The sizeable swath of humanity that militantly yearns for some reality other than reality

I'm reading a book that is proving to be among the most powerful I've ever read. It's called The Uses of Pessimism . The author is Roger Scruton. Now, here's some irony for you: It was recommended to me by a regular LITD visitor of unmistakably leftward bent, a guy who has engendered many a contentious comment thread with me and others on subjects ranging from Israel to the environment to the insurance industry.

I wonder if he really took in this book's thrust. It's so antithetical to this person's worldview that I can't be certain at all that he read it either completely or attentively.

Scruton's point is that there has existed a worldview entertained by a certain portion of humankind throughout history that is based on the notion that the slog attendant to human endeavor, the difference between human beings in terms of their levels of ambition, energy and, yes, ability, and the jolting nature of human experience - the suddenness with which life's events occur - can all be smoothed out with some kind of shortcoming-proof program. This program will remove all the elbow grease and meticulous planning necessary to turn something some individual has conceived of into a viable - indeed, robust and growing - source of real benefit to real people. This program will also ensure, forever and without fail, that nothing unfair ever occurs in the course of instituting any human enterprise.

In the course of citing examples such as the French revolution, the Nazi regime in Germany, and the post-colonial unfoldings in the Third World, he identifies some patterns that are chillingly recognizable in our own current national climate. The notion that creating office buildings and plants and hiring people and making and marketing a product somehow took some kind of collective wealth away from someone else, can be seen in all such case histories, as well as in the rhetoric of the utopian class of our own time. So can the need to target certain demographics - for instance, Jews in the case of Nazi Germany - as the main usurpers of a society's capital, and the need to corral them into isolated environments and strip them of their humanity.

It's all based on the extreme optimist's view that his vision is so pure and noble that any challenge to it is an intolerable threat.

I see this particularly when I get into snits on, say, Facebook with militant environmentalists. To merely voice disagreement with me not only will not do; in their view, it is utterly useless. Dissent must be characterized as ridiculous, even dangerous, and certainly not to be given an airing.

As I say, it's a powerful read. There are several points I'm coming across that I'd relish taking up with the guy who turned me onto it. If there's some other way of interpreting what Scruton is getting at, it requires a level of parsing my reading so far hasn't taken me to.

It's on purpose - today's edition

One more source of petroleum that will not be available to the United States for at least five years.

These monsters must be stopped.

He may be called His Holiness, but on his recent trip to Cuba, his fallability was on full display

Cuban activist Carlos Eire kicks Benedict's tail end big-time for the way he handled his visit to the island dictatorship.

Aw, sheesh, they didn't really do this, did they?

The Information Resource Center at the US embassy in Jamaica has been named after Stalinist Paul Robeson.

And the point of playing patty-cake with a state that helps Iran build nuclear reactors and rigs its elections is?

Charles Krauthammer on the full looniness of the MEC's zeal to extend the open hand to Russia.

Beautiful and glorious

Charles Hurt at the Washington Times lists the various and sundry ways the Most Equal Comrade has hurt, damaged and humiliated himself over the past week.

Now it's Spain

Mass protests, with hints of violence, over austerity measures the new government was elected to implement. All because the previous government had gone in for green subsidization and all manner of benefits funded with phantom money.

And all the lamestream media told you about him was that he was president of Dartmouth and an expert on global health issues

But, as with any MEC appointee, there's much more. Kim, who is up for the post of heading the World Bank, is a world-class Freedom-Hater.

Another subsidized greenie "company" goes belly-up

A123, based in Massachussetts, with plants in Michigan as well. Makes electric car batteries. That go kaboom at times that are incovenient for the consumer.

I put "company" in quotes because these outfits clearly can't hold their own in the marketplace for ah hour.

But the MEC continues to demagogue oil-industry profits, and still intends to redustribute what's left of the nation's wealth to these "companies."

A bd man, a bad regime, a bad ideology.

The alternative to Fher-care, in less than 600 words

A must-read Investors Business Daily editorial on what Pubs must be ready to propose the microsecond after the Supremes declare FHer-care unconstitutional.

Well, it doesn't fit the race-baiting template, that's why

Friends and parents of the white British tourists gunned down by a black guy in Florida speak at the killer's trial, lambasting the MEC for a lack of compassion.

The Most Equal Comrade, our Freedom-Hater-in-Chief

Demonizing oil company profits again. Talking raw numbers and how much a given company makes per hour, rather than what the industry's profits margin is, which is less than over 100 other industries. talks about their "tax breaks," which are the same kinds of deductions for capital expenditures that any industry gets.

Opposes the Keystone XL pipeline, ANWR drilling, Gulf of Mexico drilling, and North Dakota and Colorado oil shale drilling.

There not only has never been such a horrible US president. There have been few human beings this despicable in the history of our species.

The cartoonish desperation of the race-baiters - today's edition

Congressman and former Black Panther Bobby Rush wears a damn hoodie to speak on the House floor about Trayvon Martin and gets his ass thrown out by the Seargent-at-Arms for violating a dress code dating back to 1837.

Then there's the record being made by Chaka Khan, Kenny Latimore and other R&B singers. Then there's Martin's mom copyrighting phrases like "Justice for Trayvon" in anticipation of creating a brand of merchandise. Then there's Spike Lee's tweet of the address of the wrong Zimmerman, causing an elderly couple to have to flee their home and go into hiding.

An infantile nation preoccupies itself with ginned-up righteous indignation as it goes broke and its fundamental freedoms hang in the balance. And as its leader sells out its security to its main adversary so as to stroke his messianic ego.

Which characterization is more accurate - pathetic or chilling?

A real charming young man

Trayvon Martin's last month of Tweets.

It seems he was a bit of a misogynist and potty mouth.

"A huge and dangerous leap of logic"

The great Thomas Sowell once again brings the ultimate clarity to an issue - this time, the individual mandate. He uses the example of laws requiring drivers to stop at red lights. He points out that tired, drowsy drivers are more likely to run red lights than rested and alert drivers, but that it is a bridge to far for a municipality to pass a law requiring everybody to get x number of hours of sleep.

It sounds like the Supremes get this, from coverage of yesterday's session.

The whole world smells weakness now

Nile Gardiner at the UK Telegraph examines the scope of the damage the MEC did with his hot-mic exchange with Medvedev in Seoul. Who among our allies is going to rely on us in a crisis now? Who among our adversaries is not going to press full-steam for maximum advantage? Who among our enemies is not going to plot attacks on us?

A former comrade jumps their you-know-what over the race card exploitation du jeure

A former NAACP official tells Sharpton and Jackson to back off and get a grip.

And in the interest of getting all the facts before us . . .

George Zimmerman is a registered Democrat.

The relentless march of the Prosperity-Haters

The EPA is invoking greenhouse gases for the first time as a reason to effectively prohibit any new coal-fire power plants in this country.

Arab Spring developments

The Islamists now dominate the 100-member body created by the Egyptian parliament to draft a new constitution. They are also challenging the military's dominance of Egypt's political scene.

The Most Equal Comrade is hair-raisingly scary - today's edition

Spews that unicorns-and-rainbows dog vomit about "a world without nuclear weapons" to a roomful of world leaders, not all of which by any means have America's best interests on their agendas, and then tells Russia's Medvedev, when he thinks the microphone is off, to wait until after he's re-elected to deal with missile defense, when he'll "have more flexibility."

Squandered stimulus

Record debt and deficit

Unconstitutional individual health-insurance mandate

Solyndra

Foregoing Keystone XL pipeline

Using Henry Louis Gates incident and Trayvon Martin incident to play race card

Chevy Volt

Sitting on his hands during 2009 Iranian election protest

Wrong side of Honduran presidential crisis

Radical background

Orchestrated diminishing of America's role as leader on world stage

This horrible creature must be stopped.

Utter madness, California style

Here's a story that goes to the heart of the subject that fuels the lengthiest and most contentious comment threads here at LITD.

California's insurance commissioner is pushing legislation that would greatly weaken the state's small businesses' ability to offer employees stop-loss self-insurance, a type of coverage for which insurance companies have seen a growing market. In other words, he and those in his camp want to increase an employer's payout obligation in a claim, the effect of which would be to drive empoyers into the kind of "diverse-risk-pool" programs that FHer-care is steering the country toward.

What comes up in the comment threads here when the discussion turns to health insurance is the notion that it is somehow unfair or unjust for insurance companies to cultivate pools of policyholders that are generally in pretty good health. What never gets answered in these arguments is where an insurance company - or, if we continue to move toward a socialistic model, the government - is supposed to get the money to cover the unprofitable part of its business.

The rejoinder to those who denigrate the free market, who characterize it as some kind of lawless wild west in which strong predators hold sway over everyone else, is to point to the fact that the market works anyway, whether it is freed up to do so by public policy, or hampered by attempts to thwart it. As economist Mike Shedlock points out in the linked column, businesses are leaving California in droves because of "fairness"-based nonsense like this. And that leaves an ever-scrawnier tax base, and then what happens to all those wonderful public services?

An initiative may be excellent and marvelous but still insufficient for staving off disaster

LITD is on record as being enthused about Ryan Budget 2.0 because it is the only serious proposal that has been put forth in Washington. Count this blog as also being in the camp, however, that wishes it weren't so timid, waiting until 2040 to balance the federal budget.
There are all kinds of ratios and comparisons of the US deficit-to-GDP ratio with that of other countries, but the most effective way to convey what it all means is to cite leaders of other countries, in particular a Western country that is much better off than the US is, who freely opine that the US is not only no longer the leader among the globe's nations, but not even really quite a first-world country anymore.
Yes, in the last three years our trajectory toward doom has accelerated as the major political party inclined to view freedom with contempt has become overtly socialist, but it has been underway for decades. We're in this fix because we expanded government to include functions that can be found nowhere in our Constitution.
THe time to dismantle the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Commerce, Labor, Energy, Agriculture and Interior, the time to privatize Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, the time to simplify our tax code and make it encourage capital formation, is this week. Ryan had to be more gradual because of "political realities," but at what point do such "realities" amount to national suicide?

It was just a matter of time until we were maligned

LITD hasn't weighed in on the Trayvon Martin shooting mainly because the incident itself was not particularly fraught with ideological implications. A guy, George Zimmerman, with a history of obsessing over the rules at his gated community - complaining to the lotowners' association about open garage doors and such - and a reputation for being generally rather jumpy, shot was appears to be an innocent teenage guy walking through the neighborhood with a bag of skittles. Tragic? Beyond question. But this blog's position was that addressing the FHer victim-mongering that inevitably ensues when shooter and shootee are of different races - and shootee is black - just drew more attention to that kind of garbage.
But it's getting so pathetic and so prominently disseminated that it's time to say something. Freedom-Haters must not be allowed to get away with drawing unsubstantiated connections between an incident like this and talk radio.
And the Most Equal Comrade really needs to shut his mouth.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has a comprehensive roundup of the race-baiting going on in media new and old.

Just shut it down

The Supreme Court sided with the Sacketts, an Idaho couple who started into building their dream home only to be subjected to intolerable harrassment over a phony wetlands designation, over the EPA. That agency still has way too much, power, though. If it ever had any usefulness, it has clearly outlived it.

This kind of nonsense is exactly why we need to knock it off with the "history months" that focus on particular groups designated as official beleagured demographics

You run into pathetic stiuations like this one in North Carolina where a school's memo about Black History Month includes an "African-American dress" guideline that says, if you can't come up with a costume your indoctrinated black friends tell you is authentic, wear some animal-print fabric - you know, for that African touch.

The MEC really is a piece of work

He says he's really not responsible for Solyndra (and tries to pin partial blame on the W administration, which had most definitely backed away from the loan guarantees) but that he is responsible for the lower portion of the Keystone XL pipeline, which was a done deal before he ever went to Oklahoma and opened his Marxist mouth.

Among the pillars of modern global leftism . . .

. . . is unvarnished Jew-hatred.

If you'd wondered what Jeremiah Wright had been up to lately, he figures into this story.

Another reason why public-sector unions should be abolished

They want to stamp out parent volunteer groups in schools.

The pro-death regime breathes down Texas's neck

Texas has a women's-health initiative that is funded under the state's status as a pass-through state, which means that the state legislature gets to establish rules for dispensing Medicaid funds for special programs covering matters beyond Medicaid's normal scope. HHS is now saying that the Texas requirement that no such funds go toward the extermination of fetal Americans disqualifies it from participating.

If we're able to restore this land as the United States of America, this must be the first order of business

Paul Ryan's latest version of his Path to Prosperity plan.

So "individualism" is now synonymous with "cultural racism"?

According to the Pacific Educational Group, it is. Haven't heard of the PEG? It's working to get Derrick Bell's critical race theory insinuated into public-school curricula nationwide - and it's cozy with the MEC regime.

This one is rather famous by now, but, in this year of finally vetting the MEC, bears re-disseminating (redistributing?)

The 1991 Chicago public-radio interview with the MEC in which he says that the problem with the civil rights movement was that it didn't take on the immutability of the Constitution - that is, attack it for its essential function as a constraint on government's powers - and thereby make it possible to get into the realm of wealth redistribution.


He is a horrible creature and must be stopped.

It's on purpose - today's edition

The CBO projects that the MEC's tax and spend policies will result in $6.4 trillion in deficits over the next decade.

How much more proof that this is deliberate would we need? The Most Equal Comrade is a lot of things, But, while he's no genius, he's not stupid. He knows damn well that his policy orientation is the exact opposite of what is needed to bring about true recovery and growth.

There's a comparison we can make that really drives the point home. North Dakota is booming, with 3.3 % unemployment, and housing starts exploding, and MacDonald's offering $36 an hour with signing bonuses. That's because the state is letting its people and companies drill and frack for all the oil and natural gas they can find.

But then, freedom and common sense are anathema to the federal-level regime.

Yes, it's tempting to call him an idiot when he says things like this, but let's keep accuracy a high priority and call him a revolutionary socialist

In his weekly radio address, no sooner does the MEC bring up high gas prices than he demonizes oil companies and urges an end to their tax breaks - the same breaks most companies get for capital expenditures and set-up procedures prior to production.

The insultingly obscene style of socialist uptopianism practiced by this regime

The MEC's handlers decided it was too risky given the horrible PR beginning to ooze for Solyndra execs to sit with Michelle at the 2011 State of the Union address, but not too horrible for the Department of Energy to squander more of our taxpayer dollars on it a month later.

That Kool-Aid-laced Potomac water

I wondered about the wisdom of proceding with a new food-and-aid package for North Korea, since the Hermit Kingdom had kept up its bellicose rhetoric even after Kim Jong-un assumed power in December. Now the State Department has big-time egg on its face. NK is going to launch a rocket with a satellite on it - a clear violation of its agreements with us and pretty much everybody else in the world.

But that's Foggy Bottom for you. It's the same kind of swift move as resuming normal levels of military aid to Egypt after its Parliament issued a resolution basically declaring Israel to be an enemy state.

The simple solution would restore Americans' prosperity and America's greatness; therefore, the MEC must take it off the table

Sometimes the great Charles Krauthammer is the perfect pundit to sum up the whole of a given aspect of our current scene. He has done so in today's column about the MEC regime's energy policy. Take in all the particulars he enumerates and arranges so that we can see the agenda behind them: Solyndra, Ener1, the Chevy Volt, the drilling moratorium, nixing the Keystone XL pipeline, proposing algae as the energy source for America to collectively bank its future on.

This is madness.

The utter hypocrisy, the rank disingenuousness of this is breathtaking

The NAACP is over in Geneva, Switzerland, arguing the case against U.S. states' voter-ID laws before the U.N. Human Rights Council.

How's this for creepy?

A FHer party county headquarters in Florida flies an American flag with the MEC's picture where the stars should be.

Twice as much as was advertised in the spring of 2010

The cost of FHer-care over the next decade, that is.

These people have no shame. You now realize you were lied to, and they don't give a diddley.

For all you statistics hounds out there

The federal government's deficit reached a monthly record - $232 billion - in Ferbruary, the shortest month of the year.

Feigned pity - one of the essential tools in the FHer toolkit

There are two tiers to leftism. The top tier is occupied by those who know exactly what the game is. Sometimes these folks start out on the bottom tier, motivated by a genuine desire to impose "fairness" on the world, but once they get a taste of power, the cynicism sets in, and the power becomes an end in itself.

The second tier is occupied by the tofu-and-sprout munchers, the Unitarians, the junior-high teachers that serve as faculty advisors to the Environment Club, all your annoying Facebook "friends," the poverty-law attorneys, those in charge of what magazines are sold at the check-out stations at the health-food store. You get the idea.

Even this bunch has to wind up kidding itself, though. They have to work up feigned pity for the supposedly beleagured demographics they champion. Who, for instance, really believes that a Latino or African-American citizen of the United States can't come up with a photo ID to present at a voting location?

Attorney General Eric Holder clearly belongs to the first tier, but he is a master at pulling the strings of feigned pity to get the second tier to sing his song. It's up to us to point out the hollowness of his opposition to voter ID laws in the various states. Hell, black voter registration went up in Georgia after it enacted such a law - more than it did in Mississippi, which has no such law.

"War on women," opposition to the notion that voters should have to prove that they are who they say they are . . . it will be interesting to see which demographic becomes the recipient of their feigned pity next.

The fetid swamp in which the US Constitution is being waterlogged and rendered unreadably soggy

Kagan, Bell, Ogletree, the MEC. These people have been pals for years, and they all hate freedom and they all hate America.

The ever-present danger to the struggle to bring sense to human existence

There's an aspect of reality that's really disheartening. A look at history provides a plethora of examples. We've had two recently. There was Rush Limbaugh's enormous mistake in descending into juvenile rhetoric concerning Sandra Fluke when it would have been sufficient to focus on her assault on religious and economic freedom. Now comes, in the wake of the MEC's totally pathetic and wrong apology for the inadvertent Koran burnings in Afghanistan, an actual case of what appears to be an unjustified atrocity by a US soldier there. Apparently the guy burst into several homes in a village near his base, indiscriminately opening fire and killing 16 and wounding even more.

The incidents that cause all manner of new trouble in no way negate the underlying principles operative in the larger situations at hand, but they set aside a debate about those principles, as everyone focuses on the random nonsensical acts that have increased the chaos level.

The propaganda arm of the FHer machine

Bookworm examines the crafty way AP reversed the chronological order of events in the current exchange of fire between Israel and Hamas, so as to promote a sense of moral equivalence.

The Most Equal Comrade is counting on you to be stupid - today's edition

He's counting on you to swallow the notion that a 30 percent increase in the nation's oil supply wouldn't affect gasoline prices.

Why the EPA needs to be dismantled yet this morning - today's edition

The other day, we linked to a story about the rash of coal-fired power plants in Pennsylvania that were shutting down due to the costs of meeting EPA regulations. Let's expand the scope a bit and see how nationwide this trend is.

Some nice news for Rick

Santorum wins the Kansas caucus. He also beats the MEC by one percentage point in the latest Rasmussen poll.

Her composure level sounds like it was very commendable

Neo-neocon describes her recent descent into tech-support hell. Froum her account of it, it sounds like she got through the entire episode without a breakdown in communiciations. With me, it's inevitable that the exchange will devolve to the point of the technician saying, "Mr. Quick, it's very difficult to help you when you're screaming."

You send the regime your tax dollars; it filters them through its car company and an advertising agency and feeds you lies that insult your intelligence

I'd been waiting for some pundit to properly address those Chevy Volt TV commercials. Here it is.

"Mak[ing] it as hard as possible" for Western civilization to survive

As with the killing of the Keystone XL pipeline, which had the Most Equal Comrade personally calling FHer Senators to vote no and publicly demonizing oil companies and insisting that completely unviable "green" energy sources be an ever-increasing part of our nation's energy mix, the MEC goes before AIPAC and talks like he's some stalwart friend of Israel, and then agrees to another round of negotiations with the Iranian regime. Israel is thereby placed in the unsavory position of being made to look like the rogue in the situation.

No, I am not pleased with the array of alternatives to the MEC from which we'll choose for going up against him this fall, but I'll back whoever it is with my entire being. The Most Equal Comrade has poison where normal human beings have blood, and he and his worldview must be defeated before our way of life is gone forever.

The snippet of a quote in the header of this post, by the way, comes from a statement from an unnamed regime official to the Washington Post that the policy is indeed to make it as hard as possible for Israel to preempt Iran's obtaining of a nuclear arsenal.

The party of planned decline

Senate FHers give a thumbs-down to a bill tha would have green-lighted the Keystone XL pipeline.

Shameless.

Those must be some threads

An $11 million grant - from stimulus funds - that was supposed to get business attire for low-income job-seekers in Detroit helped two people, per an audit.

Where are they working now?

This weekend, I intend to sit at the dining room table and begin the process of complying with the federal government's demand, backed up by the implicit threat of violent force, that I cough up a significant portion of the money I busted my ass for last year.

Let's just say I'm not real motivated.

Let's call it the beginning of an era, if only to lessen the sting

It's official: Peyton Manning is leaving the Indianapolis Colts. Now the next phase of Schumpeter's creative destruction can work its way. The slow building of the next dynasty begins with the NFL draft pick.

One of those stories in which the plot thickens by the hour

Now it turns out Sandra Fluke thinks insurance companies ought to pay for transgender surgery, per an article she coauthored in the Georgetown Journal of Law and Gender.

Exhibit A, for your consideration . . .

In 1998, a small Chicago theater company staged a play - a play with an enthusiastic view - about radical community organizer Saul Alinsky. After on performance, there was a panel discussion about Alinsky's life and work. One of the panelists was the MEC. Read about the others.

Not a bad decision

Rush decides to publicly apologize for his choice of words. He still stands by the basics of his position, though, as does LITD in support of that position. This is about the assault on religious and economic freedom.

Well, they did it

The Iranian regime hangs Youcef Nadarkhani for being a Christian pastor.

Sometimes the only reasonable reaction to this world is to puke your guts out.

The UN is a foul, stinking cesspool and needs to be disbanded - today's edition

At its "Sustainable Development" conference in Rio, it calls for "global governance" and - and here is where it gets personal - control of the global food supply.

Mitt Romey must not be the Pub nominee for president - today's edition

In 2009, in a USA today column, he urged the Most Equal Comrade to embrace an individual mandate.

The ever-more daunting task of seeing exactly what's going on

So now we have two instances of conservative figures uttering remarks regarding matters that bring the matter of gender to the fore that could be argued to be over the top. There is, of course, what Rush Limbaugh said about Sandra Fluke, and also what Indiana congressman Bob Morris said about the Girl Scouts in a private e-mail he sent to fellow House members. And, just as in the Rush case, in which congressional Pub leaders felt they more or less had to distance themselves from the remarks, those leaders felt that the proper response was to wear Girl Scout sashes and otherwise demonstrate their admiration for that American institution.
Let's do some parsing. Rush was really only over the top and off the mark with one of the incendiary words he used: "prostitute." It was badly ill-considered, in that it muddied the waters with a bad analogy. It was inaccurate. There's nothing prostitutional about Sandra Fluke's behavior. On the other hand, the term "slut" connotes a female person who engages in a lot of casual sex, a behavior Fluke pretty much acknowledged in her Capitol Hill testimony. Sure, the term is pejorative, but, objectively speaking, is it not accurate?
Similarly, Morris chose perhaps the most purple way to convey what he knew to be true about the Girl Scouts, thereby ensuring that he would reap the howls and ridicule of the usual crowd.
One point in all of this, of course, is that these unfortunate utterances obscure the reality that Fluke indeed wants taxpayers to finance the removal of any consequences for her particular form of recreation, as well as the Catholic university she attends to de facto condone such activity, and that the board of directors of the Girl Scouts has been a sewer of progressivism for years.
There's an even larger point, however. The over-the-top comments play directly into the hands of the archtects of an agenda that seeks to remake basic human interaction and basic gender identity. What the Rush situation and the Bob Morris situation have in common is their invitation to impart some kind of inherent righteousness to being female. It becomes incredibly easy for the radical left - which, these days, includes the MSM, the educational infrastructure, the arts-and-entertainment world, and much of the religious sector of our society - to mount an argument along the lines of "It's time once and for all to eradicate this backward anti-woman element from our culture."
Once again, the center of gravity in the debate shifts from what's really going on to what the left wants it to be. No one is talking about "keeping women down." If you want substantiation of that claim, look at which side of the ideological divide is most vocal about the subjugation of women in the Muslim world, and which side is most inclined to make excuses for it.
It would be tempting to make the point of a post such as this the need to "strike a balance" in the way conservatives sound alarm bells about phenomena such as Sandra Fluke or the Girl Scouts - the whole "everybody-should-tone-down-the-rhetoric" position. Again, that's not the point. As always, the point is establishing clarity, something that becomes a Herculean - perhaps even Sisyphean - task in these times of sound bytes, text messages and ever-shrinking attention spans.

The Muslim world's genocide against Christians - today's edition

As you read this, remember that this kind of thing occurs all the time, from Nigeria to Egypt to Iraq to Pakistan.

The Sandra Fluke situation

1.) The MSM, leftist shill machine that it is, was obviously going to automatically make hay out of Rush Limbaugh's remarks, the MEC's call to Fluke, and Fluke's reaction to both of those phenomena.

2.) Pub Congressional leaders and prez candidates were pretty much forced into a position of having to denounce Rush's remarks.

3.) Michelle Malkin is correct that the most salient point about Rush's remarks is that they were off the mark. Fluke is a show pony for the whole push to make contraception a front-burmer "women's issue." (And he mentioned this on today's show.) Fluke is also, to the extent that her testimony was her initiative, a pathetic case of a perpetual adolescent wanting the tooth fairy to assume responsibility for her self-indulgence.

4.) That said, we now live in a time when you invite all manner of vitriol to be heaped upon you if your reaction is, "Wait a minute, she's not even married. What does she need all that contraception for?"

5.) John Hawkins is also right when he says that "you don't have a 'right' to anything that other people have to pay to provide for you," and "
When you demand that other people fund your sexual escapades by buying your contraception, your sex life becomes their business."

UPDATE: Well, well, turns out she's a hardcore leftist activist.

It's on purpose - today's edition

Five - count 'em - five Pennsylvania coal-fired power plants close due to the prohibitive expense of the regime's environmental regulations.

Once in a while one does have to take what the MEC says seriously. He very expressly told us he wanted to make this industry go broke.

The Most Equal Comrade: the enemy in the Oval Office

Two more U.S. troops killed by Aghan gunmen.


That apology didn't calm things down and the Freedom-Hater-in-Chief knows it.

The disgusting poison that is Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

Mitch McConnell isn't going to bring Jim DeMint's bill to repeal FHer-care up for a vote - because he's afraid it would upset Harry Reid.

The odds of this nation's survival are not in its favor.

Andrew Breitbart RIP

I can't believe I just typed that header.

This is so huge, such a painful loss, so devastating.

Age 42.

He understood that this is a war, that we must be in fight mode, that there is no working with Freedom-Haters on anything, that defeat is the only way to interact with them.

He understood that standing for conservative principles is going to cost us each friendships, render certain career paths unavailable to us, and make us the objects of the foulest imaginable vitriol.

He loved freedom, common sense and human dignity. He was the embodiment of courage. He was also screamingly funny, scary-smart, and a cool guy.

We must each remember that we are not alone, but we have one less major source of solidarity.

God is pleased with what this particular child of his did with the gifts he was imbued with.

"You have to do this as a condition of drawing a breath as an American citizen" is not mutual consent

The Institute for Justice is filing a legal brief arguing that the individual mandate provision is Freedom-Hater-care flies in the face of centuries of contract law.