"YOUNG MAN, THAT'S THE FUNNIEST THING YOU'VE SAID ALL NIGHT! SCREW THE IRISH!"

A passage from James Taranto's latest at the Wall Street Journal:

Life Imitates 'South Park'

 "After the TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy begins showing, metrosexuality becomes a major fad among both the men and the boys, and they all begin to act effeminate. At the school bus stop, instead of their usual winter clothing, Stan, Cartman, and Kenny wear unmasculine clothing. Kyle, who does not want to conform, is beaten up by a metrosexual gang at school. Mr. Garrison and Mr. Slave, the town's gay couple, are opposed to the fad since they feel that the gay culture should be unique to gays. The women of the town are initially in favor of their husbands' improved hygiene and willingness to communicate, but soon tire of the men becoming increasingly self-absorbed."--Wikipedia.org summary of "South Park Is Gay!," aired Oct. 22, 2003

"Booker OK With Speculation That He's Gay: 'So What Does It Matter if I Am?' "--TalkingPointsMemo.com, Aug. 27, 2013

Haw, see it's funny because... uh... 'cuz fags.

Historically in the world of comedy, there's no laugh too cheap to get -- cf. Albert Brooks,"I tell you one thing, when he said ‘shit,’ I almost died!" But when you don't even bother to construct a joke because you know your audience will go for anything Politically Incorrect, you may have actually created a frontier.

THE CULTURE WAR ON BASIC CABLE.

While you hipsters were debating the cultural significance of Miley Cyrus, at the Washington Times Charles Hurt was drawing kulturkampf from the fetid well of Honey Boo-Boo.

America, if you want to know what the establishment media and the beneficent federal government think of you, tune your television sets in to “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.”

?

It appears that no one on the program actually works for a living, other than to exploit the child in beauty pageants. Now, of course, they are exploiting the whole family with the show on the “Learning” Channel, an entity that, by the way, was founded by the federal government in 1972 to educate the poor masses. 

As with most government programs, the result is incestuously stupid, lazy and hopeless people who cannot roll themselves off the bed long enough to find a job and buy a better house that doesn’t rattle violently every time a train goes by.

While under the guidance of "the beneficent federal government" the network did supply wholesome educational fare; but after it was privatized, first under the ownership of the Financial News Network and then the Discovery Channel, it became a kingdom of crap. Hurt fails to mention this, probably because it would suggest a vastly different object lesson than he intended.

But Hurt still has the "establishment media" to blame, and in his view Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo is not offered as entertainment to attract viewers and advertisers, but as a shaming spectacle to let the rubes know with what contempt the establishment views them:

Honey Boo Boo and her fat clan is what liberal Northeast and West Coast elites think of most Americans — especially Southerners and rural people. That is because in their vast and cloistered ignorance they have never met any normal Americans nor traveled past the Potomac River. They have never been to a rodeo.

If only we could get TLC execs to a rodeo, maybe they'd change their ways. (TLC did have a rodeo reality show, but that was in 2006; presumably it was driven off the air by the Democratic sweep in Congress.)

But there is hope yet. 

The great thing about America and the genuinely promising thing about the onslaught of modern technology is the stunning degree to which the elite’s long-held monopoly on media and culture is shattered. The barbarians are at the gate and can no longer be kept out. 

Those barbarians, of course, come in the form of “Duck Dynasty.”

Ah, Duck Dynasty -- the current conservative cultural touchstone, and one that is not a product of the establishment media, but transmitted from a barn with "A&E" painted on the side by ham radio operators.  Hurt's exegesis adds nothing much to the now-customary yap about how the Robertsons are everything that's right with America, but he does have a wow finish:

In one episode aired recently, the patriarch observed: “Uptown living, you’ve got to call 911. Where I am, I am 911.” 

Truly, an observation worthy of Alexis de Tocqueville or the Federalist Papers.

This suggests a new direction for the Tea Party; instead of handing out copies of the Constitution, they can hand out DVDs of Duck Dynasty, and maybe other offerings from the same production company, such as Shark Hunters, Sole Survivor, and Auction Hunters,  which I'm sure also have a story to tell about America -- probably the same one Mencken had.

Me, I prefer to celebrate America with a Beverly Hillbillies marathon.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the shooting death of Christopher Lane and the Ooga Booga reaction by rightbloggers. It includes my theory about why the time was right for this outbreak.

SEE YOU IN THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY.

I should mention, now that he's gone ahead and pulled the trigger, that Tbogg has for years been one of my favorite writers -- and I needn't qualify that with "in the blogosphere," which is like calling someone the smartest guy on a National Review cruise. That he is known as a "liberal blogger" is just an accident of history, I think -- he's really a satirist (as his hilarious Filner summer camp chronicles show) who has hunted where, in our low mean time, the ducks pretty consistently wind up: Out on absurdly elevated media perches, defending the indefensible in loud, quacking voices, just begging for his buckshot.

Part of a satirist's racket is wisdom, and Tbogg has supplied enough of that ("no one is going to get a blogging Pulitzer for being the fastest to post what they just saw and heard on the TV"), but I've been most grateful for the laughs -- for the times when he has greeted the sententious argh-blargh of internet hierophants with appropriate seriousness, or got right to the nub on the works of Ayn Rand:

One assumes that it is somewhere around page 600 when Dagny Taggart has sex with Hank Reardon but it ends badly because, while sex is the highest celebration of human values, giving your partner an orgasm because they expect one is just sanctioning your own victimhood.

I speak in the present perfect continuous tense because I can't imagine we've heard the last of him -- though if he slips off like Rimbaud into the quarries and stays silent on this foolish world forever, I can't say I would blame him.

BUT SINCE 9/11 I'M OUTRAGED BY CHAPPAQUIDDICK THE NSA.

From out of the past, Jeff Jarvis on the NSA revelations:

As a Democrat, I am disgusted with President Obama

I haven't paid attention to Jarvis for a while, preferring the 2.0 Twitter version, FakeJeffJarvis ("Other kids dreamed of being an astronaut. I dreamed of having 500+ LinkedIn connections"). I remember him as the right wing's second favorite futurist, and one of their very favorite bullshit liberals; a man who described himself as "a former liberal pacifist transformed by 9/11 into an avid warblogger," and of whom a fan aptly said to Ann Althouse, "I think people on the right are also horrified at just how left the left has become when people like you and Jeff Jarvis and Instapundit are labeled as conservative or hard right..."

Jarvis has been since-9/11-outraged-by-Chappaquidick for a long time. I also recall him after the 2006 Congressional elections, wishing Joe Lieberman's victory would deprive the Democrats of a Senate majority. And in the 2008 campaign there were few standard-issue anti-Obama sentiments Jarvis did not circulate. March 21, 2008: "I may be the only person who’s not become worshipful of Obama’s speech on race and religion and who finds it more disturbing the more I think about it." April 30, 2008: "Now I’m actually angrier about Obama and the Rev. Wright than before." Etc.

After Obama won, Jarvis was momentarily pleased:

I have been impressed with Obama post-election. He has been moving to the center, where I am glad to see him. He has been unafraid to work with strong characters from the Clinton administration, including his rival. He was unafraid to reach out with a peace offering to the left’s boogeyman, Joseph Lieberman.

Thereafter he used Obama as a means of flogging his usual futurist schtick -- "Now that Barack Obama is in the White House, he must continue to use and spread the tools of the internet and transparency that he so brilliantly plied to win the office or else it would make his promises of change empty."

But Jarvis' thinkfluence didn't amount to much, and now in 2013 he's decided to take a bold stand "as a Democrat" against Obama because of the NSA.  This from a guy who used to say when people bitched about the NSA under a President not named Obama, "this isn’t as simple as raising the tattered-from-overuse privacy flag" -- also known as the "privacy buggabuzzword."

When it's important I'm willing to make common cause with some rightwing asshole to push the tide back on civil liberties. But when you line up with Rand Paul you know what you're getting. Jarvis is so full of shit, he's as useless as an ally as he is as an opponent -- maybe even more useless; he discredits any cause by adopting it. I'm beginning to think newspapers would already be utterly dead by now if Jarvis hadn't spent the past ten years predicting it.

THE ETERNAL RETURN.

Selected sections from Megan McArdle on how Fox News Matt Drudge The rise of warblogs Duck Dynasty big money and newspapers will make the liberalmedia less liberalmedia:

Those of us in Washington live in an era of Democratic triumphalism. Most of the Democrats I talk to are convinced that their destiny is almost upon them.

So, that's Matt Yglesias and the black lady on the bus?

People will come to the news assuming that the people making it have an agenda -- and they will seek out outlets that match their own agenda, if they see political news at all.

Boy, when people find out about this Media Bias stuff, there'll be some changes I tell you what,

A more ideological media will be hiring more conservatives, and that will change what a large portion of the country gets as news.

Because conservatives gots all the moneys, I guess. Well, I figured that crony capitalist Obama stuff was bullshit. (Later: "As I say, a more ideological media will probably also be a more conservative media, because there are a lot more conservatives in the donor class, and in the audience, than there are in the media." Ah, the audience! If only all those hardcore American conservatives knew how to find Breitbart.com, this revolution would have already taken place! Too bad they made the URL so difficult to spell. Maybe a button at AOL would help.)

How much does this matter? In his pretty convincing book, "Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind," Tim Groseclose of UCLA argues that it matters a lot. Here’s how he lays out recent research on the question of media effects:

[Long incomprehensible blockquote with statistics] 

The concept of media lambda is a bit technical, so I won’t explain it here; check out Groseclose’s book if you’re interested.

(groans, holds head in hands)

What this summary suggests is that a large number of people, from political professionals to academics who have studied the matter, think that the media’s ideological composition has a substantial effect on elections.

And we're back where we started and, for all I know anymore, where we've always been: A "large number of people" believe it, and everything proceeds from that, with a few lambdas thrown in to confuse the yokels.

I never thought I'd say this, but McArdle's starting to give Goldberg a run for his money.

TODAY IN FILM REVIEWS BY RIGHTWING PROPAGANDISTS:

Shorter Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institute: The Butler is bad for race relations in America, and I'll do my bit to reverse its effect by explaining why the Civil Rights Act was a mistake.

See, on the one hand, Title II of the Act desegregated some otherwise intractably segregated areas of American life; but on the other, "the constant use of disparate impact tests in education, housing, and employment led to an overreach by the new civil rights establishment of today."

Previously on Richard A. Epstein Explains Racial Justice: "The Supreme Court should strike the VRA down and let Congress return to the drawing board for something better." Epstein is also the author of Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws.

Sadly, I can't find anything by Epstein on Django Unchained.

UPDATE. In comments Fats Durston applies the Epstein method to Schindler's List: "its wrong narrative of the evolution of anti-Semitism serves to strengthen a set of misguided Israeli government programs at a time when it is no longer possible to bless all actions of the Zionist movement." So that's why it won all those Oscars! Well, you know Hollyweird.

Meanwhile in rightwing world,  Jim Hoft is moved to poetry, or some species of it:

HOW AWFUL! Oprah’s “The Butler” Is Chock Full of Racist Lies (Video) 

How absolutely horrible!
Oprah and Hollywood are going ga-ga over The Butler a project that is purposely filled with racist lies from beginning to end.
What horrible people. 

As Eric Bolling pointed out today on The Five that the “real” Butler was born in Virginia.
His mother was never raped by a white man.
His father was never killed by a white man.
That was just included as an extra jab at whitey.

I find it difficult to believe he typed this; it reads as if it were taken down by a psychiatric examiner. 

LIGHTS, CAMERA, CULTURE WAR!

From National Review:

Santorum’s Storytelling
As head of a Christian movie studio, he aims to change the culture... 

In June, [Rick] Santorum became CEO of EchoLight Studios, which produces Christian films. Santorum, who changed his own views on abortion as an adult, believes that if conservatives wish to gain converts, they must look not only to politics but also to the culture. 

“We’re losing this debate not because of politics,” Santorum told attendees last Saturday at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, the second annual gathering of the group by the same name. “Politicians didn’t change the culture — the popular culture changed America"... 

Santorum offers The Passion of the Christ as an example of a well-made movie that was also Christian. Other movies he cites as models of what he hopes to produce at EchoLight are Ben-Hur and The Song of Bernadette. “You used to have all sorts of movies that were very authentic in their Christian message, and it was mainstream Hollywood that made them,” Santorum remarks. “That has disappeared in the last 40 or 50 years.”

Coming soon from Santorum Studios:

The Song of K-Lo. In the 1990s, when all the other children in her small town of Chelsea, N.Y. are doing ecstasy and having sex, Kathryn Jean stays in her room studying the Holy Bible and Commentary.  One day she is visited there by a beautiful lady who glides around the room and tells her to write conservative essays. All the children and even the adults all laugh at her, but Kathryn Jean sticks steadfastly to her task and eventually ascends into an editorial job at National Review. In a touching coda, it is revealed that the beautiful lady was actually Rollerena.

God's Florist. In a dystopian future, America has gone totally gay; straight couples who dare walk hand-in-hand endure vile taunts by bitchy homosexuals, and come home to find their homes redecorated;  by government decree, all children must spend their 16th summer in The Castro; Hooters has been replaced by a new chain called The Meat Rack. The only citizen who will stand up to the pink tide is a brave florist who refuses to provide services to same-sex weddings. His righteous example sparks a revolution, and the gays, encouraged by savage beatings, flee the country, freeing men to triumphantly pat each other's asses without feeling self-conscious about it, and women to procreate and do laundry. Screenplay by Elizabeth Scalia.

The Palin of the Christ. Guilty only of patriotism, Sarah Palin is dragged from the Republican National Convention to the court of the liberal media. When asked, "What is truth?" she replies, "Well if you don't know I sure as heck ain't gonna tell ya, Four Eyes." Palin is made to run a gauntlet of Fox News programs and personal appearances until finally she perishes on Facebook. But political death is not the end, and Palin rises again at CPAC, where she is hailed as a goddess by an army of radio hosts who preach her Gospel to the world. "Well," says the risen Palin, "it just shows to go ya."

UPDATE. Oh my, commenters have outdone themselves with their own Santorum Studios movie pitches. There's Jeffrey_Kramer's Chuck Norris Facts: The Movie! ("So Chuck tips his cowboy hat, leaves, and fucks a sheep so hard he sets it on fire"); DocAmazing's Dennis Praeger Superstar ("about a Jewish kid who becomes popular by Speaking Truth to Power and is eventually betrayed by a ghostwriter who insists on his speaking in full sentences"); Diddler on the Roof ("A big song number is 'Sedition!'") from tigrismus; zencomix's Santorum and Delilah ("Eventually Santorum tells Delilah that he will lose his strength with the loss of his sweater vests"); and JayB's Black like My Friend the Black, "based on a true story Megan McArdle heard from a black person on a bus." But really, they're all winners.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about some bold new plans for the GOP that rightbloggers have been giving big up: kicking CNN and NBC off the Republican Debate party train, Mark Levin's "Liberty Amendments," and the guy from Duck Dynasty as a Congressional candidate.  This is the sort of experimentalism that makes me nostalgic for epistemic closure.

APOCALYPSE NOW.

Orson Scott Card, some of whose ravings were covered here years ago, has recently gotten some attention for his lunatic fantasy that Obama will use black street gangs to keep the presidency in the Obama family by force for years to come. But Card is a well-known sci-fi author; less likely to be noticed, but just as nuts, is longtime conservative author Donald Sensing. After explaining that Obama is running America by fiat, Sensing writes:

Obama can do this not because the Constitution or law authorize it. Most definitely they actually prohibit it. He is getting away with it because there is no one who can stop him and almost no one who wants to stop him. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, in the Democrat party is in the slightest interested in reining in Obama's expansion of executive diktat because they know what few of the rest of us are awakening to: the Democrats are never going to lose that executive authority again. Let me be clear, with a promise to elucidate another day: there is never going to be another Republican president. Ever... 

The president of the United States is now quite literally a dictate-er: he orders what he wishes and implements what he chooses.

Meanwhile a non-discrimination law in San Antonio that would keep the city from doing business with people who discriminate against gay people -- just as the city (and every other city I can think of) would if those people discriminated against blacks -- is portrayed by conservatives as "a disturbing infringement on liberty of conscience."

Try to imagine what a spectacle this presents to normal people: The Loyal Opposition telling them that the President is a dictator, and that non-discrimination laws are the real fascism. Maybe they actually think this is electoral gold. After all, we're all supposed to be libertarians now, right?  And, as we grow weary of repeating, libertarianism is basically conservatism with a brand makeover. At Forbes, Ralph Benko assures us that "Libertarians And Conservatives Must Find Common Ground" to win, and the way he suggests they achieve that is... to turn against gay rights. "Traditional values as vote getter (not just within the party base but with Independents — including ethnics and blue collar workers) violates the meta-narrative of the party elites," he says. "Still, the conclusion that traditional values is a net, and a legitimate, vote getter is almost impossible to avoid."

That'll be news to most people (though maybe Matt Welch will go for it), but conservatives aren't most people, and decreasingly resemble them. Here's Ben Shapiro with his own formula for conservative victory:

Ask anybody who’s ever broken up with a girlfriend, no matter what you say to your girlfriend after you break up with her, she’s going to think you’re a jerk. Right? And the same thing is true with the American people. 

The American people have broken up with conservativism. You’re not going to convince them that conservativism is the way to go by being really nice. The way that you’re going to convince them that conservatism is the way to go is because this is a two-party system, and we can paint the other side as mean and nasty as they are. And they are. They’re mean and nasty and they’re horrible people. I mean, they truly are.

Maybe Shapiro will get a chance to read that from the podium at the 2016 GOP Convention. You know, in my conspiratorial moments, I think these guys are all plants designed to destroy the Republican Party. Crazy, you say? We'll see who's crazy!

UPDATE. I feel compelled to add that another crazy idea of the week, that Fox News has betrayed conservatism and gone pro-gay, has drawn the attention of Rod Dreher.

Ask yourself, Fox viewers: how often do you see religion covered on the network at all, much less the regular inclusion of conservative religious voices in regular news and opinion coverage?

These guys haven't figured out that if you want dolchstoßlegende to work, you can't accuse everyone of stabbing you in the back.

AL GORE IS FAT 2.0.

Shorter Megan McArdle: You know why "we're" not interested in the carbon footprint of air travel? Because everyone who rides in a plane is a liberal.

Actually lots of people are interested in that footprint -- including the person writing the fucking article McArdle takes off from, but not limited to her. In fact, the International Air Travel Association has been working hard on it.

IATA also reports that "In 2012 air transport produced 689 million tonnes of CO2, around 2% of global CO2 emissions." Maybe McArdle's got a scarier number. Green organizations can certainly supply her with one, and then she can more effectively employ their own concerns as a stick to beat them with, using the patented we're-not-the-[blank]-YOU'RE-the-[blank] routine:

So why, pray tell, do we spend so much time talking about suburban sprawl and sport utilities, and so little time talking about FedEx and European vacations? 

The question answers itself, doesn’t it? Giving up air travel and overnight delivery is much more personally costly for the public intellectuals who write about this stuff than giving up a big SUV. If you live in one of the five or six major cities that contain virtually everyone who writes about climate change, having a small car (or no car), is a pretty easy adjustment to imagine. On the other hand, try to imagine giving up far-flung vacations, conferences, etc. -- especially since travel to interesting locales is one of the hidden perks of not-very-well remunerated positions at universities, public policy groups, nongovernmental organizations, and yes, news organizations.

This is basically the same schtick as the one about liberals not wanting to live with black people, or pay income tax, etc. You'd almost think they had a persecution complex.

LUCK, PLUCK AND BULLSHIT.

Trickle-down is not just for conservative economists; it is also the mechanism of action for wingnut memes. Take lazy-food-stamp-bum messaging: It starts with Republican congressmen, seeps down to Bill O'Reilly, and eventually it gets to Greg Gutfeld.

This is a question that never needed to be asked but must be asked now: if you can get by without working, why work at all? 

It is a question rich layabouts would ask themselves sunning on their daddy's yacht, sipping blender drinks and pawing eastern European pole dancers. But now just about anyone, of any color or stripe, with access to unemployment benefits, welfare, or food stamps can ask themselves that question too.

Yeah, you can live large on fifty bucks worth of food stamps a week. (The welfare check would of course all go to the pool boy and valet.) Sign me up for that life o' leisure!

But you don't have to be unemployed to earn Gutfeld's contempt; if you think a forty-hour week of busting your hump should be worth three hots and a cot at least, in his eyes you're just as bad as a welfare bum. (Only the well-off and those who bust their humps and sleep on straw without complaint escape his wrath.) Gutfeld opposes a living wage because it's demeaning to the worker, who never gets to experience the wonderful feeling of achievement one gets by moving up and out of a minimum-wage, hard-labor job:

The concept of a living wage (which is essentially dramatically increasing the minimum wage) will create entry-level workers who never move up or off that first rung. Why bother moving up if the wage moves up for you?... 

We create a brutal assessment of menial or service work—that it is so awful for your soul, you are better not working, period. I guess the only way a liberal can live with the idea of such work in their world is to reward these poor souls with cash and punish their evil bosses... 

And God, that is wrong. The only way to enjoy the higher rungs of the ladder is to have climbed those lower ones first, as a teen, a college kid, or new "resident" to this country. Not only do you feel the pride of achievement through the upward climb, but at the top you can look down at everyone else and say, in an annoyed voice "You know, when I was your age..."

The following is from Gutfeld's Wikipedia page:

After graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in English, he interned at The American Spectator, as an assistant to conservative writer R. Emmett Tyrrell. He landed his first full-time job as a staff writer at Prevention magazine. He formerly worked in Emmaus, Pennsylvania for approximately a decade as an editor at various Rodale Press magazines. In 1995, he became a staff writer at Men's Health. He was promoted to editor in chief of Men's Health in 1999...

I'll cut to the chase: there's no burger-frier or busboy jobs in there (though maybe just being around Tyrrell is sort of like being spattered with grease all day). I suspect Gutfeld's equivalent of the hard-knock life was having to wonder why his corner office was taking so long.

With these guys, the rap always starts off like Horatio Alger and inevitably turns into Patrick Bateman.

(Other key words in the article: "Sharptons," "race baiters," and, I'm not even kidding, "Murphy Brown.")

THE BOY WHO CRIED OBAMAHITLER.

At the New York Post, Kyle Smith is enraged that some young woman who used to play violin (oooh arty farty!) is now "senior policy advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy," and part of something Smith calls the "Nudge Squad" because its mandate is to gently encourage better behavioral choices based on the ideas in Cass Susstein's book Nudge.

Smith is pissed for a couple of reasons. For one thing, this initiative proceeds from the same thinking that got Bloomberg to make fast food joints post calories, which doesn't appear to change patrons' eating habits, at least not in the short term we've had to observe its effect. Fair enough, though letting people know something about what's in the food they eat is a pretty benign intervention, and seems to work well enough with packaged food labeling, unless you think citizens have no business knowing whether their dessert topping is mostly chemicals or if an energy bar will send them into anaphylactic shock.

But what really seems to bug Smith is something he mainly expresses with old rightwing memes and overwrought innuendo: that the Nudge Squad is oppressive. For instance:

This person was a senior at Yale as of 2007, but now she gets to tell you how to live your life. Sorry: encourage you to make choices that will make you happier... 

Remember when FDR, more or less admitting he was clueless about economics, promised, and delivered, an era of “bold, persistent experimentation”? Obama means it literally. We’re all being targeted for “behavioral interventions.” But only after randomized, controlled trials. Which don’t sound scary. At all. (Just don’t say that in a German accent.)... 

...[Susstein] was boasting in a Harvard working paper that [the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs'] central responsibilities, as defined by Obama’s Executive Order 13563, amounted to “a kind of mini-constitution for the regulatory state.” That sounds a bit immodest. And aren’t constitutions, even cute mini- ones, supposed to come up for a vote?

Similarly, shouldn't people walking around with stapleguns have a concealed-carry permit? Inevitably:

The new paternalism of Obama appointees is very much in tune with the boss. In a neverending series of campaign speeches, he’s taken to saying things like, “That means whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it.” And, “We’re going to do everything we can, wherever we can, with or without Congress.”

It's all part of the seamless garment of ObamaHitler. By the way, Smith refers to the recruitment e-mail of the Nudge Squad, properly known as the Behavioral Insights Team, but does not link to it. Here it is, and here are some of the previous interventions the Team uses as models:

Increasing college enrollment and retention: Providing streamlined personal assistance on the FAFSA form (e.g., pre-populating forms using tax return data and following up with a personal call) to low or moderate income individuals resulted in a 29% greater likelihood of their attending college for two consecutive years... 

Improving academic performance: Students taught to view their intelligence as a “muscle” that can grow with hard work and perseverance (as compared to a “fixed trait”, such as eye-color) experienced academic boosts of 1/2 a letter grade, with the largest effects often seen for low-performing students, students of color, or females in STEM-related courses.

Why, that's just how the Third Reich started.

Conservatives are always wondering aloud why they couldn't win in 2012 against a sitting president with a shit economy, and I keep explaining that it's because people think they're nuts. I used to assume they couldn't hear me because I don't have large BUY GOLD ads on my website, but I'm beginning to think no one can reach them.

Smith had a small but perfectly legitimate grievance -- that the government might be wasting money on an unproven social-science boondoggle -- but he knew that, as a Post columnist, he couldn't hold his barking readership's attention unless he laid on the totalitarian imagery good and thick. The result pleases people who agree with him that politically-correct race-pimping arugula-muching Liberal Fascists have turned America into a Union of Soviet Socialist Community Organizers, but when they try it on normal people it sends them backing nervously out the door. Even a dim person would have figured this out by now; I begin to think they're not serious about winning.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about some of the rightbloggers' recent foreign policy discussions. Basically they think Obama's a wimp as well as a bully and is too busy murdering American diplomats in Benghazi to incinerate Muslims like he's supposed to.

SO BAD THAT A SORT OF GRANDEUR CREEPS INTO IT.

It's rare you see pinched, everything's-an-Alinsky-plot culture-warrior thinking so perfectly distilled as in this headline, so kudos to Walter Hudson at PJ Lifestyle:

How ‘Monopoly’ Perpetuates Myths About Capitalism

I hope his next essay is on how Simon Says undermines religious authority.

LOVE POWER/ THE POWER OF A SWEET FLOWER/ IS GONNA RULE THE EARTH/ AND THERE'LL BE A GREAT REBIRTH.

Love. It’s the most powerful word in the English language. When it is flanked by two pronouns, it becomes the most powerful sentence in the English language: I love you... 

As a guy who remained unmarried through my early 40s, I used those three words more casually than I should have, not worried about the heart I might be wounding. Who knows why, but none of the reasons I can think of are good. Was I being careless or selfish? Was I doing it to make the women I was dating feel better? Or myself?

It sounds like something found by the police in a serial killer's room, but it's Lee Habeeb at National Review, debasing himself with bad confessional prose so the Republican Party can learn to love, yes, love as Lee Habeeb has learned to love!

It is love, regrettably, that is so utterly absent from anything we talk about as conservatives. I would bet that if you Googled every speech by every conservative candidate in 2012, you wouldn’t find the word “love” once.

Even though we believe deeply that love is the answer to so many of the world’s problems, we just can’t say the word.

"L-l-l-l-.... [wet, grinding breaths] l-l-l-.. l-l-l-l-...nigger!"

We believe that no government worker can love a child the way his parents can, and yet we still can’t say the word... 

We believe poverty is often a symptom of kids’ being born without fathers, and to mothers who are kids themselves, and yet we still can’t say the word...

Habebb goes on drawing pretty hearts and flowers on proposals to eliminate WIC and food stamps a good long while until, sensing he's losing his audience (they're milling toward the doors, muttering about "hippie shit"), he pulls his surprise move:

If we started talking about betrayal, we might win more hearts, too.

His poor, stammering target snaps to attention. Dolchstoßlegende! That they can say!

Because it wasn’t conservatives who betrayed the people of Detroit; it was that city’s liberal leaders, who made false promises to their own people; and the UAW, which drove auto plants south; and the public-employee unions, which treated that once great city as an ATM until there was no more cash left to withdraw. 

It isn’t just bad math, what liberals are guilty of; it’s bad faith. Liberals are betraying the people they purport to serve.

That's how you woo them, by God! He's only using you... what could you possibly see in him... can't you see that I'm the one.... Then out comes the knife.

Let’s talk about the kind of guy who tells the girls he loves them and then just takes what he wants from them and leaves. And the kind of guy who says the word “love” and then lives it. 

I know those guys. I’ve been both of them. 

The Legend of Two-Face: "Heads I bring America peace... tails I give them a sword." (William Kristol whispers in his ear.) "Tails it is!"

Americans know those guys, too.

And they voted for Obama. Maybe you guys should do something about your breath.

LIBERTARIAN POPULISM EXPLAINED.

National Review staffer Katrina Trinko has been given a USA Today column to show that she understands the plight of fast-food workers:

It's understandable that fast-food employees want to be paid more. Living off minimum wage can be a grim business, particularly if you're self-supporting or supporting a family... 

But mandating a new minimum wage would likely lead to fewer jobs being created in the future, and it would make for a tough job market for teenagers.

Because if there's anything worse than jobs people can't live on, it's not having enough of them. But don't worry, Trinko has found a workaround that doesn't violate the sanctity of the free market:

Instead of changing laws, fast-food workers should look to change corporate cultures. One idea would be to pressure fast-food companies to allow tip jars, so that people who wanted to pass on more to the workers had a way to do so. 

Given what these poor souls get paid, they might be better off just taking their tip jars out to the sidewalk. Maybe some passing Wealth Producer will notice and reward their entrepreneurial spirit! It worked in Trading Places.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Pope's remarks on gay people and rightbloggers' anxiety that they might be taken as something other than anti-gay. I'm so old, I remember when it was the Democrats who had to constantly worry about keeping a fractious coalition together. Now elderly Catholics who hate change are apparently the other side's problem. Lotsa luck!

POPE-A-DOPE.

Shorter Michael Potemra: The new Pope is a better liar than the old one, and a much better liar than Jerry Falwell.

I particularly love this section:

Ratzinger gets it. For this reason, I suspect that, while it’s somewhat unfair that Bergoglio is being played off against Ratzinger, Ratzinger himself, in his retirement, is not resentful of his successor’s popularity. I rather picture him watching the TV reports on Bergoglio, and saying, “Yes! Zat is exactly vat I vas trying to say.”

And then he drank a goblet of human blood. I often wonder if these Christians, when they talk openly about how they're trying to put one over on the suckers, understand how weird they sound to normal people. Then I remember normal people don't read them.

SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO PLAY THE ODDS.

Michele Catalano was once upon a time a stalwart warblogger (the precursors to rightbloggers), sworn to the War on Whatchamacallit and denouncing those of us who weren't as keen on it as traitors. Sample:

I get more and more discouraged, more upset at the tone the AWC [anti-war crowd] has taken. I will not this time apologize for calling them traitors. I will not back down from those words. When you support an insurgency against your country's soldiers, when you declare that you are in bed in with the enemy, then you are a traitor. And you should be treated as such. I wish that every vet who has returned home from Iraq would see those signs and act upon them.

And there's plenty more where that came from.

Flash forward to 2013, and here's Catalano's new thing: The goddamn Gummint is after her because quinoa!

Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in “these times” now...

NSA is the new MSM! What Catalano described as "six agents from the joint terrorism task force" paid her husband a call: "three black SUVs in front of our house; two at the curb in front and one pulled up behind my husband’s Jeep in the driveway, as if to block him from leaving. Six gentleman in casual clothes emerged from the vehicles and spread out as they walked toward the house..." Panic in Suffolk County! "All I know is if I’m going to buy a pressure cooker in the near future, I’m not doing it online. I’m scared. And not of the right things."

She even got this tale of woe in the Guardian. The usual suspects cried havoc: "A woman on Long Island says that her family was visited by authorities yesterday because of their Internet search history!" flashed National Review; "Yes, the federal government knows what you search for on Google," hand-wrung Reason.

But I knew her work, and waited.

Eventually, from TechCrunch:

Catalano asserts that the visit was likely prompted by her husband searching for the term “backpacks” in close conjunction with her searching for the term “pressure cookers” and her son reading the news. Or something. 

Turns out the visit was prompted by the searches, but not in the way most speculation asserted – by a law enforcement-initiated, NSA-enabled dragnet of the couple’s web history. It turns out either Catalano or her husband were conducting these searches from a work computer. And that employer, “a Bay Shore based computer company,” called the police on their former employee...

Actually TechCrunch is being kind (or something) -- the Suffolk County Police bulletin they worked from described his search terms as "pressure cooker bombs" and "backpacks." Now, I don't approve employers flipping out over stuff like that, even if their subject is married to an obvious nutcake like Catalano. But it's a far cry from the Federales doing a Google-enabled home-invasion, and it's a bit rich to hear such accusations coming from someone who once wrote, "It makes me angry to see how many people react with glee when something goes wrong with Homeland Security. These people who are wishing and hoping for Bush to fail are, in essence, wishing and hoping for another terrorist attack. Sick."

This would be a useful thing to remember the next time you hear wingnuts working their new "libertarian populism" schtick and denouncing the national security state that 10 years ago they all huddled against for electoral warmth. Or whenever you read anything by Andrew Sullivan.

In other words: If you know they're full of shit, when you squeeze 'em don't expect rosewater.

UPDATE. I should point out that many of the outlets that credulously carried the story have since updated to reveal the con, except people like Mollie Hemingway, for obvious reasons. Oh, and Catalano updated too:

The piece I wrote was the story as we knew it with the information we were told. None of it was fabricated. If you know me, you know I would never do that.

I was tempted to ask, how many times does that work? But then I realized there'll always be a whole lot of people who never catch on.

UPDATE 2. At the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger talks about "Obama's Creeping Authoritarianism." Please see above.

UPDATE 3. Commenter Donald G. points out that Catalano eventually came out against the war -- and so she did, in March of 2013. Here's a bit of her day-late-and-dollar-short:

There were others out there like me. I talked to them at work. I talked to them in the school parking lot while we waited for our kids. I talked to them over email or instant message, people from across the country who had that twinge of regret. What we all had in common was this: we felt used. We felt taken advantage of. We felt manipulated. And we were admitting we were wrong.

So let history record that starting in 2003 America went to war on Michele Catalano's self-esteem. Key bonus line:

Not that I would have voted for Kerry.

Maybe she can start a support group with Andrew Sullivan.

UPDATE 4. Ain't it the truth: "This story would have had entirely different vectors and volume of skree," says commenter mortimer, "had she written, 'My husband, Hakim, who was Googling "pressure cooker bombs"...' I miss Annie Jacobsen."