SIDNEY LUMET, 1924-2011. There's at least something worthwhile in all his films that I've seen. Daniel, for example, was awful, but I still get goosebumps when I recall its child's-view funeral sequence, with Paul Robeson's "There's a Man Goin' Round Takin' Names" in the background.

Lumet had several successes, and they remind me that while most hit movies don't bear re-watching (really, who wants to curl up again with The Eyes of Laura Mars?), all of Lumet's do. When he got good scripts he knew what to do with them. Dog Day Afternoon and Network are crazy stories, and he kept them urgent but sufficiently grounded that even mass audiences could accept them. He set excellent actors to perform outrageous actions in high-pressure environments, and took the results down without much underlining. (Try to imagine the Ken Russell versions.)

This isn't to say he was without style -- God, no, look at this -- just that he knew the value of restraint, and was at his best, I think, when the situation damanded it. The Verdict is for the most part a very quiet movie, which forces us to focus on the words and, especially, faces -- James Mason's "Welcome to the World" speech, and the pan to Charlotte Rampling, is a great example. Lumet and Paul Newman really make us lean forward for the summation scene. It starts with Newman small and off-center in a crowded long shot -- and stays there until he moves to the jury: "Today you are the law." Then his face becomes the focus. It's not the only way it could have been done; it just seems, now, the only right one.

He obviously liked to work, and was game for anything, whether a musical (The Wiz), black comedy (Bye Bye Braverman), or high-toned Broadway adaptation (Child's Play, Equus). He started in TV and, years later -- when it had been awhile between hits -- he went back to TV for the ill-fated 100 Centre Street. Red lights didn't stop him, and he kept following chances until he got to make Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, a capstone any filmmaker could be proud of.

His work was uneven, but I don't know that we'd have the good films he gave us if he husbanded his energies like Kubrick, and made movies less often. His was not a ruminative talent. He got the idea, made the picture, and moved on. This resembles the method of the hack, but Lumet was clearly not only talented, but artistically ambitious -- he actually got an NYPD trilogy (Serpico, Prince of the City, Q&A) made in Hollywood; who among our auteurs could do likewise? They could sell a superhero property, of course, but a three-film examination of big-city police and political corruption? It wouldn't even occur to them. Which is just another reason to mourn Lumet's passing.

UPDATE. You really ought to read Glenn Kenny on the subject, and his 2007 interview with Lumet.

BUT THIS TIME THE ADVANTAGE IS MINE. All respect to Jack Steuf of Wonkette for introducing us to The Young Cons' honky rap "Obama, Reid, Pelosi," in which the three-headed Democratic menace is said to be "easily combatable by Ryan, West, and Christie/That's the crew who's dirty filthy" (and with a Ricochet meme-check, yet). But in the spirit of the great Sadly No battles, I produce my trump card -- a 9/11 truther rap video:



When I talk about it, you call me a conspiracy theorist/ Your body doesn't need to listen, I need your spirit to hear this/ And once you learn the truth, you'll never look back/ I just get pissed off when people don't look at the facts/ Steel buildings don't just fucking collapse…

Also, "The (craziest?) forces/ Are givin' rabies to horses," and "We gotta band together, do what we can to spread the knowledge/ Pass out documentary DVDs at every college." Celebrity citations: Alex Jones, Charlie Sheen, Rosie O'Donnell, Seth Green, and Erica Jong. Why, it's practically Rosicrucian.

Your move, Steuf.

MORE NOTES FROM THE URBAN HELLHOLE. Here's one of those staples of modern social discourse, the weeping over gang-infested urban hellholes, where "drug addicted young women desperately sell their bodies in the age of HIV; their unwanted, uncared for children grow up as best they can," and "children and teenagers can be fooled into thinking that the images generated by our pleasure-seeking and irresponsible commercial entertainment complex define the meaning of life."

Author Walter Russell Mead posits the "failure of the blue social model" to prevent the Warriors hellscape in which I supposedly live. (As a marginally-employed New York City resident, I assume his concern extends to me.)

Reading these things from New York is always amusing, and Mead may have sensed he would have this effect, as partway through he expands his purview to embrace slummy cities worldwide, so my own Lefferts Gardens address gets lumped in with Kibera and City of God. Looks much worse now, doesn't it?

Here's another good bit:

Restless, violent and poor urban communities have been with us for a long time. What often seems to happen is that poor people migrate to the cities in hopes of more exciting and rewarding lives...

But many of those migrants found sadder fates; cities were not very healthy places, and the combination of poor sanitation and sewer facilities, bad diet and poorly preserved foods, poverty and violence meant that many cities had to constantly draw on the countryside to keep their populations up. In the last 150 years, the flow to the cities increased with the mechanization of agriculture and improvements in transportation — and developments in public health meant that more of those migrants lived and had children, even if they failed to find the kind of upward mobility they hoped for.

What this means, not only in the United States, but in cities around the world, is that we now have something new: vast urban conglomerations whose populations include second, third and even fourth generations of people who know nothing but the city — and lack the opportunity and ability to earn their way out of the slums through normal, legal channels.

Two words that do not occur in this historical analysis: "labor unions." You will be unsurprised to learn that the author is unconcerned with any means of providing jobs and decent livings to underprivileged urbanites. In fact, it kind of sounds like he's not sure those "developments in public health" aren't a mixed blessing at best, seeing as they curse future generations to life in metropoli.

What's Mead want to give them instead of the "Great Society blue social model," then? Jesus.

If we are serious about changing lives in the inner cities, we need to think about strengthening the capacity of these churches.

He does suggest that these God squads dispense social services along with the Gospel, which is a good idea, as Republicans are working hard to make sure that the government can no longer do so.

Link found via Ole Perfesser Instapundit. I assume he was just attracted to the city-hating, though it's possible he was trying to shore up his libertarian cred.

UPDATE. Like the crackling of thorns under the pot is the laughter of our commenters. "I've been waiting thousands of years for someone to suggest religion as the answer to social problems," claims Nom de Plume. "The major portion of Mead's research was listening hard to Stevie Wonder's 'Livin' For The City,'" hypothesizes Glenn Kenny. And mds sees the solution: "You know what a godless urban wasteland like Lower Manhattan needs? A religiously-motivated community center!"

More seriously, R. Porrofatto directs us to Mead's "Black And Blue 2: Blacks Flee Blue States in Droves" (the folks in my neighborhood must be holdouts, then), where Mead does in fact refer to unions, thus: "high public union membership," "high costs of public union urban services," "the interests of teacher unions," "high wage scales for unionized public servants," etc. So he's not unaware of ways to improve poor people's wages and hopes for the future -- he just doesn't approve of them. He does recommend "more effective government... to ensure that American citizens are not undercut in the labor market by desperate illegals," and of course Jesus, who must be wondering about now what he did to deserve this kind of treatment.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF CONCERN TROLLING. So Michelle Obama was talking about this childhood obesity thing:

US First Lady Michelle Obama's campaign against childhood obesity took a personal turn when she said she is paying more attention to a key body fat measurement for her own daughters.

Obama said she was surprised to learn that her daughters' body mass index, or BMI, numbers were "creeping upwards," she wrote on yahoo.com's website.

"I didn't really know what BMI was," she said.

"I certainly didn't know that even a small increase in BMI can have serious consequences for a child's health," she added, recommending that all parents inform themselves about the vital weight statistic.

To rebut, ladies and gentlemen, TX Trendy Chick, whose "heart breaks for these little girls":

This is how distorted self-image and eating disorders come to be, Michelle. It’s bad enough when you’re picked on by the kids at school or the boy down the street, but to have your own mother leading the charge? Shame on you. President Obama has gone out of his way to address bullying and its consequences – what happens when the bully is the woman he’s married to and the victims are his own children? Words have power and they can cut so deep that the wound will never completely heal. I’ve been there; I know. And I know these children deserve better.

So I guess the next Tea Party thing will be to demand Sasha and Malia be removed from the White House by Child Protective Services, and placed with some nice hillbilly couple who will let them have Fudgsicles for dinner.

To be fair, George W never pulled this kind of thing on his own kids.

UPDATE. Some commenters are against BMI as a standard of health, an arguable point. This post is not about nutritional science, however, but about the TX Trendy Chick's accusations of child abuse against the First Lady, and by implication the thinking behind it.

Conservatives are generally crazy on this issue. You may have noticed the recent Matt Ridley Wall Street Journal editorial on "Free-Market Solutions for Overweight Americans," including "healthy living vouchers." Commentary has focused on the imagined efficacy or lack of same of such schemes, but no one says anything about the alleged non-free-market approaches Ridley wants to supplant:

School posters, virally marketed videos, healthy-eating classes, mandatory swimming lessons, minimum school-recess times, celebrity chefs in charge of school-meal recipes, bicycle lanes, junk-food ad bans, calorie-content labels, hectoring physicians, birthday-cake bans, monetary rewards for weight loss—they've all been tried, and they've all largely failed.

First of all, this list conflates foreign and domestic programs -- there is no U.S. ban on junk food ads, so far as I know -- and I don't know what the fuck he means by "mandatory swimming lessons" (phys ed, maybe?). Secondly, Ridley seems to think handing out government vouchers, which are worth money, is more "free-market" than tweaks to government advertising budgets, public school policies, etcetera. By the wingnut handbook definition, I guess, everything the (Democratic) government does, even at the most local level, is socialism, while the giveaways Republicans approve are free-market.

As for BMI, when the government moved to include these figures in children's vaccination records, conservatives cried double secret Hitler. We sane people can argue about the usefulness of the measurement and the psychology of health programs from children, but the conservative position on such matters is basically, "Black preznit wanna pour sociamalism on mah vittles."

I WROTE ABOUT SOMETHING BESIDES POLITICS and it felt pretty good.

My essay is but a modest accompaniment to the Village Voice comics issue, out now, in which boring old words are replaced by beautiful graphic novellas. Michael Musto as comics! Robert Sietsema food review as comics! Etc. Get it in print if you can, confuse your grandchildren.

THE MANSION ON THE HILL. Kathryn J. Lopez gets one of those poetic patriot emails about how America has been plumb took over by folks what hain't got no right:

Imagine the Republic as a “mansion on the hill”.

The mansion was built with the blood of the current owners’ forefathers.

The heirs to the mansion, with no personal investment in the property, became complacent and lazy leaving the mansion for days and weeks at a time only to find increasing disrepair of the building and grounds when they returned from time to time.

The heirs spent more and more time away on hedonistic journeys.

Finally the heirs came home to find mansion occupied by squatters of all types from leftist politicians to pot smoking aging hippies & revolutionary cadres.

A small group of the former residents evicted (some of) the leftists politicians and retreated to discuss what to do next.

Some began to form groups to plan restoration of the property, others to evict remaining squatters, others to plan fumigation — most continued their hedonistic pursuits...

K-Lo sees this as a sign that people are "impatient" with her Republican buddies for not moving faster, and takes in stride the idea that "leftists politicians" come to power by squatting rather than by election, and must be removed (poetically, you understand) by "former residents" who own the house by right.

This is the thinking behind all the claims of Obama's illegitimacy, from plain birtherism to the more high-flown claims that Obama is an "alien" (again in the poetic sense). They worked it with Obama's Inauguration (where's the Bible?) and his appointment of Hillary Clinton to Secretary of State (no emoluments!), and every so often gin up another crisis of legitimacy in which an unremarkable Executive action is portrayed as the Thin End of the Wedge.

The punch line? When issues do come down the pike in which the President's Constitutional authority or lack of same bears discussion -- e.g. Libya -- what we get from conservatives is mostly self-serving bullshit. You really have to throw up your hands when the Cato Institute comes up with howlers like this:

It is probably naive to think that Congress would have blocked this war, but by exercising its atrophied war powers Congress at least might have caused the war to be waged with more wisdom and forethought.

Words to stir the soul! Well, I guess you can't get the yokels to the barricades with an anti-war pitch. So keep telling 'em about the mansion on the hill.

UPDATE. Lots of fun comments ("Ironically, this is also the story of the Playboy Mansion" -- Jay B). Some of you, though, have the impression that K-Lo wrote the email herself, which I hope you didn't get from me. Then again, maybe she was just being modest, and wanted The People to get all the credit.

THE ELEPHANT, THE BLIND MAN SAID, IS VERY LIKE A COMMAND ECONOMY. Rising food prices nationwide, exacerbated by crop shortfalls (including a disastrous wheat failure in Russia), combine with high personnel costs to cut restauranteurs' margins in San Francisco, so the cost of dining out there is going up.

The Lonely Conservative knows how to interpret this: "Everywhere you look, we’re paying the price for central economic planning... If the environmentalists, unions, anarchists and other progressives get their way, we’ll be living in the dark ages." Curse these union thug schoolteachers and their high food prices!

Also, a special note to his readers:

On the bright side, you can sign up for daily deals through Groupon for discounts on eateries and plenty of other establishments in your area. These days you have to save a buck wherever you can.

**Note, if you sign up for Groupon through the link above I will receive a small referral fee. But I do recommend it. We recently purchased lift tickets to a local ski mountain for half price...

Well, it's more dignified than Goldline

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about Donald Trump's Presidential-slash-guerrilla marketing campaign. It'd still be a gift that keeps on giving even without the birtherism, but fortunately our national descent into lunacy assures that we get the amusing add-ons, too. (Bonus track: Trump is telling people Bill Ayers wrote Dreams for My Father. Maybe for an encore he'll tell us he's heard the Michelle Obama Whitey tape.)

GRANTLAND RICE CAN REST EASY. National Review Online now has a sports blog. Here's something by Fred Schwarz:

You won’t see many cricket items in this blog, but yesterday’s India-Pakistan match, which India took by the narrow margin of 29 runs on its home pitch at Mohali (there, don’t I sound like I know what I’m talking about?), had geopolitical ramifications, as these two fierce rivals (in sport and everything else) completed the event peacefully and amicably, with the two nations’ prime ministers watching the action together. Predictably enough, the Obama administration has released a statement praising the match as a diplomatic breakthrough; soon, presumably, we can expect the president (who must be quietly mourning the loss by his beloved Pockystahn) to announce a global sports initiative aimed at building world peace through hitting, kicking, and throwing balls.

These people ruin everything they touch.

LOOK AWAY, LOOK AWAY. The Georgia Legislative Black Caucus is trying a new approach, at least so far as I know:

The Georgia Legislative Black Caucus filed a lawsuit Monday against the state of Georgia seeking to dissolve the city charters of Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Johns Creek, Milton and Chattahoochee Hills. Further, the lawmakers, joined by civil rights leader the Rev. Joseph Lowery, aim to dash any hopes of a Milton County.

The lawsuit, filed in a North Georgia U.S. District Court Monday, claims that the state circumvented the normal legislative process and set aside its own criteria when creating the “super-majority white ” cities within Fulton and DeKalb counties. The result, it argues, is to dilute minority votes in those areas, violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.

DeKalb's mostly black; Fulton's more mixed -- per Wikipedia:

The demographic make-up of Fulton County has changed considerably in recent decades. The northern portion of the county, a suburban, predominantly white area that is mostly Republican, is among the most affluent areas in the nation] The central and southern portion of the county, which includes the city of Atlanta and its core satellite cities to the south on the other hand, is predominantly African-American, overwhelmingly Democratic, and contains some of the poorest sections in the metropolitan area.

The new cities were all created since 2005, and are very white. At issue is whether the courts, which have ruled on traditional political redistricting under the Voting Rights Act, can also do so on the incorporation of new cities.

Let's see what the brethren have to say about it. Occidental Dissent:

A bunch of African-Americans (niggers) think the new Atlanta suburbs in Fulton and DeKalb counties are “too White” and have filed a frivolous lawsuit against the State of Georgia in federal court to revoke their city charters.

The African-American plaintiffs claim their “voting rights” are being violated, not because Bull Connor or the Klan is stopping them from voting, but solely because they are outnumbered by racially aware, White conservatives who understand the politically incorrect connections between “diversity,” crime, and fiscal irresponsibility in Fulton County...

No one in their right fucking mind wants to live under the incompetence and corruption that comes with an African-American controlled city government. While niggers aren’t exactly zombies, they have overrun Atlanta in much the same way. They also have reinforcements coming from up North.

Up next:

JEW-AMERICAN GOVERNMENT INCITES NEGROES TO ERADICATE WHITES IN GEORGIA

But let's not judge the issue on these fringe figures. Let's look at what mainstream rightblog Jammie Wearing Fool, frequently linked at Memeorandum, has to say about it:

Black Legislatures File Lawsuit To Disband Majority White Cities

No, that headline is not wrong. Now I don't want you folks in New England or the Midwest getting too excited just yet. This sort of thing can only happen in the south because of the most onerous piece of legislation ever passed, which is used until this day to keep whitey in his place, called the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

By the time it filters up to Ole Perfesser Instapundit and the other big-timers, of course, it'll be about "hypocrisy" or some shit.

JUST SO LONG AS YOU SPELL THE NAME RIGHT. I guess the big news is Bill Maher working blue. Here are some of the rave reviews, accent on the rave:

"Bill Maher doubles down — calls Sarah Palin the ‘c’ word," breathlessly reports The Daily Caller. "It’s a liberal favorite and they are nothing if not predictable," says Lori Ziganto. "Foul mouthed name calling from the LEFT," hollers Flap's Blog. "Bill Maher, Turd Merchant extraordinaire," says the self-unaware Underground Conservative, "is all yours, members of the Hate Left. You own him." "Always interesting when people struggling for acceptance and tolerance are so flippant about the trashing of others," says Howard Portnoy of a positive review of the performance. Some of the brethren call for Maher to be beaten up.

Glynnis MacNicol is on the right track for a while: "Sounds like a typical comedy show, which obviously is not to say it's okay, simply that comedy shows are frequently raunchy, offensive, and in bad taste." But then: "It's not like there's a lack of substantial ways in which to criticize (and mock) Palin." It seems she, like the rest of them, believes a comedy act should be like Meet The Press.

I guess they've somehow managed to miss Richard Pryor, or they'd be posting bleeped-out videos of him and complaining about Obama's reverse racism.

THE LIBYA SPEECH. Obama made his case for intervention, and along with Juan Cole's it looks pretty good. But I still respectfully dissent.

Though the differences between this action and the Iraq invasion are obvious, so is at least one similarity: The likelihood that, however much we tout the handoff to our allies, we will remain involved in Libya for years. Bosnia is the more positive example, and Obama hinted that Libya, tucked between two nascent democracies, would go similarly. This is a fond hope, as the region remains volatile, and I fear the new Libyan government will have need of our "intelligence, logistical support, search and rescue assistance, and capabilities to jam regime communications" -- and some other things that went unmentioned this evening -- for a long time to come. And under the circumstance I don't see how we could refuse.

I do see the benefit in our involvement, and appreciate Obama's kinder-gentler model of support for home-brewed revolutions as opposed to the Orwellian "Your enemy is not surrounding your country, your enemy is ruling your country" approach of Bush and the neo-cons. And it's certainly consonant with what Obama laid down in his Cairo speech. It'd be nice to get people on that side of the world thinking of us the way South Americans thought of us in the days of Simon Bolivar, rather than the way they thought of us in the days of Pinochet.

But for all its advantages, this approach still leads back to the same place we've been stuck for nine years -- and, seen a certain way, for much longer than that. I can believe Obama is very different from the imperialist Westerners who've been fucking over small states for generations, and still believe that the best way for him to show his difference is to stay out of their affairs insofar as possible. We don't have a great track record since World War II, and while Obama appears to think that the best way to fix that is to do foreign intervention right this time, I would prefer a cooling-off period. Always leave 'em wanting more.

The thing is on, anyway, and we'll see how it goes. Maybe it will turn out that "the values that we hold so dear" can be transmitted by targeted bombing runs. I hope so. It would certainly be a new thing in my lifetime.

BACK ON THE CHAIN GANG. The passing of Joe Bageant at a relatively young age is a damn shame in any case, but it's sad for more than his fans that his work hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. AlterNet has several of his articles, any of which could be recommended, but I especially like the one about the sex offender in whose Kafkaesque post-release treatment Bageant found a case study of the efficiency and cruelty with which the state squeezes citizens whose rights no one will defend. It's least-of-my-brothers stuff in the manner of Nelson Algren from a self-proclaimed redneck who saw how inhuman our way of life has become, and how good we've gotten at fooling ourselves about it. I don't always agree with his conclusions, but he looked at the world as if he were part of it, a perspective conspicuously absent from the writings of most of the manicured sociopaths who get taken seriously these days.

UPDATE. Speaking of sociopaths, though I can't vouch for the condition of his nails. Sample: "Much like Adorno’s 'Authoritarian Personality' or Hofstadter’s 'Paranoid Style,' Bageantism is a faux-analysis, a make-believe political sociology..." This by way of explaining that Bageant didn't know what real people were like. Self-awareness is not McCain's strong suit. Neither is class.

ROLLING BLACKOUT. This weekend I told you that World Net Daily heard Bill Ayers making a blazingly obvious joke about writing Dreams for my Father and reported, in all seriousness, that it meant "Ayers admits (again) he wrote Obama bio." Though I doubt such people listen to me, I figured word would get around somehow, common sense would prevail, and that would be the end of that.

Guess what's on Memeorandum today?


From super-edumacated Jeff Godlstein to the shortbus commuters Weasel Zippers, nine out of 10 wingnuts agree: It's not a joke unless it's about Michael Moore being fat.

Sadder still is Freedom Eden, who seems to sense that something's amiss but won't say so, and goes for the bank shot in desperation ("Ayers had to know that bringing up the controversy at all was not something that would help Obama"). Tell the truth and shame the devil, FE.

Kudos to John Hawkins for gently telling them what the joke was and whom it was on.

UPDATE. I see at Right Wing Nut House that Goldstein is defending his position the way all great men do --

As someone who knows a thing or two about interpretation...

-- by asserting his credentials. Schoolly G continues:

...I don’t need John Hawkins or Rick Moran to point out Ayers’ tone of sarcasm. What I’m interested in is the rather pointed tone of the sarcasm - it’s too deliberate, and the question seems too staged - and suggesting that, while Ayers wants to joke it all away, he also very much wants credit. It’s who he is. It’s who they all are.

Goldstein should consider a new career as an Investigative Heckler. He can go around to comedy clubs and yell, "I KNOW WHY YOU SAID THAT, YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYBODY!"

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the conservative answer to Earth Hour, called Human Achievement Hour, in which the faithful blazed their lights and fired up their appliances to demonstrate opposition to environmentalism.

In a late entry I missed, Peter Karwowski declares victory:

I did notice that common sense is definitely taking hold.

Driving home at about 9:00, I didn't notice any lights dimmed along the stretch of Yonge Street between Richmond Hill and North York. In fact, when I got home at about 9:15, I took a spin around the block and lo and behold, lights were on everywhere. In fact, it seemed that some houses aside from mine had extra lights turned on to celebrate the occasion.

It was heartwarming.

At that point, I got home and turned out the lights. The point has been made.

My own neighbors were wearing jackets or coats outdoors today, which they must have meant as a sign of disbelief in the Global Warming Fraud. I mean, what else could it mean?

RENT SEEKING. Nicole Gelinas is still beating the drum for an end to rent stabilization in New York, but now she has a new angle -- stabilization advocates should give up because anti-stabilization has already won:

If you look at how much government-protected tenants pay, they’re not getting a break. Sixty-two percent of “rent-stabilized” households paid between $800 and $1,750 monthly in 2008. But 56.8% of vacant non-regulated apartments rented in the same range.

Man bites dog: What the pols and the market have done worked.

Former Gov. George Pataki allowed vacant apartments to escape regulation above $2,000, so between 1994 and 2009, nearly 100,000 units have become unregulated — spurring landlords to invest and compete for tenants. Government bureaucrats have been reasonable about allowing landlords to raise the rent on “stabilized” units, and landlords have maintained them better.

New York has what the pols have long said was their goal: a healthy market...

If the rules expired (with some exceptions for the elderly and poor), chances are things would remain much as they are today.

That is, the apartments still cost an arm and a leg to rent -- and you're much less likely to luck into a deal than you used to be -- but every so often your landlord might re-grout your shower tiles. Thanx, free market! You're every bit the miracle we expected.

So why is she even talking? I thought at first she just wanted to gloat at the rent-poor peons (this is a person, after all, who thinks New Yorkers don't pay enough to ride the subway). But it soon became clear she's in it for the class war:

New Yorkers have gotten tired of people who’ve gotten cheap apartments because of connections or luck...

No poll data cited, of course. This is conservative boilerplate on the order of their anti-union propaganda -- it's based the notion that, if someone else is getting a break, citizens ought to feel resentful and punitive, instead of asking why the system can't be fixed so that they could get similar breaks for themselves. Don't ask for more, in other words -- only ask that others get less.

And in case you were tempted to take her seriously:

In “mixed income” buildings, one person can pay $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom while the person down the hall pays $1,200, not because of appreciable differences in income but because of chance. If the market was allowed to do its job, that $1,200 may go up — but that $3,000 would also likely go down.

Does anyone on God's green earth believe that a landlord getting $3,000 a month in New York City is going to lower the rent, ever? Only if the city collapses -- which a few more years of this bullshit might accomplish.

YA GOTTA DUMB IT DOWN FOR THEM, BILL. You may remember the conservative notion that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Dreams from My Father for Obama. Back in 2009, Ayers joked with a wingnut about the claim ("if you can prove it, we can split the royalties") -- which the wingnut took as an admission of guilt.

Like many such articles of faith, though its media moment in the sun has passed, the brethren still believe, and collect signs and portents they imagine support it. Now there's this joking exchange at the end of a recent Bill Ayers appearance:



From the transcript :

Ayers: I think [Dreams from My Father]... is quite good.

Question: Also, you just mentioned the Pentagon and Tomahawk …

Ayers: Did you know that I wrote it, incidentally?

Question: What's that?

Ayers: I wrote that book.

Several audience members: Yeah, we know that.

Question: You wrote that?

Ayers: Yeah, yeah. And if you help me prove it, I’ll split the royalties with you. Thank you very much.

Laughter and Applause

Guess that joke never gets old. I got that transcript, and the video, from World Net Daily. And guess what their headline for it is?

Ayers admits (again) he wrote Obama bio

It's too bad Ayers didn't think to say that if anyone believed he wrote the book, he had a bridge he'd like to sell them; he'd be a rich man now.

STAND UP AND CHEER. The makers of Atlas Shrugged: The Movie are soliciting video clips of fans saying "I am John Galt" so they can be "part of Atlas Shrugged history," i.e. marketing.

Having seen these entrants, I will say that if they scrapped the story and just strung together 90 minutes of these clips, I believe we could get it into some European festivals.

TEA PARTY POOPERS. At Big Whatever, Phillip Dennis tells those RINOs to shape up or ship out:

“What is it about the November election that Republican leadership doesn’t understand?” That is the first question I ask any Republican elected official who works in Washington. Each response from the numerous conservative Congressmen has been some variation of “they just don’t get it.” The [unnamed] Congressman who I met with said basically what I already knew, “House leadership has no plan to cut spending, repeal ObamaCare and is not conservative"...

I asked a few friends in November if they really believed John Boehner or Mitch McConnell would ever vote to defund or repeal ObamaCare. Each said “not a chance” at that time. So I give a final word of warning to the Republican leadership: The tea party is not your friend nor are you ours!

Meanwhile at National Review:

Tea Partiers Favor Romney

Mitt Romney captures 24 percent of the Tea Party vote, according to a Pew poll released yesterday. Mike Huckabee came in second...

Some revolution.

LANFORD WILSON, 1937-2011. He died yesterday morning. Wilson hadn't brought out a new play in years, but a revival of The Hot l Baltimore is now in previews at Steppenwolf in Chicago, and his most popular plays are still done regularly by resident theaters. They're crowd pleasers, and they come by their pleasing fairly. Wilson had a great gift for what you might call poetic realism if that term didn't sound so high-falutin'; his characters are grounded and believable even when (as often) they're eccentric, but their language is musically, painstakingly tuned. Any of them -- a stoner musician, a mountain man, an accountant, a prostitute -- might suddenly launch into an aria that will have you momentarily forgetting everything else, immersed in the power and beauty of the words.

Back in the late 70s I had some friends at the Circle Rep, and so got to see Fifth of July and Talley's Folly in their first incarnations, sometimes from the tiny lighting booth in the back. The Wilson play that knocked me out, though, was a little-known one-act called Brontosaurus, about a wealthy, worldly New York antique dealer who takes in her teenage nephew, who has become a suburban mystic-ascetic and a living rebuke to everything the dealer believes. I don't know if anyone can match the fire Jeff Daniels and Tanya Berezin brought to it, but someone ought to try.

UPDATE. The playwright Robert Patrick (Kennedy's Children, The Haunted Host) lived and worked with Wilson back in the day, and has a lovely video reminiscence here.

FORTUNATE IN HIS ENEMIES. In case you're wondering why Obama's doing well in polls despite the fact that America is a fucking mess, take a look at this report from Brian Bolduc at National Review's The Corner:

I just spoke with Michael Openshaw, a member of the North Texas Tea Party. Because I couldn’t fit his comments into my story, I thought I’d add them here. Like other tea partiers, Openshaw takes a pass on the constitutional question — “I’d leave that to constitutional lawyers” — but jumps at the chance to reprimand President Obama for his recent behavior: “You launch a war and go off to Rio?”

More interesting, however, were his comments on the prospect of a Tea Party protest of the Libya campaign. “To go out and publicly rally while our service people’s lives are on the line is not something we’re willing to do,” Openshaw says. “We respect them too much — not the so-called commander-in-chief. You will not see us out there waving signs.” For more tea partiers’ reactions to the military effort, see here.

Not everyone will recognize that "launch a war and go off to Rio" as part of the curious propaganda drive to present the President's recent diplomatic mission as a vacation. But the "so-called commander-in-chief" bit will certainly stir in the imaginations of many normal, middle-class Americans an image of a guy wearing a Napoleon hat and a strait-jacket.

Openshaw clearly can't help himself, but if you read The Corner regularly, you know that such news-like dispatches as Bolduc's are not so much journalism as company-newsletter copy -- they usually consist of a NR guy asking a prominent Republican why Obama sux, and the Republican going on about why Obama sux for several paragraphs, with the NR guy occasionally inserting stuff like, "Prominent Republican cautioned his fellow Republicans against over-confidence" and "Prominent Republican pointed to a recent Rasmussen poll..." etc.

That Bolduc or whoever thought Openshaw, an obvious crackpot, would make a good representative of a major conservative constituency goes a long way toward explaining why people are reluctant to turn on Obama.

UPDATE. Much argument in comments as to whether Obama in fact sux. To badly paraphrase an old saying, he's worse than anything except the current alternatives. But that may not be good enough in 2012; the traditional triangulation devices by which Democratic presidents survive may not function so well in a crap economy. Then all the Republican candidate will need is a convincing line of bullshit -- not a sure thing from what I've seen so far, but doable.

This is why I'm not counting out Palin, despite her current trench in the public's affection. If things stay/get bad enough, even her mindless optimism may convince a desperate nation to take a chance on her. Hell, a few years ago they voted for a black guy!

THE FORGOTTEN MAN. Libya is doing strange things to the brethren. Dan Riehl comes out against the neo-cons!

Below is how Kristol, Kagan and Co. began co-opting the Reagan legacy in 1996 for neo-conservatism. Call it human rights, or democracy, in some ways, the foreign policy of the neo-conservative below - one I doubt we can afford going forward - has more in common with today's Left as described by [Stanley] Kurtz, than it does with Reagan's. In a sense, some number of intellectuals from the Left broke with them years ago. Unfortunately, their intellectual tradition seems to have landed them in the very same place all these years later. Sure, the politics are different given the D vs R divide. But that's simply the window dressing. The foundational principle is inherently the same - and progressive - one could argue, its merely expressed differently purely for political purposes.

Guess what word doesn't appear once in the peroration? "Bush." Which makes sense, because when W was the neo-con of the hour, Riehl was writing stuff like this:

It's unfortunate, I don't think I've ever seen such a lack of leadership in Washington as we are seeing today. Senator's and Representatives who proudly stood up to take what now appears to have been only a purely political stand by supporting and voting for a war they evidently never had the courage to see through. But not Bush. Foremost among many, he seems almost alone now, determined to stay the course.

Mistakes? Misjudgments? Certainly, though if one takes history apart, his are no more significant, or costly than so many of nearly all Presidents who have gone before. His crime is not so much what he has done, but what he will not do - turn away from a pledge he made to America post 9-11.

Riehl's got the right idea. While guys like Victor Davis Hanson are tying themselves into knots trying to explain how Obama's bullshit is different from Bush's, Riehl's just making like Bush never existed. And why shouldn't he? His audience is just as eager to forget.

UPDATE. Riehl's Bush defenestration process can be observed in an earlier post:

If we want to invoke 20/20 hindsight as argument, the single greatest threat to America when Reagan entered office was the Soviet Union. When he left office, that huge and dangerous enemy was destroyed - a thing of the past. Whatever his reasoning, and I've never second guessed it before this, Bush can not say the same for al Qaeda. Instead of focusing more exclusively on Afghanistan and the Pakistan border area, he widened the war to Iraq. I supported it then and still do.

In other words, mistakes were made, and Riehl continues to endorse them while admitting they were mistakes. Because why not? It's not like anyone's paying attention, and if one day a Republican is dropping the bombs, Riehl can say he was for it both before and after he was against it.

GOOD NEWS FOR MODERN MAN. I have to thank Kia for turning my attention to "Defiant Chastity" by Andy Nowicki. The essay starts with fulminations against them sexed-up kids:

If many immigrants to the United States are drawn to the economic opportunities and political freedoms promised by this nation whose very existence rests on the premise of “liberty,” they soon find their children under the spell of a very different kind of “American dream”—one with an unsavory hip-hop soundtrack and a pornographic storyline. In this debased cultural environment, boys learn to be groping, grubby, hedonistic “pimps” and “playas,” and girls learn to be angry, agendized *feministas* and brazen whores, if not both.

I'm going to make T-shirts thus emblazoned: "A *feminista* in the faculty lounge, a brazen whore in the bedroom." I bet I could sell a lot at church socials.

Among the sexual dissenters, Nowicki finds "the 'contemporary Christian' scene" an "all-too-brittle and toothless cultural phenomenon... relentlessly and determinedly bland, cleansed of bad words and racy content, the fare favored by this crowd is usually harmless, shorn of all rough edges." And what's good clean fare without harm?

He is more sympathetic to "one subspecies of the burgeoning punk scene called 'straight edge'" -- Sorry, Ian, like many another pioneer you've been erased from history -- "which makes clean living -- no booze, no drugs, no sex -- a kind of mandatory creed." But though the sXe kids "bring a needed sharp and pointed aesthetic... they generally lack a metaphysical orientation for all of their behavioral prescriptions."

Now it's time for Nowicki's big reveal:

Does chastity stand a chance, when such wholesaling bulldozing of traditional notions of restraint is so ubiquitous? Strangely enough, it does, at least among one particular, and rapidly growing, demographic: Mormons.

Yes, laugh, but Napoleon Dynamite and "Killers frontman and songwriter Brendon Flowers" show the LDS has youth appeal. So: Should right-thinking young'ns line up and get right with Joe Smith?

Lest the reader misunderstand: I am not Mormon, and I’m certainly not advocating a mass conversion to the LDS creed as crucial to any kind of moral resurgence among youth. But I certainly think that the example of Mormondom as a vigorous culture with a transcendent vision which advocates a sexual morality greatly at odds with the free-for-all of mainstream culture represents a model worthy of being followed, regardless of one’s personal beliefs.

"A Catholic in the pews, a Mormon in the bedroom." We'll have a Cafe Press store full of these shirts yet.

Oh, coda:

Indeed, if a hearty culture of chastity and temperance is to re-emergence, it will likely have to take the form of what Catholic author Peter Kreeft has provocatively called an “ecumenical jihad,” uniting moral conservatives of all faith traditions, including atheists and agnostics, against the blight of permissiveness which reigns in America and the West generally today.

I'm guessing that in ecumenical jihad, you get the 72 virgins, but you can only take them to the movies and then shake hands goodnight.

This is the sort of thing that would make James Poulos take up laudanum.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightblogger reactions to the Libya adventure. Among the artifacts I didn't have time to get to: at Right Wing News, "The Real Reasons Behind Libya Attack: Petrobras, Soros, 3 Women, “New” U.N. Agenda." Oh, it's deep, people -- wheels within wheels!

Just before he flew to Brazil for his “vacation,” Obama had given permission for Brazil and Petrobras to install a first-ever large, underwater oil storage container in the Gulf of Mexico. Obama is in Brazil now attempting to curry favor for us to buy oil from Brazil. Is bombing Libya and interrupting oil drilling operations there going to improve George Soros’ investment in Petrobras? Is this what this is all about?

You may have been turned off by the author's characterization of Obama's diplomatic mission as a "vacation" (in quotes, though!), but ya gotta admit, making war on an oil-producing Arab nation is something no Republican president would do.

UPDATE. The themes I noticed remain viable, I see. "...our commander-in-chief is an effete vacillator who is pushed around by his female subordinates," says Mark Krikorian. And I must say, it's something to have Mark Steyn and Michael Potemra nodding along with the Daily Kos. If only it could last!

FERLIN HUSKY R.I.P. He specialized in the lush and lugubrious type of country music I grew up on. This one's prime to me. If you can resist lyrics like "Memories and martinis are mixed up every evening in a honky tonk on Losers' Avenue," I'm not sure we can be friends. Dallas Frazier and Arthur Leo Owens wrote it, and Husky gave it that fine maudlin sound.



UPDATE. A lot of complaints in comments that country ain't what it used to be. Sure, but as I noticed in Texas, there are a lot of players out there who are damn fine, though they rarely break nationally -- too much roughage, I expect. Someone is trying to introduce Hayes Carll into the national bloodstream (I even saw him on Letterman!) and more power to them. I would recommend "Drunken Poet's Dream" or "She Left Me for Jesus." (I also admire that he arrived at these acoustic sessions obviously hung over.) This man can serve in my beloved Country any time.

PEOPLE GET READY.



So, who'll be first to write the inevitable outraged column? Neo-neocon? Someone at American Thinker? The Washington Times? Everyone?

So far the commentary seems limited to search term scammers and social marketing thumbsuckers, but you know it can't last.

UPDATE. A nice surprise! It's a day and a half later, and there's been no movement on this issue. You'd think someone at least would demand that Obama apologize (h/t Hunger Tallest Palin in comments). Perhaps I misjudged this internet. Also in comments, Whetstone lays out the probable cause of the TT.

HACKTACULAR! When Obama was playing it close to the vest on Libya, Ole Perfesser Instapundit nagged and nagged and nagged. Now that there's a U.N.-backed joint military action, the Professor reacts:

They told me if I voted for John McCain, we’d be bombing Arab countries while the supporters of the bombing promised that we’d be greeted as liberators. And they were right!

Etc ("as he looks increasingly ineffectual elsewhere, Obama will take a more aggressive foreign policy approach..."). Reynolds also runs this alarming squib,

HILLARY CLINTON: "Fed up with a President 'who can’t make up his mind.'"

This is the lead fragment from a Daily story, which the reader later learns (if he or she continues, which is unlikely) comes from an unnamed "Clinton insider." (I thought Mark Penn had retired.) It's several grafs before reporter Joshua Hersh starts used sourced quotes, including one from Foreign Policy magazine that repeats an alleged quote from a "diplomat." That's meta!

Oh, look what Benjamin Weinthal just said at National Review's The Corner. Last week Weinthal said, "President Obama and his NATO and EU allies ought to swiftly introduce a no-fly zone over Libya... Obama has an amazing opportunity to end his zigzagging in the region and show that America’s democracy language is not merely empty rhetoric." Today Weinthal says,

Sarkozy: Europe’s Proponent of Bush’s ‘Freedom Agenda’

To get a sense of how President Obama’s Libya (and Mideast) strategy is stuck in a foreign-policy rut, one only needs to look at how French president Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be the only formidable leader on the world stage.

I've got mixed feelings about the Libya crisis myself (though Tim Carney tells me that as a fan of big government I should be in favor of intervention). It would be much more relaxing for me if, instead of judging it on the merits, I could adopt positions randomly, guided by whichever POV made more effective propaganda against some politician at any given moment.

UPDATE. Foreign Policy returns with a named source:

"In the case of Libya, they just threw out their playbook," said Steve Clemons, the foreign policy chief at the New America Foundation. "The fact that Obama pivoted on a dime shows that the White House is flying without a strategy and that we have a reactive presidency right now and not a strategic one"...

"Gates is clearly not on board with what's going on and now the Defense Department may have an entirely another war on its hands that he's not into," said Clemons. "Clinton won the bureaucratic battle to use DOD resources to achieve what's essentially the State Department's objective... and Obama let it happen."

I enjoy the suggested image of Clinton and Gates wrestling on the floor of the Oval Office while Obama sits there going "Duh," but it seems to me that the cooperation of the Arab League is consonant with Obama's outreach to Middle Eastern nations, and that waiting (or conniving) to get it was sort of the opposite of "flying without a strategy." But what do I know, I'm not in the tank -- I mean, a think tank.

UPDATE 2. In comments, Chocolate Covered Cotton makes a good case for staying out:

This is a civil war. One in which the gov't being rebelled against really is awful, and in which the rebels' side really does seem the right one, but it's still no more our concern than the similar civil wars around Africa for which we have no interest in intervening. The only thing that makes Libya different is its oil.

Yeah, funny how that's always a deal-breaker.

INGRATES. Back in 2007, Michael J. Totten of the lapsed liberal pro-war brigade was telling us in Commentary that, even though a lot of Iraqis still didn't have clean drinking water and many of their villages were rubble, things weren't going so bad, really, not like those stupid liberal reporters were saying.

Today Totten has an op-ed in the New York Post about Libya and why we're not going to put in a no-fly zone:

Here at home, liberals fear and loathe the very idea of another Iraq, which to them is "Vietnam" conjugated in Arabic...

Just had to get that out of the way. But Totten says conservatives aren't quick to get with the program either (apparently he hasn't been paying attention to William Kristol, for which who could blame him).

Now guess whose fault that is.

Few expected Iraq to transition smoothly to a stable democracy after so many years of repression, sanctions and war -- but if Iraqis hadn't responded with such a vicious campaign of violence against our soldiers and each other, the thought of helping Libyans who suffer under similar circumstances wouldn't frighten or disgust quite so many of us.

Iraqis didn't have to attack us after we toppled Saddam Hussein. Contrary to what some seem to believe, guerrilla warfare and terrorism weren't the only options available...

Americans are disgusted by our nation's endless adventure in Middle East, and it's all the Iraqis' fault. The nerve! Back in 2003 we even told them, "Your enemy is not surrounding your country, your enemy is ruling your country," and for some reason they still haven't thanked us.

This may be a good time for Arab leaders and opinion makers to ask themselves what they can do to win over the hearts and minds of Americans.

Judging by what's been going on over there in recent weeks, I'd say they stopped asking that a long time ago.

UPDATE. Some commenters pick up on Totten's deranged-ex-boyfriend vibe ("Why don't you love me, you bitch! I burned your house down for us!" -- Leeds Man). Others notice this weird passage from the op-ed:

Americans fret constantly about whether or not we're doing the right thing to win the hearts and minds of the Arabs. That's one reason Obama was elected (though I can't help but wonder how many Libyans wish John McCain were in the White House right now).

"We do?" "It was??" "You can't???" responds Jason.

I'm just sad that Totten, who has done a lot of reporting from the Middle East, has come to this. I guess he's the modern equivalent of the retired Raj officer who snarls in private clubs that he lived among the blighters for years and they're all worthless savages, every man jack of them.

ALL SERIOUS OFFERS ENTERTAINED. The tsimmis at NPR has got conservatives demanding that the subsidized station make some rightwing affirmative action hires. Offering himself for this detail is one Mark Judge, who says he'd "take a job at NPR to balance things out."

This guy has a nose for opportunity, if not the means to follow up. Some years back, under the more right-fashionably pretentious name Mark Gauvreau Judge, he was pushing a swing dancing revival as the answer to sexual promiscuity. When this wore out, he affected to be interested in rock so he could yell at Eminem and Madonna, and made his way through the world peddling similar culture-war bullshit to the Wall Street Journal about the power of exorcism and other tediosities. Eventually the work died up and Judge tried to sell a new movement called "metrocons," which was so lame even other social cons wouldn't go for it.

Now Judge has washed up at the Daily Caller, and clearly wants to be one of the shock troops leading the Long March Through the Institutions. He claims that he "once wanted to freelance for Slate," and scoffs at "bilious media critic" Jack Shafer's contention that liberals tend to flock to such jobs and make better candidates. "But hey," adds Judge, "they hired Dave Weigel, the Journolist libertarian who — shocker! — has turned out to be a liberal" -- which, while a ridiculous mischaracterization of Weigel, does show prospective commissars that Judge can remember and repeat even long-forgotten talking points, which may gain him an advantage when the wimp-asses at NPR eventually surrender to them a wingnut sinecure.

If you think Judge is too much of a buffoon for this work, consider that CNN hired Erick Erickson, who I'm not confident can tell time.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger reaction to the disasters in Japan. The main idea: We need more nuclear power plants in America, since the meltdowns in Japan aren't as bad as they could have been, and with the Tea Party days of free-market safety standards upon us, we're sure to handle them responsibly.

As we have seen, big-media conservatives have been on this case too. I know they're supposed to be Bizarro Alinskyites, but they seem to have badly misapprehended the idea of "never let a crisis go to waste." Either that or they're going for a Springtime for Hitler effect.

WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE TRACTORS? You may recall a few weeks back that William Jacobson found I had picked the wrong number from a story about union demonstrations, which I then corrected, leading an invasion of trolls to insist the correction meant that my whole article was wrong. Professor Jacobson said this gave him a "great morning."

This weekend there was another huge union protest in Madison, and the Professor went in search of more morning thrills. Here's what he came up with:

The New York Times reported that "Farmers descended on the Capitol in Madison to protest the budget bill, trundling around in a brigade of tractors," and featured a photo of someone on a tractor in its story about the protest yesterday in Madison.

A brigade of tractors? I realize The Times probably was using the term figuratively, but even so, since a brigade typically is 3,000-5,000 soldiers in number, certainly The Times was talking big numbers of tractors in Madison, right?

The Professor determines there were only 50-60 tractors, which means that the references to a brigade had been "fanciful exaggerations by people who bitterly cling to the glory days of the 1930s union movement, not realizing that the world has passed them by." Sure, something like 100,000 people attended, but there weren't enough tractors, and that's the important thing. Soon the Professors' minions will be out demanding apologies.

I'm sure Jacobson got another good morning out of this, but he's kind of like the guy you see standing on the corner every morning grinning to himself; eventually you figure out that what at first looked like a positive attitude is just plain imbecility.

IF ONLY HE'D BEEN AROUND WHEN THE DUKE MADE THE GREEN BERETS. I have sometimes wondered what happened to Christian Toto, a culture warrior whose nonsense but rarely comes to my attention. I see now that he has a website, at which appears his review... of the reviewers!

"Is ideology invading ‘Battle: LA’ reviews?" asks Toto. While admitting that saying the stupid-looking new film "isn’t perfect" is "like saving Julian Assange has trouble keeping secrets" (LOL, #TCOT!), Toto judges the real offense to be evil liberal film critics:

But perusing a few of the critical responses to “Battle” yields something else “wrong” with the film. It doesn’t march lockstep with some critics’ ideological fault lines.

Above and beyond the amazing gall of a kulturkampfer complaining about other people politicizing the arts (hey, at least these critics saw the films first!), it turns out Toto's selection is heavily padded. Here's Toto's bias example from the Washington Post:

Did somebody mention Iraq? “Battle’s” depiction of block-by-block urban combat against an implacable, enigmatic foe evokes Baghdad at its bloodiest. But director Jonathan Liebesman (whose background is in horror flicks) isn’t interested in allegory, nuance or social comment. He just wants to line up platinum-plated space-squids to be blown away.

The critic compares Marines doing an Iraq-style mission to Marines doing an Iraq-style mission. Propaganda! Also:

And Roger Ebert, an avowed liberal, hated the film so much he called anyone who disagreed with him an “idiot.”

An avowed liberal having strong opinions is a sure sign of treason. And Toto seems not to know that comments such as "the film is plainly cut from the mold of old-school military propaganda films and rejected 'Call of Duty' missions" are what we on planet earth call "jokes."

Taken all together, the message seems to be, "Liberals totes kept me out of the Film Society of Film Critics. I'll show them!"

UPDATE. Toto complains in comments. He thinks I was suggesting that he hadn't seen the film; the passage in question refers to the modus operandi of other conservative critics, which was perhaps unclear. Sometimes I neglect to explain my jokes for newcomers. Speaking of which, Toto continues:

Your example of a joke isn't a joke, it's a colorful way to express an opinion. Jokes are funny. This comment isn't.

It seems explaining the jokes wouldn't have helped in any case.

BEYOND PARODY. I was joking that now would be a good time for Republicans to push for nuclear power. But Media Matters shows us that some of them have already done so at Fox Business.

These lunatics are saying that the Japanese reactors got through the tsunami "without a dent," which proves that we should get nuclear plants up and running now. Among the choice quotes: "Regulations don't make ya safe, safety makes ya safe!" Also they claim wind power is more dangerous than nuclear because a hawk flew into a turbine.

I've tried for years to figure out what motivates them, but I'm leaning toward the explanation that they were sent by aliens to destroy the human race. (h/t zpleat)

UPDATE. Ole Perfesser Instapundit doubles down, publishing an alleged letter from a constituent who tells us he's in Tokyo. While "alarmed at the nuclear crisis unfolding in Fukushima," the reader points out no skyscrapers collapsed, "so let’s not trash nuclear energy and Japanese engineering, please." If you question the safety of nuclear power, you're attacking Japanese engineering! Years of claiming people who oppose their politics are therefore opposing America have left them with this mental tic, I guess.

Most normal people are actually celebrating Japan's rigorous building codes, which probably saved many lives and are the sort of thing modern conservatives consider Big Gummint, fascist, etc.

UPDATE 2. Commenter MikeJ observes, "Any time something horrible happens Republicans will say we need to have more of it right here. The only thing surprising is that so far I haven't heard any Republicans argue that we should have an earthquake."

DISPATCHES FROM THE CULTURE WARS. Drew Patterson in L.A. alerted me to this attack on Glee by an admitted fan of Glee, California Family Council CEO Ron Prentice, who hath repented.

I fell prey to temptation. My ears were being tickled. But I have corrected my path!

Last night, I watched Glee for the last time. A television show about a group of high school students in their school’s musical performing club, their teacher (Will Schuster), and other faculty members of the school, Glee has devolved into a worldview-training course. And its worldview is without hope.

Devolved? You mean it started out like Seventh Heaven with pop and show tunes? Prentice would have you believe so:

Standard to the majority of television series, the first season impresses viewers with good story lines, and in this case, exceptional musical talent. Then, more overt worldview messages enter into the scripts.

Apparently Glee caught this Christer with Grease, Les Miserables, and Madonna sing-alongs, and then to Prentice's shock it suddenly turned out to be full of homosexuals and teen couplings. It has to be a conspiracy!

My guess is, other members of the council walked in on Prentice dancing around the TV to "Sweet Transvestite" and singing into a hairbrush, and he had to come up with something.

Speaking of O Jesus, The Anchoress finds "Another Reason to Defund PBS": The Sesame Street parody of Mad Men.

Mad men, sad men and … happy men?

Is it too difficult for Sesame Street to teach the concept of gladness? While watching this video, everything in me was screaming, “glad! GLAD! You’re GLAD MEN!”

They missed an opportunity to make education dynamic: “This makes me happy! This makes me GLAD!”

Of course if they had, she'd be yelling about this.

Add “glad” and you’ve given the children the concept of a synonym, plus a fun rhyme, and you’ve added a little wordplay for the adults.

Instead, this is dumbed-down, and maddeningly less than it could be...

A rightwing fake nun watching children's television has no right to complain about anyone or anything else being dumbed down.

But let's not just pick on the Jesus people when there are plenty of quasi-secular conservative intellectuals to pick on. In this regard, National Review's Phi Beta Cons blog is a treasure trove. Carol Iannone reads Antonia Fraser's account of her mostly happy life with the late Harold Pinter, which fills Iannone with literally incoherent rage:

Ha ha, but the laugh is on us. So while Pinter was enjoying his high-level marriage of refined intellectual equals in the British upper class, he was inflicting on his servile public a dark vision of obscure miseries, casual cruelties, inarticulate vulgarity, strangled miscommunications, and menacing silences in sordid rooming houses.

Also, centuries earlier, Shakespeare wrote tragedies and then went out to pubs and told jokes. And wrote comedies! Later, Inannone follows up:

A reader wants to know my point in my Pinter post.

You could go read it, but it doesn't get any funnier than that opening.

NOW SHE TELLS US. Peggy Noonan used to love Donald Rumsfeld ("these days he seems, as leaders go, a natural... As a communicator he's clear as clean water," etc) but now she's mad at him because he seems to have spent his recent memoirs deflecting blame from himself for the clusterfuck in Afghanistan. In fact she wants to take that book of memoirs and "break its stupid little spine."

It's not her last violent thought. Eventually our Crazy Jesus Lady gets around to talking about why we are in Afghanistan, despite our citizens' disgust at the enterprise. Followers may recall that Noonan was as recently at 2009 telling us that "Afghanistan is a great American undertaking," but was very unclear as to what the goal of that undertaking might be; she talked about what other people were thinking and saying (actually, mainly that they were thinking and saying indeterminate things), and implied of course that Obama had it all wrong, but didn't give us her own view on the subject, other than it was great and American and an undertaking.

Well, in today's column Noonan offers a little clarity:

If you asked most Americans why we went into Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11, they would answer, with perfect common sense, that it was to get the bad guys—to find or kill Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers, to topple the Taliban government that had given them aid and support, to destroy terrorist networks and operations. New York at the time of the invasion, October 2001, was still, literally, smoking; the whole town still carried the acrid smell of Ground Zero. The scenes of that day were still vivid and sharp. New York still isn't over it...

Yeah, yeah, cut the bagpipes and get on with it.

...America wanted—needed—to see U.S. troops pull Osama out of his cave by his beard and drag him in his urine-soaked robes into an American courtroom. Or, less good but still good, to find him, kill him, put his head in a Tiffany box with a bow, and hand-carry it to the president of the United States.

It wasn't lust for vengeance, it was lust for justice, and for more than justice.

As you may have noticed long before now, that box was never delivered, and now Noonan says:

The failure to find bin Laden was a seminal moment in the history of the war in Afghanistan. And it was a catastrophe. From that moment—the moment he escaped his apparent hideout in Tora Bora and went on to make his sneering speeches and send them out to the world—from that moment everything about the Afghanistan war became unclear, unfocused, murky and confused.

I wish someone had told us at the time that we were just there for the head of Osama Bin Laden and that, once we had established that we weren't going to get it, we could split. Oh well, too late now.

MOVING TARGET PRACTICE. Standing up for white men in America, Robin of Berkeley. She was filling out an "application to be a provider for an insurance panel" (presumably because she's a licensed psychotherapist) and the application rudely asked if she were gay or Asian.

What also occurred to me while filling out the application is that every special category exists aside from that of a white, straight male. If someone is gay or a woman or a person of color, the welcome mat is laid out. But what about an ordinary Joe, a working-class stiff from Toledo?

I think a working-class-stiff set-aside would liven up any insurance panel, particularly if they waived the professional requirements... oops, next graf suggests she's talking about college admissions:

How does he get into college when all the recruitment efforts are aimed at others?

Cut to a factory clerk longingly gazing upon the gates of his local college, then hanging his head dejectedly as he remembers that college is for differently-abled lesbians of color.

Some young men turn to the military as a way of accessing needed funds for college. What are the consequences?

They are, in fact, grave: white, working class men are at much higher risk of being mortally wounded in the battleground than their privileged counterparts.

Privileged counterparts including non-white working class men? Whoops, new thought follows:

And while the working class risk their lives, the snooty elite go to college on daddy's dime.

You get the picture: The admission privileges allegedly enjoyed by minorities are easily conflated with the privileges enjoyed by rich people. The only ones left holding the bag are poor white men.

After decades of grievances, we haven't turned into a fairer nation; we're simply an angrier one.

Well, some of us are clearly angry.

In the age of Obama, aggrieved groups have joined together to demand their rights, endeavoring to put the white man under their thumb.

Unsurprisingly, there are no evidentiary links in that section.

Now men are marginalized and demonized. They are given the demoralizing message that they are unnecessary.

OK, we've made the leap from poor men to men in general, now let's take it a step further:

The United States would cease to operate if conservative white males went on strike tomorrow (not necessarily a bad idea, by the way). We'd do just fine shorn of most of the metrosexual crowd -- the college professors and the activists. But we'd crash and burn without the manly man. It's he who does the essential work that others cannot, like patrol our streets, extinguish fires, and drive tractors.

Conservative white males! If George Will, Mark Steyn and Charles Krauthammer throw down their tools, the nation will be consumed by flames, leaving only the vanishingly small coterie of metrosexuals who put Obama over the top to ask one another, "Which end goes on the hydrant?"

As a former progressive, I know how tempting it is to blame others for our own problems.

No comment.

ANOTHER MILLION-DOLLAR IDEA. Charlie Sheen has been fired, and I weep that Two and a Half Men, the sitcom of our age, is no more. But like my mother always said, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade and put vodka in it. Here's my pitch, Charlie: Bring back Playboy After Dark. Check out this vintage clip from the show of Hugh Hefner discussing philosophy with LeRoy Neiman:



The Playboy Penthouse as Plato's Cave! Now imagine Sheen taking Hef's place and discoursing, in an After Six tux and with a goddess on his arm (oh, right, two goddesses), on the "worldwide renaissance of me." It's a snug fit, no? Sheen, having none of Hef's savoir faire, will be more jagged and obscene, and more apt to inflict Korn on his guests than the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Shel Silverstein, and Lenny Bruce, but we must make some concessions to the times.

Also he should get this guy to tend bar.

(TBOGG AND SADLY NO EACH DID ONE, SO I GUESS I MIGHT AS WELL TRY A) SHORTER ROSS DOUTHAT: Let's go back to scaring kids out of having sex. This time it's sure to work!

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Charlie Sheen phenomenon and the rightblogger reaction to it. There was sufficient insanity to fill the bag, so I left out some interesting bits, like Conservative Oasis' o-tempura-o-s'mores Hollyweird lament:

We have as a country regressed intellectually I think. We don’t, I believe, still treat ourselves to the penchant of a mild mannered, wise and thoughtful reprise to a more gentle and innocent introspection of ourselves. We want to be wowed. We don’t think about why, or the consequences. We just want to be wowed. Show me the freak show! Show me the daredevil that is really jsut a dumbass! Show me the disintegrating millionaire Hollywood asshole! Show me the whore, the junky, the youthful superstar sweetheart that has turned into the bitch who shows her crotch as she gets out of the car!

This monlogue should be spoken in an increasingly loud and strangulated voice by Harris Yulin while holding a Polaroid camera in a cheap motel room.