Read it.

The Carneys are Democrats, so it goes without saying that they are well-read. (“I always have a pile. I hate to be without books,” Shipman says.) So they are photographed in front of a wall of books. … Only, funny thing: those are actually the same books, photoshopped to create duplicates and make it look as though there are more books than are really present. If you look carefully you will see multiple copies of a number of books. It is really a terrible photoshop job; the funniest thing is that they duplicated the boy’s finger, too. You can see the finger floating in front of a book on the right side of the photo, in the second shelf from the top.

…

As a man, you don’t know how easy you have it until you read feminist tracts.

Read it.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has two framed Soviet propaganda posters in his home, as revealed by the latest edition of Washingtonian magazine.

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

Just think of the reaction if a Republican White House staffer had two framed Nazi posters from WWII on his wall.

Read it.

A UCSB student interviewed by Austin Yack of The College Fix brings new meaning to the term low information voter.

Read it.

That our colleges and universities have become forums to promote political ideology is a well known fact. A few days ago, the New York Times wrote uncritically about courses on global warming being taught at the University of Oregon. The course is entitled, “The Cultures of Climate Change.” Its goal is not to marshal evidence for climate change as a human-caused crisis, or to measure its effects – the reality and severity of it are taken as given – but how to think about it, prepare for it and respond to it.” Instead of using scientific texts, the class will use films, fiction, poetry and photography. Obviously, the purpose is indoctrination, not instruction.

Steve Sailer tries to help Voices of the Crust get their act together.

 Obviously, an even more disproportionate number of Asians took the computer science AP test, but we don’t have a conceptual category for whites and Asians combined.

Is there some well-known dessert that combines vanilla and lemon flavors? It would sure help the quality of discourse on education and demographics and discrimination if journalists had a food-based ethnic slur that lumps together whites + Asians.

Jim Goad finds that his Bullshit Detector has gone off.

Like all societies before it, our society considers nothing more shameful than to be shameless. Thus, the Internet—which binds our society together like cheese binds a colon—is crammed with so much public shaming, it should be ashamed of itself.

Sticking your fist into the electronic beehive, you will be bitten by a thousand types of public shaming: age-shaming v. youth-shaming, slut-shaming v. virgin-shaming, fat-shaming v. skinny-shaming, and poor-shaming v. wealth-shaming. You will find liberals shaming liberals in the ongoing intersectionality wars, resulting in gay-on-gay shaming and black-on-black shaming.

Ain’t that a shame? Yes, it is. It’s a shame indeed, but don’t expect the public shamers to feel ashamed of their public shaming. Have they no shame? No, not for themselves. Like all moralists, they exist only to shame others.

Read it.

When a liberal says it’s time for you to shut up, it usually means they’re losing an argument.  When they want you arrested and prosecuted, well. . .  Two weeks ago I noted here that the climatistas were getting so desperate that they were starting to call for climate skeptics to be arrested and prosecuted, because, like the Inquisition, the climatistas are in possession of the complete truth, so shut up.  Because science.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Patterico catches Matthew Yglesias in a big fat stinking lie and the liar Yglesias reacts by lying about his lie. Yglesias actually blocked Patterico on Twitter, and Ezra Klein defended Yglesias’s lie.

Meanwhile, “Harry Reid Lied About Americans Being Liars, and Now That He’s Busted, He’s Lying Again“ – this is not unusual. Harry Reid is one of the most dishonest men ever to serve in the Senate, perhaps rivaling even the notoriously mendacious Ted Kennedy.

Read it.

The facts, very briefly, are these: Koch Industries has no interest in the Keystone Pipeline; it has not lobbied in favor of the pipeline; if the pipeline is built, Koch will make no use of it to ship oil from Alberta or anywhere else; and construction of Keystone would actually damage Koch’s economic interests by raising the price of midwestern oil that flows to Koch’s Pine Bend refinery. The reporters who wrote the Post article that tried to portray Koch as the driving force behind the Keystone pipeline, Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson, did not dispute any of these facts.

After my first post appeared, Eilperin and Mufson tried halfheartedly to respond to it. They posed the question, why did they write the article, given all of the facts that Power Line pointed out? Their answer was: “[I]ssues surrounding the Koch brothers’ political and business interests will stir and inflame public debate in this election year.” So their intention in writing the article was explicitly political.

But it may have been even more political, and more nakedly partisan, than we suspected. Today Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman wrote a letter to David Robertson, President and COO of Koch Industries. The Democrats’ letter was premised almost entirely on the Washington Post’s discredited article; it repeatedly footnoted that article and the IFG report on which the Post story was based. The two Democrats concluded by requesting that Koch answer questions and produce a long series of documents relating in various ways to the Keystone pipeline.

Tell the truth: Do they even really need to?

Read it.

Make that ‘reporters’.

Nearly two weeks after the American Public Transportation Association issued its deceptive press release about 2013 transit ridership, some reporters are still being fooled. Just two days ago, for example, NPR did a story claiming commuters are “ditching cars for transit in record numbers.”

Ironically, NPR begins its story in Chicago, where (APTA data reveals) 2013 transit ridership declined by 2.7 percent from the year before. “Throughout the entire country, just about every public transportation system saw hikes in ridership,” the story incorrectly claims. In addition to Chicago, transit systems in Albuquerque, Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, Kansas City, Louisville, Memphis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Antonio, and Washington DC all lost riders in 2013. Don’t NPR reporters check their facts?

Apparently not. That would be a tedious amount of work; better to just parrot the Narrative and enjoy your taxpayer-funded paycheck.

Read it.

We generally think that the purpose of words is to communicate ideas; thus words should be relatively stable to maximize comprehension across the broadest number of people. Of course, many people prefer to use words as fad items for purposes of status marking so that they can sneer at those who aren’t up to date. Eventually, this facilitates demonizing and punishing those who aren’t with it.

Apparently, ‘homosexual’ is the new ‘nigger’. Who knew?

Read it.

Ironically the vigorous claims of shortages concern occupations in science and engineering, yet manage to ignore or reject most of the science-based evidence on the subject. The repeated past cycles of “alarm/boom/bust” have misallocated public and private resources by periodically expanding higher education in science and engineering beyond levels for which there were attractive career opportunities. In so doing they produced large unintended costs for those talented students who devoted many years of advanced education to prepare for careers that turned out to be unattractive by the time they graduated, or who later experienced massive layoffs in mid-career with few prospects to be rehired.

The author includes, but does not draw some obvious conclusions from, the fact that a lot of STEM jobs today are filled by workers from overseas, where income expectations are lower and who therefore will work for lower wages than native-born candidates.

The Other McCain is flabbergasted.

It’s one of those intra-liberal feuds about something “controversial” Paul Ryan said 10 days ago, which of course was controversial only because Paul Ryan is a prominent Republican. But the feud among liberals is actually rather interesting in its own right, with one group of effete pointy-headed do-gooders squabbling with another group of subversive America-hating intellectuals. All of them agree that Paul Ryan is a dangerous right-wing reactionary, of course, but they disagree on the correct way to hate Paul Ryan.

Anyway, it’s possible Ta-Nehisi Coates had something important to say about all this, except I never got past the first sentence: “Among opinion writers, Jonathan Chait is outranked in my esteem only by Hendrik Hertzberg.”

Leon Weiseltier, in the New Republic, explains why basing your writing on actual facts is, like, so lame, and so Nate Silver is just a dork and ought not to be allowed to hang with the cool kids.

Since an open society stands or falls on the quality of its citizens’ opinions, the refinement of their opinions, and more generally of the process of opinion-formation, is a primary activity of its intellectuals and its journalists. In such an enterprise, the insistence upon a solid evidentiary foundation for judgments—the combating of ignorance, which is another spectacular influence of the new technology—is obviously important. Just as obviously, this evidentiary foundation may include quantitative measurements; but only if such measurements are appropriate to the particular subject about which a particular judgment is being made. The assumption that it is appropriate to all subjects and all judgments—this auctoritas ex numero—is not at all obvious. Many of the issues that we debate are not issues of fact but issues of value. There is no numerical answer to the question of whether men should be allowed to marry men, and the question of whether the government should help the weak, and the question of whether we should intervene against genocide. And so the intimidation by quantification practiced by Silver and the other data mullahs must be resisted. Up with the facts! Down with the cult of facts!

I guess he’s in the right place.

Read it.

When the 1% call for higher taxes, they mean higher taxes for other people.

Remember: Anybody who thinks he isn’t taxed enough need only send a check to the IRS. Takes about 30 seconds.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, takes a look at the witch-hunters.

Let me pause briefly to wonder how it is that Cultural Marxists get all the dot-org websites, then allow me to list some of the hatefulness on the $PLC side of the fence. Here a few things the hatewatchers hate.

Read it.

‘Well, we wanted to make sure everybody was properly indoctrinated with the guilt of White Privilege, and make sure they appreciate the contributions that People Of Color have made to the progress of civilization, and, um, you know, that kind of stuff.’

According to the Washington Post, Gates told teachers common standards could transform U.S. education and reduce the number of students who require remedial courses in college.

The problem is not the standards — we’ve got plenty of standards — the problem is the teachers. This is like telling the Arabs ‘all you have to do is get your tactical doctrine right and you’ll start winning again’.

Freeberg smells a rat.

Really, first time I heard of this, I was sure someone was playing a joke on Michelle Obama, who unfortunately decided to go for it, and then no one could clue her in that the whole thing was a joke, things sort of passed a point-of-no-return and everyone had to follow through. I still kinda suspect that’s what happened.

Read it.

Oddly, the news media and Democratic leaders don’t think it’s a big deal when a federal official — Lerner was the head of the unit that deals with tax-exempt organizations when she first invoked the Fifth last May — won’t answer questions about her actions as a federal official, but they are in a huff because the committee’s chairman, Darrell Issa, abruptly called an end to the hearing and shut off the microphone.

A government employee taking the Fifth ought to ring alarm bells across the fruited plain. But, of course, the supposed news media are just press agents for the Democrats, so nothing happens.

Read it.

Having lived through the Watergate scandal and the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon, I recall that one conservative journalist stood out from the pack. As the Washington columnist for National Review, George Will regularly exposed the Nixon administration’s lines of defense as the lies that they were. He distinguished himself both for his merciless analytical rigor and his skills as an anatomist.

…

George Will’s intellect made him one of a kind in the profession, but is there a liberal columnist who is willing to serve Will’s role in the current crisis of the Obama administration? Something is rotten in the Obama administration. The problem is that the political rot is instrumental to the goals of the Democratic Party. No liberal journalist has emerged to dog the administration on the multifarious IRS scandals. They are lapdogs all.

Read it.

Where does the Democratic Party get the people who work for it? I suppose from the same vast sea of unknowing where they get their voters.

Perhaps beta-male Pajama Boy is doing an unpaid internship at the White House.

Read it.

As with the case of the Holy Roman Empire, the SPLC is not southern, has nothing to do with law, and nothing to do with poverty — it’s basically a well-funded group of finger-pointers who exist to label those ‘progressives’ don’t like as ‘extremists’. As with every other such group, their paychecks depend on there being such extremist groups hiding under every sofa — so (what a surprise!) they keep finding them.

Read it.

Bitcoin is naught but a toy for rich white libertarian men, says Annie-Rose Strasser at Think Progress, as she thinks about the ways she doesn’t like progress if she doesn’t like the type of people she associates with it, or the ideas she thinks are behind it, no matter what its actual uses are or might be, for rich, poor, or in-between.

Steve Sailer fisks the Gray Lady, not that doing so is much of an effort.

Roles in mainstream movies do go to black actors that weren’t originally written for them — it’s just that those kind of movies don’t get Oscar recognition. Thirty years ago, Beverly Hills Cop was planned around Sylvester Stallone, but Eddie Murphy wound up playing the role. Murphy wasn’t nominated for an Oscar in it, but then Stallone wouldn’t have been either.

…

American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street are both period pieces inspired by true stories of white collar criminality, so wouldn’t it be racist to imply that blacks were involved?

That’s raaaacist, Steve. Get it right.

In other words, African-Americans had a poor Oscar year, but non-American blacks had a very good one, but why talk about complications of ethnicity when we can talk about race and keep it simple: black and white?

That is, after all, the main point of the New York Times.

Read it.

On Tuesday it was announced that the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) had decided to allow the group American Atheists to have a booth at this year’s event, but nearly as soon as it was announced, CPAC officials pulled the invitation.

Regardless, the original invitation was enough to spur prominent conservative Brent Bozell to pull out of the longtime conservative event, charging that CPAC is “destroying the conservative movement.”

Which is horseshit, and Bozell ought to know better. Can you be conservative and an atheist? Of course, but that’s not the point. One of the core principles of American conservatism (if, indeed, there is such a thing) is Free Speech, and that means Free Speech for your opponents as well as your friends.

In the CNN report, American Atheists president David Silverman said that his CPAC booth would be a “first step of many” in reaching out to conservatives because he was positive that there were many “closeted atheists” among them.

Indeed there are. Read the blog Secular Right for a good sample, including the Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, John Derbyshire.

“We spoke with Mr. Silverman about his divisive and inappropriate language. He pledged that he will attack the very idea that Christianity is an important element of conservatism. People of any faith tradition should not be attacked for their beliefs, especially at our conference. He has left us with no choice but to return his money,” she said.

But that’s not what he said, if he is being quoted correctly — he said he would attack an idea, not the people holding that idea, and that is what Free Speech is all about. (Sure, maybe he lied, but supporting Free Speech means taking the chance that people will sometimes lie to you. Deal with it.)

Despite having their invite rescinded, that the atheists were approved in the first place did not sit well with Brent Bozell, President of the Media Research Center and an influential conservative leader. Bozell announced that he was pulling out of the conference because of the invitation….

That sounds like a win-win to me — if CPAC needs anything, it’s the absence of people who are of the Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee persuasion.

Reacting to Bozell’s statement, David Bossie, President of Citizens United, told Breitbart that CPAC had “lost its way.”

“When you have a conservative stalwart like Brent Bozell pulling out of CPAC because of the mismanagement of a conference that is supposed to be about conservatism, not republicanism, the conference has lost its way,” Bossie said. “It truly is a shame that every year it seems we have drama surrounding this conference because ACU leadership forgets the three-legged stool of conservatism, which is a strong national defense, belief in the free market, and traditional family values. CPAC is supposed to be a conference for the conservative movement guided by its core principles. If we lose those principles, the conservative movement is dead.”

Couldn’t have said it any better myself.

Matthew Yglesias chides the 1%.

Put aside, for a moment, this instance of a Voice of the Crust growling toward the hand that feeds him.

I don’t say ‘biting the hand that fees him’ because nobody who is in a position to give money to Harvard listens to the likes of Matthew Yglesias.

And here’s why:

Basically what you see is that highly selective institutions are institutions for kids from affluent families. You’ll often hear that such-and-such a donation to an already-wealthy institution is a great idea because it’s going to financial aid. But when only about 5 percent of your class is coming from the bottom quarter of the income distribution (and we can assume that very little of that 5% is coming from the really truly poor) then even this financial aid is extremely poorly targeted. Meanwhile, the demographics of highly selective institutions reveal that highly selective institutions remain what they always have been—mechanisms for the perpetuation of inequality and hierarchy.

Giving $150 million to Harvard accomplishes a number of things:

1. It guarantees that any of your descendants who want to go to Harvard will do so, yea, unto the fourth generation;
2. It buys you status amongst the Crust and its Chattering Class.
3. It gives you a huge tax write-off, typically from securities for which you didn’t pay anything out-of-pocket, thus shielding a lot of future income from the exactions that afflict the likes of Warren Buffet’s secretary.

So this is like a flea saying to a dog: ‘Dog, don’t be that way!’ Or like a Baptist preacher exhorting his congregation not to use drugs. (Dude, if they were the type to use drugs, they wouldn’t be sitting there listening to you.) It’s all just hot air (for which he gets well paid, I presume; I should have such a job).

Now Matthew Yglesias knows this perfectly well, having gone to Dalton and Harvard himself. He knows, as some perhaps do not, that Harvard arranges its admissions policies to admit, not only ‘kids from affluent families’, but those who will produce ‘kids from affluent families’ themselves someday, in the hopes that they will want to send said kinder to Harvard. They quite deliberately skim off the cream of the student applicant universe, which consists of people who would be successful with or without a Harverd education (vide Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, whose key characteristic is not that they graduated from Harvard, which they didn’t, but that they were admitted to Harvard). Harvard is the farmer who figures out where the tallest corn will grow and then lays out his field accordingly, preening at harvest time about his ‘green thumb’ and expertise as a farmer.

Read it.

Yet another instance of a Voice of the Crust going back and re-writing history to pull the wool over the eyes of the Low-Information Voter.

Read it.

You thought water was good for you? Not necessarily, if you believe researchers at the University of Arkansas. According to a new study, if there’s ice in the water, it could pose a health risk.

That’s right. Now we have yet another “danger food” to be wary of. Let me be the first to warn you: Ice cubes are dangerous!

Oh noes!

The Washington Post obsesses about race so that you don’t have to.

‘Unfortunate’? It’s just bad luck he’s the only black guy there? Did the others miss a plane or something?

Don’t listen to your friends back home saying the Winter Olympics are just for white people who like the cold and vacation in Aspen. This is the most inclusive Winter Games ever. Why, there are Caucasians here from almost 88 different nations.

Bada-bing! I’ll be here all week.

Don’t quit your day job.

Actually, I will be here the next 10 days. And in that time, I will encounter no more than a dozen people of African American descent. They are the same ones I see over and over.

They’re probably getting tired of you.

Maybe it’s because I lived in the District for eight years. Maybe it’s because I spent my formative years in a real melting pot: rural Oahu, Hawaii, where diversity in ethnicity and culture are part of island life. Maybe I’m just used to seeing and feeling comfortable being around a variety of people, many of whom don’t look like me.

Maybe it’s because you’re a left-wing asshole who wears his White Guilt as if it were a Purple Heart.

Whatever, this place is whiter than an episode of “Downton Abbey.”

Hey, don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out. (Maybe it’s whiter than an episode of ‘Downton Abbey’ because, like Downton Abbey, the people who are here belong here and weren’t picked for their Diversity Points.)

Now, you are reading this and thinking one of two things: What’s with the white guilt, son? Or, What does race have to do with the greatest athletes in the world competing in their chosen disciplines, most of which just happen to be contested against other Caucasians?

Look, I don’t care about the color of the competitors.

Coulda fooled me. Guess somebody else wrote the rest of your column.

Read it.

Of course, since this is NPR, they assume the existence of a ‘food desert’ in this location (Michelle said so! It must be true!), so no wonder they are puzzled.

A Rational Human Being, however, would consider that perhaps the whole notion of ‘food desert’ (i.e. proles who don’t eat SWPL food that yuppies would prefer that they eat) is merely projection on the part of the Upper Crust.

Read it.

Which brings me to the weird general observation: American liberals are quite essentialist when it comes to the target of their critique. Conservatives and Republicans are racist by their nature, by their intent, so their social segregation from non-whites counts toward their racism. It’s a fundamental attribute. In contrast American liberals and Democrats are anti-racist, so their social segregation from non-whites is situational, and does not reflect antipathy to non-whites.

Steve Sailer has some fun with the Mouth of the Crust.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow discovers a new engine fueling the War on Women: having female loved ones makes men more sexist. Apparently, being around women they love causes males to notice average differences between men and women, and Noticing, as we’ve all been warned, leads to conservatism.

Read it.

Because THERE IS NOTHING MORE IMPORTANT FACING THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD then whether or not one can smoke weed legally.

Each Voice of the Crust has a Pet Conservative — The New York Times has David Brooks, and the Washington Post has Jennifer Rubin.

It is a coin flip, at best, for the president as to whether his signature achievement, his only achievement, will fail. It will be repealed in essence by a popular referendum: The mass refusal of people to go along with Obama’s top-down, compulsory system that was set to transform a sixth of the economy. That possibility should traumatize and probably is traumatizing the White House. Same goes for any Democratic lawmaker who spent time thinking this through. The political implications of this are almost too enormous to calculate.

And so, of course, she doesn’t even make an effort. Pet Conservatives are allowed to bark, but not to bite.

Read it.

Unmentioned: And pay more in taxes.

Unmentioned: And do more good than OxFam.

Read it.

1. He’s not making any money off of it.

2. It’s not vegetarian, so it displeases the Chattering Class from whom he makes his living. (The target demographic of Mother Jones, his venue, the connection with aging former hippies being left as an exercise for the reader.)

The Other McCain is on the case, when he can stop laughing.

Transgender feminist @papierhache reacted to yesterday’s notice exactly as predicted, by claiming victimhood, denouncing me as a bully “with sycophant minions” (that would be you, dear readers), and generally lecturing that I am the pluperfect example of how “people … use social media to orchestrate abusive behavior.”

Remember: @papierhache jumped into my timeline in response to incitement by a troll trying to stir up trouble because I’d used the common slang “shemale” in promoting a post about conflicts between transgender activists and radical lesbian feminists. And after sending me multiple messages condemning me as a terrible hater — because slang is the New Fascism – @papierhache evidently thought she would evade further criticism for her moralistic posturing.

Think again, sweetheart.

Steve Sailer watches his Bullshit Warning Light go on.

 The ruling mindset of white people writing about Africa is that Africans have no agency: Africans are merely robotic vehicles for the malign influence of white people. Thus, if white people pay for a refugee camp for Dinkas and Nuers, this pair of signs can then be held responsible for all future conflicts between the tribes. The alternative is to assume that Africans have some responsibility for the state of Africa, but, considering the state of Africa, that would be racist.

In truth, the Nuer were always been proud of their ability to push around the Dinka and take his cattle. They would consider the conventional wisdom of themselves as pitiful victims being manipulated by white stereotypes into fighting the Dinka as an insult.

Taki joins in a game that anyone can play.

One of the great but perverse pleasures of my life when I’m in New York City is to read The New York Times. It’s perverse because no paper north of Saudi Arabia lies quite as blatantly as the Times does. Its lying is based on omission rather than invention and by the use of the kind of selectivity on news reporting that would earn a Soviet-era Pravda newshound the Stalin Prize. Excluding facts, indeed stories, which do not fall within the purview of its viewpoint is the paper’s norm rather than the exception. “All the News Our Bias Allows” should be its motto and on its masthead, but even there, the Times is spinning the facts: “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is the first big lie one encounters on page one.

Read it.

Oh, really.

The heart of the issue, many of these people say, is that Obama and his inner circle had scant executive experience prior to arriving in the West Wing, and dim appreciation of the myriad ways the federal bureaucracy can frustrate an ambitious president. And above all, they had little apparent interest in the kind of organizational and motivational concepts that typically are the preoccupation of the most celebrated modern managers.

“No one asked you to write code or be a technical expert, but the expectation is you can set up a process,” said Kellogg School of Management professor Daniel Diermeier. “Companies do it every day.”

Makes you wonder where these guys were in 2008, when the rest of us were saying that.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

After Susan Rice disgraced herself on Meet the Press after the 9/11 attack on our consulate in Benghazi, I was so incensed that I wrote you about my research which made it very clear that the attack was not a spontaneous reaction to the YouTube video, and was undertaken by Ansar al Sharia, which is Al Qaeda affiliated.

After reading the New York Times whitewash of the Benghazi affair today, I find myself feeling like I did after watching Susan Rice on Meet the Press. The Times story is a transparent attempt to provide cover for Hillary Clinton’s upcoming run for POTUS in 2016. I find it incredible that the Times produced such a lengthy story filled with statements that are so easily refuted by facts that are readily available to anybody with half a brain and an Internet connection. There are so many misstatements that it is hard to know where to begin.

The Other McCain is on the case.

The apparent fakery by Williams probably won’t be reported in bold headlines by some outlets that reported the story originally.

And you can depend on that.

Voice of the Crust New York Times trots out one of its Pet Brown People to lay down the Party Line.

 AT the heart of the fracas surrounding the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York who promised to pay her housekeeper $9.75 per hour, in compliance with United States labor rules, but instead paid her $3.31 per hour, is India’s dirty secret: One segment of the Indian population routinely exploits another, and the country’s labor laws allow gross mistreatment of domestic workers.

Lesson: Unions vote Democrat more dependably than brown people. Check.

 India is furious that the diplomat, Devyani Khobragade, was strip-searched and kept in a cell in New York with criminals. Retaliation from the newly assertive but otherwise bureaucracy-ridden nation was swift. American diplomats were stripped of identity cards granting them diplomatic benefits, and security barriers surrounding the American Embassy in New Delhi were hauled away. A former finance minister suggested that India respond by arresting same-sex partners of American diplomats, since the Indian Supreme Court recently upheld a section of a Colonial-era law that criminalizes homosexuality.

I would find that amusing, certainly, when the Immovable Object of who-are-we-to-judge-their-culture gets in the way of the Irresistable Force of we-like-perverts-therefore-you-must-too and ‘progressive’ heads explode. Oh, that Orwell were alive to see this day….

 Notwithstanding legitimate Indian concerns about whether American marshals used correct protocol in the way they treated a diplomat, the truth is that India is party to an exploitative system that needs to be scrutinized.

Too bad that they’re not Muslim, which would deflect all such ‘scrutiny’.

I grew up in a middle-class household in India in the ’80s; my parents were schoolteachers, and our lifestyle was not lavish by any means.

Touch base I-grew-up-working-class: Check.

I received new clothes once a year; I don’t recall ever going to a restaurant; our family couldn’t afford a car, so we used a scooter.

Touch base Economically-disadvantaged: Check.

But we always had a live-in housekeeper who cooked and washed our clothes, while a man came by every other day to sweep and mop the floors.

Touch base criticize-culture-that-substitutes-human-labor-for-automation-because-latter-not-available-as-if-everybody-lived-like-Americans: Check.

Fisking the remainder of this article is left as an exercise for the reader — I have presents to wrap.

Read it.

It seems what the producers intended and what A&E envisioned with the show is much different than the show that they ended up with, but they didn’t do anything about it because it was so wildly popular and so wildly profitable. But even with all the money, they have never really been comfortable with what happened.

This is what happened. The whole idea of the show was to parade these nouveau riche Christian hillbillies around so that we could laugh at them. “Look at them,” we were supposed to say. “Look how backward they are! Look what they believe! Can you believe they really live this way and believe this stuff? See how they don’t fit in? HAHAHA”

When the producers saw the way the show was shaping up, different than they envisioned it, they tried to change course. They tried to get the Robertson’s to tone down their Christianity, but to their eternal credit they refused. They tried to add fake cussin’ to the show by inserting bleeps where no cussword was uttered. At best, they wanted to make the Robertson’s look like crass buffoons. At worst they wanted them to look like hypocrites.

Read it.

Actually, it’s still the Same Old Inequality, but a Voice of the Crust like CNN has to use handwaving like this to distract the low-information demographic from the fact that Obamacare is making things a lot, lot worse. They figure you’re so dumb you won’t notice, and will participate in the Two Minute Hate against ‘the rich’ without remembering that most rich people are, like CNN, Democrats.

Read it.

Some may think reporters and editors are simply clumsy or indifferent writers, and sometimes they are. But much of the time they choose their words (and photos) with exquisite and subtle care. They also realize that most people only look at the headlines and photos of most articles, and that those are therefore the most important elements, and that even people who do read the article often read only the first few paragraphs.

In thisWaPo article, the headline and photo have been chosen to suggest that Obama is a suffering victim—in fact, the greatest victim—of a series of unfortunate circumstances that have befallen him. He’s nearly a martyr. And the text (the excerpt quoted above is the second paragraph in the piece) reinforces that idea by this phrase, “faced a series of setbacks.” Passive voice; no actor.

The Crust rallys ’round its affirmative-action hire.

In a valiant attempt to solidify it’s position as a Voice of the Crust, The Atlantic denounces — wait for it — Republican ‘class warfare’.

Of course, pervasive and perennial Democrat class warfare is nowhere to be found.

Or so claims Jonathan Merritt, who is a journalist with no credentials as a theologian that I can find.

Setting aside the ridiculousness of creating rigidly racial depictions of a fictitious character that does not actually exist—sorry, kids—like Santa, Kelly has made a more serious error about Jesus. The scholarly consensus is actually that Jesus was, like most first-century Jews, probably a dark-skinned man. If he were taking the red-eye flight from San Francisco to New York today, Jesus might be profiled for additional security screening by TSA.

Of course, ‘white’ doesn’t mean ‘not dark skinned’ — ask George Zimmerman. Hell, ask Al Sharpton if Jews are ‘white’; I think we can count ol’ Al (and Jesse Jackson) in our corner on this one.

Just who is making the ‘serious error about Jesus’ here?

Read it.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Friday the administration is focused on putting its health care plan in place; he declined to discuss the declaration by the fact-checking website PolitiFact of its annual “lie of the year:” President Obama’s past claim that if “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”