165,000 more non-farm jobs, unemployment rate now at 7.5%, February numbers revised up from 268,000 to 332,000, and March from 88,000 to 138,000.

Not bad, but an achingly long way to go to full employment.

The third installment of Jonathan Rauch's memoir, Denial, has just posted on the HuffPo site.

That's the end of the serialization. You must buy the book to read the rest.

I am always bitterly amused when I hear people say that homosexuality is a choice. Even many otherwise thoughtful people maintain that the homosexual is a heterosexual who perversely ignores, or at least somehow represses, his natural cravings. I say "otherwise thoughtful" because I know of no position which collapses more quickly, under even a moment's examination, than this one.

Never mind the obvious question of why anyone would choose homosexuality, with all the inconveniences and confusions and difficulties it poses.

Your humorous Tumblr blog of the day:

Margaret Trudeau, the former wife of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, has a message for Canada's political meanies: stop bullying my son.

NORTH BAY – Margaret Trudeau, speaking on mental health awareness in North Bay earlier this week said one of the strategies for her continued wellness is not getting angry.

“But someone is bullying my Justin and that makes me mad,” she said to rousing applause from the packed audience at the Capitol Centre.

Though Trudeau said she steers away from making political appearances for fear of saying the wrong thing, she couldn’t resist commenting on the recent ads on her son, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. She called attack ads an American practice that “unfortunately works,” and said she would like to see all parties get back to debating policy not personality. “We have to get rid of bullying in politics,” Trudeau said, “ and focus on what we can do for each other.”

Conservative donors would turn to established groups like Robert Woodson’s Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (full disclosure: I serve on its board), or new groups based on Mr. Kuo’s American Compass to find, screen, and provide back-office support for grass-roots leaders who offer the best first-hand lessons in how to reshape public policy so that it supported, rather than undercut, our “little platoons.”

When politicians come calling on this new breed of conservative donors, they wouldn’t get any money until the politicos, too, proved willing to spend considerable time learning from the grass roots.

A Mississippi friend writes about the oxycontin plague:

I have some experience with "pain clinics" myself. Swear to God I've never personally patronized one myself, but I do know some people who have, and I accompanied them once on one of their "doctor's visits".

The location was an office park situated next to an upscale residential area in a Mississippi Gulf Coast community. I'm still kind of shocked that such an establishment dared to operate in this State - where the authorities pointedly do not make nice with drug crime - but I suppose attitudes are more lax down there.

At the New Republic, Tod Lindberg has a fascinating essay on slippery-slope politics:

One of the last of the Romanov dynasty comes to dinner in Israel. He's certainly a part of the story of the country: it was a century of persecution by the Tsarist government of Russia that created the clamor for the return to Zion.

Prince Dimitri Romanov was born in 1926, [8] years after Bolshevik revolutionaries murdered the last czar of Russia and his family at Ekaterinburg and threw their bodies into an abandoned mine shaft. The surviving Romanov duchesses and grand dukes and the rest of the extended royal family, including Dimitri’s father, Prince Roman Petrovich, fled Russia, never to return.

Romanov and his wife, Princess Dorrit, who wore an elegant salmon dress and golden slippers, were early in a 36-hour sojourn in the country …. They were being given a whirlwind tour of which the dinner — at an unmarked and luxurious establishment called Spoons, near Montefiore’s windmill — was part.

By the way, I've had dinner at Spoons myself and must salute the dynasty's fine culinary taste.

I've been harping on this theme for nearly a decade now, and now it's time to harp again. America needs a strategy to adapt to the faltering strength of its most important and congenial allies. The New York Times reported Tuesday on the next phase of that decline.

A new French defense white paper

foresees a reduction of at least 24,000 jobs in addition to the 54,000 announced in the last white paper in 2008, written under the former president, Nicolas Sarkozy. The current white paper also suggests a reduction in rapid deployment forces from 30,000 to between 15,000 and 20,000.

Meanwhile Britain is reducing its military force to 82,000 persons. To meet their budget targets, European allies are gutting already eviscerated military budgets. The casualties of the Euro policy include not only millions of unemployed young, but the last strength and sinew of what remains of the Western defense alliance.

Time for a new public service campaign, this one directed at members of Congress: "It gets worse." From POLITICO today:

Leadership is talking past each other. The conference is split by warring factions. And influential outside groups are fighting them.

The chaos has led to a sense of stalemate ...

The New York Times reminds us of the horrible pests known as cicadas:

First tractors with GPS, now farmers coordinating things with an iPhone app? Progress is scary.

The second excerpt from Jonathan Rauch's "Denial" has just posted at the Huffington Post. Jonathan summons to mind what it means to feel from an early age cut off from all the rest of humanity.

Little boys and teenagers want many things, but most of all they want to be normal. The desire not to be strange is not, I think, the callous invention of a capitalist or racist or sexist or whateverist culture which seeks to repress human beings' explosively variegated diversity. It is, for people, an indivisible part of the socializing instinct. That is why children are so easily embarrassed by their parents. The instinct which teaches children how not to be little sociopaths also instructs them, unremittingly, to conform.