IT’S TIME to choose.

THE AD FROM THE DNC seeking to link the Republican Party with the (horrors!) tea party presents a 10-item "Republican Tea Party Contract on America" to “frighten the heck out of John Q. Public.” They are:

Item 1: "Repeal Health Insurance Reform."
Item 2: "Privatize Social Security or Get Rid of It."
Item 3: "End Medicare as it Presently Exists."
Item 4: "Extend the Bush Tax Breaks for the Wealthy and Big Oil."
Item 5: "Repeal Wall Street Reform."
Item 6: "Protect Those Responsible for the Oil Spill."
Item 7: "Abolish the Department of Education."
Item 8: "Abolish the Department of Energy."
Item 9: "Abolish the Environmental Protection Agency."
Item 10: "Repeal the 17th Amendment (direct election of Senators)."

Hey, getting 8 out of 10 items right ain’t bad. I’ll leave it to the reader to guess which two of the ten I might have some disagreement with.

THE LEFT: all race, all the time. “It seems that only conservatives covet living in a post-racial society.”

JUST ANOTHER DAY AT WAYS AND MEANS: Wesley Pruden on the Charlie Rangel affair.

Rep. Charles B. Rangel, who has been in Congress longer than almost anyone else, spent Thursday vainly trying to cut a deal with the House ethics committee over his presumed capital indiscretions with the tax man. Charlie is a master craftsman of congressional bonhomie, and like most of his colleagues, he imagines that rules, most of which Congress writes, apply only to the peasants.

Hopefully, he’s going to find that the peasants have pitchforks, tar, and feathers.

Read it all.

A REPUBLICAN PARTY call to action. Well said.

IT’S COME TO THIS: the case for impeachment.

AN OPEN LETTER to Democrat politicians.

WHO DOESN’T PAY TAXES: a lot of people, apparently.

Bottom Line: “We need to restore the linkage between paying at least some income tax and being a voter. Otherwise, we can run into the dreaded scenario where those who don’t pay taxes can keep voting to raise them higher and higher for those who do. That’s a prescription for economic disaster ....”

CLEAN-UP CREWS are having trouble even finding the Gulf oil spill.

Recall former BP CEO Tony Hayward’s “spill is modest, Gulf is large” comment? Maybe he was right.

UPDATE (& BUMP): What oil spill?

HOW SMART ARE WE? Not too smart, judging from the nature of our political class.

COME TO THE USA

AN END-RUN AROUND CONGRESS? Memo outlines backdoor ‘amnesty’ plan. But a U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman argued a draft memo doesn’t mean the agency has embraced the policy. That’s more than just a bit disingenuous; in my experience, a draft memo usually means the broad policy has been accepted, and the draft memo is simply about i-dotting and t-crossing.

THE GREAT DIVIDE: More about America’s “political class.”

America's Political Class is far less enamored with the virtues of a free market [than are mainstream voters]. In fact, Political Class voters narrowly prefer a government managed economy over free markets by a 44% to 37% margin.

Read the whole thing, and then follow the Michael Barone link.

MISSOURI VOTERS overwhelmingly rejected a federal mandate to purchase health insurance in a campaign to overturn the controversial health care law passed by Congress in March.

Excellent!

POOR RICH FAMILY sails the world for 8 years.

What annoys me about this (front page) article is the smugness - just ordinary rich folk taking a few years off.

FOUR YEARS, 3083 POSTS. It's hard to believe it's been that long, and that many.

Here’s the first post on Friday, August 4, 2006.