King of Queens?  Two and a Half Men?  Scrubs?  JUDGE FUCKIN JUDY?
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During the day?  Four hours straight, on four different channels: Jerry Springer.  And also Maury Povich.  Please don’t forget Ricki Lake while you’re at it.  I am not blowing smoke up your ass, the fact of the matter is that 90% of the programming over here is American, and 90% of that is our pure, unprocessed, not-gone-through-the-sewage-treatment-plant CRAP...

And we wonder why the Brits have stupid stereotypes about ‘Murricans...

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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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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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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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We need a new political party in Washington, to get the checkbook away from the 537 people who have been kiting checks like a runaway teenager who boosted mom’s purse.  Not the G.O.P., because they’re part of the problem.

We will call ourselves the G.U.P.: the GrownUp Party, and our motto will be “No we can’t!”

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S.Weasel:

“I do get tired of every fucking thing being a learning experience.”

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