SOME OF THEM, YES: “Have academics really become so political that we are now required to write partisan pamphlets rather than scholarly treatises?”

I remember when Doug Laycock wrote Vicious Stereotypes In Polite Society, he told me that he was disturbed to have people call it “courageous.”

WHAT IS GOING ON in Missouri?

RUTHERFORD B. HAYES TAKES OFF. Hey, now it’s hip to be Hayes! And why not? “The period of American history that followed the Civil War was one of the greatest and most successful ever experienced by any nation.” Reader Michael Wallace writes: “Who knew that one of Obama’s greatest accomplishments would be reviving interest in Rutherford B Hayes?” Yes, that is one of Obama’s greatest accomplishments.

And people are still having fun:

Related: Obama’s History Lesson: Future Generations Will Laugh At Us For Taking Him Seriously. Some of us are already laughing . . . . Including Professor Jacobson.

VIA DATECHGUY, a free Kindle book.

PELOSI’S DAUGHTER: HBO Uncomfortable With ‘Freeloading Welfare Queen’ Video.

Alexandra Pelosi debuted a video she made for HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” last night. The video shows multiple welfare recipients in New York City proclaiming they were at the welfare office to get their “Obama bucks” and that they supported Obama because he “gives me stuff.” Pelosi reported that people at the HBO headquarters in New York had said to her “you can’t show this” even though just last week the ran a controversial video showing Mississippi voters saying inflammatory things against the president.

To her credit, and to Bill Maher’s, they showed the video and openly discussed how liberals would hate it. Pelosi said “I didn’t have to go far to find ‘freeloading welfare queens.'” They were, in fact, right across the street from her New York City home.

Seems like there’s even less reason to subscribe to HBO. I don’t.

UPDATE: Reader Michael Grass writes:

HBO’s reluctance to show both sides of the story (re: Alexandra Pelosi’s video) was the final straw. I called Direct TV and asked that they cancel my subscription to HBO tonight. When they asked why I answered that I was fed up with their role as political propagandist for the democratic party as evidenced not only by their support of Bill Maher, but their movie Game Change and now their desire to stifle a documentary that conflicts with their narrative via Alexandra Pelosi. The customer support person said he understood and would get it removed from my account right away. While I didn’t ask how many if any other calls he had received like mine, I did make a mental note that he didn’t miss a beat or seem taken aback by the reasons I gave for cancelling. As you would say…hmmmm…

I’d really like to see their numbers.

BLOOD TESTS WON’T STOP GENE CHEATS. “Athletes trying to cheat by loading their bodies with genes that make muscles bigger and more efficient could be caught if forced to supply muscle biopsies, but not through the analysis of urine or blood samples.”

ROGER SIMON: Romney Derangement Syndrome. “Really? The co-founder of Bain Capital is a Marxist? Well, I suppose if Bain were wildly unsuccessful you could hypothesize some kind of Cloward-Piven covert sabotage of our economic system was being attempted. But it wasn’t — and isn’t.” Not by Romney, anyway.

HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY! We lunched at the Crown & Goose, which was all done up for the day, but only beginning to enjoy the influx of thirsty customers.

UPDATE: No, I won’t be going out to celebrate. I’m staying in and working on a writing project, though I may have a Guinness, and possibly a wee dram of Tullamore Dew, later.

Pics taken with the Lumix GX-1 using the 7-14 ultra-wideangle lens.

OH, GOODY: Pakistan Carts Its Nukes Around In Delivery Vans.

Tom Clancy should be suing Pakistani generals for ripping off the basic idea behind The Sum Of All Fears. You’ll recall that Pakistan is home to al-Qaida, a particularly fearsome version of the Taliban, the leadership of the old-school Taliban, its friends in the Haqqani Network and a host of anti-Indian terrorist groups that the Pakistani intelligence service employ as proxies. Sometimes the Pakistani military helps these terrorist and insurgent groups attack US troops in Afghanistan. And any one of these groups would love a chance to wield a nuclear weapon.

Except that Pakistan isn’t trying to safeguard its nukes from them. It’s trying to safeguard its nukes from us. The Navy SEAL raid in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden has made important Pakistani generals think that the US military’s next target is Pakistani nukes. So off the vans go, along what Ambinder and Goldberg term “congested and dangerous roads,” trying to throw off the scent of the US, with little more than hope to protect them from an adventurous highwayman.

The irony is that the US isn’t planning to steal Pakistan’s nukes — but Pakistan’s cavalier attitude toward nuclear security is making the US think twice about whether it should revise some worst-case-scenario contingency planning.

So why haven’t we addressed this problem with some of that “smart diplomacy” we were promised?

A SHOCKING DISCOVERY FOR THE FOLKS AT POLITICO:

President Barack Obama promised over and over during the health care debate that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

It turns out that, for a lot of people, that isn’t true.

A Congressional Budget Office report issued this week says that 3 to 5 million people could move from employer-based health care plans to government-based programs as the Affordable Care Act takes effect. And in the worst-case scenario, it could be as many as 20 million.

For Obama, it’s an inconvenient truth at a really inconvenient time — coming less than two weeks before the Supreme Court begins oral arguments on the law and just as the administration touts the law’s early benefits on its second anniversary.

And it’s not the only hard truth Obama and the law’s supporters are facing. No matter what they said about rising health care costs, those costs aren’t actually going to go down under health care reform.

If only someone had pointed this out before the bill was passed. . . .

IT’S OKAY, HE’S A DEMOCRAT: Sen. Sherrod Brown denounces ‘niggardly’ colleagues. Otherwise it would be a dog-whistle, or something.

STEVEN CHU, CALL YOUR OFFICE: An investigation at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant has determined that the problem with contaminated respirators goes back to at least February 2009.

HE’S BACK: Whit Stillman and the Song of the Preppy. “When we started production he said, ‘I think 12 years is the right amount of time between movies.’” I didn’t realize that Stillman was an Avalon Hill fan. Plus, “I detest Parfit!”

SCIENCE: With Relentless Testing, A Professor Watches His Body Get Sick. “For two-and-a-half years, he’s had regular blood samples drawn, and tracked the ebb and flow of 40,000 different molecules within his cells, from hormones to blood sugar, to the proteins of the immune system and mutated genes. Snyder also watched as his genetic vulnerability to diabetes turned into actual disease. . . . His story marks the first time anyone’s physiology has ever been followed this closely, and portends the future of personalized medicine, according to Snyder and others.”

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OLD-FASHIONED S.F. LEAPS TO LIFE: A review of John Carter.

STILL MORE FUN WITH RUTHERFORD B. HAYES:

LOL. Related: Top 20 #BarackObamasPresidentialFacts Tweets.

Here’s one: “James A. Garfield loved lasagna and hated Mondays.”

BREITBART IS THERE: At OccupyMidwest. Heh. “I went out to grab some wine earlier and was walking home when I saw these posters. They’re all over. I only took photos of the ones on my side of the street but I could make out others down the block. Breitbart is here!” More pics at the link. The “Stop Raping People!” is a nice touch, too.

Related: Whose Town? Our Town!

VIDEO: Obama’s War On Women.

Related: In Early Obama White House Female Staffers Felt Frozen Out.

Gosh, I wonder why?

SO IS SHE A RICK SANTORUM SUPPORTER? Raquel Welch Thinks Porn Has Made Us All Sex Addicts.

UPDATE: Reader Jeff Johnson writes: “Raquel Welch really can’t say much since she made me a sex addict.”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Bride Marries Herself. “Here comes the single bride. Last week, Nadine Schweigert married herself in a symbolic wedding ceremony. The 36-year-old divorced mom of three wore blue satin and clutched a bouquet of white roses as she walked down the aisle before a gathering of 45 friends and family members in Fargo, North Dakota.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Jews On The Run. “Jews are abandoning Third World countries where historically they had been persecuted and moving to large and generally free First World countries.”

ROSIE O’DONNELL’S TV SHOW WAS JUST CANCELED: “Did you even know she had one? Yes, it was on the ‘little-watched’ Oprah Winfrey network. It was little-watched on the little-watched network.”

Oprah’s brand sure has declined since 2008. Did she do something to alienate her audience back then?

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