Pun Salad

… when they're the front page sad news:

• My new CongressCritter, Frank Guinta, made the Corner today, in a story about Rep. Marsha Blackburn's effort to reduce non-defense discretionary spending to "just below 2008, pre-stimulus levels." (When it was already too high, but what are you gonna do?)
  Additional sponsors of the amendment include Reps. Jordan, Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.), Scott Garrett (R., S.C.), Mike Pence (R., Ind.), John Campbell (R., Calif.), Jeff Duncan (R., S.C.), Frank Guinta (R., N.H.), Tim Huelskamp (R., Kan.), Steve Southerland (R., Mo.), and Joe Walsh (R., Ill.).

  So good for him. Unfortunately, the Corner poster, Andrew Stiles, notes that the amendment faces an "uphill battle". Because the GOP ranks contain a lot of cowardly weasels.

• Reason TV looks at the Free State Project

  I'm already here. Waiting for the rest of you…

• The New York Times Food Nag, Mark Bittman, devoted his column this week to good old classic fear-mongering about genetically-modified organisms. It's full of scary, scary aieee! we're all gonna die stuff! But I especially liked this:
  To be fair, two of the biggest fears about G.E. crops and animals -- their potential to provoke allergic reactions and the transfer to humans of antibiotic-resistant properties of G.M.O.'s -- have not come to pass. (As far as I can tell, though, they remain real dangers.)

  If I may paraphrase: there is not the slightest bit of evidence that years and years of fearful allegations about GMOs were true. But they still—somehow—could be! So Bittman would prefer to remain scared, thanks very much.

• Matt Welch notes the unseemly involvement of President Obama in the Wisconsin budget battle, not only taking sides himself against the Republican governor and the Republican-controlled legislature, but also mobilizing his own political machine to organize mobs "protesters" in Madison, and "to plan similar demonstrations in other state capitals."
  We are witnessing the logical conclusion of the Democratic Party's philosophy, and it is this: Your tax dollars exist to make public sector unions happy. When we run out of other people's money to pay for those contracts and promises (most of which are negotiated outside of public view, often between union officials and the politicians that union officials helped elect), then we just need to raise taxes to cover a shortfall that is obviously Wall Street's fault. Anyone who doesn't agree is a bully, and might just bear an uncanny resemblance to Hitler.

  It's hard to believe that Obama thinks this is a winning issue. But I buy into Stanley Kurtz's argument that this is (indeed) the explicit path Obama has chosen.

  American politics just keeps getting more polarized. Be assured that Obama wants it that way. I argue in Radical-in-Chief that Obama's long-term hope is to divide America along class lines (roughly speaking, tax payers versus tax beneficiaries). Obama's attack on the Supreme Court at his 2010 State of the Union address, his offensive against the Chamber of Commerce, his exhortation to Hispanics to punish their enemies, and several similar moves were all efforts to jump-start a populist movement of the left. Like his socialist organizing mentors, Obama believes that a country polarized along class lines will eventually realign American politics sharply to the left. Yet the entire strategy is based on the need for an activated, populist movement of the left. So far, Obama has failed to create such a movement. His expensive economic agenda has provoked a populist counter-movement of the right instead: Obama's nightmare.

• Cracked details 5 Amazing Things Invented by Donald Duck (Seriously). For me, the most amazing one details how Christopher Nolan's Inception was presaged by a 2002 Scrooge McDuck comic book. Check it out.

Gosh, I didn't like this much at all. This third "Girl Who" movie ties up the not-particularly-interesting loose ends from the previous two movies. Why?

It picks up where the previous movie (The Girl Who Played with Fire) left off, with überhacker Lisbeth Salander being taken off to a hospital to recover from her wounds. As is her father, Zalachenko. But it soon becomes clear that there's a Massive Conspiracy afoot to hush up the whole story, as it would involve disclosing … um … a whole bunch of corruption and unsavory behavior. Or something like that.

Anyway, the bad guys are willing to resort to murder to maintain the coverup. (Because otherwise, you see, people might get suspicious.) So they send a dying comrade to the hospital to do in both Lisbeth and Zalachenko; he only half-succeeds, then commits suicide, not being able to take a bullet in the brain quite as well as Lisbeth.

And then it gets really tedious for a couple hours—seems longer—as the shadowy forces of the Massive Conspiracy attempt to get Lisbeth incarcerated for something (I'm hazy on exactly what). But her friend, investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist has resources of his own: he tries to unpeel the conspiratorial onion, and provide enough ammunition to get Lisbeth out of her legal jam.

It's boring and talky. Lisbeth isn't given much to do, save at the very end.