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The  NY Times interviewed David Mamet.

… You also wrote about hating “every wasted, hard-earned cent I spent in taxes.” What cent did you hate the most?
All of them gall me the most. Listen, Shelby Steele and I were on a panel, and some white woman asked, “What can we do for the African-American community?” There was a long pause, and he said, in the saddest voice I’ve ever heard, “Leave us alone.” It’s appalling what the government has done to the great African-American community in the last 50 years.

Back to show business for a second. Do you care about reviews?
Of course you care. I don’t read them, but you don’t really have to — you know what they are with the way people respond. There’s nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your play. It won’t ring from room service; your mother won’t be calling you. If the phone has not rung by 8 in the morning, you’re dead.

Once again Spengler alerts us to a surprising trend.

Like the vanishing point in a perspective painting, long-term projections help us order our perceptions of what we see in front of us today. Here’s one to think about, fresh from the just-released update of the United Nations’ population forecasts: At constant fertility, Israel will have more young people by the end of this century than either Turkey or Iran, and more than German, Italy or Spain. …

… The right way to read this projection is backwards: Israelis love children and have lots of them because they are happy, optimistic and prosperous. Most of Israel’s population increase comes from so-called “secular” Israelis, who have 2.6 children on average, more than any other people in the industrial world. The ultra-Orthodox have seven or eight, bringing total fertility to three children.

Europeans, Turks and Iranians, by contrast, have very few children because they are grumpy, alienated and pessimistic. It’s not so much the projection of the demographic future cranked out by the United Nations computers that counts, but rather the implicit vision of the future in the minds of today’s prospective parents. …

A conversation on The Corner about the Dem Demagoguing of Paul Ryan’s budget.

Andrew, the quote you posted from Debbie Wasserman-Shultz on Face the Nation this morning makes for particularly appalling reading and viewing because, as you noted, her shamelessly demagogic answer was to a question that wasn’t even about the Ryan budget but rather about whether the Democrats had a plan of their own. But it’s worth a word about what she actually said, because it’s something a lot of Democrats (including the president and HHS secretary Sebelius) have been spouting about the Ryan budget. She said:

“Like I said, the Republicans have a plan to end Medicare as we know it. What they would do is they would take the people who are younger than 55 years old today and tell them You know what? You’re on your own. Go and find private health insurance in the healthcare insurance market, we’re going to throw you to the wolves and allow insurance companies to deny you coverage and drop you for pre-existing conditions. We’re going to give you X amount of dollars and you figure it out.”

None of this is true, and it’s especially important to understand that the latter parts are not true.

More on Debbie Wasserface from Ed Morrissey.

Moreover, if Democrats want to push a Buy American political campaign, one would think that they’d check out the parking lot first to find someone who, you know, actually buys American.  For some people who need low cost and decent quality, there are few American options.  But Wasserman-Schultz hardly falls into that category, and the Infiniti is hardly a low-cost vehicle.  She even paid extra for a vanity plate with her initials on it.

I have no issue with people who decide to buy a car based on their specific needs, fiscal status, and perceptions of quality; I drive a Honda CRV, so I’m not going to lecture people on buying American.  Neither should Wasserman-Schultz, and to use “Buy American” as an attack against the sane opposition to government bailouts of private automakers shortly after climbing out of a Japanese luxury vehicle is the height of both demagoguery and hypocrisy.  And she’s the Democrat that the party chose as its chair.

Mark Steyn posts in The Corner about a theme that will close us out today.

My weekend column is about our descent into hyper-regulatory tyranny. Speaking of which, from north of the border:

Martin Reid says he’s been forced to buy a fishing licence to remove carp that are swimming in a metre of water on his flooded-out fields.

He says he bought the permit to avoid the problems he faced the last time he was forced to remove fish from his flooded farmland. In 1993, Reid was fined $1,000 for illegal fishing.

“My father and I … were charged by Fisheries and Oceans Canada,” Reid recalled. “We were jointly responsible for having caused the death of fish for reasons other than sport fishing.”

Reid says the fine will jump to $100,000 if he’s cited a second time. …

Here’s Mark’s column.

… The hyper-regulatory state is unrepublican. It strikes at one of the most basic pillars of free society: equality before the law. When you replace “law” with “regulation,” equality before it is one of the first casualties. In such a world, there is no law, only a hierarchy of privilege more suited to a sultan’s court than a self-governing republic. If you don’t want to be subject to “tooth-level surveillance,” you better know who to call in Washington. Teamsters Local 522 did, and the United Federation of Teachers, and the Chicago Plastering Institute. And as a result they’ve all been “granted” ObamaCare “waivers.” Rule, Obama! Obama, waive the rules! If only for his cronies. Americans are being transferred remorselessly from the rule of law to rule by an unaccountable bureaucracy of micro-regulatory preferences, subsidies, entitlements and incentives that determine which of the multiple categories of Unequal-Before-The-Law Second-Class (or Third-Class, or Fourth-Class) Citizenship you happen to fall into. …

More from Mark in a Corner post.

I’ve been writing this weekend about a once free people’s descent into hyper-regulatory tyranny. I thought this fishy footnote was the last word in statism’s lack of any sense of proportion, but several readers then alerted me to the federal rabbit police cracking down on magic shows. As they used to say in Nazi Germany, “Your papers, mein hare!” …

Mark Steyn’s efforts are the perfect backdrop for this story from The Charlotte Observer. Seems a church in the city ”excessively pruned”  the crepe myrtles on their property. The response of the city was to fine the church $4,000.

Every two to three years, Eddie Sales trims and prunes the crape myrtles at his church, Albemarle Road Presbyterian Church.

But this year, the city of Charlotte cited the church for improperly pruning its trees.

“We always keep our trees trimmed back because you don’t want to worry about them hanging down in the way,” said Sales, a church member.

The church was fined $100 per branch cut for excessive pruning, bringing the violation to $4,000. …