I GOT SHOWN ABOUT TWENTY POSTS ON GAY MARRIAGE, BUT FRANKLY, THE WHOLE DEBATE: Is Pathetic.  It’s also a really great distraction, a way to turn people against each other and perhaps a way to give the federal government yet more power. Which is what we all want, right?

MEGAN MCARDLE: Happy Easter, Which is Not Named After Ishtar, Okay?

AT AMAZON, up to 50% off on Kitchen Appliances.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: “For years, I have been advising my cash-poor friends: the secret to an ultracheap international holiday is a Google News search for the words runaway inflation,” Graeme Wood writes in the Atlantic:

The place listed in the dateline of any recent articles including that phrase should be your destination. En route to your home airport, visit the bank and withdraw U.S. dollars in crisp hundreds and fifties. At your beleaguered landing place, the local currency’s value will be melting away like a snowman in July. Your greenbacks will remain pleasantly solid. Everyone at your destination—hoteliers, restaurant staff, tour guides—will covet them and cut you deals. For you, luxuries will suddenly become affordable. Until your return flight (assuming you make it back safely, and are not robbed by an increasingly desperate local mob), you will experience the dismal science at its most cheery.

And note this:

Inflation happens for many reasons, but hyperinflation scenarios are nearly always the same: a government fails to harvest enough revenue to pay its bills—usually because a war has drained its treasury, or its poor fiscal policies have tanked the economy—so it prints money to make up the difference. “The central bank is just producing a lot more money than people want to hold,” Hanke says. “They’re spending much more money than they’re raising in taxes, and they can’t get credit from the private sector. At that point, you’re off to the races.” Monetary supply outstrips demand, and the wild irresponsibility of the government scares everyone away from saving cash. Instead, people buy whatever they can get, immediately, and prices rise accordingly. Anyone caught with cash loses everything.

And anyone who has hard currency—the kind that doesn’t evanesce expensively, like smoke from a Cohiba—is sitting pretty.

Don’t worry, I’m sure it can’t happen here.

NEWS YOU CAN  USE :  8 ways to reincarnate a Peep, including Peep casserole, Peepshi, and Peep-infused vodka.

UNCLE JOE TAKES THIRD VACA OF 2013:  It’s tough being the Vice President.  Just ask Uncle Joe, who is now taking his 3d vacation of 2013, to swanky Kiawah Island, SC. 

YOUNG AND SEXUALLY ACTIVE IN NY? THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT: “Parents who visit the site are in for a surprising lesson about state law.”

AT AMAZON, coupons galore on Groceries.
Also, lawn mowers on sale.

SHROUD OF TURIN DATES TO JESUS’ LIFETIME:  Appropos of the upcoming Christian holiday of Easter, recent tests conducted by researchers at the University of Padua, Italy, have concluded that the famous linen sheet known as the Shroud of Turin– believed by some  to contain an image of the crucified body of Jesus– dates back to between 280 B.C. and A.D. 220, within the range of Jesus’ lifetime.

LIBERTY & SLIPPERY SLOPES:  John Hayward at RedState.com has a thoughtful essay on the slippery slope problem inherent in all new possible recognitions of constitutionally protected liberty.  Worth a read.

DEFENSE DEPARTMENT COWARDS:  The Defense Department is actively opposing legislation pending in Congress that would award the Purple Heart to the survivors of the Ft. Hood terrorism attack by Major Nidal Hasan.  Why?  Because DOD doesn’t want to call Hasan a “terrorist,” according to a document obtained by Fox News.

“The Army objects to (the proposal) because it would undermine the prosecution of Major Nidal Hasan by materially and directly compromising Major Hasan’s ability to receive a fair trial. This provision will be viewed as setting the stage for a formal declaration that Major Hasan is a terrorist, on what is now the eve of trial. Such a situation, prior to trial, would fundamentally compromise the fairness and due process of the pending trial,” the document said.

A HELPFUL TIME SAVER FOR SMALL BUSINESSES, from Doug Ross at his Director Blue blog: “As a public service for businesses impacted by Obamacare’s Byzantine maze of penalties, fees, taxes, mandates and other regulations that will require you to shed workers, our enterprising Cub Reporter Biff Spackle offers the following Semi-Official Obamacare Pink Slip.”

Heh, indeed.™

RELATED At Power Line, “Definitive Proof that Obamacare Raises Costs and Kills Jobs.”

5 GROUPS THAT ARE BEING CRUSHED BY OBAMA’S POLICIES:  John Hawkins over at TownHall outlines why blacks, single women, Hispanics, unions and young people are suffering under the Obama Administration’s policies.  Share this with your friends, particularly those who fall within these groups.

JIM CARREY, JENNY MCCARTHY HARDEST HIT: Vaccines Not Linked To Autism. Again.

MONEY FOR NOTHING:  American taxpayers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year for federal government workers who are AWOL, standby, doing union work, and other non-work.  And yet the Obama Administration insists that TSA, Customs and other critical workers need to be laid off because of sequestration.  Watch this report from Greta Van Susteren, and be prepared to be angry:

[jwplayer mediaid=”166186″]Money For Nothing! – Fed Gov’t Spends Millions On Standby Workers! – On The Record

TWO PBSs IN ONE! PBS’s Mark Shields: ‘The Rich Are the Scum of the Earth:’

MARK SHIELDS, PBS: I think it was G. K. Chesterton who said, “Wherever they are, the rich are the scum of the earth.”

[Laughter]

SHIELDS: For some reason, Charles doesn’t want to stand up for rich Russians. And I think somebody has to stand up for people who put their money in offshore or nontaxable places. Let’s remember, I mean, look at it this way: Cyprus is the Cayman Islands of a different time zone. That’s what it is. We don’t want rich people paying taxes whether they’re Russian or whether they’re Republicans.

GORDON PETERSON: But the rich people he’s talking about …

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: You don’t think there’s a difference between the way the Russian economy works and who gets rich? Russia doesn’t have a Steve Jobs. Russia has people who steal from what was once Soviet property and you get your money if you’re a crony of Putin and his other people.

SHIELDS: I wasn’t defending how one gets it. I was just merely addressing the compulsion to keep it and never to surrender any to the public wheel.

KRAUTHAMMER: There’s a difference between gains which are ill-gotten or fairly gotten.

PETERSON: Nina.

NINA TOTENBERG, NPR: [Groans] I’m not sure that a lot of the people that Mark is talking about who aren’t Russian got it so fairly either.

But please you wealthy people whom we just condemned, continue to sponsor our shows, and give generously during one of our seemingly weekly fundraisers. A generous pledge of $500 will bring you a $9.99 DVD of Woodstock and a PBS totebag!

Actually, the full Chesterton quote is:

“You English are an extraordinary lot,” said the Irishman, with a sudden and sombre quietude. ” I sometimes feel you may pull through after all.”

After another silence he said, ‘ You’re always right, Hump, and one oughtn’t to think of Yankees like that. The rich are the scum of the earth in every country. And a vast proportion of the real Americans are among the most courteous, intelligent, self-respecting people in the world. Some attribute this to the fact that a vast proportion of the real Americans are Irishmen.”

Modesty regarding my own heritage means that I can neither confirm nor deny the last portion of that sentiment, but it’s difficult to see anyone at PBS declaring that “a vast proportion of the real Americans are among the most courteous, intelligent, self-respecting people in the world.” I would imagine the thoughts of someone staring out from the glass windows of a PBS building into the hinterlands would be much more akin to this. Not to mention, this.

RELATED: Tales of the One Percent: “WaPo Executives Make Millions While Paper Cuts Staff, Benefits.” That seems rather “unexpectedly” paradoxical behavior from the management of a paper that supported Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

SEQUESTRATION MANIPULATION:  According to a new study released by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), excessive government waste amounts to $42 billion each year– enough to fund 45,000 years of White House tours. 

MORE LIB/PROGRESSIVE HYPOCRISY:  As John Nolte at Breitbart points out, The lamestream media was quick to condemn Dr. Ben Carson and other conservatives for pondering whether recognizing same-sex marriage as a constitutional right would open the door to other non-traditional unions, including polygamy, polyandry, or incest.  Yet they didn’t blink an eye when Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor– an Obama appointee– engaged in the same line of inquiry during oral arguments.  According to Nolte:

But no one on the left or in the media cared that Sotomayor used the horror of incest to make a point about same-sex marriage — because Sotomayor is a leftist and they know which way she is going to rule. Moreover, the point she was making was obvious.

The point Carson was making was just as obvious. But because the right-leaning Carson is both black and conservative, which makes him a threat to the left-leaning mainstream media’s  attempted stranglehold on the Narrative, doesn’t “know his place,” Wolf Blitzer and Andrea Mitchell and NBC News and CNN played “gotcha” with him to “put him back in his place.”

This sort of behavior by the MSM is so ubiquitous that I almost don’t notice it anymore.

CAIR CONDEMNS IN 3..2..1..NEVER: New York Muslim Calls For Sharia Law In America, Beheading Gays.

(Via the Barracuda Brigade.)

DON YOUNG AND THE DEMOCRATS’ HOMER SIMPSON PROBLEM: “There is only one Don Young in the Republican Party.  But the Democrats have a ‘Homer Simpson problem’ that dwarfs any stupid comment by a single congressman,” J. Christian Adams writes.

Read the whole thing.

I’M PUTTING MY BACK LIST ONLINE: Starting with an Omnibus of my first published books.  Warning to those who like my Science Fiction — this is very different.  The editor wanted literary fantasy and I wanted to get published.  OTOH it shows off my… versatility.

COLORING THE NEWS: “Because It Wasn’t Already Contentious Enough … WaPo Op-Ed Injects Race Into the Gun Debate.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times sees racism in the conservative reaction to the seeming attempt by leftist California elites to destroy the once Golden State.

But then, past or present, what doesn’t the Gray Lady view through a racialist prism?

UPDATE: “Why Did Those Racist Crackers at CNN Keep Roland Martin From Being a Star?”

OBAMA BACK ON GOLF COURSE AFTER SPENDING OUTCRY FROM GOP: “Nearly a month after forced spending cuts prompted some Republicans to call on President Barack Obama to cease his weekend golf outings, the commander-in-chief returned to the links for a springtime round Saturday,” CNN reports.

Meanwhile, it’s been “More than a Vacation a Month for Obamas in 2013,” Daniel Halper of the Weekly Standard noted earlier this week, and “Biden to Take Third Vacation of the Year,” Keith Koffler adds at White House Dossier.

MAGPUL REVEALS PLANS FOR COLORADO EXODUS: “It’s still not clear if the new gun control laws in Colorado will save any lives. That’s still up for debate. What is clear is that the state will lose jobs because of their shotgun gun control legislation. Magpul Industries remains committed to their customers and the Second Amendment. But the company is moving forward. They’re moving out of Colorado. And they’re taking hundreds of good paying jobs with them,” Jim Hoft writes at Gateway Pundit.

‘GERMANY PAYS BILLIONS TO DELAY GLOBAL WARMING FOR 37 HOURS:’ John Stossel interviews Skeptical Environmentalist author Bjorn Lomberg on the cost of fixing global warming.