Read it.

Without substantial scandals or wedge issues to work with, the candidates mostly argue about actual policy….

Yeah, what’s up with that?

Read it.

Membership in the E.U.? This would be the same E.U. that handed over Kosovo, Serbia’s historic heartland, to Albanian immigrants? That E.U.? Gee, whyever would ‘nationalist groups’ resist membership in the E.U.?

Paul Krugman, of course.

But isn’t keeping taxes for the affluent low also a form of stimulus? Not so you’d notice. When we save a schoolteacher’s job, that unambiguously aids employment; when we give millionaires more money instead, there’s a good chance that most of that money will just sit idle.

Is Krugman really an economist, or does he just play one in Washington? THE RICH PAY PEOPLE TO MAKE SURE THEIR MONEY DOESN’T JUST SIT IDLE. One would think that a Princeton Professor would know enough about rich people to know at least that much.

Of course, he could always just be lying to us in pursuit of a political agenda. (No! He wouldn’t do that, surely?)

Read it.

Let’s see: A manifesto on how to fix our schools by the people who are already in charge of our schools and presumably responsible for their needing fixing in the first place.

Right.

I have a question: Why are they writing pompous articles for the Washington Post instead of, you know, FIXING OUR SCHOOLS?

I wonder about these things.

Robin Hanson is one of the more eminent thumb-suckers of the modern world.

Of course, the classic statement is that there are two types of people, those who divide people into two types and those who don’t, but that’s not what he means.

This is quite obviously a warming-over of the whole Noble Savage idea most frequently associated with Rousseau (and which ought to have died with him), an idea that modern ‘progressives’ embrace because it tarts up their unrealistic assumptions in a Clever Plastic Disguise.

Memorandum that civilization did not arise among the hunter-gatherers, but among the farmers; if you want to know what ‘progressive’ policies produce, go look at the Khoisan in southern Africa.

Read it.

One thing totally missing from this discussion is the fact that Islam is radically different from every other religion in the U.S. It is not a tenet of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or Vedantism (or Sikh or Bah’ai or Jain or whatever) to subject everyone in the community to their religious law, by force if necessary. That is a tenet of Islam, and so to extend to Islam the same tolerance as has been traditionally (and harmlessly) extended to other religions is both ignorant and stupid.

To refuse to defend a community against a clear and present danger to that community is treason; to actively prevent others from defending themselves is, if possible, even worse.

Check it out.

In this artwork provided by Liquid Comics, the “Sliver Scorpion” is shown. The new superhero is a young Muslim, who loses his legs in a tragic landmine accident and must learn to come to terms with the reality of his disability while learning to use his newfound power to fight for social inclusion, equity and justice

No mention of the fact that a young Muslim with superpowers would almost inevitably turn into a super-terrorist — but, of course, that doesn’t fit the narrative. (Note that freedom, tolerance, and the rights of women aren’t on the program.)

Read it.

A journalist feels grumpy on Monday morning, and decides to phone it in.

Read it.

The New York Times, premier Voice of the Crust, voices the angst of the Ruling Class over those silly proles not doing what they’re told by Big Nanny.

Read it.

Apparently, yes. Despite the fact that close to one-third of the country’s workforce is comprised of independent workers, this sizeable chunk of our economy has none of the protections and benefits that “traditional” employees have. Health insurance? No. Unemployment insurance? Nope. Protection from unpaid wages, or race, gender, or age discrimination? Not a chance. We’ve left these 42 million workers out to dry and entirely out of our social support system.

In other words, they aren’t chained to government like the rest of us. Lucky stiffs.

We’re dealing with an outdated employment system – it was built for a workforce from the 1930s, and it no longer works for us today. So as a result, a growing number of working Americans are left with no protections.

Fortunately, we have a government built for the 1930s, as well, so it’s not as bad as it could be — we don’t get all the ‘protections’ we pay for. Although the Obamanation is trying to change that.

And freelancers need to come together and recognize their power in numbers. This group of 42 million holds tremendous potential to influence politics (by demanding better legislation to protect them) and markets (by demanding affordable health insurance). However, without solidarity and a collective desire to create change, without raising their voices and demonstrating their immense economic contributions, independent workers will never be recognized as a “class” that is worth paying attention to. Employers also have a role in the solution. Some, like Time Inc., require that freelancers take a 4% hit on what they are owed if they want to be paid in 25 days, and others “misclassify” staff members as contractors in order to avoid paying their benefits.

Forward, comrades! We have nothing to lose but our chains!

Ponder the fact that somebody actually got paid for this piece of thumbsuckery.

Read it.

The New York Times on Sunday devoted more than 1,000 words to an article by two of its staff reporters about what it described as “the brutal, premeditated killings of three Afghan civilians — allegedly at the hands of American soldiers.” Today the Times ran another 1,000-word, staff-written article, on the front-page, about gays in the military. Meanwhile, the president posthumously awards the Medal of Honor to Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Richard Etchberger, and the Times handles it with a 230-word squib from the Associated Press wire service.

Eventually, people in the military are going to get tired of being slimed by their own countrymen, and sooner or later one or more of them are going to resort to what the Special Operations people call ‘direct action’. I would not want to be an employee of the New York Times when that day comes.

Read it.

Nonsense. We grouchy pessimists don’t have hearts, so it’s not a problem.

Fargin’ sentimental know-it-alls….

Read it.

It gets better:

The Quran doesn’t just preach religious tolerance; the Prophet Muhammad demonstrated it in his life, [Emad El-Din Shahin, a religion professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana] says.

The prophet would meet Christian delegations in his mosque.

“He would allow them to perform Christian prayers in the mosque,” Shahin says.

First Things’ Joe Carter has a relevant question: “Why would Christians need to pray in a mosque? Why don’t they just go to First Baptist of Mecca or St. Paul’s in Medina. Oh yeah, that’s right. Because there are no official churches in Saudi Arabia of any Christian denomination.” I mean, how — in a story such as this — do you not mention these basic facts about how Christianity is actually treated in Saudi Arabia? It’s just journalistic malpractice. One almost gets the feeling that mainstream reporters are just expressing their hopes and wishes in stories about religious tolerance in Islam. We’re certainly not concerned about accuracy, if stories such as this are any guide.

So if you think about the current global situation when it comes to religious freedom, who matches this better? Is it — as CNN writes — the pastor of a 50-person congregation in Florida? Or do you think we should consider other small and inconsequential groups, such as the entire nation of Saudi Arabia?

Read it.

Home Owners’ Associations are living proof that Americans can be as fascist as anybody when they’re inclined to be.

Like much in contemporary American politics, this leaves me confused. I don’t understand why an exclusive residential association, freely entered into, with explicit rules that are presented at the outset, offering services-for-cash, is un-American. After all, this is in contrast to a municipality that levies taxes for services from which one cannot opt out (if one has no children in the schools, for instance) and which may not be available to all (such as public transport), and which could easily be seen as a redistributive institution, an example of that socialism we keep hearing so much about.

That’s because you’re dimwitted. The HOA agreement is usually mandatory for a particular neighborhood, and if you want to live there you have to join and pay — not unlike a municipality. And the actions of HOAs aren’t subject to the normal political processes or safeguards — quite unlike legitimate political entities. Many times their oppressive nature isn’t apparent until one is already stuck; and with the housing market the way it is, there is no easy way to escape.

NPR.

And they ought to know — just ask Bush.

Read it.

Almost everyone is pretty screwed up. That’s not my opinion, that’s official – according to a new paper in the latest British Journal of Psychiatry.

Let’s see — according to a field that makes it’s money from repairing alleged mental difficulties, which repairs cannot be objectively measured, finds that there’s a lot of fixing needed out there. Okay.

Read it.

To begin with, combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is, even if they come from senior officials. The situation on the ground in Iraq is no different today than it has been for some months. Iraqi security forces are still fighting Sunni and al-Qaida insurgents. Many Iraqis remain very concerned for their country’s future despite a dramatic improvement in security, the economy and living conditions in many areas.

As for U.S. involvement, it also goes too far to say that the U.S. part in the conflict in Iraq is over. President Obama said Monday night that “the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.”

However, 50,000 American troops remain in country. Our own reporting on the ground confirms that some of these troops, especially some 4,500 special operations forces, continue to be directly engaged in military operations. These troops are accompanying Iraqi soldiers into battle with militant groups and may well fire and be fired on.

When you’ve lost Cronkite, you’ve lost America.

Perhaps Obama ought to have had a banner in the background saying ‘MISSION ABANDONED’.

Read it.

Orszag is the eighteenth individual (that we know of) to transition between the White House and the mainstream press. He will surely not be the last. That amazingly high number again underscores the ideological similarities between members of the Obama administration and members of the press.

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

Tom Smith is disappointed.

Maybe it’s just too hard for a British intellectual to understand how Walmart shoppers think.

Steve Sailer kicks over a rock, and finds Slate magazine.

I’m always getting accused of being obsessed with IQ, but it seems an awful lot of people are obsessed with showing off how smart they are. In general, that would be a good thing, except that our culture has got itself into a culdesac whereby a proof of being “thoughtful” is by how little thought you give to crucial topics such as immigration, and by how mindlessly you sneer at those who actually have thought hard on the subject.

Read it.

Humanity is in general genetically predisposed not to take surveys, according to new research. However there exists a proportion of mutant freaks whose genes make them want to respond to surveys.

That explains a lot.

The amazing news comes as part of a new study by profs in America and Singapore. This involved the cunning sending out of a survey to over 1,000 sets of twins.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it.

At the Columbia Journalism Review, Trudy Lieberman provides further evidence for my conclusion that what really offended Alan Simpson’s critics about his comparison between Social Security and “a milk cow with 310 million tits” was his candor. Lieberman says “what’s really at stake here” is not Simpson’s colorful language but his “long-standing antipathy toward Social Security and Medicare,” which “raises the question about why the president appointed him [to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform] in the first place.”

I mean, really. Cut entitlements? What was he smoking?

Read it.

On a week that included the anchor Katie Couric’s trip to Afghanistan, the “CBS Evening News” recorded its lowest total viewer rating in nearly 20 years, tying a record that it set in June.

I guess Katie Couric is worth every penny of the millions they’re paying her. Of course, the New York Times spins it as merely people being uninterested in the war in Afghanistan.

It can be tricky to draw a direct correlation between subject matter and ratings. But last week’s ratings offer another talking point for the people — including some inside television newsrooms — who argue that the American public has tuned out the war.

No, they’ve just tuned out of what Rush Limbaugh calls ‘the chickification of the news’. Thanks, Katie; you’re the best.

Read it.

While Borgnine’s work ethic is admirable — he has three films due out this year — his personal politics are less than laudable.

No speck of sand is too small for the Thought Police.

Read it.

When the President of the United States, in prepared remarks, launches a broadside against any organization, it is no accident. In the case of Barack Obama and left, we have a new target for this White House — yet another company whose owners take issue with Barack Obama destroying the country.

On August 9th, speaking in Austin, TX, Barack Obama said, “Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country. And they don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation. You don’t know if it’s a big oil company, or a big bank. You don’t know if it’s a insurance company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it’s good for their bottom line, even if it’s not good for the American people.”

Not really news, although a useful reminder. ‘Progressives’ specialize in ginning up ‘non-profit’ organizations with specious names that usually indicate exactly the opposite of what the organization is devoted to pushing. ‘Southern Poverty Law Center’, for example, which bills itself as the foremost ‘watchdog’ against ‘hate groups’ spreads far more hate than it watches; ‘Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’ is devoted to vilifying anybody attempting to spread the facts about the leftist agenda; ‘People for the American Way’ is the foremost advocate of socialism in the U.S, the most un-American ‘way’ it is possible to conceive. So this is just another case of left-wing projection, accusing their enemies of the very tactics of which they are arguably the masters. (See Nancy Pelosi, ‘Culture of Corruption’.)

Read it.

Bloomberg News keeps up its track record of biased coverage of the effort to extend the Bush tax cuts with an article about an effort by business groups who back the tax cuts. The article quotes not a single business owner or executive, but it does quote three professors. If it were an article headlined “liberal professors favor tax increases,” that’d be one thing, but it’s supposed to be an article about a coalition of business groups that favor extending the tax cuts.

Well, professors just know these things, right?

Read it.

Ask yourself whether the Washington Post would be urging no retrial were the defendant a former Republican Governor. The question almost answers itself.

I guess some animals are more equal than others.

Kathleen Parker used to be a conservative. She then sold out and is now comfortable as a Voice of the Crust.

Reason tells us something else: The Muslims who want to build this mosque didn’t fly airplanes into skyscrapers. They don’t support terrorism. By what understanding do we assign guilt to all for the actions of a relative few?

That’s not reason, that’s invincible stupidity.

When members of a group commit atrocities in the name of the group, and the fundamental principles of said group do not rule out the commission of atrocities in service to the advancement of the power of the group, AND THE FOUNDER AND ROLE MODEL OF SAID GROUP COMMITTED ATROCITIES IN THE PAST, and other members of that same group neither denounce those atrocities nor renounce the commission of atrocities in service to the advancement of the group, said Other Members, WHETHER OR NOT THEY HAVE COMMITTED ATROCITIES, are reasonably suspect of being open to the commission of atrocities, and may reasonably be treated as enemies by people not in the group, who would be natural targets for further atrocities.

This is why Communists are our enemies, and always will be.

This is why Nazis are our enemies, and always will be.

This is why Fascists are our enemies, and always will be

And this is why Muslims are our enemies, and always will be.

THAT is reason. And Kathleen Parker is an idiot.

Read it.

Perhaps because Voices of the Crust like the New York Times encourage them to feel as if they world owes them a living.

Eleanor Clift has been a Voice of the Crust so long that it has made her tone-deaf.

The Justice Department’s decision to let former House majority leader Tom DeLay off the hook and end the six-year-long investigation that drove him out of Washington at the peak of his power should win the Obama administration some points with Republicans, if not Democrats. This is the second high-profile Republican that Attorney General Eric Holder has vindicated, the other being the late senator Ted Stevens, whose corruption case Holder declined last year to prosecute.

Let’s see if I understand this: Because Holder has decided to say “Never mind!” to a politically-motivated legal proceeding once its objective (to destroy the effectiveness of a powerful opponent) is accomplished, He’s The Nice One? That’s like having a wrestler throw sand in the other guy’s eyes and having a commentator say, “Hey, he didn’t kick him in the groin while he was distracted! What a great guy!”

In Washington, these big scandals almost always end anti-climactically.

That’s because the objective wasn’t to actually follow through, but to put the other side off balance. C’mon, Eleanor, how long have you been in Washington that you don’t know this?

Power Line sums it up:

Tom DeLay exemplifies a thoroughly modern phenomenon: a public figure whose career–and, one suspects, whose life–has been ruined by the prosecutorial/media/political complex. After six years of headlines, DeLay’s persecutors have nothing to show for their efforts. Except, of course, that they ruined the former Majority Leader of the House of Representatives.

Read it.

He’s the victim, you see. Nick Green was just minding his own business, cheerfully ignoring the congressional election that he’s paid to cover, blowing off the Republican challenger’s campaign as too insignificant to merit his attention and then — without notice or warning — somebody called him on it.

Sucks to be you, doesn’t it, Nick?

Read it.

Of course, from his name, Abuelazam, anyone with two brain cells to rub together can tell that he’s an Arab, and probably a Muslim; to call him an Israeli, although possibly technically correct, is the sort of tone-deaf misdirection that is the hallmark of the Lame Stream Media these days.

More here.

Read it.

At a fundraiser here, he trotted out his latest joke, chuckling as he told it. The punch line came after his usual story about refusing to give Republicans back the keys to the economy because they drove it into a ditch.

Speaking of cars, he said: “You want to go forward, what do you do? You put it in ‘D.’ When you go backward, what do you do? You put it in ‘R.'”

Then, with another chuckle, he added: “I’m just sayin’ that’s not a coincidence.”

And when you want it in a condition where it doesn’t do anything by itself but can be easily pushed around, you put it in ‘N’. Welcome to the post-racial society.

Read it.

A survey of North Dakota has turned up hundreds of genetically modified canola plants growing along roads across the state.

There is, of course, no such thing as a ‘canola plant’. ‘Canola’ is a trademarked term that stands for ‘Canadian oil of low acidity’ and refers to a highly-processed form of the oil from the RAPESEED PLANT. This is as brainless as referring to a cow as a ‘cream animal’.

Read it.

That’s as may be, but job advertisements still read ‘four-year college degree’, not ‘four-year college education’. Don’t weep for Harvard quite yet.

Read it.

There are several reasons why I don’t object to a mosque being built near the World Trade Center site, but the key reason is my affection for Broadway show tunes.

This person is paid a large amount of money to write a column for the most prominent newspaper in the country. Is there any better evidence of why the New York Times has been hemorrhaging subscribers like an Ebola victim?

Which brings me back to the Muslim community center/mosque, known as Park51. It is proposed to be built two blocks north of where the twin towers stood and would include a prayer space, a 500-seat performing arts center, a swimming pool and a restaurant. The Times reported that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Muslim leader behind the project, who has led services in TriBeCa since 1983, said he wants the center to help “bridge and heal a divide” among Muslims and other religious groups. “We have condemned the actions of 9/11,” he said.

That resistance to diversity, though, is not something we want to emulate, which is why I’m glad the mosque was approved on Tuesday. Countries that choke themselves off from exposure to different cultures, faiths and ideas will never invent the next Google or a cancer cure, let alone export a musical or body of literature that would bring enjoyment to children everywhere.

Anyone who thinks that a mosque is going to be a hotbed of ‘diversity’, or that Muslims will be encouraging the sort of ‘Broadway shows’ that a columnist for the New York Times is likely to enjoy, is someone too stupid to be allowed to vote, much less the sort of person who ought to have his drivel drip from the pages of the ‘newspaper of record’.

Read it.

Let’s see: We’ve got too many obese kids, so we need to buy them lunch (and breakfast, if you look into the programs) at taxpayer expense? Sure, that makes perfect sense.

One can only conclude that Senator Lugar has succeeded to Senator Byrd’s position as “most senile member of the Senate”.

Freeberg turns over a rock.

Bristol has split with Levi again. So it’s time for another session of Palin-Go-’Round. You’ve already been through a bunch of frames so by now you know exactly how the game is played:

1. Sarah Palin does something, or says something, or someone says or does something to her;
2. Liberals come up with some clever catch-phrases about it, eager to show other liberals how nasty they can be;
3. You skim through all the toxic things they have to say as they seek to impress each other;
4. Stop to consider: These are the people who want to manage health care for all of us. Scared yet?

Palin-go-round is always sickening but it’s always rewarding too. Liberals who want to show other liberals how nasty they can be, play to win. They know there are no points awarded for second-worst.

But when push comes to shove, liberals don’t put a lot of importance on being nice. They put a lot of importance on being mean and nasty. This is supposed to be why they’re better than conservatives — they’re nice, conservatives are mean.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

In Slate, Dave Weigel engages in one of the funnier rituals of modern day politics: the pre-emptive accusation of racism….

Read it.

The politically charged decisions by veteran Democratic Reps. Charles Rangel of New York and Maxine Waters of California to force public trials  by the House ethics committee are raising questions about race and whether black lawmakers face more scrutiny over allegations of ethical or criminal wrongdoing than their white colleagues.

Politico, of course, is a Voice of the Crust.

Read it. It is not a pretty sight.

The best indication of the vast cultural gulf separating people involved in Boy Scouts from people who report and edit the Times probably was in the photo cutline that ran with the story. “Boy Scouts said their pledge at the recent National Scout Jamboree in Fort A.P. Hill, Va. The organization is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.” As any Boy Scout would know, there is no Boy Scout “pledge.” There’s a Scout Law, and a Scout Oath (or Promise).

It goes in that vein. The Times sneers at the Scouts’ size: “In the last decade alone, membership has dropped by more than 16 percent, to 2.8 million.” No mention of what has happened to the Times’s circulation or advertising over that period, or of the fact that, at 2.8 million, there are still a lot more Boy Scouts than New York Times subscribers.

Read it.

Pfc. Bradley Manning is the only suspect in the Wikileaks scandal that may have endangered both American soldiers in Afghanistan and their Afghan allies. He is now in custody awaiting court martial. Manning worked in intelligence and was stationed for a time outside Baghdad. I have no insight into whether Private Manning is guilty or not; presumably the facts will come out in his court martial. I am struck, however, by the lack of curiosity the American press has shown about Private Manning.

Why would they? He’s not useful as a stick with which to beat Bush or the Republicans, so he’s of no interest to them.

First, Private Manning is openly homosexual. Did you know that? I didn’t; if the fact has been reported in the American press, I’ve missed it. Moreover, Manning was an activist who demonstrated against Congress’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. His Facebook includes a photo of him at a gay rights rally, holding a sign demanding equality on “the battlefield.” Further, he has posted anti-military comments on his Facebook page. An uncle describes him as “an introverted kid who loved computers and was fired up politically.” That tantalizing reference is left hanging. Whether he was fired up about something other than gay rights remains unknown, for the moment.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised. It’s even getting through to the New York Times.

Read it.

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

Tell the truth: You’ve never heard of Howard Zinn, have you? Trust me, you didn’t miss anything.

Read it.

The U.N. is such a joke, I don’t see why anybody wastes bandwidth on them any more.

Andrew Exum points out that there is no there, there.

ANYONE who has spent the past two days reading through the 92,000 military field reports and other documents made public by the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks may be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. I’m a researcher who studies Afghanistan and have no regular access to classified information, yet I have seen nothing in the documents that has either surprised me or told me anything of significance. I suspect that’s the case even for someone who reads only a third of the articles on Afghanistan in his local newspaper.

Third, the site asserts that the Pentagon employs a secret task force of highly trained commandos charged with capturing or killing insurgent leaders. I suspect that in the eyes of most Americans, using special operations teams to kill terrorists is one of the least controversial ways in which the government spends their tax dollars.

Indeed.

Mr. Assange has said that the publication of these documents is analogous to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, only more significant. This is ridiculous. The Pentagon Papers offered the public a coherent internal narrative of the conflict in Vietnam that was at odds with the one that had been given by the elected and uniformed leadership.

The publication of these documents, by contrast, dumps 92,000 new primary source documents into the laps of the world’s public with no context, no explanation as to why some accounts may contradict others, no sense of what is important or unusual as opposed to the normal march of war.

Andrew Gilligan (no relation, I trust) is another of those Crustians who are just chock full of bright ideas for how other people (you know, them) ought to cut back on convenience.

The bike is perfect if you don’t value your time, don’t mind getting sweaty, and really regret that technology has advanced since Queen Victoria’s time (the heyday of the bike).

Jayne Merkel is a Crustian of the Chattering Class.

Like the rest of her regiment, she makes her living by selling her opinions, and she is just chock full of ideas for those not as highly-credentialed as she (i.e. almost everybody) to Do More With Less, although I guarantee you that she doesn’t restrict her living space to 1200 square feet, unless it’s her condo in Maui.

But when it came to their houses, it was a time of common sense and a belief that less truly could be more. During the Depression and the war, Americans had learned to live with less, and that restraint, in combination with the postwar confidence in the future, made small, efficient housing positively stylish.

Horseshit. They got small, efficient housing because that’s all that the could afford. My parents were of that generation, and I grew up in that environment — it was small because we didn’t have a lot of money, and it was efficient because that’s the only way to make small work. ‘Stylish’ didn’t enter into it; ‘stylish’ was the concern of people who had the income of, oh, say, Jayne Merkel. They wouldn’t have known Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or Frank Lloyd Wright from Friedrich Nietzsche.

The apartments in the elegant towers Mies built on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, for example, were smaller — two-bedroom units under 1,000 square feet — than those in their older neighbors along the city’s Gold Coast. But they were popular because of their airy glass walls, the views they afforded and the elegance of the buildings’ details and proportions, the architectural equivalent of the abstract art so popular at the time.

And they were inhabited by soldiers returning home from the war and going to college on the G.I. Bill? Sure, I believe that.

But like much of American society, the middle-class home began to grow over time. The average size of an American house in 1950 was 983 square feet. Slowly, though, both more square footage and more amenities became part of the American dream, so that by 2004 the average home topped 2,300 square feet.

That’s because they, like my parents, bought more house as soon as they could afford it. (Not, of course, as quickly as today’s slackers, who think nothing of buying stuff they can’t afford to pay for.)

And, of course, there’s the ritual Two-Minute Hate of housing that she doesn’t approve of:

Sadly, many of the small, architect-designed houses of the postwar period have been demolished to make way for McMansions.

This is a process called ‘trading up’. If you can afford to live in a ‘McMansion’, you don’t settle for a ‘McHovel’. And, indeed, I doubt that Jayne Merkel lives in a ‘small, architect-designed house of the post-war period’. Such things, after all, are for the Little People.

Read it.

It’s a tedious job, but somebody has to do it.  Every time Tom Friedman chides us about how eco-irresponsible we are, how we all have to suck it up and pay more for everything that uses energy (which would be, uh, everything), somebody has to remind us that the honorable Friedman has a carbon footprint bigger than us, everybody who reads this blog, their families, friends, pets, hobbies, vacations and church groups, put together, times ten.

What’s eleven thousand square feet in the face of ecological collapse?

Read it.

What we have is One-Party Media: newspapers, broadcast networks, newsmagazines which represent the views and preoccupations of the Democratic Party and the political left, and consistently denigrate or ignore the views and preoccupations of the political right or centre-right; and which very often systematically ignore any news or information which might reflect badly on the one party, or reflect well on the policies, proposals, or values of the other.  (Fox is the exception – and how it is reviled for it! – although in its actual news stories, Fox often, although not always, follows the “narrative” of the other media.)  (The Wall Street Journal is the other partial exception, but with the same proviso for many of its actual news stories, and at any rate the Journal is still largely a specialised business paper with a specialised readership.  There are essentially no other major exceptions in either print or broadcast news.)