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I guess New York City is over-exposed.

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Well, I’ve always thought so.

But that’s me.

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Unfortunately, a lot of doctors won’t take on a new patient if they don’t handle that patient’s insurance company. I had that happen to me with two different specialists recommended by my primary care physician.

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They didn’t get any help from the Vatican, either. I’m astonished they forgot to mention that.

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Imagine my distress.

This is the worst news I’ve seen since I read about the closing of the hula-hoop museum.

Quelle domage.

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The obvious implication, which the authors are too cowardly to spell out, is that McCain is a hypocrite promising relief to “working families” while actually benefitting “corporate fatcats”. Bias in our media? No, never.

 “I wish he’d be as aggressive with tax pork as he is with spending pork,” said Leonard E. Burman, an Urban Institute tax policy analyst.

Translation: “tax pork” is tax cuts designed to get the economy moving again. Notice that the Urban Institute, a leftoid think tank, is not identified as such. Would the Cato Institute or the American Enterprise Institute get that kind of pass? It is to laugh.

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Seder as fashion statement.  That’s the OverClass for you.

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Wonder whether there’s any way to speed that up….

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Geez — they bitch about burning oil because it causes Global Warming, and then they bitch about high oil prices (which reduce the amount of burning oil, which supposedly causes Global Warming).

Hey, guys, make up your minds.

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Compare and contrast.

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Not that anyone will be allowed to do anything about it.

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A good thing for all of us to remember. The distinction between price and value has always confused socialists and others ignorant of basic economics.

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Of course, we”ve always known he was a socialist.

Too bad there isn’t a Geneva Convention against stupidity.

David Friedman asks a very obvious question.

So far, however, they seem to have been unable to identify the girl who made the phone call. They did identify the man she accused–who turned out to be in Arizona, said he hadn’t been in Texas since 1977, and has not been arrested, which I assume means that the evidence supports his claim. 

Funny how that works out.

Which suggests an obvious conjecture—that the phone call was a fake, possibly by someone in law enforcement who wanted an excuse to raid the ranch, possibly by someone else in the area who disapproved of the FLDS and wanted to set off such a raid. I find it surprising that none of the news stories, at least that I have seen, have even mentioned that possibility.

Indeed.

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I’ve always found it curious that rich people are so eager to give money to people who denounce them.

Maybe they have a cognitive disconnect that allows them to say, ‘Well, they’re not talking about me, it’s those other rich people — the swine — that are being complained about.’

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Why does this come as such a surprise? Nelson Mandela, and the ANC party he founded, are Marxist revolutionaries, a fact that they have never bothered to hide. Of course they would side with Mugabe, another self-proclaimed Marxist revolutionary — and other thug states around the world.
Rogue?  Certainly. Democrat? Only to the Washington Post.

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Old people rock … when we can find our glasses.

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Obama does fulfill liberalism’s transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

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

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Michael Flitcraft, a 23-year-old sophomore at the University of Cincinnati, has become a leading advocate for college students to carry weapons on campus. He’s an organizer for Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, a grass-roots organization that was formed after last year’s Virginia Tech massacre that left 32 college students and professors dead.

The group boasts more than 25,000 members.

I guess intelligence had to break out on college campi sooner or later.

“I don’t think the answer to bullets flying is to send more bullets flying,” said Gene Ferrara, the police chief at the University of Cincinnati. “My belief is we ought to be focusing on what we do to prevent the shooting from starting.”

Yeah, and we’ve seen how well that works — and how well people like the police chief at the University of Cincinnati have been at doing their jobs.

The answer to bullets flying is more bullets flying … back at the shooter. But people with a cop mentality won’t ever admit that — they want to be armed while everybody else is disarmed. Criminals think the same way.

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That’s because a lot of health care jobs are labor-intensive and don’t take a lot of training.

Rather like manufacturing jobs were during their Golden Age.

Perhaps someday we’ll be talking about “scrub-green collar” workers.

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Proof that McCain is an idiot.

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The nannification of public education proceeds apace.

Hooker [the principal] explained to parents in a letter this month that tag had become a game “of intense aggression.”

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So when has that ever stopped the government?

It must be pretty bad if even the Washington Post is noticing.

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Fine in theory, but the practice is the sticky part. Somehow, what constitutes “affluence” keeps working its way down the income chain.

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Forward into the past….

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Now that’s a stretch.

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It’s more interesting than you might suspect.

Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.

Of course, this is the type of article you’d only find in the New Yorker.

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That explains most primaries.

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A publication tailor-made for White People.

It’s the kind of arty, cheeky, ironic magazine that just published a story called “Sweat Sock: The Other White Meat.”

There you have it: “arty”, “cheeky”, “ironic”. The White People trifecta.

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A conversation only White People could face.

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Making excuses for autonomous human actors is always a form of condescension, I’d say. But when you make excuses for arguably what many people regard as normal, even laudable behavior, you double down on the disrespect, because you are also challenging your subjects’ moral framework

Would that more liberals realized that.

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Well, better late than never, I suppose.

Inside Politics.

Inside the Beltway.

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If nothing else, do it for the children.

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Mike Williams, a Florida union member, compared the DNC’s refusal to seat the delegates from those two states as similar to when a company locks outs striking union employees.

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It’s For The Children, of course.

Is there no notion so absurd that Congress won’t make it the basis of legislation? I haven’t heard of one yet.

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That ought to come as no surprise. Israel isn’t a member of the bend-over-and-grease-up crowd in the U.N.

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This sort of folk mythology is, I suspect, behind the otherwise inexplicable pro-unionism of otherwise intelligent people, such as the author Eric Flint.

Any system is capable of exploitation, and a system that allows considerable freedom allows considerable room for exploitation, depending on the personal morality of the people involved.

Unfortunately, pro-union regressives are very quick to jump on the exploitation that occurred in the system they don’t like, and very slow to jump on the exploitation that occurs in the system they do.

Read it.

The market tends to take care of such companies. Think of it as evolution in action.

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Apparently terrorism doesn’t have good medical benefits.

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It will be interesting to see who wins: Bill Cosby or Jeremiah Wright.

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There’s this widespread delusion that what government agents do is ipso facto superior to what individual citizens can (or can be trusted to) do because government agents represent the “best and brightest” expertise available.

Anybody who’s ever dealt with the government knows this to be horseshit. On average, government employees are dumber and more arrogant than most private sector employees, and the reason for that is not hard to find: They and their bosses aren’t subject to the discipline of the market, so they have less incentive to work for their “customers” (us) than for themselves.

The essential flaw in such nanny-state institutions as Child Welfare agencies is that it attracts the sort of know-it-alls who think that they know better how to raise other people’s children than the people themselves do — and that “expertise” gives them, not just the right, but the moral obligation to interfere whenever they choose.

There may perhaps be a case to make that in some portion of the available situations they’re correct. But that still doesn’t authorize them to act as high-handedly as they do. Just because I may know better than you what you ought to be doing doesn’t authorize me to tell you (much less force you under color of law) to live your life my way.

And there’s always Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy lurking in the background.

Read it.

Manifest behavior is always the summation of competing wishes and inhibitions, most of which are unconscious. When someone makes a great show of his personal piety yet his manifest behavior is often damaging to others, it is worth wondering if he is expressing forbidden unconscious wishes in ways that are disguised and acceptable to himself. Jimmy Carter, our nation’s worst ex-President, offers an excellent case in point.

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AIR TRAVEL has gotten so bad these days that going to the airport requires either an exercise in sadomasochism or an abiding faith that everything will be okay. That faith seems to be shattered daily.

Told you so. It’s so bad that even the Washington Post has noticed. That’s pretty bad.

Read it.

For more than two decades, 250 historians and specialists labored to produce the first six volumes of the General History of Latin America, an exhaustive work financed by UNESCO, the United Nations organization created to preserve global culture and heritage.

Then, over the course of two years, UNESCO paid to destroy many of those books and nearly 100,000 others by turning them to pulp, according to an external audit.

Remind me what good the U.N. is.

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Good luck with that. Anybody with an iPhone is a journalist these days.

But what exactly is he trying to hide, eh?

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Extremist ideas are being spread by Islamic study centres linked to British universities and backed by multi-million-pound donations from Saudi Arabia and Muslim organisations, a new report claims.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

Guess I’m not the only one looking askance at the drivy-by media’s coverage.