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So I guess Pakistan is next after Afghanistan, right.

Yeah, right.

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$1.2 trillion deficit, and they can’t come up with the money for a world-class military.

We always knew that the Democrats were the party of corruption, we just didn’t know that they were the party of treason as well.

Steve Sailer points out the “diversity” is just another word for racism.

Something you’ll notice over the years is that controversies over the use of quotas in fire department promotions are much more heated than controversies over the quotas that all big city fire departments use in their initial hiring. That’s because the applicants/victims of the initial hiring quotas aren’t told they are victims, they’re just sent a rejection letter.

But what can mere applicants do? Nobody will tell them anything about how they did because they are just random individuals. They’re not in the union, they don’t know any higher-ups or any clerks, they’re nobodies. Whereas firemen who have been waiting for years to be promoted have lots of ways of finding out what their scores were, so they raise a stink.

The Obama administration, taking its first stand on race and civil rights, sided with the city officials and said they were justified in dropping the test if it had “gross exclusionary effects on minorities.”

To notice the Fundamental Constant of Sociology gets you Watsoned out of polite society. So, we’re supposed to act like it’s a complete surprise every time we run into exactly the same situation.

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The council has debated mandating hybrid purchases. But the rumor among taxi drivers is that in addition, or perhaps instead, the city or other government agency will eventually subsidize the purchase of a hybrid.

Drivers have decided that they should not purchase a Prius or other hybrid until the subsidy arrived. Buying one now would mean over-paying.

There is a memorable Dilbert cartoon where Ken from Sales kills the market for a product by describing all of the great features to come in the next version, which Dilbert notes won’t be out for another year.

No matter how may times politicians get their noses rubbed in the fact that government activity distorts markets in unwholesome ways, they persist in doing it.

There would have been two preferable possibilities: for the government to come forth quickly with its subsidy, or make it clear from the beginning that no subsidy was coming. With both Chicago taxis and the secondary market for mortgages, the government did neither. Instead, it only fueled rumors that subsidies were on the way, and froze the same markets it intended to stimulate.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

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So much for Obama being a Muslim.

So much for Obama being a Christian.

He is, however, a certifiable politician.

John Tierney picks a side in the War on Salt in New York.

That antifat campaign, like the antisalt campaign, was endorsed by prominent groups and federal agencies before the campaigners’ theory was tested in rigorous trials. It too seemed quite logical — in theory.

But in practice the results were dismal, as demonstrated eventually by clinical trials and by the expanding waistlines of Americans. People followed the advice in the “food pyramid” to reduce the percentage of fat in the diet, but they got more obese, perhaps because they ate so many other ingredients in foods with “low fat” labels.

You might think that experience would inspire caution among public health officials, but instead they seem to be gaining confidence. When Dr. Frieden and Mr. Bloomberg decided several years ago that trans fats were dangerous, they didn’t simply issue a warning or a set of voluntary guidelines. They insisted on outlawing trans fats in New York’s restaurants.

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TPPF commissioned research firm Arduin, Laffer & Moore Econometrics to produce the the study, titled “The Economic Impact of Federal Spending on State Economic Performance – A Texas Perspective.” The report shows that the state of Texas could lose anywhere from 131,400 to 171,900 jobs as a result of accepting federal stimulus dollars.

Dat ol’ debbil Unintended Consequences (with Economically Clueless multiplier) strikes again.

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Oh, no!

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Sometimes you just have one of those days … although I’d be reluctant to characterize a boat worth only £20k a “yacht”.

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And you think you’ve got problems….

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Campaigners for India’s ‘untouchable’ caste – who perform degrading jobs and suffer violence and persecution – on Monday night denounced the practice and said it highlighted how low-caste “dalits” were discriminated against even before conception.

Yeah, world to end, women and minorities hardest hit.

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I’m sorry, that’s just wrong.

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Well, I’m glad to know that Britain is doing so well financially that they can piss away 100 million pounds on South African roads. Must be nice. Perhaps they could help us out over here.

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Oh, you mean that the spread of HIV is actually caused by individual behavior? Gee, you’d never know that from reading the newspapers — or from listening to the whining of the gay rights groups.

Or maybe it’s just heterosexual AIDS that is caused by individual behavior — homosexual AIDS droppeth like the rain upon the just and the unjust alike. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Read it.

The latest hijacking happened on Saturday 400 nautical miles (740 kms) off the southern Somali port of Kismayu, between the Seychelles and Kenya, a regional maritime group said.

Makes you wonder why they send ships into this area, where they know pirates are operating with apparent impunity.

Needless to say, 100 years ago this problem would have already been taken care of.

Tyler Cowen looks at the bailouts — and their deficiencies.

But there is a big hole in these proposals, as there has already been in the government’s approach to bailing out failing financial companies. Even as they focus on firms deemed too big to fail, the new proposals immunize the creditors and counterparties of such firms by protecting them from their own lending and trading mistakes.

What the banking system needs is creditors who monitor risk and cut their exposure when that risk is too high. Unlike regulators, creditors and counterparties know the details of a deal and have their own money on the line.

But in both the bailouts and in the new proposals, the government is effectively neutralizing creditors as a force for financial safety. This suggests a scary possibility — that the next regulatory regime could end up even worse than the last.

Read it.

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

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College graduates are now looking toward government to start their careers, since there aren’t a lot of other places to look. Unemployment for government employees is about half the rate of almost all private industry workers, and Washington, D.C., is a rare U.S. city that seems recession-proof.

When working for the government is the best job out there, you are officially a Third World country. Just so you know.

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Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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Read it.

Our aim today is to restore narrative coherence to the 20th century, ridding it of mystical obfuscations, poltergeists, and winds of change. In UR’s 20th century, when things happen, they generally happen for a reason. The reason is generally the obvious reason.

The 20th century was the golden age of lies. The liars of the 20th century, like the painters of the 16th, will be remembered forever as the Old Masters of their art. I know UR has many readers who are Christians or Jews, and sometimes I even regret my own inability to believe in God. But no one who knows anything about the 20th century can fail to believe in the Devil.

Thus the standard story of the 20th century includes one set of actors which are portrayed accurately (the fascist regimes), one set which was portrayed inaccurately but has since been repaired with the assistance of whiteout (the revolutionary regimes), and one set whose mythos remains gloriously intact (the democratic regimes). From this stew, clarity is not to be expected.

A conservative is someone who helps disguise the true nature of a democratic state. The conservative is ineffective by definition, because his goal is to make democracy work properly. The fact that it does not work properly, has never worked properly, and will never work properly, sails straight over his head. He therefore labors cheerfully as a tool for his enemies.

The most gross misstatement about fascism presently understood, however, is that the Axis constituted a plot to take over the world. It is truly amazing that people believe this today, for there is no evidence for it whatsoever. However, most historians simply treat it as a given.

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Guess AIG’s problem was that they weren’t a quango — yet.

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Yeah, that Industrial Revolution is quite overrated.

Next: Reintroducing the Organic Corn Laws.

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Doesn’t appear to have been a Muslim, which is somewhat surprising.

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And there you have it.

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And yet leftist students do this habitually to “right-wing” flyers and newsletters published on campus that they disagree with, yet nothing ever happens to them.

Funny how that works.

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Yeah – what’s up with that?

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

They have the backing of President Obama, who promised on the campaign trail that collective bargaining and workplace protections “will be a priority” for his administration. “It is unacceptable for TSOs to work under unfair rules and without workplace protections — this makes it more difficult for them to perform their jobs,” Obama wrote in a letter to the American Federation of Government Employees in October. “Since 2001, TSA has had the unfettered ability to deny its workforce even the most basic labor rights and protections.”

Oh, they object to being treated the same way they treat airline passengers? Quelle domage.

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As of today, smokers will have to pay an additional tax 61 cents per pack of cigarettes, amounting to a 156 percent increase – and the very people President Obama promised to spare from higher taxes are bearing the brunt of the cost, since (as ATR has been pointing out on numerous occasions)

• 55 percent of smokers are “working poor”
• One in four smokers live below the poverty line
• On average, smokers, whose median income is a little more than $36,000, make about 30 percent less than non-smokers.

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Shores of Tripoli under Jefferson, yes; shores of Somalia under Obama, no.

Change you can believe in.

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Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their five children, aged from three to 11, will appeal to a court on Thursday in Tennessee, where they fled after attempts by German police three years ago to force the family to obey the country’s laws which make school attendance compulsory.

Huddled masses yearning to breathe free — good luck with that. And stay away from California.

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California has furloughed workers and slashed programs to close a $41 billion budget gap, but it still has more than 400 judges in Los Angeles County who each make more than the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

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

Read it.

Justice Department lawyers concluded in an unpublished opinion earlier this year that the historic D.C. voting rights bill pending in Congress is unconstitutional, according to sources briefed on the issue. But Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who supports the measure, ordered up a second opinion from other lawyers in his department and determined that the legislation would pass muster.

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

Of course, if the Bush administration had done something like this, both Congress and the media would be screaming “Politicization! Partizanship!” for the next ten years. But it’s the Obama Nation, so that’s all right then.

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“We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … ourselves.”

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The nanny state advances apace.

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

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

Read it.

I’m waiting for one to get in an accident and incinerate a city block when the hydrogen tank fails.

But of course a Segway is too dangerous to allow on the streets….

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Perhaps something like this will be the Obamateurs next project.

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This is a serious scam. Legacy Bank of Texas took my brother for over $400 this way. Be warned.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Only in New York.

“NYU is an experimental community,” said Joshua Lawrence Becker, 21, a junior. “I bet student morale will plummet now that (Narnia) is gone.”

I have no doubt.

Read it.

Well, they don’t have Democrats to deal with, as we do. Gives them an unfair advantage, it does.

Steve Sailer cuts to the chase.

As I’ve mentioned before, many a female pundit’s output consists in large part of demands that society’s structures and values be revolutionized so that she, personally, will be considered hotter-looking.

That certainly explains Maureen Dowd.

Sorry, Maureen, but your nemesis, Catherine Zeta-Jones, is brown-eyed, so you can’t actually blame society’s prejudice against brown eyes for you not snagging Michael Douglas.

Ouch.

Read it.

Seems pretty obvious to me. For alleged linguists, the guys at Language Log oft times show astonishing ignorance of real languages and their history.

How many people start sentences (really: sentence fragments) with a conjunction (and, but)? Where did they pick that up? Well, how about from the Bible? St Paul does it all the time — not surprising, since that’s a standard grammatical feature of Greek — and most translators of the Bible kept the same structure, for “authenticity” (Word of God and all that, you know).

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Consumers who are trying them say they sometimes fail to work, or wear out early. At best, people discover that using the bulbs requires learning a long list of dos and don’ts.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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A former U.N. official who oversaw reconstruction funds in Afghanistan diverted half a million dollars from roads, schools and clinics to fund his luxury lifestyle, according to a confidential internal U.N. investigation.

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

Read it.

A United States senator has introduced a bill that would bail out the nation’s newspaper industry, which has fallen on unprecedentedly hard times. It’s an idea that makes sense: given the symbiotic nature of the media and the current administration (and the permanent bureaucracy), nationalizing the newspapers is the perfect way to ensure that they do not lose their status as the monopoly mouthpiece for the leftist intelligentsia.