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.

Read it. You can almost hear the sneer. Unfortunately for The Pinhead William Grimes, he’s wrong and she’s right.

Read it. I find it curious how quickly the People of the Crust rush to conclude that a brilliant scientist has somehow gone horribly wrong when he does something or comes out with an idea that doesn’t fit their a priori worldview. It never occurs to them that perhaps he was being consistently brilliant and right and they are being inconsistent and possibly wrong.

Read it. You can almost hear the sneer. Gee, an insurance company is spending some money to protect their investment. What a shock.

Read it. Life imitates great art.

Read it. The New York Times is so clueless it’s almost a parody of itself.

It would have been nicer if Mr. McConnell had really wanted to enlighten the public.

Well, that’s not really his job, is it? In fact, I suggest that his job is precisely the opposite.

This was supposed to make us feel better. It did not.

Well, anything that refrains from making the socialist morons at the Times feel better certainly has my support.  It’s still not clear to my why these clowns aren’t under indictment for all of the secret programs they’ve exposed, contrary to law.

Read it. I have a question.

As president, he said, he would streamline the bureaucracy, strengthen law enforcement to curb a rise in crime and immediately close the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet in order to restore wetlands to protect against storms.

When was the last time a Democrat succeeded in “streamlining the bureaucracy” or “strengthen law enforcement”? Although it certainly doesn’t surprise me that he would ruin the Port of New Orleans’ commercial traffic to “restore wetlands”.

Read it. The viewspapers are only courageous in denouncing censorship by people who do not, in fact, have the power to censor them. When faced with people who have demonstrated that they can and will kill them, they not only shut up themselves, but willingly shut up other people.

David Brooks reviews a book that purports to explain Democrat failure with the novel theory that Democrats are just too rational.

I must admit that the notion of Democrats, the party of deconstruction, postmodernism, and “gender studies”, being just too rational to win elections made me laugh so hard that my stomach hurt.

Read it. This would seem like a sensible precaution. Don’t see what they’re bitching about. You’d think that there wasn’t a war on.

Read it. And yet, if these kids were black, or Muslim, nobody would be bitching about it.

NYT. Remind me again — Who is the “party of the rich”?

NYT. This is silly. If the kid gets hungry enough, he’ll eat. If not, he’ll die. Either way, problem solved.

WSJ. “Environmentalism” is one of the great mental disorders of our time. Unfortunately, our legal system ecourages wackos to be wackos.

PowerLine. It’s good to call things by their proper names, even if one has to construct a new one.

NYT. There must be a rule at the Times that reviewers have to be substantially clueless about a book’s subject matter. The “Dangerous” in “Dangerous Book for Boys” represents the danger to modern political sensibilities, not to the kids themselves. This person is obviously a metrosexual who waxes his back hair.

NYT. I love the way the People of the Crust write about religion as if it were Disco, something that happens in America but with which they have only a passing acquaintance.

Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.

I’m glad that some of them are finally beginning to feel the knife at their own necks.

Understanding this difference is the most urgent intellectual and political task of the present time. But where to begin? The case of contemporary Islam is on everyone’s mind, yet is so suffused with anger and ignorance as to be paralyzing. All we hear are alien sounds, motivating unspeakable acts. If we ever hope to crack the grammar and syntax of political theology, it seems we will have to begin with ourselves.

But their heads are still up their asses.

Clue: They want to kill us. It’s not about us, it’s about them, and what we need to do to them before they do it to us. Wakey, wakey.

Read it anyway — it’s a good depiction of the sort of attitudes that will be making our job a lot harder for a long time to come.

NYT. Ever notice how poor people love to write about rich people, but rich people tend not to write a lot at all, much less about poor people?

Scratch any journalist and you’ll find a heapin’ helpin’ of wealth-envy. “These people couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag! How come they have oodles of money and I don’t?” Well, they concentrate on counting rather than writing, for one thing….

PowerLine. It has always astounded me that a “profession” that consists largely of fussbudgets and busybodies has this notion that they’re the smartest people in the room. And those that are the first to poke their noses through your curtains are at the front of the line to denounce the government trying to do the same with terrorists.

Techdirt. The buggy whip manufacturers are a pitiful sight, aren’t they?

NYT. It’s not a problem unless you’ve got something to hide. They could fly aircraft over and do the exact same thing, and that would be neither unlawful nor unconstitutional.

Steve Sailer explores the wonderful world of modern education.

LanguageLog. And the tight sphincters win another round.

Read it. Couldn’t agree more.

LGF. It’s hard to tell which is the more moronic: The terrorists who come up with this crap, or the “journalists” who publish it.