Sugarfoot is awesome

Carl Joseph played football and basketball and ran track. On one leg, with no prosthetic. And he did all that well. Read the interview here. Hop to it.

Let Them Be

And here's one to make most gay rights supporters annoyed at me. I think it would be nice if eHarmony voluntarily offered its services to homosexuals, but forcing them to is an assault on rights. The right of free association also means the right to not associate. You have the right to not associate with someone for whatever reason, whether that's because that person is mean, dumb, a criminal, or for bad reasons like that they're gay. The right to be an asshole is one of our fundamental rights. Feel free to criticize people for being assholes, but if you use force to change their behavior, you're the asshole.

What Goes Around, Reaches Around

Some Mormons have been posthumously baptizing Jews, especially those killed in The Holocaust, offending many Jews (among others, I'm sure). Mormons were also one of the driving forces behind Prop 8 in California, denying state recognition of gay marriages there. So, an intrepid blogger took the appropriate humorous steps in response.

One good, one bad

On 60 Minutes, Obama pretty definitively stated he would stop torture and close Gitmo. I always suspect politicians of leaving themselves some wiggle room, but I do applaud this. I'm still watching, but I do feel better for now.

Not as serious an issue, of course, but he later said he wanted to "throw [his] weight around" to get a playoff system for college football. I support the goal, but frankly, this is none of the US government's business, and he needs to butt out. What else could Obama mean other than using the power of the US government to get what he wants, which means using or threatening the use of force?

Credibility

More "accidental" errors by anthropomorphic global warming advocates. Remember, good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.

A First

Exciting news! Thomas Friedman (aka The Mustache of Understanding) actually said something intelligent in one of his columns! Right in the first paragraph. Of course, he goes right back to being The Mustache of Misunderstanding with almost all of the rest of the column, but we have to applaud progress when we see it.

Can we Please Bailout on the Bailout?

I was starting to chill on the financial bailout a bit. Partly because it looked like they were improving the plan from frighteningly bad to merely bad, and partly because of just what they were counting on, inertia and laziness. Well, with the changes to the AIG deal that have been made, and the refusal to have transparency in the plan, I am back to being 100% deadset against it. This is straight out corporate welfare, end of regime looting, crony capitalism, banana republic emulating transfers of wealth to the major financial players. I do not trust Hank Paulson or Ben Bernanke; they've used up all the benefit of the doubt that they were entitled to. If you want more in-depth analysis of the economics, Yves Smith has a superb post. More philosophically, go to Waldman. Also, if you have the time (they're both over an hour), Arnold Kling on EconTalk (Talk 1, Talk 2) provides excellent background to the situation; you can benefit from listening to #1, or #2, or both.

I don't know what (if anything) we can do to stop this atrocity from going forward, but please at least take from this that we have to always be extremely skpetical (to the point of being obnoxious) of any expansion of government power.

Easter Egg

I can't get it to work right in blogger, so I'll roll with it and tell you to go to this link, follow the link there, then copy and paste the symbol into notepad or Word. Don't worry, I would never let you down.