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The latest leftist smear campaign against Rush Limbaugh may have finally crossed the line into actionable defamation.

Jason Whitlock--one of the last sports columnists remaining at the Kansas City Star, features prominently, for a piece he wrote for FoxSports.com.

Ed Driscoll discusses:

I was greeted with a huge front-page box featuring this insipid column from the execrable Jason Whitlock. By way of reminder, Jason Whitlock recently wrote this ridiculous column, which somehow passes for insightful commentary while Limbaugh’s comments about McNabb are evil, thoughtless, and racist. But I digress. The newest basis for the assertion that Limbaugh is an eeeeeevil racist is as follows, according to Whitlock:

Here are two quotes attributed to Limbaugh in a 2006 book, “101 People Who Are Really Screwing America,” by Jack Huberman.

• “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray (Dr. King’s assassin). We miss you, James. Godspeed.”
• “Let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: Slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back. I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.”

The first of these quotes has already been debunked most thoroughly, long before Rush’s bid to buy the Rams. It is self-evidently the complete fabrication of someone with a wiki account, which was then picked up by the unscrupulous Huberman and reported as fact (with no citations at all) in his book. The other, also attributed to Huberman, has never been sourced, and Huberman has never cited any original article, or even given any indication as to when this alleged statement was made. Of course, these facts make it utterly impossible to refute the claim; without any date or context, Rush cannot even call witnesses who were present during the alleged confirmation to confirm or deny that he ever made such a statement. It is literally impossible for Limbaugh (or anyone else) to offer convincing proof that they have never at any time made a given statement (other than their own denial, which Rush has already given). It is preposterous to ask anyone to prove that they did not make a statement if you cannot even so much as offer a time and place where the statement is alleged to have occurred.

These inflammatory statements were in fact apparently first made by a semi-anonymous blog commenter. Numerous times. On numerous web sites.

Limbaugh has begun threatening legal action. I hope he follows through on that threat.

Limbaugh is a public figure, so "actual malice" needs to be proven.

Somehow I don't think that will be terribly difficult to do. The upside of being hated by the left is that it is pretty easy to prove that leftists hate you. Some of the people in the Old Media who have mindlessly repeated these smears had better pray that they have never before criticized or made fun of Limbaugh--either on air, via e-mail, or in written correspondence.

Legal discovery is a female dog.

My fondest hope is that is that some of the more egregious Big Media purveyors of the current "Limbaugh is a Racist" smear campaign will be found in a court of law to be guilty of malicious defamation with the intent to illegally interfere with his commercial activity--to whit his participation in a group which is offering to buy the St. Louis Rams NFL team. My understanding of defamation law is that the key for public figures to win at trial is for them to be able to prove actual harm.

I'm not a lawyer, but not being allowed to participate in an ownership group for a pro football team would seem to me to be actual harm.

Ironically enough, Rush may wind up owning a good chunk of the Internet. Or ESPN.

As Limbaugh has said: "Lord, thank you for my enemies."

And remember, RAAAAACIST!!! has five A's.

On October 13, 2006, I posted:

Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal, noting (once more) the intellectual intolerance of the Left:

What is most missing from the left in America is an element of grace--of civic grace, democratic grace, the kind that assumes disagreements are part of the fabric, but we can make the fabric hold together. The Democratic Party hasn't had enough of this kind of thing since Bobby Kennedy died. What also seems missing is the courage to ask a question. Conservatives these days are asking themselves very many questions, but I wonder if the left could tolerate asking itself even a few. Such as: Why are we producing so many adherents who defy the old liberal virtues of free and open inquiry, free and open speech? Why are we producing so many bullies? And dim dullard ones, at that.

Most reasonable folks on the center/right of the political agenda (and I'd hope to be included in that number) are desperate for a level of intellectual discourse with those on the left that rises above mindless angry sloganeering and outright suppression of speech, as happened recently at Columbia University. 

Is there intelligent life on the Left?

From the book Power in the People by Felix Morley, as linked by Gary Galles at the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

To transfer power to the State…serves only to monopolize power in wholly irresponsible hands…

I had a sudden realization the other day.

Inner cities--the ones devastated by leftist, redistributionist, high-tax, high-planning, low-freedom, low-personal-responsibility policies since the end of the Second World War--the ones where the poor, the minorities, the "left behind" of the post-war boom have been consigned to live--the inner cities are the New Plantations.

The New Plantation Owners are almost exclusively Democrats--both white Democrats and black Democrats. Not all Democrats--just those who seem to bubble up to the top of the urban power structure wherever they're allowed to do so. The crop that these New Plantation Owners raise and harvest is not cotton.

The crop is votes.

Most often, the harvest is of black and poor people's votes, fertilized with the manure of promises of government money. But sometimes, in a weird sort of heartless crop rotation, the New Plantation Owners come in and push the poor people aside, building "gentrified" urban neighborhoods--either with or without a big stadium, arena, or shopping complex as its centerpiece. But in either case, the people who "benefit" from these programs never really benefit.

They're just told by the plantation owners that they will benefit--that prosperity is just around the corner. So, in gratitude, the very people who are the primary victims of these programs vote for the politicians who continue to inflict them upon them. But prosperity never comes to the victims of the New Plantation Owners.

If those government programs were effective, why then are the lives of the inner-city poor no better now than they were in the 1960's when Lyndon Johnson launched the "Great Society?" Why has the poverty rate not improved? Why has literacy not improved? Why has not the family in the urban core been strengthened?

The reason is that it's never, NEVER in the interest of the New Plantation Owners to actually make things in the urban core better. They're continually holding the carrot on the string out in front of the residents of the inner cities, and then continually jerking the carrot just out of reach by their taxation and government policies.

And of course, who do the politicians blame for this?

Who do they always blame?

The productive class. The business community. The eeevil, heartless Republicans. The poor. Everybody but the New Plantation Owners themselves.

When I make the comment that socialism is slavery, I'm deadly serious about it. The chains aren't of iron, the chains are of ideas--of ideology, but they're every bit as binding as those that bound the slaves of the past. They shackle the urban poor to a philosophy which is destroys everything it seeks to save.

The only path to freedom for people is freedom. Government can not give freedom. Each individual person can only give freedom to him or herself--by taking responsibility not only for who they are and who they might become, but also for who they have been in the past. Freedom is recognizing where you have made mistakes, learning from those mistakes, and growing as an individual. It is the opposite of the dependency mentality which the New Plantation Owners require of their slaves.

Freedom is not the easy road. But it is the only road that leads to every man and every woman becoming the best person that he or she can possibly be. All freedom requires is that you stop listening to the siren call of the New Plantation Owners, and begin to live your own life, the best you possibly can, and stop depending on the New Plantation Owners for anything. Because history and experience have shown that you can not trust the New Plantation Owners--you can't trust them for anything.

Government never gives freedom. It can only take.

Or it can stop taking. If enough of us say STOP loudly enough and often enough.

While there's still time.

In case you haven't noticed, the New Plantation Owners have taken control of the Federal Government, and are hell-bent on turning the entire country into the same kind of plantation that they have inflicted on the urban core. It's not so much that they're evil people, they're just disastrously misguided. They really do believe that you're better off as a slave on the New Plantation than you would be as a free human being. With them as the New Plantation Owners, of course.

They want your votes. And in exchange, they want to run your life while never quite delivering on their grandiose promises of a better tomorrow. Does that sound like a good trade?

From the book Power in the People by Felix Morley, as linked by Gary Galles at the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

The market does not become more humane under the direction of the amoral institution that we have seen the State to be.

From the book Power in the People by Felix Morley, as linked by Gary Galles at the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

The distinguishing characteristic of American civilization is the subordination of centralized power in behalf of individual liberty.

On October 10, 2006, I posted:

The banners of "diversity" and "multiculturalism" have been held high for decades as goals to be assiduously striven for by right-thinking people everywhere. From the painfully ham-handed diversity of Star Trek: The Next Generation to the chirpy happiness of Sesame Street, we are fed a daily diet of messages saying diversity is in and of itself a good thing, with the implicit and unquestioned belief that those who question the relentless march of diversity are the worst kind of bigots.

Now comes this Belmont Club article, highlighting a Financial Times article discussing a new study by Harvard professor Robert Putnam, author of the popular book Bowling Alone. His new work casts doubt on the social desirability of diversity and multiculturalism.

From the Financial Times article:

The core message of the research was that, "in the presence of diversity, we hunker down", he said. "We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us."

Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, "the most diverse human habitation in human history", but his findings also held for rural South Dakota, where "diversity means inviting Swedes to a Norwegians' picnic".

When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. "They don't trust the local mayor, they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people and they don't trust institutions," said Prof Putnam. "The only thing there's more of is protest marches and TV watching."

Richard Fernandez (Wretchard) of the Belmont Club then comments:

But if Putnam is correct, then one of the central tenets of multiculturalism — that it brings people together if they simply "respect" each others differences — immediately requires qualification. In fact, it becomes entirely conceivable that the multiculti program is actually the driver behind many of the tensions which are now rising in places like France, the Netherlands and the UK.

Tribalism is programmed deep into the human animal. That's why it's World Problem #1.

Different political systems deal with this tribal urge in different ways. One reason why totalitarian governments keep springing up is that they are brutally effective in suppressing the tribal urge internally, in large part by directing the tribal urge outward toward external enemies.

This is also why pure democracies almost always collapse. Democracy is fundamentally unable to manage the tribal urge. The biggest tribe always winds up in power and then begins to impose its tribal customs and mores on the minorities. If the Majority decides it is undesirable for the minorities to ever regain power, a pure democracy can quickly devolve into a totalitarian state--we see it over and over and over again throughout history, from the Romans to the Third Reich.

We can try to pretend that humans don't have this tribal urge, or recognize the wisdom of the American Founding Fathers in promoting a federal republicanism and a careful separation of powers between a central government and soverign State governments. This provided a structure within which different self-selected "tribes" can interact. This I think is what Benjamin Franklin meant when he famously replied to the question "what have you given us?" with "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

From the book Power in the People by Felix Morley, as linked by Gary Galles at the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

Only one form of government can nurture liberty, and that is personal self-government.

Bacon and cheese (flavor) omlet

I'm going backwards again--on the scale, at least. After last week's 0.7 pound weight gain, I clocked in again with another 0.7 pounds gained. At least I'm consistent.

But, there are other indicators of progress besides the scale. My new belt, which I started at the very last hole, is now tighter by two holes. And I visited my regular doctor on Monday to update her on my weight loss progress. She responded by reducing two of my prescriptions by half--Vytorin (cholesterol) and lisinopril (blood pressure), and stopping two others--hydrochlorothiazide (blood pressure) and gemfibrozil (triglicerides).

That makes me quite happy, as you can imagine.

Still, I'm sitting at 244.1 pounds, with my Halloween goal of 230 14.1 pounds and only 24 days away. The pressure is on!

Pancake topped with vanilla pudding

We have house guests this weekend, so as usual the challenge will be to stick to the diet and exercise while being a proper host. Speaking of which, I need to go clean up the downstairs and scrub some toilets.

Boing Boing: Judge orders woman to keep her SubGenius books under lock and key.

Dang. I'd better go hide my own Book of the SubGenius.

Oh, wait. I don't have kids.

But it's always to have another argument in my pocket if I need to avoid jury duty, I guess.

The SubGenius Must Have Slack!