Read it.

This is somewhat opaque but it makes an important point. Stick with it.

Read and heed.

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This is certainly the most entertaining political season I can remember.

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Some people have it more difficult than others.

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Of course — straining at gnats and swallowing camels is what leftoids do best. Why do you think that lawyers give most of their political contributions to Democrats?

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Of course not. “When everybody’s somebody/Then no one’s anybody.”

Most of the jobs that “require” a college degree these days actually don’t, in any practical sense; I’ve got three degrees, which makes me a more interesting person, I’m sure, but not one of which involves anything that I use in my daily work.

Considering the state of the educational system these days, I suspect that employers these days require a college degree to make sure that applicants have at least what used to count as a high-school education. Go take a look at what they used to teach in high school during the ’30s and ’40s — and, and if you want a real scare, look that the tests they gave eight-graders back a hundred years ago.

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Sounds like Ramadan is a cheap copy of Lent. Funny how Christian countries don’t worry a lot about non-Christians fasting during Lent the way Muslims seems to sweat kaffirs eating during Ramadan. But that’s on a par with the Muslim approach to life in general.

Islam:Christianity::Tunnels & Trolls:Dungeons & Dragons

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Next, we’ll see the ABA demand that we hold criminals and the public accountable for the number of crooks who walk away with plea-bargains, and the AMA blame the insurance companies and patients for the high incidence of people getting, oh, wrong body parts amputated.

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Geez — it’s Wally Cleaver versus an unspecified member of the Jackson Five. I shudder for our country.

Would you put the defense of the free world in the hands of somebody who had gone to public schools? I wouldn’t.

Nor would the American people, from the looks of the last ten presidential elections.

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I don’t know — I think it’s kinda cute.

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If Black & Decker made a cell phone, this would be it.

Yaacov ben Moshe draws an analogy — a damned good one.

My original thought was to draw a superficial comparison. I wanted to ask (especially of the feminists and people of the left) why, if it is so obvious to everyone that the common and well-documented cycle of pathological denial, minimization, deflection and projection that domestic partner abusers employ to keep control of their victims and to avoid punishment for their episodes of violence must be met by confrontation or, at the very least, the safe escape of the victim, can’t they recognize the need for confrontation and punishment for the analogous behavior by the Arab/Muslim world against Israel.

Read it.

In light of what great countries and institutions might do to murderous dictators, it’s difficult to know whether to laugh or cry. Maybe The Economist will cancel Mugabe’s subscription next.

Unfortunately, an honorary degree is the price of getting an entertaining commencement speaker. This is why you get people who are mainly famous for malicious gossip, like Trudeau and Keillor, with honorary degrees that ought to have burst into flam in their hands.

Christopher Hitchens is always worth reading.

I’ll cut a lot of slack for someone familiar with the poetry of Sir Henry Newbolt.

Safire is worth reading too, of course.

Read it.

This is a great idea, and I hope it comes sooner rather than later.

Everyone involved in software development is familiar with having six or eight (very expensive) 400-page tomes on a particular subject that have to cover the whole of a particular tool (e.g. Integration Services) and so cannot do so in sufficient depth to really help out a developer who is stuck in some petty little quirk of the system. The problem is that there isn’t sufficient market to have a 100-page book devoted to, say, the Lookup Component (and if you don’t understand what that means, then you’ve never worked with Integration Services — not that there’s anything wrong with that….) to justify doing the whole write-and-publish-dead-tree-version process.

But e-books take us completely out of that high-friction world. To expand on the example that Joe used: Imagine a 25-page summary of Integration Services. For somebody seeking a broad overview, that will probably be sufficient — and, being a commercial product, it will be far more readable than the Defense-Department IBM-wannabe corporate tech-writer style of the Books On Line that come with the product.

However … say you wanted to know more about the Data Flow Task. Fine. For a few dollars more, you can buy an expansion of that section, and it will deal with that Task in depth.

And, if you’re really stuck in a problem, for a few dollars more you can get an even deeper treatment that tells you EVERYTHING THERE IS TO BE KNOWN about the Lookup task, including things that Microsoft would rather hide under the rug, preferably written by somebody who’s been bitten by that bug and had to work around it — somebody like Ken Henderson (and I’m not talking about the ball player).

I’d buy it. I don’t know anybody I’ve ever worked with who wouldn’t be delighted to have such a tool available.

Read it.

Scroll past the obligatory Palin stuff (pause to appreciate the poster).

The Left (which he calls the “revolution”) is not a unified ideology or agenda at all, but rather a way of seeing the world, and specifically it is an inversion of what normal people call common sense. And this inversion is the sole unifying factor, the one common thread running through the revolution since the 13th and 14th centuries

Read it.

You don’t know as much about the real nature of Islam as you ought to. Believe me, you don’t. But you’d better start.

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If Christians behaved the way Muslims do, would this even have gotten off the ground? I think not.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. That’s it.

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This is a favorite meme of the left. In fact, apart from Ace’s parody of the same, I’ve never seen a “lifelong Democrat” claim to be, for the first time ever (!) voting Republican in an election. Probably because it’s lame and fools no one.

Well, Nelson Rockefeller was a “lifelong Republican”, too, but that didn’t impress any real Republicans.

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With the Washington Post, you’re never more than a sentence away from a Democratic talking point.

Not really news, but a good reminder anyway.

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It’s no secret that Democrats love it when things go wrong.

Apparently misery loves company, and the Democrat establishment did such a sucktacular job with Katrina (although they will try to pin it on Bush for the next thousand years) that they want it to happen again to Bobby Jindal.

Unfortunately for them, Jindal is refusing to cooperate — he’s actually doing something, and Ray Nagin is still the mayor of New Orleans.

Read it.

Newt Gingrich’s emails are better than most people’s books.

Apparently the Obamassiah’s fifteen minutes are up. Hope he enjoyed them.

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The typical military effect on clothing is “effective but totally uncomfortable”. Let’s hope they’ve avoided that here.

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I’d rather see her President than McCain, but we live with the choices we have.

And that says everything that needs to be said on the subject.

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Read it.

Oh, yeah, that’ll help.

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And about time, too.

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Read it.

Aw, Mom….

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Excellent points. Sarah Palin seems like the most competent to run an organization of any of the four people in the election. The other three have never run anything but their mouths.

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Actually, Libya would be better off paying Italy $5 billion to take it back over. I rather suspect that life for the ordinary Libyan was better under the Italians than under Khaddafi.

Victor David Hanson is having a lot of fun.

We are supposed to believe that a first- term Alaskan governor is less qualified for the second spot than a first-term Illinois Senator is for the Presidency—who once again just announced to the nation that he is ready to invade nuclear Islamic Pakistan to get bin Laden, who wanted all troops out of Iraq by March 2008, and who once dismissed Iran as a small threat.

Read it.

Read it.

So was slavery in America, but we got rid of it.

Of course, slavery is still common in Muslim countries. They appear to have no problem with it. Per Wikipedia:

However, since if a non-Muslim population refuses to adopt Islam or pay the Jizzya protection/ subjugation tax, that population is considered to be at war with the Muslim “ummah” and therefore it becomes legal under Islamic law to take slaves from that non-Muslim population.

See here for a run-down.

Mark Steyn is back, tanned and rested and in good form.

What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I’m not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities.

Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain’t run nothin’ but his mouth. She’s done the stuff he’s merely a poseur about.

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Read it.

The stakes are so high in this presidential election for a fundamental reason that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough: The federal government is so large and powerful. In particular, any aggressive president and Congress acting together have it in their legal authority — under our presently elasticized Constitution — to exercise near complete control over the economy. A long line of judge-made law since the Supreme Court’s New Deal era decision in Wickard v. Filburn (1942) says there is almost no limit, under the commerce clause of the Constitution, to the regulatory reach of the federal government.

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It used to be that this sort of advance took place in America. What changed?

The surgery was made possible thanks to a revolutionary American-designed laser that is permanently chilled to avoid causing blood clots on contact with the brain or epileptic fits.

Read it.

The Hog descends into politics.

I’m up way too late. Here are some quotes from Democratic Underground, where the level of hysteria is, hopefully, indicative of how powerfully God has blessed us with McCain’s VP choice. Some are funny, and some are just, well, par for the course.

Read it.

Not if the Democrats get in.

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Yeah, but it’s still Coke products. Let me know when Pepsi gets in the game.

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Read it.

Londonistan is right around the corner.

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Read it.

If Muslims have no trouble at all being “as American as apple pie” then surely they have no trouble viewing the defining document of the American polity, the Constitution of the United States, as worthy of their complete loyalty. And that includes, of course, the guarantees of individual rights in the Bill of Rights. And since the Bill of Rights is so very close, in so many of its key provisions — freedom of speech, freedom of conscience (which naturally includes the right to apostatize) — to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, can we conclude that American-as-apple-pie American Muslims find it puzzling that all of the Muslim countries (save for the Shah’s Iran, and most temporarily and temporizingly) have failed to subscribe to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and instead have concocted a Muslim version, the so-called Cairo Declaration, which in every essential respect, involving individual rights, fatally vitiates the original, Universal Declaration?

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

No indication of whether it’s blonde.

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Yeah, and a lot of people can’t ride a horse any more. Color me worried.

Megan McArdle, ordinarily so sound, just doesn’t get it when it comes to food.

Crunchy cons–and everyone else–wouldn’t be so afraid of this if the rest of us didn’t get mad at people who have difficult ideals, and then put them into practice.  As long as no one else is doing it, we can let our own behavior go, swept along unthinkingly in the comforting certainty of the herd.  But once one of the sheep starts moving in a different direction, we have to start wondering if we’re going the right way.

Whenever there are a group of people who discover what they consider to be “the way”, they get very tedious on the subject to those to whom it isn’t quite as obvious. Vegetarians are especially boring about it, but “crunchy cons” are almost as bad. They ascribe all sorts of character defects to those who resist their blandishments, because the alternative is to accept that hey, there just might be cogent arguments on the other side of the question — and the True Believer refuses to entertain that thought, or any like it.

You don’t like to eat meat? Fine, give me your share. If God had intended me to be a herbivore I would have been born with hooves. You want to cancel the Industrial Revolution and go back to buying from local farms? Fine, but I prefer to keep my food budget small and spend the rest on, oh, say, books.