Read it.

Two weeks into Occupy Wall Street’s takeover of Zuccotti Park, a group of Bronx community organizers and friends rode the subway down to Lower Manhattan to check out a movement they supported in principle.

When they got there, they recalled, they found what they had suspected: a largely white and middle-class crowd that claimed to represent “the 99 percent” but bore little resemblance to most of the people in the group’s own community. That community, the South Bronx, is one of the poorest areas of the country and home almost exclusively to blacks and Hispanics.

“Nobody looked like us,” said Rodrigo Venegas, 31, co-founder of Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, a center for political activism and hip-hop run out of a warehouse in Mott Haven. “It was white, liberal, young people who for the first time in their life are feeling a small percentage of what black and brown communities have been feeling for hundreds of years.

One of the signal hypocrisies of progressivism is that they claim to speak for ‘the people’ but wind up speaking only for their own preconceptions.

Read it.

Well, not exactly.

A new survey from Spectrem Group found that 68% of millionaires (those with investments of $1 million or more)  support raising taxes on those with $1 million or more in income. Fully 61% of those with net worths of $5 million or more support the tax on million-plus earners.

So it’s actually semi-rich people supporting higher taxes — not on themselves — but rather people who are maybe twenty or thirty times richer than they are.

I see.

Still no word on why these public-spirited people don’t just send in a check to the Treasury. They could do that right now — if they really wanted to.

Read it.

What if David Frum quite pretending to be a conservative?

We may never know….

Read it.

You, too, can be a liberal wonk.

Steve Sailer has some fun laughing at the New York Times.

Almost every harvest season, we read stories in the New York Times about how some crop somewhere is rotting in the fields which proves that civilization will grind to a halt unless we import lots more illegal immigrant stoop laborers stat. Could it be, however, that NYT staffers are not quite as sophisticated in their understanding of farm labor economics as they think they are after spending a half hour on the phone with noted agriculture expert Tamar Jacoby?

Timothy Egan is one of the more entertaining columnists from the Times — his blurb says ‘Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.’ Of course, in this context ‘the West’ apparently means the Upper West Side of Noo Yawk, since Mr Egan’s attitudes are conventional ones characteristic of somebody who has only crossed the Hudson River when he was paid to do so.

Pretty white.

And so far, according to the survey, Occupy Wall Street would qualify as stuff white people like. The sample of non-white people, according to Schultz, is too small to even analyze. One thing he noticed, however, is that some people identify with nationality, rather than race–another item to keep in mind for target marketing. And in the vein, the organizers have been discussing doing a “non-white media day,” in which everyone who speaks to the media is of another ethnic background. They have also discussed doing an over-40 day.

Gotta have them tokens — anything to keep people from knowing the truth.

Steven Landsburg, a Real Economist, spanks RINO Romney.

I interpret Romney’s answer to mean that he wants to cut capital gains rates not on efficiency grounds, not on supply side grounds, and not on philosophical grounds, but on redistributionist grounds. Well, okay, I myself don’t think very much of redistribution as a primary driver of tax policy, but Romney and I can disagree on that one. But where the incoherence comes in is this: If your goal is to redistribute from the rich to the middle class, why on earth would you do it by cutting the capital gains tax, as opposed to lowering income tax rates in the middle and raising them at the top?

To put this another way: If you care about efficiency, you’ll want to cut the capital gains rate to zero for everyone. If you care about fairness, and if you believe fairness mitigates against double/triple/quadruple taxation, you’ll still want to cut the capital gains rate to zero for everyone. If you care about redistribution, you’ll want to juggle the tax brackets. But I can’t think of a single thing you could care about that would lead you to laser in on cutting capital gains rates for middle income taxpayers only.

In other words, Romney is either pandering to the redistribution crowd or doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to economics. (Or both, which is my guess.)

Read it.

The world’s oldest marathon runner, 100-year-old Briton Fauja Singh, has achieved another feat – completing the Scotiabank Toronto Marathon in Canada.

Yeah, can’t get much more ‘British’ than Fauja Singh. The beard and turban are dead giveaways.

(Wonder what it would be like in a world where ‘journalist’ wasn’t a joke term?)

Read it.

Not long ago The Huffington Post reported that roughly 170,000 U.S. families are living in homeless shelters. Who set up those shelters? Elves? No, countless caring individuals and charitable groups did. There probably isn’t a decent-sized church in America that doesn’t have a program to help the poor. Countless more Americans contribute to secular anti-poverty nonprofits, from well-known ones such as Habitat for Humanity and the Children’s Defense Fund to more obscure ones such as Hopelink and the Food Not Bombs movement.

And still we are told that “nobody cares about the poor.”

The other day Cornel West showed up at the Occupy Wall Street protest with a sign reading, “If only the war on poverty was a real war, then we would actually be putting money into it.” Funny. But the premise is flat-out wrong. In 2009 alone Washington spent $591 billion  on means-tested anti-poverty programs. (Others, such as Medicare and Social Security, are not means-tested.) By comparison, 2009 federal appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were $130 billion. Since the War on Poverty began, Americans have shelled out more than $13 trillion to fight it.

Steve Landsburg spanks Paul Krugman, who seems (for a Nobel Laureate in Economics) to be remarkably ignorant of the basic elements of his field. Perhaps the Nobel Prize isn’t the guarantee of excellence that everyone takes it to be. Just sayin’. (Remember Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize? I’m sure the people of Iraq and Afghanistan would agree that the Nobel committee really nailed that one.)

Read it.

Couple of thousand demonstrators dead? Yeah, that sorta looks like ‘near violence’ to me.

Once-peaceful Syrian protesters are increasingly taking up arms to fight a six-month military crackdown, frustrated that President Bashar Assad remains in control while more than 2,700 demonstrators are dead, analysts and witnesses say.

Guess this Kumbaya-hippie-peace-love-dope process doesn’t work against a government that isn’t a Craven Western Government. Gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way.

The growing signs of armed resistance may accelerate the cycle of violence gripping the country by giving the government a pretext to use even greater firepower against its opponents.

Yeah, looks as if they really need a pretext to take it to the next level. Although it’s not clear what that ‘greater firepower’ might mean….

Authorities already have used tanks, snipers and mafialike gunmen known as “shabiha” who operate as hired guns for the regime.

What’s left? Nuclear weapons?

I can’t believe that people get paid for writing this stuff. I’m in the wrong line of work, obviously.

Read it.

The autopsy results from the death of Kelly Thomas, a schizophrenic drifter who was allegedy beaten to death by Fullerton, California police will be announced today by Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. Rackauckas will also announce whether he will file charges against the officers involved in Thomas’ death, following the office’s investigation. The confrontation with police took place at a municipal bus station on July 5, with Thomas dying in the hospital five days later. This press conference comes weeks after the Fullerton police  refused to answer questions about the case.

Of course, if this had happened in a Red State (Texas, say), the Lamestream Media would be wall-to-wall with hand-wringing about those red-necked, cousin-screwin’, cigar-chompin’, KKK-robe-wearin’, firehose and police dog deployin’ barbarians in whatever Wide Spot Police Department was responsible.

Have you heard anything about this case other than here? Anywhere? I thought not.

Of course, the Left Coast suburb of Fullerton couldn’t possibly have anything like that happen.

Read it.

Every election season, a variety of newspapers and other entities set themselves up as arbiters of the accuracy of politicians’ statements. These “fact-checkers” nearly always turn out to be liberal apologists who don a false mantle of objectivity in order to advance the cause of the Democratic Party. Maybe there are exceptions, but I can’t think of one offhand.

A quick review of the media will reveal that these self-styled ‘fact checkers’ check only those on the right, never those on the left. And yet this is what passes for journalism these days.

Mike Masnick at TechDirt does a spit-take.

While I definitely don’t agree with famed 7th Circuit appeals court judge Richard Posner on everything, he’s generally recognized as a smart judge with a strong libertarian belief and a recognition and understanding of real economic issues. However, there are a few times when he seems to just reach a weird conclusion.

I like Judge Posner more than Mike does, apparently, but I have to agree with him this time.

We’re talking about recording public officials who are paid with taxpayer dollarsdoing a job in public, and Posner is worried about their privacy rights? Wouldn’t it be a goodthing for reporters and bloggers to be “snooping around” police if it turns up problems or corruption?

Well, yeah….

Read it.

Perry told the students, “God uses broken people to reach a broken world.” What does that even mean?

Well, Maureen, for Christians, of which I realize you are not one, it means that people are broken and the world is broken but nevertheless God uses the one to attempt to improve the other.

It would probably help if you used as much effort to understand the people you cover as you do to keep up with What’s Happenin’ Now on the Upper West Side.

Read it.

Over 46 million people are living in poverty, 2.6 million more than in 2009 and the poverty rate has reached 15.1 percent.

This is the sort of drivel that gets you tenure at Princeton. One would think that a professor of history and public policy at the third best university in the country could look behind the numbers from the Census Bureau and realize that 46 million people are not living in poverty, but merely qualify for the Census Bureau’s rather fanciful notion of ‘living below the poverty line’, i.e. prior to accounting for government benefits. Having failed that threshold, the rest of his article is dreck — and tendentious dreck, at that; it’s obvious what agenda he’s pushing.

Which makes this particular paragraph especially ludicrous:

Despite the enormity of this social problem, American politicians in either party rarely discuss the subject. Since the poor don’t tend to vote in high rates or contribute much in campaign funds, they don’t get a place at the table in Washington, D.C. Yet with the U.S. poverty rate being the highest in the developed world according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, this statistic marks a terrible failure for the nation as a whole.

Funny, you can’t spit on a page of the New York Times without hitting a Democrat politician wringing his hands (or a leftist professor wringing his hands) about the problem of poverty in the U.S. Perhaps the poor don’t tend to vote in high rates — although, with ACORN, those who do get an opportunity to make up for the ones who don’t — or contribute much in campaign funds, they nevertheless seem to be a very handy excuse for politicians looking for every new and clever ways to dip their hands in the wallets of working people.

And this is despite there being a ‘war on poverty’ in this country since the Johnson administration, a war that has cost to date multiple trillions of dollars. It would seem that the failure is not one for the ‘nation as a whole’, but rather a failure on the part of politicians who keep spending money without anything to show for it.

Read it.

An excellent example of how the Aggregation Fallacy can infect even the Wall Street Journal.

Read it.

One of the politicians instrumental in creating the TSA, Rep. John Mica, who wrote the legislation that established the TSA, has apparently decided that the whole thing has been a failure and should be dismantled. He notes that “the whole program has been hijacked by bureaucrats.”

‘Unexpectedly’. Don’t forget to include ‘unexepectedly’ before ‘hijacked’, to fit in with the Democrat narrative.

Read it.

Some grubby details: the US poverty line is calculated as being three times the food bill of a family in the early 1960s, upgraded over time for inflation. Doesn’t matter whether that’s a good definition or not, that’s just what it is.

When we calculate who is in poverty, who is below the poverty line, we include in the income said person or family gets their market income (of course) and also any cash that they get given directly by the government to alleviate their poverty. This seems sensible enough really, if you’ve got more cash you’re less poor than if you don’t have more cash.

However, we do not include in that household’s income all of the other things we do to alleviate poverty. We don’t include free medical care, or maybe help with the rent of an apartment or house. We don’t include any help that comes through the tax system nor do we include any vouchers: like Food Stamps for example.

In other words, it’s all bogus. Your tax dollars at work.

Andrew Ferguson is rather dyspeptic today.

Here’s how the go-to guy works. Let’s say you’re a reporter on a deadline and you need a quote right this minute about how Republicans have rendered Congress dysfunctional. Well then, your go-to guy is Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Perhaps you want to give readers a little historical perspective, something eggheady about, say, how smoothly leaders of both parties used to work together before the lunatics (you know who they are) started running the asylum on Capitol Hill? Quick: get “presidential historian” Douglas Brinkley on the phone before he goes live on the NewsHour! He’ll be sure to tell you, with a wistful air, that Tip O’Neill and President Reagan were always friends after five o’clock.

If it’s the economy you’re writing about, it’s Mark Zandi. He has all the qualities that go into making a go-to guy of the very first rank. He is fluent on television and keeps his sentences short. His demeanor is pleasant. He uses the word “narrative” with abandon—“narrative” being the hottest word in journalism since “transparency”; it’s this year’s “accountability.” And he’s a liberal. All go-to guys are liberals. They can’t be identified as such, lest their authority as disinterested observers be undermined and the reader or viewer begin to get ideas. Ideological fuzziness is good; ideological hermaphroditism is better.

Boy, that sure sounds familiar.

You will notice that these statements share two prominent features. First, they’re predictions and, second, they’re wrong. More frequently than most go-to guys, Zandi volunteers not merely subtly shaded opinions, not merely Ornsteinian “context” and Brinklean “perspective,” but bald predictions about how matters will lie a year or two or three from now. Over time, Zandi’s predictions are tested by reality. In August 2006, he told Newsweek that housing prices would bottom out in August 2007. In October 2007, he told the National Association of Home Builders that the bottom would come in late 2008. In April 2009, he told Time magazine that housing prices would bottom out by the end of the year. (“I feel very confident about this,” he said.) Three months later, he told NPR that “by this time next year, the market will have hit bottom.” The market is still looking for its bottom, and so is Zandi, with both hands.

Read it.

Boy, there’s a shocker.

Now, since the Obamassiah, Smartest Guy in the Room, would naturally have known that any plan including taxes is not going to pass the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and hence has no chance of passing into law, what could his motive be for introducing it and demanding that WE MUST PASS THIS NOW? Surely it couldn’t be politics; after all, he explicitly called for an end to ‘political games’. So there must be some other motive — what could it be? what could it be?

Read it.

But it has to be passed RIGHT NOW, even though it doesn’t exist.

“Congress should pass this bill right now,” Jarrett said on MSNBC. No more than one minute later, Jarrett said the White House is still writing the bill and it will be submitted to Congress next week.

Well, let’s not get into some picky little squabble about what exists and what doesn’t exist — WE HAVE TO PASS THE BILL NOW so that we can find out what’s in it. (This is the Pelosi Method.)

The Other McCain points out that Obama’s ‘jobs plan’ has about as much chance of seeing life as a Democrat’s unwanted baby.

It’s dead on arrival in Congress, so all the hype about his jobs plan was just sound and fury signifying nothing. Like everything else Obama says or does, the Big Speech was a complete waste of time.

Read it.

Hoffa’s comments were much worse than Biden’s, though the vice-president’s demeanour suggests he could be a liability on the campaign trail (I’d wager there’s a campaign plan for him to be used only in “rev up the base” type events). Put together, they are embarrassing enough to require an apology from Obama.

But will Obama have the political and moral courage to repudiate a powerful union boss and his own vice-president?

Hint: No.

Read it.

It’s the Guardian, so it’s a hit piece — not really news, that — but it shows that Perry has the Crust in a tizzy.

Never mind that it’s far and away better than any other state in the country, and that most of its problems are caused by Washington; no, it’s somehow Perry’s fault that Texas isn’t a paradise … and the fact that it isn’t a paradise after all means that Perry sucks, and Texas sucks, and Republicans suck, and Obama’s the answer even though he’s failed at everything he couldn’t affirmative-action himself through.

Megan McArdle looks at her own profession.

While it’s undoubtedly true that some reporters consciously repress facts which threaten their ideological priors, I don’t think that’s really the issue in most cases.  What bias does–in science, in media, in any situation where information is gathered–is affect what questions you ask.

Smitty at The Other McCain gets some PT in.

Fisking a Maureen Dowd column. It’s the blogger version of calisthenics, really.

Read it.

During the George W. Bush administration, liberals became so unhinged that a psychological condition called Bush Derangement Syndrome was diagnosed. Years later, some on the Left still suffer from it. The phrase has been turned to other uses, but W. has been the undisputed champion when it comes to bringing out the insanity in political opponents.

Until now. We saw it here in Minnesota, and now we are experiencing it on the national stage: there is something about Michele Bachmann that causes liberals to make fools of themselves. I can’t explain it, but it’s true.

I can explain it. They’re deranged, hypocritical, intellectually dishonest haters. That’s their whole life. Without that, they’ve got nothing.

More whining from the New York Times.

I wasn’t surprised when the administration of George W. Bush sacrificed the environment for corporate profits. But when the same thing happens under a Democratic administration, it’s depressing. With little or no public input, policies that benefit corporations regardless of the consequences continue to be enacted.

This guy’s beat is food, so of course he’s bitching about capitalism and the environment; I guess that comes under ‘all things related’. (What doesn’t? NASA?)

The ‘environment’ in question is, of course, non-gene-mod crops, which are about as ‘natural’ as a Ford Focus; every plant we eat has been tweaked by selective breeding for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And these are the guys who proclaim their devotion to science; God forbid we should use that science to improve our lives.

Read it.

One of my favorite sayings has always been ‘Jews breed for intelligence’. This article is causing me to re-evaluate that notion.

Read it.

This is the latest in a series on the use of the race card for political gain…

There is a curious argument used to paint the Tea Party movement and conservatives as racist.

The argument goes that since slave owners and segregationists invoked states rights, and since the Tea Party movement and conservatives invoke states rights, therefore the Tea Party movement and conservatives are racist.

Of course, there is no logic to this construct.  Just because one use of the 10th Amendment was for racist purposes does not mean that all other invocations of the 10th Amendment are racist.  Unless of course the 10th Amendment and our federalist structure itself is racist.

Nonetheless, it is a theme the Jesse Jacksons of the world push day in and day out in order to play the race card in favor of Democrats, in this case having a crowd repeat “big government is us by another name.”

By ‘us’, of course, Jesse Jackson (Lawn Jockey of the Crust) means himself and his tax-parasite friends.

John Hinderaker at Power Line takes a look at more Crustian goofiness.

Bill Keller, Executive Editor of the New York Times–that’s roughly like being Captain of the Titanic, but some people pay attention to him anyway–has gotten a lot of notice with a list of questions that he poses to Republican presidential candidates, collectively and individually. There is much to be said about this. For example: Why only the Republican candidates? Has Keller or anyone else asked similar questions of Howard Dean, John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton or even Barack Obama, whose brushes with religious radicalism are notorious? Does anyone expect Democratic candidates to wax eloquent on religious issues? Not that I am aware of.

Read it.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush denied reports Tuesday that his family had any special grudge against Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

“I’ve never heard anybody in my family say anything but good things about Rick Perry,” Bush stated in an interview with Neil Cavuto on the Fox News Channel, saying he was grateful to get the opportunity to set the record straight.

When pressed on the issue, Bush related to Cavuto it was possible that former George W. Bush political adviser Karl Rove had a problem with Perry, but certainly not anyone in the Bush family.

“Not with my brother, my dad. Not with me at all,” Bush said. “I admire him. And I think Texas has got a great story and he can legitimately talk about that story as a candidate for president.”

Another leftie lie bites the dust.

Slate continues the Crustian dogpile on Perry: (a) Texas didn’t do all that much better, (b) Even if they did, it was because they had all that oil and gas and shit, and (c) even if they did something right, it had nothing to do with Perry.

Boring. You’d think they could come up with something original.

Perry’s chief virtue is that he doesn’t go out of his way to encourage job-destroying policies, something that no Democrat can resist. Sometimes being King Log is praiseworthy when the alternative is King Stork.

Read it.

The New York Times continues its service to the Narrative, and a Voice of the Crust plays ‘good cop’.

He’s got good looks, charisma, experience. So how do you explain his penchant for comments that are, well, a bit out there?

The eternal lefty dilemma. How could such a good-looking, articulate, (dare we say it? ‘clean’) and apparently well-qualified guy not be on the Right Side?

Ben Bernanke’s loose-money policy is “treasonous,” and Texans would “treat him pretty roughly” if he came to their state. Global warming is a hoax. Evolution is just an idea “out there.” Social Security is unconstitutional, and the 16th Amendment, which establishes the grounds for federal income taxes, should be repealed. Are these just the words of a newbie to the national stage? Or the future of the Republican Party?

Questions that only somebody inside the Leftist Urban Bubble could ask. After all, anybody who could pen this sentence…

Remember, this is a state where Ron Paul, who believes that NAFTA is part of a plot to force America into a European Union-style arrangement with Canada and Mexico, is regarded as a statesman.

… is obviously talking out of his ass and the Democrat talking-points book (which may be the same, for all we know). Nobody in Texas, not even Ron Paul supporters, considers him a ‘statesman’; certainly not in the Washington Beltway sense of ‘Republican willing to Play Ball’.

This is what passes for journalism in these degenerate modern times.

Of course, stripped of its yee-haw bluster, Mr. Perry’s comments are not all that different from the sort of positions we’ve heard from Bachmann, Herman Cain or even Mitt Romney.

Hey, Perry’s a Republican! What a surprise!

Indeed, Representative Paul may have the last laugh in more ways than one. As he told a New Hampshire crowd, Rick Perry “makes me sound like a moderate.”

News flash, Clay: The only people who could make Ron Paul sound like a moderate spoke German or Russian, and they’re all dead.

Read it.

The New York Times takes a while to catch up. Bashing the E.P.A. has been a theme in the G.O.P. race since Nixon resigned.

Read it.

The New York Times takes it’s turn doing a hit-piece on Rick Perry. Who’s next? Boston Globe? L.A. Times? MSNBC?

Read it.

Now that Perry is officially a candidate, it’s time for the media hit-pieces to begin. CNN, as befits its seniority as a Voice of the Crust, gets to lead off.

But that doesn’t mean that all is well with employment in the Lone Star State. Texas leads the nation in minimum-wage jobs, and many positions don’t offer health benefits. Also, steep budget cuts are expected to result in the loss of more than 100,000 jobs.

Perhaps most importantly, Texas can’t create jobs fast enough to keep up with its rapidly growing population. Since 2007, the state’s number of working-age residents expanded by 6.6%, nearly twice the national average.

Translation: Well, they may have a lot of growth, but it’s still not enough, so there.

Of course, Texas enjoys advantages that have nothing to do with having Perry at the helm. Rich in natural resources, the state has been benefiting from the high price of oil and the expanded interest in natural gas exploration. Energy employment has soared by 16.8% over the past year alone.

Translation: Well, they may be in good shape,  but they’re just lucky, it doesn’t have anything to do with Perry, so there.

Uh, guys, having the government keep its hands off is far from ‘nothing’. Both Perry and Obama inherited an economy from George W Bush. Obama put his in the toilet by dicking around with it; Perry left it alone, and it’s leading the nation. ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear.’

“We have created jobs, but they are not jobs with good wages and benefits,” said F. Scott McCown, executive director, Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates for low-income residents.

So it’s not enough to make more jobs, they have to be ‘good’ jobs, according to some ‘progressive’ standard that is never articulated but which Democrats achieve while destroying economic growth but Republicans can’t seem to reach no matter how many people they put to work. I see.

Read it.

A healthy diet is expensive and could make it difficult for Americans to meet new U.S. nutritional guidelines, according to a study published Thursday that says the government should do more to help consumers eat healthier.

*sigh* No, eating according to somebody’s bogus definition of a healthy diet is expensive. This is just another transparent ploy to get more government control over everyday life.

“We know more than ever about the science of nutrition, and yet we have not yet been able to move the needle on healthful eating,” he said.

That’s because most of what you ‘know’ ain’t so. Get back to me when ‘scientists’ stop flip-flopping on what foods are good for you and what are bad.

The government should provide help for meeting the nutritional guidelines in an affordable way.

All at taxpayer expense. The government should get out of the business of ‘nutritional guidelines’ and do its job, which is keeping the peace.

UPDATE: David Friedman agrees:

The trick is quite simple. The article pretends to be about what healthy eating costs. It is actually about what people who eat healthily spend. Higher income correlates with better education, so people who spend more also, on average, spend better, nutritionally speaking. That is no evidence that good nutrition costs more—and, as a comparison between the price of spareribs and the price of pork and beans or fruit salad would demonstrate, it often does not. Precisely the same analysis could be used to show that people who spend more on rent eat better too.

Read it.

Yes, we need to get rid of bad teachers. But we can’t demand that teachers be excellent in conditions that preclude excellence.

In other words, we need more money and smaller class sizes. Couldn’t be that we’re expecting teachers to run special-needs day care centers, no indeed.

Read it.

When the richest man in the world either divorces her or dies with her as his sole heir.

This is such a silly article it’s difficult to know where to start. Well, let’s look at the first sentence:

Women may be doing better than men in the broader economy, but they’re still under-represented at the very top.

Anybody who thinks that wealth is somehow a ‘representative’ thing has greater intellectual issues than this one. But it’s a common delusion these days: Anytime a given group of people don’t have the precise mix of sexes and ethnic groups as the population as a whole (and such comparisons invariably look for the largest general population they can get away with), the cry of ‘under-representation’ goes up, as if it had any relevance whatsoever. The only reason that nobody is complaining that men are under-represented among those becoming pregnant is that they can’t figure out how to word it so that it doesn’t sound stupid on its face, although I’m sure that there are some who are willing to give it a shot nevertheless.

David Friedman points out the many ways in which the news business isn’t.

Reading Google News, I am struck by the degree to which dramatic stories crowd out arguably more important material. The top of the page is dominated by the current U.S. debt limit crisis. It is an entertaining example of the game of Chicken as played by politicians but of limited importance otherwise, since both sides are focused not on how to deal with the long term debt problem but on the terms on which they will agree to postpone dealing with it.

Meanwhile there are at least two other stories getting considerably less play but arguably of more real importance.

Read it.

To people who see no real difference between people and animals, this makes perfect sense.

Let’s have him for lunch.

Scott Johnson of Powerline draws back the curtain on the Obamanation.

Obama’s speech last night was permeated with the deep dishonesty and poll-tested euphemisms that constitute his contribution to the debt ceiling debate. Here are a few of the euphemisms Obama has contributed: revenue (taxes), shared sacrifice (taxes), asking for something (taxes), millionaires and billionaires (taxes on individuals earning more than $200,000 a year or couples earning more than $250,000 a year), the balanced approach (taxes).

You can tell when Obama is lying — his lips are moving.

Read it.

Are there any lawyers in the House who write laws that benefit lawyers?  Even if the House members aren’t practicing law now, might they be interested in doing so in the future?

I think there may be a couple.  So I guess that’s ok, then.  St. Helena should get rid of its grape-grower Congressman and elect a lawyer.  He will understand the problems of all the lawyers in the district.  I’m sure the folks there will be happier with that.

Read it.

The letter addressed to Clark Moore and postmarked February 1958 arrived at the campus mail room last week. The note ends: “I still miss you as much as ever and love you a thousand times more. Please write me real soon. Vonnie.”

Siddeeq tells the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review he has mixed emotions about it. It turns out he and Vonnie are divorced. She declined to speak to the newspaper.

Read it.

An online campaign has been launched in Russia urging young women to support Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in a presidential vote by taking off their clothes, a lawmaker’s site showed on Sunday.

I am totally certain that there is a Cause out there somewhere that is encouraging people to show their support by picking their noses. It just hasn’t made the Lamestream Media yet. But it will, in time, it will.

Read it.

An excellent example of the sort of drivel that passes for reporting these days. The New York Times appears to be specializing in that sort of thing.

An extraordinary amount of personal income is coming directly from the government.

More accurately, an extraordinary amount of personal income is being re-distributed by the government. The government only has money when it take it from a taxpayer, or borrows it from a bondholder.

Close to $2 of every $10 that went into Americans’ wallets last year were payments like jobless benefits, food stamps, Social Security and disability, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics. In states hit hard by the downturn, like Arizona, Florida, Michigan and Ohio, residents derived even more of their income from the government.

Of course, this ‘analysis’ doesn’t mention the fact that amounts that the government put into some Americans’ wallets were first taken from other Americans’ wallets. You’d think that the government magically found this money under a rock somewhere.

By the end of this year, however, many of those dollars are going to disappear, with the expiration of extended benefits intended to help people cope with the lingering effects of the recession. Moody’s Analytics estimates $37 billion will be drained from the nation’s pocketbooks this year.

Well, no, they won’t ‘disappear’ — they just won’t be spent by the government, but rather  by the citizens who earned them, instead. (Don’t you just love the phrase ‘drained from the nation’s pocketbooks’? Drained to … where, exactly? And ‘drained’ implies that it was in the ‘nation’s pocketbooks’ in the first place, which if course it wasn’t; the Crustian assumption is that if the government fails to give you a dollar, it therefore has taken that dollar from you.)

People actually get paid money to write this stuff.

Slow news day.

I’m sure that there are at least five people in the world who care one way or another.

I doubt that they know one another, though.

Read it.

Duh … because reporting on it would make Obama look bad. If the President were a Republican, it’d be all over the front page.