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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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DIA: What finally prompted you to put pen to paper?

Mr Derbyshire: An offer from a publisher.

DIA: Give me some examples of how conservative pessimism might translate into policy.

Mr Derbyshire: Abandonment of “nation-building” exercises. Abolition of the federal Department of Education. A 1924-style immigration freeze. Repeal of No Child Left Behind. End of all federal subsidies to “community groups”. End of all federal subsidies to arts and culture. End of all foreign-aid programmes that are not plainly and obviously bribes for pro-American behaviour. Restart construction of neutron bombs. Full-bore federal-subsidised research on missile defense. Withdrawal from the UN, followed by razing of all UN structures on American soil and sowing the ground with salt. How many d’you want?

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I guess “Consumer Reports” means it reports consumers to the government.

Jonah Goldberg is bemused.

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Can’t wait for that next TSA bulletin…. If a bearded man goes to moon you, run.

Yet another reason why I don’t fly — too difficult to avoid Muslim assholes.

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Cathy, this one’s for you.

Michale Barone takes a look at the Kennedy legacy.

For 18 years before the 1960 election, Americans had presidents in their 60s. At his inauguration, John Kennedy was 43 and his wife 31, with infant children. “Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated in one person doing interesting actions,” wrote Walter Bagehot in 1867. “A family on the throne is an interesting idea also. It also brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.” And so Vaughn Meader’s record satirizing “the first family” and their unusual accents topped the charts and was played over and over at parties.

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Speed the day.

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George Will has Barack Obama’s number.

In August our ubiquitous president became the nation’s elevator music, always out and about, heard but not really listened to, like audible wallpaper. And now, as Congress returns to resume wrestling with health care reform, we shall see if he continues his August project of proving that the idea of an Ivy League Huey Long is not oxymoronic.

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…which is perhaps why we ought not to take artists seriously when they talk about politics.

Hitler’s deluded view of himself as a genius is based on the confused system of thought emerging in the late 19th century, which centered on the idea that a genius — a strong personality who outshone everything else — could do anything and could do anything he pleased.

Sounds like a Kennedy.

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I am not making this up….

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By demanding we all pay more to fund their agendas in these harsh economic times, foodie snobs and lefty social critics may as well tell us to eat artisanal cake.

Not the sort of thing you might expect to see in the L.A. Times….

Those who think that there is something wrong with owning more than two pairs of sneakers or that exquisite fastidiousness about what you put into your mouth equals virtue need to be tele-transported back to, say, the Depression itself, when privation was in earnest and few people had telephones, much less cellphones. Read some 1930s memoirs: Back then, people who couldn’t afford “quality” furniture slept on mattresses on the floor and hammered together makeshift tables out of orange crates. They went barefoot during the summer and sewed their children’s clothes out of (non-organic) flour sacks. That was what “cheap” meant then — not today’s plethora of affordable goods that the social critics would like to take away from us.

Rod Dreher: Eat it.

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Well. There it is.

Read it.

Makes you wonder what the point of having a birth certificate is, after all. Perhaps we could just replace it with a register: “Found, in a hospital bed, a child; came as some surprise to the woman occupying the bed at the same time, as well as the staff.”

P. J. O’Rourke does Woodstock.

What with one thing and another, I was always touchy on the subject of Woodstock. I’m over it now, thanks to various books celebrating the 40th anniversary of too many people in bad haircuts going to an upstate New York dairy farm for no good reason. I’ve counted three of these books so far. Since counting to three was as much as most Woodstock attendees could manage on goof butts and silly pills, three is where I stop.

If you remember it, you weren’t there.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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I should say yes, because such people are a crime scene waiting to happen.

I have never understood the impulse that prompts certain (CONGENITALLY DEFECTIVE) people to share personal information with total strangers – or even mere acquaintances – WHEN IT’S NONE OF THEIR FARGIN BUSINESS. Such people ought to be placed under adult supervision – or tasered until they’ve learned better.

But that’s me.

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Well, I think it’s cool.

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I think I’ve figured out why the SWPL crowd like immigrants, especially H1B immigrants — because enough of them turn formerly American neighborhoods, especially high-tech neighborhoods, into mini-U.N.s, which means that they can feel as if they live Someplace Else Than America without, you know, actually going to the trouble of having to travel.

Show me a Google or Microsoft employee who doesn’t like sushi and vindaloo, and I’ll show you a space alien in a Clever Plastic Disguise.

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What struck me from a few hours of watching leftist television and reading leftist gobbledygook is how far detached from reality these people are. It’s not a simple case of them having a few points wrong, or looking at things from a bizarrely biased perspective; they truly make statements and cling to ideas that have no basis in reality. As conservatives struggle to find apt metaphors to explain their opponent’s mindsets and delusions, I think I may have figured it out.

The left in our country is high.  Completely stoned out of their minds.

Living and working in L.A., one encounters more stoners on the average day than they do illegal immigrants. I’ve worked with stoners. I’ve dated stoners.  I’ve lived with stoners. I know stoners inside and out and I can tell you, without a doubt, that the Democrat Party is completely crunked.

Conservatives are gearing up to do battle with an army of statist fascists, but we are really up against Cheech and Chong.

Read it.

An exposition on why you can never, ever, ever believe a Muslim, unless you’re also a Muslim – and sometimes not even then.

Islam teaches — inculcates, rather — the notion that Muslims do not owe any allegiance to non-Muslims, not to their countries, not to their institutions, legal and political, not to anything. Within Islam — uniquely, among world religions — such a doctrine has arisen, and has been elaborated, and has been written about, one that is based on both the letter and spirit of the Qur’an and on the example of Muhammad, the Model of Conduct (uswa hasana), the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil). See the assurances given the Meccans in the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya.

Islam is a Total Belief-System that reinforces, through a whole variety of means, again and again the idea that for a Muslim the main thing, possibly the only thing, in life that truly matters is being Muslim, and that loyalty to fellow Muslims and to the teachings of Islam are the only things that matter, not the trivial and the transient, the without-worth because non-Muslim, Infidel polities.

All over the countries of Western Europe, as in the Muslim -dominated lands (Dar al-Islam), one can find the message of Islam clearly set out in the sermons of imams who are either uninhibited or perhaps, in some cases, simply unaware that they are being eavesdropped on by agents of the various Infidel governments. That message is clear: loyalty to Islam and to fellow members of the Umma comes first. And if one goes to Muslim websites (it isn’t hard to do) and reads around, one discovers that the universal answer to the question “do I have to obey the laws of Infidel states if I have managed to obtain citizenship in those states” is not a resounding and unqualified “Yes” but, rather, the obvious: obey the laws of Infidel states only insofar as those laws do not contradict the principles of Islam, of the Holy Law of Islam or Shari’a. In other words, “be a good citizen” just so long as what you do does not contradict Islam.

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Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), the revolutionary group formed by self-described “communist” and “rowdy black nationalist” Van Jones, held a vigil in Oakland, California, “mourning the victims of U.S. imperialism around the world” on the night after Sept. 11, 2001.

The reason this is important is because Van Jones is now President Obama’s green jobs czar. He does not appear to have distanced himself from his past communist activities and is now part of the Obama administration’s push to turn Sept. 11 into a National Day of Service focused on the promotion of the radical environmentalist agenda.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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The charts are especially interesting.

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The real thing, this time: leaked British diplomatic correspondence published in the London Times appears to make it clear that Great Britain let Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi go in order to finalize an oil deal with Libya….

So where are all the Hollywood celebs with their Concerned T-shirts? Barbra? Viggo?

Apart from anything else, it is an argument for the death penalty. We simply can’t trust any Western government to be immune from bribery.

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Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

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Hey, if it were easy, anybody could do it. Oh, wait….

Mark Steyn dares to mention the elephant in the room.

In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s passing, America’s TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there’s a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.

When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”

At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history . . . Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

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Is this a great country, or what?

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Merely reinforcing what John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, always says: “Get a government job!”

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This is why I will never ever vote for Kay Bailey Hutchison. For anything.

<George Carlin voice>”Wonderful RINOOOOOOOOO….”</George Carlin voice>

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According to a researcher with anti-spam company Cloudmark, 419 fraudsters have been relaying a “significant” amount of messages through the democrats.org domain name. The abuse, which dates back at least to the beginning of this month, helps evade filters that internet service providers employ to block the messages.

Birds of a feather….

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

And where were the American, British, French, etc. ships?

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Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Now that’s one feisty rabbi.

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In August 1929, that community was suddenly and brutally attacked. Incited by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem—who claimed that Jews were endangering Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem—Arab rioters swept through Palestine. In Hebron, the carnage was horrendous.

Theory: Islam is a creation of Satan in an attempt to exterminate God’s chosen people. Discuss.

Read it.

He always looks as if his mother had just told him he couldn’t go to the prom.

You’ve really got to wonder how shallow the gene pool has gotten in New England that they keep electing and re-electing these dimwitted crooks.

The Onion is always on top of the news.

We could have used griffins and didn’t. That makes all the difference, morally.

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Hence the moustaches you see in all those old Romans-versus-barbarians paintings.

(Well, that’s my theory; what’s your theory?)

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Whaddaya mean, media bias? Ain’t no media bias around here, homie.

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Read it.

And laugh.

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A 10-year-old homeschool girl described as “well liked, social and interactive with her peers, academically promising and intellectually at or superior to grade level” has been told by a New Hampshire court official to attend a government school because she was too “vigorous” in defense of her Christian faith.

New Hampshire is now officially a Blue State.

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Evidently the reason Muslim men want their women all covered up is because Muslim men congenitally act like bikers on a bender.

What a religion….

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Apparently it’s not LinkedIn, which surprises me.

An even more interesting datum is that the max benefit in New York is $405, whereas the max benefit in Texas is $417. I should have thought that New York, with it’s outrageous cost of living, would be higher. Huh. Well, that’s Democrats for you.

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“Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

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Senator Kennedy, along with President Obama have been the most pro-abortion and pro-embryonic stem cell research politicians in the nation.  As a matter of fact, Senator Kennedy refused to vote for Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Samuel Alito for fear their appointment might lead to overturning Roe v. Wade.  These positions are inimical to Catholic Church teaching and throughout the years, the American hierarchy has railed against Catholic politicians such as Kennedy who hold such views.  Some bishops have even advised them not to receive Holy Communion — an action just short of excommunication.

In recent days the spin-doctors have done their best to portray Senator Kennedy as a devout Catholic.  Stories of his visits to church in order to pray for his ailing daughter Kara, a cancer survivor, and reports of his personal religiosity have been widely circulated.  The media has also noted numerous visits by priests to the Kennedys’ home during his illness for the administration of the sacraments, presumably including confession and even the celebration of a private Mass in Kennedys’ living room.  There is no report, however, of repudiation of his voting record or sorrow for his obstinate refusal to adhere to Catholic morality on two of the most important life issues.  An important part of the Sacrament of Penance, along with sorrow for sin, is to try to repair the damages that our sins have caused.  Certainly, enough time had elapsed between the diagnosis of the Senator’s terminal illness and his death for him to make amends and to alleviate some of the scandal.  Yet, there is no indication that this has happened.

A Mass of Christian Burial is a privilege — not a right.  It is for those who have lived a Christian life.  Senator Kennedy’s scandalous disregard of his Church’s teaching and the destruction of human life that may be attributed to his voting record make his funeral celebration quite dubious.