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And if Obama had lost, how would they have characterized the riots that were threatened? If you run an explicitly racist campaign, people respond accordingly.

The election of a black president triggered at least 200 hate-related incidents, a watchdog group finds.

In a country of 300 million. The term “statistically insignificant” leaps to mind.

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There’s a shocker.

I smell “government grant” here….

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The oil price will shoot back through $100 a barrel as soon as economic conditions return to normal, and will break through $200 threshold by 2030, say officials at the International Energy Agency.

Remember, you heard it here first.

On the other hand, the Guardian are a bunch of leftists, and when did leftists ever have a clue about economics? So don’t take it too much to heart.

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I often read about and hear about how designers must have the courage to speak truth to power and how political dissent is one pillar of patriotism. These are tenets I firmly believe in, by the way. But I also find laughable the way many designers think they’re speaking truth to power by creating or showcasing design examples of Leftist political dissent, in books, in magazines, and on personal websites and blogs. I’m struck by the vacuity of how anyone in the design community can believe it takes courage to do these things when there is zero chance of suffering any negative consequences for doing so.

Hey, only rubes believe that “speak truth to power” stuff.

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Let’s see, which legislators does the WASHINGTON POST think might be crooks: 8 Republicans, 1 Democrat.

Bias? What bias?

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Things are looking grim for Obama when even the socialists at the Associated Press bad-mouth him.

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Turns out that rich people are anxious about the economy. Who knew?

Megan McArdle is confused.

I confess I still don’t understand why poverty is so increasingly linked with obesity.  The common explanation is to blame the paucity of excellent cheap grocery stores in urban neighborhoods. But poverty is not exclusively an inner city phenomenon; poor people in more rural areas share grocery stores with the rich.  Besides, while this explains the latitudinal data, it does not account for the longitudinal issue.  No one thinks that New York’s grocery stores, even in poor neighborhoods, have gotten worse since the 1970s; the evidence is that they’ve gotten better.  But the obesity rate has gotten much worse.

Uh, Megan, perhaps because the word doesn’t mean what you think it means? “Poverty” in the U.S. has come to mean “only one color TV” or “no high-speed broadband Internet”. This is not what people prior to the 1960s understood “poverty” to mean. “Poverty” means not knowing where your next meal is coming from. You don’t get fat on that kind of diet.

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But you knew that.

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The Obama campaign, in conjunction with the entire mainstream media, has been attacking Sarah Palin for letting the RNC spend $150,000 on her wardrobe, as she runs for Vice President of the United States.

But the Obama campaign spent 5.3 million dollars for that phony Greek temple in Denver’s Invesco Field. For one night.

Not a peep from the media.

Bias? What bias?

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The Ministry of Truth has spoken.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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What a thumbsucker. The Washington Post actually pays money for this stuff.

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Note that the reason is not because the AP stories are tendentious crap, which they are, but because they are competing with the tendentious crap that the newspapers are generating by themselves.

Well, it’s still progress, of a sort, I suppose.

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I’m glad they have nothing more serious to worry about.

Vote to Save the Planet: Your Guide to the Issues That Matter Jeff Schweitzer / Rvive Books / $7.95 / 9781935073000 / 1935073001 / Political Science / Political Process / Elections / Trade Paper / On Sale: Oct 01, 2008

Dr. Schweitzer, a former senior science advisor in the Clinton/Gore administration, well-respected speaker, and Huffington Post blogger, pulls no punches in making the case that we must vote for Presidential Candidate Barack Obama to SAVE THE PLANET.

All this for only $7.95. What a bargain.

This comes from the “Drop-In Titles” service of the Unshelved comic strip, which is very funny so long as you remember that, like most public employees, they’re tofu-brained socialists.

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Reefer Madness, part deux.

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In the past several weeks, the shift of press-corps sentiment against McCain has been stark and undeniable, even among heavies such as Matthews long accused by the left of being residents of the Arizonan’s amen corner. Jonathan Alter, Joe Klein, Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, Jacob Weisberg: all former McCain admirers now turned brutal critics. Equally if not more damaging, the shift has been just as pronounced, if less operatic, among straight-news reporters. Suddenly, McCain is no longer being portrayed as a straight-talking, truth-telling maverick but as a liar, a fraud, and an opportunist with acute anger-management issues.

Could it be that it’s because he’s actually running against a Democrat? Could it be that he’s no longer bashing his fellow Republicans? (Or, at least, not so much.) Did anybody truly not expect this? I know for a fact that Rush Limbaugh predicted precisely this when McCain ran against Bush in the Republican Presidential primaries.

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Read it.

Well, then, let’s rush right out and do it.

Perhaps painting black people white would end racism. Somebody get on the horn to Jesse Jackson.

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In 18 months of searching, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine and Office of Professional Responsibility chief H. Marshall Jarrett have uncovered new e-mail messages hinting at heightened involvement of White House lawyers and political aides in the firings of nine federal prosecutors two years ago.

Well, duh. These prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the President. If he wants to fire them for wearing the wrong tie, he is perfectly entitled to do so. This is like saying “Warren Buffet implicated in the firing of one of his vice-presidents”.

Megan McArdle has reached her limit.

Preach it, sister.

Read it to find out what the Brahmins are obsessing on this week.

I wish that were the most serious thing I had to worry about.

Watch it.

Read it.

Yeah, and OJ is looking for the real killer. Pull the other one.

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People who startle easily in response to threatening images or loud sounds seem to have a biological predisposition to adopt conservative political positions on many hot-button issues, according to unusual new research published yesterday.

Imagine finding a “study” like this in the Washington Post. Guess they don’t know all that many conservatives.

The finding suggests that people who are particularly sensitive to signals of visual or auditory threats also tend to adopt a more defensive stance on political issues, such as immigration, gun control, defense spending and patriotism. People who are less sensitive to potential threats, by contrast, seem predisposed to hold more liberal positions on those issues.

That’s because they’re stupid and wouldn’t recognize a threat when they see one.

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But apparently some, who realize that it’s a poison pill designed to looks like and accomplishment but stymie true reform, have no problem with it.

You’d never know that from the headline, of course.

Agenda? What’s that?

Lileks is in fine form today.

The term “elitist” does not mean a smart person with an area of expertise. It means a person who occupies a narrow stratum of society, usually academic – although people in think-tanks who view the world through steepled fingers qualify as well – whose Olympian perspective is usually predicated on a set of assumptions about people tinged with equal parts indulgent condescension and faint amusement, as an anthropologist might bring to the study of a Cargo Cult. It also confuses proximity to the Washington Monument with access to truth.

Megan McArdle joins the happy chorus.

One of my commenters blames Bush for gutting the predatory lending laws at the state level.  A wicked pundit would note that this is a project near and dear to the heart of one Senator Joe Biden, (D-MBNA).  A less divisive voice would point out that predatory lending laws are aimed mostly at payday loans and credit cards, not housing loans.  The fraud problems in the housing market seem mostly to have been perpetuated by mortgage brokers, who are still regulated at the state level.  The worst problems are in Democratic-dominated California.

Donald Luskin points out that the “recession” exists only in the imaginations of those who would profit from your believing it.

But that doesn’t make any of it true. Things today just aren’t that bad. Sure, there are trouble spots in the economy, as the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and jitters about Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers, amply demonstrate. And unemployment figures are up a bit, too. None of this, however, is cause for depression — or exaggerated Depression comparisons.

In his corner, he has these things called “facts”.

Overall, the pessimists are up against an insurmountable reality: In the last reported quarter, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent, adjusted for inflation. That’s virtually the same as the 3.4 percent average growth rate since — yes — the Great Depression.

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Oooooh, “Texas billionaire”. Might as well just say “rich Nazi” and get it over with.

Of course, nothing is ever said about George Soros, New York billionaire (and actual foreigner), who bankrolls dozens of such groups to attack Republicans.

The resurgence on the right appears as though it will not go unanswered. The Service Employees International Union is set to unveil a multimillion-dollar television campaign on Monday, and other liberal and Democratic-aligned groups are rushing to establish financing for efforts over the final weeks of the campaign.

Note the implication that this is all an “answer” to the “resurgence on the right”. Hint: They were going to do that anyway:

In the spring, a coalition of liberal groups that included the AFL-CIO announced plans to spend $350 million on political activities during the 2008 campaign season, but they have been slow in coming together.

Not quite an “answer”, is it?

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I don’t recall there being any “investigative reporter” exposés of AlGore while he was Vice-President; and I rather suspect that they wouldn’t have received Pulitzer Prizes had there been any.

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Yeah, and a lot of people can’t ride a horse any more. Color me worried.

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And too clever to get it right when correcting others, it would seem.

Researchers at Collins Dictionaries found that the most commonly misspelt word was supersede – being wrong on one in ten occasions. The problem arises because people use their knowledge of the words that have a phonetically similar ending, like intercede, precede or cede, from the Latin cedere – to yield. They then wrongly assume that supersede is spelt with a ‘c’.

The truth is that “supercede” is a perfectly good word and has a slightly different meaning than “supersede”; the problem is that people don’t appreciate, and therefore don’t exploit, such precise shades of meaning.

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Note that it isn’t what you would think, that the A.P.’s stories are full of politically-biased left-wing crap. No, it’s because the A.P. is selling their politically-biased left-wing crap stories to people other than newspapers. You can lie all you want to but don’t touch that wallet….

Read it.

The Media Sectors and their to-date 2008 Political Investments

* Computer & Internet – $24,255,207 (62% to Democrats)
* Books, Magazines & Papers – $12,187,548 (78% to Democrats)
* Computer Software – $8,922,053 (61% to Democrats)
* Motion Picture Industry – $7,523,136 (88% to Democrats)
* Cable & Satellite TV – $6,303,046 (63% to Democrats)
* Music Recording Industry – $2,983,755 (79% to Democrats)
* Television Production and Distribution – $2,322,587 (86% to Democrats)

Quite frankly, I’m surprised that the percentages are that low.

Read it.

One expects to find such writing in Human Events, but hardly in Slate. Guess the left and the right aren’t so far apart as one might think.

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“Capitalism” being here defined, of course, as “money possessed by somebody other than a Washington Post reporter”.

But with the Olympics, Beijing is reveling in the most lavish display of capitalism, commercialism and celebrity the Communist Party has ever seen.

Anyone who could write a sentence like that with a straight face has serious intellectual defects.

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What truce? When operations continue, there is no truce.

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If you have the less common rs16969968 form of the CHRNA5 gene and you smoke a cigarette you are more likely to get hooked.

Well, then, don’t smoke a cigarette. Problem solved.

Read it.

He actually ought to be in a beach chair with a smoothie, but one cannot expect the Fashionable to be up on all the cultural nuances embraced by us proles.

In order to be realistic, of course, there ought to be seal guts all over the place.

I wonder whether the ice floe gets smaller over time? That would seem appropriate.

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With what? They couldn’t do shit in eight years of war with Saddam’s Iraq, which we took apart like wet cardboard.

Megan McArdle is really a girl after all.

Is it possible to be a vegan without judging other people?

Possible, yes; likely, no. Most vegans are like anti-smokers and atheists — it’s not enough that they’re living on a higher moral plane than you are, it’s required that you be forced to admit it. They’re a lot like Muslims that way.

And somebody ought to reveal to them that “vegan” is somebody from the star Vega. People who only eat vegetables are herbivores. You know, like cows.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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Obama is really a rather garden-variety liberal. Makes one wonder what all the shouting is about.

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

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“No news publication has dared to barely scratch the surface like this before,” columnist and campaign reporter Michael King wrote in The Washington Post Tuesday. “This profile sets a benchmark for mindless filler by which all other features about Sen. Obama will now be judged. Just impressive puff-journalism all around.”

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A coalition of Hispanic and labor groups in Phoenix accused Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio of racial profiling yesterday, alleging in a federal lawsuit that one of the nation’s largest sheriff’s departments is violating the civil rights of nonwhite U.S. citizens in seeking to arrest illegal immigrants.

So now it’s a civil right not to be arrested for illegally crossing the border, unless you’re white?

How very curious.

Since signing up for a U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement program in April 2007 that trains local law enforcement agents to enforce immigration laws, Maricopa deputies have found that 14,830 individuals arrested on state charges turned out to be in the country illegally. In the course of other duties, deputies discovered and arrested another 1,145 illegal immigrants, Chagolla said.

Yup, that sure sounds like a civil rights violation to me.

Read it.

Not really news, but still.