Friday miscellaneous (9/28)

Clint Eastwood ruffled a lot of feathers with his empty chair speech. However, it is looking more and more accurate. The President seems to be abandoning his day job in favor of playing a celebrity, and devoting more time to silly issues (like the NFL referee lockout) than important ones (like keeping Republican senators informed of the situation in Libya Update: Democratic senators are also complaining.). Meanwhile, the Democratic press is reduced to falling for made up stories about the Romney campaign.

Continuing the theme from my post on ideology, David Brooks writes about the missing element of today’s “conservative” party: the traditional conservative. Without them:

Republicans repeat formulas — government support equals dependency — that make sense according to free-market ideology, but oversimplify the real world. Republicans like Romney often rely on an economic language that seems corporate and alien to people who do not define themselves in economic terms. No wonder Romney has trouble relating.

Although, the Democrats are facing similar problems:

if you're a Democrat who has affirmed that you'd never vote for an opponent of gay equality; or a torturer; or someone caught using racial slurs; how are you going to vote for the guy who orders drone strikes that kill hundreds of innocents and terrorizes thousands more -- and who constantly hides the ugliest realities of his policy (while bragging about the terrorists it kills) so that Americans won't even have all the information sufficient to debate the matter for themselves?

And Thomas Sowell pits Obama of 2008 against Obama of 2012.

Yahoo News recently demonstrated its knowledge ignorance of Christianity.

It appears that Democratic Senate Candidate Elisabeth Warren earned hundreds of thousands of dollars practicing law without a license.

And just so that not everything is political this week, here is a young man’s critique of what the courtship model tells young women:

Her future husband would be a paradox: ambitious and hard-working and able to support a family, yet fully under his parents’ authority and living in their house without going to college. He would be an intelligent, independent critical thinker, yet he would agree unquestioningly with every belief of his parents and church.

And finally, this is both humorous and sobering: