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Guess That Party: Note that Voinovich is immediately tagged as a Republican, but nowhere will you see any mention of the fact that White was a Democrat, thus avoiding the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the city improved under Republican administration and then collapsed under Democrat administration.

Voinovich is also one of the most notorious RINOs in the history of the state of Ohio, so calling him “tough-minded” says more about the author than the subject.

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The wage of sin is death.

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Can you blame them?

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Don’t think of it as selling out; think of it as buying in.

Senators fetch the best prices, after all.

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The Democratic Party is of the intellectual rich, not of the worker, and not very inclined to deep change. The most critical political story of the election was the 12 to 15 percent shift of the rich, educated and suburban to the Democrats, offsetting the shift of about 6 percent of the less educated or professional, but more religious and rural to the Republicans.

A sharp observation. Unfortunately, as with many academics opining outside of their field, it is followed by a stupid conclusion:

By far the greatest issue before us, one barely on anyone’s agenda, is the astounding degree of economic inequality, perhaps approaching the levels of 1929 or even 1913. This obscene outcome, an astounding concentration of wealth by the super-rich, is a consequence of market failure – the capacity of those at the top to exercise monopoly power over the economy, and whose tax cuts and deregulation contributed to the current financial crisis and deepening recession.

1. “barely on anyone’s agenda”? The left has been whining about this for as long as I’ve been reading newspapers.

2. Economic inequality is “obscene” only if you’re reasoning from the a priori position that there is some mandate either in morality or natural law for economic equality.

3. The “astounding concentration of wealth by the super-rich” is a result of modern technological progress that produces a “winner take all” culture (why, there’s even a book by that name that explains it very well) as markets widen and there is more room for good products and services to drive out less good products and services.

4. None of this is a “market failure” unless you consider the market to be a mechanism to produce the result you want rather than the result that it actually produces. Hint: The market doesn’t care what you want. It works when willing buyers and sellers get together; the only “market failure” is when nannyists in government use their coercive power to meddle, and that’s not the fault of the market.

5. The “capacity of those at the top to exercise monopoly power” is soley the fault of the government; only the government can produce a true monopoly, and it does so by interfering with the market. That’s why lobbyists make the riches that they do — when legislators and bureaucrats determine what can be bought and sold, the first thing to be bought and sold will be legislators.

6. “Tax cuts and deregulation” didn’t contribute at all to the current economic crisis, as anybody who has been paying attention and has two brain cells to rub together would realize. It was produced by governmental agencies and quasi-agencies meddling in the housing and financial markets in a vain attempt to achieve politically fashionable ends. The market works whether you want it to or not; try to mess with it, and it will bite you in the ass every time.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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Look at Britain today, and see where we will be after four years of Obama.

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Manipulate the market? Why would they want to do that?

Notice that the Obamessiah isn’t doing anything about oil market manipulation; he’s too busy trying to get his Porkulus bill through Congress.

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Considering the train wreck that is the British police, I can’t blame them.

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Simon Heffer wonders how a young man who is illiterate could have gained seven GCSEs.

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Removing apostrophes from road signs will cause “utter chaos”, the Apostrophe Protection Society has warned.

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Can you blame them? Fortunately America isn’t in the same boat as Britain; the government doesn’t totally control the educational system. We don’t have a bullshit “National Curriculum” and we don’t have a set of government tests to determine whether people have achieved a secondary school education. It is not, however, for lack of trying on the part of education unions and “progressives”.

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The five-year-old boy and his four-year-old sister were being cared for by their grandparents because their mother, a recovering heroin addict, was not considered capable.

But social workers stepped in to remove the children from their care because of concerns about their age, despite the grandmother being just 46 and the grandfather 59.

The couple only found out last week that two homosexual men would be adopting the children in the next few weeks, and said that when they objected they were warned they may never see them again.

I suppose it’s only a coincidence that “1984” was set in Britain.

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As the nation’s drug war rages on, with its weekly tallies of headless torsos, it is getting harder to produce a shock wave in the Mexican media. But the gruesome recipes of “The Stewmaker” have gripped public attention here, as authorities describe how a “disposal expert” working for a Tijuana drug cartel boss allegedly got rid of hundreds of bodies by dissolving the corpses in vats of acid.

Yeah, we want more of those people in this country.

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The District of Columbia has the third-largest downtown in the U.S., ranking only behind New York and Chicago. More than 10 million square feet of commercial office space was added to the District between 1996 and 2005, with another 10 million having been brought on-line or underway since then. Additionally, geographic areas that in the 1960s were entirely rural farmland – such as Tysons Corner, VA, and Gaithersburg, Maryland – have grown so fast that they are today unrecognizable. For example, Tysons Corner has over 46 million square feet of office and retail space, and a daytime population of over 100,000. The Washington metropolitan area is the eight largest market in the country – and comprises the fifth largest market when combined with the Baltimore metro area – with a 2007 population of over 5.3 million people, yet almost nothing is manufactured here. It makes one wonder exactly how many people are required to properly rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

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“There were seven witnesses in the cafe. There had been no argument, no shouting” when the young woman was attacked, said Virginia Tech spokesman Mark Owczarski, confirming that Yang and been decapitated.

Hey, how about that gun-free zone, eh? Such safety! Such security! Send your kid there to be safe!

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The administration’s plans are contained in an executive order calling for the “prompt and appropriate disposition of the individuals currently detained at Guantánamo,” according to a draft copy obtained by The Washington Post.

Unlawful combatants, like pirates, may be executed on the spot. Somehow I don’t think that’s what the Obama Nation has in mind, though.

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And, of course, let’s not forget the Democrats, from FDR on down, who set up and expanded this system.

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Yeah, that gun-free zone concept really works well, doesn’t it? If you’re going to kill somebody, do it at a school; you can be sure nobody is going to shoot back.

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“Human-rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov told reporters Monday he would use all legal means to overturn the early release of the most senior Russian military officer ever convicted of war crimes in Chechnya. After walking out of the news conference, he was shot dead. A journalist with him was also killed.”

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I’m sorry, but this guy ought either to (a) not wear a suit or (b) cut his fargin hair. He looks like a retard stuck in the sixties.

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The persistent problem with environmentalism is that every fashionable alternative to common everyday processes, especially in the energy field, involve stuff on the backend that are even more unfriendly to the environment. But of course the True Believers can’t be bothered to worry about that. Life is a process of which they only see the final step — that’s why they typically have no knowledge of history prior to the day they were born.

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And you will participate, whether you want to or not. That’s what passes for democracy and free markets in these degenerate times.

New regulations require, for instance, that a typical 100-watt bulb be replaced by one that provides the same amount of light with 72 watts. Light bulbs will have to be even more efficient by 2020.

Now what business is this of the government? At all?

I thought that the whole point of the American Revolution was to get the government out of things like determining our light bulb choices. Apparently I was wrong.

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More than 200 secondary schools are shunning traditional subjects to teach “life skills” such as team-building and communication in themed classes.

If those were my kids, I’d ask for my money back.

Oh, wait, the government pays for schooling over there.

Well, then, as a taxpayer, I’d still ask for my money back.

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

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Hakimzadeh, who is a director of the Iranian Heritage Foundation and a published author, pleaded guilty to 14 counts of theft in May.

He was jailed for two years at Wood Green Crown Court on Friday.

The 10 British Library works which he admitted defacing were worth £71,000 alone.

Two years seems … inadequate.

Well, being Iranian he’s probably a Muslim, so we ought to do it the Muslim way: Cut his hand off.

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Needless to say, this is as silly as a Muslim cab driver refusing to drive somebody carrying alcohol.

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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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They’re so sentimental.

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Well, he’s certainly got more experience.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón said yesterday that President-elect Barack Obama should take steps to stem a “worrisome” rise in anti-U.S. sentiment in Latin America.

I have an idea — let’s let Latin America worry about a rise in anti-Latin American sentiment in the U.S. for a change.

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Hm. After a lifetime of studly superheroes with studly teenage male “wards” … this is news?

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Tony and Belinda Gattie cannot stop the creatures from turning their lawn into a mudbath because badgers are protected by law.

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Sure, we can make sure that all babies are healthy babies — if we kill the unhealthy ones before they are born.

Margaret Sanger is laughing up a storm right now.

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Note the prune-faced witches in the picture. God forbid their little darlings should be exposed to any tool that might be used constructively.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal viglance, it could happen here. And probably has.

Read it.

Many journalists around the world have to live with a hard truth: It really doesn’t matter what your nation’s laws say about freedom of the press if your local police will not stop a mob from burning your newsroom (or worse).

Now tell me with a straight face that you can resist that headline.

The student, from San Diego, California, USA, insisted she was not demeaning herself and had been persuaded to offer herself to the highest bidder after her sister Avia, 23, successfully raised money for her own degree after working as a prostitute for three weeks.

Chances of her actually being a virgin: Maybe 1 percent.

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Not to mention what he’s done to the rest of us.

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What’s the Arabic for “brown shirt”?

Arnold Kling draws an historical parallel.

My guess is that in 1916, anyone who doubted his own ability to direct an enormous offensive involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers would never have made it to general. Similarly, today, anyone who doubts the ability of a handful of technocrats to sensibly allocate $800 billion would never make it into government or the mainstream media.

I sure hope he’s wrong.

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Joel Kotkin isn’t afraid to say what we’re all thinking.

The most obvious recent equivalent, Richard Nixon, did cause harm to the conservative cause, but that damage was short-lived. It reflected his deviousness more than his policies. Similarly, Bill Clinton’s many personality flaws weakened the Democrats’ hold on the White House, but inflicted no permanent harm to liberalism.

In contrast, the Katrina-scale disaster that has been the Bush presidency may leave his ideological backers in the wilderness for years to come. Over the past eight years, Bush has done more to undermine conservatism than all of the country’s college faculties, elite media and Hollywood studios put together.

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Not that there’s anything wrong with that. After all, no culture is superior to any other! Diversity is a good thing! Who are we to criticize!

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Oh, yeah, China is a Commie dictatorship. Almost forgot.

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Better watch your step in Ohio.

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Question: What makes this group a “church”, other than the fact that it calls itself one? Is it a “church” only in the same sense that Bill Clinton was “the first black President”?

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This illustrates quite well the general Democrat approach to law: Laws only apply if the Democrat in question agrees with it.

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Other than the war and some tax cuts, I don’t see much difference between George Bush’s administration and your typical Democrat’s – Bill Clinton, say. He certainly hasn’t done much to lessen government interference in our daily lives.

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And why is that? Could it be high malpractice insurance coupled with low insurance reimbursement rates and semi-slave labor conditions for residents?