Eleanor Clift has been a Voice of the Crust so long that it has made her tone-deaf.

The Justice Department’s decision to let former House majority leader Tom DeLay off the hook and end the six-year-long investigation that drove him out of Washington at the peak of his power should win the Obama administration some points with Republicans, if not Democrats. This is the second high-profile Republican that Attorney General Eric Holder has vindicated, the other being the late senator Ted Stevens, whose corruption case Holder declined last year to prosecute.

Let’s see if I understand this: Because Holder has decided to say “Never mind!” to a politically-motivated legal proceeding once its objective (to destroy the effectiveness of a powerful opponent) is accomplished, He’s The Nice One? That’s like having a wrestler throw sand in the other guy’s eyes and having a commentator say, “Hey, he didn’t kick him in the groin while he was distracted! What a great guy!”

In Washington, these big scandals almost always end anti-climactically.

That’s because the objective wasn’t to actually follow through, but to put the other side off balance. C’mon, Eleanor, how long have you been in Washington that you don’t know this?

Power Line sums it up:

Tom DeLay exemplifies a thoroughly modern phenomenon: a public figure whose career–and, one suspects, whose life–has been ruined by the prosecutorial/media/political complex. After six years of headlines, DeLay’s persecutors have nothing to show for their efforts. Except, of course, that they ruined the former Majority Leader of the House of Representatives.

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Subhead: Canceling the Democrat Class Warfare Talking Points.

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Joel Spolsky turns into a Grumpy Old Man.

When I was a kid, I learned to program on punched cards. If you made a mistake, you didn’t have any of these modern features like a backspace key to correct it. You threw away the card and started over.

Heck, in 1900, Latin and Greek were required subjects in college, not because they served any purpose, but because they were sort of considered an obvious requirement for educated people. In some sense my argument is no different that the argument made by the pro-Latin people (all four of them). “[Latin] trains your mind. Trains your memory. Unraveling a Latin sentence is an excellent exercise in thought, a real intellectual puzzle, and a good introduction to logical thinking,” writes Scott Barker. But I can’t find a single university that requires Latin any more. Are pointers and recursion the Latin and Greek of Computer Science?

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Well, they’re just Christians, we can forget about them.

The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America accused New York officials on Tuesday of turning their backs on the reconstruction of the only church destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks, while the controversial mosque near Ground Zero moves forward.

“We have people that are saying, why isn’t our church being rebuilt and why is there … such concern for people of the mosque?” Father Alex Karloutsos, assistant to the archbishop, told FoxNews.com. He said “religious freedom” would allow a place of worship for any denomination to be built, but accused officials with the Port Authority of making no effort to help move the congregation’s project along.

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In the greatest movement of people the world has ever seen, China is secretly working to turn the entire continent into a new colony.

Reminiscent of the West’s imperial push in the 18th and 19th centuries – but on a much more dramatic, determined scale – China’s rulers believe Africa can become a ‘satellite’ state, solving its own problems of over-population and shortage of natural resources at a stroke.

With little fanfare, a staggering 750,000 Chinese have settled in Africa over the past decade. More are on the way.

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On the one hand, we demand that older people work longer. On the other hand, we want them out of the way so that new and younger people will new ideas and energy and innovations will carry productivity forward.

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The wartime slaughters of the twentieth century eclipsed anything previously seen in history and exposed to humanity the depths of its own brokenness as never before; humanity appears to have looked into its abyss and seen nothing redeemable.

Europe’s self-loathing is reflected in the uniformly low birthrates which–among non-immigrants–average less than 1.5 children per female. Cultures and peoples unable or unwilling to sustain a replacement rate of 2.1 per female are cultures and peoples that will die out.

Michael Rubin lays it out.

When Iran develops nuclear weapons, determining their command-and-control will become America’s overriding intelligence objective. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s genocidal rhetoric shocks the West. Would he control the bomb? Not likely. In the Islamic Republic, the president is subordinate to the supreme leader. Khamenei may be the ultimate political authority in Iran, but will an aide carrying launch codes generated daily shadow him day and night? Equally unlikely; the ayatollah allows no aide so close.

Possession is 90% of the law. And in that sense, on a day-to-day basis, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – which will “own” the arsenal – will control it. This is no comfort: Not only do the Revolutionary Guards contain Iran’s most radical ideologues, but they also remain effectively a big, black box to Western analysts.

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The biofuel uses the two main by-products from the whisky production process – ”pot ale”, the liquid from the copper stills, and ”draff”, the spent grains, as the basis to produce the butanol that can then be used as fuel.

The Other McCain marvels at American culture.

Allow me to suggest that let’s not scream “raaaaacism” at these idiots. Rather, let’s point out the ironic absurdity of someone whose native language is Spanish telling other people to “go back to Europe.”

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Any shark that can chomp a surf board in two has my respect.

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After praising Islam as a source of wisdom and force for progress, the president added the following: “in the United States, Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.”

This statement is not true in any meaningful sense.

Democrats never hesitate to lie if doing so would advance the narrative, serene in the knowledge that none of the Voices of the Crust will call them on it.

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Slate, a Voice of the Crust, unable to deny the truth any longer, still attempts to pooh-pooh it.

Callahan fully documents that the Democratic Party is much more dominated by huge donations and corporate influence than ever in its history. In the 2008 election cycle, for example, all five of the largest West Coast technology firms whose employees made political donations—Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard—gave to Democrats over Republicans by a factor of 3-to-1 or even 4-to-1.

The thesis is that, well, yeah, rich people are all lefties now, but that’s because they’ve seen the light about putting everything in the hand of Big Gov.

The 21^st-century titan has made his fortune not in shabby trades like oil, timber, or wage-slave manufacturing, but rather in sparkling, knowledge-economy fields like law, finance, technology, and entertainment. (This part of Callahan’s book was excerpted in Sunday’s Washington Post.) Hence he (it’s still mostly he) has seen the value of what only government is likely to provide: a well-educated work force; meritocratic immigration policy; speedy infrastructure; and thriving capital markets. The odds are very high that he attended at least university in a liberal-left coastal city, where he learned the good graces of racial and sexual tolerance.

Never mind that this ‘well-educated work force’ had somebody else pay for their education, so naturally they’re looking for somebody else’s teat to suck on as they go through life. Never mind that the ‘meritocratic immigration policy’ is a cheap myth promoted by people who want to continue the century-old tradition that immigrants vote Democrat. Never mind that lefties want to choke of the ‘speedy infrastructure’ by slowing traffic from airplanes and cars down to trains and bicycles, putting specially-privileged groups in HOV lanes rather than widening streets for everybody. Nope, rich people are lefties because all correct-thinking (oops, almost said right-thinking) people are lefties, so that’s really not a problem, really, not a problem.

Ignored is the fact that knowledge workers check their brains at the door of the voting booth because they’ve been carefully broken in college to the left-wing agenda, like horses at a ranch or kids at a Young Pioneers summer camp.

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These are really slick.

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Great way to hide the door to a safe room. I’ve always wanted one of these.

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What you see there is basically the result of a century or so of “bolting on” new licenses due to changes in the market, rather than any concerted effort to look at whether or not the underlying laws or licenses make sense. It’s the result of massive regulatory capture, as industries unwilling to change just run to the gov’t and demand to be compensated even as their old business models are going away. At what point do people say it’s time to scrap this mess and start from scratch?

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“It’s an incredibly consistent effect,” [psychologist Dacher] Keltner says. “When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools. They flirt inappropriately, tease in a hostile fashion, and become totally impulsive.” Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that’s crucial for empathy and decision-making. Even the most virtuous people can be undone by the corner office.

Radley Balko overturns a rock.

That’s right. A hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars spending bill made its way through Congress, and no one even noticed that the damn thing didn’t have a name. Which also means you can probably count on one hand the number of lawmakers who actually know what’s in the bill—and still have a finger left over to let them know what you think of this nonsense.

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Career guides try to distill jobs into basic components. “Work hard and get ahead.” “Be your own advocate.” That sort of thing.

But anyone who’s been in an office for a while knows that human interaction undermines those components. The real trick — and it takes a long time to learn this — is realizing the work system isn’t a system at all. It’s an arbitrary and ever-changing rule set that often pushes reason to the sidelines.

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I can vouch for it.

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But did he ever get any credit? Of course not.

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Case in point: Senator Patty Murray (D-Washington) said on the Senate floor that 3,000 teachers in Washington were in peril of being laid off. The truth is that only 445 teachers were notified they would lose their jobs. And almost all of them were hired back. Now that President Obama has signed the bill, Washington State will get $206 million in taxpayer money to save jobs that aren’t being lost.

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And that tells you just about everything you need to know about what’s wrong with the world today.

Freeberg trudges through the muck of the New York mosque affair.

The problem with that is, that if these people were as good at logical thought as they claimed to be, they’d not only recognize this as ad hominem but they’d recognize the reason  honest people frown on ad hom: It’s all bullshit because it’s all irrelevant. If you’re caught being wrong about something, it means — nothing. Intelligent people are wrong. Decent people are wrong. Honest people are wrong. You don’t have to wait long to see it happen.

Stupid people often turn out to be right. Let’s pause here and carefully define exactly what I’m saying: Glittering personal attributes are not reverse-barometers of good ideas. That would be a silly thing to say. They are irrelevant, or mostly irrelevant.

And so a sound debate will revolve around the ideas. Not the character of the people who are debating them.

Intelligent, honest people do not argue a point by shunning, and that is a primary characteristic of shunning — that it is contagious, that it cascades. This is how you know you are in the presence of an intellectual lightweight. You are to be shunned, whoever does not shun you shall be shunned, whoever does not shun he who failed to shun you, shall likewise be shunned. These are signs of a big mouth coupled up with a weak mind.

Politics have become contentious, because this has become our chosen technique for discussing them: ostracism, alienation, excoriation, derision, all of it spread by contact. And I blame our most strident liberals. I think that’s fair. And the “green light people” at the center of this particular issue, represent the most brilliant example of why I think this way. They have created the situation in which the rest of us are living, and we have been allowing them to create it.

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One of the more embarrassing mysteries of human evolution is that people are host to no fewer than three kinds of louse while most species have just one.

Even bleaker for the human reputation, the pubic louse, which gets its dates and residence-swapping opportunities when its hosts are locked in intimate embrace, does not seem to be a true native of the human body. Its closest relative is the gorilla louse. (Don’t even think about it.)

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“My thesis,” Boehm says, “is that egalitarianism does not result from the mere absence of hierarchy, as is commonly assumed. Rather, egalitarianism involves a very special type of hierarchy, a curious type that is based on antihierarchical feelings” (9-10). A society can have an “egalitarian hierarchy” in which the subordinates use sanctions–such as ridicule, disobedience, ostracism, or execution–to restrain “politically ambitious individuals, those with special learned or innate propensities to dominate.” In every society, there will be leaders in some form. But an egalitarian society will allow only “a moderate degree of leadership” (154).

He’s at it again.

50 years ago, Detroit was a thriving metropolis, the fourth largest city in America. It had no presentiments whatsoever of any imminent disaster. Today it is a burned-out ruin, more or less. This is the sort of objective phenomenon that, if you’re a student of history, you can’t help but try to explain.

When gentlemen look at progressivism, they see a movement whose purpose is to help the underclass, those whose plight is no fault of their own. When peasants look at progressivism, they see a movement whose purpose is to employ gentlemen in the business of public policy, by using the peasants’ money to buy votes from varlets. Who, in the peasants’ perception, abuse the patience and generosity of both peasants and gentlemen in almost every imaginable way, and are constantly caressed by every imaginable authority for doing so.

San Francisco’s public school system, which literally assigns children randomly around the city to aid in the great cause of social homogenization – a cause which makes the war in Afghanistan look like an unqualified success – causes immense headaches, costs or both to the very same social class which sets the public policies of San Francisco. Yet they accept it with hardly a murmur.

Peasants see a patron-client relationship between the gentlemen and the varlets – a relationship not at all unlike the late Roman relationship of clientela, where a patrician measured his social status by the vast army of plebeians that battened on his trenches. Again, what to the gentleman appears as a noble act of charity, compassion, etc, to the coarse and cynical peasant reveals itself as a purchase of political power, with his tax dollars if not his physical safety. Therefore a vision of the gallows arises in his hindbrain.

As Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.

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Obama, it is clear, masqueraded as a synthesizer in order to gain power. He took advantage of America’s yearning for a president who will bridge our divisions. He never intended to be such a president. Rather, he intended to be the agent for one side of the debate — a side I think is properly viewed as the antithesis to the traditional American narrative that we are good country with a good economic system.

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It’s struck me in my studies that the Progressives and America’s Founding Fathers are on the polar extremes of two very important issues: the nature of man and the role of government. And if you’re coming from two diametrically opposite worldviews, it of course leads to opposite conclusions. The problems we face today are a direct result of the fact that Progressive beliefs and the Founders’ beliefs, as found in the Declaration and Constitution, are like oil and water: they will never mix.

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We can’t meaningfully discuss virtue without recourse to ideas of honor, for honor itself is grounded in the recognition of performed excellence. Achilles took the idea so seriously that he was willing to let the Achaeans be slaughtered rather than bear the offense. He was not unjustified in doing so, for Agamemnon’s actions overturned the whole social order. The destruction of the interconnection between virtue as a public excellence and honor as its rightful recognition exacts enormous social costs.

Where honor perfects virtue, it creates deep ties between the participants in a mutual social order. Honoring one’s parents is, after all, the only one of the 10 Commandments that carries with it a promise – in this case, the maintenance of a stable and enduring social order. It need not be thought of in patrician terms, and becomes inordinately difficult to sustain as the size of the social order expands.

The first is endemic to the Dutch immigrant community in which I was raised and in which I live. I suspect a similar phenomenon will exist in other subcultures. It goes by the name of “Dutch Bingo.” Whenever we find ourselves in conversation with someone with an obviously Dutch last name, we immediately attempt to seek out persons with whom we are mutually connected or, barring that, to discuss known public figures of the community and start tracing their various connections through birth and marriage. It is a fun game and fairly innocent. I am not without skill at it, but I recently spent a riveting afternoon in the company of two true virtuosos. One of these virtuosi, a keen observer of human behavior, smartly pointed out to me that such games become more important as group identity becomes more fragile or threatened through assimilation. It holds off anonymity, and perhaps even anomie. The benefits of the game are obvious, and the costs seem low. No one is really harmed by such conversations.

People in the military do this habitually. The first thing one does at a new duty station is start finding out who you know that your new shipmates also know. (If you’ve been in for three our four years, you’ll only be about two or three degrees of separation away from anyone in your specialty.) It even works in civilian life — when I arrived at Indiana for law school I met a guy in the University Science Fiction club who had just gotten out; he had been on the Yarnell, the usual Task Group escort for my ship, the Kennedy, and his LPO had been a First Class ET who had been my LPO on the Kennedy. It’s a small world, if you let it be.

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The author of ‘Talk Like A Pirate Day’ displays his genius once again.

It seems a bit strange to me that the media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there’s no similar labelling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content.

I figured it was time to fix that, so I made some stickers.

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The Crust take care of their own.

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He’s the victim, you see. Nick Green was just minding his own business, cheerfully ignoring the congressional election that he’s paid to cover, blowing off the Republican challenger’s campaign as too insignificant to merit his attention and then — without notice or warning — somebody called him on it.

Sucks to be you, doesn’t it, Nick?

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The Wall Street Journal’s Greater New York section has a dispatch  reporting on a $150 million interior renovation at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: “Many of the latest changes were made to accommodate the addition of 600 Fed employees, hired after the financial crisis began to work in the markets group helping to stimulate the economy.”

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Well, considering how sheep appear to have taken over America, can The Shire be that far behind?

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A Connecticut-based law firm, Scott + Scott, filed a shareholder derivative suit in Santa Clara County Superior Court in California on Tuesday against H-P’s board, alleging directors violated their fiduciary duties in connection with the events surrounding the resignation on Friday of Hurd.

Among other things, the 45-page suit alleges that H-P’s board violated its corporate-governance guidelines by failing to inform shareholders of the investigation. It also attacks details of Mr. Hurd’s exit package, which is estimated at above $35 million.

All this is rather odd. Considering how dramatically he turned the company around, I should think it more appropriate for shareholders to sue the Board for firing him, since the actual transgressions determined were pretty trivial. But that’s me.

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One of the primary documents [pdf] used in the Holy Land Foundation trial in 2008 was the “Explanatory Memorandum: On the General Strategic Goal for the Group”. It was written on May 22, 1991 by Mohamed Akram, and gave a brief description of the mission of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States:

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. […] It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is…The above is a clear declaration that the front organizations of the Muslim Brotherhood — CAIR, ISNA, ICNA, NAIT, MSA, IIIT, etc. — intended to “bore from within” and overthrow American constitutional government by subverting our own institutions.

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“Without any prior knowledge of the planned crime in our mock terrorism scenarios, we were able to identify 10 out of 12 terrorists and, among them, 20 out of 30 crime– related details,” Rosenfeld said. “The test was 83 percent accurate in predicting concealed knowledge, suggesting that our complex protocol could identify future terrorist activity.”

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When I interviewed him for my column this week, Fraternal Order of Policy Executive Director Jim Pasco differentiated citizen-shot video from police dash cam and surveillance video this way:

How do you know the video hasn’t been edited? How do we know what’s in the video hasn’t been taken out of context? With dashboard cameras or police security video, the evidence is in the hands of law enforcement the entire time, so it’s admissible under the rules of evidence. That’s not the case with these cell phone videos.

Pasco may be right about the potential for citizen-shot video to be edited, though from what I understand that’s pretty easy to detect. The problem with Pasco’s statement is that there are too many stories where dash cam and surveillance camera video has gone missing, particularly in cases where there’s alleged police misconduct.

Freeberg lays ’em down.

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Mariam Ghorbanzadeh, 25, who was six months’ pregnant and miscarried after being beaten up in Tabriz prison this week, was initially sentenced to death by stoning for adultery but her sentence has been commuted to hanging in a rapid judicial review. The decision is thought to have been driven by the Iranian authorities’ desire to avoid further international condemnation over the barbaric punishment.

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On the other hand, the linchpin is the one that often shears under pressure. Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Linchpin is all about doing remarkable work. One way to do that  is by being creative. Left to our own devices, we tend to do things that are well within normal. Looking at things creatively, on the other hand, opens up a world of new possibilities.

Few are more creative than a lazy person avoiding work. A word to the wise….

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Roman charioteers earned far more than even the best-paid footballers and international sports stars of today, according to academic research.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Darwin Award nominee.

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Coming soon to an XBox 360 near you.

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