OK

Time to protest.

See everyone there?

Update: Check in your area as well for tomorrow's national protest.

Update II: Well, I made the trek downtown. At first I went to the Washington Monument, as that was the original planned site of the protest. But as no one was there right at noon besides foreign tourists, I called my friend to ask him to check on the location. They had moved it to the White House. 20 minutes later I came upon the protest and heard a few cheers from a distance. But that was it. About 300 to 400 people, many had signs. Mostly normal folks, with a couple of Ron Paul types. Spirits were up, but it was mostly just milling around for the time I was there. No other speakers or dignitaries. I had missed the bull horn shouts earlier. I talked to a lady who liked my shirt.
There were some people doing interviews with personal video equipment. I suppose it was a good production for a week's notice. But I just couldn't believe that a Republican leader, right here in DC, couldn't be bothered to get out in front of something like this. Isn't this their whole raison d'etre? Keeping taxes low and government somewhat limited? I felt the same way after attending the small House Republican protest over the summer over oil drilling. A couple of die-hard Republicans took part- the rest had important fundraisers to attend to, or whatever it is that they do. I think our political "leadership", top to bottom, is filled with people too small for a moment in history such as this. We are at a crossroads and a determined liberal minority is using it to reshape our nation in its own image. Shouldn't our elected leaders be more visible and vocal in opposition?

Update III: Someone else agrees politicians need to take notice.

Update IV: And someone is opposed to these uppity tax protesters.

Miscellany

Jurassic web: Internet, circa 1996.

The ultimate office.

Click here for bums: TV.

Between you and I: Obama grammar.

Liberalism

Kills.

Crisis of Confidence

It seems we are in the midst of a crisis of confidence on a number of fronts.
No one seems to trust the institution of marriage any more.
Or the economy.
Or trusts us to win the war on terror.
No one trusts the government.
And rather than building up confidence in our institutions and our way of life, our President runs around like Chicken Little.

What has happened to the world in the past several years that Iraq is now the lone bright spot?

Perhaps laughter is the best antidote we have to the glum news.

Europe's most notorious driver

Prawo Jazdy, via Tim Worstall.

Miscellany

In the beginning: Margaret Thatcher.

Patriot pirates.

Poseurs: Starlets.

Minnesota's best movies.

Media creation: Dianastein.

Buffoon of the Month

Al Sharpton.

The Big Five

via Instapundit.com

Victor Davis Hanson

Taking the pulse of America.

Miscellany

Just do as I say: Scientific Authoritarianism.

A tax on tax paying: New York State.

Scam 2.0

Geek love: Proposals.

Caution: No kissing zone.

Shamelessness

The value of shame lies in its power as a deterrent, not as a form of punishment. People behave in socially acceptable ways so that society will accept them; the threat or fear of losing that acceptance is what keeps (kept?) people on the straight and narrow.

By the time you sentence someone to the pillory, literally or metaphysically, it's too late to change his behavior and the pillory's purpose becomes a method pour encourager les autres. Being pilloried sucks, of course, but its purpose was never rehabilitative. That's not to say it can't be.

Shame or the threat of public humiliation didn't always work, either. If it had, our ancestors would have had no need for prisons and Nathaniel Hawthorne would never have written The Scarlet Letter. Which brings me to another limitation to shame: Can we restigmatize unmarriage without punishing the children of those unions?

In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne was forced to wear the letter, go to prison and bring up her daughter alone while her lover just went about his business. True, Hester refused to name her lover and Dimmesdale "suffered" psychologically, but he basically suffered no material harm. Too often, the mothers and the children bore the brunt of the shame of illegitimacy by being ostracized and unable to find work to feed their children. That that is no longer the case is, I believe, a good thing.

The Chicago Tea Party

Will you join in?

via Instapundit.com

I would really rather we take the money we would be giving to mortgage holders and drop it from a plane into some third world country that is kind of on the fence about its support for the U.S. They would totally love us for it and might even buy some of our crappy U.S. cars with the dough. Holmes 2012!

A Ringing Endorsement?

Former President Jimmy Carter endorses the stimulus plan.

Is that the same Jimmy Carter during whose administration "stagflation" came to the United States?

Missing in action

Obama's geniuses.

Is Eric Holder one of them? The first black attorney general took the opportunity of his first speech to chastise America as “essentially a nation of cowards” who “do not talk enough with each other about race.”

Is Timothy Geithner one of them? The president’s “indispensable” Treasury secretary popped up for a much anticipated bank plan rollout, but at the last minute decided the plan was . . . dispensable.

GM

A lesson in sunk cost decision making.

Not surprising

IDF: 'World duped by Hamas death count.'

While the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose death toll figures have been widely cited, reports that 895 Gaza civilians were killed in the fighting, amounting to more than two-thirds of all fatalities, the IDF figures shown to the Post on Sunday put the civilian death toll at no higher than a third of the total.

The international community had been given a vastly distorted impression of the death toll because of "false reporting" by Hamas, said Col. Moshe Levi, the head of the IDF's Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA), which compiled the IDF figures.

Via David Hazony.

My Former Governor

Bringing it some more.

Sanford 2012.

Lousy food and the portions are so small

A book reviewer pans Jimmy Carter's latest. And yet:

The book, in other words, is unoriginal, inaccurate, poorly written, and proposes precisely what didn’t work before. So what is Gorenberg’s conclusion? He urges Obama, despite the deficiencies of the book, to “take seriously Carter’s advice to pursue peace”:

The Gaza crisis is a reminder, as if another were needed, that ignoring this conflict is equivalent to waiting for it to explode again, with shock waves felt across the entire region. While a peace initiative may look risky, it might actually be the most prudent course the new administration could pursue.

What? For the last 15 years - from the handshake on the White House lawn to Condoleezza Rice’s two-year effort to create a Palestinian state - no conflict has been less ignored than this one. Nor, despite the attention, has any conflict exploded more often - usually after a formal Israeli two-state proposal, or a withdrawal from strategic land so Lebanese or Gazans could live “side by side in peace and security.”

I've often thought that benign neglect was the policy we should pursue vis-à-vis Israel and the "peace process."

Miscellany

Misery Lit: The untold story.

Criminally stupid? Sexting.

Taxing times.

F-ing outrageous: Lawyers.

Mandating IVF coverage

Ridiculous.

In 2002, Harvard Medical School researchers found, unsurprisingly, that compared with women who pay out of pocket, those whose insurance fully covered IVF were significantly less likely to have multiples since they chose to have fewer implanted embryos. And while international comparisons are fraught with confounders, it's worth noting that Sweden and Australia have almost twice as many IVF births per capita as we do, yet their infant mortality rates remain comfortably lower. At least one difference may be that their national health insurances subsidize IVF, and thus there is less incentive to implant multiple embryos per cycle.

...


Taken together, America has selected a policy that encourages multiples. Since insurers aren't compelled to cover costs for IVF, self-paying women attempt to get pregnant in as few cycles as possible. As a result, officials find it hard to justify legally restricting how many embryos can be implanted. Since they're paying for it, the thinking goes, women should be free to implant as many embryos as they wish. The result? More multiples, more costs, poorer child health, and, on occasion, bizarre cases like that of Nadya Suleman.

Having children is not a right. I shouldn't have to pay higher health insurance premiums--were I lucky enough to even have health insurance--to finance someone's unrequited maternal instinct.

And as for Nadya Suleman, how about screening patients for psychological problems? Even plastic surgeons do this and people who have a mania for repeated plastic surgery are only hurting themselves. And they aren't doing it on the taxpayer's dime.

Reproductive specialists have a responsibility to the lives they are creating as well as to their primary patients. Clearly, this unemployed single mother with six children already has more than a natural, human desire to be a parent. It's become an obsession that's been fed by her doctor, who looks to be a sort of Dr. Frankenstein of infertility.

Our Politicians

When they were mere children, rather than just governing as children.

via the Corner.

The f word

Fascism.

[D]uring the great economic crisis of the 1930s, fascism was widely regarded as a possible solution, indeed as the only acceptable solution to a spasm that had shaken the entire First World, and beyond. It was hailed as a “third way” between two failed systems (communism and capitalism), retaining the best of each. Private property was preserved, as the role of the state was expanded. This was necessary because the Great Depression was defined as a crisis “of the system,” not just a glitch “in the system.” And so Mussolini created the “Corporate State,” in which, in theory at least, the big national enterprises were entrusted to state ownership (or substantial state ownership) and of course state management. Some of the big “Corporations” lasted a very long time; indeed some have only very recently been privatized, and the state still holds important chunks–so-called “golden shares”–in some of them.

Miscellany

A lifetime of books.

Obama's evil twin: Michael Steele.

Chicanery: How Germany got a hold of Nefertiti.

Coldest winter ever: 1709, via Jonah Goldberg.

The bad old days

According to this feature in Women's Day, the average price of eggs in the 1950s (adjusted for inflation) was $5.29 while the median household income was $23,738. By the 1970s, median household income had risen to $44,741 and round steak cost $9.33 a pound.

Nowadays the average price of eggs was $1.78 in the last quarter of 2008--cage free eggs were a whopping $3.05--while the median household income is $58,976. And I can get London Broil on special at Giant this week for $2.49 a pound--$3.49 if I want to shell out for the peppercorn dry rub.

Don't the folks at Women's Day know that we're living in the worst depression since the depression?

This octuplet thing has me baffled

Who paid for the IVF?

Is this covered by Medicaid? Or does this unemployed and/or on disability woman with six kids already somehow have fabulous private health insurance that covers this procedure? Which procedure was, I always understood, kind of pricey. Or can anyone with a womb just walk in off the street and fill 'er up at no cost to herself?

Stimulus Goes Over Like A Lead Balloon

via Lucianne.com

Strangely

People still seem to know what is best.

Miscellany

World's biggest boob(s).

You're fat! Wanna bet?

"An absolute monster": Henry VIII, via Althouse.

Pixies, cougars and dirtbags: Slang.

To the pitch forks!

"I am just so sick and tired."


Update: "Until one of us dies." The Republicans are in for a day of reckoning if they roll over on this.

My Former Governor

Bringing it.

I find this hard to believe

[R]oughly 35 million Americans still own analog sets not connected to cable or satellite television.

Miscellany

Disturbing: Naked Obama Unicorn-A-Rama.

Cold case, via Fark.

Bows: Made from hair.

No longer First Frump: Martha Washington made over.

Not as easy as they look: Beards.

Democrats love taxes

In theory, at least.

I can't believe I'm defending Christian Bale

Because at heart--deep, deep down in my innermost soul--I really don't care, but the self-righteous tone of this comment to this post is just too much. Actually, the self-righteousness started with these guys, whose apparent horror of the f-word is a revelation to me.

Work can get ugly, people. Besides, he's reaming out a director of photography here, not a cleaning lady. Also, I find the transcript hilarious. I like to read it while picturing different actors in the lead.

How to reduce your carbon footprint

Get an abortion.