Michael P. DeCicco, a resident of Severn, Maryland, writes to the Baltimore Sun:

I’m not part of the black helicopter crowd. I don’t think the census will be used to track my movements or steal my DNA. Still, I don’t see any advantage in filling out the form and returning it.

My county knows who and where I am, and I trust that locally my family is accounted for. I religiously pay my taxes, so someone somewhere knows I exist.

I don’t want the federal government spending any more money on my behalf. I don’t want them to spend money on my census form, I don’t want them to pay people to come to my house, I don’t want them to pay someone to tabulate the data from my form. I don’t want them to allocate any more federal dollars to the state of Maryland due to my existence. I don’t want them burdening my children with any more debt.

The state of Maryland exists as it does due only to our proximity to the high paying jobs of the federal government. If not for that, the entirety of our one-party dominated anti-business state would be wallowing in filth, crime and food stamps. We consistently rank at the bottom of business-friendly states. We have no idea how to sustain ourselves without jobs and assistance from the federal government. I want no part in that.

It’s also obvious to me that Maryland’s congressional representatives are the worst in the nation. They are predictable liberals with no new ideas and no good ideas, whose only mission appears to be to sustain their employment while passing their bills along to our children. Are we expected to work toward increasing the ranks of those who ignore our concerns and economically assault our children on a daily basis?

I see no benefit to filling out the census. I don’t want more Maryland representation in Congress, I want less. From my vantage point, my only two options are to throw the form in the trash, or fill it out and say that I live in Texas.

I’m sure Texas would be happy to have Mr. DeCicco.

What do we do with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner? Tim Cavanaugh has a recommendation:

Geithner must not only be removed from office but be imprisoned like Magneto in a metals-free environment where there will be no conductivity for his brain waves of pure bamboozlement.

Other nominations for Washington’s version of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants are solicited.

Wilma Mankiller, first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, following husband Charlie Lee Soap’s revelation that she has terminal pancreatic cancer:

I want my family and friends to know that I am mentally and spiritually prepared for this journey; a journey that all human beings will take at one time or another. I learned a long time ago that I can’t control the challenges the Creator sends my way but I can control the way I think about them and deal with them.

On balance, I have been blessed with an extraordinarily rich and wonderful life, filled with incredible experiences. And I am grateful to have a support team composed of loving family and friends.

Mankiller, now sixty-four, was the deputy chief in 1985 when Ross Swimmer resigned as principal chief to join the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington; she won the tribal election in her own right in 1987, and was reelected in 1991.

Harry Belafonte turned 81 this past Monday, which makes him 30,318 days old. DAY-AY-AYS OLD.

(Linked to this.)

A reminder about the general lack of privacy these days, from Stephen W. Browne:

[We] have to live with the possibility any embarrassing or shameful thing we do or say could be recorded, and that recording could be around forever… It used to be religion exercised a certain amount of social control by teaching God watches and judges you. I liked it better when it was only God. He’s more forgiving and doesn’t post on YouTube.

Now if He starts posting on Funny or Die … but never mind, don’t go there. I didn’t even suggest that. (I am so doomed.)

The new O’Hare runway is planned to go right over a cemetery, potentially displacing dozens of voters.

(Linked to this.)

With an actual illustration this time around, yet. Fug Girl Heather says of Lindsay Lohan’s dress here:

This is half of a cute dress, and half of what the witches wear in Macbeth On Ice.

Admittedly, this is supposed to be Contemporary Fashion, where occasionally fair is foul and foul is fair, but geez. Is this one of the pieces La Lohan designed for Emanuel Ungaro? I don’t remember it from the Spring 2010 collection — or it could be simply that the brain is trying to protect itself from damage. Your call. “At least this is not leggings,” says Heather.

(More photos of this same garb here. And is that a bruise on her leg?)

This month in Playboy, singer John Mayer steps on his schwanz. (The heavier steps have been reproduced all over the place, including the HuffPo.) Those who track the Zeitgeist more effectively than I do, which is almost everyone, seem to be split on whether Mayer is some sort of racist for disdaining black women and blaming it on the Little Head, or whether he’s simply an asshat with a Big Mouth.

Aaryn B. leans toward the latter explanation:

Honey, you are an affront to frat boys everywhere and that’s a damn near impossible feat. You are not smart. You are not cute. You are not deep. You are not intellectual or witty or cool or hip or dope or fly or whatever it is you fancy yourself to be. You have a small, small, small brain and a very big mouth. You are a self-important asshat raised to the 11th power, quadrupled by dickheadery, topped with three servings of phony and one heaping scoop of overcompensation.

I’m glad I didn’t piss her off.

Warning: That page from which I quoted incorporates some photos that some people — those with taste — may find disturbing.

Excerpts from Megan McArdle’s Quarterly Plea for Comment Thread Civility, not necessarily in the original order:

Many people wander into the other half of the Blogosphere having carefully nurtured a plethora of witty responses to the straw man arguments that flourish in the echo chambers of both the liberal and conservative press. They are therefore expecting that as soon as they have shone the cold light of reason on the ridiculous notions of those rubes on the other side, all but the mean-spirited and vicious among them will immediately see the error of their ways. When they find out that those people have real live reasons for believing as they do, often bolstered by real live facts, they are hurt. This is not what they expected. They feel surprised, and somehow betrayed. At this juncture, they often choose to go on the offensive, name calling and writing sarcastic, bombastic screeds which often seem to center around the silliest and most biased material available to their side, yet are shocked to find out that libertarians are, for some reason, unconvinced by the latest publications from the CSPI. Often, defending their initial assertions against angles they hadn’t, in their previous hothouse environment, really considered, leads them to take increasingly extreme positions in defense of their original unnuanced view, until having found themselves arguing that in order to, say, prevent abortions we should take down the name and phone number of anyone who ever paused in front of a Planned Parenthood Clinic and then hunt them down and shoot them, they flounce away after declaring that everyone on the site is a bunch of ignorant [expletive deleted] who kill babies for fun. If you find yourself caught in this cycle, I have news for you: they’re not the ignorant [expletive deleted] here.

Other behavior by said ignorant [expletive deleted]:

No one gets to pick some time in the distant past when everyone was right, and declare that they draw their moral authority from the denizens of that halcyon era. The fifties and the sixties are over, folks. If your idea can’t stand on its own now, its popular history won’t help it.

So are the thirties, now that I think about it.

And finally:

And fer gosh sakes, will you get out a little more? The sureness of your own ineluctable moral superiority, of the venal stupidity of the other side, of the patent weakness of the opposition’s arguments and moral fiber, is a little tiresome. Cruise around and see what the other side has to say. Then attack them. Nicely, of course. Really, it saves a lot of trouble putting words in the mouths of straw men when you can probably find some idiot somewhere who said pretty much the same thing, and think of how much less typing you’ll do.

Despite its TL;DR capacity, I urge you to read the whole thing — and the subsequent comments, which for the most part do not sound the least bit chastened.

Yes, two of them. Color me indecisive. (Or maybe you shouldn’t.)

I lean toward the “Never speak ill of the dead” side of the spectrum, myself, so it would not have occurred to me to say what Jenn says here about the late Howard Zinn:

I’m not sure he will join Teddy Kennedy in hell but if he doesn’t he should be made to spend eternity in a Catholic school purgatory with nuns slapping history into his head with yardsticks. I hate to think how much damage that book of his has done to America.

Okay, it would not have occurred to me to say it out loud.

Sonic Charmer on health care viewed as a utility:

Notice that most people aren’t really all that happy about how cell phone plans work — signing lengthy contracts, paying high monthly fees whether or not they use it, etc. I submit that the way we pay for health care has a lot of the same problems (and more — after all, at least the government doesn’t incentivize our employers to garnish our paychecks to pay for our cell phone plans) — but people just don’t notice it because they don’t think about health care the same way that they think about their cell phone plans.

They should. And if Basic Health Care was essentially a utility, a monthly service, like cell phone plans, then maybe they would — and maybe they’d stop and see that what they’re asking for when they clamor for government to “reform” “healthcare” is the health-care equivalent of asking the government to take over Sprint and then force everyone to sign up for 50-year cell phone contracts in which the government has the power to limit the number of minutes.

[Insert reference to iPhone — not available on Sprint — here]

Reclusive author J.D. Salinger dead at 91. As usual, he was unavailable for comment.

(Linked to this.)

While covering the Massachusetts Senate race, Robert Stacy McCain encounters, to his delight, actual reporters, mostly at medium-sized papers:

These local reporters do the kind of straightforward, Joe Friday “just-the-facts-ma’am” reporting I was taught to do back in the day. The prospect of losing that Old School attitude is one reason I am reluctant to join the online cheerleaders for the decline of dead tree journalism.

Which reminds me: “Dead-tree” as an adjective in this context is probably accurate, but that word “dead,” even though it properly modifies “tree,” tends to ooze over the entire phrase, giving the impression of imminent extinction.

And that’s something you’d not want to encourage, regardless of your political positions, says McCain:

What’s not so great is the kind of blanket anti-media hostility that celebrates the death of dead tree journalism as an end unto itself. Old School journalism thrives best in the dead-tree environment. Media bias is a story as old as Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning Stalinist propaganda. But the answer to bias is not a Samson-in-the-temple frenzy to destroy the entire commercial enterprise that employs the majority of America’s professional reporters.

It annoys the hell out of me when people act as if that the expression of opinion is more important than the reporting of facts, and that TV talking-heads are more important than reporters whose medium is the written word. Conservatives who disdain reporting and disrespect reporters — and, oh, could I tell you some stories about that — are guilty of a recto-cranial inversion, suffering a self-defeating delusion about the nature of media.

And as for those lost souls who think it the function of reporters to adhere to the talking points proclaimed by their betters, you have to assume that they’ve been seduced by the breathtaking view of their own alimentary canals.

Matt A. Mayer wonders when the heads are going to start rolling:

Snickering aside, how does anyone expect accountability in government when those who fail suffer no real consequences? Other than Mike “Heckuva Job, Brownie” Brown, I am not aware of one federal employee who was fired due to the failures involved with the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina. What does a federal bureaucrat need to do to get fired? If we want accountability, then we need to change how federal employees in national-security fields are protected from being fired for failing to do their jobs.

So, yes, Secretary Janet Napolitano should go, but she should go because her tenure as a whole has been a wreck. From her response to the “right-wing” threat report, to the counterproductive reverses made on immigration policy, to the continued pork-barrel feeding frenzy of the homeland-security grants, to the semantic sleight of hand on “man-made disasters,” to her clueless claim that “the system worked,” she does not instill confidence in either the American public or the DHS bureaucracy. Napolitano is just plain ineffective, which is deadly. DHS is hard enough to manage already; an ineffective leader will only ensure further failures. But it shouldn’t just be token political appointees who get fired when failures occur.

Napolitano’s boss, at least, knows where the buck is supposed to stop.

Dan B. at Basketbawful describes a ghastly little contretemps in the Washington Wizards’ locker room:

In the most amazing yet somehow completely unsurprising story of the year so far, Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton went all Walter Sobchak on each other and drew their guns in the locker room on Christmas Eve. Nobody got shot, but even if Agent Zero had pulled the trigger, I wouldn’t have been too worried considering his shooting percentage this year is only 41%.

And Crittenton hasn’t taken a shot all year. On the court, I mean.

The incident, incidentally, is now reported to have occurred three days earlier, on the 21st of December.

Bonus WTF: In the 1990s, owner Abe Pollin officially changed the name of this team:

I won a World Championship under the name Bullets. However, too often during the mid to late ’90s, I would hear the word “bullets” associated with guns and violence instead of my basketball team. While the name was longstanding, I finally reached a point that I was simply tired of the association between the two. Then, my good friend, Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated in Israel. That was the final straw. It was time to change names.

Pollin died last November. He would probably not have been amused by this locker-room tomfoolery.

Yes, we have two:

MLB and Umpires reach a five year deal. Still no vision plan.

(Linked to this.)

Chickasaw Nation makes generous donation to OU Cancer Institute, will be renamed Chemosabe Research Center.

(Linked to this.)

Smitty finds the drama behind the Franken/Lieberman Incident:

Senator Lieberman may as well have been a man pleading for prostate cancer treatment. The presence of Senator Smalley foreshadows the coming Death Panel saying “Sorry, no budget for you. We can give you Ibuprofen.”

“Thanks, no offense taken,” replies a morose Joe in this hypothetical scene, “but I was taxed at a rather high rate my whole life in order to pay for this kind of thing. How is it that I’ve followed the rules all along, yet still come up short?”

Smalley takes on a expression blending boredom with sadness. “You know the four stages:

1. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
2. If everyone else couldn’t have it, it was/is immoral to let you have it.
3. You had, therefore you must have stolen.
4. Since you were classified a thief, it was morally correct to separate you from your ill-gotten gains.

Thus, you should thank the State for having kept your foul capitalism in check these years. I shall accept your gratitude, as a representative of the State.”

Lieberman, dejected: “Thanks.”

Smalley, beaming: “You’re welcome.”

As with all good drama, there is an element of truth to it. Unfortunately.

A possibly-admirable observation from The House of David:

The suffix “-able,” in English, points to an objective fact. Where there is no such fact, the suffix is bullshit. I usually see it in Progressive propaganda.

Who consumes and develops sustainable development? Who rates the price for which buyer to afford affordable housing? Who pushes for and pulls against inevitable change?

In practice: Sustainable development means Progressives cut off your water and power. Affordable housing means Progressives build in your precinct a slum for their voters. Inevitable social change means Progressives have … well, look around.

I have a word for those who use this suffix — despicable.

I wonder, though, if spelling the suffix with an I is permissible.

Florida coach Urban Meyer hospitalized for dehydration. If only the Gators had access to a beverage to prevent this.

(Linked to this.)

Smitty, interviewed at American Glob (as noted here), not only connects the dots but tracks the vectors:

It’s interesting that analysis of an engineering system, from a control standpoint, involves discovering where the state is kept. The same word, “state”, which we use in a political context. Where are the gazinatas and gazoutas? Where does potential and kinetic energy store itself internally? Given a transfer function that models something, what signals would be required to drive the system to a different operating point? To put the elevator on another floor of the building in a way that is quick, but does not have the passengers going ballistic. All useful feedback is negative: “Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.” — John 15:2

In fact, that could be a slogan for the blogosphere: “All useful feedback is negative.” In the rare instance that [fill in name of politician] is doing something right … but never mind, we’ll cover that when we get into fiction generally.

BBC angrily pulls shows off air after discovering that producers passed fake scenes off as real, saying that behaviour might be acceptable in climate change research but daytime television has higher standards than that.

(Linked to this.)

Australian Robert Townshend interrupts his study of bamboo for this observation:

On the subject of commercial achievement, one wonders why great corporations, and Hollywood studios amongst them, seem to have such scorn for the extraordinary entrepreneurs who made their corporations and studios possible. If you asked the typical Harvard MBA, CEO or Hollywood boss whom he most admired, it would probably be the charismatic figurehead of a quasi one-party state in Africa or South America, Bono, or a fashionable theocratic figure like the Dalai Lama. Or Al Gore.

Plutocrats who would rage if their limo broke down on the way to a Darfur benefit would look at you in bewilderment if you suggested that Soichiro Honda was a benefactor of mankind. For the modern corporate man, a titan like Honda is the guy who was dumb enough [to] do all the work and take all the risks. Wouldn’t know an executive bonus if it bit him on the bum.

What studio boss would be willing to make All the Vice President’s Men, story of cover-ups by a major British climate authority to aid in the dispersal of the West’s wealth and dismantling of its industries? Couldn’t happen in real life. Besides, Redford has moved on to corruption in 1950s quiz shows, Hoffman is maybe practising his Venezuelan accent for the definitive Hugo Chavez biopic.

Actually, I think I’d like to see a Soichiro Honda biopic. They could call it Dream.

Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, possibly expressing dismay at The Twilight Saga: New Moon, released this month:

The movie includes beauteous fields filled with potted flowers apparently buried hours before by the grounds crew, and nobody not clued in on the plot. Since they know it all and we know all, sitting through this experience is like driving a pickup in low gear though a sullen sea of Brylcreem.

Ebert gives the film, in lieu of stars, a little dab.

All we are saying, or at least what Robert Stacy McCain is saying, is give atavistic xenophobia a chance:

Except for straight, white, Protestant males, the only path to authentic identity under the multicultural regime is to separate yourself from the mainstream and strike a pose of alienated grievance. You’re only an authentic woman if you’re a militant feminist, and you’re only an authentic Latino if you’re marching with MALDEF.

Because such a posture only makes sense in the context of oppression and victimhood, everybody walks around with their insensitivity-detectors set to “stun,” prepared to blast anyone suspected of less-than-perfect tolerance. If it weren’t for racism, sexism and homophobia, the identity-politics lobbies wouldn’t have a fundraising raison d’etre, so they have a vested interest in magnifying every grievance.

“Tolerance,” incidentally, used to mean the ability to stand pain (from the Latin tolerare, to endure), or the range of acceptable deviation in a piece being machined. Its least-useful connotation, though, is not in this particular realm, but where it’s buckled behind the quantity “zero,” invariably found attached to an institution that honors buzzwords over brains.

This is, incidentally, not to deny the existence of actual grievances; were every last one of them immediately resolved, however, a lot of people would be out of work.

This mau-mau attitude actually causes more problems than it solves. The activist types who acquire money and influence by exaggerating evidence of “oppression” don’t really give a damn about the people they claim to represent. CAIR isn’t about the average Muslim any more than the National Council of Churches is about the average Methodist or the AFL-CIO is about the average blue-collar worker. The identity-politics professionals are merely exploiting the collective groups they claim to represent.

Not to mention the fact that anyone who tried to speak for the Syrian-Lebanese/Mexican/Scots-Irish likes of me would have to be wearing more hats than Bartholomew Cubbins.

And speaking of hats, a tip of the nearest one to Tom Wolfe, for putting “mau-mau” into the vernacular.

Members of blind and deaf community upset that one of their own won’t play Helen Keller on Broadway; authorities baffled as to how they found out.

(Linked to this.)

News, Greg Beato points out in Reason, is actually doing just fine on the Web:

While newspaper loyalists are forever touting the original reporting that appears in your morning fish wrap as the factor that distinguishes it from the hordes of opinion-spouting bloggers, what the Web has really revealed is how much territory newspapers have left either underreported or completely untouched. Newspapers never systematically reviewed school-teachers, for example, and now they’ve been scooped by the angry third-grade muckrakers who post at RateMyTeacher.com. They never systematically reviewed the lying, cheating “dumpster dawgs” that women should avoid at all costs, but the citizen journalists at DontDateHimGirl.com cover such territory thoroughly, supplying names, addresses, employer information, and more. When I want to learn something about the new hardware store that just opened in my neighborhood, I find the answers at Yelp.com, not in the San Francisco Chronicle. When I want to know what all those sirens that woke me up last night were responding to, I search for clues on Everyblock.com. Call this information trivial if you like, but it’s certainly serving the local public interest in a way that, say, a New York Times dispatch from the front lines of the fish wars on East Africa’s Migingo Island can’t touch.

That’s not to say that old-fashioned reporting isn’t hard and valuable work. It is, and as David Simon, former reporter turned champion of soon-to-be-former reporters and creator of The Wire, explained at John Kerry’s Senate panel on the “future of journalism” last May, it’s no job for part-timers and gadflies. It “requires daily, full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out until the best of them know everything with which a given institution is contending.”

And, Robert Stacy McCain might add, shoe leather:

What’s great about being a freelancer is that, if I’ve got an idea for a story, I basically assign myself to it. So last March, I called up my editor at the Spectator, told him that Hillary would be appearing within a few hours’ drive of my house, he said, “OK,” and off I went.

Kind of cool, especially after so many years of being stuck in the office most days as an assistant editor on the national desk at The Washington Times. Going out on the road to cover a story reminds me of my glorious younger days as a small-town sports editor, rolling down the highway en route to a big track meet or basketball tournament.

Maybe someday McCain will get a chance to cover the fish wars on East Africa’s Migingo Island.

AT&T to raise landline prices. In other news, Maxell to raise cassette tape prices.

(Linked to this.)

I can’t possibly argue with Little Miss Attila on this point:

Anything that “set[s] back the greater cause of female orgasm” is not a victimless crime.

I do try my best to stay out of the way.

(She was quoting Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh, if you’re curious.)

Much has been made in blogdom of that “Artificial Virginity Kit” being sold, and I was going to skip over the whole thing and pretend I never saw it.

Then Stacy McCain arrived with a fair measure of perspective:

Is not honesty a virtue equal or superior to chastity? And what virtue shall we praise more than mercy? For even if society condemns fornication — as well it should — it would be a most cruel thing to seek a woman’s hand in marriage under such terms as to require her to engage in a horrid deceit, lest she suffer death for being honest.

If this is genuinely the state of society in some places, then there is only one proper and honorable course of conduct for any woman who, for whatever reason, may have fear of this particular custom: Let her reject the proposed marriage. Her would-be husband, if he genuinely wants her, ought to be willing to accept her as she is, however she is.

Perhaps easier said than done in some societies, as noted by several of McCain’s commenters. But I continue to believe that if he isn’t willing to accept her, he doesn’t deserve her, and I don’t care what kind of doctrinal gloss is applied.

Commenter “JT” at The Truth About Cars:

[B]eing first (or loudest) on the InterTwitterGoogleWeb doesn’t necessarily make you right and it rarely makes you valuable.

Just ask the nearest elder statesman in these parts.

Start small, counsels James Taranto:

Rather than hastily remake the human health-care system, why not start by experimenting with a public option for felines and canines? We could call it Peticare or the Veterinarians Administration, and it would be a useful test of whether the government is capable of administering health insurance without producing out-of-control costs, rationing and euthanasia.

The only problem is that some people might object to having their cats and dogs used as guinea pigs.

Imagine that.