CRACKS APPEARING in the Ashley Smithwick story?

MARKDOWNS ON flashlights large and small.

MARSHA BLACKBURN FILES INTERNET FREEDOM ACT: “Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is keeping the promise she made last month. Today, she filed a bill to strike down the Federal Communications Commission’s recent move to enact net neutrality regulations. The Internet Freedom Act states Internet regulation is the sole prerogative of Congress, and is supported by more than 60 House members, including the majority of Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.”

IT’S BECAUSE SHE’S A REPUBLICAN AND THEY . . . OH, WAIT: Why Does Elizabeth Warren Hate Women And Poor People?

Related post here. Note that married women who don’t work outside the home are punished the most. Hmm.

PROF. RUSS FEINGOLD weighs in on constitutional oaths.

LIKE TAXES, REAL ESTATE LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: “President Barack Obama’s two-week stay at his Hawaii Winter White House was illegal under a long-standing Honolulu ban on short-term rentals.” A dumb law, but really, Obama is the last guy who should be saying that a law’s dumbness excuses compliance . . . .

PROFESSOR JACOBSON: OPERATION DEMORALIZE.

The mainstream media will undertake, and already has undertaken, a concerted effort to blame the Republican House for everything that goes wrong, for not living up to promises, for living up to promises, for failing to compromise, for selling out, etc.

Do not fall for it.

Holding the Republican House to its commitments is one thing; falling for Operation Demoralize is something else.

If you think that the mainstream media is not still 100% in the tank for Obama, think again.

Keep your eye on 2012. They are.

Absolutely right. Related, from Don Surber: “Yes, House Republicans have been in power for 5 hours and they have not passed their entire agenda. The New York Times thinks they should be canned and Democrats put back in charge.”

THE ONLY INNOVATION IN AVIATION SECURITY THAT’S WORKED: Passengers thwart Turkish jet hijack attempt. “The pilot raised the alarm and police said that when they entered the plane a passenger was sitting on top of the suspect.”

A MAN WHO CAN KEEP HIS HEAD IN A CRISIS, even while losing other body parts: “One of Allen’s hands was severed by the blast, but he used a garden hose with his other hand to douse flames from the flash fire.”

VIDEO: Skiing Down Park Avenue.

A NEW GUN SHOW ON THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL:

“If you can dream it, we can build it” is the motto at Red Jacket, the nation’s most unique weapons business. Owner Will Hayden and his eclectic crew of Baton Rouge, Louisiana gunsmiths and historians rise to the challenge daily on Discovery Channel’s world premiere series SONS OF GUNS, creating one-of-a-kind custom weapons. The show fires off on Wednesdays at 9PM ET/PT, starting January 26.

Via the always well-informed SayUncle.

VACCINE UPDATE: Retracted autism study an ‘elaborate fraud,’ British journal finds. “A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an “elaborate fraud” that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.”

Some background here, and some earlier thoughts of mine here.

THE ARMED CITIZEN BLOG is back online.

TIM CARNEY: What do you call three lobbyists and a Daschle pal? Obama’s short list. Change!

DOG BITES MAN: Another Day, Another Misleading Think Progress Headline.

So an event at which most people applauded Koch, but a small number of classless people booed, gets the headline “Theater audience boos ….”

That’s how they do it at Think Progress.

And what’s more, the whole incident demonstrates the intolerance of the anti-Tea Party crowd, who cannot contain themselves even at the ballet.

Yes, desire to politicize every event is characteristic of totalitarians.

FASTER, PLEASE: Compact Fusion Experiment Demonstrates Confinement of 100 keV (Billion-Degree) Ions in Dense Plasma.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: Conspiracy Theories And War.

MAIMON SCHWARZSCHILD ON scholars with anger-management problems. “Almost incoherent with hatred.”

Schama and Sachs are not isolated cases, of course. This sort of talk has become commonplace among people who used to be liberal but serious, sophisticated, and certainly not hysterical. You hear it from public figures like Schama and Sachs, and you hear it very commonly in private, from left-of-centre (or once left of centre, but now seethingly leftist) friends and acquaintances.

What is going on? I can’t claim to explain it. Surely part of the story is that you can get away with it, or you might reasonably feel you can: the (One-Party) media will never criticise such talk, or even cover it in a way that might expose it unfavourably. But this is surely not the whole story. If anything it’s a symptom as much as a cause. So why, in the early 21st century, do a great many people proud of their sophistication talk, and sometimes write, like Communist hacks in the 1930s? There seems to be a weird kind of political tribalism at work: this kind of talk marks you as “one of us”. Still: I don’t really get it.

From the comments: “Leftist intellectuals dislike capitalism because it has virtually no use for them, and they cannot stand to be ignored.” Yes, socialism places a much greater premium on sucking up to those in power and parroting the current party line, something that almost anyone who achieves a Ph.D. has necessarily acquired skill at.

MORE ON THAT ALCOHOL-AND-MONOGAMY STUDY: “Presumably, however, the only way humans can stand to be with the same partner day after day, year after year, is to get drunk.” See, beer really did make civilization possible.

BYRON YORK: Nancy Pelosi’s Partisan Parting Shot. It’s who she is. It’s all she knows how to do.

WALTER OLSON: The Fall Of The House Of Waxman. “The committee was an unending source of ghastly new legislative proposals for regulatory manacles to be fastened on one or another sector of the economy, ideas that with any luck we may now be spared for the next two years.”

MARKDOWNS ON bestselling knives.

GLOBAL FOOD PRICES hit record high.

TOM MAGUIRE: Adam Serwer Snarled Up The New Black Panther Reporting? Again? “Mr. Serwer’s first pass at the topic last summer lives as a comedy classic – between the cross-outs, the updates and the clarifications it is obvious he had no idea what he was talking about (other than Bush Sucks, natch.) A week later he was still at sea as to what J. Christian Adas was alleging and when he alleged it.”

OUR NEW CONGRESS: What Are We Going To Do About it? “The new Congress has very powerful tools ready for its use, particularly the new House which holds the strings to our purse; the tools must be used and if the House needs to be reminded with whose purse it has been entrusted, so be it.”