And who doesn’t?

NOT TO WORRY, THOUGH

…Steven Chu has a Nobel Prize!

Mark Steyn:

“Just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge – a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s Secretary of Energy. Scientists at our national labs and experts from academia and other oil companies have also provided ideas and advice.

“As a result of these efforts, we’ve directed BP to mobilize additional equipment and technology.”

Excellent. The president directed his Nobel Prize-winning Head of Meetings to assemble a meeting to tackle the challenge of mobilizing the assembling of the tackling of the challenge mobilization, at the end of which they directed BP to order up some new tackle and connect it to the thingummy next to the whachamacallit. Thank you, Mr. President. That and $4.95 will get you a venti oleaginato at Starbucks.

Better call up Bill Ayers for another nautical metaphor, because auto-presidencies don’t write themselves like autobiographies do:

My colleague Rich Lowry suggested the other day that most people not on the Gulf coast aren’t really that bothered about the spill, and that Obama has allowed himself to be blown off course entirely unnecessarily. There may be some truth to this: For most of America, this is a Potemkin crisis. But what better kind to trip up a Potemkin leader? So the president has now declared war on the great BP spill – Gulf War 3! – and in this epic conflict the Speechgiver-in-Chief will surely be his own unmanned drone:

“I fired off a speech

But the British kept a-spillin’

Twice as many barrels as there was a month ago

I fired off a speech

But the British kept a-spillin’

Up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico…”

Chris Matthews and the other leg-tinglers invented an Obama that doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, they’re stuck with the one that does, and it will be interesting to see whether he’s capable of plugging the leak in his own support. If not, who knows what the tide might wash up?

Memo to Secretary Rodham Clinton: Do you find yourself of a quiet evening with a strange craving for chicken dinners and county fairs in Iowa and New Hampshire, maybe next summer? Need one of those relaunch books to explain why you’re getting back in the game in your country’s hour of need?

“It Takes A Spillage.”

Speaking of, this is also terrifying: the prospect of a giant, un-corkable sea-bed rupture. More at The Oil Drum.

Pray.

Thomas Sowell offers up some graduation-day advice worth heeding:

Every year about this time, big-government liberals stand up in front of college-commencement crowds across the country and urge the graduates to do the noblest thing possible — become big-government liberals.

What I would like to see is someone with the guts to tell those students: Do you want to be of some use and service to your fellow human beings? Then let your fellow human beings tell you what they want — not with words, but by putting their money where their mouth is.

It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader.

Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing “compassion” for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.

And it’s a resounding testimony to the power of capitalism that it’s managed to so greatly increase the quality of life not just here but worldwide — despite and not because of the stranglehold inflicted on it by those oh-so-noble Big Government liberals. Imagine how much better off we’d be by weakening that choking embrace, instead of extending its iron grip.

“All My Terror Pals (Have Settled In)…”–Country legend Hank Hussein, Jr., from the album “Kenya Kountry Klassics and Kriss Kraft Kommissars”

WND:

The flotilla was organized by the Free Gaza Movement, a coalition of leftist human rights activists and pro-Palestinian groups engaged in attempts to break a blockade imposed by Israel on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Ayers, Dohrn and Evans’ Code Pink have led several recent Free Gaza Movement initiatives, including attempted marches into the Gaza Strip. Dorhn was in the Middle East just last month on behalf of the movement.

Ayers and Dohrn were close associates for years with President Obama, while Evans was a fundraiser and financial bundler for Obama’s presidential campaign.

I told you that old sea-dog Billy Ayers could really turn a nautical phrase!

Weekly Standard:

The Turkish nonprofit [IHH] belongs to a Saudi-based umbrella organization known to finance terrorism called the Union of Good (Ittilaf al-Kheir in Arabic). Notably, the Union is chaired by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who is known best for his religious ruling that encourages suicide attacks against Israeli civilians.

In 2006, both the U.S. government and the United Nations designated the IIRO branch offices in Indonesia and the Philippines for financing al Qaeda. French magistrate Jean-Louis Brougiere also testified that IHH had an “important role” in Ahmed Ressam’s failed “millennium plot” to bomb the Los Angeles airport in late 1999.

The U.S. government, it should be noted, also views the Union of Good as a terrorist organization. … U.S. Treasury announced the umbrella group’s leaders as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT), stating that the group was “created by Hamas leadership to transfer funds to the terrorist organization.”

… The Treasury, drawing from declassified documents, stated unequivocally that the Union of Good “compensated Hamas terrorists by providing payments to the families of suicide bombers.

Five boats were boarded peacefully. Only on the sixth boat loaded with terrorists was there violence, as they chanted slogans celebrating the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arabia by Muhammed.

There is no “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza. Only a terrorism crisis. Tons of supplies come in all the time. Indeed, the UN treating these people as permanent welfare pets is part of the problem.

Why don’t these “activists” ever yell at Egypt? After all, Egypt has miles of border with Gaza. You see, it’s not about helping Gazans, it’s about attacking Israel.

This is just an attempt to get the naval blockade stopped, so missiles may be transported freely into Hamas-stan and then fired at Israel’s cities…yet another Bill Ayers bombing campaign!

Liberals thought they were being “nice” when they humored Arafat, letting him murder our diplomats with impunity. Instead, they have turned the Palestinian people into the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the earth.

Europeans and leftists will yammer about “proportionality”, but if Europeans could do proportionality, the Jews would have never been forced to flee Europe. Masquerading as occupiers of the moral high ground, leftist Europeans are merely trying to save their own skins from Iran’s Bomb or their own Islamist Fifth Columns.

Q: What Smells So Fishy?
A: The New Euro-Vichy.

Which is just like the old Vichy in its pro-Nazi nastiness. And is not improved by the presence of the same old tired commies, too.

Okay, this is all well and good and all, and my hat’s off to these guys for their dedication and effort. But really, there’s no way in hell I could ever see anybody other than Nathan Fillion as Captain Mal. I just can’t get my head around it. And honestly, I don’t really want to.

(Via Insty)

BUT NOT OVER

Jules Crittenden:

From beyond the grave, Ted Kennedy keeps spending your money.

The Herald:

With $38.3 million in federal earmarks already secured for the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, Sen. John F. Kerry and Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Malden) have in recent days tapped the government for $30 million more in the next budget. …

“If the Kennedy family wants to honor the family they should find a way to fund it themselves,” said David E. Williams of Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington nonprofit group.

“They should be looking for private funding,” he said. “They’re using federal taxpayers as the funder of first resort. We need to be the funder of last resort.”

Williams and other critics called it “ridiculous” and an “egregious waste” that supporters want to siphon $28.9 million of the funding from the Defense Department budget alone. Nearly $19 million of that is already signed into law.

“It’s hard to fathom the defense-related portion of this project,” said Steve Ellis, a vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a fiscal watchdog group.

He said “fathom”. heh heh.

It’s not hard to understand at all; a school that teaches liberals how to pick their neighbors’ pockets, bleeding the taxpayers dry to finance the vanity of the wealthy while siphoning money from our national defense.

If that isn’t the perfect monument to Ted Kennedy, I’ll eat my love letter to the KGB.

As Crittenden says,

Allow me to suggest a tasteful architectural water feature, with a bridge.

The reflecting pool is free.

The life jackets and the Sympathy Neck Brace(tm) will run you $60 million, though. For starters.

And I yam most definitely with Stossel:

We know that conservatives want government to conserve traditional values. They say they’re for limited government, but they’re pro-drug war, pro-immigration restriction and anti-abortion, and they often support “nation-building.”

And so-called liberals? They tend to be anti-gun and pro-choice on abortion. They favor big, powerful government — they say — to make life kinder for people.

By contrast, libertarians want government to leave people alone — in both the economic and personal spheres. Leave us free to pursue our hopes and dreams, as long as we don’t hurt anybody else.

Ironically, that used to be called “liberal,” which has the same root as “liberty.” Several hundred years ago, liberalism was a reaction against the stifling rules imposed by aristocracy and established religion.

I wish I could call myself “liberal” now. But the word has been turned on its head. It now means health police, high taxes, speech codes and so forth.

So I can’t call myself a “liberal.” I’m stuck with “libertarian.” If you have a better word, please let me know.

Oh, I dunno, John; except for the flaky, unworkable isolationism found in some of the more rigid precincts of libertarianism, I’m perfectly fine with the word, myself.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

“I asked my daughter, Amy, what was the great problem we face today and she told me nuclear proliferation.”–Jimmy Carter

If Jimmy Carter can put Amy in charge of nuclear missiles, why can’t this guy bring his kids to work? They’re just little kids, so I’m sure they were searched thoroughly at the airport.

Lighten up, people.

A very humane, very touching and warm and, well, sweet (and decidedly non-political) piece from Doc Zero. No excerpt, just read it.

How is it that liberals are always the ones screaming about the horrors of “right-wing,” “Christianist,” “Teabagger” violence…and also the ones perpetrating all the actual violence, going all the way back to Ayers and Dorn? Granted, her repeated murderous outbursts weren’t politically motivated. But can anyone possibly doubt that, if she had ever once voted or offered the slightest, most anecdotal verbal support for a Republican, the words “right-wing extremist” would have found their way into the liberal-media headlines about her?

Update! Donald points out something else the liberal media ain’t exactly all over here: this Lefty killer was apparently a RACIST, too.

Betcha Obama’s Purpleshirts are waterboarding him right now. Given the man-caused disaster he inflicted on King Crapweasel’s election-fraud organization, there’s no telling what kind of terrorism he’s been up to. It’s a lead pipe cinch that he’ll be treated more harshly for his crime against the State than any jihadist ever will be by our ruling junta.

Totten interviews Hitchens. Boy, would I have loved to sit in on that one.

Hitchens: Do know anyone in Iraqi Kurdistan who actually prays five times a day?

MJT: No.

Hitchens: And you’re not going to, either. They have just as much a claim to being Muslims, Sunni Muslims, as anybody else, yet no jihadist from Birmingham went to help the Kurds when they were being genocided — or Anfalled — by Saddam’s atheist state.

The answer to your question is self-hatred, this belief that only true Muslims would want to fight against us…

It has to be, always, the most embittered, the most fanatical, the most absolutist, and the most totalitarian. This is a real poisonous phenomenon, and we refuse to give it its real name because of a combination of ignorance and what I would call multicultural masochism.

If Major Hasan were in the Turkish army, he would not have been offered a promotion after he lectured his fellow medical officers about how “we love death more than they love life.” I don’t think in Turkey he would have made it.

MJT: Nope. In Turkey he would not have made it.

Hitchens: But he made it in Texas. And nobody wanted to report him because it could have gotten them a black mark on their own dossier for possibly being an intolerant person. This is madness.

The Christian churches have been terrible about this, as have many liberal Jews, by saying we must extend a hand. No, we must not. We must withdraw the hand.

…Underneath this indulgence, Michael, this lenience we inflict on ourselves and others, is a vague feeling among millions in the West that Islam is somehow the religion of millions of the oppressed third world, of the brown-skinned, and of the black-skinned in Somalia and Nigeria. What I call the cultural cringe is involved. It’s subliminal, but it’s played on by terms like Islamophobia coined by the propaganda of the other side. It’s designed to make you feel bad even if you don’t like it. It’s thought crime. The attempt is to make Islamophobia something you’ll be as reluctant to be accused of as being a racist.

Actually, from some people I don’t even care if I’m being called a racist. Their standards have become so low that it doesn’t hurt like it should.

Two very smart guys who have been there and done that having a conversation on the issues of the day over cocktails. Yeah, I’d love to have been there. Ah well; reading about it is a pleasure, too. Lots of good stuff here; another fine, worthwhile effort from Mike. Good job, buddy.

I’ve been remiss in not mentioning two things here yet: first, Scott Brown’s campaign in Massachusetts, which represents the last desperate hope, slim reed though it is, of stopping socialized medicine in America — temporarily, of course, because the Democrat Socialists will never, ever stop trying for it. Probably the best place to check for info and links is Sissy’s; she’s been all over this one from the git-go.

And second, the esteemed Stacy McCain’s new digs. Whilst checking out his new joint yestiddy, I realized that he’s not on the blogroll here, which egregious and inexcusable oversight has been corrected. Sorry about that, Stace.

My boss sends this, uhh, touching story along:

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. – Tennessee investigators say a 4-year-old boy was found roaming his neighborhood in the night, drinking beer and wearing a little girl’s dress taken from under a neighbor’s Christmas tree.

The child’s mother, 21-year-old April Wright, told WTVC-TV that the boy “wants to go to jail because that’s where his daddy is.”

Wright said she and the boy’s father are going though a divorce.

Hamilton County Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Janice Atkinson said the incident is being investigated but the department declined to release the report.

The boy’s mother said she met with child protective services and was told she will get to keep custody of her son.

I don’t often find myself speechless, but…I’m speechless.

An all-too-brief appreciation of her over at JWF. Halle Berry? Don’t make me laugh, fool.

Update! Michelle Pfeiffer rocked the ol’ Catsuit pretty damned hard herself, I feel compelled to add.

Well, for me, anyway:

‘Sons of Anarchy’ finale hits ratings high, scores Season 3 renewal
More than 4.3 million viewers tuned in to Tuesday’s season finale of FX’s “Sons of Anarchy,” making it the most-watched episode in the series’ history.

And by God, I was one of ‘em.

The 10 p.m. event also topped rankings among men 18 to 49 and men 18 to 34. On Wednesday afternoon the network announced it had ordered a third season.

“The success of ‘Sons of Anarchy’ is very gratifying, and the show has become a bona-fide hit,” said FX President-General Manager John Landgraf said.

Love that damned show. It ain’t perfect, of course, but it’s about as real a slice of biker life as you’re ever likely to get on TV. Good writing, good acting, lots of action, lots of cussin’, some nudity now and then, bikes — what the hell’s not to like? And any show that features Peg Bundy as an iron-hard, tattooed, tough-as-nails biker wench has my vote from the git-go.

For anyone who might be interested, the show was the subject of my regular column in the mag I work for a while back, which is available for perusal here (link might not be entirely work-safe, just so’s ya know).

Bill sums up San Francisco:

San Francisco is a playground for rich, spoiled brats, and an underclass that serves their pleasures. It will continue to be such until it finally sinks into the sort of bankruptcy that makes it a less pleasant playground for rich, spoiled brats, and they leave.

Until then, though, don’t be surprised by anything that happens here. I’m certainly not.

That’s about the size of it, really.

I WAS TOLD THERE WOULD BE NO QUIZ

A: When the bench is a deck chair on Rock Star Lines’ HMS Titanic Moral Vanity.

Mike has the whole sorry story on the castaway’s ill-fated Three Hour Grandstanding for Gaia-Tour here. If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the minnow-sized moral moment would be lost.

Clearly, we’re in the wrong business, Mike. This Expedition About Nothing cost the British taxpayers £150,000, about a quarter-million US. You could dry clean the burkas of a London imam’s 5 welfare wives for a year with that kind of money.

Alert the orphans, Tiny Tim–all their problems are solved! Surely a country rich enough to indulge artistes building a bus-bench on an iceberg has solved all its real problems. And the fuel oil used to haul them there was no doubt made from carbon-capturing Unicorn waste!

I wouldn’t really care–but our own NEA looks to their European betters for guidance in how to extract pelf from the peons and waste it on ugly art and preening poseurs. Chesterton:

“Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. But the artists find it harder.”

How ’bout a federally-funded Bass-Fishing Tour instead?

Nah–they’d just end up taxing our singing bass’s off.

And we’d end up on a park bench on some iceberg somewhere.

Great post overall, but with a wee bit of unjustified confusion:

CNN ran 24/7 in our watch center, and we stood and watched it that evening as Germans from both sides of the Wall began tearing it down with their own hands. For most of us, the Wall had been there our entire lives, the symbol of Marxist oppression and totalitarianism. It seemed fitting – inspiring – amazing – to see the people themselves pulling it apart and climbing over it. I don’t think there was a dry eye on our watch floor. This was it. The Wall was coming down, removed in pieces, like a pile of garbage, like a big clean-up operation, by a determined people. The oldest person on our watch floor was a crusty first-class petty officer, a Russian linguist, in his forties, and even his eyes were suspiciously moist. “Guess I’m out of a job,” he said with a watery chuckle.

Never again would Berlin be the Soviet Union’s hostage, a geopolitical football, the human guarantee of the West’s behavior. What was broken was not the “Germans,” or the “Russians,” or any other people out there: what was broken was the back of predatory Soviet Marxism, that which had held people enslaved, imprisoned, silent, and terrified, and had perennially sought new territory over which to extend its brutal control. Berlin was one of the oldest pressure points of the Cold War, her status hammered out through decades of armed posturing and painful uncertainty – and now she was free. This was it. We dared to say it to ourselves that night, marveling and barely comprehending the import of it: “The Cold War is over.”

Reagan had gone to Berlin and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” – and here it was, coming down. Of course, he prepared his battlespace before making that demand; it was not only the words that mattered. But the words did matter. No American president had uttered them before…

Maybe you had to be in the US armed forces back then, to have the powerful memories of life in that bipolar world of competing superpowers, blocs, and thousands of nuclear warheads at the ready 24/365. Or maybe you had to be in the armed forces to recognize the fall of the Berlin Wall as such a watershed. However it is, I am just about the contemporary of President Obama, and I find I don’t understand at all his decision to not attend Germany’s commemoration next month of the twentieth anniversary of the Wall coming down. It’s one of the biggest, most important global events in my lifetime – if I could, I’d go to Berlin myself and put on a uniform and march in a parade.

Yet for Obama it seems not to matter much at all.

Oh, it matters all right. And there’s no mystery to it at all, or shouldn’t be. Why on earth would he want to participate in the commemoration of a defeat for his own side?

As I keep saying, once you let go of the initial shock of such a hard-Left reptile running the United States of America and simply accept the manifest truth about him, all his seemingly astonishing decisions make perfect sense. Well, a twisted, warped sort of sense, anyway. But that’s the Left for ya.

No surprises here, really, but telling all the same:

In his In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents they Protect, journalist Ronald Kessler gives us a peek inside the intimate lives of our presidents. Through interviews with over 100 secret service agents from the past and present—dating all the way back to John F. Kennedy—Kessler paints a picture of what our presidents are like when no one is looking.

Carter is portrayed as a phony according to the agents interviewed by Kessler. Carter would put on a show for the public to convey himself as a common man, but it was never any more than an act. For instance, we are told that when Carter would make a point of carrying his own luggage in front of the press, he was really carrying empty bags. He expected others to carry his real luggage. Unfriendly, Carter “didn’t want the police officers and agents looking at him or speaking to him when he went to the [Oval] office,” explained an assistant White House usher. “The only time I saw a smile on Carter’s face was when the cameras were going,” one former agent told Kessler.

Pinched, sanctimonious, constipated, self-righteous dickhead with no regard for anyone other than his all-important self. Gee, whodathunkit.

The man who sent Carter packing from the White House could not have been more different according to accounts from agents. Ronald Reagan would constantly interact with his secret service agents and other staffers who worked for him. He was apologetic when he would take secret service agents away from their families on holidays. While Carter would make secret service agents pay for any leftover food they consumed after White House parties, we are told Reagan would insist the secret service eat leftover food (without charge, of course).

A warm, open-hearted guy, with the greatest respect for the average working stiff. Again, no surprise. But perhaps the most unsurprising of all — besides the description of Hillary as “a monster,” is this one:

Vice President Al Gore was exceedingly obnoxious to his agents according to Kessler. When scolding his son for not doing well in school, Gore chastised him by warning that “if you don’t straighten up, you won’t get into the right schools, and if you don’t get into the right schools you could end up like these guys.” The “guys” Gore was referring to were his secret service agents!

Yet again: no surprise. With the exception of Clinton, when the cameras are off, the Democrats — those self-styled Defenders Of The Common Man — all come across as haughty, condescending phonies, and the Repubs — silver-spoon-fed elitists, supposedly, with never a thought for anyone but their rich cronies — as decent, courteous, and utterly without pretension. Kinda makes you wonder where the hoary (and demonstrably false) stereotypes come from, don’t it?

Sick, sick, sick:

CAIRO — Conservative Egyptian lawmakers have called for a ban on imports of a Chinese-made kit meant to help women fake their virginity and one scholar has even called for the “exile” of anyone who imports or uses it.

The Artificial Virginity Hymen kit, distributed by the Chinese company Gigimo, costs about $30. It is intended to help newly married women fool their husbands into believing they are virgins — culturally important in a conservative Middle East where sex before marriage is considered by many to be illicit. The product leaks a blood-like substance when inserted and broken.

Sheik Sayed Askar, a member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood who is on the parliamentary committee on religious affairs, said the kit will make it easier for Egyptian women to give in to temptation. He demanded the government take responsibility for fighting the product to uphold Egyptian and Arab values.

“It will be a mark of shame on the ruling party if it allowed this product to enter the market,” he said in a notice posted on the Brotherhood’s parliament Web site on Sept. 15.

“If this thing enters Egypt, the country is going to go to waste. God protect us,” commented a reader on the Web site of Egyptian newspaper Al-Youm Al-Sabie.

Will Saletan says:

If you’re a woman in a conservative Muslim country, you had better bleed on your wedding night. If you don’t, your husband or his family will know you aren’t a virgin. For that, you could be beaten or killed.

If you’re a man, on the other hand, all you have to do on your wedding night is ejaculate. Nobody expects you to bleed or produce any other proof of virginity.

Some day, this barbaric and hypocritical tradition will end. Until then, the best we can do is fool it. You want blood on your wedding night? We’ll give you blood. Fake blood…

Pause for a moment to consider what these men are asking God to protect them from: a cheap, mass-produced insert that releases fake blood. It’s the technical equivalent of a Halloween gag. But to them, this is no gag. It’s an offense against God.

In this way, the artificial hymen serves as a useful test of religious idiocy. If a $30 item that leaks fake blood violates your faith so profoundly that you must ban it, then what you have isn’t really a faith. It’s a fetish.

I’m gonna just go ahead and say it: Islam as practiced by the majority of its adherents around the world is a scourge, a blight, a curse, and a cancer. It is the most perverted, twisted religion ever to poison the human mind. And don’t give me any crap about all religions being essentially the same in their repressive tendencies; if there really is a wise and loving God of the type Christianity espouses, the Islamic obsession with sexuality and the savage punishments inflicted on those who threaten Muslim males’ near-universal insecurity would be an affront to Him, a blasphemy in the truest sense.

And it will never change; no amount of scorn and ridicule from civilized people will ever sway or shame these pud-jigging freaks out of their twelfth-century dysfunction. Islam is simply incompatible with modern civilization and liberty. I hate to have to say it, but it’s the naked truth. Those weak-kneed multiculti milksops in the West who insist that we “respect” this anti-human abomination are fools, cowards, or both.

Somebody a while back, can’t remember who, sort of semi-satirically asked in a column or blog post, “can there be a decent Islam?” The answer is evident to anyone with open eyes: as things now stand, no. No, there really can’t. Not without a reformation of the type that moderated Christian views several centuries ago. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it if I were you; “Submission” doesn’t allow for much in the way of reflection and rebellion, after all.

(Via Insty)

Update! And if you think it’s unrelated, better think again:

Steve (that would be Green, here) explains what he means by the term. I still don’t really think that he defines the meaning of “victory,” so much as he explains a strategy for remaining in Afghanistan and gathering intel and killing bad guys.

He describes Afghanistan as being “not so much a country as it is a spot on the map where other countries aren’t,” and I think that is a reasonable take. But then, what is victory in such a place? He points out that, in theory, we could more or less pave the entire place and turn it into a shopping mall, but that such an outcome would not solve the principal question of our time, which is “the Middle East’s failure to adapt to modernity.”

Here he begins to veer off the reality, because the real problem is Islam’s failure to adapt to modernity. And that is not only a Middle Eastern problem, it is a global problem. Saying that they “export their problems as terrorism” overlooks the possibility that a lot of Islam’s problems aren’t exported or imported, but are ingrained.

Read the rest. He’s right as rain.

Kinda hard to believe, innit? Of course, it was almost half a century ago:

The victory for Edward Kennedy is demeaning to the dignity of the Senate and the democratic process.

It most certainly was — and became ever more so as the years dragged on.

I’ve been remiss, by the way, in not mentioning Stacy’s other excellent rip on the bloated bag of shit, now thankfully rotting in Hell. Sorry ’bout that; hey, I been busy.

Rachel goes to Auschwitz. Powerful, powerful stuff. No excerpt; just read it.

Via Jonah G: how many drinks would it take to kill you?