Mark Steyn extends congratulations.

Just to be clear: I’m not indulging in the same somewhat moist-eyed congratulations as some of our colleagues. I extend my congratulations mainly in the same sense that elderly British veterans of my acquaintance like to express their admiration of the marvelously innovative ways their Japanese captors found to torture them. The President-elect ran rings round our side, and found many novel ways to torture us.

Ross Douthat contemplates the debacle of the 2008 election, and is depressed while being glad that it’s at least over.

I had a succession of meals last week with smart conservative friends, and I found them all relatively sanguine. … Each of them, in different ways, express a mix of enthusiasm for the “whither conservatism” battles ahead and relief at the prospect of finally closing the books on the Bush years. This has been an exhausting Presidency for conservatives as well as liberals, and for many people on the Right the prospect of being out of power has obvious upsides: No longer will every foul-up and blunder in Washington be treated as an indictment of Conservatism with a capital C; no longer will right-wingers feel obliged to carry water, whether in small or large amounts, for a government that’s widely perceived as a failure; and no longer will the Right have the dead weight of an unpopular president dragging it down and down and down. Defeat will be depressing, of course – none of my friends were Obamacons by any stretch – but it could be liberating as well.

This was how I expected to feel about a McCain defeat, too, and I’ve been trying to figure out why I don’t – why I feel instead so grouchy and embittered (clinging to my guns and my religion, and all that), and more dispirited than liberated…

I think the deeper reason for my political gloom has to do with something that Jonah Goldberg raised in our bloggingheads chat about conservatism – namely, the sense that the era now passing represented a great opportunity to put into practice the sort of center-right politics that I’d like to see from the Republican Party, and that by failing the way it did the Bush Administration may have cut the ground out from under my own ideas before I’d even figured out exactly what they were. ..

I’m not counseling despair here: There were people in 1976 who thought Richard Nixon had irrevocably squandered the chance to build a new right-of-center majority, and looked how that turned out.

from Mark Tapscott:

Today, as another generation of Americans go to the polls possibly to elect a true man of the Left as our 44th president, the liberal Leviathan – ever demanding that we think and act as it decrees – looms constantly larger in American life,

So it is no wonder that the excitement on this day is palpable among my liberal friends. They believe they stand at this moment on the threshold of being handed power they’ve not possessed for many decades. They rejoice at the opportunity for them to remake America in their own image.

They believe that those of us who, against all reason hold our reactionary notions about individual liberty as precious as ever, will, finally and for good, have no other choice but to submit, to be as Leviathan says we must be. To them, I have but one word:

Never.

The traditionally earliest place to vote in America, Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, has been gleefully reported by the MSM to have delivered a resounding 15 to 6 victory for Obama.

But wait a minute, as Mark Steyn observes, Dixville Notch has 19 registered voters…

As goes Dixville Notch, so goes the nation? Thanks a lot, ACORN.

The Telegraph reports one more blow on behalf of egalitarianism in Britain, the eradication of the use of Latin tags and abbreviations. Even this residual Latinity strikes some local officials as elitist.

Local authorities have ordered employees to stop using the words and phrases on documents and when communicating with members of the public and to rely on wordier alternatives instead. …

Bournemouth Council, which has the Latin motto Pulchritudo et Salubritas, meaning beauty and health, has listed 19 terms it no longer considers acceptable for use.

This includes bona fide, eg (exempli gratia), prima facie, ad lib or ad libitum, etc or et cetera, ie or id est, inter alia, NB or nota bene, per, per se, pro rata, quid pro quo, vis-a-vis (sic), vice versa and even via.

Its list of more verbose alternatives, includes “for this special purpose”, in place of ad hoc and “existing condition” or “state of things”, instead of status quo.

In instructions to staff, the council said: “Not everyone knows Latin. Many readers do not have English as their first language so using Latin can be particularly difficult.”

The details of banned words have emerged in documents obtained from councils by the Sunday Telegraph under The Freedom of Information Act.

Of other local authorities to prohibit the use of Latin, Salisbury Council has asked staff to avoid the phrases ad hoc, ergoand QED (quod erat demonstrandum), while Fife Council has also banned ad hoc as well as ex officio.

Quos deus vult perdere prius dementat. (Those whom God would destroy, he first makes mad.) – Euripedes

This Obama supporter won’t have to work anymore. Obama is going to help her.

0:26 video

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From Drudge.

No presidential candidate in US history has been able to take whichever position was convenient at the moment without being held to account for his inconsistent and contradictory statements in the way Obama has.

3:39 video

Ben Affleck does a superb job of parodying the pompous and perennially indignant windbag.

video 8:48

Shannon Love asks why isn’t Detroit and the Great Lakes region along with the former Industrial Northeast today the economic powerhouse it was in 1950?

One really has to ask the obvious question: If Obama’s economic policies work so well, why isn’t Detroit a paradise?

In 1950, America produced 51% of the GNP for the entire world. Of that production, roughly 70% took place in the eight states surrounding the Great Lakes: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.

The productive capability of this small area of earth staggers the imagination. Virtually everything that rebuilt the industrial bases of Europe and Japan came from those eight states. Cars, planes, electronics, machine tools, consumer goods, generators, concrete – any conceivable item manufactured by industrial humanity poured out this tiny region and enriched the world. The region shone with widespread prosperity. People migrated from the South and West to work in these Herculean engines of industry.

The wealth, power and economic dominance of the region at the time cannot be overstated. Nothing like it has existed in human history.

Yet, a mere 30 years later, by 1980, we called that area the “rustbelt” and it became synonymous with joblessness, collapsing cities, high crime, failing schools and general hopelessness.

What the hell happened?

Obama happened.

Of course, not Obama personally but rather the same ideas that Obama espouses. What those ideas did to the Great Lakes states, they can do to the entire country.

John McCain, accompanied by his wife Cindy and Tina Fey (as Sarah Palin), displays real talent as a comedian on SNL.

5:59 video

1:48 video

Hat tip to John Hinderaker.

The Exmoor Foxhounds

The Telegraph reports that turnout at this year’s opening meets and sales at hunt-oriented businesses are booming, despite the Labour Party’s Hunt Ban.

Part of the hunting boom is attributable to sportsmen’s success in devising ways of working around the Ban, such as a more realistic kind of drag hunting termed “trail hunting,” but resistance to the Ban is also a factor.

As the season gallops into action on Saturday, William Little finds that the post-ban hunting world is booming.

According to the Countryside Alliance, there has been a 10 per cent increase in people who pay full subscription – ie go out every week or more.

This represents an increase of 5,000 people on the number that hunted before the fox ban. On Boxing Day, popular with fair-weather riders, an estimated 30,000 more people take part than before the ban.

There is also anecdotal evidence to suggest a considerable increase in the number of people who follow hunts in cars and on foot. …

Instead of the law causing the demise of hunting and its supporting trades, such as farriers and liveries, the upsurge in newcomers has brought a rural economic boom.