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Nixon without the 5-o’clock shadow.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Gareth Jones, 30, punched Deborah James so hard she left the Lloyds TSB function event on a stretcher and attached to an oxygen mask, and will be scarred for life.

You don’t mess with Marines. You just don’t.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Darwin Award nominee.

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Not your father’s Britain.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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“It’s really vindictive,” said an attorney for some the sitters, Dennis Cunningham. “They don’t have this kind of money.”

Hey — if you can’t pay the fine, don’t climb the pine.

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If a liberal Democratic administration had put hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money at risk by bailing out Bear Stearns and nationalizing American International Group (AIG), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, wouldn’t conservatives accuse Democrats of “socialism”? Can Mr. McCain now square a circle by calling himself a conservative while favoring increased regulation?

When even Democrats can smell the coffee, what is the problem with John McCain?

Now I know what former Sen. Gary Hart meant when he told an audience of wealthy Republican businessmen during his 1984 presidential campaign, “I know why you are conservatives — you favor private enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich.”

And that, sad to say, is the plain truth — certainly when it comes to Republican Congressmen.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Yes, the gains of the very rich have increased the fastest. But that is in part because of a statistical illusion. When poor people earn more over time, they move into the middle class or the upper class and are no longer  classified as poor. Consider someone who was earning $20,000 a year and saw her income move to, say, $50,000 as she moved up the career ladder. That 150 percent gain in income isn’t apparent, because we no longer categorize her as poor. But every penny of income gain by a rich person is counted, because there is no higher income class she can move into.

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Government is the problem, not the cure: An illustration.

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I was right — Nixon without the 5 o’clock shadow….

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Perhaps the spirits just don’t like Muslims.

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But here is the truly offensive section of an overreaching piece of legislation:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.This puts the Treasury’s actions beyond the rule of law.

And here I thought that FDR was dead…. Turns out he’s living in the White House disguised as George W Bush.

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I refuse to accept any alien species in a science fiction story unless their culture is stranger than that of the Japanese. This rule of thumb has stood me in good stead for over 40 years, and it’s still going strong.

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It’s official: George W Bush is Richard Nixon without the 5-o’clock shadow.

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Crime rates are up from last year. Arrests, traffic stops and gun recoveries are down. And while there is dispute over the precise reasons, the union representing police officers in this city says it is partly because officers are doing their jobs gingerly, out of fear that the controversial police superintendent won’t back them if they face misconduct charges.

Well, that’s what happens when politics intrudes into police work.

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But we won’t, because the teachers’ unions won’t let us.

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Well, why not….

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The Atlantic takes a look at Stuff White People Like.

Lander’s White People aren’t always white, and the vast majority of whites aren’t White People (he doesn’t even capitalize the term). … Lander, like many of these writers, traces this group’s values to the 1960s, and there’s clearly a connection between a politics based on “self-cultivation” (to quote the Students for a Democratic Society’s gaseous manifesto, the Port Huron Statement) and what Lander defines as White People’s ethos: “their number-one concern is about the best way to make themselves happy.”

Neal Boortz puts it in words even a Democrat can understand. They won’t admit it, of course, but then, they never do.

OK .. so we all know that a lot of really bad real estate loans were made. The political class would sure love for us to believe that the blame here rests squarely on “greedy” (try to define that word) mortgage brokers and lenders. The truth is that most of the blame rests on political meddling in the credit decisions of these mortgage lenders.

Political correctness won the day. Washington made it clear to banks and other lending institutions that if they did not do something .. and fast .. to bring more minorities and low-income Americans into the world of home ownership there would be a heavy price to pay. Congress set up processes (Research the Community Redevelopment Act) whereby community activist groups and organizers could effectively stop a bank’s efforts to grow if that bank didn’t make loans to unqualified borrowers. Enter, stage left, the “subprime” mortgage. These lenders knew that a very high percentage of these loans would turn to garbage – but it was a price that had to be paid if the bank was to expand and grow. We should note that among the community groups browbeating banks into making these bad loans was an outfit called ACORN. There is one certain presidential candidate that did a lot of community organizing for ACORN. I won’t mention his name so as to avoid politicizing this column.

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Of course they don’t shop at Goodwill, the women said.

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These are funny. Trust me.

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To find anything comparable to crowds’ euphoric reactions to Mr. Obama, you would have to go back to old newsreels of German crowds in the 1930s, with their adulation of their Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler. With hindsight, we can look back on those people with pity, knowing now how many of them would be led to their deaths by the man they idolized.

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This must be what it was like living in the early 16th century.

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Give it a taser and I’ll take one.

Alex Tabarrok says No.

Alex Tabarrok explains it all to you.

We’re better off without it. In this, as in so many things, FDR’s government did exactly the wrong thing.

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Thus bringing the Old World in line with the New.

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Sure, watch our Overclass destroy the Indian culture the way they’ve destroyed the American.

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People who startle easily in response to threatening images or loud sounds seem to have a biological predisposition to adopt conservative political positions on many hot-button issues, according to unusual new research published yesterday.

Imagine finding a “study” like this in the Washington Post. Guess they don’t know all that many conservatives.

The finding suggests that people who are particularly sensitive to signals of visual or auditory threats also tend to adopt a more defensive stance on political issues, such as immigration, gun control, defense spending and patriotism. People who are less sensitive to potential threats, by contrast, seem predisposed to hold more liberal positions on those issues.

That’s because they’re stupid and wouldn’t recognize a threat when they see one.

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Of course the stupid ones, like Sanchez, will ignore the ban, while the sensible ones are made to suffer.

Government — narrowing in on the most ridiculous solution with unerring accuracy.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Public Health.

“Today’s students want to contribute, to empower individuals and communities to take charge of their own health,” said Ruth Gaare Bernheim, who teaches health policy at the University of Virginia. “I think they also intuitively realize that the world is their community and that the gains of the 21st century will be in global public health.”

AIDS is a dramatic example of how whole populations, not just individuals, can be at increased risk for disease — a key epidemiological concept. The emergence in the mid-1990s of life-extending treatment, which is only now being brought to Africa and Asia, where most AIDS patients live, provides a lesson in equity — the principle that underlies public health.

Only if you stick your weiner where it doesn’t belong. But I guess that describes most kids today.

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Too bad — that will just encourage people to stay in California.

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Truth from across the pond. Britain is not totally bereft of common sense. Yet.

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Hey, times are hard…. Anyway, the airlines do it, and who, riding an airplane, isn’t treated like a drug dealer? Makes perfect sense to me.

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Megan McArdle speaks some sense.

Especially in recent years, the income of the wealthy has become more volatile than the income of the middle class and below.  In good years, their earnings soar, and Uncle Sam reaps more revenue than expected.  In bad years–particularly bad years on Wall Street, since most of that money comes in the form of some sort of security, rather than cash–tax revenues nosedive.  Incidentally, the more we focus on taxing the rich, the worse this problem will get.

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We have the technology.

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Truly, you can’t make this stuff up.

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I’d love to have one of these things today.

Read it. More here.

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You’ll never outfox the fox.

Mencius Moldbug is on the case.

The great thing about being a skeptical generalist is that you trust your own ability to think about X, instead of trusting those with actual knowledge and experience in X. I am certainly no opponent of knowledge or experience, but it should be plain to everyone at this point that our financial system is, in at least one mysterious and incomprehensible way, broken.

So those who know it, know the broken thing. Worse, they believe that the dollar system is exactly what it purports itself to be – money is money, bonds are bonds, banks are banks, etc. And they have built a large superstructure of models on these understandings. Said models do not appear to be in perfect working order.