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I thought that, too.

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Tiptoe through the TULIP.

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Be careful what you look for, you just might find it.

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What would you do if you only had half a body? Well, of course you would get all tatted up and dress like a dork. That’s obvious.

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A distillation of the Crustian worldview. Usually they aren’t this honest.

What’s wrong with this picture? Air America vanishes into the ether, while Glenn Beck indoctrinates 2.7 million daily viewers with his histrionic brand of right-wing lunacy. Independent news agencies must continuously solicit donations from readers to stay afloat, while hate-filled shock jock Rush Limbaugh makes $50 million a year.

Of course, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with this picture in the eyes of anybody who realizes that broadcasting is a business and in that business those who produce content that people are willing to pay for will win out of people who don’t. ‘Progressives’ are champions at refusing to accept this reality and feel moved to make up their own facts to substitute for those that the world hands them. (Anybody who can call Rush Limbaugh a ‘shock jock’ with a straight face has so tenuous a connection with reality that it’s probably a medical condition.)

The Nation and TheNation.com are part of a progressive journalistic community that is challenging the right in every medium.

To massive yawns. That’s what burns their asses the most, and leads to the meme that The People are just too stupid to know what’s good for them. Funny how that works.

Below are ten steps you can take to help keep progressive journalism alive:….

Needless to say, it’s also a great blueprint for resisting ‘progressive’ journalism. Take whatever action you think is appropriate.

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The president, who promised in both word and style to usher in a “new era” of Washington “responsibility,” routinely says things that aren’t true and supports initiatives that break campaign promises. When called on it, he mostly keeps digging. And when obliged to explain why American voters are turning so sharply away from his party and his policies, Obama pins the blame not on his own deviations from verity but on his failure to “explain” things “more clearly to the American people.”

But, really, he’s so clean….

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The anti-capitalism view is an ideological fixture of our education systems at every level, from grade to graduate school.  We could call it orthodoxy if it were not so much like boilerplate.  It’s not so much argued as assumed.

Capitalism doesn’t have heroes.  It doesn’t have people called to higher motives.  It doesn’t have noble sacrifices for the good of others.  It doesn’t, usually, have daring action on a public stage.

No, capitalism is just has some guy who owns a handful of dry cleaning outfits in a small town in New Hampshire.  He works hard, supplies a service, pays off his loans, coaches Little League, goes to church, gets his kids through college, and spends his very few disposable hours on the golf course.

Script!  Casting!  Some one call the studio!   This is appalling.  It doesn’t matter that out of these mundane activities in lots of towns big and small, played out by millions of people across the US, something remarkable will come.  This just isn’t a story anyone wants to listen to.  So no one much wants to tell it.  Not Hollywood.  Not our mythmakers.  Not our story tellers.

Highly recommended.

Ian Murray turns over the rock.

The UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has issued its report  into the so-called Climategate scandal.  As might be expected, it’s pretty much a whitewash, except as detailed below.

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Whatever the new problem, environmentalists always end up back at the same old ‘solutions.’ No matter how many times green gloom is discredited, lapsing into the old eco-fundamentalism is just too irresistible.

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As steadily as ivy creeps up the walls of its well-groomed campuses, the education industrial complex has cultivated the image of college as a sure-fire path to a life of social and economic privilege.

Joel Kellum says he’s living proof that the claim is a lie.

The Other McCain overturns a rock.

Drew M. at Ace of Spades says John Cornyn is “starting to go wobbly,” which involves the wholly unwarranted assumption that Cornyn was ever steady to begin with.

Over and over, we have seen recently that Republican “leadership” in Washington is a joke, their cowardice exceeded only by their incompetence.

Preach it, brother.

Disgusting.

Another of the reasons I never practiced law.

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One of the reasons to have hearings on legislation is that so people who comb through it can point out hidden traps, ambiguous language, unintended consequences, etc. But large parts of the Senate bill on health care that went into law were written behind closed doors. And it shows.

Quelle surprise.

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Most people want cheap. Some people can only afford cheap. Walmart helps people maximize the return from their financial resources and all it gets is crap from the Crust.

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This presumes that postal employees can read a map. We know that they can’t read a clock.

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Dr Ulrich Habsburg-Lothringen is barred from running for Austria’s presidency by his country’s republican constitution, drawn up when the last Habsburg Emperor Charles I was forced to abdicate power in 1918.

Dr Habsburg, who has three children and six grandchildren, is angry that he and his descendants are discriminated against while candidates with a Nazi past, such as Kurt Waldheim, Austria’s president between 1986 and 1992, are not.

Not an unreasonable position.

A member of the environmentalist Green party since 1987, in a province governed for years by the far-right, Dr Habsburg has little in common with his imperial ancestors who once ruled much of Europe.

Oh, boy, just what we need – another blue-blood kook. To hell with him.

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I don’t think Sean Penn is kooky; I just think he likes Communists.

The stupidity of supposedly smart men can be simply stunning. And that stupidity is not random; it tends to almost always go in the same direction, that of failing to understand the workings of the totalitarian and tyrannical mindset.

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A perfect demonstration of the economic reality of our non-competitive labor rates can be seen in the decision of BP to shut down a solar-panel manufacturing plant in Frederick, Maryland. The plant was expanded with great fanfare three and a half years ago, and green jobs were the order of the day. BP was to pour $70 million into the expansion, but instead, they’ll be moving their production to—surprise!—China and India. BP will be laying off about 300 people here, and, as they can’t find any buyers for their building, they’ll be tearing it down. The Washington Post (a frequent “green energy” booster) now points out that BP, which once (fatuously) declared its new mission as moving “Beyond Petroleum,” is still “committed” to solar power, just not here. “‘We remain absolutely committed to solar,’ BP chief executive Tony Hayward said in an interview Friday. But he said BP was ‘moving to where we can manufacture cheaply.’”

And for those who doubted the United States would be balked in leading the green-power revolution because of obscure rare earth elements that nobody can pronounce (Dysprosium, anyone? Neodymium? Yttrium?), the evidence is becoming overwhelming that we will indeed be stymied by our lack of supply. As Daniel McGroarty, a principal of the Carmot Strategic Group observes, China is involved in an intentional strategy to ensure that the Chinese, not the United States, will be the ones building the green devices of tomorrow. And it’s not only the obvious devices, like windmills and solar panels. China will be making your compact fluorescent bulbs, your power-saving computer monitor, cell-phone display, fiber-optic cables, automotive components, and much more.

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A historic figure making history, this is emerging as an over-arching theme—if not obsession—in the Obama presidency. In Iowa, a day after signing health care into law, he put himself into competition with history. If history shapes men, “We still have the power to shape history.” But this adds up to one thing: He is likely to be the most liberal president in American history. And, oddly, he may be a more effective liberal precisely because his liberalism is something he uses more than he believes in. As the far left constantly reminds us, he is not really a true believer. Rather liberalism is his ticket to grandiosity and to historical significance.

In terms of the classic dichotomy, Barack is President in order to ‘be’ rather than in order to ‘do’. And YOU are paying for all this narcissism; rather handsomely, too. Aren’t you proud?

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The agency’s “tiger team” of security specialists was dispatched as part of an ongoing investigation conducted jointly with the Justice Department into a program backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The program, called the John Adams Project, has photographed covert CIA interrogators and shown the pictures to some of the five senior al Qaeda terrorists held there in an effort to identify them further.

The team also expressed concerns about the inmates’ access to laptop computers in the past. Some of the inmates who are representing themselves in legal proceedings were granted laptop computers without Internet access. However, the officials fear that future unfavorable court rulings could provide the inmates with the capability of communicating outside the island prison.

Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

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Jim Railton, 57, fell foul of the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act by offering the Edwardian cabinet for sale because of what was inside.

The RSPB saw the item – complete with 54 eggs from species including herring gull and guillemot inside – and informed Northumbria Police.

An inquiry was launched and the auctioneer was arrested, questioned and had to give a DNA sample.

His legal saga ended at Alnwick magistrates, where he was fined £1,000, ordered to pay £70 costs and a £15 victim’s surcharge.

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

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Check it out. Why is this person still alive?

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Check it out.

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The system works.

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Very curious. Apparently modern feminism has some odd quirks.

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Police said the customer crawled out of his car and into the drive thru window to get his fish sandwich, after slapping the McDonald’s employee in the face.

‘Course, this was in New York. (Ohhhhhohhhhhhohhhh….)

Check it out.

Just so you know.

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

In 2008 it was “Vote for Barack Obama or we’re going to call you a bunch of dirty rotten creepy racists.” In 2010 it’s “Barack Obama is still in trouble so we’re going to call you a bunch of dirty rotten creepy racists.”

These guys aren’t showing racism, progressivism, intelligence or stupidity. They’re just demonstrating a working long-term memory.

Took their own sweet time about it.

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Another reason to get rid of this stupid practice. You can tell it’s a government program because it WILL NOT DIE.

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The future of Obamacare. Don’t say that you weren’t warned.

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Professor Steve Smith, president of Universities UK, believes new research justifies offering places to candidates whose A-level results are up to three grades lower than those from independent or grammar schools.

I can hear guidance counselors all over Britain: ‘Do badly in your exams, Johnny, so you can get into a good university.’

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At the headquarters of Human Rights Watch, more than 30 storeys above the noise and bustle of Manhattan, there is so much high-mindedness hanging in the air you can almost taste it. This is the epicentre of a certain type of socially smart, progressive activism — the kind that persuades Hollywood grandees, power lawyers and liberal financiers to dig deeply into their pockets.

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Is nothing sacred?

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Hey, it worked in Zimbabwe … no, wait….

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The tax that dare not speak its name.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke took to the White House blog to write that while ObamaCare is great for business, “In the last few days, though, we have seen a couple of companies imply that reform will raise costs for them.” In a Thursday interview on CNBC, Mr. Locke said “for them to come out, I think is premature and irresponsible.”

Meanwhile, Henry Waxman and House Democrats announced yesterday that they will haul these companies in for an April 21 hearing because their judgment “appears to conflict with independent analyses, which show that the new law will expand coverage and bring down costs.”

In other words, shoot the messenger. Black-letter financial accounting rules require that corporations immediately restate their earnings to reflect the present value of their long-term health liabilities, including a higher tax burden. Should these companies have played chicken with the Securities and Exchange Commission to avoid this politically inconvenient reality? Democrats don’t like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet.

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There must be some way to cut off internet access to Nigeria.

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Can you think of a more singularly useless talent to have? This is on a par with the guys who could make pictures of Snoopy on a “letter-quality printer”. Impressive, yeah, but what’s the point?

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As doctors move from being employers to employees, their politics often take a leftward turn. This helps explain why the American Medical Association — long opposed to health care reforms — gave at least a tepid endorsement to Mr. Obama’s overhaul effort.

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I am not making this up.

Ilya Somin reviews the legal issues involved.

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We’ve been tracking the increased openness on the center-right to new or increased federal taxes: David Brooks, Glenn Hubbard, Karl Rove, Tyler Cowen, Greg Mankiw. The latest example comes in the new Spring issue of National Affairs, which bills itself as the successor to Irving Kristol’s Public Interest. There, Donald Marron, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (as did Professor Hubbard and Professor Mankiw), writes: “No one solution — not economic growth, not tax increases, and not spending reductions — can get us to our goal. To put ourselves on a sustainable fiscal trajectory, we will need to use all the measures at our disposal.” Or, to be more blunt: “some tax increases will almost certainly be required.”

An ugly trend.

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The best precedent for a Frum-style strategy of selling out compromise is probably Medicare Part D. That bill picked up support from genuine fiscal conservatives like Rep. Paul Ryan because the understanding was that, if this version doesn’t pass, something bigger and worse will. As a political calculation, this makes sense. But the end result wasn’t one to be proud of: We still ended up with a poorly designed, unsustainable, potentially disastrous policy. If ObamaCare opponents had compromised, that’s all they would have succeeded in passing here. Fine, you might say, but that’s what we got anyway! Fair enough. But unlike the current situation, they would have been responsible for those outcomes, would have given liberals political cover, and ultimately put themselves in a far weaker position to push for reforms.

Preach it, brother. Suck on it, Frum.

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The government’s war on small businesses claims more victims.

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Smoking kills. Never doubt it.

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I’ve always thought that Schadenfreude would be a great name for a high-end German sports car.

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A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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A special panel of federal judges is being asked Thursday to consolidate before a single court dozens of proposed class-action lawsuits filed by Toyota owners who say the value of their vehicles has plummeted after millions were recalled for safety fixes.