Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

Pundits! And a few nutcases. More on public health infrastructure later today, but for those searching for relevance:

Mark Steyn: On including STD prevention in the stimulus package.

Makes a lot of sense. If we have more STD prevention, it will be safer for loose women to go into bars and pick up feckless men, thus stimulating the critical beer and nuts and jukebox industries. To do this, we need trillion-dollar deficits, which our children and grandchildren will have to pay off, but, with sufficient investment in prevention measures, there won't be any children or grandchildren, so there's that problem solved.

And then there are real experts:

Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and the HIV Medicine Association of IDSA (HIVMA):

Funding for screening and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and HIV in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has come under attack from some members of Congress. The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and the HIV Medicine Association of IDSA (HIVMA) believe this funding is a critical reinvestment in our public health infrastructure. Investing in prevention now saves taxpayers money later. Singling out STD prevention funding for criticism is an ideological attack that is not rooted in public health reality.

Meanwhile, prepare to be entertained:

James Wolcott:

The Assassination of Protein Wisdom by the Coward Roger L Simon

Let us part the beaded curtains of time. It was only a few years ago, November of 2005 to be tiresomely precise, that Pajamas Media held a launch event at Rockefeller Center's Rainbow Room heralding the arrival of a superstar group blog on steroids that would wipe out the old traditional media like so many thatched huts.

But that was before the World As We Know It changed, as it may for all of us.

Peter Berkowitz: Bush hatred and Obama euphoria are the same thing, because it's all those passion-filled dirty fucking hippies. All 75% of them. By the way, maybe the Hoover Institute (Berkowitz is a senior fellow) should reconsider their name these days?

Frank Rich: Nah, leave it. Herbert Hoover lives.

Maureen Dowd:  

The president’s disgust at Wall Street looters was good. But we need more. We need disgorgement.

Disgorgement is when courts force wrongdoers to repay ill-gotten gains. And I’m ill at the gains gotten by scummy executives acting all Gordon Gekko while they’re getting bailed out by us.