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.)

Read it.

For anyone who has been in a cave, JournoList was an invitation-only email discussion group among “progressive” journalists and academics on which they exchanged candid views on the state of the nation and discussed the themes that should be pushed or suppressed as dictated by the needs of the movement.

The real problem with JournoList is that much of it consisted of exchanges among people who worked for institutions about how to best hijack their employers for the cause of Progressivism. Thus, the J-List discussion revealed yesterday in the DC was about how the group could get their media organizations to play down the Reverend Wright affair and help elect Barack Obama.

Read it.

Here’s a fascinating paradox of liberalism, one that affects not only them but anybody who lives where they have influence. Who you are determines truth. Ted Kennedy or Robert Byrd drop dead, and if Fox News says that’s what happened then it hasn’t really happened yet. Vice President Joe Biden says the Recovery & Reinvestment Act has saved-or-created a bunch of jobs, and it must be so because Joe Biden has done something to advance the progressive agenda. Thurgood Marshall was a deity, don’t say a word against his judicial philosophy or you’ll be the opposite. Identity determines everything.

Read it.

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

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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The snotty tone is pure Crustian. ‘I know a better way, so why doesn’t everyone else get with the program? You all must be idiots!’

Read it.

More junk science from ‘nospank.net’. Correlation does not imply causation. More likely hypothesis: Children with low IQs are more likely to be spanked.

Read it.

‘Oh, before you get married? Have a plan for your divorce.’ Yeah, that’s a formula for success.

If you’re not comfortable making a commitment, don’t get married. Period.

Read it.

Note the ACORN symbol on the ‘Treasury Seal’. Guess they know where their power comes from, eh?

Read it.

This is the sort of serious, cutting-edge coverage that Rupert Murdoch has brought to the Wall Street Journal.

Scientists at P & G, with help from a Yale psychology professor, surveyed women, before and after using Pantene products, using a questionnaire that psychology researchers use to measure mood. They found women felt less “hostile,” “ashamed,” “nervous,” “guilty” or “jittery,” depending on the hair products they used, while at other times they said they felt more “excited,” “proud” and “interested.”

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, not even on Elm trees.

Read it.

The New York Times devotes a front-page news article today to attacking the Bloomberg administration for its record on racial diversity. “Top Ranks of Bloomberg Managers Are Largely White,” the article’s headline says. Nowhere is there any acknowledgment that someone could write the same article, just as accurately, about the leadership of the newspaper making the accusation: “Top Ranks of New York Times Managers Are Largely White.”

The Other McCain doesn’t really like much of anybody these days.

Sandy Goodman at the Puffington Host generates a truly useful idiocy in attacking another useful idiot, David Brooks, for his PBS NewsHour appearance Friday night.

The current crisis is Constitutional, economic, and legal. The difference between our President and Hugo Chavez doesn’t seem to extend much beyond accent.

The Other McCain delivers a smackdown.

Whatever happened to young journalists learning their craft as reporters before trying their hand at punditry or criticism? I suppose it would be slumming for a Princeton grad to take a job as a staff writer for a newspaper, covering school-board meetings and such. But am I the only reader who resents being lectured to by 22-year-olds? I don’t care what your SAT score was, sweetheart. You’re not that precocious.

Read it.

The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet while the Europeans—i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers—had the unhealthiest.

White People just love to have the practices of millenia exposed (preferably by a Crustian mag) as absurd, especially when backed by ‘science’ and most especially when the implication is that they are stupider than their primitive ancestors (and, by extension, primitive cultures today).

Read it.

We’ve written here about the regulatory revolving door, in which executive branch or congressional aides go to work for big banks or interest groups. Less mentioned is the revolving door out of the press corps. Mike Allen’s Politico playbook today has two examples: “Teddy Davis, ABC News Deputy Political Director joins SEIU as Assistant Director of Communications, working with the SEIU team on their political campaigns and policy agenda. Last day at ABC, 6/11. First day at SEIU, 6/14.” And: “Mark Johnson, Capital Bureau of The Charlotte Observer/The News & Observer, with the subject line ‘Ch ch changes’: ‘I’m very much looking forward to going to work for Gov. Bev Perdue starting June 28 as deputy communications director. If you need to reach me, this address will work for another week.'” Governor Perdue is a Democrat.

Perhaps some enterprising journalist will investigate this sleazy practice.

Amity Shlaes overturns a rock and takes a look at the myriad forms of life thus revealed.

To understand the nature of the Beck challenge, you have to recall that our system of higher education is a throwback to medieval economics: a guild. As in the classic guild, members require a lengthy period of training, with formal stages. To be in any way authoritative, a writer must have a Ph.D., a guild seal. Members of this guild have enormous discretion when it comes to the conferring of the seal – also typical. In the humanities and social sciences, Ph.D.s. and, it goes without saying, tenure-track posts — are usually awarded to those not hostile to the master professors’ views. For many decades top universities have been especially rigorous in this practice, with the result that it is difficult to find non-progressives with top credentials in the humanities. The guild demands much from its apprentices, graduate students, including dull work in obscure texts. Indeed it is proud of that obscurity, for it distinguishes academic work from, say, the easy popular histories on bookstore shelves or tv.

Steve Sailer does the jobs that the LameStream Media won’t do.

What Eia had done, was to first interview the Norwegian social scientists on issues like sexual orientation, gender roles, violence, education and  race, which are heavily politicized in the Norwegian science community. Then he translated the interviews into English and took them to well-known British and American scientists like Robert Plomin, Steven Pinker, Anne Campbell, Simon Baron-Cohen, Richard Lippa, David Buss, and others, and got their comments. To say that the American and British scientists were surprised by what they heard, is an understatement.

Recall that the Norwegian scientific establishment gives out the Nobel prize in Economics. Puts a new light on Paul Krugman, doesn’t it?

Read it.

Oh, remember all that stuff about islands being submerged in the rising sea levels? Never Mind!

Read it.

Rarely does a conservative author have his thesis validated on the front page of the New York Times just as his new book hits the shelves. But that is precisely what happened recently to Arthur Brooks. In The Battle, Arthur eloquently lays out the choice America faces between “the principles of free enterprise” and “European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracy, increasing income redistribution, and government-controlled corporations.” Now the Times has given us a window into our future if we do not heed Arthur’s warnings and choose wisely between these two visions.

In a story entitled “Europeans fear crisis threatens liberal benefits,” the Times reports that “Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirements, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism. … But all over Europe governments with big budgets, falling tax revenues and aging populations are experiencing rising deficits, with more bad news ahead. With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle.”

Hooda thunkit.

Read it.

By all appearances, this is a moment of reckoning for salt. High blood pressure is rising among adults and children. Government health experts estimate that deep cuts in salt consumption could save 150,000 lives a year.

And that’s exactly all that the New York Times spends on what we Real People would consider the fundamental question: Is the purported link between salt and high blood pressure actually a fact? Or merely a suspicion? For the Times, saying “government health experts” apparently settles the question — a remarkable bit of handwaving from a publication that is disinclined to accept the word of “government experts” in any field where said experts disagree with the preconceptions of the Times.

I wish I had a nickel for every time that “government experts” were damned sure of X, only to be equally damned sure of -X five years later. And of course I an congenitally disposed to think that, if “government experts” say X, the truth is more likely than not to be -X.

But that aside, one would think that an article discussing the Crust’s attempts to strong-arm the public into using less salt would delve a little deeper into whether such fascist thuggery is actually in truth justified.

Since processed foods account for most of the salt in the American diet, national health officials, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Michelle Obama are urging food companies to greatly reduce their use of salt. Last month, the Institute of Medicine went further, urging the government to force companies to do so.

But no.

A person in whom I have absolutely no interest has died.

Apparently this has come as a surprise to a lot of people.

Alex Tabarrok spanks Paul Krugman, always an entertaining sight.

In other words, libertarianism can’t work because government sucks. I am tempted to comment further on this creative line of reasoning but that is unnecessary since Paul has misunderstood the facts of the matter.

Read it.

Andrew Sullivan is obsessed with homosexuality, both his own and that of others. He now demands to know whether Elena Kagan is a lesbian. I may be wrong, but my guess is that it is about as likely Ms. Kagan is a lesbian as it is that Sarah Palin is the mother of Trig, another deep question that Sullivan continues to ride into what should be his well deserved oblivion.

Read it.

Let me dissent sharply from that conventional wisdom and argue that what talking heads are calling “capitalism” is actually “crony capitalism” and that it is crony capitalism that is responsible for most of our current economic difficulties.

A useful reminder.

Read it.

What is this ‘find a gap, see the sky falling’ syndrome that causes the modern knee to jerk so badly?

So there’s a gap? Who the hell cares? In reality, gaps exist. Get over it.

Read it.

I’m sure they are.

While home-schooling’s popularity has increased, the rate of growth concentrated in Texas’ high school population is off the chart: It’s nearly tripled in the last decade, including a 24 percent jump in a single year.

“That’s just ridiculous,” said Brian D. Ray, founder of the National Home Education Research Institute. “It doesn’t sound very believable.”

Well, perhaps not to you….