FEELING UNSAFE ON THE STREET? There’s an App for That. “If the user feels unsafe, the Safety Advisor will stay on the line with you until you have reached your destination. In the event that something does happen to you while on the phone with a Safety Advisor, they will be able to call 911. The second feature is called ‘Silent Alarm.’ If this button is slid when you are in a situation where you cannot talk to a Safety Advisor, StreetSafe will contact the local 911 call center immediately, find your whereabouts using the GPS feature on your phone, and provide your age, physical description and any medical conditions to the authorities that are on their way to rescue you.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 13 Dumb Sex Tips From The Internet.

REPORT: Absentee ballot data not looking good for Democrats.

STEVE CROWDER: Staying Celibate Before Marriage Was The Best Thing I’ve Ever Done.

Some people seem offended. Wait, shouldn’t you respect his lifestyle choices?

AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES SEINFELD:

KRAMER: Alright, so there I am at Lorenzo’s — loading up my slice of the fixin’s bar.. garlic, (imitates the shaking of garlic onto a pizza) and what-not… mmm, mmm… and I see this guy over at the pizza boxes giving me the stink-eye. (Imitates the ‘stink-eye’) So I give hime the crook-eye back, (Imitates the ‘crook-eye’) you know… Then, I notice that he’s not alone! I’m taking on the entire Van Buren Boys!

JERRY: The Van Buren Boys? There’s a street gang named after President Martin Van Buren?

KRAMER: Oh yeah, and they’re just as mean as he was!

Flash-forward to today; the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, “A St. Louis teen who authorities say is a member of a gang called the ‘Obama Boyz’ has been charged with two shootings on Saturday.”

RELATED: Speaking of Seinfeld, “Seinfeld Star Admits ‘Man-Crush’ On Obama:”

Like many in Hollywood, [Jason Alexander, who played uber-nebbish George Costanza] has been a fervent Obama supporter and has criticized the so-called “1-percent” even though he is a part of it.

“I do not want to live in that 1-percent.  I don’t believe in it,” Alexander said. “I don’t think our country, or any country, runs well when the 1-percent is thriving and the rest are suffering and struggling.”

Alexander was reported to earn six hundred thousand dollars per episode in his final season on Seinfeld.

THIS IS A DAMN SHAME: Fighting in Syria has severely damaged the medieval souk in Aleppo. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Here are some pictures of what it looked like before it burned.

#GREENFAIL: CBO: Electric vehicles a loser that allow for more pollution.

AT AMAZON, new releases in Science Fiction.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): National Journal: “A majority of Americans now define success as not falling behind. They worry that fundamental changes in the economy are making it more difficult for them—and their children—to get ahead.”

OUT OF THE COOL: David Brooks channels Mauren Dowd. Dowd has long championed Obama as the cool and aloof “President Spock”*; Brooks, brought in to the Times’ token conservative, instead tells his fellow Obama supporters on PBS’s NewsHour yesterday that all Obama has to be do in the Middle East is “just be calm:”

“So, Obama, I think his task is reasonably clear — just be calm, stay calm, whatever that British slogan [is that] we’re all repeating now, ‘stay calm and in control,’ whatever it is,” Brooks said. “And so he just has to be calm.  And somebody made a good point today. He had a pretty bad week in the Middle East, or a pretty bad two weeks in the Middle East, but he reacted with calmness. And so he sort of gets a pass on really what is sort of a chaotic administration policy.  Romney is the one with the burden. … He has to say, listen, I haven’t been a great candidate, but if you elect me, there are four organizations I’m going to fix. I am going to fix the tax code.”

* Though as any real Star Trek fan can tell you, there’s a reason why every episode that Spock was in command nearly ended in disaster, and his fellow officers longed for Capt. Kirk’s return to the bridge to restore normalcy.

UPDATE: “The future must not belong to those who blaspheme the first officer of the Enterprise,” an Insta-reader warns:

What? Spock a bad captain? Not at all! He was trying to lead the Enterprise out of danger during “The Doomsday Machine”. He would have, if Commodore Decker had not interfered. In “The Tholian Web,” Spock successfully overcame resistance from the crew, rescued the ship and saved Kirk. While in command of a shuttlecraft crew in “Galileo 7,” Spock again saved everyone from certain death. In “The Paradise Syndrome,” Spock deflected an asteroid strike and rescued Kirk who had lost his memory.

Spock is logical, empirical and dutiful. To compare him to Obama is grossly unfair.

Heh. I didn’t say he was a bad officer at all — just noting the frustration he could cause his human crewmembers. (And riffing off a video Bill Whittle made on the topic for PJTV back in 2009.)

HONDAJET UPDATE: Honda now building jet maintenance center. “The 90,000-square-foot center will be finished and occupied in 2013, just prior to the HondaJet’s entry into service, the company said in a news release.”

I wrote about the HondaJet for Popular Mechanics a while back.

IF YOU HAVE TO ASK HOW MUCH IT COSTS:   You can’t afford it.  Mercedes Benz announced its plans to sell a 46 foot Granturismo yacht beginning in 2013.  No price has yet been announced (not that it matters).  Check it out yourself, but it looks kind of boring and not particularly well laid out– for a 46 footer– to me.

JENNIFER GARNER: My husband has “wonder sperm.”

NEWSBUSTERS: CBS Radio Reporter Cheers the State’s Ability to ‘Punish the Filmmaker’ for Upsetting Muslims? Here’s the segment that aired on CBS Radio yesterday:

CBS RADIO ANCHOR (Steve Kathan): The man behind the anti-Islam video that sparked outrage in the Muslim world is still in jail in Los Angeles. It’s for a probation violation.

RAVIV: I’m Dan Raviv in Washington. The short movie posted on YouTube has had a lot of diplomatic impact. It was *clearly* designed to insult the Prophet Mohammed, and a senior Obama administration official told CBS News last week that no one in the Middle East seems to believe that the US government could not stop the film from getting out. Now at least Federal authorities might be able to *punish* the filmmaker.”

ANCHOR The Dow is down 69. This is CBS News.

There’s audio at the link, so you can decide for yourself, but to my ears, Raviv does sound pretty darn enthusiastic about Nakoula’s arrest. As Tim Graham of Newsbusters asks, “Is this the way CBS News reveres freedom of speech? Is Raviv unaware that he sounds like he supports punishing those who speak ill of Muhammad?”

DRAMATICALLY DECLINING DEMOCRATIC VOTER REGISTRATION:  Of course you won’t find this widely reported in the mainstream media.  Fox News reports that a recent study by a left-leaning think tank, Third Way, shows a precipitous decline in voters registering as Democrat in key swing states.  In Ohio, for example, there are 490,000 fewer registered voters than in 2008, 44 percent of whom reside in Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2:1.

Ohio is not alone. . . . Democratic voter registration decline in eight key swing states outnumbered the Republican decline by a 10-to-one ratio. In Florida, Democratic registration is down 4.9 percent, in Iowa down 9.5 percent. And in New Hampshire, it’s down down 19.7 percent.

Another reason why many recent polls–which oversample Democrats and “weight” results based on 2008 presidential election turnout rates–may indeed be highly misleading.

IRREFUTABLE PROOF THAT HELL EXISTS: Ke$ha Talks About Having Sex With Ghost. Could be worse. Could have been Madonna.

UPDATE: Readers wonder what the poor guy could have done in life to merit such a punishment. Hey, don’t ask me. . .

THE NAMES CHANGE, THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME: This just in to Patrick B. Pexton, the Washington Post’s ombudsman: His paper’s “news columnists almost to a person write from left of center:”

One aspect of The Post that particularly irks conservatives is the columnists who appear in print and online in news positions (as opposed to those on the editorial and op-ed pages and the online Opinions section). With the exception of Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza, who cover politics in a nonpartisan way, the news columnists almost to a person write from left of center.

Ezra Klein* of Wonkblog comes out of the Democratic left, fills in for Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz on MSNBC and sometimes appears in the printed Post on the front page.

Steven Pearlstein, who covers business and also appears occasionally on the front page; Walter Pincus on national security; Lisa Miller of the On Faith blog; Melinda Henneberger of She the People; Valerie Strauss, the education blogger; plus the three main local columnists — Robert McCartney, Petula Dvorak and Courtland Milloy — all generally write from a progressive perspective, readers say. (So does Dana Milbank, who works for the Opinions section but writes a column that appears on Page A2 twice a week.)

Is it any wonder that if you’re a conservative looking for unbiased news — and they do; they don’t want only Sean Hannity’s interpretation of the news — that you might feel unwelcome, or dissed or slighted, by the printed Post or the online version? And might you distrust the news when it’s wrapped in so much liberal commentary?

Why yes, you might, particularly since the paper has been aware of this issue for some time, and has chosen to do nothing about it. While not naming names, the late Deborah Howell, Pexton’s forerunner as the Post’s ombud, made the same observation four years ago, immediately after the 2008 election was over, and it was obvious how deeply her paper’s writers had been in the Obama tank:

But some of the conservatives’ complaints about a liberal tilt are valid. Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world. I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.

And as Brent Baker of Newsbusters spotted at the time, “As for Howell’s presumption [that] ‘most Post journalists voted for Obama,’ that’s a safe bet given how 96 percent of the staff at Post-owned Slate reported they planned to back Obama.”

Doesn’t look like much has changed at the Post in the last four years, except for its continually eroding subscriber base and level of trust.

Much more on the topic from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

* “At Washington Post, mum’s the word on JournoList,” Byron York noted in 2010 at the Washington Examiner.

UPDATE: Moe Lane diagrams the inevitably short unhappy lifespan of a conservative working for a liberal newspaper, and concludes, “I… would heartily recommend that conservatives avoid news careers.”

A HIGHER DOSE OF LIBERTARIANISM, PLEASE:  Damon Root over at Reason takes on the New York Times’ David Brooks’ assertion that the increasing influence of libertarians in the GOP has been bad because Brooks doesn’t think libertarians “speak in the language of social order.”  Root correctly points out that Brooks seems to have no clue about libertarianism:

Libertarians favor limiting the size and scope of government precisely because they believe that approach will offer the greatest opportunity for people to seek their own happiness, whether as individuals, parents, church-goers, or, yes, even as business owners.

Does that make libertarianism anti-social? Hardly. Libertarians simply maintain that there is a crucial distinction between state and society and they hope to maintain a wall of separation when appropriate so that the latter may flourish.

My guess is that Brooks isn’t really so ignorant.  Instead, Brooks and other liberals/progressives feel intensely threatened by the growing GOP embrace of libertarians for one simple reason:  Libertarians are agnostic or supportive of “social” issues such as gay marriage and abortion–issues that the Democrats believe “belong” to their party alone, and that they use to paint (inaccurately) a sharp contrast between themselves and the GOP.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Does Having A Boyfriend Affect How Often You Shave Your Legs?

AT AMAZON, an Outlet Sale in portable audio & video.

Also, today only: $1.99 Mysteries & Thrillers on Kindle.

GOLF AND PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY: A Quiz.

TIME TO EUTHANIZE OBAMACARE:  Jeffrey Anderson at the Weekly Standard applauds Mitt Romney’s recent stump speech emphasizing that ObamaCare is the single largest attack on individual liberty since, well . . .  EVER.  For the first time in history (thanks to Chief Justice Roberts and the 4-vote liberal bloc of the Supreme Court), the federal government has the incredible power to “tax” us when we fail to buy a private product that Congress, in its infinite wisdom, thinks we should buy.   Observes Anderson:

James Madison argued in Federalist 51 that our Constitution provides a “double security” to “the rights of the people.” One half of that security is the separation of powers among the three branches of government. The other half is federalism, the separation of powers between the federal government and the states. Madison argued that both of these checks on the concentration of power were essential to securing our rights.

Obama-care lays waste to half of this “double security” by funneling almost unimaginable levels of power and money to Washington. What’s more, in its startling delegation of de facto lawmaking power to the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) and other unelected figures in the executive branch, it also severely undermines the separation of powers among the branches. For example, Obama-care is making it illegal for anyone in America (with the narrow exception of houses of worship) to freely sell or buy an insurance plan that fails to offer free birth control and sterilization. But this ban is nowhere to be found in the 2,700 pages of the law itself. Rather, it came as a decree from HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, exercising her newfound power. If Obama-care isn’t repealed, examples of such rule by fiat will proliferate.

This brings us back to Romney, the only man who stands in the way of Obama-care’s taking root from coast to coast.

A BRAVE MAN: Israel journalist and researcher Jonathan Spyer illegally sneaked into Syria to report on Assad’s killing fields.

POINTS AND FIGURES: The Coming Recession.

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FROM VODKAPUNDIT, The Week in Blogs.