Orrin Hatch: "Vicki Kennedy ought to be considered for her late husband Ted's Senate seat."

Who knows, Mary Jo Kopechne might have been a great Senator too.

This isn't exactly Darwinism in its finest hour. But Darwinism it most certainly is.

Survival of the fittest.

Courtesy of Uncle Jimbo at Ace of Spades HQ:

On Politicians and the Political Class:

I find it fundamentally offensive that there is an entire group of people who spend their lives confiscating the wealth created by others and giving to their allies.

Lately I haven't exactly had the time to throw my two cents into the national debates, or even the local debates. Unlike an estimated 10% of our populace, I am employed, and dare I say busy.

Regardless, I have noticed myself posting, and commenting less. Beyond my busy schedule, I decided a while ago to try and avoid the echo chamber phenomenon. As the right leaning blogoshpere has expanded, there are a number of really good writers who have more resources than I to keep up with this Hydra that is the Obama Administration legislative and social agenda.

As for the local scene, I will say this, the Midland City Manager and the City Council have their heads screwed on somewhat straight at the moment. Of all the local taxing entities, they seem to be the only ones who made a real effort to hold the budgetary line. MISD points fingers at the state, and the Hospital District and the County hide their budgetary increases behind their successful bond elections.

I'm most disappointed with the Commissioner's Court. While the City is actually making an effort to figure out how much all these "revenue generating" facilities are really costing the taxpayers, the 2010 County Budget disappears Salaries/Benefits and Utilities from the Horseshoe Budget and places these items in more general accounts.

Like that's not going to bite them when the decreased sales tax, hotel occupancy tax, higher tax delinquency rate, and decreased rentals hit their budget like a ton of bricks.

Oh, my bad. The Democrats are in power now. Which means that the....wait for it....Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee...can revise his tax filings and show (oops!) a doubling of his actual net worth.

And keep his Chairmanship.

You or I do this and we go to jail. Period. End of story.

Media Bias Flag: Remember how much was made of John McCain not being totally sure of the number of his heiress wife's houses? Do you think that the media will bring the heat on Rangel...the chief tax law writer in the nation...for just, um, forgetting about half of his net worth?

Me neither.

Ask yourself: What would the media do if this were the Secretary of the Treasury?

Okay, bad example. What would the media do if this were George W. Bush's Secretary of the Treasury?

Is there any doubt that our President, Ethelred III (the Really, Really Unready), will soon clean up politics in Washington just like he did in Chicago?

Related: Andy Levy on Ted Kennedy: "I hope that should I ever commit manslaughter that my punishment will be that I don't get to be President."

"Taxes are too high. He wants to raise them. His tax increases are the fine print in his economic plan, and let me be specific."

"The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes ... raise payroll taxes ... raise investment income taxes ... raise the death tax ... raise business taxes ... and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars."

-- Sarah Palin, September 3, 2008

The link above goes to the St. Petersburg Times "Truth-O-Meter" which tries to refute Palin's assertion the same way most of the MSM does...by repeating Barack Obama's claims as opposed to actually running any numbers.

The Honeymoon must be close to being over because even CNN is beginning to run the numbers:

The U.S. government has been spending a great deal more than it has been taking in, and it is on track to do so well beyond the next 10 years. It has been borrowing money to make all that spending possible and it has to pay the money back with interest. How, you ask? By borrowing more.

The solution is straightforward if unpleasant: Shy of finding a fairy willing to leave trillions under Uncle Sam's pillow, lawmakers will have to raise taxes and cut spending.

So.....I ask again. How is that Hope and Change thing working out for you, Obamatons?

Portia has drawn my attention to an article in the Wall Street Journal by the splendid Betsy McCaughey. Unlike Henry Waxman, she's actually read the bill for Obamacare, and she's exposing its dirty little secrets. The secrets that the Legacy Media won't tell us about.

Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, has been appointed as health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. I've written on this man before, and his acknowledgement that promising to save by cutting waste is merely lipstick, and the real savings will be rationing.

Emanuel doesn't think much of doctors' adherence to the Hippocratic Oath because it, in his opinion, makes doctors think too much of their patients' welfare to the exclusion of society as a whole--a communitarian prospective. He can in this way allocate, i.e., ration, resources in a way which best keep society going, and guess who defines the way it should go? From the Hastings Center Report, November-December, 1996:

Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity--those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations--are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Covering services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic, and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.

So, if you have a Down's baby, that kid's out of luck. Cerebral palsy? Costs too much. That aged parent? Kiss Grandma good bye. What if you come down with ALS? What if you are, quelle horreur, gay? Well, I suppose the lesbians might get a pass as long as they agree to be good brood mares.

"Is now the time to remind everyone that Obama's babysitters Ayers and Dohrn dedicated their communist manifesto to Robert Kennedy's assassin, amongst others?"

h/t: Tim Blair

Honestly, you can't make this stuff up.

Democrats now require an ID to ask a question at a Town Hall.....but not to actually vote.

And they can even name it after him, sort of.

KopechnieCare.

Universal health care.....ten hours after you're dead.

Leni Riefenstahl call your office.

Teddy Kennedy, the Lion of the Senate, as some people would have it, has succumbed to brain cancer at 77. Cancer is a dreadful thing and my sympathies are extended to his family. Although I despised the man, I would not wish cancer on him, or any debilitating illness.

He died forty years, one month and six days after his murder of Mary Jo Kopechne. When I lived in Midland I had several Mary Jo Kopechne Martyr's Day Parties, for without her sacrifice, Teddy Kennedy might have been president.

There is a rumor that he will be buried in a 1969 Oldsmobile Cutlass at the bottom of a creek.

The August 13, 2009 edition had this cartoon of the Hildebeest appeared in the Egyptian English-Language Al-Ahram Weekly.

And I feel that the fate of the nation would be safer in her hands, even if she did look like this.

There's something reassuring about someone who is on the face of it a monster. At least you know what that person's up to.

And whatever His O'liness wants is de natura good. I saw a chat between Janeane Garofalo and Keith Olbermann--now there's a group which will make you chip your teeth grinding them--in which Ms. Gawdawfulo stated that opposing Obama was racist. That's the level of her thinking, and of course Keith was going along with it.

Glen Beck on another Fox show on July 28 referred to Obama as a racist with "a deep-seated hatred for white people." Fox ran screaming from it; Beck did not retreat. There is a group whose name I will not present which exists solely to put pressure on advertisers who advertise on conservative shows, which they deem to be inimical to blacks. So far thirty-three advertisers, including WalMart, CVS and Clorox, have refused to sponsor Glen Beck's Fox show. I went to the WalMart web site last night and told them if they were such cowards I'd find the courage to go to Target. (And in truth, it's a lot quieter there; the aisles are bigger; and it just feels better.)

The commercial fallout from the latest tin-foil-hat utterance of Ms. Gawdawfulo? Nothing that I know of. But let Beck say something.

Recall the flap over Florida Orange Juice and Snapple? They dropped Rush Limbaugh.

Well, perhaps we have the last laugh: the mainstream media is now the legacy media.

The famous, high-dollar portrait photographer to the stars made millions, but borrowed and spent millions and millions. But she is....wait for it....a Victim.

New York's chattering classes are aghast at the renowned photographer's downfall, making her the latest spectacular victim of the bad debt crisis and nationwide recession.

Annie Leibovitz has made and, more importantly, still has the ability to earn an income that 99% of America can only dream about. The fact that she is too dim to hold onto it does not make her a victim.

Be sure and read the comments regarding the article. There is a very refreshing lack of sympathy.

We can expect some major changes in our lives if Obamacare happens. Like being murdered to avoid paying social security.

And the upside of this is the black humor:

The phone rings and the lady of the house answers.

"Hello?"

"Mrs. Sanders, please."

"Speaking."

"Mrs. Sanders, this is Dr. Jones at St. Agnes Laboratory. When your husband's doctor sent his biopsy to the lab last week, a biopsy from another Mr. Sanders arrived as well. We are now uncertain which one belongs to your husband. Frankly, either way the results are not too good."

"What do you mean?" Mrs. Sanders asks nervously.

Well, one of the specimens tested positive for Alzheimer's and the other one tested positive for HIV. We can't tell which is which."

"That's dreadful! Can you do the test again?" questioned Mrs. Sanders.

"Normally we can, but the new health care system will only pay for these expensive tests just one time."

''Well, what am I supposed to do now?"

"The folks at Obama health care recommend that you drop your husband off somewhere in the middle of town. If he finds his way home, don't sleep with him."

Further down on this blog there was a joke combining the government's performance on the Cash for Clunkers program with the proposed proto-nationalization of health care, aka ObamaCare. The joke was the you could trade in Grandma for cash thereby helping to alleviate future costs to the health care system.

Of course it was just a joke.

What is not funny is that even if that program was real and that simple and that if you brought in Grandma, picked up your $4,500, and then the government took her and humanely....um.....put her down, to use the veterinary phrasiology, the Cash for Clunkers fiasco has shown that they couldn't even do that right.

And we want these guys to have a seat at the table (along with veto power, mind you) beside you and your doctor for every discussion concerning your medical care?

I think not.

Just like any anti-Bush rant employed some mention of Halliburton, as though mentioning the oil field services giant automatically trumped any pro-Bush or pro-GWOT argument, it has always been an article of faith among the nation's BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) sufferers that he was incompetent. Whether you agree with the sentiment or not, we have all seen anti-Bush rants laced with some variation of "the incompetence of the last 8 years."

Now comes President Obama. The One. Super-hip. Zen-like. Jesus 2.0.

Our new President will not be incompetent like "everyone agrees everywhere" the last President was.

No siree!

So how is it that the incompetent Bush managed to get Congress to vote to go to war but with control of all three branches of the government...not to mention a super-majority of seats in the Senate...the all-competent President Obama can't get a health care bill passed that he says everyone wants?

I know, Bush lied. Sure.

For the sake of argument let us stipulate that YouTube doesn't exist and that you can't go back and look at countless pre-2000 clips of a parade of Clinton Administration officials saying the exact same things about Saddam Hussein's Iraq that Bush did. Or British officials. Or other government's intelligence findings. Sponsoring terror groups? Check. Genocide? Check. WMD? Check.

Even if he lied (he didn't) he still got the congress to vote for something that they all say....now....that they knew was a bad idea.

Yet the Prince of the American Renewal can't get his own party, which has total control over congress, to pass any of his trademark legislation.

For a guy that hasn't heard the word, "No", in about six years that has to be tough. Thomas Sowell hit the nail on the head when he said that "Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else".

And this is why he was totally unprepared when he went before the American people (as though descending from Mount Sinai) and told them what his vision was for the future of their health care in America....

....and the American people said, "F*** you!"

"Hope and Change" to "Hack and Same" in eight months.

MSNBC, in order to gin up more viewer angst concerning of all those white guys carrying weapons to Obama rallies, carefully edits a clip to hide the fact that the guy carrying the weapon is.....wait for it......Black.

Microsoft's Windows 7 will be available in early October. I have been using a beta and a release candidate for a while with no problems whatsoever. It is a great OS.

Question: Whenever a new refrigerator or TV is announced by a manufacturer by another company than the one you bought yours from, do you make a point to be as public as possible about how you don't currently have and would never have that other brand?

Concerning the issue of the President's plan to socialize medicine in this country, the battle lines seem to be drawn between supporters of ObamaCare and those who have actually read the bills before Congress.

Actually, that is not quite fair. There are people who have read the bill and still support ObamaCare. If for no other reason than they figure that they themselves won't be subject to it. Like President Obama himself won't be.

The good news is that the general public has taken the initiative to research what is being proposed instead of swallowing the usual "Trust me's" coming from the Army of Arlens that populate our congress. And they don't like what they are reading.

If this is to be President Obama's "Waterloo" as has been conjectured, I can't think of a more meaningful victory for the American people.

I just can't get over this White House saying that facts are stubborn things--before telling a tubful of bald-faced lies.

Let's see. It's been a month since I've invoked Kafka so I will now. Kafkaesque.

UPDATE (From Site Admin): According to Drudge, either the White House has pulled the plug on rat.out.your.neighbor@whitehouse.gov or their email server has been crashed by millions of people flagging themselves.

Melanie Martinez of Austin wants to impose her vision of what her neighborhood should be on all of her neighbors.

As is the norm there is always a justification based on some so-called "history" or heritage:

"Every neighborhood is like a story book and every house is a page in that book. If you start tearing out the pages, you don't have a story anymore," said Martinez, who lives in a 120-year-old Queen-Anne-style cottage on Newning Avenue.

Why is it that all of the onerous rules imposed on those who own homes in "Historical Preservation Districts" only apply to the exterior of the house?

Aren't you tearing a page out of history by having in your house, say, electricity? And plumbing? And telephone and internet? To say nothing of the Viking ovens and SubZero refrigerators that you know adorn the homes of those wealthy enough to put up with this stuff.

If true historic preservation is really the goal you should do it inside and out. Otherwise, the goal is just run-of-the-mill, look-at-me exclusivity.

His O'liness is not having the easy time that he thought he would have, nor are the Democrats in Congress as they attempt to control everything about us, down to our breathing.

The administration has called on favors from union thugs whom they bought with their favors. And still people refuse to knuckle under.

I'm pleased to find that some of the union thugs have actually been arrested. There is hope in the fact that the town-hall protestors, those who volunteer, tend to their business, and help other people out without the balm of noisy self-righteousness as their reward, were not the ones arrested.

And where do we hear it on the legacy media?

In my own life, in my own small way, I have tried to give back to this country that has given me so much. See, that's why I left a job at a big law firm for a career in public service.

Er, sure. You bet. No doubt that Michelle was slaving hard in the trenches of public service. In 2002 Michelle Obama was hired by the University of Chicago Hospital as its executive director for community affairs. That's a nebulous job title if I ever heard one. Once in college I was the beneficiary of a make-work job given me by two professors who liked me, and because I didn't qualify for financial aid they thought that $3 an hour, up to $30 a week, for little work would be nice.

I don't know if Michelle's first job at the hospital was a make-work job, but it did pay $120,000.00 a year.

Roger Kimball, who is as worth reading as Charles Krauthammer, has used the phrase "legacy media"; it is the most elegantly dismissive phrase since Kingsley Amis in The King's English called a word "a German noise."

A recent poll shows that the most trusted news source is Jon Stewart, the left-wing comic on Comedy Central. Although he will lampoon some precious left-wing fools, he's not even handed. He plays everything for a laugh while trying to freight in some liberal sensibilities. Here is a graphic from Time.

But think on this. The quondam major networks have less grasp on American trust than a comic. The least trusted is Katie Couric, who is believed by one seventh of the people who believe--a comic. The Tiffany network has been declining for many years; I recall Walter Cronkite saying, "And that's the way it is," when I was young and knowing that that was not the way it was. Even as a child I distrusted his oily pomposity. Then we had Dan Rather with his absurd booming of obviously forged documents about George W. Bush. And now Katie Couric, who in some states is watched by so few people that she doesn't even register as being watched.

She's the bottom of the barrel, but Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams don't get off so well either--America just isn't buying them. Or watching them.

Brian Williams interviewing President Obama

Isn't it time that we retire the trope "mainstream media"? Let's call it the legacy media. Which means that as soon as all our software and hardware are updated it will go away.

Perhaps I've sinned. I linked to Time, which is legacy media too. How odd to think that Henry Luce's most enduring legacy may be People, a glossy gossip rag.

Lance Corporal Lara's body was flown into Randolph AFB Texas and then transferred to Zoellar Funeral home which is located in his home town of New Braunfels. This video was made from a police cruiser during the transfer through Schertz on Sunday.

The funeral procession leaving New Braunfels two days later for burial at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio was equally impressive. The horses at FM 78 and 3009 were from the Comal County Mounted Possee in New Braunfels, Texas.

In Texas we know how to honor our servicemen.

But the country is held hostage to people of self-entitlement not seen since the Bourbons: The Hildebeest: "I can't worry about every undercapitalized business."

The Lion of the Senate murdered the staffer Mary Jo Kopechne. He beckons Senate pages to reposition his foot stool. Over and over again.

Nancy Pelosi is getting only four new jets--$220 million instead of the half a billion that she wanted, to shuttle these jackanapes around the world.

And of course Obama trots the globe whoring for the camera thinking that he'll get good face time if he apologizes for America.

Is there anyone who doesn't understand my desire to secede and get away from the likes of that self-absorbed precious, preening ass Obama and that thing Pelosi?

Statement from the American College of Surgeons Regarding Recent Comments from President Obama

The American College of Surgeons is deeply disturbed over the uninformed public comments President Obama continues to make about the high-quality care provided by surgeons in the United States. When the President makes statements that are incorrect or not based in fact, we think he does a disservice to the American people at a time when they want clear, understandable facts about health care reform. We want to set the record straight.

Yesterday during a town hall meeting, President Obama got his facts completely wrong. He stated that a surgeon gets paid $50,000 for a leg amputation when, in fact, Medicare pays a surgeon between $740 and $1,140 for a leg amputation. This payment also includes the evaluation of the patient on the day of the operation plus patient follow-up care that is provided for 90 days after the operation. Private insurers pay some variation of the Medicare reimbursement for this service.

Three weeks ago, the President suggested that a surgeon's decision to remove a child's tonsils is based on the desire to make a lot of money. That remark was ill-informed and dangerous, and we were dismayed by this characterization of the work surgeons do. Surgeons make decisions about recommending operations based on what's right for the patient.

We agree with the President that the best thing for patients with diabetes is to manage the disease proactively to avoid the bad consequences that can occur, including blindness, stroke, and amputation. But as is the case for a person who has been treated for cancer and still needs to have a tumor removed, or a person who is in a terrible car crash and needs access to a trauma surgeon, there are times when even a perfectly managed diabetic patient needs a surgeon. The President's remarks are truly alarming and run the risk of damaging the all-important trust between surgeons and their patients.

We assume that the President made these mistakes unintentionally, but we would urge him to have his facts correct before making another inflammatory and incorrect statement about surgeons and surgical care.

Of course we all know that there is no better path to medical expertise than spending your career as a cog in the Chicago Machine community organizer, a non-descript state senator, and then an absentee U.S. Senator.

Take two Hopes and call me in the morning.

The Obama Administration is looking for...um....volunteers to help him flack for the nationalization of health care.

Not your common, run-of-the-mill volunteers, either. Volunteers so high-grade that they must be paid one and half times the minimum wage to volunteer!

Is it just me or does this guy look like the guy Nicolas Cage played in Raising Arizona?

Senatrix Barbara Boxer has written a novel, A Time to Run. Her generosity with other people's money is legendary; her generosity with her own advice is too. Who else would have had the courage to lecture the military not to call her "Ma'am" when she had worked so hard to be come a senator? It's so hard pulling her husband for the money for that position.

And she is generous with other people's words too, for she has a contributor, Mary-Rose Hayes, in writing this Pulitzer bait. At least Ms. Hayes is credited as the ghost, unlike Barbara Feinman, who ghosted Hildog's It Takes a Village.

One reviewer on Amazon, a knuckle-dragging doubting conservative, is not as generous to the good Senatrix as he should be. As Mr. Steven Mason will be, come the Progressive World of Next Tuesday™:

All the liberals are smart, principled, and are dedicated and effective good-deed-doers. All the conservatives are greedy, corrupt, and yes, even evil. An intelligent, accomplished, and conservative Supreme Court nominee is implausibly naive. The story is melodramatic; the characters are two-dimensional. I had high hopes of gleaning genuine political savvy from "someone who really knows," but Boxer decided to write a pedestrian political thriller that doesn't inform or thrill.

Senatrix Boxer is generous with her brain-power, not wanting to expend any so she can save it for the salvation of the republic, leading it away from the dangers of self-sufficiency, self-reliance and prudence, and of course she must save her brain cycles for the odd dressing down of accomplished military personnel. She is also generous with other people's brain power, not wanting them to have to use any to read her book.

I nominate Senatrix Boxer as the most generous and kind Senator of all because nothing that she has ever done could make even the village idiot look bad. Even Jay Rockefeller laughs behind his hand when he looks at her.

From Mark Steyn:

If "health care" were about health care, the devil would be in the details. But it's not about health or costs or coverage; it's about getting over the river and burning the bridge. It doesn't matter what form of governmentalized health care gets passed as long as it passes. Once it's in place, it will be "reformed", endlessly, but it will never be undone.

Congressman Conaway is in town for a few days holding a couple of town hall style meetings much too small to hold those who are interested in attending. I know several who were turned away from yesterday's scheduled meeting at the hospital. (Note to Conaway Staff: Adequate space for those interested in attending should have ranked above the theme-based venue. And please don't tell me that the size of the crowd was a surprise, because if it was a surprise.....well, let's not go there.)

It is a good bet that our congressman will vote against anything that approaches the nationalization of the nation's health care.....ObamaCare.

And I am also sure that he has seen and knows the anger and concern that is being displayed by those showing up at these town hall meetings. And he knows that they are not organized and paid for by the insurance companies. These are real people, not the rent a mobs that the Left turns out like Keebler turns out cookies backed by Soros money. Most of these people have never been to a protest. Ever. And many are itching to find out when the next one is. And the next one after that.

I have no doubts that Congressman Conaway will vote according to the wishes of the vast majority of his constituents.

But here is a tip to Congressman Conaway: The whole health care debate is unlike any other in recent memory. It is huge and reaches into almost everyone on a visceral level.

It isn't enough to vote against it.

You had better win this battle.

Otherwise, the voters will be begin looking for people who can.

Feckless Bob Michel-style opposition does us no good.

And it doesn't hurt that she's a babe either. Hey! I read of a woman who, when sleepless, would fantasize about where Barack and Michelle were sleeping, and another who would dream of what color her children with Obama would be, and so I can call a hottie a hottie. It's not as though I, of all people, am stalking her.

Like the U. S. Cavalry, Betsy comes to the rescue again. She writes in The New York Post about Obamacare and the little monsters who are out to do it--and do you in. And I mean that literally.

This is of course from Our Empress complaining about the Bush administration.

Now that members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are evidently crashing town hall meetings to beat on people who dare to criticize His O'liness' attempt to take over one-sixth of our economy, will she continue saying this?

Don't hold your breath.

Over 100 years ago the English, for entertainment, went to a local madhouse, Bedlam, to laugh at the loonies. Because it is my turn, I went to The York Times. Where, I presume, the premises are at least cleaner, after mortgaging their building and borrowing over $200 million from a Mexican financier. At 14%.

Bob Herbert has delivered himself of a column in which he is I think trying to be more of a feminist than Susan Faludi, a spoiled woman who who can explain away cold, hard facts by shooting the messenger.

Herbert leads with

"I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne -- yet 30 million women rejected me," wrote George Sodini in a blog that he kept while preparing for this week's shooting in a Pennsylvania gym in which he killed three women, wounded nine others and then killed himself.

One nut job provides evidence of a sick society. Well, if your reflexive mode is blame America first, it does. Mr. Herbert drivels on in this way until just a bit later we have

We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation's entertainment.

This he merely pronounces, ex cathedra, and I suppose that the NYT still thinks of itself as a cathedral. A mortgaged one. And, no, I won't stop crowing about that. It's too good.

To people of Herbert's mind-set, or prejudice-set, America is bad. We have a culture of violence. Guns shoot people. People are not sick until America makes them so. So we are the evilest nation on earth. Well, it's easy money for Herbert. He doesn't have to think, and evidently the readers of the NYT like it. The decreasing numbers of readers at the NYT like it.

In Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes of the Muslim practice of female circumcision, and how it was performed on her. She describes how in Holland, where she worked as a translator for Somali, a Somali girl who was sewn up as a child, to keep her value (Muslim women are chattel) begged to be sewn up again after a gynecological procedure, out of terror that she would be killed by her relatives for bringing disgrace on her family.

Muslim women who are raped are often stoned to death. Sometimes their sisters are gang-raped by the religious police, because the raped woman was obviously bringing the rape on herself.

Mr. Herbert is wringing his hands over the only nation on earth which is trying to do something about Islamic excesses, while totally ignoring these excesses.

I nominate Mr. Herbert for Silliest Column of the Week. Walsingham, Shepherd, Ospurt, Vaughn, Site Admin, I've done my time in the barrel this week. Your turn for the next installment of Bedlam, er, The New York Times.

Just don't let Pinch see you laughing. Oh hell, why not? It might shake him out of his denial and there might be hope of paying back the loans. Wouldn't want Carlos Slim to lose his $250 million. At 14%.

I have a friend, Oleg, who grew up in the Soviet Union. He described himself to me as at first a believer in the Big Lie, then a doubter, then a skeptic, and now is an enemy. He's a good graphics artist too.

He runs The Peoples Cube, which you may surmise from the above graphic.

FDR, to make good on a campaign promise to clean up the stock market, appointed Joe Kennedy, Teddy's father. When asked why he put the biggest crook in the market in charge of it, FDR said it takes a crook to catch one.

I was once audited by the State of Texas, which is a commonplace these days, after a (now-defunct title company) was closed down for fraud. He was making a gambling book in his escrow account. The owner, by the way, was the county Democrat chairman. After I got to know the state officials, and they knew that I wasn't stealing, they relaxed and told me of some ways to cheat that I would never have considered.

I know a woman afflicted with a stalker, who is also a registered sex offender. She did nothing; he's fixated. She was completely powerless to see the signs in him, for he presented himself at first in ways which he knew, from his vile experience, would be ingratiating and pleasing. She didn't have the experience to know the signs.

Just so on the Cube, where the people who have the finest antennae are the Russians who grew up under the stink of totalitarianism.

Modern Americans do not have the experience to see what's happening now. We've been too comfortable, too fat and happy, for too long to have an institutional memory of totalitarianism. And we're sitting ducks, and the jack-booted thugs sneer at the Jeremiahs crying in the wilderness. "What? That right-wing extremist? Pay that wingnut no mind. I'll make you very happy. You're getting sleepy...You're getting sleepy..."

The problem is that these days it's hard to run a satire site because reality is far stranger than anything that most satirists could come up with.

Unless they grew up under different circumstances and know, from the stripes on their backs, the memories of oppression, and the arbitrary and capricious exercise of state power what the early-warning signs are.

One of the most hated organizations in East Germany was their secret police, the STASI. I've heard estimates that a quarter of the citizens were informants--on their neighbors, families, wives and husbands. All the knowledge gathered made for a fearsome engine of oppression, and a culture of suspicion and tyranny which was used by the state to enforce a totalitarian regime where the arts were utterly controlled, the press was controlled, and all free communication was done in private and at great personal risk.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck wrote and directed, in English, The Lives of Others, a movie about the STASI and the culture of spying and suspicion. It's one of the most moving movies that I've ever seen, right up there with Paul Greengrass' United 93, which was so powerful that a friend and I could not talk for a few minutes after watching it. You can see that my taste in movies is no longer Mary Poppins.

The Lives of Others details the awfulness of a socialist, totalitarian regime, where all power flows top-down from the state. Out of shame a woman takes her own life; other lives are ruined in less spectacular fashion, and throughout it is the dark web of oppression and political thuggery which can be exposed only by the efforts of brave people to tell the truth and to keep from being caught telling the truth, until it is out and then they are martyred. This is all in the teeth of the secret police, bugging houses, following people, and leveling threats. And carrying the threats out.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously made a world-wide reputation in the Russian samizdat press, revealing the truth about the Soviet totalitarian state. Where communication that was not approved by the state had to be passed around clandestinely.

This poster, a Photoshop job of Mr. Obama made up into Heather Ledger's Joker, has gone viral on the internet, even crashing websites which display it. One site I tried to visit yesterday took two minutes to load. I wonder if their advertising rates went up.

Predictably the right-wing is loving this--I haven't felt this good since I got a franchise-tax refund from the State of Texas. Finally, someone is calling a socialist a socialist. The left, however, is howling and showing themselves as being even sillier than usual. They loved George W. Bush being made into Hitler, which is surely much viler than the Joker. We are supposed to believe that this poster is racist because it shows His O'liness made up as a minstrel, which is fishing to be sure.

Steven Mikulan of the L. A. Weekly fancies that he is being trenchant when he gives us

It has a bit of everything to appeal to the drunk tank of California conservatism: Obama is in white face, his mouth (like Ledger's Joker's) has been grotesquely slit wide open and the word "Socialism" appears below his face. The only thing missing is a noose.

Notice that the point of the poster, that Obama is a socialist, is completely ignored. Without doubt Obama is a socialist, but that doesn't play in Peoria, or lots of places in tax-paying and responsible America. That Obama is a tax-and-spend socialist is the left's dirty little secret and with this sleight of hand Mikulan wants us to cringe before an absurd charge and ignore the very point of the poster.

Some years ago when Taco Bell introduced that talking chihuahua, the spokesman for a Hispanic group cried that the commercial was racist. It must have been racism of an appealing type: completely inexplicably to me, the sales of chihuahuas went up; a chihuahua is more properly understood as dog food, not a dog.

Remember this?

I can't worry about every under capitalized business..

Have we been in Iraq as long as it took her to find the Rose Law Firm billing records?

Let's remember Whitewater and that scandal.

The cattle-futures scandal, which was manifestly a sweetheart deal and a payoff.

James McDougal died under suspicious circumstances in jail.

And that bouncer--wasn't he?--Craig Livingstone, director of the White House Office of Personnel Security got hundreds of FBI files. Not those on enemies of the state, but on Republicans. The grossest abuse of power since Caligula had his horse Incitatus made Senator. Since Filegate, which went nowhere, of course, the grossest abuse of power was counting and recounting the votes in Minnesota to make Al Franken senator. Which pretty much makes me think that having the whole horse, Incitatus, senator is better than just the nether quarters.

Every time Our Empress attacked someone she was either bracing herself for the revelation of something that she herself had done, or she was administering anesthesia to the complaisant media for something that she was about to do. So many of her lies were homeopathic.

"The vast right-wing conspiracy," has to be the funniest line ever said by a politician since Senator Dirksen's, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money." Except that Dirkson was being droll, and the Hildebeest was either lying or being paranoid that she wasn't getting her way. Because she's Hillary.

And the sleaze of the Clinton years. That miasma of petty deceit, Arkansan political thuggery writ large, brass-knuckles, and just plain cheap-jack corruption.

What a dreadful, mean, calculating, scheming, dishonest woman.

But can you imagine her taking endless around-the-world tours apologizing for America, like Barack Hussein Obama?

No. I can't either.

Hillary! Come back! All is forgiven! I'll let you have the cranberry guest room at the house!

I will, however, hide the silver.

Washington, D.C.

President Barack Obama sat with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and Officer James Crowley on the White House lawn for a discussion about race. The president offered Professor Gates and Crowley each a glass of beer.

"Barney," the President said.

"Barney? My name is Jim."

"Oh. My bad. I thought you were Barney Fife."

"No. My name is James. James Crowley. Jim Crowley."

"Sorry, Barney, er, Jim. I didn't calibrate that well."

The President continued. "I hope you like this Old Milwaukee. We sent a Navy colonel to Anacostia to get Old Milwaukee just for you. And the White House chef said it tastes best in a Dixie cup. Nothing but the best for you, Barney!"

"Jim."

"Oh. Right. I didn't calibrate that right. Sorry."