From Allahpundit at HotAir.

Holy crap.

We obtained Justice Department accounts of some of those incidents under a Freedom of Information Act request. Examples included an incident in which a lawyer sent his detainee client the transcript of a virulently anti-American speech that compared military physicians to Joseph Mengele, the Nazi doctor of Auschwitz, called DOJ lawyers “desk torturers” and suggested that the “abuses carried out by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib . . . could involve the President in the commission of war crimes.”

Other incidents listed in the FOIA material included: a lawyer who was caught in the act of making a hand-drawn map of a detention camp’s layout, including guard towers; a lawyer who sent a letter to his detainee client telling him that “we cannot depend on the military to do the right thing” and conveying his message of support to other detainees who were not his clients; lawyers who posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet; lawyers who provided news outlets with “interviews” of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organization; and a lawyer who gave his client a list of all the detainees.

So let me see if I’m clear on this: If you’re a defense attorney providing a vigorous defense of scumbags — up to and including, handing out brochures recruiting more Gitmo detainees into your client list, convincing them the United States is conducting a worldwide campaign of torture against Muslims — that’s OK. Better than OK. You can go on to work for Eric Holder’s Department of Justice and We, The People don’t have the right to know what you’ve been doing.

If, on the other hand, you are specifically asked to provide a legal opinion about waterboarding, you determine there are circumstances under which it’s alright and you draft a memorandum saying as much — ooh, that’s bad bad bad.

Yeah…you know, I kind of saw both sides of this issue about what Liz Cheney was doing. Now I don’t. Our nation’s legal system is becoming a toxin, and the right to defend ourselves from it is an implicit attribute of sovereignty. Or “The Constitution is not a suicide document,” is another way of putting it.

Via Lileks.

Sacramento Bee:

IRS visits Sacramento carwash in pursuit of 4 cents

It was every businessperson’s nightmare.

Arriving at Harv’s Metro Car Wash in midtown Wednesday afternoon were two dark-suited IRS agents demanding payment of delinquent taxes. “They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending,” says Harv’s owner, Aaron Zeff.

The really odd part of this: The letter that was hand-delivered to Zeff’s on-site manager showed the amount of money owed to the feds was … 4 cents.

Inexplicably, penalties and taxes accruing on the debt – stemming from the 2006 tax year – were listed as $202.31, leaving Harv’s with an obligation of $202.35.

Zeff, who also owns local parking lots and is the president of the Midtown Business Association, finds the situation a bit comical.

“It’s hilarious,” he says, “that two people hopped in a car and came down here for just 4 cents. I think (the IRS) may have a problem with priorities.”

From here.

Hat tip to Kevin.

…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.