"I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies," cried the young lady in Gone With The Wind. But John Kerry knows a thing or two about berthing yachts. The Boston Herald reports that Kerry has docked his 76 foot luxury boat, the "Isabel," in Rhode Island where he will avoid a six-figure tax bill from his own state of Massachusetts.

If left in Massachusetts, the $7 million yacht would require approximately $437,500 in sales tax, and an annual tax in the neighborhood of $70,000. Obviously, someone of Kerry's standing as a compassionate liberal can't be saddled with a bill like that. Remember, liberals are famously generous ...with other people's money. But it is tough to take seriously Joe Biden's admonition that we should have "skin in the game," when limousine liberals won't even dip their sails in.

God bless Matt Drudge. I write that with no ironic or sarcastic hidden meanings. Matt figured this whole Internet thing out long before any of us realized the word was supposed to be capitalized. The speed with which a Drudge link can shut down a server is breathtaking. I’ve had a couple of political pieces linked by Drudge, and it took me days to read the comments and questions. (Unlike Ricochet users, however, many of the posters made suggestions involving body parts that seemed to push biological and physiological envelopes beyond human endurance.)

Like all of us, Mr. Drudge has certain kinds of stories that seem to capture his fancy. He loves weather extremes of any kind, especially when they raise havoc, as in today’s “Giant Sinkhole in Milwaukee swallows Escalade.” And there’s a bizarre side to him as well. He likes old ladies with rotting mounds of dead cats and items like today’s “Saudi man chains son in basement for six years; ‘Possessed by an evil female genie’...” Where else can you find these gems?

By all accounts, Matt is a secretive figure who doesn’t do a lot of socializing, and I’ve never met him. I sure would like to, though. I suspect he has an interesting story or two to tell. He must be inundated with features and columns and blogs written by people who would love to have the chance to be linked by Drudge. He’s helped break more hot political stories than just about anyone else merely by the extent of his reach.

I suppose it’s the more unusual links that makes Matt Drudge a kind of guilty pleasure, but when you have the following two headlines in the same day (today): “Kerry Docks New Yacht in RI to Duck MA Taxes” and “Alaska cop uses Taser on black bear,” how can you not admire the guy?

One of my prize hobbyhorses concerns the War on Nouns. Yes, every day we suffer from the War on Nouns, as perfectly good things are cast down and abandoned in favor of adjectives and adverbs which then masquerade maliciously as authentic nouns. It's a veritable invasion of the body snatchers. Paranoia is the appropriate response. Colbert has popularized the infamous example of truthiness -- a word which, technically, is a red-blooded American noun, but hardly belongs in the same grammatical category as truth. The integrity even of a word like truthfulness is under attack, when we slip so quickly and easily from friend (n.) to friendly (adv.) to friendliness (???). A friend, as shown in the brilliant comic below, is not at all necessarily whoever emits friendliness in your general direction...

The fifth annual gathering of the Netroots Nation (it used to be known as YearlyKos) is being held at the Rio in Vegas. Van Jones, the 9/11 Truther who was forced to resign as President Obama's "green jobs" czar, is apparently the hit of the convention thus far. Judging from the lefties I follow on Twitter, at least.

The American Spectator's Phillip Klein is also there and he reported the following tidbit:

V. Jones says not to fall for the deficit talk: "There's plenty of money out there, the only question is how to spend it."

I'm all for differences of opinion but this lack of a grasp on reality is scary. He received standing ovations for his talk, by the way.

So as I said yesterday on the podcast, a couple of the more controversial folks who've suddenly seen their JournoList contributions hit the news --- Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor who mused about having the FCC yank Fox News' license; and Sarah Spitz, a colleague at the NPR station in Los Angeles where I'm a weekly commentator, who described the joy she'd feel watching Rush Limbaugh die of a heart attack -- are friends of mine.

Jonathan is a smart, thoughtful person. So is Sarah. You'll just have to trust me on that.

But I honestly think that my liberal friends -- and trust me on this, too: it's not like I haven't debated both of them, often -- don't quite get how corrosive their bubble is. Look, we conservatives complain all the time about the reflexively left-wing culture in academia (and Jonathan Zasloff, of all people, has often complained of that, too! And you'll have to trust me on that....) and we complain about the 80% of the other news outlets (everything non-Fox, essentially) that are reflexively liberal. But that just makes us less likely to engage in JournoList-style groupthink, in line-of-the-day coordination, and in silly suggestions that Fox News doesn't deserve its license, and in pretty cruel suggestions that a person you disagree with should be allowed to die while you laugh.

Maybe it's because I live in a left-wing part of a left-wing state and work in an extremely left-wing industry that I'm not totally shocked by what's in the JournoList archives. I've heard all of that stuff before. But I guess that with me around, a lot of what they really feel -- Rush Limbaugh should DIE! Fox News should be OUT OF BUSINESS! -- is attenuated by my being there, listening. Left alone, they all revert back to groupthink. Put it this way: aside from the Rush Limbaugh stuff, most of what I've read on JournoList is the kind of thing (with the politics flipped) that Ann Coulter might say. But she says it in public. In books and appearances and newspaper columns. She stands behind it. (And they, predictably, would cluck-cluck at her on JournoList, calling her "hateful" and "incendiary" and then they'd move on to fantasizing about Rush Limbaugh's death.)

The solution to this, of course, is diversity training. Everyone on the JournoList should be forced to spend a day a week and a couple of weekends in some kind of intensive workshop experience, learning that there are others and that the others have feelings and that the others have points of view that are wonderful and rich and just as valuable as theirs. There will be tears and hugs and emotional breakthroughs. They'll make bead jewelry and write free verse. Hannity will come and address them, and they'll realize that, Gee, Sean Hannity is sort of like us! JournoList members will be given soft pillows and allowed to swat a giant plush-toy version of Rush Limbaugh, until they collapse, sobbing, and realize that it's not Rush they hate, but themselves. At the end of the workshop, they'll all get a big, hurting hug from Roger Ailes.

Diversity training is the only solution. You heard it here first.

Mel Gibson's publicist.

This kind of reminds me of a conversation I had here recently with the head of PR for a big pharmaceutical firm. I asked her, just as a hypothetical, how she'd handle communications for British Petroleum right about now. She positively blanched. Even thinking about it obviously made her ill. Anyway, Mel's people are presumably having another very, very long day.

In response to my plea that readers help me figure out whether my idea for a lawsuit version of merger arbitrage is stupid, member Scott Reusser offered this idea:

I don't rightly know what critter that would be, but if Richard Epstein can resist this, Joe Escalante needs to hire him yesterday. That's just the kind of cold, ruthless, heart-of-stone attorney who would crush Joe's enemies, see them driven before him, and hear the lamentation of their women. Anyway, Richard, I'm not suggesting you're that heartless. I think you'll really like the lobster dog.

For more excellent lobster dogs, check this out. Future Ricochet member Damian Counsell tipped me off about the lobster dogs. Thanks, Damian!

I'm more than a little puzzled to read that the Jerusalem District Court recently convicted a Palestinian man of "rape by deception" because he told a woman that he was Jewish to persuade her to sleep with him.

Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to 18 months behind bars on Monday as part of a plea bargain for "rape by deception."

Kashur first met the woman in downtown Jerusalem in September 2008. Kashur, an Arab from East Jerusalem said he was a Jewish bachelor looking for a long-term relationship. The couple went to a nearby building and had consensual sex, according to the complaint.

The woman later discovered the man was Arab and filed a criminal complaint for indecent assault and rape. Under the plea bargain, the charge was reduced to rape by deception.

So, let me get this straight. She meets this guy, scampers off to the nearest building with him for a quick shag, then discovers, to her astonishment, that his esteem for her was not the abiding and eternal sentiment she believed it to be. Color me jaded, middle-aged, single and cynical, but I could have told her that wasn't going to work out the way she hoped, whether or not the guy was Jewish.

Eighteen months in prison, that's no trivial sentence, either. Now, I'm sure we'd all agree that this man is a cad. But a rapist? "If she hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she never would have cooperated," said the judges. Well, I'm sure we all know a lot of women who could put quite a number of men behind bars using those criteria, especially the "interested in a serious romantic relationship" part of it, but I think we can see pretty clearly where we'd be headed if we encouraged them all to press charges.

Set aside the charge that this is a case of religious discrimination, as the convicted man claims. (Honestly, it's hard to avoid that thought.) Is there a man walking among us who would not be charged with rape if we define the crime as, "She'd never have slept with you if she'd known what a sleazy jerk you are?"

Or a woman, for that matter? Is it rape if she seduces him without revealing that in fact, she's a total psycho--the kind of woman, say, who would sleep with you voluntarily and then charge you with rape?

Hey, you guys totally ignored this post, and I actually really wanted to know what you all thought of this idea. I know, I know -- it's about the Turkish construction industry, which isn't exactly a subject calculated to grip the imagination, but I really, seriously want to know whether anyone thinks it's a feasible idea. I'm thinking about trying to get this started.

I'm not sure how I'd go about it, and I don't know whether the government would immediately clamp down on it. One of the big problems is that all the major political parties here are in bed with the construction industry, so they'd all have a pretty strong incentive to discourage anyone from taking it on. Still, the idea strikes me as so elegant, so wonderfully free-market. Am I missing something? Is it obviously unworkable? Is there any precedent for something like this working somewhere else?

Also, I need to maintain my reputation here. At this rate I'll be demoted from Queen of Comments to comment commoner. (Mind you, my colleagues don't seem to have noticed my little comment secret, viz., that I write a lot of them myself. I guess I could just debate that one here by my lonesome, if it comes to it.)

But seriously, could we apply the collective Ricochet intellect to that problem? Indulge me; if it's as good an idea as I think it is, it could save a lot of lives.

It's a simple graph, but it'll make your blood pressure soar. And full disclosure, it comes from the Republicans in the House.

The Blue Line represents the increase in government employment. The Red Line represents the decrease in private sector employment.

One's going up; the other's going down. The graph forms a wonderful, evocative, appropriate "X" -- forming a perfect target on your wallet, your job, and your future. And mine. And all of ours.

I’ve been away from my keyboard lately because I spent ten days in Las Vegas taping this little game show I host. It’s not that I couldn’t have written anything from that city; in fact, I had intended to do so. But ten days is a very long time to be in Las Vegas, and by about the middle of the third day my brain had turned to tapioca.

I’m not sure the temperature ever fell below 100-degrees, even overnight, and the tinted windows of my room kept me in a constant state of twilight. The outside world meant less and less to me as each moment went by. I spent more hours than I should have in the casinos, where time doesn’t seem to count. We taped from about 3:30 till 9:30, so I never had any proper dinners. By the middle of the fifth day I had trouble picturing the members of my family, and I was sure I had been there for well over a year.

After the eighth day, I seemed to remember being born in Las Vegas, and I was quite certain I would die there. When I finally did board the plane out of town, I couldn’t remember where I was headed.

I’ve been back home for two days now, and people and places are starting to look familiar to me. I’ve even turned on my computer again and looked at the Internet. I might even have something more to write for Ricochet once the fog lifts.

Diane Ellis has convinced me to come out of hiding and declare that I hate Thomas Jefferson. And love Alexander Hamilton. I think that one of the binary choices to identify personality types must be whether someone likes Jefferson or Hamilton (also: cats or dogs, the Beatles or the Who, salty or sweet, Yankees or Red Sox, and so on).

It all started with Rob Long's proposal to do away with the mortgage deduction. I blame this on Jefferson. Jefferson inflicted on the United States the idea that society should be based on the yeoman farmer. He thought that property-owners would have, as Diane pithily put it to me, "skin in the game." Jefferson feared cities, with their dense populations and what he would have called corruption, decadent ways, and "stock-jobbing." He wanted people to grow food, not invent financial derivatives. Hamilton loved New York, I think, for exactly those reasons -- classless, restless groups of merchants/tradesmens/workers and the endless activity of capitalist destruction/invention. Jefferson wanted the nation to remain essentially pre-industrial, exporting its foodstuffs to Europe but without any large industrial or financial base. Hamilton brought the modern financial system to America and wanted the United States to become a great producer as well as consumer.

This Jeffersonian ideal of a society of yeoman farmers, I suspect, is why the United States abuses the tax code to provide a hidden subsidy for home purchases to drive up the home ownership rate (a great deal of social engineering occurs in the tax code). The mortgage deduction is little different from a payment from the government to buy a house, throwing off the market's natural equilibrium. Periodic crashes in housing are the free market responding to unnatural periods of excess purchasing of homes.

This got me to thinking about other things I dislike about Jefferson, who, while clearly a brilliant man, was full of hypocrisies. Aside from the Louisiana Purchase, he was a pretty poor President. This, by the way, has nothing to do with my views on executive power -- I think Jefferson came to agree more with Hamilton once he was President and no longer in the opposition.

1. Jefferson was perhaps our nation's most eloquent spokesman for human freedom ("all men are created equal"), but at the same time kept slaves and may well have fathered illegitimate children with one.

2. He was a master of rhetoric in defense of civil liberties, but did not hesitate to use government power to pursue critics and political opponents (recall his pursuit of Aaron Burr and efforts to get him convicted of treason).

3. He criticized the growth of government power, but exercised it as president to enforce a complete embargo on all exports from the country (which would only be matched by Prohibition in its intrusiveness into daily life).

4. He demanded effective government, but would take long breaks from the Presidency during times of high stress where he would essentially refuse to perform the duties of his office.

5. He criticized political parties (he famously said that he would not go to heaven if the only way there was with a political party), yet he introduced partisanship to American politics by founding the first party -- the Democratic Party -- specifically to oppose the Washington administration.

6. He founded said Democratic Party, which engaged in vicious personal attacks on President Washington, even while serving as Washington's Secretary of State. He called Washington and Hamilton and their supporters "monocrats" who were intent on reinstalling the British monarchy in America.

7. He used said Democratic Party to allow the President and Congress to drive forward a common agenda, whereas the Framers expected that the two branches would be more antagonistic. The President was given a veto precisely to moderate and contain Congress, which they saw as the true threat to the people's liberties because of its power to tax and spend.

8. Even with Louisiana, his greatest act as President, Jefferson believed the Constitution did not permit for the expansion of the territory of the United States (a view that I think is mistaken). He even drafted a constitutional amendment to incorporate Louisiana. But when it looked like Napoleon would back out of the deal, he suppressed his own constitutional views and hurriedly agreed to the deal.

Jefferson has a monument on the mall, but I think it is for what did before his was President, namely the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. But if actions count more than words, Jefferson pales in comparison to Presidents like Washington, Lincoln, and FDR and doesn't deserve a monument to his Presidency. Am I wrong?

I don't know how useful it is to think of certain parts of the country as "real America" but my travels this month took me out of my Washington, D.C. residence and into Texas and Colorado. And let's just say that these are parts of the country where President Obama doesn't have an 85% approval rating, as he does in my neighborhood.

At a baseball game in Houston (where my Cardinals won 8-0), the guy on my right asked me "What is wrong with you people in Washington?" Others seated nearby joined in the friendly discussion. The fact is that whenever my conversations with locals turned to a discussion of where I hail from, I almost always got negative comments about what's happening in Congress or in the Obama administration.

For a good discussion of what's wrong with we Washingtonians, you could do worse than Boston University professor Angelo Codevilla's lengthy essay in the American Spectator on the ruling class, the country class and their looming clash:

Hence our ruling class's standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government -- meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class's solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming.

Unfortunately it only gets more depressing from there.

Things get worse for the New York congressman. He's been charged with "multiple ethics violations" by a House investigative committee.

Frankly, I'm surprised. Not because of the violations themselves, but because anyone in the current House leadership knows what an "ethics violation" looks like.

From the AP story:

The timing of the announcement ensures that a public airing of Rangel's ethical woes will stretch into the fall campaign, and Republicans are certain to make it an issue as they try to capture majority control of the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi had once promised to "drain the swamp" of ethical misdeeds by lawmakers in arguing that Democrats should be in charge.

Drain the swamp. Again. And again and again and again, if necessary.

The talk of tort law and Turkey's earthquake problem reminded me of this article I read a while ago in The New York Times:

Richard W. Fields says he has come up with a win-win financial strategy for the downturn. He is investing in lawsuits.

“It’s always a good time to invest in litigation,” Mr. Fields said, though he added that the weak economy helped.

Not in trip-and-fall cases, mind you, but in disputes that are far larger, more costly and potentially more lucrative, often pitting major corporations against each other.

Mr. Fields is chief executive of Juridica Capital Management. which runs a fund that invests in one side of a lawsuit in exchange for a share of any winnings.

When I read that, it gave me an idea:

The average Turkish citizen wants nothing to do with the court system, believing it intimidating, incomprehensible, rigged, and vastly too expensive and time-consuming to use -- which it is. I speak from personal experience of taking a construction company to court.

The biggest problem is that it simply costs too much to sue someone. The cost of opening a lawsuit represents a substantial portion of an average Turk's annual income.

This article suggests a free-market solution to that problem. I wonder if it might be possible to start a profit-making company that invests in lawsuits?

Basically, since the idea of a lawsuit taken on a contingency basis doesn't exist here, it would be a way of filling that gap.

The idea has an obvious huge advantage over starting a legal aid society: There would be no need to appeal to anyone's good will. Profit would be the incentive, and you can always count on that as a strong incentive.

When I mentioned this to Judith, she said something to the effect of, "Hey, why put your money on only one side of the suit? Turn this idea into a lawsuit version of merger arbitrage and you’re really onto something." (Sorry, Judith, I don't remember exactly what you said -- but it was something like that.) That's a good idea too, isn't it?

What do you think -- feasible? Could it work?

And hey, Duane: Still think I'm a crypto-Commie?

Rob Long, Peter Robinson, and James Lileks are joined this week by Istanbul based contributor Claire Berlinski (AKA, Queen of Comments) and WSJ editorial writer Joe Rago. We cover pesky software updates, The List, Mitt, Breitbart, Mac v. PC, and the lessons we should learn from the Massachusetts health care reform experience.

Ricochet Rundown: 

00:00 - 03:02 Opening Chat

03:02 - 15:07 Journo-List

15:07 - 35:17 Claire Berlinski, Queen of Comments

35:20 - 1:03:10 Joe Rago, WSJ

1:04 - Closing Chat

Links from this week's show:

• The Journo-List discussion on Ricochet by Rob Long and Bill McGurn
• Fred Barnes' WSJ piece The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy
• Martini Shot is Rob's weekly commentary for L.A.'s public radio outlet, KCRW
• Claire's past love affair with pot is documented here
• Joe Rago's WSJ Op-Ed on RomneyCare
• Claire and friends debate whether or not to Ban The Burqa

Both Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich are prospective candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. A clash between them is inevitable. Both are populists who cater to the party's grassroots, Fox-News-Channel-loving base. They are both fighting to become the populist outsider who challenges party insiders like Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty. And as this invisible primary unfolds, Palin has been much savvier than the former speaker of the House.

Consider endorsements. Last year, in the NY-23 special election, Palin went out on a line to support Doug Hoffman while Gingrich voiced support for party insider Dede Scozzafava. This week, in the Georgia Republican gubernatorial primary, Palin's candidate Karen Handel came in first, and will face Gingrich's chosen candidate, former congressman Nathan Deal, in an August 10 runoff. Handel is favored.

Then there's the Ground Zero mosque controversy. Both figures have released statements against the mosque. But each statement uses different language, and emphasizes different points. Palin's argument against the Cordoba Project is framed in terms of decency and respect for the murdered, and raises serious questions about the political agenda of the mosque's developers. Gingrich's, on the other hand, is explicitly sectarian -- he says no mosque should be built near Ground Zero until Saudi Arabia allows Christian churches on its land. (Although, if you accept his analogy, and I don't, why stop at Ground Zero?)

No matter what you think about the Ground Zero mosque -- I'm not sure what to think myself -- it is easy to distinguish between the two arguments. Palin's uses language aimed at the Reagan Democrats and independents who remain the key to American politics. Despite what her enemies say, it is not hate speech. Gingrich's language is intemperate. His reasoning is likely to turn off just as many people as it turns on. Palin wins once again.

If you watch network news - and if you do, give my regards to the other 17 people - this may be a shock: Katie Couric’s future unclear at CBS.

This past spring, CBS News president Sean McManus and executive vice-president Paul Friedman discussed whether to try to bring an end to what may be the last great experiment in network news: Katie Couric, anchorwoman. Though her reported $15 million annual contract is not up until next June, one idea that was floated was for CBS to buy out the remainder of Couric's contract this September and put in someone new this fall, according to people familiar with the conversation.

She might ankle over to NBC, or CNN, where she will be paid great sloshing buckets of money again. What was the reason for the failure? Did she smother her perky sunny nature with ersatz gravitas? Plain ol’ sexism? (Ain’t gonna believe nothin’ lessin’ a man says it.)

Or perhaps the entire concept of the evening news, with Chet or Uncle Walt or Waco Dan handing down the stone tablets is a relic of the days when news was something they worked on all day while the soaps were going on, and delivered to us while we digested the pot roast. Last time I watched evening news with any regularity was in the early 90s, while working in DC - it seemed like an in-house channel, and told you how the rest of the country was hearing what you and your clever friends were talking about at lunch. But even then the model was fraying, thanks to CNN and Headline News.

Any hope for evening news, or will it be sitting around a bar with Newspapers in ten years, talking about the good old days? Any favorite anchors? For some reason I have fond memories of Frank Smith, partly because he was on the also-ran network of the day, ABC, and partly because he seemed grim and somewhat bitter about things. But we were an NBC family, possibly because my dad liked to laugh at Irving R. Levine. The combination of the nasal deadpan and the jaunty red bow tie struck him as deeply amusing.

I have some questions for Senator Graham. When he explained his vote to confirm Elena Kagan, he again invoked the phrase that 'elections have consequences.' Question: Should those consequences include the annulment of the Constitution?

I know I haven't been the only one reminding Republicans not to go wobbly on the Kagan nomination, to no avail. The South Carolina Senator justified his shrug of the shoulders approach to Constitutional fidelity, saying:

[T]he Constitution, in my view, puts an obligation on me not to replace my judgment for [Obama's]...I view my duty as to protect the Judiciary and to ensure that hard-fought elections have meaning in our system.

Another question, Senator: When you ran for office, did you make speeches promising the good citizens of South Carolina that if elected, you would, "protect the Judiciary," and ensure that, "elections have meaning"?

When you took your oath of office, did you solemnly swear to uphold the meaning of elections? You see, Senator, your oath to uphold the Constitution trumps these other issues. Why, you ask?

In this instance, the president has nominated a person who can't even identify the unconstitutionality of Congress forcing American citizens to consume certain food products each day. It is therefore certain that she will rubber stamp ObamaCare, which will eventually lead to federal micro-management of the lives and deaths of our children and their children.

These people are waging a war on the very foundation of American jurisprudence. They take our earnings, they take our property, and now they propose to take over our bodies. Do you understand your oath to uphold the Constitution as one that renders you defenseless when it is under attack?

Senator, you say that you are not under an obligation to substitute your judgment for the president's. Why not? As a member of the JAG corps, your military oath of office requires you to obey the "lawful orders" of your superiors. This oath presupposes a level of discernment on your part to know the difference between a lawful and unlawful order. Why wouldn't your Senatorial oath presuppose a fidelity to the Constitution that would supersede blatantly unconstitutional acts of the president?

If Barack Obama and Elena Kagan have their way, future elections will have no meaning because enough permanent damage will have been done to render the Constitution meaningless. What will you say then, to the people who ask why, oh why, did you vote to send us down this awful road? Is this really the measure of your dedication to the principles of limited government and fidelity to Constitutional law? If so, wouldn't you agree with me that the people of South Carolina could do much better?

A few days ago, just before Congress passed its financial regulatory overhaul, Gallup conducted this poll, whose results were just released. America’s confidence in Congress is at an all time low. According to Gallup, Congress only has an 11 percent approval rating. 11 percent!

Of the 16 institutions Gallup rated—from churches and public schools, to big businesses and banks!—Congress came in dead last.

Politico’s Glenn Thrush reacted to the poll on twitter, writing, “No doubt people hate congress--but 11 percent approval? How many of those people even know who their rep is?”

To Thrush, it’s the people, not his handlers on the Hill, who must be wrong. Does liberal condescension have a limit, as Victor Davis Hanson eloquently asks in this Ricochet post?

Though our confidence in Congress is at a historic low, don't be surprised if it sinks even lower.

Yesterday, a major financial reform bill was signed into law. The bill didn't touch Fannie and Freddie. It leaves taxpayer funded bailouts on the table (watch the second half of this WSJ video, which explains how). And with its 500+ new regulations, it ensures that corporations and businesses will have to hire armies of workers to ensure compliance with the law. The SEC itself announced that it must hire 800 new workers to fulfill its mandates under the law.

And today, Congress is expected to move forward on extending unemployment benefits, which will only stimulate unemployment, not the economy, as the WSJ points out.

I wonder what Gallup’s poll would have looked like if it would have been taken tomorrow, thus accounting for these two new pieces of legislation.

Looks like it's going to be a bloody Tuesday, come November 4th.

Hey, this is cool!

Ten safety deposit boxes of never-published writings by Franz Kafka, their exact contents unknown, are trapped in courts and bureaucracy, much like one of the nightmarish visions created by the author himself. The papers, retrieved from bank vaults where they have sat untouched and unread for decades, could shed new light on one of literature's darkest figures.

Apparently, the pages include endings to some unfinished works. So, like, it's possible "The Castle," turns out all right in the end and all the characters break into song. Or maybe Josef K sues and gets millions in compensation. Maybe the guy in Metamorphosis turns out to be the inventor of Raid and goes on to make his fortune. I mean, this could change the entire history of modern thought!

Rod Dreher is back, ladies and gentlemen, and better than ever, as the editor of the very excellent-looking Big Questions Online. The site, dedicated to "exploring human purpose and ultimate reality, with a focus on science, religion, markets, and morals," has just made its debut. You should be sure to check it out; with offerings from the likes of Roger Scruton and Robby George, and with Rod weighing in on the great Are Parents Happy? debate, I have a feeling I'll be dropping in daily on BQO.

A couple days ago, Andrew Breitbart released a video of former USDA employee Shirley Sherrod making what seemed like racist comments at an NAACP event. In fact, they were racist comments as presented. In Breitbart's clip, Sherrod bemoaned having to help a poor white farmer over two decades ago (as I explained earlier on Ricochet, here).

As it turns out, the Breitbart clip, such as it was, edited out the non-racist punchline. Sherrod was actually telling a lovely road-to-Damascus story about overcoming her own biases. Eventually, she did everything she could for the white farmer--and, in her peculiar construction, referred him "to his own kind," meaning a white person, for more help.

In the maelstrom that followed the release of the Breitbart clip, Sherrod was asked by her superiors in the Obama administration, specifically Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, to resign.

When it came to light that Sherrod was in fact not a racist, the Obama administration did a 180, apologized to Sherrod, and offered her a new, unique job.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's words are a window into the Obama administration's approach to race as a whole: "I did not think before I acted," he said, speaking about his hasty decision to fire Sherrod.

The Obama administration reacts to an accusation of "racism" the way an audience reacts to the cry of "fire!" in a crowded theater--bolt for the doors, even if there is no sign of smoke or heat. Full Panic. Make the call. Have Sherrod pull over during a long road trip tender her resignation via blackberry.

We've seen this before, when Obama accused a Cambridge officer of racial profiling and acting "stupidly" for arresting the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates in his own home. By his own admission, Obama made his statement "not having been there and not seeing all the facts."

Joe, you don't know how good you've got it.

I was just reminded of this by yet another news item warning yet again that Istanbul is on schedule to be leveled by a massive earthquake.

What does this have to do with tort law? I'll let Anne Applebaum explain; she put it well. Why, she asked rhetorically, did Chile fare so much better than Haiti in the aftermath of a similarly strong earthquake?

Before the quake, Chile also had regulations in place that required contractors to construct all new buildings to earthquake-resistant standards. Not every structure met the standards, but many did. And residents of those that did not will have some recourse: In the city of Concepción, residents of a new building that collapsed completely are threatening to take their builders to court, according to one report. The fact that they are even discussing this option implies that these apartment owners believe they have a court system that works, a legal system that could force builders to pay compensation, and a building regulatory system that is generally respected. Haiti has none of the above.

Turkey has none of the above either, and let me tell you, this I know from experience. Last year at around this time, the building I lived in was destroyed by a sleazy construction company that found the structures next door to my building--a protected, historic bathhouse and the wall abutting it--an impediment to their plans to build an ugly modern high-rise on the lot next door to mine. So they had a little "accident." They knocked down the wall, and nearly collapsed my building in the process. They rendered the building completely uninhabitable. They did this in the full knowledge that the building was full of people. They nearly killed us all. They also left me homeless. I wrote about the incident here:

It is estimated that 90 percent of the construction in Istanbul is illegal, and much of this construction does not conform to safety codes, earthquake codes in particular. This story is evidence of this. ...

The justice system in Turkey is severely overtaxed. Criminal trials can take years. Turks are reluctant to use the civil justice system: They believe nothing will ever be resolved by it, and quite often they are right. Construction companies such as this one count on this fact.

When I told Sargin that I would bring civil charges against him, he shrugged and said, "Go ahead." If companies like this are ever to be forced to respect the law, they must be made to believe that there will be penalties for violating it, and that these penalties will be swift and certain.

I am assured that it will take at least another year for the courts to render a verdict on my lawsuit against the company, and that in all likelihood I won't collect a penny.

Yes, America's a very litigious society. God bless America. It's not until you live in a country where the words "I'm going to sue your keister off" mean nothing whatsoever that you realize how much of our civilization is built upon the credibility of that threat.

I've been in a cave working on this video that explains the insane, frivolous, and scandalous lawsuit I'm fighting against The Daily Variety right now. I'll be on Redeye with Greg Gutfeld on Friday and I might get a chance to talk about it some. Please enjoy:

In Bloomberg Businessweek, a story about how Walmart came -- finally -- to Chicago's South Side, after a long fight:

Since 2006 a single Wal-Mart has been homesteading in Austin, a mostly African American Chicago community with an unemployment rate of 40 percent, its alderman says. Now the company wants to put two dozen more stores in the city, including a 145,000-square-foot Supercenter on that 200-acre plot. In an area ravaged by poverty and desperate for the 400 jobs the Supercenter would provide, you'd think this would have been a slam dunk. It was not.

After the first Chicago Wal-Mart opened, unions and community organizations successfully lobbied the city council to pass an ordinance requiring Wal-Mart and other big box retailers to pay at least $10 an hour, with benefits. The legislation infuriated Wal-Mart and its chief advocate, Mayor Richard M. Daley. In response, Daley, the country's longest-tenured big-city mayor, exercised his first and only veto, then watched labor spend $3 million to elect a cadre of pro-union aldermen to the city council.

But now, after a lot of wrangling and negotiating, they have come to an agreement. Walmart has agreed to a wage package of about $0.50 more than the state minimum and they pointed out how desperate and underserved the neighborhood is. It's one of the tenets of the left and Big Unions that Walmart is an abomination, a destroyer of Main Streets everywhere. But, as the Bloomberg piece concludes:

While unions were reflexively arguing that big box retailers are exploitative, Wal-Mart didn't endure much suffering. The unemployed did. So did shoppers on a budget. On a Monday trek to Chicago's current Wal-Mart, the parking lot in front of the store was packed by 10:30 a.m. Van Gooden, 56, a community representative for a nonprofit group, happily showed off his purchase: a white, button-down polo shirt slashed to $3.29 from an initial $12. Asked about Wal-Mart's impact on the impoverished ward, he said: "It's all about jobs and price."

In the end, which institution is going to do more -- measurably, practically -- for the working American? Big unions, big government, or the world's biggest retailer?

Megan thinks we should end the barbaric practice:

The arguments for academic tenure have always struck me as pretty weak, and more to the point, transparently self-serving. The best you can say of the system is that it preserves a sort of continuity in schools that is desireable for the purposes of cultivating alumni donations. But the cost of such a system is simply staggering.

Consider what the academic job market now looks like. You have a small elite on top who have lifetime employment regardless of how little work they do. This lifetime employment commences somewhere between 35 and 40. For the ten-to-fifteen years before that, they spend their lives in pursuit of the brass ring. They live in poverty suck up to professors, and publish, for one must publish to be tenured. It's very unfortunate if you don't have anything much worth saying; you need to publish anyway, in order to improve your chances. Fortunately, for the needy tenure seeker, a bevy of journals have sprung up that will print your trivial contributions.

The grim indictment continues for several more dispiriting paragraphs. It's true -- all of it. But we should still keep tenure. Because we still need tenure. Killing off tenure is like killing off the Electoral College out of anger and frustration with everything rancid and deranged about American politics. Ending tenure is like reforming the federal courts by abolishing the Supreme Court. Nihilistic and cruel as the graduate farm can be, effete and banal as our tenured professors can become, tenure remains one of our culture's last few outposts of real authority -- a place where people are listened to and taken seriously despite being powerless. And you cannot have a civilization worthy of the name without that.

Megan decries the cost. But the formation of character that is supposed to be the purpose of a university education can never be judged rightly by the standard of efficiency or the bottom line, and neither can tenure, which removes formers of character from the profane and worldly business of performance reviews, the distraction of job insecurity, and the allure of ladder-climbing.

Megan dismisses the tenured as a small elite that rewards nonproductivity. But an economist can never capture the goods and services produced by even a merely adequate tenured professor, because his or her services usually escape quantification when they are not outright denying it, and his or her goods often do not show forth in the world for decades, if not generations.

And Megan heaps scorn on the decadent disgrace known as academic publishing. But many good articles do manage to appear here and there in those many journals that nobody reads. And many of those who write them do not write them because they are desperate for tenure. They are given tenure because they are good enough to write them.

Of course the graduate education industry is a bizarre, punishing madhouse. Is it this way because of tenure? Or is it this way because professorial jobs of any kind are being pieced out and annihilated by administrators and budgeteers who see no point in putting a coherent, collegial faculty at the head of their campus -- and the serious, edifying, humane, well-integrated, and authoritative education that has the thinnest hope of issuing forth from any but such a faculty. By the numbers, higher education as a vocation is always a losing proposition. Judged from the standpoint of civilization, putting an end to tenure will only hasten its demise.

Anne Applebaum writing in the Washington Post yesterday:

I've listened to Sarah Palin's "Mama Grizzlies" video. I've watched the Tea Party movement evolve from a joke into a political force. I've read up on the primary candidates who want to take back government, take down government, burn down Washington.

I've seen all of it, I hear all of it and I don't believe any of it. A rose is a rose is a rose -- and hypocrisy is hypocrisy, whether it takes the form of champagne socialism or mama grizzlies who would go on the rampage if, God forbid, their mortgage tax relief were ever taken away.

Diane Ellis: While I'm convinced that most Americans favor some government intervention, and some social programs, I think the case could be made that the government has gone way too far in expanding itself. Will see some sort of scaling back happen in the next decade or two? Or are we just in for big and bigger from here on out?

James Pinkerton: I think people do want smaller government. Not nearly as small as the Cato Institute might want, but smaller. The challenge, though, is to figure out how to shrink it in ways that preserve the things that people want. I wrote a whole book about this back in 1995: "What Comes Next: The End of Big Government--and the New Paradigm Ahead."

What's worth remembering though, is that the frontal assault on government won't work. It hasn't worked in the past. Yes, we can avoid the mistake of the stimulus package (which I opposed) and wind down TARP and all the other bailouts (which I also opposed, including those proposed by G.W. Bush), but if we want to put a dent in the overall size of the state, we on the right will have to show that we have a better plan.

OK, Rob, I'll bite. (You knew I would.)

Not news that a UCLA prof fantasizes about keeping Fox News down. That's not the scandal of JournoList.

The scandal, as my WSJ colleague James Taranto put it in his Best of the Web column yesterday, is that a group of journalists used a private forum to discuss ways to suppress the news -- and no one thought this was, well ... inappropriate (at least until the Daily Caller started publishing the email traffic. The money quote, as James pointed out, was the one by journalist Spencer Ackerman, who now writes for Wired.com, where he suggested that his fellow journalists should push back against the media treatment of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright with a deliberate policy of libeling Fred Barnes or Karl Rove -- he said it didn't matter who -- by calling them "racist," in the hope their response would help get people off the Wright story. Again, not for anything Karl or Fred said or did, but as a deliberate strategy of smear.

The larger story is that it is part of a pattern of establishments (media, academe, etc.) that profess to be "objective" or "scientific" but really harbor deep biases against conservatives -- some of which are so vile they dare not express in public but clearly feel free to express to one another without any fear of rebuke. Indeed, so far as we can see, the only objections to Mr. Ackerman's mudball were tactical, and as Politico reports, he has kept his job with Wired. It comes atop the Weigel story, where he made clear on JournoList not only his disagreement with conservatism but his loathing. Which itself comes in wake of ClimateGate emails about professors trying to undermine colleagues and rig the peer review process: Nobody here but us objective scientists here.

Is it any wonder that conservatives feel that these ostensibly "objective" or "scientific" institutions are rigged against them? Nothing we didn't already know, about the press on most issues and the academy on climate change. But somehow it's still striking to see some smoking guns.

Now I have my own fantasies. E.g., that one day the New York Times or Washington Post might decide that conservatives, who account for about 40% of the U.S. population by self-definition (compared to about 20% for liberal), are not treated as an exotic tribe. In that regard, it would be nice to have people cover conservatives or represent conservative thought who 1) did not vote for Barack Obama; 2) does not loathe conservatives.

In the meantime, let us enjoy the spectacle of the JournoList, as we watch all these Wizards pleading with us to trust in the Great and Wonderful Oz instead of looking at the pathetic little huckster from Kansas behind the curtain.

Via BoingBoing, it's Marshall McLuhan's 99th birthday:

This calls for a song:

Toto released "99" in 1979, the year before McLuhan died.