Read it.

It’s getting so that even Brits are noticing that Jimmuh is a moron.

George Bush was reviled in the most blood-curdling terms by large sections of the American population: did anyone ever claim that this was because he was a Texan? The Ali G question, “Is it because I is black?” has a pretty straightforward answer in this case: no. Americans have profound fears about central government taking power away from individual citizens and those fears are legitimised by the Constitution. They have every right to express them without being smeared as “racists”.

Read it.

You can’t be in the business world for long without being impressed by how hard companies work to be good at what they do. And yet, here and there, there are exceptions. In recent years, the liberal news media–what used to be known as the “mainstream” media–have been in that category. Time after time, with mind-numbing regularity, they miss news that would be of interest to their readers. Of course, the stories they miss are not random–they are stories that make the Democratic Party, or liberal politicians or organizations, look bad.

Read it.

Bottom-feeder journalism.

The Other McCain is having fun.

One post is never enough, is it? When you take up the habit of bashing David Brooks, it’s like crack cocaine. One hit and you’re hooked.

Would that other conservative writers would catch the habit regarding the MediaPetCons like Brooks and Gerson.

Brooks speaks for the testosterone-deficient, the effete, those who are by habit critics because they lack the capacity to actually do anything. To borrow Patton’s description of such creatures, they know even less about fighting than they know about fornication, which is nothing at all.

Yeah, that’s about right.

Steve Sailer fisks Dalton Conley’s NYT op-ed.

Personally, I suspect that the main reason that poor people are less likely to pay back their mortgages than rich people is because poor people tend to have less money than rich people, but, then, I’m not the Dean of Social Sciences at NYU like Dalton Conley, so what do I know?

Decades of government programs to make homeownership “affordable” only succeeded by 2007 in making homeownership insanely unaffordable, so I guess the plan is to replace the word “affordable” with the word “attainable” and then just rerun the same old stuff.

Interview in some left-wing rag. Warning: He looks like the Cowardly Lion.

Where are you politically these days?
I became a registered Republican about five or six years ago because to have a successful democracy you have to have at least two parties, and one of them was failing miserably. We had enough good Democrats. We needed a few more good Republicans. We needed a loyal opposition.

Like Lindsay Graham, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter?

Have you ever seen “American Idol”?
No, I have never watched it. But I’m thankful we’re living in a world where we can actually afford to waste your time. What a great thing that is.

Read it.

As we noted yesterday, some of the less well-grounded members of the political media have been harshly attacking Palin for having a baby. Egads! Can we really have a heartbeat away a Christian who prays, or a woman who has borne children?

It really does seem as though the media and the Angry Left loathe Sarah Palin precisely because she is normal. Through the words of his supporters, Barack Obama has become the candidate of those who oppose religion and motherhood. With friends like these, who needs Karl Rove?

The media logothetes hate Sarah Palin because she’s every normal thing they’re not.

Yesterday the Associated Press, in reporting on the interview, relied on its own inaccurate reporting of a week earlier in claiming that Palin had “contradicted an assertion she made at her former church that ‘our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.’ ” This claim disappeared from later versions of the AP dispatch, although we haven’t found any evidence that the wire service issued a correction.

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

The Other McCain voices an eternal truth.

Keith Olbermann is an evil maniac, but at least he is not as consistently jaw-dropping stupid as Matthews.

Indeed.

Read it.

Apparently journalists don’t know the meanings of the words they use. Who knew?

The term “icon” has two basic meanings, neither of which apply to Michael Jackson, Greg Norman, Ed McMahon, most Scottish mystery writers or anyone from Paul Revere & the Raiders. Originally it referred to sacred images painted on tiny wooden panels back in the days of the Eastern Empire. Thus, in theory, Farrah Fawcett’s famous ’70s poster could vaguely qualify as an icon. But for the longest time the word “icon” was used to refer to what Webster’s describes as “an object of uncritical devotion.” No more. Today it is used to describe anyone reasonably famous who is completely over the hill, on a respirator, or stone dead. Or, in the case of Mickey D’s, beloved but inanimate.

This is just another case of hyperventilating journalists hijacking an otherwise admirable language because they are desperate to insert an infectious banality into their work and don’t care if it belongs there. There is no such thing as “the mother of all stimulus packages.” One cannot go in search of the Holy Grail of killer apps for the iPhone. The English language doesn’t work that way. It’s flexible, but it’s not stupid.

Read it.

The New Yorker is reputed to have legendary fact-checkers. That state of affairs obviously died some time ago, and now it reads just like the rest of the media — a doe-eyed journalist who sees their role more as a conveyor of what someone told them than as an investigator trying to figure out what’s going on.

In the latest issue, there’s a risibly clueless article on what makes us fat. First it confuses two levels of explanation — ultimate or evolutionary causes that made our bodies the way they are today, and proximate causes like “junk food adds pounds.” At the level of mechanisms, the author makes no mention of what causes fat to be stored in fat cells rather than flow into the bloodstream to be burned as fuel. It’s not very complicated — it’s hormonally regulated, and almost the entire story is how much insulin has been released. The word “insulin” does not appear once in her 4000-word article.

Easy access to fast food, potato chips, and the like is not necessary to drive up obesity rates, since plenty of other groups have been plagued by metabolic syndrome without any such food. There is a common factor, however: foods that are high in carbohydrates. She ends the article by ominously noting a new offering from Burger King that has lots of beef, bacon, and cheese. But of course, what everyone eats when they go to Burger King, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Olive Garden, or any other cheap human feed lot, has almost no meat or cheese at all. Most of the “hamburger” is the bun, and the rest is fries and soda. Let’s see, carbs, carbs, and more carbs — but that teensy ration of beef is what’ll get ya!

Contrast this with what you get when you eat at a place with Michelin stars — it’s animals, animals, and more animals, with a token portion of vegetables on the side or to enhance flavor. And not sissy animal products either — foie gras and caviar have some of the highest concentrations of saturated fat and cholesterol of any food. Yet somehow well-to-do French, Spanish, and Italians seem to be much thinner and freer of heart disease than lower-class Americans. Not only that, but their food — loaded with fat — actually tastes like something!

The Other McCain puts it in a nutshell.

People who like Sarah Palin don’t hate women. But everybody hates whiny bitches like you.

And that about says it all.

Read it.

Regina Benjamin is a family doctor who runs a rural clinic that treats many poor patients in the town of Bayou La Batre, Alabama. She has an MBA and she was the first black woman to be elected to the AMA’s board of trustees.

Look at the picture and tell me true: Would you have known that Obama’s pick for Surgeon General was a “black woman” unless somebody told you?

The Other McCain takes a look at David Brooks’ ordeal.

My theory is that the Senator wanted to borrow a pair and too late realized his mistake.

Read it.

INDISCRIMINATE gluttons and discerning gourmands alike have long been crazy for pizza. But over the last few years, they have elevated their passion to a vocation, sending pizza into a whole new stratosphere of respect. It isn’t just loved, and it isn’t just devoured. It’s scrutinized and fetishized, with a Palin-esque power to polarize.

They actually pay people to write this stuff.

Steve Sailer points and laughs.

Like I’ve been saying since last August, Biden is “kind of a bozo,” which is fine in a Senator or blogger or whatever, but not so fine in a Vice President, especially when he’s talking foreign policy, because foreigners might not realize he’s just Old Joe Biden running off at the mouth again, but might take what he says seriously on the assumption that he’s, like, you know, the Vice President of the United States of America. (As a commenter points out, Biden was brought on board specifically to impart foreign policy gravitas to the newcomer from the South Side of Chicago.)

Read it.

Even in Washington, it’s unusual to see an actual price tag placed on a chance to “alter the debate,” as the Post’s flier tastefully put it. Stranger still is it to see the city’s scourge of public corruption — the Post broke the Watergate story and the Walter Reed scandal, among others — seemingly offering its own good offices for hire.

One hand washes the other. The separate components of The Hive work together like any other form of social insect.

Jerry Pournelle has something to say about “consensus science”.

Apparently I’m not the only one to have noticed the herd mentality at New Scientist magazine.

David Broder outs the Obama staffers who’d really rather keep running against the Bushitler if they could.

Bush’s silence has made it harder for Obama to keep the public focused on Bush as being responsible for our present difficulties — the weak economy, the unsettled wars, the scandals of Guantanamo and the detainee program.

It is not for lack of trying. Obama regularly reminds the public in his speeches and news conferences of all the problems he inherited from his predecessor. But to reporters covering the White House, those reminders have become familiar boilerplate. And since Bush won’t fight back, they rarely get much coverage.

Disappointing that a columnist of Broder’s stature can’t use the subjunctive properly, but that’s the way it is these days.

Read it.

“The DC voucher pilot program, which is set to expire this year, has been a failure,” the NEA’s letter fibs. “Over its five year span, the pilot program has yielded no evidence of positive impact on student achievement.”

That must be news to the voucher students who are reading almost a half-grade level ahead of their peers. Or to the study’s earliest participants, who are 19 months ahead after three years. Parents were also more satisfied with their children’s schools and more confident about their safety. Those were among the findings of the Department of Education’s own Institute of Education Sciences, which used rigorous standards to measure statistically significant improvement.

Read it.

But the storm has fallen with a special ferocity on black and Latino homeowners, the analysis shows. Defaults occur three times as often in mostly minority census tracts as in mostly white ones. Eighty-five percent of the worst-hit neighborhoods — where the default rate is at least double the regional average — have a majority of black and Latino homeowners.

Perhaps that’s because they listened to the government and bought houses that they, you know, couldn’t afford. Always a bad idea, taking the government’s advice.

“My district feels like ground zero,” said City Councilman James Sanders Jr., an African-American who represents hundreds of blocks in Queens like this one. “In military terms, we are being pillaged.”

Novel concept: an area that pillages itself.

Years ago many banks drew red lines on maps around black neighborhoods and refused to lend; more recently, some banks began taking aim at those neighborhoods for the marketing of subprime loans, say consumer advocates.

How dare those racists target minority neighborhoods for loans! The swine! Not like the good old days where we could bitch at them for not lending in minority neighborhoods.

And that’s always a good rule of thumb when reading Maureen Dowd.

… which I never do unless moved by an unusual circumstance — in this case, the hilarious photoshop of Obama as Spock.

Consider: The New York Times, perhaps the premier newspaper in the country (if not the world), winner of enough prizes and awards to sink the Titanic, actually paid her money to write this. And will continue to do so. That tells you all you need to know about why newspapers are dying.

Read it.

An international team of scientists has used the latest electro-magnetic induction equipment to discover that the Arctic ice is in fact “twice as thick” as they had expected, says Christopher Booker.

Imagine that.

Read it.

Rule of thumb: Anybody who capitalizes “Other” save at the beginning of a sentence is a pseudo-intellectual moron who ought to be taken out and shot to improve the gene pool and safeguard what little culture we have left.

Read it.

No doubt starring Russell Crowe.

Wouldn’t mind seeing Gwyneth Paltrow in a suit of woad, though.

Read it.

This is the season of the beat-sweetener. A beat-sweetener (some prefer the term source-greaser) is a gratuitously flattering profile that a reporter writes about a government official in the hope that it will encourage (or, at the very least, not impede) that reporter’s access to the official in question. Newspapers and magazines have been full of them, and even the uninitiated may feel they’ve been reading a lot of dull profiles lately without knowing exactly why. My advice is to adopt a defensive-reader posture and treat all profiles of Obama’s new team as guilty until proven innocent. If you encounter emollient rhetoric in the first five paragraphs, skip the rest and move on. A beat-sweetener is a meal prepared for someone other than yourself, and there’s no reason you should waste precious time ingesting it.

The smell must be getting pretty bad when a Democrat administration — and its publicity arm, the dinosaur media — are being criticized in Slate, mouthpiece of the Chattering Classes.

Read it.

Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a confidential report that labeled the CIA program “inhuman.”

Isn’t it amazing how often these “confidential reports” wind up being published by, oh, say, the Washington Post?

Let’s see: Any criticism for “gross violations of medical ethics” of doctors who deliberately kill unborn children? Nope, not here.

Read it.

But at the heart of the dispute is a struggle that is tormenting Republicans both in the state and nationally: whether to rigidly pursue an agenda dominated by conservative social issues or reach out to more moderate voters with a pledge to focus chiefly on economic concerns.

That little word “rigidly” reveals the unconscious bias that permeates what passes for journalism these days. An unbiased reporter wouldn’t have written it; an unbiased editor wouldn’t have permitted it. But we have neither any more.

Read it.

The coming shakeout in the journalism biz is one of the more entertaining situations to come down the pike. And, unless the government gets involved, the result is likely to be both surprising and useful.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

A new Oberlin graduate, James Brennan, has his costly Eurail Pass backpack tour canceled by his parents because his alcoholic father’s executive career is wobbling. Suddenly needing a summer job to pay for tuition in the fall at the Columbia Journalism School, he finds that a resume featuring his SAT scores and his Renaissance Studies major doesn’t compensate for his lack of any work experience. Nobody in Greater Pittsburgh, it turns out, needs a fresco restored. He winds up at the employer of last resort, the Adventureland amusement park.

Writer-director Greg Mottola, who helmed 2007’s comedy hit “Superbad,” explains the origin of his quasi-autobiographical film with an ingenuous snobbishness that would have annoyed and amused John Steinbeck. “I was talking with a bunch of writer friends, and I was telling them these embarrassing stories about a summer in the ‘80s that I spent as a carnie working at an amusement park … It was the worst job I’ve ever had… I should have had a good job—I should have been a tutor or gone to Manhattan and been an intern at a magazine or something respectable …”

Please note that Mottola isn’t, personally, a jerk. Judging from “Adventureland,” he’s an insightful yet gentle observer. That’s just the way people think nowadays.

Steve Sailer likes to look for, you know, facts.

Is Maureen Dowd a racist? Let’s find out.

Obviously, Dowd (a red-haired Irish Catholic who felt undervalued because she has brown eyes) is using the code terms “blue eyed” and “white bread bankers” to refer to Northern European Protestants. So, it made more sense to look up ancestry, religion, and self-identification directly.

Well, first, Maureen Dowd’s media stereotype about the financial world as dominated by an Old Boy’s Network of blond, blue-eyed WASPs is badly out of date. Finance has evolved from an old Relationship Model to a newer Transaction Model about who can make you the most money in a New York minute.

Imagine my surprise. Maureen Dowd, famous liberal establishment columnist, seduced by media stereotypes? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

Two American journalists detained last week by North Korean soldiers are likely to become bargaining chips for North Korea in its feuds with the outside world, according to analysts and politicians in South Korea.

They must have a higher estimate of their worth than we do. Shoot ’em — we got plenty more. In fact, we’ll ship you another jumbo-jet full and never miss ’em. Or better yet, keep ’em around for a few years, so that they learn what it’s like in a real dictatorship.

Read it.

If you’re interested in studying left-wing social movements like organized labor, civil rights or feminism, there are dozens of universities and colleges that have created special programs and research centers devoted to the subject. But hardly any similar institutions exist in academia for those looking for a place to study the right wing in America and abroad.

The distinction, of course, is that left-wing social movements are studied in order to promote them, while any study of the right wing will be after the manner of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Case in point:

Now, with backing from an anonymous donor, the University of California, Berkeley, where ’60s-era students stood atop a police car and ignited free-speech protests, is creating a Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements. According to experts in the field it is the first of its kind in higher education.

What kind of a study of right-wing movements will you get in Berkeley? Oh, sort of like the study of ebola you get at the Center for Disease Control.

The New York Times, of course, is totally clueless:

For more than 30 years the right in America has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into education and research efforts, lending support to efforts like establishing an extensive network of research institutes outside of academia and pumping up efforts to teach Western civilization and American history on campuses. But little effort has been expended toward studying the movement’s own history or putting it in a global context.

Let’s see: Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, George Nash…. Naw, not much effort at all.

From which political direction the financing for this latest effort is coming is masked.

Oh, really? What a surprise.

The donor’s request for anonymity may be more to ward off requests for other contributions than for political reasons. The donation, $777,000, is relatively small, but enough, Mr. Rosenthal said, for the center to sponsor lectures, conferences and colloquiums; offer fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students; and publish papers.

No doubt on how to “fix” it.

Ms. Bacchetta insisted that researchers’ own political orientation was irrelevant. “It’s a question we always get asked,” she said. “But we really like to think of ourselves as scholars in the academy,” working on evaluating these groups without any agenda. “We’re not a political organization.”

Yeah. And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Read it. Easier than you would think.

Read it.

Number one is that he’s black. I’ve got Sicilian in-laws with darker skin than he has.

Read it.

Six years after the publication of her blockbuster best-selling novel, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Audrey Niffenegger has sold a new manuscript for close to $5 million, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations.

Have you ever heard of this “blockbuster best-selling novel”? Neither have I.

After a fiercely contested auction, Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, bought the rights to publish the new novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry,” in the United States this fall. The book is a supernatural story about twins who inherit an apartment near a London cemetery and become embroiled in the lives of the building’s other residents and the ghost of their aunt, who left them the flat.

Well, there’s a must-read. I must confess that the concept of inheriting an apartment is mildly interesting, but while there is a Neil Gaiman book yet to be read, I doubt that this one is going to be high on my priority list.

Read it.

Read it.

Not sure it will help in the long run — they’re just so clueless in the dinosour media — but at least the ship is beginning to turn away from the iceberg.

Jeff Jarvis is on the right track.

The complaint is that state government won’t get “covered” if newspapers die.

How about we crowdsource that? Every trendy issue has “interest groups” that pay attention to it. We just need to have these guys cover the local level like a blanket and blog about it.

And having transparent government is a good step in the right direction, as well. Any resident of locality X ought to be able to get every vote cast and every public word spoken by his representative(s) with just a computer and an Internet connection — like the ones available at public libraries.

Read it.

And the reason they do that is because people will buy it. But do trendy leftoid journalistas look into that question? Oh, no.

Read it.

Turns out, quite a few. So of course we have to let the rest of them go. (Huh?)

Read it.

Wouldn’t it be a kick to see a headline “Barack Obama urges Amnesty International to suspend political aid to the enemies of freedom”? Won’t ever happen, of course, but it’s a delightful thought.

Read it.

These images show members of the Ku Klux Klan as they want to be seen, scary and secretive and waiting in the wings for Barack and his colour-blind vision for America to fail.

Precisely so — “as they want to be seen”; here we see the leftoid media acting as their propaganda shills.

Today the Klan is a mere shadow of what it used to be and there are at least 34 differently named Klan groups. “They are a fairly low-rent bunch of people, many of whom use their local organisations as a way of raising money for themselves,” says Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.

Ah, so they really aren’t that big a deal after all. The truth is that they’re not alive and kicking, they’re dazed and limping.

When was the last time they blew up innocent people? When was the last time they cut people’s heads off?

This shows the peculiar blindness of the leftoid media. They’d be smarter reporting on the Muslim “no-go” areas in their own country.

Steve Sailer joins the dogpile on Eric Holder.

America’s most distinguished man of science, James D. Watson, talked about race back in 2007. How’d that work out for him?

Read it.

A new guide for journalists warns against using terms which discriminate against people of a certain age.

Oh, for crying out loud. This is just absurd. Terms don’t discriminate. Using terms doesn’t discriminate. People discriminate. Old people are old people. They aren’t going to get any younger by not being called old people. Sheesh.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in Florida.

Read it.

How a bottle-blond former waitress and self-described “55-year-old virgin” with a taste for the good life became the financial messiah for millions of Americans might be a fun Lifetime original movie. Why the masses continue to invest their faith in Suze Orman in the wake of a financial meltdown she never saw coming is a more timely question. The answer is complicated.

Savor the irony of a writer for Slate magazine complaining that someone else doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

Steve Sailer doesn’t quite say “you can’t make this stuff up”, but he doesn’t have to.

Read it.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

The Australian Prime Minister is a prima facie idiot:

KEVIN RUDD has denounced the unfettered capitalism of the past three decades and called for a new era of “social capitalism” in which government intervention and regulation feature heavily.

Anybody who thinks that during the past three decades “unfettered capitalism” could be found anywhere in the world ought not to be allowed out without adult supervision.

Read it.

Fooled me.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Funny how Obama personally presiding over the giving away of $100,000,000 or so to improve Chicago school performance as chairman of the Annenberg Chicago Challenge didn’t do a damn thing for the test scores of Chicago black students, but his ascent to supreme power, his wonders doth work.

Funny indeed.