Senator DeMint exposes Democrat lies.

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Time to choose, then. “Everybody wants to be Hank Williams, but nobody wants to die.”

Megan McArdle dips into sociology.

I’m surprised–though I shouldn’t be, of course–that any number of liberals who are (presumably) comfortable with concepts like unconscious discrimination and privilege when it comes to race, have not even stopped to consider that the same sort of thing might be operating here.

Let’s be honest, coastal folks:  when you meet someone with a thick southern accent who likes NASCAR and attends a bible church, do you think, “hey, maybe this is a cool person”?  And when you encounter someone who went to Eastern Iowa State, do you accord them the same respect you give your friends from Williams?  It’s okay–there’s no one here but us chickens.  You don’t.

Red America exaggerates the contempt, of course.  It’s also true that if you’re expecting racism and sexism, you’ll probably end up misinterpreting perfectly innocent remarks.  But the fact that they aren’t right in every particular does not mean that, in general, they’ve got it wrong.  For one thing, in both DC and New York I’ve spent a fair amount of time listening to liberals make jokes about red states that would horrify them if they were told about blacks.  But even if that weren’t true, I wouldn’t be the best person to assess whether there is prejudice or not.  I’m so close to it that I can’t see it. 

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Just don’t do either one in public.

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Reminds me of a classic WKRP in Cincinnati episode.

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Hey, that’s the way things are done in the Overclass. Nobody’s going to take such a job without negotiating a plush severance package, and now they’re stuck with ’em.

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One of the “benefits” of the government getting involved with commerce.

“That’s almost 20 years of hard work and investment by all the personnel here wiped out at the stroke of a pen. It frightens me and revolts me,” he said.

That’s government for you.

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Can you imagine reading a headline “Americans pilfer Russian equipment”?

And that tells you all you really need to know about international relations.

Steve Sailer reveals the sordid truth that Obama only wanted to organize one community: Can you guess which one?

Ultimately, he didn’t help any steelworkers, black or white. The Southtown Star reported on August 24:

“And none of the laid-off steelworkers Obama talks about in stump speeches, the people he was brought to Chicago to help, could be found for this article, despite repeated requests to the campaign.”

So what is an Obama-style “community organizer?”

It means a radical racial activist who, in Tom Wolfe’s immortal phrase, “mau-maus the flak catchers”—intimidates bureaucrats into giving your ethnicity a bigger slice of the pie. It means, more than anything else, that you organize political protests for more handouts from the taxpayers (even though dependence upon those handouts is one reason the community is so disorganized.)

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Hey, she was just doing her Choice thing, ya know? She just waited a while to be sure.

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What’s a mother progressive to do?

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Of course, they could also put more soundproofing in the damned thing.

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Gas prices have been falling steadily since … when? Oh, gee, maybe it was when President Bush cancelled the Executive Order that barred drilling on the continental shelf.

What an odd coincidence.

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Anybody who is upset by the sight of a mother nursing her child needs to get out more.

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

Think of the Post Office in charge of your health care.

That’s what the Democrats want to do to us.

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In the Good Old Days, a German University student would have made science, not art, out of DNA.

But that was then; this is now.

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The art of poetry is not dead. Unfortunately, it’s vehicle, language, may be.

This phenomenon is discussed in greater depth here.

My experience is that rising-intonation used at the end of supposedly declarative sentences is characteristic of women and homosexuals, but that may just be observational bias on my part.

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Jean-Yves and Bernadette Delane were sailing to France from Australia when they were captured on board their 16-metre French sailing boat Carre d’as in the pirate-ridden waters of the Gulf of Aden on Tuesday.

Well, there you go – avoid the pirate-ridden waters of the Gulf of Aden if you’re rich people on a yacht.

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Pretty bad when even the French are offended.

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I am not making this up.

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Perhaps the conspiracy theorists were right all along.

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And the saddest part is that they don’t even realize how insane that sounds.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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I am not making this up.

“Community organizers work in neighborhoods that have been hit hardest by the failing economy,” said John Raskin, founder of Community Organizers of America and a community organizer on the West Side of Manhattan.  “The last thing we need is for Republican officials to mock us on television when we’re trying to rebuild the neighborhoods they have destroyed.  Maybe if everyone had more houses than they can count, we wouldn’t need community organizers.  But I work with people who are getting evicted from their only home.  If John McCain and the Republicans understood that, maybe they wouldn’t be so quick to make fun of community organizers like me.”

So basically “community organizers” are left-wing agitators who try to herd the Underclass together in order to exert political pressure to squeeze more oink from the public trough. I notice that these people seem to flourish primarily in large, Democrat-run urban areas, like New York and Chicago, where “enlightened public policy” have destroyed families and neighborhoods for the last 40 years.  One hand washes the other, I guess.

Wonder what these people do for a day job? I suspect that it all comes out of the taxpayers’ pockets ultimately.

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France does that to some people.

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After showing his army pass when asked for identification by the hotel’s receptionist, Cpl Stringer was told “we don’t accept military personnel here” and that this was “company policy”, according to his mother Gaynor.

He spent the night in his car after failing to find any other available accomodation late on a Sunday evening, she said.

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

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“For more than two years, the Chinese have stalled [on nuclear talks],” said one defense official frustrated by what he called excessive secrecy and lack of dialogue. He asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the topic.

Whoa, there’s a shock: A Communist dictatorship being secretive and stalling talks?

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No surprises here. Among Arabs, Africans, and other tribal societies, public employment is seen as hitching a ride on the friends-and-family gravy train, not as an actual job.

Any African looking at Barack Obama would see a typical waBenzi: Progressing through elite schools, getting into “public service” as a ward heeler “community organizer” and working his way up the Chicago political machine, getting plum jobs for his friends and relatives and receiving cushy deals in return.

If he gets elected President, they’ll be standing in line — with their hands out.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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Some times the old ways are best.

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Yang Qinghua, the vice-director of the Cultural Heritage Bureau, asked for the route of the train to be changed. But the Beijing-Shanghai Express Railway company, which is in charge of the project, refused, citing its “national importance”.

The city therefore instructed the company to pay five million yuan (£410,000) to excavate the site fully before beginning work.

“These precious cultural relics absolutely must be excavated before construction continues,” said Mr Yang. “The site contains eight levels of cultural relics dating back through Chinese history. You can’t just ignore them.”

However, the company never replied and simply proceeded with the construction, destroying around 20,000 sq ft of the site in the process.

Why, those greedy capitalist bastards…. Oh, wait….

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Of course, that’s only effective if the boy in question worries about what’s on YouTube.

In which case, he’s a total loser and deserves a little humiliation — good practice for the rest of his life.

Personally, I think these girls ought to thank God that they’re rid of these losers.

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There is something deeply disturbing about this….

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Of course — straining at gnats and swallowing camels is what leftoids do best. Why do you think that lawyers give most of their political contributions to Democrats?

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Of course not. “When everybody’s somebody/Then no one’s anybody.”

Most of the jobs that “require” a college degree these days actually don’t, in any practical sense; I’ve got three degrees, which makes me a more interesting person, I’m sure, but not one of which involves anything that I use in my daily work.

Considering the state of the educational system these days, I suspect that employers these days require a college degree to make sure that applicants have at least what used to count as a high-school education. Go take a look at what they used to teach in high school during the ’30s and ’40s — and, and if you want a real scare, look that the tests they gave eight-graders back a hundred years ago.

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Aw, Mom….

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Not if the Democrats get in.

Megan McArdle, ordinarily so sound, just doesn’t get it when it comes to food.

Crunchy cons–and everyone else–wouldn’t be so afraid of this if the rest of us didn’t get mad at people who have difficult ideals, and then put them into practice.  As long as no one else is doing it, we can let our own behavior go, swept along unthinkingly in the comforting certainty of the herd.  But once one of the sheep starts moving in a different direction, we have to start wondering if we’re going the right way.

Whenever there are a group of people who discover what they consider to be “the way”, they get very tedious on the subject to those to whom it isn’t quite as obvious. Vegetarians are especially boring about it, but “crunchy cons” are almost as bad. They ascribe all sorts of character defects to those who resist their blandishments, because the alternative is to accept that hey, there just might be cogent arguments on the other side of the question — and the True Believer refuses to entertain that thought, or any like it.

You don’t like to eat meat? Fine, give me your share. If God had intended me to be a herbivore I would have been born with hooves. You want to cancel the Industrial Revolution and go back to buying from local farms? Fine, but I prefer to keep my food budget small and spend the rest on, oh, say, books.

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I thought people with expensive yachts all had platoons of heavily-armed thugs to do their bidding?

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So quit whining about what a bad day you’ve had.

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Leftists are essentially haters, and leftist policies are characteristically designed to punish people they don’t like. Think about it, and you’ll see it’s true.

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With campus no-guns-unless-you’re-the-killer policies, sounds like a very useful thing.

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“Vote for Barack! Get it in the shorts!” There’s a winning campaign theme for you.

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And I, for one, am looking forward to it.

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Sen. Barack Obama sought more than $3.4 million in congressional earmarks for clients of the lobbyist son of his Democratic running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, records show. Obama succeeded in getting $192,000 for one of the clients, St. Xavier University in suburban Chicago.

Democrats? Corrupt? Boy, that’s news.

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I guess the Overclass would get their wish to revive the trains. I strongly suspect that a lot of leftoids would have played with trains as a kid if they could have figured out how to put the tracks together.

Just think: Four days from New York to Los Angeles rather than eight hours, and you’d have to travel through all those grubby big square states full of non-organic farmers and people who drive pickups with gun racks in the bag. The horror! The horror! But they’d get to have negro servants again; I suppose that would be something.

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Politicians abuse power, and the less power they have the more they abuse it. This is a particularly absurd example. Be careful who you vote for; you never know what you’re going to get.

The city attorney told the mayor that a link is perfectly legal — but offered to send a cease-and-desist anyway, which the mayor approved.

That that’s why lawyers have a popularity rating below used-car salesmen.

How can you tell the difference between a lawyer and a prostitute? A prostitute will make you feel good for at least a little while, doesn’t wear a necktie, and charges less.