1. I’m still feeling really lousy. Consequently, posts authored by yours truly will appear only during those moments of lucidity not otherwise occupied by half-awake trips to the john. 2. Such moments are likely to be infrequent. 3. You do the math.

Why did you bastards make me eat an entire jar of pickled peppers and send me $5, a condom, and a 6-pack of MGD?

JC: Sluts are the nicest people in the world. They’re people pleasers! (h/t Instapundit)

Something wicked this way came — and I’m afraid it settled in my left ear like a Tom Tancredo cross-border gordita invasion. Consequently, I’m feeling a bit under the weather — not to mention violated in a rather intimate way. — Though, let me be perfectly clear: what I experienced was not aural sex. In fact, such violations have everything to do with power and nothing to do with intimacy

Master Thompson, on the Hillary!Care scheme described here yesterday by Darleen: “What is it that makes liberals think the best way to help somebody is to punish them?” “I understand Hillary Clinton has just acknowledged that her new health care plan could require somebody to actually prove they’ve got insurance before they can get a job. You know, a job — the thing that would help you get health care.

In this case, the concept is “diversity.” And — surprise! — the protectors and saviors of such a laudable social imperative are those academics who, for good reason (we can’t, after all, have a chaotic combination of differences, can we?), enjoy their “diversity” tightly controlled, preferably by the very people who get to define what comes to count as “diversity,” for purposes of social policy, in the first place. Which

Watching John Murtha stammer and hedge when confronted directly about having preemptively (and, it so happens, erroneously) convicted the Haditha Marines of murdering Iraqi civilians “in cold blood”: absolutely friggin’ priceless. **** update: Murtha’s heartache continues. From Reuters: The U.S. Marines have dismissed charges against an officer accused of failing to report accurately the U.S. killing of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005. Capt. Lucas McConnell was granted immunity

From Michael Yon and Bill Ardolino. Plenty of photographs of the strange brown Other — including some of their young, caught unawares in the wilds — for those of you who’ve let your subscriptions to National Geographic lapse. Such a strange people! And to think, we’ve given them fire! Oh, the arrogance! Oh, the hope! To borrow from Eliot — do we dare? And, do we dare?

To libertarian Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi, whose book, Nanny State, is out today. I had an opportunity to read the manuscript in its embryonic form and was both fascinated and appalled by the lengths to which nanny statists will go to micromanage the behaviors of supposedly free peoples. For those of you interested in exploring nannystate excesses, I highly recommend it. It’s like reading Reason without having to sift

…but I think this is what Maha and her ilk are inadvertently getting behind when they claim themselves to be “intolerant of intolerance.” Though Maha and other progressive crusaders bent on ridding the world of the scourge of “giving offense” — being the civilized sort — would likely choose a pen rather than a sword, and would of course happily donate a quarter of any “bounty” they collected to, say,