Visit me at www.cbrookskurtz.com

I set up this blog as an experiment to see what I could incorporate for my main site, www.cbrookskurtz.com. The experiment ended sometime back, so if you wish to read my work, go to my site. --C. Brooks Kurtz

Shrugging...

Disincorporation - dig it. 

Most talk of disincorporation appears to be exploratory, and some public-finance experts say towns may not have that option if it is being used to unload financial obligations. "This is somewhat of a legal gray area, because disincorporation was not designed to allow cities to escape financial hardship," said John Knox, a public-finance consultant with the San Francisco office of law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.

Mr. Knox, a bankruptcy consultant to Vallejo, said shifting oversight of a city's services to a county or state during the current economic environment would be a tall order. In California and many other states, the county or state must approve such a move, he said. Most counties are ailing as badly as cities, and are unlikely to readily approve a disincorporation, he said.

That isn't stopping some towns from checking into the possibility. In Mountain View, a Denver suburb with about 500 residents, sales-tax revenue has shriveled with the departure of four businesses last year, undermining its ability to pay city-government employees or to afford police and sewage service.

This is fun...

I do love the Great One, and was surprised to see how many retorts he offers in the comments.

Excellent Mem-Day post

There are several types of pieces writers publish on days like Memorial Day. As I noted on my FB feed, like most Americans, I spent a weekend with friends/family grilling/eating/drinking/catching up, but Memorial Day is an observance, not a celebration like July 4th. 

One interesting thing I didn't know about Memorial Day is disclosed here, in a good piece by Kurt Schlichter over at Big Hollywood:

At the risk of being presumptuous, those who gave their lives for our country would want you to gather your buddies and drink beers and eat barbecue (Resolved:  Barbecued beef ribs are superior in every way to pork ribs.  Discuss.).   I plan to.  There is a reason that on Memorial Day the flag flies at half-staff only until noon, when it is raised to the top of the pole again.  It symbolizes that we honor our dead by going forward with our lives.

Honor our fallen by remembering them, and just as importantly, what they did.  We can do that best by confronting the nonsense that surrounds us by telling the stories of these brave American men and women.  When little Jimmy comes home confused because the teacher said that America is irremediably racist, you tell him about the Union soldiers who fell at Gettysburg.  When your daughter tells you her textbook says that World War II was really instigated by war profiteers, pop in the disc of the Band of Brothers episode where Easy Company stumbles onto a Nazi death camp.  When your son asks what that bumper sticker saying “End the War” means, you tell him about what the cops and firefighters had to do on 9/11.  Let the truth be your tribute.

More Cheney love here, and more to come

Hey-O! I like the phrasing in this excerpt, but it's an excellent piece. For someone who was going to put aside the old ways of politics, it sure does take someone special to rehab the image of Dick Cheney - the defenses keep coming:

Think about that. Back in those heady days after the 2008 election, anyone who suggested that Mr. Obama might find himself playing defense to Dick Cheney on Guantanamo would have been hauled off as barking mad. Yet that's exactly what Mr. Cheney has pulled off, leaving a desperate White House to try to drown him out by adding an Obama speech the same day Mr. Cheney was slated to address the American Enterprise Institute.

Great piece by RS McCain

I was not home-schooled but have long been an advocate of it. I don't buy the absence of "socialization" in home-schooled kids because it is a false argument on two fronts: home-schooled children are more likely to be involved in any number of religious, civic and charitable organizations than students of the public schools, and when we speak of socialization, we need to examine what it is, exactly that we're talking about. 

Here is a wonderful piece from The Other McCain about his daughter, and within it you'll find yet another piece from a prominent LP. What is understandable from parents who resist homeschooling is the peer-pressure and sense of "they're kooks" from friends, and that's not a trivial concern. Yet, I would recommend any parent who is considering sending their children to a public school to get qualified as a substitute teacher and spend a few weeks in one, then see if this is really the kind of socialization you want your children exposed to:

Bragging on one's children is an especial joy when the kids are home-schooled, since Kennedy's achievements reflect credit on her mother, who spent seven years teaching our daughter at the kitchen table.

The success of home-schoolers is a refutation to the arrogance of a government education bureaucracy that is prone to assert, with the self-righteeous authority of official expertise, that my kids and theestimated 1.5 million other home-schooled students in America are being deprived of something useful. My only regret is that more children are not similarly deprived.

Steyn's latest

Back from Memorial Day Weekend fun and observation, and back to the real world, which continues to crash about us. It took Rome a bit to fall - it's going to take The United States much less time. What a shame:

S

EVCA serves two rural counties with a combined total of a little over 40,000 households. If you wanted to stimulate the economy, you’d take every dime allocated to Windsor and Windham counties under ARRA and divide it between those households. But, if you want to stimulate bureaucracy, dependency, and the metastasization of approved quasi-governmental interest-group monopolies as the defining features of American life, then ARRA is the way to go. Oh, you scoff: ARRA, go on, you’re only joking. I wish I were. We’re spending trillions we don’t have to create government programs to coordinate the application for funds to create more programs to spend even more trillions we don’t have.

The stimulus will do nothing for the economy, but it will dramatically advance the cause of statism (as Mark Levin rightly calls it). Last week’s vote in California is a snapshot of where this leads: The gangster regime in Sacramento is an alliance between a corrupt and/or craven political class wholly owned by a public-sector union-bureaucracy extortion racket. So what if the formerly Golden State goes belly up? They’ll pass the buck to Washington, and those of us in non-profligate jurisdictions will get stuck with the tab. At some point, the dwindling band of citizens still foolish enough to earn a living by making things, selling things, or providing services other than government-funded program coordination will have to vote against not just taxes but specific agencies and programs — hundreds and thousands of them.

Creepy

The Dear Leader and his henchmen never miss a beat when it comes to controlling the message. From Tapper:

Read the TV pool report: "Your Pool was not allowed to go over and shoot POTUS with the team shooting hoops.  We protested loudly."

Now we know why: Obama White House officials decided to do their own media report on the visit, complete with cuts, interviews, and chyrons identifying who's speaking. 

A brief history of Gitmo

Wow.

Gitmo was never meant to be a prison where inmates were to serve sentences for crimes. It was, in the words of a Defense Department document, a detention facility set up in order to prevent “enemy combatants from continuing the fight against the US. and its partners in the war on terror.” Its goals were military and tactical, not juridical or penal. Still, the conditions under which these unconventional prisoners were to be held did involve questions.

I'm shocked, shocked! to learn that Greenunist Dogmatists are profiting from it!

What can you say? This isn't exactly a new story, but Bjorn Lomborg is the anti-Gore in ever sense of the word, and his case at WSJ.com should make headlines everywhere. Sadly, it won't. Fascism won't come to America with a cross and a flag, it's coming here with a recycle-bin and Prius with a Hopenchange bumper strip. 

The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.

Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking."

The world's largest wind-turbine manufacturer, Copenhagen Climate Council member Vestas, urges governments to invest heavily in the wind market. It sponsors CNN's "Climate in Peril" segment, increasing support for policies that would increase Vestas's earnings. A fellow council member, Mr. Gore's green investment firm Generation Investment Management, warns of a significant risk to the U.S. economy unless a price is quickly placed on carbon.

Obama as Spock? Not so, says some guy

I find The Medea's insistence on Obama being some kind of modern Spock funny, because, well, is there anything remotely intelligent they won't compare him to? Oh wait, they haven't compared him to me, so that's that. I'd note, no matter your politics, if you're not the smartest guy in the room but you proudly state that you can identify who that guy is, you're not only not the smartest guy in the room, you're not even in the unspoken coterie of smart people who actually know who the smartest guy in the room is. 

Anyway, from Parcbench, a relatively new Conservative culture site, comes this interesting piece by Nick Rizzuto:

Obama’s lack of logical guidance can also be seen in his reversals on key issues. From military tribunals, to wiretaps, to the abuse photos, Obama seems to have only adopted logical positions after he discovered that his initial ones were illogical and unworkable.

Obama’s entire political career has been based on emotional pleas to victim groups, as can be plainly seen by some of the alliances he’s chosen in the past. As a matter of fact, Barack Obama’s most Spock-esq calculations have been of a political nature rather than decisions that legitimately speak to his abilities as a leader. 

Missing link?

Wow.

Huh?

Ross Douthat's piece in the NYT takes a crazy U-turn. Writing about Dan Brown's Catholic fanfiction that is The Davinci Code and Angels and Demons, he brings up Ayn Rand? 

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots,he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

Ah, so Rand's an idealogue now. So, aside from being a crank, a cult-leader and such, she's also now compared with Dan Brown while lumped with Deepak Chopra. Seriously? 

Rand isn't for everyone, because her works take effort to read and they challenge assumptions most people have about the way the world works. The only thing Dan Brown has in common with Rand is that his novels sell in the millions. To lump her in with a hack writer of Catholic fanfiction and two spiritualist nut-jobs is, well, expected, I guess. That Rand was an atheist who glorified Capitalism while eschewing almost all metaphysics is beside the point. 

Whenever possible, dump on Rand. It'll get the commentariate going. 

Great piece about Nock at NRO

Aside from being an informative intellectual bio about a writer I'm barely familiar with, Jonah Goldberg has penned one of the better essays I've read in the last few months. I recommend the whole, but I love this passage:

But here is the odd, or wonderful, thing about Nock. For all his clarity and passion, he professed no interest whatsoever in trying to persuade anybody. “The wise social philosophers,” he wrote, “were those who merely hung up their ideas and left them hanging, for men to look at or to pass by, as they chose. Jesus and Socrates did not even trouble to write theirs out, and Marcus Aurelius wrote his only in crabbed memoranda for his own use, never thinking anyone else would see them.” Indeed, Nock struck a pose of bemused disdain for the self-proclaimed prophets of the New Age — the Father Coughlins, the Huey Longs, the Upton Sinclairs, and even the Liberty Leaguers. Surveying the landscape of demagogues, mountebanks, and experts sucking the oxygen out of democratic discourse in the 1930s, he wrote, “I cannot remember a time when so many energumens were so variously proclaiming the Word to the multitude and telling them what they must do to be saved.” 

Abortion and Bias

Wanna see a nice example of bias? Read any of the Medea's reporting - not commentary, reporting - on why there is a kerfuffle over The Dear Leader visiting Touchdown Jesus. According to media reports, like the one from Time excerpted below, the issue is with Obama giving the address at Notre Dame. That is controversial, yes, but it's not why Catholics and Lifers have gone nuts - it's the awarding of an honoroary degree. 

Note the sarcasm at the beginning of the piece as well. The Vatican, like Notre Dame, has lost credibility on this issue. The Medea has not lost crediblity because it no longer has any. 

At the rate things are going, Pope Benedict XVI may find his next trip to the U.S. dogged by airplanes overhead trailing banners with images of aborted fetuses. O.K., that's a bit of hyperbole. But while several prominent conservative Catholics in this country are apoplectic over the University of Notre Dame's invitation of the pro-choice Barack Obama to give the school's commencement address on May 17, the Vatican has stayed completely silent on the matter.

Oh yeah, they want to kill off old people too

In Atlas Shrugged, the story of the decline of The Twentieth Century Motor Company, once the greatest motor company in the world, is arguably Rand's strongest argument by rhetorical example she ever produced. The TCMC was willed to three direct heirs, who applied the creed 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need' and they ran the company into the ground. 

We learn the story from a steamer tramp, who tells Dagny the story as he eats with her in her dining car. As he tells the story, everyone started keeping tabs on everyone else, because the harder you worked, the harder you had to work, and the more you needed, the harder others had to work. Near the end, he tells of an old woman in their community that was beloved by the people at the factory, the elderly mother of one of the workers. She fell, and was going to need a costly operation (to be shared by everyone, of course) and the tramp tells Dagny that a couple nights before the surgery, she mysteriously died. 

In short, someone killed the kindly old woman because they got tired of having to pay for other people's problems. You have a microscript for what national healthcare and the monsters who are trying to force it down our throats have in mind. Literally. Also from NRO:

Word to the wise: Short your shares in Grandma, Inc. That’s because Dr. Emanuel has embraced a technique for simplifying some of the tough calls: age discrimination. He wrote in The Lancet in 2008: “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination.” We all were young once, the argument goes, so denying the elderly and weak in order to care for the young and fit is just. It does not take the fine nose of a Robert Parker to detect a whiff of Social Darwinism in ideas of this vintage. It is morally shallow, but unsurprising: Age discrimination is not a side effect of politically managed health care; it is a critical and fundamental feature of Britain’s National Health Service and other government-run health systems admired by Obama and his advisers. Under their arithmetic, the rewards of a procedure must be divided by the remaining life expectancy of the patient, leaving the elderly with what McCaughey calls a “denominator problem.” 

Abortion booster give speech to Cathoilics

I've made clear my feelings on the subject over at CBK.com, but my question here is a bit different: is there a mandate among Catholic parishoners that abortion, the intentional destruction of human life, is always and forever wrong? From Gerard V. Bradley over at NRO: 

Three hundred thousand Catholics have signed petitions criticizing the university. Over $8 million in donations has been withheld in protest. Local bishop John D’Arcy is boycotting the commencement. Scores of other bishops have spoken out against honoring Obama, because the president has (in Bishop D’Arcy’s words) “reaffirmed, and has now placed in public policy, his long-stated unwillingness to hold human life as sacred.” D’Arcy suggested that Notre Dame had chosen “prestige over truth.”

What surprises me about this that 300,000 people signed the petition, but there are millions of Catholics in America. In the age where signing a petition takes about 15 seconds online. What is creepy - very creepy - about this business is the honorary degree. Keep in mind we're discussing a politician who refuses to say what his stance is on abortion, because his stance would appall most thinking people. Recall it was State Sen. Obama who voted Present - not Yay, Not Nay - on the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, a bill that states if a child lives through an unsuccessful abortion, they cannot be murdered. As the stories of what happens to these children after they are born are too greusome to go into here, I'll leave it at that. I think 99.99999% of the public agrees that once a child has exited the womb and taken a breath of air, life has most certainly begun. 

One aspect of this story that I find intriguing that is off the radar is the fact this is an administration who wants to take away the right of doctors to not take part in medical abortions (the so-called "conscience clause). If this becomes law, that means that Catholic hospitals, who overwhelmingly serve the underprivileged, would either have to start performing abortions or shutter their doors. You want to honor people who believe in this obscenity with degrees, just because they don't look like the guys on the dollar bill and have a funny name? 

What a disgrace. The more I think about it, the more I think serious Catholics may want to start a new sect. I'm glad to see there is a serious divestment campaign underway. As I've said elsewhere, don't like Progressive, anti-human values the Left keeps beating over our heads? Quit sending your money to these institutions just for better parking and seats at games. It's pretty simple. 

Wow, this chick really hates atheists

Fascinating piece in the LA Times by Charlotte Allen (h/t Hotair), who's had it up to here [picture me holding my hand under my chin] with these goddamn atheists - sorry, couldn't resist. There's plenty not to like about all sorts of atheists, but Allen certainly picks some strange fights. I rarely write about this online, but yes, I am an atheist, 'out of the closet' for about three years, 'in the closet' since I was 22, agnostic since I was 17, and before that, I was a Christian who'd wanted to become an evangelist or a missionary. 

Seriously.

My fear, honestly, was that my family would disown me - and I've still never explicitly told my mom, though I suspect she knows. When I finally did come out of the metaphysical closet, I promised to myself that I'd not be one of these atheist know it alls who go about bashing religious people and their beliefs over the head with it, and I don't. I'm just as likely to agree with a religious point of view as not (see my Pro Life stance, support of Israel, etc).  Being a Conservative Atheist is the most natural thing in the world to me, but most people on both sides claim it's either hypocritical or self-hating. I have plenty of self-hate,  but not about my view of a rational world. I learned all the self-hate I needed while sitting in church. 

Anyway, the point is that Allen makes some of the silliest points about why she hates atheists imaginable. The atheists she's talking about are

a) either hated by most atheists (those ones always going to court over some right of their that was violated

b) or misrepresented by Allen. 

Consider the point she makes the excerpt below. I have read all the atheist books she references, have watched debates involving every one of these men (many of them debating renowned religious scholars about a/theism) and she represents them in the worst possible light, if not actually misconstruing what they say. The point Dawkins is making that Allen fudges is not that is evil, it's that if the Judeo-Christian God - especially the one of The Old Testament - was real, he was one mean, cruel entity. 

We don't claim that God is evil or that God is dead, we claim that God does not exist. If you want to nail an atheist to the wall, see what kind of weird superstitious beliefs they have. Bill Maher - who's film 'Religulous' everyone tells me I must see - has some pretty strange beliefs of his own. He's not an atheist, he's just anti-religion. The fact that he calls himself an atheist to sound cool, that's the kind of atheist I hate. Anyway, from Allen's piece:

And then there's the question of why atheists are so intent on trying to prove that God not only doesn't exist but is evil to boot. Dawkins, writing in "The God Delusion," accuses the deity of being a "petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak" as well as a "misogynistic, homophobic, racist ... bully." If there is no God -- and you'd be way beyond stupid to think differently -- why does it matter whether he's good or evil?

 

A pretty straight definition of torture

I wrote extensively about torture, what it is, what it ain't and what it means on CBK.com this week. Victoria Toensing, former chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee, just penned as instrucive a primer as you're going to find on what legally constitutes torture by the standards of United States and United Nations law. 

Not to say I told you say, but you'll note the language of Ms. Toensing's piece and my definition of torture fall neatly in line, even though I'm far removed from the gods on The Hill. 

Read the piece here. 

The memo to the CIA discussed 10 requested interrogation techniques and how each should be limited so as not to violate the statute. The lawyers warned that no procedure could be used that "interferes with the proper healing of Zubaydah's wound," which he incurred during capture. They observed that all the techniques, including waterboarding, were used on our military trainees, and that the CIA had conducted an "extensive inquiry" with experts and psychologists.

But now, safe in ivory towers eight years removed from 9/11, critics demand criminalization of the techniques and the prosecution or disbarment of the lawyers who advised the CIA. Contrary to columnist Frank Rich's uninformed accusation in the New York Times that the lawyers "proposed using" the techniques, they did no such thing. They were asked to provide legal guidance on whether the CIA's proposed methods violated the law.

More Cheney still...

Loving it. 

Shrugging

From Doc Zero over at HotAir's Green Room:

These casual accusations of criminality and deceit come easily to Obama, who has been a real bull in the china shop of the credit industry. He’s threatened Chrysler’s bond holders with personal destruction, and used raw government power to adjust the balances on home mortgages. Nervous banks have taken TARP funds designed to stimulate new lending, and sat on those funds instead, because they’re afraid to make loans in the increasingly Venezuelan business environment the Administration has created. U.S. Treasury bonds are losing frightening amounts of value in the face of reckless deficit spending.

Another defense of Dick Cheney

An interesting trend is emerging. I have never been shy about my admiration of Bush and Cheney, especially Cheney, but I've noticed many denfenses of the man, the latest coming from a very odd place: the Washington Press. The piece, by veteran Washington reporter Carl Cannon, is astonishing because it is honest, something we no longer expect from the Washington press and the larger MSM, which I have taken to calling The Medea. 

My theory on this - well, I don't really have a theory, I think it's just common sense - is that even pragmatic liberals are starting to understand that The People are playing politics with national security, which is not only suicidal and insane, it is also reprehensible (Steyn illustrates that point quite well). I don't like politics being play with health care and cap and trade, but that's life. However, using the political winds as an excuse to not only endanger the country, but save your own ass is despicable. I expect more of these defenses of Cheney in the future. 

At about 10 a.m. that awful morning, the vice president entered a secure White House shelter. He was told that the Air Force was attempting to scramble planes to defend the air space over Washington. That raised another question, one pertaining to the missing plane White House officials assumed was heading their way: Who was going to authorize shooting it down? Cheney, with Bush's concurrence, gave such an order. Minutes later, officials in the shelter learned a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. In the unemotional prose of the report, the 9/11 commission noted: "Those in the shelter wondered if the aircraft had been shot down pursuant to this authorization."

At 10:39 a.m., Cheney spoke with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It's clear from the transcript of that call that Cheney believes he may have authorized the shooting down of an American passenger jet. Rumsfeld seems skeptical, but he doesn't really know either. I'm not sure "changed" is the right word, but I believe that in those 40 minutes--with the nation under attack, with Cheney not knowing if his daughters and grandchildren are safe, with his impression that he's directed a very hard order to some flyboy in the U.S. Air Force, possibly killing another 200 Americans--that Dick Cheney resolved to do whatever it would take to protect this country, regardless of the cost to his reputation or popularity. I respect him for that, and I empathize with him.

Steyn's latest howler

Steyn's turning into the king. 

It’s worth noting that, by most if not all of her multiple accounts, Nancy Pelosi is as guilty of torture as anybody else. That’s not an airy rhetorical flourish but a statement of law. As National Review’s Andy McCarthy points out, under Section 2340A(c) of the relevant statute, a person who conspires to torture is subject to the same penalties as the actual torturer. Once Speaker Pelosi was informed that waterboarding was part of the plan and that it was actually being used, she was in on the conspiracy, and as up to her neck in it as whoever it was who was actually sticking it to poor old Abu Zubaydah and the other blameless lads.

Where is Where is John Galt?

Apologies for an absence of posting since DMB weekend. Frankly, I've had the writer's block but have finally come out of it. So, the posts will start back up today. --CBK

New at cbk.com

Sorry, but here's one about gay marriage. Blase, I know. 

New at CBK.com

Regarding Dick Cheney...

CBK.com update

Sorry for the absnece on the site and here, but I've been away. Anyway, it's update time:

http://www.cbrookskurtz.com/articles/2009/5/10/star-trek-im-not-into-it.html

http://www.cbrookskurtz.com/articles/2009/5/10/the-real-white-house-correspondents-dinner-speech.html   --Warning - graphic language ahead on this one

Herein, the glass half-full

Here is a rosy portrait of American life a third through '09, and I want to agree with it. Yet, while agreeing with it, I tend to be bearish on the author's sentiments. From what I see not only in the national media, but in the local media and the unscientific petri dishes like my Facebook feed, I think Capitalism as it can and should be is becoming a lost cause. 

My first concern was how many intelligent, college-educated, high-earners I know who were so enthusiastic about The Dear Leader's campaign, his innauguration, and currently, his regi- er, Administration. If we can't rely on private sector earners to watch out for their own self-interest, then I'd say we're fuct. I know several Obamacons who now regret their brush with dystopic idealism, but that cat's already shat the bed, to mix a few metas and run them round the old oak tree. 

I'm pessimistic about the outlook of the author. I think if people who earn their coin in the free-market find anything - and I mean absoultely anything - appealing about a Statist like Obama, then the wall's already been written upon. My politics are on the margins, this I freely admit. Yet I make no apologies for Capitalism or free-market Conservatism, and to see so many people who make their living from it abandon it for notions of Hope is not only distressing, it is epistemologically catastrophic. Put another way, the narrowing majority of us who actually pay Federal Income Taxes have reaped what we've sown. We've elected a Sexiest Man Alive when a Pragmatically Acceptable Living Person would have sufficed. 

Before getting to the blood, I will admit this: Arthur C. Brooks is dead-on when it comes to defining the "battle" regarding what it is and what it ain't - it's not abortion or gay marriage or immigration, it's about money and what we who've earned it can and cannot do with it; in short, the culture war was, is and remains about the fate of Capitalism. It will perish not with a bang, but with the thousand whimpers of those who thought there was a better way. The bed is made, now we can rot in it. 

Enough of the negativity. Here's what the author had to say in the WSJ:

Still, the tea parties are not based on the cold wonkery of budget data. They are based on an "ethical populism." The protesters are homeowners who didn't walk away from their mortgages, small business owners who don't want corporate welfare and bankers who kept their heads during the frenzy and don't need bailouts. They were the people who were doing the important things right -- and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong.

Latest at CBK.com

Hell yeah - the tour is finally close. 

The Dear Leader notices things

Funny. 

Laying his plan for a President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Obama began to name the members of PCAST listed in his prepared remarks – before realizing he’d already introduced them, earlier in his speech. 

“In addition to John – sorry, the – I just noticed I jumped the gun here,” Obama said, pausing for several seconds as he looked at the prompter. “Go ahead. Move it up. I had already introduced all you guys.” 

New at CBK.com

My latest is on the decline and fall of Conde Naste Portfolio. 

PJ O'Rourke goodness

PJ O'Rourke is the rare treasure of modern American letters - the great wit and thinker who only shares his thoughts on occasion as opposed to occasionally each day. Like Hitchens and Paglia, he sees no need to keep us updated on his every thought - as a man who does update whomever wants to know on his latest thought, I admire this. PJ is what Hunter Thompson could have been. Oh well.  His latest is wonderful. My favorite passage?

t's going to be hard to do a worse job running America than the Republicans did, but the Democrats can do it if anyone can.The Left is the party of government activism - the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, slimmer, taller, and take a dozen strokes off your golf game.The Right is the party that says government doesn't work. And then they get elected and prove it.

Excellent essay

Another find at Big Hollywood leading to elsewhere. The salient passage:

Our enemies bomb restaurants, shopping malls and night clubs, shoot their own citizens in soccer stadiums, behead Americans on the internet, fly planes into buildings, imprison or shoot their citizens who speak out against the government, threaten to vaporize Israel off the planet and who knows what else. Yet we have these 4 pompous freaks wanting to criminalize sticking a guy's head under water in a bathtub?

Funny

John Nolte over at Big Hollywood posted this hysterical review of Earth, another piece of Greenuism propaganda. My favorite line is the first:

Anyone who’s figured out that Global Warming is socialism disguised as nonsense will immediately understand why DisneyNature’s “Earth” was dropped into theatres and aimed at your children on Earth Day. 

In civil rights news...

I don't remember The Dear Leader campaigning on a platform of not allowing suspects in a crime access to an attorney until the trial begins. Wonder how I missed that? 

In other news, Democrats still hate children

This kerfuffle has been brewing for some time, and if it actually happens, I expect to see Obama fiddle while Washington burns. Of the 200 children who will be directly affected, consider that three of them attend school with his two props/daughters at the Quaker snobatorium, Sidwell Friends. Fear not for those girls - rest assured that headline-grabbers like Hitchens or gazillionaire limosouine liberals who despise bad publicity will pay for the three girls all the way through their Womyn's Studies grad courses at Brown. 

School vouchers are, frankly, almost frivolous in budgetary terms. More astonishing, they are supported by the vast swaths of voters who are not linked by syringe to a union. But after the debt he owes to Planned Parenthood, The Dear Leader's blood pact with the NEA is the strongest. Nobody raised more grassroots money for him, and there is nothing that disturbs the NEA more than children getting a decent education, especially if that education takes place outside the walls of a public education prison. There are several premises to this theory of children not being educated in public schools; one presumes that the NEA's strongest argument lay in that it makes it much more difficult for their female teachers to rape the male children. Anyway, Juan Williams unloads:

And all along the administration indicated that pending evidence that this voucher program or any other produces better test scores for students they were willing to fight for it. The president has said that when it comes to better schools he is open to supporting “what works for kids.” That looked like a level playing field on which to evaluate the program and even possibly expanding the program.

But last week Secretary Duncan announced that he will not allow any new students to enter the D.C. voucher program. In fact, he had to take back the government’s offer of scholarships to 200 students who had won a lottery to get into the program starting next year. His rationale is that if the program does not win new funding from Congress then those students might have to go back to public school in a year.

He does not want to give the students a chance for a year in a better school? That does not make sense if the students and their families want that life-line of hope. It does not make sense if there is a real chance that the program might win new funding as parents, educators and politicians rally to undo the “bigotry of low expectations” and open doors of opportunity — wherever they exist — for more low-income students.

This actually is change I can beleive in

Found this over at HotAir. One thing I'd like to see out of The Dear Leader's four-year stay in the White House is a drastic relaxation of American drug laws. I'm not a drug user, but frankly, the prohibition of many illegal drugs - especially marijuana - is absurd. 

Where do I sign up? 

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Regarding the tenth anniversary of the Columbine massacre. 

Well, you have to admit it's change

I wonder if Phil Connors is now working for The AP. I have made my disgust for the MSM and the AP known, but this is one dilly of a pickle that made it across the wire:

While historic analogies are never perfect, Obama's stark efforts to change the U.S. image abroad are reminiscent of the stunning realignments sought by former Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev. During his short—by Soviet standards—tenure, he scrambled incessantly to shed the ideological entanglements that were leading the communist empire toward ruin.

But Obama is outpacing even Gorbachev. After just three months in power, the new American leader has, among many other things:

—Admitted to Europeans that America deserves at least part of the blame for the world's financial crisis because it did not regulate high-flying and greedy Wall Street gamblers.

—Told the Russians he wants to reset relations that fell to Cold War-style levels under his predecessor, George W. Bush.

—Asked NATO for more help in the fight in Afghanistan, and, not getting much, did not castigate alliance partners.

—Lifted some restrictions on Cuban Americans' travel to their communist homeland and eased rules on sending wages back to families there.

—Shook hands with, more than once, and accepted a book from Hugo Chavez, the virulently anti-American leader of oil-richVenezuela.

—Said America's appetite for illegal drugs and its lax control of the flow of guns and cash to Mexico were partly to blame for the drug-lord-inspired violence that is rattling the southern U.S. neighbor.

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Regarding Susan Boyle. 

Steyn's latest on the Tea Parties

As always, quite fun. 

Amid his scattershot pronouncements on everything from global nuclear disarmament to high-speed rail, President Obama said something almost interesting the other day. Decrying a “monstrous tax code that is far too complicated for most Americans to understand,” the Tax-Collector-in-Chief pledged: “I want every American to know that we will rewrite the tax code so that it puts your interests over any special interests.”

That shouldn’t be hard. A tax code that put my interests over any special interests would read: “How much did you earn last year? [Insert number here] thousand dollars? Hey, feel free to keep it. You know your interests better than we do!”

Okay, to be less absolutist about it, my interests include finding a road at the end of my drive every morning, and modern equipment for the (volunteer) fire department, and a functioning military to deter the many predators out there, and maybe one or two other things. But 95 percent of the rest is not just “special interests” but social engineering — a $400 tax credit for falling into line with Barack Obama and Susan Roesgen. That’s why these are Tea Parties — because the heart of the matter is the same question posed two-and-a-third centuries ago: Are Americans subjects or citizens? If the latter, then a benign sovereign should not be determining “your interests” and then announcing that he’s giving you a “tax credit” as your pocket money.

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You can read my latest column about Igor and animal rights here. 

Gotta love Ann

I wrote about this in my recap of the OKC Tea Party, and Ann Coulter picks up on it in her weekly column today.

Coulter zeroes in on the "tea bagging" humor that has wafted dandelion spores from MSNBC to pretty much everyone who watches MSNBC, including too many people on my Facebook feed. What is so funny about the stupidity of the terms "teabag, tea-baggers and tea-bagging" is that it is is the perfect watermark to indicate, in person or online, you are hearing commentary from the hosts at MSNBC (and that includes you, Mr. A Cooper), only retold without credit by a person far less clever, which isn't saying much. Read it here. 

On MSNBC, hosts Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have been tittering over the similarity of the name "tea parties" to an obscure homosexual sexual practice known as "tea bagging." Night after night, they sneer at Republicans for being so stupid as to call their rallies "tea bagging." 

Every host on Air America and every unbathed, basement-dwelling loser on the left wing blogosphere has spent the last week making jokes about tea bagging, a practice they show a surprising degree of familiarity with. 

Except no one is calling the tea parties "tea bagging" -- except Olbermann and Maddow. Republicans call them "tea parties." 

But if the Republicans were calling them "tea-bagging parties," the MSNBC hosts would have a fantastically hilarious segment for viewers in San Francisco and the West Village and not anyplace else in the rest of the country. On the other hand, they're not called "tea-bagging parties." (That, of course refers to the cocktail hour at Barney Frank's condo in Georgetown.) 

VIDEO: OKC TEA PARTY

Here is a quick video the OKC Tea Party right before it got started taken from the steps of the Capitol. Sorry for the shaky-cam feel, but it was the first time I've used my Flip camera. I don't have a stake in the company, but it's quite easy to use and you can see, the quality is good. 

I posted my first column about going to the Tea Party here. I'm sure there'll be more. 

Just to be clear...

Like many, I was ambivalent about abortion throghout my college years, and like most, I'd made up my mind by the end of said years. I know the debate from both sides, but - and this is no way to win an argument - I'm forever creeped out by the arguments pro-abortion people make. They fetishize and ethicize the ending of human life, and that's rather creepy. A widely circulated piece regarding the same:

We all frequently experience ambivalence when faced with a deep and life-changing crossroads in our lives, and the choice of an abortion is an example of that. Women can feel initial sadness, but simultaneously know what she needs to do, that the abortion is the absolute best choice, and ultimately feel resolution, peace, and pride. In fact, many women do feel goodness, empowerment, increased self-esteem, and pride in the wisdom and the awareness that they took control of a frequently chaotic situation - unwanted pregnancy - and made a moral and ethical decision that was beneficial for their lives, their futures, and, ultimately, was also good for society.

Human kindness

I'm not a touchy-feely person, and I'm not moved when people are surprised that animals demonstrate many human-like qualities such as empathy, fear, pain, rage, intelligence and deductive reasoning. As a defender of a wide range of animal rights, I'm always surprised that people had never noticed these qualities before. 

I am forever surprised by human kindness that is either immaterial or irrational. 

Here is a link to a social experiment. It's making the rounds at HotAir, and it is fascinating. An arts student assembled a 10-inch tall cardboard robot and filmed it with a hidden camera as it made its way through Washington Square Park in NYC. It is fascinating to watch one person after another help it out of a jam (pothole, immovable object etc).  The robot is crude and cute. It is a couple of cardboard boxes, and for its face we have the classic "smiley face." It also has a pennant attached to a staff that comes out of its back. 

What interests me - and I just watched this - is what is it that compels the people to help? Except to its maker, there would be little cruel about either leaving it be or, for that matter, destroying it (again, except to its maker). I'm quite surprised it wasn't stolen. Anyway, it's quite interesting. 

Don't do it!

Hong Kong has been the freest economy in the world for more than a decade (probably longer, but most surveys on the subject don't go back a long way). The Index of Economic Freedom has listed it as the freest for 14 consecutive years. A must-read piece by John C. Goodman over at NRO discusses what the Adminsitrative State is doing to kill capitalism's paradise by "death from a thousand cuts." Goodman describes a Hong Kong that few people hear about - the large government benefits, especially in health care - but most chilling for me is the institution of a minimum wage, that is coming soon. No free economy can survive wage controls on one end and collective bargaining on the other and stay free for long. 

Ironically, the biggest problem is: The people of Hong Kong are just like us! They don’t understand free enterprise any more than Americans understand it. They are no more dedicated to it than we are. They do not think of free-market capitalism as a moral and ethical ideal any more than Americans or Europeans think of it that way.

True enough, people in Hong Kong are aware that theirs has been named the freest economy in the world, and they are proud of that fact — even though capitalism was handed to them by a colonial government that no one in Hong Kong ever voted for. But from what I can tell, they would be perfectly willing to let it die a death of a thousand cuts — just as the rest of the developed world has done.

All signs point in the wrong direction. The government is about to impose Hong Kong’s first minimum-wage law. It is pushing for expansion of the public sector in health care. And when the welfare cash allowances described above were reduced recently, almost all the members of the elected Legislative Council (which acts in an advisory role) protested the move.

Now, for some good news

About damn time, and good for him, if the report is accurate.

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama twice authorized the military to rescue a U.S. captain held by Somali pirates and whose life appeared to be at risk.

Atlas is shrugging

I wonder if Gov. Patterson is happy to see these people leave? 

“After 10 years, I did not see a future for myself,” said Mr. Jung, 42, who quit to parlay his sales expertise into a career at Aladdin Capital, a small but rising investment firm run by others who had also left some of the most venerable names in finance.

There is an air of exodus on Wall Street — and not just among those being fired. As Washington cracks down on compensation and tightens regulation of banks, a brain drain is occurring at some of the biggest ones. They are some of the same banks blamed for setting off the worst downturn since the Depression.

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Sunday morning jam session: bags, Kanye, South Park and Lohan

Meghan McCain and stuff

6000 words about taxes, Taylor Swift and Game Theory

Yeah, it's CBK.com update fun. 

Read my take on Taylor Swift's remarkable album here. 

Read my take on Dollhouse and its embrace and manipulation of Game Theory here. 

Read about why I'm taking off work and attending the Tax Day Tea Party here. 

Blogging Atlas Shrugged returns with a Danneskjoldian vengance tomorrow. To the observers, Happy Easter. 

Ragnaar is screaming

Here's an excerpt of Mark Steyn's latest at NRO. Before getting to it, though, a word about the pirates, who have now taken a second American vessel, this time a tugboat with 16 people on board. 

I was not aware that merchant ships, due to one treaty or another, have been completely unarmed for some time. This seems rather, um, insane to me, chugging across the Indian or the Pacific with millions of dollars worth of merchandise without a couple of guns, or, I dunno, bazookas. If you want to know the dangers of bad people knowing you are unarmed, you need only to witness the Great Pirate Outbreak of '08-'09. Small vessels carrying savages from a third-world hell-hole are taking over massive ships using, you guessed it, guns. 

The lesson isn't difficult. People with guns, no matter how unrefined, uncivilized and disenfranchised, tell people who don't have guns what to do. This is zero sum. As The Dear Leader dreams of a world without nukes, those of us who are not categorically batshit recognize that nukes did not exist when Adolf Hitler came to power, but it took only two of them to make the Empire of Japan rethink its position. The People's Republic of Korea and Iran certainly seem to understand the joys of nukes, as they are both moving as quickly as possible to get them. 

Weapons keep dishonest people honest, and the absence of guns in the hands of some but not others orders a two-class system: those who prey, and those upon whom they prey. It's quite simple. 

Now, from Steyn:

As it happens, Somali piracy is not a distraction, but a glimpse of the world the day after tomorrow. In my book America Alone, I quote Robert D. Kaplan referring to the lawless fringes of the map as “Indian Territory.” It’s a droll jest but a misleading one, since the very phrase presumes that the badlands will one day be brought within the bounds of the ordered world. In fact, a lot of today’s badlands were relatively ordered not so long ago, and many of them are getting badder and badder by the day. Half a century back, Somaliland was a couple of sleepy colonies, British and Italian, poor but functioning. Then it became a state, and then a failed state, and now the husk of a nation is a convenient squat from which to make mischief. According to Chatham House in London, Somali pirates made about $30 million in ransom and booty last year. Thirty mil goes a long way in Somalia, making piracy a very attractive proposition.

Great piece by Andrew McCarthy at NRO

An exceptional column, and the link in the except below goes to a great WSJ piece. 

That’s not our position anymore. The scourge of piracy was virtually wiped out in 19th century because its practitioners were regarded as barbarians — enemies of the human race (hostis humani generis, as Bret Stephens recently reminded us in a brilliant Wall Street Journal essay). They derived no comfort from the rule of law, for it was not a mark of civilization to give them comfort. The same is true of unlawful enemy combatants, terrorists who scoffed at the customs of civilized warfare. To regard them as mere criminals, to assume the duty of trying to understand why they would brutalize innocents, to arm them with rights against civilized society, was not civilized.

Atlas is shrugging

Want to know how to empty a city's braindump and watch it crumble? Like Detroit, you can allow organized labor to collectively bargain itself out of a baron to rob, or like New York, you can tax people to the point that the joys of city life are no longer fiscally responsible.

Much ado was made about Rush Limbaugh's decision to sell his properties in New York and not spend another day there (he only spent three weeks a year there - he lives in Florida, which has no state tax). What will be interesting is how many other mega-earners will follow suit. New York is trickle-down taxation - fewer and fewer high earners are paying for services for low- or non-earners, and now, with the highest tax rate in the country, expect to see the brainpower flee. 

Enough is enough. 

But who and where are all these millionaires to pluck? More than any other state, New York has been hurt by the financial meltdown, and its $132 billion budget is now $17.7 billion in deficit. The days of high-roller Wall Street bonuses that finance 20% of the New York budget are long gone. The richest 1% of New Yorkers already pay almost 40% of the income tax, and the top 0.5% pay 30%.

Well said, from another fan of the Austrian school

Long, but beautiful. 

I would note that the same people Robert Stacy McCain cites (Hayek, Mises, Friedman and Rand) are the same people who have influenced so much of my thinking (as a freedom-loving libertine, I'd be remiss if I didn't note that de Sade, Dostoevsky and Paglia have also influenced said thinking). I would venture that most people are intimidated by their work because - frankly - they have unusual names. 

Yet - to use a favorite method of devout Christians, and no disrespect is intended by that remark - one can open "The Road to Serfdom" to any page and find wisdom that is breathtaking. Forget the Limbaugh Challenge, I would ask anyone who despises free markets and how people behave when participating in them to read "The Road to Serfdom" or Friedman's "Free to Choose" (or, for a more modern take, Norberg's "In Defense of Global Capitalism" or Sowell's "Basic Economics" or "Black Rednecks and White Liberals") and see if they still think the same way. 

By virtue of going to college, I've been exposed to the most lauded progressive thinkers, and by virtue of intellectual curiosity, I've read many more on my own. Strangely, it's reading the thinkers to the left of me that have cemented my views on the right. A severe problem on the Left when it comes to thinking is that it believes by listening to Ann Coulter on Hannity while chewing on five minutes of a three-hour Rush Limbaugh they've found some missing link to understanding Conservatives. I love both, but Conservatism in America - especially in economics - blossomed around the thinkers mentioned herein, and oh so many more that came before them. 

What Mises, Hayek and others of the Austrian school patiently demonstrated was that socialism (Marxian or otherwise) is based on a fundamental fallacy that ultimately makes socialism unworkable in practice. Socialism -- the "planned economy," as Hayek often described it -- neglects the function of prices as information by which individuals make their own economic decisions.

Krauthammer goodness

Nice read here. Excerpt:

When Austria is mocking you, you're having a bad week. Yet who can blame Frau Fekter, considering the disdain Obama showed his own country while on foreign soil, acting the philosopher-king who hovers above the fray mediating between his renegade homeland and an otherwise warm and welcoming world?

After all, it was Obama, not some envious anti-American leader, who noted with satisfaction that a new financial order is being created today by 20 countries, rather than by "just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy." 

To be a fly on the, er, picnic table at this brainstorming session

Nothing to see hear people, just the POTUS and the SOS sifting through the rules of Chinese Freeze Tag to see if a boy freeing a girl by crawling through her legs is gender-neutral or constitutes sexual harassment. No word yet if the POTUS's daughters are allowed to play pirate. 

New one at the flagship

Regarding that POTUS bow and other addictions here...

Atlas casting once more

Notes from a pro...

#1: Since the book already a has a following and is now back on the bestseller list, the movie has a built in audience. You don’t really need to cast the Hollywood heavyweights. So, let’s forget about Angelina and mainstream Hollywood for a moment and cast it with no names. OK, maybe the talented lesser known named Hollywooders. Then let’s go to Broadway where the cream of the crop actor’s are, as well as regionally where you’d be sure to find some amazing undiscovered talent. Assuming the screenplay follows the book and the director respects the material, casting stage actors is the cherry on top of this scenario. 

Linguistial fortitude

Nice:

 We know boiling frogs we cannot by frogs dropped in water that's hot--  They'll jump from the pan, but boil them we can when water's first cold 'stead of hot.  Succeeding in ways Machiavellian without causing leaps to rebellion requires cool linguistics so languages transfixes perceptions that might cause rebellion.

Mystics and Skeptics collide again!

Sounds like an interesting debate - look forward to watching the video...

While most of us are familiar with Christopher Hitchens, many people may not know of his opponent Dr. William Lane Craig. I simply call him, “The smartest living Christian.” Like Hitchens, Dr. Craig makes a good living at debate. Dr. Craig is a brilliant logician and eloquent advocate of the faith. He is an “evidentialist” in that he argues for the existence of God based on evidence not presupposition (which is another popular form used in debate).

The anti-Black Swan?

Some practical wisdom, not even hindsight.

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

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Watched Twilight last night. Yeah, this oughta be good. 

Still shrugging

It's disturbing and revelatory that the most coherent writing, speaking and thinking about these times is coming directly from Westerners who are being suffocated in the very type of society The Dear Leader is attempting to create. From Jeff Randall at the UK Telegraph:

This Government, I accept, is not solely responsible for the diminution of decency, but it has played a significant role. It promised much and delivered little. In doing so, it fostered a wrath among those who cling on to the hope that sanity can be restored to high office. These voters will not be found hurling rocks at the Bank of England or setting fire to RBS's head office. But, make no mistake, their yearning for fulsome retribution is palpable.

Be very afraid

Chilling, yes. 

Bloomberg News has tallied Washington’s spending and promises as it props up banks, insurers, automakers, and seemingly everyone except hardworking taxpayers who promptly pay their bills. Bloomberg deserves great credit for focusing on this constantly moving target. In its latest estimate, Bloomberg correspondents Mark Pittman and Bob Ivry reported on March 31 that the Federal Reserve, Treasury, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Department of Housing and Urban Development have saddled taxpayers with $12.8 trillion so far. America’s 2008 gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion. Hence, the federal bailout now equals 90.14 percent of GDP.

A new kind of politics? Yes it is

Dad and I have been exchanging the same meme about The Dear Leader, his people and his plans, taken from Apocalypse Now: the shit piles up so fast you need wings to stay above it:

Lawrence Summers, a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, pulled in more than $2.7 million in speaking fees paid by firms at the heart of the financial crisis, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America Corp. and the now-defunct Lehman Brothers.

He pulled in another $5.2 million from D.E. Shaw, a hedge fund for which he served as managing director from October 2006 until joining the administration. 

Unions are evil. What else needs to be said?

Just strange to hear it coming from one of collective bargaining's biggest cheerleaders. Guess Pub and Ed aren't on the same page:

In a striking example of corporate hardball, the New York Times Co. has threatened to shut down one of its journalistic jewels, the Boston Globe, unless the New England paper's unions agree to sweeping concessions.

Blogging Atlas Shrugged 1.6

Wherein Dagny trades diamonds for metal ... here. 

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Dollhouse rockin' like Dokken.

20 Great Poly-Incor statements from Hollywood

My favorite from the American Thinker list? 

"The thing that I resent most is that they [the communists] are able to get into the union, take them over... I feel, that they really ought to be smoked out and shown up for what they are, so that all good, free causes in this country, all the liberalisms that really are American, can go out without the taint of communism." --Walt Disney

Still Shrugging....

Oft-mocked in J-schools, USA Today was the last great innovation in newspapers. The paper, a creation of Gannett and founder Al Neuhart, realized that papers were getting left behind by Americans increasing addiction to television. USA Today was often referred to as "McPaper," proving that the smugness of newspaper people knew no bounds even then. It was and remains a four-section (News, Life, Sports, Money) five-day-a-week national paper, and for the most part, has been as good a way as any to get the pulse of the nation through a newspaper. Like most papers, it skewed/s to the Left, but regularly publishes Conservative commentary, and regardless of its daily editorial view, always publishes an opposition view. 

I was an avid reader of USA Today for years. I called it dessert, and that's not meant as a putdown. Before wi-fi was everywhere, it was the fastest way to get a taste of what's going on in the country. I began to get hesitant when the paper invited Michael Moore to cover the 2004 GOP National Convention and Ann Coulter to cover the Dem convention. Moore's work was printed, Coulter's was not. 

Neuharth is a Lib, but his 300-word column every Friday tended to stay away from partisan politics. Beginning with our invasion of Iraq, that changed, and noticeably too did the letter printed, the tone of the editorials, and the growing imbalance on the Viewpoints page. 

Going Galt means many things to many people, but the last movement of my first act in the Going Galt game was to quit buying USA Today everyday. I'd quit buying and subscribing to newspapers in 2007, but the coverage of the POTUS race in '08 - particularly with the paper's coverage of then-Sen. Obama - did me in. I was not alone, and the news grows bleaker for America's largest newspaper. Give them credit: they earned their demise by openly, flagrantly backing an anti-business Leftist when the primary consumers of their rag are business travelers. As someone who actually a business traveler, I won't even pick up the free copy anymore when I'm staying at a hotel, although I do still sneak a peak at its Friday Travel section, at least if it's free.

From WSJ:

USA Today President and Publisher Craig Moon announced his sudden retirement Tuesday, leaving the country's largest newspaper with its top two jobs unfilled during perhaps the most difficult stretch in its 27-year history. He also said the newspaper has lost about 100,000 subscribers just from the slowdown in travel.

Mr. Moon said in an interview that the slowdown has resulted in a reduction of more than 7% in the number of copies of USA Today distributed through partnerships with hotel chains such as Marriott, which account for more than half of its circulation.

Renewed vigor to bring Atlas to the screen

It looks like we might be getting closer to seeing Atlas onscreen. Like everyone who likes the novel, I have my thoughts. 

I would like to see the same visual techniques that made Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow so effective used in it - the green glow of Rearden metal would be particularly compelling. Atlas, like LoTR, deserves to be a three-parter. If producers don't think there's an audience for it, they're out of their minds, and the book is broken into three parts. I don't think it would be an effective representation of the book or Rand's ideas to jam it into a three- or even four-hour production.

Casting will be key for many reasons. If big money gets behind the production - and I get the sense that it is - Atlasphiles and Objectivists will go berzerk if left-wingers fill the roles. I've always been happy with Angelina Jolie as Dagny Taggart, because Jolie has stated her admiration for the novel before. Some of the names batted around as Dagny - especially Julia Roberts (old and left-wingy) and Anne Hathaway (left-wingy) would infuriate fans. As for the other key characters, a star will be made if a relatively unknown Latin actor is cast as Frisco; Hank Rearden's tough, because people think of him as older (I think most people think of Harrison Ford) but he's only in his 40s and is described as "looking younger."). I don't think the actors have to all be conservatives or libertarians, but the producers better proceed with caution if they consider actors with loudly-voiced leftist views playing anyone other than looters and moochers (Alec Baldwin would be perfect as James Taggart - a great lefty actor with a great screen presence). 

Anyway, from the story:

Rand’s popular but polarizing book — it’s derided by many literary critics but has a huge public following — tells the story of Dagny Taggart, a railroad executive trying to keep her corporation competitive in the face of what she perceives as a lack of innovation and individual responsibility

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April Fools Day for smokers: the joke's on you!

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Wherein I talk about a hotel room.

This is why we hate them

Hate is nothing but a four-letter word. Whatever. 

It's always fascinating to experience liberals hagiographically profile other liberals. Evan Thomas's piece in Newsweek about more-liberal Nobel Laureatte, NYT Op-Ed page nutcase Paul Krugman is no exception. The nonexistent, er, unstated subtext - which Thomas stumbles into, because and not in spite of his own glaring ignorance of the subject - is that Krugman thinks The Dear Leader isn't doing enough to wreck the economy. 

Thomas dances around it using the limber rhetoric of the follower. In essence, Krugman - who I just described as a nut - is at least honest enough to note that Obama has not followed ideological diktat closely enough. This perturbs Thomas, presumably because he's not as smart as Krugman.  Having not met either man, I can state flaty that Thomas is not as smart as Krugman, not because Krugman has a Nobel while Thomas writes for a party organ like Newsweek, but because Thomas and his ilk take their "smart points" from people like Krugman. 

I'm frineds with a fair share of uber-brains of the academic persuasion, and even the ones I love, even the ones I consider mentors, would I never describe as "sweet." 

Also, what is particularly enjoyable about this moment is that Krugman thinks he has a megaphone, especially a big one. It's sad when a Nobel winner and acclaimed economist like Krugman doesn't realize he's doing mop-up duty for Meghan McCain. And, as a final observation, only a liberal could bask in the glory of having a proftiable microphone just as "the wold [is] going to hell."

 Seriously:

Krugman is having his 15 minutes and enjoying it, although at moments, as I followed him around last week, he seemed a little overwhelmed. He is an unusual mix, at once nervous, shy, sweet and fiercely sure of himself. He enjoys his outsider's power: "No one has as big a megaphone as I have," he says. "Aside from the world going to hell, it's great." He is in much demand on the talk-show circuit: PBS's "The NewsHour" and "Charlie Rose" on Monday last week, ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" this past Sunday. S