Happy (belated!) Memorial Day!

I’ve always loved Memorial Day weekend. Of course, like most red-blooded American families, this weekend means that pools are opening, a big family bbq, and the beginnings of summertime. More importantly, it is a thankful time – where we “memorialize” all those who have given so much to serve our nation.

Most of us have friends and family that have served in the military. My granddad, my pop, my two aunts, and my one uncle all have served. My cousin is going to be deployed in the fall. Some of you reading probably served yourself or are still serving today. Thank you. You are heroic stewards of freedom.

I was with my grandparents this weekend, both a part of the “Greatest Generation.” When Tom Brokaw coined the phrase, I think he must have had my grandparents in mind. They are hearty stock. As I sat with them one morning, my grandma was reading some stories in the paper about WWII vets. Inspired by their words, she told me some of her own memories from that time. There was something that stood out to me as she recollected: she always referred to the troops as “our boys.” Compare that to now. As a culture, we tend to refer to the troops as, well, “troops” or “the military.” We’ve lost the sense of community, the personal connection with those who are serving. Not to say that there aren’t wonderful organizations that coordinate letters, care packages, or special ways of thanking our troops, but as a culture, I believe there should be a renewed, cultural recognition of the sacrifices these men and women are making to protect us. After all, like my grandma says, these are “our men and our women.”

So, as you enjoyed your beers and burgers, I hope you stopped and remembered those who have gone before us, some paying the ultimate price for freedom, and those who still protect us.

In addition, as we approach the 68^th anniversary of D-Day on June 6^th, I found an excerpt of Reagan’s speech at Pointe du Hoc on the 40^th anniversary of that important day. Reagan captured the essence of the Greatest Generation, their fierce duty and honor, as thanked them for risking everything so that we could be free.

Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender’s poem. You are men who in your “lives fought for life . . . and left the vivid air signed with your honor.”…

Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet, you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love.

The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge — and pray God we have not lost it — that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.

You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you…

Here, in this place where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead. Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for. Let our actions say to them the words for which Matthew Ridgway listened: “I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.”

Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their value [valor], and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.

Thank you very much, and God bless you all.

President Ronald Reagan – June 6, 1984

It may turn out a relatively minor character is the one they change. However, if they decide to mess with the top tier, like Superman, Batman, or Flash, then we are going to have some problems. These are important characters that have established histories and personalities and you can’t go changing them on a dime. A key part of Superman is his relationship with Lois Lane. It won’t work the same if he suddenly becomes interested in Jimmy Olsen.

Now I can see how they could change Batman into liking dudes (I mean, the Wertham Commission thought he was having “improper relations” with Robin), but despite that, some of Batman’s key subplots involve his flirtatious interactions with Catwoman and his issues with Talia al Ghul. A gay Batman wouldn’t work the same and he’d be a less effective character.

This dismay isn’t related to male characters only. No matter how much a part of me would like to see Black Canary spend more time with the ladies, she belongs with Green Arrow.

I think DC is just trying to garner publicity with this gimmick and that is what this is, a gimmick. I have no problem with a homosexual superhero character if it serves the story and he/she is interesting, but this is an attempt to get headlines. You attract and KEEP readers with well written, well-thought out stories and characters (gay or straight) that we share a connection with. You do NOT keep readers with gimmicks. Spider-Man’s black costume, while initially a gimmick, actually served to further the story (see Venom). Wonder Woman’s costume change (the one in the 70s)  did not.

Ten days after she was born, Bella came home from the hospital. As doctors explained to us how to best prepare for her death, we chose to celebrate her life. And we did, every, single day. I remember when we first brought Bella home; we hung a sign in our living room. It read, “Happy 1-Week Birthday Bella.” As the weeks went by, we changed the sign from 1 to 2 to 3 weeks. Eventually weeks turned into months and now, thanks be to God, years. We fought for her each step of the way, giving her every opportunity to do well. She beat the odds and has been doing so ever since.

As I reflect on this last year of her life, it has been amazing to see how many people Bella has touched and the issues that have been discussed in the public sphere as a result of her condition. In the middle of winter, when the world found out that Bella had been hospitalized, the response was overwhelming. Our inboxes and mailboxes were flooded with notes of encouragement, prayer, and support. People in all walks of life from around the country united around the witness of a three-year-old little girl. We even got notes that said, “I don’t agree with you politically, but thank you for being a voice for the special needs community.” She brought unity and refocused us on what was really important in the midst of a heated primary season.

When her hospitalization hit the news networks, commentators started discussing important issues surrounding the special needs world, such as the legal struggles that occur when special needs children aren’t given fair medical treatment or any treatment at all. A whole host of issues were brought to the forefront of the debate, dealing with families, the pro-life movement, the special needs community, and so much more. It was as though people realized that the pro-life movement doesn’t end at birth, but it continues at the bedsides of the disabled, the elderly, and the vulnerable. Bella put a face to the helpless, those whom society looks upon as “useless.” When did we become so utilitarian that we measured worth in terms of “ability?” Bella is able to do the most important thing in life more perfectly than I will ever be able to: love.

As people started to learn more about Bella, we discovered that more and more people were bringing their special needs kids to our campaign events. We even met several beautiful children with Trisomy 18. They talked to us about their struggles, and all were different, but there was a common thread in all of their experiences: the irreplaceable joy and love their child brought into their lives.  In a world too often focused on instant gratification and personal satisfaction, it is no wonder that these lives are considered “inconvenient.” Joe Klein talked about just that in an article he wrote for TIME several months ago: “I am haunted by the smiling photos I’ve seen of Isabella with her father and mother, brothers and sisters. No doubt she struggles through many of her days — she nearly died a few weeks ago — but she has also been granted three years of unconditional love and the ability to smile and bring joy. Her tenuous survival has given her family a deeper sense of how precious even the frailest of lives are. …. I also worry that we’ve become too averse to personal inconvenience as a society—that we’re less rigorous parents than we should be, that we’ve farmed out our responsibilities, especially for the disabled, to the state—and I’m grateful to Santorum for forcing on me the discomfort of having to think about the moral implications of his daughter’s smile.”

Bella has opened our eyes to many things: the importance of treasuring each day, how to hope even in the darkest of circumstances, that faith is our foundation, and most importantly, what pure, unselfish love looks like. So as we look back on another year of life, another year of miracles, we are filled with gratitude and hope. We are grateful for one more year of life with our precious girl. We are hopeful that through the witness of Bella’s spirit, people will continue to be inspired, challenged to think about the “moral implications” of my sister’s smile.

Happy 4th Birthday Bella

I think it would be safe to say for many on the right, including myself, this whole sideshow is exasperating. If the President is for gay marriage (who’s he kidding) then he should come out (no pun intended) and say so. However, that would be too easy. I see this whole charade playing out in one of several different ways.

1.) Obama is actually against gay marriage, but doesn’t want to tick off his Hollywood supporters and more importantly, he doesn’t want to lose their contributions. Those contributions matter, a lot. But who are we kidding, Obama’s for gay marriage. People actually opposed to gay marriage (like me) don’t say they are “evolving” on the issue.

2.) Obama WILL announce he is for gay marriage some time this year, but he wants to save it for a special occasion. I anticipate this occurs either a.) the day after the Republican National Convention to change the subject (the media will happily oblige) b.) during his speech at the Democratic National Convention (sets SOME sort of second term agenda) c.) during one of the debates (anything to change the subject and/or to catch Romney flat-footed. He’ll aim to have a “The American President” or “The West Wing” moment).

3.) Obama announces he’s for gay marriage after the election. He’ll have more “flexibility” and he won’t have to worry about the fallout from his fully evolved position.

4.) Obama doesn’t change his position at all, he continues with what he has been doing, never coming out in favor of gay marriage, but opposing any pro-traditional marriage initiatives that might come up.

I think 2 & 3 are the most likely. As we’ve seen, the President isn’t shy about trying to change the subject and if he thought that announcing his support of gay marriage would, on balance, help him one iota, he’d do it.

So what to do about it. Well, if I were the Romney campaign, I’d do two things. First, pressure Obama to come out and announce his support for gay marriage. Let everybody know that you’re not buying his faux opposition and that Obama should announce his support for gay marriage. If you put enough pressure on Obama and he is forced to announce his support in May or June and not in the fall, then one giant distraction goes away. Second, Romney should prebut the President on this issue. Like he tried to do in Charlotte in regards to jobs, do so again in regards to marriage. State your support for traditional marriage and attack Obama for his obfuscation. Turn a weakness of yours (lack of authenticity) and turn it around and make it a weakness of your opponent too.

Of course, anything can happen and I shouldn’t be arrogant enough to believe that a Presidential candidate would listen to me (I’d be flattered if he did though).

Btw: While I am opposed to gay marriage, I am under no illusion as to the current course of public opinion. I pretty much agree with this article by Rod Dreher in regards to social conservative opposition to gay marriage. However, sometimes you fight the fights that need fighting even if you end up losing.

P.S.- If you want a rational debate about gay marriage (i.e. Dan Savage isn’t within a 1000 miles of the event) check these out (that means you AP):

Dr. Michael Brown vs. Dr. Eric Smaw

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse vs. Christine Sun

Little b-words are probably sexist, sizeist, and ageist too.

According to the study, babies of 9 months (whose lives, we should note, are centered on eating, doodying their diapers, and putting unsanitary things in their mouths) have difficulty interpreting the facial expressions of people of other races.  Medical Xpress, reporting on the U. Mass Amherst study, summarizes the findings as follows:

The researchers found that by 9 months, infants show a decline in their ability to tell apart two faces within another race and to accurately match emotional sounds with emotional expressions of different-race individuals. This is the first investigation of this effect in infancy and supports other studies suggesting that emotion recognition is less accurate for other-race faces than own-race faces.

So there is a decline in infants’ ability to distinguish between other-race faces (the decline was observed between 5 and 9 months in the study).  Of course, there are a lot of changes in babies between 5 and 9 months, such as getting way bigger, gaining teeth, sitting up and crawling, sleeping through the night, and so forth.  If we went by the labeling standard with which the “racist babies” study is being touted, we’d describe a baby’s growth as obesity and his sleeping proficiency as narcolepsy.

Baby, wired to register racism (U Mass-Amherst photo)

If “racism” is defined as any form of noticing that there are physical differences between the races – anytime, anywhere, by anyone – then the concept has no political or moral meaning whatsoever.  It is as neutral and uninteresting as eyelashes and fingernails.  The “differently abled” or handicapped, according to this definition of racism, would be those who did not develop it.  If it’s typical of babies in a study, regardless of race, then it’s – by definition – normal.

But the thoughtless use of the word “racism” in connection with this study highlights a snowballing trend – something in the nature of an avalanche – in modern communication.  There are a number of freighted words, like “racism,” “intolerance,” and “[x]-phobia,” which have specific meanings and were coined at one time to identify patterns in which people either made conscious choices to believe certain things and behave in certain ways, or were driven to by pathologies attributable to rearing or their social environment.  The point of this post is not to refight the battles of their creation, but to observe that these words are used in invalid ways to prejudice public dialogue.

The idea of racism – see Dinesh D’Souza’s comprehensive volume on it – gained momentum in the 19th century with theories of race from well-known historians and philosophers, followed by a moral and political backlash against the idea of permanent racial disparities.  Racism was initially considered to be an intellectual choice, based on “empirical” observation and analysis.   Its opponents, for their part, regarded their position as a moral one, adopted out of moral concern for the treatment of – discrimination against – their fellow men.

As D’Souza notes, the modern take has evolved further: the “prevailing view … is that racism … is a product of irrational antipathy … a kind of pathology or dementia.” (1995 hardback edition of The End of Racism; p. 28.)

These two distinct concepts are themselves something of a mishmash, requiring much refinement and explanation.  The first implies a choice that is ultimately moral:  a choice of how to perceive and treat other humans.  The second implies a socio-psychological problem that may require therapy, although it’s not clear how to administer such a program for vast numbers of people.  But in either case, the central idea is that there is a problem, an anomaly that affects the community and needs to be dealt with by policy of some kind.

These concepts are on another planet from the untutored responses of 9-month-olds.  If our earliest natural response to other races constitutes “racism,” then the manifestation cannot be either a moral problem – which must be based on individual choice – or “a pathology,” something that is damaging to a system because it is anomalous.

We have developed imperfect (and easily abused) means to try to deal with the kinds of problem racism has been defined as in the past.  But what do we do if it’s not one of those problems?  Babies aren’t making moral choices to “discriminate” or assume derogatory things about others.  And if they carry a universal “pathology,” what meaning can that possibly have?  How are we to see ourselves as a species, if we are all carriers of this pathology?  How do we justify placing a moral value on ourselves?  Or are we to subjugate our moral value to the need to eliminate “pathologies”?  Do we declare open season on ourselves because of our innate characteristics?

The lunacy of labeling the natural responses of infants “racism” consists partly in that doing so robs racism of any useful meaning.  But it also creates an open-ended pretext for haranguing the people, and making policy that seeks to limit their options and punish them preemptively.  It suggests, if it doesn’t explicitly say, that liberty and freedom of choice are problems for mankind – because who knows what all these racist babies would do with them.

The issue here is partly that a concept as poorly defined as racism is constantly waved at the public like a talisman.  But an equally great problem – perhaps a greater one – is that so many in the media have obediently discussed the U. Mass Amherst study’s results as evidence of racism.  It’s as if the entire nation has adopted the word “racism” as a banner with felt appliqués, something big and colorful and recognizable, without much of an explicit definition, but conveying a set of self-congratulatory emotions.

Yet the implication – that there’s a terrible, destructive pathology born into us that needs to be eradicated – is incompatible with the idea of humans as moral actors, in charge of our behavior and accountable for what we do.  It’s incompatible with the very useful respect we have for our moral consciences.  We get angry with ourselves when we don’t follow our consciences – and we know when that has happened – but we don’t drown in metaphysical doubt about the efficacy of conscience or the fundamental propriety of its guideposts.

In the end, we can’t help noticing that the implied concept of “original racism” is basically like the Christian concept of “original sin,” but without the all-important redemption feature.  Christians do believe that the “sin nature” requires renovation through the ministrations of Jesus Christ.  But Christianity is about redemption of the whole person – turning what was corrupted to the good purposes it was meant for – not removal of innate human traits.   Moreover, America was established as the world’s beacon of religious liberty precisely because concepts like original sin and Christian redemption are inherently a matter of conscience, to be handled by the individual and his fellows in faith without coercion from the state.

We should actively resist turning public education and the legal code into a doctrine of salvation – from racism or anything else – administered by the government.  It isn’t enough to make jokes about the racist babies, and thereby convey that we’re not taking this too seriously.  The careless, inconsequent use of the word “racism” needs to be called out, and all its implications refuted.  Talking about “racism” should entail talking about something that has been defined for a declared purpose – a purpose to which the means at human disposal are suited.  We don’t have the power to remake mankind, not even with the resources of the government, nor would we use it wisely if we did.

If you believe that it’s an example of racism when David Duke associates laziness and other contemptible qualities with black people, or when Louis Farrakhan associates the world’s great evils with white people, then I’m with you, and we can unite in decrying racism.   If you believe we humans harbor original racism, an evil existing outside the competence of our moral consciences, but one that needs to be expiated, and exorcised by appointed practitioners, then just register as a religion already.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

For starters, I admire the transparency of the label’s pitchmen, HispanicLatino founder Jesse Treviño, and Texas Representative Richard Peña Raymond (D-Laredo) .  They have no qualms with stating that “HispanicLatino” was born out of a need to carve out a new ethno-political identity for those who traditionally identified themselves as “Hispanic” or “Latino” (more on the difference here).  According to Treviño and Peña Raymond, there is an ongoing war on Hispanics/Latinos, which can only be solved via the creation of a new artificial ethnoracial umbrella.

Never mind that, according to the most recent Pew Hispanic poll, the labels are rejected by a majority of people who would much rather identify by their country of national origin.  Read through the entire poll findings, and you will find that they demolish every one of the premises thay underlie the supposed need for an all-encompassing label.

No wonder, then, that Al Punto anchor Jorge Ramos (who never passes up an opportunity to advance racial grievance in furtherance of the immigration agenda) struggled to keep a straight face during the segment.  When faced with the reality of the Pew poll, Treviño and Peña Raymond had no other choice than to be transparent about the aims of the “HispanicLatino” label.  Ramos went to the Pew poll so many times, that I half expected him to reprise Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s instant classic “…it’s not selling very well“.

If you follow the Pew link and go deeper into the poll, you’ll find that left to their own devices…Hispanics, Latinos, or “ethnic identity to be named later” are just like any of the many ethnic groups that came into this country before them.  The great truth behind the Pew poll is that Hispanics/Latinos have largely resisted the Institutional Left’s attempts to herd them into the uniquely American Hispanic/Latino construct.  Individual Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans, Cubans, et. al are free to assimilate into the mainstream when they do not get sucked into the “Latino” identity, and the Left knows it (as do media institutions that depend on a steady influx of non-English-speaking, non-assimilated individuals for survival).

HispanicLatino is, ultimately, nothing more than yet another naked attempt at herding individuals from all over Latin America into a single monoblock identity for the purposes of political manipulation.  As such, it should be laughed out of the room.

This article is cross-posted at El Tercer Riel (The Third Rail), and a Spanish-language version is available here.

Don’t misunderstand – the GSA and other federal agencies should be held accountable for this and other unethical abuses of the public’s money. As The Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell outlined on April 19, and again on April 23, this is only one of many publicly egregious wastes of taxpayer money in the bureaucracies in D.C. But when it comes down to it, $820,000 is not even a drop in the bucket of fraud/waste/abuse/duplicity. Here are some of the other, more easily ignored abuses:

First off is simple abuse that is acceptable for the well-connected politician but disgraceful and/or illegal for anyone else – small change, but ultimately emblematic of the systemic corruption in the federal government. Case in point is how former Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY) gets a pension and other benefits for the rest of his life, despite resigning in disgrace. President Obama, following in the footsteps of his predecessors, is almost certainly using taxpayer dollars for campaign trips – illegal, but obviously acceptable under both parties. Senator David Vitter (R-LA) was busted for solicitation, but never spent time in jail. He will get a pension and other monetary benefits, same as Weiner.

Antithetical to many conservatives is looking hard at unproductive defense spending. However, the Defense Department is rife with abuse. For example, last October a report by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) outlined how major defense contractors who paid civil fines or settled for amounts of $1 million or greater still received over $500 billion in contracts in the last 10 years. Another report, this one from The Commission Wartime Contracting, estimated that between $31 billion and $60 billion had been lost to poor oversight and/or fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan during our time in those nations.

Outside of fraud, simple inefficiencies abound in the Defense Department. This Forbes piece notes that approximately $100 billion had been spent on weapons programs that were either never used or eventually canceled – all after significant investments. In an informal conversation with a friend who is a military auditor, I was told that a number of contractors take a contract and take a percentage off the top. They then subcontract to another company, which takes a percentage off the top. This subcontractor then subcontracts to another company, and takes a percentage off the top. Finally, several levels down, the contract actually gets fulfilled.

Duplication of federal programs is something that has come to light in the last 15 months. A pair of Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports in 2011 and 2012 found, according to Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), “hundreds of billions” of dollars in duplication in the federal government. ABC News reported that the GAO found many programs were not tested for actually accomplishing their stated goals, and the same applied to a number of tax loopholes, credits, etc. (Several aspects of the 2012 report can be found at the first link, including examples of duplication and the report’s Executive Summary.) Here are some of the juicier parts of ABC’s article:

• GAO found the Department of Defense could save up to $460 million every year by undertaking a “broader restructuring” of its military health care system.
• The military came in for special scrutiny: over $10 billion on defense-wide business systems every year; $49 billion in military and veterans health services; and at least $76 billion since 2005 in urgent processing systems for the military.
• Fifty-eight billion dollars at the Department of Transportation [was spent] for over 100 separate surface transportation programs.
• [A]lmost $1 trillion in government-wide tax expenditures listed by the Treasury Department, some of which the GAO found “may be ineffective at achieving their social or economic purposes.”
• [T]he government has neglected to investigate numerous programs, making the expenditure of some funds not only redundant but wasteful. For instance, only five of 47 job training and employment programs surveyed by the GAO had been studied to evaluate whether outcomes were the result of the program itself or another cause altogether.
• “Little is known about the effectiveness of most programs,” the watchdog observed.
• That point also applies to domestic food assistance, where “little is known about the effectiveness of [11 of the 18 programs] because they have not been well studied,” the GAO said. In fiscal year 2008, for example, the government spent $62.5 billion on those 18 programs.

Of course, no critique of the federal government’s spending habits is complete without highlighting simple stupidity. In fiscal year 2011, improper payments totaled $115 billion in, over three percent of the federal budget. According to a press release from Rep. Todd Platts (R-PA): “An improper payment could be an incorrect payment, an over- or under- payment, and could include a payment to an ineligible recipient, a payment for an ineligible service, a duplicate payment or a payment for a service not received.” Medicare and Medicaid represented over half of these improper payments; in Fiscal Year 2010 alone Medicare cost the taxpayers $48 billion in improper payments.

To be fair, $115 billion is less than what was spent on improper payments in fiscal year 2010… but the $115 billion did not account for many agencies that simply fail to report improper payments. According to Platts: “Although not all agencies are required to report improper payment estimates, some agencies that are required to report do not do so.  The most significant agency failing to report is the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), although both the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the DOD – Office of Inspector General has found that the DOD is at a high risk for improper payments.

The simple fact of the matter is that while Congress and much of the media focuses on the President’s unnecessary and wasteful $52 million gas manipulation task force, or the GSA’s junket, hundreds of billions of dollars are slipping through the system. Perhaps Congress should focus on stopping these abuses of the taxpayer dollars, instead of intentionally misdirecting the attention of the American people to what amounts to literally cents on the dollar of the “fraud, waste, abuse and stupidity” (to quote Senator Coburn) so prevalent in our ever-growing, ever-expensive federal government.

Dustin Siggins is an associate producer with The Laura Ingraham Show and co-author with William Beach of The Heritage Foundation on a forthcoming book about the national debt. The opinions expressed are his own.

TT includes the following passage from news coverage of the event (which, you may be relieved to know, shocked at least some Swedes, who are now calling for Adelsohn Liljeroth’s ouster):

As part of the installation, which was reportedly meant to highlight the issue of female circumcision, the culture minister began cutting a large cake shaped like a black woman, symbolically starting at the clitoris.

Makode Aj Linde, the artist who created the installation and whose head is part of the cake cut by the minister, wrote about the “genital mutilation cake” on his Facebook page.

“Before cutting me up she whispered, ‘Your life will be better after this’ in my ear,” he wrote in a caption next to the partially eaten cake.

So the artist meant well.  Swedes of African origin were unimpressed, however, calling the whole thing a “racist spectacle.”

Frankly, it does come off as one.  But in my view, that’s not even the most important point.  Watch the video (it’s only 47 seconds) to see the art patrons laughing their heads off at the clever howling cake-woman.  For them, it’s a big, hilarious joke.  I don’t think these folks are representative of the Swedish people, but they are certainly Sweden’s self-appointed guiding lights.  And they don’t have any compunction – any “ick” reaction, any vague uneasiness – about an “artistic” depiction like this.

It’s quite possible that they think the shock factor is an effective way to alert, well, someone – clearly not themselves – to the evils of female genital mutilation.  But in that context, their full-throated laughter is simply grotesque.  There are some jokes it is our purpose as a civilization not to take, and this is one of them.  In terms of the horrors we should all be aware of, what the Stockholm arts crowd has alerted us to with this piece of “art” is itself.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

A.  Stupid.

We have become the caricature curmudgeons and common-sense libertarians warned about decades ago.  The day of mindless stupidity and standardized irresponsibility is upon us.  Our news media post headlines like this:

“Calif. kids can have Happy Meals, judge rules”

… and we don’t bat an eye.  Instead of finding grotesque the very idea of judges ruling on what can be sold to accompany meals, we shrug and move on.

Some of us probably think, “Well, the judge made a sensible ruling, and things could be worse.”

Others have a confused idea that there exists a sort of moral brokerage inhabited by judges, politicians, and celebrities, which occasionally puts up some white smoke and signifies that it has reached a new decision about how we are to live our lives.  This idea lurks in the human subconscious, manifesting itself from generation to generation in fealty to the imagined moral brokerage of the day: the emperor and his officials, the priestly class, the state church, the monarch, the parliament, the Party, the media, the cradle-to-grave welfare state.

The human spirit has a very powerful sense that there must be a set of “oughts” and “shoulds” to guide us.  Used in our own lives, as individuals and in voluntary congregations, this sense does great good.  But when we insist on using the apparatus of civil government to herd our fellow men around like pasture animals, according to the oughts and shoulds favored by a few, we turn into a Stupid Society.

Societies that put government in the roles of father, mother, priest, and tutor invariably descend into stupidity.  No generation of humans has ever been wise enough to use the power of the state against the lives of the citizens, on an endlessly interpolated basis, without getting stupid.  No generation ever will.  If you let the state advertise a food pyramid to you, and if you let the state decide what kind of medical care everyone should get, and who should pay for it, the constituency will always be there to take the next step, and the next, until you have activists petitioning the courts to slap Happy Meals out of other people’s hands, and judges agreeing to rule on such petitions rather than throwing them out because they’re an egregious abuse of law.

We have had heavy-handed, intrusive, intricately detailed government for decades now.  Nothing that has happened in the last 40 years has happened in unregulated conditions (and little in the last 80).  Other than criminal enterprises, there is no such thing as the left-wing fantasy of businesses running rampant in the absence of regulation.  Regulation touches literally everything businesses do and is one of the biggest business costs, in some states second only to employee costs.

The beauty of regulation and regulatory bureaucracies is that they can grow by stealth.  The people can tootle along thinking they’re free, and they just want breathable air and food safe from e. coli and salmonella, and the next thing they know, cities are outlawing Happy Meals, and judges are entertaining lawsuits brought by activists for whom city ordinances just aren’t far-reaching enough.

Fifty years ago, such a premise for a lawsuit would have been laughed out of court.  Today, everything in our society has been softened up, bruised, corrupted – like rotting fruit – by decades of victory for the twin impulses of statism and regulatory sanctimony.

Neither impulse can be domesticated, and both are incompatible with liberty.  If a government you pay taxes to will even consider the idea of outlawing Happy Meals, what else will it consider that could affect your livelihood, your life choices, or your liberty of conscience?  (How about a plastic bag ban?)  It is useless to insist that our governments won’t go too far; they already have, and specifically, much farther than their apologists claimed they would back in the 1910s, the 1930s, the 1960s, the 1990s, and even the decade just past.  Assurances that government would never go that far have always been proven false.  They will be again.

The day is here.  We have officially become a Stupid Society, at least in terms of the way our government is suffered to behave, from the courts and city councils to the school systems, the vast army of regulators, and the Regulator-in-Chief in the Oval Office.  I know for certain that there are many, many Americans who are not fit for a Stupid Society: who see the nanny state for what it is, and reject the regulatory premise refined and glorified in the last century.  But there will have to be more, if the nanny state is to be given its notice via the electoral system.

So it’s necessary to point out from time to time where the Stupid Society is manifesting itself.  The California judge’s ruling on the Happy Meals is the opposite of meaningless or merely funny; there is a monstrous regiment of false and dangerous statist assumptions behind it.  The whole episode should never have even happened.  If we want to restore our Stupid Society to a condition of intelligence and liberty, we will have to agree on that – and change our course.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

And some aspects of it aren’t bad at all.  Judd runs into an acquaintance from her espionage days in each episode, and so far it’s been foreign guys with charming accents.  French Canadian Lothaire Bluteau (Black Robe, The Tudors) in the most recent episode was a superb choice.  (The Judd character – Rebecca Winstone – is widowed, by the way.  Her husband, Sean Bean, was also in The Business, and was assassinated in an airport years ago.  Too bad.)  The outstanding Portuguese actor Joaquim de Almeida (Clear and Present Danger, Desperado) is the director of French intelligence.  And then there’s the scenery.  There’s a lot to enjoy.

But I’m not sure how long I can stick with it.  Ashley Judd getting beat up and shot all the time is one thing.  I did see Salt (Angelina Jolie), on an Encore movie channel not too long ago; I can be hip.  But what’s with this 18-year-old son who’s, like, twice Mom’s size and completely helpless?

Michael Winstone is the son’s name.  He’s a prospective architecture student who went to Rome in the first episode to pursue his studies.  I can certainly buy that he has never been a spy or received any training; that he was abducted; and even that he’s being moved around Europe to tantalize his desperate mother, the former CIA agent with a Past.  (Hey, we’ve got to have a story, after all.)

But at the end of the second episode, Mom rushes to the French airport where Michael is being bundled onto a private jet, and, catching sight of him as she pulls up in a car, leaps out and starts running onto the tarmac.  She runs in that purposeful, symmetrical, hard-striding manner that moviegoers now expect from the stars of spy thrillers.  Her son is being herded resistless toward the plane by a phalanx of armed thugs, and as she shouts at him, he howls back, “Mom!  Help me!  Mom!  Help me!!!!”

The plane begins to taxi, Mom loses ground against it, and finally she has to collapse in agony on the tarmac.  As a loving mother, she has been unable to reach the armed abductors of her shrieking, strapping, grown-up son, to wreak mayhem on them and rescue her baby.

I don’t know, maybe you have to have spent a military career working with 18-year-old men to realize that, however lacking in wisdom and experience they may be, they are smart and brave as well as strong and fast.  (They have, for another 10 years or so, the greatest potential of any human demographic to be the latter.)  In a perilous situation with lots of gunmen in it, they are going to feel instinctively protective of their mothers.  They’re not going to shriek wildly at them for help.  A young man in this particular situation is more likely to yell, “Get out of here, Mom!”

Eighteen is the age of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines entering America’s armed forces.  Eighteen-year-olds go into combat.  Eighteen-year-olds with the proper training take on the responsibilities of adults.  And throughout the ages of mankind, 18-year-olds have watched over their mothers, up to and including taking up arms and defending their mothers at peril to their lives.

Story narratives do often ask us to suspend disbelief about one thing or another.  But it seems to me to be sloppy story-writing, to ask us to buy into an 18-year-old behaving like a helpless 6-year-old in a dangerous situation involving his mother.  That’s just icky, and audiences won’t stay with it for very long.  If Junior is a wimp, then for the story’s sake, he needs to grow out of it.

This hole in the plot could have been salvaged pretty simply, by amending the “Mom!  Help me!” scene at the airport to let Junior show some spunk (even though he clearly couldn’t have made an escape).  It would be a better show, and we’d care more.  Mom can be a very capable and talented former CIA agent without her son being infantilized to advance the story.  You could make a very good story out of reuniting mother and son if you let the Michael Winstone character be an actual young man.  The plot takes care of whether his abductors would kill him for showing spunk; they won’t.  As a series denouement, Mom and Michael fighting their way together out of the captors’ clutches could be a great episode.

But Missing is the wrong genre for Mommy Bathos.  And if Michael remains an inert, somewhat pathetic cardboard cut-out of a character, I suspect that that potentially great episode is one viewers won’t stick around for.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Let me state up front that I don’t think the filmmakers meant anything by the “Christo” character.  I do think they stumbled haplessly on a hornet’s nest of anti-Semitic tropes – and thereby hangs a tale that matters.

Act of Valor is a moving, gripping film, all the more so for being enacted by real Navy SEALs.  (Full disclosure: this reviewer is a 20-year Navy veteran, and while definitely not a SEAL was privileged to work with some.)  The one major flaw I found with the production, per se, was the rather annoying sound track, which could have dispensed with the hackneyed crescendos at suspenseful moments.  What the SEALs do needs no audience-cues or embellishment.

And they do incredible things.  The movie conveys well the deceptive simplicity of their narrowly-scoped tactical operations.  Naval Special Warfare is the unique funnel through which attack submarines, amphibious assault ships, and special-purpose aircraft are brought to bear on strange, one-off combat problems for which they weren’t necessarily designed.  The whole Navy – indeed, all the special ops capabilities the United States has – makes up a big bag of tricks for the SEALs to reach into.

Yet when the SEALs are on-scene conducting their operations, doing what no one else can, it all depends on them.  Training and expertise are indispensable, naturally.  But the on-scene surprises, the multi-vector firefights, the heart-rending collateral damage, the fallen comrades – that’s where the valor comes in.

It doesn’t come in with a trumpet fanfare.  The SEALs are effective in the movie because they evince valor so realistically.  They are terse, focused, making every yell and profanity count – which is what highly-trained men sound like in combat.  Valor isn’t something you emote your way through or sit around thinking about.  It’s just what’s left when all the props have fallen away.  And it requires a context if it is to matter and be detectable: a life saved, a mission accomplished, a job not given up on, a shipmate not left behind.

That, it turns out, is the poignant weakness at the heart of Act of Valor’s premise.  The ambiguous real-world context of the war on terror is the greatest narrative disability of all.   The film’s story, with so much gripping tactical realism, seems to be built on a strategic hallucination: that it’s Chechen underworld gangsters who are likely to be masterminding a terrorist insertion into the United States.

Hezbollah is all over Latin America; Hamas is showing up there; Iran’s paramilitary Qods force is reported to be operating out of Venezuela; Hezbollah and Somali Islamists have already sneaked illegally across our border from Mexico; the great majority of drug criminals in Latin America are Latin American – yet the production team for Act of Valor decided to make the villains in the movie Chechens, and make the Chechen drug smuggler a Jew.  Why in the name of Jumping Jehoshaphat did they do that?

The Jewish character’s name is Mikhail Troykavitch, but his nom de narcotics in Latin America is “Christo.”  This seems a little studied, but perhaps is merely a coincidence.  (If you’re not getting it, all Western names containing the syllable “Christ” in any form map back to the name of Jesus Christ.  The “Christ” comes from the Greek christos, meaning “anointed.”)  I say let’s assume nothing about a Jewish criminal naming himself “Christ” and move on.

Other reviewers have pointed out Christo’s rather cartoonish hooked nose and eyeglasses, so we need not belabor that.  I was struck forcibly, however, by a disclosure early on about Christo’s Chechen associate, Shabal – the terrorist who blows up children while assassinating the US ambassador in the Philippines, and then plots to put suicide bombers with high-tech explosive vests in cities in the United States.  Shabal, we are told, was connected with the 2004 massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan, in southern Russia.

The insertion of a Jewish character into this mix begins to rise to a remarkable level of haplessness with the Beslan tie-in.  Perhaps the filmmakers were unaware that there is a well-worn theme among some factions in Russian politics of Jewish complicity in the Beslan massacre.   (A relatively printable fulmination represented at a Pravda forum here; more colorful ones can be found in Russian.) The baseless allegation is periodically inflamed by reports that alternately suggest Israel is sympathetic to the plight of Chechnya, and in league with the hated, Russian-approved government there.

The flames are fanned further, however, by 9/11 Truthers who believe a Russian Jew, Boris Berezovsky, was connected with the 9/11 attacks.  The same Berezovsky, who had business interests in Chechnya in the 1990s, is also quoted all over the net by the conspiracy-minded as boasting that he “caused the war in Chechnya.”  Those of fevered imagination can’t decide whether the Jews are abetting Chechen terrorism or allying themselves with Moscow, but in any case, you can’t make a criminal a Chechen Jew and give him an underworld buddy who blows up kids and had a hand in the Beslan massacre, and not open up a big, sweaty bottle of single-malt anti-Semitism.

“But, good grief,” you might say.  “Can’t anybody ever make a Jew a bad guy?  What, screenwriters are supposed to look under every rock for exotic anti-Semitic tropes they might be inadvertently evoking?  Seriously, we have to be that careful?”

And the proper response, the pointed, relevant response is: Why shouldn’t we have to?  Look at Act of Valor itself.  About whom were the screenwriters at least that careful?  Consider the interview on Christo’s yacht, in which the SEAL senior chief is interrogating the drug smuggler.  Note what the senior chief says out loud, and what he doesn’t.  He barks at Christo, “But you’re a Jew!” – by which he is suggesting that it’s odd for Christo to be in league with a terrorist like Shabal, whose goals are presumably hostile to Jews.

Then the senior chief asks Christo, “You know what he is?”  Well, we all assume we know what Shabal is, having seen him in a video near the beginning of the movie, calling on Allah while waving an automatic weapon.  But the SEAL doesn’t say it.  He doesn’t say “Muslim radical,” he doesn’t say “Islamic terrorist,” he doesn’t say “Islamist” – he doesn’t fill in the blank at all.  The question hangs there, answered in every viewer’s mind but not on the screen.

In the real world, meanwhile, the transnational terrorists who keep popping up far abroad, especially in the Western hemisphere, are Arabs, Pakistanis, and Somalis.  But Act of Valor gives us Chechens and Filipinos.  (There is a brief interlude at an airfield in Somalia, but no Somalis in the terror gang we follow in the story.)

This political correctness wouldn’t be as noticeable if the filmmakers did not seem to have taken the long way around the barn to shoehorn a Jew into the story.  The contrast can’t help standing out, and it is right to point it out.  It would be wrong to accept it without cavil.

It is almost as if the filmmakers were consciously determined not to appear to give a Jewish character kid-glove treatment – as if to say: “Fears about negative depictions of Jews are outdated and overblown.  Jews are just like anyone else; we can make some of them villains.  The evils of the past don’t mean we have to whitewash the present.”

But, of course, the world hasn’t changed that much.  If it had, we could make Lebanese-Arab Hezbollah Muslims or Yemeni-Arab Islamist jihadists into our main screen villains for a movie, without self-consciousness.  The truth is that this world is pretty much as it has ever been, and a political recognition of that – an unspoken one would be fine – is what is missing from Act of Valor, because it is missing from America’s official, public dialogue on the war on terror.  The breathtaking nature of the SEALs and what they do makes the movie a thrilling ride.   But the story comes off as thin, not because the SEALs’ missions don’t matter, but because there is no strategic-level narrative, no “Why We Fight,” tying them together.

Our enemies in World War II were basically living caricatures, armed with tanks and aircraft carriers.  Writing a narrative in which they were the enemy wasn’t difficult.  It was harder to write our narrative in the Cold War, but even then it was easier than it is today to define what the problem was, and how to bring the nation-state to bear in solving it.

Today’s war is a war without a narrative: a war in which there is only an endless series of “battles,” which we cannot afford to lose but which don’t bring us any closer to winning.  We don’t have an actionable concept of what winning would look like, and we certainly have no strategy to get there.

In a sense, the SEALs are the perfect force to follow in a movie about a war like this one.  A number of reviewers have complained about the shallowness of the plot; some even consider it to be laughable, no more than a cheap device to get a particular SEAL team from one operation to the next.  But the joke is on them, because that is pretty much how a war looks from the perspective of a SEAL team.  One of the most realistic aspects of the movie is precisely the narrow immediacy of the pretexts for moving the SEALs around.

SEALs don’t run extended joint-force campaigns, they don’t take and hold territory, and they don’t hand the president enduring, decisive political victories.  For those activities – the kind that form a coherent narrative – you must, to paraphrase T.R. Fehrenbach, put your young men in the mud and give them enduring, decisive political objectives.  But that is not the war on terror as it has been waged for the last four years.  Act of Valor has a plot like a police-procedural TV show because that’s what the war on terror has become.

The war was losing strategic steam by the end of the Bush presidency, and has settled into a tactical police-action posture under Obama.  The throw-away “Chechen-Jewish-drug-smuggler” character has about it the whiff of a Law & Order episode; it comes off as a quasi-random composite, of the kind writers can just make up when the narrative is as open-ended as the face of human crime.

Wars against well-defined enemies preclude such literary license, which is quite clear if we imagine writing a story like this about World War II.  The Nazis were Germans; there was no getting around it.  Today, we have worked hard not to define an enemy; we have no enduring, decisive political objective; and we have no positive strategy.  So we end up with as much literary license as we can handle, and no end in sight to the conflict.

Seen in that light, it is perhaps even more remarkable that Act of Valor is so compelling.  I admit to not even registering the thespian inadequacies of the SEALs, because – as many readers can probably also say – they looked real to my eyes.  The actors in G.I. Jane looked like actors playing SEALs; the SEALs in Act of Valor are authentic.

I saw one review in which the writer supposed that the SEALs “don’t really talk that way,” but I’m not sure what he meant: the SEALs talked as military men talk.  SEALs tend to be very intelligent, well-read, and understated, with a somewhat mordant sense of humor and a natural, unforced patriotism and warrior’s honor.  That came through in the movie.  To ask for something else is to miss the point.

When one of the SEALs is killed after throwing himself on a grenade, the scene is depicted accurately, without gratuitous gore, and the other SEALs react, but continue their mission.  At his funeral, the team’s wounded SEALs make a powerful visual, gathered around the casket, but equally powerful is the quiet dignity and courage of the assembled family members.  The SEALs would have it no other way.

Critical reviewers have denigrated the voice-over by the SEAL chief (NCO, E-7) whose narration frames the movie.  They suggest that the narration and its content – which is focused on the heritage passed between generations of fighting men – are simplistic or hackneyed.  It didn’t strike me that way.  The SEAL’s voice, with its Midwestern accent and unpracticed cadence, sounded familiar and authentic to me.  It sounded like the voice of a sailor.

Tethering the story to the SEALs’ family lives cements the film’s message.  The silly, tortured ambiguities of politics and the war on terror are mostly offstage.  The reality that grounds these men is captured in the face of the SEAL lieutenant’s baby boy in the final seconds of the movie.   Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard:  in a war without a narrative, there is still valor.

We sleep soundly in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.   (Attributed by George Orwell to Winston Churchill)

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Romney, the son of a politician, has been running for office, holding office or thinking about running for office for more than two decades. “Just level with the American people,” Gingrich growled. “You’ve been running … at least since the 1990s.”

For some reason, Romney can’t do that. Or at least it seems like he can’t. His authentic inauthenticity problem isn’t going away. And it’s sapping enthusiasm from the rank and file.

Goldberg is right, but the underlying theme that voters need to be reminded of is that during so many important debates fromhealthcare, jobs, Wall Street Reform, confirmations, recess appointments, to taxes the culprits to invoke cloture or side with the Democrats typically are the same:  Senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe,  and Scott Brown–the trifecta of RINOs. All from the northeast, too.  See where I’m going with this?

Frankly, Romney, who the mainstream liberal media would like to see win the nomination, has yet to unite the GOP base.  His used car salesman pitch simply rubs people the wrong way.  We’ve seen this over and over again–even John McCain pointed this out and won in 2007′s primary–and now supports him–that should speak volumes to my point.  Romney has always been dogged by this and this is why we have such a large ‘Not Romney’ camp on the right side of the aisle.

The GOP is also paying the bitter price for not having anyone in line to succeed GW Bush.  The party’s internal tug of war will be an historical teachable moment and prepare the party for future elections.  The one saving grace is that, while the Democrats have Hillary, they have no one to succeed her at this point in time.  I say Hillary because she seems to be the only power broker left untarnished by Obama–even though she is an Alinsky kinda girl.

Additionally, the GOP presidential candidate will have a two-pronged mission as the nominee:  to beat the MSM and Obama.  However, enlightened voters now know for sure the media is mostly state-controlled, Obama was never vetted, and that his radical leftist ideology drives his policies, appointments, and regulations out of the mainstream.

Furthermore, the MSM needs Romney to offset Obama.  The formula is quite simple:  RomneyCare is to ObamaCare as Obama’s rhetoric is to Romney’s rhetoric all of which cancel each other out according to how the media sees it.

I’m not buying the media hype over who can beat Obama.  The primary is the primary and the game changes in the general.  Voters are more inclined to vote with their wallets.  We have gas prices averaging at almost $4 per gallon across the country, skyrocketing food prices, record foreclosures, record number of people on food stamps, high unemployment, ObamaCare, crippling regulations, and much more.  So if the MSM thinks that the historic 2010 midterm GOP wave was a whim, think again.  The Right accomplished its key mission of splitting the Congress so that Obama’s agenda could not be rammed through anymore.  Would we have liked the Senate, sure, but in 2012, the job will be finished.  My point is that who do we really want in the Oval Office?  A northeastern Republican who disavows the GOP or not.  We already have someone who does not have the consent of the governed.  Are we really going to take that risk again?

Finally, Romney has always touted RomneyCare as a great model for all the states to implement, but the reality is, the only person who implemented RomneyCare was Obama and now we have ObamaCare.  No thanks.

The performances are superb – Gary Oldman as George Smiley immediately makes you forget even Alec Guinness – and the script and staging range from not overly annoying to inspired.

But in the theater where I saw it, the quiet, understated delivery of the actors caused an older gentleman in the audience to shout, “Turn up the damn volume!” (He was shushed by his embarrassed wife.)  The cast does affect a certain amount of mumbling and whispering, which apparently forms an important part of Swedish director Tomas Alfredson’s concept for remaining true to le Carré’s trademark atmospherics.  (It could also be that his artistic hero is Ingmar Bergman; I haven’t seen any of Alfredson’s Swedish films.)

This little audience-reaction vignette sums up beautifully the movie’s basic disconnect.  Tinker works very hard to be true to le Carré, whose classic Cold War spy novels were contemplative and brooding, generous and patient.  Le Carré is a writer of unequalled talent in his sphere, giving his name to an enduring, identifiable mood about the fictional business of international espionage.   But for that mood to grip an audience’s short hairs when the story is told on screen, something more is needed than a faithful rendition of le Carré’s style.  What is needed is a Cold War audience.  What is needed is the Cold War.

Le Carré didn’t do cinema-ready chase scenes in his Cold War spy novels.  He isn’t a mystery writer or a spinner of fantastic tales about resurgent Nazi cabals or Nazi breeding programs in Latin America.  His fascination has been with character, moral decisions, and the tension between professionalism and human weakness.

Frederick Forsythe, by contrast, another great action-fiction writer from the same era, gave his readers a sort of documentary insight into spycraft, constructing stories around criminal plots, suspense, and danger.  Robert Ludlum, for his part, built his name on fast-paced action, stock characters, shocks and surprise twists.  Ludlum’s Bourne series has been translated effortlessly into a modern franchise, and the film adaptation of Forsythe’s Day of the Jackal, released in 1971, holds up for 21st century audiences who have barely heard of Charles De Gaulle, because the story is about the respective crafts of assassination-for-hire and police sleuthing.  When the tale was reset in the United States for the 1997 Bruce Willis vehicle The Jackal, it worked as a film of its own because the story is a generic classic: rumpled, wily law enforcement official pursues preternaturally brilliant international criminal.

But le Carré was the Greek-tragedy hymner of Spies in the Cold War.  His genius was to sketch stories against the background of the common angst, fears, and assumptions of that strange, twilight conflict.  He didn’t have to explain why a fanatical Soviet spymaster who had never heard of compunction was a figure both frightening and fascinating – because everyone knew why.  The tanks that rolled into capital cities in Eastern Europe, the nuclear weapons that were pointed at everyone in the northern hemisphere 24/7, the grainy videos of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, eyes shadowed under their Russian-style swaddlings, the mental water-torture of endless coups and insurrections and wars – Soviet spymasters were connected with these lurking threats, these things that could actually hurt us.  These things that could end life as we knew it.

The necessary but somewhat ironic outcome of winning the Cold War has been that we no longer viscerally understand le Carré’s world without having it explained to us.  What Soviet communism was in the Cold War world is something that does not even exist today.  We have no common perception now of a threat figure like the storied Soviet spymaster, because there is no threat like the predatory Soviet Union.

The specific threat environment within which the humans do their shabby maneuvering is a surprisingly important component in a le Carré tale.  A diabolical plot, car-chase, or shoot-out can be reset almost anywhere, but the towering existential threat and moral exhaustion of the Cold War are sui generis.  Without a prior sense of them in the hearts of the audience, the conflict at the core of Tinker’s narrative comes off as flat and uncompelling.  Ho-hum, we think.  Another bunch of cynical spies, unable to trust each other.  And why is this lumbering story of teletype messages and old paper files moving along in such a jerky fashion?

The 1979 TV adaptation of Tinker, featuring Alec Guinness as Smiley, did less homage to le Carré’s style, but it fit squarely within the cultural expectations of Cold War fiction, and in that way was less self-conscious than the 2011 movie.  It was suited to its time, with Guinness as a memorable Smiley.

But Oldman is a wonderful George Smiley in his own right.  If there are more adaptations of Smiley novels, I predict that all future performances will be compared to his.  Oldman hits off le Carré’s ordinary, understatedly noble functionary perfectly.  He carries the movie, which I think would otherwise be rather tedious and inexplicably dour for under-40 audiences with no tribal memory of the Cold War.  Virtually all the performances are excellent, although some of the actors, like the wonderfully effulgent Ciaran Hinds, have too little to do.  Hinds plays Roy Bland, one of the top British spy leaders suspected of being a mole, and manages with just a few close-ups to keep those who don’t already know the story interested in the possibilities of his guilt.

Tom Hardy (Inception, The Take), as lower-class thug Ricky Tarr, almost steals the movie out from under the tremendous older cast.  He manages to convey a feral audacity without being coy or grating.  Other stand-outs are Benedict Cumberbatch (BBC’s 2010 Sherlock Holmes) as Smiley’s sidekick Peter Guillam, and Mark Strong (Sherlock Holmes, The Young Victoria) as Jim Prideaux.  The Prideaux character is shortchanged somewhat in the film, but Strong grabs attention for it anyway.

One of the most poignant moments of the story occurs when Prideaux – after being sneaked back into Britain from his supposed assassination in Hungary – finds himself in a rural classroom with a group of young students.  An owl emerges like a wild dervish from the schoolroom’s chimney, precipitating an explosion of feathers and char over the assembled children.  Prideaux, who was tortured by the KGB before he was returned to the Brits, kills the bird quickly and professionally with a stick, administering one deadly, jolting whack that leaves the owl emitting terrible cries in its death throes on the classroom floor.

We are meant to see in this jarring vignette the seared conscience of a beaten-down, used-up spy – and back when spies seemed terribly necessary, in a world rent by a grotesque ideology married to weapons of global destruction, the irony and sorrow of such a moment had a power to pierce the heart.

But more heart-rending today is the fact that they no longer do.  We may appreciate the owl’s scene as a narrative device, but it doesn’t make us secretly long to hug a spy for all the moral sacrifices he makes to keep us safe.  We simply don’t live in a world anymore in which his services seem indispensable, or like the center ring of a global struggle for civilization.

It is this passing of an era that does in Colin Firth’s turn as Bill Haydon, another of the potential moles among the senior leadership of the British spy service.  Firth’s performance is terrific – in his last scene with Oldman you can hardly bear to look at him – but the elephant in the room is the stark recognition that it just doesn’t matter anymore.  Without the Cold War context – of politics, of ideology, of threats to the future of mankind and to our very existence – the hubris and manipulation and cynicism and betrayal look small and pathetic, like something way too inconsequential to build a story around.

I suspect that today’s generations will have an existential-conflict narrative of their own soon enough.  We who remember every assumption and slogan of the Cold War don’t by any means wish it back.  But we are in a peculiar hiatus now from the civilizational compulsions that attend a life-and-death struggle, and nothing – no fiction, no poetry, no art – that requires a context of that kind to grip our minds and hearts has a hope of tasting the way it once did.  For such a savor, we will have to await the next brush with existential brinkmanship.

Addendum:  For more poignant Cold War reminiscing, be sure to check out Rick Richman’s superb review of The Iron Lady, the late-2011 indie film in which Meryl Streep portrays Margaret Thatcher.  Rick makes the case that, whatever the narrative intentions of the film’s producers, the movie’s result is to spotlight the remarkable strength, grace, and admirable quality of Thatcher’s character and legacy.  If I were to sum up Rick’s thesis, I would put it this way: No matter what you try to say about Margaret Thatcher, she’s going to have the last word.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The controversy surrounding the show has spread beyond the Florida conservative group which began it. Just this week, as Jim Hoft reports, WordPress took down the blog Bare Naked Islam, which had been calling for the show’s cancellation. (Though the reasons cited by WordPress don’t specifically include a reference to the show.) They were also getting attacked from the Left, as PETA blasted them over one woman’s decision to give up her ten year old dog.

Lining up on the opposite side of the aisle, hip hop artist Russell Simmons took the side of the show, being joined by Mia Farrow. He called for a boycott of Lowe’s, (though I’m not sure what that’s supposed to accomplish) and bought advertising time during the broadcast himself.

So has the show benefited in the form of higher ratings amid all the Sturm und Drang, as I speculated it might earlier this month? The premier episode actually did fairly well, with more than 1.7 million viewers and a .9 overall rating, though it dropped nearly 50% over the next couple of weeks. The impact on the ratings from these stories seems to be… not so much.

TLC’s ‘All-American Muslim’: Controversy Does Not Equal Ratings

It would appear members of the conservative Florida Family Association are among the few actually paying attention to TLC’s All-American Muslim.

The reality series about Muslim families living in suburban Detroit, which lost advertising from Lowe’s and other brands after FAA condemned it as propaganda, is languishing in the ratings.

Only five episodes into its first season, the series ranked 78th among Sunday’s cable broadcasts for Dec. 11. With only 908,000 viewers and a 0.3 rating among adults 18-49, it’s being easily outperformed by series like History’s American Pickers, Discovery’s Moonshiners and its latest lead-in, Little People Big World: Holiday Surprise.

We’re still waiting for the confirmed numbers for the last episode, but the trend lines don’t seem to indicate that all of the shouting over the subject matter is causing viewers to come back in droves.

And if not Ron Paul, then who? This brings us back to an old chestnut where people ask how any gay person could vote for any Republican. I bring this up today because of a letter I received recently from a conservative who also happens to be a lesbian which tackles this question in a direct fashion. I have permission to reprint it, but because of her particular circumstances, the author shall remain anonymous. (So you are free to disregard this if you don’t care for unnamed sources.)

Answering the question of how somebody can be a politically conservative lesbian in the 21st century is harder than it sounds and still brings me some uncomfortable moments, but I can take a shot at it. It also matches up with how people in a supposedly enlightened age can still be in the closet. While I know it’s not the same thing and the metaphor fails, I tend to think of it as being something like being part of any other “assumed minority group” when it comes to voting. (And I simply gag on that phrase.) It’s kind of insulting to think that just because you happen to be Jewish, or black, or Hispanic, or Muslim, or a man, or a woman, old or young, – OR GAY – that somehow that sticks you into a particular folder and you need to agree with everyone else who fits that category on EVERYTHING.

These days it seems like the big defining thing about gays in politics is marriage. (Now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has gone away, which I see as a good thing, particularly since the love of my life was in the Air Force and in the closet also.) And for those who want to fight that battle, good for them. I just can’t get excited about the marriage question. I know many of our sisters do, and good for them, but here’s my main stand on that. I care more about my relationship with my girl and my God than I do about my relationship with the state. If we decide we want to be married, we will have a ceremony with our friends and family and take our vows before God. We will be married in our eyes and in the eyes of those that matter to us. I don’t know if that’s going to happen and neither of us is particularly worried about it. If the state or the nation think I’m married doesn’t matter much to me.

But I DO have concerns about our country when it comes to public policy, and most of my friends who are seriously engaged in politics over marriage push a whole bunch of policies which seem to me to be destructive. We have to cut the debt. We need our own energy that pays for itself. We need law and order and fairness under those laws for everyone. And my liberal friends don’t get that. And that ties in to the question you asked about jobs.

Why am I in the closet? Because where I work I found out early on that openly gay people of either sex were in for trouble. We live in a supposedly VERY liberal city, as you know, and the owners claim to be very progressive. But when it comes to having clients find out that anyone on the staff is gay, they say pretty much, “business comes first.” I could get [expletive deleted] off about that, but I need a job. And my employer needs customers. I can trash him for being “weak” and “not taking a stand” I guess, but I still wind up unemployed either way if he goes out of business. I honestly don’t give a [expletive deleted].

The world’s not a fair place full of unicorns and rainbows. I need to make a living. I need to have the country survive so I hopefully CAN make a living. Things will get better in the future. We have bigger fish to fry right now than having me just support people who think I should be able to get married but are sending America into a messed up situation where maybe nobody’s marriage will matter. I don’t have to be out. I don’t approve of forcibly outing private citizens. And just because I think some of my friends should be able to get married if they want to, it doesn’t mean I should vote for idiots if they agree on that one thing.

Thanks.

Here’s the portion of that which stood out most to me. “I care more about my relationship with my girl and my God than I do about my relationship with the state.” I have to wonder how prevalent that attitude is across the country, and if just maybe it might be the most libertarian stance of all. If you truly do follow a libertarian ideology and don’t think that the government should be involved in the business of marriage, why would you care if the state “endorsed” your marriage or not? Either it is the state’s business or it isn’t, right?

I keep meaning to bring this up with Chris Barron of GOProud fame and get his take on it. Anyway, just something for you to chew on during the closing days of 2011.

I spent the morning plagued by an indescribable sense of sadness, though everyone had known for some time that this day was coming. I never met Hitchens, but it always felt as if he lived around the block from me and only poor timing had kept us from running into each other. Such was the nature of his constant output of notable work; his books upon my shelves, the regular links which popped up in my mail, pointing to this or that column in every major publication which wound up being brilliant, infuriating, or – most frequently – both.

For many years I have either puzzled or enraged my friends and regular correspondents when the inevitable topic among writers would crop up. Who are the greatest writers of our time? I long ago narrowed my list down to four – George Will, James Kilpatrick, Christopher Hitchens and James Wolcott. (That last entry never fails to send conservative friends into apoplectic fits, but he deserves his place on the roster.) Sadly, we have now lost two of the four.

We can, perhaps, learn more about the nature of the man not from what he wrote, but what his friends and enemies wrote about him over the years. (And the ranks of the aforementioned categories are legion.) But even identifying his actual friends can be difficult, since he demonstrated a lifelong propensity to slash at his allies – in a seemingly careless way – with the same vigor he displayed in eviscerating his foes. Even that should have come as no surprise, though. What else should we expect from someone who penned a scathing editorial attack on Mother Theresa? Andrew Anthony of The Observer offered a defense of Hitch’s wide ranging attacks in a jacket blurb he did for one of my favorite books in the Hitchens collection, Love, Poverty, and War:

Among his many weapons… a moral authority that is built on something sturdier than cheap moralizing.

Hitchens wasn’t some overnight success, suddenly appearing after his famous moment of liberal apostasy when he embraced the invasion of Iraq. (A seminal moment which led to a mass upwelling of rage among his legions of followers, including yours truly.) He had always been there, frequently behind the scenes, stirring up trouble wherever he went. I often pictured Hitchens as the quintessential, revolutionary character in all of those movies we all remember. Whether it was Dead Poets Society or The Big Chill, there was always the one rebellious student, striding back and forth on the university library steps, gesticulating wildly and quoting centuries dead monks which nobody else had heard of yet, while a crouched group of future protesters and disaffected youths looked on in awe. Hitchens was that guy. He was always that guy.

I imagine him at the moment of his birth as being the baby who refused to squander his first breaths bawling and mewling after the doctor spanked him. He would have contained himself, storing up his energy until he developed sufficient motor skills to hold a pencil and write his first scathing review – probably a critique of his mother’s womb as a prenatal carrying device. (“All in all a creditable conveyance, though tending a bit toward the damp side and the lighting was simply abysmal.”)

Hitchens moved boldly across the world stage, wandering through places which would paralyze a more cautious man. While he found much to criticize, he still revealed a deep well of empathy in his writings for those who were left out in the cold by forces they could never hope to overcome themselves. In one of the many jewels among his collection of essays, I was particularly moved by the stark image he painted of North Korea following a trip there in the nineties. Titled, “Visit to a Small Planet,” (an ironic homage to the Jerry Lewis film of the same name) he crafted a meticulous, insult laden assault on the late Kim Il Sung and his hapless, seemingly inbred progeny. He describes his visit to the U.S.S. Pueblo with a visceral, white hot anger, but then goes on to convey the shame he experienced for feeling hungry in a land filled with hopeless, starving peasants.

North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read the Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as “duck.” One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy—they wouldn’t tell me the breed—but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the realization that I hadn’t seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there. (In a Pyongyang restaurant, don’t ever ask for a doggie bag.) Nobody knows how many North Koreans have died or are dying in the famine—some estimates by foreign-aid groups run as high as three million in the period from 1995 to 1998 alone—but the rotund, jowly face of Kim Il Sung still beams down contentedly from every wall, and the 58-year-old son looks as chubby as ever, even as his slenderized subjects are mustered to applaud him. Kim Jong Il, incidentally, has been made head of the party and of the army, but the office of the presidency is still “eternally” held by his adored and departed dad, who died on July 8, 1994, at 82. (The Kim is dead. Long live the Kim.) This makes North Korea the only state in the world with a dead president. What would be the right term for this? A necrocracy? A thanatocracy? A mortocracy? A mausolocracy? Anyway, grimly appropriate for a morbid system so many of whose children have died with grass in their mouths.

Hitchens was one of the few who could pull off the feat of making up his own, new words when a suitable one was not extant in the English language. And the imagery of the North Korean children who, “died with grass in their mouths” while their delusional leaders told them they lived in a land of milk and honey is heart rending. But that was Hitchens in a nutshell. You didn’t need to go to North Korea after that. He had done it for you and you could immerse yourself in the experience without ponying up the cash for a plane ticket and a full suit of body armor.

Hitchens was the party crasher who never made you feel like calling the cops. He was completely unapologetic for the smoking, the drinking, the unhealthy food and his take no prisoners, bon vivant lifestyle. He was The Honey Badger decades before YouTube would be invented to bring the now iconic video clip to us. He simply did not – if you’ll pardon the alteration – give a crap. Hitchens was in technicolor when much of my early life seemed to be playing out in black and white.

And now he’s gone. I’m sure I’m not the first to describe him as a “devout atheist” and I won’t be the last. (Another case where an ironic contradiction in terms is the only suitable way to describe him.) He has either been proven right and sunk back into the cosmic background noise, or found himself to be wrong and is pounding on the Pearly Gates in righteous indignation. If so, somebody will have some explaining to do, and I expect in this case Hitchens will be demanding an answer as to how God could be such an inexcusably obstreperous contrarian as to exist.

Yes, I can bring myself to say it now. Christopher Hitchens is dead. But he most assuredly did not die with grass in his mouth.

Addendum: Hitchens beat the ploughshares of the English language into a sword. And he wielded it mightily.

An answer to that question seems to have been provided on Monday, at a branch of In-N-Out Burger in Pinole, California, where a man in his twenties opened fire on another man just after 5 p.m. The shooting occurred in the drive-through line, but drivers mere feet from the incident were unmoved—literally—by the sounds or sights of gun violence. Instead, they sat patiently in line, waiting to pick up their orders.

MercuryNews.com reports that the victim was airlifted to a regional trauma center, where he remains in critical condition.

The sound of the gunshots was loud enough to rouse customers of a pizzeria next door but not to deter burger lovers, who continued streaming through until 7:15 p.m., when police officially closed the restaurant to investigate the shooting.

One possible explanation for the customers’ stoic behavior is that the food at In-N-Out Burger is that good. Another possibility is that violence at fast food restaurants is becoming so routine an occurrence that patrons have become inured to it.

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The Seattle School Board is considering relaxing its ban on unhealthful food in high schools amid complaints from student governments that the policy has cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars in vending-machine profits over the past seven years.

But board members now acknowledge they probably went too far. The restrictions, which are more strict than the now-crafted state and federal nutrition guidelines, allow only products such as milk, natural fruit juice, baked chips and oat-based granola bars.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many students are not particularly interested in those items.

In 2001, before the junk-food ban was passed, high-school associated student body (ASB) governments across the city made $214,000 in profits from vending machines, according to district data. This year, they’ve made $17,000.

Well, there’s a shock. In a television report on CNN they interviewed a few students who said they were simply either bringing their own treats to school or running out at lunch or during study halls to the store down the street and buying them. Gee… ya think? So the end result was just that they cost the student government a ton of funding with no real change in dietary habits.

Keeping children healthy is important. It involves a lot of personal choices involving not only what and how much they eat, but how much physical activity they get, as opposed to sitting in front of the television or a video game. And who do you suppose has the real power to influence those choices? At one time in the far distant past I seem to recall that parents were responsible for that, not the school or the government. And if the parents fail at that job, Seattle has demonstrated once again that the rest of the “village” is completely incapable of it.

The Associated Press reports on another such list, this one the ten* most hated people in America. The list is the result of an opinion poll conducted by E-Poll Market Research. Here, in descending order toward “most hated” are those who were named. See how many you can guess. (A slideshow of the “honorees” is here.)

No. 9: Howard Stern. The shock jock still manages to ruffle enough feathers to edge onto the list.

No. 8: Heidi Fleiss. If you were of a mind that the “Hollywood Madam” is yesterday’s news, you are not alone. What may have catapulted her back into the spotlight was her stint on Celebrity Rehab as well as her upcoming reality show Heidi Fleiss: Prostitutes to Parrots.

No. 7: Paris Hilton. Her highly publicized (and all too brief) stint in jail, followed by continued brushes with the law, make the heiress a perennial object of scorn. Her towering intellect is a factor as well.

No. 6: Levi Johnston. The celebrity media magnet would be an obscure 21-year-old oil rig worker in Alaska if it were not for his one brush with fame—fathering a child with former fiancée Bristol Palin when her mother was in the headlines as GOP veep nominee. Some respondents probably responded unfavorably to Johnston’s Playgirl spread.

No. 5: Jon Gosselin. The former reality TV star of Jon & Kate Plus 8 likely made the list because of his very public and very messy divorce from Kate Gosselin, the mother of his eight children. Rumors of his infidelity are no doubt a contributing factor to his placing fifth.

No. 4: O.J. Simpson. Not much to say here except that murdering your children’s mother and then walking away scot-free is a source of ongoing revulsion for many. Simpson is currently serving prison time for armed robbery.

No. 3: Nadya Suleman. The Octomom’s story—giving birth to octuplets while an unemployed single mother with six other children in tow—is an object lesson in how to not to win friends and influence enemies. Suleman denies ever having said, “I hate the babies, they disgust me,” and “My older six are animals.”

No. 2: Spencer Pratt. It’s obviously the year to hate reality TV stars (maybe reality TV, too?). Rumor has it that Pratt and wife Heidi Montag are broke. No word on whether they think of themselves as belonging to the 99 percent.

No. 1: Casey Anthony. The Florida mother who was found not guilty of murdering her two year-old daughter is a member of the O.J. club. She is also the most hated person in America for 2011, described by 60% of respondents in the E-Poll survey as “creepy” and “cold.” And those are among the more charitable comments.

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A Michigan music teacher’s decision to censor the word “gay” from a traditional Christmas carol is being met with a frosty response.

The teacher, who has not yet been named in any of the published reports, allegedly removed “gay” from “Deck the Halls” after 1st and 2nd grade students kept giggling during preparations for a Christmas concert at Cherry Knoll Elementary School in Traverse City. Instead of the traditional lyric, the students were taught to sing “don we now our bright apparel”….

One of the many infuriated Cherry Knoll parents and fellow educators who expressed umbrage on the school’s Facebook page wrote:

Essentially, this teacher has now taught the elementary school children, including children as young as five, that gay means homosexual sex.

One way of avoiding this problem in the future would be removing the sex from homosexual—in other words, dealing discreetly with what takes place in the bedroom, which is precisely what heterosexual couples do. It is certainly the tack taken by the authors of two celebrated children’s books that preach tolerance, Heather Has Two Mommies and One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads.

But removing references to overt gay sexuality from the public square is not everyone’s cup of tea. Members of the Gay Straight Alliance at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania, believe that one historically gay issue—HIV/AIDS awareness—should be front and center in this holiday season. Accordingly, they have adorned a Christmas tree on campus with condoms.

Not everyone is happy with the display, which includes a sign reading, “AIDS Awareness! Free condoms! Take one!” Joshua Habursky, a junior and president of college’s Young Republicans Club, told TheBlaze.com:

I submitted to [the club's leaders] that I understand the tree was for thr [sic] AIDS Awareness Day … but why is it continuing to stay up into the Christmas season?

I pleaded to the college president to take it down. I met with the dean of student life who said that he approved the tree and that he would approve the tree again.

The Gay Straight Alliance is claiming their First Amendment right to co-opt a holiday symbol for their cause, once again missing the critical distinction between rights and what is right.

One additional concern of Joshua Habursky is the tree’s location—in a spot that elementary school children visiting the campus are likely to pass through. Imagine the fallout if the tykes snicker at this spectacle the Alliance is so hell-bent on displaying.

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Perhaps the next edition can provide kids with a full accounting of the Occupy-related illnesses, vandalism, rapes, deaths, and other criminal violations — and a related pop quiz on John Nolte’s Occupy arrest rap sheet.

The kids deserve the whole truth. The teachers unions’ Alinsky brigade won’t give it to them.

However, while Scholastic continues its love affair with OWS, it also has a hypocrisy problem (yes, go figure).  Seems Scholastic senior editor, Natalie Smith, who wrote this OWS puff piece dated well after this gem of a photo, conveniently forgot that her company is a $1.9 Billion publicly-traded company on the NASDAQ exchange.  Smith writes:

The Occupy protesters argue that large companies like those on Wall Street are making too much money while millions of Americans are struggling just to put food on the table. The protesters say they want average Americans to have more job opportunities and share in companies’ prosperity. They want their voices to be heard.  (emphasis mine)

What Smith fails to report is that Scholastic is in quite good shape financially:

In fiscal 2011 operating income was $100.7 million on revenue of $1,906.1 million, primarily reflecting lower sales of educational technology relative to a year ago, when the Company benefited significantly from the federal stimulus program, as well as increased strategic spending on digital initiatives in the children’s book business. Free cash flow was $120.5 million, which exceeded net income, compared to $171.6 million a year ago, which reflected that year’s strong educational technology sales. The Company also returned $176.4 million to shareholders in the form of share buybacks and dividends in fiscal 2011.

Last year we celebrated the 90th Anniversary of the founding of Scholastic. From the launch of a single classroom magazine in 1920, Scholastic has grown to become the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books and a leader in educational technology and children’s media.

Ah, yes, the sweetness of a capitalistic economic system, vision, ingenuity, and success.  Scholastic has been able to grow due to the very capitalistic system OWS condemns.  It’s mind-boggling, to say the least, how Scholastic can support a movement that validates and teaches children class warfare, lawlessness, and lewd behavior.  But then again…

However, the design element that sets this one apart from others—a whimsical “pixelated cloud” of terraced apartments jutting out from the buildings—has become the center of a controversy. To many viewing this architect’s rendering, the “cloud” conjures up disquieting memories of smoke billowing outward from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2011.

The project is still on schedule for completion in 2015. Yet, the negative reaction to the design has been so widespread that MVRDV felt the need to release a statement of apology that reads in part:

MVRDV regrets deeply any connotations The Cloud projects evokes regarding 9/11.

The Cloud was designed based on parameters such as sunlight, outside spaces, living quality for inhabitants and the city.  It is one of many projects in which MVRDV experiments with a raised city level to reinvent the often solitary typology of the skyscraper. It was not our intention to create an image resembling the attacks nor did we see the resemblance during the design process. We sincerely apologize to anyone whose feelings we have hurt, it was not our intention.

Well, maybe not overtly. The Weekly Standard writes that of MVRDV’s Jan Knikker told the Dutch-language newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, “I have to admit that we also thought of the 9/11 attacks.”

In fairness to the architect, Daniel Libeskind, the similarities between The Cloud and the Twin Towers on 9/11 is less apparent from perspectives other than ground level, as the images in this slideshow reveal.  Libeskind, should the name fail to ring a bell, was the designer of the original “master plan” for the reconstruction of Ground Zero.

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That was the experience of three women on a New York-bound AirTran flight out of Palm Beach on Monday. The women, complete strangers who happened to be seated near one another, found themselves huddled together in the face of adversity. That face belonged to a testy flight attendant, whom the three insist was the only bad actor in a situation that rapidly escalated out of control.

The female passengers were buckled in and ready for takeoff when one of them, Marilyn Miller, noticed a male flight attendant attempting to force her carryon bag into an already-stuffed overhead luggage compartment. “Hey,” she said, “I have breakables in that [bag].”

Miller claims that the flight attendant not only ignored her concern but became more aggressive, shoving other bags into hers.

A second woman, Carol Gray, attempted to alert the same flight attendant to the fact her seat was broken and was greeted by a similarly hostile reaction.

Both Miller and Gray maintain they tried to defuse the situation but that the attendant became increasingly irate. Ultimately, to their amazement, he called the gate and asked that they be removed from the flight.

As staff and deputies led the Miller and Gray toward the exit, the third woman, Karyn Schorr, spoke up, saying, “This is crazy, they didn’t do anything. Why are you doing this to them?”

At this point the attendant said simply, “Throw her off, too.”

All three say they were in shock at being led off the plane and back to the terminal. Says Gray in a video clip recorded after the fact:

My seat was broken and it really was. Her bag was being mishandled. And this other woman came to our defense. Those are hardly causes to throw us all off the plane.

The women were not cited or charged with a crime. On the contrary, AirTran offered to fly them to New York on a later flight at no charge.

AirTran’s behavior might be construed as an admission of guilt, but Southwest Airlines, which acquired AirTran in 2011, released a statement on Tuesday that contradicts that reading:

Our Employees are responsible for the safety and comfort of everyone onboard a flight. Our goal is always to mitigate any uncomfortable situation prior to departure. Our crew assessed the environment onboard and ultimately decided to accommodate the passengers on an alternative flight. In addition to booking new travel arrangements, we compensated the passengers—offering a gesture of goodwill for their inconvenience. We always prefer that a passenger walk away with a positive experience when flying our airline, we regret that didn’t happen in this scenario. As we often do in these situations, we will take this opportunity to review the reports and take away any key learnings [sic] that we might uncover.

As for troublesome flight attendants, this is not the first time an individual in that line of work “lost it.” In August of 2010, a flight attendant with Jet Blue went berserk over a heated exchange with a passenger, deployed the plane’s emergency chute, and ran off.

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Some will accuse Obama of getting the date wrong, as he did when he wrote “2008” next to his signature in the guestbook at Westminster Abbey earlier this year. But this video clip provides evidence that the president knew full well what he was doing this time.

So why did he jump the gun on the actual start of Hannukah? Hey, the guy is busy! Who knows what his calendar will be like two weeks from now? He’s got important campaigning to do. Besides, it’s not as though we’re talking about Ramadan here.

As for the president’s observation about never needing an excuse for a good party, Daniel Halper at the Weekly Standard blog writes:

[W]ith unemployment at 8.6 percent, and with many having already quit looking for a job, I doubt many Americans would be heartened to hear the president saying he ‘never need[s] an excuse for a good party.’

As for the party, Hannukah is customarily celebrated by the eating of latkes, potato pancakes fried in hot oil. I wonder if the ever-vigilant First Lady saw to it that White House chef Sam Kass substituted fruit, which is an “any time” food.

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The teacher, Kimberly Crain, 48, was arrested on Friday and arraigned on charges of child pornography. Pottawatomie County District Attorney Richard Smothermon has asked that bail be set at $1 million, stating that Crain is a flight risk. Crain resigned her position at McLoud Elementary School on Thursday.

The investigation began earlier this month when a parent told Shawnee Police that her daughter and the girl’s classmates had been invited to a pizza party at Crain’s residence. The child told her parents that “they dressed up in bras and panties [imprinted with phrases like “Ho! Ho! Ho1”] and decorated the tree and ate pizza.”

The child also revealed that Crain “took photos of her and her friends decorating the tree,” and that some of the girls “made up a cheer dance and did it in the bra and panties while Crain videotaped them.”

A search warrant affadavit provides additional creepy details, including this one based on a statement taken from another of the girls in attendance: “Crain has all the kids in her class Skype over the computer with an older man wearing glasses named ‘Uncle G.’” The man is not further identified in the affidavit.

An article at the website of station KRMG notes that the FBI is also on the case. An agent named Clay Simmons is quoted as saying:

Currently we are examining the computers and the other digital media that may contain images of child pornography and try to review them and see if there’s any [additional] criminal charges to be filed.

A final detail worth noting is that Crain at one time was McLoud’s “teacher of the year.”

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Today, his chances of getting past this scandal grew immeasurably worse. A fourth woman has come forward with tales of Cain’s sexual predation. And this time there is a name—Sharon Bialek—and concrete details of the CEO’s alleged inappropriate advances.

There is also a recorded video statement by the accuser.

Bialek told reporters during a press conference on Monday that in 1997, Cain—then head of a restaurant trade group—tried to grope her genitals and force her head into his crotch. The woman claims that she initially rebuffed the advances and asked Cain what he thought he was doing. She insists that he replied, “You want a job, right?”

Cain’s campaign immediately issued a denial, but I believe the die is now cast. Whether Bialek is telling the truth is beside the point. Cain is now in the same unenviable place that former Congressman Anthony Weiner found himself in just before a shirtless photo of the veteran politician went viral. Even those who believe in Cain’s innocence will have formed an indelible picture that is hard to erase. I expect the candidate to withdraw from the race within the next two weeks.

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NBC New York reports that the new sex education curriculum, which will be mandatory for middle and high school students next spring, will provide a frank and comprehensive grounding in the birds and the bees that will be customized according to age group.

Middle school students will receive “risk cards” that rate the safety of different sexual activities, among them, the New York Post reports, “intercourse using a condom and an oil-based lubricant,” mutual masturbation, French kissing, oral sex, and anal sex.

High-school students get to go on field trips. These will include a visit to the neighborhood pharmacy, where they will compare and contrast condoms in terms of brand, price, and features such as lubrication. Others will research and map out a route from school to a clinic that provides birth control and STD tests. You just can’t tell when an emergency visit might be in the cards for your honor student.

While the city Department of Education hastens to point out that the curriculum “stresses that abstinence is the best way to avoid pregnancy and STD/HIV,” it will also feature a fair amount of role playing. One lesson focuses on just saying no, while another entails “negotiating condom use” with a partner.

Best of all, the Post writes:

Teens are referred to resources such as Columbia University’s Web site Go Ask Alice, which explores topics like “doggie-style” and other positions, “sadomasochistic sex play,” phone sex, oral sex with braces, fetishes, porn stars, vibrators and bestiality.

In case you were wondering, the classes will be coed. No word on whether students get to choose their homework partner and, if so, whether they will have a chance to specify cup size, length, and the like. In the meantime, think of the many rich opportunities for cross-disciplinary study afforded by the curriculum (“If Mary fakes two orgasms every hour and John has three real orgasms every two hours…”).

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The 2002 play, the book for which was written by Tim Acito, with additional lyrics and material by Alexander Dinelaris, is set in a fictional high school. It was, however, a recent performance at a real school, Hartford Public High, that generated headlines.

The Hartford Courant reports:

Members of Leadership Greater Hartford’s Quest, a program for professionals that develops leadership skills, put forth ‘Zanna’ as an anti-bullying community service project that helps lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth.

In a partnership with the nonprofit True Colors, one Quest team raised $10,000 to show the musical three times at Hartford High this month. The Knox Foundation and the Samuel Roskin Trust at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving gave sponsorship money. Students from area high schools and Trinity College are the actors.

In one scene in the play two males of the species exchange a brief kiss. The scene was obviously meant to raise the consciousness of audience members. But when the play had its debut at Hartford High last week, the scene instead raised the blood pressure of some in attendance.

The Courant notes that

a piercing clamor rang through the auditorium. There were screams and loud voices and a bit of feigned or real disgust. Dozens of students, mostly male and a few in their Owls football jerseys, hurried out of their rows and walked out. A few jumped over seats to leave.

Before the day was out, one parent had stormed into the main office with a Bible, pointing out portions that condemn homosexuality as a sin. Others took their teenage children out of school early.

According to the Courant David Chambers, principal of the school’s nursing academy, had informed his students ahead of time there might be same-sex affection in the play. Some had asked to be excused, and Chambers had considered—but then rejected—the idea of sending home an opt-out letter.

Chambers is said to have hoped the play would help his students develop a sense of empathy toward gays and lesbians, or at least exposure to “that which makes them uncomfortable.”

“Our kids are not there yet,” he is quoted as saying.

But some evidently are. Oneida Fernandez, a 17-year-old law and government student, is quoted as saying, “To me, people are people. We’re human beings.… I don’t discriminate.”

Another, Dineily Vargas, told a reporter:

I think it opened a lot of people’s eyes.… This school never really had anything like this happen. I’m still happy. It was wonderful.

The only part I hated, was when some people left.

This story raises all manner of questions. Chief among them is where a school’s responsibilities to its students and to the community at large begin and end. There are also see clear-cut First Amendment issues here. Anyone with answers is welcome to weigh in below.

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“They’re defecating on our doorsteps,” Community Board 1 member Catherine Hughes told the New York Post. Hughes, who lives a block away from Zuccotti Park, was referring to the park’s “inhabitants” of the last five weeks, adding:

The cowbells start at 4 a.m. and the drumming goes past 10 p.m. A lot of people are very frustrated. A lot of people are concerned about the safety of our kids.

Other area residents told the Post they’ve been insulted and harassed as they walk to work each morning.

Bloomberg can’t run for the mayoralty again, and judging from his recent polls, it’s unlikely New Yorkers would have him. But he still has his legacy to preserve. That may explain why he announced this morning on local talk radio that more arrests are imminent. He spoke of enforcing rules, such as requirements of permits for marches and assemblies.

A separate column in the New York Post quotes OWS media coordinator (OWS has a media coordinator?) Thorin Caristo as essentially threatening Bloomberg back:

The mayor’s statements sound hardline and I have no doubt he may actually try to enforce those. But we all know that every time excessive police force is used in this situation the movement grows exponentially.

Caristo also said of Bloomberg:

His inability to create a clear and definitive opinion or position on OWS just shows he’s being tossed around like a bird in a storm.

In short, Caristo was calling Bloomberg a wimp—an insult he doesn’t need to take. After all, he’s been called a wimp by far better people than Thorin Caristo.

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The city is now threatening to shut down the route if the carrier, Private Transportation Corporation, doesn’t stop its practice of segregating passengers based on sex.

The New York World, which broke the story on Tuesday, recounts the experience of passenger Melissa Franchy, who boarded the bus on October 12 and took a vacant seat near the front. Franchy claims she was immediately warmed by curious glances from the men on the bus, all wearing full beards and long black coats.

When the vehicle began to fill, one of the men rose and told her she would need to move to the back, adding that the B110 is a “Jewish bus.” When she inquired why she had to move, the man responded sternly, “If God makes a rule, you don’t ask ‘Why make the rule?’”

After the World story ran, the New York Post got in on the action. The paper dispatched one of its photographers to Williamsbug, one of the two Hasidic communities serviced by the line, and instructed her to refuse to change seats. She did. Like clockwork, the driver told her the bus would not budge until she moved to the “non-reserved” section at the back. At the time, the vehicle was half-empty.

Yesterday, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan (a woman yet!) fired off a letter to Jacob Marmurstein, reminding him that his comapny’s franchise agreement with the city prohibits discrimination “based on race, creed, color, national origin, sex, age, handicap, marital status, or real or perceived sexual orientation.”

The letter further warned that if the company continued its discriminatory practice, the city would terminate the agreement.

The view of women as inferior under Orthodox Jewish law last made news in May, when a Hasidic Jewish newspaper photoshopped two females out of the iconic White Situation Room photo taken during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s lair. One of the two was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

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Despite Jon Stewart’s frequent reminders to his audience that his is a “fake news show,” a slightly heated on-air clash in June with FOX News Channel’s Chris Wallace suggests the Comedy Central host takes himself and his politics more seriously than he lets on.

So when he poked fun last night at conservatives for their recent calls to “take back America,” you could tell Stewart was only half joking. (Video clip is here.) Even when he went out of his way to riff on Rep. Allen West’s impassioned plea to pick up “your muskets,” Stewart himself understood that the reference was an historical metaphor even if his guffawing studio audience didn’t.

Today Mediaite devotes some space to the segment and to Stewart’s ironic question of who those on the right are trying to take the country back from. A related question that the host might want to devote another hilarious segment to is to who those on the left are trying to take the country back from.

He might want to begin with Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy, who offers a recipe for “How Progressives Can Take Back America” in an article with the same name.

Too obscure? Then how about crazy man Howard Dean, whose 2004 book is titled Winning Back America? Or better still the radical-left Take Back the American Dream (formerly “Take Back America”) conference. Dean was keynote speaker at the group’s conference in 2004, where he told those in attendance:

So over the next few months we’re going to partner with 21st Century Democrats, with the Progressive Majority, with SEIU, with AFSCME, with other groups, where we can come together not just to make sure John Kerry is the next president of the United States, but to make sure that if he is, that this is not just simply a weigh station in between right-wing presidents. That we are going to take this country back this time, and never again are we going to permit the extreme right wing of the Republican Party to tell us what to do. I am tired of listening to the fundamentalist preachers, and we’re not going to do it anymore. [Emphasis added]

An even better Daily Show guest would be the man who told an auditorium full of fellow progressives in 2006:

We are here tonight because we believe that in this country, we have it within our power to say ‘yes’ to those questions—to forge our own destiny—to begin the world anew.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is our time.

Our time to make a mark on history.

Our time to write a new chapter in the American story.

Our time to leave our children a country that is freer and kinder, more prosperous and more just than the place we grew up.

And then someday, someday, if our kids get the chance to stand where we are and look back at the beginning of the 21st century, they can say that this was the time when America renewed its purpose.

They can say that this was the time when America found its way.

They can say that this was the time when America learned to dream again.

Were you able to guess from the florid prose that the speaker was the current progressive-in-chief, Barack Obama?

Mediaite, at the close of its article, quotes Jon Stewart as saying (with his tongue embedded, as ever, only halfway in his cheek):

It must be tough to love America so much, but hate almost three fourths of the people living in it.

Since conservatives still outnumber liberals in this country by a margin of better than two to one, it’s hard to know who Stewart was talking about. Could it be he was looking in a mirror when he made this sage observation?

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Knox teaches at a school that is currently celebrating Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender History Month. In her Facebook comments she makes specific—and critical—reference to the school display shown on this page.

John Paragano, an attorney and former town councilman, sent the district a copy of Knox’s Facebook commentary along with his unsolicited opinion, to wit:

Hateful public comments from a teacher cannot be tolerated. She has a right to say it. But she does not have a right to keep her job after saying it.

The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey argues otherwise. ACLUNJ legal director Ed Barocas is on record as saying:

Although we do not agree with the sentiments expressed on Ms. Knox’s personal Facebook page, her comments are protected by the First Amendment. The ACLU believes that the response to offensive speech is not the restriction of speech, but more speech.

Meanwhile, the battle lines have been drawn. A gay rights group that dubs itself Garden State Equality has joined Paragano in demanding Knox’s dismissal. Steven Goldstein, who chairs the groupis quoted by NJ.com as saying:

Teachers are supposed to be role models for our children, not hatemongers. I don’t see how this teacher could possibly be effective in implementing the state’s new anti-bullying law, designed precisely to teach children that bullying, including cyber-bullying, is unacceptable.

The law in question was adopted last spring after a Rutgers student committed suicide upon learning that a video of him kissing another man had gone public.

In the opposing camp is Knox’s pastor, who argues another aspect of his parishioner’s First Amendment rights—her freedom to express her heartfelt religious views. Rev. Milton B. Hobbs, of New Covenant Fellowship in Clark, New Jersey, notes:

It’s not saying that people who are gay sin any more or less than anyone else. But to say that the Bible doesn’t say it’s a sin would be untrue. It does say that.

Any Christian who makes a stand that’s unpopular can expect to be persecuted. That’s in the Bible, too. But no American should expect to be prosecuted for exercising free speech. At what point does that stop?

The against Knox case is similar in many respects to one involving a Florida teacher who had posted comments opposing New York’s gay marriage lawon his personal Facebook page.That teacher, Jerry Buell, was suspended after his comments were made public but won a lawsuit against the school district and has been reinstated.

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I only need to pay $1,500 if she dies. But if she lives, it would cost ten times more at least.

But the driver is not the only member of that society in desperate need of a soul. The dozen or so passersby that walked or drove by the child impassively over the next seven minutes also boggles the mind.

And if your blood is not yet at a full boil, consider this: A second truck rumbled by, and it too rolled over the child as she lay unconscious and bleeding.

Finally, after what seemed to this viewer like an eternity, a woman in the clip appears and drags the child out of the path of oncoming traffic, after which her mother—said to be a migrant worker—rushes into the frame.

Remarkably the child did not die immediately, though she is currently in a coma. Her prognosis, according to China’s official English-language newspaper, China Daily, is grim. In any case, she has been declared brain dead.

Reuters, which produced the video, writes that many in China are reluctant to aid people who appear to be in distress for fear of being blamed. “High-profile law suits,” the wire service adds, “have ended with good Samaritans ordered to pay hefty fines to individuals they sought to help.”

Another factor noted in the article is a growing disparity between rich and poor, which has led to a climate of general apathy. If this is the road we as a society are headed down, God help us.

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If you are fed up with politics as they exist in the real world, a new free online application will give you the chance to make up your own movie featuring the pols of your choice. Called GoAnimate, the app provides you with a debate stage, a cast of characters, and a behind-the-scenes animation engine that will convert your script and voice-overs (via your computers mike) into a Flash movie.

That there is likely a market for this app is suggested by the popularity of Bad Lip Reading, which syncs pure gibberish to videos of selected pols mid-speech.

Gary Lipkowitz, GoAnimate vice president of corporate development, is quoted by The Blaze as stating that the purpose of the site is

to provide a fun mode of expression for the masses. Candidates and pundits are constantly talking at us, and people are trying to shout back in social media, but most of the tools are just text. So we launched this project to provide rich media feedback tools—to empower everyday people to turn their comments into commentary—whether they’re responding to the debates, campaigning for a cause or recreating key political moments.

I perused the site and couldn’t find the particular actor I was looking for to star in my own movie. At least I can take solace in the fact that from time to time he provides his own real-life comedic relief.

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McIntosh is (make that was—he’s since been fired) a cashier at a McDonald’s in Greenwich Village, where two women handed him what looked like a phony $50 bill last Friday. An altercation that ensued quickly turned obscene, then violent.

A video of the incident shows one of the women slapping McIntosh. Seconds later the other woman jumped the counter while the first walked around to where the cash was kept.

McIntosh swung into action—literally. Grabbing hold of a metal rod he kept in the back of the store, he began whaling on the two women. One ended up with a fractured skull and a broken arm. The other was treated for a deep laceration.

All three combatants were arrested. The women were charged with menacing, disorderly conduct, and trespassing. McIntosh received two counts of felony assault and criminal possession of a weapon. It may be irrelevant, but McIntosh did a “dime” at Sing Sing for shooting a high school classmate to death in 2000.

So who’s the hero in this tale of bunko bungling and urban unrest? That would be McIntosh, who according to the New York Post has become a “McHero” among the social network set. The Post reports that a Rayon McIntosh Defense Fund has been set up on Facebook and that other cyber-support pages have followed suit.

I do not disagree entirely with the person who wrote at one of the abovementioned pages that the women “needed a good whupping.” For me, the problem is according hero status to a man who settles his differences by picking up a metal pipe.

It’s not that the nation has not had its share of heroes. One can make a persuasive case that the men of Seal Team 6, the group that took out Osama bin Laden, were heroes, though members of that elite team would argue that what they did was all in a day’s work.

Part of the problem facing the country is that its “heroes” so often turn out to be false idols (think Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens). An even bigger issue is that the term hero is sprinkled around so injudiciously. It has become a commonplace in news reports to refer to victims who survive crimes against them as “heroes.”

A curative, I believe, would be the emergence of a genuine, certifiable hero—someone who truly deserves the recognition and thanks of the American people. Sadly, Captain America is a fictional character. And Rayon McIntosh, the appreciation of his fans notwithstanding, is far from a hero.

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Before you answer that question, be mindful that no one attempted to evict anyone. Early this morning, the squatters in Zuccotti Park learned that Brookfield Properties, which owns the plot of land, had aborted its planned cleanup. The mayor’s office sent tidings at 6 a.m., informing the occupiers that they were once again free to camp out in the park indefinitely.

But the protesters, who apparently had girded themselves for a good fight, began “throwing bottles and bags of garbage at officers” anyway. Police retaliated. CBS New York reports on one particularly ugly skirmish:

First Precinct Commander Ed Winski checked a protester who refused to stay on the sidewalk. When the protester came back into the street, Winski hurled his megaphone down and wound up rolling around in the street with the protester, throwing punches. Other officers surrounded the two, throwing punches. The protester was arrested.

Shades of Chicago, 1968.

There were about a dozen arrests in all, all provoked by demonstrators who, channeling the president’s former chief of staff, decided not to let a crisis go to waste.

Today’s were not the first arrests since the sit-in began. That dubious distinction belongs to some 700 protesters who were taken into police custody after blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 2. Something, however, tells me this won’t be the last incidence of violence from the “party of peace.”

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Zuccotti Park, the plaza in downtown Manhattan where the movement got its start three-plus weeks ago and which remains the national epicenter, is overrun with refuse. Brookfield Office Properties, which owns the park, has released a statement that reads:

Normally the park is cleaned and inspected every weeknight.… Because the protestors refuse to cooperate … the park has not been cleaned since Friday, September 16th and as a result, sanitary conditions have reached unacceptable levels.

A catch-22 for both Brookfield and the city is that Zuccotti Park is a public space. It is privately owned but operates under a charter that gives anyone free access—even squatters in desperate need of a bath.

Filth is not the only way in which the movement is adversely affecting New York. The tendency toward violence among the protesters, 28 of whom were arrested on Wednesday for disorderly conduct, requires a constant police presence. NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly reports that the protests have so far cost the city about $2 million in overtime for officers assigned to cover the demonstrations.

How serious a problem is the sit-in becoming for a city that is already in debt to the tune of $100 billion? So serious that even its socialist mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has told the protesters to “lay off the banks.” Bloomberg is quoted by Politico as saying:

The protests that are trying to destroy the jobs of working people in this city aren’t productive.

What they’re trying to do is take away the jobs of people working in the city, take away the tax base that we have. We’re not going to have money to pay our municipal employees or anything else.

I share Bloomberg’s concern, if for different reasons. His chief worry is not having enough warm bodies to place more traffic-choking bike lanes on city streets.

As for Commissioner Kelly, he warned the protesters, several of whom have been arrested for assaulting police officers, that “they’re going to be met with force when they do that—this is just common sense.” Kelly added:

These people wanted to have confrontation with the police for whatever reason. Somehow, I guess it works to their purposes.

Clearly, the commissioner has the OWS demonstrators confused with the Tea Party. Everyone knows that it’s conservatives who are violent. Liberals are the party of peace and tolerance.

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Christie suspended the film tax credit program in 2010 to close a budget deficit, but the 2009 season still qualified for the credit.

“I have no interest in policing the content of such projects,” Christie said in a statement. “However, as chief executive I am duty-bound to ensure that taxpayers are not footing a $420,000 bill for a project which does nothing more than perpetuate misconceptions about the State and its citizens.”

To those of you who don’t live in New Jersey, please be advised that orange-dyed overexposed (in every meaning of the word) louts are the exception, not the rule, to the Garden State’s inhabitants.

Jersey Shore is awful enough that companies pay the orange-dyed “stars” not to use their products:

The Situation doesn’t usually require a lot of motivation to lose the shirt. But Abercrombie & Fitch wants him to go one further — the company has offered to pay “Jersey Shore” cast members to stop wearing clothes carrying their brand.

The preppy teen retailer said Tuesday it would pay a “substantial payment” to Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino or any cast member who stops wearing its clothing on the popular MTV reality show because the series is “contrary to the aspirational nature of the brand.”

Coach didn’t like Snooki carrying their purse to the bar, either.

Thank you, Governor Christie for ending the $420,000 Jersey Shore tax break.

And, A&F, you can pay me to not wear your clothes any time, too.

Cross-posted at Fausta’s blog

The intended recipient was Ralph Steinman, of Rockefeller University. Unbeknownst to the committee, which was planning the awards ceremony for today, Prof. Steinman died on Friday at age 68. And the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.

Nobel Foundation spokeswoman Annika Pontikis is quoted as telling the Associated Press, “I think you can safely say that this hasn’t happened before.” One might quibble that the decision to award the prize to noted climatologist Al Gore should have caused the committee at least as much embarrassment.

The judges now face another dilemma: how to divvy up the $1.5 million in prize money. Steinman was to share the Nobel Prize for Medicine with two other recipients. Should those men—American scientist Bruce Beutler and French scientist Jules Hoffmann—split the cash two ways? Or should a third go to Steinman’s heirs?

It’s a problem the Nobel committee has never had to confront before. Maybe they can get some help from the Obama administration, which has experience handing out money to dead people.

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Police diverted from more important tasks to function as baby-sitters admonished demonstrators to stick to the pedestrian pathway. Needless to say, about 1,000 protesters interpreted the warning as their cue to move their act to the roadway, where they blocked traffic and clashed with cops for several hours, creating larger-than-normal traffic delays.

Some 700 protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct amid chants of “Let us go.” Change the slogan to “Off the pigs” and the theme to taking down “the Man,” and the scene could have been straight out of the ‘70s—except that the Man is currently black, which kind of spoils everything.

Some of those taken into custody claim they were tricked into being arrested by the NYPD, which they insist gave them misleading information about where on the bridge they could demonstrate.

Then again, the misinformation has been flowing for the duration of the sit-in, and those assembled have been willing dupes. At one point, for example, a rumor sprang up on Twitter that the police planned to use tear gas on the protesters—a crowd-control tactic the department doesn’t use. The claim was eventually rescinded.

As to what the protesters hope to accomplish, one of their own summed it up neatly in an email to The Associated Press. Erin Larkins, a Columbia University graduate student, wrote:

I don’t think we’re asking for much, just to wake up every morning not worrying whether we can pay the rent, or whether our next meal will be rice and beans again. No one is expecting immediate change. I think everyone is just hopeful that people will wake up a bit and realize that the more we speak up, the more the people that do have the authority to make changes in this world listen.

I’m pretty sure that most Americans at this point are on the same page as Larkins. The only question is how to bring about the change she is seeking. Somehow, I don’t think taking up residence on the streets of lower Manhattan and defiling the bathroom at a nearby McDonald’s is the answer.

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• Civility alert: WI protesters tell GOP senators “YOU WILL DIE!”
• Wisconsin protesters choose to be obscene and not heard (SLIDESHOW–UPDATED)
• Protesting Milwaukee teachers earn triple the city’s per capita income
• The view from Wisconsin: Is the left willing to make sacrifices?
• The shooting in Tucson and the political blame game