beating a dead horse, Snow didn't say that because he thought anyone listening to him at that moment would believe it.

He said it because he knew that by the time Faux Snooze got through slicing and dicing it, the folks to whom it WAS directed - the Faux "listeners" - would hear just enough of it to form a meme in their tiny little brains, which would feed off the other memes in there to produce:

We trust and admire Bush because Mr. Snow said we do; the Lib'ruls don't trust and admire Bush; the Lib'ruls hate America.

Except they would have gotten the semicolons in the wrong places. Other than that, this is just about how it will go. Stupid people, half-listening to inaccurate and unsubstantiated claims, will base their beliefs on such claims, and seek no other source. And thus is a meme born.

Now, tell me I'm wrong.

Well said. But it fails to explain the self-loathing nature of Sowell's entire published philosophy.

If the world were indeed the way Sowell says he wants it to be, he'd have been lynched 20 years ago or more. That's the tiny little irony involved in his existence. And only adds to the argument we've been having here, about how such people can hold contradictory thoughts.

Thomas Sowell is AFRICAN AMERICAN.

Under most circumstances, this fact wouldn't matter to me unless the author under discussion wanted it to matter. It matters to me, to his published philosophy, and I would guess to most of those who DO take him seriously, and who DON'T take him seriously, for reasons that are clear usually within the first paragraph of anything Sowell writes.

The post in which the opening line is "White man speak with forked tongue" seemed to require this little bit of clarification.

I am one who does NOT take Sowell seriously, or perhaps more accurately, I don't admire what he says. It's not because he's black, it's because he's a self-loathing black man who believes that if he claims not to want, indeed to hate all that it means to be black, and to disdain all the gains made by and for members of his race over the past several centuries, he will be "just as good" as whites. I would fully expect Sowell and Clarence Thomas to get along well if they meet.

Or so it seems to me. In any case, Sowell does seem pretty unquestionably to have a self-hatred thing going on, or at the very least to want people not to notice he's black as he proceeds to race-bait and -bash. It doesn't require a very thorough reading of his published work to see it, although I have done a reasonably thorough reading of it. To my personal detriment, in most cases.

Zack's got my vote so far, though it's a tight race:

Profiles in Cowardice: The “Real Men” of the Right and other myths.

But I'm going to try my own entry:

Chicken Hawk Nation: Why the Right is Only Bloodthirsty with Other People's Blood

You Salon readers are so comPETitive!!!

but if I were, I'd be a-prayin' that the Repugs would keep getting their read on the zeitgeist so very VERY wrong. So far, they're answering my every prayer by doubling down and showing us that they believe the road to the White House is paved with being even BIGGER assholes than they have been for the past 40+ years.

They really seem to believe that what's wrong with their party is that they're not Neo-con ENOUGH, so they have to bear down and grunt, and shit out even more criminality and asininity.

Yes, Huckabee is scary - and even more so because, if you don't listen too carefully, like most Repug voters don't, he sounds almost reasonable.

But for my money, the most interesting portion of the evening was at Minute 99. Again with the prayers, I can only hope they did that because they don't want assholes, not because they want bigger assholes.

It was not a good night. Perhaps the first time I've ever agreed with Frank Luntz.

...If you're that much upside down and you don't have any equity in your home, just mail the keys into the bank and leave. People in the Dallas area in the late 80's did this a LOT.

People in Dallas in the late 80's didn't have the all-compliant 109th Congress to make sure they couldn't get out of loans that easily.

Nowadays, you try that and they'll track you down and make you pay for the loan anyway. No more easy-bankruptcy laws in THIS democratic republic, Sir! Or Madam.

My mortgage is with Countrywide - fixed rate, 30-year, so I don't THINK they can find a way to jack with me...but I will note that they unilaterally decided to stop sending me paper statements and bills as of last month.

Sure, less paper waste, good for the environment, etc etc. But also, greater chance that the customer will forget, since the only notification one gets is via email. And then, late fees, maybe even defaults, ya never know.

They're already charging me $3 a month for the privilege of paying my mortgage online, ON TIME. That kind of stuff adds up. Though apparently it doesn't add up to the salaries of 12000 employees.

I don't begrudge corporations making a profit. I DO begrudge them making obscene profits, and then laying off massive numbers of employees when the profits drop from the obscene range to the merely reasonable.