ENTHUSIASM: A report from the Utah Caucuses from reader Kendall Jackman: “This is my precinct’s caucus meeting right now. In 2008, only 14 showed up, 40 in 2010. This year, over 100. Our precinct covers only a dozen and a half neighborhood streets. This is big.”
TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Dianne Feinstein, intellectual-property felon! “At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Feinstein held up a burned CD with a pirated version of the movie Shrek that she said an aide had downloaded from a peer-to-peer network.”
J.D. JOHANNES RECOMMENDS this piece on Afghanistan.
Related thoughts via Michael Yon.
And if you missed it, check out this WaPo editorial on Afghanistan.
AS JUDGE SPOTSWOOD ROBINSON USED TO SAY, WHAT’S YOUR NEXT ARGUMENT, COUNSELOR? Bill Maher: There’s No Double Standard, Because I’m Funny, and Rush Isn’t.
UPDATE: Reader Michael Smith writes:
Just cancelled this morning, if you’re counting the decrements to the HBO user-base.
I think they’re going to need more than a few global climate change scientists to hide this decline. Gleick might be available.
I’d like to see the numbers.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader James Smith — no relation to Michael as far as I know — writes: “Seriously, does anyone remember when he was last funny? Not in my life time and i’m older than he is.”
AT AMAZON, Blu-Ray and DVD as low as $5.99.
SKYDIVER MAKES TEST JUMP FROM 13 MILES UP. “Baumgartner is only the third person in history to have jumped from such a height. As amazing as it was, the leap from 13.5 miles was but a test run for his truly insane plan for a record-setting stratospheric skydive later this summer from 23 miles up.”
NEW YORK DEMOCRATIC REP. GARY ACKERMAN will retire.
THEY SAY THAT LIKE IT’S A BAD THING: Nerf: The “Gateway Gun?” I say: More toy guns, fewer religious extremists like Father Pfleger who want to run our lives.
TO PROTECT AND SERVE: Meet Officer Vader.
UPDATE: Reader Mike Pendray points out that you can buy it on Amazon.
MORE ON LIMBAUGH, MAHER, HBO, ETC., from reader Sean Crowley:
I’m a long-time reader who usually has no time or patience for social activists or activism. I find staying out of one another’s way works best. But even I have reached a point where I realize Edmund Burke was right and standing aside is no answer. All I’ve done is cancel my HBO account. But from here on in I am looking for ways to help right thinking businesses.
This seems to be a trend.
GUESS WHO’S HIRING: Atlas Shrugged, The Movie.
If the effort to limit the contraceptive mandate were truly a frontal assault on women, a majority of them would not be endorsing the offensive. But the ideology of groups like Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women (NOW) sometimes ignores inconvenient gender realities.
Those advocates have been distracted from a different and far less figurative war on women—which, as it happens, is helped rather than hindered by one of the “reproductive rights” they champion. Legal abortion may empower women, but it has also become a powerful method for the mass elimination of females.
Modern technology allows prospective parents to learn the sex of a fetus, and many of them use that knowledge to exercise a preference for sons. Absent such intervention, about 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. But as Mara Hvistendahl reports in her 2011 book “Unnatural Selection,” the number for boys per 100 girls has risen to 112 in India and 121 in China.
It was once assumed that the general preference for male offspring would subside as countries became richer and women became more educated. But in country after country, that has proved false.
Nor is the phenomenon limited to the eastern hemisphere.
Read the whole thing.
HMM: Sinking land shows East Antarctic ice sheet is stable.
The East Antarctic ice sheet looks unlikely to release its frozen grip any time soon. A new model suggests that prehistoric sea-level rise long thought to have been caused by the ice sheet melting was actually the result of local subsidence.
The science appears to remain unsettled.
MORE THOUGHTS ON THE CHARLIE ROSE SWEATSHOP LAWSUIT:
Liberals are trying to destroy Limbaugh by attacking him for his failure to live up to principles that could be characterized as either liberal or conservative. (Treating women with special respect — is that a feminist or a traditional-values notion?) Now, here’s a way to attack the liberal icon Charlie Rose, using what I think are mostly liberal principles: minimum wage, equal pay for equal work, and government-imposed rules about labor relations. Also: ensuring that the children of the wealthy don’t get special advantages. (They’re the ones that can afford to begin their careers with nonpaying internships.) I assume libertarians and conservatives don’t worry about free citizens freely choosing to work for free.
But you can’t really compare Charlie Rose to Rush Limbaugh. There’s no fun in bringing down Charlie Rose, and, anyway, conservatives aren’t salivating at the opportunity to destroy a voice on the left, are they?
No. As Professor Jacobson observes: “There is no equivalent of Media Matters on the conservative side, a well-funded organization devoted to silencing political opponents through secondary advertiser boycotts.”
UPDATE: Reader Patrick Carroll writes: “Give me a Conservative ‘Media Matters’ and I will write an annual $1,000 (at least) check. If I don’t, please feel free to shame me in public. God knows, spending on this, rather than scotch, may well prolong the time I am a minor gore in sacred liberal oxen – which always make the best conservative hamburger- and also extend my life. Which, well, more liberal oxen”
INSIDE NASA’S next Mars rover.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Are you easily seduced?
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NICK GILLESPIE: When Wall Street Makes Crap Loans, It’s a Crisis; When DOE’s Steven Chu Does It, It’s Green Energy.
Watch out, Nick. Obama will be calling you a flat-Earther or something.
On the other hand, even Talking Points Memo is busting Obama for this one. “President Obama got a laugh out of a Maryland audience on Thursday when he mocked the Republican Party in a speech, comparing their skepticism of alternative energy to the ‘Flat Earth Society’ in Christopher Columbus’ day and President Rutherford B. Hayes’ apparent dismissal of the telephone. But while Obama thinks the GOP is in need of a science lesson, he may need to bone up on history himself. . . . Obama’s hardly the first presidential candidate to screw things up on the trail. But for an address specifically going after his opponents for their ignorance, it’s probably not great to have a ‘citation needed’ banner on top of his speech.”
Science is based on evidence. The evidence here is that Obama’s green programs are about funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to cronies and supporters.
BOMBS VS. BUNKERS in a potential Iran attack.
MATT DRUDGE DEMONSTRATES THE ART OF DRUDGETAPOSITION:
A BMW FOR GEEKS.
CRYING FOUL: Frank J. Fleming says that if they were going to make his hugely popular Obama book into a movie, they should have given him credit or something.
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