The News from South Philly

Former Bush administration solicitor general goes to court in favor of gay marriage

That ought to make folks' heads explode on both sides of the -isms. Knee-jerk lefties hate the guy for his role in Bush v. Gore. Knee-jerk righties grant him permanent victim status because he lost his wife on 9/11. Wikipedia entry in case you need a refresher.

Bonus: from a thread in the conservatism community, "My attitude is generally 'give it to them, because it doesn't affect me, and I want everyone involved to go away'."

Here's a cheerful note about online medical records:

Hackers break into Virginia Health Professions Database, Demand Ransom

If you follow this Washington Post story back to Wikileaks, you can see a replica of the taunting message left on the site's home page.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit offers a chart and a reminder in this short post. The reminder is that folks from both sides of the aisle, but especially the R side, were pushing on the culture of earmarking with the Porkbusters movement. The graphic: a look at the way our government will be hemorrhaging red ink this year and for a decade to come.

A lot of what's labeled "the right" doesn't float my boat -- I could care less about who forms a union with whom and think that "marriage" is a term and a concept with which the government has no legitimate business. But limited government does.

EDITED TO ADD:

Also via Instapundit, the invaluable John Keegan on responses to pirates. These guys are definitely less cute than Jack Sparrow and we hates them, Precioussssss. Let them learn why the U. S. Marine Corps was founded.

From Classical Values, a post on the difference between individualist and communitarian small-c conservatives in the context of the Tea Party movement.

Keith Hennessey, who was to George Bush as Larry Summers is to Barack Obama, offers some information on the "45 million uninsured" and several scenarios for approaching the subsets of the 45 million.

Back home, I continue to be amazed at how much easier it is to work in my home office now. I have this feeling that, in addition to the cat-hair and the fact that at any moment a wet-footed feline might land on what I was doing, just having a room-mate that was bat-shit crazy and also demented (slightly different things) added a certain atmosphere that took the edge off my concentration.

I ran across this piece by Arnold Kling that sums up what I think about the forced charity known as government social programs:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/04/some_libertaria.html

My absolute favorite bit:

Think of government as a charity. From a libertarian perspective, it is a charity run by the Mafia, which will break your knuckles if you don't make your donations. It is also a badly mismanaged charity. It funnels lots of money into questionable causes, and even when the causes are good the programs that it funds tend to be very wasteful.

I would like to see government have to compete with other charities on a level playing field.

Hear, hear. I can give a dollar to charity and be reasonably sure that $.80 (or $.90 or $.70 but you get the idea) will go toward the charitable purpose. Or I can give a dollar to government and be reasonably sure that a fat chunk of it will be pissed away by the layers and layers of redistributionists who are getting their salaries before a penny goes to the ultimate purpose. Moreover, I can check up on the charity and decide whether it's run efficently enough to be worthy of my dollars. With the government programs, not so much.

I found this on comments on one of montieth's entries, and I want to be able to find it again.

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

EDITED TO ADD AN IRRELEVANCY: I soaked parsley seeds last night and planted twenty four of them, plus six Supersonic tomato seeds, this morning.

I don't know how I feel about this.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/30/AR2008113002217_pf.html

But I suspect that when the ACLU and the Cato Institute are united in their concern about something, we should all be a little worried. I'd be a lot happier, I think, if they were equipping the National Guard.

On the other hand, recruiting the troops returning from Iraq into the Reserves would probably be a really really good idea. I suspect that's a cadre of fighters the bad guys would rather not encounter.

(Unrelated update: I rode about 7 miles today)

From irismoonlight
http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/resources/quiz.aspx

My score:
You answered 30 out of 33 correctly — 90.91 %

I read somewhere on teh intertubes recently, including irismoonlight's LJ, I think, that the average score when they did this last spring was 49% -- but lawmakers didn't do that well. Sigh... why don't they just wise up and let me run things?