Heh....

Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion:

"There are so many apologies needed. Shirley Sherrod is the least of them.

So well said....

Welcome To Via Meadia:

"I was waiting to name my blog until the White House came up with a new name for the Conflict Formerly Known As The Global War On Terror (COFKATGWOT); I’ve pretty much given up on that now. We are fighting an anonymous war with unspecified goals against Those Who Cannot Be Named and that’s the way it will stay for a while.

But just because our civilian leadership cannot settle on a name for the high stakes conflict now being fought on six continents plus cyberspace by the largest and most powerful military and intelligence forces in the history of the world against an unspecified constellation of people and organizations seeking to destroy American power and western civilization for reasons that cannot be described in polite company is no reason for me to have an anonymous blog.

Worth examining at a lot of different levels....

Tenure: An Idea Whose Time Has Gone:

"Academics within the tenure system are probably more careful about weeding out heresy, because they'll be stuck with it if it manages to sneak in. Tenure can easily be used to entrench the ideological or scholarly commitments of a department's powerful members, reducing diversity rather than enhancing it."

The Manchurian Listserv

Ed Driscoll:

"“Rev. Wright is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

Getting to the point....

Walter Russell Mead:

"This is a dumb strategy, but the people who have come up with it, and who persist in it after a year of epochal political collapse and historic levels of fiasco and humiliation continue to believe with a serenity I can admire if I can’t quite respect that they are smarter, more virtuous and altogether more worthy than the rest of the world — and that they and they alone know how the world must be run.

The strategic incompetence exhibited by the climate movement and its congressional allies is something that students everywhere need to study — and especially those who hope someday to help build a better world or fight for social change. This is how you fail, kids: Advance half baked policy ideas by hyping the science to create a global panic; when that fails, fall back on shady little dodges that don’t fool anybody — all the while telling anybody and everybody that you are the smartest, most virtuous person in the room.

Under the "No Shit!" title....

Time for a Chief Executive?:

"Whether it is Pawlenty or some other candidate who captures the nomination, it may be high time to hire someone who’s run something, turned a profit, maintained a payroll, balanced a budget, or hired and fired people. There is something terribly adolescent about Obama — an infatuation with himself and with pretty words, a lack of decisiveness, an inability to make tough choices, and an unwillingness to take responsibility for his own actions. By 2012, the country may be ready — desperate, even — for a grown-up executive.

Quote of the decade!

Popehat:

"We get, and deserve, the tyranny we tolerate. We get it because we teach officious government officials that regulating our life is their birthright. More frighteningly, we get it because we teach our children that the role of the government is to regulate our life — thus dashing their chances to be free people.

United States v. Arizona -- How 'Bout United States v. Rhode Island?

Andy McCarthy:

"So, we have a Justice Department that drops a case it already won against New Black Panthers who are on tape intimidating voters in blatant violation of federal law, but that sues a sovereign state for enacting a statute in support of immigration enforcement practices that have already been upheld by two of the nation’s highest courts. Perfect.

Quote of the Day:

The Agitator:

There is no “right” to something someone else has to provide or pay for. That’s an entitlement.

And the truth shall set you free!

View From The Porch:

My god, if there's a more perfect metaphor for the modern progressive movement, I've never seen it.

Thanks, Uncle Joe!

Kopp the Custard Man

A simple way to think about the Democratic Party is, you're the human being, they're the tapeworm. Yet they claim a weird sort of parasite's moral superiority over you: if you point out that they have their hand in your pocket, you're a "smartass." The Democratic Party needs to be torn, root and branch, from our public life.

I'm with him....

Jerry Pournelle:

I believe that the upcoming election is the most important election in decades, and that its effects will be felt for decades to come. What's at stake are the very principles of this nation. Surely that's clear enough? Clearly I believe that those who voted in this government were mistaken. I want those people back on our side.

I knew... How about you?

The Useful Idiots Begin to Blubber:

Listen up, you punked, chumped boobs: We looked at Obama not through your rose colored hallucinations, but through the cold, clear spectacles of reality. None of what he’s done since has surprised us one bit. In fact, many of us, myself included, predicted it even before his coronation by people like you. Yes, it’s nice that after a year and a half of horrible examples, the truth about him is finally beginning to penetrate your skulls. But why, for the love of god, couldn’t you see it at the beginning, when it was no less obvious, but your understanding of it might have done some good?

Had enough yet?

Obama's Bizarre '9/11' Take on Gulf Spill

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, one of the most bizarre things ever said by any president.

The left’s strange hostility to Hirsi Ali...

Mark Steyn:

All she wanted was a chance to do what Nicholas Kristof takes for granted—to live her own life. What difference would saying “I love you” in a Lifestyle Channel soft-focus blur accompanied by saccharine strings make? As they see it, the perpetrators of “honour killings” love their daughters: that’s why they kill ’em. Would Kristof wish to swap his options for the set menu served up to Muslim women? How would he like it if, just as he was getting ready to head to Oxford on his Rhodes Scholarship, his dad had announced that he’d arranged for him to marry a cousin? Oh, and in Canada.

Do ya' think?

Victor Davis Hanson:

I used to think that oil, Arab demography, fear of Islamic terrorism, and blowback from its close association with the United States explained the global double standard that is applied to Israel.

But after the hysteria over the Gaza flotilla, the outbursts of various members of the Turkish government, and Ms. Thomas’s candid revelations, I think the mad-dog hatred of Israel is more or less because it is a Jewish state. Period.

...How odd that the more the activists, political leaders, and media figures issue moral strictures against Israel, the more they prove abjectly amoral. And the more they seek to pressure Israel, the more they are liberating it to do what it feels it must.

Can't stop laughing....

The gulf between Hollywood hypocrites and the oil spill:

Now that the gulf faces a crisis that's poised to be potentially worse down the road for the region, Hollywood celebrities are not only absent from the area - they are practically silent. Unlike after the earthquake in Haiti in January, there hasn't been an overwhelming response of donations, large-scale fund-raisers, contribution-driven Web sites and hotlines or public service announcements encouraging Americans to do all they can to help out the fishermen or the oil-drenched ducks.

Not because celebrities don't want the media attention, but because their guy, Barack Obama, is in the middle of the mess.

Not a bad thought....

Commentary:

We need to think carefully about what that means and whether we can take a holiday from history.

Toss a coin - it's only our future....

Fiscal Stimulus

And you thought only Congressmen could be that stupid...

John Derbyshire:

Front-page headline in my New York Post this morning:

2 + 2 = 5
NY passes students who get wrong answers on tests

The accompanying story describes a further dumbing-down of state math tests for kids in grades 3 to 8. Half marks are given for fragments of work; also for wrong answers arrived at via correct methods: “A kid who answers that a 2-foot-long skateboard is 48 inches long gets half-credit for adding 24 and 24 instead of the correct 12 plus 12 . . . ”