Instead of wasting your time on this weekend’s Noonan, go read Freeman Hunt:

Who will be the next Reagan?  Who will be our Thatcher?  Who will show encroaching statism for the tyranny it is and turn the tide against it?  Never mind that Reagan and Thatcher, while they did make great gains, did not turn that tide permanently.  We expect some even greater personage.  The minute a promising face appears we ask, “Could it be? Is this the one?”

I tell you it isn’t.

He is not coming.

We don’t even bother to ask who our next Jefferson or Washington or Adams or Lincoln will be.  We seem to have accepted that we have not produced one of these.  Yet, that is what it would take, isn’t it?  At the very least anyway.  Even then, who knows?  Even that might not be enough.

He is not coming.  And he is not coming because we have not produced him.  From whence would he come?  We are an ignorant people.  Our best and brightest, outside of the hard sciences, are a sorry lot by historical standards.  Intelligence, we have.  Wit, we have in surplus.  But knowledge?  Real, discriminating knowledge, where is it?  Our standards for knowledge are now so low. Now we are only required to sound as if we know. We are masters of rhetorical style, but of wisdom there is a dearth...

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Victor Davis Hanson:

Two of the rhetorical cornerstones of the feminist movement used to be zero-tolerance for sexual slurs by men alleging promiscuity (“slutty flight-attendant look”), and jokes about something as serious as rape...  David Letterman, who has become ever more creepy in his dotage, on both counts proved a boor — and receives only silence?

Because sexist smears aimed at 14-year-old girls are fine if they’re Republicans.  Duh.

National Organization for Women - Media Hall of Shame

The Offense:  Late night TV host David Letterman “joked” that during their recent trip to New York, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s daughter “was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez” during a Yankees baseball game.  The next night Letterman said that the hardest part of Palin's trip was “keeping Eliot Spitzer away from her daughter.”

NOW Analysis:  After two nights of “jokes” at the expense of Palin and her family, Letterman tried to explain himself and offer something of an apology.  On his June 10 show, Letterman said he was referring to Palin's 18-year-old daughter, Bristol -- not the 14-year-old daughter who actually accompanied Palin on her New York trip. Letterman said “I recognize that these are ugly” jokes. NOW agrees.  Comedians in search of a laugh should really know better than to snicker about men having sex with teenage girls (or young women) less than half their age.

The sexualization of girls and women in the media is reaching new lows these days -- it is exploitative and has a negative effect on how all women and girls are perceived and how they view themselves.  Letterman also joked about what he called Palin’s “slutty flight attendant look” -- yet another example of how the media love to focus on a woman politician’s appearance, especially as it relates to her sexual appeal to men...

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Last night Instapundit linked a CaymanNetNews story that reviews the Department of Homeland Security’s new passport-required-for-reentry rules for American citizens travelling to Canada and Latin America.

The new requirement is the final phase of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which requires all American citizens re-entering the United States from Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean to have official proof of identity when crossing the border.

The move is part of a raft of US Government initiatives designed to improve the national security of the United States following the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001.
...
Before the new rules went into effect, land and sea-based American travellers were only required to show a birth certificate plus a form of government-issued photo ID such as a driver’s licence to regain entry into their country.

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Everybody knew Labour would do badly, but this here debacle was a fucking Greek tragedy of an ass-kicking: the worst Labour has done since 1918 (founded: 1900). The worst a party in power has done in a national election EVER.

Labour lost Cornwall for the first time in decades. They came in sixth. Below the Cornish National Party (Uncle B describes as ten nutters in a pub). This after coming in lower than the Monster Raving Loony Party in St. Ives [council election] last week.

It was epic.

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The Hill:

Sarah Palin has begun to get on the nerves of Republican senators...

...Palin, who does not have a lot of Washington connections, energized the party’s grass roots in 2008 while bucking the D.C. establishment, leaving much of the party’s elite grumbling about her appeal to the conservative base.
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Republicans are frustrated that Palin has wavered over whether to accept an invitation to appear as the headline guest at Monday’s fundraising bash for National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).
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A... GOP senator, who endorsed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) early in the 2008 primary, argues Palin would face a lot of difficulty raising money.  He said she had little appeal among the major fundraisers who made up McCain’s financial base.
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For Monday’s high-profile fundraiser, NRSC Chairman John Cornyn (Texas) offered Palin a seat at his table and organizers discussed the possibility of her making an appearance on stage.  But NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions (Texas) objected to the arrangement, according to a source outside the NRCC but involved in planning the dinner.

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S. Weasel:

...If anyone reading is near Colorado Springs and catless, commenter Scubafreak got hisself stuck with these five crusty hobgoblins and sure could stand to unload a few.  The Humane Society was going to gas them.  Yeah. There’s a title mismatch for you.

I know those goggle eyes and bony, stretched faces; that’s what all-but-starved looks like in a kitteh.  Charlotte looked worse when I pulled her out of the squirrel trap: gray with filth, one eye crusted shut, a kink in her tail and no fur at all on her belly.  She was the most repulsive little beast I’d ever touched with my bare hands.  But she cleaned up real good…eventually.

You will — seriously — not find a more faithful cat than one you pulled from the brink when it was small.  Charlotte is seven this year and still trails me everywhere like a shadow...

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Barry Obama and the Ethic of Justice

By now, you’re all familiar with President Obama’s description of what he’s looking for in a judge – someone with “empathy,” who can look beyond the law and understand the plight of the single mom or the minority businessowner.

This perspective reveals one of the fundamental differences between liberals and conservatives: the ethic of justice versus the ethic of care.

When politics in a democracy is normal, the political parties all agree to preserve the operating system while they compete to improve it...  Honorable people often will disagree about what to do -- sometimes quite strongly -- ...but in normal politics the outer limits of all these disagreements are marked by a shared commitment to preserving and improving the operating system.

In abnormal politics, the objective of one party isn’t to improve the operating system, but to overthrow it.

[So] ...Now we can see clearly what’s been happening in the United States during the last three decades.  While conservatives have been working to improve our democracy and our free-market economy, liberals have been working to replace our democracy with a dictatorship, and our free-market economy with a command economy controlled by the government.

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