Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.
—quipped Columbia University political science professor Wallace S. Sayre (well before Henry Kissinger).

Allen Guelzo argues, however, that those stakes, which include the opportunity to form the background assumptions and fundamental perspective of society’s educated elite, may not really be so petty after all.

The conservative revolution was supposed to be a revolution. It has not been. It has been an insurgency. And while that insurgency captured a vast swath of open territory, it failed utterly to capture the key citadels of American culture, beginning with American higher education.

The academic left likes to complain about how the conservative onslaught forced it to “retreat” to the ivory tower – but without acknowledging that the ivory tower had become the Gibraltar of American life. For better or worse, an undergraduate degree has become the prerequisite for entry into middle-class life. Academics control the narrow neck through which America’s managers, writers, thinkers, bankers, politicians, and executives must pass, and that passage has acquired an atmosphere, no matter how self-pityingly the academic left likes to deny it, in which Left assumptions are set as the default positions

The academic Left is correct when it pooh-poohs the idea that it conducts a massive ideological de-programming; but then again, it does not need to. It has merely to nudge the standard deviation of the politics of the future ruling class a few clicks to the left for conservatism to seem abnormal. Conservatives made the disastrous mistake of assuming that if they abandoned those tedious and expensive plans to lay siege to the university, they would be free to move on to the larger and more easily-annexed plains of government and finance. They were wrong. Governments change, finances crash, but the faculty is forever.

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Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Michael Yon links a SPMAGTF (Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force) Force Reconnaissance Platoon PowerPoint After Action Review of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan ambushes and attacks, well-planned, highly effective, and often cleverly designed to take advantage of characteristic Marine Corp aggressiveness.

Until recent times, for most people, both food and sex were considerably less available than they are today.

In the Hoover Institute’s Policy Review, Mary Eberstadt meditates on the curious way in which, at the present time, the community of fashion has come to place a strongly principled ethical focus on eating, just when old-style sexual morality has been replaced by total latitudinarianism.
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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Charles R. Kesler, in Christian Science Monitor, warns that Barack Obama intends to move America as far in a leftward direction as his predecessors Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

Modern liberalism came to America in three waves, and it’s useful to think of Obama in this light.

The progressives of the early 20th century were the original liberals, developing the essential tenets of liberalism as a political doctrine. Woodrow Wilson and others argued that the Constitution was an 18th-century document, based on 18th-century notions of rights. While suited to its day, they said, it was now painfully inadequate unless interpreted in a vital new spirit.

This spirit was Darwinian and evolutionary, turning Hamilton’s “limited Constitution” into a “living Constitution” that must be able to adapt its structure and function to meet the latest social and economic challenges. To guide this evolution, to organize society’s march into the future, presidents had to cease being merely constitutional officers and become dynamic leaders of popular opinion.

Obama accepts all the major elements of this evolutionary approach to the Constitution and American government. As he wrote in “The Audacity of Hope,” the Constitution “is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.”

Likewise, in his inaugural address he declared, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works….”

This emphasis on what “works” is his nod to pragmatism, which he implies is almost the opposite of ideological liberalism. In fact, however, such pragmatism is part of liberalism.

What “works,” after all, depends on what you think government’s purpose is supposed to be. Pragmatism tries to distract us from those ultimate questions, while assuming liberal answers to them. Thus Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal promised “bold, persistent experimentation.” Obama’s domestic agenda betrays the same eagerness.

Liberalism’s second stage was economic. In the New Deal, the Great Society, and its sequels, liberals turned to the wholesale minting of new kinds of rights. Citizens were thus entitled to socioeconomic benefits through programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Besides these entitlements, the federal government also extended its regulatory authority to areas previously private or under state and local jurisdiction.

But this wave crested unexpectedly, and for a while, contemporary liberals seemingly lost their enthusiasm for such top-down regulation and the work of transforming privileges into rights.

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of socialist economies around the globe, liberals such as Bill Clinton took a second look at the free market. He populated his Treasury department with highfliers from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms. In left-leaning think tanks and even in the academy, capitalism commanded strange new respect. This rehabilitation of the market, though never more than partial, was the greatest change in American liberalism in the past 40 years. Obama absorbed it, as did many members of his new administration.

But the financial crisis and market meltdown have changed things.

It looks like 1932 again, a time for reinvigorated government activism. ...

An enduring Democratic majority is not out of the question. The wild scramble to stop the economic and financial downturn may well leave America with a politically controlled economy that would corrupt the relationship between citizens and the federal government – sapping entrepreneurship and encouraging new forms of dependence on the state, as in much of Europe. That would be consistent with the more socialized democracy that liberalism has been striving for ever since the Progressive Era.

Obama likes to emphasize that America is more like the world than we realize, and must become still more like it if the US is to remain the world’s leader. Despite his summoning oratory, his sense of American exceptionalism thus is far less lofty, far more constrained, than Reagan’s or FDR’s. The greatest stumbling block to Obama’s ambition is likely to be the inability of this exceptional president to persuade Americans to follow him into so unexceptional a future.

The democrat Porkulus is bad enough viewed simply as a colossal waste of money and burden on the productive portion of the economy, but additionally the many-hundred-page package (passed unread by the nation’s Solons) contains some deviously crafted provisions constituting a very large step toward federal takeover of American health care, as William Winkenwerder, Jr. and Grace-Marie Turner at National Review’s the Corner explain.

The health-related provisions take a sharp turn toward greater government control over our health sector, without any hearings or serious debate in Congress and without telling the American people what the changes would mean for their personal health care. This is the biggest land grab in the health sector ever attempted by the federal government, and it would be a major step toward thrusting full responsibility for health-care financing onto the American taxpayer—today and for decades to come.

For starters, the bill would create a 15-member federal health board, composed entirely of federal employees appointed by the president, charged with running “comparative effectiveness” research to assess which drugs and other medical treatments are most effective. The board’s decisions would determine what medical treatments the federal government would or would not pay for. The treatments some patients desperately need might not be on the list. House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D., Wis.) explained that drugs and treatments “that are found to be less effective and in some cases, more expensive, will no longer be prescribed.”

The bill would also establish a $400 million slush fund, which the secretary of health and human services would use to give government, not doctors and patients, more control over health-care decisions.

There will be a substantial burden on employers: The bill would impose a back-door mandate for them to continue providing health insurance to workers long after those workers have left. PricewaterhouseCoopers says the ten-year cost of this provision would be up to $65 billion just for those workers currently eligible for COBRA (the current program through which people can participate in ex-employers’ health plans). The estimated costs would be even higher if many more workers retire early, as they likely will if they know they can continue their employment-based coverage indefinitely.

Reviving the inglorious tradition of King Aethelred the Unready, Britain’s Labour Government has made a spectacular public surrender to Islamic intimidation, banning Dutch Parliament member Geert Wilders from entering the country for a private meeting with the House of Lords.

Brussels Journal:

This morning Lord Malcolm Pearson, a member of the British House of Lords, announced that he has invited Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch Parliament, to show the movie Fitna (see it here) in a committee room of the House of Lords next Thursday (12 February). Mr. Wilders has been asked to address a private meeting with members of the British Parliament, explaining to the Peers and MPs why he made Fitna and to engage in an open and frank discussion with them.

This afternoon Mr. Wilders received a letter from the British Embassy in The Hague [see below] saying that he is a “persona non grata” in the United Kingdom. The ambassador told Mr. Wilders that he is a threat to public security and public harmony because of the controversy created by Fitna. Mr. Wilders intends to go to London anyway. “Let them arrest me in Heathrow,” he says.

If Mr. Wilders is denied entry to the United Kingdom, it will be the first time that Britain refuses entry to an elected politician from another member state of the European Union. The Dutch government has protested to the British government over the unprecedented barring of an EU parliamentarian by another EU country.

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The Spectator was deservedly outraged.

If anyone had doubted the extent to which Britain has capitulated to Islamic terror, the banning of Geert Wilders a few hours ago should surely open their eyes. Wilders, the Dutch member of parliament who had made an uncompromising stand against the Koranic sources of Islamist extremism and violence, was due to give a screening of Fitna, his film on this subject, at the House of Lords on Thursday. This meeting had been postponed after Lord Ahmed had previously threatened the House of Lords authorities that he would bring a force of 10,000 Muslims to lay siege to the Lords if Wilders was allowed to speak. To their credit, the Lords authorities had stood firm and said extra police would be drafted in to meet this threat and the Wilders meeting should go ahead. ...

So let’s get this straight. The British government allows people to march through British streets screaming support for Hamas, it allows Hizb ut Tahrir to recruit on campus for the jihad against Britain and the west, it takes no action against a Muslim peer who threatens mass intimidation of Parliament, but it bans from the country a member of parliament of a European democracy who wishes to address the British Parliament on the threat to life and liberty in the west from religious fascism.

It is he, not them, who is considered a ‘serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society’. Why? Because the result of this stand for life and liberty against those who would destroy them might be an attack by violent thugs. The response is not to face down such a threat of violence but to capitulate to it instead.

It was the same reasoning that led the police on those pro-Hamas marches to confiscate the Israeli flag, on the grounds that it would provoke violence, while those screaming support for genocide and incitement against the Jews were allowed to do so. The reasoning was that the Israeli flag might provoke thuggery while the genocidal incitement would not. So those actually promoting aggression were allowed to do so while those who threatened no-one at all were repressed. ...

[T]his is another fateful and defining issue for Britain’s governing class as it continues to sleepwalk into cultural suicide. If British MPs do not raise hell about this banning order, if they go along with this spinelessness, if they fail to stand up for the principle that the British Parliament of all places must be free to hear what a fellow democratically elected politician has to say about one of the most difficult and urgent issues of our time, if they fail to hold the line against the threat of violence but capitulate to it instead, they will be signalling that Britain is no longer the cradle of freedom and democracy but its graveyard.

James Lewis, at American Thinker, admires the scale and enthusiasm of the orgy of looting well underway on the Potomac.

Just before the election, Barack Obama made fifteen references to “pie” in 100 seconds of a speech—all about dividing up that yummy pie of the American economy. His audience laughed and chanted, “Pie! Pie!” to show how hungry they were. In one fell swoop Obama gave away the rapacity of socialism. In his first weeks of his presidency the world has seen how hungry he really is.

Mr. Obama doesn’t look like he has an eating problem, but he is hungry, voraciously hungry. ...

Socialism is rapaciously greedy—that’s what endless envy warfare comes down to. The Left likes to preen itself with the word ‘progressive,’ when it is actually the most regressive political strategy in history. The key political move is to seek out the most rapacious people—not hungry for food but power—and use them to mobilize an attack on the productive sector, the milk cows of society. It is the most primitive political strategy ever. It goes back to the Romans and long before. Karl Marx merely reinvented a very old and decrepit wheel.

That is why everything is grist for the mill of Obama Marxism. Old-time Marxism just pitted the poor against the rich—a compelling sympathy play in the 19th century, with grinding poverty, industrial workers living in little better than slavery, and peasant farmers in Europe who were all but slaves, as in Czarist Russia. Then decades of capitalist vitality provided the goods and services for an unprecedented spread of wealth, so that today Joe the Plumber is an instinctive conservative. Industrial workers became prosperous.

So the Left needed a new underclass. That is why the Boomer Left had to find new victim groups—women who could be made to envy men, blacks to envy whites, homosexuals to envy heterosexuals, the young against their parents, each ethnic group against the other. The New Marxism plays off any victim group against any perceived winner.

First, Obama’s appointees were having trouble with unpaid taxes. Now, according to Iowahawk, it’s dead hobos.
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Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Nadeem Esmail, in the Wall Street Journal, suggests Americans thinking about socialized health care ought to look at the Canadian health system to see what it’s going to be like.

Health-care resources are not unlimited in any country, even rich ones like Canada and the U.S., and must be rationed either by price or time. When individuals bear no direct responsibility for paying for their care, as in Canada, that care is rationed by waiting.

Canadians often wait months or even years for necessary care. For some, the status quo has become so dire that they have turned to the courts for recourse. Several cases currently before provincial courts provide studies in what Americans could expect from government-run health insurance.

In Ontario, Lindsay McCreith was suffering from headaches and seizures yet faced a four and a half month wait for an MRI scan in January of 2006. Deciding that the wait was untenable, Mr. McCreith did what a lot of Canadians do: He went south, and paid for an MRI scan across the border in Buffalo. The MRI revealed a malignant brain tumor.

Ontario’s government system still refused to provide timely treatment, offering instead a months-long wait for surgery. In the end, Mr. McCreith returned to Buffalo and paid for surgery that may have saved his life. He’s challenging Ontario’s government-run monopoly health-insurance system, claiming it violates the right to life and security of the person guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Shona Holmes, another Ontario court challenger, endured a similarly harrowing struggle. In March of 2005, Ms. Holmes began losing her vision and experienced headaches, anxiety attacks, extreme fatigue and weight gain. Despite an MRI scan showing a brain tumor, Ms. Holmes was told she would have to wait months to see a specialist. In June, her vision deteriorating rapidly, Ms. Holmes went to the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, where she found that immediate surgery was required to prevent permanent vision loss and potentially death. Again, the government system in Ontario required more appointments and more tests along with more wait times. Ms. Holmes returned to the Mayo Clinic and paid for her surgery.

On the other side of the country in Alberta, Bill Murray waited in pain for more than a year to see a specialist for his arthritic hip. The specialist recommended a “Birmingham” hip resurfacing surgery (a state-of-the-art procedure that gives better results than basic hip replacement) as the best medical option. But government bureaucrats determined that Mr. Murray, who was 57, was “too old” to enjoy the benefits of this procedure and said no. In the end, he was also denied the opportunity to pay for the procedure himself in Alberta. He’s heading to court claiming a violation of Charter rights as well.

These constitutional challenges, along with one launched in British Columbia last month, share a common goal: to win Canadians the freedom to spend their own money to protect themselves from the inadequacies of the government health-insurance system.

The Washington Times notices an Obama administration appointment indicating that sharp poniards and poison rings will be just as much a part of daily life in the West Wing as puppies and unicorns.

Shauna Daly, a 29-year-old Democratic operative, was named last month to the new job of White House counsel research director. Though she is inside one of the most powerful legal offices in the land, Miss Daly holds no law degree and doesn’t list any legal training on her resume.

Her sole experience has been as an opposition researcher for Democratic political campaigns: She helped dig up dirt on rivals, or on her own nominee to prepare for attacks.

The addition to White House counsel Greg Craig’s staff has alarmed some Republicans, who consider it a politicization of the office, and has irritated others who say that Democratic lawmakers who railed against Republican opposition researchers in legal positions in the past are now silent.

“Daly does not have the qualifications to be holding a significant position in the White House counsel’s office,” said Mark Levin, a conservative lawyer and radio-show host who worked in the Reagan White House and as chief of staff for Attorney General Edwin Meese.

“Her only qualification is that she knows how to dig up dirt on other people,” he said.

Tom Cheney in the New Yorker, February 9, 2008

Scott S. Powell, writing in Barron’s, exonerates George W. Bush for the mortgage crisis and blames instead a long-term trend featuring the intrusion of politics into the US economy.

Well, electing Obama will certainly fix that, won’t it?

The Bush administration made many mistakes, but deregulation was not one of them.

Not only was there no major deregulation passed during the past eight years, but the Bush administration and a Republican Congress approved the most sweeping financial-market regulation in decades.

The bipartisan Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted in 2002 to prevent corporate fraud and restore investor confidence after the collapse of Enron and WorldCom. It failed to prevent the accounting fraud and influence-peddling scandals at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And even after those scandals were widely understood, regulators sent Fannie and Freddie back into the market to continue buying subprime loans, lending and borrowing with implied taxpayer backing.

Across the government, the Bush administration supported new regulations that added almost 1,000 pages a year to the Federal Register, nearly a record. If this is insufficient regulation, it’s hard to imagine a scope that would be effective.

We are in this mess largely because critical thought and moral judgment have been subordinated to the politicization of our economy, resulting in regulatory gaps and excessive controls of the wrong kind.

Government regulations should be limited to those that increase and protect transparency and competition, protect public and private property, promote individual responsibility and enforce equal opportunity under the law. Even if the right laws and regulations could be found, they would prove insufficient to protect freedom and prosperity.

In his farewell address, George Washington said that religion and morality are essential to sustain democracy in America. He might well have added that virtue is just as indispensable to its economy. When the captains of banking and finance and their congressional overseers fail in moral judgment, the results are disastrous for everyone. As we are now witnessing in the real-estate, stock- and bond-market dislocations, once trust is lost, markets freeze and long-standing relationships break down, resulting in illiquidity, irrational pricing and severe losses.

Today’s problems have their roots in programs and financial instruments that shifted the locus of moral responsibility away from private individuals and institutions to wider circles that were understood to end with a government guarantee. Heads of the top banks and financial institutions could approve substandard home-mortgage underwriting—prone to increased default—because those loans could be securitized by Wall Street and sold off to investors or to government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), with no likely recourse to the financial institution of origin.

Our present crisis began in the 1970s, during the Carter administration, with passage of the Community Reinvestment Act to stem bank redlining and liberalize lending in order to extend home ownership in lower-income communities. Then in the 1990s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development took a fateful step by getting the GSEs to accept subprime mortgages. With Fannie and Freddie easing credit requirements on loans they would purchase from lenders, banks could greatly increase lending to borrowers unqualified for conventional loans. In the name of extending affordable housing, this broadened the acceptability of risky loans throughout the financial system.

The risk lurking in the GSE portfolios was acknowledged in the Bush administration’s first fiscal-year budget, released in April 2001. It stated that Fannie and Freddie were “a potential problem” because “financial trouble of a large GSE could cause strong repercussions in the financial markets, affecting federally insured entities and economic activity.” Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan issued repeated warnings that the GSEs “placed the total financial system of the future at substantial risk.” Such warnings went unheeded even after accounting scandals rocked Fannie and Freddie.

The collapse and government seizure of Fannie and Freddie in September 2008 ended the experiment in partial socialization of the U.S. housing sector. Before we try complete concentration of federal financial power, we should understand that power and political corruption abrogated moral judgment on every level.

The poor and middle class were encouraged to live beyond their means and buy houses they couldn’t afford; speculators were lured into excessive risk-taking; banks were rewarded for lowering their loan standards; and Wall Street found new windfall profits from securitizing and reselling bad loans in bulk. With the support of regulators, credit-rating agencies provided cover for the whole charade.

There is plenty of blame to go around on both sides of the political aisle. But the lesson should be clear that socializing failed businesses—whether in housing, health care or in Detroit—is not a long-term solution. Expanding government’s intrusion into the private sector doesn’t come without great risk. The renewing and self-correcting nature of the private sector is largely lost in the public sector, where accountability is impaired by obfuscation of responsibility, and where special interests benefit even when the public good is ill-served.

Barack Obama’s political career began with the winning of an Illinois State Senate seat by taking control of the process and getting all his democrat party opponents (in a one party race) kicked off the ballot. Barack Obama’s career reached its present zenith, at least in part, through other process short cuts like the democrat party’s rules committee awarding him primary delegates from Michigan where he did not run and duplicate registrations and votes courtesy of ACORN.

Newsmax:

The Obama administration is ending the Census Bureau’s traditional autonomy – a move that has Republicans outraged over the White House’s politicization of counting Americans.

Last week, an administration official revealed that the yet-to-be-named director of the Census Bureau will report to the White House rather than Commerce Secretary nominee Judd Gregg, a Republican.

What this move undoubtedly signifies is the Obama Administration’s intention to make an end run around the Constitution’s specification of an “actual enumeration” every decade to permit statistical estimates of non-actually-enumerated democrat constituencies in order to enlarge the congressional representation and budgetary apportionment for inner-city, one-party democrat-controlled districts. The estimating would be done by hardcore democrat party partisans, of course, who can estimate with the best.

Mr. Gregg should never have agreed to accept the Secretary of Commerce appointment in the context of such a cynical and opportunistic partisan manuever.
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UPDATE 2/13:

Senator Judd Gregg announced, very politely, that he was declining the appointment due to “irresolvable conflicts.” Good for him.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford articulates the Republican position on the democrat party Porkulus:

A problem that was created by building up of too much debt will not be solved with yet more debt,” Gov. Mark Sanford said Sunday, making a reference to the federal deficit spending that will likely finance the federal stimulus package.

“We’re moving precipitously close to what I would call a savior-based economy,” Sanford also said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.

The South Carolina Republican said such an economy is “what you see in Russia or Venezuela or Zimbabwe or places like that where it matters not how good your product is to the consumer but what your political connection is to those in power.”

“That is quite different than a market-based economy where some rise and some fall but there’s a consequence to making a stupid decision,” Sanford said after pointing to the powers granted to the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve to help deal with the current economic crisis.

“A lot of people who’ve made some very stupid decisions are being bailed out by the population at large,” he added.

Instead of bailing out failing companies, Sanford told CNN’s John King that the government should let the economy work through the current challenges without intervention.

“We’re going to go through a process of deleveraging,” Sanford said. “And it will be painful. The question is: Do we apply a bunch of different band aids that lengthen and prolong this pain or do we take the band aid off? I believe very strongly: let’s get this thing over with, let’s not drag it on.”

Talk about the man who had everything.

Jacques Littlefield didn’t only own what every Silicon Valley executive wants: his own hilltop in Portola Valley. On his 430 acre Pony Tracks Ranch he kept and serviced his own collection of 230 tanks, missile launchers, armored cars, and personnel carriers.

SF Chronicle:

Jacques Littlefield, an unassuming multimillionaire who amassed the country’s largest private collection of tanks and other military armored vehicles, died Wednesday at his Portola Valley ranch. He was 59. ...

Mr. Littlefield owned about 200 tanks, self-propelled guns, armored personnel carriers, anti-aircraft vehicles and other heavy combat vehicles, ranging from an M1917 “Six-Ton Tractor” from World War I to a Russian T-72 used by Saddam Hussein’s forces in the Iraq war.

He painstakingly restored the vehicles and kept them in a football-field-size showroom on his ranch. In accordance with state and federal law, none of tanks had functioning firing apparatus, but he did occasionally drive them around his 470-acre property.

A jewel in his collection is the German Panzer V (Panzerkampfwagon V -JDZ) Panther tank that the German army sank in a Polish river during World War II to keep it from the advancing Russians. The Panther sat submerged for decades, and Mr. Littlefield acquired it five years ago and began restoring it.

“Restoration is very satisfying, especially with something like the Panther,” Mr. Littlefield said in a 2007 interview with The Chronicle. “People say: ‘You’ll never get that thing running again.’ Well, it was built once, and we can do it again.”

His collections extracted a personal cost. “It happens to a lot of guys,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 1992. “It happened to me. You get a tank, you get divorced. You get divorced, you lose the tank to pay the settlement.”

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Jacques Littlefield web-site

Lots of photos of his collection here

Driving restored (turret not yet mounted) Panther 5:00 video – not easy parking one of these in the garage.

Littlefield runs over a Mercedes with his tank 0:49 video

And Melanie Phillips has had enough.

President Obama has had, by general consent, a torrid First Fortnight. To put it another way, it has taken precisely two weeks for the illusion that brought him to power to be exposed for the nonsense that it so obviously was. The transformational candidate who was going to sweep away pork-barrel politics, lobbyists and corruption has been up to his neck in sleaze, as eviscerated here by Charles Krauthammer. Despite the fact that he came to power promising to ‘ban all earmarks’, his ‘stimulus’ bill represents billions of dollars of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections—which have nothing to do with kick-starting the economy and everything to do with favouring pet Democrat causes.

He has been appointing one tax dodger, lobbyist and wheeler-dealer after another. After appointing one official,Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who had unaccountably forgotten to pay his taxes, he then watched his designated Health Secretary Tom Daschle fall on his sword because he too had taken a tax holiday. Daschle was furthermore a prominent actor in the world of lobbying and influence-peddling. Leon Panetta, Obama’s nominee for Director of the CIA has also, according to the Wall Street Journal, consulted for prominent companies and sat on the board of a public affairs firm that lobbies Congress. The Weekly Standard reports that Secretary of Labour nominee Hilda Solis was not only involved with a private organization lobbying her fellow legislators on a bill that she helped sponsor, but she apparently kept her involvement secret and failed to reveal a clear conflict of interest. ...

America – what have you done?!

Read the whole thing.

Betsey Ramsdale’s Facebook photo

A young woman teaching in the middle school in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin was suspended by panicking school administrators after a busybody on the school staff discovered that Betsey Ramsdale had posted a picture of herself on Facebook aiming a gun.

WKOW-TV:

Beaver Dam school officials placed a middle school teacher on administrative leave after discovering a photograph of the teacher with a gun on the teacher’s Facebook page.

In the photo, teacher Betsy Ramsdale is training a rifle at the camera. ...

[T]he Facebook photo was brought to the attention of school district officials by a concerned staff member at Beaver Dam Middle School. ...
Middle school parent Jennifer Buzzell said the teacher’s decision to post the photograph was concerning.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate,” Buzzell told 27 News. “I’m not sure why this would be on the computer at all.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” school parent Mark Hagstrom said. “She’s on her time to do what she wants.”

1:55 video

Ms. Ramsdale’s pose in the photo is actually not a terribly unusual shooting photo pose. If the photographic objective is to present the subject aiming, this angle is the only way to show the person’s face aligned with the barrel and the sights. Additionally, the looking-down-the barrel viewpoint adds drama.

Beyond which, chicks and guns have a particular appeal as a combination, image-wise. Hollywood has been exploiting the iconic image of the girl with a gun forever. Some of the biggest Hollywood film industry supporters of gun control, people like Sigourney Weaver and Jodie Foster, can be found striking fierce poses-with-pieces on lobby cards

Ramsdale’s photo on a personal Facebook profile obviously has nothing to do with her job, and ought to be considered to exist in a realm outside the jurisdiction of her employers. Its supposedly alarming character is simply a case of the extreme and unreasonable fear of arms which infects the deracinated and effeminate contemporary community of fashion.

Note also the inability of the school administrators and the press to distinguish a shotgun from a rifle.

Yuval Levin, in Commentary, reflects on Sarah Palin’s candidacy and what it revealed about class and politics in contemporary America.

In American politics, the distinction between populism and elitism is… subdivided into cultural and economic populism and elitism. And for at least the last forty years, the two parties have broken down distinctly along this double axis. The Republican party has been the party of cultural populism and economic elitism, and the Democrats have been the party of cultural elitism and economic populism. Republicans tend to identify with the traditional values, unabashedly patriotic, anti-cosmopolitan, non-nuanced Joe Sixpack, even as they pursue an economic policy that aims at elite investor-driven growth. Democrats identify with the mistreated, underpaid, overworked, crushed-by-the-corporation “people against the powerful,” but tend to look down on those people’s religion, education, and way of life. Republicans tend to believe the dynamism of the market is for the best but that cultural change can be dangerously disruptive; Democrats tend to believe dynamic social change stretches the boundaries of inclusion for the better but that economic dynamism is often ruinous and unjust.

Both economic and cultural populism are politically potent, but in America, unlike in Europe, cultural populism has always been much more powerful. Americans do not resent the success of others, but they do resent arrogance, and especially intellectual arrogance. Even the poor in our country tend to be moved more by cultural than by economic appeals. It was this sense, this feeling, that Sarah Palin channeled so effectively. Her appearance on the scene unleashed populist energies that McCain had not tapped, and she both fed them and fed off them. She spent the bulk of her time at Republican rallies assailing the cultural radicalism of Barack Obama and his latte-sipping followers, who, she occasionally suggested, were not part of the “the real America” she saw in the adoring throngs standing before her. Palin channeled these cultural energies more by what she was than by what she said or did, which contributed mightily to the odd disjunction between her professional resume and her campaign presence and impact. ...

Palin never actually boasted of ignorance or explicitly scorned learning or ideas. Rather, the implicit charge was that Palin’s failure to speak the language and to share the common points of reference of the educated upper tier of American society essentially rendered her unfit for high office.

This form of intellectual elitism is actually fairly new in America, though it has been a dominant feature of European society since World War II. It is not as exclusive or as anti-democratic as cultural elitism is in other countries, because entry to the American intellectual elite is, in principle, open to all who pursue it. And pursuing it is not as difficult as it once was, at least for the middle class. Indeed, most of this elite’s prominent members hail from middle-class origins and not from traditional bastions of American privilege and wealth. They can speak of growing up in Scranton, even as they raise their noses at dirty coal and hunting season.

Nor is membership in the intellectual upper class determined by diplomas hanging on the wall. Palin could have gained entrance easily, despite the fact that she holds a mere degree in journalism from the University of Idaho. Although the intellectual elite is deeply shaped by our leading institutions of higher learning, belonging to it is more the result of shared assumptions and attitudes. It is more cultural than academic, more NPR than PhD. In Washington, many politicians who have not risen through the best of universities work hard for years to master the language and the suppositions of this upper tier, and to live carefully within the bounds prescribed by its view of the world.

Applied to politics, the worldview of the intellectual elite begins from an unstated assumption that governing is fundamentally an exercise of the mind: an application of the proper mix of theory, expertise, and intellectual distance that calls for knowledge and verbal fluency more than for prudence born of life’s hard lessons.

Sarah Palin embodied a very different notion of politics, in which sound instincts and valuable life experiences are considered sources of knowledge at least the equal of book learning. She is the product of an America in which explicit displays of pride in intellect are considered unseemly, and where physical prowess and moral constancy are given a higher place than intellectual achievement. She was in the habit of stressing these faculties instead—a habit that struck many in Washington as brutishness.

This is why Palin was seen as anti-intellectual when, properly speaking, she was simply non-intellectual. What she lacked was not intelligence—she is, clearly, highly intelligent—but rather the particular set of assumptions, references, and attitudes inculcated by America’s top twenty universities and transmitted by the nation’s elite cultural organs.

Many of those (including especially those on the Right) who reacted badly to Palin on intellectual grounds understand themselves to be advancing the interests of lower-middle-class families similar to Palin’s own family and to many of those in attendance at her rallies who greeted her arrival on the scene as a kind of deliverance. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that while these members of the intellectual elite want the government to serve the interests of such people first and foremost, they do not want those people to hold the levers of power.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog’s Best Essays of the Year.

Shiite Iraqi policemen (and their officers) receive a solid dose of the effective kind of motivational instruction that Western soldiers have been receiving from non-commissioned officers since back when Christ was a corporal. One can picture some Roman centurian delivering the same address at Hadrian’s Wall, also via translator, to his blue-painted Brithonic auxiliaries.

5:35 video

Some of us have very amusing commenters. At Ann Althouse’s blog, garage mahal writes:

Althouse voting for Obama is like buying a Barbie to mutilate it.

The American leftwing establishment recently erupted in outrage and indignation over the rise to political prominence of a flagrant tax cheat.

Who was it that provoked the storm of criticism? How much had he declined to pay?

Warner Todd Huston has the answers.

A.Q. Khan celebrates the end of his house arrest

Another foreign policy triumph for the new Obama Administration was recorded when Pakistan announced that, there being no big, bad Republican administration to push Pakistan around any more, the need to keep up the pretence of confining A.Q. Khan, the father of the Islamic nuclear bomb and the world’s key source of nuclear proliferation, under house arrest had passed.

Presumably now the lovable old gnome can get back to work assisting the oppressed and indignant of the Third World win the respect of the decadent and Imperialist West by brandishing brand new nuclear weapons in its face.

Guardian:

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist at the centre of the world’s largest proliferation scandal, has been freed from five years of house arrest by a court in Islamabad.

Khan, lionised as the “father” of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, confessed in 2004 to selling nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya. He was immediately pardoned but detained in his home.

Since then Khan has retracted his tearful televised confession. Speaking outside his house today after the high court ruling, Khan said: “It’s a matter of joy. The judgment, by the grace of Allah, is good. It is because of this judgment that I am speaking to you.”

Khan’s lawyer said the high court had declared him a free citizen. “The court has said as he was not involved in nuclear proliferation or criminal activity, there is no case against him, therefore he is a free citizen,” Ali Zafar said. ...

His confinement had been progressively relaxed over the past year as he was allowed to meet friends and give selective interviews. He travelled to Karachi at least once under tight security.

Last year a UN nuclear watchdog said Khan’s network smuggled nuclear blueprints to Iran, Libya and North Korea and was active in 12 countries. Last month the US state department imposed sanctions on 13 individuals – two of them British – and three private companies because of their involvement in Khan’s network.

Pakistan has prevented foreign investigators from questioning Khan, insisting it has passed on all relevant information about nuclear proliferation.

Khan said he had no need to answer to any foreign government. “I will always be proud about what I did for Pakistan,” he told reporters. “I am obliged to answer only to my government, not to any foreigners.”

R. Emmett Tyrell warns that, like the first Robin, the first crocus shoots announcing that Spring has arrived, the first corrupt and ludicrously leftwing appointments, the first foreign policy gaffes already herald the arrival of a classic democrat fiasco presidency.

Egads, it is going to be a long four years! It is only two weeks since the Prophet Obama’s inauguration, and already he has revived memories of Boy Clinton’s first 100 days. Political observers with a sense of history might well ask whether the Obama Administration will approximate the adolescent incompetence of Clinton Administration or the Pecksniffian pratfalls of the Carter Administration. Presidential historian that I am, allow me to caution my fellow citizens that here in the vestibule of the Obama Administration it is probably too early to say. Yet with the economy in crisis and American national security in the hands of a starry-eyed novice, one can argue that we are in for a reprise of the Carter years complete with the self-righteous pout.

I had wanted to suspend criticism of our incoming president for a few months until his bungling became obvious. As I wrote during the campaign, it is inconceivable that a modern-day president with only four years in the Senate (and but three terms in a state legislature) could be equal to the demands of this high office. Still, I thought it would take a few months for President Obama to reveal his ineptitude. Well, it only took two weeks.

Poor New York Times! Neocon Bill Kristol was, well, simply too darned con. He actually defended the Bush Administration and openly sided with conservatives. A respectable NYT token conservative columnist is suppose to confine his conservatism to occasional dyspeptic grumbling about changing times, fashions, and morals, but avoid flagrant heresy on the big questions that matter: George W. Bush, the War in Iraq, and the outrageous insult to everything that’s proper and good that is Sarah Palin.

Jennifer Senior, in New York Magazine, describes the fraught quest for the Upper West Side conservative.

[N]ot to say that Times readers don’t like conservatives. They just like conservatives they can take home and introduce to their families (or maybe Paul Krugman’s family [or Michael Meeropol’s family – DZ]). David Brooks is the sort of Republican whose column a self-respecting liberal can read without wanting to hurl things in the aftermath—an Obama enthusiast, a Palin critic, a careful questioner of GOP shibboleths. He’s a vocal supporter of gay marriage and abortion rights. And he’s just as apt to be writing about culture as politics.

The Times may even have thought it’d be getting the same cuddly conservative intellectual when it hired Kristol. Like Brooks, he was a known quantity: a quotable source during the Bush I era (he was Dan Quayle’s chief of staff), the scion of New York intellectuals. But it didn’t, and the Republican party line that Kristol was peddling was an embarrassment.

Senior recommends comedian Stephen Colbert.

I won’t name names, but I can think of more than one prominent passenger on the conservative movement’s bus, who could be relied upon to broaden and grow into just such a role, becoming worthy of “strange new respect,” given the right inducements.

Varifrank, on Twitter:

Pass it now or we may never recover’ – is he talking about the Dems or the American people?

Jane Fonda has started blogging and, sure enough, it took her only 4 entries to get down to business: opposing US military efforts overseas and lending aid and comfort to the enemy.

Her topic was one Marlissa Grogan, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and one of the so-called Hempstead 15, a group arrested by Nassau County Police for disorderly conduct during a protest outside of the final presidential debate at Hofstra University on October 15, 2008.

I left rehearsal tonight in a temp wig and costume to go downtown to the screenings of The FTA Show. David Zeiger and I came in after the first showing was over and answered questions. Joining us was Marlisa Grogan, Captain in the US Marine Corp (29 UES). I had never met her before and was very impressed. She has such a deep understanding of why it is important for us to support active duty members of the military who are anti war or, at least, anti a war they feel is wrong and ill-conceived. She herself has been involved in an anti war show that has performed for active duty personnel. She said that it is the soldiers who have seen active duty who tend to be anti war more than the ones who have stayed stateside. “They just don’t know,” she said.

She talked about the similarities that exist between today’s military and those of the Vietnam era but also pointed out the profound differences, citing in particular, the fact that so many recruits are confronted with the choice between jail or military. For many it’s a much needed job. Look how young she is, yet so wise and committed. “We can’t just rely on the hope that Obama has brought us,” she told the audience. “We have to get off our asses and make sure we organize and speak out for what we feel is right.”

Time to update Fonda’s soubriquet to “Jihad Jane.”

Taliban militants have concentrated their efforts for months on interdicting US supply routes to Afghanistan from the port of Karachi, Pakistan.

75 percent of the supplies for the Afghan war pass through Pakistan, including 40 percent of the fuel used by US military forces.

The Khyber Pass, described by Kipling as “a sword cut through the mountains,” features a winding road 30 miles/48 km long through the mountains of the Hindu Kush a crucial part of the trade route between Peshawar and Jallabad.

LA Times:

Reporting from Istanbul, Turkey, and Peshawar, Pakistan—A day after blowing up a crucial land bridge, Taliban militants torched 10 supply trucks returning from Afghanistan to Pakistan on Wednesday, underscoring the insurgents’ dominance of the main route used to transport supplies to Afghan-based U.S. and NATO troops.

Months of disruptions on the route from the Pakistani port of Karachi through the historic Khyber Pass have forced NATO and American military authorities to look for other transit options. About three-quarters of the supplies for Western forces in Afghanistan—mainly food and fuel—are ferried through Pakistan by contractors, usually poorly paid, semiliterate truckers. Many now refuse to drive the route because of the danger.

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, said last month during a visit to the region that routes outside Pakistan had been found, but he provided no details and gave no timetable for their use. The supply question has taken on added urgency with the planned deployment of up to 30,000 more U.S. troops in the Afghan theater in the next 18 months.

The complications of moving supplies through Central Asia were also highlighted Tuesday when the government of Kyrgyzstan said it would close a U.S. air base important to the Afghan war effort. U.S. officials said talks were underway to keep the base open.

Investors Business Daily:

The Russia of Vladimir Putin and his puppet, President Dmitry Medvedev, threw some sand in our gears by getting the Kyrgyz government to close a vital NATO air base in that country in exchange for more than $2 billion in aid for that country’s struggling economy.

Russia has long resisted and resented U.S. interference in former Soviet republics as well as the expansion of NATO and democracy to the Russian border. It has put economic pressure on Ukraine, invaded Georgia and threatened Poland with missile attack. Now it wants to sabotage our efforts in Afghanistan, a country it failed to swallow up.

Two weeks ago, Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, met with senior Kyrgyz officials during a tour of the region, and they assured him there were no discussions with Moscow about closing the base in exchange for aid.

Petraeus announced on inauguration day that Russia and neighboring Central Asian nations had agreed to let supplies pass through their territory to U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, lessening our dependence on dangerous routes through Pakistan.

That need was shown Tuesday, when insurgents in Pakistan blew up a bridge in the Khyber Pass, disrupting one of two truck routes from the port of Karachi by which the 60,000 U.S.-led NATO troops in Afghanistan receive about 80% of their supplies.

“We have sought additional logistical routes into Afghanistan from the north. There have been agreements reached,” Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said.

But as Moscow was offering new supply lines, it was also bribing the government of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev to close the base at Manas by agreeing to provide Kyrgyzstan with $150 million in aid, to extend $2 billion in loans and to write off debt worth $180 million. Bakiyev made the announcement in Moscow.

The Russian business daily Kommersant, citing a “source close to the negotiations” with Bakiyev, said Moscow had made the U.S. base closure a strict condition for Kyrgyzstan getting aid.

Honoré Daumier. Les Joueurs d’échecs, c. 1863-1867. Oil on panel. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris

According to the latest Rasmussen Poll, public support for the democrat party’s so-called Stimulus Package is now in the minority, having declined to 37%.

Like the Daschle nomination, the Stimulus Package is visibly in serious trouble, and it appears very likely that the Obama Administration will soon demonstrate all over again the hasty retreat which is already becoming recognizable as this administration’s favorite, and most relied upon, political strategy.

Barack Obama made his way upwards to the Senate, his party’s nomination, and the Presidency by a combining an attractive image with studious avoidance of commitment to any controversial position which might expose him to attack.

It was easy to carry water for the democrat party’s ultra-liberal base and special interests, as well as for the Daley machine, while keeping one’s head down, and voting “Present!” on the hottest issues back in the Illinois State Senate. It was even easier to vote with the democrat majority some of the time, and be away campaigning, in the US Senate, when decisions which might cost something needed to be made.

Barack Obama is, as time goes by, going to find it harder to hide in the White House.

He won’t always be able to backtrack quickly, and issue a mildly rueful “I screwed up” press statement to dodge the bullet and get off the hook. In the end, he is going to wind up forced to commit himself one way or another on the big decisions that matter to America and the world. And, when he produces a national or international disaster, humiliation, or defeat, he is not simply going to be able to take it back or smile apologetically to an indulgent press corps, say: “I screwed up,” and get a free pass.

Character counts in leadership, and Barack Obama has made himself a political career by substituting charm for character. The Obama magic mirror, in which admirers can see whatever they want to project upon it, was a great way to get elected, but it is never going to protect its owner for four years.

Fark readers explore the dire possibilities.
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Hat tip to Conservative Grapevine via RightWingNews.

If you wanted to buy a pre-1921 edition of the Royal Geographic Society’s Hints to Travellers Scientific and General, I’m afraid you’d be completely out of luck today. Only a single copy of the 1921 10th edition is on offer at the present time at all. though you can buy it at three different prices, depending on the book search venue chosen: $57.66 (Bibliophile) or $63.70 (Choose) or $72.94 (Amazon UK).

Or you can read it on your PC, right here, for free.

The Archive.org stream isn’t as fast over satellite modem as one would like, but it is surprisingly readable and the user interface is simple and intuitive.
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Hat tip to John Murrell via Karen L. Myers.

Andrew Stuttaford comments on Michael Phelps’s apology for pot smoking.

In the meantime, I merely note that this broken wreck of a man’s failure to win any more than a pathetic fourteen Olympic gold medals (so far) is a terrifying warning of the horrific damage that cannabis can do to someone’s health—and a powerful reminder of just how sensible the drug laws really are.

Meanwhile, Radley Balko, at Reason Online, offers his own alternative version of Phelps’s letter of apology.

Jonah Goldberg admires the gaping chasm between democrats’ expressed enthusiam for paying taxes and their actual personal behavior in some recent examples in the news.

During the presidential campaign, Joe Biden insisted that paying your taxes is a patriotic duty. No, scratch that. He said that supporting a tax hike was the American thing to do. “It’s time to be patriotic,” he told America’s putative tax slackers. When asked whether he might be questioning the patriotism of people who don’t want higher taxes, Biden, as is his wont, took things to the next rhetorical level. Forget patriotism, insisted Joe, paying higher taxes is a religious obligation.

The man who gave an average of $369 a year to charity over the previous decade fulfills his religious obligations by cutting a tax check—a check he’s required to cut by law.

Now it’s always perilous to take Biden’s statements too seriously, but it does seem eminently fair to say that his comments reflect a common, if not universal, attitude among Democrats. Taxes aren’t a “necessary evil” so much as a joyous affirmation of the possibilities of government and the lifeblood of a more hopeful society. “Taxes are what you pay to be an American”—like “membership fees,” says Democratic language guru George Lakoff.

Victor Davis Hanson observes that, only two weeks into the new Obama Administration, the trainwreck is already well underway.

Some of us have been warning that it was not healthy for the U.S. media to have deified rather than questioned Obama, especially given that they tore apart Bush, ridiculed Palin, and caricatured Hillary. And now we can see the results of their two years of advocacy rather than scrutiny.

We are quite literally after two weeks teetering on an Obama implosion—and with no Dick Morris to bail him out—brought on by messianic delusions of grandeur, hubris, and a strange naivete that soaring rhetoric and a multiracial profile can add requisite cover to good old-fashioned Chicago politicking.

First, there were the sermons on ethics, belied by the appointments of tax dodgers, crass lobbyists, and wheeler-dealers like Richardson—with the relish of the Blago tapes still to come. (And why does Richardson/Daschle go, but not Geithner?).

Second, was the “stimulus” (the euphemism for “borrow/print money”) that was simply a way to go into debt for a generation to shower Democratic constinuencies with cash.

Then third, there were the inflated lectures on historic foreign policy to be made by the clumsy political novice who trashed his own country and his predecessor in the most ungracious manner overseas to a censured Saudi-run press organ. ...

At home, Obama is becoming laughable and laying the groundwork for the greatest conservative populist reaction since the Reagan Revolution.

Abroad, some really creepy people are lining up to test Obama’s world view of “Bush did it/but I am the world”: The North Koreans are readying their missiles; the Iranians are calling us passive, bragging on nukes and satellites; Russia is declaring missile defense is over and the Euros in real need of iffy Russian gas; Pakistanis say no more drone attacks (and then our friends the Indians say “shut up” about Kashmir and the Euros order no more ‘buy American”).

This is quite serious. I can’t recall a similarly disastrous start in a half-century.

Just a bit ironic.

0:31 video

Hat tip to Daniel Lowenstein.

2:41 video

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Just like Leda and the Swan: Obama and the Unicorn.

Hat tip to John Hawkins.

Velociman has harsh, but fair, comments on the American left.

I have no gripe with those who believe there are different paths to an ideal, healthy America. I’m fairly convinced that America is no Leftist’s dream, however, hence the charge of dishonesty. The smallest of children can smoke out a platitude, and I take no solace in the Left’s charade that they want as I do for the nation, and western civilization as a whole. It is a bald-faced lie, built upon a shifting, unstable Sargasso Sea of prevarication. ...

The sad truth is the Leftist cohort, proudly represented by the Democratic Party, has engaged in a decades-long lie of being for the “little guy”, the “forgotten man”, when in fact they are power-mad usurpers of freedom, whose only interest in the little guy is how much of his hard-earned money they can abscond with, and to what nefarious disproven social experiment they can apply it.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to the Gerard van der Leun via the News Junkie

Daniel Hannan, blogging at the Telegraph:

Here’s an eye-popping figure: the cost of EU rules in Britain over the past decade is £106.6 billion – accounting for 72 per cent of the cost of all regulation in Britain. Despite repeated noises in Brussels about making life easier for businesses, each year is more expensive than the last. The burden falls most heavily, not on financial institutions or big corporations, but on small and medium firms.

Open Europe, a business group campaigning to turn the European Union into a looser trading area, says official figures show the cost of regulation has risen from £16.5bn ($23.7bn) a year in 2005 to £28.7bn last year.

The report, based on a study of more than 2,000 impact assessments published by Whitehall departments, found that EU legislation was responsible for almost 72 per cent of the annual cost of regulation.

It claimed that the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform – which is responsible for fighting red tape – imposed more regulatory costs than any other government department, describing the department as the UK’s “regulation factory”. ...

The study found that the cost of EU legislation had risen every year over the past decade, imposing costs on the UK of £18.5bn in 2008, compared with £12.2bn in 2005. ...

The proportion of regulatory costs coming from Brussels is more than 90 per cent for the FSA, environment department and Health & Safety agency, it found. New EU rules for food and feed hygiene more than doubled the FSA’s regulatory burden in 2006, making it impossible to hit its deregulation targets.

“The government effectively has control of less than 30 per cent of the annual cost of regulation,” the report says.

Ralph Peters takes the Heinleinian view of our Taliban adversaries.

A fundamental reason why our intelligence agencies, military leaders and (above all) Washington pols can’t understand Afghanistan is that they don’t recognize that we’re dealing with alien life-forms.

Oh, the strange-minded aliens in question resemble us physically. We share a few common needs: We and the aliens are oxygen breathers who require food and water at frequent intervals. Our body casings feel heat or cold. We’re divided into two sexes (more or less). And we’re mortal.

But that’s about where the similarities end, analytically speaking. ...

Regarding Planet Afghanistan, we still hear the deadly cliché that “all human beings want the same basic things, such as better lives and greater opportunities for their children.” How does that apply to Afghan aliens who prefer their crude way of life and its merciless cults?

When girls and women are denied education or even health care and are executed by their own kin for minor infractions against the cult, how does that square with our insistence that all men want greater opportunities for the kids?

What about those Afghan parents who approve of or even encourage suicidal attacks by their sons? This not only confounds our value system, but defies biological reason.

So: These humanoid forms with which we must deal don’t all want or value the same things we do. They form different social aggregates and exchange goods and services within wildly different parameters (and exhibit hypocritical sexual tastes that diverge from procreative mandates – ask our troops about that).

These alien tribes seek to destroy physical objects and systems valued on Planet America. They perceive time differently. They treat other life forms more harshly than we do. Their own lives are shorter, with different arcs. They quite like our weapons, though .

This is a “war of the worlds” in the cultural sense, a head-on collision between civilizations from different galaxies.

And the aliens don’t come in peace.

Read the whole thing.

The Wall Street Journal admires the democrat part double-standard that worked for Tim Geithner and which also seems to be working for Tom Daschle.

So Tom Daschle, the erstwhile prairie populist and scourge of multiple Presidential nominees, failed to disclose and pay taxes on hundreds of thousands of dollars of income. He also waited months to pay up and told the Obama transition team about his tax oversights only days before his Senate confirmation hearing to become Secretary of Health and Human Services.

This one is going to be fascinating to watch, less for what it says about Mr. Daschle than what it will reveal about Democratic standards. Every Republican in America knows that if Mr. Daschle were a Reagan or Bush nominee he’d now be headed back to private life faster than you can say John Tower. That’s the way Democrats have treated GOP nominees who were accused of far lesser transgressions than Mr. Daschle’s tax, er, avoidance. ...

Mr. Daschle failed to report some $255,000 in income from 2005 through 2007 for a car and driver supplied to him for personal use. The chauffeur service was provided by Leo Hindery, a big Democratic donor who also made Mr. Daschle a bundle by making him a limited partner in InterMedia Partners, a private equity shop.

As a legal tax matter, this isn’t even a close call. Mr. Daschle says he used the car service about 80% for personal use, and 20% for business. But his spokeswoman says it only dawned on the Senator last June that this might be taxable income. Mr. Daschle’s excuse? According to a Journal report Friday, “he told committee staff he had grown used to having a car and driver as majority leader and did not think to report the perk on his taxes, according to staff members.” How’s that for a Leona Helmsley moment: Doesn’t everyone have a car and chauffeur, dear?

Detail, Giovanni Bellini, Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, (c. 1470), Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice

From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:

From a very early, indeed unknown date in the Christian history, the 2nd of February has been held as the festival of the Purification of the Virgin, and it is still a holiday of the Church of England. From the coincidence of the time with that of the Februation or purification of the people in pagan Rome, some consider this as a Christian festival engrafted upon a heathen one, in order to take advantage of the established habits of the people; but the idea is at least open to a good deal of doubt. The popular name Candlemass is derived from the ceremony which the Church of Rome dictates to be observed on this day; namely, a blessing of candles by the clergy, and a distribution of them amongst the people, by whom they are afterwards carried lighted in solemn procession. The more important observances were of course given up in England at the Reformation; but it was still, about the close of the eighteenth century, customary in some places to light up churches with candles on this day.

At Rome, the Pope every year officiates at this festival in the beautiful chapel of the Quirinal. When he has blessed the candles, he distributes them with his own hand amongst those in the church, each of whom, going singly up to him, kneels to receive it. The cardinals go first; then follow the bishops, canons, priors, abbots, priests, &c., down to the sacristans and meanest officers of the church. According to Lady Morgan, who witnessed the ceremony in 1820:

‘When the last of these has gotten his candle, the poor conservatori, the representatives of the Roman senate and people, receive theirs. This ceremony over, the candles are lighted, the Pope is mounted in his chair and carried in procession, with hymns chanting, round the ante-chapel; the throne is stripped of its splendid hangings; the Pope and cardinals take off their gold and crimson dresses, put on their usual robes, and the usual mass of the morning is sung.’

Lady Morgan mentions that similar ceremonies take place in all the parish churches of Rome on this day.

It appears that in England, in Catholic times, a meaning was attached to the size of the candles, and the manner in which they burned during the procession; that, moreover, the reserved parts of the candles were deemed to possess a strong supernatural virtue:

‘This done, each man his candle lights,
Where chiefest seemeth he,
Whose taper greatest may be seen; And fortunate to be,
Whose candle burneth clear and bright: A wondrous force and might
Both in these candles lie, which if At any time they light,
They sure believe that neither storm Nor tempest cloth abide,
Nor thunder in the skies be heard, Nor any devil’s spide,
Nor fearful sprites that walk by night,
Nor hurts of frost or hail,’ &c.

The festival, at whatever date it took its rise, has been designed to commemorate the churching or purification of Mary; and the candle-bearing is understood to refer to what Simeon said when he took the infant Jesus in his arms, and declared that he was a light to lighten the Gentiles. Thus literally to adopt and build upon metaphorical expressions, was a characteristic procedure of the middle ages. Apparently, in consequence of the celebration of Mary’s purification by candle-bearing, it became customary for women to carry candles with them, when, after recovery from child-birth, they went to be, as it was called, churched. A remarkable allusion to this custom occurs in English history. William the Conqueror, become, in his elder days, fat and unwieldy, was confined a considerable time by a sickness. ‘Methinks,’ said his enemy the King of France, ‘the King of England lies long in childbed.’ This being reported to William, he said, ‘When I am churched, there shall be a thousand lights in France !’ And he was as good as his word; for, as soon as he recovered, he made an inroad into the French territory, which he wasted wherever he went with fire and sword.

At the Reformation, the ceremonials of Candlemass day were not reduced all at once. Henry VIII proclaimed in 1539:

‘On Candlemass day it shall be declared, that the bearing of candles is clone in memory of Christ, the spiritual light, whom Simeon did prophesy, as it is read in. the church that day.’

It is curious to find it noticed as a custom down to the time of Charles II, that when lights were brought in at nightfall, people would say—’ God send us the light of heaven!’ The amiable Herbert, who notices the custom, defends it as not superstitious. Some-what before this time, we find. Herrick alluding to the customs of Candlemass eve: it appears that the plants put up in houses at Christmas were now removed.

Down with the rosemary and bays,
Down with the mistletoe;
Instead of holly now upraise The greener box for show.
The holly hitherto did sway,

Let box now domineer,
Until the dancing Easter day Or Easter’s eve appear.
The youthful box, which now hath grace

Your houses to renew,
Grown old, surrender must his place Unto the crisped yew.
When yew is out, then birch comes in,

And many flowers beside,
Both of a fresh and fragrant kin’, To honour Whitsuntide.
Greeu rushes then, and sweetest bents,

With cooler oaken boughs,
Come in for comely ornaments, To re-adorn the house.
Thus times do shift; each thing in turn does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.’

The same poet elsewhere recommends very particular care in the thorough removal of the Christmas garnishings on this eve:

‘That so the superstitious find
No one least branch left there behind;
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected there, maids, trust to me,
So many goblins you shall see.’

He also alludes to the reservation of part of the candles or torches, as calculated to have the effect of protecting from mischief:

‘Kindle the Christmas brand, and then
Till sunset let it burn,
Which quenched, then lay it up again, Till Christmas next return.
Part must be kept, wherewith to tend
The Christmas log next year;
And where ‘tis safely kept, the fiend Can do no mischief there.’

Considering the importance attached to Candlemass day for so many ages, it is scarcely surprising that there is a universal superstition throughout Christendom, that good weather on this day indicates a long continuance of winter and a bad crop, and that its being foul is, on the contrary, a good omen. Sir Thomas Browne, in his Vulgar Errors, quotes a Latin distich expressive of this idea:

‘Si sol splendescat Maria purificante,
Major erit glacies post festum quam fait ante;

which maybe considered as well translated in the popular Scottish rhyme:

If Candlemass day be dry and fair,
The half o’ winter’s to come and mair;
If Candlemass day be wet and foul,
The half o’ winter’s gave at Yule.’

In Germany there are two proverbial expressions on this subject: 1. The shepherd would rather see the wolf enter his stable on Candlemass day than the sun; 2. The badger peeps out of his hole on Candlemass day, and when he finds snow, walks abroad; but if he sees the sun shining, he draws back into his hole. It is not improbable that these notions, like the festival of Candlemass itself, are derived from pagan times, and have existed since the very infancy of our race. So at least we may conjecture, from a curious passage in Martin’s Description of the Western Islands. On Candlemass day, according to this author, the Hebrideans observe the following curious custom:

The mistress and servants of each family take a sheaf of oats and dress it up in women’s apparel, put it in a large basket, and lay a wooden club by it, and this they call BrÏd’s Bed.; and then the mistress and servants cry three times, “BrÏd is come; BrÏd is welcome!” This they do just before going to bed, and when they rise in the morning they look among the ashes, expecting to see the impression of Brad’s club there; which, if they do, they reckon it a true presage of a good crop and prosperous year, and the contrary they take as an ill omen.
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It is easy to see how the American Groundhog Day is a adaptation of the earlier traditions.

Some ordinary Muslims

The curmudgeonly traditionalist editorialist for Asia Times who signs himself Spengler demands to know.

‘My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives,’ United States President Barack Obama told an Arabic television channel on January 26. Really? What are their names? Word has come to the West of no extraordinary Muslim thinker since the 12th century.

Read the whole thing (and, if you’re liberal, be sure to take your apoplexy pill first).

Woolrich Maine Guide Jacket

I always marvel when I read a fashion article like this one in Newsweek.

Fok-Yan Leung doesn’t look out of place at the local field-and-stream emporium. His Maine Guide Jacket is nearly indistinguishable from the coats his fellow Moscow, Idaho, residents have on, and its maker, Woolrich, has been a wilderness staple since 1830. But despite the duds, Leung is actually a Harvard-trained researcher at a nearby university—not a grizzled Gem State native on the hunt for a new Winchester. And his jacket isn’t your average Woolrich. It was produced by an Italian company. It was designed by Japan’s Daiki Suzuki. And, as part of the luxe Woolrich Woolen Mills spinoff collection, it sells for $500—four times the price of a comparable Woolrich garment. “If the guys here found out, they’d be like, ‘He’s flipped his lid’,” says Leung, who also manages Styleforum.net. “I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”

Introducing haute Americana, one of the most powerful—and paradoxical—forces in men’s sportswear. Until recently, men like Leung would’ve skipped the Woolrich for a skinny Dior suit. But in recent years a number of tastemakers, many foreign, have dedicated themselves to reviving iconic American clothing for a hip new audience. Some have collaborated with classic U.S. brands on revitalized products (see: Suzuki and Woolrich). Some have stocked hunting garb in their big-city boutiques. And some have actually begun to reproduce emblematic gear—Wayfarers, Penfield vests—to exacting standards of authenticity. The result—on ample display in places like Brooklyn, N.Y., and Portland, Ore., where certain streets now resemble catwalks crowded with bookish lumberjacks—is a subset of prosperous peacocks paying a premium for garments originally meant for mining or fishing, then wearing them to tapas bars and contemporary art installations.

Affected? Absolutely. Still, how we dress says a lot about who we want to be, and that ache for authenticity—or, at least, the aura of authenticity—is revealing. For the foreigners who instigated the fad, sturdy American gear has long evoked a distant, idealized culture. ... With the recent decline in our security, industry and standing, that nostalgia for a prelapsarian America (and the durable domestic goods that defined it) seems to have settled over the stylish set here at home. “Ironically, it’s largely because of overseas interest that Americans can now wear real American stuff,” says Michael Williams, a fashion publicist who covers Americana on his blog, A Continuous Lean.

Like articles of military uniform adapted as fashion statements, outdoor and equestrian garb have become another occasion for sartorial Walter Mitty-ism on the part of an urban community willing to pay premium prices for artificially distressed blue jeans.

My parents and grandparents, who actually had a life, would be appalled at both the routine enjoyment of a budgetary surplus available for this sort of overpriced grasp at self definition and the need for purchasing an identity different from one’s own. Who knows? If we live long enough, we may come to see “Coal Miner Chic” adopted by residents of the coastal enclaves of sophistication, complete with knock-off carbide lanterns and specially imported coal dirt.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Just last week, many of those on the left, like Andrew Sullivan, were applauding Barack Obama’s conciliatory tone and acceptance of the viewpoint of the United States’ overseas Islamic adversaries.

But, as Peter Berkowitz recently noted, left liberalism has turned into a kind of secular religion that is in the domestic political context so sure of itself that it “transforms dissenters into apostates or heretics.”

Jonathan Chait, at New Republic, notes the peculiar foreign-vs.domestic discrepancy of the liberal approach to opposition.

It’s kind of funny how, when it comes to domestic politics, many liberals employ assumptions about human nature that are wildly at odds with the assumptions they use about human nature when it comes to foreign policy. When you read the liberal blogs on domestic politics, concessions to the enemy are always counterproductive, will must be met with will, etc. When you read them on foreign policy, all those assumptions are flipped on their head. I’m not saying that these two sets of assumptions are completely impossible to reconcile, but it is pretty odd how easily they sit together.

Personally, I think it has to do with self-hatred.

Liberals want to believe America’s foreign enemies are basically right, at least on the crucial issue of our being wrong.

There is no compromise with or forgiveness for domestic adversaries, because we are the expressive part of the American self that liberalism exists to turn against and destroy.

Clarence Darrow believed in them as useful tools for selecting jurors. Deliberations quotes, and links, 1936 Esquire article.

If a Presbyterian enters the jury box and carefully rolls up his umbrella, and calmly and critically sits down, let him go. He is cold as the grave; he knows right from wrong, although he seldom finds anything right. He believes in John Calvin and eternal punishment. Get rid of him with the fewest possible words before he contaminates the others; unless you and your clients are Presbyterians you probably are a bad lot, and even though you may be a Presbyterian, your client most likely is guilty.

If possible, the Baptists are more hopeless than the Presbyterians. They, too, are apt to think that the real home of all outsiders is Sheol, and you do not want them on the jury, and the sooner they leave the better. The Methodists are worth considering; they are nearer the soil. Their religious emotions can be transmuted into love and charity. They are not half bad; even though they will not take a drink, they really do not need it so much as some of their competitors for the seat next to the throne. If chance sets you down between a Methodist and a Baptist, you will move toward the Methodist to keep warm.

Beware of the Lutherans, especially the Scandinavians; they are almost always sure to convict. Either a Lutheran or Scandinavian is unsafe, but if both in one, plead your client guilty and go down the docket. He learns about sinning and punishing from the preacher, and dares not doubt. A person who disobeys must be sent to hell; he has God’s word for that.

As to Unitarians, Universalists, Congregationalists, Jews and other agnostics, don’t ask them too many questions; keep them anyhow, especially Jews and agnostics. It is best to inspect a Unitarian, or a Universalist, or a Congregationalist with some care, for they may be prohibitionists; but never the Jews and the real agnostics.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

When the multi-talented Charles Johnson and Roger Simon announced the successful first round of financing for an advertising coalition of bloggers, originally known as “Open Source Media” back in November of 2005, there was a veritable explosion of negative emotion on the Blogosphere.

Several notorious contrarians deplored what they perceived as “fencing in the open range.” The institutionalization and amalgamation of blogging under a commercial entity, they argued, would stifle creativity and surrender the freedom of individual self expression to crass commercialism.

Others, like Dennis the Peasant (who claimed he had collaborated with Roger Simon in coming up with the big idea, and been later jilted) were pea green with envy, as visions of bloggers a few years down the road cashing in PJM stock worth untold millions and tooling down the highways in shiny new Ferraris danced through everyone’s head.

One particularly hostile blogger set up a PJM Death Pool, gleefully predicting the imminent breakup and demise of the new project, and inviting critics to place their bets and pick a date. The Death Pool’s last posting occurred in May of 2006, and the betting pool raised a whopping $18.

After all of 2005-2006’s storm and fury, it was a bit disappointing to learn last night that Roger Simon had announced the dissolution of the PJM advertising network and the termination of payments to member bloggers as of April 1, 2009. Simon stated that the proprietors intend to re-direct the PJM project toward television programming production.

Pity. The recession obviously was the final nail in PJM’s coffin, but it seems clear in retrospect that blog readership didn’t really continue growing rapidly to the sky, blogging didn’t actually replace print and electronic journalism, and nobody has succeeded in developing a terribly lucrative advertising model for blog sites.

All PJM seems to have achieved, in retrospect was to divert the talents and energies of Charles Johnson, and some of his very talented editors, away from blogging to the pursuit of a chimera. But, who knows? perhaps the lessons learned in this first experiment in a blogging business model will, in the end, make possible the development of the ship which actually sails.

The editor of Never Yet Melted extends his condolences on the unhappy result of so much effort, and best wishes for future prosperity and success (new red ferraris for all!), to the management, editors, and individual PJM bloggers.

So completely marginalized are conservatives at Yale today that the sympathetic liberal Judy Wang regards them as a flamboyant and threatened rarity in need of their own wildlife refuge and support group.

Peter Berkowitz, in the Wall Street Journal, identifies the source of the irrational immoderation and limitless self-righteousness of today’s community of fashion as our Gramscian-hijacked educational system.

Some will speculate that the outbreak of hatred and euphoria in our politics is the result of the transformation of left-liberalism into a religion, its promulgation as dogma by our universities, and students’ absorption of their professors’ lesson of immoderation. This is unfair to religion.

At least it’s unfair to those forms of biblical faith that teach that God’s ways are hidden and mysterious, that all human beings are both deserving of respect and inherently flawed, and that it is idolatry to invest things of this world—certainly the goods that can be achieved through politics—with absolute value. Through these teachings, biblical faith encourages skepticism about grand claims to moral and political authority and an appreciation of the limits of one’s knowledge, both of which well serve liberal democracy.

In contrast, by assembling and maintaining faculties that think alike about politics and think alike that the university curriculum must instill correct political opinions, our universities cultivate intellectual conformity and discourage the exercise of reason in public life. It is not that our universities invest the fundamental principles of liberalism with religious meaning—after all the Declaration of Independence identifies a religious root of our freedom and equality. Rather, they infuse a certain progressive interpretation of our freedom and equality with sacred significance, zealously requiring not only outward obedience to its policy dictates but inner persuasion of the heart and mind. This transforms dissenters into apostates or heretics, and leaders into redeemers.