Good morning.

1. Life imitates art, Kafka version.
2. Hypocrisy and the life of the Congress-critter. 
3. Is there anybody dumber than Mr Biden?
4. Distancing from Mr Obama … already 8 timezones or so away. I think “honest” is a good enough to create a huge separation.
5. Religion in the land of the Cossack.
6. Work and joy.
7. Tribute offered.
8. The myth of liberal guilt. Not unrelated.
9. Another liberal myth.
10. A teacher.
11. Ignoring taxes.
12. Pot shots at the most incompetent in our midst.
13. Deontological dinner party.
14. In the face of evil, in the absence of God … what to do?
15. Considering unemployment extensions.

Good, uhm, mid-day.

1. Earmarks and moral hazard.
2. Cinema and the cold-war.
3. Baltic states in the news with Ms Clinton.
4. Union reps hiring min-wage strikers seems somewhat comparable to declaring a hunger strike but still eating.
5. Mr Obama lies about GOP stance regarding extending unemployment. Color me unsurprised.
6. Actually, I guess that’s a broken promise and a lie.
7. Speaking of Mr Obama and his hyperbole.
8. Tea party and racism, some data examined.
9. More on racism here.
10. Elijah’s ascent, and the “as if.”
11. Criticism of a progressive polemic.
12. Greece, military and economy intertwined.
13. Theories of conspiracy abound.

Good (alas late) morning.

• Budget response.
• Riffing on Blake.
• Hyperventilating on secrecy. “Every day the NSA … collects and stores 1.7 billion” phone calls and emails, which means no human agent is paying any attention to that. Uhm, so what? 
• Diversity and diversity.
• Cinema.
• Gender roles and the Roman church.
• Gas.
• Why won’t they condemn? Why won’t liberals publicly condemn every fringe movement on their shores? Same reason. (hint: its a fruitless waste of time).
• All in a day’s work.
• In the aftermath.
• A song and debt.

Good morning.

1. Watermelon affection.
2. Memory Eternal.
3. A question for union supporters.
4. Employment.
5. Inception reviewed from another point-of-view.
6. Medical tech and self-empowerment.
7. Emergent behavior.
8. A typical response.
9. A book reviewed.
10. A blogger and jail.
11. A big list of upcoming books.

Good morning.

1. East and West.
2. On the “unconditional engagement” strategy.
3. Why? I guess it’s part of the hope/change thing.
4. Tax cuts and revenue.
5. On those payday loan services.
6. Missing the moral of the story … the moral isn’t about immigration it’s about inculcating dependency on congress-critters.
7. Holder defends a rapist … hmm, nobody out there is connecting this with the Admin paying back Hollywood for their money and support. More here.
8. Yah, and if not, he’ll be kicking some butt (for all the good it did and would do).
9. More like unbelievably irrelevant.
10. For the panic stricken.
11. Watermelons in Bulgaria.

Good morning.

1. More about taxes and choices.
2. An interesting article noted.
3. More on the new law in France, prohibiting super-heroes from using masks. More here.
4. A monastery of note in Arizona.
5. One man’s prediction for 2012.
6. Hobbes in the news … although I’d have to say for my part, Bertrand de Jouvenel skewered his main thesis quite well.
7. CEA, models and a fallacy of argument.
8. A little zoom and boom.
9. The media has started to forget (already).
10. Self perceptions, 1000 words.

Good morning.

• Shadow banks?
• Greece and stimulus.
• Slovakian politics.
• Nazi influence on Islamic extremist movements.
• A more reasonable (and likely more prevalent) Islamic action.
• Heh.
• 2 x 1000 word pick-me-up feel-good link for the day.
• A certain Mr Wallace.
• From the abortion front lines in Rockford. Chainsaws? Huh?
• Cap and trade.
• Cops get an average of a 6 figure compensation?
• I concur. The conservative meme’s on the economy are wrong (although the linked piece is not very demonstrative of that point). The flip side is that the liberal/progressive meme’s on the economy are just as wrong.
• A bookstore noted.
• Things that go boom, with a 280mm bore no less.

Good morning.

They check immigration status at traffic stops.  This can only be referring to those racists in … Rhode Island.  Do you think we’re likely to see a lawsuit from the Justice Department there?  Yea, me neither.  In fact, it’s already been upheld by the First Circuit Court of Appeals when a private citizen sued.  Yet the government is going after Arizona for this.  Can’t have anything to do with who each state voted for in the last election, right?

“A federal district court judge in Boston today struck down the 1996 federal law that defines marriage as a union exclusively between a man and a woman.”  I’ve read portions of the ruling, and I can actually see the judge’s point.  However, I think the 10th Amendment’s “equal protection” clause is being misused a bit to now refer to things like health benefits, which doesn’t really strike me as “protection” from a government’s viewpoint.  And Jack Balkin, a supporter of same-sex marriage incidentally, wonders (among other things) if liberals really want to go down this path with the 10th Amendment.  “As much as liberals might applaud the result, they should be aware that the logic of his arguments, taken seriously, would undermine the constitutionality of wide swaths of federal regulatory programs and seriously constrict federal regulatory power.”

The “biggest revolution in the NHS [Britain’s National Health System] for 60 years” is … giving doctors responsibility for overseeing patient care!  Yes folks, it took 60 years of socialized medicine for them to realize that.  Do you want to lose those 60 years of common sense here?

Much of the media is saying that the report that was commissioned by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia to investigate the ClimateGate document dump exonerated the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia.  Except there’s the issue of the biggest thing critics have been harping on; the “hide the decline” suggestion that inconvenient data has been reworked to be consistent with the conclusion already drawn.  Buried in the report is this gem:

On the allegation that the references in a specific e-mail to a “trick” and to “hide the decline” in respect of a 1999 WMO report figure show evidence of intent to paint a misleading picture, we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the IPCC Third Assessment Report), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was Misleading.

Terry Miller explains:

The researchers were not trying to hide evidence of a decline in global temperatures over the last decade—we have plenty of actual thermometer readings to show temperatures in recent years. What they were trying to hide was the discrepancy between actual temperature readings and the temperatures suggested by tree ring data. They have relied on tree ring data to show that the earth was cooler in the past. If the tree ring data is not reliable (as the discrepancy in recent years would suggest), then maybe the earth was actually hotter in the past than these researchers would have us believe—and perhaps the hot temperatures of recent years do not represent unprecedented global warming but just natural variation in climate.

So the big issue that critics latched on to is, indeed, still a big issue.

Good morning.

Is there a turn in the tide regarding gun rights? As a result of the recent Supreme Court ruling on 2nd Amendment rights, a DA in Wisconsin will not prosecute certain state laws restricting the use or carrying of firearms. Some of the laws he will not prosecute include:

prohibiting uncased or loaded firearms in vehicles;  prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons, including firearms;  prohibiting the possession of firearms in public buildings;  and prohibiting the possession of firearms in establishments where alcohol may be sold or served.

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Besides not letting them learn to read, black slaves couldn’t own guns either. Justice Clarence Thomas likens restrictions to the 2nd Amendment to tactics used by racists. From his opinion on the McDonald v. Chicago suit,

Militias such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, the White Brotherhood, the Pale Faces and the ’76 Association spread terror among blacks. . . . The use of firearms for self-defense was often the only way black citizens could protect themselves from mob violence.

By the way, Otis McDonald, of McDonald v. Chicago, is black.

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And lastly, regarding the 2nd Amendment, a cogent and well thought out argument. Excerpt,

In no other country, at no other time, has such a right existed. It is not the right to hunt. It is not the right to shoot at soda cans in an empty field. It is not even the right to shoot at a home invader in the middle of the night.

It is the right of revolution.

Written not by a Tea Partier or Right-wing Gun Nut, but by a very liberal author at Daily Kos.

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Well, if we can’t ban gunsmoke, then how about… smoke?

Under the new law, smoking is prohibited in indoor and outdoor areas frequented by the public, including sidewalks, parking garages, bars, restaurants, stores, stadiums, playgrounds and transit centers. Lighting up outside is also banned in places that are within 20 feet of indoor areas.

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There won’t be any smoke around our family meal, though. In Family Meal as Therapy, we read,

…there is something about a shared meal–not some holiday blowout, not once in a while but regularly, reliably–that anchors a family even on nights when the food is fast and the talk cheap and everyone has someplace else they’d rather be. And on those evenings when the mood is right and the family lingers, caught up in an idea or an argument explored in a shared safe place where no one is stupid or shy or ashamed, you get a glimpse of the power of this habit and why social scientists say such communion acts as a kind of vaccine, protecting kids from all manner of harm.

At risk to my standing at my place of employment, I make it a point to have dinner with my family. It matters.

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What about Jeremiah 29:10? Never read a Bible verse; especially Jeremiah 29:11.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Good morning.