As conservatives plan a comeback, we need to be careful not to be wield too harsh a conservatism so as to scare off moderates. That’s why we need compassionate conservatism. Here’s the tenets of that as I understand them:

TENETS OF COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM

* When someone is starving on the street, we don’t point and laugh.

* When we shove hippies into crates and ship them to Antarctica, we put in air holes.

* We kill our enemies (relatively) quickly.

* When we drown orphans’ puppies, we don’t do it in front of them.

* We only punch an individual hippie in the face once per half-hour.

* We send illegal immigrants back to their home countries instead of into the sea.

* We believe terrorists should only be tortured in dire circumstances such as a ticking time bomb scenario or extreme boredom.

* After we get an unconditional surrender from a country, we stop bombing them.

I know some of these will be hard to follow, but it will make you feel like a nice person.

I am starting a new colony on Mars. It will be called Libertytown City. Not everyone will be invited. It will have liberty, respect for individual rights, and lots of red rocks. Maybe you’re saying to yourself, “But I don’t like liberty and red rocks.” Then this colony is not for you. You probably won’t be invited anyway.

PEOPLE WHO AREN’T INVITED TO MY COLONY ON MARS
* People who are whiny.
* People who are sissies.
* Sparkly vampires.
* People who find freedom scary.

Only good, freedom-loving people are invited to my colony on Mars. When the colony is first founded, we will have an ice cream social to get to know everyone. Then we must get to work. We’re going to make dinosaurs with rocket launchers on them to protect us. We will declare war on the moon. And we will be free, as no liberals will be allowed on Mars. They can maybe go on Phobos or Deimos — I really don’t care — but Mars will remain liberal-free. It’s the only way to protect liberty because as soon as liberals get scared they attack and bite liberty. We don’t put up with that crap on Mars.

So anyway, I’m just announcing my colony on Mars that not everyone will be invited to. I don’t know what day it’s happening, but while you wait you can sing a song like “There Are No Cats in America” from An American Tale except change it so it’s about how there are no liberals on Mars (I couldn’t get the meter working myself).

Jim Treacher as been hired by Tucker Carlson to blog for his new site The Daily Caller. This means Treacher is moving to DC and will be blogging under his actual name which is something other than Treacher (it’s in his post; you’ll be amazed!).

We here at IMAO wish Treacher well. If you don’t wish Treacher well, then you are not here at IMAO.

A very special video from Steven Crowder. That place looks worse that Baghdad after sustained bombing.

It’s the kind of place that’s spooky in the day and you expect to be overrun with vampires and mutants at night.

IMAO hasn’t received an award in a while, but now we got a special one from the president himself:

We haven’t done as much for the blogosphere as Obama has for America, but we’ll accept the rating.

(thanks to Joel Hoekstra)

Looks like the health care bill is going to pass. It will be yet another bloated program anchoring down our country until it eventually succumbs and sinks. Personally, I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime, but whenever there is another liberty-based revolution, I hope they look back on us and learn from our mistakes.

Anyway, it’s all probably inevitable. Freedom is scary and complicated, and the future is heading towards things being simpler and user-friendly — like an iPhone. Freedom is more like Linux command line. Someone will stare it and go, “What do I do with this?”

And you’ll excitedly say, “Whatever you want!”

And they’ll stare at it some more and say, “I can’t do anything with this.” Then they’ll head back to what they know: Windows Vista. It works simply for most things most of the time. Sometimes it fails horribly and there’s nothing you can do. And it’s large and bloated — but again, nothing you can do about that. And now Windows has added some large new feature set that slows down everything and messes up lots of your existing programs and it will automatically download so, once again, there is nothing you can do about it.

Man, I hate big government and Windows Vista.

So, anyway, once Obamacare passes, Republicans can campaign to repeal it, but I don’t know how realistic that would be. They probably couldn’t really do it until we have a Republican president, and then too many people might be dependent on the program for that to be politically feasible. So it’s just more of America slouching towards collapse. It’s kinda like how eventually Windows will become so bloated it will eventually be unusable for even the simplest of functions. You can try and uninstall some of the programs, but that will just mess up other things dependent on them. You have to format and start over.

Anyway, not there yet, but we’ll know it when we get there. Hope we saved the original install disks.

That Phantom Menace review made me think how there have been a lot of movies lately that are really long, have tons of effects on screen, and no story anyone can follow or really cares to. Of course, there was the Star Wars prequels (did that whole trilogy make any sense?), the Matrix sequels (no one had any idea what was going on there other than that lots of stuff was happening), the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels (again, tons and tons of crap on screen, not quite sure why I was supposed to care), the Transformers movies (those Transformer designs were so complex, they could be standing still and you wouldn’t know what’s going on), and the King Kong remake (the original was an hour and forty minutes, but for the remake someone thought that story needed three hours so lots of weird crap could attack everybody). I haven’t seen Avatar, but I kind of expect the same problem given how simple the story looks yet its two hours and forty minutes and filled with special effects.

The thing is, I think I thought I enjoyed most of these movies the first time I watched them, but now thinking about them and trying to remember what happened in them gives me a headache. In the end, I was about as drawn into their stories as I was for a fireworks display — one that went on for three hours. I don’t want to sound like an old fogey, but please slow it down, Hollywood. Simpler stories, less stuff happening on screen. And shorter!

And please have more like Iron Man were terrorists get flung around like rag dolls. Thank you.

It’s a seventy minute review of The Phantom Menace. Just Watch the first part here and decide whether you want to see the rest. Me, I think it’s the next big internet cultural event. (language warning)

(hat tip Allahpundit of Hot Air)

I don’t think anyone will be opposed to guns after seeing this video:

I have never seen guns made to look so lame. I don’t see how anyone could be afraid of guns after seeing this. We get liberals to watch it, and it will take all the steam out of their gun control efforts. Of course, it might also make us feel gay the next time we’re at the range.

My new column is up at Pajamas Media. Really, when have liberals contributed anything useful to a discussion of war?