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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?

Read it.

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….

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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.

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Not really news, but still.

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Anyone remember the last time CNN wailed about “war crimes” when Palestinian terrorists used Red Cross ambulances to transport weapons, or used schools to hide the launching of rockets into Israel?

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Damn if the boy don’t sound like a Republican.

He sure can talk the talk, can’t he?

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A column in the Sunday New York Times from the newspaper’s public editor Clark Hoyt is essential reading for anyone concerned with modern journalistic practices of taboo avoidance.

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Why the term “dinosaur media” is so appropriate.

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Well, it isn’t really “justice for gays”, but rather “justice for children who happen to be in a position where they’re used as political footballs”. But one can’t expect the Washington Post to appreciate such rational distinctions.

How could the OLC, which gained notoriety for putting ideology before the rule of law to justify extreme interrogation techniques, come to such a conclusion? By reading the law governing Social Security benefits neutrally and correctly — and by keeping politics out of the analysis.

Note the tententious perspective: When they reach the conclusion we like, they’re “neutral and correct” — but when they reach a conclusion we don’t like, they’re “putting ideology before the rule of law”.

Here’s a thought that will cause the nearest leftoid brain to implode: Perhaps, just perhaps, they were applying the same standard in both cases — what the law requires. But that wouldn’t ever occur to whoever writes editorials for the Washington Post.

Read it.

Let’s hold a pity-party for the shark.

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The Washington Post continues its long-running series “Defending the Agent of Change against Scurrilous Attacks by Ignorant Right Wingers.”

It’s a dirty job but somebody has to do it.

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But Mugabe may not be Africa’s worst. That prize arguably goes to Teodoro Obiang, the ruler of Equatorial Guinea whose life seems a parody of the dictator genre. Years of violent apprenticeship in a genocidal regime led by a crazy uncle? Check. Power grab in a coup against the murderous uncle? Check. Execution of now-deposed uncle by firing squad? Check. Proclamation of self as “the liberator” of the nation? Check. Govern for decades in a way that prompts human rights groups to accuse your regime of murder, torture, and corruption? Check, check, and check.

Somebody in Slate criticizing black foreigners. Hell has officially frozen over.

But the agenda here is quite clear. In order to salve their consciences from decades of trumpeting how much better Mugabe was than the previous {insert string of leftoid swearwords here] “white” regime he replaced, it is now necessary to point out that, relatively speaking, he’s not so bad. And they’re all about “relatively speaking”.

Read it.

Note that it didn’t become a problem for the leftoid thumb-suckers at Slate until it started to be used against their Golden Child, Barack Hussein Obama. You will search in vain for criticism from anybody at Slate or their ilk about such tedious phrases as “Bushitler”, for example, or that perennial surrendernik dingleberry “quagmire”. And don’t get me started on the intellectual vapidity of “No blood for oil”.

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Remember how much fun the future used to be? Everyone trim and twinkle-toed in their one-piece jumpsuits with plenty of robots to do the work then mix the cocktails. And yet, despite the decades of excitement, the promised robot epoch remains mostly out of reach.

One of the key problems with our health care system is rising cost, and a central component of that is the requirement for highly-trained human labor. We haven’t benefited from the cost-cutting effects of significant automation. That may be changing — and it can’t come too soon.

The leftoid thumb-suckers at Slate of course see this as a bad thing.

But the advent of robot surgery signals a shift in the balance of power. Now the nerds, who previously had been content sending rockets to Mars, have seized control of that most sacred prize, the human being. Our future suddenly is in their heartless hands.

All part of the eternal campaign to cancel the Industrial Revolution….

Read it.

The New York Times is shockd, shocked I tell you, that populations are plunging in Europe.

Gee, if they’d read Mark Steyn’s book, they’d know all about it.

But then, of course, they might be hauled into a Canadian kangaroo-court and accused of being Islamophobic.

You can see where they wouldn’t want to take that risk. What would their friends say?

Read it.

The Washington Post, voice of the Overclass, dislikes handguns. Why? Because handguns empower the individual citizen. The Overclass can afford to hire bodyguards, and don’t like individual citizens with the power to resist tyranny.

The right to buy weapons is the right to be free. The Overclass don’t want you to be free. It’s just that simple.

David Broder is an idiot. Proof:

Meanwhile, they have paid much less attention to what may well be a larger problem: the way that district lines are drawn to create safe seats for one party or the other, in effect denying voters any choice of representation.

The point of representation is not choice; the point is representation. “Safe seat” means that voters like the guy currently in place and will vote for him forever. That’s what representation is all about. If the sitter in a safe seat didn’t please the overwhelming majority of the voters, it woudn’t be a safe seat. Drawing lines to create safe seats means that there are fewer losers (people who didn’t get the representative they prefer) in each election than in so-called “competitive” seats. “Gerrymandering” makes democracy work better.

But journalists (and others in the Brahmin class) don’t want democracy to work better, they want exciting election contests that generate news (and, in the case of columnists, provide chin-stroke fodder). And they have the typical Brahmin arrogance that thinks everybody must want the same things they do. (“But how could Nixon win? I don’t know anybody who voted for him!”) They are mentally incapable of realizing that “safe seats” are a feature, not a bug.

Read it.

I’m these road warriors would be a lot happier if there were some indication that Bush even were aware that they exist, much less really gave a shit.

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There is more similarity on feelings of personal racial prejudice: Thirty percent of whites and 34 percent of blacks admit such sentiments.

So a higher percentage of blacks are racist than whites. But you’ll notice that the focus is all on whites and how they react to Barack Obama. The agenda here is pretty clear.

Read it.

No, they’re not talking about Republians.

No, they’re not talking about Christians, either.

Hint: The author teaches law at Harvard and is a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.

So which Fashionable Victim Minority is he wringing his hands over. Well, you’ll just have to read it and find out.

Read it.

Don’t know why this comes as such a surprise; naturally the Overclass is going to listen to its own preachers.

Former Vice-President Al Gore took his message to Carnegie Mellon University where he urged graduates to help the U.S. reassume its rightful position as a world leader by confronting the challenges associated with global warming.

Reminds me of the crack Jewish Suicide Squad from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

Read it.

Good luck with that.

Slate writer explores a Democrat’s favorite subject.

One looks in vain for any similar examination of the brains of, say, Robert Byrd or Ted Kennedy.

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This is the sort of thumbsucking “journalism” that pervades the Washington Post.

A pair of psychologists recently evaluated hundreds of employees at a large North American university that was in the grip of painful change. The researchers wanted to find out whether there were factors that explained why some employees successfully weathered the transition and reengaged with their jobs, while others spiraled into cynicism and exhaustion — the classic signs of burnout.

No doubt the latter read and believed all the doom-and-gloom that outlets such as the Washington Post keep pounding them with. And, of course, “a large North American university” is a really representative sample of the population.

Read it.

Ya think?

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The United States owes a federal shield law not only to American journalists but to journalists around the world.

And it just gets sillier from there.