Today NPR devoted a long interview to the former Obama worker who started the Coffee Party movement to counter the Tea Parties.

She’s got her work cut out for her.

An overflow crowd turned out Wednesday at 9:45 AM to attend the “Kill the Bill” rally today in St. Charles, MO. On Wednesday night, 2,300 patriots turned out to protest Barack Obama, the Carnahans, and liberal Senator Claire McCaskill at their fundraiser in downtown St. Louis.

Today, local liberals held their second Coffee Party to push for more socialism. 30 people turned out… Including the people who were already at the restaurant and the tea party infiltrators.

Another example of an actor who should be screened and not heard. Victor Davis Hanson:

Much has been written of the recent Tom Hanks remarks to Douglas Brinkley in a Time magazine interview about his upcoming HBO series on World War II in the Pacific. Here is the explosive excerpt that is making the rounds today.

“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

Hanks may not have been quoted correctly; and his remarks may have been impromptu and poorly expressed; and we should give due consideration to the tremendous support Hanks has given in the past both to veterans and to commemoration of World War II; and his new HBO series could well be a fine bookend to Band of Brothers.  All that said, Hanks’ comments were sadly infantile pop philosophizing offered by, well,  an ignoramus.

Hanks thinks he is trying to explain the multifaceted Pacific theater in terms of a war brought on by and fought through racial animosity. That is ludicrous. Consider:

1) In earlier times, we had good relations with Japan (an ally during World War I, that played an important naval role in defeating imperial Germany at sea) and had stayed neutral in its disputes with Russia (Teddy Roosevelt won a 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for his intermediary role). The crisis that led to Pearl Harbor was not innately with the Japanese people per se (tens of thousands of whom had emigrated to the United States on word of mouth reports of opportunity for Japanese immigrants), but with Japanese militarism and its creed of Bushido that had hijacked, violently so in many cases, the government and put an entire society on a fascistic footing. We no more wished to annihilate Japanese because of racial hatred than we wished to ally with their Chinese enemies because of racial affinity. In terms of geo-strategy, race was not the real catalyst for war other than its role among Japanese militarists in energizing expansive Japanese militarism.

2) How would Hanks explain the brutal Pacific wars between Japanese and Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, Japanese and Filipinos, and Japanese and Pacific Islanders, in which not hundreds of thousands perished, but many millions? In each of these theaters, the United States was allied with Asians against an Asian Japan, whose racially-hyped “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” aimed at freeing supposedly kindred Asians from European and white imperialism, flopped at its inauguration (primarily because of high-handed Japanese feelings of superiority and entitlement, which, in their emphasis on racial purity, were antithetical to the allied democracies, but quite in tune with kindred Axis power, Nazi Germany.)

6 of the 10 richest counties in U.S. are in DC area

Loudoun ranks as the richest county in the United States, immediately followed by Fairfax and Howard counties, while Montgomery, traditionally one of the wealthiest, is now 10th.

Forbes magazine ranked eight other Washington-area counties in its list of the nation’s 25 wealthiest counties, far more than any other area in the country. The rankings are based on 2008 median household income data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Act 1: The Free Speech movement that began at UC Berkeley in 1964, which was about saying what you want to say. It was started by student radicals.

Act 2: Campus speech codes, which restrict free speech in order to enforce political correctness, get enacted. Originally conceived to protect minority students from harassment, they metastasize to become a bludgeon to stifle legitimate dissent. They were started by former student radicals, by then in positions of authority in academia.

Act 3: Students demonstrate for free or heavily subsidized tuition at University of California campuses, whining about suffering part of the state’s fiscal hangover.

As a parent of a student about to start at UC, I’m not happy with a 32% fee increase either. But someone has to pay the bill, and it can’t always be someone else.

One measure of the left’s infatuation with Europe is its love affair with fixed rail transportation, aka trains. They work in Europe — which is small and densely packed –thus they must work here, too. Right?

In New York City and places like that, yes. Not so in most of America. Yet city planners have a jones for fixed rail, despite studies dating back decades showing that busses cost way less and are more flexible.

There’s also the control freak aspect of liberalism: it’s just galling for libs to see people driving their cars, going their own way on their own schedules. Gotta fix ‘em to some rails for their own good.

The Left is throwing a Coffee Party to counter the Tea Parties. Started by one Annabel Park, it’s mission statement reads:

…the federal government is “not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges we face as Americans.”

No doubt the coffee party will be joined by many of the activists loudmouths who paraded through the streets during Bush’s eight years, bitching nonstop about the government.

So, quickly:

• Was the Patriot act enacted by Congress an expression of  the collective will?
• Was the Iraq war, approved by a wide Congressional margin, an expression of  the collective will?

Mark Steyn:

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen – because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter 20 (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter 17 or 18.

What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 – or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: 10 grandparents have six kids have four grandkids – i.e., the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility – the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared with Spain and Italy, Greece has the least-worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.

So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when 10 grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

By the way, you don’t have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement: The Athenian “public service” of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation. Still, America as a whole is not yet Greece. A couple of years ago, when I wrote my book “America Alone,” I put the Social Security debate at that time in a bit of perspective: On 2005 figures, projected public pensions liabilities were expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 percent of GDP. In Greece, the figure was 25 percent: in other words, head for the hills, Armageddon outta here, The End. Since then, the situation has worsened in both countries. And, really, the comparison is academic: Whereas America still has a choice, Greece isn’t going to have a 2040 – not without a massive shot of Reality Juice.

Is that likely to happen? At such moments, I like to modify Gerald Ford. When seeking to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, President Ford liked to say: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” Which is true enough. But there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s the point Greece is at. Its socialist government has been forced into supporting a package of austerity measures. The Greek people’s response is: Nuts to that. Public sector workers have succeeded in redefining time itself: Every year, they receive 14 monthly payments. You do the math. And for about seven months’ work: for many of them the work day ends at 2:30 p.m. And, when they retire, they get 14 monthly pension payments. In other words: Economic reality is not my problem. I want my benefits. And, if it bankrupts the entire state a generation from now, who cares as long as they keep the checks coming until I croak?

We hard-hearted small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government: Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and to hell with everyone else. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense.

A. Barton Hinkle:

Shakespeare himself could not have chosen a better foil for Barack Obama than Sarah Palin. The professor and the hockey mom make the perfect pair to dramatize the ongoing contest between liberal condescension and conservative populism.

A lot of ink and pixels have been expended lately to castigate what Jacob Weisberg, writing in Newsweek, terms the “childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.” Time’s Joe Klein likewise casts his gaze across the land and sees only “a nation of dodos,” who are “flagrantly ill-informed” because they think federal stimulus funds have been misspent.

Writing in The Boston Globe, Renee Loth terms Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race a “collective primal scream.” The “lesson of Massachusetts,” says the L.A. Times’ Tim Rutten, is: “Anger.” In The New York Times, Charles Blow finds that as America has become less enthralled by Obama it has become more “angry,” “riled,” and filled with “bloodlust.” The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne tries to comprehend the “rage” and “venom” of the Tea Party movement and, after careful consideration, decides they are owing to two things: Many members of the movement are racist, and the rest are simply oblivious to facts.

This is nothing new. Those with long memories, such as The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, recall nightly news anchor Peter Jennings’ reaction to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. Comparing Americans to a 2-year-old child, Jennings concluded “the voters had a temper tantrum.” Gerard Alexander, a professor of politics at UVa, goes back even further to recall Lionel Trilling’s view that conservatives do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

It’s a common theme in public discourse: My side is full of passionate idealism — your side is just a bunch of angry fruitcakes. Both sides play the game, but some progressives manage to achieve a level of disdain that approaches the Olympic. The Tea Party movement’s proletariat and its de facto leader, Sarah Palin, seem to bring out the worst among those who profess to care about the little guy. Calling her and her supporters dimbulbs and buffoons only stokes populist resentment, of course, so the mockery plays right into her note-covered hand.

Could all this talk of the angry mob represent a case of projection bias? After all, the mob is largely made up of working-class folk like Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher, who had the temerity to question candidate Obama’s proclivities about the redistribution of wealth. Progressivism purports to protect the toiling and exploited masses from the amoral rapacity of big banks, big insurance, big tobacco, and whatnot. It must be exceedingly frustrating to have the toiling and exploited masses turn against the policies you have designed for their own good.

…produce nonsense such as this book review in the liberal In These Times

Part history, part ethnography, part marketing theory and part coffee memoir, Everything but the Coffee places Starbucks at the center of the hypocrisy of the American middle class. Simon has to stretch a great deal here, as he explores why, for a time, the American middle class saw Starbucks is central to its identity.

Simon shows us how we really live, and it ain’t pretty. There was a time, not so long ago, Simon reminds us, that many of us wondered why people would pay so much money for a cup of coffee—even as we were edging closer in line to place our own order. Starbucks, writes Simon, “had little to do with coffee, and everything to do with style, status, identity and aspiration. … Starbucks delivered more than a stiff shot of caffeine. It pinpointed, packaged, and made easily available, if only through smoke and mirrors, the things that the broad American middle class wanted and thought it needed to make its public and private lives better.” Starbucks fed our emotional needs for status. It became our little “self-gift,” an emotional pick-me-up. It allowed us to feel successful.

It also provided a safe, clean “third space” between home and work, those big chairs and couches becoming our new public sphere. It brought us exotic places and sounds, exposed us to an underground in the safety of a cushy seat: teaching us about places where our coffee came from, and new music and literary voices. It tried to be our cultural guide and helped us feel good about our environmental footprint through its green campaigns and aid to farmers, even if Starbucks did little and we did nothing but buy coffee. It did so consciously, purposefully manipulating our desires, hopes and aspirations, all the while making us feel good about ordering up a venti soy latte.

Or maybe people just liked the stuff.

IBD:

Didn’t Acorn, the corrupt community organizer, get its federal funding yanked after its last scandal? Actually, no. Through municipal middlemen, it’s poised to rake in another $4 billion. Where is the outrage?

You’d think a group implicated in dozens of electoral fraud cases, theft of funds and, most recently, helping criminals interested in bringing child prostitutes to the U.S. would have been ruled ineligible for federal aid long ago.

But think again, because these aid rats are experts at survival.

FrontPage magazine reports that federal Judge Nina Gershon ruled that Acorn is eligible for the Obama administration’s proposed $4 billion in Housing and Urban Development grants within the $3.83 trillion federal budget proposal for 2011.

That cancels the ban Congress placed on Acorn funding late last year after at least five of the group’s offices willingly aided undercover reporters posing as a pimp and prostitute to get federal funding for a brothel and cheat on their taxes.

Acorn’s antics were revealed after a series of reports last September on the BigGovernment Web site. Faced with a firestorm of complaints, Congress had no choice but to pull funds for the group.

Many were surprised that Congressional Democrats backed Acorn’s defunding. Usually, Acorn and the Democratic Party work hand in hand. Acorn supplies votes and election assistance to Democratic candidates, and the Democrats supply them with funding.

Turns out, the fund-pulling was really just for show.

Acorn is being allowed to make an end-run around the federal funding ban through the use of a middleman, the Washington Times reports.

The way it’s done is through HUD Community Development Block Grants, which are given to cities and states to help boost development efforts. Instead of applying directly to the federal government for aid, a violation of Congress’ ban, Gershon, a Clinton appointee, effectively ruled that Acorn can instead apply directly to cities and states.

In short, this gaping loophole means the ban is off.

Newsbusters brings us this amusing bit from Monday’s Joy Behar show. The twit (Joy) interviews Eve Ensler (the tw*t), author of The Vagina Monologues.

ENSLER: Well, I just think the idea that she doesn’t believe in global warming is bizarre.

BEHAR: Every scientist of any note believes in it but Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in it.

ENSLER: And I think we just kind of have to walk around the world at this point and look at what is happening to nature and earthquakes and tsunamis.

BEHAR: Right.

ENSLER: And weather changes to just feel it. But I think that idea that she doesn’t believe in global warming and she could actually run for vice president, and we have a country where that is possible, it seems insane.

BEHAR: It’s unbelievable. It does seem insane and the fact that she has not negated the possibility of running in 2012.

ENSLER: But we have. We have negated the possibility of her winning.

Maybe they rely on the NYT.

Tim Blair in the Daily Telegraph Australia writes about squishy liberals refusing to condemn Islamic clitorectomies:

Some 180 words into an ABC piece on female genital mutilation in Australia, this paragraph appears:

Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital says it is seeing between 600 and 700 women each year who have experienced it in some form.

And that’s just in Melbourne. What about Sydney? Adelaide? Perth? What the hell is going on here? The hospital’s Zeinab Mohamud tries to explain:

“Some people when they hear they say, ‘how can that happen?’ It’s when something is cultural and the people have been doing it for so long, it’s not easy to either eliminate it or to say, ‘you have got a bad culture’,” she said.

You have got a bad culture. It’s not that difficult to say. Dr Ted Weaver, of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, is similarly delicate:

Dr Ted Weaver agrees and he says ordering people against the practice would be inappropriate.

No. Weaver’s response is inappropriate. Recall the words of Kevin Rudd from last September:

“Silence is tantamount to tacit approval,” he said …

“We cannot afford to be silent … We have a responsibility to speak up and say ‘I swear never to commit violence against a woman’.

“I swear never to excuse violence against women and I swear never to remain silent about violence against women, and this is my solemn oath as a man, that is the oath to which all men of Australia should adhere to and swear.”

Further from Weaver:

“If we try and dictate and pontificate about this and not provide culturally appropriate care, we’ll further disenfranchise those women,” he said.

Forget disenfranchised. They’re disfigured.

Apparently, Ms. Huffington (whose voice should be banned from the airwaves) forgets the paranoid rantings from her crowd during Dubya’s terms. For example:

• the coming theocracy
• Bush lied, people died/war crimes
• wiretaps that weren’t wiretaps
• turning Hurricane Katrina into a racial issue

As much as liberals, particularly the urban upscale variety, proclaim their solidarity with the middle class, at heart they regard it with disdain and pity.

Consider Neal Gabler’s LAT’s essay on the excellent NBC drama, Friday Night Lights. First, Gabler indulges in hyperbole:

…at a time when NBC is being vilified, here is one thing it has done right. Despite paltry ratings, it has continued to support what may be the best dramatic series in the history of television. That’s right: history.

Umm, did Gabler not see The Wire? The Singing Detective?

But never mind — the show is excellent. Set in a fictionalized version of Odessa, Texas, it follows various characters as they make their way through life.

High school football is a key source of entertainment in those parts, much as basketball is in Indiana (see Hoosiers).

Or, as Gabler puts it:

The provenance of “Friday Night Lights” is H.G. Bissinger’s now-classic 1990 book of the same name that followed a year in the life of Odessa, Texas, and of the oil town’s perennially superb high school football team, the Permian Panthers. Bissinger’s Odessa was desolate – physically and spiritually parched.

It was racked by boom-and-bust oil cycles, by bigotry and racial division, by misplaced educational priorities and by a general sense of doom. What it had was the Permian Panthers to fill its existential void as they filled its 20,000-seat stadium on Friday nights during football season. As Bissinger quotes one booster, “Life really wouldn’t be worth living if you didn’t have a high school team to support.”

One wonders if the booster wasn’t just enjoying a bit of hyperbole at the author’s expense. After all, how do folks get by the other two-thirds of the year when there’s no football to distract them from their purported misery?

Do suicides spike after the playoffs?

Back to Gabler:

Friday Night Lights” may owe as much to Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film “The Last Picture Show” as to Bissinger’s book. Everyone in Dillon seems to realize, even if only subconsciously, that those football highs are temporary and that the miasma of Dillon may be permanent. Everyone seems to realize that the very best of life may be those four years playing Panthers football with a crack at the state championship, and that everything after that is anticlimactic. And everyone seems to realize that the dreams they harbor are likely to be unfulfilled.

Texas is a big place with a lot of “Dillons” but only one can be state champion. Does the rest of the state stumble about in gloom? Judging by the health of the Texas economy, I’d say no.

Hope comes hard. Like the town in which they live, nearly all of the characters are thwarted: Jason Street, the all-state quarterback headed to Notre Dame, breaks his neck on the first show; his replacement, sophomore Matt Saracen, is tentative about football and most other things; Street’s best friend, fullback Tim Riggins, is a handsome and bighearted but promiscuous lout with no ambition; Riggins’ former girlfriend, Tyra Collette, coasts through life trying to shake her bad-girl reputation; Street’s girlfriend, town beauty Lyla Garrity, has her life derailed by his injury; Smash Williams, the star running back, wrestles with whether he has the size to succeed at college football, his only ticket out of Dillon.

To Gabler, small towns are only for escaping. He cannot imagine that millions of small town people actually enjoy fulfilling lives: raising kids, loving each other, going to the movies, going fishing, and yes, watching/playing sports.

If life cannot be good in Dillon, where is the hope? The suburbs? Oh, heck no — the suburbs are routinely mocked by the elite left.

That leaves the urban areas where the have-nots live as sullen, often criminal wards of the state while the haves go to out to sushi restaurants, gallery openings and (oops!) therapists. Oh, the miasma!

Who, then, can be happy in Gabler’s world? Boring and stifling as he may find small town America, the people living here are filthy rich by global standards.

My hunch is that the left projects its own unhappiness on others. They’re miserable, so everyone else must feel that way, too. If you think you’re happy, you must be too dumb to know otherwise.

Pity locally, pity globally.

Doctor Zero at Hot Air. HT: Simon Bass

It’s clear that the middle class is the great enemy of collectivism. Only they have the combination of voting power, money, and economic self-interest to see the growth of government as undesirable, and provide effective resistance. They generally view their interactions with government in a negative light – they’ve all spent time in the Department of Motor Vehicles mausoleum, spent hours wrestling with tax forms, or been slapped with a traffic citation they don’t think they deserved. They understand the inefficiency and emotional instability of government, and instinctively resent its intrusion into their lives. A health-care takeover is the best chance collectivists will ever have of persuading the middle class to vote itself into chains… but for the better part of a century, they’ve been able to hear the hammers of the State ringing on the metal of those chains, in the forges of taxation and regulation.

The middle class is a vast group in a capitalist society, which is one of the things collectivists really hate about capitalism. Its upper reaches include the entrepreneurs and small business owners that bring economic vitality. Virtually every aspect of Obama’s agenda is designed to injure or burden small businessmen, and this is no accident. Despite their angry rhetoric about giant corporations, leftists have little trouble controlling them. They often do business directly with the government, as vendors… and, through lobbyists, as customers. They generally employ members of labor unions, which serve as a de facto arm of Big Government, injecting the agenda of the State directly into the corporate bloodstream. It’s the small business owners and self-employed, along with those who aspire to join their ranks, who are the most difficult to control, and the most likely to muster effective electoral resistance to the statist agenda. The middle class is filled with people who pay attention to the second page of their paycheck stubs.

I realize all of the above sounds terribly sinister… and perhaps you find that appropriate, having reviewed the works of Saul Alinsky and the Cloward-Piven strategy of manufactured crisis. I believe it is crucial to understand that it doesn’t matter if the people engineering a collectivist state have sinister motives or not. In fact, the belief that their intentions make a difference is incredibly dangerous. It’s related to the catechism of the faculty-lounge Marxist, which holds that communism and fascism only failed because bad people were in charge of them. In his interview last night, the President gave this as his reason for pushing so forcefully for his health-care takeover plan:

The reason I tackled healthcare wasn’t because this was my personal hobbyhorse. The reason I tackled it was during the course of the campaign, I traveled all across this country and I kept on hearing heart-breaking stories about families who were bankrupt because they got sick. If they had health insurance, suddenly insurance companies were doing things that were just plain wrong, and were leaving folks in an extremely vulnerable position.

It doesn’t matter if this is his sincere belief, spoken straight from the heart. His health-care plan was still an awful idea that united the country in opposition against the increasingly thuggish and arrogant methods he used to advance it. Those methods are integral to the collectivist enterprise. It will always become thuggish and arrogant, because when all virtue resides in the State, those who oppose the growth of the State become villains by definition. Consider the President’s assessment of his Republican opponents:

My hope was a year ago today when I was being sworn in that reversing that process was going to be easier partly because we were entering into a crisis situation and I thought that the urgency of the moment would allow us to join together and make common cause. That hasn’t happened. Some of it, frankly, is I think a strategic decision that was made on the side of the opposition that… I think that some of it had to do with a sense that the best political strategy was to simply say no.

Here, in a nutshell, is the heads-we-win, tails-you-lose mentality that keeps the State plodding blindly forward, crushing a formerly vibrant economy beneath it. If you don’t answer Obama’s trillion-dollar health-care plan with your own trillion-dollar program, you’re an obstructionist – not an opponent to be debated, but an obstacle to be swept aside. The middle class is frustrated because they understand the basic concept of fiscal responsibility, and they know they – and their children – will be expected to pay for these titanic solutions.

Most of my liberal friends scorn “Big Pharma” for making profits. (More accurately, they scorn drug companies because they don’t give them drugs for cheap — the sense of entitlement runs deep in Boomers.)

These same people think nothing of shelling out big bucks for vitamins and supplements that have no proven value. Unlike drug companies, which must prove their products are both safe and effective, supplement makers face no such strictures.

When there was a move to tighten this loophole, these otherwise Big Government types turned into raging libertarians, demanding that the government keep its hands off their vitamins.

Now Emily Anthes writes in Slate about the effectiveness of the multivitamin:

Deciding what to eat for dinner can be mind-bending. How do we keep track of the ever-evolving recommendations for what to put on, and leave off, the plate? Red meat might cause cancer! But don’t replace it with tofu—soy concoctions might be carcinogenic, too! Don’t even try to figure out where carbs stand this week. And the verdict on coffee, chocolate, and alcohol changes faster than you can order a mocha martini.

Vitamins—with their promise to bridge the gap between the nutrients our bodies need and those they get—have always seemed reassuringly simple: Just pop a multivitamin and let your body soak in those extra nutrients. But not any longer. During the past few years, study after study has raised doubts about what, if any, good vitamins actually do a body. They could even pose some real medical risks.

Half of all American adults take some sort of nutritional supplement. But research on a wide variety of patient populations and medical conditions has failed to find much evidence that multivitamins, the most commonly used of the lot, prevent major chronic diseases in healthy people. The most recent knock came this spring, when a study of more than 160,000 post-menopausal women, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that the all-in-one pills did not prevent cancer, heart attacks, or strokes and did not reduce overall mortality.

//

Individual vitamins and minerals haven’t fared much better under scientific scrutiny, with research debunking some of the reputed benefits of vitamin B6, calcium, niacin, and others. In 2006, the National Institutes of Health convened an independent panel of experts to evaluate the evidence that vitamins could prevent chronic disease. The scientists ultimately issued a report stating that studies “do not provide strong evidence for beneficial health-related effects of supplements taken singly, in pairs, or in combinations.”

The news on antioxidants, the darlings of the vitamin menagerie, is even more troubling. These compounds, which include vitamins A, C, and E, selenium, beta carotene, and folate, fight free radicals, unstable compounds thought to damage cells and contribute to aging. But not only do antioxidant supplements fail to protect against heart disease, stroke, and cancer; they actually increase the risk of death, according to a 2007 analysis of research on more than 232,000 people, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, as well as other studies.

California’s tax dollars at work:

A group of California artists wants Mexicans and Central Americans to have more than just a few cans of tuna and a jug of water for their illegal trek through the harsh desert into the U.S.

Faculty at University of California, San Diego, are developing a GPS-enabled cell phone that tells dehydrated migrants where to find water and pipes in poetry from phone speakers, regaling them on their journey much like Emma Lazarus’ words did a century ago to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” on Ellis Island.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool is part technology endeavor, part art project. It introduces a high-tech twist to an old debate about how far activists can go to prevent migrants from dying on the border without breaking the law.

Immigration hardliners argue the activists are aiding illegal entry to the United States, a felony. Even migrants and their sympathizers question whether the device will make the treacherous journeys easier.

The designers – three visual artists on UCSD’s faculty and an English professor at the University of Michigan – are undeterred as they criticize a U.S. policy they say embraces illegal immigrants for cheap labor while letting them die crossing the border.

“It’s about giving water to somebody who’s dying in the desert of dehydration,” said Micha Cardenas, 32, a UCSD lecturer.

The effort is being done on the government’s dime – an irony not lost on the designers whose salaries are paid by the state of California.

“There are many, many areas in which every American would say I don’t like the way my tax dollars are being spent. Our answer to that is an in-your-face, so what?” says UCSD lecturer Brett Stalbaum, 33, a self-described news junkie who likens his role to chief technology officer.

Jonah Goldberg:

Some may not remember the anti-Ashcroft hysteria of yesteryear. Here’s a pretty good summary-snapshot from a 2003 Wall Street Journal editorial:

Frenzy mounts uncontrolled over John Ashcroft, now considered—in those quarters touched by the delirium—enemy No. 1 of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and all that Americans hold dear. What is the cause of these fevers? Is there a doctor in the house?

We may exclude Dr. Howard Dean, running for the Democratic presidential nomination, who has already offered his findings, to wit: “John Ashcroft is not a patriot. John Ashcroft is a descendant of Joseph McCarthy.” Sen. John Kerry, once properly—and eloquently—infuriated over the campaign of cretinous slanders mounted against John McCain in the last Republican presidential primary, has in turn offered his views on the attorney general. During the Democrats’ debate in Baltimore, candidate Kerry said he saw before him “people of every creed, every color, every belief, every religion. This is indeed John Ashcroft’s worst nightmare here.” Richard Gephardt, eyes similarly on the prize, has let America know which of our great national concerns he considered most pressing—a good thing to know about a candidate. The national priority looming largest in his mind is, Mr. Gephardt has let it be known, to fire John Ashcroft in “my first five seconds as president.”

On the subject of the attorney general, no candidate has waxed more passionate than John Edwards, who warned, “we cannot allow people like John Ashcroft to take away our rights, our freedoms, and our liberties.” And further: John Ashcroft and this administration can “spin their wheels all they want about the Patriot Act. . . . They have rolled over our rights for the past two years,” says Mr. Edwards, one of the most uncompromisingly staunch Senate supporters of the Patriot Bill when it was passed after September 11—a fact the candidate seems to have found little or no occasion to mention in the course of his current crusade. Also among those voting for the bill were Rep. Gephardt, and Sens. Kerry, Lieberman and Graham.

It’s hardly necessary by now to list all the charges and the alarms being raised about Mr. Ashcroft, by those portraying the attorney general as the menace to civil liberties that should haunt the dreams of all Americans who want to preserve our way of life. This is no exaggeration; the fever has spread wide, fed largely by the American Civil Liberties Union and allied sentinels of freedom, its signs clear in the ads calling on citizens to “Save Our Constitution,” in emergency rallies led by the ACLU, and such groups as “Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow” and “The New York Bill of Rights Defense Committee.”

Never mind that many of Ashcroft’s   worst alleged sins are now pretty much Obama-Pelosi policies. But the Napolitano-Ashcroft comparison is telling.

Ashcroft was demonized for suggesting that Americans be on the lookout for terrorists. One of Napolitano’s main talking points these days is the need for vigilance from the public. Heck she claimed the “system worked” because a flying Dutchman took out the “alleged” terrorist.

Ashcroft was demonized because he allegedly was turning America into a police state where political enemies were targeted (remember that’s why Naomi Wolfe had a years-long mental breakdown). Janet Napolitano oversaw a report that singles out American citizens and returning vets as potential terrorists because of their political views.

Ashcroft was mocked as a provincial hick who didn’t know much. Napolitano — who runs our immigration service and was governor of a border state — thinks it’s  not a crime to illegally cross the border and insists that the 9/11 hijackers came from Canada.

John Ashcroft was a dangerous ideologue because he believed the war on terror is real. But Janet Napolitano isn’t a dangerous ideologue for believing the war on terror isn’t real?

What sounds more ideologically blinkered after 9/11?

Ashcroft’s view:  organized Islamic terrorists want to kill Americans in a holy war.

Napolitano’s view: Islamic terrorist attacks are merely “man caused disasters” by disturbed  individuals  — who should be assumed to be acting alone as criminals, not terrorists, despite credible evidence —   while peaceful “rightwing extremists” should be given extra scrutiny on the assumption they could well be terrorists.

The Left snickers at the idea of evil, but here it is in bold relief.

The young marine received the highest military honors that the Mexican state could offer. Killed during a raid that ended the life of a notorious drug lord, the marine was buried a hero, ushered to his grave by an honor guard of commandos in camouflage, his mother awarded a folded flag.

Hours later, the grieving mother, the marine’s sister, his brother and an aunt were mowed down by gunmen in a revenge attack that sent a chilling message to the Mexican military combating drug traffickers.

The slaughter of Melquisedet Angulo Cordova’s family early Tuesday horrified Mexicans seemingly inured to a drug-war brutality that has claimed more than 15,000 lives in three years of spectacular violence. The killing, especially, of a mother seemed to violate the most basic code of conduct that even coldblooded hit men and traffickers obeyed.

And then there are coldblooded regimes that murder their citizens in the streets.

I remember this from the giddy days of the Whole Earth Catalog when there were so many cool utopian ideas floating around.

Then most of us grew up. Byron York explains:

In the high desert of central Arizona, more than five thousand miles from the global-warming summit in Copenhagen, sits an aging and unfinished vision of the enviro-friendly, sustainable life that some climate change activists foresee for us all. It’s called Arcosanti, created in 1970 by the Italian architect Paolo Soleri, and it is the prototype of a green community of the future.

The only problem is, it doesn’t work. And it never did.

Arcosanti is an “arcology,” a word Soleri coined by combining “architecture” and “ecology.” In Soleri’s vision, an arcology is a self-contained city in which hundreds of thousands of people live in a small space, their needs met by green energy sources, recycled and sustainable products, and carefully planned social and cultural events. There are — G0d forbid — no cars.

In a Soleri design, masses of people are packed into the small-footprint arcology so that the land surrounding the community can remain pristine, unpolluted by human touch. It was an idea much in fashion a few decades back. “As urban architecture, Arcosanti is probably the most important experiment undertaken in our lifetime,” wrote Newsweek in 1976.

Soleri designed models of many futuristic communities, guided by his intense dislike of U.S.-style development. “The ‘American Dream,’ as physically embodied in the single-family house,” he once wrote, “has to be scrapped and reinvented in terms which are coherent with the human and biospheric reality.”

Despite his many designs, the only community Soleri ever attempted to build is here, on the edge of the Agua Fria River canyon about 70 miles north of Phoenix.

Still, Soleri managed to win the National Design award for Lifetime Achievement.

Steven Den Beste captures the essence of liberal thought in this brilliant essay.

_______________________

Way back in the depths of time, Greek philosophers ended up with two basic and incompatible ways of looking at the universe. One way was materialism, which says that there is a material universe which behaves in a consistent way, and if you study it you can learn the way it works.

That’s the world view of engineers and scientists — and businessmen, for that matter. It’s the world view of people who understand and use mathematics, and statistics. It is a place where cause leads to effect. It’s the place that game theory studies. It isn’t necessarily inherently atheistic; a lot of religious people live in the materialist world.

But there are people who don’t. A different epistemological view is teleology, which says that the universe is an ideal place. More or less, it
exists so that we humans can live in it. And human thought is a fundamental force in the universe. Teleology says that if a mental model is esthetically pleasing then it must be true. Teleology implies that if you truly believe in something, it’ll happen. Wikipedia says:

A teleological school of thought is one that holds all things to be designed for or directed toward a final result, that there is an inherent purpose or final cause for all that exists.

And in its modern form that final result is presumed to be creation of a world of peace and harmony, a utopia, in which all men live in peace and brotherhood, in harmony with nature.

At least, that’s the distorted form of Teleology that has come down to some of us in the modern era, mainly on the left wing. Aristotle probably wouldn’t recognize his red-headed step child as it exists today, though. Like many philosophically pure ideas adopted into popular culture, it’s gotten mutated nearly beyond recognition and almost all the mutations were negative.

One way to compare and contrast those two world views is to consider what they think about socialism. Materialists look at history since Marx and point out that socialism has been tried many times, in many nations, in various forms, and it has always failed. In places where it was fully implemented the result was decline and economic collapse. When it was only partially implemented you got slower decline. It often looks like it’s working in the early stages, but in the longer term it has never succeeded.

So to materialists, it’s apparent that socialism is a nice idea, but one that doesn’t work and shouldn’t be adopted.

To teleologists, none of that matters. What matters is the fact that it’s a beautiful idea. It’s how things should be. (more…)

From the New York Times:

The number of organizations that can offer their donors a tax break in the name of charity has grown more than 60 percent in the United States, to 1.1 million, in just a decade.

Experts say nonprofits are skillfully exploiting the tax code’s broad and elastic definition of what constitutes such a charity, making it difficult for the Internal Revenue Service, which must bless them, to say no.

That is, they are following the letter of the law.

The agency approved 99 percent of the applications for public charity status last year, according to a new study by students at Stanford University — or more than one every 10 to 15 minutes…

Charity — people helping people without the government? Oy!

The $300 billion donated to charities last year cost the federal government more than $50 billion in lost tax revenue.

“Especially during these tough economic times, it’s troubling to hear we are increasing the number of these organizations at such a rapid pace,” said Representative Xavier Becerra, a California Democrat who is one of the few members of Congress to pay attention to the nonprofit sector.

“It’s not free,” Mr. Becerra said, “and so we need to do something to make sure taxpayers are getting a big enough benefit in return.”

Democrats view your money as their money. Money that belongs to the government, which knows better how to spend it.

Wisdom of crowds? Pffft!

Democrats think, when they take less of your earnings in taxes, they are giving you something.

Nitwit.

Not from Bruce Tinsley, but Newsday:

About 20 people picketed the offices of Newsday yesterday protesting the publishing of a Mallard Fillmore cartoon last Sunday and demanded that the editor, John Mancini, be fired for running the cartoon according to Editor & Publisher.

The cartoon depicts a large dinosaur chasing a smaller saying, “I’m not chasing you because you’re a pachycephalosaurus … I’m chasing you because you’re delicious” in which the small dinosaur responds, “Oh, thank goodness. I was worried that this might be a hate crime.” The cartoon ran a week after the first year anniversary of the death of an Ecuadorian immigrant at the hands of seven teenagers. Protestors felt that running the cartoon reduced hate crimes to a joke.

Newsday issued a statement saying, “we expect the cartoons we publish, many of which are nationally syndicated, to amuse, stir and entertain, but never to offend. Hate crime is a serious issue. This nationally syndicated cartoon should never have run and we have expressed our concern to the syndicator.”

Curious: the Fort Hood murderer yells “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire.

Do libs see that as a hate crime? No, they fret about potential hate crimes against innocent American Muslims as a backlash.

Mocking liberals will soon become a “hate crime.”

Charles Krauthammer:

What a surprise — that someone who shouts “Allahu Akbar” (the “God is great” jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre downplaying Nidal Hasan’s religious beliefs.

“I cringe that he’s a Muslim. … I think he’s probably just a nut case,” said Newsweek’s Evan Thomas. Some were more adamant. Time’s Joe Klein decried “odious attempts by Jewish extremists … to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs.” While none could match Klein’s peculiar cherchez-le-juif motif, the popular story line was of an Army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

They suffered. He listened. He snapped.

Really? What about the doctors and nurses, the counselors and physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who every day hear and live with the pain and the suffering of returning soldiers? How many of them then picked up a gun and shot 51 innocents?

And what about civilian psychiatrists — not the Upper West Side therapist treating Woody Allen neurotics, but the thousands of doctors working with hospitalized psychotics — who every day hear not just tales but cries of the most excruciating anguish, of the most unimaginable torment? How many of those doctors commit mass murder?

It’s been decades since I practiced psychiatry. Perhaps I missed the epidemic.

But, of course, if the shooter is named Nidal Hasan, whom National Public Radio reported had been trying to proselytize doctors and patients, then something must be found. Presto! Secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, a handy invention to allow one to ignore the obvious.

And the perfect moral finesse. Medicalizing mass murder not only exonerates. It turns the murderer into a victim, indeed a sympathetic one. After all, secondary PTSD, for those who believe in it (you won’t find it in DSM-IV-TR, psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), is known as “compassion fatigue.” The poor man — pushed over the edge by an excess of sensitivity.

Read it all.

by Burt Prelutsky

Back when I was a kid, the two major fears in America revolved around polio and Communism.  Because the first disease was so prevalent and so often fatal prior to the miraculous cures wrought by Dr. Albert Sabin and Dr. Jonas Salk, neither of whom managed to garner a Nobel Prize for their heroic efforts, children were kept out of public swimming pools and were discouraged from having too much physical activity.  It’s a wonder that our entire generation didn’t grow up to be hypochondriacs because if you were even slightly fatigued or had an aching back or a stiff neck, anguished parents started measuring you for an iron lung.

            The second disease, Communism, created its own form of hysteria.  During the late 40s and early 50s, we had A-bomb drills in public schools.  We grammar school kids were led to believe that in case the Russians hit L.A. with an atomic bomb, we would be safe so long as we dropped to the floor and huddled beneath our desks with our hands clasped tightly behind our necks.  As everyone knows, there’s nothing better than tiny hands to ward off the effects of atomic radiation.  To this day, I wonder who came up with that particular brainstorm.

            On the off-chance that the Russkies elected not to vaporize us, a lot of people were convinced that the plan to prevent tooth decay by introducing fluoride into our reservoirs was a Commie plot.  The fluoride, we were warned, would turn our brains to mush and make us easy prey for the Soviet Menace.  It’s taken about 60 years, but I am now convinced that the scaremongers were right.  How else to explain American liberals except by accepting that the Commies contaminated our water supply?

            The fact that most Americans haven’t turned into brain-dead zombies muttering “hope…change…hope…change” like those scary creatures in horror movies only goes to prove that people have different tolerances to tainted water, just as they do to alcohol, various viruses and Barack Obama’s voice.

            I mean, seriously, when Obama, during the campaign, spoke about judging him by the people he surrounded himself with, he pointed to Richard Lugar, Joe Biden and Warren Buffett, while drawing the curtain on Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and Rashid Khalidi.  These days, though, he surrounds himself with such visitors from a strange planet as Van Jones, Jeff Jones and Cass Sunstein.  I’m just wondering if it’s still okay for us to judge him by his associates.

            The MSM likened Obama to Abe Lincoln.  I guess their confusion was caused by  both men being skinny and from Illinois.  One major, rather obvious difference, though, is that Lincoln waged a war to preserve the Union.  Obama, on the other hand, would go to war to preserve such unions as the SEIU and the UAW.

            Liberals get all in a tizzy when they’re accused of hypocrisy, but it’s hard to escape the fact that while arguing for the redistribution of wealth, you never see such kazillionaires as George Soros, Dianne Feinstein, Jay Rockefeller, Charles Schumer or John Kerry, redistributing any of theirs or even paying a penny more in taxes than is absolutely required.  And, as we discovered when he was putting his administration together, Obama’s friends and colleagues quite often try to avoid paying any taxes at all.

            You also don’t see any of his political allies signing up for Obamacare or trading in their outrageously generous pension plans for Social Security.  These phonies are far worse than Marie Antoinette, who allegedly joked that if poor people couldn’t afford bread, they should eat cake.  What these creeps would have us eat is nowhere near as tasty or nutritious.

            Consider the fact that the late unlamented Ted Kennedy was a hero to the green movement even after he used his considerable clout to make certain that windmills, those essential items that would free us from our dependence on fossil fuels, didn’t interfere with the view from his estate.

            To fully appreciate how contemptible the left is, you merely have to note that whenever people oppose any item on Obama’s radical agenda, liberals follow Jimmy Carter’s lead and label them racists.  The majority of Americans voted for Obama last November and now, apparently millions of them, according to recent polls, are suffering from buyer’s remorse.  Is it really possible that they simply failed to notice on election day that they were voting for a black man?

            It reminds me of those various black basketball and football coaches who insist, when they’re fired for not winning enough games, that it’s because of their race, even though the people firing them are the very same people who hired them in the first place.

            Recently, some Americans were outraged when movie director Oliver Stone made a laudatory documentary about Hugo Chavez and then showed up with the Communist dictator at the Cannes Film Festival, where they bumped fists and naturally received a standing ovation.  It was enough to make me wish that Major Aldo Rayne had been there with his Inglorious Basterds to deal with Stone, Chavez and the assorted Euro-trash in attendance.

            Speaking of Stone and Chavez, there are those who wonder why lefties are so often drawn to tyrants.  Why is it, normal people ask, that those on the left looked so fondly on Stalin; why they adorn their walls with Che Guevara posters; why they wore those dopey caps with the red star and carted around Mao’s Little Red Book in the 60s; why Sean Penn went to Iraq to show his solidarity with Saddam Hussein; why, to this day, they will flock to Cuba and kiss Castro’s behind; why they will side with Hamas and Hezbollah, while accusing Israel of crimes against humanity; and why Thomas Friedman of the N.Y. Times will feel free to extol the virtues of one-party autocracies such as China.

            The answer is that they identify with tyrants.  They don’t oppose gulags on principle; they simply don’t wish to be sent to one.  That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t like to run one.  They also have a soft spot for dictators because they, themselves, are miserable excuses for human beings who look down on the masses as being ignorant, religious peons who, in a just world, would exist only to serve as organ donors.

            Don’t you ever find yourself wondering why liberals are happy to see Obama expanding the power and influence of the federal government, of appointing three dozen regulatory czars who answer only to him, of gobbling up major industrial and financial entities in a way reminiscent of Stalin and Hitler?  I mean, wouldn’t you think they’d dread the thought of a Republican president having all of that authority in the future?  After all, we have presidential elections every four years.  It’s not as if Obama could rule for 27 years like Mao, for 29 years like Stalin or for half a century like Castro.

            Shouldn’t those on the left be the least bit concerned that a Mitt Romney, a Rick Perry, a Bobby Jindal or, God forbid, a Sarah Palin could inherit all that power?

            After pondering that question, how can you avoid concluding that they simply have no intention of ever allowing that to happen?

Conservatives vs. liberals could be a subject for full course of study.

But this clip of Penn Gillette agonizing over a furious verbal attack on him by Tommy Smothers offers an interesting illustration. Smothers was enraged at Gillette for appearing on the Glenn Beck show.

The shorthand about the political divide has been this:

• conservatives view liberals as stupid
• liberals view conservatives as evil

I don’t think liberals are stupid. Academia is rife with liberals. That so many liberals are indeed smart and educated is what makes their political views so darn fascinating to ponder. For example, how could anyone still believe in collectivism? Or the UN?

But I do think many, many liberals regard conservatives as selfish — that’s because we favor market forces and meritocracy over government meddling in outcomes. They take this as not caring.

And many liberals do regard conservatives are evil, not just wrong. This makes their politics (in their minds) a righteous moral crusade that fulfills a fundamental psychological void.

As a conservative, I don’t think liberals are evil, and on some social issues, I tilt more liberal than conservative.

But liberals have caused great harm with their noble intentions — harm to millions of Africans who’ve died unnecessarily from malaria. Harm to millions of the American underclass who’ve been stunted by their welfare policies. Harm to world peace for believing that evil can be sweet talked.

Lately, I think of liberals as termites — creatures that incessantly nibble away at our fundamental rights, one seemingly righteous cause at a time. They are never happy, never sated. Which makes living with them so tiresome.

He’s not just wrong, he’s a suck up. Nobody is more doctrinaire and close-minded that a liberal Democrat. But they fancy themselves as free thinkers. Having grown up in the ’60s, I can attest that the most conventional thinkers (on politics, not culture) are my liberal friends.

Did you know that the United Nations observed October 1 as “International Day of Older Persons”? And that:

The theme this year is: “Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the International Year of Older Persons: Towards a Society for All Ages”.

Perfect: celebrating the celebration — that sounds about right for the U.N. and liberals in general.

Scotland really took it to heart, putting up wrinkly billboards to show how sensitive they are to the plight of old people.

They even did a video, sort of a Black Like Me for geezers.

What an inspiring fellow, that Chairman Mao — he killed nearly 70 million of his own people, but by golly, he stood up to the man!