Obama’s position on corn-based ethanol is no better on the substance, but at least his position has stayed the same:
This is what we’ve come to in the strange world of ethanol politics: a presidential candidate furiously trying to explain away her previous good sense. Sigh. I can’t wait until the Iowa primary is over.
C’mon, guys. You can do better than "Writers want fair share!" Meanwhile, the slow march toward a perfectly virtual popular culture continues:
The significance of this is that live action movies and animated features operate under different rules. And, additionally, a fully-realized animated actor never ages, dies, or gets fat (unless the producer of the film want him or her to do so). This puts additional power into the hands of film producers and rather less into those of performers. The other major effect may be to further tip the scale in the direction of video games. The electronic games industry is already larger than the film industry and it, too, operates under different rules. Will Hollywood writers turn to electronic games?
Ron Jeremy impersonates Britney Spears. You know you wannit. It’s after the jump.
Newton, Massachusetts, 3.22 pm.
Now I understand Glenn Reynolds a bit better:
“If little children and primates show pretty much the same pattern you see in adults, it calls into question just how deliberate these rationalization processes are,” [psychologist, Matthew D. Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles] says. “We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that’s an outsider’s perspective. This experiment shows that there isn’t always much conscious thought going on.”
Brian Doherty notices an interesting nugget in this piece on NPod’s view that it is always 1937 and he is always Churchill. If you didn’t know that the Podhoretz family – Midge and Norm and JPod – are pathologically homophobic, this will help jog your memory:
In Podhoretz’s view, "the best people looked to other men for sex and romance," and as a result, didn’t much like them being killed by the score on the Continent. "Anyone familiar with homosexual apologetics today will recognize these attitudes."
Tying things back into the 1970s, Podhoretz pointed to the "parallels with England in 1937" and warned that "this revival of the culture of appeasement ought to be troubling our sleep." (A correspondent in a subsequent issue of Harper’s would admit that he "had not previously realized that Winston Churchill fought the Battle of Britain almost singlehandedly while England’s ubiquitous faggotry sneered and jeered from below.")
Ubiquitous faggotry? Heh.
Welcome to $9 trillion worth of debt. Ah, the responsibility society that Bush promised us. It just didn’t apply to him, did it? Kicker:
The total national debt is actually higher than $9 trillion because it includes borrowing by some agencies that are not covered by the congressional debt limit. That total was $9.086 trillion on Tuesday.
It took the country from George Washington until Ronald Reagan to reach the first $1 trillion in debt.
It’s wonderful to see such an unimpeachable icon of the last civil rights movement adding his voice to today’s:
"I just want to be very clear and this is obviously in no way an insult to the Muslim community who I respect deeply but I want people to know who I am. I am a Christian. I am a member of Trinity United Church of Christ. I have been for 15 years. I have never practiced Islam and I think it’s important for people not to buy into these sort of fear tactics that people also often use during political games. People need to know the facts. These are the facts as I presented them and I hope that that at least does not become a reason for people not to want to vote for me," – Barack Obama, rebutting one of the remarkably resilient attempted "smears" of his candidacy.
VDH:
The nearly half-trillion dollars we will soon pay for imported oil does a lot more than prop up Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The petrodollar drain also contributes to our trade deficits, falling dollar and a general demoralization of the American people.
Our oil habit not only makes us dependent on some creepy suppliers, but we look like fools as we work nonstop to hand over our earnings to those who are rich by an accident of sitting atop oil someone else found and developed.
I’m worried. Agreeing with Hewitt and Hanson in the space of half an hour? Are the ideological tectonic plates shifting again?
