from Ricochet:

Darlene Love of 20 Feet from Stardom gave the most rousing acceptance speech at Sunday’s Academy Awards. The Love song to the Lord rightly brought the audience to its feet for a hooting, hollering standing ovation.

A bit later, Matthew McConaughey started his Best Actor acceptance with equally impassioned thanksgiving to God. His powerful praise to the Creator was met with awkward murmurs and nervous glances. Time magazine called it confounding, even publishing a long explanation of his speech (video at the link).

The New Yorker called McConaughey’s acceptance a “self-indulgent lemon of a speech” yet effused over Love’s “gospel verse that was earth-shaking, unexpected, and a long time coming.”

The charge of racism is so overused that it has nearly lost its meaning. But the elites' striking responses to Love and McConaughey were hard to ignore. Instead of praising or deriding professions of faith equally, this difference in black and white is widespread.

Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson is honored for his overt displays of faith; Tim Tebow ridiculed for his. The media insists that the religious right stay out of the public square, while the Rev. Al Sharpton gets a show on MSNBC. Just look at the standard treatment a predominantly black church gets on a prime time drama compared to a predominantly white one.

While certainly unintentional, white liberals have deeply hypocritical racial views on religion. They will ostentatiously praise Darlene Love to flaunt their racially progressive bona fides. But these same people will look down on McConaughey to flaunt their supposed intellectual sophistication.

Despicable climate ugliness courtesy of Lawrence Torcello – assistant professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology

in short:  Scientists who don’t believe in catastrophic man-made global warming should be put in prison.

and: “The professor is a feminist studies professor and her specialty is pornography, and she did commit an act of violence against another woman. So, the irony there to us is rather great.”

not quite as strong, but on point: Blind Resentment

from Bench Memos:

On Thursday, a Fourth Circuit panel unanimously concluded that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allows minority-owned corporations to challenge racial discrimination in contracting on behalf of their owners. The court rejected the corporate defendants’ spurious argument—asserted by the government in some recent cases—that because the plaintiff is a corporation, it cannot be a “person” that is protected by federal laws.

This is an increasingly popular argument on the left, sometimes articulated as the notion that because a corporation can’t pray, therefore it can’t have religious rights, and because a corporation can’t vote, it doesn’t have freedom of speech. The solicitor general has made this argument explicitly, arguing in Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties that corporations don’t have religious freedoms under federal law in the first instance, and even if they do, they lose those freedoms if they engage in for-profit activities (as if real religious exercise stops once synagogue, church, or Friday prayers are over).

But as Fourth Circuit judge Barbara Keenan (an Obama appointee) pointed out in a footnote, federal statute generally defines “person” to include corporations, and Title VI does not contain its own definition to override the Dictionary Act. The Fourth Circuit adopted a line of cases from the Ninth Circuit saying that a corporate entity can assert the racial identity of its owners in an anti-discrimination claim. All that the plaintiff corporation had to show was that it was minority-owned and certified to be so.

Read the whole thing

William Anderson writes in today’s Mises Daily:

If Beltway political culture permits any criticism of the Holy Stimulus, it is this: “the stimulus wasn’t big enough.” Intones the NYT: “The stimulus could have done more good had it been bigger and more carefully constructed.”

The rest of the editorial is a compilation of near-plagiarism from Paul Krugman’s columns and blog posts, and it reflects how Keynesian anti-wogic works. The “logical” narrative goes as follows:

• “Enough” government spending during a recession will bring the economy to “full employment.”
• The economy is not at full employment.
• Therefore, there wasn’t enough government spending.

Should one question the Keynesian premises of this awful syllogism, the standard answer is: America had “full employment” during World War II. (Robert Higgs has thoroughly debunked this enduring myth.) But, then, so did Germany and the U.S.S.R., according to Keynesian standards, but no one envies what people there experienced!

Don't hit this one very often.  I was in grade/high school when the "global cooling" scare swept the country.  Global warming, espoused by the same players, always seemed squirrly to me.  Tacking "man-made" on the the front only made it more so.  Then when THAT fell apart (ie no warming for over a dozen years) they went to the quasi-religeous non-falsifiable "man made global climate change". 

I started paying attention.  Looking at the science.  Ask any schmo on the street what has the GREATEST impact on the temp of the earth and 75% will tell you, correctly, the sun.  And yet MOST of the models used by the leftists do not consider solar radiation AT ALL!

And now my fellow Welshmen have gone and done the following: 

From Cardiff University

Sun’s energy influences 1,000 years of natural climate variability in North Atlantic

Changes in the sun’s energy output may have led to marked natural climate change in Europe over the last 1000 years, according to researchers at Cardiff University.

Scientists studied seafloor sediments to determine how the temperature of the North Atlantic and its localised atmospheric circulation had altered. Warm surface waters flowing across the North Atlantic, an extension of the Gulf Stream, and warm westerly winds are responsible for the relatively mild climate of Europe, especially in winter. Slight changes in the transport of heat associated with these systems can led to regional climate variability, and the study findings matched historic accounts of climate change, including the notoriously severe winters of the 16th and 18th centuries which pre-date global industrialisation.

The study found that changes in the Sun’s activity can have a considerable impact on the ocean-atmospheric dynamics in the North Atlantic, with potential effects on regional climate.

Just like I learned in science classes back at Norwood Elementary.

The painful reality in America: for increasingly more it is now more lucrative - in the form of actual disposable income - to sit, do nothing, and collect various welfare entitlements, than to work.

And that trend appears to be accelerating as more and more men drop out of the workforce...

 Study: ObamaCare not reaching uninsured.

Old storyline: If you oppose ObamaCare, you want uninsured people to die!!!!

New storyline: Meh, there were always going to be a lot of people left uncovered, but most of ‘em don’t want insurance anyway.

MORE RUBES SELF-IDENTIFY: Liberal labor union makes Republican arguments against Obamacare. “A new labor union research report offers a scathing indictment of how Obamacare affects middle-class workers. The report features a series of arguments that conservatives have long made about the law, right down to mentioning the language of ‘unintended consequences.’”

Judicial Watch Confronts 'One-Man Congress' with Obamacare Appeal

BYRON YORK: Dems can’t run on Obamacare and can’t hide from it either.

Rutgers faculty urge school to drop Condoleezza Rice as speaker.

also, EZRA KLEIN’S diversity problem. As diverse as a Howard Dean meetup, an MSNBC anchors’ convention, or an Obama Campaign HQ. Perhaps with work, Ezra Klein can achieve the diversity of a Tea Party rally. But I doubt it.

A FAILURE OF INTELLIGENCE: Putin Smashes Washington’s Cocoon:

ANGELO CODEVILLA: There Will Be Blood: Our Own. “Something like that has happened before. A hundred years ago Theodore Roosevelt had warned Americans that, if we wanted peace in the Pacific, we should either withdraw from the Philippines or build a navy that Japan must respect. We did neither. Instead, US policy consisted of sonorous moral commitments to peace and good order, coupled with an increasingly hollow military: the unbridled tongue and the unready hand. The American people paid the price in blood.”

SLOW LEARNERS. SOME OF US NOTICED THIS A LONG TIME AGO: Washington Post editorial: “President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy.”

Ann Althouse notices that they’re still not facing up to facts.

USA TODAY: “Perhaps the most surprising thing about Russia’s weekend invasion of Crimea is that the U.S. and its allies were caught so flat-footed, groping for a response that didn’t look weak and ineffectual.”

Um, at this point, is that really surprising?

SLATE: Why Obama Got Russia Wrong (and Romney Got It Right). “So you see the politics—they reveal Obama as the player of a cheap trick.”

Also: The New Republic: Mitt Romney Was Right About Russia.

Do tell. And do remember the lefty, and general media (but I repeat myself) mockery with which his statement was greeted.

Related, also from TNR: Enough With the Cliches Already: Obama’s vapid rhetoric on Russia is accomplishing nothing.

UPDATE: Forget the Bush picture. It’s come to this:

I mentione this to a reaer the other day.  PAUL RAHE: Could China Be Planning Something? “Putin’s invasion of the Crimea reportedly caught the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department off guard. It is a good time to ask, ‘What else might be in the pipeline?’” I gotta say, all that NSA snooping doesn’t seem to be doing much to give us a headsup.

I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER WHEN DISSENT WAS THE HIGHEST FORM OF PATRIOTISM: Sally Kohn: These Republicans are “undermining” Obama by criticizing him on Russia.

Plus: “What will the consensus lefty line on Cold War II be? The Kohn-ian ‘support your president’ take or Eugene Robinson’s ‘who are we to judge someone else’s invasion?’ line? Dilemmas, dilemmas.”

This is WAY too long already, but how about these: THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE. JUST A FEW MONTHS AGO, SMART DIPLOMACY^TM ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED THAT HE BE OVERTHROWN. With Latest Victory, Assad Has Won the War in Syria.

NOT FLATTERING: How Iran’s Rulers See Obama. “Iran’s rulers are watching Obama lurch from crisis to crisis, and they’re not impressed. Indeed, if this cartoon is a window into their thinking, it’s a safe bet that Tehran is already planning to walk away from the ‘interim’ deal now that it has loosened the global sanctions that had been crimping Iran’s economy.”

Related: Russia Blows Past Obama’s ‘Off Ramp.’

Plus: Charles Krauthammer: The Wages Of Weakness. Obama cares about consolidating Democratic power domestically. He’s not interested in what happens abroad, except to the extent it impacts that. And now that he’s been re-elected, he has more flexibility.

UPDATE: 2012 Is Calling to Get Its Naive Belief That Russia Is Not a Threat Back.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Doug McKelway: Is There A Double Standard For Political Gaffes?

Obama Misspells Aretha Franklin's 'RESPECT' During Women of Soul Jam

NBC, CBS Cover Obama Spelling Flub; ABC Out to Lunch