Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:05 AM | Comments (44)
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Take a look at Amazon's Best Seller list. Or that of the New York Times, or the Washington Post. Do you notice anything? Concentrate, now. What stands out?

Women drive the publishing industry. That's my take-away, anyhow. Women readers probably outnumber men by three-to-one. Maybe even four-to-one. At least in the mainstream fiction genres and in periodicals. I see women reading all the time: on buses and trains and airplanes, in waiting rooms, on lunch breaks, everywhere. If I see a man reading, it's usually a newspaper, and it's usually the sports page. (Guys might be reading stuff on their smartphones, I guess.)

Here are some off-the-cuff observations I have about this phenomenon:

- Women read romances, mysteries, fantasy novels, and mainstream fiction.
- Men read thrillers (military and murder), hard sci-fi, and graphic novels.
- Nobody seems to read Westerns any more.
- In non-fiction, women read relationship books, personal-improvement books, "How To Be Thin" books, and "spirituality" books.
- In non-ficiton, men read about history, sports, business, finance, and science.
- Music geeks of both sexes read about music, but only guys read guitar magazines.
- For every ten women's magazines (People, US, Good Housekeeping) men have one (Guns and Ammo, Road and Track).
- Women have so pussified vampires that they no longer bear any resemblance to fearsome blood sucking ghouls like Varney and Nosferatu.
- I am the only man I know who has an e-book reader (a Kindle). I know about twenty women who have one.

What think you, Morons? Am I on or off base here? What are y'all reading?

Posted by: Monty at 03:59 AM | Comments (323)
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We're starting to see a coalescing of the narrative from the Left in terms of what they perceive our intentions to be. The narrative seems to be not so much a downsizing of government, but an elimination of government altogether- in short, to paint the right as anarchists.

Obviously, that isn't the case- quite the contrary, the clear story from the commenters here and at other blogs shows a deep devotion to the Constitution and the rule of law.

So what is pushing all this? more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 11:03 PM | Comments (45)
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Undoubtedly just a mental lapse on his part to admit this.

...EU president Van Rompuy warned that the bloc risks irrelevance and the end of its expensive welfare programs if it can't speed up economic growth, forecast to expand by just 1 percent this year.

"With 1 percent growth we can't finance our social model any more. With 1 percent structural growth we can't play a role in the world," he told the World Economic Forum in Brussels. "We need to double the economic growth potential that we now have."

Many are skeptical that can be achieved...

The New Dark Ages are upon us. All we need are a bunch of Huns and Vandals sacking the joint to make it complete.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 09:09 PM | Comments (151)
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Welcome to the Monday.

The Esquire 2010 Survey of American Women

Okay it was an internet poll of 9000 women rather than a random sample, but there are still all kinds of statistical goodness here. According to the survey most women make less than $30K a year, 31% have had plastic surgery, 84% claim to be able to parallel park, and a plurality would want to sleep with Zooey Deschanel if they were lesbians and/or had a few cocktails.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:30 PM | Comments (1135)
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Hmmm...

Thanks to JoeH.

Update: In news that's nearly as big, Meghan McCain reports she's become "disillusioned" with politics after someone shouted to her and her mother that John McCain should "be more conservative."

Believe it or not, nothing like this has ever really happened to me before.

In related news, Princess successfully detected a pea beneath her pillows.

Posted by: Ace at 04:27 PM | Comments (224)
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Case closed.

No, but seriously, Andrew Sullivan's in a snit about her being in a closet, or something.

Posted by: Ace at 03:43 PM | Comments (167)
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I agree with Allah -- her answer was a transparent dodge and tells us nothing.

Actually, the way she phrased it -- artfully, in definition 2b, meaning craftily and deceptively -- almost certainly means she does support a constitutional right to gay marriage.

Given your rhetoric about the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy—you called it “a profound wrong—a moral injustice of the first order”—let me ask this basic question: Do you believe that there is a federal constitutional right to samesex marriage?

Answer: There is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

Ann Althouse says that's a present tense answer, rather than a subjective tense answer -- that is, whether there should be discovered such a right. I read it as a descriptive answer rather than a prescriptive one -- she's just telling us, as anyone could, what the state of the law is, rather than what she thinks it should be.

As Clinton said -- it all depends on what the meaning of "is" is.

She could have actually responded to this question and revealed her true thinking with a longer and more substantive response. Instead, she deliberately chose a brief answer with multiple interpretations.

She could have written a clarifying follow-up sentence -- either "But I believe the constitution does strongly suggest such a right" or "And nothing in our jurisprudence suggests such a right can be fairly discovered" -- but did not.

I don't believe that those who work in a profession where words are everything and ethical treatises are written on how to convey an impression without actually committing to that impression write things like this absentmindedly.

According to a jurist of impeccable judgment and wisdom -- a jurist in fact praised by Barack Obama himself -- Kagan should not be confirmed to the Supreme Court for her deliberate lack of candor:

If recent hearings [on the nominations of Justice Ginsburg and Justice Breyer] lacked acrimony, they also lacked seriousness and substance. The problem was the opposite of what Carter describes: not that the Senate focused too much on a nomineeÂ’s legal views, but that it did so far too little.Â… When the Senate ceases to engage nominees in meaningful discussion of legal issues, the confirmation process takes on an air of vacuity and farce, and the Senate becomes incapable of either properly evaluating nominees or appropriately educating the public.


I suspect that both [Ginsburg and Breyer] appreciated that, for them (as for most), the safest and surest route to the prize [of confirmation] lay in alternating platitudinous statement and judicial silence. Who would have done anything different, in the absence of pressure from members of Congress?


The kind of inquiry that would contribute most to understanding and evaluating a nomination is … discussion first, of the nominee’s broad judicial philosophy and, second, of her views on particular constitutional issues.… But responses to … questions [on judicial philosophy] can—and have—become platitudinous, especially given the interrogators’ scant familiarity with jurisprudential matters.… Hence the second aspect of the inquiry: the insistence on seeing how theory works in practice by evoking a nominee’s comments on particular issues—involving privacy rights, free speech, race and gender discrimination, and so forth—that the Court regularly faces.


[As for claims that such inquiry would compromise “judicial independence”:] The judicial independence that we should focus on protecting resides primarily in the inability of political officials, once having placed a person on the court, to interfere with what she does there. That seems a fair amount of independence for any branch of government.


[W]hat is worse even than the hearings themselves is Â… the evident belief of many senators that serious substantive inquiry of nominees is usually not only inessential, but illegitimate.

So, according to this jurist, Kagan should not be permitted by an acquiescent Senate to hide her views by offering up a combination of "platitudes" and "silence."

As you probably already know: The jurist making this criticism was none other than Kagan herself, before she learned the career-building value of platitudes and silence.

As noted moral philosopher John Bender observed: "Answer the question, Claire."

Whelen hits her hard, again, on barring military recruiters from Harvard over "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." It's not just that she did this in the first place -- it's that her principles only apparently demand that she hate the military over this, while conveniently permitting her to suck up to the Democratic politicians who created and voted for the policy in the first place.

After all, she had no plans of seeking a job with the military. On the other hand, she always had in mind jobs that Democratic politicians could grant her:

It’s also worth emphasizing that what Kagan mischaracterized as the “military’s policy” is in fact the Clinton administration’s implementation of a provision of the defense-appropriations law that a Democratic-controlled Congress enacted in 1993 (with Clinton’s signature). Instead of taking potshots at military recruiters who were merely complying with the law, did Kagan ever exclude from campus any of the politicians responsible for the law? Of course not. Indeed, whatever moral opposition Kagan had to the law when it was adopted didn’t deter her from seeking and obtaining employment in the Clinton White House. Nor will it keep her from palling around with the many senators who voted for it, such as Vice President Biden.

Sad About Socialism's Decline: Obama nominating a socialist? Who'd have imagined it.

From her senior thesis at Princeton:

Titled "To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933," Kagan opined that infighting caused the decline of the early socialist movement. She asked why the "greatness" of socialism was not reemerging as a major political force.

"In our own times, a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States. Americans are more likely to speak of a golden past than of a golden future, of capitalism's glories than of socialism's greatness," wrote Kagan, Obama's solicitor general.

"Why, in a society by no means perfect, has a radical party never attained the status of a major political force? Why, in particular, did the socialist movement never become an alternative to the nation's established parties?" she asked.

...

"The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism's decline, still wish to change America," she wrote. "Radicals have often succumbed to the devastating bane of sectarianism; it is easier, after all, to fight one's fellows than it is to battle an entrenched and powerful foe. Yet if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope."

Her thesis was dedicated to her brother "whose involvement in radical causes led me to explore the history of American radicalism in the hope of clarifying my own political ideas."

Ask her about whether she believes in socialism and I'm sure she'll offer up the meaningless descriptivist statement, "Socialism is a theory of economics that does exist, yes."

Posted by: Ace at 01:44 PM | Comments (233)
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We will probably not get the thrill of retiring this nasty (perennially voted among the Senate's meanest) bastard ourselves; the Democrats will beat us to the punch.

One partisan, media-bashing point: The media will take the ouster of Bob Bennet as an indictment of conservatives. We're too ideological and/or partisan, they'll claim. (See the predictable Kathleen Parker, for example.) This take-down of one of the "good guys" (that is, someone willing to bend the Democrats way) proves that, as if it needed further proving.

First of all, one of the media's go-to Neutral Story Lines is that incumbents have too much of advantage in elections and there's not enough turn-over and fresh blood (read: drama which makes the news more fun to write) each election. Mickey Kaus often notes the media likes Neutral Story Lines, as they're easy to write, but are supposedly nonpartisan, as they usually criticize some procedural defect in both parties.

What makes the "Neutral Story Line" not neutral at all is that the media seems most interested, each cycle, in the "Neutral Story Li9ne" that hurts the Republicans more. For instance, the amount of money flowing into elections became a more and more intense problem as more and more money flowed to Republicans, putting Democrats at a disadvantage. The supposedly Neutral Story Line doesn't really seem all that Neutral when you consider that there's-too-much-money-in-politics reached its crisis stage during Bush's 2004 election, when he spent more money than anyone in history, but suddenly wasn't a problem at all when Obama topped him in 2008. This despite the fact that Bush actually had a higher percentage of small-money donors than Obama (as a percentage of total money donated), and Obama had a bigger percentage of high-dollar donors.

The media loves these story lines, because facially they appear neutral -- "money in politics is a danger" has no on-its-face, explicit partisan import -- but the timing of when to deploy a particular story line is highly partisan, and always made with the Democratic Party's best interests in mind.

Thus, when Bush refused the campaign spending limits, and spent only private money, it was nearly a constitutional crisis; when Obama did the same, it was a triumph of people-powered politics.

Are conspiracy theories bad? Well, right now, when the Republican base is vulnerable to buying into conspiracy theories about Obama's birthplace or sabotaged deep-drilling oil rigs, conspiracy theories are bad, and examples of the Paranoid Style of American Politics.

On the other hand, when former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright confessed to Mort Kondracke she feared Bush had actually captured bin Ladin and was secretly holding him only to publicize his capture on the eve of the 2004 elections, a party's trafficking in conspiracy theories wasn't even worth noting.

Certainly such conspiracy theories weren't worth noting when Bush and Cheney (and their deadly cabal) were accused of sabotaging a plane in order to murder a sitting and popular liberal US Senator.

Now, of course, in the case of Bob Bennet, the media is instructing us that we on the right are too partisan and too ideological and too inflexible and so on and so on -- the "neutral story line" they're pushing; a call for moderation is neutral, by its own terms -- and ignoring the other possible neutral story line -- that it's wonderful that an incumbent got beat, which proves that our politics can change when an electorate gets involved.

But consider the case of Sestack and Specter: The media will once again have its choice of two "neutral story lines" when that primary is resolved. It's heads the Democrats win, tails the Republicans lose, as far as the media is concerned.

If Sestack wins, the media will in fact push the "neutral story line" they could have pushed, but chose not to, in Bennet's case: That we're retiring an old warhorse in favor of a fresh face and that proves that our system works.

On the other hand, if Specter wins, they'll push the "neutral story line" that the Democrats, unlike Republicans, are welcoming of moderates. (And Specter, a moderate Republican turncoat now voting as a somewhat-less-moderate Democrat, is still pretty moderate.) So that story line does have something to it.

But we'll have no stories about "overly-partisan and inflexibly ideological Democrats driving out a true moderate and fence-crosser" if Specter should lose -- trust that. Instead we'll have the other supposedly-neutral story line, the one that once again just happens to wind up praising Democrats.

And this is how media bias works 75% of the time. Most of the time, the media is selecting between several possible "rules," many of which are arguably correct, but which are contradicted by nearly opposite rules, which are also arguably correct. The media never decides which rule is correct in the most cases; instead, they choose whichever "rule" benefits the Democrats this cycle.

Are we too interested in personal scandals which don't really have much to do with a party's governing philosophy? The answer is "No" if you mean Mark Foley or Mark Sanford; the answer is "Yes" if you mean Eric Massa or John Edwards.

Is it out of line for a former vice president to toughly criticize a new president of a different party? Well, if you're Al Gore criticizing Bush, you're just being patriotic and expressing the frustrations of millions of Americans. If you're Dick Cheney criticizing Obama, you're deliberately weakening a new president and endangering national security.

Is it patriotic, or treasonous, for a high-level national security staffer to leak to the press? Well, if you're exposing Bush's SWIFT snooping, you're a patriot, keeping a vigilant eye on the shadowy, murky world of espionage. If you're embarrassing Obama by noting that he has no Iran plan at all, you're a dirty leaking traitor giving away critical state secrets for a cheap partisan advantage.

And dissent? Is it the highest form of patriotism or the lowest form of partisanship? I think you know the answer there, and the answer is, of course, It depends on who's dissenting.

In each of these situations, a halfway decent case can be made either way -- often, both of these "rules" is kinda-sorta true and kinda-sorta false.

The way the media shapes opinion is by stating, categorically, without caveat, that one rule is true in all cases when it benefits Democrats, and then, the following election cycle (or even the following month) that its opposite rule is categorically, and without caveat, true, in all cases, when it hurts the Republicans.

Neutral story lines are only really neutral when the criteria for choosing them is neutral. When partisan and ideological considerations drive the choice of which conflicting "neutral" story line to push, it's just a partisan press covering its tracks with the thinnest pretense of objectivity. As usual.

Thanks to James.

Posted by: Ace at 12:12 PM | Comments (149)
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Really?

What makes Greece so damn lucky?

Lucky in the sense that they can benefit from such changes, whereas we in the United States are apparently required to do the precise opposite.

Actually, the NYT isn't endorsing this plan (as the linked analysis at Hot Air suggests); it's just reporting, neutrally, that this is the austerity plan forced on Greece by the IMF, EU, and European Central Banks.

Still: I'm sure the NYT doesn't notice the irony that the program it urges for America is the exact program which must be undone in Greece to keep the country from going bankrupt.

As unions denounced the cost-cutting measures and pledged to take to the streets over the weekend and go on strike on Wednesday, Prime Minister George Papandreou said Greece must quickly adopt the international aid plan. “Today, the top priority is the survival of the nation,” he told Parliament on Friday. “This is the red line.”

...

Greek officials close to the discussions said the deal would include as much as 130 billion euros in aid over the next three years at reasonable interest rates. In return, the I.M.F. asked Greece to cut public sector spending by 8 billion euros in the 14 months after the plan was adopted. Economists called that provision crucial because past reform programs by the government have relied too much on overly optimistic assumptions about the collection of unpaid taxes.

Union and government officials said Greece had also pledged to raise its value-added tax to 25 percent, to freeze civil servantsÂ’ wages and to eliminate public sector bonuses amounting to two monthsÂ’ pay. They said the government intended to increase taxes on fuel, tobacco and alcohol.

Among the most significant features of the plan, a Greek government official said, would be a measure making it easier for the government to lay off some of the many thousands of public sector workers, whose low levels of productivity and high wages are a big contributor to GreeceÂ’s debt problem. Until now, the government has not been able to lay off civil servants, whose employment rights are in effect constitutionally guaranteed.

In America, they're not constitutionally guaranteed per se, but they are politically guaranteed -- one party is dedicated singlemindedly to expanding the government workforce and jacking up its already-generous compensation.

Another reform high on the list is removing the state from the marketplace in crucial sectors like health care, transportation and energy and allowing private investment. Economists say that the liberalization of trucking routes — where a trucking license can cost up to $90,000 — and the health care industry would help bring down prices in these areas, which are among the highest in Europe.

Yes, a lot of "raise taxes" stuff in there too, but that's because Greece has gotten so far down the road of guaranteeing a bunch of pricey while avoiding raising the tax rates, preferring to borrow and spend, so that the public is never alerted to the true costs of these programs until it's too late, and the country must accept higher tax rates or go bankrupt.

Sound familiar? Seems to me there's a very cool cat with nice pecs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who has a similar agenda. Hide the costs of your programs in order to get them passed, and then, when it's politically impossible to restrain those costs, tell the country you are sadly forced to raise taxes due to circumstances beyond your control.

Can't happen here? Reason argues it already has happened here, at least in the once-Golden State of California.

California's longterm population-loss trend has reportedly turned around slightly in the last few months, and Greece will no doubt bring in a new haul of tourists this summer, proving the claim that self-satisfied Californians love to make whenever their state is compared unfavorably with Texas: The weather is really nice. And people still haven't managed to screw up the weather.

But every suntan eventually turns into parched, leathery skin. The insidious thing about an unfriendly business climate is that it takes a long time for the effects to show up in the government's inability to pay its bills. So long, in fact, that when the sovereign bankruptcy comes, it's easy to draw the conclusion that tax rates are too low. Both California and Greece are going through a variety of this type of denial right now. But with the governor of California and the prime minister of Greece both promising to turn over a new leaf, this is a good time to remember that you can't take people's money if you prevent them from making money in the first place.

Thanks to Larissa and StarChamberMaid.

Posted by: Ace at 10:44 AM | Comments (170)
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