…this is absolutely awesome. Much better than awesome. It provides a whole new definition for the word.

Gerard finds the good stuff. Again.

Update: James Wilson speaks for me.

RINO.
And, let us not “get together and get something done”. Let us instead learn to respect boundries, after we remember what they are.
Heir to Arnold.
P. J. O’Rourke to Carley and friends: We don’t want to know how to make government work. We want to know how to make it stop.

I’m in some trouble on the home front. All these ladies running for seats in California to “fix what’s broke” and “get things done” are making me nervous. I’m going chauvinist-pig on this…which is unusual for a Palin supporter…but the simple fact of the matter is that California’s problems are far too serious to just dump on the ladies, walk away & call it good.

I do not want to “get things done.”

I want to get the nonsense stopped. Ms. Fiorina’s favorite catchphrase, I’m afraid, is becoming a might too popular among the petticoats.

I understand my lady’s rage at me, she is one of the girls who “get things done” and, in so doing, stop nonsense cold in its tracks. I’d vote for her in a heartbeat. And my cynicism is inspired by a male — specifically, one H. Ross Perot who “knows how to run a business” and “can get things done.” He also turned out to be a first rate whack-job.

So I’m not trying to be like Archie Bunker. I’m more like Yoda. Hard to see, the future is; nevertheless, the shroud of the dark side has fallen. All these contenders looking to “take charge and get things done” — this is how all the problems started in the first place. Cut the crap. Do or do not, there is no try.

Back to the subject at hand though. Boxer as an out-of-control gasbag? Hehehe. Yeah, that’s about the size of it.

Locutisprime blogging at Rick’s place:

Today’s headlines indicate that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has recommended “black boxes” be included into all new vehicles.

US mulls ‘black box’:

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration chief David Strickland told a congressional hearing on Thursday that the regulator is considering whether to make “black boxes” mandatory for all new vehicles. [ID:nN11246251]

The devices can capture data on speed, braking effort and other details which can be vital in reconstructing accidents.

I have never seen this level of intrusive legislation being put forth in my life time. In just the past week we have seen senators Schumer and Graham proposing biometric ID cards to be required of all Americans. In addition, part of the proposed health care reform act includes similar provisions where biometric medical records are to be obtained and kept on all citizens. That has already begun via the HIPAA regulations that we allowed to be enacted several years ago.

LP is referring to this, I think…

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill are proposing a new national biometric ID card that would be required of all U.S. workers. WSJ’s Laura Meckler explains the proposal and the objections from privacy advocates.

Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past.

The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.

All workers.

This is something that needs to be put to a challenge, I think. Especially in our nation’s capitol, in which the rules are made. This notion that equality is always good and inequality is always bad.

Let’s require registration by all seasonal workers. Oh no, that’s discrimination and an invasion of privacy. All right then…let’s make everyone do it. No problem! There can be no invasion of privacy if everyone is losing their privacy at the same time. So the Sr. Vice President who helped start this company and has been working at it fifteen hours a day for thirty years…the mousey little admin assistant with no social life who’s never worked anywhere else…the chieftain of industry who is the grandson of the inventor of the widget his company sells, whose life has been a matter of public record since the day he was born. You all have to go get your National ID cards.

And then you need to stick a box in your cars so we know where you’re going and what you’re doing.

See, I think that’s how you get this veal-calf society going in America, where people guard their privacy with such zeal. This…is how you overcome that. Through our guilt. Our revulsion against anything that might be “discriminatory.” It’s a powerful instinct we have when we’ve been hearing, since third grade on the playground, “If I have to make one exception I have to make a hundred.” This misguided notion that if you have a raw deal, that’s just awful and nobody should allow it to happen — but if we all have the same raw deal then that’s quite alright.

Meanwhile, how much sense does it make to require Bill Gates to get a biometric card so we can confirm his identity? Absolutely none. How much sense does it make to require it of everyone who works at a hotel, a canning factory, a farm? Uh…quite a bit more. Yes, that would be unequal. There would be criteria defining the employer. The aforementioned HIPAA law already does this. Pages and pages defining what a “covered entity” is. We have health insurance requirements for employers with so-many-numbers of “workers.” It’s done all the time. Banking regulations. Auto manufacturing regulations.

When it comes to these outright brazen invasions of our privacy, suddenly we have to be equal in everything we do. It’s not a principle. It’s a pot-sweetener. Many among us, even among our knee-jerk libertarians who are indignant about driving around with license plates on their cars, will be shamed into silence if the argument shifts to “equality” versus “inequality.”

So there you have it, the government owns all our work and is perfectly entitled to maintain records on it. And now we’re “workers.” Workers, that’s another thing. If I could work my will, the word would be banished from Congress forever. Everyone caught with that word crossing their lips would be branded as a labor union lackey, which is probably correct close to 100% of the time, and placed in permanent exile.

When I was young I was taught through soft, humorous suggestions — nobody really stating it word-for-word — that blathering away about the communists taking over, was a sign of dementia.

It must be true. The older I get, the more signs I see that they are, and have been for awhile.

Tom Hanks, ruining his own credibility as “America’s Historian in Chief,” speaking on the subject of World War II in the Pacific:

“From the outset, we wanted to make people wonder how our troops can re-enter society in the first place,” Hanks says. “How could they just pick up their lives and get on with the rest of us? Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

Two pieces of ignorance bundled up into one sound bite. They’re both much, much bigger than being-a-good-liberal, and bigger than Hollywood.

Some of the left-wing service members I’ve met — they seem to huddle up together — offer a really disturbing viewpoint of their service. They held their boss at the time, George W. Bush, in contempt for sending them and their comrades-in-arms into a war. Fine and good, but they didn’t deny Hussein was a dangerous character; their argument was “If we’re going to go after him, then why not go to this other hot spot in the world, or there, or there, or there.” It wasn’t the Powell argument about having an exit strategy. There was no specific demand of what conditions should be fulfilled before the military should be sent someplace. It was more of a dislike that the call had been made — at all, ever.

M-u-u-u-c-h discussion of educational benefits involved in enlisting. Lots of recalcitrance with regard to what kind service might be asked of them. It’s as if, their expectation was that there should be some kind of vote — as if the military is not a dictatorship. Or worse, yet, that somehow anything with violence involved should be left off the table. As if the whole point to having a military is to provide free tuition to people who sign a form.

The other canard is straight out of (Berman) Star Trek. Contests of force take place because of, and only because of, misunderstandings. People who want to promote this should really stay away from World War II. We had two primary opponents in that greatest of all wars; one was a country filled with brown people, the other was a nation of Aryans. We fought them with equal ferocity.

I’m not sure which of these two is more dangerous. The first one offends me greatly because it shows an unwillingness, or inability, to recognize heroes. Everyone’s-a-victim. And it’s a sick, terrible, contagious problem because so many people are under this spell and don’t realize it. They introduce you to a friend of theirs, and within the first few minutes of getting acquainted there are no, or few, strengths. Everybody knows everybody else by their weaknesses. Carpal tunnel. ADHD. Dyslexia. Even if the guy is in business selling something, like insurance policies maybe…it isn’t that he has something that will help you out — he needs you to buy it, which is quite a different thing.

So the finest-of-the-finest among our young, are just a bunch of walking dead riding in a boxcar with all kinds of mental health issues. Hey, glad to hear it Tom.

Cassy has a wonderful answer for your question, by the way.

How can they cope with that?? They can cope with that because they’re good men, they’re good soldiers. They cope with it because most of them are coming home to their families, to their homes. They’re happy, believe it or not. And they believe in their mission.

As to the second…good gracious. Obviously, this has a blinding effect. Tom Hanks, I’m sure, must be plenty smart enough to figure out if he goes the “we wanted to annihilate them because they’re brown and don’t have round eyes” route, someone might mention Pearl Harbor. A fifth-grader, not daydreaming, should be able to anticipate that. But Tom Hanks evidently cannot.

It is a mindset that proves itself manifestly unhelpful anytime there is someone who wants to kill somebody else. Which is a good deal of the time, actually.

Funny thing about these imbeciles is, any time the subject turns to something else, you haven’t long to wait before they’re taking up that other tired monologue: Nation of immigrants, white people not breeding, “they” are going to be a minority by 2050, America is not a Christian nation.

Okee dokee, then. If we’re a mixed nation just chock full of people of all colors, then we’re not a bigoted nation…or, at the very least, it becomes impossible to assert we have some “hair trigger” that goes off anytime we see someone with dark skin. That would be like two rabid wild dogs tied up in a bag together wouldn’t it?

No, the fact is that sometimes fighting is necessary because someone — of a non-determinant, irrelevant skin color — is trying to kill you. And a strong defense is what responsibility and racial equality happen to be.

I respect that some people just can’t get that because they don’t want to get that. Fine, then. Stay home and watch Star Trek when the rest of us go out to vote. Maybe you can watch Mr. Hanks’ “overhaul” of history. Living in a fantasy world is one thing, forcing others to live in it is a different thing entirely. And some of these decisions we have to make about what’s going on, have something to do with those whatever-colored people who are trying to kill us…and you…and your family…and all kinds of other nice folks who also have all kinds of colors to their skins. If that’s just too much for you to think about, then so be it. Don’t be part of the process. Leave it to people who can handle it, and form some coherent thoughts about it.

“One Fine September Morning…”

HOLY FREAKING BATTLESHIP MISSOURI! By the time the shutter snapped, the ball was, in relation to this picture on your screen, about six monitors up and climbing. It was whistling. I lost track of it since I was trying to get the picture, but the guys say it cleared the treeline by probably another hundred yards.

Cool. I’d like one.

Thank God. Can’t breathe easy until we get a solid 218 opposed.

But this is good news. FDL wants this shit and they want it bad. I saw, a day or two ago, they tallied up something like — I think it was 214 yes 211 no, something like that.

So things are moving in the right direction. Question is, where do they go from here.

It’s the wrong bill at the wrong time.

Update: Wall Street Journal has a great op-ed up about the cost control illusion. Hey, how many government programs have been started, since 1789, that saved us some money? Is that what government programs do? This is the one thing I view as the silliest sales pitch out of ’em all. But they wouldn’t be pushing it if someone somewhere wasn’t falling for it.

Nevermind all that, says Patrick Kennedy. (hat tip to Westsound Modern) Pass it or you’ll end up living in a van down by the river.

Yasmine Bleeth goes up against the last letter of the alphabet, represented by Zooey Deschanel. Zooey, of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame.

It’s pretty easy to find some Yasmine swimsuit pics on the web, and dang hard to find any of Zooey. But Zooey takes it anyway. She’s not a cokehead, she’s got gorgeous eyes, seems (from what I can gather) to be a woman of class, and she’s got nice bangs.

Bangs. You know, as in hair.

Hey, Bryan Singer. You cast Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane. Zooey was right there. She was right freakin’ there. Ms. Bosworth was alright…but to envision a 1980 Margot Kidder aging into Kate, was a little distracting. All in all it would have to go into the Mistake File. Shoulda gone with Zooey.

Yeah, I know that’s kind of late notice for ya. But it’s true.

Hat tip again to Quotalatiousness, via Gerard once again.

I’m thinking I need to go update this just one more time.

Oh, brother.

A dispute at a Lancaster movie theater during a screening of “Shutter Island” ended when a man, who had complained about someone nearby talking on a cellphone, was stabbed in the neck with a meat thermometer.

The incident occurred two weeks ago at the Cinemark 22 theater in Lancaster, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

The theater was packed for a 9 p.m. Saturday screening of the Martin Scorsese horror movie when the victim complained about a woman near him who was using a cellphone during the show. She and two men with her left the movie theater. Two men returned a few minutes later and stabbed the victim, said sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore.

“It was vicious and cowardly attack,” Whitmore said.

The victim, who was not identified, was hospitalized with serious injuries Two other moviegoers who came to the victim’s aid were also were hurt during the fight, officials said.

Meat thermometer? What the hell?

Almost as random and inefficient as a spoon:

Drama queen who goes on record to say it feels like she was raped…careless bank…bad move made right when “fat cat predatory lending” is the most popular catch-slogan in our nation’s capitol.

I don’t wanna be that guy. Whoever is responsible for this screw-up.

Five months after repo men broke into her Hampton Township home and took her pet macaw, Angela Iannelli told Team 4 that it still feels like she “was raped.”

“I cannot walk into my house by myself. I tried it one time by myself, but the whole time, I was jumping like somebody was behind me and just started shaking.”

In a lawsuit filed this week, Iannelli claims that her mortgage company mistakenly targeted her house for foreclosure, and she said she came home one day to find that she had been locked out and someone had gone inside, cut the utilities, poured antifreeze into the drains and taken her bird.

“If you or I did to Bank of America what Bank of America did to my client, we would be in prison for 10 years,” said Iannelli’s lawyer, Michael Rosenzweig, partner at Edgar Snyder & Associates.

Team 4 reported that, in a lawsuit filed Monday, the homeowner says she was up to date on her mortgage payments — and out of the blue, Bank of America sent a contractor to invade her home in October and then padlock it.

For 20 years, Iannelli has maintained a residence on Fountainwood Drive. She says she never had a problem with her mortgage — always making the payments to Bank of America on time.

Iannelli told Team 4 investigator Jim Parsons that she got no notice from anyone at Bank of America that anything was wrong. The first time she realized something was amiss was that October day when she arrived home, took out her key, went to put it in the lock and realized that the locks had been changed.

And they took her bird too.

When the lawyer is salivating, it’s a bad sign.

He knows it for a fact. You’ll never in a million years guess how.

Me, I’m wondering about the qualities of judgment of half of my fellow countrymen. And I mean that in a good way…trust me.

The post previous has me thinking about yet another divide bisecting all of thinking humanity. And like so many of the others, it seems to fall squarely upon the chasm separating Architects from Medicators.

Some of us think a right is something that, when violated, requires and justifies any and all means of intervention, up to and including the invasion of a country.

Others among us think a right is something that, when violated, requires and justifies any and all means of intervention short of violence. At that point, civilized people should go back to what they were doing and allow the right to continue to be violated. Hey, at least you got yours.

Those who think the violation of a right justifies the invasion of a country, define rights minimally. They don’t think a right is a right if it has to cost someone else something.

Those who think the violation of a right justifies peaceful protest only, and then you should go back to what you were doing because at least you got yours, define rights much more broadly. If you have it and want to keep it, or if you don’t have it and you want it, or if you are not in immediate need of it but can see some clear advantages involved in having it, then that’s enough. A “right” it is.

A belief in God is common among those who define rights minimally, and hold violation of these minimal rights to be a justification for war. They distrust bureaucracies.

Those who define rights broadly and enforce them only softly, are overwhelmingly, although perhaps not completely, secular. They trust bureaucracies completely, which is odd because when someone they dislike happens to be in charge of the bureaucracy they are suddenly bursting at the seams with conspiracy theories about how these “wrong” people took over the bureaucracy and have way too much power. It is almost as if…I would say exactly as if…they are spending a lifetime in worship of a replacement deity.

Dr. Melissa is concerned, and so are we. Traipsing through her links we stumble upon this:

BBC World Service just released a global poll that sends conflicting signals about people’s attitudes toward the Internet.

On the one hand, 79 percent of the 27,000 adults polled in 26 countries believe that Internet access “should be a fundamental right for all people.” (Half of them strongly agree with that proposition.) But on the other hand, 53 percent believe that “the Internet should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere.”

If these people regard the word “right” the way I do, then this is a terrible situation. It is my reluctance against the deepest and darkest variety of pessimism that persuades me to believe the term could benefit from some clarification; to believe that, where I think a “right” is something justifying the invasion of a country, to many other people in those other countries a “right” is justification for simple diplomacy. As in “Hey, those people don’t have Internet access.” “Well, let’s try to get it to ’em.” Which is a far cry from saying “Hey, those women are being raped on a regular basis, and murdered when they try to learn to read,” to which civilized people say “Well this sucks big ol’ donkey balls, but we’re going to have to go in there and put a stop to that.”

Rights. It seems America was out grabbing another beer from the fridge, when someone came on the teevee and handed out the instructions to be so casual and flip with that word. So ninety-six percent of the adults in South Korea think it’s a basic human right to be hooked up to the net? In my world, this would mean only four percent of them should be allowed to vote, or to make any decisions about anything at all. What in the world is going on in your head? You like surfing the net, therefore it becomes a “right”?

Has anybody mentioned equality? Holy smokes, that would really stir up a hornets’ nest wouldn’t it. All over the world, it seems people who are most into this hyper-“New Rights” stuff are also into equality. Now, if only ten percent of us have access to ninety percent of the available bandwidth, then…oh, goodness gracious me. Better do something about it right now! Human rights are at stake!

Rights. Pffffft. You realize the danger here, don’t you? And it’s a pretty serious one: If everything is a right, then nothing is.

So I have a new right in mind for myself: When I vote, my vote should not be watered down by the votes of numbskulls laboring under the delusion that we’re living in a populist pure-democracy, and that they/we can have any li’l thing they/we decide is desirable, simply by voting on it.

New “ripening smartphone fruit” project: Civics knowledge quiz for Americans who want to apply for their “right” to vote. And I’m going to limit its length. But one of the very first questions is going to be — what is a right? That, to me, seems to be where the trolley is leaving the tracks here. Too many people think, if it would cause some bad feelings of withdrawal if they were deprived of something they have currently, that this by itself conjures up a “basic human right.”

It is, more and more, taking on the form and substance of a problem that is too serious to be left alone, and allowed to smolder itself out. More and more, it is demanding some intervention.

It’s a new one on me that the written history’s scarcity is due to the Christians disallowing it from being recorded. We’d noticed this about our family tree: Kids within an immediate family sharing a name; nobody remembering a single thing about the woman who bore ten, twelve, sixteen of these kids who couldn’t all be named. No journals, notes or diaries. No letters.

We figured it was just a matter of Swedes and Norsks not being much into that readin’ and writin’ stuff. I would imagine it would be an even bigger factor back in the days when the long ships were being launched and the Norsks were invading all those other countries. Who’s got time for writing with all that raping, burning and pillaging to do.

Scandinavia, 21st century, superpower status: 0%
Political correctness: 100%

Scandinavia, 10th century, superpower status: 100%
Political correctness: Are negative numbers allowed?

Terry McDermott, Columbia Journalism Review, looks into White House at-the-time-Communications Director Anita Dunn’s famous quip:

The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. And it is not ideological. . . . What I think is fair to say about Fox, and the way we view it, is that it is more of a wing of the Republican Party. . . . They’re widely viewed as a part of the Republican Party: take their talking points and put them on the air, take their opposition research and put it on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news organization like CNN is.

How did Mr. McDermott handle this?

When I approached Fox to gain access to their studios and staff for a story about the nature of their news operations, I was told that if I wanted to do a piece on Fox, I should do a profile of Shepard Smith, their main news anchorman. I should be careful, they told me, to distinguish between Smith, a newsman, and their bevy of more notorious personalities—Bill O’Reilly, Neil Cavuto, Glenn Beck, and Greta Van Susteren*. They aren’t really news people, I was told; they are editorialists and ought to be analyzed as such. They are analogous, Fox suggested, to the editorial and op-ed opinion pages of newspapers, which ought not be confused with the straight news coverage.

The proposal to do a story on Smith was fair enough, but would not in any way address the central issue: Was Fox a political operation? I declined. A Smith profile would be a wonderful story for another time, I told Fox, but it wasn’t the story we felt relevant at the moment. That being the case, Fox “declined to participate” in my reporting, which is another way of saying I should go do something to myself and possibly the horse I rode in on, too.

Wow, that’s really unreasonable of Fox, huh. They’re accused of filtering and tailoring their news to such an extent that they’re a Republican mouthpiece, and they respond by insisting that any investigation into their news should be confined to their…news.

But that isn’t where McDermott lost me. Where he lost me was right about here:

Shepard Smith is an interesting guy. He is far and away the most charming personality on Fox. Not that this takes special effort. Generally speaking, Fox doesn’t do charm. O’Reilly, for all of his considerable talents, blew a fuse in his charm machine years ago, and it’s not clear Beck ever had one to blow. Let’s not even start on Sean Hannity and Cavuto.

So the guy starts out fastened like white-on-rice to his central question, which is whether Fox News gets its talking points shipped in straight from GOP headquarters. Fox offers him an opportunity to interview its news personality, and his response is to split hairs so finely that, hey, this doesn’t service my stated mission so no-can-do. And just a few paragraphs after that, Mister Stalwart is distracted by the bright-shiny-object of the charm question.

This brings back bad memories for me. Two-year-old memories. Then-candidate Barack Obama had a serious problem when His attempts to appear Christian-like backfired on Him; we found out His “spiritual mentor,” Jeremiah Wright, was a bigoted asshole.

Obama delivered a speech.

The speech was oh so charming.

He called for a “national dialogue on race.”

Some — many — called it the BEST! SPEECH! EVAR!!!

Today, just-about-nobody can recite from memory a single statement from the speech.

And exactly which friends Barack Obama does or doesn’t have, or did & didn’t have, is thought to be absolutely nobody’s business. In fact, since then it’s come to light that quite a few more of His friends are assholes. Were you to task me to go out and find someone with as many asshole friends as Barack Obama, I really wouldn’t know how to look. But we pay it no mind, because Mister Charming is oh-so-charming.

At least sometimes.

This seems to be what happened to Mr. McDermott. Past this point excerpted above, the job he does sticking to the subject at hand is…well, let us call it rather lukewarm in quality. And that is being charitable.

Resigning himself to checking out the question by simply watching news shows from Fox, CNN and MSNBC, he comes up with these…

Here are some more representative examples. They might seem chosen to make a point; they were not. They are admittedly impressionistic, but we think a fair sampling of what was on the air that day.

On the Senate compromise on health care reform:

MSNBC—Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon called it “a godsend.” Howard Dean said “the Senate bill really does advance the ball.”

CNN—Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, called it “the type of coverage that they [her constituents] deserve.”

Fox—Neil Cavuto posed this question to independent Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut: “Senator, they just didn’t put lipstick on a pig? It’s still a pig, right?” Lieberman was noncommittal on the porcine nature of the compromise, but assured he would vote against it. Hayes of The Weekly Standard said, “it is absolutely insane.” Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said, “It is the lump of coal in our Christmas stocking.”

On climate change:

MSNBC—Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, addressing Sarah Palin’s claim that climate change is not necessarily the result of human activity: “Her bigger problem, if she wants to be a candidate, is that she’s on the wrong side of history. She’s on the wrong side of science. She’s on the wrong side of politics here.”

CNN—Kitty Pilgrim, CNN correspondent: “The United States is falling behind the rest of the world in what some see as the cleanest energy option available, nuclear power.”

Fox —Amy Kellogg, Fox correspondent: “…stolen e-mails suggest the manipulation of trends, deleting and destroying of data, and attempts to prevent the publication of opposing views on climate change…”

We could go on, but the pattern would not change.

This seems to be the point where McDermott makes up his mind. It also gives him away. He does not seem to personally know of anybody who might show some reasoned skepticism toward the Obama agenda, the left-wing agenda, let alone anyone who might be rationally hostile toward these. People like this heard all about the big ol’ dust-up with Anita Dunn and Fox News. You know what they had to say? They said, Fox News gets in trouble with the White House, for presenting both sides of a given issue, including the side that might not be so convenient to the White House. And because it does this, it is worth watching; whereas, its competition is nothing more than a bunch of damnable echo chambers.

If he had heard of this, he would have realized his two universally-representative samples — “we could go on, but the pattern would not change” — prove their point, and not so much his. For within his two samples, CNN and MSNBC contributed absolute-zero discourse, and on open questions even. They did not travel. No foundation of ideas upon which the chatter could rest. They began precisely where they ended: health care “reform” is a “godsend,” and you’re “on the wrong side” if you don’t go along on climate change.

And so I have two concerns here — since Terry McDermott is not doing anything here that I don’t see lots of other people doing every single week.

One: To look upon someone presenting only one side of a story, as presenting two sides…and vice-versa. How is that done exactly? To plagiarize from Prager, it impresses me as an exercise of confusing clarity with agreement. Fox is found undesirable; just how, McDermott doesn’t really say. But clearly, he finds the ClimateGate scandal to be inconvenient and harbors a preference that it not have been mentioned.

Two: Barack Obama is charming, Bill O’Reilly is not. I recognize we live in a world in which some people are charming and other people are not, and I bow down before the reality that — right or wrong — this is, occasionally, and maybe not so occasionally, a serious advantage on some serious issues.

But you know what? That should buy you only so much.

This one needs no introduction. It’s an editor’s note over on one of our favorite sites, IMAO, and it’s in response to a snarky bit of what appears to be left-wing brain-fart that doesn’t merit quoting or for that matter any attention whatsoever.

But this is a piece of solid gold, right here:

Conservatives tend to treat as hobbies what liberals treat as occupations.

Hehe.

CNN Money:

The percentage of American workers with virtually no retirement savings grew for the third straight year, according to a survey released Tuesday.

The percentage of workers who said they have less than $10,000 in savings grew to 43% in 2010, from 39% in 2009, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s annual Retirement Confidence Survey. That excludes the value of primary homes and defined-benefit pension plans.

Workers who said they had less than $1,000 jumped to 27%, from 20% in 2009.

Well, lessee. I was 29 before I worked for a company that had a 401k plan. Up until then, it could be fairly said my checking account was my retirement plan. And I can pretty well guarantee to you there was less than a grand in there, in “free” cash, the entire time.

That seems pitiful, but by Freeberg standards it’s affluent.

So I’m hoping these folks in the 27% are real young pups.

Still and all, that’s pretty damn bleak. The 43% figure worries me some more. Ten grand…in an age where you have better-than-even odds of reaching the century mark…and it is considered odd or eccentric to work past age sixty-five. Oh no wait, sixty-two-and-a-half. Oh no wait, six decades even. Oh no wait, fifty-seven and…well, at least we’ve already accounted for inflation.

Oh no wait, no we haven’t.

Stanley Fish, Opinionator, NY Times Blogs:

I know you’re not supposed to, but I just love to say I told you so.

What I told you back on Sept. 28, 2008, was that within a year of the day he left office George W. Bush would come to be regarded with affection and a little nostalgia. The responses (over 300 before the comments were closed) to that prediction were overwhelmingly negative; even the very few who agreed with me attributed what they took to be a sad fact to the stupidity of the American people. The other 290 or so said things like “No way”; “Are you kidding?”; ”Are you mad?”;“What a ridiculous and insulting premise!”; “I’ll miss him like a rash”; “This must be a satire”; “Bush is a sociopath”; “George Bush has destroyed this country”; “History won’t forgive him”; and (a popular favorite) “I hate the man.”

Well it’s a bit more than a year now and signs of Bush’s rehabilitation are beginning to pop up. One is literally a sign, a billboard that appeared recently on I-35 in Minnesota. Occupying the right side (from the viewer’s viewpoint) is a picture of Bush smiling genially and waving his hand in a friendly gesture. Occupying the left side is a simple and direct question: “Miss me yet?” The image is all over the Internet, hundreds of millions of hits, and unscientific Web-based polls indicate that more do miss him than don’t.

You hate that guy who slept with your wife — who happens to have a pilot’s license. Until lately, he was flying your plane; now the cockpit is in the control of a bunch of hyperactive, sugared-up six-to-eight-year-olds.

So the low down dirty skunk does have his place after all, doesn’t he? That’s okay if it takes some time to admit it. Thirty-four months to go.

Blog-Uncle Gerard claims credit for the graphic, and we saw it at his place before we saw it anywhere else so we have no reason to doubt him.

Geez…we elected this guy President who’s really fun to watch and sounds kinda like Walter Cronkite, even though He doesn’t seem to know a damn thing about what He’s doing and we’re going to have to pay for His programs plus all the interest on the resulting debt for generations and generations…that doesn’t do the trick? What on earth is it gonna take?

According to Obama and liberals across America, electing Obama would undo all the damage to our reputation that Bush supposedly did. Only, in reality, the United States is less respected under Obama than it was under Bush. Shockah!

A majority of Americans say the United States is less respected in the world than it was two years ago and think President Obama and other Democrats fall short of Republicans on the issue of national security, a new poll finds.

The Democracy Corps-Third Way survey released Monday finds that by a 10-point margin — 51 percent to 41 percent — Americans think the standing of the U.S. dropped during the first 13 months of Mr. Obama’s presidency.

“This is surprising, given the global acclaim and Nobel peace prize that flowed to the new president after he took office,” said pollsters for the liberal-leaning organizations.

Gee, you might even think that he didn’t deserve the acclaim and the awards.

Maybe the fact that Obama has yet to forge one strong relationship with a major world leader has helped further destroy our credibility around the world. Now, granted, this is a poll of Americans, not foreigners. So I guess we technically can’t put too much stock into this. But Americans aren’t feeling more secure in our place in the world, and we’re the ones who are supposed to be benefiting from all the hopey-changey-ness anyways, right?

The tee shirt I wore on Saturday has Obama’s face right on the chest, with the words “WELCOME BACK, CARTER” emblazoned underneath. Apparel like this is getting more and more popular, by the day. This time it was another shopper three places behind me in line, yelling out “I love it!”

This world communicates in the language of horse heads in beds. Not primarily, perhaps. Here and there, civility, restraint and good manners may and will get you what you want and need.

But very few have any genuine respect for the submissive. And when you don’t respect somebody, you act in his interest only when it is costless for you to do so. That other language involving decapitated equine creatures does have its place.

So this problem will get worse before it gets better.

Pajamas Media Exclusive.

The emails show that the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) coordinated their response to a damning Spanish report on “green jobs” with wind industry lobbyists and the Center for American Progress (the progressive think tank founded by John Podesta and funded by George Soros).

The report from Spain’s Universidad Rey Juan Carlos — which was the subject of a George Will column in the Washington Post on June 25, 2009 — showed each “green job” that had been added by Spain’s aggressive wind energy program cost Spain nearly $800,000 and resulted in the loss of 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy.

Eight times, Obama had publicly referred to Spain’s program as being a model for a U.S. wind energy program.

The 900 pages of emails, obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Christopher C. Horner, show staff members from the DoE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the EPA developing a response to the report. They also show them coordinating the response with the Center for American Progress, plus the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) — two wind industry lobbyist groups.

Water is dry.

I noticed this myself awhile back, so it had to be obvious inside the Congress before:

My proposed motto for the 111th Congress, and it’s much bigger than health care: “Our approach to any given problem, is to make sure nobody can make a profit by finding a solution to it.” Go on down the list of things we need to do. Manufacture energy. Fund our retirements. Invent drugs and therapies. Finance houses. Sell cars. Save…the…planet.

They who have control of the Congress now, will just make sure nobody can make a profit first. And then figure out if they managed to solve the problem, second. Maybe they will have and maybe they will not have. But first, make sure no one is making any serious money.

No one outside the beltway, that is.

Caplin Rous, the capybera.

More here.

Via FARK.

On the subject of yesterday’s smartphone-fodder rant about what would happen if liberals decided it was in their interest to “prove” water is dry?

Dr. Helen did some more reading of F.A. Hayek’s book and had some more thoughts.

Freedom begins with the freedom of think. Or, as Winston Smith put it, channeling the spirit of his author George Orwell (1984, chap. 7): “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Take what follows, more than anything else, as a commentary on the way I think about things.

One thousand one hundred and seventy paces from my front door is a Starbuck’s. Now, if you walk from that point an additional three hundred ninety paces across a busy boulevard, you get get to a large luxury supermarket. The supermarket has gourmet quality meats, vegetables, breads, seafood, frozen goods, flowers, vegetables, organics, liquors, condiments. It is not bag-yer-own. It is the kind of quality from which you would select if you were about to throw a party, with your very best friends in attendance.

The bank that maintained a branch in that supermarket, was my bank. They staffed it up with bright, competent ladies of all ages who I don’t think I ever once caught making a mistake. And if you showed up there just to pull twenty dollars from your account, they would politely direct you to the ATM machine thirty feet away — for next time — and then politely accommodate you. Oh and by the way, this branch had extended hours. Other branches would be open until six weekdays, maybe twelve-to-three Saturdays. This one was open until seven weekdays and ten-to-five on Saturdays.

As of a week ago, this massive supermarket has a big white wall where the bank used to be. Oh, and the machine is gone.

So I say this:

Some guy, who is very high up the food chain at that particular supermarket location, or perhaps its region, had some trouble with his wife. He separated and began dating a lady who is a highly placed executive with the bank. He patched up his differences with his wife. Now they’re back together. The homewrecker from the bank was given the heave-ho and she’s feeling pretty damn sore about it.

I look at people, generally, as high-drama people.

And the reason I got this checking account in the first place, was when I first moved to California I began dating a gorgeous, hot-blooded young widow who worked for that bank. She was more reasonable and rational than some of the girlfriends who came before, or who came afterward. But she was also a little bit…shall we say…impetuous.

But more than anything else…and maybe this is a bit of irrational selfishness on my part. But this does NOT look like a business decision. It just doesn’t.

An actual branch with some competent people in it, costs a certain amount of money to run. A machine? Eh…that costs some money too. But not nearly as much. That’s supposed to be the point of having a machine. The machine has to be pulled out?

Seems a tad vengeful to me.

Perhaps I’m inventing soap opera episodes where they aren’t actually taking place. I’m willing to allow for that possibility. But if I had to bet some money — I’d say nuh-huh. Someone’s pissed off at somebody. That, or what was once a thriving, exploding community of young opportunistic first-time home-buyers, is now becoming a ghost town and it’s not worth the trouble of dealing with our neighborhood.

But I don’t have too much faith in the ghost-town idea. I just don’t. Someone is teaching someone a lesson.

The noise was coming from inside the house!

A woman in Germany phoned police after hearing “suspicious noises” in her flat…authorities said Friday.

The noise was so loud and strange, even over the telephone, that police in Bochum in western Germany decided to send a patrol car around to the “scene of the crime”, a statement said.

“Daringly, and with the occupier’s permission, one of the officers opened the drawer of a wardrobe where the noise was coming from.

“Underneath some clothes he found a very personal, battery-operated object which had obviously switched itself on… The tenant’s face abruptly changed colour.”

Police then “wished her a nice evening and left”.

I’m going to call it right here and now: Future generations of high school and college students are going to be allowed to enroll in special U.S. History classes dealing with the last two-fifths of the twentieth century, specifically between 1965 and about 1980. And how incredibly, unbelievably wrong we were.

I’m not criticizing the widespread unified notion that history was heading in a certain direction. I am referring specifically to this toxic, companion notion that anyone on the wrong side of history should be driven out of whatever position of authority had been entrusted to them — and executed otherwise capably — and these offenders should be defrocked, isolated, ostracized, “disappeared.”

I was looking over this article about the National Organization of Women handing out their smug, condescending “awards” to advertisers and other mass media merchants who were unlucky enough to have NOW disagree with them with regard to their portrayal of women. And I suddenly realized: It’s okay we didn’t have blogs during that time. It is quite alright that we were not allowed to say out loud in any public venue, “you know, I’m not too keen on this part of feminism” or “maybe that guy shouldn’t be fired.” All fine and good that NOW secured their monopoly on free mass-media speech in the 1970’s, and got the first-word last-word all-words-in-between…all of the time…just because they wanted it.

Look at it this way: What if you found a newspaper article from much earlier. Say, from 1899…about the jail term a guy got for using a dirty word with no kids around, but a cop/constable overheard. Or for drinking a beer on a Sunday. Or for dropping what he was doing and helping a “colored” with some personal household chore.

You wouldn’t need to see an argument from the other side, would you? You’d just think “what a bunch of flaming fucking assholes.”

And that’s precisely what this article looks like to me. That is how our grandchildren will see it. What a bunch of unpleasant, nit-picking, controlling shrews.

According to Wikipedia, Paul Anka also won the “Keep Her In Her Place” award for his song, Having My Baby. I don’t recall a single instance of anyone requesting, let alone demanding, the feminists to elaborate on the point they were seeking to make with this. In Mr. Anka’s case I would want some specification on which among the lyrics were most oppressive. Ever listen to it? Not a single negative, oppressive or condescending syllable in it. Someone, somewhere got the idea that this number deserved scorn. That person should have been abducted and studied, because that’s nucking-futz.

Since then, feminism has evolved. It now zeroes in on two points of focus, one of which became prominent sometime in the 1990’s and the other of which started capturing attention in 1973: Gay marriage and abortion.

Gay marriage does not enhance the role of women in society. It diminishes it.

Ditto for abortion.

So in some ways, feminism is crazier now than it was then. But back then, it was much more accepted to force an entire nation to do things your way, by means of an energetic and highly visible campaign to destroy people who don’t agree with you. To go out looking for things that piss you off. And advertise that this is what you’re doing, so the people who make the decisions become frightened of you. That would not be quite so appealing now…I don’t think.

The era will be studied. Sometime. As soon as we have done a more thorough job of pulling our society’s metaphorical head out of its own ass. I would say, as I write these words, it is somewhere around…forty percent extricated. Depending on our collective mood from moment to moment.

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.

Update: Here’s an example of a healthy way to deal with odious advertising. You don’t see some man’s-rights-group gathering together to hand out self-important, sanctimonious, scolding “awards” for dreck like this:

But everyone with two testicles, and a wife or girlfriend, would love to give that asshole a beat-down kinda like what Joe Pesci got in Casino. Depriving him and his bosses of a livelihood? Pretty fun to think about it.

But we don’t mobilize to actually get it done, because grown-ups know there is such a thing as having destructive thoughts, and there is also such a thing as acting them out. Those are two different things.

These otherwise-decent people we call “feminists”…they lack this adult sense of self-restraint. They think every impulse — provided it’s hostile — m-u-s-t be acted-upon. At least, they thought that 35 years ago. And I’m still making up my mind about today. The most militant ones seem to still have this problem.