The International House of Bacon

6 inches of sleet for me, a slate of links for you. None about Obama, so you’ll have to find something else to get angry about. d;-)

* GetReligion has a great entry up about the media missing the boat on Huckabee’s rhetoric. It’s a good exposure into the liberal media concept - it’s not necessarily that the media is going out of its way to be biased, but rather that the media’s makeup is generally Democratic, and there’s probably a bit of confirmation bias involved in the whole thing. Essentially, the media misses the boat with Huckabee often because the major orgs don’t have the type of diversity in the newsroom to catch these sorts of things when they come up. It’s an interesting framework to think about when discussing media biases - it’s not always right/left.

* Radley Balko posted at the Reason blog about the online gambling ban, which involved the US Trade Department making some concessions to work around some international treaties. The terms weren’t disclosed, and a Freedom of Information Act request was denied based on “national security” reasons. More at Cato and the links within the two posts, but how ridiculous.

* Also from the Cato blog, a new study about how non-smokers actually cost more for the health system than smokers do. A bit of a hole in the universal healthcare argument.

* Kudlow notes the strange coincedence that the stock market has plunged around the same time as the last few primary contests.

* OverLawyered notes that McCain’s big wins yesterday repudiate one of the main reasons for his campaign reform bill. Money doesn’t win elections, people. If they did, President Perot would have been quite the hoot.

* New England Republican gets it. The second half is worth reading for Democrats and liberals as well, just substitute “terror” with “Iraq” and the concept is the same - there’s more going on in the world that is ultimately more important. The problem, unfortunately, is that there isn’t a Goldwater or Reagan type waiting in the wings to steer the Republican Party back to what made them worthwhile in the first place.

* Stanley Kurtz over at the National Review presents an interesting theory about the electorate as it stands, namely that the right missed the boat. It’s a little more hysterical and inflammatory than it needs to be, but the gist of it is that the education system has moved left with no real significant response from the other side, thus churning out people who have no serious insight into the other side of things. Hell, I went to private Catholic schools and can largely speak to that. It’s interesting to see if this holds water long-term.

* Linked everywhere, Right Wing News interviews Thomas Sowell. Sowell’s the most important intellectual on the right today, and, IMO, is proof positive that you can make a charismatic case for wonkish views. The Vision of the Anointed should be required reading for anyone with even a cursory interest in politics.

* Finally, if you haven’t been keeping up with the Drew Carey Project at Reason’s video site, you’re missing out on some pretty good stuff. His latest is on the middle class, and how the assumption that we’re getting squeezed doesn’t really hold water. It fits in well with Reason’s piece on the middle class from last year as well as the fact that the middle class is disappearing because they’re getting richer.

This video spoke to me in a different way, though - for those of us in the middle class (and Ann & I fit into the lower middle class by most accounts), it is a lot about choices. Our savings rate isn’t quite what we might want it to be, and some weeks may feel harder than others, but a lot of that has had to do with the choices we’ve made - we chose to buy a house and have a mortgage as opposed to rent for less. I bought a newer car because I felt a car payment now would work out better in the long run. We go out to eat once a week, we try to catch a movie, we go to Red Sox games. The important part? We’re happy.

This isn’t to say that luck or outside influences aren’t occasionally a factor - we’re certainly lucky we haven’t had medical catastrophes or that my employment issues didn’t hurt us long term the way that they do for other people - but that the concept of a “middle class squeeze” is largely a bizarre manifestation, and one we can probably blame on the Lou Dobbses and the John Edwardses of the world.