From RR

• The proper rôle of government. The government isn’t there to be generous, kind, helpful, supportive, charitable [I’ll add godly] and so forth — it exists so as to make sure peace prevails and justice is done. The government, like referees at a sports event, must take care of the rules, not play the sport, as it were.
• Good: Americans are angry at the feds. But of course Fox News hasn’t joined us; they’re just sniping because their side’s not in power.
• This poor census worker shouldn’t have been murdered but that happens in revolutions.
• Who’s afraid of Sibel Edmonds? Security sham or some foreign spies get special treatment.
• Will Griggs doesn’t like cops. Most LRC regulars don’t. I don’t reflexively oppose the police (part conventional conservatism/unashamed nostalgia, part Catholicism honouring legitimate authority as scripture teaches) but, especially after recently having been extorted out of nearly 60 bucks in a New Jersey town for a burnt-out light bulb and threatened because my papers (like in a war film in Germany) were out of date (wrong address), I know what they mean. Philly cops in my firsthand experience over the years are the finest locally.
• Country bankrupt? Stop funding the imperial war machine.
• Great Depression II: it ain’t over ’til it’s over. My company’s officially out of bankruptcy, the boss says the layoffs are over and I just got a good performance review after eight months at my rejigged job as copy chief of two merged newspapers. Sure, wages are standing still but that’s better than no job.
• Smartass anti-religious jibes from a left-libertarian. His legitimate points: the nation’s founders were deists and the RC school system was a grand example of Catholics saying no to both the state and its de facto Protestantism (the fine old King James Bible in class: it was the principle of the thing). Hooray for religious liberty. Want to see where secularism leads as opposed to being secular (impartial, as I am politically)? Talk to the people I know who escaped the USSR after WWII.
• Former CIA inspector general confirms BBC torture report.
• If Obama thinks this arrangement is such a wasteful and inefficient way to subsidize student loans, why does he want to make it the way we subsidize health insurance? I trust a National Review writer as far as I can throw him (exception: Derb) but yes.
• Ron Paul: trade wars and protectionism are not free trade.
• Same as the old boss, indefinite-detention edition. How many of those crying about what country he was born in support this 2001 betrayal of rule of law?
• Cheneyesque White House power grabs. Anybody acquainted with the real history of the left isn’t surprised.
• Nadir of Western civilisation to be reached this Friday at 3.32pm. Cracked is better but The Onion still has its moments. It sometimes stinks of SWPL haughtiness including its latent eugenicism, making fun of the mentally ill for example. Cracked finds humour in real news (the point of ‘American Voices’ sustained in good top-five kinds of articles).
• Britain talks about cutting troops in Afghanistan.
• McChrystal himself fails to grasp the essential fact about the country he is invading and occupying, which is that Afghans — like people everywhere — hate invaders and invariably resist occupation. Just ask the Russians or the British.
• Carl Levin: Vietnamise Afghanistan. The Republican Party in general has denied the lessons of Vietnam, long associated with two Democratic presidents and ended by a Republican, however disgraced. I’m sure in ‘Jaywalking’ Leno would find ignorant people who, if they know what the Vietnam War was, think an ugly Republican started it and a handsome Democrat ended it. (BTW religious lefty Bill Moyers worked on the lying 1964 ‘daisy’ commercial for Johnson that claimed Goldwater, who should have been president, was a warmonger.)