?
8. Does the wealth gap matter?
9. Security or prosperity?
10. Can we end poverty and famine? What about war, can we get rid of that someday?
11. Does the inner decency of a people, or lack thereof, show through in the laws passed by their governments?
12. Is a right really a right, if it costs someone else something?
13. If your kids grow up never learning how to do what you had to do because technology has made it unnecessary — that’s harmless, right?
14. Is it alright to major in a discipline that is highly unlikely to get you a job?
15. Should it matter how many men, women, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, straights, gays, handicapped are seated in Congress or the Supreme Court?
16. Is empathy important in a judge?
17. Is it alright with you that your daughter picked her current boyfriend because “he makes me laugh”?
18. Are businesses more likely than government agencies to screw people over?
19. Is Europe all that & a bag of chips?
20. Is a real man in touch with his feelings?
21. What got you where you are today, be it up or down: circumstances, or your decisions?
22. Should we let illegal immigrants in, and leave them them to continue doing the jobs Americans won’t do?
23. Should we worry at all about screwing up the economy by means of our various social-services safety nets, or are they inherently harmless?
24. Would you feel comfortable leaving your house, or your car, or your pets, or your kids in the care of the politicians who have most often received your support?
25. As we learn more about evolution, will it ultimately explain everything about every living thing?

From Kini Aloha Guy.

Yukozuna!

Good. This should reflect poorly on all the race-baiters and they richly deserve it.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who has been critical of Arizona’s new immigration law, said Thursday he hasn’t yet read the law and is going by what he’s read in newspapers or seen on television.

Mr. Holder is conducting a review of the law, at President Obama’s request, to see if the federal government should challenge it in court. He said he expects he will read the law by the time his staff briefs him on their conclusions.

“I’ve just expressed concerns on the basis of what I’ve heard about the law. But I’m not in a position to say at this point, not having read the law, not having had the chance to interact with people are doing the review, exactly what my position is,” Mr. Holder told the House Judiciary Committee.

This weekend Mr. Holder told NBC’s “Meet the Press” program that the Arizona law “has the possibility of leading to racial profiling.” He had earlier called the law’s passage “unfortunate,” and questioned whether the law was unconstitutional because it tried to assume powers that may be reserved for the federal government.

Rep. Ted Poe, who had questioned Mr. Holder about the law, wondered how he could have those opinions if he hadn’t yet read the legislation.

“It’s hard for me to understand how you would have concerns about something being unconstitutional if you haven’t even read the law,” the Texas Republican told the attorney general.

The object of the exercise, aside from the instant-democrat-voters and the cheap labor, is anarchy. Every good destroyer of civilizations knows the first step is to take the illegal and make it kinda-sorta-a-little-bit-legal. This whole thing with skin color is just a diversion from what’s being done.

It was not quite so long ago when President Obama, Holder’s boss, presented a turkey of a health care plan to Congress…or to be more precise about it, Congress presented it to Him. There were all kinds of objections against it much more valid than the one about the Arizona law leading to racial profiling. Obama’s response was to give a zillion and one wonderful speeches, each one more impressive than the last…which is to say President Obama inhaled and exhaled during this time. In His speeches He regularly called to Republicans to “come up with ideas of your own” if they could. Which they had done, actually.

But it interests me that I’m not hearing that kind of rhetoric now. Arizona is being invaded and Arizona has given up waiting for the feds to enforce the laws; they’ve taken the job on themselves for the sake of gettin’ it done. We hear all this talk about “could lead to racial profiling” and I’m not hearing too often of anyone saying “Hey! If you don’t think this is the right answer, come up with some answers of your own!”

I find that interesting. Isn’t that just the logical inquiry, assuming these critics are to be taken seriously?

Update 5/15/10: FrankJ comments as only he can:

Eric Holder is really sure the Arizona bill is a bad bill worthy of condemnation even though he never read it. It’s kinda like with the Democrats saying how super important it was to pass the health care bill even though none of them knew what was in it.

So why don’t Democrats read bills? I can think of two possibilities:

1. They have magical psychic powers and can know what’s in a bill without reading it.

2. They’re illiterate.

The politicians often argue they’re just too busy to read all these bills they’re voting on and commenting on. Busy doing what, though? Don’t they get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to make laws and enforce laws? Wouldn’t you think part of that generous salary would be maybe reading those laws? What exactly do they do all day to earn their money? They already have these useless jobs where just sit around and talk and occasionally vote; is it really so much to ask they do some honest work and read these important bills? The Arizona one they’re all freaking out about isn’t even that long.

Maybe we should write all our bills in Spanish. Then we can hire illegal aliens to read them since apparently that’s yet another one of those jobs Americans won’t do.

Daphne is feeling homeowner pains.

I can’t believe that, in one year’s time, this is exactly where I’m going to be sitting if everything goes well. I’ve sat out this game for a long time now, mostly because of a wretched mistake I made in my early twenties, but now that we’re forty-something apartment rats it’s time to get on the stick and get back into the swing of things. The only way out is through.

But oh my goodness, does this rant of hers bring back some memories.

Wall Street Journal:

The findings suggest that public opinion has hardened in advance of the 2010 elections, making it tougher for Democrats to translate their legislative successes, or a tentatively improving U.S. economy, into gains among voters.

Republicans have reassembled their coalition by reconnecting with independents, seniors, blue-collar voters, suburban women and small town and rural voters—all of whom had moved away from the party in the 2006 elections, in which Republicans lost control of the House. Those voter groups now favor GOP control of Congress.

“This data is what it looks like when Republicans assemble what for them is a winning coalition,” said GOP pollster Bill McInturff, who conducts the survey with Democratic pollster Peter Hart.

He said the Republican alliance appeared to be “firmer and more substantial” than earlier in the year.

Mr. Hart noted that, to his own party’s detriment, a series of major news events and legislative achievements—including passage of a sweeping health-care law, negotiating a nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia and making a quick arrest in the Times Square terrorism attempt—has not measurably increased support for Democrats. “A lot has happened,” he said, “but the basic dynamic of the 2010 elections seems almost set in concrete.”

A big shift is evident among independents, who at this point in the 2006 campaign favored Democratic control of Congress rather than Republican control, 40% to 24%. In this poll, independents favored the GOP, 38% to 30%.

It would seem someone has “squandered” some “goodwill.”

The pattern will continue because of, not in spite of, “passage of a sweeping health-care law, negotiating a nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia and making a quick arrest in the Times Square terrorism attempt.” The health care bill is a turkey, disarmament is nothing but ostrich diplomacy, and the whole Times Square thing is a scandal that ought to involve a massive purge from our government’s highest offices and maybe a guillotine. Once again terrorists were thwarted by their own inept bomb-making.

We are so lucky to have Obama be our President right now! Really, we are. If we have to have Him, I’m so glad we’ve got Him when the terrorists seem to have started sucking at their jobs.

I can just see the terrorist boss right now, pacing to and fro in his cave in Pakistan or wherever: “Come on you shitheads, we’ve only got six months left before our window of opportunity closes! Let’s get hold of some decent fuses here and use ’em right!”

Back in ’94, I made a special point to bring in an extra special dinner on election night so I could watch the returns come in and thoroughly enjoy myself. This year, I think I’m going to call a caterer. No matter how it turns out, we need to look past it, onward into the future and ask ourselves the question that really matters: How do we make sure we never need to learn this lesson again? How do we talk to our young people, with their dwindling attention spans, and get the message across to them that government does not exist to give you an emotional high or to keep that high sustained; it is there to butt out where it doesn’t belong, to make responsible decisions where it does belong, and that freedom and opportunity are much more important than more & more nanny state programs?

Obviously, the first step is going to have to be a conservative coalition that sticks to its knitting, and doesn’t make the mistake of acting like a rancid rotten incumbent power when it’s been an incumbent power for awhile. But you can’t stop there; all of the blame doesn’t go there. The voters have to take some of the blame.

MediaMatters has put together a list of right wing bloggers and pundits who have actually deigned to notice that Solicitor General Elena Kagan, the President’s nominee to succeed Supreme Court associate justice John Paul Stevens, is a frump-a-dump.

The Blog That Nobody Reads didn’t make the cut. Oh well.

Our concern is not so much with the Solicitor General as an individual, but with the trend overall. And this, we submit, is something that should concern everybody…especially career-minded women who happen to be gorgeous. The pattern would seem to indicate they need to stop wasting their time, at least with regard to any career endeavor adjudicated by a progressive. It seems there is a memorandum somewhere forbidding career advancement for any female endowed with as much pulchritude as Sandra Day O’Connor. It’s outta the question.

There is some measure of twisted, inexplicable pride wrapped up in ignoring the obvious when it’s right in front of your face, and has been paraded before you for decades. Or, as our resident gadfly Arthurstone says…

That would be a perfect slogan for liberals. “We are decent people because we ignore facts.”

And that’s why I consider this to be a serious issue even though I really don’t give a fig whether the most powerful female progressives in our government look like Alyssa Milano. The existence of the “uglier than O’Connor” memorandum should be proven or disproven…since that would be discrimination…something progressives say they oppose. But if such a memorandum does not exist, then Arthurstone’s ignorance is metaphorical for something else; it’s a manifestation of something larger and more dangerous.

Just go shopping sometime — not at Wal-Mart though. Someplace else. Look at the women you find there. How many are ugly? How many are babes? I’d put Sarah Palin at about the eightieth percentile, meaning one-in-five are even hotter. (Sorry Sarah.) How many look like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Donna Shalala, Janet “System Worked Perfectly” Napolitano, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor? Maybe one in four. Our Secretary of State may be the beauty contest winner, so let’s make her the waterline. It rises to one in three.

If you were to task me to fill all these positions with women who were qualified for them, without regard to how they looked, I’d never be able to stack them with women who uglier than two thirds of the general population. I wouldn’t be able to do it. Not unless I was really, really trying.

See how Palin’s been treated? I don’t think that’s because of a Couric interview. I don’t think it’s because she’s a conservative or even quite so much because she kept Trig. What you’re seeing, in Alaska, is the attitude our hardcore liberals have against pretty women. An appealing female countenance is a form of success and they cannot stand success. Well, you look at Kagan and see what you want, but that’s what I see.

I would never be able to go out in that shopping mall and find a woman who looks like Elena Kagan. So yes, you’re right Media Matters, the remarks could be called crude and classless. If they came from someone in a position of real power rather than from a bunch of shock jocks, I might join you in demanding some kind of apology. But if you’re trying to convince me that noticing the trend is indicative of some ugly personality defect, that this is the picture of a mindset we do not want making important decisions about things…sorry, you march in that parade alone.

Arthur has shown where this other kind of thinking, this “count me among those who ignore the facts” thinking, comes off the rails. If you have apathy, and you want to advertise that you have it so people might be led to believe you’re decent, then you have to care about people noticing your apathy. Which means you have to lose it. You have to become a walking breathing lie, you have to become the opposite of what you are pretending to be. And that is why, IMO, progressives seem to be entrenched in this habit of hiring and promoting ugly women. They are eager to put up meaningless symbols that ostensibly show what wonderful and decent human beings they are.

Probably to compensate for something. Yes, just let that thought percolate awhile.

Update: I see Harvey didn’t make the cut either. He should’ve. What’s the deal, MM? You’re getting sloppy.

Congratulations to blogsister Cassy for getting hitched over the weekend. And by the way, she’s once again reading Feministing so you don’t have to. Where harpy gargoyle and ex-Edwards-blogger Amanda Marcotte is being interviewed. Just let the words wash over your ears and eyes…

For me, women’s rights and liberalism are, in my mind, pretty hard to unhook, and it fascinates and amuses me that you see conservatives complain that feminists are always with the democrats, as if there’s ever going to be a form of conservative feminism. You look at someone like Sarah Palin trying to wear that mantle, and you see the flaw in trying to be a so-called conservative feminist, which is that you’re not very pro-women. Women need things for equality that tailor very neatly to the general liberal agenda: Clean environment, universal healthcare, civil rights, individual rights, bodily autonomy, things like that. I fail to see how the two agendas are all that different. The flipside, of course, is that most liberals I know, whether they call themselves feminists or not, tend to agree with the general feminist goals. The only real opposition that you see to those goals is coming from the right.

…The healthcare battles were truly awful, because Bart Stupak was allowed to run around on television, portraying himself as some kind of morally upstanding icon, whereas, what I was seeing was an idiot who didn’t understand the issues and was being duped by a bunch of Republicans. And I saw no investigation whatsoever into the fact that he had all these connections to Republicans that he wasn’t really talking about – except on The Rachel Maddow Show. That was probably the thing that has made me angriest because it nearly brought the healthcare debate to a close. And I think it’s hilarious that he’s retiring and thinks he’s the target of harassment now. He should take a day at an abortion clinic and find out what it’s really like to be a target of harassment and abuse. And of course, the thing with Stupak is that most of the threatening emails and phone callers that he was getting were from the right. They don’t take well to a perceived betrayal at all.

What I think is hilarious and infuriating and makes me LOL and grind my teeth together and let loose a big ol’ gut chuckle and get angrier than Marvin the Martian and tickles my funnybone and chaps my hide, is this awkward-beyond-any-description working-in of “It makes me (some superlative term) angry” and “I find amusing.” I grew up in a college town and I’m well acquainted with this. There is no intentional irony going on there; the contradiction speaks to the general thoughtlessness of it. It’s a cliche the college kids toss into their monologues after they’ve been told a few times too many how unbelievably smart they are. This makes me sizzle with fury; this makes me laugh out loud. I find this to be unforgivable, I find this to be comical.

If you hear these words phonetically, you understand the situation. Four-five-and-six-syllable words that real people don’t use, like “stereotypical” and “patriarchy” and “heteronormative” just slide off the tongue. Each consonant carefully articulated, but the entire overwhelming syllable-sequence is over and done with in a heartbeat, like rapid fire from a machine gun. It is well rehearsed. Know why? Because the dedicated feminist talks like this all day.

As to the nugget of thought that goes with this tsunami of syllables: Some of the aborted babies are female. Just that one fact by itself, entirely brings down her house-of-cards. Back to Womyn’s Studies 101 classroom with ya.

As Cassy points out, what we call “feminism” today does not equal what feminism was at the beginning. People like Amanda have been allowed to re-define it too much. Think about it: If I were intent on molding and shaping our modern society so that women were more expendable and had less of a role to fill, what would be the issues most worthy of my support?

Well, I would try to push a lot of abortions, which stops women from taking on what two thirds of us now say, and have said for awhile, is a woman’s most important role. Just like our modern feminists. And, I would work like the dickens to sell gay marriage so that I could re-define the institution as something that doesn’t necessarily have to include a woman. Just like our modern feminists. What would be my third-most-important issue? I dunno; I’d care most about those two. What’s their third-most-important issue? I dunno that either. Lately, most of the “feminist” outbursts that make their way to me, concern one of those two. “Environmental” stuff maybe? Marcotte specifically identified “Clean environment, universal healthcare…” So okay, if it can be used as a euphemism for turning a thriving beacon of prosperity and free trade into yet another filthy socialist mudpuddle, she’s for it. So if you’re in her camp, you want to do things that make women less important in our culture, you want to sell socialism, and outside of those there really isn’t an awful lot to it other than being generally unpleasant and nasty.

Thing I Know #322. Feminism exists today to make women disposable; it attempts this by confining their energies to those specialties a man could pursue just as capably.

I have never entirely understood this. They pressure girls and young women to “pursue a career” when the girls and young women don’t really want to; they browbeat everyone within shouting distance into believing the girls and young women can run a department, or run a fifty-yard-dash, better and faster than the dudes. But when you think on it for awhile — what of it? If all the women all over the place dropped out and concentrated on mothering, we’d find a man to run the department. We’d find a guy who can run the fifty-yard-dash. Even if the best and fastest woman is superior to the best and fastest guy. What, on the other hand, is to happen if all women abandon mothering? I can’t get pregnant. I can’t give birth. Once the child is born, I can’t mother it. We’re supposed to be finding ways to make women important, respected, valued. Feminism’s actions are in direct conflict with the stated goal. They should’ve worked to bring women this much-valued “choice” — along with the responsibilities that go with it — and then left well enough alone. Instead, it’s more like they brought women the choice and then pressured them regarding what choice to make, and now, as Cassy pointed out, the whole “movement” is nothing but a perversion of what it once was.

Regarding the socialist bumper sticker issues, if you do buy into that stuff, there’s another problem with what Marcotte said up there: Men and boys need a “clean environment” too, and we have health care needs too. If there was anything left of her argument after that earlier broadside fusillade, this last one would finish it off.

This is the problem with modern feminism. It dwells far too much on the negative, and as Marcotte demonstrates, people who devote themselves to it don’t have to walk too far down that toxic road before they can’t think straight anymore.

For those who need to be told…

Parents of future warriors, be you conservative, liberal or somewhere in between: Would you not agree with me that, perhaps, this is taking things just a bit too far?

A proposal to grant medals for “courageous restraint” to troops in Afghanistan who avoid deadly force at a risk to themselves has generated concern among U.S. soldiers and experts who worry it could embolden enemy fighters and confuse friendly forces.

Lt. Col. Edward Sholtis, a spokesman for Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who commands NATO forces in Afghanistan, said that no final decision has been made on the award, which is the brainchild of British Maj. Gen. Nick Carter.

“The idea is being reviewed at Headquarters ISAF,” Sholtis said. “The idea is consistent with our approach. Our young men and women display remarkable courage every day, including situations where they refrain from using lethal force, even at risk to themselves, in order to prevent possible harm to civilians…That restraint is an act of discipline and courage not much different than those seen in combat actions.”

Oh, but it is different.

I understand what you’re trying to do here Col. Sholtis, and I have no doubt that your movement is recruiting many who display far better judgment when they make other decisions. And I’ll readily agree that when our troops do have this courage and it makes a difference in the outcome, that yes that’s a more preferable outcome at least in the short term.

But honoring it with a medal, specifically to encourage our side to reach that outcome more often? That fails to take into account the situations in which they’ve been placed; what their five senses tell them about it. Also, there are some enemies involved in this little skirmish and the message this sends to them is not helpful. Doesn’t a two-star think of such things? I would’ve hoped that someone would bring it up.

Screw you guys. If my lad is headed into your little theater in the years ahead, I’m raising him to take care o’ business; that if he’s ever in a situation where it’s him or the other guy, then sorry but it’s gonna be the other guy. I’m a capital-D Dad, and I figure that’s my job.

But I thank you for helping to decide what we’ll be doing this weekend. We can do some target shooting, get some fresh air, have a man-to-man talk about things, and when it’s time to head in we’ve got the entire collection of Rambo sitting on our DVD shelf, right next to Patton.

Like Grandma Freeberg used to say: “My boys aren’t cannon fodder.”

Hat tip to FrankJ.

Something tells me “Kidzmom” and I will both be able to relate to this one.

Hat tip to Viral Footage, via Linkiest.

Washington Post: Impact of War:

A cassette tape is waiting for me. It sits in a small bubble mailer on my night table. It stares at me when I walk in the room; it beckons to me as I walk out. But still it sits there and waits. It is the last thing. The last thing he sent to me from “over there.”

There is no note inside, just a regular old-school cassette tape. The outside of the envelope is addressed in his handwriting. “Love, Poppa Bear” is written on the back. I’ve opened it to look inside, but I haven’t yet drawn up the courage to listen.

I know what I can expect to hear. The same things he always told me. He’ll tell me how much he loves us and misses us. He’ll sing to us–he always sang to us. Probably our favorite songs, maybe some new ones. He’ll talk to the baby, he loved talking to her and she loves to listen to him. The first time I saw her smile was when he talked to her on the phone from “over there.”

From Innominatus.

Embedded by Andy in a comment about blogger pal Buck‘s crappy day.

Diversity Lane, via blogger friend Rick.

Cracked:

Women See Mauve, Men See Purple

A couple is staring at paint samples, the wife enthusiastically discussing the merits of aged ivory over albino Caucasian while the husband starts chewing off his own arm in hopes of escaping this hell where “white” has 30 different names.
:
What Science Says:

The gene for seeing red is only carried by the X chromosome, which puts men at a serious disadvantage for seeing the color spectrum. Color, after all, is defined by our ability to perceive red, green and blue, and every other color we see is based on combinations of those three.

This means that while men, having merely one X chromosome, might not be able to see red at all, women and their double X chromosomes have a 40 percent chance that their vision includes a broader expanse of the spectrum than their male counterparts.

Why this colorful superpower? It goes back to food again. While the men were out killing dinner and developing that radical spatial perception of theirs, women were gathering fruit and vegetables for the salad course. Having the ability to distinguish between the shiny red berries that taste good and the shiny red berries that can kill you was an important survival skill, and the women who didn’t pick the death berries lived to pass on their genes.

I was explaining this to my son after we went to watch Iron Man 2, and my girlfriend needed to visit the facilities before we headed over the hill to go home. The human genome evolves…and it evolves on either side of a gender barrier. Just about anything that would come in handy when you go out to kill a wild animal and bring it home, men are going to excel in that particular skill. Anything that involves guarding a bunch of helpless babies from hazards as if you’re a momma bird guarding a nest, women are going to be much better suited for it. Going a couple of hours without taking a leak, obviously that’s our department.

This article was a bit tougher on the ladies than I would’ve been, though. Of the six items, only two of the write-ups made our sisters look somewhat good. Naturally, it goes without saying #6 was by far my favorite. Bearing in mind these are generalizations…they don’t apply to all women. Or all men either.