When I was in 9th grade, I played Freshman football. As a defensive back, we were coached to yell "BINGO!" when we intercepted a pass as a signal to our teammates that the ball had changed hands and was coming back the other way. With that background established, this sort of silliness could have ended my football career even before I chose to end it:

A district judge has banned a Kentucky teenager from saying “bingo” for half a year, after the youth repeatedly and falsely yelled the game-ending exclamation at a local hall, upsetting patrons.

Ben Shapiro explains the real motivation behind the push for same-sex marriage:

Unlike the movement to retract laws restricting sexual behavior, the same-sex marriage movement has never been about freedom in any real sense. The push for same-sex marriage is not about wanting freedom to copulate; same-sex copulation has been effectively legal in this country for decades, and formally legal since Lawrence v. Texas (2003). The push for same-sex marriage is not about wanting legal benefits available to heterosexual couples; same-sex couples are largely able to make contractual arrangements to achieve those benefits, and in many states, civil unions equate legally with marriage.

The push for same-sex marriage is about placing the power of government in direct opposition to traditional religious viewpoints.

From Ace of Spades comes this absolutely brilliant analysis: Maybe global warming, whether it is a natural phenomenon or a man-made one, is keeping the next ice age away.

So, can someone explain to me again why mile thick glaciers over the northern states are desirable again? I missed that explanation the first time.

interesting op-ed in the Washington Examiner. When everything is a crime, everybody is a criminal.

Statutory law in America has expanded to the point that government's primary activity is no longer to protect, preserve and defend our lives, liberty and property, but rather to stalk and entrap normal American citizens doing everyday things. After identifying three federal offenses in the U.S. Constitution - treason, piracy and counterfeiting - the federal government left most matters of law enforcement to the states. By the time President Obama took office in 2009, however, there were more than 4,500 federal criminal statutes on the books.

Hyper Grammar

I was reading this review of Pat Buchanan's book and came across this curious construct:

Prague was not a Germanic city. Its part of Czechoslovakia was taken as a conquest by Hitler, and that was something up with which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain did not feel able to put.

That, my friends is a mighty effort to avoid dangling a modifier.

This Venn diagram cracked me up.

National Review Roundup

National Review Online has a great collection of essays today.

Rich Lowry writes that we no longer build things, we obstruct them:

We don't excel at building things. We excel at studying things, and putting up obstacles to building them. We delay, cavil, and sue. We protest and micromanage. It is not the age of the engineer but of the bureaucrat, the lawyer, and the environmental activist.

Mona Charen comments on the Democrats continuous campaign:

Democrats are so focused on blaming any misfortune on Republicans that they've become almost cartoonishly predictable. Mr. Obama devoted the first two years of his term, after his policies failed to deliver the economic results his administration had promised, to blaming his predecessor. Following the 2010 elections, the president continued to shake the George W. Bush mask with one hand and point the finger at the Republicans in Congress with the other. It was the Republicans who were to blame when the recovery dissipated, unemployment remained high, and labor-force participation tanked. The how part was a little vague, but never mind.

Charles Cooke explains why the government is buying so much ammunition:

Nonetheless, one could reasonably ask why the Social Security Administration would need any ammunition at all. Are the elderly especially unruly these days? Jonathan L. Lasher, in the SSA's external-relations department, explained to the Huffington Post that the ammunition is "for the 295 agents" in the outfit's office of inspector general "who investigate Social Security fraud and other crimes." Divide the rounds by the number of agents, and you get about 590 per agent; in a given year, that's about ten rounds a week. "Most will be expended on the firing range," Lasher continued.

John Lott looks at what motivates mass murderers. He concludes:

We should be trying to deprive these killers of what they crave: attention and easy targets. Instead, we ignore measures that might keep them from getting attention and pass laws that give them defenseless victims.

Victor Davis Hanson on Barack Obama's relationship with the press:

(T)here are plenty of reasons to assume that Barack Obama has established the tenor and methodology of press relations from the very outset of his administration, characterized by expectations of unfailing support, coupled with a general vindictiveness toward his few critics among the press corps. In the past, Obama's habit of leaking the divorce records of opponents, his calls for supporters to confront opponents and "get in their face," petty threats in St. Louis by prosecutors against any who might say untrue things about Obama, and successful pressure to keep unpublished the Obama speech praising the radical Palestinian-American Rashid Khalidi were not even news, but usually written off as the normal pro-Obama zeal. Obama alone could not have elevated The View to a supposedly serious 60 Minutes-type news show - and reduced 60 Minutes to the inanity of The View.