VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: some very bad habits.

Read it all.

HEY, ERIC HOLDER: meet my people.

Background here.

SO WHO IS the ‘bitter clinger’?

A REQUIEM FOR MULTICULTURALISM. Key graf: “[L]ike a parasite sucking the blood from its host, multiculturalism often latches onto the righteous aims of true diversity. Indeed, many organizational mission statements cannot separate the two, presenting them as corollaries amidst flowery platitudes about values. ”

Something the company I work for has yet to learn.

JEFF JACOBY: What would Jesus cut?

[W]e are emphatically commanded by Scripture to help the poor, to comfort the afflicted, and to love the stranger. But those obligations are personal, not political. It requires a considerable leap of both faith and logic to read the Bible as mandating elaborate government assistance programs, to be funded by a vast apparatus of compulsory taxation.

Yes.

JUST DESSERTS: Press coverage of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Tex., usually focuses on her megalomania ... [b]ut being a race-baiting megalomaniac is no crime. It is against the law, however, to racially harass your employees.

Put some popcorn in the microwave ....

IGNORANT, STUPID, or just a liar? You make the call.

YOU KNOW, there just aren’t enough Hitler comparisons in politics.

Another Democrat, naturally.

BADGERING THE WITLESS: Ottumwa Body & Fender’s most famous graduate responds to criticism of his earlier post.

REASON’S Nanny of the Month: Harry Reid.

HEH: POSSIBLE GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN. From the office email:

The senior team met to discuss ... actions should the government temporarily shut down as a result of Congress’ inability to reach agreement on the budget. Unless Republicans and Democrats can come together ... the government will likely shut down.

[T]here may be some government offices that will be shuttered, thereby leaving some of you who work at a government site needing a place to work. There is an outside possibility that the shutdown may also affect your specific tasks for your sponsors. Your managers will be working with you on a case-by-case basis to see what your needs are and help you find space to work as needed.

Of course, there’s no cost associated with all of this ....

HAH. “Anything that puts Krugman back behind a paywall can’t be all bad.”

PRESIDENT OBAMA announced Monday that military trials will resume for detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Two years wasted while the boy president finally figured out that the Bush administration was right.

NOT THE WAY TO WIN FRIENDS: public union workers walk off the job in the midst of power outage. And in Hawaii, it’s a wee bit difficult to bring in replacement workers from neighboring states.

BREAKING NEWS: Congress cannot repeal the Laws of Physics.

A SMALL VICTORY: it looks like Donald Berwick is out as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. I had forgotten his was a recess appointment.

CARTER REDUX: Obama is making the same energy mistakes as Jimmy Carter did.

The full article is here.

HIGH SPEED RAIL: in high gear and speeding toward a wreck. As is usual in IEEE Spectrum’s green technology posts, the commenters have the better argument: high-speed rail simply isn’t justifiable outside high-density urban centers with effective local mass transit.

Read the entire post and comments.

NO KIDDING. There is actually strong empirical evidence that climate scientists are very highly paid, and it comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Gee, and all this time, I thought they were compassionate altruists, toiling endlessly for the benefit of all mankind.

WOULD UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE actually improve health? The answer seems to be “No.”

JEFF JACOBY: “There is no ‘fundamental right’ to collective bargaining in government jobs.” Here’s the zinger:

[President] Obama scolds [Wisconsin Gov.] Walker for trying to restrict collective bargaining by government employees to wages, yet the two million federal civilian (non-postal) workers Obama presides over can't even bargain over that much: With rare exceptions, the wages, hours, and benefits of federal employment have never been subject to union contracts. The president appears to be quite OK with that. Last November he unilaterally announced a two-year pay freeze for all federal civilian federal employees, informing them -- no negotiating -- that they were going to "make some sacrifices" adding up to $2 billion this fiscal year.

Another case of “do as I say, not as I do.”

UH, OH. THAT GOLD STRIKE may be fools’ gold.

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S SCIENCE ADVISOR is a global warming denier. Just 40 years ago, an eyeblink in geological time, he was predicting the end of the world as we know it from global cooling.