| Morning Jolt – February 25, 2012 By Jim Geraghty First a bit of housekeeping: The guys who actually know how this technology stuff works have informed me that the filtering system used in Comcast e-mail accounts, Cloudmark, blocks mail containing links to HotAir.com. Apparently this is not because of some Comcast crusade against Ed Morrissey, Mary Katharine Ham, Allahpundit, and the gang, but because someone is spoofing HotAir.com and "because hotair.com doesn't do a lot of mail via the hotair.com domain or IP, there isn't enough of a balance to negate a negative reputation." If you have further questions ... I am absolutely the last person who is going to be able to explain it to you. I've been urged "to avoid linking to HotAir articles." But if you're a regular reader, you know that I really like linking to those guys and quoting what they're saying and reacting and adding to it and so on. I suppose I theoretically could quote them without linking to them, but that strikes me as bad Web etiquette.
Anyway, I mention all this because if you don't see the HotAir crew quoted in the coming days/weeks/whenever, it's not because of any tiff or spat.
Enjoy your Morning Jolt!
Jim Our Increasingly Prominent National Scapegoat: YOU
Last Thursday, David French kindly praised this newsletter in the Corner, in a post about modern parenting and the "effort shock" some people experience once they leave the protected enclaves of high school and college and enter the real world. (He added that he wants to see the culture-based material up top, so we may experiment in that direction.) One of the commenters on that post responded:
You know what would be awesome? If well-intentioned people stopped trying to fix the world. Seriously. All of you. Just go get a good job, love your kids, home-school them, and stop worrying about how terrible the schools are, what bad parents your neighbors are, how much obesity there is, what drugs people are taking and what light bulbs they are using.
Another commenter responded, "refreshing." And indeed, that notion sounds really appealing at times. But a lot of powerful forces prevent most of us from doing that.
It will probably not surprise you that my non-work, non-parenting hours are filled with a slew of half-baked and often half-executed ideas aimed at the realms of television and pop culture. One of the cultural arguments I'd like to make is that we now celebrate the folks whom we should mock and criticize and we mock and criticize those whom we should be celebrating.
One of my nuttier ideas was taking a Twitter conversation between Cam Edwards and Kurt Schlicter envisioning a rightward sitcom answer to HBO's "Girls" entitled "Dudes" and trying to turn it into an actual script.
At one point, I had a character in that script rant:
I'm a married middle-aged guy with a house in the suburbs who goes to work, pays his taxes and takes care of his kids. When the hell did I turn into the villain in society? Chris Brown still walks the streets! In the time it's taken me to finish this sentence, "Shawty Lo" has impregnated three more women and Kim Kardashian's been on four more magazine covers! I think one of 'em's a fishing magazine! Yet somehow Madison Avenue considers me to be their go-to stereotype as a doofus, I'm the butt of every joke, sneered at for unsophisticated tastes, dismissed as a relic of a fading past, accused of not paying my fair share in taxes and insufficiently globally conscious because I'm only taking care of what's directly in front of me instead of glaciers or the Gaza Strip. How am I the problem in the world today? What the hell did I ever do?
I remember a comment from Mark Steyn a few NR cruises ago, and I'm going to paraphrase it now: "Americans are first citizens of a global superpower with no interest in conquest. We don't want other territory, we don't seek to subjugate other nations, we're not trying to wipe out any culture we deem inferior. And yet through the rhetoric and of the environmental movement, you, driving your SUV and drinking your Big Gulp and eating your Big Mac, are accused of literally destroying the planet! Not even history's most brutal dictators faced an accusation on that scale!"
Our political culture and our popular culture are the one-two punch contending that you, ordinary American, going to work or looking for work or looking for better work and just taking care of your families, have somehow become the root of the biggest problems facing the country. It's your fault.
Don't scoff — we see this in the way the state chooses to enforce its laws. We are a nation of laws ... lots and lots of them. But we don't really enforce all of them. Sometimes, as with speeding, the law chooses to arrest and prosecute the worst offenders: If you go 59 in a 55 zone, they'll usually let it pass, but if you're going more than ten miles over the limit, you're taking a gamble.
One of our biggest debates at the moment is whether entering the country illegally should carry any significant legal consequences. There is an enormous, loud, consistent push for a giant, official "eh, never mind that entering-the-country-illegally thing," and this is after decades of spotty enforcement, where everybody in local, state, and federal government knew where to find illegal immigrants (every morning, there were a bunch of guys outside the Home Depot willing to work hard for a little cash paid under the table).
Certain laws just aren't that important, apparently. As of January 2012, 36 of President Obama's executive office staff owe the country a total of $833,970 in back taxes.
D.C. attorney general Irvin Nathan cited "prosecutorial discretion" in his decision to decline to bring criminal charges against Meet the Press host David Gregory for his display of a 30-round magazine on air as he discussed the role of high-capacity magazines in the Newtown shooting. "According to D.C. law, it is illegal to possess a large capacity magazine — defined as holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition — even if it is empty. The misdemeanor is punishable by up to a $1,000 fine and/or up to one year in prison." Of course, other people, not so famous and influential, have been prosecuted and convicted for breaking the same law. Remember Hadiya Pendleton, the girl who sang at Obama's inauguration and who was fatally shot in Chicago? Her alleged slayer had multiple arrests, and yet he kept being released back out onto the street.
The reputed gang member accused of gunning down 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton last month was on the street even though he had been arrested three times in connection with break-ins and trespassing while on probation for a weapons conviction in recent months, the Tribune has learned.
In two of those arrests, including one just 2 1/2 months ago, Cook County probation officials failed to notify prosecutors or the judge that Michael Ward had been arrested on the new misdemeanor charges and allegedly violated his probation... .
Police also arrested Ward numerous times as a juvenile on charges ranging from robbery to battery to marijuana possession, court records show. At least two of those arrests resulted in convictions, and Ward spent time in 2011 on juvenile probation.
Apparently keeping him off the streets just wasn't enough of a priority for the government.
Meanwhile, Michael Arrington tells us about his recent experience with the Transportation Security Administration seizing his boat ... after he pointed out an error in their paperwork:
The primary form, prepared by the government, had an error. The price was copied from the invoice, but DHS changed the currency from Canadian to U.S. dollars.
It has language at the bottom with serious sounding statements that the information is true and correct, and a signature block.
I pointed out the error and suggested that we simply change the currency from US $ to CAD $ so that is was correct. Or instead, amend the amount so that it was correct in U.S. dollars.
I thought this was important because I was signing it and swearing that the information, and specifically the price, was correct.
The DHS agent didn't care about the error and told me to sign the form anyway. "It's just paperwork, it doesn't matter," she said. I declined.
She called another agent and said simply "He won't sign the form." I asked to speak to that agent to give them a more complete picture of the situation. She wouldn't allow that.
Then she seized the boat. As in, demanded that we get off the boat, demanded the keys and took physical control of it.
What struck me the most about the situation is how excited she got about seizing the boat. Like she was just itching for something like this to happen. This was a very happy day for her.
The people of this country increasingly feel that the government and its laws are a rigged game, only enforced when convenient to those running the show. David Gregory, White House staffers, illegal immigrants — for some reason, their lawbreaking isn't worth the attention or time of the government. Not even Michael Ward warranted more than a cursory punishment for crime after crime. But if we break any one of the ever-expanding encyclopedia of laws issued by Washington or our state capitals, we're likely to face expensive and consequential punishments. The Future of Online Journalism ... Collaborative Visuals! Or Something.
The Franklin Center's journalism conference late last week was about "Raising Online Community." As conference organizer Tabitha Hale put it, "We have every tool for collaboration in the world, and yet it feels like we don't collaborate enough."
They've put together "A Guide to the Political Blogosphere", and most of us in attendance wish we had something like it when we began. It covers protecting your privacy, integrating social media, FOIA requests, interviewing, multimedia, and building and maintaining relationships across the blogosphere, and so on.
If you're interested, there is a plan to put it online in the not-too-distant future. If you have a blog, or are thinking of starting one, it's definitely worth a look and I'd say that even if they hadn't mentioned the Morning Jolt as necessary reading:
A few other notes from the weekend: - Speaking of images like that, during one presentation, the wise Melissa Clouthier contended that every blog post needed a visual component, either a picture or video. She argues that Pinterest is a rapidly-growing social network, and that visual-based searches will eventually become the dominant form of web searches. Apparently , Pinterest drives the same amount of users clicking through to the linked article or page that as Twitter, even though Pinterest has 1/50 of the user base of Twitter.
You'll notice Campaign Spot has days where it features a lot of YouTube videos and pictures or graphs or illustrations ... and days where it doesn't. And this newsletter rarely if ever uses photos, graphs, and so on. Since I have access to a nice six-figure potential polling sample before me, dear readers, what do you think? More visuals? Apparently a large segment of Web users visit Facebook and rarely venture beyond it. So it means that if your material isn't on Facebook, it's missing a large chunk of the potential audience. So thank you for every time you've Facebook "liked" and shared items from this newsletter, Campaign Spot, and NRO. - I wonder if righty/libertarian bloggers come across as self-mocking online as they are in person. We (largely) love what we do, we want to make a difference, we want to reach the widest audience possible, we want our words and images and audio and video to move people ... but deep down, we all know that none of us, individually, is irreplaceable.
- Hey, that video of that ninny Colorado state lawmaker, Joe Salazar? The one who dismissed the right of young women to carry concealed weapons on campus because, "it's why we have call boxes, it's why we have safe zones, it's why we have the whistles. Because you just don't know who you're gonna be shooting at." We all saw that because Kelly Maher of Revealing Politics spent her Friday night in the state capitol instead of doing any of the things we would rather spend our Friday nights doing. Send her a few "attagirls", she really deserves some.
ADDENDUM: Nathan Wurtzel, examining the tax hikes Virginia enacted to deal with its long-term transportation issues: "There used to be a pretty significant tax advantage to living in Virginia vs. Maryland or DC. I wonder if that's still true." To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com Save 75% . . . Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for print-edition information. Click here for digital-edition information. And National Review makes a great gift. Click here to send a full-year gift to NR Digital, and here to send a full-year subscription to the print edition. Conservatives – stay healthy! Get plenty of Vitamin Sea on the next National Review cruise. Visit www.nrcruise.com for complete information about our next trip. National Review, Inc. | 
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