The Brokers With Hands on Their Faces Blog offers an amusing and eloquent chronicle of human reactions to the abundant bad news in these difficult economic times. Some of these people look to me like they’re suffering enough to deserve those large-figure bonuses they won’t be getting this year.

William Voegeli, in the Fall edition of the Claremont Review of Books, argues that Americans ought to think rationally about the American Welfare State.

Voegeli contends that, though conservatives will never succeed in repealing the New Deal, the public is fundamentally unwilling to pay for significantly greater expansions, the problem of persistent poverty really stems from causes federal money cannot effectively address, and meanwhile ideology and illusions prevent sensible allocation of limited resources.

In a society that is remarkably prosperous by global and historical standards, shouldn’t “most vulnerable members” be construed as referring to the most vulnerable 5, 10, or 25% of the population—not just the abjectly miserable, let us concede, but people confronting serious threats or problems? Yet when it turns out, time and again, that the effective meaning of liberal welfare and social insurance programs is to elicit compassion and government subventions for the most “vulnerable” 75, 80, or 95% of the population, it’s hard not to feel scammed. ...

.. Paul Starr of Princeton University and the American Prospect, says the welfare state is about the poor. Its “objective should be, above all, to eliminate poverty and maintain a minimum floor of decency to enable individuals to carry out their own life plans.” But giving benefits to everyone, not just the most vulnerable, serves social and political purposes. Socially, “the long-term tasks of nation-building and of fostering a common culture and a sense of shared citizenship also strongly argue for public and universal schooling, old-age pensions, and other services that serve an integrative as well as egalitarian purpose,” according to Starr. Politically, the imperative to construct democratic majorities that support programs for the poor “will often mean support for programs that provide universal benefits.” We may say that such programs “target” the most vulnerable 100% of the population.

Read the whole thing.

Just like General Arnold, who, after he went over to the British, proved particularly eager to undertake raids on American towns, Kathleen Parker is today trying to bash John McCain for selecting Sarah Palin one more time.

My husband called it first. Then, a brilliant 75-year-old scholar and raconteur confessed to me over wine: “I’m sexually attracted to her. I don’t care that she knows nothing.”

Finally, writer Robert Draper closed the file on the Sarah Palin mystery with a devastating article in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: “The Making (and Remaking) of McCain.” ...

As Draper tells it, McCain took Palin to his favorite coffee-drinking spot down by a creek and a sycamore tree. They talked for more than an hour, and, as Napoleon whispered to Josephine, “Voilà.”

Meow.

La Parker could say the same thing about the entire democrat party, the liberal establishment, the mainstream media, and, yes! the GOP turncoats like herself, all visibly besotted by the svelte and stylish liberal candidate with the voice like a warm sweet Machiatto and the glow of a winner. He may be a socialist whose friends all hate America, but he’s so cool.

You can’t blame McCain for picking an attractive female Republican. Female Republicans, it is commonly recognized, are very frequently attractive, notoriously more attractive than democrats. Remember the well-known poster?

A typical Republican

Even the Washington Post notices:

Now the good news for Republicans: You are happier than Democrats. You always have been, and you probably always will be.

Never mind that your presidential candidate is sinking in the polls while your president plumbs historic depths of popular scorn and your free market squeals for intervention while your investments evaporate on Wall Street. You are not just happier than the other guys, but more of you are very happy indeed, according to new survey results published yesterday by the Pew Research Center.

The pollsters were in the field asking about happiness this month, a period when economic news was gloomy for everybody and presidential campaign news seemed especially baleful for Republicans. Yet they found 37 percent of Republicans are “very happy,” compared with 25 percent of Democrats; 51 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats are “pretty happy”; and 9 percent of Republicans are “not too happy,” compared with 20 percent of Democrats.
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The partisan happiness gap—unbroken for nearly four decades—is impervious to electoral ups and downs. It has something to do with worldview. ...

Brooks says a lot hinges on the answer to this question: Do you believe that hard work and perseverance can overcome disadvantages? Conservatives are more likely to say yes.

Pew found that Democrats are more likely to say that success in life is mostly determined by outside forces. Republicans lean toward thinking that success is determined by one’s own efforts.

The hypothesis: Those who think they can control their destinies are happier.

Read the whole thing.

“The most effective informer the F.B.I. ever placed among the Weathermen” (NY Times) Larry Grathwol describes how William Ayers and other Weather Underground leaders cheerfully planned to deliver the United States to foreign occupation, and proposed to murder 25 million Americans.

Grathwohl: I brought up the subject of what’s going to happen after we take over the government. You know, we become responsible for administrating, you know, 250 million people. And there was no answer. No one had given any thought to economics. How are you going to clothe and feed these people? The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans, the North Vietnamese, the Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States. They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education in the Southwest where we would take all of the people who needed to be re‑educated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be. I asked, “Well, what is going to happen to those people that we can’t re‑educate, that are die-hard capitalists?” And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated and when I pursued this further, they estimated that they’d have to eliminate 25 million people in these re‑education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill 25 million people. I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of whom have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well-known educational centers and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people and they were dead serious.

2:20 video

Hat tip to Confederate Yankee.

Hat tip to Larry Johnson.

Argues Paul Boutin in Wired:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

If you quit now, you’re in good company. Notorious chatterbox Jason Calacanis made millions from his Weblogs network. But he flat-out retired his own blog in July. “Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it,” he wrote in his final post.

Impersonal is correct: Scroll down Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs and you’ll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can’t keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.

When blogging was young, enthusiasts rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google’s search results for any given topic, fueled by generous links from fellow bloggers. In 2002, a search for “Mark” ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain. That phenomenon was part of what made blogging so exciting. No more. Today, a search for, say, Barack Obama’s latest speech will deliver a Wikipedia page, a Fox News article, and a few entries from professionally run sites like Politico.com. The odds of your clever entry appearing high on the list? Basically zero.

Read the whole thing.
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He seems a bit overly pessimistic to me.

I think election year fatigue can be observed right now, and a lot of Right bloggers are understandably depressed. I’ve found it impossible to get a link from any of the big time blogs for a long time now, and have nearly completely stopped emailing any of them. Still, traffic tends to creep upward slowly. And NYM postings do come up high on Google fairly regularly.

I disagree with Boutin. Innovative and amusing blogging concepts, like Stuff White People Like, can still very rapidly gain a major audience, and even we boutique bloggers, aiming at a more sophisticated and inevitably limited readership, are able to attract a few thousand readers per diem. Professional group blogs don’t bother me a bit.

Obama Campaign Manager David Axelrod in foreground

Somehedgehog imagines this year’s presidential campaign as a game of D&D:

GM: OK, the bugbear attacks you. What do you do?

OBAMA: I send one of my 672 henchmen after it.

MCCAIN: OK, seriously. Why does he have so many henchmen? I’m a level 72 ranger and he’s only a level 8 paladin.

OBAMA: Well, if you’d bought the Grassroots Organizing and Oratory/Colgate Smile proficiencies you could min max it so that you…

MCCAIN: Why is he even IN this campaign? I thought this was supposed to be a high level party.

OBAMA: Well, maybe some people got tired of the grim and squinty “Matterhorn, son of Marathon” shtick you keep doing. Dude, could you be any less original?

MCCAIN: Oh my god, I did not leave my left nut in a tiger cage in the Tomb of Horrors to spend my Friday nights mopping up after the new kid.

OBAMA: “My friends, I am a totally unoriginal grizzled character class stereotype. I should lead the party because I have more testicular damage than that one.”

MCCAIN: Yeah, well, you pal around with dark elves.

Via Cory Doctorow.

Back in the days of Dwight Eisenhower, we had Me-Too Republicans who were simply too timid to challenge a conventional liberal orthodoxy for fear of being labeled radical. Tony Blankley finds today a new form of Me-Too Republican motivated by snobbery and misplaced loyalty to the community of fashion.

A commenter who signs himself “Waynes World” at Political Punch explains his reasons.

I’m voting Democrat because I believe the government will do a better job of spending MY MONEY than I would. I think when you spread the wealth around it is good for everybody! It’s Patriotic!

I’m voting Democrat because I believe that business should not be allowed to make profits for themselves. All profits are evil and should be confiscated for Government Redistribution.

I’m voting Democrat because I believe that MORE Government regulations and higher taxes on Business will stop Business from exporting their jobs to Countries with LESS Government regulations and lower taxes.

I’m voting Democrat because I believe terrorists should be allowed to have trials in American courts. And be able to subpoena top secret documents, soldiers, government officials, etc. to cross examine for their defense. They should have ACLU lawyers who can help intimidate Americans who serve on the juries!

I’m voting Democrat because I believe Gay Marriage should be the law of the land and will probably produce better children.

Read the whole thing.

Two female conservative columnists today discuss the media’s indulgent treatment of gaffemaster Biden.

CORRECTION: Should be: Two female columnists, one a Fox News commentator of democrat party background, and our own Michelle Malkin today discuss the media’s indulgent treatment of gaffemaster Biden.

(Thanks to Bohemian Conservative for enlightening me on the political background of Kirsten Powers.)
—————————————————-

Kirsten Powers, in the New York Post:

Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as his running mate prompted a small wave of warnings about Biden’s propensity for gaffes. But no one imagined even in a worse-case scenario such a spectacular bomb as telling donors Sunday to “gird your loins” because a young president Obama will be tested by an international crisis just like young President John Kennedy was.

Scary? You betcha! But somehow, not front-page news.

Again the media showed their incredible bias by giving scattered coverage of Biden’s statements.

So what gives?

The stock answer is: “It’s just Biden being Biden.” We all know how smart he is about foreign policy, so it’s not the same as when Sarah Palin says something that seems off.

Yet, when Biden asserted incorrectly in the vice-presidential debate that the United States “drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon,” nobody in the US media shrieked. (It was, however, covered with derision in the Middle East.) Or when he confused his history by claiming FDR calmed the nation during the Depression by going on TV, the press didn’t take it as evidence that he’s clueless.

And Biden is the foreign-policy gravitas on the Democratic ticket, so his comments are actually even more disconcerting. ...

Part of the problem is their “Obama love,” but we’re also seeing the media elite’s belief – prejudice – that anyone with an R behind their name is dumb. So, if they say something dumb, they must be dumb. A Democrat, like Biden, can make wildly inaccurate or outrageous comments and they are ignored because the TV and press insiders feel they “know who he really is.”

On the stump recently, Sen. Biden declared he had “three words” for what the nation needs: “J-O-B-S.”

Lucky for him, his name isn’t Dan Quayle, or that would have followed him for the rest of his career.

Michelle Malkin:

Hysterical Sarah Palin-bashers on the unhinged left and elitist right have dominated campaign press coverage and pop culture. They’ve ridiculed her family, her appearance and her speech patterns. They’ve derided her character, her parenting skills, her readiness and her intellect.

Meanwhile, the increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Joe Biden gets a pass. What does the guy have to do to earn the relentless scrutiny and merciless mockery he deserves? Answer: wear high heels, shoot caribou and change the “D” next to his name to an “R.” ...

Dan Quayle will have “POTATOE” etched on his gravestone. But how many times have late-night comedians and cable shows replayed the video of senior statesman and six-term Sen. Biden’s own spelling mishap last week while attacking McCain’s economic plan?

“Look, John’s last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the No. 1 job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S.”

No, Joe. “D’-O-H” is a three-letter word.

Nightly news shows still haven’t tired of replaying Palin’s infamous interview with Katie Couric. But how many times have they replayed Biden’s botched interview with Couric last month—in which he cluelessly claimed: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”

Er, here’s what really happened: Roosevelt wasn’t president when the market crashed in 1929. As for appearing on TV, it was still in its infant stages and wasn’t available to the general public until at least 10 years later.

During the lone VP debate earlier this month, the increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Biden demonstrated more historical ignorance that Palin would never be allowed to get away with: “Vice President Cheney’s been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history,” he said. “He has the idea he doesn’t realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that’s the executive—he works in the executive branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.”

Article 1 of the Constitution defines the role of the legislative branch, not the executive branch. You would think someone who has served 36 years in government—the same someone who is quick to remind others of his high IQ and longtime Senate Judiciary Committee chairmanship—would know better.

Biden’s erratic and gaffetastic behavior is the least of America’s worries. He’s worse than a blunderbuss. He’s an incurable narcissist with chronic diarrhea of the mouth. He’s a phony and a pretender who fashions himself a foreign policy expert, constitutional scholar and worldly wise man. He’s a man who can’t control his impulses.

And he could be a heartbeat away.

Sci Fi author Orson Scott Card pleads with the MSM to tell the truth.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That’s where you are right now.

It’s not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation’s prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama’s door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion. ...

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You’re just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it’s time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

Not gonna happen.

Read the whole thing.

Via Mark Hemingway at the Corner at National Review:

Here’s humorist David Sedaris in that bastion of sophistication, The New Yorker, on undecided voters:

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of s—t with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?

I expect Sedaris and I don’t agree on which item of the menu is which, but we certainly agree on the clarity of the choice.

Peggy Noonan and Chris Buckley ought to like her a lot better after listening to this one.

3:39 video

This month’s Garden & Gun has a feature on the turkey call collection assembled over 15 years by Bill Jones III, including more than 7000 examples of box calls, yelpers, and scratchers.