PUNCHING BAGS. As conservatives denounce schoolteachers who seek to preserve their collective bargaining rights, it's good to be reminded by Matt Taibbi that the banksters who wrecked the economy have been let off scott free and then some by the government. Lehman Brothers' Dick Fuld, AIG's Joe Cassano, and assorted big and less-big fish have suffered no meaningful consequences for their actions. But that doesn't mean law & order sleeps:

Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers — of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses.

So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let's not even make them say they're sorry...

One of the saddest things about the decline of this country is that we've relearned a pre-democratic contempt for the suffering of the less fortunate and a solicitous interest in the problems of the very fortunate. Poor saps who never had a chance are presumed to never have deserved one, while the rich are treated with kid gloves lest they take offense and go Galt on us. Once Americans cheered the underdog. Now I see there's a book out called Underdogma: How America's Enemies Use Our Love for the Underdog to Trash American Power which tells that this generosity of spirit is actually a dangerous delusion:

David versus Goliath, the American Revolutionaries, "The Little Engine That Could," Team USA’s "Miracle on Ice," the Star Wars Rebel Alliance, Rocky Balboa, the Jamaican bobsled team and the meek inheriting the Earth.

Everyone, it seems, loves an underdog.... But this tendency, which international political consultant and human rights activist Michael Prell calls “underdogma,” can be very dangerous – both to America and to the world at large.

We hear a lot of talk about "hippie punching" these days, but make no mistake: Under a certain, very high net worth, everybody's getting punched.

TEACHER'S PELT. The big teachers' union fight is on in Wisconsin. The Republican Governor Scott Walker claims the government needs to severely curtail the union's collective bargaining power in order to save money; TPM notices that Walker blew a hole in the budget himself and suggests that he did so in order to create this crisis and break the union.

As the Christian Science Monitor headline demonstrates, the union is aware of the stakes: "We’re fighting for our very existence." Conservatives know it too. They have been full-throated in their denunciations not only of the union but of teachers in general, portraying them as parasites -- like Teamsters, only easier to beat up. National Review's Jay Nordlinger has been particularly obsessive in this regard. First:

Teachers used to be something like a holy caste, practically the most honorable among us. I come from a family of teachers. Everyone thought of it as a noble calling. Teachers earned too little, but that was remedied, over time.

Then everything went screwy. Teachers were not just well paid. (“Best part-time job in America,” Lee Iacocca once quipped, to the howls of many.) They were some of the most petulant, greediest, nastiest unionists around...

Then:

In a previous era, long ago, teachers were rather like missionaries. You practically had to take a vow of poverty to be a teacher. Often, a teacher [blah blah, miles in the snow]...

I would never go back to the days of missionary-teachers. They ought to be generously compensated. (Shouldn’t we all.)

Even Grandpa Simpson has his moments of generosity, I guess, but Nordlinger quickly catches himself:

But good grief: These grasping, lying, bullying unionists are enough to give the teaching profession a bad name...

Later:

And everything the teachers do, of course, is for the sake of “the children.” I wish the children could talk back, borrowing a phrase from anti-war movements: “Not in my name.”

Instead of playing in the yard and thanking God for their luck.

For decades now, union militancy has dragged the teaching profession through the mud, robbing that profession of its public spirit, even of its professionalism...

And so on. Funny as it is, I don't find the situation cheering. They're trying to turn teachers into a pariah class in order to normalize their removal from the middle class. The whole energy of our rulers seems devoted these days to squeezing that remnant, and if they are not completely successful in this grand opportunity to reduce its number and further weaken union power at the same time, they will keep coming back until they are.

Their cheerleaders ("Look, I am the daughter of union folk; I appreciate why unions were initially formed") spread the story that the rollback is unavoidable, as the morality for collective bargaining died with their parents' need for it, and anyway "the money is not there." Indeed it's not there, because it has been painstakingly relocated.

Though the state of American manufacturing is so parlous even the CIA is worried about it, "economic futurist" Jeff Thredgold is bullish. He explains:

The common wisdom notes that most of these jobs left in search of less-costly havens, initially Mexico and then China. This is certainly true for a share of the jobs.

However, the most important factor leading to lesser employment was major gains in worker productivity. We simply make more goods with fewer bodies. While overall U.S. worker productivity gains have run just under 3 percent annually over the past 10 years, productivity gains in manufacturing have run two to three times higher.

Maybe Thredgold has good reason to feel confident. There's just been an uptick in the mid-Atlantic manufacturing index. The big winner from this, so far, is Mexican stocks, as the uptick "indicated strength in one of Mexico’s most important export sectors," says MarketWatch. I wonder how much of that money is going to be left over for the guy on the line.

THE FAN CLUB. The story of reporter Lara Logan's beating and sexual assault in the thick of the Egyptian revolution is horrible. But there isn't anything on this earth that can't be made more horrible by Debbie Schlussel:

Hey, sounds like the threats I get from American Muslims on a regular basis. Now you know what it’s like, Lara.

Uhhh...

I just love it when the people of the profession of “the public’s right to know” suddenly want “privacy.” Tell it to your next interview subject, Lara.

The whole thing's an atrocity, so let's move on to the rest of the rightbloggers. Some are incensed by the insensitive reaction of NYU's Nir Rosen, and they're certainly right to be. (Update: Rosen has apologized.) Others are very caught up in the white-lady-among-heathens narrative. theblogprof:

As the saying goes - you mess with the bull, you get the horns.

There's not even a profession of sympathy to leaven it, though there is a big photo of Logan in a low-cut dress. Let us be charitable and assume steroids have affected theblogprof's brain.

Patterico wants answers, preferably in detail:

Nobody else seems to know more than this and of course “brutal and sustained sexual assault” could mean several things. LA Weekly claims she was repeatedly raped, but they seem to be assuming that this is what CBS news is saying. That is less than clear. I would add that the LA Weekly article is downright creepy in the way it was written

"Did they...? Was she...?" "What do you want me to do? Draw you a picture? Spell it out?" I don't know what's worse -- that he wrote it down, or that he wanted to share it with the rest of us.

As usual, if you go into the comments sections, you'll get even worse. From one of the fans at Gateway Pundit:

The arrogance of these journalists amazes me.

They might as well walk into a lion cage wearing a meat suit. Let’s see, “hot young blond American reporter (read infidel) stands in the middle of thousands on drunken, uneducated testosterone driven radical Muslims”.

Is anyone really surprised THAT ended badly?

This cowboy was probably at the first run of I Spit On Your Grave, telling the rest of the audience what was coming next. Oh, I forgot his closing:

Meanwhile, I plan on taking a relaxing stroll through Harlem tonight wearing a gold Rolex.

No, really, buddy, it's cool, just leave your Confederate flag t-shirt at home.

UPDATE. A needed corrective.

UPDATE 2. Oh Jesus, Atlas Pam: "Imagine if this were ..... Israel. Or a tea party." Imagine! You may say she's a screamer, but she's not the only one.

UPDATE 3. Echidne breaks it down.

UPDATE 4. The real monsters here, says Robert Stacy McCain, are feminazis:

There is only one acceptable way to discuss sex, and feminists are the self-appointed arbiters of the discussion.

Also, feminists "control the conversation." Maybe McCain is looking at a different internet from the one the rest of us see.

As with all leftist ideologies, feminism is collectivist in nature. Rape is therefore not a crime perpetrated by specific criminals against specific victims. Rather, rape is men’s collective crime, of which women are the collective victims: All men are therefore complicit in every rape, and all women suffer when any woman is raped.

The more enlightened view, it would seem, is that rape is Arab men's collective crime.

UPDATE 5. Good journalism angle by Nancy Nall.

UPDATE 6. Comments are brill, but a special award goes to JohnEWilliams, who says now that "Scott Brown says he was abused by a camp counselor as a child, I'm certain we'll hear how he shouldn't have been so hunky and fetching."

Oh, and Jason informs us that Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft realized he was losing the crazy derby and weighed in:

[Lara Logan's] liberal belief system almost got her killed on Friday.

If Lara Logan were a man, no doubt Hoft would call what she had "courage" or "mama grizzliness."

Well, reckon it's about time for another article about how conservatives are the real feminists.

R.I.P. KENNETH MARS. Attention must be paid.



He was lovely in Young Frankenstein, nastily impersonated the critic John Simon in What's Up, Doc?, and did a lot of TV, most of which I missed (though I have misty memories of him on He & She). But to me he will forever be Franz Liebkind.

In a way he had the most difficult job in the movie -- making an unrepentant Nazi funny -- but like all the other major players in The Producers, by going absolutely balls-out with his performance he achieved escape velocity. Roger Ebert recalls that one time Mel Brooks, chided by a woman for having created this "vulgar" film, answered, "Lady, it rose below vulgarity." That's what Mars did, too, turning the previously scary idea of the Hitler holdout dwelling amongst us into a ripe vaudeville joke: all tantrums, cowardice, sentimentality, and (best of all) absurd dignity ("Gentlemen, it iss magic time").

And timing. Never, ever forget timing. And lazzi. Check the nose wipe during the Churchill rant.

This is not to claim that the movie or Mars' performance did anything uplifting, but to note that they were in the very, very best of bad taste. And, in the words of the ad campaign for another old movie, boy, do we need it now.

SOCIAL, AND A CON. From that great laboratory of Republican neo-medievalism, South Dakota:

A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state's GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.

(h/t HoneyBearKelly.) Meanwhile elsewhere in the hinterlands, in Washington, and in the propaganda mills of the Right, the war on abortion rights is suddenly hotter than it's been since the 1990s

One way I'm able to tell that I haven't gone senile is that I knew from the start this talk about the Tea Party being a libertarian phenomenon was utter bullshit -- which is gratifying, since even the New York Times has been flim-flammed by CPAC into reporting that "the Tea Party tenets of smaller government and fiscal conservatism were at the center of the conversation, rather than social issues." There, however, I imagine the problem is not hardened arteries, but wetness behind the ears.

History shows that when conservatives get even a toehold of power during a Democratic Administration, the first troops to appear on the field are from the Jesus Brigade. And when the Republicans take over, they'll also be the first to appear at the paymaster's window. If things go as usual, I expect a few of them will drop by the armory in the days to come as well.

UPDATE. The bill's sponsor says abortion providers (or, in South Dakota's case, provider) have no worries, because abortion is legal and the law would only pertain to criminal acts, as when some guy "beats on his ex-girlfriend's abdomen in trying to abort her baby." You may go read the bill and see what you think. Considering South Dakota's history of trying to get around Roe v. Wade, and the nullification fever spreading in red states thereabouts, I remain suspicious.

A LITTLE SOMETHING OF MINE AT ESQUIRE. Just my 25 fave quotes from CPAC. (Front matter done by editors. Editors! What won't they think of next.) When I'm shuffling senile and confused down Broadway, five years from now, I hope I have sufficient presence of mind to shout, "I was a contributor to Esquire magazine" after each coughing fit or self-wetting. (Say, is Rust Hills still over there? I believe he still has some manuscripts of mine.)

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about CPAC, specifically the great gay (and Muslim) outreach and what came of it. The Muslims drew a shitstorm from Atlas Pam, David Horowitz, and other members of the He-Man Muslim-Haters Club. As for the gay group, GOProud, they crossed CPAC's gender-preference barrier like Jackie Robinson in whiteface, doing everything possible to be acceptable, and in return -- well, you can read it there.

Not much by way of outtakes, though I did enjoy Yid With Lid's "CPAC Wrap Up: What The Media Didn't Tell You." Apparently the media conspired to cover up for... Ron Paul.

3.) Ron Paul Supporters Hate Was Under-Reported, Their Presence Was Over Reported. Every year at CPAC Ron Paul’s political action committee buses supporters to the convention (more on that later). While this group does not represent more than 15-20% of the attendees, they are very passionate, very unruly and very bigoted.

Mainly I'd say they're bigoted against losing CPAC straw polls -- so much so that Paul won it again this year with 31 percent, despite his alleged 15-20 percent support level. How? YWL explains that the other attendees didn't bother to vote for their candidates. And the Lamestream Media ignores this highly flattering portrayal of Republican enthusiasm.

The mainstream press protects Ron Paul, his crazy positions create a wealth of story ideas, and his continued participation provides the opportunity to label the entire conservative, Republican and/or libertarian movements as right-wing extremist nut jobs.

You know, you could switch just about any Republican's name in for Paul's there and that sentence still works.

CPAC DAY 3. Well, I'm bummed -- Jonah Goldberg was supposed to show up, but he had an emergency (gastric bypass, I'm guessing)* so they sent Rich Lowry. Lowry said that after the 2008 election "I came back home to my neighborhood which is infested with liberal college kids… in my neighborhood it was like we had won a war. You've seen the pictures of Tahrir Square, it was just like that." He compared this tragic encounter with that one time Ronald Reagan was confronted by "unwashed, unshaven dirty hippie types."


He called Goldberg's Liberal Fascism "a very prescient [critique], given what we've seen over the last 2 years," and explained that America must always be conquering if it wants to stay alive.

Now Coulter's on, which is every bit as charming as you would imagine. She's pissed that we didn't stand up for Mubarak, and blames slavery on liberals.

*UPDATE. My apologies and condolences -- I'm told his brother died, a horrible thing no one deserves.

IT'S THE FEEL-GALT MOVIE OF THE SUMMER! I know the rest of sane humanity is absorbed with the revolution in Egypt, but surely some of you must be excited by the debut of the Atlas Shrugged movie trailer:



It's got good production values and the jump-cuts-per-millisecond of a real trailer. And Michael Lerner is Barney Frank! Best of all, the makers know that story appeal isn't as important to their intended audience as faithfulness to the Rand philosophy, so while it's hard to figure out what or who exactly we should be rooting for -- Two unpleasant people and their railroad? Capitalism? -- it's clear that statism sucks and money is too important even to joke about.

Personally I think Hollywood does capitalism a much bigger favor with comedies like Trading Places, but I can't begrudge the Randroids their moment in the cineplex. The only question is, are there any theaters within driving distance of the Gulch?

THE HEARTBREAK OF CPAC. I originally thought this tweet by KevDough was the saddest CPAC '11 artifact :

I bet I could have gotten a lot of chicks at #GOPROUD as it seems they are there in force. Damnit, #CPAC!

Or maybe he was only kidding -- KevDough's a real funster. (Sample: "Tomorrow night at #FauxPAC, we will be roasting a whole pig. Her name is Meghan McCain.")

Never mind, I've actually found something sadder in David Weigel's account of the commotion caused by a Sarah Palin impersonator at CPAC:

Alas, it was a hoax, and she disappeared. Some people kept passing word that "she's here!" through the halls, unaware of the interesting lesson about the psychology of fame and crowds that was being demonstrated. Some were disappointed, for a number of reasons.

"I was bummed out when she said she was married," said one attendee, Tom Delano. "But Palin's prettier."

Tom is going to have that box of chocolates all to himself on Valentine's Day, I'm guessing.

CPAC DAY 2: JUST JOY-POPPING, TRYING TO STAY CLEAN. I can't, I just can't -- oh well, the live feed is right there. Some guy is introducing the guy who's introducing John Thune. I didn't catch the name of this warm-up act but he says he wants to test the idea of Obamacare the same way Reagan did in the 1980 Presidential debate, when he asked "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" As Obamacare is just getting started/strangled, the analogy turns out to be shaky, and the questions are on the order of "How many of you believe that the quality and availability of your health care will go down under the health care law?" Believe! Well, guy, you can get them to believe anything, as their response shows.

Also "the real liberals really want Obamacare to fail so they can get what they really want" -- Single Payer Hitlercare! Cripes, why didn't you guys tell me that was the plan! (He also traced the problem of attempted national healthcare back to Ted Kennedy, but by that point the crowd was too worn-out to boo.)

The event's moderator -- some loopy talk-show host -- characterizes the Obamacare approach as, "Well, at least the senior citizens won't die as quickly waiting on all those long lines." Even the CPAC crowd doesn't know what to do with that. (Later she tells a long story about how she got messed up in a motorcycle crash, but "I'm an American -- I wanted to live.")

Eventually Thune arrives. He looks like a former high-school swim team star grown rich in the tanning-salon business.



"We can't win the peace if we don't tell it like it is." He's talking about Obama's under-utilization of the word "terrorism." You can imagine how serious the speech is. Oh, also Reagan Reagan Reagan, cut everything, Jesus loves Israel and torture, "The FCC is trying to take over the internet," and such old, old chestnuts at the Balanced Budget Amendment. I can see why the fringe of the fringe like him -- he spits the talking points without gagging -- but he's basically the same old vanilla dairy queen in a plastic cup and he has as much chance of being President as did the man he replaced and physically resembles, Tom Daschle.

NEW ARTICLE UP AT ALTERNET. It's called "10 Historical 'Facts' Only a Right-Winger Could Believe."

You may notice that every so often conservatives, in talking on this or that subject, will say something about women's rights, the founding fathers, etc., that suggests a bizarre notion of history (e.g., "self-avowed modern day feminists are anything but feminist"). Since not only the right-blogosphere but also the conservative world in general has become more full-throatedly crazy, sometimes they'll even express these historical fallacies out loud. That's what the article is about.

It's in bite-sized Top Ten form, and goes down easy. Tell your friends!

OSCAR CATCH-UP, PART 2. The Kids Are All Right. Cholodenko's a weird one -- High Art and Laurel Canyon are like traditional Hollywood movies re-edited by someone with brain damage; all the right pieces are there, and sometimes beautiful, but they're stuck together in ways that vitiate rather than amplify their impact. (I really like High Art, especially when Patricia Clarkson's onscreen, but watching it is a frustrating experience.)

But The Kids Are All Right benefits from Cholodenko's discursive approach more than the others because it's unified by a conflict that is almost laughably formulaic: Daughter of uncooperative lesbian couple tracks down sperm-donor dad; hijinks and hetero adultery ensue! It's like someone smart and serious radically remixed I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. The plot is so strong that Cholodenko can mix and mash to her heart's content and never lose track of what's at stake.

Thus, we can have enjoy the bonding of the kids with the donor, and even have some fun with the (spoiler spoiler spoiler) affair between the donor and one of the lesbians, but the danger these developments present to everyone's happiness is never far from our minds. When the broken pieces are put together at the end, the resolution feels incomplete, not because the art has failed because it has succeeded -- she actually captured the messiness of life without making a mess.

There are plenty of good privileged moments in the movie, but I especially liked the scene in which the donor (the ultra-brilliant Mark Ruffalo, who reacts to the pain he's feeling with some petulance, as if it were something from which he thought he was exempt) explains to his usual fuck-buddy why he doesn't want to sleep with her. He wants to say what's in his heart without actually revealing anything -- the secret affair requires it, but we get the feeling this is not an uncommon mode for him. Finally he clumsily burbles about how at this stage of his life "I don't want to be that guy" who's still going around doing what... he obviously really still enjoys doing. The girl responds, with perfect appropriateness, "Fuck you." Life, ladies and gentlemen, captured on film.

The Social Network. A smart friend asked me: Why does anyone think this movie "defines a generation"? Oh, that's easy: Because they're old and The Social Network believably shows young shits acting like shits. Duh.

I'm old too, and a Leveller to boot, so my favorite part of the movie is the beginning, when the shittiness of Harvard shits is vividly revealed, and the Trent Reznor music has just started to kick in. Really, I loved it: For 20 minutes we're immersed in a milieu both dark-and-aged (kudos, DP Jeff Cronenweth) and totally frattish, and the kids are believably and expeditiously shown to be in equal parts callow and ambitious, and swimming in privilege. It's such a casually brutal portrayal that, at that stage, you might have convinced me that it defined something-or-other.

That doesn't last, but that's not so bad. Indeed, the ripping Alan Sorkin gabfest unto which we devolve is sort of the definition of not-bad. Sorkin's dialogue is always crisp, glib, and fun, and he's major enough that he can get top actors to supply the character attributes his writing by and large doesn't bother with.

In this regard he's extremely fortunate here, especially with Jesse Eisenberg. His Zuckerberg has been characterized as an Asperger's case, but the brilliance of the performance is that you can't write off his self-involvement that easily -- you can imagine all kinds of reasons for his behavior (parental coddling, youthful alienation, genius), and still be left wondering -- which, if I may say, is the kind of mysteriousness that distinguishes great acting, and probably why his narrow-band performance got an Oscar nomination.

But his singularity is something from which the other characters aren't exempt (except for his partner Saverin, very well played by Andrew Garfield). I still recall with a little shiver the shy arm-punch Zuckerberg gives Saverin when he arrives at his and Sean Parker's apartment, and it strikes me now that this is the reason: It's the most intimate gesture in the movie. Most of the characters are so absorbed in self-definition strategies that they can't bond. Maybe that's what really spurred the "defines a generation" idea -- unlike almost any other movie about young men (and it's almost exclusively about men) I can think of, The Social Network portrays a set of manhood rituals that drives them apart instead of bringing them together, and maybe people (and, who knows, maybe Sorkin) think that this is what the internet has done to them.

SHORTER ARTHUR LAFFER: Watch me write a 983-word article about Reaganomics -- for a major newspaper with editors, yet! -- without once using the word "deficit."

UPDATE. Shorter is shorter, but not always better, and Doghouse Riley does the hard work of identifying some of the specific streaks of bullshit in Laffer's self-serving item. One of his digressions struck me hard:

Y'know, somebody, sometime--I nominate Mitch Daniels--needs to explain to me why simple is always better than complex, except when they decide it isn't. You don't go to a mechanic who can only work on flathead Fords. You don't go to a doctor who stopped studying surgery when anesthesia was introduced. If this were just proposed as an ethical argument that would be one thing, and bad enough at that. But it's not; it's supposed to be a declaration of apodictic certainty even though the facts say otherwise.

This hardstruck me because earlier I'd been listening (though I'd promised myself not to) to Paul Ryan at CPAC talking about how the Obama Administration/liberals/socialists/Hitler were in love with experts -- "government wizards," "bureaucrats," etc. -- and the idea that "there must be someone or some few people who have all the information." He contrasted this with the allegedly more homespun conservative concept that "each person is the world's top expert in his or her unique skills, the people as a whole understand society as a whole, no matter how complicated it gets," etc.

Bullshit. Our economy was self-evidently fucked by purported free-marketeers like Ryan who'd been telling us for years that government should get out of the way and let the people drive us to prosperity. But the "people" they were talking about weren't Joe and Jenny Six-Pack -- there were Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. And contrary to Obama's piquant analogy, they didn't exactly drive us into a ditch -- they pushed us out of the car and over a cliff, and then drove on down the road to sinecures and prosperity.

The financiers who screwed us over were "experts," too -- and very good ones, as they successfully achieved their goal of directing a larger share of the nation's wealth into their own hands. The only experts Ryan and his buddies oppose are those who might attempt to direct some of that money back to the rest of us.

CPAC: NO, I'VE STOPPED WATCHING...


...Can you blame me? Sure, I missed Cheney's name being heckled, but I got a little fresh air. And if I'd stayed outside, I wouldn't have seen this monster who once ran our trillion-dollar multi-war pretending to be a tea partier and talking about "the gentle despotism of Big Government."

(Oh, and no cutting the Defense budget!)

CPAC 5: DONALD TRUMP. I'm really starting to have a toxic reaction to this and would like to stop, but... Donald Trump?

Introducer announces Trump is "thinking about tossing his hat into the ring" for the Presidency, which Rick Santorum didn't even get.



Some drunk chick is yelling YOU'RE HIRED! at him. He thanks her, tells them he'll decide about running by June. He sounds like Ed Koch with a bad cold. Says the United States has become a "whipping post for the rest of the world... they are not treating us properly... we have become the laughing stock of the world..." And Trump knows from laughing stocks! He claims his many foreign contacts have informed him that all foreigners now "view our leaders as weak" and have actually been ripping us off, by means which Trump really should be sharing with the Treasury if they're factual rather than with CPAC.

Talks about how his money is a "scorecard" showing how great he is. Then comes a long ramble about billionaire psychology that I couldn't follow, which is probably why I'm not rich.

The current President "came out of nowhere... with no track record and, I will tell you... wonderful guy, nice man, but he had no record." With Trump, however, you know what you're getting: Giant ugly buildings! And now he brags on his press clippings. New York magazine, Steve Forbes, they all love the Donald! Segue: "We don't have free trade," says Trump. China is manipulating their currency -- Trump won't stand for it. "We buy so much of their product because their currency is so low" that it's too cheap not to buy. What to do, Donald? "We need a highly competent person or we're going have very, very serious trouble very, very quickly."

But what do we do, Donald? "We have to watch China and we have to watch OPEC..." Suddenly he's talking about OPEC. "$4.54 for gas. Get used to it, folks... nobody calls up OPEC and says, 'That -- price -- better -- get -- lower -- and it better get lower fast!'" The crowd loves it: War with Saudi Arabia! Maybe we can hire George Bush as a general.

"How 'about this?" he says, working the room. "Germany is buying the New York Stock Exchange!... how about the Somali pirates?" Where you from, darling? Salt Lake City? Wonderful town.

"By the way, Ron Paul cannot get elected, I'm sorry to say." OUTRAGE! BOOING! "I like Ron Paul, I think he's a good guy" -- silence -- "but honestly I think he has zero chance..." More yelling! But! If Trump runs, "This country will be respected again." YAY! GO TRUMP! "I'm pro-life." YAY! "I'm against gun control." YAY! etc. "We'll be taking in hundreds of billions of dollars from countries that are screwing us... create vast numbers of productive jobs..."

He's just spinning and cruising like he always does. I think his goal might really be to see how full of shit you can be and still get away with it. Well, at least he has the brains to smell that he's dealing with rubes here, and he laid it on thick. But I wonder what the organizers were thinking. Maybe they too wanted to see how far they could take them down the primrose path. As far as you like, it seems.

CPAC 4: WAYNE LaPIERRE. This is rich -- NRA's Wayne LaPierre wants us to remember the dead at school massacres like Virginia Tech -- who were killed not by guns, but by gun control laws which kept those students from firing back!



Same goes for the Tucson shooting, only the media is a co-conspirator. "The national media wasted no time making a celebrity of the deranged killer," says LaPierre, and "airing photographs of a mass murderer" makes other people killers. "The media ought to be ashamed of themselves…."

Here's the glory, right here:

"If Tucson tells us anything anything at all, it tells us this: Government has failed… heck, they can hardly get the snow plowed."

In Hell, Joe Goebbels is giving him the golf clap.

UPDATE: "As soon as you leave this hotel, your life is in jeopardy." Ooga Booga! Also, a story of an illegal immigrant child rapist. Well, he knows his crowd. (Also refers sneeringly to Hollywood stars and -- get this -- "the wealthy." Wonder what his suit cost.)

UPDATE 2. "The presence of a firearm makes us all safer." This guy's full of great one-liners.

(I'm generally pro-gun -- I want lots and lots of them! And hollow point bullets! -- but I wouldn't join a group run by someone like this. Does this kind of talk really help build their membership? Or just terrify current members out of leaving?)

CPAC 3: Aaaack Carrie Lukas...



...author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism and other outrages. For someone who's been in the culture war game so long, she looks good. She's in favor of people getting married, staying married, and having children.

And she's gathered a panel of other scolds, one of whom -- an excitable Harlem conservative, bless him (Update: He's Michel Faulkner, author of Restoring the American Dream) --hollers THANK YOU FOR CARING ABOUT MARRIAGE! His great line (really, how can you top it?) is "Our liberties, which have made us great, are now destroying us." See, "we are beginning to destroy ourselves" with non-traditional marriage. "We must stand for traditional marriage on the grounds that it is good for our society... one man and one woman... if we do not, we will indeed destroy ourselves."

I wonder how the GOProud guys are liking this.

UPDATE. Now there's an old white guy with a PowerPoint presentation about "the decline of marriage," which was caused by Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and causes infant mortality. It's a festival of correlation as causation! Also: Countries with gay marriage and/or unions tend not to believe marriage is necessary to happiness, about which we should be outraged. "Let me conclude with Ronald Reagan's statement..."

UPDATE 2. New black preacher up now, saying the GOP shouldn't give up on black people because a lot of them hate gay people and abortion too, and thus can be tempted -- don't "try to sell the whole farm" of horrific Republican ideas to them, just dangle a fetus. Stands strongly against Heather Has Two Mommies and has said "Don't throw us under the bus" five times, which helps get the crowd on his side.

UPDATE 3. Lukas comes back on to blather something about how traditional marriage was in trouble before we started talking about gay marriage and we should all take a "friends and family" approach to the issue, whatever that is (maybe an anti-gay calling plan?). Possible translation: Please, you guys back in civilization, don't give me too much shit about this at Happy Hour.

CPAC 2: RICK SANTORUM. Some guy (Foster Freeze? Is he a DC supervillain?) introduced Rick Santorum. Made a couple of non-political jokes, bless him. Also talked about Santorum's anti-abortion mojo. Quoted a "valentine greeting" to a special needs child (Update: Apparently it's Santorum's child), full of words like "self-sacrifice" and "perseverance," which proves that abortion is murder.


Santorum comes on looking like an 80s ad executive, to "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." His career is finished!

Said his grandfather came here to escape fascism. And that makes even more treasonous Obama's rejection of American exceptionalism! "He doesn't believe that America is exceptional -- well I can tell you Ronald Reagan… believed in American exceptionalism." Also Obama "apologized for America" because to him, America has "evil, even sinister aims" and doesn't have the "moral authority… to help spread this objective truth that Reagan and Bush believed in."

Well, "there are real consequences" to this attitude -- for example, where we "turned our backs in Iran," when we could have sent encouragement and nukes. And why? Because Obama "sides with that regime." Same thing in Egypt -- only this time Obama sides with the protestors. Why? Not because he loves freedom, but because Egypt is our friend and Obama hates America's friends.

So, the story thus far: Obama always picks the side that hates America most.

UPDATE. More Santorum: Obama "does not believe in truth or evil or America."

Also: "We allow people to fail... you learn more from failure than you do from success," which is why we should cut unemployment benefits, so starvation will teach the jobless a lesson. "My Grandfather didn't come here because we had 99 weeks of unemployment benefits!" (applause)

Now he's talking about culture war, which he characterizes as the indispensible third leg of the conservative stool, but oh so much more: "America is a great moral enterprise. What I read to you abut being endowed by our Creator is a great moral enterprise." And All Men Are Created Equal means God made you equal, not because you're equal to your neighbor per se.

Finally, his speciality: Social issues "are the issues that matter... and those are the issues we can not retreat on. I know that's not necessarily a popular thing." But Obama's reign is "tyranny," and abortion and gay marriage are proof of that. "The judiciary did not create life, and it did not create marriage, and it has no right to redefine either one of them!" Then he picks up his introducer's valentine reference. Santorum's special-needs girl is further proof that abortion is murder. Some people -- unnamed, alas -- "told us to move on," I guess meaning they should drown her in a well or something. But Santorum and his wife don't drown her in a well because "we love her."

"Ladies and gentlemen, America belongs to God." He asks people to put on their "Cap of Citizenship, and go out and fight for the greatest country in the world." So if you see a mob of pro-lifers wearing identical caps coming down the street, run! They mean business!

Then Q&A, in which he endorses state legislatures passing anti-abortion laws to challenge Roe v. Wade.

UPDATE 2. They played Fleetwood Mac three times! Doomed, I tell you.

HURRAH, CPAC IS ON! Emerging soiled and groggy from a seething bed, I proceeded unthinking to the internet and was confronted with this:


It's all sorts of wonderful. There's a suggestion of Macbeth: "Read no more, Jim Hoft does murder sense." It also suggests another Murderer's Row, and a vision of one of these mobile gas rigs asking Lou Gehrig what he thinks of the Progressive Menace. Overall there is the hilarious idea that this bunch should be called anything more butch than the Wingnut Whine Press or Piddlers' Pond or All The Good Ones Are Taken or GOPRoud, Ladies, or the Hack Isolation Ward, or -- oh I could go on all day.

Been poking around the related social media. Here's attendee @jtejkl: "Girls grindin, UK kids smokin, throw up, and errbody drunken.. On the way to #CPAC." Name: Joshua Location: 517, Miami University Bio: I hope that the future will be better than the past. Recent tweets: "@lizzielitzow are you still going to dc?" "Looks like Michigan is stopping at least some of the waste, peace out bridge cards. #welfare." The movement's in good hands.

And I see they're bringing in Donald Trump. Bad move. When Trump joined WWE everybody knew it was in the shitter. (They still don't know it's fixed, though. Wrestling, I mean.)

UPDATE. Gingrich tells the crowd, "2010 was the appetizer. 2012 is the entrée," a remark worthy of Clubber Williams. From @mpk33: "My most memorable #CPAC moment was the 2010 Breibart/Madden shouting match in the Marriott lobby." Really? I prefer the 2010 Breitbart/Max Blumenthal shouting match. I think someone should compile a DVD of Breitbart's shouting matches so we can all judge for ourselves.

UPDATE 2. CPAC has a live feed. Who is this guy?


He was talking about Reagan, which seemed to be the panel subject. Told a funny Reagan story: "Reagan was confronted by a smelly hippie -- it could have been Bill Clinton…" Said liberals are trying to "reinvent" Reagan with the "pernicious myth that Reagan and Tip O'Neill were friends." Reagan was for a time in danger of being remembered "as a nice guy," until his diaries came out and everyone realized he was brilliant (and presumably not nice). Also, Reagan "was even more tea party than Jefferson" -- Jefferson was interested in libraries, for Chrissakes, whereas Reagan was "entrepreneurial." (Bonus: Freedom "was lost for a time at the beginning of this century." Not sure whether he meant George Bush or Woodrow Wilson. Maybe both!)

Moderator came out at the end to tell everyone to spread the word about Reagan before the kids get confused about him.

OH WELL. You know what? I thought. I should see what Jim Lileks is doing. After all, life is full of surprises. Maybe it'll be like running into someone I went to college with and seeing that he's way cooler than he was when I knew him -- I might then be forced to think whether I had misjudged him, or whether people can change more than we normally think they can; either way it will lead me to an improving contemplation of the human condition. Surely that can't be bad.

As for the reading to the class: it’s the school’s annual Readathon, and I was a “celebrity” reader for my daughter’s class and a first grade class. Fifth-graders are tough. They know everything. Top of the food chain, ma. One kid was sitting back with his arms crossed over his chest, wearing what appeared to be Oakley sunglasses, challenging my remarks on the difficulty of climbing Everest. K2 was harder, he said, and yes. he’d read the book I was about to read.

At this point you want to walk over and DI the guy until he sits up straight and looks away and says SIR YES SIR, but that battle: long lost. Adults are not Elders, or creatures worthy of respect; they’re just slower, lesser creatures who have authority because they’re older, and there’s no reason other than that. I don’t believe in ancestor worship, but I do remember having respect for grownups. They were not my “friends.” They occupied a completely different realm...

Oh, never the fucking mind.

UPDATE. In comments, lots more interest in Jimbo, child behavior, and A Wrinkle In Time than I expected. Well, I should have expected the last -- this crew has a serious representation of sci-fi nerds. (I was never that way myself; I was always more of a nerd without portfolio.) And Lileks is an endless source of pleasure even when he's not fantasizing Fargo engulfed by barbarian hordes.

But those damn kids? HMDK, for example: "I agree with your point and despise Lileks, but I also hate snotty spoiled kids. You'd think that'd make me conflicted. It doesn't. Turns out: I have plenty of hate to go around." Oh well I appreciate that. But as for kids, my default reaction to their occasional impudence is 1.) recognition of my jacked-up-shit former self, reincarnated in better clothes; and 2.) a gently-delivered message that if you miss this, kid, it's your loss. YMMV but I haven't been shivved by the little hoods yet.

A FINE EXAMPLE OF THE GENRE. Megan McArdle has a 1,494-word post up about how conservatives are discriminated against in academia, just like black people are discriminated against in whatever it is they want to get jobs in. It is everything you expect and more, but for the time-conscious consumer I here reproduce my favorite ripple in her stream of consciousness:

In other words, a professor is almost twice as likely to support the Democratic party as a member of the general population, and about 80% less likely to support the GOP... In fact, the only profession I could find that skews 80% towards Republicans is Southern Baptist ministers. I suspect both professors and ministers would resent the comparison.

Professors might rightly rejoinder that no one's demanding that the Southern Baptist Conference start recruiting liberals to balance things out. I'm not sure this is quite true, actually, as there are quite a lot of liberal baptists attached to the American Baptist conference, and probably even some within the Southern conference who would like to move it to the left.

Probably even some! Oh, wait, I almost forgot the punchline:

But certainly, I don't know many professors who are demanding some sort of liberal baptist affirmative action.

She's like Gracie Allen with no sense of humor.

ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM, PART 544,030. Goldman Sachs got cold feet about its sale of Facebook shares to preferred U.S. investors in advance of a public offering. It was widely suggested that they feared SEC scrutiny, as the Feds might consider the drawn-out sale an attempt to jack up demand. At the Daily Beast, former Goldman Sachs managing director Nomi Prins said the deal looked like a stinker to her:

If you're one of those investors, here's the deal in a nutshell: You get to buy shares, forking over 5 percent of any possible gains, on top of a 4 percent placement fee and a 0.5 percent expense reserve fee (so you're down 10 percent before the game starts) in a private company that doesn't have to disclose any pertinent financial information to you or any regulator for 15 months. For the privilege, Goldman gets its eight-digit windfall...

Finally GS and Facebook decided to sell the shares exclusively to foreigners with the help of some friendly Russians, which took some of the heat off and raised a lot of cash.

This may look to you like more shady business by which some rich people try to screw other rich people -- and since the suckers will in this case be foreigners, go U.S.A.! But the Wall Street Journal saw it differently: Though "it is 'considered a serious embarrassment for Goldman,'" they wrote, actually "it is the SEC that should be embarrassed." Because of the overregulation. You see -- oh, why not let Ron Hart at the Daily Caller give you the libertarian interpretation directly?

Sadly, the great mother of innovation that was once our country, that helped us create Facebook and Google, might no longer benefit investors. With the proliferation of cumbersome and often ambiguous American financial regulatory laws, companies like Facebook choose to let people in other countries invest in their growth, not Americans. Such was the case with Facebook’s most recent offering where, instead of filing all the complicated paperwork and risking our litigation/regulatory system, it sold $1.5 billion in shares to Russian and other overseas investors, giving them what will probably be a hefty profit. All the layers upon layers of rules and regulations Washington has heaped on an already-fragile financial system have hamstrung our competitiveness and sent jobs and investment money to friendlier shores...

That Russia, a country that once crumbled under the weight of its own immense bureaucracy, is now less regulated and more business-friendly than America speaks volumes.

A writer at Reason gives this big ups, right on the heels of a post that tells how "Russia has long been backsliding, in the words of The Economist, into a 'neo-KGB state.'" But with all those invigorating fee-market deals coming their way thanks to Obamasocialism, no doubt the Russkies will soon shape up.

Meanwhile more internet companies are entering the sluice, and no doubt there'll be more calls for the government to stop being a killjoy when there's money to be made on intangible services. It's all beginning to remind me of what I saw at the dot-com revolution.

This worldwide depression can't come fast enough. The suspense is killing me!

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Reagan 100th festivities. Not a loser in the bunch!

"PILONIDAL CYSTS" WAS ALREADY TAKEN. I want to keep most of my Reagan Centennial powder dry for tonight's column, but I had to pass along this Warner Todd Huston joint, in which he explains that before St. Ronnie turned things around, young bucks like himself were losing their patriotic fervor:

In the 70s I was myself on the verge of thinking that America was irreversibly broken. I even passed on joining the armed forces at the time because I couldn’t imagine serving under the hated Carter regime.

Sure, Betty Lou, that's why he was just hanging around the corner drug store. Were I Huston, I would have gone with, "I saw Apocalypse Now and decided I couldn't sign with any outfit that treated premium beef so poorly."

SERVICE ADVISORY. For me Blogroll Amnesty Day will be this weekend. Nominations?

UPDATE. Getting a lot of links for sites that are already on my sidebar. Guess that means I have good taste, indie cred.

UPDATE 2. I'm gonna rotate them over the week. Today, Unbound Confine, D-Squared, and Zen Comix.

SHORTER COMMENTARY: Don't worry, subscribers, Rand Paul was just kidding about denying aid to Israel. Ask that more traditional voice of the Tea Party, Rev. John Hagee. It's still totally on for Israel to be the eternal Jewish homeland or the staging ground for the Apocalypse, depending on your preference.

(I know it's Alana Goodman, but this seems written by executive order.)

IN WHICH GALILEO PERSECUTES THE POPE. Long piece at National Review today by Discovery Institute-Intelligent Design-woo woo crackers guy David Klinghoffer about how science is persecuting Christians. Some of Klinghoffer's renderings of the Jesus people's ordeals at the hands of scientist-inquisitors are in conflict with those of other sources -- for example, he says Guillermo Gonzalez "was refused tenure, despite a spectacular research publication record, because of a book he co-authored arguing that life is no cosmic accident," but Wikipedia indicates that a.) no, he wasn't, b.) some critics found Gonzalez's pub record less than spectacular, and c.) the Discovery Institute has been working long and hard at a self-publicity campaign based on Gonzalez's case, in the course of which they have not been entirely scrupulous with the facts.

I feel about this the way I usually do when the sons and daughters of the Inquisition weep that they have been denied their First Amendment rights by schoolteachers. I also see that one of Klinghoffer's implied remedies is to defund the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health so that they can no longer feed a "universal compulsion to conform" with their corrupting research grants. Then, presumably, churches and corporations will take up the slack, and force those atheistic scientists to get working on better boner pills and the greater glory of God, as they should be.

The punchline comes from one of the many crybabies in the comments section:

Looks it's all a matter of who has political power, nothing else. Islam has it in droves and Christianity does not.

There actually are people in America who think Islam runs the country while Christianity cowers in alleys, yet have not been committed to asylums -- which is a good thing, as the Discovery Institute would make a persecution protest out of that, too.

UPDATE. Thanks, Tom M, for spelling help.

CONNECT THE DOTS, PEOPLE! A lot of people are laughing at Glenn Beck's latest teaching exhibition on the Snowball of Marxist-Islamist Death that will turn Western Europe into a caliphate. And it's pretty funny, with such great lines as "I have chalkboards full of questions" and "The entire Mediterranean is on fire!"

But it's a pity these mainstream lunacies steal so much of the spotlight from indie comers like National Review's Michael Walsh, who today tells us:

Anyway, when you look at the course of revolution in the modern era, it’s always the same-old same-old:

• Czar Nicky -- Kerensky -- Lenin
• Kaiser Willie -- Weimar Republic -- Hitler
• Shah Pahlavi -- Mr. Bani Sadr -- Khomeini

I was hoping next he'd go "Ferdinand Marcos -- Corazon Aquino -- NoyNoy Aquino." But then he'd have to explain how Aquino fils is a monster fit to stand with Lenin, Hitler and Khomeini. Instead Walsh gives us this:

Heck, we can even take it one step further:

• Gorbachev — Yeltsin — Putin

All hail the new king of the monsters! The thin end of the wedge: Putin sent his pal to take over the New York Nets*.

The rebellions sweeping across North Africa and into Jordan may in fact be the stuff of the neocon/Bushian fantasy that all peoples everywhere yearn to be free and that the answer to “Islam is the answer” is Jacksonian democracy. But color me skeptical.

Wow, things have sure changed at National Review since a Republican was President! Wonder why that is?

By the way, does the Obama administration’s use of that historically resonant catchphrase bother anyone besides me?

Pace Marx, maybe “farce” isn’t the right word.

I've broken with my usual style and implanted Walsh's links so you may see that he refers to the White House's admission of the protesters' "legitimate grievances," ties that to the use of the same phrase in a 2003 anti-Iraq-war article by Richard Falk at MERIP's Middle East Report (boy, is that a distant echo), and ends with a reference to -- Neville Chamberlain!

We may infer from this that Obama is down with the leftists who treasonously noticed how bogus the "neocon/Bushian fantasy" was before Michael Walsh did, leading to appeasement, leading to Hitler (or maybe Putin, or maybe NoyNoy).

Maybe the guy's bucking for a TV show.

*UPDATE. A commenter asks: "New Jersey Nets?" That ship has sailed, though they may be called the Brooklyn Nets instead. The city fathers and their new commie friend saw to that! Maybe Walsh should add to his taxonomy of tyrants, "LaGuardia -- Giuliani -- Bloomberg."

UPDATE 2. Some commenters are enjoying the game: "Coke -- New Coke -- Coke Zero," "Legwarmers -- Hammer pants -- Jeggings," "Nixon - Kissinger - Pol Pot," etc.

R.I.P. JOHN BARRY. The veteran film composer has died. His resume is extremely varied -- from the pseudo-medieval chants in The Lion in Winter to the witty score for The Wrong Box to the theme from Midnight Cowboy -- but today everyone's talking about his Bond movie scores. I recall, in my days as a young film nerd, having my attention directed past the jangly guitar theme to the moody orchestral stuff. One of my fellow nerds claimed the Thunderball score contained the greatest romantic music of the 20th Century. I wouldn't go that far, but it's remarkable how much feeling Barry could work into a big-budget assignment that required him to be acceptable to the masses, and which might have led other composers to offer something less than their best work, out of panic or contempt. I never get the feeling from Barry that he's faking it, even with cheese like Born Free. That's as much as you can demand from any popular artist and, most of the time, much more than you're likely to get.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Egypt crisis and the fluctuations in rightblogger reactions to it. For a while they were going in a "Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!" direction ('member that?), but now they're all very upset that the Bad Muslims are taking over, and blame Obama -- whom they were earlier deriding for not getting behind the groovy revolution fast enough -- for fucking up that great thing we had going with Mubarak. You can't win!

The switcheroo has led to some muddled responses. Ole Perfesser Instapundit, having no truck with consistency anyway, just sort of rambles, blurting out sour nothings like "This is a tough problem, but nothing Obama has done so far has inspired any confidence," and occasionally some good ol' country-lawyer revisioning:

Had we pushed the overthrow of tyrannical Arab regimes post-Iraq (as some unsuccessfully urged) there might have been a wave of truly democratic revolutions, with Iraq explicitly the model, leading to Egypt as the “prize.” We are now seeing, at least potentially, such a wave, but the U.S. has been propping up Mubarak — thanks, Joe! — the Saudis, and other despots since we lost our pro-democracy mojo in 2005 after the Cedar Revolution, for reasons that are still not entirely clear.

"Reasons that are still not entirely clear"! It's something to see Reynolds, who gets all the talking points when they're still wet from the mimeograph, stalling until the labs can cook up some clear reasons why Bush didn't just go swinging through the Middle East like Errol Flynn, dishing out democracy. I'm betting they'll have something to do with tyrants knowing that their best friends the Democrats were about to take over Congress, and nothing at all to do with America's finances.

For straight pinheadedness I direct you to Reliapundit, whose prediction for the fate of Mooslimland includes goodies like these:

El Baradei is probably not a jihadist, but he is most definitely a postmodern leftist who sees the USA and the West as evil - just as Obama's mentor at Columbia --- Edward Said --- did!...

And, he probably thinks he is using the Iranians to promote a postmodernist and socialist and UTOPIANIST world...

YES: the postmodernists think that the USA and Israel and fossil fuels are so very evil that getting rid of them would be worth destroying the present world economy and bringing on a totally global and viciously kinetic final battle to WW4.

Reliapundit also observes that "Iranians invented chess and are patient chess-players - patiently moving pieces in position over years," which probably occurred to him as he was trying to get one of the marbles from his Chinese Checkers out of his left nostril.

UPDATE. It's true, apparently -- there's nothing that can't be made worse by the contributions of Ross Douthat, whose new column tells us this:

The long-term consequences of a more populist and nationalistic Egypt might be better for the United States than the stasis of the Mubarak era, and the terrorism that it helped inspire. But then again they might be worse.

That's pretty much the summary, if you add "Arabs suck," as Douthat describes Nasser and Mubarak in monster-movie terms -- no matter what they did, it came out jihad! (I bet Ataturk was even worse.) Also anti-Americanism: "For many young Egyptians, restless amid political and economic stagnation, it’s been a short leap from hating their dictator to hating his patrons in the United States." The next day, Douthat's paper ran BBC poll results that show Egyptians like the U.S. a lot more since Obama was elected. Douthat, alas, will never improve; his faith in Jesus insulates him from any instructive feelings of humiliation.

YOU DIDN'T WANT THAT AMERICAN DREAM ANYWAY. Ack! Remember when Ann Althouse was pretending not to believe that America once had a middle class that included blue collar workers who were able to support their families on a single income? David Harsanyi (surely you remember him -- big libertarian!) goes her one better -- he sort of acknowledges that such a state of affairs existed, but insists it was horrible compared to the dynamic depression we're in now:

Really, was this country ever about being proud that your children ended up in the same plant you slaved in for 30 years? Even with a promise of a union pension and -- if you're lucky -- an "occasional" promotion, it sounds like a soul-crushing grind you'd want your offspring to escape, tout de suite.

Luckily, in the real world, history tells of a story filled with dynamic movements of people, class climbing, churning innovation, booms and busts, and widespread embrace of risk taking...

...ending in a collapse of the banking system due in large part to "churning innovation" in financial instruments. But that was just the wow finish -- for decades the middle class has self-evidently been squeezed until the entry fee, which had once just been a willingness to (to coin a phrase) work hard and play by the rules, became a college degree, a second income, a willingness to work round the clock and on holidays, and the normalization of the sort of financial manipulations in which, once upon a time, only brokers and con men engaged.

And that's for the lucky ones.

Go ahead, Dave -- go among the unemployed and marginally employed and ask them if they think a steady job is an intolerable oppression that they're fortunate to be rid of. Hell, ask the fully-employed people who're hanging onto solvency by their fingernails if they're enjoying your churningly innovative thrill-ride.

I've always assumed these people were raised in Skinner boxes, but I'm beginning to think they never got out of them.

EGYPT ME, EGYPT YOU. Al Jazeera, whose live feed you can see here (thanks Skinny John!), is reporting that Egyptian cops are beating up reporters. And they're on their way up to the Al Jazeera studios in Cairo. ("I will stay on the air as long as I can... until we are forced off the air.")


It's almost curfew time, so this should be interesting.

UPDATE. I'm so old I remember the Iranian Twitter revolution -- which achieved little concrete political change, though it did lead in an uptick to avatar modification -- so I'm not making any calls on this. I do notice that some conservatives are worried that the uprising, should it take, may not be to America's liking*. But the mainstream play for conservatives is to act enthusiastic about it, as they did with the Orange Revolution and the Cedar Revolution. Remember those? Many medals were given out then for supportive blogging! But the world seems not to have gotten much freer because of them.

UPDATE 2. State media reports Army's been ordered into the streets to put down the protests, says AJ. Just saw a bunch of protestors flip over an armored personnel carrier.

UPDATE 3. *At National Review, Michael Rubin really wants it both ways: "A reader points out that while Biden’s 'Mubarak is not a dictator' comment is risible, the vice president was correct that Mubarak should not step down, because what comes next — a Muslim Brotherhood dictatorship — could be worse." There's a man who knows how to spread his chips!

And would you believe it, the situation reminds Victor Davis Hanson of In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, and Stop Loss. And Michael Moore! It's become a major Hanson tic. He'll be applying these topics to world events at his rest home, assuming perhaps unfairly he's not in one already.

UPDATE 4. "GOOD NEWS," says Atlas Shrugs, "EGYPT ARRESTS MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD LEADERS." Apparently Mubarak is cleverly engineering just who will chase him out of the country and take over. Probably he's working with the most pro-democracy faction. What a patriot!

Good continuing coverage at Mother Jones.

SHORTER RADLEY BALKO. A Tennessee university fired a gay coach. Students protested, and the school agreed not to discriminate against gays in the unlikely event that they ever let one get by them again (the fired teacher didn't get her job back). This proves that the Civil Rights Act is useless and should be repealed.

UPDATE. In comments, Angry Geometer considers Balko's punchline -- "This is just one example. But it's a pretty compelling one" -- and says, "I'd hate to see this dude at the roulette table."

ONE BORN EVERY MINUTE. In and among her abortion ravings, The Anchoress always finds time to check out American Idol (in which she periodically pretends not to be interested). Lately the show's had segments about a singer who's taking care of his brain-damaged fiancee, and another who got knocked up and found out her baby was going to be disabled but had the baby anyway and loves her. The Anchoress reflects:

This is either the most cynical exploitation of human drama for the sake of ratings that we’ve ever seen, or it’s a downright providential celebration of the inherent worth of every human life (and the right to live the life one has, no matter what the challenges) and a far-reaching lesson in the transcendent power of love.

Guess which The Anchoress decides it is? (Bear in mind, this is American Idol she's talking about. After the mom sings, Jennifer Lopez says, "It brought tears to my eyes, and that's the first time that's happened today.")

Gotta tell you that after reading the filth of the utter disregard for humanity contained in the Grand Jury Report against Kermit Gosnell and his abortion clinic, these videos feel like pure gift.

This is mainly what you need to know about The Anchoress: She's always going on about how you can't trust the lamestream media/MSM, but she believes 110% in American Idol.

OSCAR CATCH-UP, PART 1. Black Swan. The Exorcist in tights. Instead of the struggle of God and the Devil, we have the struggle of the White and Black Swans driving our poor little girl unto her indignities. (The Swan fable is even spoken aloud for us at the beginning by the hilariously elevated ballet master with a vestigial sweater around his neck.) The film puts our ballerina Nina through much grisly (though hallucinated) physical trauma that compares nicely with Linda Blair's spinning head and crucificial hate-fuck. And since it's just about artsy people rather than a major religion, the dark forces get to win.

Darren Aronofsky, who likes to show the ugly-real's losing struggle with the seductive-unreal (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler), goes heavy on the fantasy here. The showmanship is dazzling, but I think he lost his grounding. Fantasies are powerful when they heighten a real-life feeling shared by lots of people. But Nina's need to be perfect is neurotic rather than transcendent; while performers may project enough of their own experiences onto Black Swan to buy it (and that may be why it's so acclaimed), ordinary people will wonder why she didn't go to a doctor when she saw feathers growing out of her skin. I don't think they'd question, say, Lust for Life the same way, because corny as it is, there they can see and feel where the drive comes from.

The acting's fine. Natalie Portman's persistently childlike affect is perfect for Nina; Barbara Hershey's game for Monster Mommy; Mila Kunis and Vincent Cassel are appropriately ludicrous as the life-force and the cock-of-the-walk, respectively. And thanks so much, Winona Ryder, for the unexpected laughs.

The Fighter. The last half-hour threw me (mild spoiler), as I didn't see the turn-around coming. I mean, what suddenly made family love real to all these people, who had previously expressed it only with insults and jealous rages, and motivated them to come together? Christian Bale's so good that I almost believed his pitch to his brother's girlfriend Charlene to come back and make things right, but with everyone else it was like, "Wuh-okay, guess here's what we're doing now." It's really just something you have to buy to get to the feel-good ending.

Maybe David O. Russell thought this hey-ho-let's-go approach had worked so well in the beginning that it should work at the end. And in the rest of the film, it does work. We get thrown into the story so fast that momentum carries us. The brothers' relationship we at first have to take for granted and on faith, but over time we get little glimpses of how growing up together might have been for them: Dicky the crazy cut-up, Micky the quiet, industrious plodder -- and Mom the breeder/empire-builder who decided long ago that Dicky was going to be the ticket out for them all. We get enough information that by the time the relationships break, it doesn't have to be explosive -- it's just right, and thereby dramatic.

In this context the more conventionally-developed romance between Micky and Charlene takes on added weight: You get the feeling that family was just something that happened to Micky, while Charlene is part of his underdeveloped adult life of choices and forward movement. No wonder his family hates her -- and that Micky clings to her like a life-raft.

All the acting is terrific (though at one point I wanted to yell STOP IT, YOU'RE MAKING ME GRIND MY TEETH at Bale), but I give special props to Marky Mark, who also produced the picture. I saw an interview recently in the Hollywood Reporter with filmdom's biggest producers, and Wahlberg was in there. He was very, very focused on the job of making the picture the best and most successful it can be, no matter what. His performance in The Fighter is unshowy, even slightly withdrawn. Wahlberg's a pretty good actor, and he knows what a star needs to get over in a big picture; I get the feeling he took one for the team here. For some reason that really impresses me.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B. demurs: "I thought Bale was overrated, actually. The clip of Dick and Mickey at the end shows what kind of juice the real guy had -- he was more charming in thirty seconds than Bale can ever be, and funnier too. Bale can act, but, for me, he can't connect. His eyes are empty." Hmm. I thought Bale was going full crackhead, which would make anyone a little opaque, but come to think of it I've never seen him do a lot of relating onscreen -- whenever I see him, all I can think is, "You like Huey Lewis and the News? Their early work was a little too new wave for my taste..." Anyone else?