The taxpayer shortage

(BUMPED; UPDATES BELOW) For years, pro-life activists have warned that abortion and the contraceptive culture were leading us toward a demographic crisis. At least a decade ago, Jim Sedlak of the American Life League was warning: "In order to turn things around . . . young people getting married have to be thinking of having four or more children."

Well, the crisis is now upon us. Today, Conservative Grapevine linked my reaction to Obama's Monday press conference:

Suppose a pipe-dream hypothetical: Somehow, this "stimulus" actually produces a sort of dead-cat bounce in the economy, so that unemployment is down around 5% again by 2012. Is that good? No, not really, because government will have produced that bounce by borrowing massively against the future in a society that's about to sustain a serious demographic shock.
The first Baby Boomers turn 65 in 2011, and every year after that will see more and more retirees going onto the Social Security and Medicare rolls. Even if we raise the retirement age, there is still the net drain of productive labor. The average 67-year-old can't produce goods and services as efficiently as the average 38-year-old and (due to certain legal decisions circa 1973) after 2011, we'll have a growing shortage of 38-year-olds and a growing surplus of 67-year-olds.
We are on the verge of a taxpayer shortage, you see, and what the Democrats want to do is take out a massive loan that will have to be repaid by a shrinking pool of taxpayers, who will be expected to support a burgeoning population of increasingly sickly Baby Boomer retirees.

Yet, even as America reaps the disastrous economic consequences of the Culture of Death, the misanthropic Malthusians continue to scream about "overpopulation." As I've said elsewhere, some people at least have the excuse of ignorance. Others are merely evil.

UPDATE: A 12-year-old pro-lifer speaks:

"I was stunned by how good this video is," says Cassie Fiano. (Via Melissa Clouthier, who isn't sure that 12-year-olds should be voicing their opinions on political issues.)

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin reports that House Democrats have reached a backroom deal on the "stimulus," excluding Republicans from the conference negotiations. Which is good news, because now they've given Republican Senators a valid excuse to filibuster the conference report. This "stimulus" abomination might blow up yet!

UPDATE II: Thanks to the commenter who informs me that YouTube commenters are saying vile things about the girl who made this video. You stay classy, "progressive netroots"!

UPDATE III: Welcome Ace of Spades readers.

UPDATE IV: Allahpundit:

[Y]oung talent in the service of a righteous cause deserves some extra publicity. Worth watching for the sheer precocity of the performance, which suggests she’s destined someday for Hollywood.

Destiny? Kind of a religious concept, eh?

UPDATE V: "She's more articulate than most people I know, and even our teleprompter president." Heh.

"[I]f this girl is this good at 12, just imagine what she’ll be like in high school and college. Politics is clearly in her future." Heh -- and once again, happy birthday, Sarah Palin!

UPDATE VI: Linked at JillStanek.com.

The moral aspect of the crisis

"Today 'virtue' is literally and figuratively missing from our public vocabulary and the idea of 'the moral' has been either trivialized or totally relativized. No training session or quick executive briefing can revive ethics and morality because they are habituated over years and years not in some late afternoon consultants' PowerPoint presentation or a touchy feely weekend retreat. At the very root of our financial crisis is a moral vacuum, which can only be filled with true virtue."

UPDATE: My compliments to Fear and Loathing in Georgetown for reading further than I did, to where the author disparages "greed." To quote an AOSHQ commenter, "Greed is a constant element."

The guy behind the counter at Burger King is not necessarily less "greedy" than the millionaire Wall Street tycoon. Both want to make big bucks; the difference between them is that the Wall Street tycoon has been more successful in finding and exploiting the opportunity to make big bucks. It is an error of logic to assume that the guy making $9 an hour at Burger King is less "greedy" -- i.e., more virtuous -- than the Wall Street tycoon, and yet liberalism assumes just that: The poor are virtuous merely because they are poor.

Both the Burger King guy and the Wall Street tycoon may be trustworthy, industrious, diligent and thrifty -- the sort of Boy Scout Law stuff we associate with "virtue." Such virtues are, really, much more important on Wall Street. If the guy at Burger King is lazy or dishonest, his potential to do harm is less than the potential harm done by a Bernie Madoff. But are the people who thought they could get a 10% annual return from Madoff's scam really so much less culpable than Madoff himself?

The guy who thinks he can make an easy buck playing three-card monte is enabling the three-card monte dealer. And the guy who thought he could make an easy buck by refinancing his house was enabling the mortgage industry. Yet the "victims" of such scams profess their innocence and expect us to feel sorry for them.

Happy Birthday, Sarah Palin!

Conservatives4Palin reminds us that this is the governor's 45th birthday.

So, let's see, Gov. Palin is 45 and has five kids. My wife is 44 and we have six kids.

Considering that the U.S. total fertility rate is 2.1 lifetime births per woman, this means that between our two families, we're 268% above average.

The sun on the meadow is summery warm.
The stag in the forest runs free. . . .

Helen Rittelmeyer, girl genius

"The road to success is paved with cheesecake," she says, and there's never a bad excuse to blog about Christina Hendricks.

Charles G. Hill got the message, too.

BTW, I noticed there will be a debate next week involving that punk, Ryan Sager, who never blogs about Christina Hendricks. Hint, hint.

URGENT UPDATE: Guess who's No. 1 on a list titled, "Ten Hottest Women Size 10 and Up"? (H/T: Conservative Grapevine.)

Sowellism

"You can't raise a whole population of people who don't know how to think, but are taught to resent anything they don't understand, and expect that you're going to survive in the long run."
-- Thomas Sowell

Imported poverty

Immigration has consequences:

Utah's Latina teens have an alarmingly high birth rate: They are nearly four times more likely than other 15- to 17-year-olds to have a baby.
The Utah Department of Health is releasing the report on Latino health disparities today as part of a series exploring the challenges facing Utah minorities.
It shows that while nearly 18 of every 1,000 girls ages 15 to 17 in the general Utah population had a baby in 2006-07, 66 of 1,000 Latinas had one.
The implications go beyond those teens' immediate futures. National data show Latina teen moms are more likely to drop out of high school than other teen mothers, and teen mothers are more likely to be on welfare. Children of teen mothers are more likely to live in poverty and have educational and social problems and are more likely to become teen parents themselves.

I've written about this seldom-acknowledged consequence of our immigration problem, but our political system can't address it, because any politician who opens his mouth about the demographics of teen pregnancy is immediately targeted as a racist xenophobic nativist bigot.

"Teen pregnancy," per se, is not the problem. As Maggie Gallagher has pointed out, the real problem is unwed pregnancy. Yet as a society, we spend millions to discourage "teen pregnancy," even while celebrating single motherhood (a subject that Ann Coulter addresses in her new book).

There is a cultural factor involved that nobody wants to talk about, even when you have 14-year-old brides being bartered for beer in California. And the fact that this story about Latina teen pregnancy rates is coming out of Utah highlights the unaddressed double standard. On the one hand, when the polygamous FLDS cult relocated to Texas, the Texas legislature actually raised their state's age of consent from 14 to 16, in order to outlaw the cult's known practice of marrying off young teenage girls. And yet Texas led the nation in teen pregnancy in 2004 -- and it wasn't because of fundamentalist Mormons, OK? Like I said, if Texas is going to stage a paramilitary raid every time a 15-year-old gets pregnant, they're going to need to hire a lot more SWAT officers.

Given the seriousness of our nation's demographic crisis, one could argue -- and I actually have argued -- that we probably need more teen pregnancy, and if it weren't for Hispanic immigrants, the U.S. birth rate would still be below replacement level. Yet while liberals demand that we spend millions of taxpayer dollars on teen-pregnancy prevention, they simultaneously demand that we have open borders, so as to import more teen pregnacy. And if anybody tries to talk about this in a realistic way, they're denounced by liberals as "hatemongers."

Given these contradictory messages from liberals -- unlimited immigration, good; teen pregnancy, bad; honest policy discussion, hate -- one must question either their sanity, their intelligence or their bona fides.

The Hasidic pornography defense

Somehow, I don't think his First Amendment rights are going to help him here:

NEW YORK - A Spring Valley man accused of having sex with underage girls claims his religious beliefs prevent him from viewing sexual photographs and helping his own defense.
David Silverman, 21 at the time, is accused of having sex with three Westchester girls during a day of debauchery in Manhattan in March 2007, authorities said. . . .
Silverman is accused of not only having sex with the girls, but also taking photographs of them having sex with other men, according to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.
But because he later returned to being an ultra-religious Hasidic Jew, Silverman won't look at the photos, his lawyer, Israel Fried, said yesterday. . . .
A grand jury indictment accuses Silverman of having sexual intercourse and oral sex and of committing other sex acts with three girls - two 15-year-olds and a 14-year-old. . . .
Silverman and another man are accused of picking up the girls on March 23, 2007, in Westchester and driving them to a building near the Javits Convention Center on 34th Street.
A third man joined them, and they are accused of getting the girls drunk on alcohol.
Silverman and the other men were accused of having sex with each girl, with digital photos being taken, Kushner said.

OK, so three guys have a pornographic orgy with three jailbait girls, and one of the accused refuses to look at the evidence because he's a born-again Hasidim. Just when you think you've heard everything . . .

Re-inflating the bubble?

The news that Senate Republicans have added "tax relief for homebuyers" to the stimulus bill is not good news, says Doug Bandow at The American Spectator:

The housing market bubble burst. It cannot be reinflated. The bust will be painful, but dumping more money into the market in an attempt to inflate prices will only slow the adjustment process. The pain is unfortunate, even tragic for some people, but inevitable.

Exactly -- a point made by Ron Paul just yesterday. While driving to Washington, I was listening to C-SPAN radio coverage of the House Financial Services Committee hearing with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and caught this:

Ron Paul . . . says that, as a free marketer, he is also upset that Congress wants to prop up housing prices when there is a glut of housing on the market. "What's wrong with allowing the market to allow these prices to adjust," and drop quickly, so that "we can all go back to work again?"

That is to say, from a free-market perspective, those houses are worth whatever they'll sell for. The losses caused by the collapse of the bubble are real, and until those losses are realized -- that is, until the houses are sold and the market readjusted -- we are living in a state of economic denial, which Senate Republicans are attempting to prolong.

This is what Michelle Malkin has been trying to say in her many months of outspoken opposition to Washington's bailout/stimulus frenzy. The market is the market, and you can't fool the market. It might be the only thing that Ron Paul and Michelle Malkin agree about.

UPDATE: While trying to find video of Dr. No's statements yesterday, I found this video from February 2007 -- two years ago, before the bubble burst -- where he's talking "fiat money.":

This sounds kooky at times, but his essential points are correct:

• By manipulating the money supply and interest rates, the Fed conceals economic reality behind a wall of artificial price-signals.
• During the "bubble," the consumer price index (CPI) did not accurately reflect the inflation that Americans were experiencing in higher costs of housing, health care and college tuition.

We had government "experts" telling us that inflation was running only 2% annually, even while housing prices soared, effectively pricing many young people out of the market.

In retrospect, we see that kooky "Dr. No" was prescient, and all the "experts" were full of crap.

Death by karaoke

Being a legendary karaoke performer, I am troubled by this report:

Last November, an inebriated 24-year-old with the woefully apt name of Kyle Drinkwine was found by police in the back of a Wisconsin alley, his hands covered in blood. According to testimony compiled by the Smoking Gun, Drinkwine had spent the evening unwinding at Emma's Bar, a local watering hole that was hosting a karaoke night. Shortly after performing an Eminem song, he allegedly became so enraged by another patron's version of "Holy Diver" -- the 1983 anthem by heavy-metal patriarch Ronnie James Dio -- that he assaulted the singer and his friend and fled when police arrived. "This had started … over one's ability to sing karaoke," notes the arrest report, which reads like a Mike Judge novella.
Drinkwine's sad, stupid plight wasn't an isolated incident: In August 2007, a Seattle man was assaulted onstage during a karaoke rendition of Coldplay's "Yellow," while last December, a San Diego man encored his karaoke set by walking toward the crowd and attacking an audience member. And in Asia, there's been a string of karaoke-bar stabbings and shootings, including a horrific incident in Bangkok in which eight amateur singers were murdered by their neighbor, reportedly due in part to his hatred of John Denver's "Country Roads."

To begin with, no one should ever sing Dio for karaoke. Heavy metal was not meant for karaoke. So that attack was understandable. And did the Bangkok singers really deserve to die for "Country Roads"? It depends on how bad they were. In general, karaoke violence is a bad thing; but bad karaoke is itself a form of violence.

Investigate leaky Leahy

Pot. Kettle. Black.

So Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Nutopia, wants to create a Truth Commission to investigate the Bush Administration.
How about a Truth Commission to investigate the multiple leaks Leahy made to The Washington Post and others as the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee during the Reagan years? This guy never met a secret he didn't want to betray in the name of political expediency and may well have cost the life of at least one covert agent because of his sneaky political ways

Exactly.

Chuck Schumer: 'You lost'

By "you," I suppose he means taxpayers:

(Via Michelle Malkin.)

Never trust Democrats with money

Not known for fiscal probity:

The Democrat Executive Committee of Palm Beach County wants change all right, spare change that is. Local Democrat activists found out at last week’s DEC meeting that the local party is flat broke.
As of last week's meeting the Palm Beach County DEC had $33,444.70 in cash on hand and $53,347.49 in unpaid bills, according to the info handed out at the meeting.
Most are placing the blame on former DEC Chairman Wahid Mahmood for leaving the party in such a wretched state of affairs when he left office in December of 2008.

But this is the party now running the federal government.

Fear itself

You can't fool the markets:

US stocks fell sharply Tuesday, led by banks, as details of the government's latest bank bailout plan trickled out.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down about 70 points, then lost another 100 in a matter of minutes -- before even any official government announcement.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geither will reveal the proposals to help banks at 11 am New York time, after a one-day delay. CNBC will interview Geithner after his speech, at noon. Then he's on to Capitol Hill, where he will testify before a House panel.

(Via AOSHQ.) The stimulus just passed the Senate -- $800 billion for Democrats to squander.

The Obama Doctrine

Pre-emptive excuse-making:

[I]f the economy is still in trouble as the 2010 elections approach, Democrats will argue that eight years of Republican rule left the country in such awful shape that Democrats will need more time to clean up the mess. If unemployment is in the 7 percent to 9 percent range, they'll say, without their policies, it would have been 12 percent, or perhaps higher.

Read the whole thing.

1,000 Facebook friends!

Just passed the awesome 1K milestone today.

Real Hope, Real Change

"The ever-optimistic Milton Friedman believed that America enjoyed two distinct advantages over other nations with regard to its ability to escape from the worst effects of socialism. First, Americans have an uncanny ingenuity that has allowed them to continuously find loopholes in government regulations. And second, the US Federal government is incredibly wasteful. Friedman believed that government waste was good, because the resulting inefficiency that it caused effectively forestalled absolute tyranny, and the enormous scale of its waste would continually spur grassroots efforts aimed at at reform and change."

Signs the Apocalypse is upon us

The going gets weird:

An unusual wedding ceremony was held in the southern resort town of Eilat on Wednesday, as Sharon Tendler, a 41-years-old Jewish millionaire from London married her beloved Cindy, a 35-years-old dolphin, Israel's leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported Thursday.

First "Miss Teen Weimar," now this . . .

'Real journalistic standards' watch

The Washington Times just hired a former fashion model as a "style" reporter. And she's not making a nickel more than any other reporter there, I'm sure.

Obamanauts diss DC media elite

It's apparently a one-way love affair. The MSM cheerleaders go to the party, get drunk on Hope, and then are surprised to discover that the football team doesn't respect them the morning after.

Breitbart on Hope

He's doing some great columns nowadays:

Consider the tale of the ubiquitous "Hope" poster that helped get Mr. Obama worshipped, inoculated and elected — and the anti-capitalist street artist who "created" it.
Shepard Fairey last week was sued for copyright infringement by the Associated Press, which claims he stole photographer Manny Garcia's work and made it the basis of the iconic off-red, white and blue posters whose signed editions are being sold on eBay for thousands of dollars. . . .

Read the whole thing.

Garet Garrett!

It is not every day that the author of The People's Pottage is named out of the clear blue sky:

Though often identified as a strict libertarian, the Old Right writer Garet Garrett was a fiercely nationalist thinker, who never let his ideological sympathies get in the way of his patriotic duties. He was also an "isolationist." By contrast, Blankley equates servitude with service and duty with deference to the State. His "Nationalism" is globalist internationalism on steroids.

Somewhere around here I've got a paperback copy of The People's Pottage that I bought for 50 cents in a used bookstore about 15 years ago. I seem to recall it as having been reprinted by the John Birch Society. I suppose the Paulista movement must have revived interest in the old guy.

Moran goes Gonzo?

From "Hope and Change" to "Fear and Loathing"

Rick, you b------, you knew I couldn't resist linking that one, didn't ya? And wait 'til I tell my Samoan attorney about this . . .

Sixteen-year-old sex change

Tim Petras began hormone treatment at age 12 and recently became Kim Petras, the world's youngest post-operative transsexual:

The op -- carried out in secret last month -- was authorised after psychologists confirmed that Kim was "without doubt a girl in a boy's body."

(H/T: Right View from the Left Coast.) The appropriate pronoun? Oh, never mind. And what's a sex story without a media-approved "expert"?

Dr Bernd Meyenburg, who treats patients with identity disorders at the University of Frankfurt Hospital, said . . . "I was always against such operations on children so young but after seeing how happy one of my patients was and how well adjusted after returning from having the operation abroad while still a teenager - I realised that in some cases it is the right decision."

Thank you, Dr. Mengele! And I'm sure Steven Kotler is happy that "Tim/Kim" won't be contributing to overpopulation. Teen pregnancy? Not a problem. (Everybody go neuter yourselves in the name of ecology.)

Kim reportedly signed a record deal, and here is a video of the song "Last Forever":

Here is video of Kim answering blog questions:

Who can wait until Disney announces "The Kim Petras Show"? A role model for your children! Next: "Oprah"! "The View"! "Larry King Live"! . . . "Cabaret"? (Isn't there something kind of Weimar going on here?)

TOP TEN SIGNS THE PETRAS FAMILY KNEW YOUNG 'TIM' HAD A PROBLEM

10. Won the lead role when the kindergarten staged its version of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."

(Commenters can finish the list.)

UPDATE: Linked at AOSHQ headlines.

UPDATE Ii: Kim may not be the youngest for long. "Experts" have approved sex-change treatment for preteens.

Insert Nancy Pelosi joke here

Thanks to frequent commenter Smitty.

The salty-sweet taste of Hope

Take the "ournal" out of "journalism" and it's all over the faces of the White House press corps:

Chip Reid of CBS sounded like he wanted a job in the administration . . .

Yeah, let's hope there's some money in that "stimulus" for a fresh supply of knee pads for those tingly-legged reporters. This is the steamiest R-rated "honeymoon" in presidential history. Michelle Malkin:

President Obama’s lucky he didn’t slip and fall from the drool flood.

Oh, don't worry, the cult brides will clean up the mess, then fix their Dear Leader a pot of coffee and bake him some cupcakes with pink icing for Valentine's Day.

Doom and gloom alert

UPDATED & BUMPED 10:20 p.m.: There is sort of a false-dilemma fallacy that's mucking up arguments about government economic policy lately, and I'll tee it up by quoting something that Matt Cooper Twittered tonight:

Strong opening statement explaining the problem and why stimulus will help. Best line: "Tax cuts alone can't solve our economic problems."

Allow me to go long here a bit, because this is important. We just had a once-in-a-lifetime wipeout in the financial markets. If you talk to smart economists, off the record, you understand that the bursting of the real-estate bubble was not just a normal hump in the business cycle. It was more like the Mother Of All Corrections, a Drudge-siren alert that the fundamentals of our economy had gotten waaaay out of whack.

When the Good Times go away, there's no guarantee they'll ever come back. And if you've been reading Megan McArdle over the past year or so, you know that she has advanced the notion that top marginal rates are now sufficiently low that major Laffer Curve effects are not to be expected from further reductions. (Not sure I'm buying that argument, but it is worth considering.) So the question is not necessarily whether the Right is correct in saying that tax cuts will fix the economy or the Left is correct in saying that deficit spending will fix the economy. Rather, the question is, Can the economy be "fixed" at all?

That is to say, given all the economic realities -- including the graying of the workforce and the ballooning entitlement burden -- is there any government intervention that will automatically return us to the Good Times? I'm not entirely sure. There are textile-mill towns down home where the Good Times left and never came back. There are little towns all over rural America that have been shrinking toward ghost-town status for the past 15 or 20 years. Inner-city Detroit has never really recovered from the 1967 riots.

That a nation as large and wealthy as the United States might go down, never to rise again, is a remote possibility, but there is no guarantee we'll ever get back to the go-go heyday of 1987, when the Baby Boomers were age 23-41 and thus in their healthy prime working years. We have suffered a serious financial loss and, because of underlying structural problems in our economy, recovery will be difficult whatever the government does. But if government does the wrong thing, it's going to be much more difficult.

All this is to explain why we should be extremely pessimistic about the prospect of this massive neo-Keynesian intervention. Suppose a pipe-dream hypothetical: Somehow, this "stimulus" actually produces a sort of dead-cat bounce in the economy, so that unemployment is down around 5% again by 2012. Is that good? No, not really, because government will have produced that bounce by borrowing massively against the future in a society that's about to sustain a serious demographic shock.

The first Baby Boomers turn 65 in 2011, and every year after that will see more and more retirees going onto the Social Security and Medicare rolls. Even if we raise the retirement age, there is still the net drain of productive labor. The average 67-year-old can't produce goods and services as efficiently as the average 38-year-old and (due to certain legal decisions circa 1973) after 2011, we'll have a growing shortage of 38-year-olds and a growing surplus of 67-year-olds.

We are on the verge of a taxpayer shortage, you see, and what the Democrats want to do is take out a massive loan that will have to be repaid by a shrinking pool of taxpayers, who will be expected to support a burgeoning population of increasingly sickly Baby Boomer retirees.

So, even if all this deficit spending could purchase a dead-cat bounce -- and I am on record as saying it won't -- it cannot fix the underlying problems of our economy, which have nothing to do with "green energy" or other such nonsense programs run by the Department of Unicorns and Rainbows.

What we need, really, is a strong dose of Schumpeterian "creative destruction," and this neo-Keynesian approach is the exact opposite of that. No matter what government does, we may be doomed. But Obamanomics is like seeing a drowning man and tossing him a cinderblock instead of a life preserver.

Total bummer? Depends on your point of view. Back in 2003-06, when the economy was going gangbusters, you leftist bastards were all whining about "the growing gap between rich and poor." Well, congratulations: It's stopped growing, hasn't it?

If Obamanomics makes things worse (hello, "stagflation"!) then the advocates of social justice can do a happy dance because we'll all be more equal, and much, much poorer.

(Linked by Jules Crittenden, who gets the Instalanche for his Iran-blogging.)

(Linked by the Anchoress, who gives me waaaay too much credit for what was really just second-hand copyright infringement.)

(Ed Driscoll gives the linky-love, too.)

(Linked at Conservative Grapevine.)

(Linked at Maggie's Farm. BTW, I've updated this theme, with cute video.)

PREVIOUSLY: Malkin watches the Doomsayer-in-Chief's press conference so we don't have to:

"It is only government that can break the vicious cycle."

Government is the vicious cycle, sir.

UPDATE 9:21 p.m.: Back to his bogus "experts agree" argument:

Sir, experts agree your ears are too big.

UPDATE 8:55 p.m.: From his opening remarks:

I took a trip to Elkhart, Indiana today. Elkhart is a place that has lost jobs faster than anywhere else in America. In one year, the unemployment rate went from 4.7% to 15.3%. Companies that have sustained this community for years are shedding jobs at an alarming speed, and the people who’ve lost them have no idea what to do or who to turn to. They can’t pay their bills and they’ve stopped spending money. And because they’ve stopped spending money, more businesses have been forced to lay off more workers. Local TV stations have started running public service announcements that tell people where to find food banks, even as the food banks don’t have enough to meet the demand.

Folks, ask yourself why Elkhart's economy is hurting so bad. Because their No. 1 industry there is -- wait for it -- RVs. Yup, big-ass fuel-guzzling RVs that get worse gas mileage than an M1 tank. If it were up to Al Gore, driving one of those things would be punishable by the death penalty, and when gas went up to $4 a gallon, the market wasn't exactly craving those behemoths. But by the time gas prices fell back to $1.69 a gallon, the real-estate market had tanked, and nobody had the the money to buy a $70,000 motor home.

Supply. Demand. Very simple. Nothing against the good people of Elkhart, but (a) Obama's plan ain't going to do jack for your local economy, and (b) if you end up on the wrong side of the supply/demand equation, that's not the fault of the American taxpayer, is it? Cry me a river. I spent 22 years in the newspaper business, and nobody's offering to bail me out.

UPDATE: Althouse liveblogged. Loved this part:

7:14: "That wasn't just some random number that I plucked out of.... uh" -- he's thinking: can't say my ass — "out of a hat."

Allahpundit and AOSHQ are also blogging the press conference.

Michelle Malkin was liveblogging the action on the Senate floor today:

[Sen. Susan] Collins laundry-lists all the spending and concludes again: "Our effort is bipartisan, targeted, and effective."
No: It's pork-laden, out-of-control, and irresponsible.

Susan Collins (R-INO) would swallow a porcupine if you told her it was a "bipartisan compromise." Obama is scheduled to give a nationally televised press conference tonight at 8 p.m. ET, at which time he will tell us that we are doomed -- DOOMED! -- if this thing isn't passed immediately.

'Waxing sanguine'

Some congressional Republicans are "waxing sanguine" over their stimulus battle with Obama, says Lynn Vincent. She cites today's report by Byron York quoting Lindsay Graham:

"Instead of hanging our heads, we're picking good fights. In that regard, there is an energy among Republicans that is counterintuitive to the beating we just took."

Yeah, and considering that Senator Grahamnesty was a major cause of the beating, I sure hope he's happy.

Brokebarack Obama

From Aaron S. in the Graphics Department. In case you can't read the slogan: "His forbidden love of socialism was a force of nature."

Jack Hunter's girlfriend is right!

"Watching a television news story about Obama's stimulus package, my girlfriend, who not only voted for Obama but has the bumper sticker to prove it, said to me, 'I'm not an economist, but doesn't spending money you don't have make the situation worse? Doesn't it just devalue the dollar even more?' I'm not an economist either, but I did manage to pass basic math in high school. And unless the rules of math have changed recently, my girlfriend is absolutely right."
-- Jack Hunter, Charleston City Paper

Random freaking adults!

Matthew Yglesias does a happy dance over a Gallup poll showing higher public approval for Democrats than Republicans on handling the "stimulus."

Yglesias is exactly right that what the poll shows is, "People hate Republicans." That is to say, Bush-inflicted "brand damage" causes people to give negative answers to any poll question involving the word "Republican." There are two big problems with this poll as a guide to what policy Republicans (or anyone else) should support:

• Rational ignorance -- One of the most interesting polls of the past year was the one showing that 41% of CNN viewers didn't even realize Democrats had taken control of Congress. What voters knew was that Bush was a Republican and they hated him, and therefore an overwhelming majority was eager to vote against Republicans. These voters -- independent "swing" voters being a particularly ill-informed segment of the electorate -- were operating on the principle that Ilya Somin dubbed "rational ignorance." Given the vastness of their ignorance, it is likely that many of them (a) still don't realize that Democrats hold the whip hand in Congress, and (b) don't have a clue in hell what's in the stimulus or what the GOP position is.
• "Random adults" -- Gallup says, "Results are based on telephone interviews with 1,018 national adults, aged 18 and older." Not likely voters, not even registered voters, merely random adults. As everyone who knows anything about polling knows, non-voters always skew left of the actual electorate, especially on economic issues. Why? Because non-voters tend to have very low levels of income and education. The whole point of the massive Democratic get-out-the-vote drives every election year is to counteract the extremely low level of political involvement by the poor and ignorant, who would vote Democrat, if only they weren't too stupid and lazy to vote. (Obama got 63% of the vote among high-school dropouts, his best performance among any educational demographic. ) So polls that don't screen out non-voters will always show that feeble-minded welfare parasites want more welfare giveaways, and the parasites are at least smart enough to know that Democrats are the Welfare Giveaway Party.

Let Yglesias do his happy dance, and ignore those stupid "random adult" polls. Nothing Republicans do will gain them many votes among the parasite/deadbeat constituency, and certainly the GOP has nothing to gain by supporting a "stimulus" that won't work.

Stimulating unemployment

"Clearly, the chart shows that more government spending does not create jobs. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. More government spending is correlated with higher levels of unemployment. In 1965, federal government spending was 17.2% of GDP and the unemployment rate was 4%. By 1982, spending had increased to 23.1% of GDP and unemployment had climbed to almost 11%.
"Government spending then fell from its early-1980s peak back to a new low of 18.4% of GDP in 2000, and the unemployment rate fell back to a low of 3.8% in 2000. Lately, due mostly to the profligate spending of the Bush Administration, government spending has increased to 20.7% of GDP. And guess what, the unemployment rate is up, not down."
-- economist Brian Westbury

E-mail from Obama

From my inbox to the blog, without comment:

Robert --
Americans have organized Economic Recovery House Meetings in all 50 states -- including 382 in California, 255 in Florida, 115 in Ohio, 199 in New York, 105 in Washington, and 149 in Texas.That's more than 3,587 meetings in 1,579 cities and 429 congressional districts.
This past weekend, meeting hosts and guests watched a video of Governor Tim Kaine answering your questions about the president's recovery plan. Then they shared their own stories about how the crisis has affected them.
Watch Governor Kaine's video and share your economic crisis story.
The media is filled with numbers about the economic crisis. But the numbers do not tell the full story.
The story of this crisis is in homes across the country -- homes where a family member has lost a job, where parents are struggling to pay a mortgage, and where college tuition has slipped out of reach.
That's also where the story of our recovery begins -- in communities where repairing roads and bridges, manufacturing green technologies, and rehabilitating our schools and hospitals will directly impact the lives of ordinary people and their families.
President Obama's recovery plan will help struggling families right now by saving or creating up to 4 million jobs. But it will also help strengthen our economy for the future by investing in crucial infrastructure projects in health care, education, and energy.
Share your story about how this economic crisis is affecting you and your family and join your fellow Americans in supporting bold action to speed our recovery:
http://my.barackobama.com/sharestories
Thank you for organizing so much support at this crucial moment for our country,
Mitch
Mitch Stewart
Director
Organizing for America

Without comment, except three words. It Won't Work.

202-224-4254

That's the phone number for Sen. Arlen Specter's Capitol office, and I'm sure he'd love to hear your reaction to his support of the Pelosi-Reid "stimulus" plan.

If you can't get through -- lots of people want to share the love with Specter nowadays -- you can also try these numbers:

• 610-434-1444 (Allentown office)
• 814-453-3010 (Erie office)
• 717-782-3951 (Harrisburg office)
• 215-597-7200 (Philadelphia office)
• 412-644-3400 (Pittsburgh office)
• 570-346-2006 (Scranton office)
• 570-826-6265 (Wilkes-Barre office)

Three words: It Won't Work.

UPDATE: Sen. Jeff Sessions is pushing to get an amendment that would prohibit "stimulus" money from going to illegal aliens. How come Specter isn't supporting that? And who could possibly be against it?

Start your own d--- blog!

While over at Right Wing News, where I frequently cross-post, I noticed "RWN's Short & Sweet Guide to Creating Your Own Blog," which offers some very useful advice to wannabes and newbies. Since I make a little scratch now and then as a "New Media consultant," I'm not going to give away for free all my proprietary knowledge, but here are two key pieces of advice:

• 1. Link me often. This will prevent bad kharma. As a friend, I'm useless, but you wouldn't want me as an enemy.
• 2. Christina Hendricks.

People pay good money for that kind of advice.

Joe Feehery vs. Rush Limbaugh

An unequal match, prompting Mike at Cold Fury to retort:

Gee, I dunno, Mr Moderate. How have you spineless, big-spending, Dem-fellating RINO bums done the last two elections yourselves?

Heh. As if on cue, here's Arlen "Bukkake Queen" Specter to explain why he loves the taste of "stimulus"!

MUGGER ATTACKS BLOOMBERG

Russ "Mugger" Smith takes down the NYC mayor's "tone-deaf politics":

It takes a lot in 2009 to drop your jaw upon looking at the front page of a newspaper -- one now fairly shrugs at the laundry list of crippling economic news -- but last Friday, a particular New York Times story leapt out as if it were headlined in neon: "Bloomberg Campaigners Taste the High Life." . . .
[Y]ou have to marvel at Bloomberg's outlandish and arrogant demonstration of tone-deaf politics, considering that as he grapples with a $4 billion deficit by laying off cops and education employees, raising the city sales tax, trimming health care packages for NYC workers and imposing regressive taxes on items like bottles of soda, lottery tickets and cab rides, he's running for a third term as if the country and his city were in the midst of unparalleled prosperity. When asked by a Times reporter whether his projected $80 million reelection campaign was excessive, Bloomberg grew testy, responding, "I don't understand your question. I am not going to talk about the campaign… I think it's one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard."

Read the whole brutal thing.

Video: Newt Gingrich interview

At Friday's premiere of Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny, I caught up with the former House Speaker and asked him about the future of the GOP, Sarah Palin, and the current "stimulus" proposal in a brief interview captured by Kerry Picket:

ON THE REPUBLICAN FUTURE:

"It depends on whether the Republican Party learns to focus on America first, and learn to rejoin the majority of American people that Ronald Reagan personified -- gives up big government and elite values -- and if they do that, they've got a great future. . . . I don't think about the party's future. I think about the future of the United States. I think Republicans ought to quit worrying about the Republican Party, and spend their time worrying about America."

ON THE 'STIMULUS':

"This is a spending bill, as President Obama said -- it's not a stimulus bill. It is an absurdity to have spent [$1.2 trillion] last year on this kind of spending, and come back for $900 billion this year. For the price of this bill, every American could have a seven-month holiday with no income tax, no Social Security tax, no Medicare tax and, for the employer, no matching tax. That would do dramatically more for the economy than this kind of policy . . ."

Notice that Gingrich (a) walked a wide circle around the brushfire war between the GOP intellectuals and Palin, and (b) sought to speak as a non-partisan figure concerned more with America's future than the GOP's future. A very shrewd man.

Mother Teresa with an AK-47?

"All my life, from birth, it's been a fight. And it always seemed to be another man's war. I always seemed to be fighting for someone else. But it always came back to me. The Word says we're born into sin, and sin always comes back to war."
-- Sam Childers

Lots of do-gooders want to help poor people in Africa. You can turn on the TV and see celebrities talk all about Africa at their charity concerts. And you can turn on the TV and see politicians yammer on about Africa. But while the rock stars and senators were talking, one courageous missionary was already there, fighting to save lives. When God's people in war-torn northern Uganda and southern Sudan needed help, God sent a Pennsylvania steel-worker's son, a two-fisted biker who wasn't afraid of a fight.

Another Man's War: The True Story of One Man's Battle to Save Children in the Sudan will be released next month, but you can pre-order it now at a special price.

The New York Times has a report on the effort to hunt down Joseph Kony and his LRA terrorists, who have inflicted evil in Africa for two decades. Last week, two of Kony's lieutenants said they're ready to surrender.

It (Still) Won't Work

(BUMPED; UPDATES BELOW.) From my latest American Spectator column:

. . . The real problem with the stimulus bill is not that it is too big (although it is too big) nor its various objectionable ingredients (although many are objectionable), but rather that it is based on a false economic theory.
"The American people…did not vote for the false theories of the past," Obama assured his listeners Thursday. Yet the "economic recovery plan" pushed by Pelosi and other Democrats is nothing but Keynesian theory in postmodern drag, elegantly costumed by the Orator-in-Chief with a lot of glittering generalities about "modernizing our health care system…21st century classrooms…and end[ing] the tyranny of oil in our time."
This plan is not a Change We Can Believe In and, as I wrote two months ago, before Obama was inaugurated, it won't work. . . .

Please read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds: "They won't tell you what they're doing with the money you already gave them until they make sure Congress is giving them still more." As a freelance writer, I've got the envy the rate paid by the U.S. taxapyer: $1 billion per page. (Via Memeorandum.)

Nowadays, everybody's saying "it won't work," and here's a video of Peter Schiff saying it:

UPDATE II: Ron Paul says it's "unfortunate that three Republicans caved in" to support the stimulus in the Senate.

UPDATE III: In honor of Sens. Specter, Snowe and Collins, Michelle Malkin dubs it the "Sellout Amendment."

UPDATE IV: Via Hot Air, here's new RNC chairman Michael Steele on the stimulus:

UPDATE V: One economist calls the bill "a seismic shift in the role of government in our society." Via Donald Douglas, who has more reflections on the big-government aspect of the Mother Of All Boondoggles.

UPDATE VI: Stephen Gordon links at The Next Right.

UPDATE VII: Jennifer Rubin: "Yeah, but the Senate moderates are cheap dates, so they fell for it."

UPDATE VIII: Linked by Vocal Minority.

Internet civility, an oxymoron?

John Hawkins does have a point:

That sort of compartmentalization is one of the reasons politics has become so ferociously partisan. On the Internet, people have broken up into small, like-minded groups where they have minimal contact with people who disagree with them. As a result, there is little pressure to show respect for the opinions of people who see the world differently -- since those people are, for the most part, not present. It means that facts that run contrary to their ideology will tend to be viewed with suspicion at best and will be totally ignored at worst, thereby creating groupthink on a titanic scale.

Yes, but also no. The Internet is a medium and, as Marshall McLuhan taught us, the medium is the message. Television has been a far more powerful contributor to the decline of civility and the loss of the sense of civic duty. The rise of the 100-plus-channel cable environment has made it easier to "drop out" of mainstream society, to spend all your leisure hours watching sports or whatever specialty programming suits your taste. And considering what is now "mainstream" -- the worthless dreck of network programming -- this is an understandable instinct.

TV destroys civility because TV watching absorbs time that educated people once filled with reading. Furthermore, by its very nature as a primarily visual medium, TV celebrates the superficial. This is as true of TV news as of any episode of "Oprah" or "American Idol." Give credit to Fox News impressario Roger Ailes for the brilliant insight of finding glamorous anchorettes like Laurie Dhue. If we're going to tune in for an hour of war, murder, celebrity gossip and political intrigue, why not let a hottie be our hostess?

One of McLuhan's students, Neil Postman, wrote a great book about the culture-killing phenomenon of TV, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, and it's a book I wish everyone would read. Postman was a man of the Left, politically, but he cared deeply about how the image-based medium of television, when consumed in large quantities, rendered people incapable of engaging effectively with the text-based medium of writing. Another great book addressing the same basic issue is The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, by Sven Birkerts.

All this is far afield from the question of how the Internet -- and especially the blogosphere -- contributes to the loss of civility. But the blogosphere is still, for the most part, a text-based environment. Literacy and civility generally coexist, and I think the savagery that sometimes erupts among bloggers is due in large part to the influence of TV on the discourse.

When does TV ever explain, in a dispassionate way, the fundamental facts of economics? If you understand how markets work, and if you understand the inherent limitations of the alternatives to a market-based economy, then the entire class-envy rationale of the Democratic Party's economic agenda becomes absurd.

I refuse to apologize for "incivility" toward dangerous ignorance, which is why I was so curt in dismissing Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons. How does a man, describing himself as a "conservative," reach a mature age without apparently ever having read Mises or Hayek? The Road to Serfdom is less than 300 pages, and I don't think it took me more than a weekend to finish the first time through. Socialism is a bit over 500 pages, and might take longer.

Yet in 10 days, I believe, you could read through both books, and any intelligent, decent person would finish that experience wholly persuaded of the case these great Austrian economists make: Socialism doesn't work, it is ultimately destructive of both liberty and prosperity, and even a liberal democratic government attempting to implement socialist ideas will tend toward increasingly undemocratic and illiberal governance.

If I am contemptuous of the intellectual laziness of "conservatives" who can't be bothered to read economics -- hello, Governor Huckabee! -- why should I be less contemptuous of liberals who are equally ignorant if not more so? And what about Paul Krugman, who can't even plead ignorance, but whose advocacy of welfare state socialism must be attributed to evil?

We are right, and they are wrong. We do not merely "disagree with them." We advocate liberty, and they are enemies of liberty. The socialists aim to destroy all opposition, to deprive us of our liberty, and to immerse our nation in hopeless poverty. Some support socialism due to their ignorance, while others are simply evil. We can hope to educate the ignorant, but what shall we do with the evil?

Am I engaged in "groupthink on a titanic scale"? Were Mises and Hayek likewise engaged? When it comes to the basic truths of economics, "the opinions of people who see the world differently" -- i.e., people whose opinions are rooted in ignorance, falsehood and error -- ought not be respected, and indeed ought to be disrespected loudly and often. If we would resolve to be less tolerant of these economic ignoramuses, perhaps we might shame them into actually learning something.

The evil, of course, are another matter.

UPDATE: Fear & Loathing in Georgetown comments:

The conservatives he refers to are Dreher's Crunchy Cons and, as mentioned in the quotation above, the evangelical types. I agree wholeheartedly that they should read their economics, but that might miss something more fundamental. The Crunchy Cons and the evangelicals to an even larger extent pursue politics for their own therapeutic purposes. They want the government to ban, discourage, encourage, promote behaviors because that's what makes them feel better about themselves. The economics aren't particularly relevant to accomplishing that.

I am myself an evangelical, but like James Madison (who was educated at Princetown under the Presbyterian tutelage of Witherspoon) my views on faith are heavily Calvinistic. That translates, politically, into a distrust of power and a skeptical view toward "progress." Men are not more virtuous today than they were 50 years ago, nor will men 50 years from now be any better. Original sin is a constant, and which is more likely over the next 50 years, enlightenment or decadence?

"Progress"? We've made progress down the road to hell. We appear to be gaining momentum as we go, and the young do not even notice the acceleration.

However, the failure to learn economics is not exclusively a problem of "crunchies" or evangelicals. Crazy Cousin John confessed his own economic ignorance, and many who rallied to the colors after 9/11 -- the patriotic hawkish types -- share that ignorance.

I consider economics of the Austrian school completely compatible with Christian faith. What did the Good Samaritan do to deserve Christ's praise? He gave personal and direct assistance to the waylaid traveler, from his own resources. He did not circulate a petition or stage a protest march or enact legislation on behalf of waylaid travelers in general; the Good Samaritan's mercy was self-sufficient and independent.

Much of this noise you hear about "social justice" from evangelicals nowadays is nothing more than Pharisaical do-gooderism. If you want to help the poor, help the poor; nothing prevents you from doing so. But if you're waiting for me to praise you for collecting a six-figure salary as head of a 501(c) operation -- as if being the president of a non-profit makes you Mother Teresa -- you will be waiting a very long time.

UPDATE II: Linked at The Week. Thanks, you %@#&ing @$$holes.

Too bad . . .

"What's in the Senate stimulus plan? All we have so far is a summary and a spreadsheet. The specifics of what the money is going to be spent on remains carefully concealed from view. Too bad we didn't elect an administration which promised to publish the full text of bills in advance of votes. Oh, right."
-- Jennifer Rubin

Don't worry, Jennifer. Just give 'em $800 billion, and you'll get all the transparency money can buy! Jimmy Bise Jr. at Sundries Shack has very similar thoughts, vis-a-vis the TARP:

Think about that. Your government refuses to tell you what it’s going to do with money it took from you under what we now see were false pretenses unless you let it take even more money under the very same pretenses.

"Trust us -- we're experts," is one of those rotten scams that no self-respecting carnie would dare attempt.

Obama 'coddling conservatives'?

Maureen Dowd on psilocybin:

Somehow the most well-known person on the planet lost control of the economic message to someone named Eric Cantor. . . .
Barack Obama could not locate the bully pulpit and ended up being bullied.
Republicans, pulled out of their existential lethargy and re-energized by the president's charm offensive, immediately mounted an offensive against him. Just as Michael Bloomberg learned the perils of cuddling a groundhog when it bit him, Mr. Obama learned the perils of coddling conservatives.

This is simply counterfactual. Dowd is hallucinating, a different derangement than Judith Warner's neurotic obsessive disorder, but nonetheless utterly out of touch with the reality of what happened.

Obama did not "coddle" anyone. He wanted Republican votes for the Democratic "stimulus" bill so as to head off partisan attacks on his economic policy, a policy which -- I'll say it again -- won't work. If he could pull over a double handful of GOP votes, he'd have the tissue wrapping of "bipartisanship" that would inoculate him against blame if the policy ended in disaster. (You saw how much trouble Democrats had in attacking the Iraq war that Bush got so many of them to vote for.)

"Someone named Eric Cantor" may not be as famous as Barack Obama, but Cantor worked for 10 years in the real economy -- his family's real-estate business -- and so he knows a thing or two about economics. Cantor knows that, if enacted, the Pelosi plan will make the economy worse, not better. And he was apparently able to persuade his GOP House colleagues that the "stimulus" was wrong, both as policy and as politics.

Since Dowd's tripping on magic mushrooms here, let's all engage in a little hallucinogenic reverie, shall we? Pretend that the Pelosi plan actually creates an economic recovery. Will Republicans get any credit for "yes" votes? Is voting "yes" going to help Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe win re-election? Of course not. This is a Democratic bill, embodying Democratic priorities, and all the credit will be claimed by Democrats.

So, even under the psychedelic delusion that the Pelosi neo-Keynesian approach could actually work, there is zero incentive for Republicans to vote "yes." Nancy and Harry Reid have the majority, let them pass it. It's theirs; they own it, lock, stock and barrel. And in this drug-addled vision where Keynesianism works, the economy recovers -- at the expense of $780 billion in taxpayer dollars that must be repaid somehow.

Ah, see? Win-win, baby. Republicans represent taxpayers, who will be presented the bill for all this, and won't like paying the bill, even if the stimulus does lead to recovery. But it won't. And so Pelosi and Reid and Obama will be on the hook for a $780 billion failure, with the overwhelming likelihood that the economy will in fact be much worse in fall 2010 than it is now, and except for the Senate GOP Jellyfish Caucus, there won't be a single Republican fingerprint on this disaster.

That's the reality, and if Maureen Dowd is too stoned to see it, she needs to be reassigned to do more fluffy travel features.

'Rendezvous' premiere

Friday's premiere of the new documentary, Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, was a standing-room only affair.

Produced by Citizens United in association with Newt and Calista Gingrich, directed by Kevin Knoblock, Rendezvous With Destiny features interviews with Jack Kemp, James A. Baker III, William J. Bennett, Linda Chavez, Edwin Meese III, Mari Maseng Will, Richard Perle, Michael Reagan, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Natan Sharansky, Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, historian Douglas Brinkley, newsman Sam Donaldson and many more.

All of these people appear in the movie, but the star of the show is indisputably Ronald Reagan. The film footage and photos of Reagan in the movie are the highlights. His star quality carries the film. Here's the trailer, and below that, some photos from the premiere.

David Bossie, president of Citizens United, at left; American Spectator publisher Al Regnery, at right.

Newt Gingrich talks with Seattle talk-radio king Kirby Wilbur, a member of the board of the Young America's Foundation, which gave filmmakers access to the Reagan Ranch near Santa Barbara, Calif.

Me with Craig Shirley, author of Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America.

Philip Klein and J.P. Freire of the American Spectator with Ericka Andersen of Human Events.

Former Virginia Sen. George Allen talks with friends.

Cato Institute vice-president of communications Khristine Brookes and Fox News contributor James Pinkerton.

Fox News producers L.A. Holmes and Lee Ross.

Quin Hillyer of the American Spectator and me.

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson and Jena Lenz of George Washington University Young America's Foundation.

Former Virginia GOP chairwoman Kate Obenshain and Pete Parisi of the Washington Times.

Me and Kerry Picket of Newsbusters.

Kerry Picket, talk-radio producer Heather Smith and Quin Hillyer.

(Corss-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

Change You Can Believe In!

UPDATE: By special request -- hey, I've got some twisted commenters -- the notorious Speedo pic gets a Change You Can Believe In.

To create your own Change, go to ObamIcon.me.

And they say WE'RE 'wingnuts'

Judith Warner is having some weird dreams about the POTUS. Donald Douglas and Ed Driscoll weigh in. I don't know which is weirder: That Warner would write something like this, or that the New York Times would publish it.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll: ". . . which brings new meaning to the phrase "Unicorn Rider." The ironic absurdity of all this ought not go unremarked.

Permit me to risk denunciation by recalling that when the McCain campaign rolled out its "Celebrity" ads, a large swath of the left-wing commentariat jumped on it like a graduate seminar in semiotics, deconstructing the context to declare that the Republican was subliminally conjuring fears of miscegenation by associating Obama with such noted icons of virtuous white womanhood as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Now, however, the New York Times gives Judith Warner leave to publish the uncorrected draft of her script for Mighty Anaconda of Hope: Jungle Fever on the Potomac and . . . well, that's OK, see? Progressive standards are so high, they need two standards for everything.

And where the heck is Ace? Do you expect me to believe that Ace doesn't have anything to say about Judith Warner's couch trip?

UPDATE II: Deuce Geary at Skepticrats:

What really kills me about these self-obsessed neurotics is their need to normalize these bizarre fantasies.

One wonders how much Prozac they gobble to reach that state of mind. According to them, conservatives are the repressed people with "hangups," but ask any of my friends: I'm the most unrepressed person on the planet. Heck, I'm irrepressible. I'm an unabashed babe-blogger, and I have no trouble acknowledging celebrity hotness. But writing about your obsessive fantasies -- do we really want to go there? I mean, I'm sure nobody wants to deal with the mental image of me in fishnet stockings and stiletto heels . . . or do they?

Hey, it's the blogosphere. Bring you own brain bleach.

It's all good, Kate

Don't go changin' ...

Kate Winslet says she is not going to go crazy if she has a little junk in the trunk.
"I don't know a single woman who doesn't stand up and check the tushie before she walks out the door," she tells Nightline in an interview airing Friday. "I've decided I am going to start loving my backside, really just saying, yes. Because I don't know anyone who does that, you know? And for my daughter [Mia, 8], I want to be able to say to her, I love this."

Hey, we love it, too! I was ragging on Jessica Simpson last week, but that was tongue-in-cheek. Sure, the camera adds 10 pounds, but real men don't mind a bit more girth in the saddle, and it makes no sense for women to starve themselves to death trying to get that "social X-ray" look.