Read it. What — the UN in a power grab? That couldn’t happen, could it?

Read it. Apparently Frank Rich knows everything he needs to know about Clarence Thomas without consulting the real world.

This is “journalism” today, folks. Aren’t you proud?

Read it. Of course, it means that from now on dictators will have to be pried loose with automatic weapons, with a corresponding loss of (perhaps innocent) lives. But the goo-goos never count other people’s lives as being worth as much as their own self-righteousness.

Read it. This is what passes for political thought on the left these days. Apparently, as with candy in the fourth grade, we can’t have any unless we brought enough for everybody. Unless we can spread perfection everywhere, we should give up attempting to spread perfection anywhere. A classic case of making the best the enemy of the good.

Read it. Pity the poor New York Times. Whenever they find a real juicy atrocity, it just turns out to be an illusion. What’s a good anti-American newspaper to do?

Read it. Kid looks like he could use a good smack in the mouth, doesn’t he?

Read it. Shamble, Al, shamble.

Read it. Why you can’t expect real information from a journalist.

Journalists write stories. The best stories have villains and victims. The villain-victim framework is often ill-suited to capturing economic phenomena.

Read it. I guess Blackwater’s “mercenaries” are doing jobs that Americans won’t do.

Read it.  Brought to you, of course, by Air America — in the little time it has left.

Read it. Sounds like a plan. Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.

Read it. Of course, if “conservatives” had done this sort of thing to progs, there’d be a firestorm in the press and much blathering in Congress.

Read it. Ward Churchill the zombie.

Read it. An economist who checks theory against the real world. How did that happen? Well, he’s at Harvard — they’ll soon beat that out of him.

Read it. And don’t forget the shoot-from-the-lip functionaries.

Read it. Of course, Tiffany is a medieval name indicating that a girl was born on the feast of the Theophany, January 6. Even when journalists have a good point, they manage to step in it.

Read it. More on the attempt to libel Rush Limbaugh.

One wonders sometimes how liberalism can survive, when its most cherished myths can be exposed as frauds in a matter of minutes.

Easy — they think that they’re smart and everybody else is stupid. This notion is proof against any counterexample, as Dan Rather illustrates very elegantly.

Read it. You’d better — you won’t hear it on the evening news.

Apparently the New York Times has mucked with some of its RSS feeds so that the feed gives you the article title and a little blurb but there is no link to the actual article.

I suppose that this is designed to act as a teaser so that you’ll be moved to go to the paper’s site to find and read the actual article (and be exposed to more of their advertising).

I’m wondering how long it will take for someone to point out to them that the purpose of an RSS feed is precisely to avoid this sort of hunt-and-peck information-gathering (which is so last-century).

Expect to see a lot less mention of the New York Times here — and elsewhere, I expect.

Read it. Apparently the efforts to reduce consumption of fossil fuels are instead encouraging their use. What a surprise.

Read it. In most states there is a crime called “unauthorized practice of law”, which comes of someone who doesn’t have the requisite legal training, and who hasn’t passed the bar exam and been licensed, acting like an attorney — advising people for pay and  sometimes even attempting to represent them in legal proceedings. The basis for this crime is that people who aren’t trained as lawyers, and who haven’t demonstrated that they’re competent to act as attorneys, will do more harm than good, just like someone who hasn’t gone to medical school or been licensed as a physician trying to act like a doctor.

There ought to be an equivalent concept of “unauthorized practice of religion”, for people who have read a book or two and think that they’re now completely conversant with what a religion teaches and ought to practice. (Hm, wait a minute — that describes most Protestants….)

Read it. Unfortunately, a knowledge of basic economics is not a requirement for any job that I know of — including economics, as Paul Krugman demonstrates pretty clearly.

Read it. Were I running for President, I’d be embarrassed to have such people as supporters.

Read it. The progs’ OCD with respect to “race” never ceases to amaze me. 19th-century European aristocrats weren’t this bad.

Read it. This is just silly. For the Democrat kid who has everything, I guess.

Read it. Pretty sad, when even the New York Times recognizes a program as being dim-witted.

The economics of corn ethanol have never made much sense. Rather than importing cheap Brazilian ethanol made from sugar cane, the United States slaps a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on ethanol from Brazil. Then the government provides a tax break of 51 cents a gallon to American ethanol producers — on top of the generous subsidies that corn growers already receive under the farm program.

Oh, it makes perfect sense — if you realize that it’s all about buying votes in the farm states.

Pork pork pork pork, pork pork pork pork….

Read it. “Journalists” always insist on full disclosure — unless they are the ones not sharing.

Read it. Probably not … although I’m sure that won’t stop the Times and its close from pontificating about it.

Read it. This is news? This is like auto mechanics recommending a Universal Car Care Plan.

Thomas Sowell on the dogs barking at the heels of Petraeus.

The real problem is that many Democrats have bet the rent money on an American defeat in Iraq, and without that defeat they could find themselves in big trouble in the 2008 elections.

Got it in one.

Read it. *snort*

Read it. For the Democrats to win, America must lose. What do you call people like that? There’s a word I’m thinking of….

Read it. Yeah, it’s stupid, but I bet they sell a shitload in Seattle. For those whose rear hatch bike rack isn’t sufficiently pretentious….

Read it. I suppose he figures that, if OJ can get off by playing the race card, it’s worth a shot.

Read it. “Tom Tomorrow” is obviously a communist, as you can tell from his treatment, but it’s mildly entertaining.

Read it. As with most everything in the NYT, both this review and the book it is nominally about, Hannah Rosin’s God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America about Patrick Henry College, deals with Christianity the way Margaret Mead dealt with the Samoans.

One could just as easily titled the book and/or the review Down the Alimentary Canal With Gun and Camera. Obviously Nina Easton and Hannah Rosin have heard about Christians but don’t really know any, other than superficially. Rosin at least makes an attempt, but it’s clear that neither of them can get beyond the clichés that were drilled into them in school and reinforced by the narrow prog circles in which they move. A pity.

These are the enemy, folks. They don’t know anything, and they don’t want to learn anything.

Read it. Steven Heller talks about typography. Jonathan Barnbook, for example, is a perfect postmodern typographer:

In fact, once they have been decoded, Barnbrook’s distinctive style can be appreciated as a personal expression in the service of mass communication, usually containing a social or political agenda.

In other words, he’s a prog dork determined to infect the world of type as similar prog dorks have infected art and fashion and politics. Indeed, most of the article is an almost self-parodying example of modern artsy-fartsy prose — so don’t bother reading it if you have a low pain theshhold for that sort of thing. But if you can stand it, it’s entertaining.

Read it.

It seems that some environmentalists are more interested in producing guilt than in reducing carbon.

That’s it precisely. For non-Brahmin environmentalists, “carbon credits” are at best a halfway stage on the way to decivilization; their only advantage is that it wins them the first stage of the argument, which is getting civilized people feeling guilty for not living in straw huts with outhouses.

Read it. And, of course, it’s all about the children.

Read it. AlGore is not alone.

Read it. I guess we can’t say that progs don’t have any historical memory — their ability to hang on to a grudge exceeds that of a pit bull.

Read it. I knew it — AlGore is trying to kill poor people in order to make life easier for him and his rich friends.

Read it. Only an idiot would believe that being left-wing will lead to being denied anything at any college these days. Unfortunately, we have many idiot judges, so there’s no telling where this will lead.

Read it. Using the term loosely, of course.

You’re a liberal. You’ve identified a problem — the massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States; a net loss of 4.6 million jobs over the last 20 years. You’ve even done a decent job of identifying the causes of the problem: “Companies lose market share to foreign low-cost producers . . . or move their operations overseas in search of lower wages . . . or apply production techniques that require fewer workers.”

So, what’s your solution? Measures like reducing taxes and regulation to make U.S. manufacturers more competitive, perhaps? Of course not! Remember, you’re a liberal. No, your solution is what you yourself describe as a “massive” new welfare program for affected workers and communities that will contribute to making U.S. manufacturers even less competitive and destroy even more jobs!

Read it. There appears to be quite a bit of envy in all this coverage of unusually large houses. You can almost hear the sneer.

But the Hartford-based businessman, who plans to vacate a comparatively tiny 8,900-square-foot home when he moves, doesn’t want too many people to know about it. He refused an interview and had a freelance photographer seeking permission to photograph the house for The Associated Press cited for trespassing.

I’d probably do the same. Guess “privacy rights” only belong to people wanting to kill their unborn babies.

But later in the article we find out what’s behind it:

Some question the morality of building a private home that large.

“Do you actually need to have that amount of space to live a good life?” said Susan A. Eisenhandler, a sociology professor at the University of Connecticut. “There are homeless people. There are impoverished people. There are serious social concerns, and we’re not addressing that.”

In other words “Shame on you for not spending your money on what we think you ought to be spending it on rather than what you think you ought to be spending it on.” Does it surprise you that this is a sociology professor? How is it this guy’s fault that there are homeless people, and whence comes his obligation to spend money that he earned on such useless garbage? Last time I looked, sociology professors made pretty good money for not much in the way of useful work — how much of her paycheck (and book royalties) is she contributing to these homeless and impoverished people, if she’s so concerned? I daresay it isn’t very much. She’d rather spend other people’s money.

Read it. Funny how everybody knows what you ought to eat — and how much — except you. It’s like the Monty Python sketch with “the machine that goes Ping!”, where the pregnant woman who is there to deliver a child says, “What do I do?”, and the doctor answers with a smile, “You don’t do anything, dear — you’re not qualified!”.

Read it. And see if you can make more sense out of it than I can.

Read it. No, telling AlGore “Bite Me” doesn’t count.

Read it. The new Democrat party motto: “It’s always somebody else’s fault, probably George W Bush”.

Read it. The simple answer is that dermatologists compete with other specialist doctors for Botox shots, while they only compete with other dermatologists for mole evaluations. Obviously some of them are competing on the basis of service as well as price.

These people wouldn’t know a free market if it bit them in the butt — and if they did recognize it, they’d try to kill it.