† How To Tell If You’re A Closet Racist (For Whites Only): Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer comments on the sudden pervasiveness of virulent racism in America:
 

[P]romiscuous 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.

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: Investor's Business Daily reports that in 2Q 2010 the number of U.S. subscribers to cable, satellite and telecom TV services fell for the first time ever:

The U.S. multichannel TV market lost 216,000 customers last quarter, vs. a gain of 378,000 a year ago. The total number of subscribers to cable, satellite and telecom video fell to 100.1 million in the second quarter, SNL Kagan says.

Cable TV firms lost 711,000 subscribers last quarter, while satellite and telecom TV services managed to add 81,000 and 414,000 subscribers, respectively.

"[W]e believe economic factors such as low housing formation and a high unemployment rate contributed to subscriber declines in the second quarter," said SNL Kagan analyst Mariam Rondeli.

† Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race: When Congress passed the Nursing Home Reform Law to correct pervasive elder abuse at these facilities in 1987, lawmakers could not have envisioned that patients rights would collide with civil rights, The Associated Press reports:

Certified nursing assistant Brenda Chaney was on duty in an Indiana nursing home one day when she discovered a patient lying on the floor, unable to stand.

But Chaney couldn't help the woman up. She had to search for a white aide because the woman had left instructions that she did not want any black caregivers. And the nursing home insisted it was legally bound to honor the request. …

At nursing homes, tension over patient rights and race "comes up occasionally in virtually every state in the United States," said Steve Maag, director of assisted living and continuing care at the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging. …

Under federal law, nursing home residents are free to choose their own physicians. Indiana's law is broader, saying patients can choose their "providers of services." Both laws say nursing homes must reasonably accommodate residents' "individual needs and preferences." …

Nursing homes can be hotbeds of racial friction, said David Smith, a Drexel University professor who has studied racial integration in hospitals and long-term care centers. In urban areas, staffs are often predominantly African-American while most patients are white. Some elderly people revert in dementia to the prejudices they grew up with. …

Courts have held that patients can refuse to be treated by a caregiver of the opposite sex, citing privacy issues. But the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling in Chaney's case last month, said applying that accommodation to race goes too far.

† Fed Up With Farmers: The Washington Post notes that “the Obama administration was paying Brazil $147.3 million to settle its international trade lawsuit over U.S. cotton subsidies, thus freeing Washington to continue lavishing taxpayer money on wealthy farmers in Arkansas, home state of politically embattled Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln.” Apparently, that’s not enough for Lincoln, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee:

Ms. Lincoln, who, is now demanding $1.5 billion in "disaster aid" for already-subsidized farmers in Arkansas and other states, mostly in the South. Even the usually farm-friendly Senate balked; the extra spending threatened to sink a $20 billion small-business aid bill that President Obama supports. So White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel got her to relent in return for his promise to find the money elsewhere by the end of August. Officials are scouring the federal government for cash. …

[T]he 2008 farm bill, passed over Mr. Bush's veto, sought to end notoriously recurrent, and notoriously expansive, "relief" demands. It established a fund that farmers afflicted by truly epic events could tap if they bought federally subsidized crop insurance to cover more mundane losses. But most Southern farmers opted out, arguing that insurance was a bad deal for them. Ms. Lincoln, it seems, was their insurance policy.

† Mortgage Loan Modification Less Than Advertised: Dealerships teeming with customers while the Obama administration’s Cash For Clunkers program was in effect, became ghost towns when the cash ran out. Unable to sell homes once the $8,000 tax credit for first-time purchasers expired, it's real estate agents and sellers who are now suffering, reports The New York Times:

[T]he volume of single-family home sales [is] at the lowest level since 1995. …

Mortgage rates are the lowest in modern memory while affordability, because of price declines of 30 percent in many areas, is the highest in at least a decade. The government is allowing buyers to put only a token amount down, guarantees lenders against default and regularly issues proclamations that the worst is over.

Apparently, all of that is not enough to put a floor under housing. With unemployment steady for month upon month at more than 9 percent, and with millions heavily in debt or simply skittish, many potential buyers are lost to the market.

No region was immune in July, with sales in the Northeast dropping 30 percent, the Midwest falling by a third, the South down 20 percent and the West off 23 percent. …

Analysts had been expecting a drop in July home sales because the month was the first time in a year that buyers were ineligible for the government housing tax credit. But the consensus expectation was for a decline of about 13 percent. …

Economists said that just as the credit had artificially buoyed the market, the end of the credit was artificially depressing it. “If you pay them, they will come. But when ya stop paying them, they leave in droves,” the economist Tom Lawler wrote in an e-mail.

His conclusion: “People shouldn’t panic.”

Either Lawler has ice water running through his veins or he’s determined to ignore the effect the growing inventory of bank-owned homes will have on the market. Robert Ward, director of global forecasting at the Economist Intelligence Unit, tells The Washington Times that “Real estate problems will continue to weigh on growth” because “[t]here is still a large amount of housing likely to come into foreclosure, and many homes already held by banks as a result of foreclosures have not yet moved onto the market."

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Reality Check: Part IV): Two new Rasmussen Reports telephone surveys of likely voters finds that Republicans are trusted more than Democrats on all 10 of the important issues about which the company regularly conducts polling: the economy (47 percent to 39 percent); ethics (40 percent to 38 percent); health care (48 percent to 40 percent); immigration (44 percent to 35 percent); Afghan war (43 percent to 36 percent); Iraq war (43 percent to 40 percent); national security and the War on Terror (49 percent to 37 percent); taxes (52 percent to 36 percent); education (41 percent) to 40 (percent); and Social Security (44 percent to 38 percent).  

Note that President Barack Hussein Obama and his fellow Dems have demagogued every one of these issues: the economy (“we inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression”); ethics (during her first 100 hours as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed to "drain the swamp" after more than a decade of Republican rule); immigration (without having read AZ’s SB1070, Attorney General Eric Holder opined “I think it has the possibility of leading to racial profiling and putting a wedge between law enforcement and a community that would, in fact, be profiled” and then sued the state to block its enforcement); Afghan war (AKA “the Good War”); Iraq war (“Bush lied and people died”); War on Terror (AKA “Overseas Contingency Operation”);  taxes (“end Bush’s tax cuts for the rich”); education (“No Child Left Behind is firmly cemented as President Bush’s failed education experiment”); and Social Security (Republicans trying to destroy Social Security).