SALT TYRANTS: Walter Williams explains.

WELCOME TO FLYOVER COUNTRY. “I’m never against elected officials coming to the tri-states to really hear what the heart and soul of America is thinking. It’s when they come to simply get photo ops, gather cheap political currency, and have no plans of listening whatsoever that it infuriates me. If you’re coming to really find out what ideas we have to fix your mess, that’s great. Enjoy your stay. If you’re coming to just use us as props in campaign photos, please stay in the plane.”

Photo ops aren’t environmentally friendly; please save jet fuel and stay home.

THE MEDIUM ISN’T THE MESSAGE. The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby has some thoughts on technology and messaging in pursuit of democracy and freedom.

WANTED - DEAD COYOTE: Florida’s Charlie Crist is getting desperate (third item).

SAN FRANCISCO calls for Arizona boycott. But it won’t take Arizona's illegals.

Hypocrites. Let’s see what happens if the state of Arizona boycotts San Francisco.

IF AMERICANS RESPONDED with "Go to hell" and "See you in court" each time they were asked to produce their license, both hell and court would be very crowded.

UPDATE: It appears that it “reveals a fundamental lack of empathy” when I “fail to comprehend” that being asked for a driver’s license is more burdensome in some circumstances than in others. Nuts. Empathy for whom? If you are doing something illegal, then even mundane interactions with the police are “burdensome.”

THE WASHINGTON POST’S Colbert I. King is unhappy that he can’t have his cake and eat it too.

Enacting D.C. voting rights legislation with a "poison pill" gun amendment [restricting D.C.’s absurd gun laws] attached would have been worse than winning ugly. It would have meant accepting the assertion that Americans in the District of Columbia don't have a fundamental right to representation in Congress ....

If D.C. residents really wanted voting rights, they’d exercise their right of retrocession and rejoin the state of Maryland. But they don’t, really; they’re “too important” to be mere citizens of Maryland.

They want to remain victims with special rights, so they continue to whine.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON examines the Arizona hysteria.

OBAMACARE IS A RATIONING SYSTEM, and the IPAB [Independent Payment Advisory Board] will be one of the key drivers for that rationing. If you don’t believe me, just listen to [OMB Director Peter] Orszag.



Linked from Hot Air.

FINES ARE FOR LITTLE PEOPLE. Vehicles assigned to the offices of [Washington D.C.] Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee have racked up more than $1,000 in unpaid parking tickets and traffic fines, according to a new D.C. auditor's review.

No surprise here, of course. Traffic fines are for little people, not D.C.’s movers and shakers.

Here’s the interesting factoid, though. Washington D.C. has a total land area of 61.4 square miles; it has 40 Metro (subway) stations, or roughly one station for every 1.5 square miles. If they were uniformly distributed over the land area, there would be one within 1,200 yards of wherever you are in the city.

Yet the city owns a fleet of 2,635 vehicles, or just over 40 vehicles for every square mile of land area.

Can’t they use the Metro?

OBAMA TO DEBT COMMISSION: ‘Everything Has to Be on the Table’.

The Washington Examiner’s Chris Stirewalt observes (third item):

The president certainly likes to set a big table, but the portions usually seem to end up being pretty skimpy for those who disagree with him.

As with health care, Afghanistan strategy, economic recovery, energy and seemingly everything else, Obama favors a laborious process of decision making before arriving back at his obvious decision.

His debt commission seems to be the most lavish example of this process-intensive approach to validating his decisions so far.

The end result from the deficit commission – after Alan Simpson gets done berating his fellow Republicans for anti-gay bias and a list of other offenses real and perceived – will be the president’s support for a huge tax increase and some modifications to Medicare to help battle the deficit that is squeezing America so much tighter after the president’s emergency spending and national health program.

The best evidence is that the administration so often finds ways to rephrase candidate Obama’s iron-clad promise not to raise taxes on any family making less than $250,000 a year: “Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes,” he once said. Now, the president talks about a promise not to raise “income taxes.”

After the election, get ready for some even more creative language.

In other words, the panel is designed, not to succeed, but to give Obama cover.

AFTER POLICY STUMBLES, Obama turns to politics.

In his first 14 months in office, Barack Obama worked to change public policy, with partial success. He jammed through the stimulus package in February 2009 and health care legislation in March 2010 on party-line votes.

But he paid curiously little attention to the substance of the legislation. One-third of the stimulus money went to state and local governments -- i.e., to public employee unions -- which helped ensure that the bill would not hold down unemployment to the promised 8 percent. And the health care bill, we now learn from Health and Human Services Department actuaries, is going to increase spending rather than hold it down.

Now Obama seems to be pivoting toward legislative priorities chosen not for policy but for political reasons.

It’s all about power.