NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Obama-Galifianakis comedy sketch and how this was -- wow, everyone hit the buzzer at the same time and said "an outrage," huh? Yes, but I tell you how they did it!

GALT III: THIS TIME IT'S PROFITABLE.

Just as the New York Times has to do its "Neediest Cases" and the Girl Scouts have to sell Thin Mints, so libertarian standard Reason magazine has to pimp every installment of the Atlas Shrugged trilogy. Though Reason's Brian Doherty and Shrugged producer John Aglialoro love capitalism, at least one of them is not quite ready to accept the verdict of the marketplace:

I questioned the business sense of Aglialoro’s foray into filmmaking during a February interview on the set of Atlas III. The first two movies in the trilogy were financial failures, losing him millions. 

“We don’t know that the trilogy will not make money,” he corrects me. "We know Part I did not and Part II did not."

Though I saw the first movie and hoo boy did it suck, I'm inclined to side with Aglialoro -- fuck all these nay-sayers, cowboy, make the movie you know will blow their minds! Alas, Aglialoro appears to incline more toward rightwing human product placement:

To further prime the promo pump, they’ve given guest-casting appearances to what Aglialoro says are “almost 10 personalities who have TV shows or radio shows who have a million plus followers who are going to talk to their people" about Atlas III.

I think they could have saved some money by just having Michael Savage, Tammy Bruce, and Peter Ingemi tour the country with a readers-theater version.

The libertarian-entertainment complex are so eager fro ASIII to succeed, they're even promising to make it less like the source material:

Aglialoro thinks Rand was having an intellectual “bad hair day” when she decided to valorize the term “selfishness,” which he thinks blunts her message of individual achievement through freely chosen market cooperation, not “self at expense of others.” Thus, he tried to make their approximately four-minute condensation of Galt’s speech a bit more inspirational, a bit less condemnatory, than the novel’s version. It ended (from what I could hear) with talk of how you should not in your confusion and despair let your own irreplaceable spark go out and how the world you desire can be won. 

With the speech, says [co-producer Harmon] Kaslow, the “challenge was, you want people to feel good” and so they tried to “accentuate the positive aspects as opposed to presenting things in negative”...

So, basically, it'll be like Flashdance, only hella talky. My favorite part is where Doherty explains the Randian morality of the ASIII Kickstarter campaign:

This led many to assume that asking people to freely support something they valued was in some sense un-Randian. Aglialoro sees it differently, as would anyone who understands Rand. Her novel The Fountainhead is a paean to an artist whose work is not rewarded by the marketplace. Rand believed in the glory of trading value—money—for value—a film the giver wants to see.

I understand why he'd see it that way. Me, I don't get why it's worth anyone's money to propagandize themselves. Well, markets in everything and one born every minute, I suppose.

THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS.

Ben Shapiro's TruthRevolt reporting from CPAC some days back:

[Dr. Ben] Carson spoke about the need for small government, but warned that the tactics of progressives come straight out of Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." They are not trying to have a conversation with you, he said, because that will humanize you. Their ultimate goal is to demonize you...

Then they quoted Carson:

And then recently, I said that in Nazi Germany, people do not believe in what Hitler was doing. Most of them did not. But did they speak up? Did they say anything? Absolutely not, and look at the atrocities that occurred. And of course the left said, Carson says that they are changing American to Nazi Germany. Of course that is not the case, but that is what they do. They repeat these lies over and over again because they cannot argue the actual facts...

At TruthRevolt today:

Dr. Ben Carson: U.S. is Like Nazi Germany

Again they quoted Carson:

I mean, [we are] very much like Nazi Germany. And I know you’re not supposed to say ‘Nazi Germany,’ but I don’t care about political correctness. You know, you had a government using its tools to intimidate the population. We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe. And it’s because of the PC police, it’s because of politicians, it’s because of news...

In a few more days TruthRevolt will cover Carson saying the left lies about him saying "they are changing American to Nazi Germany," and then a few days after than he'll compare America to Nazi Germany again, and a few days later...

You get the idea. So does Carson. He's caught on quickly to the secret of conservative political success: Say something offensive, then complain that liberals are misrepresenting you.  It's like writing a book called Liberal Fascism, then saying "the real problem with all of this loose Nazi talk is that it slanders the American people." Not everyone's dumb enough to buy it, but the ones who are you can get coming and going.

UPDATE. Paul Ryan's pretty good at it too.

THEY'RE ONTO US!

Zombie at PJ Media offers a roundup called "Progressive Racism: The Hidden Motive Driving Modern Politics." Most of it is what any follower of such writers would expect: For example, progressives wish to "restrict access to guns as much as possible; ultimately ban and confiscate them all" because "white urban liberals are deathly afraid of black gangbangers with guns, but are ashamed to admit this publicly, so to mask their racist fears they try to ban guns for everyone, as a way of warding off the perception that their real goal is to target blacks specifically," which is why the notorious liberal Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act when the Black Panthers started walking around with loaded firearms.

And on and on. But there's one bit that deserves special attention:

PLASTIC BAG BANS 

Progressive position:
Prohibit businesses from giving plastic bags to customers.

False public rationale offered by progressives to justify their position:
Discarded plastic bags harm the environment and befoul the landscape; we should be kind to the Earth by using cloth or paper bags instead.

Conservatives’ inaccurate theory of progressives’ real intent:
Leftists have an illogical phobia about plastic, because to them it symbolizes artificiality and consumerism; they’re trying to outlaw an extremely useful invention simply to make shopping and capitalism more inconvenient.

The actual racist origins of the progressive stance:
White progressives specifically want to stop inner-city blacks from littering, but don’t want to be perceived as racists who further penalize the black community for its behavior, so rather than focus on whom they believe to be the actual perpetrators of littering, they remove from everyone‘s hands any objects which might potentially become litter.

Strangely, Zombie doesn't have one for Obamacare. Which should be easy: Black people are always getting shot up at card games and contracting sickle-cell anemia, but liberals are so ashamed of their own racism that they're making everyone get health insurance.

UPDATE. Commenters want to play too! DocAmazing:

Progressive position:
Proper dental hygiene and water fluoridation are necessary for community health.

False public rationale offered by progressives to justify their position:
Poor dental hygiene leads to poor health overall.

Conservatives' inaccurate theory of progressives' intent:
Progressives just want to dictate every phase of life; elitist emphasis on having a full set of teeth.

The actual racist origins of the progressive stance:
Fearful white liberals want to be able to see approaching black people in the dark.

Plenty more where that came from (e.g. Warren_Terra: "Better Gas Mileage: Liberals are afraid of running out of gas in the wrong part of town. Carpool Lanes: Liberals want company in case they run out of gas in the wrong part of town," etc).

Also, textual analysis from Spaghetti Lee: "'I'm not racist; I have a black friend' has apparently evolved into 'I'm not racist; you have a black enemy.'"

NEW FRONTIERS IN GOLDBERGOLOGY.

My fellow connoisseurs of Jonah Goldberg's literary fartitiousness may have noticed these little logic-eddies Goldberg gets into when his mind veers from the topic, and which he leaves in his copy, probably out of laziness. There is a nice example in his latest post, which starts out being about the Sheryl Sandberg "bossy" campaign, then wanders into the War on Boys, then off a cliff, producing this spectacular graf:

Then there are the issues at the school level. Admittedly, I don’t send my daughter to public school in DC (because I live in DC), but to one of those hoity-toity schools that affluent liberals who oppose school choice send their kids to (for the record, we love our kid’s school). Most of my friends either send their kids to similar schools or, if they live outside the District, to good public schools in the DC suburbs. In short, these are the kinds of schools Sandberg probably sends her kids to. And the idea that the girls are being shunted or shortshrifted strikes me as just plain other-worldly. Don’t get me wrong, my kid has her complaints. For instance, she signed up for girls lacrosse and is miffed the boys get to “tackle” and the girls don’t.

There is so much in this -- the argument-from-italicization; the defense of his daughter's private school education with an assertion that unnamed liberals (and "probably" Sheryl Sandberg) use private schools too; an irrelevant discussion of his friends' educational preferences; a surprise repetition of the sorta-theme (that girls have certain disadvantages at school), and finally another observation that's irrelevant if not injurious to his cause. One may also enjoy Goldberg calling the kind of school his daughter goes to "hoity-toity" (perhaps so he can use it as an insult to liberals, assuming Goldberg can think one clause ahead), then parenthesizing "for the record, we love our kid’s school" -- like a comedian backing off a mean joke, except comedians are funny.

Not that the rest of his post has much going for it, either, but the drain-circling nature of it, and the realization that he does it frequently enough that it qualifies as a motif, suggests to me a new definitional term: J-hole. Maybe if I work at it, I can develop an entire Goldberg Rhetoric. History will thank me!

UPDATE. First out of the comments gate, coozledad: "Beginners in Jonah's rhetorical style are encouraged to talk with their mouths full of Fruity Pebbles."

TODAY IN CULTURE WAR.

At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson wonders why people watch Jon Stewart when they could be reading The Road to Serfdom:

Mr. Stewart is among the lowest forms of intellectual parasite in the political universe, with no particular insights or interesting ideas of his own, reliant upon the very broadest and least clever sort of humor, using ancient editing techniques to make clumsy or silly political statements sound worse than they are and then pantomiming outrage at the results, the lowbrow version of James Joyce giving the hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the unlikely name of Stephen Dedalus and then having other characters in the novel muse upon the unlikelihood of that name.

Ah, Williamson has been to college, I see. Later:

Mr. Stewart is the leading voice of the half-bright Left because he is a master practitioner of the art of half-bright vitriolic denunciation. His intellectual biography is that of a consummate lightweight — a William and Mary frat boy who majored in psychology, which must have been a disappointment to his father, a professor of physics — and his comedy career has been strictly by-the-numbers, from the early days on the New York City comedy-club scene to changing his name (Mr. Stewart began life as Mr. Leibowitz)...

There are plenty of insults here, but nothing that qualifies as criticism -- until Williamson abandons aesthetics, in which he seems to have no real interest, and addresses politics. He is upset that there are so many headlines on internet aggregation sites like "Jon Stewart Destroys Fox News Over Syria Coverage" and "Jon Stewart Destroys Bill O’Reilly."

Williamson seems unaware that headlines on the internet are often calculated to draw the attention of consumers, and thus monetize the enterprise (maybe because he works at a place where profit is not expected); he also seems unaware that other entertainers such as Ann Coulter are frequently portrayed as "destroying" their opponents for a different audience but for the same reason. He thinks "destroy" in these headlines actually says something about The Left:

...there is no substantive difference between what Mr. Stewart does and what, e.g., Ezra Klein does (“Ezra Klein Destroys Romney,” “Ezra Klein Destroys David Brooks,” “Ezra Klein Destroys Republican Opposition to Temporary Payroll Tax Cut,” etc.) because for the Left the point of journalism is not to criticize politics or to analyze politics but to be a servant of politics, to “destroy” such political targets as may be found in one’s crosshairs. For the Left, the maker of comedy and the maker of graphs perform the same function. It does not matter who does the “destroying,” so long as it gets done...

As a close follower of the New Zhdanovites, I often hear the liberal establishment blamed for Hollywood, pop music, the theater, comics, etc. but this is first time I've ever heard it blamed for SEO.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Crimea crisis and the rightblogger angle that a real man/President would be kicking Putin's ass right now-- you know, like we did to Saddam, only rhetorically! It brings to mind the old saying: Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to commit U.S. troops to a highly unpopular foreign war.

UPDATE. Oh God, I have to transfer a comment from my Facebook feed from Bill Alexander: "In Yakov Smirnoff voice: 'In Russia we have Pussy Riot; in America, Dick Armey!'"

AFTER THE BALL.

The remainder of my Raw Story CPAC dispatches are here, here, here, here, and here. It was a grueling three days, and I didn't even attend the after-hours festivities like Reaganpalooza -- you can go to Wonkette for that stuff. I also recommend Charlie Pierce's dispatches, which are full of fierce indignation, unlike the measured, just-the-facts reporting for which I am known.

Overall I'd say the event was a success for its people, in that they seemed energized by it and optimistic about their chances on the hustings. Of course they had every reason to feel that way in 2012 too, and we saw how that turned out. But though CPAC is for true believers and, as you may have gleaned from the coverage, some of what they true-believe is crazy, the folks I spoke with and overheard were serious about success.

And I think for them the libertarian schtick is where it's at. The youngs who have driven the Paul-heavy straw poll results in recent years were there already; I believe the growing conservative tendency these days of portraying, for example, their opposition to mandatory insurance coverage of contraceptives and gay rights as religious-liberty issues, instead of merely denouncing birth control and homosexuality as tools of the Devil, shows that the elders are also ready to talk the talk, at least.

Also, consider: The American Conservative Union reported that in this year's straw poll, 62% of respondents said marijuana should be legal in at least some circumstances (21% approved for medical reasons, 41% in all circumstances) and only 33% said it should remain illegal. ACU also claimed that all age-groups but the oldest were broadly pro-legalization. I haven't seen any cross-tabs -- and moldy fig Patrick Brennan thinks the wording of the questions makes the survey "push-polling for libertarians" -- but I wouldn't be surprised. The Republican voters who might be turned off by a pro-legalization policy aren't going anywhere except to the grave, while there are a lot of independent voters who might be pleasantly surprised to hear conservatives want to free the weed while Democrats like Jerry Brown are much less enthusiastic.

I predict whoever gets the GOP Presidential nomination in 2016 will preach marijuana legalization and abortion bans. It may seem incongruous to you, but national politics is about coalition-building.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER DOLOR.

But you're a good girl, the way you grab me, must wanna get nasty...

I dragged my ass through CPAC again today, and Raw Story posted it here, here, here, here, and here. I must say that I liked all the people with whom I spoke, notwithstanding that they're trying to destroy the country; we all have our faults. I particularly liked the Duggars, maybe because, after my long acquaintance with show folk, their cheerful cooperation with a humble member of the press charmed me. Trust me, I've been treated worse.

Tomorrow we do it again. [retch]

SERVICE ADVISORY.

Raw Story's running my live-and-in-person dispatches from CPAC. So far they're here and here. If you know anybody at this thing you think I should talk to, please let me know; I'm just running catch as catch can.

I have to say that the CPAC scene, such as it is, isn't too different from other conventions I have been called on in various professional capacities to cover, except that the overheard conversational snippets occasionally slide into politics. Things like, "they can't name one thing Hillary achieved as Secretary of State. Not one!" Kind of like the bitching one used to hear at the New Music Seminar about bands that were not to the speaker's liking. Except everyone's got money, it seems. They want more, and power besides, but who at a convention does not?

BRINGING A KNIFE TO A SHOTGUN WEDDING.

Shorter Dennis Prager on bringing together social and fiscal conservatives:




Money shot:

The entire American experiment in smaller government — and even in secular government — was based on the presumption that Americans individually would be actively religious. Unlike Europeans of the Enlightenment era — and unlike the Left today — the Founders understood that people are not basically good. That is a defining belief of Judaism as well as of Christianity. Therefore, to be good, the great majority of people need moral religion and belief in accountability to a morally judging God. In other words, you will have either the big God of Judaism and Christianity or the big state of the Left.

Which is why Europe went up in flames and to this day is used exclusively for guano farming -- oh, wait, no, actually they get two months of vacations a year, socialized medicine, and Gothic cathedrals, and make us look like shit.

The thing is: Prager's probably addressing this appeal (if that's the word for it) to bullshit libertarians like David French who already don't give a shit about any freedoms that don't apply directly to themselves and their employers, and whose libertarianism is a Jedi mind trick that only works on people like Dennis Prager. And if it won't make any difference to them, try and imagine how it will be read by normal people who only seem to be hanging in with the Democrats because they're afraid the Republicans will destroy all safety nets and do away all public positions except Witchfinder General, Corporation Bagman in Chief, and Keeper of the Rapestick. It's like Prager is saying, "Everything you hate about us? That's the part that's non-negotiable!"

THE MIGHTY WURLITZER, PLAYED BY MONKEYS.

Sometimes, when you're a busy professional propagandist like John Fund, the week's talking points sort of slosh together in your mind and you wind up with analogies like this:

Last week, New York’s ACORN mayor Bill De Blasio announced he is evicting Success Academy, a widely praised charter school from the Harlem public school building it occupies. Two other charter schools will be blocked from opening. He claims elementary-school kids wouldn’t be safe in a building with high-school students. His excuse is as absurd as the propaganda Vladimir Putin is using to justify the occupation of Crimea.

I understand his first draft included "stuck on stupid" and the Dark Enlightenment, but was trimmed for space.

Try to imagine a normal person reading that and thinking, yes, I see the connection. There's plenty to say about why most political writing is so incredible shitty, and one important reason is that the apparatchiks thus engaged aren't trying to clear a path to truth; they're just sticking pebbles in pieces of shit.

UPDATE. Hmmph! I wished to talk about style, but some commenters insist on addressing the charter schools issue, in which conservatives who squawk any time taxpayer money feeds a starving bum will suddenly burst into tears if a city refuses to use that money to prop up a charter school. Susan of Texas quotes from Fund, who complains that "charging the rent Mayor de Blasio’s backers envision [for the charters] would result in 71 percent of the city’s charters running deficit." "The free market fails again," Susan observes. She also observes that the charter in question isn't necessarily delivering value for money -- as does Diane Ravitch, via commenter mds: "When the New York State Comptroller attempted to audit Success Academy’s use of public money, Success Academy sued to prevent the audit..." I've seen some good charters, but this kind of thing ain't helping.

Also commenters are at least as interested in the "ACORN Mayor" sobriquet as they are in the Putin/Crimea analogy, which is what caught my eye. ACORN we will have with us always -- as a wingnut curse-word, if not as an actual living organization -- but comparisons of local expenditure issues to geopolitical military crises are as of yet rare, unless you count the Third Reich.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the religious freedom bills that were supposed to protect citizens from gay brides and grooms, and how as usual the brethren took their enthusiasm so far that ordinary observers might just think they were also rooting for repeal of the Civil Rights Act. (Which some of them were, of course, but no fair reading anything bigoted into it.)

WE SURE COULD USE A LITTLE GOOD NEWS TODAY.

Happy Friday. Let us turn from the sad news of the world and nation, and toward the Mt. Gox Bitcoin disaster. I am generally agnostic on the Bitcoin phenomenon. I know libertarians like Bitcoin, which you'd think would dispose me against it; but then, libertarians also like Frank Zappa and that hasn't spoiled his music for me.

But it's an ill wind that blows no one some good -- the Gox thing has roused a stirring peroration at Business Insider by Erik Voorhees, calling on his libertarian comrades, many of them dispossessed Bitcoin billionaires, to be brave and not give up the dream, and it has warmed my heart with the gift of laughter. Here's the fiat-currency shot:

And finally, the lesson is not that we ought to seek out "regulation" to save us from the evils and incompetence of man. For the regulators are men too, and wield the very same evil and incompetence, only enshrined in an authority from which it can wreak amplified and far more insidious destruction.

If only man could throw off the chains of regulation, I wouldn't have to pay these speeding tickets. I'd own my own damn privately-run toll road!

Let us not retreat from our rising platform only to cower back underneath the deranged machinations of Leviathan.

We're never going back to your so-called economy! The internet has freed us to recreate the barter system without having to lift anything heavy, and we're going off the grid forever without leaving the comfort of our subdivisions!

The proper lesson, if I may suggest, is this: We are building a new financial order, and those of us building it, investing in it, and growing it, will pay the price of bringing it to the world. This is the harsh truth. We are building the channels, the bridges, and the towers of tomorrow's finance, and we put ourselves at risk in doing so...

Except in the physical sense, for any of that, though my Eames chair could probably use some readjusting.

So why do we do it? Why do we build these towers that fall down upon us? Why do we toil and strain and risk our precious time, which is the only real wealth we possess?

Because the world needs what we're building. It needs it desperately. If that matters to you, as it does to me, then hold to that thought. You will see through the smoke, and your wounds will heal.

And that right there is the tell.  Whenever a libertarian -- raised on the Virtue of Selfishness, and inclined to believe that the dismantling of society will inevitably benefit "producers" such as himself, and is therefore a good thing whatever happens to the sheeple -- starts talking about how the world needs whatever racket he's got going, hold onto your virtual wallet.

Somewhere out there, at the crossroads of Narnia, Galt's Gulch, and the Floating City, there's a world where the dream will never die. And when Voorhees and his pals finally all go there, maybe we can have some peace and quiet around here.

(h/t @M_DiPaola)

UPDATE. Lots of good comments, some suggesting new names for the freedom currency: "I propose that we call 1/100 of a bitcoin a 'rand,'" says PulletSurpise, "1/20 is a 'ron,' 1/10 is a 'hayek,' 1/4 is a 'friedman,' 1/2 is a 'galt," and five bitcoins is one 'weimar.'"

My favorite comes from @benzero: douchemarks.

FIGHTING THE LAST WAR.

Jan Brewer said no to Butch Crow and Rich Lowry is sad. After many paragraphs of "Gay? What gay? No mention of gay in this bill," Lowry finally gives it up and gets to the money shot:

The market has a ready solution for these couples: There are other bakers, photographers and florists. The wedding business is not exactly bristling with hostility to gay people. If one baker won’t make a cake for gay weddings, the baker across town can hang a shingle welcoming all couples for all types of weddings.

Which is how it works for other kinds of people, too: If someone says "we don't serve your kind here," you can always go somewhere else. What's the big deal? Look. it's their lunch counter; who are you to say you have a right to be served there?

These guys are often accused of not seeing the connection, but make no mistake, they see it, alright. That's why they're working so hard to convince people that the folks forced to offer equal service to homosexuals are the wronged parties here. This is the best chance they've had since 1964, and they hate to see it slipping away.

UPDATE. In comments -- which are as usual way better than the post -- chuckling points out the relevant statute, in which the U.S. proscribed on the ground of "race, color, religion, or national origin" what conservatives are hell-bent on sticking to gay people.

"It's unfortunate, I think," says chuckling, "that that argument is not front and center in the professional liberal counterattack against this recent spate of 'religious freedom' bills." Then it's up to us amateurs -- just like in the Bowery Boys movies! Actually there's a pretty pro effort at Think Progress by Ian Millhiser, reminding us that in addition to states' rights and freedom of association, the brethren have often cited God in favor of separate-but-oh-who-cares-if-it's-equal. That's why religious-liberties bills are suddenly all the rage throughout the neo-Confederate diaspora.

And in a brief cheeky post I can't get to all the tropes conservatives are using to disguise their efforts here -- that may be work for the weekend. One that comes up in comments is the whole "'but it won't make much practical difference!' card," as Daniel Björkman describes it. It's a common tactic -- just give us this little piece of your rights and we'll go away! -- and Kia is very eloquent on how it works:

It looks stupid until you realize that if you concede the point you have in effect let him decide the value, to you, of what he wants to take from you. He wants to deprive you of the protection of a principle, so he pretends there is no principle at issue. So while you and he are in the living room discussing hypotheticals like two seekers of truth who happen to disagree, his lawyers are throwing your possessions into the street.

FIRST TIME AS FARCE, SECOND TIME AS FARCE.

First Ole Perfesser Instapundit says Americans sitting on their asses is the equivalent of the Ukrainian uprising, and now we have Roger L. Simon:

After Ukraine, We Need an American Spring... 

We need some government, obviously, but at this point in American history, in order to save our nation, we need to get the state as much as possible out of our lives, to cut its functions with a meat cleaver to release our better impulses, to have the renewal of Spring.

I wonder whom Simon hopes to wave into action with his cleaver. Are there enough wingnut preppers to take down Obama and deliver our nation into the hands of the European Union? Probably not, so Simon is ready for outreach:

Those already convinced of our cause — small-government conservatives, Tea Partiers, libertarians — should put aside their squabbles for now, join together and seek to be as inclusive as possible.

With Nick Gillespie and that guy in the Ben Franklin get-up on board, how can the Boehner Orange Revolution fail?

UPDATE. Comments are very good. To Simon's ""The [American] people aren’t the problem. It’s the state," Chairman Pao responds, "Which is run by who or what? Loki? AD-45 Riot-Bots? Care Bears?" Nyet, comrade, the election was stolen, the people are with us and will rise at the signal of the meat cleaver! At Simon's Strange New Respect for libertarian convert/election loser Joe Trippi, Halloween_Jack muses, "Now if we can only pass Mark Penn off on them..." Shhhh don't tip 'em off!

THEY ALSO TAKE UP ALL THE GOOD SEATS AT THE PIANO BAR.

At National Review Quin Hillyer has a fairly classic "Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock" essay. There's plenty of laughs in it, including Hillyer's suggestion that gay people want only to be left alone "but the activists and media chorus won’t let them," and a climactic lament over the degraded culture as represented by Beyonce and Shirley Jones.  But here's the best part: Hillyer's denunciation of "figure-skating announcer Johnny Weir":

His antics are appalling. The problem is not that he’s homosexual; it’s that he advertises his sexuality to the extent that it makes him (his choice of makeup, jewelry, and extravagant dresses or furs) more of a story than the athletes he is supposed to cover.

Can't Hillyer enjoy his ice dancing without some flamboyant homosexual getting in the way? Next Olympics let's get Terry Bradshaw.

UPDATE: Quin dumbles down!

I think if I were a figure skater, I would want the focus to be on my athleticism.

Yeah, that's what keeps ice dancers up at night -- the thought that audiences will somehow get the impression that their punishing routines don't require athleticism, but are merely the icebound version of mincing, because the booth announcer doesn't resemble Dave Madden.

And if you’ve got somebody– I mean, who cares if he’s homosexual? The question is, by dressing as a woman and bringing that image of femininity to the sport, does that feed the image of it as somehow less than a fete of athleticism?

"Fête of athleticism" is how I'll think of ice dancing from now on. I wonder if he'd have the same problem with Martina Navratilova?

THE BATTLE OF SIT-ON-YOUR-ASS.

Ole Perfesser Instapundit's waving the stars and bars at USA Today under the title, "Americans rising up against government." The column is accompanied by a picture of someone poking a Gadsden flag out of a bunch of umbrellas -- maybe them folks under the umbrellas is all a-decked out like Ben Franklin and the Tea Party is back!

"America's ruling class has been experiencing more pushback than usual lately," the Perfesser commences. "It just might be a harbinger of things to come." How so, Perfesser? Three things:

• "First, in response to widespread protests last week, the Department of Homeland Security canceled plans to build a nationwide license plate database." Funny, I don't remember any such protests -- oh, the Perfesser means widespread  in the press and among "lawmakers and privacy advocates," not Ma and Pa Tricorn marching on Washington.

• The FCC's Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs, which was going to question newsroom personnel, went down because "the blowback was sufficient to stop it for now." Again, this was not achieved by a popular uprising, but by the press, with its paranoid conservative wing and normal-people wing united in defense of its own interests.

"Meanwhile, in Connecticut a massive new gun-registration scheme is also facing civil disobedience." Ah, now we're getting somewhere! Tell us about it, Perfesser:

• "As J.D. Tuccille reports: 'Three years ago, the Connecticut legislature estimated there were 372,000 rifles in the state of the sort that might be classified as 'assault weapons,' and 2 million plus high-capacity magazines. ... But by the close of registration at the end of 2013, state officials received around 50,000 applications for 'assault weapon' registrations, and 38,000 applications for magazines.' This is more 'Irish Democracy,' passive resistance to government overreach..."

Really? Sounds to me like a bunch of people sitting on their rear ends. In fact, none of this "uprising" involves... anyone doing anything.

And yet here's how the Perfesser characterizes it:

Though people have taken to the streets from Egypt, to Ukraine, to Venezuela to Thailand, many have wondered whether Americans would ever resist the increasing encroachments on their freedom. I think they've begun.

Us and the guys at Tahrir Square and Maidan Nezalezhnosti! We just have different styles: Furriners do uprising by putting their bodies on the line in lethal mass demonstrations, whereas American patriots sit on their asses and wait for the heroism commendations to roll in.

The timeline of conservative derangement is long and complicated, but I think I can trace this particular strain of gibberish back to Human Achievement Hour, in which conservatives portrayed Americans who did not change their normal everyday energy-use patters as implicit supporters of their anti-environmentalist cause, and the Battle of Chick-Fil-A, in which conservatives showed their hatred of homosexuals (or love of freedom, whatever) by gorging on fast food and deputizing everyone they saw at the mall as co-conspirators. It's the perfect form of activism for a movement largely composed of agitated geriatrics, shut-ins, and people who think they're entitled to everything, including revolutionary status, without raising a sweat for it.

UPDATE. From commenter Fats Durston:

The Revolution Will Be Sitting In Front Of The Television
You will be able to stay home, brother.
You will be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will be able to lose yourself on Xanax and
skip out for beer during commercials, if you haven't DVR'd
Because the revolution will be sitting in front of the television.
The revolution will be sitting in front of the television
Brought to you by Xbox...

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the proposed minimum wage hike, and the way rightbloggers reacted to the CBO report on it. They could have kept their mouths shut about this very popular plan, in short, but the bait was too good. They think the possibility of half a million jobs lost is a good talking point against the raise, but they don't understand that they're the last people on earth anyone would trust on the matter; hell, they could be reading straight from the Holy Bible and no one would believe them -- which, come to think of it, is how they got in this predicament in the first place.

I keep hearing that some of the more adventuresome conservatives might go for a guaranteed income, but I'm old and remember when they were saying that about slavery reparations.

FINALLY, A JIM CROW THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH.

Conservatives finally have something to celebrate -- a wave of laws to deny public-accommodation relief to gays who've been discriminated against, so long as offending business remembers to cite the Lord or His equivalent. There's a bunch of it out there but National Review's Kevin D. Williamson will do:

Barry Goldwater, who set the great precedent for Arizonans’ shocking liberal sensibilities, had been an instrumental figure in the Phoenix desegregation effort but opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because he believed that by expanding the federal mandate it would lead to cumbrous and byzantine federal micromanagement of social affairs, and about that much he has been proved correct. The concept of “public accommodation” has been so inflated that as a practical matter no private sphere exists outside the home when the question of discrimination arises. That situation does not inculcate mutual toleration and respect, but the opposite.

And that's why there's still racism -- because Big Gummint won't get out of the way and let businesses say, "Keep walking, nigger, we don't serve your kind."  (Or "faggot," whatever.)

It's like they don't want any more votes, isn't it?