Dear Kathleen Parker . . .

Tempted as I am to write a short post ("bite me"), your dishonest attempt to walk back your "oogedy-boogedy" slur deserves more. Much more.

In seeking to evade responsibility for your studied insult to millions of Americans, you describe a "broad perception among centrists, moderates, conservative Democrats, renegade Republicans, etc. . . . that the GOP is the party of white Christians to the exclusion of others."

What you call a "broad perception," Ms. Parker, would more accurately be called a stereotype, and it is your lazy willingness to solicit favor from liberals by demonizing this stereotype of Republicans that has put you in such odium among conservatives.

It is an unfortunate fact that many conservative activists seem incapable of objectivity about the Republican Pary's image problems. Your "oogedy boogedy" slur obscures, rather than illuminates, the real sources of Republican brand damage. You are therefore part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The GOP's image problems are multifaceted. There is, for example, the broad perception of Republicans as the party of inherited wealth and privilege, a perception aggravated by having a scion of the Bush dynasty in the White House for the past eight years. There is also the broad perception of Republicans as the party of warmongering jingos . . . er, ditto.

Furthermore, there is the perception of Republicans as the party of grumpy old fuddy-duddies, a perception aggravated by the recent candidacy of a 72-year-old bald guy with a notoriously bad temper. A party that rejects the magnificently handsome millionaire Mitt Romney in favor of a grouchy geezer like Crazy Cousin John isn't really serious about trying to win elections in the TV age.

So, Ms. Parker, with all these image problems for Republicans to overcome, why your "oogedy boogedy" fixation on white Christians? Answer: Because it is easy -- as easy as reaching a "compromise" with Ted Kennedy on No Child Left Behind, as easy as deciding that the solution to illegal immigration is a "path to citizenship," as easy as selling out the GOP to Jack Abramoff's casino clients.

So much for the GOP's problems. Your biggest problem, Ms. Parker, is that you think you're so smart that no one who disagrees with you can ever catch on to what you're doing. Let's go back to your column of Nov. 19:

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh.

I call specific attention to your use of the term "evangelical," by which you actually mean, conservative Protestants. Do you not see this? And do you not see what is wrong with your analysis? You are not the first to do this, Ms. Parker -- you follow a path previously trod by Christopher Caldwell and Ryan Sager, among others.

It is an indisputable fact that conservative Catholics are the solid backbone of the Christian pro-life movement. (If you doubt this, come to Washington, DC, for the annual March for Life next month, and witness the crowds of Catholic students packed into the trains at Union Station.) Conservative Catholics also are staunch opponents of same-sex marriage and embryonic stem-cell research, and are the leading activists on the kind of end-of-life issues dramatized by the Terry Schiavo case. And yet you, Ms. Parker, say not a word about Catholics.

When critics of social conservatism single out "evangelicals" as the source of the GOP's woes, what they actually have in mind is TV preachers like Pat Robertson and the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, as well as (a demeaning stereotype of) their followers. "Poor, undereducated and easily led," as a Washington Post reporter once summed it up.

If your concern is about the Republican Party's stance on abortion and other social issues, Ms. Parker, why do you specify "evangelicals" and not conservative Catholics? Answer: Because smearing Catholics still carries the taint of prejudice, whereas conservative Protestants are a favorite target of ridicule among the enlightened elite whose esteem you covet. And when you narrow it down by specifying that you mean white conservative Protestants, this allows you to disguise your appeal to bigotry as a call for diversity! (Neat trick, that.)

We are not stupid, Ms. Parker. We know what you mean by "oogedy-boogedy." It's those hillbilly holy-rollers, the Bible-thumping hicks and their slick-hair preachers you mean to hold up for universal scorn as the source of the GOP's woe.

Your column today indicates you have not yet realized your error, Ms. Parker. The reason liberals single out "evangelicals" for particular scorn can be summed up in three words: Divide et impera. By identifying social issues with hayseed Baptists and Pentacostals, liberals mean to drive a wedge into the conservative coalition, to try to embarrass Catholics, Orthodox Jews and other non-evangelical conservatives by associating their issues with an unfashionable crowd of (supposed) troglodytes.

You, Ms. Parker, claim that your lazy emulation of this liberal tactic was motivated by sincere concern for the Republican Party. You will excuse the eye-rolling disbelief of conservatives, especially after your contemptuous dismissal of Sarah Palin's prayer that God would lead her to "an open door."

A woman earnestly seeking God's will for her life is what's wrong with the Republican Party?

I searched your latest column for any evidence of contrition for that remark, and found none. This absence of remorse on your part tempts me to make reference to a supernatural conception of the afterlife, Ms. Parker. But rather than tell you to go to hell, I'll stick to my Bible-thumping hayseed ways, and turn the other cheek. Or is that too "oogedy-boogedy" for you?

UPDATE: Linked at Conservative Grapevine. Linked at Ace of Spade HQ.

UPDATE II: Shannen Coffin takes a swing at the Parker pinata:

At bottom, the fundamental problem with Kathleen Parker's argument is that leaves to Kathleen Parker the decision as to what is too "oogedy-boogedy” for the public square. She even quotes the indecipherable legal standard proffered by Justice Potter Stewart for cases involving pornography: "I know it when I see it." . . .

Parker, like Stewart, has failed in intelligibly defining a standard. But she's failed even more in defending her characterization of the Religious Right as made up of "oogedy-boogedy" fundamentalists who put off moderates.

The problem with the term "moderate" in politics is that it posits some happy medium between equal extremes. Well, then, what's "extreme"? Planned Parenthood nurses acting as accomplices to statutory rape -- is that "extreme"? If so, then I make the "moderate" proposal that we prohibit federal funding of Planned Parenthood. It's Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass:

"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

You either acknowledge Kathleen Parker's authority to declare what is disreputable "oogedy-boogedy" extremism or you don't. And I'd like to know where she derives that authority, other than being published by The Washington Post, by which standard E.J. Dionne and Richard Cohen can likewise boss us around at will.

Planned Parenthood exposed

Victor Morton of The Washington Times reports:

Planned Parenthood of Indiana has suspended a nurse after the release of an undercover videotape showing her coaching a supposed 13-year-old on how to duck Indiana's laws about parental-consent on abortion and the reporting of child sex-abuse.
The videotape shows Lila Rose, the president of a university pro-life group and a brunette, posing as a blonde 13-year-old girl named "Brianna" and telling the Planned Parenthood nurse at the clinic in Bloomington, Ind., that she is pregnant by a 31-year-old man.
"I am supposed to report [you] to Child Protective Services," says the nurse on the videotape, though assuring "Brianna" she will not do so if she can tell a plausible different story.
"I didn't hear the age. I don't want to know the age," the nurse says at a later point on the tape.
The nurse, who is referred to on the video as "Diana" but whose face is blurred out, knew neither that the session was being taped nor that "Brianna" really was Miss Rose, a 20-year-old pro-life activist at UCLA.

And an ironic note:

A city spokesman said Thursday that the Bloomington City Police is not investigating the clinic or the nurse for possibly violating the statutory-rape notification law, but is beefing up security around the facility to protect it from a possible backlash.

So the potential criminality at the clinic elicits no police interest, but watch out for those deranged pro-lifers!

The video:

In June, Students for Life of America (SFLA) did a very similar video about Planned Parenthood of North Carolina:

SFLA has an online petition to end taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

Ditto, Dwight!

"And in 2012, we'll have Sarah Palin to clean up Obama's mess and remind us again of America's exceptionalism."
-- Z. Dwight Billingsly

Fake hate, real stupidity

Predictable: Another campus "hate" hoax, with a black student posting a bogus "racially offensive" message on a student Web forum, prompting the ritual recriminations by students and faculty, until finally the hoax is admitted, and defended as "satire." (Via Volokh & Instapundit.) This very much reminds me of the anti-Muslim "satire" at GWU last year.

Liberals possess Complete Moral Authority, which means that however vicious, unfair, obnoxious, dishonest, or coercive their tactics, their good intentions can never be questioned. Conversely, no matter how courteous, honorable and erudite a conservative may be, he will inevitably and routinely be accused of bad faith. One recalls the reviewer of William F. Buckley's classic God & Man at Yale who said the book had "the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night."

At some point, any conservative who aims to accomplish anything must learn to accept such attacks as evidence of success. If you were accomplishing nothing, they wouldn't bother to call you names and impugn your motives.

UPDATE: In seeking that particular criticism of Buckley's first book, I turned up an online version of his introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of God & Man at Yale. Buckley quotes a two-sentence formulation from the book that drove his critics into paroxysms of fury:

I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.

Those two sentences were eagerly embraced by Christian conservatives -- indeed, Buckley might well be said to have been a founder of the "Religious Right" long before that term came into common usage -- but were bitterly assailed by liberals.

What Buckley's critics did not realize was that this passage had been crucially amended by Buckley's mentor and editor, Professor Willmoore Kendall. Yet Buckley did not disown or repudiate that striking parallelism because, he says, he was "not unamused by the sputtering outrage of its critics."

This, you see, was the original genius of Buckley -- his unabashed joy in offending the sensibilities of liberals and driving them into "sputtering outrage." What liberals always count on in debate is their moral superiority (wholly imagined as it is) which they expect will cause the conservative to slink away in shame. Buckley, however, was made of sterner stuff. He saw the fury of the liberal attack on that two-sentence passage as evidence that he must be onto something. The indignation with which liberals denied a nexus between the religious and the political, he realized, meant that he had touched them in a tender place. He therefore vigorously defended the most unpopular part of his book -- even though the precise wording was not originally his own.

I call attention to this not merely because it is an important lesson in conservative discourse, but because it is such a contrast to the method of many of the latter-day Buckley wannabes. David Brooks, who professes to admire Buckley, would rather sneer at conservative "populists" than to lay down a withering fire on a vulnerable salient of the liberal position. And Buckley, it will be recalled, once co-authored a stout defense of Joe McCarthy, a thoroughgoing populist.

Buckley was a fighter, a man who did not hesitate to identify liberalism as the enemy, and who attacked it with all his might. Go and do thou likewise!

Discussing "Conservatism 2.0"

Keying off a Village Voice column, Michelle Malkin talks about the future of conservatism with Joe Hicks on PJTV.

Quote of the Day

"I'll tell ya, you know, liberals out there cannot stand her. Regular populist liberals cannot stand her. A lot of the middle of the road people can't stand her. But as long as you got an audience, look at that crowd! . . . This is really hard to do this, to salute Sarah Palin."
-- Chris Matthews

UPDATE: A liberal responds:

The sense of entitlement that this blowhard personifies is truly stunning. He's spent his entire life as a principle-free political gossip in Washington - a human embodiment of all that is sick and wrong with Beltway culture. And yet, he really thinks he can just parachute into one of the largest states in the country, buy a mansion in Philadelphia and be a senator on sheer celebrity alone.

Hmmm. Wonder where Matthews got that idea?

Blame Al Gore . . .

. . . for the "new American political tradition: the quadrennial early-winter attempt to overturn presidential results by any means necessary," says Dave Weigel.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

Hanging with Alito

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito made headlines with his Joe Biden jokes at Wednesday's American Spectator gala. The missus and I attended, and here are a few photos:

Josiah Ryan (CNS), Justice Alito, Cool Sexy Blogger Guy.

Cool Sexy Blogger Guy & His Hot Wife.

American Spectator Managing Editor J.P. Freire & the Cool Sexy Blogger Guy's Hot Wife.

American Spectator Editor-in-Chief R. Emmett Tyrrell & the Cool Sexy Blogger Guy.

American Spectator editorial director Wlady Pleszczynski & the Cool Sexy Blogger Guy.

UPDATE: Kerry Picket has a story and video audio:

UPDATE II: R. Emmett Tyrrell's speech is now online, along with Jay Homnick's account of the banquet.

Jade Vixen Ph.D.

An engineering grad student at Penn is revealed to be a kinky dominatrix known as Jade Vixen, and her transvestite "sissy slut" boyfriend turns out to be a top attorney at a prestigious Manhattan law firm, after a tattooed muscle-bound stalker kills the boyfriend and kidnaps the dominatrix.

No, that's not the quick-pitch for a movie starring Kevin Spacey and Lucy Liu, it's front-page news in the New York Post.

The real shocker? Neither Eliot Spitzer nor Jim McGreevey makes an appearance in this story.

UPDATE: Welcome AOSHQ Morons!

Crackdown on illegals works

One of the most persistent excuses you hear to justify amnesty for illegal aliens is, "We can't deport 14 million people!" No, but a little bit of get-tough enforcement goes a long way, as one Virginia community has discovered:

Many illegal immigrants have left Prince William County or slid out of public view in the 17 months since the county's high-profile crackdown on them was proposed.
Student enrollment in the public schools' English as a Second Language program has dropped by several hundred students over the past year while increasing in surrounding jurisdictions, one sign that immigrants have left. fewer day laborers congregate outside the 7-Eleven on the corner of Route 1 and Prince William Parkway in Woodbridge. . . .
Indeed, Victor Rincon, manager of Michael's Restaurant -- adjacent to the 7-Eleven on Route 1 -- said the exodus of immigrants has practically decimated his business.
"My place has lost about 75 percent of the business," he said. "We have lost nearly everything. There's no immigrants anymore. They have gone to Maryland or another state."

An enforcement-oriented attitude tends to encourage "self-deportation," and if more effective interior enforcement were combined with more rigorous border security, the result would be a net outflow of illegals. No drastic or extreme measures are necessary. If only a few basic steps were taken, a substantial reduction of the illegal population could be achieved in a few years.

Chambliss win bad news for GOP?

No matter what happens -- even a 14-point Republican victory -- the media geniuses will always find a way to spin it as bad news for conservatives:

With time and money on their sides, though, we can expect that Obama and other Democratic leaders will be look to make 2012 the year that the Solid South is broken once and for all. Certainly with an incumbent president and demographic trends continuing to work, Democrats could cement gains in Virginia and Florida and perhaps even North Carolina. . . .
With an invigorated Democratic effort and Libertarians drawing better than 3 percent in key races, it wouldn’t take long for the rest of the South to turn blue.

Somehow these geniuses can't accept the simple and obvious explanation that nominating a bald, grumpy, old guy for president is bad politics. No, the Big Picture must be something nuanced and complex, so that only geniuses can explain it.

As I've said before: Don't overthink it. At some basic level, politics is about popularity. When the other guys nominate Will Smith and you nominate Mister Magoo, no grand ideological theory or demographic trend is necessary to explain why you got your ass kicked.

Holiday Books: Regnery on Conservatism

Only 20 shopping days until Christmas!

The 2008 Holiday Book Sale continues with Al Regnery's Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism. This is a valuable history of the movement that changed America, told by one of the participants, and based on interviews with dozens who were eyewitnesses to that history. Regnery shows how the intellectual stream of conservatism intersected with political activism to produce the powerful movement that first spectacularly failed (with the defeat of Goldwater in 1964 and the subsequent Nixonian detour) before succeeding with the election of Ronald Reagan and the "Republican Revolution" of 1994. Regnery ends with sober reflections on the Bush era.

Regnery, by the way, is no fan of "compassionate conservatism," "national greatness" and other big-government Republican heresies. In the December/January double issue of the American Spectator (subscribe now!), Regnery takes aim at an icon of the "national greatness" crowd by recommending Thomas DiLorenzo's Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Arch Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution--and What It Means for Americans Today. Regnery's recommendation alone makes this a book worth reading.

Books make great gifts and Amazon offers nationwide delivery, so why wait? ORDER NOW!

PREVIOUSLY:

• 11/29: Family values
• 11/28: Black Friday Special
• 11/27: Civil War
• 11/26: Immigration
• 11/25: Thomas Sowell
• 11/24: The Great Depression
• 11/23: Blacklisted by History
• 11/22: Mises & Hayek
• 11/21: White Guilt by Shelby Steele

What happened to Natalie Holloway?

Maybe something like Donkey Punch -- a casual hookup with a guy who (surprise, surprise) decides to indulge a porn-inspired taste for sado-masochism.

While it's not often that an Ace 0f Spades post inspires literary allusions, I am very much reminded of William Faulkner's Sanctuary, the story of a sheltered college girl, Temple Drake, who by chance finds herself cast into the outlaw millieu of a Memphis bootlegging gang. The name "Temple," like the title of the story itself, is a sort of symbolic play on words.

While I have no clue what happened to Natalie Holloway (and let's face it, Greta Van Susteren is just milking the case to get expense-paid trips to Aruba), her disappearance has always struck me as a typical Temple Drake scenario: Privileged girl strays outside the boundaries of her sheltered existence and discovers that the rules are different "out there." Whatever happened to Natalie, her decision to leave the resort hotel with a local was the kind of choice that no streetwise person would have made.

Tom Wolfe played on the same theme in a different way in Bonfire of the Vanities: The wealthy young investment banker stumbles into an underclass environment he doesn't understand, a world where his wealth only makes him a more conspicuous target for the streetwise hustlers.

So Donkey Punch, the tale of three girls on holiday who find themselves in a deadly situation as a result of hooking up with attractive strangers, is very much in this literary vein.

Self-quotafication

OK, suppose you're a Vanilla-American, trying to figure out how to game the affirmative-action quota formula by which Democrats choose Cabinet officers. Take inspiration from this Labor Secretary wannabe:

For the rainbow cabinet of the nation's first African American president, Mary Beth Maxwell is the perfect labor secretary you've probably never heard of: a gay woman, community organizer and labor leader with an adopted African American son.

Don't despair, homogenous honkies: You're only one same-sex relationship and one transracial adoption away from having Cabinet-worthy "diversity" credentials. Further commentary at Newsbusters and Ace of Spades HQ.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

Oprah's inauguration

She's going to be in D.C. for the entire week of the inauguration. Renting the Kennedy Center for use as a temporary studio:

Winfrey, who fundraised for Obama, appeared with him in several key primary states, including Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. She was also on hand for his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Denver, and his victory speech in Chicago last month.

Prediction: The backlash against Obamamania will eventually undermine Oprah's popularity. By 2010, her ratings will be in serious decline.

The missing rationale

Ann Althouse tries, without much success, to make sense of a study showing that female students are more interested in studying abroad.

Ms. Althouse, let me give you a very simple explanation: Daddy's Precious Darling Syndrome.

To the extent that anything is seen as a luxury, modern American parents are more likely to provide it to their daughters than to their sons.

One can analyze the causes of Daddy's Precious Darling Syndrome, but its existence is beyond dispute -- back in the day, I dated enough of those spoiled-rotten girls to know the phenomenon quite intimately. There is a certain upper-middle-class environment in which the overprivileged daughter functions as a status symbol for the parents. Think: Monica Lewinsky.

If foreign study is a parent-provided luxury, then you can be certain in our contemporary culture that girls will get more of it than boys. It's really that simple.

Obama to base: 'Thanks, chumps!'

He promised a windfall profits tax on oil companies. Forget it. He promised to bring the troops home. Forget that, too:

On the campaign trail, Senator Barack Obama offered a pledge that electrified and motivated his liberal base, vowing to "end the war" in Iraq.
But as he moves closer to the White House, President-elect Obama is making clearer than ever that tens of thousands of American troops will be left behind in Iraq, even
if he can make good on his campaign promise to pull all combat forces out within 16 months.
"I said that I would remove our combat troops from Iraq in 16 months, with the understanding that it might be necessary -- likely to be necessary -- to maintain a residual force to provide potential training, logistical support, to protect our civilians in Iraq," Mr. Obama said this week as he introduced his national security team.

Democrats, do you know why Obama is screwing you over like this? Because you're a bunch of pathetic, masochistic weaklings, that's why. You get ripped off and sold out because that's your existential purpose in the universe.

You man the phone banks, you walk the precincts, you're a True Believer, and as soon as they get what they want, you cease to matter. You are nothing but a vehicle for someone else's ambition, a means to their ends.

Remember all those speeches, all those e-mails from Obama, proclaiming that the election was all about you? And now you see it's all about GM and Citgroup and Goldman Sachs, right? Obama doesn't give a damn about you, and never did. He's a user, and you've been used.

Obligatory Chambliss-gropes-granddaughter in campaign video

Jon Stewart's reaction is classic:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Indecision 2008 - Chambliss vs. Martin

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Ethnic patronage

Michelle Malkin notes the pressure to get more Latino appointments in the Obama Cabinet. For some reason, the appointment of Bill Richardson to Commerce reminds me of the late Ron Brown, who was memorably mourned by Bill Clinton.

Watch out for those Balkan trade missions, Bill.

'Man, she was dynamite'

Advice for Saxby Chambliss

From Erick Erickson:

Now Saxby, pay attention: If you do not fire Charlie Harmon tomorrow and undergo a significant restructuring of your Washington office you will prove yourself a fool who has learned nothing from this. Hiring a Democrat to run your office was a bad idea. That he pushed you to engage in bipartisan compromises that did nothing but piss off your base was inexcusable.

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!

Death by consultants

Erick Erickson writes about "the need to purge the party of the 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back' consultant regime."

This is relevant to two facts I recently mentioned: (a) the GOP raised $720 million in the 2008 election cycle, and (b) the GOP is run by assholes.

Lesbian has no life!

And that's a good thing, says Ed Rendell, who more or less outs Janet Napolitano in an open-mic incident highlighted by Campbell Brown:

What Rendell is saying is that heterosexuality is a career-killer for women.

Huffpo love for Georgia

A commenter at Michelle Malkin's mentioned that the HuffPo comments field was going toxic in reaction to Saxby Chambliss's win in Georgia, and he wasn't kidding:

Way to go Georgia!! Keeps you right in there with Texas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arkansas, South Carolina and Alabama as bastions of family values (those primarily being that it is desirable to marry within ones own family). lesterbud

It's reminicent of lynching or raping a child or pummeling a little old lady. -- Kit Chandler

I have come to conclusion that the South prefers not to be educate their young, they would rather keep them dumb, and vote Republican. -- jpshotwheels

Is anyone really surprised by this evolutionarily challenged, brainless, toothless, interbred heehaw state? I'm not. -- ConcernedAboutRFuture

The real story is about how incredibly gullible and stupid Georgia voters are. -- raker

GA is a racist redneck rethug holdout. -- roshni

There are also multiple commenters who repeat the Democratic propaganda claim that, in the 2002 Senate race, Chambliss somehow libeled Max Cleland. The truth -- which no Democrat wants to accept -- is that Cleland had voted to allow unionization of the Department of Homeland Security. The Chambliss campaign ran a tough ad attacking Cleland for that vote, and that is the sole grounds of the myth that Chambliss mistreated Cleland. But Democrats cling to that myth -- "How dare Republicans question Max Cleland's patriotism!" -- because it helps them rationalize their hate.

Oh, and as to all those "toothless inbred hillbilly" comments: Chambliss got his decisive margins in the prosperous, fast-growing suburbs and exurbs surrounding Atlanta.

UPDATE: Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote Monday about the "attacking Cleland's patriotism" canard.

UPDATE II: Welcome, Jawas!

The crazy generation

Twent percent of kids are nuts:

Almost one in five young American adults has a personality disorder that interferes with everyday life, and even more abuse alcohol or drugs, researchers reported Monday in the most extensive study of its kind.
The disorders include problems such as obsessive or compulsive tendencies and anti-social behavior that can sometimes lead to violence. . . .
Counting substance abuse, the study found that nearly half of young people surveyed have some sort of psychiatric condition. . . .
Personality disorders were the second most common problem behind drug or alcohol abuse as a single category. The disorders include obsessive, anti-social and paranoid behaviors that are not mere quirks but actually interfere with ordinary functioning.

Bunch of psycho dope fiends! This explains why Obama won the youth vote 2-to-1.

Chambliss and the growth factor

In analyzing Sen. Saxby Chambliss' impressive victory in Georgia -- he defeated Democrat Jim Martin by more than 300,000 votes in Tuesday's runoff -- it is important to understand where that Republican margin comes from. While liberals will try to explain Martin's defeat as a product of retrograde rural backlash, the decisive factor for Chambliss was his large margins in the prosperous, fast-growing suburban and exurban counties around Atlanta.

As usual for Republicans in Georgia, Chambliss piled up huge margins in the mega-suburban counties of Cobb and Gwinnett, beating Martin by nearly 50,000 votes in each. But Chambliss also piled up a combined margin of nearly 150,000 votes in nine "outer ring" exurban counties. Here are those counties, showing Chambliss' margin and each county's population growth rate (April 2000-July 2006) according to the Census Bureau:

County... Margin...Growth
Barrow......7,184......38.1%
Bartow.....10,948.....20.1%
Carroll.......6,642......23.0%
Cherokee...33,274......37.6%
Coweta......15,002......29.2%
Forsyth......30,624.....53.4%
Hall...........20,625.....24.4%
Paulding ....12,795.....48.9%
Walton.......12,681....30.8%

Please note that the margins are based on results available at 8 a.m., when 97% of precincts statewide were reporting, and the vote is not complete in all counties.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

Election Day in Georgia

UPDATED & BUMPED: Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Chambliss's double-digit victory dashed Democrats' dreams of securing a filibuster-proof, 60-vote "super majority" in the Senate and buoyed a Republican Party battered by staggering losses in the Nov. 4 general election.
"Republicans still know how to win an election," Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan told hundreds of Chambliss supporters at the Cobb Energy Centre.

The size of the victory (a margin of more than 300,000 votes) is important as a warning to Democrats going forward that the GOP is still a viable opposition. It is also important that Barack Obama diminished himself by refusing to risk his political capital campaigning for Democrat Jim Martin.

I've added an analysis of the vote here. Also, Michelle Malkin responds to my defense of Chambliss' immigration record: "[T]he guy went wobbly went it mattered most -- and it took massive resistance and vigilance to set him straight." OK, but at least he responded to the outcry, whereas Maverick did not.

PREVIOUSLY: Associated Press and New York Times call it for Chambliss. With 93% reporting at 10:15 Chambliss leads 58-42% with a 300,000+ margin. Still 70+ precincts to report in Fulton County and, for some odd reason, only half the precincts in Paulding have reported. I might add an analysis if I can get those numbers.

With 84% of precincts reporting by 9:30 p.m., you've got the makings of a solid victory for Chambliss. The key thing to notice is the Republican's overwhelming majorities in the fast-growing exurban "outer ring" counties. Most of these margins are based on partial reports, but look:

Carroll .........2.2-to-1
Cherokee .....4.5-to-1
Coweta .......2.8-to-1
Fayette .......2.3-to-1
Forsyth ........5.3-to-1
Hall ............3.3-to-1
Paulding .......3.2-to-1
Walton ..........3.7-to-1

It looks like Chambliss is cruising to re-election. But I'm disturbed to see Michelle Malkin transmitting misinformation, calling Chambliss a "pro-amnesty Republican." This is false. Chambliss has an A+ rating from NumbersUSA for his opposition to amnesty. Yes, Chambliss supported the bailout, but he's been a solid conservative vote on immigration issues.

UPDATE: Michelle responds by reminding me that Chambliss was booed at the Georgia GOP convention in May 2007 for defending the guest-worker provisions of the bill that was then pending in the Senate. But Chambliss eventually voted against cloture on S.1639, just as he had voted against S.2611.

I remember being shocked by Chambliss' May 2007 defense of the immigration bill, since I knew he'd opposed S.2611. I am under the impression that, between the Atlanta business community and the Beltway echo chamber, Chambliss had gotten the mistaken idea that maybe the "enforcement" bells and whistles on the shamnesty bill would be enough to satisfy the base. Getting booed at the convention apparently sobered him up pretty quick.

New York Times reports low turnout in Atlanta:

At the Atlanta Public Library on Ponce de Leon Ave., where more than 1,600 people voted in the general election, only 400 people had voted by noon today.

This is probably good news for Chambliss. Also, Bob Barr has endorsed Chambliss. Will update.

Boosted by Sarah Palin's whirlwind tour, Sen. Saxby Chambliss appears poised to win today's runoff in Georgia. Jim Antle reminds us why the runoff was necessary:

Libertarian Party candidate Allen Buckley . . . received nearly 3.5 percent of the vote, running almost 100,000 votes ahead of Libertarian presidential nominee Bob Barr . . .
Many of those voters were fiscal conservatives upset with Chambliss's vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout -- or, as he prefers to describe it, "the financial rescue package."
"It's for the people, by the people," an anti-bailout conservative told the Politico in late October. "I think that 99 percent of the phone calls that Saxby got were for him to vote against the bailout, yet he did it anyway. He's supposed to represent the people of the state of Georgia.… By far, the vast majority did not want the bailout."

"Libertarian populism," anyone?

(Hey, who is Bryan Caplan, and why is he stealing my title without credit?)

Anti-math bigots

The Wall Street Journal's open-borders war on math continues. (H/T: Derbyshire.)

Sarah Palin is Joe McCarthy?

Neal Gabler doesn't mean it as a compliment:

For the polite conservatives, McCarthy was useful. That's because he wasn't only attacking alleged communists and the Democrats whom he accused of shielding them. He was also attacking the entire centrist American establishment, the Eastern intellectuals and the power class, many of whom were Republicans themselves, albeit moderate ones. . . . Moderate Republicans, not Democrats, led the fight against him. . . .
McCarthyism is usually considered a virulent form of Red-baiting and character assassination. But it is much more than that. As historian Richard Hofstadter described it in his famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," McCarthyism is a way to build support by playing on the anxieties of Americans, actively convincing them of danger and conspiracy even where these don't exist.

Of course, Gabler's reference to the tendentious Professor Hofstadter takes us back to the Adorno/Frankfurt School of political psychoanalysis. But the Reds whom McCarthy baited weren't Oedipal complexes or Rorschach's inblots. They were genuine Communist agents and communist sympathizers in government, influencing U.S. policy in a pro-Stalin/pro-Mao direction, and the true story of McCarthy's courageous crusade to expose this subversion is the subject of M. Stanton Evan's excellent book, Blacklisted by History.

Buy one for yourself, buy another as a gift to someone you love, and be sure to check out the other selections in the 2008 Holiday Book Sale.

Hasta la vista, Mel

And good riddance. I'd really like to say something clever here, but yesterday I found out I've been in a depression since December 2007, and I'm just too depressed to be clever.

Wait, I just thought of something semi-clever: "Dead wood"!

(I'm really not funny when I'm depressed.)

Conservative 'dead wood'

Erick Erickson writes:

Inside the conservative movement, there is a lot of deadwood -- institutions and personalities who continue sucking up resources long after the usefulness of the organization is over. . . .
There are few truly indispensable people in the movement and far too many dispensable people who think they are indispensable. Likewise, there are too many conservative organizations that operate as employment vehicles for out of work politicians still needing their egos stroked.
Conservatism must be about the advancement of freedom and opportunity, not the advancement of any one person. Thus we need to rebuild the movement and burn up the dead wood.

Erick here puts his finger on the problem of the conservative movement's institutional inertia. Over the past 40 years, conservatism has established numerous institutions that have grown and flourished and done valuable service. Many of those institutions remain vital and effective.

But there are other institutions that have bogged down into the rut of habit: Doing what they've always done because . . . well, because it's what they've always done. And even those institutions that are relatively effective may be less effective than they could be because of inertia. Why should a previously successful organization change its ways? And why should an organization with a multimillion-dollar budget try to hustle and scrap and work overtime as if it were an underfunded startup?

Methods of activism that were effective in 1978 or 1989 or 1994 may not be effective in 2008. While conservative principles may be timeless, the messages by which those principles are conveyed might need to be reframed in language that better speaks to the interests and cultural background of the younger generation, and conveyed through new media channels. But this kind of updating is hard to do when entrenched institutions are staffed by time-servers whose chief interest is the maintence of their own personal turf.

One of the things that the conservative movement sorely lacks is "outsider eyes." The movement takes in young cradle Republicans, trains them in its beliefs and methods, and then buries them inside institutions where everyone else has undergone the same process. It's impossible for any of them to "think outside the box" for the very reason that none of them have ever been outside the box. The situation resembles that described by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty:

If every part of the business of society which required organized concert, or large and comprehensive views, were in the hands of the government, and if government offices were universally filled by the ablest men, all the enlarged culture and practised intelligence in the country, except the purely speculative, would be concentrated in a numerous bureaucracy, to whom alone the rest of the community would look for all things: the multitude for direction and dictation in all they had to do; the able and aspiring for personal advancement. To be admitted into the ranks of this bureaucracy, and when admitted, to rise therein, would be the sole objects of ambition. Under this regime, not only is the outside public ill-qualified, for want of practical experience, to criticize or check the mode of operation of the bureaucracy, but even if the accidents of despotic or the natural working of popular institutions occasionally raise to the summit a ruler or rulers of reforming inclinations, no reform can be effected which is contrary to the interest of the bureaucracy.

Bureaucratic ossification doesn't affect only government agencies, you see. Every long-established organization has its institutional habits, and systemic inertia always favors the maintenance of the status quo. And not even spectacular failure, like that which the conservative movement has experienced over the past few years, can overcome that inertia.

Much of the institutional bureaucracy of the conservative movement is dead wood, as Erick says, and the urgent question is, what can be done about it?

Obama as 21st-century Hoover

Jeffrey Lord suggests Republicans steal a page from the Democrats by imitating Jazz Age journalist Charley Michelson:

A hard-bitten cynic with a wintry, satanic smile and a dry humor, who had seen everything and lost all illusions he brought a new professionalism to political publicity.… Michelson turned out an uninterrupted stream of interviews, statements and speeches in Washington. These releases -- over 500 in the first two years, signed indifferently by leading Democrats in the House or Senate -- poured ridicule on the Hoover administration. Michelson himself, playing interminable bridge or dominoes with newspapermen at the Press Club, saw to it that his best wisecracks received full circulation. This barrage undoubtedly had something to do with fixing the Depression image of the Hoover administration.

The problem: Republicans don't hire journalists. They hire know-it-all assholes like Tucker Bounds.

Simple question

I just heard Forbes columnist Rich Karlgaard on "Fox & Friends" say, "We need to keep people in their homes." Simple question: Why?

We got into this crisis because of lax lending standards -- ACORN was pushing banks to count food stamps as income for lending purposes -- which means that there are a lot of people living in houses they can't afford. How is it fair to people who've lived within their means to prop up deadbeats who took on mortgages they couldn't afford?

We moved to DC, sold our home in Georgia, and have spent more than a decade renting simply because we couldn't afford to buy a home in the overheated DC housing market. Now that the market is finally cooling off, why should the government punish me for my prudence by artificially propping up the housing market, thereby keeping me from snapping up a bargain?

UPDATE: Jimmie at Sundries Shack has more thoughts.

Ala. Democrats charged with corruption

Birmingham, Ala., Mayor Larry Langford has been charged with accepting nearly $250,000 in bribes from two former top officials of Alabama's Democratic Party. Both former state party chairman William Blount, a Montgomery investment banker, and former state party executive director Al LaPierre also have been charged in connection with the alleged scheme:

The charges stem from a long-running federal investigation surrounding bond deals that were at the center of Jefferson County's upgrade of its sewer system, deals that have left the county billions of dollars in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy.

The 80-page federal indictment in this case is online, and the Birmingham News has a special page about the Langford case. Democrats have claimed for months that the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman was a politically motivated "witch hunt" orchestrated by Karl Rove. We'll see if they'll try the same defense for Langford, Blount and LaPierre.

All these (allegedly) corrupt Democrats -- somebody ought to write a book about it.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

UPDATE: The Washington Times:

"It was a classic pay-to-play scheme," said Alice Martin, the U.S. attorney for Northern Alabama whose office is prosecuting the case. . . .
Mr. Langford dismissed the charges as politically motivated, accusing Miss Martin, a Bush appointee, of targeting him because he is a Democrat.
"This is certainly no surprise to us - we anticipated something happening soon especially knowing Alice Martin's days in office are numbered with the swearing in of a new president in late January - just a little over a month from now," said a statement released by his office.

Amazing how the Bush administration has prosecuted so many Republicans -- including former Reps. Bob Ney and Duke Cunningham and Sen. Ted Stevens -- and yet whenever a Democrat gets charged with anything, it's always a political witch hunt.

UPDATE II: Jammie Wearing Fool notes that some media coverage of this case is of the "Name That Party" variety. The B'ham News makes the first reference to Blount and LaPierre as "friends" of the mayor, rather than as former state Democratic Party officials.

On media and bias

Ed Driscoll linked me last week in a long post about media bias, keying off a Washington Times column by Rep. Lamar Smith:

President-elect Obama won by about 7 percent. That means if the media's one-sided coverage changed the minds of just 4 voters out of 100, the media - because of their bias - determined the election's outcome!

Read the whole thing. Ed's suggestion:

Hopefully the next GOP candidate will lay sufficient upfront groundwork so that his supporters (and not just the base) will know that the media attacks are coming--and that the GOP isn't competing merely against another party, they're also competing against the bulk of the legacy media, where most voters go to receive whatever scraps of information they'll get to justify their voting decisions.
It wouldn't hurt to remind people of the media's excesses and kneejerk support for Obama in this election, as many will have forgotten it. Laying this groundwork early in the campaign would also allow the candidate to have lots of "See, I told you so" moments when the drive-by media hits start flying.

What bothers me is how Ed -- and I think most Republicans -- take hostile media as a given. This is defeatism, and I don't like it. Go back to Rep. Smith's math: If media bias influenced 4% of voters, that made all the difference.

To my mind, what this says is that if Republicans could get slightly more favorable press coverage -- say, reducing the media's pro-Democrat bias from 70/30 to 60/40 -- this improvement could make the difference between defeat and victory. Ergo, an effective public-relations program doesn't have to be 100% successful in order to make a decisive difference.

I have often noted that GOP political operatives all think they know everything about media, even though none of them have ever worked in the news business. This is why you saw Steve Schmidt and the other McCain campaign operatives essentially repeat the errors of Dick Wadhams and the '06 Allen Senate campaign in Virginia.

Conservatives needs to understand how much of media bias is the fault of Republicans. If you entrust your media operation to clueless assholes -- hello, Tucker Bounds! -- you can't expect good coverage.

Unless and until Republican campaign officials admit that they don't know what they're doing, until they stop whining about bias and start asking some questions about why they suffer from such a horrific relationship with reporters, they're never even going to start to fix the problem.

During the 2008 election cycle, the Republican Party raised $720 million. You'd think for that kind of money, those idiots could have bought a fucking clue about what's wrong with their media strategy.

More evidence: Markets work

Marginal incentives:

As the credit crunch bites, Britons may be turning to sex as a cheap way to pass the time, a charity says.
A YouGov survey of 2,000 adults found sex was the most popular free activity, ahead of window shopping and gossiping.
The Scots were most amorous with 43% choosing sex over other pastimes, compared with 35% in South England. . . .
Around one in 10 respondents to the survey, carried in November, said their favourite free activity was window shopping and 6% chose going to a museum as the cheapest way to pass the time.

Hmmm. Maybe this explains why my wife and I -- who came of age during the recession-plagued '70s -- have six kids. The U.S. economy has been in recession since 2007. Get busy, people!

Palin vs. Ludacris

Sarah Palin drew "several thousand people" to an 8:30 a.m. rally for Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss today in Augusta, Ga.:

The Palin rally in Augusta drew a crowd of 3,000 to 4,000 people, many holding aloft campaign signs and shouting their adoration of the GOP vice presidential candidate.
"Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!" they chanted. One woman stood behind Palin with a huge red sign that read: "Save My Gun."

Meanwhile, Democrat Jim Martin is planning a "rally at the state Capitol at 5:30 p.m. with civil rights veterans and hip-hop star Ludacris." Hip-hop vs. the hockey mom -- we'll see which gets a majority in Tuesday's Senate runoff.

UPDATE: Another big crowd in Savannah:

More than 3,000 people flocked to the Savannah Civic Center, some to rally support for Chambliss, others, to catch a glimpse of Palin and see her in person.
When she was introduced, the crowd erupted in applause for the Alaska governor and former vice-presidential candidate, eclipsing the ovations for Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue and the candidate himself, Chambliss.

Barracuda!

UPDATE II: Welcome Michelle Malkin readers.

UPDATE III: Thousands more in Perry, Ga.:

Palin was greeted by cheers of "Sarah! Sarah!" in what is decidedly Republican country: south Houston County. More than 2,700 people RSVP'd for the rally at the Georgia National Fairgrounds and Agricenter, one of several appearances for the duo today across Georgia. . . .

But this afternoon, in Perry, the energy belonged to the GOP. The crowd packed in close, shoulder to shoulder for, as state Sen. Ross Tolleson called Palin, "one of the most exciting women in U.S. politics." . . .
"It isn't just about your state," Palin told the crowd. "It is about the entire United States of America and our future. ... The eyes of our nation are on this stage. We all have Georgia on our minds."

Next stop: Gwinnett County.

UPDATE IV: The Gwinnett rally:

Oh, the Saxby Chambliss signs are plentiful, but it's clear even before you walk in that this is a Sarah Palin for President event, four years ahead of its time.

Several thousand people are already here at the Gwinnett Center, a majority grouped in front into one large mosh pit.
A decidedly younger crowd than Republicans usually draw to the events like this, and the music is less twangy as well. More rock than country, and many young ladies with tiaras and beauty contest ribbons. . . .
Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska and former GOP nominee for vice president, just got an extended standing ovation from a crowd of several thousand in the Gwinnett Center.
Palin said re-electing Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss, and denying Democrats a 60th vote in the Senate, was essential to "maintaining the checks and balances needed for our democracy."
She mentioned that she had been here once before -- a politician always likes to say, "It's good to be back" -- when her oldest son graduated from boot camp at Fort Benning. "Georgia, you took care of my boy, now he's taking care of you," she said.

A smashing success. Sounds like Sarah's the most popular Yankee in Georgia.

UPDATE IV: The biggest attraction:

Chambliss was "happy to become the warm-up act at his own final rallies," said CNN congressional correspondent Dana Bash, who is covering the Georgia runoff election. . . .
Sen. John McCain returned to the trail to campaign with Chambliss just nine days after losing the presidential election to Obama.
Two weeks ago, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination before dropping out in March and backing McCain, also campaigned with Chambliss. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney also teamed up with Chambliss. . . .
Last week, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani campaigned with Chambliss. . . .
Some in the crowds were chanting "Sarah, Sarah" at times, and the audiences were much larger than when the other Republican surrogates teamed up with Chambliss in recent weeks.
"With adoring signs and 'Palin for President' T-shirts, it may be easy to forget Palin came to Georgia campaigning for someone else," observed Bash. (Emphasis added.)

Sort of refutes the notion that she was a drag on the McCain ticket, eh? Also, here's a Democratic prediction to remember:

Martin called Palin's four campaign stops Monday a sign of desperation for Chambliss, adding that "bringing Sarah Palin is not going to help him (Chambliss) because the voters of Georgia want someone who will stand up for them in Washington. Someone who understands their issues."

OK, so the Democrat says Palin won't help Chambliss. We'll see what you have to say in 24 hours, Jim Martin.

Video via Hot Air, where Allahpundit notes Palin's reference to John McCain, which doesn't get many cheers from this grassroots GOP crowd. The 'Cuda needs to scratch any references to the Maverick from future speeches, and instead start talking Reagan.

Breitbart goes Bollywood

Susan Sarandon Syndrome goes international:

On the evening of Nov. 26, the biggest names in Bollywood walked the red carpet at the Bombay premiere of "The President Is Coming," a comedy about six 20-somethings vying to win the right to shake hands with President Bush.
Among those in attendance at the star-studded premiere Wednesday evening was Bollywood's "new heartthrob" Imran Khan, who proudly posed for paparazzi donning a T-shirt with Mr. Bush's face sandwiched between the words "International Terrorist." . . .
At the precise moment Mr. Khan and hundreds of others making their fortunes in the multibillion-dollar Indian movie business were watching "The President Is Coming," only a few blocks away, 10 20-something Muslim extremists began a horrific three-day terror spree.

Read the rest.

Memeorandum rules

My favorite aggregator gets written up in the Guardian:

Memeorandum is based on the idea of "memes" or ideas that spread across the web (along with a pun on memorandum). Someone publishes an interesting story, other people find it, discuss it, and link to it. That's how the web works. Small stories come and go quickly, while big ones generate lots of comment and dominate the page for hours.
The developer, Gabe Rivera, says it's all done in software. He provides a list of publications as "seeds," but the software still finds stories on sites he's never heard of. It's just a question of following links, and then trying to assess the contents. The algorithms are, obviously, secret.

The Guardian writer then goes on to assert that Memeorandum is better than Google News. I think that's an apples and oranges comparison. I use Memeorandum to keep up with what the blogs are saying, whereas Google News I use to search for specific stories.

The two most important features at Memeorandum are the "New Item Finder" and "Featured Posts." Keep track of those, and if you're not precisely "ahead of the curve" on the state of the blogosphere, you're certainly up-to-date.

UPDATE: Mary Katharine Ham also does some aggregating. She doesn't have an algorithm, but she does have a great smile.

Unions vs. jobs

Want to be unemployed? Join a union!

Toyota, BMW, Kia and others now make 54% of the cars Americans buy. The internationals also employ some 113,000 Americans, compared with 239,000 at U.S.-owned carmakers . . .
To put it concisely, the transplants operate under conditions imposed by the free market. Detroit lives on Fantasy Island.
Consider labor costs. Take-home wages at the U.S. car makers average $28.42 an hour, according to the Center for Automotive Research. That's on par with $26 at Toyota, $24 at Honda and $21 at Hyundai. But include benefits, and the picture changes. Hourly labor costs are $44.20 on average for the non-Detroit producers, in line with most manufacturing jobs, but are $73.21 for Detroit. . . .
This $29 cost gap reflects the way Big Three management and unions have conspired to make themselves uncompetitive -- increasingly so as their market share has collapsed. . . . Over the decades the United Auto Workers won pension and health-care benefits far more generous than in almost any other American industry. As a result, for every UAW member working at a U.S. car maker today, three retirees collect benefits; at GM, the ratio is 4.6 to one. . . .
Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina -- which accounted for a quarter of U.S. car production last year -- are "right-to-work" states where employees can't be forced to join a union.
The absence of the UAW also gives car producers the flexibility to deploy employees as needed. Work rules vary across company and plant, but foreign rules are generally less restrictive. At Detroit's plants, electricians or mechanics tend to perform certain narrow tasks and often sit idle. That rarely happens outside Michigan. In the nonunionized plants, temporary workers can also be hired, and let go, as market conditions dictate. (Emphasis added.)

Gee, letting automakers run their own factories -- without meddling from thievish union bosses and their featherbedding rules -- what an amazing idea!

The senescence of Peggy Noonan

She doesn't report. She provides no research. She doesn't even try to come up with any coherent argument. It's just a random collection of stuff:

One of the weirdest, most perceptually jarring things about the economic crisis is that everything looks the same. . . . Three great investment banks have fallen while a fourth totters, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen 31% in six months. And yet when you free yourself from media and go outside for a walk, everything looks . . . the same. . . .

News flash: Peggy Noonan went for a walk!

Anyway it is odd, surreal, to have the steady downbeat of Great Depression II all over the news, and few signs of GDII on the street, odd that the news we're hearing is at odds with what our eyes are seeing, at least at the moment.
So where is GDII happening? Right now mostly in conversations between wives and husbands, in families and among friends, about selling, about digging in, about layoffs, and not taking chances, and reduced income, and fear. . . .
I close with a nod of small thanks for the title of a book I saw the other day called, "Are You There, Vodka? This is Chelsea." The stewardess was reading it on a flight from Phoenix to Newark. She was laughing. It was nice.

News flash: Peggy Noonan flew to Phoenix!

One column a week, and she can't be bothered to produce anything better than banal observations about the reading habits of stewardesses? "She was laughing. It was nice." I hope she's not getting paid by the word.

Deepak Chopra, terrorism expert

Blame America First:

Soon enough, there was Deepak Chopra, healer, New Age philosopher and digestion guru, advocate of aromatherapy and regular enemas, holding forth on CNN on the meaning of the attacks.
How the ebullient Dr. Chopra had come to be chosen as an authority on terror remains something of a mystery. . . .
What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that "our policies, our foreign policies" had alienated the Muslim population, that we had "gone after the wrong people" and inflamed moderates. And "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay." . . .
Two subsequent interviews with Larry King brought much of the same -- a litany of suggestions about the role the U.S. had played in fueling assaults by Muslim terrorists, reminders of the numbers of Muslims in the world and their grievances. A faithful adherent of the root-causes theory of crime -- mass murder, in the case at hand -- Dr. Chopra pointed out, quite unnecessarily, that most of the terrorism in the world came from Muslims. It was mandatory, then, to address their grievances -- "humiliation," "poverty," "lack of education." The U.S., he recommended, should undertake a Marshall Plan for Muslims.

It's the Office Krupke theory of evil: "I'm depraved on account I'm deprived."

Good-bye, Ted Baxter

Gray-haired news anchors (and their big salaries) are riding off into the local news sunset:

In October, three weeks after Ernie Bjorkman, an institution in Colorado television, signed a new annual contract worth close to a quarter of a million dollars, he was told he was being let go by KWGN, the CW affiliate in Denver, a victim of consolidation with another station.
In the self-assured baritone of his profession, Mr. Bjorkman, a 36-year television veteran who will be paid through the end of his contract period, said, "I don't think we’re going to see the anchor people grow old with the audience anymore."
Across the country, longtime local TV anchors are a dying breed. Facing an economic slump and a severe advertising downturn, many stations have cut costs drastically in the last year, and veteran anchors, with their expensive contracts, seem to be shouldering a disproportionate share of the cutbacks. When station managers are forced to make cuts, hefty anchor salaries are a tempting target.
In Chicago, the 23-year anchor Diann Burns was laid off from WBBM. In Boston, the renowned sports anchor Bob Lobel was let go by WBZ. In Houston, the 26-year veteran Carolyn Campbell was dismissed from KHOU.
When the anchors depart, they take decades of experience and insight with them. "Basically, you replace someone who knows City Hall with someone who can't find it," said John Beard, who lost his job at KTTV last December after 26 years as a news anchor in Los Angeles.
"There is certainly an erosion of longtime anchors happening at many stations across the country, for a very simple reason: economics," said Al Primo, a television news consultant who developed the "Eyewitness News" format in the 1960s and 1970s.

Good-night and good luck!

'The terrorists were watching CNN'

The favorite network of mass murderers:

"[O]ur safety was actually compromised by CNN, which broadcast where we were.
"The terrorists were watching CNN and they came down from where they were in a lift after hearing about us on television. For that reason I would appeal to the media to be very careful about what they broadcast.
"When we left Mumbai there were still around 100 people trapped there." She added: "People talk to one another on mobile phones and that gets broadcast and the
terrorists knew from that."

(Via Michelle Malkin.)

Krugman's thesaurus

"Fiscal expansion" = deficit spending

Now he's working on the Nobel Prize for euphemisms.

Calling B.S.on Politico

A rumbling in the barrio?

Obama promised hope and change, and Hispanics hoped for the usual two Latinos in the Cabinet. And heck, why not three or four? Now that would be a change. But at this early stage in the appointments process, there is a trickle of disappointment running through the Latino community.

Yeah, right. Someone should do a poll and see what percentage of Latinos can name a single appointee to Obama's Cabinet. I doubt it's 10 percent. Given that the "community" is not paying attention, where is this "trickle of disappointment" really located?

First, the most prominent Hispanic leader, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, lost the plum secretary of state assignment to New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Last spring, Richardson angered the Clintonistas by backing Obama over Clinton during the heated Democratic Primary contest, only to now see her being offered the top diplomatic post.
“There’s nobody more prepared and experienced” for the job than Richardson, said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. Richardson was energy secretary and ambassador to the United Nations during the Clinton administration, and he helped free hostages in North Korea, Iraq and Cuba.
Second, grass-roots immigrant rights activists have mixed feelings about Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano being the likely nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security.
Arizona is the epicenter of the national immigration crisis, and Napolitano, the popular border state governor, has navigated through turbulent rhetoric on all sides to calm the debate.
Napolitano signed into law last year the nation’s harshest penalties against employers who hire undocumented workers.

In other words, a bunch of Hispanic officeholders are grumbling about "jobs for the boys," and the amnesty activists are afraid that the choice of Napolitano might indicate that Obama won't pander sufficiently to the Atzlan mob. It's not the "community," it's the special interests.

The special interests ought to remember that Hillary was leading in Iowa until she stumbled over Tim Russert's question about drivers licenses for illegals. If the "trickle of disappointment" means that Obama isn't going to pander to La Raza, it's a very good sign.

Bias? What bias?

Associated Press story: "Is gay the new black?"

You have to get to the 14th paragraph before any opponent of same-sex marriage is quoted. Exactly one opponent is quoted, and the only other voices in the 1,110-word story are supporters of same-sex marriage, so that supporters outnumber opponents by a 4-to-1 ratio among sources quoted in the story.

Outside of AP stories, however, a clear majority of Americans oppose same-sex marriage, which has only ever been implemented by court decree. Ballot initiatives banning same-sex marriage have been passed in 31 of the 31 states where they've come to a vote.

The AP is no longer in the journalism business. They're an activist lobbying organization.

'The Best Christmas Tree Ever'

I just got home with an 8-foot Douglas fir that is The Best Christmas Tree Ever. This has been a McCain family tradition for two decades. The weekend after Thanksgiving, Dad goes out and brings home a big, bushy Christmas tree, and everyone pronounces it The Best Christmas Tree Ever. Other family holiday traditions include:

• My wife and I resolving that this year, we're not going to go overboard and buy the kids too many gifts.
• Going overboard anyway.
• Each year, each of the kids adds a special personalized Christmas ornament to the tree. With six kids, the tree is getting pretty crowded, which is why getting a big tree is important.
• Accusing each other of peeking at gifts.
• Denying peeking at gifts.
• Peeking at gifts.
• Teapots. My wife collects teapots, so every year, she gets a new teapot for Christmas.
• Pantie balls. I always buy my wife lingerie for Christmas. The panties are rolled into balls for wrapping and then used as stocking stuffers.
• Christmas jeans. My wife always buys me two pairs of jeans for Christmas.
• GI Joes. Each of the four boys gets a GI Joe, which is stuck in the top of their Christmas stocking, weapon at the ready, for Christmas morning. (Our 16-year-old twins may be getting a bit old for this, but they'll probably get GI Joes anyway.)
• Christmas Eve snacks. After putting the kids to bed, my wife and I begin assembling toys, stuffing stockings and doing last-minute wrapping. And I always make a plate of beef sausage, cheese and crackers to eat while we do this.
• Wake-up toys. Each kid gets a stuffed animal in their bed to wake up with.
• Christmas morning. The first kid to wake up about 6 a.m. wakes up the siblings, and then they wake us up so we can take photos while they open gifts.
• The nap. Since we're usually awake until 3 or 4 a.m. getting Christmas ready, my wife and I get maybe three hours' sleep before the kids wake us up. So Christmas afternoon, we take a nap.

Family traditions are important.

The Mother of All Fiskings

Some self-designated "doctor of journalism" decided to take on Mark Steyn, who opens up a can of forensic whupass on the aforesaid professor:

Not for the first time you realise that, for the lazy white liberal, driving around with a "CELEBRATE DIVERSITY" sticker absolves one from having to take the slightest interest in other cultures. . . .
I think Professor Waggy-Finger is doing what they call "projecting". He's accusing me of everything he's been doing himself. . . . . To be more charitable to you than you deserve, you assume that Oriana Fallaci and I so want to think the worst of Islam that we'll fall for any old hooey. Actually not. On the other hand, you so want to think the worst of us blowhard provocateurs that you assume we're as ignorant of Islam as you evidently are. . . .
[H]e has accused me of failing to provide a source for a quote: False. He's accused me of making up famous rulings of the Ayatollah: False. He's declared flat out that there is no such thing as a Khomeini "Blue Book": False. And people pay money to study "responsible journalism" with this guy?

The subject is the Ayatollah's rulings on, inter alia, having sex with 9-year-olds -- a green light, Allahu Akbar! -- so read the whole thing.

Critics of Islamic barbarism are denounced by liberals for much the same reason Joe McCarthy was denounced by liberals. It is vitally important for liberals to convince Americans that they have no enemies other than Republicans. Ergo, liberals worried less about the subversive efforts of Kremlin stooges than about the Republican effort to expose the stooges, and they worry less about terrorism than about Republican efforts to apprehend terrorists. And conservative columnists who tell the truth about the Ayatollah's rulings are more of a danger, liberals would have you believe, than the genocidal Jew-hating regime in Tehran.

I wonder if hating Republicans is considered a violation by the Canadian Human Rights Commission?

Brian Williams, Pentagon stooge?

Hey, if you believe Glenn Greenwald . . . well, that's might big "if," isn't it?

YouTube vs. Malkin

Michelle Malkin has a long post about her battles with the censors at YouTube, including a New York Times feature on the phenomenon.

I'd be happy if I could just find a way to get my blog off the "spam blog" list at Blogspot (another Google-run venture). The Obamanauts hit me back last summer, and ever since, I've been required to submit a word-verification for every post and update.

Amazing thing: It's a one-click procedure to flag a blog as objectionable, but there is no way for bloggers to contact Blogspot to complain about being flagged. Seriously -- there is no inbox, no e-mail address, no phone number or address by which the proprietors can be reached for such complaints.

Good news on global warming?

It's apparently bad for squirrels:

Last year, oaks in metropolitan Washington produced a bumper crop of acorns, and squirrels and other urban wildlife produced an abundance of young. This year, experts said, many animals will starve. . . .
"I was worried they'd think I was crazy. But they said I wasn't the only one calling who was concerned about it," [Arlington, Va., resident Louise Garrett] said. "This is the first time I can remember in my lifetime not seeing any acorns drop in the fall and I'm 53. You have to wonder, is it global warming? Is it environmental? It makes you wonder what's going on."

(Via Memeorandum & the Corner.) Notice how they bring in the Anecdotal Amateur to blame the DC-area acorn shortage on global warming, since no climatologist was willing to take on that proposition.

In fact, the most probable explanation is the region's unusually rainy spring season this year. Oaks produce more acorns in dry conditions. So the squirrels are doing just fine in drought-stricken Georgia. This is a short-term, regional phenomenon, but if amateur speculation can be used to feed the media's climate crisis motif, you can be sure they won't miss the chance.

Indeed, the regional acorn shortage has driven the bushy-tailed rodents into a frenzy. I live up in the woods about 70 miles north of D.C., and yesterday when I was in the back yard, the leaves were rustling madly with desperate vermin trying to find a nut. Such was the frantic scurrying that I mentioned it to my wife when I went back in the house. "Damn squirrels! The place is infested with them!"

Maybe some city-slicker liberal tree-huggers have a soft spot for squirrels, but not me. Squirrels are disease-ridden scavengers, the rats of the forest. And the imminent starvation of a few million of these menaces is good news.

Blame global warming, please. I just bought a Ford Explorer, and if my gas-guzzler is doing some small part to diminish the squirrel population, you can thank me later.

Economic shock and awe

George Will:

FDR's hyperkinetic New Deal created uncertainties that paralyzed private-sector decision making. Which sounds familiar.
Bear Stearns? Broker a merger. Lehman Brothers? Death sentence. The $700 billion is for cleaning up toxic assets? Maybe not. Writes Russell Roberts of George Mason University:
"By acting without rhyme or reason, politicians have destroyed the rules of the game. There is no reason to invest, no reason to take risk, no reason to be prudent, no reason to look for buyers if your firm is failing. Everything is up in the air and as a result, the only prudent policy is to wait and see what the government will do next. The frenetic efforts of FDR had the same impact: Net investment was negative through much of the 1930s."
Barack Obama says that the next stimulus should deliver a "jolt." His adviser Austan Goolsbee says that it must be big enough to "startle the thing into submission." Their theory is that the crisis is largely psychological, requiring shock treatment. But shocks from government have been plentiful.

The Republican message for the foreseeable future is three words: "It won't work." Nothing is more predictable than the failure of the Keynesian interventionism of the Democrats' economic program.

I debated whether to link Will, considering that I've recently argued that he and David Brooks ought to be loaded onto a C-130 and dropped on the Taliban. But now that Will is back to quoting George Mason economists, I suppose Brooks can make the trip solo.