NYT. Everybody gets a world of his own.

NYT. Guys, it’s a bridge. Put up a plaque, or something. In the mean time, people need to get across the fargin river.

“I think the public is asking for a distinctive bridge,” Councilwoman Diane Hofstede said. “This is a bridge that got international attention and was the scene of a terrible tragedy.”

Woman, the public is asking FOR A WORKING BRIDGE. A distinctive bridge is one THAT CARRIES TRAFFIC ACROSS THE RIVER.

This is the sort of bureaucratic bun-fight that is delaying the replacement of the World Trade Center in New York. Every two-bit politician has to get to pee in it before they like the taste.

LGF. People forget that they leave tracks in this electronic world.

PowerLine. Sometimes politics can be the best amusement going.

NYT. Prediction: The conclusion will be that humans suck and it’s all our fault. Any takers?

NYT. And yet nothing about Hamas, or Hezbollah, or Fatah. Or Cuba or Zimbabwe, for that matter. Boy, those guys from “Human Rights Watch” are really watching, aren’t they?

NYT. Of course textbook prices are outrageous. What would you expect from something invented in the 16th century?

Of course, the solution is to get rid of them, and the factory-model school that requires them. But that would mean actually thinking about how education is done these days, and it’s much more convenient to do the same-old same-old.

NYT. Another nomenklatura pathway back to the pre-modern world.

LGF. Well, I guess AlGore will shut up now. (NOT)

LGF. I guess the patron saint of jounalists is P. T. Barnum.

PowerLine. Wisdom about journalists and what they do.

But there have been, especially since the sixties, disturbing trends in journalism. Just as Hollywood, in its hiring practices, has replaced talent with education, journalism is in danger of replacing experience with report cards. Journalism is not a profession. There is no specific body of knowledge required, and there is no licensing. What is needed is a sharp set of skills, high powers of observation, and a humility about how much we can understand quickly, and these come only from experience. But when you’ve gone through Yale or Stanford, when you’ve been told how smart you are, when you got 700s on your SATs, you start to believe what mom has whispered in your ear. You start to think that you “know.” It’s a kind of self-inflicted grade inflation. I’m bright, therefore I’m right.

As somebody who’s gone through Yale and gotten 700s on his SATs, I can vouch for it. In fact, I’m still prepared to argue that I’m smarter than you. I guess I ought to have been a journalist. *sigh* I’m just a victim of bad career choices. Surely there is a government program for such a victim as I….

Read The Whole Thing.

WSJ. Sometimes giving both sides gives the false impression that one side is as legitimate as the other. That’s not always the case.

NYT. You can almost hear them breathing hard.

Guys, this is science, not religion. This stuff gets re-arranged all the time, as new evidence comes to light and existing theories, most spun from a few scraps and threads, get revised. By its nature, it’s an iterative process. Hold the panic attacks.

WT. I have an idea: Let’s send Mexico a bill for all the shit we have to go through because people are trying to get out of their kleptocracy.

WT. Oh, ya think?

I don’t know whichis worse: The thumb-suckers who did the research or the one who wrote the article.

Let’s see: Government-funded academics find evidence that the government ought to spend more money on education. What a surprise.

Read it. The world is full of people who are delighted to run others’ lives.

EconLog. The trees used to print the New York Times — those have died in vain.

Read it. And I can understand that.

You’d think that Greenwich would be solid Bush-loving turf — what with all those tax cuts for the rich. It is not. The voters are roughly 40 percent Republican, 40 percent unaffiliated and only 20 percent Democratic, but Bush won the town by only a sliver in 2004, even though his father grew up here.

Well, duh; the filthy rich are all Democrats, popular political mythology to the contrary notwithstanding.

Steve Sailer is not the first to note that the nutroots YearlyKos conventions was largely a herd of middle-aged white males, but he’s pretty funny about it.

A lot of the influential segments of American society are almost as white male-dominated as in 1960, especially those where affirmative action doesn’t apply, such as at liberal netroots conferences or as CEOs of Fortune 500 firms, which are about 99% white.

PowerLine. The New Republic doesn’t seem to be having a good time of it these days.

LanguageLog. Well — apparently Teaching By Gesture may not be the panacea we might have been told it was.

Read it. Only a socialist would complain about no vegetarian choices at a free lunch.

Read it. Only if they decide to hire Scooter Libbey.

How did the Bush administration follow up? Faced with the politically explosive challenge of indicting our country’s leading newspaper, it did nothing at all. It was rewarded for its forbearance by another New York Times sensation, a front-page story in May 2006 revealing the details of a second highly classified counterterrorism program that worked through the European banking consortium SWIFT.

If you reward bad behavior, you only get more bad behavior.

NYT. Guess these guys never heard of “federalism”. You’d think that the states were Iraqis being abandoned to their fates.

“States will act in a vacuum,” said Leticia Van de Putte, a Democratic state senator from Texas who is the president of the conference this year.

Note: No federal law = a vacuum. That tells you all you really need to know about these people.

The Times. I’ve always suspected as much….

NYT. Just when you think the Times has reached the limit for partisan drivel, something like this comes along.

One part of the Justice Department mess that requires more scrutiny is the growing evidence that the department may have singled out people for criminal prosecution to help Republicans win elections.

Oh, as if Democrats haven’t been doing that since the time of Tammany Hall? Certainly prosecuting voter fraud will help Republicans win elections, but that’s because Democrats are the one who are mostly responsible for trying to steal them. The Florida 2000 debacle is all you need to know on that subject.

NYT. Well, if it’s “quick and painless” they want, there’s always the guillotine. Yeah, it’s messy, but it’s quick and painless. And certain.

Why do I suspect a hidden agenda here? Hm?

NYT. Every now and then the Times prints something from an outside contributor that makes obvious what a bunch of dimwits their normal staff must be. The fact that it doesn’t appear to have any impact on the rest of the paper suggests that even the people who publish the Times don’t read it.

These life-cycle measurements are causing environmentalists worldwide to rethink the logic of food miles.

Oh, yeah, I really think so….

Ross Douthat is apparently unfamiliar with the fact that the Brahmin caste use the term “working class” to mean people who actually work for a living, i.e. not of the Brahmin caste. To them, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are “working class”.

Hyper-inequality is part of the story here, no doubt; on the other hand, I’m pretty sure there have always been people who are rich by any normal standard, but want to live the lifestyle of the super-rich and find themselves scrambling to keep up. And my interest in/sympathy for their plight is … limited.

You got that right.

LGF. No surprises here.

LanuageLog. Apparently the cultural transmission of professional knowledge within journalism is breaking down.

NYT. Surprisingly, an important topic surfaces where one would least expect it. Unfortunately, it’s only treated from the Inside Politics level, not as a serious issue.

NYT. The book reviewer as zoologist: Who are these strange people called “conservatives”? And why are they so inexplicably successful in connecting with our proletariat?

What he doesn’t realize is that, while clinging to the Liberal Label, he’s just as conservative as the right-wingers he detests; just about different things. This illustrates the primary defect of “conservative” as a political category.

I especially love the little tag at the end:

Stephen Metcalf writes the Dilettante column for Slate and is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

Somehow I’m sure of it.

NYT. The Universalist view: If people are hungry, we are obliged to feed them; the only argument is about how.

NYT. Doesn’t say anything new about the illegal immigration problem but it says a lot about the biases of the New York Times and its ilk.

NYT. Note the headline: Rahmat Abdhir is just a “Californian”. No doubt he’ll soon be singing with the Beach Boys.

PowerLine. Hey, it doesn’t matter if it’s not true — it ought to have been true, and the story serves a Higher Purpose. These are the new ruling class. Aren’t we lucky?

LGF. Freedom of speech among the Kossaks. With video.

NYT. Will there be feminist protests about gender wage inequality? I rather doubt it.

Read it. No, the rich love you. There’s a difference. Trust a “journalist” to confuse the two.

But wait: These new Greenwich/Manhattan billionaires happen to be donors, friends, and constituents of Democrats–not Republicans. What’s a presidential candidate to do?

Ask what they know that you don’t. Hmmm?

Techdirt. They’d have to endure the drop in social status, however.

NYT. Only People of the Crust could have an argument about this.

WE. Poor Hillary! Nobody wants to treat her as if she matters.

“I couldn’t care less what Dick Cheney says about me. But when he plays politics with the lives of our troops, you had better be sure I’m going to respond. And I know that you want to respond too.”

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, sweetheart, but Dick Cheney couldn’t care less what you say about him, either. And as far as “playing politics with the lives of our troops”, giving an anti-war Senator such operational details as how we plan to withdraw from Iraq would be exactly that.

NYT. The Times is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

It is a testament, perhaps, to the fact that, compared with other immigrant groups, Indians tend to speak English when they arrive and are ready to assume a place in the middle class.

Oh, ya think? Plus they aren’t trying to blow us up. That’s a big plus in my book.

I guess assimilation works, huh? And you don’t have to give up your culture to do it, eh? What a surprise.

NYT. I see: Killing unborn children is within medical ethics, but preventing terrorists from starving themselves to death is not. Ah, it’s all clear to me now.

WP. I give up — why do we, the U.S. taxpayers, need to fork out billions of dollars to teach immigrants English?

NYT. Well, no, not really. It’s just the first of what I predict will be an amazing number of similar articles laying the groundwork for future “commentators” to cast doubt on the Chief Justice’s judicial opinions. If he were a left-wing member of the court, this would disappear in a week. But the moonbats will be echoing it forever, as with Bush’s youthful drinking problem.

NYT. Note how this servant of the Brahmin caste attempts, in the second paragraph, to limit the debate to their favored meme:

But in the short term, members of both parties say, the broader outline of that struggle is likely to be reduced to a simple question: “Are you for or against children?”

That’s certainly what they’d like the debate to be about. What it’s actually about is “Are you for or against government control of the health care system?” Let’s see if the anti-statist side can get a word in edgewise.

WT. Note that all of this angst is from people who normally consider the Wall Street Journal the voice of the new Nazi party.

NYT. Would she have gotten interviewed by the New York Times if she were a “global warming denier”? you be the judge.