WHO WAS TODAY'S BIGGEST ASSHOLE? Ben Domenech, gay-judge-hunter? (Or the CBS News exec who published his stuff?) Or the Cali financial planner who took to the Wall Street Journal to revive the old Go Galt schtick, only with even more whining?

Ah, let's give it to Dreher. He's always a safe choice.

JOLLY GOOD SHOW. Watching what I guess amounts to the PM Debate in Britain. The moderator is running a tight ship, but that and the jarring intro make this look too much like a game show. Will the Leaders Debate losers hug the winner at the end?

First module is on immigration, and while all three contenders agree immigration is a good thing (Mark Steyn is screaming at his telly, "TALK ABOUT THE DARKIES!"), Cameron wants a cap; Clegg says he wants to make sure hospitals and football teams can still get immigrants, and Brown says he's handling it.

Ah, Cameron's talking about "people who don't want to work." Steyn has risen! And telling stories about a homicidal burglar who "could be out of prison in four and a half years." Ooooh, was he a sooty?

Not that I know shit about shit, but I would think Brown benefits (yes, I know only his own constituents vote for him) by being called "Gordon" by the others. It does more to humanize him than the poor man can do for himself.

Anyone else watching this?

UPDATE. Aw Jeez, Clegg tells a story about a guy whose house was burgled while he attended his father's funeral. He should have brought out a little music box and played sad music.

UPDATE 2. Liveblogs! Libs here. Funny Socialist Scots here. WSJ here. Dr. Samuel Johnson (in period drag!) here.

UPDATE 3. "Right of recall"? "A House of Lords that is elected rather than hereditary"? What a wrecker this Brown is! Has he ever held office before?

UPDATE 4. Ha! "I met a young lady the other day who said she was sick of being used in madeup anecdotes."

UPDATE 5. Dear God: Gordon Brown talks for two minutes about supporting the troops. First the pubs started selling Budweiser, now this! America ruins everything!

IT'S A FAIR COP. BUT SOCIETY'S TO BLAME!

You know I'm the last person to want to cut the Catholic Church any slack over clerical child sex abuse.

Says Rod Dreher. Yes, that Rod Dreher.

But it must be said, especially these days, that it's not only Catholic bishops who have failed to halt the sexualization of children. We are all complicit. As awful as the Catholic bishops have been on protecting kids, children would be far better off in a culture run by the moral convictions doctrines of the Catholic bishops than the one we have, run by the moral convictions doctrines of commercial interests.

If only we had the theocracy Dreher desires, priests would stop raping little boys.

Oh, wait, it gets better:

As awful as the 1950s church was, with abuse of children going on behind a veil of sacred secrecy, is it really true that kids back then were worse off than kids today, in terms of the moral environment?

You know, he's got a point. Even if your little boy was caught by one of the chickenhawk priests and fucked in the ass, he still wouldn't have heard a single rap record.

Better still, the update: After the expected, "Don't you n00bs know I was personally agonized over this thing, and that trumps any number of tore-up little-boy anuses?*" he gets to the money shot:

We sexualize our children, then are shocked, shocked when people treat them like sexual objects.

Why he didn't just call the post "Whores! You're all Whores of Babylon!" I'll never know.

(* Not a direct quote.)

UPDATE. Commenter Aaron Baker correctly points out the similar and similarly idiotic argument of Ross Douthat, ably plunked by Henry Farrell here. The Right's Catholics and Catholics Emeritae are accustomed to pin all sex crimes on Dirty Fucking Hippies. And they don't bother to change strategies when the fault obviously lies closer to home. Infallibility will do that for you.

SHUT-INS. For a bunch of people who claim -- and have claimed every year since the invention of blogs -- that the Main Stream Media is in its death-throes and soon everyone will get their news from Instapundit and Jeff Goldstein, they sure do spend a lot of time harassing newspapermen.

My favorite part of the post is Scott Johnson's straight-faced observation, "If you have been following the underlying controversy with any care, you know that Mr. Farrell has the better of this exchange," which is rather like saying, "You will notice that no one has refuted the arguments of the homeless man yelling at Fifth and Main." Also amusing are the entreaties of the poor Washington Post ombudsman, trying to get Farrell to recognize that he is not talking to a gigantic straw man named MSM but a real person with a specific job ("The McClatchy story is of no interest to me. As ombudsman for The Washington Post, I am concerned solely with the journalism of The Washington Post").

Forget journalism -- if you've ever worked in customer service of any kind, you will probably recognize Farrell's type. It was once hoped the internet would rechannel the energies of such people from the phone lines of working people to the electronic void, but it appears their need is, like the universe, ever-expanding.

SHORTER MEGAN McARDLE. Government is not the solution, it is the problem, unless traffic is making my customary bike route less pleasant, in which case government is the solution.

(Or to put it another way, "As a resident of DC, I'm certainly overjoyed to hear that violent crime has fallen to a level where we can spare valuable police resources to fight the silent scourge of . . . unruly traffic circles.")

UPDATE. Commenter mds summarizes: "Previously, she attacked the sanctity of contracts, because one of the parties thwarted her. Then she seemed to imply that affirmative action was needed for conservatives in academia. Now she's demanding that the heavy boot of the government security apparatus be deployed to smooth her way. 'Are you sure you're reading that libertarianism manual correctly?'"

FYI. You probably already had some idea of this:

A growing number of conservative groups are bankrolling startup news organizations around the country, aggressively covering government and politics at a time when newspapers are cutting back their statehouse bureaus.

The news outlets usually receive their money from right-leaning, free-market organizations...

"If you have a laptop, a wireless card and a flip cam, you're as powerful as The New York Times," said Jason Stverak, a former North Dakota Republican Party director who runs the year-old Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity in Bismarck and advises news outlets like those in Harrisburg and Boise.

The AP story is timely, as we have a big story from Now!Hampshire called "Source: State Dems scrambling to deploy tea party ‘crashers.’" Their nameless informant -- who, like the jiu jitsu practitioners who used to advertise on the backs of comic books, "sought anonymity for fear of reprisals" -- allegedly told N!H that former Democratic State Party Chairman Kathy Sullivan -- who, the website reminds us, "has been attending meetings of the [Mancester] Board of Mayor and Aldermen to glower at Mayor Ted Gatsas" -- is "heading up" a tea party infiltration scheme.

This is not the self-admitted CrashTheTeaParty operation of Josh Levin they're talking about, but an alleged false-flag operation run by a prominent Democratic attorney known mainly for pursuing unremarkable legal action on her party's behalf.

Nonetheless the story is immediately and unquestioningly believed by the sort of people who would find this sort of thing immediately and unquestioningly believable ("Setting the Stage For An American Neda" -- Confederate Yankee).

Now!Hampshire, by the way, was started up by Patrick Hynes, described by National Review as "one of the bright minds behind CrushKerry.com, now AnkleBitingPundits.com." He has also worked as a political consultant; Andrew Cline of the Union-Leader describes some of Hynes' prevarications in that role ("Hynes identified himself as 'executive director of Responsible Environmental Policy for New Hampshire'... Turns out the group did not exist").

Hynes was previously head of something called New Media Strategics, which attempted to manipulate blog chatter in less direct ways. But hell, why bother with middlemen? The great thing about the internet is, no one knows you're an operative, particularly if you take pains not to let them know.

UPDATE. SIster Toldjah finds more liberal perfidy in a North Carolina ordinance prohibiting the TP People's Gadsden flags from being mounted on long poles:

That’s strange, because the only times I ever see flags used as weapons is when radical leftists set fire to them.

How did I miss this flaming-flag weapon? It sounds rilly cool, and should be in a 3-D movie.

UPDATE 2. Sullivan denies it.

FOTO FUNNIES. Back when President Bush tried to give German Chancellor Andrea Merkel a shoulder rub she clearly didn't want, The Anchoress wanted to know what all the fuss was about:

(And btw, just as an aside, that one-second shoulder-squeeze by Bush? He should have kept his hands to himself – that’s always the smarter thing to do – but I think Merkel’s reaction had more to do with not expecting a the squeeze than her feelings of being “violated and almost raped” as some hysterics are carrying on.)

Today she saw a picture of Obama pointing in the general vicinity of Canadian PM Stephen Harper, and three guesses:

The look on Harper’s face, I can’t read. He’s either cowed or repressing his own anger. He appears to be looking directly at Obama’s finger. He is making a fist. Anyone want to supply a caption?

I miss the swaggering cowboy. He may have been tongue-tied; he may have screwed up with an errant backrub, but the didn’t boy to royalty, he didn’t give embarrassing gifts to allies, he didn’t show the Dalai Lama the back door. He never said to a visiting ally (paraphrased) “I’m gonna go have dinner with Laura, and if you decide to obey me, I’ll be around.”

He didn’t shove his finger in the face of another country’s prime minister.

But he was considered the boor.

She doesn't have the slightest idea what's actually going, but instead of just making jokes about the picture as custom dictates and as even rightwing frostbacks are doing, she grimly denounces Obama for humiliating the guy. Then, as if suddenly noticing the audience giving her the old Springtime for Hitler look, she springs to an impassioned defense of Bush, before ending:

Oh, puke.

This, I believe, we can take literally.

UPDATE. The rest of the brethren, meanwhile, are trying to unravel the mystery of the President's daughter's soccer game:

Even three days later, there are still no pictures of the president from Saturday's game. The USA just disarmed to Russia, Poland's president and 95 others were killed hours before, and there were many international leaders in Washington, D.C. for the nuclear summit set to begin on Monday, April 12.

And we shouldn't raise even more questions on his whereabouts? According to the MSM, the answer is yes.

But that's okay, comrade! The lousy MSM is dead, and it's up to Citizen Journalists like you to pore obsessively over Google Maps and girls' soccer league schedules. Track the coordinates of Castro, Chavez, and Michael Moore, too, and never, never give up! Write when you strike gold; we'll be waiting at the bar.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: I can plausibly-deniably see why my fellow conservatives are pissed at Obama's nuclear policy. Sure, no President has ordered a nuclear strike since Truman, but what about Bill Pullman in Independence Day? Plus I'm too lazy to read this, but from what little I know it makes Obama worse than Bill Pullman. And this was his senior year in college, the apex of a man's intellectual development! Faarrrrrrrrrrt*.

(*Note to syndicators: If space is an issue, this sentence can serve as the Shorter.)

WHERE I'M CALLING FROM, PART 2. Oh, yeah, Junior Brown at Gruene Hall was excellent. I assume his hot-dogging on the guit-steel, rolling his eyes back in his head, etc., are a thoroughly customary schtick, but the crowd seemed very happy to see it however many times they'd seen it already.

I love his tunes and his Ernest Tubb voice. I also admire that he has his missus in the band -- great way to double your share, guy! -- and that they've managed not to kill each other. (Years ago I played briefly and traumatically with my former life partner; when Junior started fiddling with Mrs. Brown's equipment mid-show, I flinched, expecting flying debris.)

The opener was A.J. Downing and the Buick6, who seemed to be taking it easy, which was fine as it made it less daunting for Mary and I to practice our two-step. (She reported later that a woman in the ladies' room told her, "You two are just learning, aren't you? That's so cute!" Terpsichore was never my stock in trade, but as a veteran showman I was stung to the quick.)

We had to miss the Chilifest in Snook for this, but that's just as well, as the event generated 41 arrests and 167 citations, according to our delightful local paper, the Eagle -- DWI, disorderly conduct, public intoxication, etc. The local PD "had judges on call to issue warrants for people who refused to give breath samples after being pulled over on suspicion of driving drunk." That's worse than Saint Patrick's Day on Staten Island!

The Eagle has provided me with a great window on Texas folkways. Just before Easter it carried a story from the Corpus Christi Caller-Times about a local megachurch's membership drive:

Bay Area Fellowship, the largest church in Corpus Christi, is giving away flat-screen televisions, skateboards, Fender guitars, furniture and 15 cars -- yes, cars -- at its Easter services next week...

“We’re going to give some stuff away and say, ‘Imagine how great heaven is going to be if you feel that excited about a car,’ ” lead Pastor Bil Cornelius said. “It’s completely free -- all you have to do is receive him.”

This whole thing is wonderful, but I would like to give reporter Denise Malan a special Pulitzer just for her rendering of this expert-opinion section:

Michael Emerson, a sociology professor at Rice University and co-director of its Institute for Urban Research, said “Wow” several times as Bay Area’s giveaway was described to him.

Rice, locals will have you know, is the Harvard of the South.

I have also been talking to people, all of them so far as nice as pie. Last weekend I got to talk to a machinist about his trade, the fortunes of which ebb and flow with the oil industry; his company makes parts and devices used in drilling. He showed me a ring he'd made on the job out of titanium. And he told me about things he'd seen as an amateur pilot, including a training flight in which his instructor pulled down hard on the throttle to keep the craft in which they were riding from striking a tree -- not due to operator error, but because the engine was balky. (An experience like that would keep me out of airplanes and possibly daylight for quite some time.) We discussed pets and he told me about how a raccoon had gotten the better of one of his dogs. "If a dog fights a raccoon and it's near the water," he had heard, "the raccoon will win every time." We had no occasion to talk at all about politics or the internet, which was a great relief.

SHORTER MEGAN McARDLE: I and my fiance wanted to buy a home and there were these paupers renting it. And they refused to leave! Said they had "rights"! What is this, Russia?

UPDATE. R. Porrofatto goes through McArdle's list of real estate demands in comments, making the jest even creamier: "...she finally found one house in an urban area with little traffic and no public schools, teeming with nightlife but very safe, from acceptable housing stock and isn't a condo, with such visible access to the Metro that she doesn't have to look at a map to know about it, and the damn unicorn who lives there refuses to let her see it."

ROBBED AGAIN. The awful Kathleen Parker has won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. You may read some of her anodyne, conservative-MoDo columns here.

Kathryn J. Lopez enthuses and disingenues:

I know many readers here frequently disagree with her. I do too! I know she has been unfair to conservatives — and the truth — at times. But she has also been open to us and it. She has a perch at the Washington Post that she has undeniably used to highlight issues and views that wouldn't otherwise get attention there.

Lopez fails to mention that prior to her mainstreaming, Parker was a commentator at the National Review, where she speculated that Obama related to Reverend Wright's anger at honkies because he was mad at his own white grandmother, and engaged in other such gibberish, including Delphic utterances like this:

The bottom line is Barack Obama is a cool cat. That's it. He is the saxophone.

This awkward pass at the President-to-be was, to those who can smell such things, a warning that she would be going semi-rogue in defense of her own career, briefly spelling David Brooks and Michael Gerson as the conservative conservatives love to hate with mildly disapproving statements aimed at Republicans, before settling into her niche as a vendor of formless and gormless soft-right editorial mush.

Parker also wrote a book about how America has "produced a new generation of children tattooed, pierced, angry, depressed, obese" by its discrimination against the beleaguered minority known as men.

About the best you can say for her is that she once inspired Dan Riehl to one of his more repulsive emissions.

I would have given the prize to former New York Times reporter, now homeless person Mark Hawthorne. (If you enjoy his recent work, by all means read this 1991 Times article on him, discovered by a Gawker reader.)

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightbloggers who ran with an obviously bullshit story about Sarkozy calling Obama insane. This is a study in miniature of how they do, all of the time. If some fact-shaped object appeals to them, they'll bite it no matter how bad it smells. One almost gets the impression that truth doesn't matter to them.

UPDATE. When you follow stuff like this all the time, you get a humor bonus when rightbloggers pretend to be mortally offended that McClatchy reported the Republicans at SRLC are "unified by hatred of Obama. "All it claims is some alleged hate for Obama by Southern Republicans with no explanation for it at all," says Riehl World View. "So, where’s the proof of this 'unified' GOP 'hatred'?" says Obamaganda, etc.

Yeah, where are they getting this outrageous accusation that Republicans hate Obama? it's like those cartoons where dogs chase cats. How can they be so sure? Where is their data?

WHERE I'M CALLING FROM.



Last weekend we took in the Grit 'n' Groove Festival in Luckenbach. Among the entertainers: Hayes Carll, Slaid Cleaves, James McMurtry, and our host for the evening, Ray Wylie Hubbard, who sorta struck me as the David Peel of Austin.

The only one I wasn't crazy about was Chris Robinson, yeah that one. Nice voice, but it was like Linda Rondstadt singing "Party Girl." (The crowd was much more polite toward him than we would have been back in the Old Country. I don't know whether that was because Hubbard is friendly with him, or because Texans are courtly, or because Robinson is actually good and I don't appreciate it because I, like all New Yorkers, am an asshole.)

Had bratwurst and Shiner Bock, and plenty of it. Tonight, Junior Brown at Gruen Hall. Looking forward, but I'm kinda sorry to be missing the Chilifest.

Aw hell, this Texas ain't half bad.

AS I WAS SAYING. Maybe I was too hard in the previous post on bloggers with pretenses to journalism. Take the recent death of the Polish President in a plane crash at Smolensk, for example. Many rightbloggers are soberly compiling the facts as --

I THINK IT LOOKS VERY MUCH LIKE PUTIN IS EXPANDING RUSSIA'S GLOBAL POWER WITH NO FEAR OF OBAMA.

IT LOOKS LIKE OBAMA IS PUTIN'S BITCH.

AHMADINEJAD AND MAHMOUD ABBAS MUST BE GETTING JEALOUS.

Never mind.

DEFINING JOURNALISM DOWN. Cleaning the mailbox (amazing how clogged it can get even when I'm not working my ass off) and found a note from Mr. Miller of Blogoland about a TechCrunch story from last week entitled, "52 Percent Of Bloggers Consider Themselves Journalists" -- this number representing a four-percent increase from the year before. (Note: I'll only add his remarks on the subject if he permits me, as they were part of a private conversation.)

At first I wondered: Why would anyone want to be considered a journalist if he could possibly avoid it? Everyone hates journalists. They certain don't trust them.

I considered that, for many of these fools, the title might still be a step up. Then a better explanation came to me.

First, a general answer: These days an unprecedented number of people in several fields want cred for something they can't or won't actually do. To some extent 'twas ever thus -- administrators who do not practice nor know anything about the sort of work they supervise, for example, have existed since before the dawn of management theory. But management theory sure increased their number.

And technology has done the same in other fields. How many more musicians, for example, do we have now than before who can't actually play an instrument? I don't mean as in, "You don't play no guitar, boy!" I mean they just program machines to do it for them.

Now, a lot of them get great results, so it's not a bad thing in and of itself. But it also gives a lot of less-capable people the idea that, with the right equipment, they can do just like the big boys do. too.

Similarly, because they have the electronic wherewithal to publish as news sites do, a lot of bloggers consider themselves "journalists" even though they've never covered an event, nor engaged any information (whether first-, second-, or third-hand) with anything like journalistic rigor.

That may explain why they think they're entitled to be called journalists, but it still doesn't explain why they would want to own it, given journalists' low status.

The Citizen Journalists it has been my curse to contemplate most are the rightbloggers, so I mediated on them for an answer, and came to this:

They want to be journalists not so much to elevate their own reputations as to lower that of journalism.

I've talked a lot here about the seemingly contradictory self-image of rightbloggers: on the one hand, all-powerful and poised at any moment to destroy the MSM with the awesome force of their Citizen Journalism; one the other, helpless victims of media malfeasance.

Clearly the big papers and networks are losing money, but it isn't like Joe Wingnut's House o' Slander is getting rich off that. People can still tell the difference between the Daily Bugle and some guy yelling about Nobama socialism.

But they have reason to hope that this situation won't last. As more papers fold or diminish, it may be that people will notice that the journalistic conventions to which they were once used are going away, as the old ice-wagons and Fuller Brush Men did, and mentally abandon their expectation of them, as clearly no one has the money to keep that coming anymore.

To help speed this transition along, we have bloggers increasingly delivering in breathless tones the BREAKING news that something that didn't happen happened, or vice-versa. This, their confidence announces, is the new journalism -- braying and blarghing, 24/7. It only remains for the punters to admit it.

It's possible that these guys actually don't understand that what they're doing is substantially different from what, say, reporters at the Washington Post do. I doubt they miss that fact -- but they may at least intuit that, if they keep yelling loud enough, maybe other people will.

SHORTER JACOB HORNBERGER: Oh, you littlebrains are bitching about slavery, are you? OK, OK, slavery was bad. Now 1880 -- when poor Americans could actually starve, and striking workers could actually be gunned down, as Our Hayek intended (but there were, ahem, NO SLAVES, haters) -- that's what libertarianism is all about!

(Were the Randroids not so notoriously bad at PR, I would expect them to engage the Ole Perfesser to take pictures of black people at their cell meetings.)

UPDATE. Comments by the Reason bigbrains are lovely. Every once in a while a woman drops in to say, "1880? Not so great for me," and you can almost hear the ferocious shirt-retucking as the brethren wait for her to leave so they can get back to "Boaz is just another beltway hack" etc.

I applaud the parodist who adds, "Blacks didn't have income tax in 1880. Their money was not debased. They knew who their fathers were." Assuming, perhaps unfairly, that he's a parodist.

THE HORROR, THE HORROR, THE SEQUEL. Thank you, internet. Just when I was starting to miss New York, you snapped me out of it:



That awful Jay-Z thing, which makes "New York, New York" sound like Michael Hordern reading "Sailing to Byzantium." Conspicuous consumption. Having it all. The boredom of the privileged masquerading as dramatic conflict. Liza Minnelli. It's like ipecac for homesickness, and if that doesn't get it out of my system, there's always the unsettling feeling that, at any minute, one of their faces might cave in.

They really should have taken my advice.

UPDATE. Oh Christ no.

I WAS SO EAGER TO AVOID WORK THAT I CLEANED MY BLOGROLL. Fixed some long-wrong links and dropped moribund ones (Margaret, your late entry spared you the axe; Kia, I'll wait but not forever; Joshua, Twitter updates? Really?), despite the delightful fact that Joshua Trevino's old site is now this (NSFW, I've just been warned -- boy, only three weeks out of work and already I've become thoroughly unsocialized).

Trevino/Tacitus is replaced by Rightwing Film Geek under "Wrong But Readable." (RWFG doesn't talk about his politics much, so he probably should be under "Sui Generis" instead, but conservatives are so out of their minds these days that I have to reach to pad this section.) RWFG knows his stuff, and explicates in a way that both experts and novices can appreciate. It's worth sitting through an occasional lecture on how Vera Drake isn't really anti-abortion (no doubt, but so what?) and such like just to watch him work.

I am going to slowly and stealthily add Texas links. First is Juanita Jean. Found by accident. Hers is a charming approach.

Jesus, you never know what a mess things are until you start to clean. If anyone's interested in redesigning this site for nothing or nearly so, email me.

THESE ARE THE JOKES, FOLKS: "RECORD HEAT IN NEW YORK CITY. It’s obviously proof of global cooling. Hey, if cold weather can be proof of global warming..." -- The Ole Perfesser. Yeah, that's bringing down the house of cards that is AGW, alright.

UPDATE. Another QOTD, from Ace O. Spades: "There's an old saying that success is like a fart, only your own don't stink. So it is with political extremism, especially as practiced by paranoiacs like Charles Johnson. He lectures others on civility and moderation while sticking his face in his ass and burbling over how sweet his own farts smell." Ace really missed his calling as a copywriter for greeting cards. Bonus points for the CJ Iz a Fag follow-up.

NEVER FORGET 4/7! First those seamen were rescued from pirates, which was an Obama Administration failure. Then the crotch-bomber failed to crotch-bomb a plane, which was another Obama Administration failure.

But that was nothing. Now a diplomat -- with an Ay-rab name! (or as Founding Bloggers like to call such people, "a man with striking similarities to the profile of a potential terrorist") -- smoked a cigarette in an airborne restroom and made a snotty comment! And we had to turn him loose!

Aargh! Blaargh! Aargh and Blaargh again! "All of that talk about making our enemies like us and forgiving us in the post-Bush era isn’t really working out for us, is it?" thunders Erick Erickson. Later he notes grimly that "speculation has moved" to what actually happened. But we will never, ever forget 4/7. (Hey, 4 goes twice into eight! 2-4-8 -- there's got to be some numerological significance to this.) (UPDATE: It was last night, not this morning -- numerology crisis averted!)

Etc. My favorite (so far -- these guys can always top themselves) is from The American Pundit, who's all like "'Diplomatic immunity!' 'BOOM!' 'Revoked!'" across the entire diplomatic corps:

We tried to have sex with a child, but we had to release him and he still leaves free because of his diplomatic immunity.

Don't ever change, American Pundit, and especially don't ever change that typo.