Read it.

It was a fairly typical lunch at an academic conference in the East after the New Hampshire primary in 2008. There was a smattering of endowed professorships and international reputations at the table, perhaps eight academics in all.

Along with the sweet tea and penne pasta came the inevitable skewering of George W. Bush.

“Never has a president experienced such horrible poll approval numbers in the midst of a war,” one professor quipped.

“That is, if you overlook Harry Truman,” I interjected into an uncomfortable silence.

It was going to be that kind of meal.

Illustrating once again Jonah Goldberg’s theory of The Tyranny Of Clichés: Nobody in the Crust likes George W Bush, so obviously he’s The Worst President Ever; everybody in the Crust loves Barack Obama (although that love is wearing kinda thin recently), so obviously he’s The Best President Ever. Record? Who cares about the record?

“I couldn’t vote for a Mormon,” one professor said. There was some polite (or perhaps impolite) head-bobbing. “It’s a cult. Very intolerant, and their opinions about women, and, well … ” and his voice trailed off.

Ask him his opinion of Muslims, and I expect that he would fall all over himself proclaiming his willingness to vote for one for President.

I’ve attended numerous scholarly conferences since that lunch where Mormonism has been discussed, and it is amazing to confront snide and disdainful comments and even overt prejudice from intellectually and sophisticated academics. And it seems perfectly acceptable to express this bias. Mormons are abnormal, outside the mainstream; everybody knows that. They don’t drink alcohol and coffee. Their women are suppressed. They don’t like the cross, and their most holy book seems made up. And there’s that multiple-wives thing. At one session involving a discussion of Utah’s history, several dismissive comments were spoken, rather blithely and without any sense of embarrassment. Belittling comments were made about Mormons’ abstemiousness, and there was a general negative undercurrent. The LDS Church was referred to as the Mormon Church, something many members object to. They don’t mind being called Mormons, but their church is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or LDS Church. At least some of the professors who were making these remarks knew that.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/05/29/essay-about-prejudice-academe-against-mormons#ixzz1weV83BeG
Inside Higher EdI’ve attended numerous scholarly conferences since that lunch where Mormonism has been discussed, and it is amazing to confront snide and disdainful comments and even overt prejudice from intellectually and sophisticated academics. And it seems perfectly acceptable to express this bias. Mormons are abnormal, outside the mainstream; everybody knows that. They don’t drink alcohol and coffee. Their women are suppressed. They don’t like the cross, and their most holy book seems made up. And there’s that multiple-wives thing. At one session involving a discussion of Utah’s history, several dismissive comments were spoken, rather blithely and without any sense of embarrassment. Belittling comments were made about Mormons’ abstemiousness, and there was a general negative undercurrent. The LDS Church was referred to as the Mormon Church, something many members object to. They don’t mind being called Mormons, but their church is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or LDS Church. At least some of the professors who were making these remarks knew that.

Timothy Egan purportedly writes for the New York Times purportedly ‘from the West’ (I think they mean ‘the Upper West Side’).

His nominal thesis is that it would not be a good thing to require that a President have business experience.

Well, there goes Teddy Roosevelt, the writer, rancher and police commissioner, not to mention his distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt, the assistant naval secretary and politician, or Dwight Eisenhower, the career soldier. Ike’s résumé, which includes defeating the world’s most concentrated form of evil in Nazi Germany, would not be not enough to qualify him for the presidency.

I don’t know about you, but it wouldn’t bring a tear to my eye to have had any of those three miss the Presidency. Teddy Roosevelt was the living icon of Progressivism, and laid the groundwork for the explicit fascism of Woodrow Wilson; Franklin Roosevelt took a Depression and, by his policies, stretched it out as long as he could; and Eisenhower not only sat on his hands during the Polish and Hungarian revolts against Soviet hegemony in 1956, but jerked the rug out from under the British and French when they attempted to respond to that poster child for third-world-dictator confiscation, the theft of the Suez Canal by Nasser. Not one of them had any more business experience than Barack Obama, and not one of them was a positive influence on world history. So that dog won’t hunt.

The less experience in business, the better the president.

So much for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and all those old Dead White Males. By this standard, the election of Barack Obama (who has less business experience than any kid who has run a corner lemonade stand) ought to have brought in Utopia. How’s that hope and change thing working out for you?

Read it.

From Captain Cook to playboy Prince Bertie, Tessa Dunlop examines the appeal of the tattoo among high society.

A transparent attempt to sanitize the celebrity culture of narcissism that has rich white liberal kids attempting to act like the poor black underclass. If the tattoo has any appeal, it is among low society, not high; a public distinguishing characteristic of people with poor to nonexistent impulse control, like slacker adolescents and the criminal fringe. ‘Here’s your sign.’

Gavin McInnes looks at the race-hustle all-stars.

It was a tough week for racial witch hunters. In fact, it’s been a tough quarter-century for them.

Funny how that works.

Here are ten examples of fabricated “hate crimes” that fuck it up for those of us living in the real world.

Read it.

House Democrats received training this week on how to address the issue of race to defend government programs, according to training materials obtained by The Washington Examiner.

Read it.

While studiously avoiding and evading any investigation of Barack Obama’s “youth” (i.e. the period prior to his running for President) or devoting resources to any of the many scandals (selling guns to Mexican drug lords, politicizing along racial lines the Justice Department, etc.) which would have been front page day after day in another administration, WaPo devoted months and resources to investigating what Mitt Romney did in high school.

Media bias? What media bias?

Read it.

Here’s the problem with the press coverage of Barack Obama: the mainstream media is so overwhelmed by his charisma that they often miss the important details. Every decision, speech, policy statement or impromptu visit to the bathroom is presented as a piece of “history” – the dawn of a new era. The Prez could go seal-clubbing and much of the media would see it as a new epoch for winter sports. “Barack Obama Becomes the First President to Kill Six Seals in Under One Minute,” the New York Times would proudly report, while Twitter would be all abuzz with how hot he looks in snow shoes.

Even Brits can see the truth.

So on Monday, Obama was losing dollars on the Hollywood fundraising circuit. On Wednesday, he endorsed gay marriage. On Thursday, he flew to Hollywood for a fundraiser, where 150 donors paid $40,000 each to meet the Prez at the home of George Clooney. Coincidence?

Barack Obama, candidate of the 1%.

Read it.

The UN Security Council on Thursday condemned the deadliest bomb attacks of Syria’s 14-month uprising, urging all sides to stick to an international peace plan after at least 55 people were killed.

Actual effect on what happens in Syria: None.

Read it.

“I am not a welfare queen,” says Melissa Bruninga-Matteau.

Although the hyphenated last name does look like spoor of a would-be member of the Crust.

That’s how she feels compelled to start a conversation about how she, a white woman with a Ph.D. in medieval history and an adjunct professor, came to rely on food stamps and Medicaid. Ms. Bruninga-Matteau, a 43-year-old single mother who teaches two humanities courses at Yavapai College, in Prescott, Ariz., says the stereotype of the people receiving such aid does not reflect reality. Recipients include growing numbers of people like her, the highly educated, whose advanced degrees have not insulated them from financial hardship.

Uh, I think the prominent arm tattoos might have something to do with it…. As well as the fact that the  typical business requirement for medieval-history PhDs (outside of academia) is, last time I looked, too small to measure. If her degree were in statistics, she’d be sitting pretty. ODF.

“I find it horrifying that someone who stands in front of college classes and teaches is on welfare,” she says.

I find it horrifying that so fine a fellow as myself has to work for a living at all, but that’s life for you. Markets work, even when they horrify you.

Read it.

Sure, just as soon as Muslims give the Middle East back to their native Christian inhabitants. Let’s start with giving Egypt back to the Copts, and Istanbul back to the Greeks. And then perhaps ‘Kaliningrad’ back to the Germans, and Tibet back to the Tibetans, and you can carry on like this all day.

Read it.

President Obama’s campaign re-election website has put up a public relations initiative called “The Life of Julia.” The goal of this initiative: to compare “how President Obama’s policies would help one woman over her lifetime – and how Mitt Romney would change her story.” It’s propaganda of the worst order. It’s a typical Obama scare tactic. And worst of all, it assumes that Julia will remain dependent on the government her entire life.

Well, under Obama’s policies, she will.

Julia’s story begins when she’s 3. Thanks to President Obama, the website says:

Julia is enrolled in a Head Start program to help get her ready for school. Because of steps President Obama has taken to improve programs like this one, Julia joins thousands of students across the country who will start kindergarten ready to learn and succeed.

Well, no. Head Start has been one of the worst failures of the federal government. The Department of Health and Human Services itself found that the government has invested $150 billion in Head Start since 1965 … and that has yielded precisely zero impact for the kids involved. But according to Obama, that dastardly Romney fellow would cut Head Start by 20%. The horror, the horror!

Apparently, nothing happens in Julia’s life until she’s 17. There’s a reason for that – America’s public school system is an utter failure, and Obama knows it. But Obama says that Julia at age 17 is flourishing (presumably she isn’t one of the approximately 25 percent of all students who drop out of school, or one of the 40 percent of black or Hispanic students who do so). Here’s Julia’s life under Obama at 17:

Julia takes the SAT and is on track to start her college applications. Her high school is part of the Race to the Top program, implemented by President Obama. Their new college- and career-ready standards mean Julia can take the classes she needs to do well.

Julia must be one of the lucky ones to get into a charter school. If she goes to one of America’s normal public schools, this is a pipe dream. But according to Obama, nasty Romney would cut funding for public education “to pay for tax cuts to millionaires.” Because what we need is more education spending, not less – even while districts like the Los Angeles Unified School District expend about $30,000 per year per student to achieve the worst results in the nation.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Rod Dreher brings the heat.

Honestly, Maureen Dowd writing about anything having to do with religion is about like me writing about the storm and stress of the PGA Tour. In her column, she recycles every tired cliche about the Mean Old Men of the Vatican picking on the Poor, Defenseless Church Ladies. Even though the Vatican report is publicly available information, Dowd never once mentions the main reasons for the Vatican investigation into the nun group nor does she bring up the fact that the Vatican did not investigate all American nuns, only those who had substituted radical feminism and related ideologies for Catholic doctrine.

Read it.

Thanks a bunch, guys. Your’re the best.

Read it.

In an explosive memoir released today, former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez provides new evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi lied when she declared she had not been briefed about the use of waterboarding.

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

Read it.

There’s a reason why most would-be politicians start by running for lesser offices, as Massachusetts Democrats are finding to their chagrin this spring, as their anointed US Senate candidate springs one unpleasant surprise after another.

The Warren campaign is becoming an excellent illustration of the Cerberus-like combination of government, academia, and the media that Mencius Moldbug used to call The Cathedral.

Last week, news broke that Harvard Law had cited Warren as a minority hire — a Native American — when it was under criticism for lack of faculty diversity in 1996. Asked Friday for proof of her Indian ancestry, Warren’s said it’s part of her family “lore.”

Of course, one must be a member of a fashionable minority if possible. Don’t bother us with pesky facts.

Better a Native American than a ‘white Hispanic’, presumably.

When the campaign began, The Boston Globe saluted Warren for her “rise from poverty” as a child in Oklahoma City. Since then, as the truth has trickled out, the narrative has evolved. Goodbye poverty, hello to “the jagged edge of the middle class.”

We’ve learned that, by 1965, Elizabeth’s family had three cars, including a white MG that the hard-scrabble Native American drove daily to her tony high school. Still, the Globe insisted, the MG was “beat up.”

Well, that’s all right, then. That surely qualifies as Working Class. Don’t bother us with pesky facts.

Last Friday, she released four years of tax returns. Over those four years, Warren and her husband, another Harvard Law prof, averaged $300,000 more than Sen. Brown and his spouse, a TV anchor. In 2009, the Warrens made $981,000 vs. the Browns’ $249,000.

Even the Globe had to admit that Warren was “in the top 1 percent of earners” — ironic, considering her bragging that she provided the “intellectual foundations” of Occupy Wall Street.

Hey, it doesn’t matter who you really are, what matters is who you want to be. Don’t bother us with pesky facts.

Read it.

“The fracture between the common traveller and the people providing the services is broken,” said Hawley, “and I’ve used the term ‘toxic,’ and I think that is dangerous to security when neither side are particularly listening to the other and I think that is what needs to be fixed.”

Of course, the obvious response is: Well, whose fargin fault is it that the TSA is resented? Hmmm?

And don’t get me started on that whole ‘security theater’ thing….

Read it.

Read it.

NPR’s Mara Liasson outraged female listeners on Weekend Edition Sunday on April 15 when she said Mitt Romney’s political problems aren’t with “stay-at-home moms,” but rather with “educated women.”

Seven days later, NPR admitted it scrubbed the clip and the transcript for the website.

Got a problem? Down the Memory Hole with it!

Read it.

Reading through the numerous articles about “pink slime” alongside articles about general meat consumption published conspicuously close to the “pink slime” controversy, one can only come to the conclusion that the hysteria over “pink slime” was ginned up to make consumers focus on meat production.

Ya think?

The Food Elite doesn’t just want to ban “pink slime.” They don’t want to curtail only red meat consumption. The Food Elite wants to curb the consumption of all meat. There is an explanation for why the Food Elite wants us all to consume less meat, but that’s a discussion for another day. For now, it’s enough to focus on the fact that the Food Elite doesn’t want us eating meat.

As indeed they don’t.

Read it.

As it so happens, I agree.

In fact, aside from Margaret Thatcher, the ‘Conservatives’ haven’t had a Right Wing Person lead their party since Churchill, and he was kind of borderline.

Makes you wonder what exactly they’re thinking over there.

Read it.

ABC News has got hold of a photo of the back of George Zimmerman’s head, purportedly taken three minutes after Trayvon Martin was shot to death. It shows blood trickling down the back of Zimmerman’s head from two cuts, as well as a possible contusion forming on the crown of his head.

So I guess all of the whiners will apologize, right? Wrong.

An attorney for the Martin family, Benjamin Crump, told ABC the photo changed nothing. ”How bad could it have been if they didn’t take him to the hospital [and] didn’t stitch him up,” he said.

As you can see, it’s not about the facts, it’s about the Narrative. They could find video footage of Martin pounding Zimmerman’s head repeatedly on the ground, and they’d still say that Zimmerman shot the poor innocent little thug down in cold blood.

This article from CNN:  For President, Two Pragmatic Problem-Solvers.

At first I thought he was talking about Romney and Gingrich, but no — he’s talking about Obama.

What problem, of any kind, has Obama ever solved? No, I can’t think of one, either.

Let’s move to stage two: What problem, of any kind, that Obama has ever attempted to solve, has he not made worse? Another empty set.

I even checked the date to make sure it wasn’t a stale April Fool’s Day post. But no.

When they call this guy a ‘CNN Contributor’, they must mean he donated money to them.

Read it.

A top Obama campaign adviser said yesterday that the president has no plans to chip in extra money from his own income to help the federal deficit — after Obama’s tax returns showed that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary.

We don’t need a ‘Buffett Rule’, we need an ‘Obama Rule’.

Daniel Salinas, Democrat.

The Associated Press manages to write 600 words about the mayor-elect of Sunland Park, New Mexico, Daniel Salinas — “Alcohol, padded expense reports, prostitutes and kickbacks. Those are some the latest charges filed in New Mexico against the mayor-elect of the troubled border town” —without mentioning his political party affiliation.

Read it.

One activist who tried to enter pointed out that the 40-story building where the event took place was owned by “Bain and company”–you know, that evil Mitt Romney’s company.

She also called Juan Williams “a known Republican.”

But perhaps the most remarkable accusation came when she said, “If charter schools were so good, why didn’t the white folks keep them for themselves?”

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

Ms Pillay made the comments about the controversial case at a press conference in Barbados, as she wrapped up a three-day visit to the Caribbean island nation.

“As High Commissioner for Human Rights, I call for an immediate investigation,” she said.

“Justice must be done for the victim. It’s not just this individual case. It calls into question the delivery of justice in all situations like this.”

Of course, if it hadn’t happened in the U.S., not a word would be said.

If anybody needs proof that the U.N. is full of anti-American wankers, this should do it.

Steve Sailer translates the Protocols of the Elders of Selma.

From the NYT, a classic statement of how only white people possess moral and empirical agency, and everybody else today is just a puppet of how white people felt generations ago. It’s not like new immigrants would be so uncouth as to believe their lying eyes about African Americans; instead, they must be picking up the white man’s vibes from Jim Crow days. Blacks and Hispanics in 2012 are just automatons under the control of powerful brainwaves sent out by Lester B. Maddox from the Great Beyond.

Steve Sailer reviews recent controversies in the jump-to-conclusions press.

Just a week ago, the New York Times was explaining how the upcoming French election would be affected by how immigration-restrictionist talk had inspired that neo-Nazi to kill those Jewish kids in Toulouse.

Then, it was all about all the time how an evil white racist had hunted down and murdered in cold-blood cuddly 12-year-old Trayvon Martin.

The growing SPLCization of the prestige press is frightening. I realize that times are tough for everybody, and that the Southern Poverty Law Center has a gold-plated track record of piling up hundreds of millions of dollars via spreading fear and hate in the guise of fighting hate, so it’s not surprising that the national media is following the path the SPLC has pioneered. But this is scary stuff to play around with to make money.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine never tires of pointing out the inconvenient truth.

At the American Thinker, Jack Cashill writes that the open speculation by European talking heads was that the killer sought for the shootings at the Jewish school in Toulouse was a Neo-Nazi, thus someone on the “extreme right,” a possibility that energized the media. Cashill titles his post “A neo-Nazi named ‘Muhammed’?”

Cashill doesn’t actually name the suspect. Murray Wardrop is covering the siege that has been laid to the suspect’s apartment live for the Telegraph. Turning to Wardrop’s live coverage, we learn that the suspect is indeed named Mohammed — Mohammed Merah. He is 23 and of French nationality. Reuters reports that Merah was jailed for bombings in Afghanistan in 2007, but escaped months later in a mass prison break organized by Taliban insurgents.

Poor LameStream Media — forever waiting for the new Timothy McVeigh and forever disappointed with Yet Another Guy Named Mohammed.

Stanley Fish has decided that they don’t have to pretend to be fair any more.

The idea is that in the public sphere (as opposed to the private sphere in which you can have and vent your prejudices) you should not privilege your own views to the extent that they justify treating those with opposing views unequally and unfairly.

Yeah, that is the idea … for the rest of us. Stanley, however, has a different idea.

If we think about the Rush Limbaugh dust-up from the non-liberal — that is, non-formal — perspective, the similarity between what he did and what Schultz and Maher did disappears. Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?

In other words, let’s all be Mafia, the primary adherents of this approach in the modern world. If you’re not a Made Guy, you ain’t shit, and needn’t be treated as anything but shit. Hey, presto, let’s just erase the last four hundred years of human progress.

If you do that you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair. “Fair” is a weak virtue; it is not even a virtue at all because it insists on a withdrawal from moral judgment.

And there you have the ‘progressive’ program in a nutshell. Muslims would love this guy; they all think the same way.

Read it.

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) is launching a new effort today to target 36 commentators who speak out against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people.

The Commentator Accountability Project (CAP) “aims to educate the media about the extreme rhetoric of over three dozen activists who are often given a platform to speak in opposition to LGBT people and the issues that affect their lives,” the media monitoring organization said in a press release. Among those activists are Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council; Bob Vander Platts, the president of The Family Leader; Candi Cushman, an education analyst at Focus on the Family; and Bill Donahue, the head of the Catholic League.

Now: Imagine — it won’t be hard — the firestorm and 24/7 outrage that would consume the media were an organization like the Family Research Council to do something similar to high-profile shills for homosexual privilege.

Planet Moron does the work so that you don’t have to.

Such is the problem some people have with understanding Sandra Fluke, an innocent doe-eyed youngster barely 30 years out of diapers who came to fame when testifying at a make-believe congressional hearing (it’s fun to play pretend!) at which she pointed out her friends at Georgetown Law were going broke having sex.

And people say Congress doesn’t have the courage to take on tough issues like deficit spending, entitlement reform, and promiscuous co-eds.

It can be a problem.

Sandra Fluke, was so hurt and shocked from all the unwanted attention that she did what any purely private citizen would do involuntarily thrust into the limelight:

Hire a publicist with close connections to the White House and appear on eight national news programs.

It’s all part of the healing process.

We feel her pain.

Fluke: “Access to contraception.”
Translation: When someone else pays for your contraception.

Fluke: “Guaranteeing women access to contraception.”
Translation: Guaranteeing that someone else will pay for women’s contraception.

Fluke: “Restricting access.”
Translation: Having to pay for contraception yourself.

Fluke: “Silencing women’s voices.”
Translation: Criticizing Sandra Fluke.

Fluke: “Raising this issue in our public consciousness.”
Translation: Agreeing with Sandra Fluke.

Fluke: “Unfair obstacles to participating in public life.”
Translation: Having children.

Fluke: “Attacking women who use contraception by calling them prostitutes.”
Translation: Attacking women who want someone else to pay for their contraception so they can have sex by calling them prostitutes.

Fluke: “The regulation under discussion has absolutely nothing to do with government funding: It is all about the insurance policies provided by private employers and universities that are financed by individual workers, students and their families — not taxpayers.”
Translation: Taxpayers will not pay for Ms. Fluke’s free contraception unless they happen to be workers, students or their families.

Fluke: “99% of sexually experienced American women have used [contraception].
Translation: We’ll never get that number higher if we don’t start making it free.

As The Other McCain points out, this template works for about 90% of Leftist NewSpeak, since the distortions are fairly constant over the domain of affected concepts.

The Other McCain jerks the camouflage off of the modern race-victim industry’s program.

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, “civil rights” has become a code phrase for “whatever Democrats want,” so that anyone who disagrees with Democrats is said to be “anti-civil rights.” Case in point, the Texas voter ID law:

The Justice Department’s civil rights division on Monday objected to a new photo ID requirement for voters in Texas because many Hispanic voters lack state-issued identification.

Why do Hispanic voters in Texas “lack state-issued identification”?

No drivers license? No passport? Nothing?

Is it cynical — or perhaps even racist — to suggest that many Hispanics in Texas don’t have ID because they are illegal immigrants and, as such, are not actually legal voters? Are Republicans just a bunch of xenophobic bigots for suspecting that Democrats oppose voter ID laws because they hope to use the votes of illegal aliens (or other methods of vote fraud) to elect Democrats?

Oh, say it ain’t so.

Read it.

Pity poor Senator Olympia Snowe, forced to actually take a position on issues rather than collecting a government paycheck (a rather hefty government paycheck) for emitting bromides and blowing with the wind and living the serene RINO life. Ah, the cruelty!

This article is a rather pure example of a Voice of the Crust in full yap. The Vital Center, that dumping ground for the oh-I-don’t-know, I-suppose, why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along, politics-is-boring-let’s-watch-basketball side of the bell curve, is in danger! The horror! People might actually have to think about questions! And make a choice! Oh, the humanity!

Quite characteristic is the tendentious coloration of the term ‘partisanship’, as if we all got handed a Team Ticket when we entered the public arena and what political party we’re assigned to is purely random, like water sprayed from a fountain — so it doesn’t really matter, does it? Except that it does matter, a bunch. ‘Partisan’, despite the Left’s attempt to re-define it as ‘those stupid, ugly, flyover-country people who for some unaccountable reason don’t agree with me’, means ‘belonging to a party’, and people belong to a party because they’ve made a choice about what they want to have done, and that is what the whole business of politics is about. ‘Partisan’, in the mouth of this sort of lamestream-media driveler, means ‘benighted people who refuse to get with the program’. ‘Non-partisan’, of course, correspondingly means ‘people who are willing to do it our way’.

A world in which Olympia Snowe will no longer be allowed to pretend to be a Republican is a better world. Now, let’s see whether we can get Susan Collins to go retire to Florida as well.

Fisking the minions of the Obamassiah, the Koch brothers turn over a rock and watch the Democrats squirm.

Because every American has the right to take part in the public discourse on matters that affect the future of our country, I feel compelled to respond directly about a fundraising letter you sent out on February 24 denouncing Koch. It is both surprising and disappointing that the President would allow his re-election team to send such an irresponsible and misleading letter to his supporters.

For example, it is false that our “business model is to make millions by jacking up prices at the pump.” Our business vision begins and ends with value creation — real, long-term value for customers and for society. We own no gasoline stations and the part of our business you allude to, oil and gas refining, actually lowers the price of gasoline by increasing supply. Either you simply misunderstand the way commodities markets work or you are misleading your supporters and the rest of the American people.

I’d call it deliberate bald-faced lies, myself, but one can’t rule out mind-numbing stupidity. Neither is in short supply in the Democratic Party.

Read it.

Well, you know, they don’t want to rush into anything.

Read it.

I once had to get a special dispensation to work at a newspaper because my degree was not in journalism but, rather, in economics. Have you ever been in a newsroom with a bunch of journalism grads who don’t know how to calculate anything meaningful about, say, the most recently released budget document because, well, their degrees are in journalism? I have. It’s not pretty. If you think some reporters have trouble getting religion, let me assure you that many reporters also have trouble getting statistics.

Read it.

“In ‘08 it became pretty apparent MSNBC was going left,” says one source. “They were using our research to write their stories. They were eager to use our stuff.” Media Matters staff had the direct line of MSNBC president Phil Griffin, and used it. Griffin took their calls.

Stories about Fox News were especially well received by MSNBC anchors and executives: “If we published something about Fox in the morning, they’d have it on the air that night verbatim.”

But MSNBC executives weren’t the only ones talking regularly to Media Matters.

“The entire progressive blogosphere picked up our stuff,” says a Media Matters source, “from Daily Kos to Salon. Greg Sargent [of the Washington Post] will write anything you give him. He was the go-to guy to leak stuff.”

“If you can’t get it anywhere else, Greg Sargent’s always game,” agreed another source with firsthand knowledge.

Jonah Goldberg, in discussing Diane Sawyer and the pseudo-debates:

The point here isn’t simply to highlight for the millionth time the reality of media bias. It’s to note how issues like homosexuality now only have one purpose when it comes to political reporting: Make conservatives look weird. In all of these debates gay marriage and similar issues are not brought out to elicit a serious argument or elucidate a meaningful principle. The whole point is to get Republicans to look sex obsessed, “homophobic,” or mean.

If the substance of the issue mattered, you’d think Diane Sawyer would ask the one guy running for president with any control over the issue to explain himself. Heck, you’d think she’d ask the one guy whose position on these matters is an incoherent mess to clarify his views. But no. Asking Obama about these things would only hurt Obama. And that’s not why she’s in this business.

If you don’t subscribe to the G-File, you’re missing out.

Read it.

In his address to the Sydney Institute on January 24, the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, David Irvine, pointed out that ”of the 38 people prosecuted for terrorism-related offences in Australia, 37 were Australian citizens and 34 were either born here or lived here since childhood”. Clearly home-grown terrorism is a threat in Australia.

Well, unfortunately, ‘home-grown terrorism’ is a concept only valid if one accepts the silly utopian modern notion that if, for example, one is born and raised in Australia, one is necessarily ‘an Australian’ in every sense of the term. This is ludicrous with respect to anyone brought up outside the mainstream culture of the country, and especially ludicrous in the case of Muslims, whose first allegiance is to the Umma of all Believers, and maybe (or maybe not) to whatever country they happen to be living it for the time being — a fact that Britain and the Scandinavian countries are having their noses rubbed in at this very moment.

Read it.

Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune tells the world how painful it was for his lobbying group to stop taking millions in donations from natural gas companies. And what organization wouldn’t be happy to rake in $26 million in donations?

Now the Sierra Club has decided that natural gas is just another evil fossil fuel that it getting in the way of the solar, wind, geothermal future that the organization wants to impose on Americans. And that’s OK. Environmentalism as an ideology is driven by the constant need to create an endless series of monsters to fear – natural gas is now one of the newer ones. The Sierra Club flip flop on natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to the low-carbon energy economy was motivated by NIMBY concerns of local chapters and the fact that cheap abundant natural gas makes the case for expensive renewable energy sources even less economically plausible.

Read it.

Imagine that.

Read it.

So take pity on Harvard’s Elizabeth Warren, the scold of the 1 Percent who is currently running for the Senate in Massachusetts after getting hosed by the Obama administration. Warren is widely credited with pushing for the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would simplify credit offerings so that all of us idiots who bought houses we couldn’t afford could blame somebody else. Faced with opposition from Republicans, Obama tossed Warren aside as the first hea of the CFPA.

So she wants the ‘Ted Kennedy seat’ in the Senate as a consolation prize. In Taxachusetts, she’ll probably get it.

Hard to see how Warren wouldn’t be, by most standards, wealthy, according to the Personal Financial Disclosure form she filed to run for Senate shows that she’s worth as much as $14.5 million. She earned more than $429,000 from Harvard last year alone for a total of about $700,000, and lives in a house worth $5 million.

She also has a portfolio of investments in stocks and bonds worth as as much as $8 million, according to the form, which lists value ranges for each investment. The bulk of it is in funds managed by TIAA-CREF.

But she’s not one of THEM, however.

“I realize there are some wealthy individuals – I’m not one of them, but some wealthy individuals who have a lot of stock portfolios” she told [MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell].

Just poor as a churchmouse, that’s our Lizzy.

Tom Smith shares my sentiments about the pretentious New York Times columnist.

Freeberg brings up some inconvenient truth.

This blog, which nobody reads anyway, has frequently made the point about GoodPerson Fever; we’ve got all these ninnies just like Juan Williams, running around everywhere, and even worse still they are disproportionately represented in the hallways of power. Every decision made has to be absolutely non-offensive, and that includes the decisions of others, about matters well outside of their purview, and so they end up excoriating strangers for violating the Could Be Construed As standard. In other words, they get offended on behalf of other people, people who exist only in theory and might very well not exist at all in reality.

It’s all an outgrowth of the ‘progressive’ compulsion (which appears to be congenital) to stick their noses into other people’s business given the slightest excuse — or even no excuse at all.

Read it.

Medical scientists in San Francisco have sent a chill wind blowing through the IT industry as they issue a call for swingeing taxes on “soda, fruit punch, sweet tea, sports drinks, and other sweetened beverages”.

A collection of health profs and other researchers led by Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo (associate professor of medicine and of epidemiology and biostatistics at California uni’s San Francisco campus) say they have now put numbers on the horrific toll exacted as Americans poison themselves with no less than 13.8 billion gallons* of disgustful pop annually. Furthermore they say that huge numbers of lives would be saved if only the government would slap a hefty tax on the sugar-laden beverages of death – to the tune of a cent per fluid ounce.

I’d like to call for a law requiring all professors who call for taxes on other people for lifestyle choices to wear brown shirts and KGB armbands.

The Other McCain looks at ‘journalists’.

Journalism has become an elite profession, and attracts basically three kinds of people:

1. “Save the World” types who think of journalims as a sort of humanitarian charitable endeavor, wherein they’ll “make a difference” on behalf of the oppressed victims of society. Such people should be encouraged to join the Peace Corps instead.
2. Neurasthenic intellectuals with literary pretensions. These people are essentially dilettantes, slumming it in the news business as a way to pay the bills until they can sell a screenplay or a novel.
3. Would-be TV stars. The cable-news era has created a niche market for camera-friendly “personalities,” and a lot of these young kids in journalism nowadays are writing news or punditry as a means of auditioning for a TV gig. They wake up in the morning, turn on MSNBC, and imagine the days when they’ll be sitting at the table with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski, who will chuckle at their pithy aphorisms and bon mots.

Good luck with that, OK?

In other words, ‘journalism’ is now show business for English majors.

Read it.

Pretty sad — is there really a ‘journalist’ in the world who doesn’t know how the Crust live? This guy needs to buy a clue.

Lileks points out the unfortunate fact that this alleged Professor of Journalism probably couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag.

Even if you give him a pass on the prose, the opening paragraphs have done nothing but state the obvious, peeling back the withered skin of this wither fig to reveal the author’s alienation from the subject of his piece. He’s lived there for 20 years, but like a plant that sits in a pot on the ground, the roots somehow never made it into the soil. Apparently this makes him the ideal person to explain Iowa to the rest of the world through the pages of the Atlantic.

You suspect at the start that the piece exists to comfort the smart sets living on the coastal crusts: your assumptions of the lumpendorken wandering around the empty innards of the land, one hand scrabbling their goolies while the other digs for nose-gold, are pretty much correct.

Stephen Bloom is one of those sad people who pine for the corridors of academic power on one of the Blue Coasts but are stuck in Flyover Country because of the tedious requirement that one earn a living at something rather than being supported somehow by tax revenue so as to be able to spend one’s days Thinking Deep Thoughts rather than, you know, working. Perhaps out of some cruel whim, the Atlantic has (at last!) given him an opportunity to (a) demonstrate the deep hatred and contempt he holds for the state that has been paying him these last two decades and (b) demonstrate that they’ve not been getting much value for their money.

Them. Iowa is full of them.

Grocery AND clothing shopping at Wal-Mart! These maroons wouldn’t know what to do if you led them by the hand to Zabar’s or Armani’s and pressed a black Amex gently in their palms.

And Lileks mocks him as only Lileks can. Read the whole thing, as they say.

I repeat: Professor of Journalism. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

It really does.

Read it.

Just for fun, I compared the performance of the Times’ stock against some of the Wall Street banks that have been among the paper’s favorite whipping boys. The following numbers show common stock performance from December 2004 to the present:

Citigroup: -94.62%
Bank of America: -87.39%
New York Times: -81.45%
Morgan Stanley: -72.96%
Wells Fargo: -17.59
JP Morgan Chase: -17.12
Goldman Sachs: -11.67

An unbiased observer might wonder: why isn’t the CEO of the NY Times Company going to jail? Or why, in any event, is she leaving with a multi-million dollar payoff? If what happened on Wall Street was bad, why isn’t what happened in the newspaper industry worse?