I guess it's too much to ask that anybody - anybody - in Washington base activity on principle

The Stafford student loan program - designed for the middle class, as opposed to Pell grants, which are for poor people - had been doling out its loans at a supposedly temporarily lowered rate for a few years.  Well, that rate is set, per the legislation that lowered it, to rise to what it had been.  Of course, the MEC and FHers generally want to extend the lower rate.  But what the hell are John Boehner and Mitt Romney doing going along with this?

Here's why we here at LITD don't make any big defense of the Republican party per se

They are all too often the stupid party, that's why.  Even the smart wings that emerge within it from time to time, such as the Young Guns, can do incredibly goofy stuff like tell conservative voters that Lugar is a better choice than Mourdock. Hello?  Do they really want to plant their flag in from of the stinkin' Department of Education?

He really has dropped all concern for whether we see how sinister he truly is - today's edition

The Most Equal Comrade quietly overrode last September's congressional ban on aid to the Palestinian Authority.  They're getting $192 billion of your tax dollars. This, in the face of the reuniting of Fatah and Hamas.

Granted, the guy has only ever had a peripheral acquaintance with Western civilization, but the utter contempt he has for it was clearly and deliberately inculcated in him from an early age.

Whether it was constitutional wasn't even remotely on her mind

Representative Trey Gowdy grills Kathleen "religious-institutions-have-to-fund-extermination-of-embryonic-and-fetal-Americans" Sibelius on what Supreme Court precedents have to say about First Amendment non-interference in religious conviction.

These people are thugs

Kim Strassel at the WSJ on the MEC's enemies list.  Romney donors being named individually and made to sound unsavory just because, in some cases, such as foreclosing on homes or running energy companies, they're doing their jobs, and in some cases because they are on record as holding pro-normalcy positions like keeping the definition of marriage what it has always been.

This regime is going to get so nasty and ruthless between now and November, we must be surprised at nothing. 

How reality-driven normal people respond to conversational overtures from the hopelessly disconnected

Ohio Governor John Kasich can't hold back a bemused snort in response to a reporter's question based on the premise that, now that the state's horrific deficit situation has been dealt with, it's time to reopen the spending spigot and aim it at the socially underserved.  Or whatever they're calling themselves these days.

The latest area into which the totalitarian MEC regime is reaching

The family farm.  The regime is working to impose child-labor regs on them.  The overlords want the cattle to be indistiguishable from the people.

And I've seriously been taken to task for calling them Freedom-Haters

An EPA official likens what he thinks his agency should do to normal-people energy producers to the way Roman military units subdued Mediterranean communities during the empire days.

It's on purpose, people, and there's nothing sensationalistic about saying so.

It's on purpose - today's edition

Durable goods orders down to worst level in three years.  Inventories increasing.

The FHer regime reads numbers like this and sees multitudes of Americans on their knees, resigning themselves to government dependency.

Slacking off on border security is never a good idea

Mark Krikorian at NRO looks at the numbers for recent illegal immigration trends and concludes that, to the extent that they show a decline, it's because we steppped up enforcement. Plus, as he points out, there are millions of folks from other countries besides Mexico who would like to sneak in here.

When a civilization loses its will to survive

Meet Cathereine Ashton, the head negotiator for the P5+1 team that is trying yet another round of pattty-cake with Iran over its nuclear program.  Her background is alarmingly, sordidly anti-West.

Still basing policy on a thoroughly debunked fraud - and using your tax dollars to implement it

The MEC regime is funding a Global Climate Initiative that will conduct "green" programs in Africa and South America.  Never mind the real loooming catastrophe of US debt.

FHers are every bit as deranged as the Kim regime or the jihadists.  You wouldn't pursue this course if you were in touch with basic reality.

Sure motivates you to send 'em food and fuel aid

North Korean state television interrupted its normal programming to announce this little tidbit.  "Very soon."  "Steps/" "Targets."  "Ashes." That Kim family, those folks aren't wrapped too tight. 

Rapid progress by a society of imperfect people

I've been thinking about Michael Barone's latest column since I came across it earlier this morning.  He makes a supremely noteworthy point, which is that, for all the nostalgia one hears about the days when an 18-year-old could get an assembly-line job at a good wage, with benefits such as health insurance and retirement money, the fact is that most people hated those jobs.  They slogged away for decades in a scramble for security.  And Barone knows whereof he speaks.  He's a native Detroiter.

In the course of crafting his argument (that the world of work no longer looks anything like that), he mentions Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management.  I looked up his bio and refreshed myself on what he was about.  His careerpath was a bit odd for a guy from a well-to-do Quaker family whose mother was a leading abolitionist.  But instead of reading law at Harvard, he went to work in a machine shop and became a mechanical engineer and the first real industrial consultant.

There's no way to deny the strain of contempt and cynicism that runs through Taylor's worldview.  He once testified to a congressional committee that anyone who would make a lifelong occupation out of shop-floor work was too stupid (his word) to grasp the big picture behind the tasks he performed, the role his efforts played in a larger scheme.

So Taylor did no favors to the effort to make labor and management feel like they were on the same team.  He saw two entities: brains and mules.

Lest the argument be put forth here that such is exactly the justification behind the union movement, it must also be affirmed that thousands upon thousands of Americans did indeed sign up for jobs of mind-numbing tedium of their own volition.  The production schedulers at General Widgets are not responsible for the worldviews of applicants who come seeking employment.

A true all-on-the-same-team management approach did not get underway until the Six Sigma push, with its teams of black belts and green belts and improvement projects, got going at Motorola in the 1980s.  Just in time for the twilight years of America's manufacturing focus.

Retrospect can tell us a few things.  Industrial theory would have benefitted from taking a more hopeful view of the stock of people entering the shop-floor ranks.  That would have required a different kind of educational system, however.  As we know, John Dewey thought American education should cultivate just enough human refinement to make the masses suitable for, well, mass production.

The big-picture arc of how humans - particularly in the United States - organize themselves to get things done does indeed show a trend toward greater choice, greater affirmation of individual sovereignty and emphasis on the fact that one's choices are really one's own.

And that's how it needs to be, since the shop floor is not where many of us are headed anymore.

We offer patty cake; they reciprocate with contempt

Remember that downed drone?  You know, the one for which the Pentagon drew up three - count 'em - three plans for getting back from Iran, and then for which the MEC issued a tepid "pretty-please-give-it-back"?  Well, the Iranian regime is building an exact replica - not a scale model, but a replica replete with all the technology.

The wacky lens through which FHers view reality

David Axelrod on the Sunday talking-head circuit saying that pro-freedom Pubs are waging a "reign of terror" in Congress against Reasonable Gentlemen.

FHers don't know what to make of a Pub who doesn't just hand them his vital parts on a platter saying, "Lunch is on me, respected colleague."