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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.

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Not that they’ll ever get much credit.

The Hog doesn’t do political commentary any more. Nope. Wouldn’t think of it.

It looks like the liberals have won the education battle. Socialism has caused the deaths of tens of millions of people, and it has never produced a good standard of living anywhere, and it is the greatest evil mankind has ever encountered. But a fair number of Americans, especially those who were “educated” after our school system was destroyed by liberals, think socialism is…pretty rad. No work! Free beers! Che T-shirts! If you want to be a lazy, flabby slouch all your life, socialism is the bomb. A lot of people are content to live that way. Clip your own wings and belly up to the trough.

Just tools and food, and some religion here and there. That’s all. Nothing else.

Here is the lesson conservatives should have learned from the last three elections, especially after seeing the impact of swing voters. The stupid are incredibly dangerous. The stupid make totalitarianism possible. Our kids are stupid, and they’re getting more stupid every decade. Look out.

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Elizabeth Wurzel, a writer turned lawyer, bites the hand that fed her.

Anyone who toils in the legal-industrial complex — better known as Big Law — should be able to tell you how we got here. Corporate attorneys like me, even those with the eyesight and insight of Mr. Magoo, all should have been able to see this financial collapse coming.

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This is the season of the beat-sweetener. A beat-sweetener (some prefer the term source-greaser) is a gratuitously flattering profile that a reporter writes about a government official in the hope that it will encourage (or, at the very least, not impede) that reporter’s access to the official in question. Newspapers and magazines have been full of them, and even the uninitiated may feel they’ve been reading a lot of dull profiles lately without knowing exactly why. My advice is to adopt a defensive-reader posture and treat all profiles of Obama’s new team as guilty until proven innocent. If you encounter emollient rhetoric in the first five paragraphs, skip the rest and move on. A beat-sweetener is a meal prepared for someone other than yourself, and there’s no reason you should waste precious time ingesting it.

The smell must be getting pretty bad when a Democrat administration — and its publicity arm, the dinosaur media — are being criticized in Slate, mouthpiece of the Chattering Classes.

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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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Good news for us, bad news for the Regressives.

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No rose without a thorn.

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Put a 50-cal mount on that puppy and I’m in.

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I like the one with the lights inset into the roofline.

The Lamborghini isn’t bad, either.

Darwin Award nominee.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Another good reason not to live in the urban core.

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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.

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The U.S. Treasury took enormous powers for itself last fall by telling Congress they would use it to “ensure the economic well-being of Americans.” Six months after passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 Americans are worse off.

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was sold to Congress and the American public as an absolute necessity to save the American Dream of homeownership. Once the legislation was passed and the funds were released, however, Treasury decided to give the money to banks with no restrictions on its use – no monitoring, no reporting requirements, no nothing. We are worse off today than we were when the legislation was signed – and are likely to remain so when TARP has its first year birthday later this year.

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.

Carrie Vaughn (whose books you really ought to read, by the way; she’s in the list of Recommended Writers over there on the right) takes on the love that launched a thousand books.

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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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Or it could just be a city whose revenues are down and could use some publicity.

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Yeah, they’re the winners.

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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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One of Spain’s most enduring historical mysteries is close to being solved as experts undertake a project to decipher more than 10,000 Arabic inscriptions adorning the walls and ceilings of the Alhambra palace in Granada.

Wonder how many of them just say “Hey, we’re really great!” and “Kill the infidels!”?

The Nasrid motto – “There is no victor but Allah” – is the most common inscription found so far.

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Yeah, there are a lot of Aztecs hanging around wanting that cleared up….

Check it out.

Some people just have entirely too much time on their hands.

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Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a confidential report that labeled the CIA program “inhuman.”

Isn’t it amazing how often these “confidential reports” wind up being published by, oh, say, the Washington Post?

Let’s see: Any criticism for “gross violations of medical ethics” of doctors who deliberately kill unborn children? Nope, not here.

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Pay-for-performance, the personnel system President George W. Bush advanced in an effort to replace the traditional General Schedule wage scale, has come under tough scrutiny by federal employee unions and their allies on Capitol Hill.

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

But now, eight chairmen and subcommittee chairmen in the House have upped the ante and urged the Obama administration to suspend any further implementation — government-wide — of pay-for-performance.

The chairmen, all Democrats, questioned the justification for such programs in a Friday letter to Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Yeah, everybody knows that government workers get paid without reference to performance. What was Bush thinking?

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And you think you’ve got problems….

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Darwin Award nominee.

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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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We have the technology.

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And there you have it.

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GM and Segway’s joint venture is probably best described as a rickshaw without all the charm.

Well, once the nanny-staters wouldn’t let the Segway out in public, this is the obvious next step.

More here.

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I’m sorry, that’s just wrong.

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You never know what can happen when you fly the friendly skies….

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That’s certainly one of my recurring nightmares.

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I rather suspect that the Red State/Blue State borders are a more accurate predictor of where the U.S. would split, but I still find this sort of speculation fascinating. Fragmentation of the U.S is not an uncommon conceit in speculative fiction but usually depends more on the needs of the plot than of any practical analysis.

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Well, it’s got bacon. Duh.

Jeff Jarvis points to the silver lining of the current financial crisis.

Rates for the Hilton are about the same as for the Marriott. The Hilton site won’t say whether they charge for internet access. I call. They charge. I hang up. I book the Marriott, where it is included.

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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.

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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.

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Peace Pie Street and Treacle Mine Road are among the list of streets named after the comic fantasy series of novels at the Kingwell Rise development in Wincanton, Somerset.

A beam of sunlight in an otherwise Stygian world.

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.

But at the heart of the dispute is a struggle that is tormenting Republicans both in the state and nationally: whether to rigidly pursue an agenda dominated by conservative social issues or reach out to more moderate voters with a pledge to focus chiefly on economic concerns.

That little word “rigidly” reveals the unconscious bias that permeates what passes for journalism these days. An unbiased reporter wouldn’t have written it; an unbiased editor wouldn’t have permitted it. But we have neither any more.

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