I’M SYMPATHETIC TO THE ARGUMENT, but in this case, I think retaining a Democrat majority in Congress – even a dysfunctional Democrat majority – past the mid-term elections is too high a risk to be acceptable even if the GOP might benefit.

NO RATIONING UNDER OBAMACARE.
Nope. None. Move along now.

OBAMA FATIGUE. Already.

“DEMOCRATS PREPARE TO GO IT ALONE ON OBAMACARE.”

[So] proclaimed the headline here at The Washington Examiner. These were appropriate verdicts if you viewed the summit as an attempt to reach bipartisan agreement or even a limited consensus.

But that of course was not why Barack Obama convened this unique colloquy. He did so as part of an attempt to pass some Democratic health care bill, somehow, through both houses of Congress -- and to discredit the Republicans who opposed the bills passed by the House in November and the Senate in December.

In that he seems to have failed.

One can hope, but today’s announcement of a Democrat attempt to push “mini-ObamaCare” through Congress by reconciliation seems to indicate the president hasn’t given up quite yet.

TOO FAT? Maybe it’s time to blame the feds.

Instead of nagging ... the feds ought to consider how their own policies have contributed to Americans’ expanding girth.

Science journalist Gary Taubes said federal advocacy for a low-fat diet, starting in the ’70s, helped shift Americans toward a diet emphasizing the carb-heavy bottom of the USDA food pyramid. “We ate more fat-free carbohydrates,” Taubes wrote, “which, in turn, made us hungrier and then heavier.”

Farm subsidies were a major contributing factor. Take the Twinkie, food journalist Michael Pollan wrote, it’s “basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports.”

Local produce, organic food, farmers markets, and your backyard garden? In the name of food safety, be gone.

TO LAUGH, OR WHAT? Mickey Kaus on GM (non)unionization: “It would almost be as if the existing UAW members had become the profit-seeking owners of the company!”

Hmm. If “card-check’ passes, I will be looking for unionized companies to start paying their employees in company stock....

POETIC JUSTICE: “Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) today asked the Obama administration to investigate what he called ‘the greatest scientific scandal of our generation’ — the actions of climate scientists revealed by the Climategate files, and the subsequent admissions by the editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). Senator Inhofe also called for former Vice President Al Gore to be called back to the Senate to testify.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON on political hypocrisy. “Is all this hypocrisy simply liberal-conservative politics, Democratic-Republican ying and yang? ...’[J]ust politics’ does not quite explain the advocacy of the media, the universities, the foundations, the arts, the legal community, the judiciary, and creative communities, whose zealotry is reserved for the Left.”

Read it all.

IT’S THE NARRATIVE, STUPID. Never mind that it's an absurd narrative.

[T]ea partyers also skew toward middle age or older. That's the tell. Most came of age in the 1960s, an era distinguished by widespread disrespect for government. In their wonder years, they learned that politics was about protesting the Establishment and shouting down the Man.

Um, I qualify, I guess, having turned 21 in the 60’s. But most of the Tea Party leaders are much younger than I. Sarah Palin, for example, was born in 1964. Unless she was very precocious, “coming of age” in the 60’s would have been very difficult.

The tea party is a harbinger of midlife crisis, not political crisis.

Oh, come now. This statement is self-fisking.

The partyers are essentially replaying the '60s protest paradigm. (We're aging boomers ourselves, so we know it when we see it.)

I love the parenthetical. We were idiots in the 60’s, and because we're still idiots, the “tea partyers” must be as well. News flash, guys -- the rest of us grew up; you didn’t.

Linked from Hot Air.

LATTE LIBERALS: “And they continue to wonder why they are called limousine liberal[s], gucci marxists, and champagne socialists....”

Dumb is the new elite.

FALSE CHOICES, STRAW MEN, AND NON SEQUITURS. ”[T]he answer is a lot simpler than a total overhaul of the health-care system: Get out more.”

Click through to read Roger Cohen’s column. I’m reminded of a visit I once made to the gorilla enclosure at the zoo. Cohen reminds me of one of the gorillas: fat, dumb, and happy; every need attended to by the zookeepers. And completely unaware he’s the one in the cage.

PITCHFORKS AND TORCHES FOR OBAMACARE. Hmm. And I was warned about those knuckle-dragging teabaggers carrying the pitchforks and torches.



Original link here. Instapundit comments here and here.

DEMOCRATS HAVE SLIPPED INTO THE 2010 INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION ACT (H.R. 2701) a new provision that would establish criminal punishments for CIA agents and other intelligence officials who engage in "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" during interrogations.

It covers "any officer or employee of the intelligence community" who, during an interrogation, engages in beatings, the infliction pain, forced sexual acts, inducing hypothermia, conducting mock executions or "depriving the [detainee] of necessary food, water, sleep, or medical care." The bill gives Congress flexibility in defining just what those terms mean, and it would provide for punishments of up to 20 years in prison and life behind bars if a detainee dies as a result of the interrogation.

Unless the CIA officer’s name is “Jack Bauer” and he works out of the Hollywood office.

“IT IS BAD ENOUGH to have the proles reject the specific policy proposals of the good and the wise. But what may infuriate those liberals who have been castigating the idiocy of the angry mob even more is as follows. Their program is premised on believing a select group of superior people should be empowered to organize everyone else's affairs. The Tea Party proles who reject the interference, reject also the premise that the Obama administration and its progressive supporters constitute a superior class: America's would-be overseers really are no better than anyone else. For those who profess to care about equality, this must be terribly hard to hear.”

Unbearable, actually. Link from Instapundit.

CLOSETED NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST writes about that which he knows not.

Frank Rich should get out more, but I can understand why his keepers afraid to let him out of his cage - he could hurt himself.

[Update] To fisk or demolish? PowerLine chooses demolition; then bounces the rubble.

Will Retracto the Correction Alpaca demand an apology from Frank Rich and the Times?

COMING TO A WORKPLACE NEAR YOU: if every character blemish or emotional turbulence is a "disorder" akin to a physical disability, legal accommodations are mandatory. Under federal law ... there might be a legal entitlement to be a jerk.

Oh, joy.