Boyd

Kelly:

It has become clear by now that God Himself has struck down our nation with mass insanity as punishment for sins I can only guess at, and it behooves us to endure this meekly until such time as it pleases Him to avert His awful Wrath. Our politicians are not stupid or wicked, they are agents of divine retribution, the heaven-appointed angels of our destruction, and as such we must accept whatever torments they choose to inflict with humble submission.

Presumably he's talking about England. However, these agents have undoubtedly migrated here.

Update: Probably illegally.

Jeffrey Friedman:

If I don’t like ice cream Brand A, I don’t need to have a theory about why it tastes bad. I just need to be able to try Brand B. But if the government tries to improve on Brand A, the political decision maker—whether the voter or an “expert” legislator or bureaucrat—has to have the right theory about how to make the best ice cream. This is too much to ask of any given human being. Markets throw fallible entrepreneurs’ different theories of what makes for the best products open to a process of competition in which the consumers is king—but in which consumers don’t have to be knowledgeable or logical kings in order to rule well.

Too little, too late. More here and here.

McNamara:

Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on "officer safety" and paramilitary training pervades today's policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn't shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed. Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.

How much longer are we going to put up with this foolishness?

It's a market, not a war. There's demand for drugs and as long as that doesn't change, there will always be suppliers. The more illegal you make drugs, the more risk goes up and the greater profits become thus ensuring that someone will always be enticed to go into business.

Eliminate all pretense.

Update: Wonder what 'Benefactor' is code for?

Update II: Probably the yin to the yang of 'Centerfold Model.'

The Economist:

There has been much hand-wringing over the state of America's capital markets and their ability to help businesses grow. The main worry is that despite being big, they are no longer competitive compared with the leading financial centres of Europe and Asia.

Sullum:

Coherence is something conservatives could have learned from Milton Friedman, who emphasized that freedom is indivisible.

Inside Edition:

Doss spoke to INSIDE EDITION about how the incident came about. "I told him that my friend doesn't think that you're funny. Simple as that, that's all I said."

Uh oh. Guess we better prepare for the impending Dane Cook meltdown.

The Australian:

Dealing with cut-throat real estate agents can be like floating on your back in the sea as hungry sharks circle ever closer.

Recently some Manhattan brokers seem even more desperate to secure sales in a slowing market -- arriving at showings stressed and sweaty, with bags and black circles under their eyes.

Would it ease the pain if these brokers were chic, beautiful young women?

One boutique agency thinks so, and has hired fashion models from the catwalk to be real estate agents.

Perhaps once the Democrats are done fixing the wealth gap they can fix the looks gap.

Update: Hopefully this will mean making the ugly among us beautiful instead of the other way around.

Derbyshire:

All the buzz now is that neoconservatism is as dead as mutton, and that we are about to turn back to good old Nixon/Kissinger/Bush-41 realism: Let the blighters have whatever despotic, kleptocratic, homicidal, economy-destroying, women-subjugating, minority-oppressing governments they want, so long as they don’t impinge on our own national interests.

Haarbürste:

'Ach,' says Roy suddenly, 'I find I have forgotten to obtain a Christmas present for my Mother who is wintering at Baden.'

I sip my Glühwein carefully and remark, 'This will lead to familial tensions and unseasonal strife.'

'It is so,' says Roy.

Noland:

Friday the 13th of April 2029 could be a very unlucky day for planet Earth. At 4:36 am Greenwich Mean Time, a 25-million-ton, 820-ft.-wide asteroid called 99942 Apophis will slice across the orbit of the moon and barrel toward Earth at more than 28,000 mph.

Don't worry, it'll probably miss us by a few thousand feet and if it doesn't, it takes care of the social security and medicare problems although finding someone to mow the lawn in April 2029 is going to be brutal.

DeLong:

He was a conservative of the old, libertarian school, from the days before the scolds had captured the levers of power in the conservative movement. He hated any government intrusion into people's private business. And he interpreted "people's private business" extremely widely. He detested the war on drugs, which he saw as a cruel and destructive breeder of crime and violence. He scorned government licensing of professionals — especially doctors, who heard over and over again about how their incomes were boosted by restrictions on the number of doctors that made Americans sicker. He abhorred deficit spending — again, he was a conservative from another era. He feared that cynical politicians could pretend that the costs of government were less than they were by pushing the raising of taxes to pay for spending off into the future. He sought to inoculate citizens against such political games of three-card monte. "Remember," he would say, "to spend is to tax."

Simmons:

Q: I'm 99 percent positive that Randolph and Mortimer Duke recently wagered $1 that they could turn the funniest, most successful stand-up comic into a disturbed bum on the street and turn a random unfunny guy off the street into the hottest comic in the land with TV specials and a feature film. How else can you explain the fall of Dave Chappelle and the rise of Dane Cook? It is the only answer. Looking good Dane Cook! Feeling good Dave Chappelle!
--DeVito, Washington

SG: There's still a month left in 2006, but that's the E-Mail of the Year so far.

My wife says I'm obsessed with Dane Cook. I am not obsessed. I am on a mission to expose Dane Cook as the fraud that he is. There is a difference.

Milton Friedman via the WSJ today:

“Given our monstrous, overgrown government structure, any three letters chosen at random would probably designate an agency or part of a department that could be profitably abolished.”

Stein:

...I took an old pal from high school in Maryland to dinner at a Greek seafood place in Manhattan. He sells watches to billionaires -- watches that cost $300,000 that these guys pay for with Titanium American Express Cards.

All around me, diners were drinking red wine at $25 a glass for the most ordinary brand and martinis at $22 a pop. The rib-eye steak went for $42. The place was mobbed and everyone was laughing and joking. Behind me, two men I did not know said they were in the process of raising $400 million for Hillary's campaign.

My friend told me about how his uncle, a Jew fighting in the army in World War II, was killed by German mortar fire. Another uncle had three Purple Hearts. We talked about Iraq and the hell it's become for the U.S. armed forces. What would those guys living in fear every minute think about the life of $300,000 watches and $22 martinis and $42 steaks and everyone laughing their heads off? What do we think about them in their body armor and their Bradleys dying for us whom they don't even know?

You also had Webb's essay yesterday in the Journal.

This issue ain't going away. Folks who believe in free markets would be wise to get out in front with solutions like less government regulation before the usual suspects start proposing capping CEO pay and other idiotic socialist leaning conventional wisdom that will backfire in a plethora of unintended consequences that will do nothing to solve the problem and will impede the only real fix - competition.

David Simon The Wire creator:

"Look, the world is a complicated place. Nothing's black or white … not even race."

AP:

Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who advocated an unfettered free market and had the ear of Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, died Thursday. He was 94.

I was delighted to be in proximity to Friedman on the Political Compass and disappointed that no one else around here who took the test was over there. There's still time to repent, Triad.

Part Mannheim Steamroller, part Motley Crue, part A Christmas Carol, part Tommy, part Pink Floyd laser light show, part American Idol, part Spinal Tap, ladies and gentlemen, Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

Hands down, this was the oddest, most earnest, most couplet laden concert I've ever been to.

Lott. Murtha.

Front pager in the WSJ today on pastors buying sermons off the Internets. The lesson is obvious, isn't it? Anyone can make productivity gains through outsourcing.

You know, I actually think we have a pretty good idea already.

Too good to be true.

WSJ:

"You cannot solve the nation's fiscal problems without increased revenues," declared Mr. Rubin, the Democratic Party's leading economic spokesman, in a speech last Thursday.

Cline:

Somewhere along the road from revolution to "permanent majority," Republican leaders abandoned the core theme that brought Republicans to power: disgust with Washington insider culture.

Republicans might have saved their majority by keeping a single signature promise from 1994. More than any other point in the Contract With America, the promise of term limits showed how serious these reformers were about changing the culture in Washington. Like the capital's namesake, they were willing to walk away from power if the people entrusted them with it. Yet when the time came, they chose to stay put rather than step down.

We don't let presidents get away with becoming permanent fixtures, so why do we tolerate it in Congress?

King:

But it wasn't Marlo who kept me riveted, or kept me plugging HBO's semidefective preview discs into my DVD player with increasing dread and fascination; that honor belonged to Marlo's hired hit team of Chris (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and Snoop (Felicia Pearson). The latter is perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series. When you think of Chris and Snoop, think of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, only smart.

The Wire is the most perfect television I've ever seen.

CNN:

Gunmen clad in Iraqi National Police uniforms kidnapped between 100 and 150 people at a government research institute in Baghdad Tuesday morning...

Is it just me or has the frequency and scope of attacks in Iraq increased since the election? Seems that the terrorists may have read something into 11/7 and are attempting to shore up our resolve.

I am happily surprised that the first major domestic proposal by the Dems is to rework the AMT.

Which has got me wondering just why in the hell the Democrats ever opposed tax cuts in the first place?

The answer, my friends? Republicans.

Used to be that when Democrats were in charge of at least one branch of government (which was the case pretty much always until 2002) and they proposed something the Republicans didn't like, the Republicans would bat them around the head with the dire economic consequences that would surely follow such massive spending. Believe it or not, this was very effective technique back when people worried about deficits and debt and economic laws and things like that. There was even this one guy who had a trailer with a tote board that he'd haul around to state fairs to show you just how fast the national debt was piling up. Anyway, the Democrats would then be forced to say how they'd pay for their vitally important projects and they'd propose this tax or that which then made them unpopular in certain quarters - namely the quarters not benefiting from the new spending and they'd catch a fair amount of grief.

As difficult as it is to imagine now, because of all this the Republicans had massive street cred on budget discipline. They even managed to ride the economic responsibility wave into power. However, that's when a funny thing happened. They seemed to forget why people voted for them and they began funding every project anyone with a pulse could get in front of them.

While all this was going on, the Democrats were sitting back watching, biding their time, for they knew if they ever returned to power there was no way the Republicans were now going to oppose Democrat projects as being wasteful. And to rub salt in the wound, they decided that while they were at it, they'd give the vast, middle class a bone and get themselves way more mileage with their tax cut than the Republicans got with theirs.

So, where's that leave us? Stop fretting and join the party. Nobody likes a wet blanket. If the original, maverick Republicans were right and all this spending is eventually going to catch up with us, it's going to catch up with us. Won't matter much whether you worried about it or not. Have a drink. On second thought, have two.

Samuelson:

In the global-warming debate, there's a big gap between public rhetoric (which verges on hysteria) and public behavior (which indicates indifference). People say they're worried but don't act that way.

It's worse. People want someone else to do something. And they want that someone else to pay for it. Or if they have to pay for it themselves, they want to pay for it in increased hidden costs that are spread out through the economy and don't seem like costs at all.

Of course we're going to regret putting the Democrats back in power. However, there was no other way. The Republican ranks had to be culled.

And if the Democrats, as I suspect, haven't changed since '94, this will be a short-lived phenomenon. Remember how quickly we got from 'Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow' to the Republican revolution. Kos and his ilk will overplay their hand. The Dems will allow it because they're petrified of being behind this particular trend. It is as inevitable as Clinton making gays in the military his first major priority. They cannot help themselves.

The main danger I see is that if the Democrats have been paying attention they've learned that they can stop advocating for tax increases and hence rid themselves of one rather large albatross. The Republicans have shown the way regarding how to have tax cuts and spend at will. Fiscal responsibility as an issue is dead and buried and will be until it's not. In the meantime, if the Dems would leave the rich alone and push for middle class tax breaks, they'd be impossible to dislodge. Assuming, of course, they can resist the charms and wiles of interns and pages who continually assault the capitol looking to bag unwitting Congressmen.

Update: Old way of doing things.

Democrat: We'd like to raise your taxes to give you this social program.

New way of doing things after having watched Republicans for the last few years.

Democrat: Want some social programs you don't have to pay for?

Dobbs:

While the Democratic Party was the clear winner, I don't believe for even a moment that the Democrats' ideals prevailed over Republican ideals. Election Day was middle-class America's declaration of independence from a Republican-led administration and Congress that for six years has been telling working men and women and their families in this country to shut up, listen up and go to hell.

Sooner or later someone is going to make an anti-globalization stand.

Limbaugh:

The way I feel is this: I feel liberated, and I'm going to tell you as plainly as I can why. I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don't think deserve having their water carried.

New beginning or cynical ploy to get from behind one's audience to in front?

Althouse:

To be on camera, under the lights, in the middle of a whirl of activity, expected to perform on cue the way you ordinarily perform naturally in the privacy of your home... oh no! The obvious analogy is to a porno movie!

Good lord, what have we come to when the TV powers-that-be think it's a good idea to show bloggers sitting in a room typing on their laptops.

I'm about ready to follow Sam Jackson's advice and begin wandering the earth like Kwai Chang Caine.

Yeah, I know there's an election going on and a war happening and I know that we all knew that this was as inevitable as the forthcoming January Peyton Manning choke, but it's still fun when you see the initial breaking story.

MSNBC:

Britney Spears filed for divorce Tuesday from rapper-dancer Kevin Federline, officials said.

BTW, they have officials for this sort of thing?

AP:

"The Saddam case is not a Muslim problem but the problem of America and its domestic politics," (Vitaya Wisethrat, a respected Muslim cleric in Thailand) said. "The Americans are about to vote in a midterm election, so maybe Bush will use this case to tell the voters that Saddam is dead and that the Americans are safe. But actually the American people will be in more danger with the death of Saddam."

Somehow, I fail to think so. There ought to be some sort of licensing requirement where you have to prove your ability to carry out a threat before you can be quoted.

For the definitive take on the subject, go here.

If there's a mood out there that needs to be reported, at least find some Arab intellectual who can say things like, 'This is perceived as an attack on all Muslims by those useless f****** slobs in the market-place that I have to deal with every day, ya see what I have to put up with, you try being an intellectual in a s***hole like this.'

TSG:

And after seeing him choke like Aurora Snow (vs.) Pittsburgh last January...

First, if you don't know who Aurora Snow is (or can't figure it out from context), don't google her.

Q. Who's the subject?

A. Peyton Manning.

The best QB since Montana is Brady. Manning isn't even in the conversation yet.

Broad:

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.

What?

Come on New York Times, you can't just stick that line in this story four days before an election and not expound a bit.

How DeAngelo Williams celebrated Halloween.

Olson:

"I'd hit the garage door, and the door would come up, and as it is, I'm cranking up the chainsaw," he said. "And as I'm cranking up the chainsaw, you hear these little kids saying, `There's something in the garage!' "

Derbyshire:

Heard in cocktail-hour chat last night at a NYC conservative bash. The speaker was a senior academic at a major university. The context was donor (as opposed to fee-paying parent) funding of controversial college programs. He: "People just LOVE writing big checks to universities!"

I guess different people get their excitement different ways.

I'm pretty sure this is how liberals feel about taxes - 'People want us to have their money!'

Better still - 'People want us to have our money back!'

CNN:

Kerry was supposed to say, "I can't overstress the importance of a great education. Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq."

You know where else you end up if you don't study, aren't smart and are intellecutally lazy? Back in Washington hoping you don't cost your party an election that was a slam dunk up until yesterday.

Sheffield:

How can any comedian get this famous with no jokes?

The Dane Cook backlash can't get here soon enough.