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?

Read it.

Of course they were! EVERYBODY knows THAT!

Yeah, well, at one time ‘everybody’ knew that the world was flat, too. ‘Everybody’ can be wrong, and frequently is.

It is common to see history rewritten before our eyes. Still, even in that context, the myth of the Wall Street bailout is remarkable.

And depressing. As Some Famous Person once said, nobody every lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

Banks in a fractional reserve system are uniquely fragile. They don’t actually “have” any of their “own” money, of course; they have mostly other people’s money–deposits, CDs and wholesale funds (interbank loans and other debts) on a relatively small capital or equity base to fund their assets (loans). NO bank is or can be solvent if the public thinks it is not. That’s why a run is a self fulfilling prophecy.

This applies to governments, too, a fact that Greece and Italy are having their noses rubbed in even now.

Read it.

Last October, when Bush traveled to British Columbia, the group demanded that Canada arrest him as well. At the time, Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney blasted Amnesty, declaring, “This kind of stunt helps explain why so many respected human rights advocates have abandoned Amnesty International.”

One of the chief problems with advocacy groups is that they are obsessed with ‘raising consciousness’, even when it works against their nominal ‘mission’. Couple this with the degree of self-righteousness needed to devote considerable amounts of one’s time to hectoring others about how they ought to behave, plus a noticeable degree of narcissism reflected in their constant need for public attention, and one has a very disgusting conjunction of some of the ugliest aspects of the human personality. One might forgive them their sins if they were effective, but chiefly they aren’t — I know of no case where Amnesty International (or any similar group) has had any positive effect on human rights in the countries where it is most at risk; a moment’s though is sufficient to figure out why. Pretty sad, really.

Read it.

Or he will taunt you a second time.

Ouch.

Andrew Rossi’s Page One (2011), a sleek, self-important infomercial for The New York Times, largely involves Times partisans whining that the dinosaur carcass of the Gray Lady is being picked clean by the mammalian swarms of the new media. There are cursory nods to the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller scandals, but essentially nothing in the way of real introspection or self-criticism. The Times‘ complaint largely goes like this: “What kind of world fails to recognize the inherent nobility of our enterprise! O fallen mankind, repent your shallowness!”

Let the whining begin.

“If approximately 75 percent of your workforce disappears, what are you to do?” the Florida Grower trade monthly asks in its current issue.

Oh, let me think — raise wages, maybe? Until you get people who are here legally? It’s called a free market. You might try it some time.

With unemployment near record highs, “these jobs should go to legal workers,” he said June 14 when he introduced the bill.

What an extremist!

Farmers could hire legal guest workers under a U.S. H-2A visa program, which provides entry for temporary or seasonal agricultural work.

But these workers must be covered by U.S. wage laws, workers’ compensation and other standards farmers say they can’t afford, the Post says.

Welcome to our world of massive government over-regulation.

Freeberg contrasts a selection of pro-Obama headlines now with corresponding anti-Bush headlines then.

Situation’s pretty much the same…except the unemployment rate being talked about seven years ago was 5.7%. How sweet would that be now.

Read it

The central myth of the JFK assassination was that a climate of hate inspired by the far right created the conditions for President Kennedy’s murder. A single assassin may have pulled the trigger, but he was put up to it by an undercurrent of hatred and bigotry that President Kennedy tried but failed to subdue. On this view President Kennedy was a martyr, somewhat like Abraham Lincoln, to the causes of civil rights, racial justice, and an elevated liberalism. JFK’s assassination was a tragic but richly symbolic event for many Americans who saw it as a vivid expression of an ongoing battle in American life between the forces of light and darkness.

This explanation for the assassination did not drop out of thin air but was circulated immediately after the event by influential leaders, journalists, and journalistic outlets, including Mrs. Kennedy, President Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, James Reston, Russell Baker, and the editorial page of the New York Times, columnist Drew Pearson, and any number of other liberal spokesmen. Mrs. Kennedy took the lead in insisting that her husband was martyred by agents of hatred and bigotry. Within days of the assassination, she elaborated the symbolism of Camelot and King Arthur’s court to frame the Kennedy presidency as a special and near-magical enterprise guided by the highest ideals. The eternal flame she placed on his grave site invokes King Arthur’s candle in the wind as imagined by T. H. White in his Arthurian novel, The Once and Future King, later the basis of a Broadway musical that was popular during the Kennedy years.

These were the myths, illusions, and outright fabrications in which the Kennedy assassination came to be encrusted. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they are still widely believed. In fact, the Kennedy legend, incorporating the myths about his assassination, is closely intertwined with the history of modern liberalism: JFK has come to represent a liberal ideal and his assassination the threat posed to it by the forces of the far right.

Read it.

Which eliminates him as a possible Republican nominee. Glad to have that out of the way.

Now, let’s see him justify pretending to be a Republican. (Not impossible … look at Arlen Specter and Lindsey Graham … but guaranteed to be somewhat amusing.)

It’s hard to argue with Johnson here if you dig liberty.

And that’s the kind of ‘reason’ you get at ‘Reason magazine’, a name that is about as oxymoronic as those of most left-liberal think tanks. The fact that ‘marriage’ is a term with an ancient established meaning that has never included homosexual relationships, and has nothing to do with ‘liberty’, is, apparently, not even on the radar with these soi-disant ‘libertarians’.

Read it.

They say they believe in freedom and share our values. They say a few bad apples shouldn’t bring down judgment on their entire kind. Don’t be fooled. Though they walk among us with impunity, they are, in the words of Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, “a group that is notoriously associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs.”

They are engineers.

Yet another politically unfashionable group to worry about. Note that the guy raising the alarm is not an engineer.

Actually, this isn’t hard to figure out: Engineers are just as permeated by their cultures as anybody else; unlike Queer Studies majors, though, they actually build stuff that works.

Read it.

This is somewhat untimely, but still worth pondering.

I have never understood the bleeding-heart whiners who sob and moan over the fact that people convicted of murder get terminated.

This is not tragedy, such as people who contract fatal diseases or die in freak car accidents. This is not (popular mythology to the contrary notwithstanding) oppression, like Christians run over by Muslim tanks in Cairo. This is not even obvious miscarriage of justice, like some poor black kid getting lynched by a mob of Democrats because he kissed a white girl, as happened far too often in the South. This is a long-established system (granted, less than perfect) for removing from society people who have demonstrated that they do not choose to live by the same rules as everyone else, rules that are objectively demonstrable as necessary for society to exist at all. Who could have a problem with that, except someone who has become so totally detached from reality that his judgment is suspect in every realm of life?

Certainly, there are people on death row who don’t belong there. There isn’t, however, anyone on death row who doesn’t belong somewhere other than wandering around loose where he (and it’s almost always a he) can bother innocent citizens — Pat Boone doesn’t wind up on death row. Considering the number of murders who happen every year, and the number of people who are executed for murder every year, one could almost say that it’s more likely somebody in prison will die of food poisoning than of deliberate execution.

There is a very good case to be made (certainly from a Christian perspective) against capital punishment, but there is no good case to be made for letting these people out on the street. I’m curious how these armchair judges would feel about hosting such convicts for five or ten years in their spare bedrooms, just to prove their sincerity?

Mickey Kaus is always worth reading.

Let’s just suppose, as a thought experiment, that the New York Times is a liberal conspiracy.  In this hypothetical alternate reality, the paper’s editors would like the government to do more to redress the material disparities generated by our version of capitalism, and they commission stories designed to bring this better world closer. They might think it a brilliant idea to get the U.S. Census Bureau to calculate, not just how many people are poor according to the government’s fancy new Supplemental Poverty Measure (which takes into account regional cost of living, and government benefits like food stamps, plus medical expenses and taxes**) but how many are under 150%of this new poverty line. Not poor, but “near poor.” Bet there are a lot of them!

I’ll just bet there are.

So the NYT piece notes, in its lede graf, that within this “near poor” category “many own homes.” Some 20 percent of the “near poor,” it turns out, own their homes mortgage-free. One reason they don’t earn much income may be because they don’t need it to pay the rent! And DeParle contacts Robert Rector of the Heritage Institute, who notes that “near poor” is a loaded term designed to “suggest to most people a level of material hardship that doesn’t exist.”

Imagine that. ‘Poor’ people who really aren’t all that poor after all. Where have we seen that before?

…unlike the old poverty line, it doesn’t measure Americans’ absolute level of material well-being or destitution, but their relative measure of well being. It’s pegged to the expenditures of the 33d percentile rather than a fixed amount of purchasing power (set, under the old poverty line, at three times the cost of a “minimum food diet” in 1963). Under the old poverty line, “poverty” could be eliminated as society got richer–an achievable and widely shared goal. But the new poverty line will rise as society gets richer (“adjust for rising levels and standards of living”). The newly measured poor will always be with us in substantial numbers, just as there will always be a third of the American population trapped in the bottom third of the income char

ts.  That will yield a permanent, inextinguishable stream of NYT front page “poverty” stat stories–even if  “poverty” no longer means ”poverty” in the sense we now understand the term.

The ‘poor’ you have always with you, by definition. Funny how that works.

If I were inclined to be paranoid–-and I am–-I’d say it’s an audacious, slimy bait-and-switch by liberal activists inside the government anti-poverty bureacracy.

Naw, that couldn’t happen. Could it?

Read it.

Christensen retells the story of how  Dell [DELL] progressively lopped off low-value segments of its PC operation to the Taiwan-based firm ASUSTek [LSE: ASKD]—the motherboard, the assembly of the computer, the management of the supply chain and finally the design of the computer. In each case Dell accepted the proposal because in each case its profitability improved: its costs declined and its revenues stayed the same. At the end of the process, however, Dell was little more than a brand, while ASUSTeK can—and does—now offer a cheaper, better computer to Best Buy at lower cost.

Christensen also describes the impact of foreign outsourcing on many other companies, including the steel companies, the automakers, the oil companies, the pharmaceuticals, and now even software development. These firms are steadily becoming primarily marketing agencies and brands: they are lopping off the expertise that is needed to make anything anymore.  In the process, major segments of the US economy have been lost, in some cases, forever.

Of course, it’s not the pursuit of profit per se that causes the problem, but the pursuit of insanely short-term profit, a distinction that Christensen doesn’t care to make and which the author of the article appears delighted to avoid.

Christensen recalls an interesting talk he had with the Morris Chang the chairman and founder of one of the firms, TSMC [TSM], who said:

“You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.”

Chang, who is Chinese and therefore sensible about business, obviously understands the necessary distinction, and assumes that his listener understands it as well, which I suspect is not the case.

Yet another case of smart people asking the right questions but unfortunately grabbing a not-quite-right answer and running with it. (Cf. the ‘cult of the shoe’ in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.)

Read it. And watch the video.

Two dozen “patriotic millionaires” traveled to the national’s capital on Wednesday to demand that Congress raise taxes on wealthy Americans.

The Daily Caller attended their press conference with an iPad, which displayed the Treasury Department’s donation page, to find out if any of the “patriotic millionaires” were willing to put their money where their mouth is.

As everyone who is paying attention (alas, a minority of the voting-age population) knows, the reason these ‘patriotic millionaires’ (or ‘buffets’, as I call them) push for higher taxes but don’t care to give on their own is not because they think that they’re taxes are too low, but rather that they think that the taxes of the people below them are too low. Raising rates will increase their relative advantage, and they’re all for that. If Hector makes $200, 000 a year, and Algernon makes $200,000,000 a year, raising the tax rate to 50% will certainly make Algernon pay more than Hector — but Algernon will still be making $100,000,000 a year, and Hector will only be making $100,000 a year, and guess which one is closer to not being able to make ends meet, especially if (say) they’ve got kids in college? Not to mention the fact that Algernon can hire a lot of fancy lawyers and accountants with that $100,000,000 that he would otherwise pay in taxes, and I’ll bet you a healthy chunk of $100,000 that those lawyers and accountants will make sure that Algernon won’t be paying any 50%.

This is all political posturing on the part of the Crust, a show put on for the rubes.

Read it.

In a sane world, the news media would disseminate information about which states are most successful and what policies they pursue, so that other states can emulate them. That is a pipe dream, of course: we all know that in the world we actually inhabit, our media have an entirely different agenda.

Which leads me to the three-part hit-piece that NPR recently did on South Dakota.

Read it.

Presidential candidate Ron Paul said Sunday that the CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan was making the U.S. less safe.

“It makes things worse,” said Mr. Paul, the Texas congressman running for the Republican presidential nomination. “Sometimes they miss. Sometimes there is collateral damage. And every time we do that, we make more enemies.”

I like Ron Paul’s domestic policies, but in foreign policy he’s still off in batshit-crazy land where live the radical libertarians and Pat Buchananites.

1. Every drone strike targets an enemy of the United States. I fail to see how killing enemies of the United States is a bad thing.

2. Hey, Ron, wake up and smell the hummus — they’re Muslims. Muslims are already our enemies, either in esse or in posse — read the Koran if you don’t believe me. To the extent that drone strikes convert passive enemies into active enemies, it helps us identify them … and kill them. The only good enemy is a dead enemy, and it’s better to kill them on somebody else’s turf than here at home.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to run for President, apparently.

Read it.

Doing well by doing good. (Hey, compassion like that don’t come cheap.)

Attending the event required a donation of between $1,000 and $5,000, continuing Warren’s trend of raising money outside the state where she is actually running.

The Boston Globe reported in late October that, according to Warren’s campaign filings, nearly 70 percent of the $3.14 million Warren raised last quarter to unseat Republican Sen. Scott Brown was from out-of-state donors.

The Crust is nothing if not cosmopolitan. Hillary Clinton blazed that trail.

The Other McCain has the scoop.

My response is: If that’s what’s going on, he’s not doing a very good job.

Just sayin’.

Read it. And watch the slideshow .

Representatives of “the 99 percent” have been camping out in lower Manhattan to protest economic inequality since late September, but the riches on display at some of their home addresses clearly came from “1 percent” families.

We searched Google Maps and the real estate Multiple Listing Service for the home addresses police collected during the arrests of less-than-law-abiding New York City “occupiers,” and found dream homes aplenty. These opulent houses include in-ground swimming pools, manicured lawns, and golf course access.

As I’ve always said, this is merely an internal dispute among the Crust, in a Clever Plastic Disguise.

Read it.

Remember the U.S. government report report five years ago that polar bears were drowning? Kassie Siegel, director of the U.S.-based Center for Biological Diversity, cited the report in her call to place the polar bear on the endangered species list.  Never mind that we now have 5 times as many polar bears today than we did 50 years ago. We must take action immediately. Based on one report. Because that’s how science works. One report is all it takes to leap to a conclusion that may cost society billions.

I still have yet to see any explanation of how ‘scientists’ can measure the temperature of the entire globe to the precision of 1/10 of a degree Celcius, much less any explanation of how that measurement escapes the Aggregation Fallacy.

David Frum progresses on his career as a contra-conservative. I can see why CNN continues to publish his drivel, but I can’t see any reason for people to continue to read it.