STORY APPEAL.

I'm on a few mailing lists, so I got this thing from Eugene Delgaudio, "The Public Advocate of the United States," an office which I'm guessing is even less well-budgeted than New York City's Public Advocate. Delgaudio also has a more official position in Loudon Country, Virginia, but from what I read in the papers it may not last.

Dear Roy, 

President Obama claims you support homosexual "marriage."

Well, I get so many requests for testimonials, I just can't keep up.

He and his ultra-liberal media allies brag that you're demanding special job preferences for homosexuals and teaching so-called "alternative" lifestyles in school.

Is it true? What do you say? 

That is why I've prepared a nation-wide American Morality Survey.

The survey has questions like "Should decisions about morality and sexuality be taken away from parents, in order for radical teachers and counselors to promote the homosexual lifestyle in schools?" And it wants your email, presumably so someone can send you ads for gold and survival foods.

But the beauty part is the narrative portion of the pitch:

One stormy night, I drove to a mailshop hidden deep in a nearly deserted stand of warehouses. I'd heard something was up and wanted to see for myself. 

As I rounded the final turn, my eyes nearly popped. Tractor-trailers pulled up to loading docks, cars and vans everywhere and long-haired, earring-pierced men scurrying around running forklifts, inserters and huge printing presses. 

Trembling with worry, I went inside. It was worse than I ever imagined. 

Row after row of boxes bulging with pro-homosexual petitions lined the walls, stacked to the ceiling. 

(Issue with verisimilitude here -- wouldn't homosexuals pack boxes more neatly?)

My mind reeled as I realized hundreds, maybe thousands, more boxes were already loaded on the tractor-trailers. And still more petitions were flying off the press. 

Suddenly a dark-haired man screeched, “Delgaudio, what are you doing here?” Dozens of men began moving toward me. I'd been recognized.

Well, of course. He's the Public Advocate of the United States.

 As I retreated to my car, the man chortled, “This time, Delgaudio, we can't lose!”

Driving away, my eyes filled with tears as I realized he might be right. This time the Homosexual Lobby could win it all.

There's a lot about this gig that's depressing, but thanks to prose stylists like Delgaudio it is not without its compensations.

UPDATE. My commenters are as usual one up on me: smut clyde informs that Delgaudio's been telling this specific story since 2010 at least. But don't despair, Delgaudio's no one-trick pony -- TGuerrant finds him elsewhere warning that "the Homosexual Lobby hoards vast treasuries" and requesting donations to counteract their power; also, assuring suckers/patriots that the struggle against gays "has driven me on many lonely road trips, spending days and weeks at a time far from my loving family to face the hatred of rabid anti-Family, anti-Christian activists." There's a road movie I'd like to see! Too bad the title The Straight Story has already been taken.

Lots of smart-aleck remarks, too, e.g. Spaghetti Lee: "Oh no, not the gays! NOT THE GAYS! AAAAH! AAAAAGHGGHH! AHHHRRGGH!"

UPDATE 2. More comments: "Ok, that settles it," says JennOfArk. "If this deranged tool is making $150K per year with this kind of fantasy dreck, then there's no reason for me to put off writing my monster porn opus." Don't dream it, be it!

FREEDUMMIES.

In the latest attempt by wingnuts to make more of America as miserable as they are, some folks want to carve California into six separate states so at least a few of them will be Red/impoverished. (One of the new states would be called "Jefferson" because freedom.) This Washington Times puffer doesn't even try to conceal it:

Revenue from sales and property taxes also would be distributed unevenly among the six states. Jefferson and Central California have the lowest personal income taxes and the lowest sales and property tax bases, although Jefferson would become a net exporter of water. 

[Rich guy Tim] Draper said support for the six-state concept is highest in Central California and Jefferson because “the existing state is not working for them.” 

"Of course, we expect all six states to get richer because governments will be more in touch with their citizens,” Mr. Draper said... 

They may be smaller and poorer but they'll have responsive government, unlike those Silicon Valley statists. Folks'll naturally prefer their water-power computers to those powered by communism!

For [secessionist Mark] Baird, that’s the beauty of the six Californias proposal: bringing government closer to the people it represents. 

“When you ask people here about this, they tell you, ‘If I could live in a free state, I’d live with a few more potholes and some used equipment,’” said Mr. Baird. “We need representation. We’ll figure the rest of it out."

I assume Draper's got some land- and power-grab scheme in mind -- his home base, the Sovereign State of Silicon Valley, would become the richest in the country under this plan -- and that Baird, if he's not merely deluded, would try to use the threat of dehydration or deliberate flooding to end gay marriage in neighboring states in the name of the Lord, until a team of assassins financed by the Siliconians took him out and replaced him with a puppet regime. (Maybe by then Gary Sinise will be ready for a governorship.)

It makes sense, if you're of a cynical turn of mind, that as soon as Jerry Brown successfully un-fucked the state's finances after years of calamitous Republican rule -- and Californians decided they liked the change --  conservatives would try to flip the chessboard like this.

I'm put in mind of "Rule or Ruin," except with these guys it's always Rule and Ruin. Get a load of Human Rights Watch's report on the trend toward privatized, "offender-funded" probation services in some states -- the result of which is what anyone with a brain would expect: massive rip-offs and persecution of the poorest and most vulnerable citizens.

In Georgia, Thomas Barrett pled guilty to stealing a can of beer from a convenience store and was fined US$200. He was ultimately jailed for failing to pay over a thousand dollars in fees to his probation company, even though his entire income—money he earned by selling his own blood plasma—was less than what he was being charged in monthly probation fees...

Most courts do not even track and do not know how much their probation companies collect in fees from the probationers they assign to them. Companies treat those figures as a trade secret and refuse to publish them. Human Rights Watch estimates that in Georgia alone, probation companies take in at least $40 million in revenues from fees they charge to probationers

The report is mostly based on "interviews conducted with people in the states of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi" -- three states where, you may be sure, the tax bases are low but the "freedom" is high, as evidenced by the innovative ways they've found to sell out their own people.

UPDATE. Good to see Andrew Cohen of The Atlantic is getting in on the privatized probation scam story. "The perils of private probation isn't a bigger national story, I reckon," writes Cohen, "because it does not impact the rich and powerful nearly as much as it impacts the poor and powerless." No shit.

I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S NOT KRISTALLNACHT!

Did you know complaining about income disparities is kinda sorta anti-Semitic? Ruth R. Wisse explains at your Rich People Kristallnacht clearing house, the Wall Street Journal:

Two phenomena: anti-Semitism and American class conflict. Is there any connection between them? In a letter to this newspaper, the noted venture capitalist Tom Perkins called attention to certain parallels, as he saw them, between Nazi Germany's war against the Jews and American progressives' war on the "one percent." For comparing two such historically disparate societies, Mr. Perkins was promptly and heatedly denounced. 

But is there something to be said for his comparison—not of Germany and the United States, of course, but of the politics at work in the two situations? The place to begin is at the starting point: with the rise of anti-Semitism, modernity's most successful and least understood political movement.

Basically: The racist Wilhelm Marr was "originally a man of the left," and Karl Marx once used an unfortunate metaphor. This proves progressives are anti-Semitic, just as the Jamaican bobsled team proves that Caribbeans are natural winter athletes.

Also, today we have an "anti-Israel movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions," not because people (including plenty of Jews) are troubled by the treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories, but because they all hate Jews and just needed a more exotic focus for their hatred now that Nazi rallies are unfashionable.

Wisse continues:

The ranks of those harping on "unfairly" high earners include figures in American political life at all levels who have been entrusted with the care of our open society; in channeling blame for today's deep-rooted and seemingly intractable problems toward the beneficiaries of that society's competitive freedoms, they are playing with fire...

...says the lady equating mainstream liberals with Hitler. Would it be anti-Semitic to tell her to go fuck herself?

UPDATE. Commenters catch the anti-Semitic bug! "Tl;dr, alt: If you don't have anything nice to say, you're Hitler," offers whetstone. Jeffrey_Kramer kicks it up a notch:

It turns out that anything can be equated with Hitler if you keep the association abstract enough. Flip through the dictionary and come up with a random word: I got scrum. So, "Is it not at the very heart of Nazism to join arms mindlessly in an attempt to crush the enemy into submission?" Flip again: crayon. "The opposing team's suggestion that children be given crayons is redolent of the Nazi love for gaudy propaganda which dazzled its followers with colorful phrases while bypassing the intellect"....

Etc. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard posits "Cristalnacht," because "now [the rich] can't drink their overpriced champagne in peace." Jay B recognizes that because he wants the 1% "taxed at a reasonable level and maybe several dozen of them in prison," he is "the Gregor Strasser of Liberal Fascism or something. We've already established that Roy is the Ezra Pound." Hmmph! I'll be Celine or nothing.

A DYING RACE.

Thanks Nancy Nall for tipping me to Alicia Colon, whose work as a professional Kathryn J. Lopez impersonator at the old New York Sun I had noted, but whose more recent career at American Thinker I had missed.  Her latest is about how people think they like homosexuals only because they don't envision buttsecks whenever they look at them, as she apparently does. Sample:

Those lovable characters in the sitcoms are robustly healthy and affluent, cuddly folks who never even hint at any of the negative consequences that follow on a lifetime of practicing anal intercourse. Nobody wears Depends, nobody deals with feces-borne diseases, and the devastation of AIDS is left for a few feature films that generate sympathy for the victims without addressing the behavioral component of the disease vector.

Colon obviously missed that very special Will & Grace episode, "Giardia is Not a River in Italy." Colon does approve of gay Catholics who do not have anal intercourse, and hopes a book her friend is writing about them "may enlighten others and be helpful to Catholic gays as Bill W's book was for alcoholics."

It's almost charming that such people still exist; they're like bigot Shakers. I wonder if they ever perceive the irony of the likelihood that the carriers of the Gay Plague will outlast them.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Obama's reference in the State of the Union to income inequality, and the rightblogger rage thereby engendered.

GO AHEAD, TRY IT THAT WAY.

Love seeing headlines like this at the Washington Times:

Is the GOP deliberately trying to sabotage the 2014 midterms?

The author is Tammy Bruce, a radio nut, whose complaint is that Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the first of 57 official Republican respondents to Tuesday's State of the Union, did not froth at the mouth:

Criticism of the content of the GOP response has also been well-deserved. Within the first two minutes, the Republicans assured Americans that Mr. Obama (like the GOP) wants what’s best for everyone. Really? There are many people who legitimately have every reason to not believe that.

Among the reasons Bruce thinks Obama hates America and is "sending this nation off a cliff": Obummercare, Benghazi, and skree.

She also thinks Mia Love should have been selected to do the speech, because she has attained the exalted position of Mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah,  and can froth with the best of them, but Love was kibboshed and Bruce suspects it's because the Republicans don't want to win in 2014:

Perhaps the current GOP leadership prefers things as they are: not enough power to do anything conservative of consequence, while watching (and applauding as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor did during the State of the Union) the liberal agenda, including de facto amnesty, become the law of the land...

Well, beats workin'. And if your emoluments of office aren't what they would be if you ruled absolutely, you can pick up the slack with advertising scams --  like the ad cluster that pops up when you go to Bruce's story at WashTimes.

We’re in this mess for a reason, and it’s because GOP leaders either doesn’t understand the conservative ideal (which is why they can’t articulate it), or they do understand it and simply don’t like it.

If that's true, it's probably the only thing "GOP leaders" and the American people have in common. Nonetheless I support Bruce's scheme to seize power by telling voters that the people most of them voted for are traitors. It's gotta work! And if it doesn't, well, can we interest you good people in Goldline?

UPDATE. smut clyde in comments: "Next year the official alternative SOTU speech will be delivered by a Siamese cat walking randomly on the keyboard of Stephen Hawking's speech synthesizer."

BUT SOME ARE MORE UNEQUAL THAN OTHERS.

Some yap from Ace of Spades about "social inequality," which is what liberals (all of whom, one would surmise from this essay, light their American Spirits with hundred-dollar bills) are really up to with their Class Warfare:

It is weaponized for politics. Sarah Palin quite plainly is not dismissed by the New Class merely because they disagree with her beliefs. Their disdain has a nasty personal edge to it -- they disapprove of her and the class she hails from. The New Class is not to content itself with disparaging Palin. They actively wish to include millions of Americans they've never even met inside the broad circle of their angry, arrogant disdain. The fact that they are not just attacking Palin but attacking millions of other people is not a bug, but a feature. The additional casualties of the attack are not regrettable collateral damage, but rather bonus damage to be celebrated.

However heartbreakingly unfair this may be to her, I suppose Palin consoles herself with money, of which she has tons. As for those "millions of other people," Spades apparently hopes to excite in them a rooting interest in Sarah Palin of the sort they might also hold for, say, the Seattle Seahawks against the Denver Broncos, or Team Edward against Team Jacob.

We who have free souls know these struggles are only really meaningful to shareholders in the respective franchises.  But under present economic conditions, a growing number of Americans are out of sympathy with rich fucks of any sort, and will pick a side between them not out of fellow-feeling but on the theory that one bunch of rich fucks is less likely to leave them to starve than the other.

And the only reason we're having this ridiculous discussion is that Spades' team isn't doing well in that regard.  The State of the Union wasn't much of a speech, but it was very good politics, and Spades' panic gives a clue as to why.

UPDATE. Some commenters see the relevance of the Duck Dynasty racket to Spades' social-equality blubbering; like Palin, the Dynasts are rich fake backwoodsmen whom the suckers are inveighed to support against somebody who failed to treat the fakes with the proper respect -- and by so doing, they assure their marks, they are disrespecting you, too.

Jeffrey_Kramer subjects Spades to some admirable textual analysis -- and while that sounds like something fancy-pants liberal academic elitists would do, even a lumpenprole such as myself can enjoy it:

Notice the negligible degree of fact which has to be provided, in order to fuel the ragegasm. Ace declares:

...that the New Class has dismissed Palin!
...that they are nasty and personal in their disdain for her!
...that they have most contumaciously disapproved of her and her class!
...that this New Class is not content to disparage but arrogantly disdains!
...that they attack not only Palin but millions of others!

It's like he's writing a Declaration of Independence from the Liberal Elites, but without any content whatsoever.

Finally, regarding another missing piece, DocAmazing: "As Ace of Play-doh opposes social inequality, I suggest that we find out where he lives, and throw a big party. I'll invite all my friends from East Oakland and the Mission District. We'll all have a splendid time, and Ace can enjoy the company of those of a different social caste." No, Doc, you don't understand: Black people are part of the Social Inequality Oppression forces -- that is, when conservatives slur them, people get offended, which is totally unfair.

NOT WORTHY OF OUR TIME.

Looking in on Rod Dreher just to see if he's still awful. Here's one about (groan) evolution where he says fancy-pants liberals

who love to put the Darwin fish on their cars and rail against fundagelicals who want to teach Creationism in public schools should be honest with themselves and admit that they don’t really want to teach Science and nothing but either.

Because if they were being honest, they'd accept his idea of science, which is that black people are inferior. He demonstrates this via a Steve Sailer link that pulls the cheap parlor trick of never mentioning American blacks (except indirectly, e.g. "Darwin wouldn't be surprised to learn which race had invented rap music") while maintaining Darwin proves races are unequal; for the missing pieces, you just have to look at the rest of Sailer's career. Plus there's the old nudge-wink from Dreher:

One of the things that keeps drawing me to Steve Sailer’s writing is that his beliefs on human biodiversity sometimes lead him to point out inconvenient truths about ideologies informing our common life.

[pushes in nose, pushes out lower lip]

I don’t read him often enough to say for sure...

Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Anyway, Dreher says it's cool, libs, we all ignore reality sometimes:

Unless you believe that plans for building atomic bombs and how to poison a city’s water supply with ricin should be distributed freely on the Internet, then you too believe in the concept of forbidden knowledge.

This is comparable to Jonah Goldberg's schtick of saying you liberals are in favor of censorship just like me because no one wants spread beaver on children's TV. The thing is, while you might entertain these logic games from someone who offers them in good faith, Goldberg and his crew have over the years so convincingly proven themselves first-class enemies of human liberty that there's no need to say anything back except, "Sure, make it Adventure Time for real, what the hell I don't have kids." It's even worse with Dreher, who ably represents centuries of theocratic suppression; the idea that inquisitors like him now stand outside our discourse, hiding pots of flaming pitch behind their backs, and say may I point out your hypocrisy is just too rich to bear.

Fuck 'em. Call me a liberal fascist, but I say Torquemada doesn't deserve a second chance.

HE WHO FEELS IT, KNOWS IT.

There'll be a lot of garbage talked about Pete Seeger's politics today. (At the moment there's a post-mortem hush, and even Ann Althouse is gracious, but the assholes are already crawling out.) There'll probably be some cavilling about the quality of Seeger's ethnomusicology, too, and about appropriation and authenticity and all that shit.

But today I'm thinking of him as a player -- because though he has a fat political legacy on which others can speak eloquently, he was also, I would say foremost, a musician, someone in love with songs and sounds who had the gift to transmit that love to large groups of people. He was a lefty Brahmin who took up hill country music, and that mix could have and maybe should have been ridiculous, like a Puritan trying to swing. But it isn't, in him; Seeger felt the music, and if his diction was a little sharper than was traditional, you could still tell he felt it. His singing was like John Carradine playing Casy in The Grapes of Wrath -- a performance, a bit stagey, but absolutely shot through with the true feeling of a time and a people. And with something timeless, too, that can still speak to us.

"Wimoweh" starts about 1:35 in this clip from Wasn't That a Time, the doc about The Weavers' 1980 reunion. Watch Pete. He's possessed by the sound, as much a raver and a wailer as that other great appropriator, Buddy Holly.



At the time he was 60 years old, and he kept right on going till the end. Music is so much more important than politics, really.

UPDATE. Charlie Pierce understands. Many good lines:

He loved the country and its people and the idea of it that outlasted so many attempts to hijack it for other purposes. Pete Seeger was a great American because he dared to be thought otherwise. That is the only real qualification. It gets more dear as the years go by.

UPDATE 2. Somebody called Howard Husock at National Review:

In other words, Pete Seeger led the way in devising the formula that pushed popular culture leftward: the music (or the movies) had to work as art and must avoid heavy-handedness.

Yes -- the art had to work as art! Ingenious, these communists! No wonder, as Husock complains, "the cultural Right has long, and unsuccessfully, been trying to match his example" -- they don't even know that art and politics are different things. What miserable lives they must have.

UPDATE 3. Donald Douglas goes into comments, calls one of the other commenters a "cum-receptacle"; said another commenter wonders if his employer would like to see that comment; Douglas puts up a post called "@Edroso Commenter Threatens Workplace Harassment Over Pete Seeger Communist Blogging." Later, he comes back and threatens another commenter. I've banned him; he can issue his Cries For Help elsewhere. What is it with these people?

WATCH YOUR BACK, GOLDBERG.

Betsy Woodruff of National Review on how Macklemore won a Grammy because homos:

Far be it from me to assume there’s any rhyme or reason behind who wins Grammys (ha! not doing that).

The very next goddamn sentence:

But it’s hard not to look at this situation and wonder if the Grammys put politics before music.

This breathtaking display of self-unawareness, along with her ridiculous Lena Dunham columns, makes Woodruff the front-runner to replace Jonah Goldberg as the Corporal Agarn of NR's culture war troops.

Anyway I don't know what she's complaining about; one might as easily argue that Daft Punk's big night is a victory for the Singularity.

UPDATE. Hear hear, M. Krebs in comments: "Actually it's hard not to wonder if there's anything the Grammys don't put before music."

Plus, Formerly_Nom_De_Plume:

I won’t be talking about Ryan Lewis at all here because first, I don’t know anything about him 

lost out to someone named Ariana Grande about whom I know nothing 

Someone with a better grasp of hip-hop history than I (read: someone with any grasp of it at all, really) 

(And if this piece already exists, can someone send it to me?)

Her training is complete. Jonah watch his back? More like congratulate himself on a job well done. 

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about all the ways liberals are persecuting conservatives these days, from the progressive Kristallnacht to poor Dinesh D'Souza. I don't know about you, but I never dreamed I had so much power.

UPDATE. Here's a cartoon that didn't make the cut:

I'm not sure why Uncle Sam looks so blasé. Maybe he's thinking, "Well, at least it's not a Puerto Rican." Or maybe witnessing over decades the slow destruction of the American Dream has turned his brain into harmless goo, and death comes as a blessing.

UPDATE. Ole Perfesser Instapundit has not one but two posts denouncing the "LEFTIES" who "WERE ALL OVER TWITTER RIDICULING" Tom Perkins' ridiculous assertion that a progressive Kristallnacht is coming. Apparently a bunch of nuts protested at a Google engineer's house, and someone threw a rock at a Google bus; no casualties, but "could things get worse?" Questions... remain! 

Plus Obama is mean to rich people, "the basic political thuggishness for which Chicago politicians are known," yadda yadda. There's a FEMA coffin with your name on it, sheeple!

For some people, The Paranoid Style in American Politics is a how-to book.

STUPIDEST, WRITTEN, GOLDBERG, AGAIN*.

There are several things that are not good for Jonah Goldberg's arguments -- challenges, logic, a light rain -- but the worst results come when he tries to go off-road, i.e. abandons the simplest right-wing verities and tries to think for himself.

Case in point: The Satan statue that was proposed to make a point about religious imagery on public property in Oklahoma. Maybe what led Goldberg astray was that he noticed people were having lulz over it, and he didn't want to be the scold wagging his finger about Satan; long before he became a Professor of Liberal Fasciology at the Bulk-Order School of Conserviatrics, Goldberg was what passed in Republican circles for a comedy act, and funsies remain part of his Brand.

So Goldberg bravely eases his jalopy off the asphalt and into the sand. He acknowledges the statue is "a stunt — a clever one — exploiting the constitutional injunction against governmental favoritism towards religion" and that

...if you want to argue that erecting a tribute to Lucifer on public property is a bad idea, the Constitution is pretty useless. That’s no knock on the Constitution, mind you. Lots of wonderful things are of little utility in fighting Satan. Puppies, ice cream, the warranty on a Ford Pinto: These are as helpful in fighting Satan as a winning smile is in putting out a house fire.

(Did you catch the thing about the Ford Pinto? Years ago someone taught Goldberg the Rule of Three, and one of these days he's going to get it right.)

Unprotected by Constitutional argh-blargh, Goldberg floors it into the desert.

The Satan statue controversy is of course absurd, but absurdities are often useful in illuminating more substantial issues.

Uh oh.

America is becoming vastly more diverse — ethnically, culturally, religiously, and morally. In a great many ways that’s a good thing. But in this life, no good thing comes without a downside.

Double uh-oh. Here's where Goldberg may have begun to feel his wheels spinning. Being too lazy to rewrite, he had obliged himself to explain what, exactly, is bad about diversity. He couldn't just go "haw, diversity, amirite" like he usually does.

Consider immigration, historically a boon to America. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam (a liberal in good standing) found that increased immigration hurts “social trust,” causing people to “hunker down” within their own bands of friends or alone in front of the TV.  Everything from trust in political leaders and the political process — both of which are at or near all-time lows, by the way — to voting and carpooling drops precipitously as more strangers move into a community.

By "immigration" I'm guessing he doesn't mean Satanists, and by "strangers" I'm guessing he doesn't mean that nice fratboy on a career track who moved into the condo next door. Since it came out six years ago, Putnam's cohesion study (and the gloat that Putnam's a liberal) has been required screeding for rightwing racists, but practitioners like Daniel Henninger and Rod Dreher can just stand there, go Ooga-Booga for three minutes, and disappear in a puff of smoke -- Goldberg's still got to get back to Satan without being any dumber than he's already been. Alas, there was no intern around to tell him to shut up about diversity:

Conversely, people increasingly look more to government — the police, local politicians, and bureaucrats — to solve problems that once could have been worked out in a neighborly conversation. This reliance on legal authority and entitlements further crowds out the charitable mechanisms and institutions of civil society, inviting yet more government intrusions.

So when we didn't have all these blacks and foreigners we didn't need cops? Here comes the flop sweat and the first, high-lonesome squeals of anxiety farting --

By the way, Putnam explicitly rejects racism as the culprit here.

-- which builds to a crescendo:

Rather, the cause is a breakdown in shared norms, customs, language, and the other often invisible and intangible but no less real sinews that bind a community together.

It was Cheetos, not chitlins,  we all knew where we stood!

Family breakdown, the decline in good blue-collar jobs, the decline of organized religion, etc., are all equally good or better examples of things sapping the strength from social trust and cohesion and encouraging government to pick up the slack...

It's big government, big government's to blame, I didn't mean black people shut up shut up FARRRRRRRRRRT.

From there it's Goldberg crawling out of the overheated wreck and across the blazing sands gasping "Funyuns... Funyuns..." and this pathetic denouement:

The unraveling of the old cultural, moral, and religious consensus has been a boon to individual freedom in myriad ways. But you can say this for the old civilizational confidence: It didn’t lack for arguments against state-sponsored devil worship.

Satan target achieved -- a lack of cultural consensus leads to devil worship, and since the Constitution can't stop it, we should get back to "civilizational confidence," which I guess means figuring out which Oscar-winning movies are conservative and following their example.

* Sorry, but I do get tired writing it all over again sometimes.

THE SPECIAL-NEEDS CHILDREN OF ZHDANOV.

Try and imagine being Jonah Goldberg:

As for the liberal bias thing. I absolutely agree there’s an enormous amount of leftwing bias in Hollywood, including often at the Oscars. But it’s hardly the case that pro-war or pro-American movies never get nominated. Last year, recall, Argo won best picture (to the dismay of some on the left). It beat out Zero Dark Thirty​, which was even more hated by the left but nonetheless received four nominations. The “Hurt Locker,” a more ambivalent war movie but hardly anti-American, won three years before that (it also won best director, a huge snub to her ex-husband, James Cameron, who directed Avatar). ​ ”Saving Private Ryan” was nominated for 11 Oscars and won five including Best Director — not exactly an anti-military or anti-American movie. 

There are certainly movies that benefited from being on the left. “Crash” didn’t deserve Best Picture. “American Beauty” is wildly overrated. But if the academy was really so leftwing in its tastes, it’s hard to see “Braveheart,” “Forrest Gump,” or even “Gladiator” beating out their competition.Warren Beatty certainly didn’t deserve an Oscar for “Reds,” a piece of soporific agitprop about American Communist John Reed. I think you can make a case for Oliver Stone getting the Oscar for “Platoon” without the benefit of politics, but not for “Born on the Fourth of July"...

That is to say, imagine that you are obsessed with politics but too stupid to say anything interesting about it, and so associate your crackpot ideas with things you do understand, barely, though they have nothing to do with politics -- such as one's choice of football teams, music videos, TV shows, and female body type -- and say things like "great novels are, by nature, conservative" with a straight face.

This is really why we have a "culture war." It's not a categorical imperative; it's a make-work program for unskilled wingnut dilettantes.

UPDATE. Goldberg's previous low-water mark as a kulturkampfer.

UPDATE 2. Commenter Ellis Weiner focuses on Goldberg's murky adverbial phrase "to the dismay of some on the left," which he finds

about as full of meaning and import as a teenager's "like." You can use it anywhere and not be entirely wrong. "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should--to the dismay of some on the left." "I AM your father, Luke--to the dismay of some on the left." "A specter is haunting Europe--to the," etc.

Other commenters come up with their own versions ("Baby, everything is all right, uptight, [and] clean out of sight (to the dismay of some on the left)"). And whetstone reminds us of John Rogers'/Kung Fu Monkey's definitive rebuke to anyone who seeks to anthropomorphize Hollywood as anything but an anteater that eats money instead of ants.

TODAY IN CAREER ADVANCEMENT.

I see the Washington Post has formed some kind of alliance with The Volokh Conspiracy. For those of you unacquainted with these guys, here are some leaves from my notebook on them:

Eugene Volokh has expressed interesting feelings about bringing pain and death upon his fellow man: In 2002 he at least considered the "slippery slope" argument against torture ("Once torture is legitimized in principle to save thousands, it becomes much easier to urge it to save one important person...") before telling us that "abstract arguments about moral high grounds or stooping to the enemy's level do more to weaken the argument against torture than to strengthen it." But by 2005 he was ready to let his freak flag fly:

…I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging… 

…I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness.

In an update he relented, and thereafter devoted himself to more humanitarian causes, like promoting the death penalty.

Perhaps definitely related, Volokh got very pissy when someone suggested Rudy Giuliani was "milking" the 9/11 thing in 2007 (I know, right?). "Imagine a surgeon who, in the wake of some disaster, does what many see as a superb job of saving many patients," sniffed Volokh. "...Would we fault him because 'milking [his] reputation [formed during a deadly disaster] for crass [careerist] gain is, obviously, despicable'?" Considering that this surgeon found on the worst possible day that the super-special operating room he'd built at great expense to the hospital for such occasions was completely useless, I'd say so, and Giuliani's subsequent experiences suggest everyone thought so except Volokh.

And here's Volokh on Obama not wearing a flag pin:

Wearing a flag pin is not supposed to be an explanation or an argument, just as "I love you" is not supposed to be an explanation or an argument... Yet if you used to say this and then you stopped, the symbolic message is pretty powerful. 

The message is clear -- Obama no longer loves America! (Wingnut rejoinder: He never did!) Oh, and yeah, Volokh thinks homosexuals are trying to recruit.

As for his Conspirators: From 2007, here's Ilya Somin discussing "Dating Across Ideological Lines," which sounds like it could be a fun topic until Somin actually outlines his argument -- "I. Why People Overestimate the Undesirability of Cross-Ideological Dating" and "II. Defensible Limits of Political Tolerance in Dating" -- and dishes out passages like

Whether or not such pragmatic considerations are weighty enough to prevent a relationship will vary from case to case. However, it is important to recognize that they should in fact be judged on a case by case basis.

There's a guy who never got enough wedgies as a kid. Also, Somin frets about socialism (which he links, via Hugo Chavez, to Hitler): "The spectre that once haunted Europe and the world may have been defeated and discredited. But we have not yet completed the task of driving a stake through its heart." If only capitalism hadn't taken a header into the loo!

Then we have David Bernstein, a reliable Bush bagman back in the day ("W just represents lots of things that coastal liberals dislike, and they will continue to dislike him regardless of how he governs policy-wise"), though by the beginning of the Obama era he was telling everyone Bush v. Gore? No one I know agreed with that! And you might get a kick out of his argument with Kevin Drum over whether or not he said the term "Likudnik" had become an anti-Semitic slur (spoiler: he did). Bernstein used to wonder a lot  "why Jews tend to despise Republicans," but maybe they were just embarrassed by Republican Jews like Bernstein. (Or by Volokh, who, when Howard Dean said the Democratic Party was comfortable with Jews because Dems believed "there are no bars to heaven for anybody," spent hundreds of words arguing that surely there must be some "traditionalist Christians" in the Party who disagreed. No, baby, we had Andy Cuomo run 'em all out!)

As for Orin Kerr, here's my favorite quote:

Now, I wouldn’t in a million years compare torture and wiretapping with gay rights. Obviously, the subject matter is totally and completely different. But...

These guys are often described as libertarians; I think it's the gay and torture things. Anyway, congrats on the new assignment.

UPDATE. In comments, Jon tells me "I know Orin Kerr sorta well (we're both law professors), and notwithstanding that he hangs out with some really questionable folk at VC, Orin is not a nut." Good news! brandonrg asks why I didn't mention Todd Zywicki. OK, here are two old alicublog posts that touch upon his considerable mendacity.

UPDATE 2. Commenter Vatnisse asks: "Isn't [Conspirator Ilya] Somin the guy that got all pissy and defensive after not scoring all that well on Charles Murray's absurd manliness test?" Why, yes, yes he is ("I would also have achieved a higher score if there were more sports-related questions").

Ann Althouse thinks your humble interlocutor is a "hack" because I lack "the grace to say you know, these guys pretty much are libertarians." Who said they weren't? My disrespect extends to them and to libertarianism, which is just a niche brand of conservatism for people with social anxieties anyway. There's no conflict between their beliefs and those of any other advocate of Maximum Freedom for the Rich.

SHORTER OLE PERFESSER INSTAPUNDIT: I'M NOT NUTS, YOU'RE NUTS!

Behold Glenn Harlan Reynolds' evidentiary standards: At USA Today, he deduces a level of PR damage to the government due to the IRS "scandal" (i.e., the taxmen having the nerve to review Tea Party claims that they weren't political organizations) from the findings of "a tax symposium at Pepperdine Law School." Then he speculates that this directly affects how the American People think about the NSA revelations, which apparently would have been perfectly acceptable to them otherwise. (Of course the large number of commentators who switched from pro-surveillance to anti-surveillance around January 20, 2009 would have had nothing to do with it.) Then:

Spend a little while on Twitter or in Internet comment sections and you'll see a significant number of people who think that the NSA may have been relaying intelligence about the Mitt Romney campaign to Obama operatives, or that Chief Justice John Roberts' sudden about-face in the Obamacare case might have been driven by some sort of NSA-facilitated blackmail.

Unfortunately there's no way to compare this "significant number of people" to the percentage of the population who believe in flying saucers, but I'll bet it's roughly equivalent.

A year ago, these kinds of comments would have been dismissable as paranoid conspiracy theory.

And to normal people they still are. But normal people are not the Perfesser's audience:

But now, while I still don't think they're true, they're no longer obviously crazy. And that's Obama's legacy: a government that makes paranoid conspiracy theories seem possibly sane.

To recap, some people believe crazy shit because Obama has made it believable, and the proof is the crazy shit some people have believed all along. It's a perfect loop of bullshit. Like Salieri with the mediocrities at the end of Amadeus, the Perfesser is absolving the wingnuts.  Did you believe in birtherism? The Whitey Tape? The Hillary Clinton constitutional crisis? That Sarkozy called Obama nuts? That Obama campaign workers beat up Ashley Todd? That Obama apologized for World War II? Wrote a treasonous college thesis? Wanted to make veterans kill themselves? Bill Ayers wrote his book? That he's a Mooslim, or a Muslin? Or a Socialist? And/or a Fascist (indeed, Hitler)? Whatever total nonsense you peddled, it's okay -- because Obama. Now, on to the next wave of hearings over the people the Kenyan Pretender murdered at Benghazi!

IF YOU CELEBRATE MLK DAY BY DENOUNCING AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, YEWWW MIGHT BE A CONSERVATIVE!

On MLK Day -- rightblogger reactions to which we've made a point of following over the years -- it's good to be reminded that Martin Luther King Jr. was, in addition to a great advocate of equality under the law, a committed leftist who supported labor unions, a swift end to the Vietnam War, and several measures against income inequality including a guaranteed basic income for all Americans.

The reason it's good to be reminded of this is that all kinds of crazy fuckers are using the occasion to portray King as a wingnut, mainly because they know denouncing King isn't too hip and they're obliged to interpret the "content of their character" bit to mean that giving black people a break is the worst kind of racism.

At National Review, for example, Roger Clegg and Hans von Spakovsky wish to celebrate the Day with state legislation "outlawing government racial preferences" -- not in the old-fashioned civil-rights sense of Jim Crow laws, but in "the politically correct version that discriminates against whites, and often Asians (particularly in college admissions), by giving preferences to other racial or ethnic groups like blacks and Hispanics." Because if there's one thing that burned Dr. King's butt, it was some black kid getting into college and thus freezing out some deserving honky.

DaTechGuy gives his space over to some pastor who sermonizes:

We all need to be thankful that in the scheme of Providence that men like Pastor Martin Luther King, Jr., President Ronald Regan, and the founder of Prison Fellowship Mr. Charles “Chuck” Colson all utilized their great oratory gifts in a responsible manner.

DaTechGuy post-scripts that if King were alive today "he would be considered a person spouting 'hate speech' by the very people pol that profit off his legacy today" because of his "Orthodox Christianity," which conversion by King I'm not sure I've heard of -- could DaTechGuy be thinking of Rod Dreher?

You can sort of tell where Donald Conkey of the Cherokee (GA) Tribune is going when he refers to "the Negro, as King referred to his people in a day before the term Negro was 'politically incorrect.'" Sure enough, Conkey asserts that King would not be happy with "the directional changes made by his associates shortly after his death. I strongly believe his associates sold out King’s dream to Lyndon Johnston’s Great Society..." If his analysis seems appallingly ignorant of history, please remember he's just trying to defend King from accusations of liberalism. (Also, did you know that "when a white congressman attempted to join [the Congressional Black Caucus] he was refused membership"? That's the real racism right there.)

Representing the libertarian angle, Nick Gillespie writes, "Ending the War on Pot Would Help Complete Martin Luther King's Call for Civil Rights." Glad to see those cowboys have their priorities straight.

Some of the brethren can't be reconstructed. Public nuisance Kathy Shaidle revives some of her Ooga Booga greatest hits and hey, did you know King was an adulterer?  "Happy Martin Luther King Day. Obama Blames Race for His Abysmal Approval Ratings," headlines radio shouter Teri O'Brien. "If it weren’t for his race, this empty suit would still be on a Chicago street corner with his clipboard and bullhorn," says O'Brien. Well, at least she didn't refer to a shoeshine kit, so maybe King was right about the arc of history.

UPDATE. At The Raw Story Scott Kaufman fills in some blanks, and segues into some strange conservative reactions to the epic rants of Seattle Seahawk Richard Sherman. I especially enjoyed that Deadspin included John Podhoretz in "Dumb People Say Stupid, Racist Shit About Richard Sherman."

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the latest rightblogger outreach to women: a bunch of essays about how ugly Lena Dunham is. It's a cinch! The small number of people who know who Lena Dunham is won't we swayed one way of the other, but the ones who don't know who Lena Dunham is will see that conservatives are mad at some woman for making them look at her tits, and that's bound to make an impression.

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS, "LIBERALS LOVE BLACK PEOPLE AND HATE JESUS" EDITION.

Jesus hack Mollie Hemingway:

But the critical reception of [12 Years a Slave] also demonstrates a dramatic change in critics’ appreciation for violence in movies. When my husband and I viewed the movie, I found it almost unbearable to watch. It reminded me of my response to “The Passion of the Christ,” the visceral 2004 film about the suffering and death of Jesus. Both films are very good. Both films are depictions of real people in history. Both films are full not just of violence but violence that must be depicted because it serves the central point. And both films deal profoundly with the effects of human sinfulness...

I wish she'd tell us what she thinks of Pasolini's Salò.

Whereas many claimed they objected to “The Passion of the Christ” on the grounds of the violence it portrayed, many critics also claimed that the violent depiction of slavery was what made “12 Years A Slave” such a great film.

Hemingway thinks the liberal art people only booed The Passion to razz Christians:

...Our society is in general agreement that, apart from homophobia and racism, the only real sin is believing in sin. This creates a climate where a brutal depiction of what Christ suffered is frowned upon.

Similarly, if you liked The Maltese Falcon, you have to love The Adventures of Ford Fairlaine because it's a detective movie, too. If you don't, you're hypocritical and prejudiced against Cursery Rhymes.

Bonus hackery: Hemingway tells us that though the liberal art people stuck up for 12 Years a Slave against Jesus, they are simultaneously against it ("don’t let the bullying from progressive critics or the lame protests from the professionally outraged dissuade you from seeing the film") for some unexplained reason, probably because Mollie Hemingway, a Christian, liked it. Oh, and a moment of what I wanted to believe was intentional comedy:

There was one critic who was favorable toward “Passion” and slammed “Slave.” Yes, it was Armond White.

Alas, Hemingway affects to believe White was kicked out of the NYFCC for siding with Jesus, though in fact he was expelled for bad manners. It took a little training but I guess her hack reflexes are pretty well-trained at this point.

UPDATE. If Hemingway's post isn't snarly enough for you, you can read Ben Shapiro's version ("shows the rampant hypocrisy that is alive and well in Hollywood and in the media").

WHY ARE YOU AFRAID OF ME, BABY-KILLING BITCH?

At National Review, Charles C.W. Cooke explains why buffer zones around abortion clinics are unconstitutional:

Apologists for the measure claim rather anemically that the law is necessary to prevent “harassment,” and they promise that it strikes a reasonable “balance” between respect for free expression and the need to protect visitors from being hassled. McCullen and her lawyers disagree, holding that because the law’s applicability is contingent not on one’s behavior but on one’s speech per se, it is unconstitutional. They are right.

Similarly: What's the deal with restraining orders? What if a guy just wants to talk to his ex -- yeah okay, sometimes things get out of hand, but still, what about the First Amendment?

If anything we need more transparency in the abortion business. A lot of these abortion mills are surrounded with suspicious-looking guards wearing "escort" vests -- they must have something to hide. If I could just follow those murdering sluts right up to the door, I'm sure I can get in there and find out. I'm good with the ladies!

UPDATE. In comments. Formerly_Nom_De_Plume notices one of the crazier quotes from Cooke's column:

...Massachusetts’s law discriminates against citizens not for the manner in which they express themselves but simply for holding a point of view, for praying, or for displaying a protest sign — for exercising one’s right to “walk and talk gently, lovingly, anywhere with anybody,” in the words of [clinic protester] Eleanor McCullen.

"Then," says Nom, "I'm sure Eleanor won't mind if I shadow her as she walks into and out of her church, gently and lovingly talking about how her religion is bullshit. All day every day." For guys like Cooke, the Constitution is just an opportunity for obnoxious thought experiments that never apply to themselves.

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LET THE SUCKERS WIN.

Shorter Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal: After Walgreens, Best Buy, et alia learned some of their customers disapproved of their association with ALEC, they ended that association. What is this, Red China?

Attend the liberal hate crimes Henninger documents:

In December, articles appeared on progressive websites attacking Google, Facebook and Yelp for participating in ALEC's annual conference last year. The Web giants wanted to explore various Internet legal issues with the state legislators. 

And by "explore" he means "let them know how it's gonna go down." But they hadn't counted on someone else sticking their oar in:

A coalition that included the Sierra Club, RootsAction and the Center for Media and Democracy said it outputted 230,000 petition signatures in a "Don't Fund Evil" drive to separate Google from "right-wing extremists" at ALEC, whose sin is "climate denial."

This whole idea of so-called "right-wing extremists" pushing so-called "climate denial" is made up out of a whole cloth of facts.

The Sierra Club's site says Kraft, GE and McDonald's pulled away from ALEC in the past under pressure. To date, none of the Web companies have done so.

 Just like Mao Tse-Tung, these liberals.

...Here's the audio transcript of a radio ad created by ColorOfChange about CVS pharmacies, which supported ALEC: "CVS, when you hear that name, do you think of the law that protected Trayvon Martin's killer? Or laws that suppress the black vote." The ad never ran. But copies of the ad were mailed to CVS, John Deere, HP, Walgreens, Best Buy, BP and a dozen others. All disassociated from ALEC.

This is the Democratic left's modus operandi...

Yeah -- it's called democracy, speaking truth to power! But only of a kind: Since our Elected Representatives are useless, these liberal groups have decided to cut out the middleman and appeal directly to the corporations who own them. It's like serfs bringing their grievances directly to their overlords. Shout-out to the libertarians, this one's for you!

Henninger doesn't approve, though; he calls it "threatening companies that participate in politics with reputational destruction" -- that is, thinking badly of them, and saying so -- which is "the American left's version of Maoist shaming sessions." Why isn't he looking at the big picture, and applauding the fortuitous shift from representative democracy to feudalism? Maybe he's just making it look good; the house can't win every time.

MISS PARKER'S MAGICAL CONCOCTION.

Kathleen Parker, holder of the Roberto Begnini Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, hates feminism enough to engage in weird, lurid public fantasies about its invalidation ("The feminist woman of the left, who burned her bra and insisted that all hear her roar, is today a taupe-ish figure who wonders where things went wrong"), so it was inevitable that she would join the other dumbbells on the marriage-makes-you-rich bandwagon.

Here's my favorite part of her column, from near the end:

Obviously, marriage won’t cure all ills. A single mother could marry tomorrow and she still wouldn’t have a job. But in the War on Poverty, rebuilding a culture that encourages marriage should be part of the arsenal.

Hold on -- marriage won't get you a job? Then how, specifically, does it fight poverty? Does it make you better at picking lotto numbers?

Here is the closest thing to an explanation Parker offers:

...because marriage creates a tiny economy fueled by a magical concoction of love, selflessness and permanent commitment that holds spirits aloft during tough times.

In other words: Misery loves company. Why can't poor people just get a dog instead of a spouse? It would fulfill the "love, selflessness and permanent commitment" part, and cost less to feed.

Oh, right -- anything that might give paupers pleasure would be blocked by Republicans.

I guess all conservatives will get with this program soon enough, even though, in correlation-is-causation terms, marriage is as likely to make you white as it is to make you rich. Poor people who don't want to get married, here's your only hope: When the Republicans come for you, tell them you're gay.

UPDATE. Nancy Derringer, known around these parts as Nancy Nall, was on this last fall:

"That argument is that marriage causes the best outcomes for your children,” [University of Michigan professor Pamela Smock] said. “That if you get people who are poor to marry, it would solve a lot of problems. But things don’t work like that. People who have better economic prospects are more likely to get married. You couldn’t take two poor, unemployable people and marry them and lift them out of poverty."

I thought people knew this, but I guess common sense has gone further out of fashion than I thought.

In comments, JennOfArk: "Apparently Lifetime re-ran Pretty Woman for the umpteenth time this past weekend, and Parker watched it (again) for the umpteenth time...only THIS time, she realized that the movie's plot holds the key to helping every impoverished woman in America improve her lot."

SENEX IRATUS OTD.

Flatus Maximus Victor Davis Hanson saith the sooth on equality, which (you will be unsurprised to hear) he is against.

Millions of Americans have lost the liberty to select their own type of health insurance, purchased on their own volition to best match their own assessments of their particular needs. Obamacare — the federal government’s redistributive effort to equalize health care for all — sought to destroy the liberty of many millions in order to ensure a state-directed sameness in care for all.

Similarly, years before most of you were born, Americans were unilaterally stripped of their freedom to dispose of sewage in their own way. No more just throwing your shit into the river, or on your lawn; fascist protObamas enforced a wearying state-directed sameness of sewer pipes, and thus our liberty was flushed forever!

Also mentioned in the lengthy ululation: "mandated equality," "Sidwell Friends," Obama's "Malibu supporters," "the French Revolution’s grandees, the Soviet nomenklatura, and the EU elite." Plus Hanson compares California to "the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Eastern Europe."

I'm beginning to think the old gasbag is hipper than he looks, and composes these things from cut-up pieces a la Burroughs.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Chris Christie GWB thing and its interesting side-effect: A Strange New Respect from rightbloggers who find that, RINO or no, he's still no Obama and that's good enough for them.

ANOTHER LIBERTARIAN MARKET FAILURE

Peter Suderman, talking about the GOP's Obamacare strategy, seems disappointed that Republicans have been reluctant to propose sweeping changes to the nation's health care scheme besides Repeal Because Freedom. His Republican sources also complain of it, with (considering the Party's historic obstructionist approach to all things Obama)  breathtakingly transparent insincerity: One of them -- "'We don't have a Republican majority that remembers how to govern and understands how to juggle trade­offs,' one health policy aide complains" -- actually made me laugh out loud.

As you would expect, Suderman gives a favorable hearing to the ideas of libertarian-conservative wonks:

In a 2009 paper, "Yes, Mr. President: A Free Market Can Fix Health Care"...

What'd I tell you?

...[Cato Institute Health Policy Director Michael] Cannon laid out a plan for converting Medicare into a voucher system (he now favors Social Security-style direct payments to enrollees), ending state-based monopolies on both insurance and clinician licensing, capping federal spending on Medicaid through block grants, and eliminating the tax preference for employer-sponsored health care. 

Eliminating that tax preference, which since World War II has allowed employers to purchase health coverage for employees on a tax advantaged basis, would actually result in a substantial tax cut, Cannon argues counter-intuitively.

I'll say it's counterintuitive. So is the rest of it, for those of us who've been trained by decades of experience to hear "ending state-based monopolies," "capping federal spending," etc. as the patter of privatization bunco artists.

If employers cashed out the amount they now pay for health insurance, workers with family coverage would see an average compensation increase of $11,000.

Question for my readers residing in workaday reality: If your boss got a $11,000 windfall, would you expect him to forward it to you?  (These are the same people who'll tell you that if your landlord is absolved of rent control and can charge any rent he likes, he'll lower yours.)

The trick would be to replace that tax preference with the creation of very large health savings accounts-tax-free savings that could be applied toward health purchases. Versions of these accounts exist today, but they are capped at $3,300 for individual coverage and $6,550 for families; Cannon's proposal would dramatically increase the cap, perhaps tripling it, and in the process free thousands in individual income both from taxation and from employer control. The result would be to simultaneously give individuals control of thousands of dollars in compensation now tied up in employer health benefits, while eliminating the government-granted financial advantage of employer-provided coverage. Individuals, and not their employment status, would then dictate health insurance coverage.

And if that worker bee, freed from the necessity of paying into a liberty-restricting group insurance program, finds his car needs a new transmission and his home needs a new boiler, and he doesn't put as much into that savings account as he'd planned, and suddenly gets cancer, it's sad trombone time (though libertarians won't feel sad themselves, because Moochers Have It Coming).

Suderman also talks about last year's government shutdown; he knows it was unpopular and counterproductive, but he doesn't appear to know why. It's simple: The nation may dislike Obamacare, but that doesn't mean they prefer Pay or Die.

THURSDAY MISCELLANY.

How're conservatives reacting to Chris Christie Is An Asshole-gate? James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal:

Worse, the Christie administration's evident abuse of the Port Authority is reminiscent of the Obama administration's abuse of the Internal Revenue Service...

I already checked, guys -- no mention of Benghazi. For that you have to go a few rungs down the ladder to Greta Van Susteren, or to the sub-basement that is Michelle Malkin's alternate-universe Twitter.

Or maybe Breitbart.com -- hang on, this article by Joel B. Pollack is from November. Yet it may be relevant!:

Chris Christie Really Needs Benghazi
Benghazi is Hillary Clinton's most important weakness, no matter whom she faces in the 2016 presidential election. Among Republican contenders, only Chris Christie can claim it as a strength. That's because of his performance during Superstorm Sandy. Whatever his mistakes--i.e. heaping praise on Obama and backing a pork-laden relief bill--his performance was a sharp contrast to Clinton's dereliction of duty during Benghazi.

Has this bullet become any less magic? Then Christie should save himself by demanding a Benghazi investigation at once. It's not like he doesn't have the nerve.*

If you have 11 minutes to spare, this is what Christie's bit about being "misled by a member of my staff" reminds me of:



I guess National Review sent Kevin D. Williamson to Appalachia just so he'd have white welfare cases to harsh on, and thus escape charges of racism. Charges of stupidity will be harder to evade. Williamson admits there are few opportunities for the unfortunate residents of Owsley County, and can't even make the usual specious case that marriage would make the hillbillies rich. So his anti-government-assistance case boils down to 1.) some people have defrauded the system, something you never see investment bankers and other such higher-order beings doing, therefore the system has failed; and 2.) whatever this is supposed to mean:

In effect, welfare has made Appalachia into a big and sparsely populated housing project — too backward to thrive, but just comfortable enough to keep the underclass in place. There is no cure for poverty, because there is no cause of poverty — poverty is the natural condition of the human animal. 

Which Kevin D. Williamson evaded by luck, pluck, and virtue. The rest of you can go fuck yourselves. Liberty!

...The lesson of the Big White Ghetto is the same as the lessons we learned about the urban housing projects in the late 20th century: The best public-policy treatment we have for poverty is dilution. But like the old project towers, the Appalachian draw culture produces concentration, a socio­economic Salton Sea that becomes more toxic every year.

Maybe he means we should evacuate and demolish these poor hill towns, as if they were urban projects, and "dilute" their populations. Maybe send them to Mexico? They better hurry, the authorities may start to get strict about who they let in.

*UPDATE. I should add that I don't think this will negatively affect Christie's Presidential push. That he's an asshole is a large part of his appeal, and there's a whole country full of suckers who, like the folks who hire a hitman, are inclined to believe he'll restrict his viciousness to people they don't like.

UPDATE 2. Ah, here's the libertarian-branded response to Christie from Ed Krayewski at Reason:

The petty, retaliatory nature of the lane closure reminded me of something the Obama White House might do, something like closing down open-air spaces or websites because of a partial government shutdown or even getting Tea Party groups audited.

Refresh my memory: I seem to recall that libertarians were once perceived to be something different from conservatives. Anyone remember how that got started?

UPDATE 3. I'm even more convinced now that Christie will skate, notwithstanding his refusal to accept my Benghazi advice.

Meanwhile we have this from the Daily Caller:

As liberals support Christie during scandal, conservatives abandon him

The evidence: Guys like Erick Erickson who consider Christie a RINO continue to bay for his blood, "Democratic mayors in New Jersey who endorsed Christie’s re-election are also defending Christie," and David Axelrod thinks Christie will skate -- like me, so I guess I'm also part of Christie's liberal love-wave. I assure you it's inadvertent!

UPDATE 4. Meanwhile from the other side of the bullshit rainbow, The Washington Free Beacon:

U.S. Attorney Probing Christie Has Donated Thousands to Democrats

I tell ya, guys, we gotta get our story (as told by rightwing operatives) straight.

FORCED TO DRAW BENEFITS: A CONSERVATIVE'S HEARTBREAKING CONFESSION!

Remember the lady who was mortified Obama gave her free Medicaid, because stigma? We can now top that.

At National Review Jillian Kay Melchior describes how her own experience of unemployment benefits proved to her that "extending [unemployment benefits] contributes to the underlying economic problem." Now I have to say, I was hoping at the start that she'd try to excite her audience by telling us how she used your taxpayers dollars to buy Cadillacs and T-bone steaks. But alas, Melchior had a miserable time on UI. And it's easy to see why -- she doesn't seem cut out for the vagaries of everyday life:

I lost my job in January 2011. It was my first permanent job out of college, and losing it was mentally and financially traumatic. I spent the cab ride home, box in hands, fighting tears, and then worrying that I should have taken the subway instead because taxis are expensive and my income source had just vanished.

I think my first "permanent" job in New York was as a messenger, and while losing it was financially disadvantageous, I wasn't "traumatized" so much as momentarily hassled, then stoked that I didn't have to get up early the next day. And I wasn't even getting unemployment! That would have made it an awesome day. (I haven't collected UI since the early 90s. That's how deep my devotion to the free market goes!)

Anyway, Uncle Sam offered Melchior the dole and she accepted it as Fantine in Les Miz accepted a life of prostitution: "The Internet consensus is that unemployment isn’t welfare," she chokes, "but it felt like it to me." So different from this hell I'm living/So different now from what it seemed!

Melchior found out that the lousy benefits weren't enough to live on -- and yet insists they were "a disincentive to work." How? Because when she got freelance assignments, UI would cut back on her benefits! In other words, if someone else paid her money, the government gave her less money, instead of letting her accept fixed benefits and keep whatever she earned on top of it. Here I sympathize with Melchior and look forward to her next essay, which I expect will endorse Martin Luther King's national minimum income plan. It's only fair!

Plus, humiliating as that was, Melchior was also forced to observe the law when she claimed benefits, which she counts a further humiliation -- "figuring all this out felt shamefully like working the system," much like when employers force her to take sexual harassment seminars and it makes her feel like a rapist.

As you might imagine, it all worked out for Melchior: "In the end, I took the risk and did as much freelance writing as I could manage. It paid off — in fact, it led to a job" -- Yay wingnut welfare! But the experience scarred her, and she wants to spare other broke people the same ordeal: "A safety net can fast become a trap," she tells the folks to whom she would deny money for food and shelter, "and I wonder how many unemployed people who could be somehow engaged in the economy are waiting things out, taking their benefits and avoiding the risk of effort while they wait for something to open up."

Let her wonder; such are the mysteries of the human heart. What I wonder is why Melchior didn't show the courage of her convictions, refuse to take the benefits, and proudly starve in the street.

THE MARRIAGE-MAKES-YOU-RICH ARGUMENT AGAINST THE MINIMUM WAGE.

In yet another anti-minimum-wage* article at National Review, Andrew Biggs:

I don’t believe I’m overstating things much in saying that when the progressive man-on-the-street sees something bad happen to one person – say, low wages – he believes it’s very likely someone else’s fault.

Biggs gets points for admitting liberals can be men-on-the-street, and  not exclusively pointed-headed college professors, union thugs, and homosexual activists, as they are normally portrayed at National Review. But as to that "someone else's fault"... wait for it:

Progressives’ job, in this mindset, is to find that person-at-fault and make him pay. In this case, progressives blame the employers of low-wage workers, who they assume could easily afford to pay more but choose not to. 

Now, progressives could make their emotional impulses consistent with economic reality by placing the blame on, say, liberal social policies that encourage single-parent families...

Turns out it is someone else's fault, but the culprit isn't McDonalds or Wal-Mart -- it's Hugh Hefner! Also "teachers' unions."

The marriage-makes-you-rich argument explained here, here, here, and especially here.

*UPDATE. It should be noted that Biggs doesn't mention abolishing the minimum wage, but that's what the Greg Mankiw article on which he based his own is about ("a good case can be made for eliminating Plan B entirely by repealing the minimum wage"). For the moment they're playing it cagey, lest the "progressive" "man on the street" catch on. There must be more of us than I thought.

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS, PART 432,239.

I hadn't looked at Ben Shapiro's Truth Revolt (which Breitbart.com told us in October would "WILL MAKE MSM 'PAY' FOR LIES, CHANGE 'NATURE OF MEDIA'") before now. Right out of the gate:

Also, there's an item devoted to telling us what Shapiro said on Fox News. Sample:

...[Megyn] Kelly moved on to a another quote from the piece that posits a society where people were paid for doing only what they were passionate about, like painting murals. When Kelly asked who would pay the millennials for painting their murals, Shapiro turned the conversation to the inherently destructive philosophy of Keynes.

Shapiro: This is the whole thing, passing the buck to the next generation that doesn’t exist yet. And John Maynard Keynes was fond of saying that in the long run we’re all dead. This is that philosophy taken to the extreme: In the short run we’re all dead, so we might as well all paint murals. Who’s going to clean the toilets? Who’s going to do the actual work that needs to be done in this country? Maybe this is why some of these folks want open borders.

The Mexicans clean toilets, millenials paint murals, and Shapiro yammers on Fox News. Maybe Shapiro will explain how he would redistribute these responsibilities in Part 2. I'm guessing Shapiro won't wind up wielding a brush of any kind.

Rule of three demands:

Vogue Mag Lowers Standards
‘Girls’ star Lena Dunham to feature on cover despite untraditional body type

No clue whether, before he wrote this, the author saw the recent Acculturated essay called "Why Conservatives Should Cheer On HBO’s Girls" (short vs.: The characters are dissatisfied with their lives and since they're liberals the reason must be liberalism). Despite her untraditional body type, I would bet that since the 2012 election Dunham has gotten enough hate-wanks out of conservative men to float a National Review cruise out of drydock.

UPDATE. In comments, Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard:

Leaving aside the fact that one's body type is a matter of biology, not tradition, a perusal of the large "History of Art" textbook on the shelf reveals more depictions of women who are built like Lena Dunham than like Kate Moss. A quick stroll through the neighborhood finds me encountering more women who are built like Lena Dunham than like Stephanie Seymour. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear that Mr Shapiro has never seen a female body up close.

IDENTITY POLITICS.

John J. Miller, the genius who gave us The 50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs, today informs us,

Google honors a conservative today: Zora Neale Hurston.

Well, Hurston was against Brown v. Board of Education, so I guess they have something in common at that.

It's nice to see them celebrating a black person who isn't insane. But it's sad that politics is all that can animate them to do so. In one of the supporting documents for Miller's case, John McWhorter writes:

Hurston’s modern fan base doesn’t know quite what to do with all this. “I think we are better off if we think of Zora Neale Hurston as an artist, period—rather than as the artist/politician most black writers have been required to be,” [Alice] Walker writes... Sure -- but if Hurston had been more inclined to sing about what happens to a raisin in the sun, one suspects that Walker would have had no trouble celebrating her as an “artist/politician.”

Really? I guess McWhorter so judges because he figures everyone else must be like him, counting artists like captured checkers for their cause. But we haven't all been made into Zhdanovites yet.

UPDATE. Commenter D. Johnston dipped into the support docs and found "in a nutshell, McWhorter's case is based around the fact that Hurston didn't believe that black people should take credit for things other, unrelated black people did. See? She rejected identity politics!" Supporting a policy is a political decision, emotions and behavior are not. I don't think being self-sufficient is any guarantee of how you'll vote. I've spent my whole life working in the private sector, yet I'm far more liberal than anyone on wingnut welfare.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...Part 2 of my 10 Dumbest Rightblogger Ideas listicle. I know, but it had to be done and I was out of cat pictures.

UPDATE. I was running long, and so much could have been added, particularly from National Review, which seems to have gone in big-time for insane gender-based gibberish lately. There's the outraged report that "[Rachel] Maddow is part of the new matriarchy running NBC News behind the scenes," for example;  Victor Davis Maximus Super Hanson's extremely weird paen to reality-show stars ("A big gut can add gravitas to the moonshiner’s biceps in a way impossible to achieve at the gym"); and David French telling his no doubt receptive readers that liberal males are all pussies "walking on eggshells, dating women and living in cultures that are constantly calling out any kind of behavior subjectively perceived as 'male' or oppressive... liberal men often lack a distinctively masculine purpose." If National Review gets any more butch it'll turn into the Ramrod.

UPDATE 2. In comments, JennOfArk: "Nah. I've seen those guys. If anything, National Review is the Mine Shaft, not the Ramrod."