NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the recent Obion County, Tennessee case in which a city fire department refused to rescue some guy's house because he hadn't paid the user fees up front. They let his house burn to the ground. The conservative endorsements of this psychopathic course were depressingly expected, as was the ratio of endorsements made on sterile grounds of libertarian ideology versus those made on grounds that some parasite/looter had been made to suffer. Sometimes I wonder if Jack the Ripper wasn't a precocious Randian.

STILL MORE NOBELONEY. Imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Even better, the Chinese government is royally pissed about it. I hope the Prize does Liu and his fellow citizens some good, and I think the best way we could show solidarity would be to develop a sane manufacturing and tariff policy, and stop giving so much of our business to Chinese slave labor factories. (I am not assuaged by the recent boom in Chinese imports of American garbage.)

I doubt political prisoners like the current laureate would be among those arguing that we only harm Chinese hopes of liberty by refusing to feed the regime so many Yankee dollars. So I join the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, PEN, Reporters San Frontieres, and others in support of Liu, and leave the Heritage Foundation and such like to support his Red Chinese slavemasters ("What [Obama] is really saying is that he wants Americans to pay more for Chinese goods").

Conservatives can at least be pleased that President Obama is no longer the reigning laureate, which had them shitting their pants last year. Betsy's Page declares that the choice of Liu means "at long last, the Nobel Peace Prize committee gets it right." The Nobel Committees aren't out of the woods with wingnuts yet, though -- they gave the Medicine Prize to Robert Edwards for his role in developing in vitro fertilization, and the Jesus people are up in arms. (Fear and loathing of test tube babies is enjoying a vogue among social cons.) The win goaded National Review's Kathryn J. Lopez to one of her legendary twittergasms:


But that's okay -- as we've noticed before, conservative psychology relies on sudden swings between delusions of grandeur and delusions of persecution. They can rile the troops by telling them that America won big at the Nobel Prizes (which is like the Oscars, except the men have to wear real tuxedos) and, when needed, enrage them with the spectacle of Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in bed together.

SERVICE ADVISORY. I'm sorry I didn't tell you good people this sooner, but last weekend I moved back to New York. Texas didn't work out. I'm pretty blue about it. I was hoping for a new life of love, happiness, and fresh air, and six months later here I am in a sublet in Harlem (and, by the way, I don't know what you've heard, but up where I am it isn't what you would call gentrified). I spend my days wondering if I'd feel better if I took a shower, and contemplating my abject failure at relationships, driving, and other things millions of ordinary people manage to accomplish as easily as I might, oh, compose an aperçu.

Plus they just raised the price of a MetroCard. Welcome home, brother!

If you know of any jobs in the area, please drop me a line. Because I can't bear to hold a Godlstein pledge drive. I have some pride left.

UPDATE. Thanks guys.

SOMETHING TO CELEBRATE. Mario Vargas Llosa has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and good for him. Rightbloggers are ecstatic, but mainly on political grounds. "A consistent voice against repression wherever he finds it and an eloquent champion of freedom in all its manifestations," declares Nick Gillespie. Donald Douglas is happy that the laureate doesn't like Che Guevara. The American Enterprise Institute proudly reproduces part of his Irving Kristol Award acceptance speech. Tyler Cowen seems to have actually read Llosa's fiction, but he's a special case.

Jay Nordlinger at National Review is very happy because while many previous laureates have been "anti-Americans, Communists, and other anti-democrats," and only won because "politics, particularly leftism, has seemed more important than literary quality" to the Committee heretofore, today's winner is "an advocate of a free economy." The judges must have caught freedom fever in the interim. (Nordlinger adds that Llosa is a "fine writer," but seems to consider this the gravy rather than the meat.)

This is the flip side of the pants-shitting rage that conservatives came out with when Harold Pinter won the Prize in 2005. Everything to them is politics, and for the most part they only get interested in literature when it serves their usual tedious yay-boo.

So far coverage from mainstream media outlets and liberal sites has been appropriately respectful and laudatory, as you might expect. It's gotten me interested in Llosa's work, with which I am only glancingly acquainted. Your recommendations for further reading would be appreciated.

DEPRAVED ON ACCOUNT OF THEY'RE DEPRAVED. National Review's Daniel Foster, you will be pleased to know, doesn't unreservedly endorse the decision of the Ayn Rand Hook & Ladder Company to let some poor guy's house burn to ground because the man hadn't paid them a fee. But his asshole buddies are asking what his fucking problem is -- as you might expect, Jonah Goldberg is the douchiest of the bunch, giggling dementedly because the loss of someone's home nicely sets up his zinger about compassionate conservatism (I guess Goldberg hasn't learned the difference between fires in real life and fires in cartoons); John Derbyshire is typically savage and Kevin D. Williamson thinks a scorched-cat picture is an appropriate response, perhaps believing that by not adding a LOLcat caption he is exhibiting admirable restraint. (Is failing a psychological test a requirement for employment at National Review?)

Foster seems to have been unnerved by the insight these attacks offer into the character of his workmates, and like a battered child attempts to restore equilibrium by lashing out against a common enemy, Paul Krugman:

I don’t have much more to add, except to note that Paul Krugman, in a brief blog post on the subject, makes a really bad analogy:

This is essentially the same as denying someone essential medical care because he doesn’t have insurance. So the question is, do you want to live in the kind of society in which this happens?

No. Krugman would have been correct if he’d said “This is essentially the same as an insurance company refusing to pay for someone’s essential medical care because that person never bought insurance in the first place.” And I don’t mind living in that kind of society at all.

Actually, since the guy's home burned down, the best analogy -- an exigent situation in response to which public servants refuse to respond because the piper hadn't been paid -- would be a guy bleeding to death in the emergency room of Fred Hayek Memorial Hospital. Which I assume they would also endorse, unless the guy were a fetus.

Do these creatures actually know any human beings?

UPDATE. Interesting, isn't it, that libertarian magazine Reason has yet to comment* on this? If I didn't know better I'd assume they were thinking, "Everyone knows we're assholes -- do we have to prove it to them?"

*UPDATE 2. "You spoke too soon," commenter atheist informs me; the Reasonoids are "already pointing out how this excellent example shows the clear superiority of the libertarian worldview, and mocking hopey-dopey statist Paul Krugman." Yeah. The thrust of the thing is that since a government agency did this, you can't pin this on the libertarians -- even though the agency was clearly operating on the libertarian principles that are allegedly sweeping the country. I'm surprised no one has suggested a fire department voucher system.

Nick Gillespie also asks the Patrick Bateman impersonators who inhabit Reason comments whether they would let the house burn down, and gets the expected results. My favorite so far: "I've never felt so viscerally that people are starting to talk about us [libertarians] like others talk about Jews." Hmm, the more successful they are, the more victim status they claim -- refresh my memory: How are they not conservatives, again?

(There's also supposed to be a Katherine Mangu-Ward video, but I can't see it in my browser; I assume God is trying to protect me.)

UPDATE 3. God abandoned me and allowed me to see that video:

HOST: "Do you think the firefighters did the right thing by just standing by?"

MANGU-WARD: "Y'know, it's actually an interesting story because it's all about the context…"

HOST: "So you have absolutely no mercy for these people?"

MANGU-WARD: "Y'know, I think that it's a question of free riders…"

Jesus Christ, they're just monsters, aren't they?

SHORTER GLENN HARLAN BEAUREGARD CLETUS T. CORNPONE REYNOLDS: You pointy-heads want to make my little girl go to school with black people, but you won't allow ROTC? That's not very "diverse," hyuk hyuk hyuk.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP. I was inspired by the Voice "White People" story to go over some of the ways rightbloggers approach the issue of race in America. There's the sledgehammer, the battering ram, the mace, the giant foam finger gloves covered with poo, etc. A lot of diversity, in other words, but the effect is basically the same.

WE HAVE A WINNER. You heard about Tyler Clementi, the guy who committed suicide after his roommate webcast him making out with another man, right? Vox Day:

It is obvious that Clementi didn't kill himself simply because his actions were made public; as a musician, no doubt he had been filmed before and some of those films may have even been put online. He killed himself because he could not live with the shame of knowing that everyone would be aware of his submission to what he apparently believed to be evil desires...

A normal man being forced to confront his immorality in such a public way might have reacted with anger, irritation, embarrassment, or amusement, but only one who is both psychologically disturbed and appalled by his own actions will destroy himself over it.

The headline is "Gay rights killed Clementi."

Is someone holding a World's Biggest Asshole contest with a huge cash prize? (h/t Evan Hurst)

UPDATE. Commenters point out Sadly, No!'s coverage of Alex Knepper, who brags that "my sympathy runs thin for someone who commits suicide over a sex tape," then giggles about it in comments. That prize must be enormous... wait a minute, given the contenders, it might just be a plastic ring or a kick in the teeth.

SHORTER KATHERINE MANGU-WARD: Telling parents to feed their kids fresh food instead of McDonald's is ObamaHitler.

(Yes, I know it's from Australia. Don't you know ObamaHitler is a world movement?)

DADDY'S LITTLE RAGE-PROP. If you want a rare insight into how the Tea Party people keep the rage flowing, even under circumstances that should embarrass rather than enrage them, take a look at what happened with Carl Paladino, the lunatic TPer now running as the Republican candidate for Governor in New York, and how it was covered by Glenn Beck's web outlet.

As to events, New York's Daily Intel put it beautifully: "Who would have thought that insinuating [opponent Andrew] Cuomo cheated on his ex-wife wouldn’t even be the most insane thing Carl Paladino would do in one day?" Paladino also got into it with Fred Dicker of the New York Post. Dicker demanded evidence for Paladino's charge against Cuomo; Paladino blamed Dicker for the Post's taking photos* of his 10-year-old love child from an actual affair, then told Dicker he was going to "take him out." There was a brief scuffle, and then Paladino's campaign manager stepped up to tell Dicker he was off the campaign because he was biased in favor of Andrew Cuomo.

That's right -- Fred Dicker, of Rupert Murdoch's Post, is working for the Democrats. Even other conservatives know that's rubbish. These guys are real bridge-builders.

The coverage is as you might expect -- except at The Blaze, Glenn Beck's web boondoggle.

Here's their lede:

It has already been clear that New York gubernatorial candidate is no shrinking violet! So he’s not about to walk away from a situation like this:

He's not crazy, he's feisty! The commenters, most of whom seem not to know what's going on specifically or in general, take Paladino's side, and take it on faith that Murdoch reporter Dicker is just another "Lame Stream Media" "plant reporter" out to help Cuomo, Obama, and Hitler.

They also believe that Paladino's rageaholic episode was thoroughly justified because someone took a picture of his illegitimate (and unacknowledged by Paladino until last year) daughter:

I would vote for him just because of his anger towards those targeting his daughter...

Well when you mess with a mans daughter you better expect an explosion of a reaction...

...You decide to run for office and some sleezeball reporter starts violating your families privacy, He hounds and intimidates your daughter that lives on her own... I would have laid the SOB out, right then and there. It would and could be classified as self defense in that context.

The consensus is that, if they had secret second families and someone reported it, they'd act the same way -- righteously indignant that the Press had attacked their widdle girls!

This is out of the same playbook as Sarah Palin's constant whining about her own children, which has proven a reliable way to agitate the troops on her behalf.

Recall the outrage Palin stirred up after David Letterman made a joke clearly meant for Bristol Palin. The incident that inspired the joke, it turned out, involved a younger sister, and Letterman apologized, but Palin and her paladins continued to holler about it for weeks as if Letterman had snuck into their home at night and fondled the children.

Then there's Palin's reliable outrage over jokes about Trig Palin -- not just the actual, direct ones ("Family Guy Takes Shot at Sarah Palin's Mentally Disabled Son, World Awaits Her Facebook Retaliation Rant"), but also the ones she infers out of all reason -- like when Rahm Emanuel called liberals "retarded" and Palin actually demanded, and got, an apology because the common insult was allegedly a crime against "all God's children with cognitive and developmental disabilities -- and the people who love them" (such as the world's most famous Down Sydrome child and her mother).

Seeing the even-more-insane lengths to which Paladino is taking this aggrieved-parent approach to politics, and the reaction of the true believers to it, is instructive. The long-term strategy is obviously to get their followers trained to the point where they don't even need a real insult against the candidate's children to get them started -- soon they'll just be able to yell "MSM SKREE MY LITTLE GIRL!" and the mob will commence ravening.

In fact, they won't even need real children! Hell, Paladino didn't even own up to this kid until she was nine -- when the going gets tough, a Tea Party candidate can just suddenly announce that he or she has a bastard, and that the media has forced him or her to admit it. (Maybe they can briefly flash a doll, or a stock photo of a cute kid making an awwww face.) They'll be stringing up reporters in no time!

UPDATE. The best video's been pulled, but Tom Robbins' play-by-play of the Dicker incident is a thing of beauty.

*UPDATE 2. Actually I should clarify that Paladino only claimed the Post had tried to take such pictures -- they haven't run in the paper yet. It would be a sucker's bet to take one side or the other in an honesty competition between Paladino and the Post.

UPDATE 3. Left Coast Rebel suggests it's a net plus for Paladino:

But NY is the place John Steinbeck once penned "neither good nor bad but unique." It's the home of mega-radio shock jock Howard Stern. NY is a place where polling shows that a majority of people in the state had no problem with Paladino's distasteful emails. It's a place where sometimes, the bad guy is hero.

As LCR's own link reveals, this finding regarding the "distasteful" Paladino emails (e.g. "Run, niggers, run") comes from an internal Paladino poll which, given the harem-scarem way that campaign is run, may or may not actually exist. Their claim is that "70 percent of Republican men said that they had received or forwarded the same [kind of emails]. And that 55 percent of the general electorate males had done the same thing." That claim's a little spongey -- I can say that I've gotten emails like this from my idiot friends, too, but that doesn't mean I approve of them, let alone that I would ever vote for a psychopath like Paladino -- though it's interesting these people would find it something to brag about, rather than being deeply ashamed, as a normal person would. Maybe Steven Thrasher was right!

SERENDIPITY. My old colleague Steven Thrasher has a story in the Voice about wingnuts gone wild, called "White America Has Lost Its Mind." Today the world has been very graciously corroborating his thesis -- first, with news of ACORN pimp James O'Keefe's planned sexual harassment of a CNN reporter, and then with rightblogger reactions to Thrasher's article.

The best of the lot take the traditional we'll-tell-you-who-the-real-racists-are position. "The author of this RACIST column works at NPR," yells Reliapundit. "If you substitute 'BLACK' for 'white,' you'd be fired for racism." Cripes, these black people are always getting away with shit.

Reliapundit also claims he and his imaginary friends aren't racist because "We'd've voted for Powell in 2000 - and elected him." I don't know why he's bragging on that, because in 2008 this is what he thought about Colin Powell:

ONCE AGAIN, COLIN POWELL PROVES HE'S A BIG FAT JERK

That big fat jerk Powell refused to go after Saddam in 1991. This was the primary mistake which led us to have to complete the job in 2003.

That big fat jerk Powell made an ass of himself with an awful WMD presentation at the UNSC.

That big fat jerk Powell got "played" by de Villepin at the UNSC and failed to get a second UNSCR in 2002...

Maybe Reliapundit means he would have supported Powell because he knew Powell's horrible record of failure would have made it impossible for any other black guy to get elected for years afterward.

At Big Hollywood Dana Loesch includes among her tales of Democratic racism "Obama: Blacks are a ‘Mongrel’ People," which I suppose means that liberal bigotry is so pervasive that even Obama hates black people -- either that, or Loesch has a spreadsheet called DEMS = RACIST and never checks her data before she dumps it. She also says Thrasher "has no clue what he’s talking about" regarding Shirley Sherrod, then goes on to explain that the civil rights worker was not misrepresented by the strangely-edited tape of her speech -- though even Andrew Breitbart admitted it was out of context -- but revealed to be racist against white people. Well, I suppose there are people who still think Dreyfus was guilty, too.

The moral of the story is, you can be fortunate in your enemies as well as in your friends. Congrats Steve!

UPDATE. Reason gives the libertarian response: We're not nuts, you're nuts!

UPDATE 2. Special guest appearance in comments by Reliapundit, who explains that he's a "registered democrat since 1974" who marched with MLK and the Black Panthers. What a long, strange trip it's been! He also claims "70% of the usa hates obama," and rebuffs several requests that he produce a citation for this finding.

SHORTER THEE ANCHORESS: I always disapprove of using kids in political ads, except when it's right-wing and aimed at unseating a Muslin.

THE BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM, PART 2,818,299. Thanks to Pour Me Coffee, whom you should follow, for pointing out this story at Fox Nation:



I understand the original headline was "President of the United States Loves Miles Davis," but not enough of their readers knew about Miles' stated desire to strangle a white man before he died.

UPDATE. They actually pulled the story off the website! If only it were possible to believe that they did so because they were ashamed. My guess is they're working on a version in which the message is conveyed, not with words and videos, but with MIDI files of "Cop Killer" and "Mind of a Lunatic" and animated gifs of Samuel L. Jackson.

Speaking of which:

UPDATE 2. At American Power, in a post timestamped well past Happy Hour, Donald Douglas:



After careful parsing of Douglas' gibberish ("MOFO CRACK PIPE"?), I have determined that he's trying to say, "I'm not a racist asshole, I'm just emulating other racist assholes."

LIFTING THE ROCK. Over at the Galt Gulch outlet store Reason, Steve Chapman says never mind all those protests and Koran-burnings, non-Muslim Americans and Muslim Americans get along great because capitalism. He starts by laying out the controversy thus:

On the one side is widespread opposition to the proposed Islamic center near ground zero in lower Manhattan, which the Republican nominee for governor of New York has promised to forcibly stop...

On the other side, you have the Lebanese-born man arrested for allegedly trying to set off a bomb near Wrigley Field in Chicago and Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood.

On the one hand, anti-Muslim bigots, and on the other, Muslim mass murderers -- America's toleration of whom is even more of a miracle than advertised! But seriously, folks, Chapman finds that "most American Muslims are about as radical as Jay Leno," and "only a quarter of them say they have ever suffered discrimination," which must be pretty good, because only a tiny minority of these citizens support Al Qaeda. Also, opposition to the Burlington Coat Factory Mosque is "restrained" to screaming about victory mosques and sharia, and the occasional act of violence. Thus,

The tensions and conflicts in evidence in our public debates do exist, but they give a misleading picture of modern American society. The reality is the one proclaimed by the Founders: E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

Say, did you know Reason has a comments section? Let's see how their libertarian readers celebrate their Muslim brothers and sisters:

You can have a favorable view of an organization who's sole purpose is violent Jihad but since you haven't acted yet you lack motivation? Is AQ now some sort of Islamic scouting organization?...

Oh good. Only 1 out of every 20 American Muslims have a favorable view of Al-Qaida. Thanks for quelling all my irrational neo-con fear Chapman... Just so I don't jump the gun and prematurely relapse into my former state of hate and fear from which I've purged myself, when does salivating bigotry become rational fear of an existential threat?

I used to be share Chapman's overly simplistic and naieve view. Then I actually interacted with South-Asians Muslims... I reject the default assumption that all Muslims are basically decent, hard-working, religion-of-peace types. That doesn't mean I think the plurality are the exact opposite. It means, I know enough about what they say when they're in their group, to not buy into this politically correct jargon about how they're patriotic Americans just like you and me...

I am dumbfounded at how many people attempting to claim nice-nice and politically correct about Islam have never considered dishonesty in their game theory...

The tone and preponderance of these comments are about what you'd expect to hear at an Andy McCarthy smoker. But in fairness, I think things may be a little worse at Stormfront.

I think the libertarian view of how tolerant the free market makes us would be more convincing if it weren't for libertarians.

FURTHER ADVENTURES IN THE WAR AGAINST COMMON SENSE. A press release for a Jon Stewart book has made its way to the National Review editorial cages. One passage:

The book ends with a plea to the aliens to reconstruct the human race from DNA in the hope that, with guidance from the visitors, “we could overcome the baser aspects of our nature… and give this planet the kind of caretakers it deserves,” revealing the tears behind Stewart’s clown.

Clumsy copy, but it seems to describe a standard satirical trope about man's misspent time on earth, seen in such disparate works as H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and the popular doggerel "Evolution -- The Monkey's Viewpoint."

John J. Miller, the Kulturkampfer who brought you "The 50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs," pulls it in through the bars and poops an analysis:

What a perfect embodiment of liberal utopianism: a call for extraterrestrials to make us better by changing who we are.

Within two weeks, expect the rightblogger bottom feeders to spread the word that Jon Stewart has betrayed America and declared his allegiance to alien powers.

Sometimes I think they must have classrooms where the teacher holds up a hard-boiled egg and asks, "Johnny, why is this conservative?" and if Johnny can come up with an answer like "Because it is nature improved by man!" or "Because it is suitable to fuel Jonah Goldberg's farts of wisdom!" he gets promoted.

UPDATE. Further down The Corner, we learn what happened to Jim Manzi, who was a reliably dunderheaded NatRev commenter until the Epistemic Closure fracas last April, when he criticized made man Mark Levin for taking the whole global warning denialism thing a little too far and was denounced for wrongthink by his fellow wingnuts. He writes from Paris:

Living in Europe has created for me a mostly pleasant sense of distance from a lot of the day-to-day of U.S. politics, hence my limited blogging over the past months. Or maybe it’s just that the warm summer breezes and French wines and cheeses have put my ambitions at bay.

Jesus Christ, he had to leave the country! These people take omerta pretty seriously.

ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM, PART 1,929,001. Another culture-war denunciation ("Hollywood Hates Capitalism") of commie movies like Wall Street, Avatar, Aliens, Mission Impossible:2, etc. (No, I'm not kidding.) Followed by an explanation that in real life companies that "break the rules" don't benefit from their crimes -- ask Goldman Sachs! (Which is doing fine, thanks, and advertising itself as the mentor of "10,000 small businesses," which those who are dumb enough to believe the rest of this crap just might also believe).

Newbies may be blinking, astonished, and assuming that this comes from National Review, Forbes, Weekly Standard, StormFront, or something like that. Regular readers will have already guessed it's from libertarian magazine Reason.

Refresh my memory: What's the difference between them and Republicans again?

UPDATE. In comments, some astute answers to my question. Susan of Texas: "Conservatives are authoritarian followers. Libertarians are authoritarian followers who think they are authoritarian leaders." By my life and my love of it, that's good.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Stephen Colbert Congressional appearance and the shitstorm that came with. The reactions of the usual blog dummies were funny enough, peppered as they were with the sort of accusations of ungood unfunniness you would expect from Stalinist goons -- for example, HillBuzz, which militated against laughter at unapproved targets:

Laura Ingraham called [Jon Stewart] a “sad clown”, because Dr. Utopia is failing so badly in the White House, his presidency is crumbling, and he’s leading Democrats to a midterm election that will be the biggest political disaster for a party since 1896.

Yesterday, his cohort in shenanigans, Stephen Coldbear, made an absolute ass of himself at a Congressional hearing and humiliated the Democrats who invited him to testify (as a migrant worker, no less). Stewart and Coldbear will join together the day before Halloween to make further asses of themselves at the Lincoln Memorial, where they will attempt to make fun of the Restoring Honor rally we went to last month.

These guys are ridiculous, but not in the way Comedy Central wants or needs.

Da, da, please to refrain from wronglaugh at so-called comedians, and to laugh instead at funny names made up by Politburo! Victory in culture war is within our grasp. Now, a serving of gruel and performance of four-hour ballet! As Chairman Mao said, that's entertainment!

More interesting to me, though, was the cooperation of several Lamestream Media outlets like Politico and Chuck Todd in denying the official Good Humor certification to Colbert. It seems he stepped a little close to their toes, if not upon them.

You can read the column here.

THE BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM, PART 1,543,929. I hate to make this Megan McArdle week, but she's been spectacularly awful lately. After her "How to Survive a Layoff" post -- an astonishingly condescending, EST-type exercise clearly meant to be enjoyed by other screw-the-poor types, not by actual jobless people, who probably feel bad enough without McArdle telling them what wasters they are -- she actually composed something called "Why Are The Rich So Rich?" that basically answered the question with Beats me, but it's definitely not because they have some unfair advantage!

Now she's onto school loans. Perhaps to compensate for his frequent logrolling, she quotes Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds to the effect that we just make people soft by letting them take subsidized loans to get into college. As anyone who actually walks this planet knows, people take on these ever-more-expensive loans and the years of debt that come with because they want to get jobs -- increasingly scarce jobs -- and live, if not better (who can expect that anymore?), then perhaps almost as good as their parents. But the Perfesser and McArdle treat this motivation like some kind of ridiculous presumption, as if a beggar had come to their door and asked for his tin cup to be filled with mocha latte.

Nonetheless McArdle does acknowledge that the poor students have been exploited -- by the schools, who have upped their tuitions to capture the increased loan money ("It's hardly surprising that colleges began to claim more and more of the surplus created by their college degree"). And of course by the dad-gum Gummint, which subsidizes the loans, thereby enabling the scam.

Guess who never gets mentioned in her post? The banks. Banks whose profits on college loans have exploded thanks to the recent boom market in private loans. From MSNBC:

Private loans reached a high of 23 percent of the student-loan market in 2008. The number has fallen since the credit markets seized up but will probably go up again. These, not federally guaranteed loans, are the ones implicated in the worst stories of student debt. It's not just undergraduate programs but graduate and especially professional schools where this has become a huge issue. That's why the American Bar Association, worried that excessive private loan debt is keeping students out of public-interest fields, has pushed for an increase in the (professional school) subsidized-loan limits.

Wonder how McArdle missed this piece of the puzzle.

My favorite sentence in the whole thing:

Who but a lunatic would loan money to an eighteen year old with no job and no credit record, in the hopes that they will graduate college and begin speedy repayment?

Too bad she wasn't around to say this when FDR was signing the GI Bill. It would have made history more interesting, and then we'd be slightly less likely to miss its lessons.

MEGAN McARDLE'S ADVICE FOR OLD PEOPLE WHO LOSE THEIR JOBS: Have more money, and get to work.

UPDATE. You don't get the full flavor of these McArdle posts without the spices added by the Patrick Bateman impersonators who populate her comments section. In this case they talk about what a terrible thing it is that unemployment insurance exists, the liberal bias of the New York Times (one gripes that the paper gave a better review to Menace II Society than to The Pursuit of Happyness), and how, on those rare and justified occasions when they were out of work, unlike the wastrels under discussion they lived in a paper bag in a septic tank to economize. (Now, of course, they are all rich arbitrageurs.)

If you want to know what happens when libertarians are in power, try to imagine a boot kicking at a sleeping bum, forever.

ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM, CONT. On the Bill Maher show, Jon Hamm (Mad Men) said some stuff:

Actor Jon Hamm said that the "Luo tribesman" statement [made about Obama] was racist. "That's what it's all sort of couched in ... that's the secret agenda." He then added this: "When they say [Obama] is a 'Luo tribesman,' it's all sort of code"...

Hamm finished up the "racism" discussion with a jab at conservatives. He said that the Tea Party keeps ta[l]king about "taking back" America. "Well," he said, "who are 'we' taking it back from?" Hamm then concluded with this remark: "I'm pretty sure ... 'we' as Americans still have America. I don't know who 'we' need to take it back from." The crowd applauded when he was done.

This is just good sense. The whole Gingrich-D'Souza Luo thing is clearly racist, and the TP "taking America back" message is clearly populist piffle by which well-funded Republican pressure groups try to position themselves as the Forgotten Man.

As followers of rightbloggers may have already guessed, this was seized upon by the usual idiots with Gol-Durn-Hollyweird rants like "is there something that happens to you when you become a huge star in Hollywood... that makes you unable to understand that Americans are often partial to limited government" etc.

There is a particularly ripe example out now, entitled "Don Draper Thinks You Might Have a Hidden, Racist Agenda" (even though its author says of the "racist" charge, "the actor never actually says it outright"). It's got all the rightwing culture war crap you've learned to expect from such outlets: The author laments that "actors, musicians, and comedians" have "exceptionally dumb political views" (like the Dixie Chicks, amirite? Shut up and sing!). He "wonders how Mad Men star Jon Hamm would react to Maher asking about the 'violent' nature of Islam." He bets Hamm would be all "reasonable" about that, yet he smears good tea party Americans on Bill Maher by almost-sorta saying they're racist. Etc.

This was published on the blog at Reason, where consumers who have some lingering doubts about going full wingnut can get their talking points in the "libertarian" flavor. In advertising, they call this a niche market.

UPDATE. Commenter Bob asks, "Okay, so how long before there's a full blown Mad Men boycott by people who already weren't watching it?" The hardcore cases are way ahead of you, Bob -- they recognized long ago that even such seemingly innocuous entertainments as Paul Blart: Mall Cop are full of liberal propaganda, and have stopped engaging so-called "pop culture" altogether. Bible Reagan puppet shows for the kids on Sunday will suffice. The rest of the week's for Galt-Goin'!