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The children of the Crust are constantly indoctrinated with “America sucks!”, so it’s no surprise when some of them actually take action.

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Remember the left cheering when the New York Times did this stuff to the Bush Administration? Somehow I suspect they’ll still actually cheer for this, which won’t exactly do anything to reassure the American people that those in charge are good on national security issues.

Makes you wonder whose side they’re on. (Oops, I forgot, we already know that: Anybody But America.)

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Friday’s development: A Phoenix police officer has sued over the Arizona immigration law, arguing that he could be sued for racial profiling if he enforces the Arizona law.

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Recent reports from the L.A. Times show that since 2007, nearly $4.8 million in welfare funds have been withdrawn from ATMs in California casinos. And a new report shows that more than $12,000 from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program was withdrawn from ATMs in California strip clubs.

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They coulda let Bear Stearns’s creditors or AIG’s or LTCM’s or Mexico’s or Continental Illinois’s lose some, just some of their money. They shoulda. And they woulda if it had been safe. Or so they claimed. But it was too risky.They–the regulators and politicians didn’t give all that money to creditors because the creditors were politically powerful. No. The politicians and regulators did it for the country. At least that’s what they told us. They just couldn’t let lenders pay a price, even a very small one, for making imprudent loans if the lenders were large. I doubt the regulators will see their way to doing it differently the next time either. They could, of course. They just won’t.

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Nothing personal — it’s just business.

Financial reform might irk Wall Street, but the president’s real problem is with small businesses—the engine of any serious recovery.

And, as the BP executives have found out to their sorrow, Obama is not an Honest Politician; he doesn’t stay bought.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in Ann Arbor.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, yanks back the curtain.

In the dismaying-but-not-surprising category of news stories recently, this one in the July 2 New York Times got my attention. It describes how the Obama administration is killing off the summer-internship programs, many of them unpaid, that are so popular with high-school seniors and college students.

What seems to be going on here is a war against the notion that any American citizen should do any kind of non-academic work before the age of 25 — before, that is, a college degree and a couple of years of law school have been completed.

A person acquainted with the real world would recognize this for what it is: the romantic piffle of fools living in money-padded cocoons. There, however, you see the circularity of the issue. The overclass types who extrude this gibberish are not much acquainted with the real world; and one reason for this is, they have never done low-paid, low-skill work. They may have done higher-status internships for little or no pay, but it seems the administration now wants to shut youngsters off from even that much acquaintance with the world of work.

I have noticed that if, among 30-something colleagues, I mention one of my own school or college summer jobs — factory or construction work, dishwashing, retail sales, bartending — my colleagues will look amused, and a bit baffled. How come a guy as well-educated as Derb was shoveling concrete? Boy, he’s a real eccentric! No, I’m not. Those experiences were perfectly normal for a person of my generation. They’re just not normal any more, not for children of the American middle and upper classes.

When I was in college, I spent my summers building mobile homes. My Yale T-shirt was unusual, but I worked alongside people from Notre Dame and Purdue and the local Bible college. It’s not a bad thing for a college graduate to know how to use a screw-gun or a band-saw.

Nor was physical labor always thought shameful. In the older American ideal, which is now as dead as the one-room schoolhouse, physical labor was held to have a dignity to it. Even elites believed their youngsters would benefit from a taste of it. Calvin Coolidge put his 15-year-old son to work in the tobacco fields of Hatfield, Mass., as a vacation job. (When the lad happened to mention who he was, one of his co-workers said: “Gee, if the president was my father, I wouldn’t be working here.” Cal Jr.: “You would, if your father were my father.” For a comparison with the “conservative” sensibility of our own time, recall Karl Rove’s remark: “I don’t want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes.” Good heavens, Karl, of course you don’t: The poor lad might break a fingernail.)

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In 2009, a poll of nearly 12,000 people by online dating site Shaadi.com, revealed that skin tone was considered the most important criteria when choosing a partner in three northern Indian states.

“Indians believe that if you have fair skin you belong to the higher caste, the Brahmins,” he added, explaining that a succession of light-skinned colonisers in India reinforced the association of fairness with power.

Varna, the term conventionally used to describe the ‘caste’ system in India, literally means color.

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So he’s dumping the trophy wife he dumped his first one for.

The couple have been married for 16 years and have four children together.

I assume that his father is rotating rather briskly by now.

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The Nanny State proceeds apace in Britain.

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A notable achievement. Message: The future is against the law.

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A rogue Afghan soldier shot dead a British colleague in his sleeping quarters before killing two more by firing a rocket-propelled grenade into a control room.

This is exactly the sort of situation that the British Army spent two centuries coping with prior to World War II. Unfortunately, the modern British soldier isn’t just some yob swept up off the street and drilled rigid, but a highly-trained specialist who is more talented to start with and represents a significant investment in time and money.

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Next time, use MasterCard.

The 23-man squad, plus families and supporters, want to travel on traditional Haudenosaunee – or Iroquois – passports which represent six nations of indigenous North Americans.

However, the UK has said the passport is not an internationally recognised travel document.

It is understood the US authorities are also refusing to recognise the document.

Yeah, they might be Muslim terrorists (They’re everywhere! They’re everywhere!) or something. Government Rule #1: Never pass up an opportunity to inconvenience somebody for no good reason.

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There were some unusual moments during the first hearing of the presidential commission on the BP-Deepwater Horizon accident. And no, we’re not talking about the speakers who showed up claiming to represent the Communist Party. Or the witness who pulled out a guitar and crooned a song about the accident.

Sometimes Congress is the most entertaining thing around.

No, the really odd moment came when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement that he was looking to the commission for information that could inform the administration’s position on halting deepwater drilling.

Salazar’s statement stunned the commission’s two co-chairmen, William K. Reilly and Bob Graham, who said they had been assured by Salazar’s office and the White House that giving advice on the moratorium wasn’t their job.

Oh, gee, the Obama administration lied to you? How could that happen? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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On one stretch of the border, Chinese troops apprehended five North Korean soldiers in May alone. Prior to the sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan in March, allegedly by a torpedo fired from a North Korean submarine, it was rare for troops to be taken into custody on the Chinese side of the Yalu River.

“In the past there have been cases of North Korean troops crossing the border and plundering Chinese farms for their food, which they then took back to their posts in the North,” Kim Sang-hun, a human rights activist in Seoul, told The Daily Telegraph.

The defectors apprehended by the Chinese were reportedly returned to North Korea, where they face execution.

Those Communists, they’re just so warm and fuzzy.

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The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the main opposition party in the Indian parliament, wants to ban beef from the menu at this year’s Commonwealth Games in New Dehli on Oct. 3-14 to showcase the country’s “cultural values and age-old traditions”.

Don’t tell me – let me guess: the ‘cultural value’ they’d be ‘showcasing’ is ‘Do It Our Way’ and the ‘age-old tradition’ is Suppression of Freedom. On historical grounds, I must admit that they have an excellent case.

Muslims have an equally good case to make that Killing Non-Muslims And Stealing Their Land is likewise one of their ‘cultural values’ and ‘age-old traditions’; indeed, the Moguls had been doing that in India for about 300 years before the British stepped in and ruined all the fun.

I wonder whether the BJP would be down with that?

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The new regulations, which kick in at the start of 2012, require any taxpayer with business income to issue 1099 forms to all vendors from whom they purchased more than $600 of goods and services that year. That promises to launch a fusillade of new paperwork: An estimated 40 million taxpayers will be subject to the requirement, including 26 million who run sole proprietorships, according to a report released this week by National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson….

“The new reporting burden, particularly as it falls on small businesses, may turn out to be disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvement in tax compliance,” the Taxpayer Advocate Service wrote in a report released this week.

Unintended Consequences, thy name is Obama.

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One of the nation’s most iconic nonprofit organizations, founded 166 years ago in England as the Young Men’s Christian Association, is undergoing a major rebranding, adopting as its name the nickname everyone has used for generations.

‘Young Men’? Certainly. ‘Christian’? Not so much.

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It’s like watching a snowman melt in the sun.

“People’s patience is running out and many will now be asking whether they should try and practice their Catholic faith in the Church of England,” he said.

Well, no. If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that heresies eventually self-destruct.

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Every school should have a “useless teacher” so children can learn to deal with incompetent people in authority, the outgoing chairman of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) has claimed.

We’ll be happy to send you some of ours, guys; we have excess of requirements.

Read it. And watch the video.

These people are among the reasons why I work in database development rather than law — it substantially reduces the amount of time I have to spend taking a shower.

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Over the past few years I’ve been able to observe first hand the devolution of a person into a liberal.  My findings are not surprising but I thought I would share them with you.

Of course it doesn’t take a genius to conclude that if one is allowed to blame upbringing for conservatism and portray that negatively, one should not simultaneously be allowed to exalt liberal indoctrination at college campuses as though it were the product of free thought.  If the family environment creates a conservative, and the college environment creates a liberal, shouldn’t we view any “creation” process in equal terms?  Of course not, because a small house in the hills of Appalachia is a den of ignorance to be derided whereas the shimmering ivory Berkeley campus is a palace of worship deserving of all praise.  In the eyes of a liberal, anyway.  Once made, a liberal must fall over themselves to help these poor unforunate ignoramuses who live in places other than metro areas think and be just like them.  Interesting contradiction, don’t you think?

Since I have known her, she becomes more liberal by the day.  And I find that each liberal virtue she extolls seems to originate in her mind only after the virtue is in someway relevant to her.  I won’t go into the details – use your imagination.

Another less positive way to put it would be like this: the more she fails at life, the more liberal she becomes.  It would appear that her liberal beliefs emerge only to justify a course in life she’s already chosen to take.  Her beliefs did not arise independently.  They exist only as an excuse to justify actions in the past.  Or as a justification for why she isn’t doing what the rest of us are doing, such as respectably contributing to our civilization.  As opposed to whining about it.

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Medical helicopters are supposed to save lives. Too often, they put both flight crew and patients in danger instead. Here, in this Popular Mechanics special report, we investigate the crashes and statistics that make medical helicopter an unacceptable risk.

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Wally Olson was two years ahead of me at Yale and his decades-long struggle to point out how lawyers are bringing our civilization down is good and useful work.

And, as in this case, sometimes pretty amusing.

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At least under this system, when government wanted your land, you knew.

Not so under many of today’s taking methods, the most insidious of which occur by tame-sounding names and friendly partnerships among government, special interest, and landowner. Take National Heritage Areas (NHAs), a voluntary program of the National Park Service that confers honorary titles on properties deemed historically significant and crucial to telling stories of America’s past. Forty-nine such areas currently exist, and more are in the works.

The enabling legislation also requires the NHA to have a management entity oversee creating and implementing a management plan for the site that the Secretary of the Interior must approve. And examples abound of these management boards—comprised of volunteer members of local government, conservation and preservation groups, U.S. Parks Department personnel, and other interested individuals—acting as a quasi-government body that pressures local land-use changes.

In not one of these instances were landowners deprived of their lands. That’s why supporters can claim NHAs do not take property rights. But only the most dishonest would insist that NHA designations do not lead to land-use changes from local governments. While one might opt out of inclusion in the NHA, how does one opt out of local zoning?

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She looks like a model and he looks like a dork. What’s up with that?

I see a romantic spy/chick flick starring Justin Timberlake and Megan Fox.

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The Russian government has realized that Obama can be rolled, so they are busy rolling him.

The Kremlin is upset—but not exceedingly so—at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for pointing out the obvious: Russian troops are occupying Abkhazia and South Ossetia in violation of the ceasefire agreement that ended its brief war with Georgia. The deal, brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, required the Soviet military to withdraw to prewar boundaries. Instead, it is has built permanent bases in the breakaway republics.

Vladamir Putin’s response was noticeably restrained: “While some think South Ossetia is occupied, others think it is liberated.” The message from Moscow is, more of less, this: The Obama administration’s “reset” is paying dividends for us—NATO membership for Georgia is unlikely in the near future, missile defense is a dead issue, the START treaty was but a minor concession—so why respond to Clinton’s empty assurances to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili?

When Kruschev met with JFK in Vienna and realized he could be rolled, the result was the Cuban Missile Crisis. What will Obama, that gift that keeps on giving, get us?

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Sell a guinea pig, go to jail.

That’s the law under consideration by San Francisco’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare. If the commission approves the ordinance at its meeting tonight, San Francisco could soon have what is believed to be the country’s first ban on the sale of all pets except fish.

San Francisco seems determined to be on the cutting edge of idiocy in North America.

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The unstated goal of any piece of advertising is to rip the reader’s attention away from what they were really interested in, and focus it for a moment on something they likely don’t give a damn about. It belies a complete lack of respect for the reader or viewer, and suggests that their sole reason for producing content is to ambush the consumer with unrelated garbage: it’s nothing but Mahalo or a typo-squatter, a tawdry bait-and-switch that leaves the user feeling, well, used.

My List:

1. Ads that make noise, whether you want them to or not. (Example: Background talking that starts up automatically when you land on the page.)
2. Ads that move. Period. (Example: Self-starting flash videos.)
3. Pop-ups that totally block the site and require playing ‘hunt for the close control’.

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Hint: It was tending down until 2008, then went through the roof. Wonder why?

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Of course, persuading many Americans that Progressivism initiated a struggle over the soul of America is a hard sell. For decades, liberal scholars and politicians have attributed the 20th-century growth of government to changes in the mere material circumstances of American life. The Progressive era’s progressive reforms, we have been told, were the necessary and inevitable response to problems created by the closing of the frontier, the rise of huge corporations and a transition to large-scale factory production, population shifts out of the countryside and into the city, large waves of immigration, etc. The New Deal, in turn, was simply a response to the economic hardships caused by the Great Depression. By attributing these periods’ reforms to America’s changing material circumstances, the orthodox view implies that there was no change of philosophical or moral import likewise under way. More to the point, it implies that the Progressives’ reforms were guided by the principles of the American Founding.

And yet this is demonstrably false.

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Peter Bethune, an environmental campaigner who boarded a Japanese whaling vessel in the Antarctic Ocean in February, has been sentenced to a suspended two-year prison term in Tokyo.

Not a positive development. All you have to do these days is label yourself (or be labelled by the lamestream media) an ‘activist’ and you can get away with behavior that would land any ordinary person in prison. This merely encourages such ‘activism’. That’s not what the law is there to do; it’s supposed to discourage that sort of thing.

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A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has rejected an Oregon man’s petition for habeas corpus relief (PDF). This despite acknowledging that the man has established actual innocence for the crimes for which he’s being imprisoned (sexual abuse and sodomy of a four-year-old). The reason: He was late filing his petition. By the panel’s reckoning, adherence to an arbitrary deadline created by legislators is a higher value than not continuing to imprison people we know to be innocent.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (the most reversed Federal Appellate Circuit in the country) is a constant disgrace.

The Other McCain is having entirely too much fun.

Joe Miller  is the Republican primary challenger to Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who was rated No. 5 on the Human Events list of “Top 10 Senate RINOs” (and that was when Arlen Specter was still a Republican).

Matt Welch is bummed.

Our grandchildren won’t believe our stories about the 1990s. Yes, there really was a time before the World Wide Web and ubiquitous portable communication devices in sub-Saharan Africa. Yes, you really could travel to some foreign countries without a passport, without a return ticket, without a credit card, and without entering multiple government databases. Yes, the Pittsburgh Pirates really did once play winning baseball.

But as the Bush-Obama era of bailout economics and Keynesian rehabilitation settles into something like cruising speed, perhaps the most fantastic fact to swallow will be that once upon a time the United States had a president who restrained government spending, balanced the budget, argued forcefully for the benefits of free trade, and declared that “the era of big government is over.” And he was a Democrat.

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PowerPoint – it’s not just boring, it’s insecure.

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The Western defensive alliance NATO was a product of the Cold War. While it may have been a useful tool back then, the organization has so far proven utterly incapable of dealing with the tidal wave of Islamic aggression and Third World invasion through mass immigration that is engulfing the Western world. It is likely that there will soon be a concerted push by Morocco to retake the Spanish-ruled enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. How will NATO react to such a blatant attack on one of its member states? Will it respond in any meaningful way at all?

It is becoming increasingly evident to intelligent observers that the experiment with secularism in Turkey is failing and that the country is reemerging as a hostile Islamic power, the way it has been for most of the past 1,000 years. There are clear parallels between how the USA currently acts toward the Turkish neo-Ottomans and how Western European powers acted vis-à-vis the original Ottomans in the late 1800s. For example, there is the unholy practice of using smaller nations as bargaining chips to appease Muslims. The difference is that the USA treats all of Europe the way the British and French used to treat the Balkan Christians, by consistently pushing for Turkish membership in the European Union. NATO has actively supported the Islamization of Europe through its military actions in Serbia and Kosovo.

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Feldman, like other modern liberal writers who yearn for the Progressive days of yore, whitewashes Progressivism, so that it consisted solely of public-spirited regulation of corporations and the labor market. Meese and Oman note that the regulations in question weren’t always so public-spirited, but I’d add that Progressive regulation also included alcohol prohibition, coercive eugenics, housing segregation laws, bans on public schools, and other measures that people today across the political spectrum would agree were gross violations of individual rights. Resistance to these measures came primarily from the libertarian constitutionalists Feldman decries, not from his Progressive heroes. With that context, and in stark contrast to the way Feldman portrays things, the idea that property rights and limited government were a bulwark of individual liberty doesn’t seem quite so bizarre.

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

With the Clintons, it’s All About Them.

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There are obvious actions to speed things up, but the government oddly resists taking them.

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

As the oil spill continues and the cleanup lags, we must begin to ask difficult and uncomfortable questions. There does not seem to be much that anyone can do to stop the spill except dig a relief well, not due until August. But the cleanup is a different story. The press and Internet are full of straightforward suggestions for easy ways of improving the cleanup, but the federal government is resisting these remedies.

It’s not hard to fathom. The federal government is  composed of agencies that, come hell or high wather (often literally) defend their turf whether or not it makes sense to Ordinary People.

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We have paid public officials with tax money to paint out an American flag mural just before the Fourth of July, because it was on state property without a permit. Caltrans officials quickly pointed out that this wasn’t intentional disrespect, it’s just that murals aren’t allowed on state property without a permit, and this was just discovered, and of course once it was discovered they had to act. Aren’t you glad we’re getting the government we are paying for? Do you think that in these economic times we might do with fewer public officials whose job it is to enforce this regulation?

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Color on color. Fail.

On the other hand, if they’re trying to express the rot that’s creeping into the UK — it just might work.

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The number of people who appear to be gaming the state’s health insurance system by purchasing coverage only when they are sick quadrupled from 2006 to 2008, according to a long-awaited report released yesterday from the Massachusetts Division of Insurance.

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

Steve Sailer is never afraid to look Political Correctness in the eye.

The background is that the winners of WWII, America and Britain, kept their old-fashioned elitist colleges like Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge old-fashioned and elitist. The losers, like Germany, France, and Italy, after the war trashed their great universities on the altar of egalitarianism by going to open admissions. (In the U.S., CCNY was the only famous college to take the Spirit of ’68 seriously enough to dump selective admissions.) Today, that’s why ambitious Korean and Chinese students want to go to American or British universities, not to Continental ones: We won The War.

Whereas imposing a quota will suddenly produce creative risk-takers. Right. That’s why Google was founded by Michelle Obama.

To an American, it’s amusing to hear the French come up with the exact same cliches and fallacies as Americans have been telling each other for 40 years. Indeed, there are problems caused by reliance on entrance exams in terms of selecting for creativity and the like. But quotas do zip to fix those real problems. It’s not like the American quota kids all flock to Silicon Valley and start-up their own firms. A quota won’t give France its own Silicon Valley.

“With the objective of a great social opening,” the U.S. has been trying to invent “a better measure of young people’s intelligence” for 45 years, but we keep finding out that the old tests we had before the Great Society worked fine. It’s the test-takers who turned out to be the problem, not the test. But why should the French government learn from the U.S. experience? The U.S. government never learns from the U.S. experience.

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In every state, people are free to feed others in their filthy, unregulated homes, it’s only when money changes hands that home cooks transform into a public health hazard.

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The world is crazy for soccer, but most Americans don’t give a hoot about the sport. Why? Many years ago, my former White House colleague Bill McGurn pointed out to me the real reason soccer hasn’t caught on in the good old U.S.A. It’s simple, really: Soccer is a socialist sport.

Think about it. Soccer is the only sport in the world where you cannot use the one tool that distinguishes man from beast: opposable thumbs. “No hands” is a rule only a European statist could love. (In fact, with the web of high taxes and regulations that tie the hands of European entrepreneurs, “no hands” kind of describes their economic theories as well.)

Soccer is also the only sport in the world that has “hooligans”—proletarian mobs that trash private property whenever their team loses.