Boyd

CNN:

...Pelosi defended Jefferson's appointment, saying that while the Ways and Means Committee "had something to do with the accusations made against him," his new post does not.

Jefferson is William Jefferson. Yes, that William Jefferson, the one with $90,000 in his freezer.

Update: Oh, what might the new post be? Wait for it. Homeland Security.

Ross and Wolf:

...people in the intelligence community have speculated recently that the CIA may have obtained surveillance photos of either bin Laden or Zawahri in Pakistan.

You'd think if you could take a picture, you could get a shot off. If you couldn't get a shot off, you'd think you'd keep your mouth shut about where you think Bin Laden might be.

And what, pray-tell, does the CIA think Numbers 1 & 2 are doing in Pakistan? Re-establishing training camps. Seems that fanatical recruits are supposed to be able to find their way to Bin Laden, but not our highly-paid, highly-trained intelligence bureaucrats.

Lorenz and Wagner:

...while economists in Europe and the United States advocate "less government" and "open markets" as a response to globalization and the Chinese challenge, the Marxist-Leninist party that rules China blatantly avails itself of every advantage of capitalism while steadfastly refusing to give up state control over the economy.

As long as Chinese workers remain content (and financial shenanigans are kept to a minimum), this hybrid beast will be in excellent position to take advantage of openness in the rest of the world. But that's the $64 million question - how long you can maintain a feudal society in the face of tremendous prosperity for everyone but your billion-member workforce.

AP:

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said ... Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."

Perhaps a little gruel for dinner tonight, dear?

Applebaum on Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

...she lost her faith, concluding that the Quran spreads a culture that is "brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war," and that should not be tolerated by European liberals.

and...

Curiously, what seems to rankle Europeans most is the enthusiasm with which Hirsi Ali has adopted their own secularism, and the fervor with which she has embraced their own Western values. Though this is a continent whose intellectuals routinely disparage the pope as an irrelevant dinosaur, Hirsi Ali's rejection of religion in favor of reason, intellect, and emancipation seems to make everyone nervous.

Partlow:

"I don't know who I'm fighting most of the time," said Staff Sgt. Joseph Lopez, 39, a soldier based in the northern outskirts of the capital. "I don't know who is setting what IED."

Uniforms are a vastly underrated convenience.

How about this. We revisit Daniel-san present day. He's running a dojo for little kids, coaching youth soccer on the side and keeping up Mr. Miyagi's house as a shrine to his dead master.

Johnny has become a wealthy, high-powered real estate developer.

Ali, down on her luck, married Dutch, who works for Johnny, and now has a couple of charming kids and occasional black eyes.

Johnny, having grown more ruthless and politically connected, decides to take Mr. Miyagi's house to put up condos as revenge for being humiliated in the All Valley Karate Championships back in '85. Bunch of stuff and a montage with 80s music happens, they decide to settle it on the mat only instead of Johnny, Daniel has to face Kreese. Daniel, being near death in the match, has a miraculous comeback. Wins. Beats up Johnny and Dutch and gets Ali and her kids.

Tell me you wouldn't watch this.

Look, if they can make Rocky VI, they can find it in their hearts to do this. What Ralph Macchio, William Zabka, Martin Kove and Elisabeth Shue have anything better to do?

AP:

It's an obscure vignette in civil rights history. (Alma) Shippy not only was Warren Wilson's first black student, but one of the few to attend any segregated college or junior college by invitation -- and not by court order and armed escort.

and..

"There were no dogs, no guns. He didn't have to be shot at. There was nobody that was beaten up, nobody died because he came here," says Rodney Lytle, a 1974 Warren Wilson graduate and now the school's multicultural adviser. "And that -- that story -- that is beautiful!"

Warren Wilson is in Swannanoa, NC near Asheville.

Burkhauser:

...since 1983 the United States has had a substantially higher, but relatively constant, level of inequality than we experienced in previous decades. But during the past 20 years (at least for the bottom 99 percent of us) people at all points on the income distribution have experienced increases in economic well-being with little additional increase in income inequality.

Whitlock:

I was there. Walking The Strip this weekend must be what it feels like to walk the yard at a maximum security prison. You couldn't relax. You avoided eye contact. The heavy police presence only reminded you of the danger.

I've done my own taxes all my life as a protest against the government. I figure that in America, a reasonably intelligent person ought to be able to follow some bureaucrat's instructions to determine what the politicians think they are entitled to of one's earnings. Plus, I get to seethe for four hours every February or March as I marvel at the complexity the people of this country allow their politicians to create and foist upon them.

However, I broke down this year. I bought Turbo Tax. It is as easy as they say. It is intuitive and simple. And that is the problem. It is too simple. It is too easy.

There are two things that would lead to immediate and sensible tax reform in this country. First, everyone should be required to do their own taxes without assistance. They should be ushered to a gray IRS cubicle with decades old office furniture in some ugly office park somewhere and left there until the task is done. Second, and more importantly, withholding should be scrapped. If the people received all the money they earned and then had to write a check to the government each month, demands for accountability would increase a thousand-fold.

Doherty:

Milton Friedman’s relentless belief in the power of a free people and the justice of a free society had vivid real-world effects. Thanks to Friedman, we are no longer forced into the armed services. Thanks to Friedman’s monetary ideas, the cash in our pockets is worth something close to what it was a year ago. Thanks to Friedman, many more people appreciate the arguments against government policies that are no longer considered as untouchable and unquestionably right as they were before he came along.

Hunt:

"The biggest shock with executive compensation is how unembarrassable these people are," says Nell Minow of the Corporate Library, a corporate-governance research group.

Gekko:

And you are all being royally screwed over by these, these bureaucrats, with their steak lunches, their hunting and fishing trips, their corporate jets and golden parachutes.

I don't really want to be commenting on this, but damn girl, lose the wig. I've shaved my head from time to time and it's no biggie.

Listen, stop clubbing, stop drinking, go into seclusion, get a personal trainer, beg Rick Rubin to work with you, drop a smokin' hot techno record next year.

Easiest job in sports: Nascar rules official. Make it up as you go.

Had it not been the last lap, NASCAR surely would have thrown a caution flag immediately, which would have frozen the field at that moment.

Hardest job in sports: Nascar spokesman. Having to explain what just happened.

"When the 07 [Bowyer's car] got sideways on track, the yellow came out at that time," Poston said. "The 29 [Harvick] was ahead of the 01 [Martin] at that time and declared the winner taking the checkered flag."

Huh?

It's a show not a sport.

Mohammed:

Only way out for America is to accept defeat graciously and withdraw. For there is greatness (in) gracious acceptance of defeat.

The reality is our withdrawal is going to play very badly on the street. No telling who will feel emboldened.

Stealing Percy's thunder for a minute. News & Record caption contest this week:

Winner, Cathy Cockerham, Greensboro:

So, you say you counted 22 people in the get-away car?

Boyd's entry sent at 8:39 am last Friday:

How many suspects in the getaway car?

Damn liberal-biased newspaper.

Simons:

As a gesture of solidarity, 150 newspapers in 60 countries reprinted the cartoons.

One of those brave newspapers is headquartered right down the road in Greensboro!

Marcotte:

What I also failed to understand was how much McEwan and I would stick out. I was aware that I didn't exactly fit the image people have of bloggers who join campaigns -- the stereotype being 30-something nerdy young white men who wear khakis and obsess over crafting their Act Blue lists. I wasn't aware that not fitting the image would attract so much negative attention. In fact, I mostly saw this all as a baby step in the direction of diversity, since McEwan and I differed from the stereotype mostly by being female and by being outspoken feminists.

Must suck to be a victim.

Buy this book so that my friend Michael might afford to buy his way out of white slavery.

Update: Does it really matter what it's about?

Update II: Also, he has a new suggestion for what leftists can do. Has something to do with something called Boots.

Update III: Presumably Boots is the UK version of Walmart.

Fund:

...the libertarian impulse is part of our political culture. "I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism," Ronald Reagan declared.

Tyrrell Jr.:

...we might all ask why the opponents of global warming are so hysterical. Basically they are led by the same environmentalists who have been so wrong in the past, and they are always hysterical. In the 1970s they predicted a coming global ice age and overpopulation that would give us all claustrophobia by the end of the twentieth century. They predicted a depletion of resources that would lead to global recession. Their solution has always been the same, hand the government over to them. In fact, if they control the debate over global warming as they hope they will, they envisage governing the world and ending global warming by taxation and limiting the use of fossil fuel worldwide.

There may be growing consensus that the world is getting a bit warmer, but we're a long, long way from deciding what that means.

Burkhauser:

Our economy is not a zero sum game. My gain does not mean your loss or vice-versa. I know of no evidence that increases in the incomes of the top 1 percent of our population are the root cause of the challenges faced by those at the other end of the distribution. Over the last full business cycle, the incomes of rich and poor moved in the same direction. I suspect that for every Robert Nardelli or Hank McKinnell there are far more people like Tiger Woods, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, or Bill Gates, whose skills, vision, and effort allowed them to burst out of the pack of us ordinary 99 percent. But in doing so, the value of the goods and services they create for us greatly exceeds the earnings they receive. That is the consequence of our market economy...

Jim B. of Nelson County, Kentucky writes to say I'm a jerk.

Jack D. of Lynchburg, TN emails to let me know I'm an idiot.

E. Williams of Louisville, KY phones to insult my mother.

All in a day's work. Perhaps you'll shed a tear for me.

Simmons:

It's a tie between Justin Timberlake and Chase Budinger for "white guy who does the best job transcending his whiteness." Justin Timberlake is performing right now, although he made the tragic decision not to sing "D*** in a Box." Hey, it's OK to think he's talented, right? Two hit albums AND he's one of the best SNL hosts ever AND he sold at the highest point possible on Britney's stock AND he wrote the best revenge song ever (the "Cry Me A River" song that pretty much murdered Britney's soul) AND he's plowing through every hot female in Hollywood right now. He's a hero, I say.

This whole thing is inexplicable. I can't believe it's happening, but Bill is right on. I'm loving the guy. His songs are good, he dresses well and who wouldn't trade places with him in two seconds (hypothetically, of course, dear)? Hell, Britney would sell Sean Preston and Jailynn into Lucius Vorenus's childrens' slave camp for a chance to get back with him.

I'm very confused. He was in a boy band at one time, right? Something happened at the Super Bowl too.

Going to go listen to Pantera now.

Phelps:

...the Continental economies' root problem is a dearth of economic dynamism--loosely, the rate of commercially successful innovation. A country's dynamism, being slow to change, is not measured by the growth rate over any short- or medium-length span. The level of dynamism is a matter of how fertile the country is in coming up with innovative ideas having prospects of profitability, how adept it is at identifying and nourishing the ideas with the best prospects, and how prepared it is in evaluating and trying out the new products and methods that are launched onto the market.

and...

The most basic point to carry away is that the empirical results related here lend support to the Enlightenment theme that a nation's culture ultimately makes a difference for the nation's economic performance in all its aspects--productivity, prosperity and personal growth.

It was a mistake of the Continental Europeans to think that they expressed the right values--right for them. These values led them to evolve economic models bringing in train a level of economic performance with which most working-age people are now discontented.

Marcotte:

The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels.

What, she wants god should show up with candy and flowers and take his vessel out for dinner and dancing first?

Update: It goes without saying, however one supposes he has to say it in this case, that god in Christianity is generally viewed as 'so powerful' that he can pretty much do what he wants to whom he wants.

I've been messing around with My Space this weekend because of the Toxic Popsickle site I ran across. I see the appeal. It's fun. Found a bunch of people I used to know. The last time I looked at it very closely was a couple of years ago and everyone with a page seemed to be about fifteen. No more. If I were Classmates.com I'd be worried. My Space is giving away what they're selling.

Here's my other virtual self.

Thornton:

In the West, respect for Muslim ways such as the veil for women is supposed to be granted as a self-evident right beyond argument or debate. Yet Western ideals and values, such as the equality of the sexes, are derided, disrespected, and rejected as self-evident evils.

Henry:

Proclaimers of catastrophe almost always call for expensive government studies, programs, even entire departments, to address their complaints. Government began way back in the Primatene mists when somebody threw a barrier across a road and demanded a bribe for passage. Governance, a necessary evil, starts with extortion. Resist any demand to make that extortion any worse than it has to be.

Capaccio:

U.S. Defense Department officials prepared pre-war intelligence reports that may have exaggerated links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, the Pentagon inspector general said today.

Rubin:

Not even LBJ could have imagined No Child Left Behind.

Martin.

CNN:

Four U.S. helicopters -- three military and one civilian -- were shot down in Iraq between January 20 and Friday, raising concerns that insurgents are becoming more proficient at downing the aircraft.

Maitra:

It is widely acknowledged that the Soviet military was demoralized in the 1980s by the Stinger missiles supplied by Washington to the Afghan mujahideen fighters, who routinely shot down Russian Hind helicopter-gunships.

$800 to bring down $22,000,000 is a heck of a ROI.

Samuelson:

Don't be fooled. The dirty secret about global warming is this: We have no solution. About 80 percent of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), the main sources of man-made greenhouse gases. Energy use sustains economic growth, which -- in all modern societies -- buttresses political and social stability. Until we can replace fossil fuels, or find practical ways to capture their emissions, governments will not sanction the deep energy cuts that would truly affect global warming.

Considering this reality, you should treat the pious exhortations to "do something'' with skepticism, disbelief or contempt. These pronouncements are (take your pick) naive, self-interested, misinformed, stupid or dishonest. Politicians mainly want to be seen as reducing global warming when they're not. Companies want to polish their images and exploit markets created by new environmental regulations.

Kling:

The typical libertarian shorthand is that we are with the Democrats on social issues and with the Republicans on economic issues. In recent years, the Republicans betrayed us on economic issues. However, my sense is that many in the conservative movement are anxious to repent.

One can only hope. Maybe Bush is Nixon, Hillary is Carter and there's a Reagan waiting in the wings for 2012.

Via Althouse.

Meet the Press:

MR. RUSSERT: Another opponent in the Democratic race for the presidency is Barack Obama of Illinois. In October of 2002, he was a state senator in the Illinois legislature. He came out against the war, and I want to share his words with you and our viewers. “ I know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

“I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.” His judgment was on the money.

SEN. EDWARDS: Yeah, he—he’s correct. Now, I will say, he wasn’t burdened, like a lot of us with the information that we were receiving on the Intelligence Committee...

Obviously, past correct predictions are not a guarantee of future correct predictions, but you have to give Obama credit. He nailed it.

If I were Edwards, I'd think of a better response than wishing I had been less informed.

AP:

"Just a little over a mile away from the placement of the first device, a group of terrorists boarded airplanes and launched an attack on New York City," police Commissioner Edward Davis said in an interview with The Associated Press.

"The city clearly did not overreact. Had we taken any other steps, we would have been endangering the public," he said.

See, this is why it's bad to put government bureaucrats in charge of more stuff. They're a bunch of ninnies with no common sense operating in perpetual CYA mode as they try to get in their thirty.

Update: Weigel:

They exposed the sleeping bear tactics of Boston's terrorism response network, which consist of taking three weeks to notice something "suspicious," then locking the metropolis down in a panic without testing to deduce whether several dozen "bombs" are actually "harmless mini-billboards covered with light bulbs."

Exactly.

Totally uneffingnecessary, Fec.

Carrington:

...the building plans...(show)...the Edwards home totaling 28,200 square feet of connected space. The main house is 10,400 square feet and has two garages. The recreation building, a red, barn-like building containing 15,600 square feet, is connected to the house by a closed-in and roofed structure of varying widths and elevations that totals 2,200 square feet.

The main house is all on one level except for a 600-square-foot bedroom and bath area above the guest garage.

The recreation building contains a basketball court, a squash court, two stages, a bedroom, kitchen, bathrooms, swimming pool, a four-story tower, and a room designated “John’s Lounge.”

It's mind boggling that someone who is running for president with 'Two Americas' as his theme could be so politically obtuse as to build a 28,000 square foot house during the campaign.

In America today, there are millions of our neighbors who think they're alone. That no one knows they're struggling with their bills. That no one cares they can't afford to turn on the lights. That no one thinks twice about the fact their kids go to bed hungry at night.

Well I have something to say to those families today: We know. We care. And we will lift you up.

Maybe if they get too cold and tired and hungry, they could sleep over at John's.