David P. Goldman

America is the land of opportunity, and never before the great housing bubble has a Ponzi scheme drawn such a wide base of support and benefited so many people. This was the most democratic scam in history, and if you got in on the first half of it, you’re still better off. The big losers were not homeowners, but the bankers.

A quick look at the numbers shows how misinformed are the protesters running around Wall Street. Instead of picketing the bankers, they should pair off and picket each other. I ran through the numbers recently in an Asia Times Online essay. Here’s the story of the People’s Ponzi scheme in a nutshell:

Household real estate assets rose nearly two-and-a-half times from around $9 trillion in 1998 to $23 trillion at the peak of the bubble in 2006. Bank stocks (a pretty good proxy for bankers’ net worth, as most of compensation for management is in stock) had a smaller bounce, from around 80 on the KBW index to a 2006 peak of 117, a gain of less than 50%.

That’s not surprising, for households could buy a house with 5% or 10% down, and deduct the mortgage interest from their taxable income. A homeowner who bought a US$100,000 home with a $5,000 down payment doubled his original stake every year as home prices rose 10% per annum. Return on equity of 100% to 200% was common for homeowners; Goldman Sachs’ return on equity never made it above the mid-30% range…

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

– Shakespeare, Macbeth

Yesterday Michael Medved interviewed a woman named Melissa, a participant in the Occupy Wall Street show now playing on Wall Street. Medved was trying to pin down her objectives.

“Complete this sentence for me,” he asked. “We will consider our protest a success when…”

Melissa cut in, “It’s already a success. We’ve created a movement that’s taking off all over the country.” [I've paraphrased the exchange.]

So there you have it: the objective is to add voices to the choir. The fact that her choir has no coherent song to sing is beside the point. They are the change they’ve been waiting for, I suppose.

In Sacramento, a group of protestors gathered without a clear reason.

Organizer Anthony Bondi said he has what he referred to as a “message team” working on the primary goals of the local protests, which he admitted “was kind of vague.”

“That message team will reveal that tomorrow [Friday] morning,” Bondi said.

“So you guys are in the process of forming the reasons why you are here?” asked CBS13 reporter Tony Lopez.

“Exactly correct,” Bondi said.

Other protesters gave clearer reasons for their attendance, saying that wealth disparity and corruption in the business world are causing harm to society.

Ah, yes, there’s “corporate greed” also known as the profit motive. No doubt many of the attendees found out about the event via their iPhones.

Does Apple count as a greedy corporation? They sure as heck gouged their customers for years with very high profit margins, all the while convincing their customers they were rebels in the mold of Albert Einstein and MLK for buying their brand.

Does anyone with an iPhone in his pocket have the right to feel aggrieved because there are billionaires afoot?

Medved asked Melissa if she thought the world would be better if the stock exchange closed down. She said that wouldn’t happen, at least not right away. But she implied she’d like it to.

Their real cause is anti-capitalism, the very system that made America a rich country, so rich that America’s poor have cell phones, microwaves, TVs and enough food to be fat.

Unlike China where the poor are still dirt poor. In the 1980s, “60 Minutes” did a story on China. They showed Chinese tourists having their photo taken inside an automobile — it was the closest they’d get to owning one.

Then the Chinese Communists got smart. They looked around to see what system generated wealth: aha, capitalism. So they scrapped their Marxist folly and went for the big bucks. And in doing so, allowed 300 million Chinese to lift themselves out of poverty.

That’s an amazing achievement. Perhaps America should borrow from the Chinese and institute reeducation camps to teach basic economics and common sense.

Obama, who praised the protestors yesterday, should be the first to matriculate.

LA Times

Shayne Eastin, 27, of Los Angeles protests at Los Angeles City Hall on Sunday, part of Occupy Los Angeles. Eastin is trying to find work. “I am here to protest the top 1% of the population who pay little taxes while others are out of work,” she said.

Sweetheart, the top 1% pay 38% of all income taxes.

Let’s break that down for you using the “buffet” rule. Imagine 100 people gather for $10 buffet meal.

When the $1,000 bill comes:

• one person will pay $380 for their $10 meal
• 9 people will pay$35 each
• 50 people will pay 54 cents each

Is that news to you, Shayne?

Here’s a tip: don’t believe what President Obama says. He’s playing you for a fool.

Source: National Taxpayers Union

The loony left burps up another gem.

Janeane Garofalo: “Herman Cain is probably well liked by some of the Republicans because it hides the racist elements of the Republican party. Conservative movement and tea party movement, one in the same.

“People like Karl Rove liked to keep the racism very covert. And so Herman Cain provides this great opportunity say you can say ‘Look, this is not a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-gay movement. Look we have a black man.’”

Herman Cain has another view:

The one African-American running for the GOP presidential nomination said Wednesday the black community was ‘brainwashed’ for traditionally siding with liberal politicians.

“African-Americans have been brainwashed into not being open minded, not even considering a conservative point of view,” Godfather’s Pizza executive Herman Cain said on CNN’s “The Situation Room” in an interview airing Wednesday between 5-7 p.m. ET. “I have received some of that same vitriol simply because I am running for the Republican nomination as a conservative. So it’s just brainwashing and people not being open minded, pure and simple.”

Are voters in California crazy or just oblivious?

Consider the results of an LA Times opinion poll:

• 60% said they want Obama to “stand up to Republicans and fight for my priorities.”
• 60% (40% strongly, 20% somewhat) disapprove of how Obama is handling the economy
• 49% believe “slashing government spending to restrain the deficit will better lead to prosperity”

So the voters want Obama–the great big spender who has resisted any attempt to rein in spending–to stand up to the GOP, the party that is trying to slash government spending.

That helps to explain the mess we’re in.

And progressives fancy themselves as logical.

What a spooky lady — and she’s one of the architects of Obamacare!

Just think: she can’t imagine that opposition to raising minimum wage is to protect jobs. No, it’s a conspiracy to make poor people run up credit card debt to benefit bankers

Bonkers!

Van Jones, Obama’s one-time Green Jobs Czar until Glenn Beck outed him as a proud communist, is an excellent speaker. Much better that the oft vaunted Obama.

But he can’t think.

Jones’ brain is so hardwired with collectivist ideas, he cannot understand the world as it is. Being able to persuade but not able to reason is a dangerous combo.

Watch him at work in this video.

He has his audience believing they’ve been screwed, or as he says it, “We were robbed and somebody has our money.”

Who is “we?”

Ah, that’s the rub. Does a person free riding on welfare have the right to gripe? Are the 47% of Americans who pay no federal income taxes entitled to feel aggrieved?

Are the millions who borrowed money to buy houses they couldn’t afford victims when they’re foreclosed?

Jones would say yes, a thousand times yes.

For the umpteenth time I bring up this quote.

Selwyn Duke in American Thinker

Of all idiots, none is so useful as he who can masquerade as a genius.

MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky recently denounced Hugo Chavez, accusing the Venezuelan strongman of making an “assault” on his nation’s democracy and of cruelty with respect to a female judge he imprisoned for issuing an unwelcome ruling. The criticism made headlines, as the “renowned scholar” had long given aid and comfort to Ego-and-Mouth Chavez. In fact, when the leader denounced President Bush in an infamous 2006 U.N. address, it was Chomsky’s book Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance that he waved and used as a prop. And Chomsky often praises Venezuela’s socialist revolution, most recently saying, “It’s hard to judge how successful they [the Venezuelan socialists] are, but if they are successful they would be seeds of a better world.”

Well, socialism has only failed every time it’s been tried, but I guess Chomsky’s renowned intellect has finally figured out a way to do the same thing over and over again and achieve different results.

But some people never learn, and in our time they’re known as leftists. It’s bad enough when a starry-eyed teenager gloms onto a demagogue and then registers surprise when the scorpion acts in accordance with his nature, but it’s downright pathetic when an old man behaves as if he has been born yesterday.

And Chomsky, it seems, is continually born again yesterday. In the late 1970s, he defended the Khmer Rouge at the very time that those Cambodian communists were in the midst of a genocidal campaign that ultimately claimed 30 percent of their nation’s population. He steadfastly refused to believe reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities, calling them part of a “disinformation” campaign targeting a group that, he said, could usher in not only “national liberation but also … a new era of economic development and social justice.”

Now, understand that the Khmer Rouge weren’t “just” genocidal maniacs — something not unusual in the annals of communism. They formed what was perhaps the most cruel, bizarre, twisted, and incompetent government in modern history. Immediately upon taking power, they initiated their agrarian revolution, ordering the evacuation of Phnom Penh and other major urban centers; they even emptied hospitals and created a situation in which patients had to be pushed through the streets on hospital beds. They abolished the practice of religion; separated families; started history anew with their “Year Zero”; and murdered those showing signs of Western influence, such as the wearing of eyeglasses. And this is just a small sampling of what was a complete rending of every Cambodian tradition and institution (for more, click here).

Of course, Chomsky didn’t “know” about this. Oh, if he had actually walked the Cambodian killing fields, stepped over the thousands of human skulls and retched at the smell of rotting flesh — and, most particularly, if he had found himself in a re-education camp — he would have “known.” But he was too busy rationalizing. After all, he understood the facts of life: Communists are nice, social justice-oriented people. And they were being targeted by the big bad United States, the source of all the world’s woes. So it was obvious that all the negative stories about them were Western propaganda. Renowned intellectuals know these things…

The busybodies have decided to try and outlaw circumcision in San Francisco and in the Peoples’ Republic of Santa Monica.

Matthew Hess, the man behind the effort, may have shot himself in the crotch with his grotesquely anti-Semitic comic book, Foreskin Man.

A politically motivated comic book pitting a blond superhero called “Foreskin Man” against a sinister-looking “Monster Mohel” is causing a serious flap in California.

The colorful series was created by the “intactivist” group MGMBill.org as part of its campaign to ban circumcision through ballot initiatives.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is blasting it as overtly anti-Semitic.

“‘Foreskin Man,’ with its grotesque anti-Semitic imagery and themes, reaches a new low and is disrespectful and deeply offensive,” Nancy J. Appel, ADL Associate Regional Director, said in a statement Friday.

The online series portrays a menacing-looking mohel – someone specially trained to perform the traditional Jewish circumcision ceremony – waving bloody scissors over a screaming baby laid out on a pool table.

Will liberals who typically vote for this kind of intrusive government be turned off by the blatant anti-Semitic images?

Let’s hope so, for their sake.

Mark Steyn notes that:

In America, over 90 per cent of circumcised men are non-Jewish.

Around the world, 70 per cent of circumcised men are Muslim.

Wouldn’t it be more statistically representative for Mr Hess to show his, er, Caped Crusader zapping the minaret of the nearest mosque? Or would that risk attracting the attention of Fatwa Man?

Matthew Hess…any relation to Rudolf Hess?

Would you trust any of these clowns to teach your kids history? Civics?

I subscribed to Harper’s for 25 years until I got fed up with its liberal slant. What a shame.

Joe Carter at First Things tells how Harper’s published a loony left, conspiracy-laden tale of murder at Gitmo, then won a prestigious award.

…Horton’s article implies that from 2006 to 2009, an unprecedented conspiracy involving Army enlisted and officers, Navy enlisted and officers, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the Justice Department, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Bush administration, and the Obama administration in the murders and subsequent cover-up of three low-level prisoners at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Although such an elaborate story would be enough to give a 9/11 Truther pause, Horton, the editors of Harper’s, and the American Society of Magazine Editors think it is not only entirely plausible but that it actually happened.

You might think that for such an esteemed organization to award their top prize for reporting to such a story, there must be strong evidence in its support. But there isn’t. A journalism professor at any third-rate land-grant college would give a student an “D” for comparably shoddy research (and only give them a non-failing grade for producing such a creative effort).

Astonishingly, people who regard themselves as intelligent hang on Noam Chomsky’s every twisted word.

Not Christopher Hitchens.

Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism. This cognitive dissonance—to give it a polite designation—does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaida’s martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the “operation.” As far as I know, only leading British “Truther” David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.) In his recent article for Guernica magazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden’s claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky’s own claim to have won the Boston Marathon.

I can’t immediately decide whether or not this is an improvement on what Chomsky wrote at the time. Ten years ago, apparently sharing the consensus that 9/11 was indeed the work of al-Qaida, he wrote that it was no worse an atrocity than President Clinton’s earlier use of cruise missiles against Sudan in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centers of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. (I haven’t been back to check on whether he conceded that those embassy bombings were also al-Qaida’s work to begin with.) He is still arguing loudly for moral equivalence, maintaining that the Abbottabad, Pakistan, strike would justify a contingency whereby “Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.” (Indeed, equivalence might be a weak word here, since he maintains that, “uncontroversially, [Bush's] crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s.”) So the main new element is the one of intriguing mystery. The Twin Towers came down, but it’s still anyone’s guess who did it. Since “April 2002, [when] the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it ‘believed’ that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan,” no evidence has been adduced. “Nothing serious,” as Chomsky puts it, “has been provided since.”

As if determined to prove three things about ultraliberals — that they’re humorless, grouchy and self-righteous– a University of  Iowa prof got nasty over an email invitation to the campus GOP’s “Coming out Week.”

Ellen Lewin, a professor of Anthropology and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies in the Department of Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, sent a vulgar response [“#*@% [F-Word] YOU, REPUBLICANS] to a College Republican email about the group’s, “Conservative Coming Out Week.”

Campus politics today are such that openly declaring oneself conservative is akin to admitting homosexuality in the 1950s.

Lewin, who pulls down $94,800, defended her nasty, hurtful, insensitive and uncivil language, noting that:

“This is a time when political passions are inflamed, and when I received your unsolicited email, I had just finished reading some newspaper accounts of fresh outrages committed by Republicans in government.  I admit the language was inappropriate, and apologize for any affront to anyone’s delicate sensibilities.  I would really appreciate your not sending blanket emails to everyone on campus, especially in these difficult times.”

Political passions are often inflamed, particularly by thin-skinned academics who spew angry invective over a mild joke.

But she wasn’t done.

I should note that several things in the original message were extremely offensive, nearly rising to the level of obscenity.  Despite the Republicans’ general disdain for LGBT rights you called your upcoming event “conservative coming out day,” appropriating the language of the LGBT right movement.   Your reference to the Wisconsin protests suggested that they were frivolous attempts to avoid work.  And the “Animal Rights BBQ” is extremely insensitive to those who consider animal rights an important cause.

So F-you is okay, but satire is offensive. Where is Orwell when we need him?

Things got violent in jolly ole England over the weekend. The crowd gathered to bitch about spending cuts. Everybody sing!

Britain is broke but I don’t care.
Hoo-hah, hoo-hah.
Britain is broke but I don’t care.
Jes keep the cash coming my way.
All the live-long day.

The photo below is one from a story in the Daily Mail.

Mark Steyn was there and writes:

I chance to be passing through London today. Picked the wrong afternoon for it. Every sleepy side-street in this normally agreeable corner of Mayfair is awash with union heavies and other unlovely types who’ve wandered loose from the supposedly half-million-strong protest march against alleged government “spending cuts” – of which, in fact, there are distressingly few.

As I write, I am approximately fifty feet from the scene of this balaclava-ed anarchist’s heroic stand. Looks rather less exciting in close-up, I have to report. The livelier lads have already rampaged through Fortnum & Mason, the upscale Piccadilly emporium, and attacked the Ritz. Obvious targets, you might say. But I found it more poignant earlier in the day when I went to a favorite coffee place hoping to enjoy a beverage outside on a pleasant spring day as the massed ranks of British layabouts marched by. Instead, the Polish and Balkan baristas were hurriedly dragging in all the sidewalk tables and chairs before the Socialist Workers’ Party chaps showed up in search of projectiles. Nobody in the Socialist Workers’ Party actually works, which is one reason why it’s Mitteleuropeans frothing your coffee rather than any of the natives.

Still, on balance I prefer the class-war thugs trashing the joint, who at least have the courage of their convictions. The “nice” people bussed in from the shires struck me as some of the most stupid people I’ve ever met anywhere on the planet. One elderly lady from Yorkshire told me she was there because her grandson’s university fees were likely to go up. I was in a cranky mood because I hadn’t had my coffee. “You can protest all you like,” I said. “But this country’s broke, so all you’re doing is postponing its reacquaintanceship with reality, and ensuring that your grandson and his contemporaries are going to be stuck with the tab because you guys spent their future.” I pointed out that in her part of the world – northern England – as in Wales and Northern Ireland, the state accounts for three-quarters of the economy. And it’s still not enough for the likes of her and her pals.

She stared at me blankly. “Well, I don’t want to argue,” she said politely. “I just think it’s a disgrace.” In a democracy, there are not many easy ways back from insane levels of “social” spending, and certainly not when the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition panders to the mob by comparing them to anti-apartheid activists. Judging from the many marchers partial to robotic, pseudo-ethnic West African drumming, the British left’s plan is presumably for the entire country to relaunch itself as the world’s least rhythmic percussion ensemble.

Finally, there were the radical Islamists making their pitch.

…just seeing this clown’s smug face makes me want to clobber him with a 2×4.

Warning: foul language and rampant stupidity.

Obama’s old terrorist pal, Bill Ayers, got himself educated but he never got wise.

Here he is, at 66, blathering like an undergrad.

I want to build an educated city, a school without walls where we can live in search of, rather than in accommodation to. I want us to accept ourselves as works-in-progress, searching and unfinished, on the move in a dynamic, going world, with Chicago our commons, our performance space, and our workshop.

De-couple education from schooling: all human beings are learning from birth until death—learning, like eating and breathing, is entirely natural. It’s wasteful to think of education as a K-12 affair, or to think of education as preparation for life rather than life itself.

I want a city poised to learn more in order to achieve more in terms of human enlightenment and freedom.

An educated city would take seriously the notion that residents are the sovereign, neither objects to manipulate nor subjects to be ruled. Education, formal and informal, would become focused on the creation of public citizens…

Yes, and as sovereigns, we would be free to throw off the yoke of the teacher’s unions that have throttled school reform.

Power to the People!

Powerline:

The Center for American Progress is generally regarded as a front for the Obama administration. Its President and CEO is John Podesta, formerly Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff and the chairman of Barack Obama’s transition team. CAP is lavishly funded by George Soros and several other left-wing billionaires. It runs, among other things, a web site called Think Progress, which cranks out a steady stream of slimy hit pieces for the benefit of the Obama administration and the far left.

Soros apparently believes that only left-wing billionaires should be able to participate in public discourse, so his Center for American Progress, through its web site, has carried on a bizarre vendetta against Charles and David Koch and their company, Koch Industries. The Kochs are two of the very few billionaires who are active in politics on the conservative/libertarian side, a phenomenon that apparently drives left-wing billionaires wild with rage. I’m not sure why; maybe they think the Kochs are traitors to their class. In any event,Think Progress has stalked the Koch brothers with video cameras and produced one false, over-the-top attack on the Kochs after another, some of which we have had fun dissecting here.

As part of its ongoing obsession with all things Koch, Think Progress has attacked Congressman Mike Pompeo, who represents Kansas’ 4th Congressional district. Wichita, where Koch Industries’ headquarters is located, is in the 4th district. The 4th district seat was open in 2010, and Pompeo was the Republican nominee. Not surprisingly, the Koch brothers, who are Republicans, supported Pompeo, as did many Koch employees. (Koch Industries employs well over 2,000 people in the 4th district.) The 4th is strongly Republican, and Pompeo easily defeated his Democratic opponent, Raj Goyle, with 59 percent of the vote.

This may be the ultimate dog-bites-man story: Republicans support Republican candidate in Republican district! Republican candidate wins, despite opposition from goofball, Communist-leaning web sites! Not only that, having taken his seat, the Republican proceeds to vote with his fellow Republicans!

Nevertheless, Think Progress has found Pompeo’s Republican behavior to be sinister.

Via Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit.

It didn’t take long for the usual suspects to blame the Japanese earthquake on global warming. But this claim isn’t new. Remember this?

Then there’s the sexy babe explanation:

A SENIOR Iranian cleric says women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.

Iran is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, and the cleric’s unusual explanation for why the earth shakes follows a prediction by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that a quake is certain to hit Tehran and that many of its 12 million inhabitants should relocate.

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi said.

Ed Driscoll writes about the Angry Left, those malignant malcontents who will never, ever find satisfaction.

They can’t because their Sisyphean mission is to perfect the world, which is naturally imperfect.

They make a lot of trouble, but can be fun to watch.

Back in mid-2008, Jim Geraghty spotted the white-hot anger that Obama-supporting “progressives” aimed towards Hillary Clinton, her husband Bill, Hillary-supporting Geraldine Ferraro, and even Hillary’s voters in the presidential primaries, and wondered just what was going on. This was only a year and half after the left attempted to sandbag Joe Lieberman, going so far as to picture him in blackface at the Huffington Post, just six years after nominating him to be Al Gore’s veep. And it was months before Sarah Palin became a household name, in part because of the left’s wrath being directed at her. One expects the tolerant, progressive, diversity-obsessed left to cling bitterly towards its anger to conservatives, but not towards each other — and certainly not with this level of vitriol.

As Jim wrote on Friday, the Angry Left, having turned on the man they elected to the White House, came full circle this week:

Once you start marinating in this nastiness, it starts to seep into how you think and speak, and perhaps you can’t turn it off. It is now defining the Left. Michael Moore. Bill Maher. Joy Behar. It didn’t just stay in the grassroots and celebrities; it came to the halls of Congress with Alan Grayson.

We on the right hated Hillary Clinton back in the 1990s. Then the 2008 campaign comes along, Hillary is perceived to be the less liberal candidate than Obama, and suddenly Air America’s Randi Rhodes is calling her a “big [f-word]ing whore.” This is Hillary Clinton we’re talking about. Ten years earlier, almost every Democrat in America loved her, and we were the ones calling her names. But once she’s not their preferred choice, they can turn on her and denounce her in the same tone they would use to denounce a conservative Republican.

And now, finally, it comes full circle. Now they’re sneering at Obama. Their guy. The guy whom they adored, perhaps as much as any party has ever adored its leader, in 2007 and 2008. Now they say, “[F-word] him.”

Hey, pal, that’s the President of the United States. Show some respect.

(How did it come to the point where we have to be the ones to demand that?)

And of course, concurrent with that fire and brimstone rage is the desire to create messianic figures out of perfectly ordinary politicians — witness first the transformation of Al Gore from Bill Clinton’s vaguely wonkish veep and robotic board-stiff failed presidential candidate in 2000 to The Goracle, maaan, followed in very short succession by the deification of political neophyte Barack Obama. This early 2008 quote from JournoList founder Ezra Klein hints at the frenzy to come throughout that year:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

Zombie Time has a hilarious send up: “Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco” with dozens of photos and a few videos.

A great reminder of how many insane people live in the city by the bay.

Wesley Pruden:

Anyone who expects a nice, quiet run-up to the 2012 election, with lots of civility, good manners and prim refinement can forget about it. President Obama thinks nobody is really mad about what he’s done, they just want a little soothing syrup on it. He promises better speeches to describe the same old soggy dish the dogs won’t touch.

This is the “no change” and “more of the same” the Democrats on the left — just about the only Democrats remaining — heartily embrace. Daily Kos, the blog that affects to speak for the George Soros wingnuts on the left, echoes the president’s sentiments, and concludes that it was the Grand Old Party that the wave of Nov. 2 left in ruins and rubble. Talk about a man with imagination.

“Democrats didn’t lose because Republicans are suddenly popular, or people embrace their agenda,” he says. “Democrats lost because people are angry and desperate and flailing and had to punish someone for the nation’s economic woes. There’s little there for the GOP to build on.” Mr. Kos, whose mother knows him as Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, celebrates the ethnic cleansing that all but banished white Southerners and Blue Dogs from the party. “It’s hard to argue that the Dems should move [to the] right … we can focus on the important thing, and that’s beating back [John] Boehner … and the crazed teabaggers that have taken over the GOP.”

His first order of business would be to bring back Howard Dean, not necessarily kicking but surely screaming, to run the Democratic National Committee and plot comeback strategy for 2012. Harry Reid would continue as Mr. Obama’s go-fer and Nancy Pelosi would be the gift that keeps on giving.

The party that for more than a century relied on the yellow dogs — white Southerners who would vote for a yellow dog before casting a vote for a Republican — has thrown nearly all of them on the street. Of 105 seats in a wide arc stretching from the Potomac to Texas, only 16 white Democrats will be seated in the new House of Representatives in January. Such faithful Democrats as Gene Taylor of Mississippi (10 terms), John M. Spratt J. of South Carolina (14 terms), and Rick Boucher of Virginia (14 terms) were washed into the sea of voter forgetfulness…

The “waging war” bit seems a bit overheated.

Still, the clowns on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals– the most leftwing and most overturned court in the nation — must be nuts to rule that a foreign nation has legal standing in our internal affairs.

Do they believe Mexico or any of the others has a right to send their citizens to our nation? Probably. Who put those idiots on the court? Democrats.

HT: Susan Gertson

BANGALORE: A historic decision to reserve one seat each in its 52 postgraduate departments for transgenders and slapping a penalty of Rs. 5 lakh on 11 B.Ed. colleges for admission and examination malpractices were among the key resolutions approved by Bangalore University’s Academic Council here on Monday.

Vice-Chancellor N. Prabhu Dev said the provision to reserve seats for transgenders under the supernumerary quota would be in addition to the existing reservation. “It will lapse if nobody comes forward,” he said.

Alas, no one taught the boy responsibility.

From a long profile in the June 7, New Yorker of Julian Assange, the force behind WikiLeaks.

…Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told me. In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled, sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. “I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,” he recalled. He absorbed a large vocabulary, but only later did he learn how to pronounce all the words that he learned.

When Assange was eight, Claire left her husband and began seeing a musician, with whom she had another child, a boy. The relationship was tempestuous; the musician became abusive, she says, and they separated. A fight ensued over the custody of Assange’s half brother, and Claire felt threatened, fearing that the musician would take away her son. Assange recalled her saying, “Now we need to disappear,” and he lived on the run with her from the age of eleven to sixteen. When I asked him about the experience, he told me that there was evidence that the man belonged to a powerful cult called the Family—its motto was “Unseen, Unknown, and Unheard.” Some members were doctors who persuaded mothers to give up their newborn children to the cult’s leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The cult had moles in government, Assange suspected, who provided the musician with leads on Claire’s whereabouts. In fact, Claire often told friends where she had gone, or hid in places where she had lived before.

While on the run, Claire rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange would go there to write programs on a Commodore 64, until Claire bought it for him, moving to a cheaper place to raise the money. He was soon able to crack into well-known programs, where he found hidden messages left by their creators. “The austerity of one’s interaction with a computer is something that appealed to me,” he said. “It is like chess—chess is very austere, in that you don’t have many rules, there is no randomness, and the problem is very hard.” Assange embraced life as an outsider. He later wrote of himself and a teen-age friend, “We were bright sensitive kids who didn’t fit into the dominant subculture and fiercely castigated those who did as irredeemable boneheads.”

When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yet—this was 1987—but computer networks and telecom systems were sufficiently linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teen-agers with the requisite technical savvy could traverse. Assange called himself Mendax—from Horace’s splendide mendax, or “nobly untruthful”—and he established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all#ixzz0uuFjxwtz

Think Progress, a leftist organization, cut together a video purporting to show rabid racists at a Tea Party gathering.

Too bad for them that other video contradicted their point.

Watch the videos here.

Hint to “progressives” — libeling your political opponents as racist is not progress.

The tubby, wealthy polemicist gets called out for stealing video and photos.

Karina Longworth of the Village Voice does not care for Oliver Stone’s latest.

So one-sided that it nearly validates what the Right says about Hollywood’s liberal crusaders, Oliver Stone’s essay/lecture/travelogue South of the Border is propaganda in the form of a home movie, documenting Stone’s summer vacation spent in the collegial company of the figureheads of various South American states.

About 10 minutes in, the iconic filmmaker appears onscreen for the first time alongsideHugo Chávez, the charismatic, controversial leader of Venezuela. This is not a sit-down interview; the filmmaker isn’t directing questions at Chávez, or apparently directing much of anything—they’re just hanging out. Afforded extraordinarily casual access to Chávez, Raúl Castro, the Kirchners of Argentina, Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo, and other heads of state, Stone generally allows his subjects to set the course of conversation, avoiding not only the tough questions about their records on human rights and allegations of corruption, but also pretty much any question that might get in the way of each leader’s sales pitch for his regime, or the notion of the U.S. as the big, bad man holding them down.

Stone and Chávez seem especially palsy-walsy: They kick around a soccer ball, kick it on Chávez’s private jet, and casually shoot the shit about how Chávez is a misunderstood man of the people, unfairly demonized by the media. Later, when it’s mentioned that Lugo owes money to the International Monetary Fund, Stone cracks, “Chávez will loan you that if I ask him.” His crush on Chávez is such that he avoids interrogating not only his politics, but also his demonstrated tendency to pitch those politics via a kind of over-the-top comic public theater.

And yet Stone raises the specter of media manipulation when it suits him, devoting a whole section of the film to sympathetically presenting Chávez’s argument that during the failed coup attempt of 2002, the Venezuelan media were so in the tank for his political opponents that they edited footage of rioting in the streets to make it look as if Chávez’s supporters instigated a fire fight. The construction of false realities for political gain is the subject of much of Stone’s own work—so why is he content to take each leader’s practiced-for-the-camera spiel at face value, never pushing for information or conducting interviews on any deeper level than a photo op? South of the Border’s subjects are masters at cooking bullshit, and Stone just eats it up.

This is how the anti-capitalists behaved at the G20 summit. By contrast, last summer the Tea Partiers left the Washington Mall cleaner than they found it.

Who did the media determine were a danger?

More images here.