LINK AND GROW RICH! Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews the National Marriage Project's W. Bradford Wilcox, who tells us that rich people are better at staying married than poor people, which proves (as veteran followers of the schtick will have already guessed) that marriage causes wealth, and it's a pity more paupers don't realize that just popping by City Hall for a license will substantially increase their earning power.

So far so what, but Wilcox's proposed solutions include one that is new to me:

It also means that highly educated Americans need to put their privilege in service of the public good by doing a better job of extending their marriage mindset to the rest of America. To wit, they need to stress the value of marriage in our nation’s companies, schools, social-service agencies, hospitals, religious institutions, and, especially, popular culture.

I would dearly love to see teams of rich people and Justices of the Peace cruising the charity wards, offering patients the quickie weddings that will make them rich enough to afford better medical treatment. And maybe NMP can pony up for some promo, to run during whatever TV shows indigent unmarrieds are watching these days (Sarah Palin's Alaska, maybe), and put "highly educated Americans" before the public with the good news:

OK, BOYS, ROUTINE 12! Thanks to Eric Boehlert for doing the grunt work:

The specifics in the case that [Byron] York highlights today are almost irrelevant. Or at least they're irrelevant to the Obama-hating bloggers who will link to York's insipid attack. But for the record, York's gotcha is based on the fact that when honoring a recent Nobel Peace Prize winner, Obama made reference to the the fact that, last year, he was honored with a Nobel Peace Prize.

Yes, Obama stressed that he was not nearly as deserving of the honor as this year's recipient. But the mere fact that Obama briefly mentioned the connection between himself and this year's honoree proved (are you following along?) that he's arrogant and can't stop talking about himself.

So it goes. I wonder if, amongst themselves, they call for these routines by number, as the Bowery Boys did.

SPLIT RUN. Ole Perfesser Instapundit:

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH: “It is not any kind of orthodox Republican talking point that Barack Obama is ‘an alien and a threat.’”

Elsewhere and previously:

The Alien in the White House -- Dorothy Rabinowitz, Wall Street Journal

Obama the Alien -- Larry Kudlow, National Review

Alien Obama... The heartland of America, the small towns and suburbs, the "baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet" that forms the core of our cultural experience is alien to Barack Obama. He cannot love it, share it, or reflect it, because he does not know it. -- Confederate Yankee

CHRIS MATTHEWS: He [Obama] wasn’t born here and he’s never gone through a naturalization that you know of, right?
G. GORDON LIDDY: Not that I know of.
MATTHEWS: Therefore he’s here illegally. You’re saying he’s an undocumented alien.
LIDDY: Illegal alien.

Etc. And that's just skimming the cream, and not accounting the frequent conservative comparisons of Obama to Hitler (by such fringe figures as former presidential speechwriter Ben Stein*), to Stalin, et alia. The question isn't whether top-drawer wingnuts say these things, but why some among them occasionally deny it.

For obvious reasons we can rule out shame. The simplest explanation is niche marketing. They can always count upon a certain percentage of goobers to buy the Godwinesque claims; it only takes a little extra effort to assure the higher-end targets whose vanity requires it that they have nothing in common with that crowd. They get the prestige advertising. And the beauty part is, once they've bought the car, their vanity will also prevent them from noticing when they see the same model on the road with the tailpipe smoking, the muffler throwing sparks, and a Obamanazi sticker on the bumper.

(* For the passive-aggressive version, see as always Ross Douthat.)

UPDATE. Jeffrey Kramer in comments: "No no, those aren't Orthodox Republicans saying those uncouth things, they're Lubavitcher Republicans. "

IS THIS MUMBLECORE? Blue Valentine is one of those E-for-effort kitchen-sink dramas that I usually have a hard time finishing -- like Frozen River, which I abandoned two-thirds of the way through, wanting to know what happened but not enough to keep watching it. So I may not be the target nor the best judge, though I did get all the way through this one.

I can't fault anyone's skill; the acting is terrific all the way up and down, and I have to credit Derek Cianfrance and the writers for scrupulous fairness toward the characters, and even for style, on the low-key terms of the story; the painfully slow unfolding of the scenes is thoroughly appropriate, and the time shifts, while unannounced, are never jarring and make perfect sense even before we have enough evidence to to confirm that while the relationship at the center of the movie goes through changes, the members of it are victims of something like fate.

Early on we get the impression Cindy (Michelle Williams) is much less of a loser than Dean (Ryan Gosling); she is (was) interested in her high school studies, he's a dropout; her displays of affection toward her grandmother make a better impression than Dean's emotional awkwardness with everyone but their kid -- though we can see the depth of his feelings from the start, he usually has to strain them through filters of rage or comedy, and we can immediately see this has something to do with the shit their life together has become.

But as we learn more about them, we realize that Cindy isn't much smarter than Dean, at least where it counts. She's as much a victim of her crummy, small-town environment as he (it's Brooklyn, but sufficiently deep in Brooklyn that it may as well be Oneonta), but her reaction -- defensively sinking into herself -- doesn't work any better for her than Dean's passive-aggressive macho behavior works for him. [Spoiler alert.] Dean's willingness to marry Cindy when she's got a kid coming from her asshole boyfriend (Mike Vogel) is stupid, if brave and romantic, but what should we think about her willingness to accept it? Dean is a bad risk even in her narrow circumstances -- that is, if she wants something more than devotion. And we quickly learn that devotion isn't going to satisfy her.

Maybe the preferred way to look at it is as a drama of acceptance -- "How can you trust your feelings when they can just disappear like that?" Cindy asks her grandma when we get to see how lousy her family life has been; "I think the only way to know is to have the feelings," replies the grandma; her follow-up, "You're a nice person," is the non-sequitur that tips us to the central dilemma -- good intentions are worse than useless in the ugly business of living, of which we must make the best we can.

I'm very willing to believe that it reveals a flaw in my character, or a devotion to absurd romanticism, that I was unhappy with Blue Valentine. I admire the strenuous honesty of the thing. The aborted abortion is notable for its unpleasant realism, as are the sex scenes (yeah, I know, fellas, but believe me, you aren't going to enjoy the copious Michelle Williams nudity); even the sweet moments between the lovers get so weighted down by the accumulated details of their lives that by the time we revisit their wedding at the end, I was fixated on the "or for worse" part Dean is so insistent upon. That isn't about silly romcom spats or crises with neat resolutions, but endless misery redeemed, if it is, by the simple willingness to stick. (It's impossible to believe Dean isn't coming back, nor that Cindy won't take him.) Maybe it takes a more developed consciousness than mine to appreciate that.

I mentioned the acting, and should mention it again, since it's really fine. Ryan Gosling reminds me of a Larry Fessenden character -- a sharp, expansive personality formed by circumstances into a particularly inept macho man. Michelle Williams gets the better end of the deal; when she's not immersed in deep suffering, she is allowed to be radiant, and makes the most of those opportunities.

BY THE NUMBERS. Victor Davis Hanson has a long complaint against Julian Assange. Here are some of his key points:

•  Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ."
• "Climategate."
• "Hollywood agents, producers, and financiers," and their product, Redacted and Rendition. [What, no Lions for Lambs?]
• "Harvard or Yale tenure committees."
•   George Soros.
•   The "let-it-all-hang-out Sixties."

His conclusion is that Assange is a narcissist, a term of disapprobation normally saved for Barack Obama, but his point, such as it is, is that WikiLeaks is like a lot of other things he doesn't like.

It doesn't matter whether it's a genuine domestic issue, or the actions of the foreign leader of a stateless group which have been denounced by the Obama Administration, or a lampshade or a hobby-horse. The Mad Libs never change, because the subject doesn't matter nearly as much as the intended audience, which apparently finds certain words as reliably funny as audiences of Hollywood comedies find swearing geriatrics and blows to the crotch.

ELIZABETH EDWARDS R.I.P. Here's a lovely pre-emptive tribute by Ann Althouse:

She did not apologize to us for participating in the deceit perpetrated by John Edwards, which skewed the 2008 Democratic primaries.

Her commenters are even better:

Its hard to take this seriously when a Libtard weighs in to browbeat the OP over "compassion"...

I just realized Eliz Edwards is a lot like Hillary was in overlooking their husband's affairs for the sake of political ambition...

Also, there's a price for polticizing the Wellstone funeral, politicizing the Correta Scott King funeral, politicizing the death of Ted Kennedy, etc. The Left doesn't treat its own dead with respect. The corpse is a political prop. So it means very little when they whine about not showing respect for the death of Elizabeth Edwards...

Elizabeth Edwards participated in the use of her disease to manipulate public opinion in her husband's quest for power. For that, she is accountable. I'd rather say a prayer for the 20 unknown human beings in the world who died while I wrote these 3 sentences....

That last one was from Professor Althouse herself. This is my favorite, in a way:

She's saying the ends don't justify the means. She used people like Ann, traded on her victimization by Cancer and John's affairs to deceive us.

We gave her a pass out of sympathy, only to discover she was lying to us. Now we're expected to give sympathy at her passing?

Meh.

Can't you just picture this person ensconced in a Barcalounger, skimming the cable channels and going "Yea" or "Meh" as lives and deaths pass across his or her field of vision? Thank your parents or whoever taught you better that you didn't wind up like that.

GIFT HORSE. Dave Weigel:

You could seriously argue that if Democrats approve extensions of all the Bush tax cuts, it would be as big a cave-in than George H.W. Bush's cave-in on the 1990 budget.

Hold on. Didn't George H.W. Bush accede to an increase in taxes? This time we're keeping tax cuts, doing more tax cuts, and extending unemployment benefits. It's Christmas in December! As shown time and again, the American people love tax cuts, and believe they're magic, even when the only evidence of magic is clouds of smoke that are more likely produced by a faulty boiler.

This is more like, "This dinner we're writing a bad check to cover is as disastrous as when we pawned Grandma's punchbowl for food money."

If you don't like this arrangement, heed the advice of your old pal Rich Lowry:

The liberal angst about Obama seems profoundly misplaced to me. Liberals should care about one thing and one thing only: Re-electing Obama.

Lowry portrays this as a possible way to preserve what reforms Obama has already achieved, but since everyone's allegedly playing 3-D chess now, we may assume that Lowry is just making his meta-countermove:

Fortunately, [liberals'] unreasonableness may get the best of them. Katrina vanden Heuvel writes in the Washington Post...

And when you've lost Katrina vanden Heuvel, you've lost the The Nation. At the end Lowry ducks -- " I fear, though... liberals will bond again with Obama as better than the alternative" -- and Daniel Foster grabs the ball:

Meanwhile, some folks on the Left act like he surrendered Washington to Lord Cornwallis. Liberals are never happy.

Yeah -- they just don't see the magic.

MONEY FOR NOTHING. The big tax-cut giveaway Obama just announced -- assuming that it accurately portrays the deal with the GOP -- demonstrates one unremarked fact: Republicans don't give a shit about the deficit. No sane person thinks we can even begin to scale that back just with cuts. Yet they just agreed to abandon the easiest route to new revenue, plus Democratic "concessions" that close others.

I wonder who else has noticed.

UPDATE. Brilliant comments here, especially as regards the general U.S. strategy the deal suggests -- as Tiny Tyrant puts it, "a mad scramble for the loot before the whole thing implodes! From that point there will be suffering by all, just a little less for those with the loot."

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about two Constitutional Amendments the rightbloggers are pushing. Last week Dana Loesch was loudly insisting that the libertarian and evangelical factions of conservatism had to keep together if the Republic were to be saved, but I notice that neither of the Amendments that conservatives consider important enough to discuss are about abortion. This would seem to indicate where the juice is in that coalition; they finally get pumped to change the Constitution, and it's all about state legislatures.

If, as is likely, the Amendments don't fly, interested parties will try something on a more grassroots level. The Roanoke, Virginia Tea Party:

This section deals with a variety of nullification bills that have sponsors. So our task on December 2 will be to see if we want to support any of these other nullification bill in lieu of the Freedom For Virginians Act (FFVA) which does not have a sponsor yet...

The FFVA, in part states:

As a Sovereign state, the Commonwealth of Virginia reserves the right to determine whether any law, regulation, executive order or Judicial Ruling goes beyond the powers vested to the Federal Government by Virginia and the several states that created the United States Constitution. Any laws, regulations, executive orders, Treaties or Judicial Rulings from the United States that the Commonwealth of Virginia deems not within said enumerated powers shall be considered moot and unenforceable within its borders.

The Tea People hasten to assure us that this does not mean secession, which I confess disappoints me.

I Love You Phillip Morris. Along with the pleasure of seeing Jim Carrey have sex with men, this is best seen as a big gay parody of Catch Me If You Can. The gag, at least initially, is that Carrey -- who has an authenticity fetish that manifests in compulsive fraud -- gives everyone what they want and expect, and they go for it, and for a while it's every bit as compelling as Spielberg's version while being totally, self-evidently bogus. The reduction of prison brutality to cheap yuks, and of Carrey's courtship of Ewan McGregor to something like Carry On Prison Queers, made me hope they'd go all the way with this subversive strategy into uncharted territory.

Alas, no: Big-movie sentimentality comes in hard. Once he's got a good, relatively straight gig and life with McGregor, Carrey gets offended by how "boring" his colleagues are (that one of them restates his joke as one about "a nigger and a jew" is the cheesy underliner that's meant to help us buy it) and goes balls-out with his shenanigans, leading to new incarceration. This gives him a new reason to want to get out -- love for his partner -- and for un-good measure the filmmakers give us an even cheesier underliner in a flashback involving Carrey's AIDS-afflicted ex-partner.

Then we get the strings and star-affliction and it all goes to shit. The final scam is supposed to be impressive, and gives Carrey some Oscar-worthy acting hacks. I feel sorry for the real person Carrey plays, Steven Russell (to whose fate we are alerted in supers), and it would be nice if this movie gave some attention to his sad case. But either the ending is a failure of nerve, or the movie should have been much, much sadder.

THIS AIN'T ENGLAND. The conservative war on that bastard FDR proceeds apace. Some Heritage guys have pulled Churchill into it. Churchill disapproved of socialism, FDR was a socialist, therefore Churchill disapproved of FDR, despite appearances.

Churchill commends Roosevelt’s desire to improve the economic well-being for poorer Americans, but he critiques Roosevelt’s policies toward trade unionism and attacks on wealthy Americans as harmful to the free enterprise system. Drawing on Britain’s experience with trade unions, Churchill understood that unions can cripple an economy: “when one sees an attempt made within the space of a few months to lift American trade unionism by great heaves and bounds [to equal that of Great Britain],” one worries that result could be “a general crippling of that enterprise and flexibility upon which not only the wealth, but the happiness of modern communities depends.”

And this was borne out by the great U.S. General Strike of 1946. Next: Thomas Jefferson appears at a seance and denounces Social Security.

ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM. Over at Reason they're talking about doing away with public roads. I'm not shitting you.

"There's certainly no reason that private firms couldn't run all the toll roads in the United States," says Professor Bruce Benson of Florida State. Back in colonial times we had lots of private roads, it seems, and if you're the sort of guy who wears a tricorner and yells about the death of liberty, here's a new opportunity to emulate the lifestyle of the Founders.

There are even today some private roads; their owners "can limit access to them if they want to… they can tell somebody to leave if they don't like them being there." (Comes the revolution, if you're thrown off an existing road because the owner doesn't like SUVs, longhairs, or whatever, you can go build your own. Freedom!) Whereas gummint roads are "for the most part free access roads. That means anyone with a car can get on them, or a truck. They don't have to pay the cost that they impose on other people or on the road itself."

Why have the American People tolerated this outrageous interstate highway system for so long? Because, the Professor suggests, they are unaware that they pay for this socialist scheme; the gummint has deceived them by funding such boondoggles indirectly through gasoline taxes, which citizens presumably only pay because they think it's going to something useful, and consider the highways a gift from God. But free-drivers are ever a problem, and thus the people abuse the roads by driving on them overmuch, leading to damage which we certainly can't expect the gummint to repair. That's the people's money.

I'd imagine that, just as New York subway ridership went up when the Metrocard let riders move more freely through the system for a fixed price, highway use would go down when every Tom, Dick, and Exxon owned his or her or its piece of the road. But the Professor is more optimistic. He believes "there won't be tolls everywhere" because when the new age comes there will be "groups and firms who want people to come to their location" and will thus build free roads. The example of such groups/firms he offers is the casino owners of Las Vegas, who may get together and build a superhighway so people can get to their gaming tables, the present gummint highways having crumbled or been destroyed in the Great Awakening. (Given that the owners would retain their right to refuse service, prospective drivers will probably have to undergo a credit check.)

The route would be an efficient, straight shot from Los Angeles, and not subject to the vagaries of politics, under which "very powerful Senators" currently make highways go through their dinky towns to grub votes. The new barons of transportation will not be thus tempted, because they won't need votes. FREEDOM!

I don't see how we can take the Tea Party seriously until they get behind this 100%.

A MIGHTY FORTRESS. At Big Journalism, Dana Loesch is mad at a Newsweek column (also referred to as "Media"):

“Most evangelical Christian conservatives I know would at least be uneasy about the prospect of the government leaving the poor to their own devices and having churches pick up the slack,” he says.

Wrong. Heinously, irresponsibly, embarrassingly wrong. This from Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. His sound bites are all about stoking libertarians to feel like disenfranchised underdogs with the goal of rousing them to lash out at the big bully Christian conservatives.

I'm not sure how that's supposed to work -- maybe she means the libertarians and glibertarians, who are warm to see Americans deprived of social services and have the upper hand in the Republican Party now, are supposed to be outraged that some followers of Jesus Christ -- maybe the weak sisters in the GOP evangelical bloc that came apart in the late 00s -- take the "least of my brethren" stuff seriously. If so, they don't know Christians like Dana Loesch knows them:

Lynn should perhaps study the faith before he attempts to try to emotionally blackmail the faithful. That’s precisely what should happen: churches should be doing more, people of faith should be doing more and want to do more because big government is an attempt to remove action from faith thus making the faith less viable. When taxes go up, tithing goes down. When the government assumes the role of the shepherd, the power of churches is diminished. It’s another way to attack religion and for the state to eradicate it from society.

Thus, the more people we can turn out into the street, the stronger the churches get, because the increasing masses of the poor, having no recourse, will be forced to turn to them for soup and a cot. Then we'll have a healthy society (which, despite Loesch's inapposite citation of the Declaration of Independence, sounds rather medieval.)

Perhaps sensing she has not made the sale, Loesch then yells for a while about how the "various groups comprising the tea party movement" better stick together or they'll never overcome "the left: the communists, the socialists, the say-their-anarchists-but-are-actually-socialists."

She needn't worry, nor does she seem to know how the game is played:

When out of power, you rouse the Christians with culture war controversies -- which seem to be making a comeback now. When in power, you talk about Jesus and hand out presents, as Bush did when he got into office, showing his appreciation for the evangelicals who supported him by ladling out cash in the form of "Faith-Based and Community Initiatives."

Loesch appears to believe that the Tea Party thing is all new, and those who once had their hands out are now pushing away. But the hands are always out, and the only ones who ever really get pushed are those with the least power.

THEATER NIGHT. Tim Miller has been at the performance-art game for decades, and was a player in the NEA funding wars of the 80s, which seem to be making a comeback these days. He tours a lot and has a new show, Lay of the Land, at P.S. 122, where I saw him Thursday night.

Though I thought I'd seen every crackpot thing in New York in the 80s (I recall with particular fondness one performance in some fetid basement where a guy smashed beer bottles against the wall and then demolished a cinder block with a sledgehammer), I'd never seen Miller work before. Lay of the Land was mostly story-telling about his challenged life as a gay man in unfriendly America, with some slides and props. His stories, from his childhood and adulthood, explained both the origins and the depths of his outrage, which has led him into political action as well as performances.

However, the impression he left me was not of outrage, but of disciplined passion. As with many other performance artists I've seen, evident expense of energy seems to be part of his act; he motormouthed, he gesticulated, he stalked the stage. But he wasn't sloppy and I never got the feeling that he was trying to alert us to his capacity to go suddenly to outrage or violence (the flashing of which trump card is not unknown among many kinds of performers). He has obviously worked to keep his body, breathing and enunciation in condition, and the whole thing was carefully modulated. What tension there was came from the stories.

The political attitude expressed by those stories would be familiar, perhaps overly so, to anyone who would go to such a performance; it was his metaphors, and the eloquent way he expressed them, that put it as far as it went above agitprop. At one point he described himself as an already-gay kid having a dinner-table argument with his father about going to a baseball game, and suddenly choking on a piece of chuck steak. This led quickly to both lascivious and existential references of "biting off more than I can chew," to his feeling of being choked as a homosexual in a country that wants him silent and invisible, and (when the father prepares to perform an emergency tracheotomy on him) to the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac, to Caravaggio images of which he used to masturbate. It's no shock Tony Kushner is a fan of Miller's. They both have that tendency to reach through the ridiculous to the sublime.

At one point Miller seemed ready (if the audience would support him) to burn a flag in protest. I was surprised. Then he said he couldn't do it, even if they wanted him to, because he still believed in the promise of America. I still entertain a sneaking suspicion that he isn't eager to bite off more than he can chew anymore -- NEA pays some of P.S. 122's bills. A more charitable explanation would be that Miller, who's talented enough to have done plenty of other things with his time, is not inclined toward the quick shock, but for the long haul, if it's more likely to lead to victory.

LIF, LIBERY, AND THE PURSUIT OF BULSHIT. Now what can we do at The Corner to make politics out of a World Series bet? Oh Jesus:

Before the series began, [Arlen] Specter, confident in the bats of Ryan Howard and Chase Utley, made a wager with [Nancy] Pelosi. And this afternoon he paid up, via an enormous Hershey’s chocolate cake emblazoned with an image of Independence Hall.

For Pelosi, it may be a bittersweet gift: a reminder of a baseball triumph . . . and of the libery-loving tea parties which led to her party’s shellacking.

Being the world-record holder in typos, I wouldn't normally twit Costa or anyone for misspelling, but it's a gloriously apposite detail in the midst of all that hooey.

A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION. Ann Althouse equates liberalism with GWAR. Since the current Administration has been offering mostly Muzak, I see this as an advance, but only if GWAR serves as a gateway drug to the original Stooges. Liberals need more of a "Search and Destroy" ethos.

Professor Althouse, check out the Mentors. It's worse than you thought!

UPDATE. In comments, Professor Althouse engages! Always happy to see her here.

I'm equating Bloggingheads.tv and its visitors with liberalism. The GWAR video, which shows the graphic depiction of torturing and killing a woman, is presented by the website for its readers amusement. My point, which I make extremely concisely at the link, but will make verbosely here, is that liberals often put party politics ahead of feminist values, and when they do, I like to point it out. If the female victim were not Sarah Palin, the feminist issue would be obvious.

I have no idea what she means. Bloggingheads is liberal? (You could have fooled me.) The members of GWAR are liberals? (ADDED: Ahem. Thanks, jsacto!) The hordes of drunken fans are liberals? Maybe I should have gone to law school.

I wonder what the political demographics are for Lingerie Football.

UPDATE II. Wait, I get it -- Bloggingheads is Jewish! And you know how they vote.

I'm beginning to think this is all a plot to get people to watch videos on Bloggingheads. Well played, Professor!

SERVICE ADVISORY. I played around with the template here this evening. Nothing fancy, just a different Blogger template into which I could easily add features I'm too stupid and lazy to jerry-rig with massive workarounds. I wanted to keep the old comments despite our regular problems with the system because they're so good, but it wasn't working.

I fear the old comments may be lost in the next edition. Can you live with that? A few years ago all old comments were expunged when my previous service shut down; I hated to lose those, too, but we are but a moment's sunlight fading in the grass and all that.

Don't worry, whatever I do alicublog will probably remain butt-ugly.

THIS IS YOUR FUTURE. The new Republican Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, wants us to know that Wisconsin is now "open for business," and Remapping Debate wants us to know what he likely means by that, focusing on Walker's pledge to "require state agencies to review [business] permit applications within 60 days of receipt and approve or deny them within 180 days or else they will be presumed approved":

Wisconsin’s Commerce Department currently insures that businesses meet the regulatory standards the state sets before issuing them a permit to do business in the state. Walker would transfer the regulatory functions of the state Commerce Department to the relevant state agencies for the specific industry -- the norm, actually, before former Republican Governor Tommy Thompson incorporated many regulatory functions into the Commerce Department’s granting of permits.

But the Commerce Department wouldn’t be stepping out of the process. It would be changing hats. Walker would reconfigure the Department as an advocate for private industry in negotiating the regulatory demands of state agencies. Instead of the Commerce Department acting as a gatekeeper -- protecting the public interest in, say, workplace safety -- before issuing permits to do business, the new agency would advocate for the business, becoming, potentially, the adversary of state agencies seeking to insure compliance with government standards.

Remapping Debate also gives us a taste -- sometimes tinged with animal excrement -- of what this could mean for neighbors of the state's factory farms, which "account for only 2 percent of Wisconsin’s farms, but 50 percent of its output from animal-based agriculture," and one of which, per Midwest Environmental Advocates, is "the state’s fourth largest source of sewage, lagging only behind the cities of Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay."

Who knows, maybe the new state administration (Republicans now run both houses of the legislature) will wind up balancing community interests in a thoughtful manner. But with jobs everyone's #1 issue (Wisconsin unemployment is at 7.8 percent), large-business interests have a tremendous advantage over environmental interests, as citizens (as suggested by their votes) increasingly acknowledge. The Republicans react accordingly ("the House Appropriations Committee will be exercising its prerogative to withhold funding for prospective EPA regulations and de-fund through the rescissions process many of those already on the books").

The Atlantic has today a slideshow of the "30 Most Dynamic Cities in the World" as found by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. Only one U.S. city, Austin, is on the list; the winners are mostly in places like India and China -- which make things foreigners want to buy, and which also have less exacting standards than we do at present, to put it mildly, when it comes to balancing community needs against commercial growth. They are slowly moving in our direction, while we appear to be moving rapidly in theirs. Wisconsin is exporting less milk these days, but they and the rest of America seem to be importing ideas about growth from the developing world at a fast rate.

THE OLD BAG OF TRICKS. The booboisie have caught up with that gay show at the National Portrait Gallery I mentioned yesterday.

Prepare For Massive Christian Riots In 3... 2... 1...(Update)

No, wait. Christian don't riot over this stuff, so it is okay to offend them...

Why riot, when you can call in the mullahs? John Boehner and Eric Cantor squawked, and the Gallery pulled the ant-covered Jesus, though the clown fucking a skeleton is apparently safe, at least until they need something to make a new stink over.

I keep hearing about what an innovation the Tea Party Republican Party is, but so far it looks like Jesse Helms all over again.

SHORTER ARMED LIBERAL: James Fallows claims that liberals who denounced civil rights offenses in the Bush era still denounce them in the Obama era. But that's not the point; the point is that Toby Keith song, "Beer for My Horses." I really like that song, especially the part about lynching, but liberals hate it. I rest my case!