IS GOVERNMENT TOO BIG?



Only by a factor of 2 or 3. Or 4 or ....

The YouTube link here.

WASHINGTON POST HEADLINE (print edition): “Supreme Court expands gun rights.”

Hogwash! The Supreme Court decision merely affirmed that the Second Amendment applies to all Americans; that the fundamental right to bear arms cannot be violated by state and local governments.

For more, go here.

CHICAGO GUN BAN STRUCK DOWN: the right to bear arms is an individual right.

WE HAVE a stupid gap. It’s widening.

BRAVO, GOV. BREWER!



Mr. President, contrary to liberal belief, Arizona belongs to Americans. We intend to keep it, with your help - or without it.

Link from Hot Air.

SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK


June 26, 2010.

OUR TAX DOLLARS WELL SPENT: U.S. spent $2 million on study promoting condom use among intravenous drug users in Kazakhstan.

Link from Neal Boortz.

NO CHOCOLATE FOR YOU. A subsistence diet is healthier.

WHO IS BARACK OBAMA? PowerLine comments on the Barack Obama - Jimmy Carter comparison and notices that Glenn Reynolds has called it a “best-case scenario” many times.

I would only add that Jimmy Carter needn’t worry about losing his title as the “Worst President of the 20th Century” since Obama was elected in 2008.

WITH OBAMA, the Left got what it wished for. “Unfortunately, the rest of us have to suffer along with you.”

HOME SALES SANK IN MAY, consumer confidence is faltering, the head of the last business group to give Obama the benefit of the doubt ripped into administration policy as “hostile environment for investment and job creation” and unemployment is back on the rise. What better time to start talking about a middle class tax increase?

HECKUVA JOB, BARRY. And you did it all in less than 18 months.

CRITICS ATTACK ARIZONA AGAIN for enforcing the law.

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT halts Louisana sand berm dredging: “The berms are meant to protect the Louisiana coastline from oil. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department has concerns about where the dredging is being done.”

Gotta protect all those dead fish and pelicans.

Instapundit headlines it correctly: OBAMA TO GULF COAST: DROP DEAD

GEN. PETRAEUS, PART II: I posted on the initial announcement here. PowerLine has some thoughts I agree with:

I can't help wondering whether Obama himself feels any discomfort at turning to the hero of the Iraq surge to try to bail the administration out in Afghanistan. After all, Obama opposed the Iraq surge before it happened, and after the fact claimed that it had made only modest gains and was not responsible for the most significant improvements in Iraq.

This video from September 2007 reminds us that before Obama became a lousy President, he was a lousy Senator. Watch as he badgers Petraeus and ambassador Crocker and belittles their efforts in Iraq; almost eight minutes go by before either witness gets a word in.

You have to admire Gen. Petraeus for accepting an assignment from a Commander-in-Chief he cannot possibly respect, and I have to wonder if it’ll be “Bush’s fault” if Gen. Petraeus fails under Obama’s onerous restrictions.

HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER STENY HOYER: Yeah, we’re punting the budget this year.

The primary responsibility of Congress under the Constitution is to pass a budget for the federal government. The Democrats have a 77-seat majority in the House and an 18-seat majority in the Senate, where filibusters won’t apply anyway on budgetary matters. Barack Obama’s presidency gives them a clear path to passing whatever budget Democrats desire for FY2011.

So with significant majorities in both houses of Congress, why can’t the Democrats pass a budget? The Hill has answers:

[B]because [what will be passed] won't be a traditional budget resolution, it will be silent on future deficits, which are expected to average nearly $1 trillion for the next decade.

Democrats have expressed concern about voting for a document showing lots of red ink in an election year.

Aha!

GREEN JOBS turn brown.

T. CODDINGTON VAN VOORHEES VII rethinks his support for President Obama. Read it all.

I was particularly amused by the “git r dun” phrase, since I saw exactly that same phrase on a bumper sticker driving to work this morning.

TOO RICH: “The Labor Department is shoving money out the door for ‘green jobs,’ yet at the same time is admitting it doesn't know what a ‘green job’ is.”

IS OBAMA FAILING, OR LIBERALISM? Both.

"VERY SENIOR OFFICIAL": McChrystal’s out, and Petraeus is in as top war commander in Afghanistan.

BUMPED: Much more here. Follow the links.

AMID CRISES, Obama declares war -- on Arizona?

BUSINESS LEADERS SAY Obama's economic policies stifle growth. I listen to the Business Roundtable ‘public service’ advertisements on the radio almost every morning. When the Business Roundtable is unhappy with the president, you know something is seriously wrong.

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH MICHIGAN?

Standard political analysis would suggest that Michigan should have moved even farther toward the Democrats since 2008. In the deep recession Michigan has consistently been the nation’s number one unemployment state. And the federal government under the Obama administration bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, two of Michigan’s largest employers—although one might more accurately say that the Obama administration bailed out the United Auto Workers, Michigan’s largest private sector union.

But Michigan voters have been moving right, not left. A recent poll taken for the Detroit Free Press poll showed that only 43% of Michiganians support the Obama Democrats’ health care bill and 53% are opposed. Most interestingly, 69% of those under 30 are opposed; they apparently have figured out that the bill would force them to pay more to subsidize insurance for their elders.

What’s the matter with Michigan? Nothing. They’ve learned.

ANOTHER REASON TO AVOID BIG GOVERNMENT: Nannies and Bootleggers.

PUT YOUR COFFEE DOWN FIRST (I didn’t) and follow the link: Waiter! There’s A Fly On My Dupe!

Via Instapundit.

OBAMA’S 'CHICAGO WAY' plunders the private sector: “The Chicago Way works locally because there is an America out there that ultimately pays for it. But who will pay for an America run the Chicago Way?”

Good question.

AT LAST: a cell phone for senior citizens.

YOU CAN THANK OBAMACARE: Demographics and economics have conspired to put a lot of doctors at the age where they are ready to cash out, and facing the specter of more paperwork and more regulations for less money under Obamacare, many will decide to get out while the getting is good.

OBAMACARE: Get ready to pay for young slackers’ sex-lives.

OBAMA FIRES UP THE BLAMETHROWER AGAIN: The GOP to blame for spill, because if I had tried to prevent it, which I didn't, they would have stopped me.

AN AESTHETIC REASON for manned spaceflight.

WHAT HAS THE OIL SPILL taught us about Obama’s leadership and competence?

That he is neither a leader nor competent?

SARAH PALIN: “Mr. President, please do not punish the American public with any new energy tax in response to this tragedy. Just because BP and federal regulators screwed up that doesn’t mean the rest of us should get punished with higher taxes at the pump and attached to everything petroleum products touch.”

As I’m sure Mrs. Palin knows, that’s the liberal way: always punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty.

USEFUL IDIOTS and the degeneration of democracy.

OBAMA’S ENERGY PIPE DREAMS. It's not industry lobbyists who sustain fossil fuels but the reality that they're economically and socially necessary.

THE STATESMEN OF ERAS PAST have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to take over the risks of our everyday life.

Too true. Read it all and follow the link.

THE WORST PRESIDENT EVER. I’ve given up on missing former President Bush; now I’m hoping for a return of former President Carter. At least he was stupid and lazy; the current President is both stupid and industrious.

INCOMPETENCE IS the opportunity cost of corruption.

TO THOSE ON THE LEFT, monumental hypocrisy is not a bug, but feature. Read it all.

Link from Instapundit.

YOU CAN'T FIX STUPID. This from my email:

For those of you who have never traveled to the west, or southwest, cattle guards are horizontal steel rails placed at fence openings, in dug-out places in the roads adjacent to highways (sometimes across highways), to prevent cattle from crossing over that area. For some reason the cattle will not step on he "guards," probably because they fear getting their feet caught between the rails.

A few months ago, President Obama received and was reading a report that there were over 100,000 cattle guards in Colorado. Colorado ranchers had protested his proposed changes in grazing policies, so he ordered the Secretary of the Interior to fire half of the "cattle" guards immediately!!

Before the Secretary of the Interior could respond and presumably try to straighten him out, Vice-President Joe Biden, intervened with a request that before any "cattle" guards were fired, they be given six months of retraining.

This is obviously not real, but ... it does neatly encapsulate the growing lack of confidence in government by the Harvard-educated "elite."

IS THE TEA PARTY a "social justice" movement?

Link from Instapundit.

CAN DO, CAN TALK: Apollo versus Obama.

HARSHING OBAMA'S MELLOW: Whiny Little Bitch: The Excuse-Filled Presidency of Barack Obama.

Link from Instapundit.

BRIGHTNESS VS MERE COMPETENCE: Instapundit links to a series of posts on intellectual capacity versus mere competence to achieve great things as seen through the lens of the Obama administration's appalling incompetence to accomplish anything. Follow all the links.

As a PhD myself and an employee of an organization that boasts of a (very) high percentage of PhD's on staff, I have to agree with the conclusions: great accomplishments and great intellects are not well correlated.

OBAMA BEGINS "LIFESTYLE HEALTH MODIFICATION" PROGRAM, mandating behavioural changes within U.S. society. Makes you feel warm and fuzzy all over, doesn't it?

From the comments: "I have a lot of contact with Public Health people and they are the biggest fascists of all. They have powers the police would love to have. All they have to do is define something as a 'public health threat' and they can do anything they want to you."

Instapundit suggests it's time to modify the nannyist's lifestyle instead. I agree.

A VIEW FROM THE WINDOW.


Caldwell County courthouse, Lockhart, TX, 12 June 2010.

OBAMA NO LONGER trusting BP's word on offshore oil drilling. I suspect BP no longer trusts Obama's word on anything. I wouldn't either.

A VIEW FROM THE WINDOW


Austin, TX, 2:30 pm, 14 June.

SARCASM IS LOST ON LIBERALS. Joan Vennochi of the Boston Globe can't tell the difference. Discussing Helen Thomas' anti-semitic remarks, Vennochi wrote:

Ironically, in discussing it, Beck might be accused of similar insensitivity. Before her retirement was announced, he questioned why Thomas was still employed: "You know, may I tell you this Jewish-run media, really, they're really bad at running the media, if they are indeed Jewish. You know what I mean? The Zionist masters really suck at being Zionist masters."

Sarcasm or anti-Semitism?

The PC police can't tell the difference.

TENNESSEE DEMOCRAT ON FEMALE REPUBLICANS: “You have to lift their skirts to find out if they are women.” But you don't have to drop their pants to know male Democrats aren't real men.

THE GOVERNMENT thinks I'm greedy. I think my grandchildren have a better friend in their "greedy" grandparents than they do in their paternalistic government.

THE PRESIDENT said what?

ARE UNIVERSITY ETHNIC STUDIES DEPARTMENTS RUNNING THE COUNTRY? Victor Davis Hanson thinks so.

William F. Buckley famously said: "I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard." He was right.

DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSMAN'S assault on a student reporter deserves censure. No, it deserves criminal charges - at a minimum.

UPDATE: more here.

WITH GULF CRISIS, Obama in over his head. Ya think?

Link from Instapundit.

SMART CARS aren't so smart. And this is a commercial company running the program. Can you imagine what it would be like if the government were involved?

OBAMA TO BP: speed up the pace or we'll, ... we'll hold our breath until we turn blue.

MAN ARRESTED for saving life. Making government look bad one example at a time.

Link from Instapundit.

BACK SOON: on travel; blogging will be intermittent. Back in full swing in a week or so.

SARAH PALIN: “Mr. President, please do not punish the American public with any new energy tax in response to this tragedy. Just because BP and federal regulators screwed up that doesn’t mean the rest of us should get punished with higher taxes at the pump and attached to everything petroleum products touch.”

As I’m sure Mrs. Palin knows, that’s the liberal way: always punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty.

AVOID STRAYING FROM THE LIBERAL PLANTATION.

Consider Cuban refugees.
In Kennedy's time, liberals embraced them. Today, not so much.
Cuban refugees included too many successful businessmen.

Don Surber nails it: don’t be successful.

BILLBOARD OF THE DAY: possibly a photoshop, but still a winner.

PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE or stupidity principle? You make the call.

WHAT WOULD YOU RATHER CAP? The Gulf oil spill in 5,000 feet of water, or the gusher known as Rosie O’Donnell?

WHO KILLED SCHOLARSHIP? Two nuggets of wisdom from columnist Paul Greenberg:

[S]cholars seem to have been largely replaced by educators, just as learning has been replaced by expertise, teachers by facilitators, and education by educanto.

And:

"It never entered (our) minds to dumb down the curriculum." But that's just what happens when graduating students becomes more important than educating them.

Read it all.

VICTIMS do not make good leaders.

NO FEAR: Obama “may be walking loudly, but he is carrying a very small stick.”

The President should be afraid - very afraid - for his future.

JUST DO IT and ask permission later.

Link from Instapundit.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS: vacation at Club ICE.

SURPRISE, SURPRISE: Self-identified liberals and Democrats do badly on questions of basic economics.

ACADEMIC ASTROTURF: the “Cry Wolf” project.

Jeez. They can’t even write their own straightforward propaganda proposals. I guess it’s all that academic nuance they’re burdened with.

UPDATE: “By soliciting “paid activists” to create research papers that are intentionally designed to silence opposing viewpoints, they have undermined the political system and manipulated the governmental policy making process. And in the meantime, they’ve also implicated all of academia in the manufacturing of their propaganda.” Read it all.

MORE: It’s now “Academia-gate”.

UNION BULLYING: A retired U.S. Marine who runs a high school ROTC program in Worcester [MA] faces the boot for refusing to pay local [teachers] union dues.

OUR NEW ECONOMIC PLAN does not need to include "worshipping" the free market - it requires worshiping government control.

Link from Neal Boortz.

THE CONSTITUTION AND DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE are now published with a disclaimer?

Here's the disclaimer:


I prefer SayAnythingBlog's disclaimer:

This is the US Constitution and it’s not a historical document but rather the supreme law of the land. It says what it says, and if you don’t like it you should advocate for its amendment. If you can’t get it amended you should live with it. Or move to Canada.

Original link from Neal Boortz.

ANOTHER OBAMA PROMISE goes under the bus. Remember Obama saying “If you like your current health insurance plan, you can keep it”?

What he meant was “If we like your current health insurance plan, we’ll let you keep it.”

JOURNALIST DIVES INTO OIL SPILL; finds ... er, oil.

Link from Hot Air.

WHY AREN’T BANKS LENDING? Because bureaucrats and politicians won’t let them.

RANDOM THOUGHT: Obama promised hope and change; he appears to be delivering hype and chains.

OBAMACARE NAILS ITS FIRST “VILLAIN.” Virginia-based nHealth has announced that the uncertainties associated with ObamaCare are driving it out of the health care business.

[W]hat kind of insurance plans did nHealth offer? The kind of high-deductible, HSA-driven plans that put patients in charge of routine care and leaves insurance to cover the crises instead. They saved money while offering better pricing signals to hold down overuse of provider networks. In other words, nHealth was part of the real solution to “steeply rising health care costs,” and ObamaCare drove them out of business.

What’s particularly frustrating is that nHealth offers exactly the kind of health insurance I would buy if it were offered on the group market. Read the whole thing.

LEAVE BLAMING OTHERS TO ME: Obama warns students … not to blame other people for their problems.

OBAMACARE COULD wipe out health insurance for 1 million low-income workers.

As we read the bill, every new ObamaCare "oops" is just another indicator that the people who drafted the law have no understanding of the insurance industry, or of the private sector.

INSTAPUNDIT has an astute observation.

WHAT OUR MEDIA TAUGHT ME: Victor Davis Hanson cuts loose with both barrels.

OBAMA ON BP: I want to know “whose ass to kick.”

He might try looking into a mirror.

WHO SAID Obama doesn’t have an immigration plan?

PERSONALLY, I’M REMINDED OF JIMMY CARTER saying “I’ll kick his ass” about Ted Kennedy. But then, I’m reminded of Carter a lot lately.

GOODBYE, EUROPE. Been nice knowin' ya.

A WWII 'SIMPLE' SABOTAGE MANUAL. On page 1:

A second type of simple sabotage requires no destructive tools whatsoever and produces physical damage, if any, by highly indirect means. It is based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a non-cooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit.

Reads like a certain "community organizer" we all know and love....

OBSERVING THE D.C. COUNCIL AND THE MAYOR work on the budget "is like watching kids play in traffic: You know sooner or later someone's going to get hurt. When D.C. politicians cavort, however, the city takes the hit."

It's a universal law of politics - the taxpayer always takes the hit.

WIN BIG AND LOSE. Just when you think you've driven the self-esteem movement back into the cloistered confines of the elite colleges and universities, it reappears.

Link from Hot Air.

RANDOM THOUGHTS from Thomas Sowell:

Just as the American left has adopted blacks as mascots, so the international left has adopted Palestinians as mascots. In both cases, the actual well-being of the mascots is not the point.

Much more here.

OBAMA IS AN INCOMPETENT SOCIALIST. Dick Morris writing in The Hill:

Conservatives are so enraged at Obama’s socialism and radicalism that they are increasingly surprised to learn that he is incompetent as well. The sight of his blithering and blustering while the most massive oil spill in history moves closer to America’s beaches not only reminds one of Bush’s terrible performance during Katrina, but calls to mind Jimmy Carter’s incompetence in the face of the hostage crisis.

Don Surber responds (#11): "Do we really want a competent socialist in the Oval Office?"

MEGAN MCARDLE THINKS that there are no good answers on public pensions (i.e., Social Security). Her "no good answers" options include:

- eliminating the payroll tax ceiling;
- means testing benefits; and
- raising the retirement age.

With all due respect, I disagree. There is a good option, called getting the public (government) out of pensions. As one who is just 4 months shy of full retirement age, I've looked carefully at my soon-to-come social security benefits versus what my payroll taxes would have brought had they been invested in the stock market (privatized).

The difference is startling.

In one sense, though, McArdle is right - there are no good answers on public pensions. The good answer is with privatization.

LIFE'S LESSONS: What I learned at war. Not surprisingly, most are equally applicable at home.

WASHINGTON POST LIBERAL mugged by reality. There may be hope for Richard Cohen yet.

PRESIDENT OBAMA SKIPPED MEMORIAL DAY wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington Cemetary but Vice President Joe Biden filled in admirably.

Obama should borrow Biden's teleprompter.

TWO AMERICAS: government bureaucrats and the rest of us.




Via PowerLine.

THOMAS SOWELL: "No nation ever protested its way from poverty to prosperity or got there through rhetoric or bureaucracies."

MARK STEYN: "Back in 2008, when I was fulminating against multiculturalism on a more or less weekly basis, a reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that 'we’re rich enough to afford to be stupid'. Two years later, we’re a lot less rich."

And just as stupid.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE to start expressing your right to free speech, Democrats in Congress are gearing up for a vote on a new piece of legislation to blatantly undermine the First Amendment for bloggers.

THE MESSIAH IN ACTION INACTION: “The first messiah in history that needs on the job training.”

Scroll up to read Surber's post on the catastrophe known as the Obama administration.

MR. SOROS, WHERE ARE YOU? I'm sure you'd like to make a small contribution to pay off the public debt.

PAY, PAY SOME MORE, for the union label.

And be sure to thank President Obama.

AND SPEAKING OF PRIVACY: Secret spaceplane spotted by amateur skywatchers.

PEGGY NOONAN ON PRIVACY IN A CONNECTED WORLD: "Remember Jeremiah Johnson? The guy who went off by himself in the mountains and lived on his own? I'd like to do that. But they'd find me on Google Earth."

THE NANNY STATE IS ALIVE AND WELL at my office. This came through the office email.

Learn to stay out of trouble so that you don't have to learn how to get out of trouble! LIVE SAFE AMERICA, a local safety awareness training organization, will be here to train you on nonviolent methods of staying safe in an emergency crime situation. Safety products will be available for purchase.

I prefer violent methods.

OBAMA 2008: I RAN A BIG CAMPAIGN, so I can handle a Gulf emergency.

No, he can't.

REPLACE THEM WITH WHOM?

If you could control an oil spill with lawyers and regulation-writers, and by signing papers and obtaining court injunctions ... then maybe the U.S. government could do something," said Byron W. King, an energy analyst at Agora Financial. "But really, Uncle Sam has almost no institutional ability to control the oil spill. For that, you need people with technical authority, technical skill and firms with industrial capabilities.

So explain to me why the Obama administration - and the Governor of Florida - continue to threaten and vilify the only team in town with the skill and industrial capability to stop the oil spill.

FEDERAL DEBT as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the Carter years....

ON MAY 25, BP SENT FLORIDA "a $25 million 'grant' for, well, let's see. Hazmat suits, sand berms and containment booms to counter the looming threat of oily muck? Well, no. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is using the funds for an 'emergency tourism marketing campaign' to preserve and protect, we assume, the image of the Sunshine State."

Today on the radio news, I heard Crist say “It’s okay to vilify BP.”

Seems to me it would be more appropriate for BP to vilify Charlie Crist.

HMMPF! Nerobama.

Emperor Nero meet President Barack Obama. Just as Nero was the youngest emperor to be named when he became such at the tender age of sixteen, so too President Obama is the youngest president in the last fifty years. Like Nero before him, Obama's inexperience is showing, as is his deafness to the real priorities and needs of the people he purports to lead.

And the answer to the final question is stupidity.

But, I suspect, a truth nonetheless.

NEW JERSEY GOV. CHRIS CHRISTIE: “We have a spending and size of government problem, and we need to start saying ‘No’.”

BUT OTHER THAN THAT, the story was accurate.

Those layers of editors and fact-checkers must have taken the day off.

WHY CONSTELLATION WAS CANCELLED.

"Mr. President, even if the public would stand for signing LeBron to improve the quality of the presidential pickup game, where are we gonna find the money?"

"Didn't I just cancel the man-back-to-the-moon program?"

Link to comic strip is here.

THE FIRST FREE PEOPLE IN HISTORY to eagerly build their own prison.

PROTECTING YOUR RIGHT TO BE STUPID. Oregon police officer asked to leave vegan coffee shop.

Sometimes I wonder why we bother to protect these twits.

YOU MUST BE KIDDING: Public college in California creating scholarship specifically for illegal immigrants.

At least they'll be easier to find....

CLASSY LADY: White House press corps’ Helen Thomas tells Jews to leave Israel and "go home to Poland and Germany."

'TOP KILL' FAILURE NEWS that didn't make the news: Ms. Carol Browner, special assistant to the president for energy and climate change "said the administration told BP on Saturday to halt the top-kill procedure, after becoming 'very concerned' that the operation was putting too much pressure on the out-of-control well."

So if the decision to halt was made by the Obama administration, why is BP being demonized?

LARRY KING INTERROGATES OBAMA: "[T]hat’s the kind of real journalism people have come to expect from CNN — which is why more people watch Fox News. And MSNBC. And the Cartoon Channel. And HGTV…"

COMMENT OF THE DAY. "There’s a reason herbivores don’t develop intelligence: How smart do you need to be to sneak up on a leaf?"

The post is here.

IT'S NOT ABOUT TEACHERS.



It's about bullies: "You punch them; I punch you."

DID CASH FOR CLUNKERS WORK?

The data show that the government stimulus did increase sales — but that the following month, sales dropped in proportion to the spike. The three-week incentive program simply moved sales from the future into the present, and did nothing to increase organic demand even in a relatively short run.

The government did, however, manage to spend several billion dollars we don't have. Keep that in mind on November 2.

REP. ALAN GRAYSON (D-FL) wants Republicans sent to prison.

Could we get him sent up for impersonating a Congressman?

NEW ARRIVAL. You can get yours here.


November is coming.

PRESIDENT BIDEN? Why not? And from the comments:

[U]nlike the current president, Biden shows a humanity that is currently lacking in Obama. He came to the defense of Israel in the recent flotilla debacle, he made particularly noteworthy remarks on memorial day “in loco ‘presidentis’,” he refused to engage in the media trashing of Sarah Palin, and perhaps most telling, years ago in the senate, in the course of tied votes on an issue, he voluntarily sat out votes so that the elderly senator, Strom Thurmond (Biden’s opponent), could take a needed break. Whatever else Joe Biden is, and however much one might disagree with him politically, he is not a cold-blooded politician like our current President or the current chief-of-staff. I would never support him if he ran for president, but he could certainly do no worse than Obama.

I could live with Biden.

SAY WHAT? White supremacist groups are behind the Arizona immigration law.

Democrats must have an upper IQ limit to join the party.

HMM. WHEN GOVERNMENTS CHOOSE TO PAY FOR MEDICINE, they also choose what medicine to not pay for.

Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.

1979 AGAIN. Victor Davis Hanson remembers.

If anything, it seems to me to be worse today than it was during the Carter years. Jimmy Carter was merely incompetent; Barack Obama is aggressively so.

WILL WASHINGTON bail out the mainstream media?

Oddly enough, although I am vehemently against any subsidy to the media - mainstream or otherwise - I would be willing to grant a tax on broadcast spectrum just to be relieved of having to listen to the “public-interest programming” which broadcasters are required to provide.

Read it all, and be sure to follow the link to the New York Post article at the bottom.

THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT ISN’T RACIST. But that’s not to say we aren’t trying to make it so.

DRILL, BABY, DRILL: Sarah Palin on green hypocrisy.

NATIONAL REVIEW endorses Republican candidate Linda McMahon for the Connecticut Senate seat held by retiring senator Chris Dodd - in a back-handed way.

First, the forehand:

The presumptive Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut is an inspiring business success who battled adversity and the competition to build an internationally recognized brand.

And then the backhand slap:

If decency means nothing, McMahon is the businesswoman par excellence. With her husband, Vince, she grew WWE [World Wrestling Entertainment] into a billion-dollar business. The company had to fend off fierce competition in the mid-1990s, when its future looked precarious. The McMahons prevailed on the back of those timeless entrepreneurial values of shrewdness, determination, and risk-taking.

So the “timeless entrepreneurial values of shrewdness, determination, and risk-taking” are okay only in pursuit of acceptable goals? What, pray tell, are acceptable “timeless entrepreneurial values of shrewdness, determination, and risk-taking?”

As for me, I like the idea of having a Senator who has actually run a business and created wealth, even if I personally never bought the product being sold (I’ve never owned an Apple product, either).

NOW WE KNOW what the White House means by a “jobs program.”

THERE GOES THE (PALINS’) NEIGHBORHOOD. Time for McGinniss to move on.

SOME FUN FACTS on the national debt: Under former President George W. Bush, the national debt grew at a rate of $1.6 billion per day. Under President Obama? A mere $4.8 billion per day. Obama has a very good chance of accomplishing in a single term what took Bush two full terms to accomplish.

SOCIAL JUSTICE: letting people starve.

OBAMA WALKS ON WATER; gets oil on feet.

OIL(Y) POLITICS. Responding to President Obama’s latest press conference defending to the Gulf oil crisis, Paul Greenberg asks: “So whom are you going to believe, the president's description of this administration as responsive and fast-acting, moving urgently to contain the catastrophe, or your own lying eyes?”

Read it all.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: At a time when Europe is discovering that its democratic socialism does not work, why in the world is the United States doing its best to copy it?

SLOW LEARNER: Obama cramming for midterms.


In November, we will issue our first report card on his performance.

IF HE WATCHED MORE OFTEN, he’d find out that Shepard Smith is always “a jerk and a fool.”

FINALLY: The U.S. is $13 trillion in debt.

It seems like only yesterday .....

MISSION TO NOWHERE. “Big, fat, pointless and expensive describes [the] plan to twiddle our fingers” say Paul Spudis and Robert Zubrin about Obama’s cancellation of NASA’s Constellation manned spaceflight program. “If implemented, this decision will guarantee a decade of non-achievement by NASA's human spaceflight program, ...”

But the entrepreneurial space industry -- collectively called "NewSpace" -- are finding fresh opportunities for work as NASA and the White House redirect U.S. space exploration efforts.

As I’ve pointed out before (here and here and here), I’m not sanguine about the future of manned spaceflight.

Low Earth orbit (LEO) is, I think, within the reach of commercial enterprise and NASA certainly has a role to play in technology development for exploration and eventual colonization (of the moon, Mars, and asteroids).

But as Spudis and Zubrin imply, what is lacking in the Obama administration is leadership and a coherent “Vision for Space Exploration.” With neither direction nor destination, manned space will likely falter.

OBAMA TELLS VOTERS: Remember Bush.


We do.

OUCH! In the comments: "I remember when The Won sent chills down the legs of media-ocrities. Now, they realize it was just incontinence."

MISSILE DEFENSE CRITICS should check their facts. Uzi Rubin, founder and first director of the Israel Missile Defense Organization, responds to George Lewis and Theodore Postol’s paper "A Flawed and Dangerous U.S. Missile Defense Plan,” in which Lewis and Postol argue that simple countermeasures can easily defeat the defensive interceptor missile.

[Countermeasures] are and will remain a real hazard for any military system, be it missile defense, air defense, tank defense or ship defense. There is nothing special in missile defense that makes it more sensitive to countermeasures than any other tool of war, from bow and arrow (interlinked shields) to RPG (reactive armor). The "Wizard War" between weapons and countermeasures is age-old and will continue indefinitely; the winner will be the side that keeps one step ahead of its adversary. In the minds of the "countermeasure culture" proponents, it is the U.S. that is always the loser. It is left for the talent of genuine experts in the U.S. defense industries to prove them wrong.

As I commented here, an imperfect defense is still better than no defense. And an imperfect defense can be improved.

AMERICA’S NEW CULTURE WAR: free enterprise vs. government control.

This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country's future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise -- limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution. These visions are not reconcilable. We must choose.

Read it all.

WHETHER WE WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT AS A WAR OR SOMETHING ELSE, there are indeed two irreconcilable worldviews at work in the United States today.

Link from Instapundit.

IN A RECENT SPEECH, President Obama declared, “'At some point, I think you’ve got enough money.’ And it’s what he thinks, not what you think, that matters.... There lies – bare as can be – the irrefutable evidence of ... just how serious a threat he is to this nation.”

SIX WEEKS AFTER THE GULF COAST OIL SPILL, some wonder why BP is still in charge of response and cleanup.

The obvious answer is because they’re the only ones with sufficient capability to respond.

Personally, I wonder why BP cares enough to respond. Here’s the counter question: given the governments’ “boot on their neck” why should BP give a rat’s behind whether the oil flows one more day, one more month, one more year? With the Obama administration’s “boot on their neck” attitude – and the threat of civil and criminal indictement even before the well is capped - BP knows that they’ll never make another dime. At best they’ll be the abused “wage slaves” of the U.S. government for the next 20 years, so why should they care? Lesser men would simply declare bankruptcy and walk away.

In a less hostile environment, BP would have tremendous incentive to cap the well and clean up, for every barrel of oil lost is profit lost. In Obama’s fantasy land, not so much.

OIL SPILL tars Democrats' reputation for competence.

They have a reputation for competence?

OBAMA WHITE HOUSE now distancing itself from BP response efforts.

After 4 days of ownership. It’s easier to file criminal charges against someone other than yourself.

FORMER VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE and his wife, Tipper, are separating after 40 years of marriage.

Must be "climate change."

A DEMOCRAT I could vote for.

PUBLIC EMPLOYEES — who function without the discipline of markets, and apparently, politics — should not be allowed to unionize.

The linked article is here.

THE CULTURAL CONTRADICTION OF LIBERALISM: ”Democrats insist they’re the party of empowerment. They may admire it in movies. But in real life they’re the party of rules.”

But only if the rules don’t apply to them.

SARAH PALIN DROPS THE ‘F’-BOMB. The Washington Post is in a tizzy because Palin has the effrontery to call herself a feminist.

THE ONION describes my day at the office.

NOVEMBER IS COMING.



Mark your calendars.

ONE LAST MEMORIAL DAY REMINDER



Link here.