RAGGED GLOURY. [spoilers.] For the first hour or so of Inglourious Basterds I thought: well, it's finally happened. Either Tarantino has become totally brilliant, or I've watched enough Tarantino that I can't tell the difference anymore. The two first scenes -- the drawn-out agony of Colonel Landa's visit to a farmhouse where Jews have been hidden, and Aldo Raine's ludicrously inspiring speech to his recruits -- are among the best things he's ever done, from Landa's cheerful gabble to the close-ups of Brad Pitt's crinkled eyes, and it looked as if Tarantino was going to finally resist his impulse to undercut himself, and just turn his considerable gifts toward the end of making a damn genre picture without willfully jacking the whole thing up with random crazy ideas until the whole thing flips over. Maybe, I thought, he was catching on to what Sam Fuller knew -- if you're already nuts, you don't have to force it: your war movie, no matter how tightly plotted, will bear your gloriously (or glouriously) insane hallmark. (The Steel Helmet would not have been improved by song numbers.)

The first sign of trouble was the payoff on the "Bear Jew" idea (introduced by a suitably Vaudevillian Hitler). You mean that's it, I thought, -- he beats Nah-zis to death with a baseball bat? And ominously thumps the bat in the dark woods before he does it? Whoops, that was it, and the character recedes, to be supplanted by a lot of other show-stealing but debilitating schtick. The Theme from Cat People; non-Italian-speaking Basterds as Italians at a Third Reich shindig (maybe a hommage to All Through The Night); most disappointingly, a really interesting tension between the Jewish massacre survivor and Goebbels' new "It" boy, which climaxes in a projection-room scene that shows Tarantino still relying on childish, film-geeky blood-love as a resolution for difficult relationships.

I shouldn't complain. There's enough jam here to get you through the long running time, and it's fun. But Tarantino's technique has gotten so good that I wish he'd goof around a little less, and I grow tired of wishing for it. One of the great scenes introduces our British Forces hero -- a film critic (!) chosen for Operation Kino based on his knowledge of UFA and German language-fighting skills. The scene is as mad as you could wish, with Churchill incomprehensibly present and Mike Myers in highly successful make-up briefing the critic, with stiff upper lips all 'round. The absurdity is baked into the concept, and played and filmed beautifully. The tension between the barely-possible reality of the scene and Tarantino's rendition of it makes you giddy but keeps you in the story.

But it all leads to a Nazi Gotterdammerung so muddled and overblown that it blew my connection to the movie. I could accept an alternate WWII ending -- sure, why not; it was fine when Chaplin iron-masked Adenoid Hynkel in favor of a Jewish barber -- but by then the little tweaked realities had turned into a pile-up of absurdities, and my faith in the film was broken. It should be much more satisfying than this to see Hitler machine-gunned to pieces -- and for that matter, to see Landa get what's coming to him. But the movie has gotten so out of control by the end, all that's left are violent bits. Good bits, mind you, but without the benefit of the gathered force that a more disciplined film might have afforded.

Tarantino's too good to leave it at that, but no one's going to make him take the next step. At times like this I miss Louis B. Mayer. Or David O. Selznick.

Every craft aspect of the film is wonderful; the music is lovely, especially the theme from The Alamo, and Christoph Waltz deserves some kind of prize for bringing some badly needed joie de vivre to the Nazi villain role.

F MINUS. President Obama is going to talk to schoolchildren on TV about public service which, Michelle Malkin informs us, is child abuse. She reproduces a teacher's guide which includes questions for students like "What is the President trying to tell me?" "What is the President asking me to do?" and "Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us?" when it should be instructing them to shout the president down and bring loaded guns to the classroom.

Malkin's analysis:

Will Obama be able to resist issuing a call to youth arms to marshal help in passing his legislative agenda? The thing is: He won’t need to make the call explicit.

This is clever, as it means that Obama could just tell the kids to help little old ladies across the street and the faithful may still imagine him to be pouring acid on the foundations of the Republic.

Melissa Clouthier is reminded of Elian Gonzalez, Ace of Spades is reminded of The Omen III, Noisy Room quotes Hitler, Fire Andrea Mitchell calls it "Obama Youth," Stephen Kruiser says "Can I get a Hammer & Sickle in the house?!?!?" etc.

These guys make me miss the John Birch Society. At least so far as I know, they never thought the President's Council on Physical Fitness was an attempt to create a new Aryan Youth.

WWJ-LoD? After wringing a little more outrage out of the Lockerbie bomber's release, Kathryn J. Lopez is reminded she's a Christian, maybe by a picture of a kitten, and regrets the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. "I'm opposed to the death penalty," she proclaims. National Review readers try to smack her back into compliance by noting Willingham's obscene gesture during execution. "These things, too, do not require the state to end his life," she bravely insists.

Eventually, inevitably, K-Lo does the walkback:

I should note that the debate over facts is not my moral argument against the whole execution business. I think the man shouldn't have been killed, period, with or without the New Yorker. Capital punishment isn't intrinsically evil, there are times when it may be necessary. But those strike me as rare -- if not inconceivable -- instances in the U.S. in 2009.

Not so inconceivable, apprently: She closes by linking an argument in favor of capital punishment from her brother in Christ Ramesh Ponnuru.

Earlier Lopez wrote about "Vigilance in the Defense of Life." She was at that time talking about fetuses. "For Catholics," she wrote, "while other matters are subject to prudential debates, innocent human lives are not."

I can understand the distinction between innocent and non-innocent human life. But it rather vitiates the power of the Jesus card when you start making distinctions based on the laws of Man, or at least the ones you favor.

I honestly don't get much atheistic pleasure out of tweaking the contradictions in the Christian conservative perspective -- excepting the bloodthirsty ravings of Rod Dreher and such like; that's always a treat. But I do think that if you can't go full metal Jesus, you should stop appealing to cardboard cutouts of him as an authority.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightbloggers' attempt to pull a Wellstone on Kennedy. They didn't get much, but some of them are still reacting ("Use of Kennedy's Death for Political Advantage Sinks to New Lows") as if liberals had invaded their memorial service, as the schtick demands.

Even the dimmer bulbs among them seem to realize it isn't going over, and have moved on to more exotic Kennedy slurs than the ones they emitted at Kennedy's death. Patterico parses a casual comment Kennedy made to Jose Maria Aznar, Cortes E. DeRussy attacks Kennedy's letter to the Pope for not being as awe-inspiringly humble as the one DeRussy would have written, etc.

Once upon a time, pretending to care so greatly about a dead liberal that they would endeavor to protect his reputation from his own family and friends -- while simultaneously spreading every loathsome story about the deceased that they could dig up -- seemed like breathtaking nerve. But they've spent the past seven years topping themselves.

SHORTER MEGAN McARDLE. Liberals complain that conservative protesters bring loaded guns to meet the President. But liberals burn flags, which is every bit as dangerous. I mean it's not like guns were made for shooting; they're mainly used for protest. God, where do you people get your data?

SHORTER RIEHL WORLD VIEW: Liberals bitch about our hate-screams at dead Kennedy, but the reaction I fantasize they will have to the future death of Dick Cheney proves them hypocrites.

(As to their general "Oh yeah well a liberal laughed at Tony Snow" bit, they usually have to trawl message boards and comments to get evidence for this, on those rare occasions on which they bother to show it, whereas you can find Kennedy grave-spitting from Breitbart, Say Anything, TigerHawk, Confederate Yankee, Robert Stacy McCain, and other top rightbloggers regularly linked by the Ole Perfesser and displayed at memeorandum. Like we said about the Obama illegitimacy fantasies: on the left you get this stuff from Code Pink; on the right you get it from the leadership.)

HITLERMANIA! Megan McArdle realizes she hasn't pretended to be Above the Fray for a while, and goes on about how wrong it is to call even Obama a fascist. Her commenters, nearly to a man (and trust me, they're all men), prove an Army of Jonah Goldbergs ("I think fascism is a sufficiently distinct superset of Nazism that it still deserves useful life on its own"), and say it was LaRouchites (who are Democrats!) who called Obama Hitler so why are you hitting yourself?

Try to imagine making such a basic proposition as Our President is Not the Living Embodiment of Adolf Hitler and getting such an overwhelmingly negative response from your readers. I bet her next post is about puppies or how when you get married you have to buy stockings or some shit.

Meanwhile Ace of Spades calls Obama a Nazi For Reals (wow, I didn't know Ace was a LaRouchite) because the NEA had a focus group about a government ad campaign. Don't tell Ace that all those ads for fire prevention and against drugs (of the sort he sees when he wakes up in the middle of the night and finds the TV still on) are produced by the government -- it'll really blow his mind.

Can't we somehow spread the word that Obama is really an anarcho-syndicalist? I'd like to hear them try and pronounce it.

UPDATE: In a very deranged post*, Melissa Clouthier pulls a new one, or at least one that is new to me:

The left resisted efforts to get involved in WWII. They didn’t want to see the atrocities of Japan, Germany and Italy, especially, because it didn’t fit their never ending selfish narrative.

Good thing the Republicans were able to defeat FDR and get a real American elected President in time for WWII.

I don't know what the fuck this crackpot is talking about, either, but expect it to be the new conservative talking point within a week.

* Really, if I hadn't read it and you had merely described to me the part where she said she enjoyed Inglourious Basterds but would have liked it more if the Nazis were Arabs, I wouldn't have believed you.

LATEST FROM THE GOLDBERG FUDGE FACTORY. Jonah Goldberg closes his Liberal Fascism blog with a post that seems to say (without ever categorically saying it) that he doesn't think Obama is a Nazi. "Indeed," he says, "while I don't think it is remotely right or fair to call Obama a crypto-Nazi (if by that you mean to say he's a would-be Hitler), the real problem with all of this loose Nazi talk is that it slanders the American people."

The post directly preceding this, about Obama's health care plan, Goldberg headlines "Lebensunwertes Leben" -- and in case his readers don't get it adds a link to the Wikipedia page about the Nazi classification ("This is nothing new").

The post before that: "The editorial blog of the Baltimore Sun is accusing me of violating Godwin's law, and some of the commenters are rushing to my defense." (Representative sample: "How, precisely, is it a 'fantasy' that all statism is on the left?")

No matter how inept he gets -- and, no mistake, he has only gotten worse over the years -- Goldberg can still make me angry, as with his justly ridiculed post about how torture is no big deal because they do it to bad guys on TV all the time. It's sort of like Billy Budd's reaction to Claggart; something about his perfect viciousness and dishonesty just makes you want to smack him. At such moments I try to imagine Claggart, not as I first pictured him or as he was brilliantly portrayed by Robert Ryan in the 1962 film, but as he might have been enacted by Stephen Furst. That usually wins me a little perspective.

THE GREEN, GREEN GAS OF HOME. Seemingly out of nowhere, Bryan Caplan tells his readers Europe's not all that. Tourists who think so don't realize that they couldn't afford the best neighborhoods. Also, you would have to use subways and bikes, which everyone knows are terrible. Plus the suburbs aren't so nice, and as an American you would naturally prefer to live in a suburb.

Tyler Cowen jumps in, says Americans are impressed by Europe's fancy old buildings: "in reality most Americans would think of Europe as some kind of dump." Megan McArdle finds this "spot on": look at the dreary buildings in that great European capital, Toronto. She knows a liberal who doesn't like it!

There's no recent poll or anything like that I can find that might have animated this discussion of how bad Europe/Canada really is despite what Americans might think -- though a June Economist report finds all of the world's top ten livable cities outside the U.S., and a recent study confirms the well-known fact that Americans work far longer hours and have much less free time than Europeans.

Maybe the chat was inspired by the present consideration of a socialistic health-care program that would make us a little more like the Eurnadians. I could see how that would make them feel a little insecure.

THE RISE OF BIRTHER-WITH-AN-EXPLANATION. Politico reports Arizona Rep Trent Franks' complaint that he has been maligned as a birther, when he's really what we call around here birther with an explanation -- he has come to believe, after "a significant amount of research," that Obama was in fact born in the U.S., but is outraged that the President won't produce the double-secret long form birth certificate, which despite the conclusive results of Franks' painstaking investigation he still finds necessary to "put people's concerns about his national identity to rest for good."

The item draws a passel of interestingly passive-aggressive comments in a similar mode. Here's a good one:

I think President Obama is a wonderful man and a history maker, too! I want to celebrate him! Let's construct a great monument marking his place of birth, like we do with other presidents. I'd also like to shake the hand of physician who delivered our great president into the world on his day of birth. So... who exactly is that doctor? And, specifically, what is the address where we can begin building that monument? ...crickets...

This is my favorite:

I am sitting on a very large cash donation that I wanted to make to the childrens ward of the hospital that Obama was born. I mean it is historically significant the first Black President and first from Hawaii, I want to make that donation in the name of the doctor that birthed Obama. That simple tidbit of information available on the long form version of his BC is the only thing standing in the way of the poor sick children getting some much needed upgrades to their hospital ward. Emails to the White House have not been responded to. No one will provide this information. It couldn't be that Obama wants to deny the sick children.... no that definately isn't it so why can't I get this information from the most transparent administration in our history?

The current, sad era in American history isn't good for much, but it is proving a golden age for tendentious arguments. These folks want to keep the birther obsession alive as part of their greater effort to delegitimize Obama, but perceive that they are being laughed at. So they invent fantasy scenarios in which Obama is actually harming citizens by failing to produce the proof they claim not to need.

Franks' version is rather bland, but his defenders show great imagination and nerve. You've got to admit, most ordinary people wouldn't pretend to have a large endowment to offer as ransom -- in comments to a blog post, yet. But we're not dealing with ordinary people.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the new thing: Obama killing veterans with mind control. Oh, wait, I see there's a new new thing -- Obama's dastardly plan to turn 9/11 "from a day of reflection and remembrance to a day of activism, food banks, and community gardens." That's right: instead of repeating for the thousandth time how we're gonna get Osama, the pretender wants us to give soup to the homeless. Just like that bastard FDR did to Pearl Harbor Day! We used to kill Japs on December 7, but after the Democrats got through with it, it was practically meaningless. No wonder Bin Laden considered us ripe for attack.

Nonetheless, the vet-killing thing is worth noting as one of the steps leading to our inevitable idiocratic nadir. Plus it's got that Goldberg touch. Also, for the hometown crowd, my suggestions for the Bill Thompson campaign.

THERE WAS SHRINKAGE. National Review enlists a psychiatrist, Dr. Irwin Savodnik, to tell us the meaning of Obama's visit to Martha's Vineyard. Among the Doctor's interesting findings:

Tony is the word for the Vineyard — style uber alles: In Chilmark, it’s Birkenstocks, creased shorts, a well-worn T-shirt and — to top it all off — a low-brow Red Sox cap. Anti-Bush stickers stare at you from rear bumpers while Obama rules the road from every Jeep and SUV, not to mention the occasional (and embarrassing) Hummer. While the whole island tilts left, if you’re really a committed radical-left politico, you have no choice but to reside in up-island Chilmark, where the Far Left, still obsessed with dragging the Bush/Cheney duo into Federal Court, spends its summers.

National Review describes Savodnik as "a seasonal resident of Martha’s Vineyard," from which we may assume that he is a glutton for punishment, or perhaps a claimant to the journalistic throne of Alan Bromley.

In fairness, the Doctor shows more allegiance to Edgartown, which he finds "less ideological and quintessentially New England" than Chilimark -- home of former prosecutor Linda Fairstein -- and where he "had the strange experience of nearly running into a post-jog, diaphoretic Bill Clinton with my bike, which evoked a nervous smile on my face and a full body tremor that propelled me all the way home," which he may feel strengthens, in a projective way, his standing to psychoanalyze the current President from a distance:

It’s not the sharp difference of opinion between the president and the public that has hurt him. It’s how he thinks. Barack Obama thinks differently from Bill Clinton. He’s more doctrinaire, passionate about his ideas, fixated on a single path for the country. He ran as a man above the fray, the man who ushered us into post-racial America. Unlike Clinton, Obama looks to a hardened ideology that draws its inspiration from the storming of the Bastille, a Rousseauian social contract, and the dialectical struggle between the haves and have-nots...

The president chose Chilmark for his well-earned vacation because that’s where the utopians go. And like many utopians, he wants to transform all of us into the idealized participants of his dream. I suspect he hears his inner voice more loudly than he hears the shouting crowds of unruly moms, grandmas, and sick kids. It would be best for his presidency if he were to put a lid on that voice and tune in to what the cheering and jeering off-island crowds are telling him. Were he to hear them, he might learn some deep truths about the people over whom he presides and -- most importantly -- about himself.

Dr. Savodnik has come a long way from 2004, when he said about a similar attempt to shrink George Bush:

[Bush on the Couch author Dr. Justin] Frank acknowledges he never met Bush, much less interviewed him on his couch. There is not an ounce of psychoanalytic material in the entire book... Frank justifies his method with the argument that others, such as Jerrold M. Post, have conducted 'at-a-distance leader personality assessments.' Freud himself tried it, when he collaborated with the journalist William Bullitt on a book about Woodrow Wilson, but it was, to say the least, not a high point of Freud's career... Mostly, though, Frank is blind to the underlying silliness of his enterprise.

Again in fairness, while Dr. Frank has put in some time in D.C., he shows no evidence of having vacationed in Crawford, Texas, and thus had not the geographical excuse for at-a-distance leader personality assessment that Dr. Savodnik has.

Also, even before Dr. Savodnik dismissed Frank's analysis of Bush, he felt comfortable explaining that Howard Dean's scream was "signaling of primitive emotional states," proving that "were [Dean] to become president, we would be besieged with dangers" and that as President he "would disorganize and abandon us to our deepest anxieties." Which even non-professionals may recognize as a cry for help.

CODE RED. The Ole Perfesser gets mad at Josh Marshall's essay on the violent tendencies on the right. Oh yeah, says the Perfesser, what about Ken Gladney and the Kennedy assassination? It's not an edifying discussion.

Actual violent political gestures are thankfully rare these days, and I don't see that they have a significant number of defenders even in the overheated environment of the blogosphere. We do see some half-assed shooty-shooty posts sometimes. I don't worry much about those leading to violence, but I do think they feed, and feed on, another tendency that is dangerous in a different way.

Each side has people who will, when exiled from power, get a little paranoid about the people who aren't. I was suspicious of Bush, but generally refrained from calling him a Nazi, except in jest, and I am famously shrill and unreasonable. About some other people's ideas I have been less circumspect. I am not immune from nor averse to a little hysterical speech.

The sort of thing that's going on now with the right is different in one regard: imputations against Obama of alien ideology -- commie, Nazi, whatever -- aren't coming exclusively from the cheap seats (though there's plenty of that). Representative Michele Bachmann talks about re-education camps. Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich talk about Obama as a euthanasiast. Congressman Paul Braun says Obama's planned expansion of federal volunteer groups like the Peace Corps is "exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did." Republican National Committee leaders tried to get Chairman Steele to escalate his denigration of Democratic policies from "collectivist" to "socialist" -- and he finally got the message. Jeb Bush says he doesn't know whether Obama is a socialist. Senator Jim DeMint says, "we’re about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy." Etc.

This isn't Code Pink -- this is Republican political leadership. They're endorsing the idea that the policies of the duly elected government are not just wrong, but fundamentally illegitimate. That's why I'm disinclined to parse the funding and provenance of the tea parties and health care town halls -- what difference does it make how much FreedomWorks has to do with these eruptions when the leaders of the opposition have already declared Obama, in effect, a foreign agent?

The real danger is not violence but political dementia. The default if not official position of the opposition is that the party in power is literally the enemy of the American way of life. This also soaks up the birther, Obama-is-a-Muslim, and other cults born of a desire to negate the results of the last election. The guys who think Obama was born in Kenya may not get their citizen grand juries credentialed, but they have the comfort of knowing that their comrades don't acknowledge Obama as a real American President, either.

When the hollering started and some of these guys claimed it mean that America had conclusively rejected the Obama Presidency after seven months, I thought they were just exaggerating for political effect. Now I begin to think they really believe it. And so we find ourselves trying to right a badly listing ship of state with a large percentage of our countrymen convinced that their first order of business should be to throw the rest of us over the side.

One bright spot: the Perfesser is going on about Black Panthers in defense of the gun issue, still apparently oblivious to the historical fact that it was the Panthers that made Ronald Reagan a gun controller.

GUN NUTS. A guy brings his guns to an Obama speech. The Ole Perfesser asks, why you stressin'? Then, after considering whether "these aren’t agents provocateurs but rather militant gun-rights activists trying to counter 'denormalization,'” he asks:

Plus, if people had showed up with guns at Bush events, do you think the press would have spun it as evidence of Bush’s unpopularity?

Oh brother, the old "If it were Bush." Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2001:

Armed Man Detained in Park During Bush Jog

The Secret Service detained a man with a gun in a Des Moines park where President Bush was jogging, local police and White House officials said.

Secret Service spokesman Jim Mackin said the man was about 60 yards from Bush when he was spotted by officers. He said the man had a permit for the gun, but he was detained because he was so close to the president. Mackin said the man appeared to be in the park for reasons completely unrelated to Bush's visit.

New York Times, February 8, 2001:

Officer Shoots Armed Man Near White House Fence...

An accountant who worked for the Internal Revenue Service years ago and has been engaged in disputes with the agency fired shots outside the White House fence today and after a 10-minute standoff was shot in the knee by a Secret Service agent, officials said.

The incident sent the police and heavily armed Secret Service agents swarming across the White House grounds and into the surrounding streets about 11:30 a.m. White House officials said President Bush, who was exercising in the residence area of the White House at the time, was never in danger. After being informed of the gunfire by the Secret Service, he resumed exercising, Ari Fleischer, his press secretary, said...

Not a lot of what-if-it-were Clinton in these dispatches. But that's one of the drawbacks of the MSM which the blogosphere was built to correct.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP. It's a miscellany, offered under the excuse that it's summer and I should get to be trivial on that account, but really because I've been kept too busy to function at normal levels. You, being the real people, can be entrusted with the truth. I expect a letup or a nervous breakdown presently, after which things will go back to normal.

Meanwhile I see Ross Douthat is concerned that "the country suddenly has two political parties devoted to Mediscaring seniors," which is touching. Maybe he should be printing up large-type editions of his Sam's Club Republicans book and distributing them at senior centers. More than a few of them will think it's a government publication, and that Republicans are still in charge. Maybe it owes to my own advanced age, but I'm beginning to incline toward that explanation myself.

A SIGN OF PROGRESS. Of a sort, anyway. Rightwingers are disowning an Obama-is-Hitler sign! It'll be temporary, of course, as Obama-is-Hitler is one of their steady tropes. But at this critical moment, any outrage multiplier is useful, even if it puts them off their usual game for a few minutes.

Meanwhile the Weekly Standard's John McCormack assures his credulous readers:

Now, Dave Weigel points out that the Obama-as-Hitler posters are produced by the group of many-times Democratic presidential candidate (and absolute nutter) Lyndon LaRouche.

And David Freddoso tells us, "Don't blame conservatives for LaRouche's Obama=Hitler signs."

Almost simultaneously, the Lyndon LaRouche website tells us "Do Not Believe A Word Obama Utters" and praises the Town Brawls: "The anger is real. The hatred for the Obama policy is real." Also: "The fact is: Obama is out to commit genocide. And he's got members of Congress goose-stepping behind him."

This is a wonderful schtick: Obama's opponents consider him a Nazi, but claim his supporters are really the ones calling him a Nazi, and direct us to these "supporters," who call Obama a Nazi.

I had so little hope for health care reform that I suspected Obama's rush to pass it was an intentionally Pyrrhic plan to marginalize his enemies. If I was right, he's certainly getting his money's worth.

TRAWLING THE BACK CATALOGUE. Michael Rubin at The Corner:

Obama Still Flailing for the Clenched Fist?
Iran’s Alef News and Jahan News are reporting that the Obama administration sent the Iranian government another letter in the past couple days, reportedly with regard to the three detained Americans. The newspapers report that the Iranian government has yet to respond.

Maybe they should try sending them a cake in the shape of a key.

(See also Hanson, Victor Davis: "I think we are going to collectively sober up and realize that we just did what we always said we would never do: bargained for the release of hostages from terrorists." Sometimes, despite all evidence, I think he's trying to be funny.)

THE EMPRESS OF I SCREAM.

The Legislature, in a special session, voted to override former Gov. Sarah Palin’s veto of roughly $28 million in federal stimulus money intended for energy projects. A three-fourths majority in each chamber was needed to override the veto. The House voted 30 to 9 to accept the money, and the Senate voted 15 to 5. Ms. Palin initially said she would not accept about one-third of the $930 million designated by President Obama for Alaska, citing “strings” that could bind the state to federal mandates and increase the size of government.

Maybe she spoke truer than we thought when she said she was leaving the statehouse for Alaska's own good. The management of actual funds have nothing to do with the totally symbolic politics Palin practices. Hers is going to be the most interesting campaign since Lonesome Rhodes'.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the health care town brawls. The common elements of these spectacles and their defenses are familiar to regular readers of the rightblogs -- assertions of great power derived from the true will of the people, inevitably coupled with persecution mania, and of course references to Hitler and threats of civil war. I know it sounds tedious, but it's really something to see how they lug this same formula from topic to topic and from event to event like a carney wagon lugging a freakshow to the cowtowns.

I regret not having included Oliver Willis' report on the town hall held in Harold Ford's old district; Willis says this is "the only majority black district in Tennessee," yet the bellowing crowd of alleged constituents seems awfully majority-white.

GEORGE SODINI LIVES! Latest hot-button at Dr. Helen's place: irate ladies crazy-glue cheater's penis. Dr. Helen is against (so, as a practical matter, am I, and so is local law enforcement, which has charged the gluers, though not so strongly as Dr. Helen prescribes). Comments commence:

I think marriage is a joke (I have never been married and will likely never be married).Back in my casual sex days before AIDS (early 1980s), I remember how many slutty married women were around. Left, right, everywhere. I thought at the time, "What man is stupid enough to PAY FOR this woman not to work, while she's doing whatever she wants sexually?". I'd be in favor of penalties for adultery in marriage, it just is not going to happen. The trend is in the OPPOSITE direction (i.e. no-fault). There won't even be a return to Pumpkin leaving the marriage without most of the man's assets if she cheats. Sorry, it's just all a bit silly. And men can be incredibly gullible and naive.

...But then this goes with what I've always said about women all along. When you play with women, you're playing with fire...

...Men pay for women. Period. If women ever pay for men, for any reason, the man is a thief.

A story: My daughter has been married twice and divorced twice. She made off with money and treasure each time. She has taken after her mother (a very good teacher) in that for her whole adult life she has been taking money from men for her sexual favors. Including the two times she was "married". She has never once been punished or reprimanded for her behavior. She is now almost 46 y/o and finds that her body's sexual appeal has left her stranded.

This is why I approve and endorse Dr. Helen's place: so that these people have a better public forum than a Pittsburgh health club at which to address their grievances.