Motor Mania

Teach Me Tiger - 1965

I can't speak for other households, but for me growing up in the 1950s and 1960s had strong elements of a "Leave it to Beaver" lifestyle.  Playing was free and wide-ranging, interacting with other kids was simple and straight-forward, and notions of sex were mostly repressed.  Not so much from active suppression, but more from lack of exposure.

We had 3 TV stations in the DFW area, broadcasts were in black and white, and with the exception of a risque late night program called, "Playboy After Dark" in the early 1960s, we really weren't exposed to anything very sexy.  Movies and TV programming were subject to censorship by some kind of industry group seeking to protect its licensing from the FCC.

However, nature being nature, some of us experimented sooner than others and the result was often either a forced teenage marriage or the girl disappeared into one of the local "homes" during her pregnancy.  I don't recall having any school sponsored sex education and there wasn't any such education taking place at home either.  There was an 8th grade class entitled, "Health and Safety" where sex education was intended to be done, but about all I recall about that class was that it was boring and clinical.

Soon enough, we discovered where the soft parts were, where the fun parts were, and what parts caused the stirring within.  Nature has its own way of conducting class.  The subtleties of stimulating attraction between the sexes was something that took time to develop and you took cues from where ever you could find them.  One of those simulations was a little song that came out in 1965.  All I recalled of it for nearly a half-century was the title, "Teach Me Tiger" and the singer, April Stevens.

When the song came out, it was considered so naughty that many radio stations would not play it and the record was often a bootleg item, not readily available.  Nowadays with Youtube and a title, you can find most anything...and here it is:
 

1960's Surfer Slang

Amped:
Overdoing it; excited; stoked.

Anglin':
Turning left and/or right on a wave.

Ankle Busters:
Small waves.

Avalanche:
An outer reef surf spot on Oahu, Hawaii; the white water pouring down the face of a wave.

Awesome:
Great; fantastic (also see "Off the Richter," "Off the Wall," "Outrageous").

Back Down:
To decide not to take off on a wave.

Baggys/Baggies:
Oversized, loose fitting boxer-type swim trunks worn for show or comfort by surfers.

Bail out:
To get away from, jump off, or dive off the surfboard just before a potential wipe out.

Banzai:
A gung-ho type of yell given by surfers as they shoot the curl (also see "Cowabunga").

Banzai Pipeline:
A surf spot on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, between Waimea Bay and Sunset Beach; also called Pipeline (also see "Pipeline").

Barrel:
The breaking motion of a perfect wave; a hollow channel formed inside a good wave when it breaks and curls over.

Beach Bunny:
A girl who goes to the beach to watch surfing.

Beached:
Totally stuffed from eating.

Beaver tail:
A wet suit that features a snap-on crotch, the shape of which resembles a beaver's tail.

Big Gun:
A 9-foot or longer surfboard especially designed for large waves.

Big Surf:
Extremely large waves (also see "Bombora," "Heavies").

Bitchin:
(also "Bitchen") Very good; tops; excellent (also see "Boss," "Excellent," "Primo," "Rad").

Blown Out:
Winds blowing so hard as to chop up the surf and render it unridable.

Body Surfing:
Riding the waves without a surfboard.

Bogus:
False; lame; ridiculous; unbelievable.

Bombora:
An Australian word that refers to a big wave that breaks outside the normal surf line.

Bone Yard:
The area where the waves break.

Boogie Board:
A soft, flexible foam bodyboard invented in the 1970s (unlike a surfboard, a boogie board is ridden lying down).

Boss:
Outstanding; the best (also see "Bitchin," "Excellent," "Primo," "Rad").

Breaker:
Any wave that breaks on the way to the beach.

Breakwater:
A line of large boulders, cement, and/or steel extending out into the water and designed to reduce shoreline erosion.

Bro:
(also "Bra") Short for "brother" (also see "Dude").

Bummer:
Too bad; a total drag.

Bunny:
(see "Beach Bunny")

Carve:
To make a radical turn (also see "Hot-Dogging," "Shred").

Catch a Wave:
To ride a breaking wave.

Climbing:
To carve an S-shaped path on a wave, making a radical

Dropping:
bottom turn, climbing to the wave's crest, then radically cutting back

Cheater Five:
Five toes on the nose - keep your weight back on the board to maintain trim and speed, squat down and extend one foot forward

Coffin:
Riding a surfboard while lying stiffly on one's back with arms crossed.

Cowabunga:
(also "Kowabunga") A yell of excitement by a surfer (also see "Banzai").

Crest:
The top portion of a wave.

Cruncher:
A big, hard-breaking wave that folds over and is almost impossible to ride.

Curl:
The portion of the wave that is spilling over and breaking.

Cut Back:
To turn toward the breaking part of the wave.

Cut out:
To pull out of the wave, like kicking out.

Ding:
A hole, crack, dent, or scratch on the surface of a surfboard.

Doggers:
Multicolored swimming trunks.

Dork:
Someone behaving inappropriately (also see "Geek," "Kook").

Double Spinner:
Two consecutive 360-degree body spins on a surfboard.

Drop Knee:
One foot on the bodyboard, with the other hanging off the back. Difficult and fun.

Dude:
A male surfing enthusiast (women are referred to as "dudettes").

Dweeb:
A geek; someone who acts or looks like a simpleton.

Eat It:
To fall off of a surfboard (also see "Wipe Out").

El Rollo:
Lying prone on a surfboard and holding on to the sides while rolling 360-degrees during a ride.

Excellent:
Great; fantastic; exceptional (also see "Bitchin," "Boss," "Primo," "Rad").

Face:
The unbroken wall, surface, or nearly vertical front of a wave.

Fer Sure:
The surfer pronunciation of "for sure," meaning absolutely, correct, or definitely.

Geek:
Someone behaving inappropriately (also see "Kook," "Dork").

Glasshouse:
(see "Green Room")

Glassy:
A smooth water surface condition caused by absence of local winds.

Gnarlatious:
Anything that's really great or awesome.

Gnarly:
Treacherous; large and dangerous. Also bitchin

Goofy-Foot:
Riding a surfboard with the right foot forward (left foot forward is the more common stance).

Green Room:
The space inside of a tube.

Gremlin:
A young hodad; a beginning surfer (also see "Grommet").

Gremmy/Gremmie:
(See "Hodad")

Grommet:
A young hodad; a beginning surfer (also see "Gremlin").

Ground Swell:
Large waves generated by distant storms.

Gun:
A large surfboard designed for very big waves (see "Big Gun").

Hairy:
(see "Gnarly")

Hang Five/Ten:
To place five (or ten) toes over the nose of the surfboard (also see "Toes on the Nose").

Head Dip:
Touching the water with your head while surfing.

Headstand:
Standing on one's head while riding a wave.

Heavies:
Very big waves usually higher than 12 feet.

Hit the Surf:
To go surfing.

Honker:
A really big wave (also see "Heavies," "Bombora").

Hot-Dogging:
Fancy surfing done by a skilled surfer.
 
Hodad:
A non-surfer, usually someone who just hangs around the beach.

Honeys:
Female surfers or girlfriends of surfers.

Huarache Sandals:
Leather sandals worn by surfers with a sole made from tire treads.

Jetty:
(see "Breakwater")

Kahuna:
The Hawaiian god of sun, sand, and surf.

Kamikaze:
Riding the board at the nose with arms held straight out to each side.

Kick Out:
To push down on the tail of a surfboard to lift and turn the nose over the top of the wave.

Knots:
Callouses, or calcium deposits, just below the knee and on the tops of the foot caused by kneeling on the surfboard.

Kook:
(also "Kuk") A surfing beginner; someone who gets in the way or into trouble because of ignorance or inexperience (also see "Dork," "Geek").

Kowabunga:
(see "Cowabunga")

Kuk:
(see "Kook")

Leash:
A cord attaching the surfer's ankle to the surfboard.

Locked In:
Firmly set in the curling portion of the wave with water holding down the tail of the board.

Log:
Slang for pre-foam board made of wood.

Longboard:
A surfboard eight to ten feet long.

Max Out:
To be over the limit.

Meatball:
The yellow flag with the black circle indicating "No Surfing".

Mondo:
Something huge; of epic proportions.

Nailed:
To get badly wiped out.

Neptune Cocktail:
The large bellyful of seawater that one ingested during a particularly gnarly wipeout. Usually happened concurrently with the Sand Facial.

Nose:
The bow or front end of a surfboard.

Off the Richter:
Used to describe something that's very good, excellent, or "off the scale" (also see "Awesome," "Off the Wall," "Outrageous").

Off the Wall:
Incredible, excellent (also see "Awesome," "Off the Richter," "Outrageous").

Outrageous:
Incredible, excellent (also see "Awesome," "Off the Richter," "Off the Wall").

Outside Break:
The area farthest from shore where the waves are breaking.

Over the Falls:
To wipe out, or to get dragged over as the wave breaks.

Pearl:
Driving the nose of a surfboard under water to stop or slow down the ride. The term is borrowed from "pearl diving."

Pendleton:
A brightly colored plaid wool or flannel shirt worn by some surfers.

Pipeline:
A surf spot on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, between Waimea Bay and Sunset Beach; also called Banzai Pipeline. Originally named by surfing filmmaker Bruce Brown (also see "Banzai Pipeline").

Point Break:
A type of surf break where waves wrap around a promontory of land and curl as they break. A classic example of a point break is located at Rincon, California, just south of the Santa Barbara/Ventura County line.

Poser:
A surfer "wanna-be"; someone who only dresses the part.

Pounder:
A hard-breaking wave.

Prone:
Ride with your belly on the board. The most common and easiest way to ride a bodyboard.

Prone Out:
Pulling out of a wave by dropping to your belly causing the nose to go under water and the tail to turn around.

Primo:
The best (also see "Bitchin," "Boss," "Excellent," "Rad").

Pull Out:
To steer a surfboard over or through the back of a wave to end a ride.

Quasimoto:
Riding forward in a hunched-over position; riding a wave on the nose of a surfboard in a crouched position with one arm forward and one arm back, named by surfer Mickey Muöoz.

Rad/Radical:
Very good; tops; excellent (also see "Bitchin," "Boss," "Primo," "Excellent").

Rails:
The rounded edges of the surfboard.

Re-Entry:
Attacking the lip, usually going vertically and then turning nose down and re-entering the wave.

Ripping:
Executing drastic and radical moves on the wave. Having it your way with a wave.

Sand Facial:
The result of wiping out and being dragged along the bottom, face first.

Sano:
Abbreviated form of San Onofre; also means a very clean, nicely contoured wave condition.

Selling Buicks:
The process of reversing the ingestion of the dreaded Neptune Cocktail. After selling Buicks, it was generally assumed that ones day at the beach was pretty much over.

Set:
A group of waves.

Shape:
The configuration, or form, of a wave.

Shoot the Curl:
Riding a surfboard through, or in and out of, the hollow part of the wave formed as it crests over.

Shoot the Pier:
Riding a surfboard in between the pilings of a beachside pier.

Shoot the Tube:
(see "Shoot the curl")

Shore Break:
Waves break very close to the beach.

Shred:
To surf aggressively (also see "Hot-Dogging).

Sidewalk Surfing:
Skateboarding.

Skeg:
The fin at the tail end of a surfboard.

Soup:
The foamy part of the broken wave; the white water.

Spin Out:
The result of a surfboard's skeg and tail end losing contact with the wave face and the surfer wipes out.

Spinner:
A surfer making a complete 360-degree turn in an upright position while the surfboard keeps going straight (also called a "360").

Sponger:
Somebody that bodyboards.

Stick:
Surfboard.

Surfs Up:
Waves are breaking and surfable.

Stoked:
Happy; excited; contented.

Stringer:
The wood strip running down the center of the board; sometimes used for design.

Surf Bunny:
A surfer's girlfriend; a female surfer (also see "Beach Bunny").

Surfari:
A surfing trip; a hunt for good surf.

Swells:
Unbroken waves moving in groups of similar height and frequency.

Tail:
The stern or rear end of a surfboard.

Tail Slide:
Part of a larger maneuver in which the surfer purposely makes his/her fins lose their grip and the board slides.

Takeoff:
The start of a ride.

Taking Gas:
To wipe out.

Tandem:
Two people riding on a surfboard at the same time, usually a man and woman.
360:
(See "Spinner")

Toes on the Nose:
Riding a surfboard with the toes hanging over the front end (also see "Hang Five/Ten")

Tube:
The hollow portion of a wave formed when the crest spills over and makes a tunnel or hollow space in front of the face of the wave. (The Green Room)

Tubed:
Riding inside the "tube".

Val:
Person from the San Fernando Valley, as referred to by persons living in the L.A.-area beach cities.

Walking the Board:
Walking back and forth on the surfboard to maintain control.

Walking the Nose:
Moving forward on the board toward the front or nose.

Wax:
Substance applied to the top, or deck, of surfboards for traction.

Wedge, The:
A famous, but dangerous, body surfing spot located at the tip of the Balboa peninsula in Newport Beach, California.

Wet Suit:
A neoprene rubber suit used by surfers to keep warm.

Wipe Out:
To fall off or be knocked off your board (also see "Eat It").

Woodie:
A station wagon, made in the '40s and '50s, with wood paneling on the sides.

Technology Timelines

Since about 1995 I've felt constantly nudged in the butt by computer technology.  It's been a sense that something was going on that I should know about and perhaps find a way to use.  The nudging had actually been going on since about 1980 when Tandy brought out some of the first reasonably priced PC desktop computers.

Although we didn't really know it at the time, those early 1980s desktops couldn't do very much.  Nevertheless, there was a sense that if your were in business, you needed to have some computers around.  For years, until the mid to late 1990s, after getting the first ones, we used them as little more than expensive and complicated typewriter replacements.  Then came LANs, Internet, dot com...dot com...dot com, and a stock market crash.

Since the very beginning of my involvement with computers, there has been a small group of people moving in and out of my sphere who generally feigned knowing a lot more about computers and all things technological than I did.  I've never had the time nor the interest needed to delve deeply into the intricacies of these various technologies as they were developing.  However, I've always had a general understanding of them and made use of those things I thought might be helpful, but tended to let most other things mature before giving them a try.  That approach helped protect precious time and permitted the market to sort out the winners before I jumped in.

Telling a time-line type of story would be boring for both the writer and a reader, so I've been looking for a graphic way to present a longer view of what has transpired technologically over the past 30-years or so.  The time-lines below represent those things I've found most enlightening, yet maintaining some simplicity.  The overriding problem in understanding the issue is that the story has been developing in several interrelated technologies, each one depending on the other to progress its agenda:  Computer hardware, processors, memory, software, operating systems, communications infrastructure, and the slow development of human interface competencies in a constantly changing environment. 

Intelligence Test

The Alien in the White House

The distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed.

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

June 10, 2010

The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.

There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn't lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason.

Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchill—a gift from Tony Blair—by packing it back off to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind. Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.

Far greater strangeness has since flowed steadily from Washington. The president's appointees, transmitters of policy, go forth with singular passion week after week, delivering the latest inversion of reality. Their work is not easy, focused as it is on a current prime preoccupation of this White House—that is, finding ways to avoid any public mention of the indisputable Islamist identity of the enemy at war with us. No small trick that, but their efforts go forward in public spectacles matchless in their absurdity—unnerving in what they confirm about our current guardians of law and national security.

Consider the hapless Eric Holder, America's attorney general, confronting the question put to him by Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) of the House Judicary Committee on May 13.

Did Mr. Holder think that in the last three terrorist attempts on this soil, one of them successful (Maj. Nidal Hasan's murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, preceded by his shout of "Allahu Akbar!"), that radical Islam might have played any role at all? Mr. Holder seemed puzzled by the question. "People have different reasons" he finally answered—a response he repeated three times. He didn't want "to say anything negative about any religion."

And who can forget the exhortations on jihad by John Brennan, Mr. Obama's chief adviser on counterterrorism? Mr. Brennan has in the past charged that Americans lack sensitivity to the Muslim world, and that we have particularly failed to credit its peace-loving disposition. In a May 26 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Brennan held forth fervently, if not quite comprehensibly, on who our enemy was not: "Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is just a tactic. Our enemy is not terror because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear."

He went on to announce, sternly, that we do not refer to our enemies as Islamists or jihadists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam. How then might we be permitted to describe our enemies? One hint comes from another of Mr. Brennan's pronouncements in that speech: That "violent extremists are victims of political, economic and social forces."

Yes, that would work. Consider the news bulletins we could have read: "Police have arrested Faisal Shahzad, victim of political, economic and social forces living in Connecticut, for efforts to set off a car bomb explosion in Times Square." Plotters in Afghanistan and Yemen, preparing for their next attempt at mass murder in America, could only have listened in wonderment. They must have marvelled in particular on learning that this was the chief counterterrorism adviser to the president of the United States.

Long after Mr. Obama leaves office, it will be this parade of explicators, laboring mightily to sell each new piece of official reality revisionism—Janet Napolitano and her immortal "man-caused disasters'' among them—that will stand most memorably as the face of this administration.

It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.
It is what has caused this president and his counterterrorist brain trust to deem it acceptable to insult Americans with nonsensical evasions concerning the enemy we face. It is this focus that caused Mr. Holder to insist on holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan, despite the rage this decision induced in New Yorkers, and later to insist if not there, then elsewhere in New York. This was all to be a dazzling exhibition for that world community—proof of Mr. Obama's moral reclamation program and that America had been delivered from the darkness of the Bush years.

It was why this administration tapped officials like Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Among his better known contributions to political discourse was a 2005 address in which he compared the treatment of Muslim-Americans in the United States after 9/11 with the plight of the Japanese-Americans interned in camps after Pearl Harbor. During a human-rights conference held in China this May, Mr. Posner cited the new Arizona immigration law by way of assuring the Chinese, those exemplary guardians of freedom, that the United States too had its problems with discrimination.

So there we were: America and China, in the same boat on human rights, two buddies struggling for reform. For this view of reality, which brought withering criticism in Congress and calls for his resignation, Mr. Posner has been roundly embraced in the State Department as a superbly effective representative.
It is no surprise that Mr. Posner—like numerous of his kind—has found a natural home in this administration. His is a sensibility and political disposition with which Mr. Obama is at home. The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.

They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.

The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good. A country governed by leaders too principled to speak the name of its mortal enemy needs every infusion of reality it can get.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

The last refuge of a liberal

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, August 27, 2010;  Washington Post

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the "bitter" people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging "to guns or religion or" -- this part is less remembered -- "antipathy toward people who aren't like them."

That's a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities -- often lopsided majorities -- oppose President Obama's social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president's proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and S.B. 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays -- particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the mosque near Ground Zero. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration's pretense that we are at war with nothing more than "violent extremists" of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" -- blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims -- a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, "just downright mean"?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.