NOW NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP....

...surprise, it's about the border crisis. The brethren are really tearing this up like an abused German Shepherd mauling an infant; check this World Net Daily headline:

WILL OBAMA'S BORDER CHAOS SPARK REVOLUTION?
Exclusive: Morgan Brittany on administration action: 'It is classic Cloward-Piven'

Well, you say, even at a low-rent outfit like WND, the authors don't always write the headlines --

Ah, but this is what the left and this administration wants. It is classic Cloward-Piven. Overwhelm the system, anger the populace, create chaos, and then, martial law takes over...

If Obama gets his way and the system collapses through illegal immigration or financial means, if he succeeds in confiscating our guns and ammo so that no one but the government has them, then we the people will be at their mercy, and the sad thing is that many people will welcome their control. At that point the American people will be helpless against a totalitarian state, and they will have succeeded in the full transformation of this country.

She forgot the bit where a leering Nicaraguan lights his cigar with a dollar bill and sneers, MUCHAS GRACIAS SEÑOR OBAMA! HA HA HA HA! as your sons and daughters are herded off to work as poolboys and tequila-bandolero waitresses in Aztlan, but otherwise it's perfect.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN... DELAYED AGAIN!

Yeah, I know, it's like when network TV was a thing and they took a show you liked and moved it around the schedule chaotically and you were too young to know that meant they were going to kill it. (Except they not going to kill me! No sir, if anyone's gonna kill me it's gonna be me! That or cirrhosis!) So I'm guessing Monday night, maybe Tuesday morning. Sorry for the delay.

I don't think I'm killing the surprise when I tell you it's about the border controversy. There's an aspect I didn't get to, though, that you might enjoy:

Chicago Slams Obama: ‘Worst President Ever Elected’ 

Amid the daily grind of poverty and violence afflicting Chicago’s South Side, black residents spoke up Friday to express their disgust with President Barack Obama. 

“Barack will go down as the worth president ever elected,” one man told Rebel Pundit. 

“Bill Clinton was the African-American President.” 

Residents gathered in front of the Chicago Police Department headquarters to protest, questioning why federal dollars were being spent on immigrants while native Chicagoans suffered. 

Some called for Obama’s resignation.

This is it! Helter skelter she's coming down fast! It's sort of like when conservatives used to tell us black people were going to turn on Obama because they hated gay people -- and it's almost as long-lived: Take William Jacobson, whose current headline is "Black Chicago activists: Why are illegals at border getting aid while we suffer?"; back in 2012, he was telling the world about the "Media blackout of black Chicago protesters marching against Obama," which news he got from Rebel Pundit, who seems to specialize in this sort of thing. The 2012 item appeared four days before the election; perhaps Jacobson thought it would turn the tide for Romney. Well, it's worth trying again, especially since there'll be no more Obama elections to reveal how little this shit matters. Plus it gives conservative whites a chance to make fun of black people, as a trip through the Free Republic thread demonstrates, and that always seems to cheer them up.

Oh also:

Even Chicago is fed up! Furious black protesters call Obama ‘worst president ever elected’... 

‘He has to resign!’ Chicago residents FED UP... 

This video is about Chicago residents fed up with President Obama...

It's a thin line between message discipline and just plain laziness.

UPDATE. In comments, satch reveals he's done a little reading on the Manchild Movement folks who appear to be running this protest, and finds they are concerned with the male seed:

Be a part of the Manchild Movement as we voyage to the bottom of the wounded hearts of men. You will experience the transforming power as it challenges the frustrations and afflictions that have caused many men to become silent as a lamb and have lost their stand to roar like a lion. 

Manchild allows you to be an overcomer of the plot through the world system to destroy the male seed which many have become increasingly emasculated by tragedies, traumas and abuse.

Or, as commenter DocAmazing puts it, "the same old Iron John with a blue steel finish."

FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

• The tension was thick as the President, accompanied by his unsmiling Secret Service retinue, entered the Clintons' living room. The Secret Service took up strategic positions as the current President weakly and unconvincingly shook the 42nd President's liver-spotted hand. On a nearby loveseat Hillary loftily pretended to read the latest New Yorker, a magazine she didn't really enjoy, as she had never really warmed to the biggest city in the state she had adopted for purely political reasons.

"Looking good, Mr. President," Obama lied with his customary ease.

"You, too, Mr. President," said Bill, going him one better in the easily-lying department, though secretly he was concerned that, away from the carefully-orchestrated spotlights, the Leader of the Free World looked so haggard, and reeked of cigarettes. He wondered if the AIDS rumors were true.

"I merely came by so our friends in the media can accurately report that I visited my 'biggest fan' and my 'former Secretary of State,'" said Obama. There was a stunned pause before the Clintons and Obama all burst into maniacal laughter, terminated by Obama's coughing fit.

"Hillary, you're looking wonderful," said Obama, not bothering to try. Hillary smiled cynically. Though they despised one another, she and the bumbling President had shared so much -- that night of drunken passion on Air Force One, the Benghazi Deception -- that she was almost charmed by his nefariousness.

"OK, fellas, let's go," Obama told the Secret Service, and instantly they vanished like goblins on midnight at Halloween.

"That fucking bastard," roared Hillary, hurling her magazine to the ground. "Where the fuck does he get the balls to come in here and jerk me around like that? Fucking faggot." She jumped up, went to the sideboard, and filled a crystal tumbler with expensive bourbon.

"Now, Hillary," said Bill, pretending as he had so many times, in and out of office, to conciliate, "he may be a deviate but he sure ain't no faggot."

"Oh yeah?" said Hillary, her throat burning from the hefty slug of top-shelf liquor. "Then how come all the whores he sneaks into the Oval Office are flat-chested?"

Bill shrugged. "He does like 'em skinny," he said in the appraising tone of a practiced whoremonger. "And white. Guess he wants the opposite of Michelle."

Hillary laughed raucously, bourbon dribbling down her chin. "Christ on a fucking crutch, who wouldn't? That fucking beast. She should be in a diorama at the Museum of Natural History. No wonder 'Let's Move' is such a success. Shit, if I was trapped in a room with her I'd move through the fucking wall!"

Bill was laughing so hard that he winced; the excitement was putting a strain on his heart. Hillary noticed this, and considered administering the coup de grace by showing Bill her secret photos of Michelle and Elizabeth Warren having lesbian sex; if that didn't do it, she could show him the even more secret pictures of herself and Mary Landrieu having lesbian sex. But no, she thought, let's save that for the 2016 primaries. Playing the loving wife, she went to him, smiled, reached into her pocket, and offered him a soothing dose of heroin.

"Man," said Bill after snorting it up, "I sure hope these witnesses who always seem to be nearby when we act like this don't ever talk to Ed Klein."

ADVICE TO CONSERVATIVES (OFFERED NOT IN KINDNESS, BUT BECAUSE THEY'RE TOO STUPID TO TAKE IT).

Don't use "orphanage" in a headline. It reminds people of why they hate you. (See also "widows.")  Geraghty goes on:

We may help out these kids because we’re kind-hearted souls...

Sorry, had something caught in my windpipe.

...some will say it’s the Christian thing to do.

Sorry, same thing. Okay:

...But we’re not obligated to do this. This isn’t our responsibility and this isn’t our fault. The parents of those kids are the ones who should be taking care of them – feeding them, clothing them, sheltering them and educating them. And I don’t think it’s cold-hearted to ask whether our immediate effort to take care of these kids – because they so desperately need care – is setting us up to be their long-term caretaker.

Geraghty supported the idea that we should devote $2 trillion and thousands of lives to invading and occupying Iraq to bring them freedom. But that was different, of course: We got to kill a bunch of them, which made it butch. Also we didn't have to hang around with them. Huddled masses yearning to breathe free are the worst!

Sometimes I wonder what these people think America is all about, but it's becoming clearer every day that their vision resembles an endless loop of Three Stooges shorts with Sousa marches playing in the background.

WITH A CAPITAL T, AND THAT RHYMES WITH P, AND THAT STANDS FOR PISSANT WINGNUTS BITCHING ABOUT OBAMA PLAYING POOL.

Guess pool is the new golf, as raged-up rightbloggers go after the President for playing pool with the Governor of Colorado instead of picking off Messicans with a shootin' ahrn at the border

"This is a sign that the bubble around the White House is much thicker than people think,” [Jonah] Goldberg said. “Obama’s always liked to cultivate the idea of the ‘No Drama Obama.’ Maybe they think this shows him as an every-man kind of thing.”

Said Goldberg as he completed a round of Fudge Pong.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Obama shoots a little pool while his nation crumbles.

Hey, a classical (or at least Classics Illustrated) allusion! Who else saw Quo Vadis or Roman Legion-Hare?

And not only that he can then go to Colorado, swill beer, play pool and pretend all is well. Beer and pool – the modern version of Nero’s fiddle.

WHILE THE WORLD BURNS, OBAMA FIDDLES, GOLFS, AND SHOOTS POOL

AND WEARS MOM JEANS AND EATS ICE CREAM AND EATS DOGS AND AAAARRRRGH [SPLURT]*

WHO IS IN CHARGE OF PRESIDENT OBAMA’S p/r? PLAYING POOL WHILE OUT WEST? (and not going to the border! yikes!) Click to see who tweeted the pic!

This headline-salad was tossed by Greta van Susteren, and "who tweeted the pic" was the Governor, who is apparently is not sufficiently nuts to worry about the effect of the President playing pool on the nation's security, unlike Andrea Mitchell. Susteren added, "Pic tweeted by Colorado Governor….with all the problems going on, the President finds time to play pool (BUT NOT CALL AND HELP SGT TAHMOORESSI?)" (peculiar capitalization, color scheme in original). I don't see why Obama should bother freeing any more sergeants after the way the brethren treated the last one.

Here’s What Obama Is Doing Instead of Visiting the Crisis-Stricken Border 

...Between this and his conscious decision to avoid the disaster on the border, for which he is at least partly responsible, he’s basically daring Republicans to join Sarah Palin’s call to impeach him. “So sue me!” was yesterday’s taunt. 

That would be a foolish thing to do. They should run against his policies and portray him as what he is — a slacker who doesn’t care about the damage that he is doing to the country.

That ought to cut a lot of ice, coming from the most work-shy Congress in history. National Review has also gotten into it with its usual dickishness ("Images of President Obama playing pool amid the border crisis aren’t going over well..." Andrew Johnson, you'll never miss a meal). Soon, in addition to accusing him of fritterin' away his noontime, suppertime, chore-time too, the brethren will recirculate that Photoshop of the President smoking what they will now characterize as Bevo or Cubebs.

Before they add that to the impeachment bill of particulars, however, they better scour the internet of this.

UPDATE. * I really wanted to link that bit to the scene in 1900 where Donald Sutherland gets his dick sucked while raving about the fascist revolution ("They will pay in money and land and cows and cheese and blood and shit and AAAGH!") but I can't find it online. Anyone else?

In comments some smart alecks bring up the previous President ("Now watch this drive"). I also enjoy dex's contribution: "SAVE US KENYAN IMPOSTER SAVE US." And Tom Hartley reminds us that while it hasn't been such a good idea for a Democratic President to visit Texas since 1963, going to the parts where armed crackers are currently congregating would be an even worse one.

THE THIRD REICH 'N' ROLL SWINDLE.

Dinesh D'Souza, his publicists, and their factota think, or pretend to think, that D'Souza's new movie is being suppressed by Google. The Hollywood Reporter:

Lawyers representing Dinesh D’Souza’s newest film, America, have fired off a letter to Google demanding that the search engine correct problems that they say are hampering the ability of consumers to figure out where the movie is playing. 

The letter claims that Google has been confusing America with 2016: Obama’s America, which was D’Souza’s first movie and has been out of theaters for two years, while Lionsgate released America on July 2 and it is currently playing in about 1,100 theaters nationwide.

This is my favorite part of the whole thing:

While Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment, some potential moviegoers are accusing the search company, or others, of engaging in a plot of misinformation. "This mixup is likely being coordinated by those in the film industry who hope the film fails at the box office," one wrote at the film’s Facebook page.

Say this for D'Souza's team: Getting mainstream press to take this seriously is impressive, but getting The Hollywood Reporter to put Facebook comments by "potential moviegoers" in their story is even more impressive. Best of all, they got action from Google:

“Our systems have unfortunately confused the title of the movie America, because it’s a common term and appears in many movie titles,” a Google spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday. “We’ve updated the Knowledge Graph, our database that stores this type of information, but it will take some time to display showtimes and other details for this movie. We’re always working on improving our systems, and we appreciate the feedback.”

The squeaky wheel gets the publicity!

The complaint is of course bullshit -- any "potential moviegoer" who can't remember the full name of the movie he wants to see, nor think to check with his local theaters, is probably too developmentally disabled to go outside alone. And you can imagine what kind of "update" Google is doing based on one complaint, even one sent by lawyers.

But for D'Souza's purposes it doesn't matter: If box office receipts go up, the D'Souzans can say it was because they broke the Google-Commie logjam; if they don't go up, they can claim Google is stonewalling them, just like the IRS!

As anyone can see by the steady stream of paranoid emails (and Reason videos) that they churn out, pitchmen for conservative products believe their audience are suckers for anything that stokes their persecution mania. On the evidence, it seems they have assessed that audience correctly.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

and what is it about again? Oh yeah, Hobby Lobby. I know, no one remembers. Special thanks to Nick for being my cat's-paw as the Voice publishing tool's still verkakte.

Anyway this late edition includes a particularly snide bit of Ross Douthat; if you haven't had enough of him after that, you can go to today's Times and see him take thousands of words to explain that he agrees with Erik Erickson. Anyone got a Thomas Aquinas facepalm gif?

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN... DELAYED!

There's a problem with Movable Type, so I can't get in to publish, so the column goes up tomorrow. What an interesting experiment in publishing a regular column in an unaccustomed time/date slot with no prior warning!

Anyway, to pass the time of day here's a little something from the culture war desk, from Adam Bellow -- yes, I thought he was doing alright too; not only does he have his dad's name and money and a related career in publishing, he's also got a stake in Liberty Island, the wingnut welfare arts site covered here a few times. Sounds cushy, but every so often I guess he still has to rattle the tin cup. Here he is at National Review:

We need to invest in the conservative right brain. A well-developed feeder system exists to identify and promote mainstream fiction writers, including MFA programs, residencies and fellowships, writers’ colonies, grants and prizes, little magazines, small presses, and a network of established writers and critics. Nothing like that exists on the right. 

This is a major oversight that must be urgently addressed. We need our own writing programs, fellowships, prizes, and so forth. We need to build a feeder system so that the cream can rise to the top, and also to make an end run around the gatekeepers of the liberal establishment.

Ca-chunk! Ca-chunk! The clot of coins bangs inside the can. Keep a brave front, Adam; Richard Mellon Scaife is dead, we have to hustle.

Conservative leaders are more concerned with raising money for political campaigns than supporting the new cultural creators.

It's a point he can sell: Even the rubes are catching on that the big outfits to which they've been entrusting their donations are not delivering bang for buck. But no one knows what will: You can't trust those tea party guys, either.  So maybe put money in conservative art? Their pig eyes narrow: Do I have to dress up for galas? It is abstract, or done by fags? It would take too long to explain, so he goes straight for the Iron Curtain -- you boys remember that! The fellas who invested in samizdat, they really cleaned up, morally speaking! You don't want to miss this opportunity to take down Commissar Obama:

Today’s conservative fiction writers are not in danger of having their fingers hammered in a labor camp. But their self-publishing efforts do represent a modern analogue to the dissident samizdat movement, and they are deploying the same weapons in defense of your freedom of conscience. Can we really afford to ignore them?

They're grabbing their coats! Quick, wheel out the big gun:

I know what Andrew Breitbart would say if he were here:

Okay, some of them are staying -- maybe they're passed out, or just wondering if you have any coke, but they're here, so they're half-in: Now all you have to do is establish the connection between that wad of cash their financial manager advised them to throw down a sinkhole (as long as the papers are in order) and that country they love so well:

What good will it do to write a novel? May as well ask what good it did to show the revolutionary flag at Bunker Hill (a battle we lost, by the way).

One good thing about this racket: If they do go for it, you don't have to worry about them coming to their senses later.

UPDATE. At the Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg tries to be helpful, suggesting that if conservative novelists would just use their "aesthetic powers" they might get somewhere. I imagine Bellow, tipped to the presence of upscale attention, checking his cup for folding money. Look, lady, when a beggar asks for money don't give him a lecture!

UPDATE 2. Making everything worse as usual, Jonah Goldberg tells us the liberals who run Hollywood actually make lots of conservative entertainments because that's what sells ("Most Hollywood liberals probably oppose the death penalty, yet they make lots of movies where the bad guy meets a grisly death to the cheers of the audience"). A sane person might ask: if Liberal Hollywood is making the bloodthirsty entertainments conservatives like, what is Goldberg bitching about? See Bellow, Adam: They may fantasize about being treated with the respect due an artist, but what they really want is their names above the titles and (especially) on the checks. All the rest, as someone once said, is propaganda.

WONKS PROPOSE AND MOBS DISPOSE.

As part of the mainstream media campaign to drown America in liberal lies, the New York Times prints Sam Tanenhaus' long, loving article on "reformicons" -- the Republican New Ideas grifters I wrote about a month ago at the Village Voice. This excerpt will give you some idea:

On Jan. 8, the day before the reformers met for their brainstorming session, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida stood in the Lyndon B. Johnson room at the Capitol — it was the 50th anniversary of Johnson’s declaration of a war on poverty — and announced a plan to create a “revenue-neutral flex fund” that would disburse federal funds to the states to spend as they wished on antipoverty programs. The response was mixed. A Brookings Institution scholar said the idea was workable, but liberals warned that bloc grants give too much power to the states. At the same time, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation argued that collecting money at the federal-government level and handing it out to states is the “exact wrong way to produce conservative policies.”

But for reformers, it was a breakthrough.

[Pause to reflect that these people have ridiculous life priorities, and need to be shaken like paint cans in old-fashioned department stores and told to 'reform' their own dork asses, starting out by taking some drugs and jumping into a fountain]

The plan wouldn’t save a dime in the short run — in fact, it would most likely increase costs — but it met the bigger ideological goal of “incentivizing” work, a pet theme on the right since the days of [Irving] Kristol and his liberal ally Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Mmm, that's some good reform right there! But since so many white people are falling out of the middle class into poverty, will it be as easy as it was in Moynihan's time to convince them that the poor need bootstrappado?

The punchline to this reform bullshit is what conservatives are actually doing these days, as you can see just by reading the news:

• Celebrating a Supreme Court decision that yanks birth control coverage from women because Jesus;
• Blocking buses of immigrants from entering a California town;
• Calling for America to go back to Iraq.

So while reformicons play patty-cake, the people they will allegedly lead into an enlightened new age are dancing around the same anti-contraception, anti-immigrant, pro-war bonfires that exercised them in decades gone by. Meanwhile in Texas, which conservatives like to point to as a laboratory of Republican ideas, the state GOP has endorsed repealing the Voting Rights Act, among other boob-bait. Reform is just something to make the starched-collar crowd feel better about themselves.

UPDATE. "Reading through the comments, I see many of us hit on the 'incentivize work' nugget o' shit," says Derelict, and I can see how that particular bit of awfulness would give most normal people pause. The actual Room to Grow manifesto Tanenhaus and his subjects are pimping contains several similar New Ideas, like this, written by Michael Strain:

The federal minimum wage requires that potential employers take a $7.25 per hour risk on long-term unemployed workers -- workers who are already seen as quite risky compared to applicants who are coming from other jobs or have been employed more recently. The government should lower the risk associated with hiring long-term unemployed workers by temporarily lowering the minimum wage that firms must pay them.

Now, now, he did say "temporary":

Temporarily lower minimum wages for the long-term unemployed should be coupled with a temporary subsidy (through an enhanced Earned Income Tax Credit or a wage subsidy) to ensure that no one who works full time and heads a household lives in poverty.

Instead of subsidizing the peons, let's subsidize businesses so they can pay them less -- that's one beauty part. And there another: A hint of how long that "temporary" subsidy would last comes in another part of the same section written by Michael Strain, in which he bitches about Obamacare and its subsidies:

The law gives subsidies to households with income up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line (this year, that would mean up to $94,200 for a family of four) in order to help with the cost of purchasing health insurance. The more money you make, the smaller the subsidy you receive. Because a little extra work results in losing some of the benefit workers receive from the government, the “subsidy phaseout” operates as a tax that discourages work.

Were his EITC plan ever to pass into law, how long do you think it would take for Strain the Cutter to confront Strain the Giver and tell him his "subsidy phaseout" was making people workshy -- that sub-minimum wage workers were declining to bootstrap themselves to higher wages because their cushy government-subsidized jobs had deincentivized them -- and that it has to go? So it would -- and the workers would stay at their starvation wages, because why would Republicans restore a minimum wage they'd always hated and which their Reform scam had finally enabled them to kill?

MAKING IT UP.

Oh look, National Review celebrates the 4th with an advertorial for Dinesh D'Souza's America: Back to Our Injun-Slaughtering Roots:

Is America a Source of Pride, as Americans Have Long Believed … or Shame, as Liberals Insist?

The answer may surprise you!

By the Makers of Dinesh D’Souza’s America 

 Talk about a mark of quality. Why no gushing pull-quote from Wendy Long?

New York Times bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza and Schindler’s List producer Gerald Molen share alarm at how these destructive accusations are taught in schools, preached by Hollywood, and are setting policy in today’s baffling, confused White House. Obama sees Americans as “greedy, selfish, materialistic” — needing to be punished and subdued. 

No, Americans are the most wonderful, moral people in the world, says D’Souza — and history proves his passion, which he celebrates in this astonishing, entertaining movie, America: Imagine a World without Her.

The forced march of overheated adjectives is predictable, but what's this “greedy, selfish, materialistic” thing? A quick Google shows no clear provenance -- certainly no direct quote from Obama, as this marketing copy/temper tantrum suggests. I thought for a while it might be from the Michelle Obama Whitey Tape, but as I thumbed through the Google results it seemed more likely that once upon a time somebody had portrayed Obama as saying it, as in this email-from-your-angry-grandma  ("The people pulling the wagon are Greedy, Selfish, Materialistic, and those in the wagon are Good and they deserve more" says made-up Obama), and it became part of conservative folklore -- so much so that at least one of their top public figures has integrated it into his schtick, knowing that instead of going "huh what" his target audience will take it in stride as yet another Obama outrage.

There's more than one reason why these guys often seem to be in their own world.

STYLE COUNCIL.

Despite all of them being entirely wrong about everything, rightbloggers do show some variations in style; there is the manic fart-bluster of Jonah Goldberg, the quiet Renfieldian madness of Stanley Kurtz, etc. Noticing, indeed savoring these attributes is sometimes all that keeps me from abandoning the Scourge & Minister desk entirely.

Amity Shlaes' ideas are so horrible that it may distract you from her prose characteristics. She's basically an old-fashioned hack who apotheosizes or demonizes as circumstances require in a workaday manner, but without the natural energy of inspiration that animates many of her colleagues, which may be why (as I have noticed before) she sometimes falls short of relevant material and has to pad her work in unusual and amusing ways.

Shlaes' latest for National Review is an argument for putting kids in debate club -- an admirable cause. She is most secure when concatenating talking points and her style is bright and boosterish when she does ("debate’s social achievements are so great that the sport even earned the solicitude of the Boston Fed").

But then something or someone reminds her conservatism's the client, and so she cobbles an endless, ramshackle lede about why teens prefer listening to music to talking with their parents:

The trouble isn’t that children don’t know anything, though they may not. It is that the kids won’t talk. And they certainly won’t discuss. Or argue...

The psychologists have been the opposite of silent on their explanation for teen silence: rebellion. The pop-culture experts will tell you something about Marshall McLuhan and the earphones.

The pop-culture experts who arrived in a time machine from 1974, perhaps.

But there is another analysis. It is not that adolescents won’t talk. It is that they cannot. At some point habit becomes necessity and they are afraid to take the earphones out. Teens are just not accustomed to quality argument and aren’t likely to become so in the monosyllabic or one-sided classes that await them at university.

Stark terror prevents teens from removing their earphones, and from talking; that must be the reason behind the Plague of Silent Children we've all seen as the kids march soundlessly to their buses after school. Not only are they mute, they're also deaf, at least to "quality argument," which is readily available -- somewhere, I guess; maybe from the old Firing Line tapes in Shlaes' den. But who can blame them from disengaging, when all that awaits them in the World of Sounds is "monosyllabic or one-sided classes," presumably conducted by Ima Stupid Liberal at Indoctrinate U. (How come these guys never send their kids to Bible colleges, where presumably enlightened colloquy flows?) (j/k, I know why.)

This trend works out fine for screenwriters, professional athletes, software coders, high-frequency traders, and supermodels, i.e., people who talk only to people in their set. But inability to talk to grownups and strangers punishes those who work in sales, the law, or medicine. Or any other area when you have to interact. 

I didn't know before this that supermodels, coders et alia only talk to their own kind; is this out of Robert Putnam?

The anti-argument trend plays out of course in politics, where the habit of silence eventually does become a habit of ignorance. When, 20 years later, former teens start to talk, what one notices first is the poor quality and evidence-short nature of their argument. All you have to do is watch MNSBC to know what I mean: “Perception is reality” is the network’s mantra. It’s all pretty sad for a nation whose founding, celebrated this week, would not have happened without Publius and, yes, the Anti-Federalist Papers.

It took enormous effort and time, but not only did she get the wingnut money shot in there, she also gave readers to understand that if you don't send the little thugs to debate club, they'll grow into stupid liberals. It seems to render the rest of the article superfluous -- oh, right: word count; also the chance to deliver this delightful anecdote:

One person who gets this is President Bush. With remarkable frankness and grace, “43” stood up in the fall of 2012 told a room with hundreds of Texan high schoolers, “I wish I’d debated in high school.” At the same dinner, a speaker, the Mexican philosopher Roberto Salinas Leon, talked about free trade and Hayek, and President Bush nodded approvingly.

If the becoming modesty and nodding of a famous dumbass doesn't strike you as inspiring, wait till Shlaes works her magic:

Next to me, a freshman from Chicago’s North Shore sat right up and smiled. The kid knew about Hayek, and now he knew that a president had heard of Hayek too. Whatever you think of Bush’s performance, that night he gave free marketeers a great gift. He showed kids that powerful people loved free markets, something they never would have picked up from U.S. television.

Guess it's time for ol' W to make an inspiring national tour -- maybe even finally appear at a Republican Convention! And so another deadline is met and another check is cashed. The writing life is hard, though I suspect it's easier if you just don't give a shit.

UPDATE. "Shorter Amity Shlaes," says NonyNony in comments: "I don't know anyone younger than 30." L Bob Rife is amused to learn of "G. Dubb, the freemarket old pres who can talk to the kids." W's nodding, or rather Shlaes' appreciation of it, touches Jay B: "'Silence = stupidity' but 'Nodding = wisdom.'" Also, when "the Mexican philosopher Roberto Salinas Leon, talked about free trade and Hayek," extrapolates mds: "then, in the spirit of debate, a Mexican farmer whose livelihood was destroyed by Archer Daniels Midland was permitted to retort. Wait, no, that would be too one-sided."

D Johnston says debate club isn't entirely a feast of reason: "The first and most important thing you learn is not how to compose an argument or gather evidence, but how to read the judge and play to his/her expectations... In my experience, the people who really enjoy debate are the ones who enjoy manipulating people and take great joy in it." That may be why so many of the more damp-palmed pundits act the way they do. It's like someone gave them a rhetorical dictionary years ago, but they have no human experience to apply it to.

THE NEXT CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION.

Oh, Jeez:

Those figurines [on the picture frame]? They’re all bowing down to her... 

So does Jarrett really consider herself someone to be worshiped?

Wait'll they find out Obama has a mug that says "World's Greatest Dad."

LIBERTARIANS: IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN'T MAKE WORSE?

As should shock no one, on the Hobby Lobby decision libertarians come down unanimously for the rights of corporations over those of women who need medicine. Megan McArdle:

Otherwise, according to the reasoning of that [anti-decision] tweet, I am being denied something every time my employer refuses to buy it for me: cars, homes, Hummel collectible figurines. And don’t I have a First Amendment right to express my love of round-faced Bavarian children doing adorable things?

Two things: first, McArdle trying to be funny is a natural emetic; and second, as awful as she is I'm still surprised to see her promoting the ridiculous idea that health insurance benefits amount to "free stuff" (as the conservatives who don't bother to call themselves libertarians have unfailing come to call it) whenever it specifically benefits women's health. (Sample witticism: "My company won't pay for my toothpaste. I'm going to be forced to have cavities now.").  Then, McArdle goes on about how unreasonable other people are being. I guess I'll have to downgrade my opinion of her, if such a thing is possible.

McArdle also suggests that Obama wanted to lose the Hobby Lobby case so his free-stuff-fueled slut-minions will vote Democrat in November. So does McArdle's husband Peter Suderman at libertarian flagship Reason, only presumably he's got a sense of shame because he's more evasive about it:

To be clear: I am not at all suggesting that the administration was hoping or intending to lose in court. But...

[sigh.]

...this does help explain, at least somewhat, why the administration was so eager to pursue the case... It’s the political/legal equivalent of online clickbait; it grabs the attention of large numbers of people, sparks their interests and passions, and gets them engaged (or at least enraged). That doesn’t mean the administration set out to lose, or doesn’t care about having lost. But it does potentially change the calculus about whether and how hard to press an issue like this by offering some real benefits just for fighting the fight, even in the event of a defeat.

If the smell didn't tip you off, the incoherence of the last sentence is a glaring tell that you've just been handed a load of bullshit. What real benefits are offered, and by whom to whom? Also, what were they supposed to do, press less hard? As for the ruling itself, Suderman's all smiles:

The big question isn't whether the contraception mandate violates the religious freedoms of some faceless corporate entity entirely separate from the individuals who own that company -- it's whether the requirement would violate the free exercise of religious for the particular people who founded and now run the company... 

As Alito writes in his opinion, "A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends....When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people." 

In seeking to defend the requirement, the federal government had argued that Hobby Lobby, as a for-profit corporation, was not eligible to challenge the rule under the RFRA because corporations are "separate and apart from" their individual owners and operators. They were distinct, and not "people," and therefore ineligible for the protections of a law designed to shelter "a person's exercise of religion." Alito says, more or less, that this is nonsense: "Corporations, 'separate and apart from' the human beings who own, run, and are employed by them, cannot do anything at all."

The next time someone talks to you about corporate personhood, remember that entire fiction gets dropped as soon as it's convenient to portray the corporate citizen as a mere painting on a scrim, which when rear-lit reveals Ma and Pa Jesus, smiling, waving their snakes, and crooning "we's jes' simple folk, tryin' to get right with the Lord"; when it's time for mega-million-dollar political donations, the scrim gets front-lit again and Ma and Pa sneak offstage to count their loot.

Also at Reason, Shikha Dalmia addresses Jonathan Cohn's suggestion that a single payer system would stop all this my-employee's-medicine-is-against-my-religion crap. Dalmia begins:

One: By calling Obamacare a “new entitlement” and a “public program” he has basically accepted that the program constitutes a de facto government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, a conclusion that liberals have generally resisted. Leftists, notes Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon, have been trying to convince Americans that Obamacare is not a step in the direction of socialized medicine as opponents claim because it uses private insurance and relies on market forces to deliver coverage. Cohn’s candor is both refreshing and clarifying, so thanks, Jonathan, for that.

The dream of Obamasocialism, and that any normal people give a shit about it, will never die in Galt's Gulch.

Eventually Dalmia gets to the point: single payer is just how "libs" go around "playing their brother’s keeper... and demanding generous subsidies," probably while wearing their I'M A STUPID LIB shirts and going "durr hurr," whereas libertarians want to "unleash market forces to lower soaring costs without resorting to price controls or rationing" -- which judging from Dalmia's sourcing means a tax credits and vouchers scheme similar to Paul Ryan's Medicare plan, which nobody wants because, like libs, they don't understand freedom.

Meanwhile big libertarian Rand Paul (he only wants to kill foreigners with drones, remember?) praised the decison; Cathy Young said "there are many women who believe the birth control mandate infringes on religious liberty -- among them Hobby Lobby co-founder Barbara Green," that Planned Parenthood should stop lobbying because it's "divisive," and bunch of other stupid shit; and -- well, why go on? You knew the minute I said "libertarian" how this was going to go.

UPDATE. Among conservatives who don't mind admitting it, today has also been a festival of pedantic shirt-retucking. Ramesh Ponnuru on Ruth Bader Ginsberg:

[Ginsberg says] “It bears note in this regard that the cost of an IUD is nearly equivalent to a month’s full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage.” Who truly believes that this cost plays any role at all in Ginsburg’s analysis? It’s expensive, so she cites it to show that employers have to pay for it; if it were cheap, she’d cite it to show that employers aren’t burdened by it.

I suppose she'll tell us next that gold is expensive because gold just happens to be expensive! Jesus, it's like Ponnuru is taking lessons from Jonah Goldberg.

Also I'm grateful to commenter Glock H. Palin, Esq. for pointing out that Rand Paul actually doesn't mind killing a citizen with drones, after all. Maybe he's still a libertarian because he likes Drew Carey or something.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about last week's hilarious Mississippi GOP run-off.

Among the outtakes: At TownHall, John Hawkins explaining to Mississippians that "Thad Cochran isn't conservative enough to be a senator for a state like Mississippi." His argument:

McDaniel is a fire-breathing, Tea Party-friendly conservative who has been endorsed by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party Express, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Freedomworks, the Club for Growth, the Senate Conservatives Fund and Right Wing News (I wrote the endorsement) among many others.

Rightbloggers are blaming the black people and the GOP "Establishment," but I have noticed that many of the McDaniel appeals in the runoff were like this: They appealed to people who were really into all the typical wingnut stuff; people for whom names like Mark Levin and Freedomworks would be meaningful; that is, people who had almost certainly already voted for McDaniel. They didn't have a Plan B for expanding their electoral base -- only for keeping it riled up. That's why appealing to new voters worked so well for Cochran.

Can we count on them staying this dumb? I'd say the odds are even.

FRIDAY AROUND-THE-HORN.

•  Sam Stein and Michael Calderone find that "If You Were An Iraq War Critic, You're Probably Not Being Asked To Go On TV," and boy ain't it the truth. But for the most part they're concerned with the dearth of televised People Who Were Sane From The Start who also belong to the officially-sanctioned class of pundits and pols. Really, I don't care if Russ Feingold pipes up or not; I'd like to see Digby or Atrios or Tbogg on the tube, asking a shocked and disdainful Dick Cheney how it came to be that they could see what a clusterfuck this was going in and he couldn't.  But that's obviously out of the question -- wingnut shouters like ham-faced Erick Erickson may get promoted to bigtime TV, but whenever the nets need a nominally-left blogger-type, they call up some golden-boy trimmer. Thus we get "YADDA YADDA JESUS CARVED MERICA OUTTA THE WILDERNESS WITH A BIBLE AN A GUN"  versus "Well you make some good points." Bah. Sometimes I think they keep things vanilla like that just so their credentialed conservatives don't get scared; get this, from Victor Davis Hanson's latest bullshit about how everybody makes mistakes that cost thousands of lives on the other side of the world:

A number of prominent columnists, right and left — from George Will, David Brooks and William F. Buckley to Fareed Zakaria, David Ignatius and Thomas Friedman — supported Saddam's forcible removal.

Fareed Zakaria, David Ignatius and Thomas Friedman! That Overton Window is somewhere over in the next fucking county.

•  Speaking of Ezra Klein, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry's attacks on Vox don't bother me -- number one, who cares, and number two, so what -- but he uses Klein & Co.'s perceived biases as proof that liberals have the real epistemic closure problem. (Plus, "another symbol of growing epistemic closure on the left is The New Republic" which Gobry liked when it was "an idiosyncratic magazine critiquing liberalism," two Andrew Sullivan identity crises ago.) Gobry concedes conservatives had a little problem with E.C. for a couple of minutes, but not now...

A flurry of innovative young writers like Yuval Levin, Reihan Salam, Ross Douthat, Tim Carney, and Avik Roy put out fresh, 21st-century ideas on everything from tax reform to health care to social mobility to poverty to curtailing the power of Big Business. Many of these ideas are now compiled in a seminal new book... it's clear that the GOP is becoming the party of ideas again.

That "seminal new book" is Room to Grow, which I reviewed some weeks back, and which is a rat-bag of old-fashioned drop-the-minimum-wage, school voucher, and marriage promotion clunkers, with some sweet sauce poured over to make it look tastier. Also, how long are we going to keep calling Ross Douthat and his crew "innovative young writers"? It's getting to the point when I imagine even the kids at the Free Beacon are embarrassed when Salam drops some beats.

•  Fans of hot messes will be pleased to hear Rod Dreher is still the hot mess he's always been. In a post called "The Empire Takes Culture War To The World," he quotes a new report:

Seeking to mobilize a global front against anti-gay violence and discrimination, Vice President Joe Biden declared Tuesday that protecting gay rights is a defining mark of a civilized nation and must trump national cultures and social traditions.

Dreher comments on this:

The mark of a civilized nation. Well. Let it be noted that as far as the Obama administration is concerned, traditional Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are vestiges of barbarism.

Well, now that you mention it...

It’s been clear which way this country is going on religious freedom. I hadn’t expected that we would be getting there so quickly. Signs of the times, people, signs of the times.

Oh go take another Paris vacation ya big drama queen. Later:

UPDATE: To clarify, I’m completely on board with the anti-violence stuff. If that’s all this was, I would support it. But we all know it doesn’t stop there, because what Biden defines as “prejudice” is what many, many of us believe is truth.

And in another update Dreher produces proof that Emperor Obama's homo dystopia "goes far beyond opposing violence against LGBT folks. For example, USAID is providing funding for gay-owned start-up companies in other countries."

It's about time for Rod and his comrades to start writing songs of their oppression. Maybe for starters they can just add new lyrics to old ones -- here, to the tune of The Wearin' of the Green:

Oh I met with Maggie Gallagher a-cryin' o'er her books:
"They used to give us cash," she cried, "but now just dirty looks.
It's the most disgraceful pledge drive that NOM has had in years --
They're stiffin' us fine Christians for the Ragging on th' Queers."

WHY LIBERTARIANS STILL SUCK, PART INFINITY.

Big headline at libertarian mothership Reason:

New Teaser Trailer for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Shows Why Big Government Is Scary

Regular readers will recall that top libertarians like Nick Gillespie, Glenn Reynolds and Ross Douthat consider the Hunger Games franchise a metaphor for real-life Washington D.C., because Emperor Obama draws the noble children of the Red States (miserable and starving, despite the heavy subsidies they receive from Blue States) to fight for his entertainment. This, rest assured, is more of the same.

The newly released teaser trailer for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1 will remind everyone why no other recent pop culture phenomenon is as strikingly libertarian.

Except for the Atlas Shrugged trilogy. Wonder why they're not talking about that? Maybe because libertarianism is not so much an inspirational as a parasitic phenomenon -- its acolytes find popular movies in which authority is challenged, and storm the premiere crying RON PAUL!

Another big headline, for a video credited to Nick Gillespie and Amanda Winkler:

'America Has Ceased to Exist': Investment Guru Doug Casey on the Coming Economic Meltdown

I will confess that I did not listen closely to the entire 15-minute video, having heard enough Glenn Beck Goldline ads, and the sort of America-is-Doomed-Buy-My-Video-and-Day-of-Resistance-Silver-Coin gibberings that support the smaller rightblogger sites, to know what I was in for. Sure enough, Gillespie introduces a Seer, Doug Casey, and tells us "unfunded liabilities, excessive government spending are basically bringing the U.S. to the brink of some kind of economic catastrophe" and the Seer himself tells us that "The U.S. has been going downhill in all important regards for many years...

I'm not saying that what happened in Yugoslavia is gonna happen in the U.S., but then again, on the other hand, increasingly the U.S. is sectionalizing -- where people that live in ecotopia in the Pacific Northwest don't have an awful lot in common with the people in Southern Florida. So I think centripetal force is overtaking the U.S...

Helter skelter, she's coming down fast! Gillespie is game: "So I guess the term is called Balkanization for a reason, right?" The Seer says that's cool because what he wants is "seven billion little nation-states... if the U.S. broke up into six, more or less, that would be a good thing." Just like what those libertarian geniuses want for California, only global! Out of the one, many -- just like the Founders intended! The solution is to buy libertarianism now! Operators standing by day and night!

One more headline:

The Populist Uprising Against Common Core Is Libertarian and It’s Winning

Libertarian? But I'm no libertarian and I don't like Common Core -- in fact, Diane Ravitch is pretty much the polar opposite of a libertarian and she doesn't like it. But look -- when you're peddling Randroid ravings no sane person could support, and doing such a bad job of it that you're reduced to claiming yourself a victim of censorship because a college refused to take your donation, you have to appropriate victories wherever you can -- and besides, the Central Committee rejected your original "choc-o-muts ice cream is libertarian" proposal. So: Common Core, amirite? In a really free society most of you peons wouldn't need to know how to read and write!

I'm wondering how long it'll take before the Kochs decide this is a waste of their money and opt to just offer to pay our student loan debt if we become their slaves.

UPDATE. Some commenters tip us to the longevity of Seer Casey's racket -- smut clyde:

OK. So it turns out that Casey's exclusive interview with Gillespie is a reprise of an interview he gave elsewhere in 2012, including all the same jokes, except that in 2012 Casey was celebrating the immanent disintegration of the EU whereas in the current version he has used s/EU/US (in passing, he sneers at George Soros and Warren Buffet for being mere idiots savant who know how to make a lot of money without actually understanding anything about markets).

It's a living.

IT WAS ME WHO PROVOKED THE FATAL BARRAGE OF T-SHIRTS... BUT LET'S NOT PLAY THE BLAME GAME!

A Jonah Goldberg column called "The Liberal Blame Game on Iraq"? How could I miss it?

The Atlantic’s James Fallows says Dick Cheney and company “have earned the right not to be listened to.” Slate magazine’s Jamelle Bouie says that prominent public intellectuals and journalists who supported the Iraq war should “be barred from public comment.” Charles Pierce at Esquire is less subtle: “Shut up, all of you. Go away.”... 

I’m always curious what agency in a free society is in charge of enforcing prohibitions on such things.

Shriek, wail, I'm being censored.

Given the tendency for nearly everyone to get things wrong over time, this is a dangerous game. Vanden Heuvel has been wrong about so many things, it’s difficult to know where to begin. She opposed pretty much the warp and woof of America’s Cold War policies. She opposed Bill Clinton’s war in the Balkans. She opposed the Persian Gulf War. 

Fallows made a name for himself in the 1980s and ’90s championing the notion that Japan Inc. would overtake the United States. Shall we stop listening to him on economic issues?

Similarly, this guy thought Avatar was going to win Best Picture, while Jonah pushed America into the hellmouth that is Iraq. Everybody makes mistakes!

There's more, but who cares.

UPDATE. Oh, all right:

I supported the war, and I still think the arguments in favor at the time were superior to the arguments against. Alas, the facts on the ground didn’t care about the arguments.

Stupid facts! Farrrrrt.

UPDATE 2. Oh wait, oh wait, oh wait:

If postwar Iraq grew into a stable, confident nation progressing toward a lawful, decent society, I’ve argued, then someday in the future the mistake might look like a success.

I don't even have to write punchlines for him anymore. Or farts!

THAT'S A JOKE, SON!

As you may have heard, incumbent Senator Thad Cochran won last night's Mississippi primary, and it is supposed he reversed Tea Party nut McDaniel's polling lead by encouraging black Democrats to cross into the GOP primary (as is legal there) and vote for the lesser of two evils -- a practice to which I expect they must be accustomed by now.

There have been some entertaining ravings and rendings of garments over this, but my favorite bit comes from a relatively sober report at Breitbart.com. After covering McDaniel's post-election tantrum, Matthew Boyle got an interesting sidelight from an unexpected source:

In an interview by phone with Breitbart News late Tuesday evening after the McDaniel headquarters cleared out, state Democratic Party chairman Rickey Cole said McDaniel should challenge the election results. “Clearly there was some sloppiness to say the least, and probably some failures to comply with the law,” Cole told Breitbart News. 

“I listened to some of McDaniel’s speech, and in a race this close I’m sure there are irregularities that ought to be looked into,” Cole said. “I’ve been around a lot of close elections in my life. I think the candidate owes it to his supporters to make sure that everything was done on the up and up.”

Some conservatives are already reacting as if this is excellent news for their cause. I guess they've been trolling so long they no longer recognize a troll when they see one. Let the bloody internecine battle begin!

UPDATE. With the grim hysteria of Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald yelling "This is it!" in JFK,  Jeff Goldstein declares that in the wake of Cochran's victory, "the GOP is over. Done with. Finished. Sleeps with the fishes. And we, the legal conservatives, will have no organized vehicle left by which to claim representation."

Great news, right? Hold the laughter, libtards, because Goldstein has a plan to start a new party: one that's not just made up of bitter-enders such as himself, but also "brings in Reagan Democrats," only this time they'll be lured by the charisma of Jeff Goldstein, and maybe a Reaganesque-Democratisch Republican like, say, Chris Christie -- wait, Goldstein doesn't like Christie, apparently he's not anti-homo enough for him -- so I guess it'll have to be Rick Santorum in a gimme-cap.

Our team of crack cryptographers is still trying to decode Goldstein's closing...

And we’ll be colorblind in our purging of what has become a rather dubious "big tent," to boot.

...but I'm guessing it means "if we get a black guy, you're the real racist."

UPDATE 2. Erick Erickson of Red State: "The Republicans have become the party of lobbyists..." which is like saying Earth has become a planet of oceans and land masses.

UPDATE 3. At National Review, John Fund shows his fellow wingnuts the fatal flyer with which McDaniel was Stabbed in the Black, and then offers a very strange thought experiment:

Imagine if a tea-party candidate in some state had openly appealed to registered Libertarians to help him win a close primary runoff. There would have been howls of outrage that people who didn’t agree with Republican values on social issues and foreign policy were being invited to decide a GOP race.

Really? I would expect yawns. Like most thinking people, I assume libertarians of any-size L vote for Republicans -- they sure ain't voting for Libertarians in any kind of numbers!

But I do remember somebody getting pissed when Libertarians "openly appealed" to libertarians to vote for Libertarians instead of Republicans -- namely, Republicans after the 2013 McAuliffe-Cuccinelli race. Hell, Fund's colleague Charles C.W. Cooke, one of NR's many crypto-libertarians, pleaded before the election for readers not to vote for Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis, "the supposed 'Libertarian' candidate," whom Cooke unmasked as "a social liberal. He is in favor of gay marriage, is (radically) pro-choice, and supports the legalization of marijuana. In this regard, he stands in stark contrast to the Republican candidate, Ken Cuccinelli..." It's clear who the real libertarian is here!

Oh, you know who else bitched about it? John Fund.

MONEY DOESN'T TALK, IT SWEARS.

New York Observer:

A 16-year veteran professor at the CUNY subsidiary [Brooklyn College], Mr. [Mitchell] Langbert claims he was denied the opportunity to propose a multimillion-dollar grant to the Charles G. Koch Foundation because of the organization’s Republican roots. Mr. Langbert had been working with the Koch foundation on the proposal since mid-2013... 

“Given the shocking suppression—the almost total absence—of anyone who does not agree with far-left ideology at Brooklyn College, saying that there might be controversy because there’s a Koch grant is like saying that you will not tolerate any conservative viewpoint to be expressed here,” Mr. Langbert responded.

Seethes Ian Tuttle at National Review:

N.B. to prospective collegians: If you’re looking for a genuinely open-minded academic experience, Brooklyn College may not be the place for you.

There's something perfect about conservatives flipping out because someone refused to take their money. We always knew they believe money is speech, but it's getting easier to see that they also think money is the pre-eminent form of expression -- the one all others exist to serve. That's why they're so pissed that someone won't accept theirs -- because it's money censorship! (In the conservative world, as we see again and again and again, censorship is when their point of view doesn't get ahead of anyone else's.) Libtards have refused to listen to their money!

Money talks and bullshit walks -- and to them, bullshit is anything that's not money.

BOOTSTRAPPADO.

Detroit Free Press:

Detroit to resume water shutoffs for delinquent customers 

With the harsh winter’s end, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department is resuming efforts to shut off water service to thousands of delinquent customers. 

Meanwhile, resources are limited for Detroit residents in need to get assistance with water bills and avoid the health risks associated with having water cut off... 

Crews will be targeting those who have received a shutoff notice and whose bills are more than two months late. Customers with late bills can avoid a shutoff by entering into a payment plan. Typically, it takes a payment of 30% to 50% of the amount owed to start such a plan...

There are 323,900 DWSD accounts in Detroit. Of those, 150,806 are delinquent. Some of those delinquencies are low-income customers who are struggling to keep their utilities on, said some who work in providing assistance to those in need.

Coming soon: An article by Megan McArdle about how having to struggle for water will be good for the poor: "When I waited in line for the first iPhone, I was young, single, and carefree, and thoughtlessly failed to pack a Thermos of water (some of my friends offered me theirs, but all they had was Dasani). I emerged hours hours later absolutely parched. The lesson stayed with me and I profited from it: A few years later I was married, which made me rich, and now I keep a bottle of Resource handy at all times. Wouldn't depriving the poor of this kind of education be the real cruelty?"

UPDATE. Some garden-variety psychopaths have already gotten to the story ("You can certainly tell this story was written by a liberal. Water is not a right, human or otherwise. It is a need, but not a right"), but it won't become a really valuable conservatarian property until someone like McMegan puts a nice, fancy bow on it.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the brethren's latest impeachment enthusiasms. If you thought it was all about the Benghazi, brother, you've got another doublethink coming!

FRIDAY AROUND-THE-HORN.

• Back when George Will signed up with Fox News, I wondered why; though he and they were both technically conservative, Will seemed too pointy-headed for people who think Fred Barnes is a sage and Steve Doocy a wit. But Will's recent column in which he suggested ladies get raped for the street cred shows that he had a strategy. The column has raised an outrage and even gotten him unsyndicated by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (who knew, women read newspapers too!) but it has also made Will a hot ticket among the yahoos who think Will has been punished for "blasphemy" ("this is America -- not China, not Cuba... despite the left’s attempts to silence," argh blargh etc.) and use the term "feminazi" seriously. Years of bullshit and bad-faith arguments have sufficiently infantilized these guys that a weedy professor type like Will would just make them mad with his fancy lingo -- unless he used it to validate their more thuggish sentiments. So goodbye ruminative considerations of U.S. policy, hello war on women, only with a bow-tie, and the brethren may consider their cause uplifted by the endorsement of a genuine intellectual. (Camille Paglia must be kicking herself.)

• Visiting Clickhole does not make me as happy as not visiting it but knowing it exists. Is this the future of the web? Paging Prof. Jeff H. Jarvis...

• Terry Teachout has an interesting list of American artworks he would require high school students to study. The choices are intelligent and worth debating, but he prefaces the thing by telling how the UK's Tory education minister got rigorous about teaching literature and this resulted in a "predictable convulsion of high-minded outrage" in which the minister was accused of being "antiprogressive."  I'd love to know how your average conservative parental units in, say, Minot, North Dakota would react to the news that their young'uns would be forced to absorb Martha Graham and Langston Hughes. Oh, one other thing, Terry -- I recommend we add Otto Preminger's Skidoo to the film curriculum. It will teach the kids something about the 60s, and scare them off drugs.

NANO-CONFEDERATES.

At libertarian flagship Reason, J.D. Tuccille:

Have you heard about the great political divide that sets red against blue—the national polarization touted by breathless news stories about an already pretty gasp-y report by the Pew Research Center?... 

But...How is this a problem? If people with common preferences and values choose to live near one another, shouldn't that reduce friction?... 

Political sorting is actually a solution to deep ideological divides—if that sorting lets people live the way they want. But if people go through all of that trouble of moving away from the opposition, only to find alien rules, laws, and taxes jammed down their throats, you can see why "partisan antipathy" might get a little heated.

Here to make it worse as always, Megan McArdle:

If we're going to have a more partisan geography -- and it does seem as if we are -- then what we also need is more federalism. Push as many decisions as possible down to the local level -- not whether Colorado can pollute rivers that run through California, but decisions about taxes, social spending, health care and regulation.

Just like the Kansas-Nebraska Act!

I've said before that libertarians are conservatives with social anxieties, but I feel compelled to add that conservatives mainly tolerate them because they're not ashamed (having no shame, nor other human emotions, nor any chance of being elected) to argue that the Civil War was a huge mistake on the part of the North.

ESCAPE FROM LIBERTY ISLAND.

Remember Liberty Island, that workshop for explicitly rightwing artists we visited back in March? Have you wondered how it's doing? Wonder no more, they're crowdfunding. Here's how they pitch the content offerings:

They have compelling characters, cool settings, biting humor … and, we insist, they celebrate the value and dignity of the individual conscience over the supposed glory of the collective.

Wow, sounds great! Because I'm sure sick of reading all those celebrations of the collective in Granta.

Liberty Island is already in business as an online magazine, but we need to raise additional cash to fund our foray into book publishing.

Sure you do, comrade. While we wait for The Roy Cohn Nobody Knew: A Novel, here's a sample of what the website is offering -- a puffer on a musician:

"My first response to any musician is, 'I don't wanna hear about your politics. I don't care about your politics'," says Nathan Harden.

"The idea of conservative music doesn't sound appealing to me, or anyone," Harden adds, breaking into a laugh. "It sounds boring, right?

Interesting sentiment at a site that actually repurposes John Miller's classic "50 Conservative Rock Songs" on its front page -- and from a guy who writes for National Review. Further down...

Ballad of Dani Girl is a concept album of sorts... that traces the troubled path of the title character, through the very "liberated" American landscape that has now become the norm... 

"...It's sort of taking what we all know, as red-blooded males, that there's something alluring about a woman who...doesn't show everything in the first three seconds you meet her," [Harden] says. "It's modesty and restraint...the erotic charge of what a woman withholds from you."

You mean like The Kinks' "Lola"?

"...So the way that breaks down is this: there's a particular message coming out of the music industry, which is that sexual fulfillment comes from getting it on with as many complete strangers as you can this coming Friday night, doped up on amphetamines or whatever. But when you look at the lives young people are leading today, the sex is not that great..."

If you're bored with all the promiscuous sex you're having, kids, try the music of Nathan Harden. Or you can listen to a Tones on Tail cover while watching pictures of Andrew Breitbart. The revolution is here! Now it's time to pass the tip jar...

JUST THINK WHAT JAY LENO COULD HAVE DONE WITH THIS.

At the Wall Street Journal:

By Dick Cheney! It's like having an op-ed by Hitler on Obama's failed Israel policy.

One more:

Option 1: Depends -- can you make them smell bad and teach them to stand too close to you when they talk?

Option 2: Not if we come up with an "empathy" patch.

UPDATE. In comments, libertarians are always good for a laugh, but libertarian robots are a riot. "Like Daleks without the charm," says susanoftexas. ("EXPROPRIATE! EXPROPRIATE!" rejoins BadExampleMan.) "More importantly, will libertarians of the future be robots?" says mortimer2000. "Well, they're already drones! *rimshot*" Come on, lady, he laughed when you came in.

"It's actually somewhat heartening." says BigHank53, "that even John Stossel now sees the most likely path to creating additional libertarians is building them in a factory."

HONEY, WHAT'S AT THE MOVIES?

Rebecca Cusey at The Federalist:

Angelina Jolie wants us to talk about rape, but not in the Western-centric, man-blaming, feminist-professor way of the chattering classes.

She would like us to move beyond insular #YesAllWomen Twitter outrage to a global perspective with a broader, wiser understanding of the evils of human nature and the ability to overcome that evil with good. 

Jolie stepped into this conversation way back in 2009 when she agreed to lend her considerable star power to a movie that explored rape in the context of a children’s story. 

That movie became “Maleficent”...

OK, how about Jersey Boys?

UPDATE. Commenter D Johnston points us to Cusey's other essay on Maleficent, in which she denounces morally demented movies that "make the case that the villain is simply misunderstood" and "argue that the euro-centric, patriarchal, cisnormative, everything-normative world has gone crazy and the sane ones are those who buck the system" -- movies like (I am not joking) Shrek.

FILE YOUR NOMINATIONS!

The Stupidest Reaction to the Capture of a Benghazi Suspect Contest is sure to be heated, but let me nominate Patterico:

Guy Arrested for Benghazi Attack Has Been Hanging Out in Plain Sight for Ages 

Obama done caught him a terrorist. Yay! Except . . . what took so long?... 

Hm. He sounds easy to find. If you care... 

Doesn’t sound like Obama cared.

What's this remind me of -- oh yeah: "In six games!"



Got any nominees of your own? All serious candidates considered. I warn you, though, you can forget about low-hanging fruit -- so don't comb the gutters for small-time operators peddling fringe Benghazi truther bullshit like... um... um... popular radio blowhard Joe Walsh ("Timing of Benghazi Arrest Suspicious")... Ah, prairie shit -- everybody!

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the brethren's hard-on for Iraq now that it's collapsing again -- this time without our help, which may be why they're so concerned. Oh, who am I kidding -- it's about Obama and the Democrats being weak on defense, etc. Guess we'll find out whether the American people still think we'll be greeted as liberators.

UPDATE. The Voice column mentions a lot of war-whoopers from early days who are again telling us again what to do in Iraq instead of requesting fresh blankets from their jailers in Den Haag. Well, today in the New York Daily News I see a let's-do-it-again column from... Fred Kagan. This AEI hack told us back in 2005 that "Iraq is Not Vietnam"; now that Iraq seems to be passing from the Quagmire stage to the Ignoble Retreat stage, Kagan is trying to reverse the judgment of history in his favor:

And so, the current impending defeat is much worse than the one we accepted so blithely in 1975. This war won't end with U.S. personnel escaping from the embassy roof (although that might happen as well). There is, in fact, no end in sight for this war now, especially if we allow Iraq to go down. A policy of retreat and abandonment remains as it has always been the fastest road to endless war.

Whereas doubling down in Iraq is the scenic route to endless war. Jesus Christ. Why couldn't we have given these guys the Inglourious Basterds treatment so people would know better than to trust them again?