WHO WOULD YOU PREFER FOR PRESIDENT? Obama or a sack of hammers? The sack of hammers looks pretty good right now....

CLASSY: Obama To Give Jobs Speech as GOP Contenders Debate. I like Krauthammer's suggestion -- move the debate back 1 hour to 9 pm and then let the contenders shred Obama's proposals (assuming of course that they're not more hot air).

In any event, you can safely assume the one I'll not be watching is Obama.

I KNEW IT!

The English language has some wonderfully anthropomorphic collective nouns for the various groups of animals.

We are all familiar with a Herd of cows, a Flock of chickens, a School of fish and a Gaggle of geese.

However, less widely known is a Pride of lions, a Murder of crows (as well as their cousins the rooks and ravens), an Exaltation of doves and, presumably because they look so wise, a Parliament of owls.

Now consider a group of baboons. They are the loudest, most dangerous, most obnoxious, most viciously aggressive and least intelligent of all primates. And what is the proper collective noun for a group of baboons?

Believe it or not ... a Congress!

I guess that pretty much explains the things that come out of Washington.

From my email.

BACK FROM ALASKA: here are some photos.


Anchorage from the hotel room. About 10 pm Alaska time.


A view from the water's edge about 8 blocks from the hotel. The Alaska railroad runs along the water at the bottom of the photo.


Mt. Whitney taken from Highway 3 just north of Wasilla.


Taking off from Fish Lake on a floatplane tour of Mt. Whitney and the Denali National Forest.


Path carved by a long ago glacier. We could see occasional pools of bright blue glacier water in the ice beneath us. This photo was taken at about 6,500 ft.


Mt. Whitney at our peak altitude of 8,000 ft. We flew among the peaks, occasionally only a few hundred feet from sheer rock walls.


Seward Harbor as we prepared for a marine tour of Renaissance and Aialik Bays. The weather was perfect, and we got lucky, seeing otter, seals, whales, salmon, and puffins (a bird that lives solely in the water).


Holgate Glacier in Aialik Bay. The ship you can (maybe) see at the base of the glacier is the same size as our own tour boat.

OFF TO ALASKA: back next week.

A TEXAN definition of a planet.

CAN'T AFFORD a $350 bottle of wine or a $400 haircut of a $10M vacation? You don't need to -- here's how.

I remember those times. For me, they were pretty good years.

ADVANCE COPY of Obama's post-vacation speech. Like Lincoln's Gettysburg speech, it will be given at a "Civil" War battlefield: "Bull" Run.

ONE OF THE SIDE BENEFITS of living in urban areas: you can't evacuate in an emergency. In rural areas, you can but don't usually need to....

WOULDN'T IT BE NICE to have the Space Shuttle back? Russian rocket carrying Space Station supplies fails to reach orbit.

SO ARE WE A PETRI DISH in some mad scientist's lab, and if so, who created the mad scientist?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Old 'Not Enough' Excuse:

The administration still adheres to the logical fallacy that the toxic medicine cannot be proven to be useless or harmful, because there was supposedly never enough of it given. And the proof is that the worsening patient is still not quite dead.

Read it all.

BACK TO THE FUTURE -- on a bus.

GLOBAL WARMING now causes civil war. What the author of this strange piece seems to forget is that correlation does not imply causation. It's just as likely that civil war causes global warming.

Perhaps if all wars would immediately cease, all the world would be full of rainbows and unicorns, the temperature would be a constant 72 degrees, skies would be cloudless, and it would rain only between 6 am and 10 am on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

FROM THE 'YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING' FILE: Eric Holder Sides With Grizzlies as Well as Black Panthers. In an earlier post I used the phrase 'felony stupid.' This is another example.

RISK FACTOR: Should Access to Social Media Ever Be Limited?

After reading the article my fundamental question is this: How is it that so much of a largely welfare population has access to smart phones such as the Blackberry? Is access to social media a fundamental human right?

IT'S ALL BUSH'S FAULT: Illinois implodes.

RAINBOWS AND UNICORNS as far as the eye can see.

The view from Fantasy land looks pretty good. Unfortunately, it's not in my neighborhood.

FELONY STUPID: Inadequate IT Security Knowledge Exposing Personal [Medical] Information. And to compound the 'felony stupidity' the medical records from my last hospital visit aren't even right!

YEAH, RIGHT: If you like your current health plan, you can keep it.

DIG, BABY, DIG: environmentalists aren't going to be happy.

JOHN STOSSEL: Almost Everything We're Taught Is Wrong.

"TAR, FEATHERS. 'Eavesdropping on a public official,' my ass. Let me be very clear: That law is there for only one reason: to protect corrupt politicians and their lackeys from exposure."

DAVID HARSANYI: Science When It Suits Them.

As a voter, like me, you may find Perry's view on creationism disconcerting and a sign of an unsophisticated candidate. But the fact is that the progressives' faith-based devotion to government is far more consequential than Perry's faith-based position on evolution.

Read it all.

DEATH KNELL FOR JON HUNTSMAN. He should challenge Obama as a Democrat.

ARE AIRSHIPS making a comeback? The Hybrid Air Vehicle website is here.

BEATEN DOWN? Nope. Fighting back. The only ones being beaten down are the ones who started the crisis in the first place.

OBAMA'S NEXT EXCUSE: the earthquake did it.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Only the government can spend massive amounts of money (in)efficiently.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT is alive and well.

IF TRIAL LAWYERS hate Rick Perry, maybe I should vote for him.

YOUR GOVERNMENT AT WORK: Federal buildings closed following "earthquake."

[Update] More from Instapundit.

UM, LEAD? What could Obama have done?

OBAMA CAN'T WIN REELECTION. So, will he walk?

IF YOU DREW a straight line between the Obama White House, Harvard and Martha's Vineyard, you'd apparently find no real economists.

OBAMA: earthquake epicenter along the "Bush fault."

GOTTA PAY THE RENT: the bait-and-switch environmental swindle.

IT LOOKED LIKE the students gathered in an MIT lecture hall last Tuesday morning were randomly cheering while footage of an astronaut floating in space with little round robots played on a projector overhead. In actuality, the students were going head-to-head in a robotics competition unfolding on the International Space Station in real time.

THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE is officially dead. And -- miracle of miracles -- on Obama's watch.

OBAMA'S SPECIFIC PLAN: just an outline?

RANDOM THOUGHT: It will be an outline. Obama thinks he is an Emperor, not a President. Emperors don't do work, they issue decrees.

EARTHQUAKE: We had an earthquake here in Manassas shortly before 2 p.m. The cats and dog noticed it first, and skedaddled for the house on the run. When I heard it, it was a loud rumbling sound, much like an unmuffled race car might sound when idling. I did not feel the ground shake, but our porch is 'on stilts' so to speak, so any vibration was probably damped. The only visible impact in the house was the ceiling fans swaying slightly. The quake lasted, start to finish, perhaps 20-30 seconds.

My wife was at LaGuardia airport in New York; she felt nothing. However, my daughter in Stamford CT did feel the earthquake, as did a friend of hers in Boston.

GUN OWNERS: What are you compensating for? Instapundit has the perfect response.

ADD A NEW LOW to the Obama Approval Index: it's now at -26; two points lower than his previous 'record'.


Here's the link to Rasmussen's Daily Presidential Tracking Poll.

HMM. LABOR CONTRIBUTIONS to Democratic candidates down from 2010.

THE END OF AN ERA: Shuttle program to officially end on August 31.

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE between a Federal Jobs Creation Program and Kim Kardashian's wedding? The answer is here.

[Added] For what it's worth, Klavan's commentary strikes me as a perfect analogy for what the Left has derisively called "trickle down" economics.

IF I WERE (A LIBERAL) PRESIDENT: I would make more plans, spend more money, and educate indoctrinate our children. Click on the pictures to see their "ideas." Be prepared to graon.

GONE TO FLOWERS, every one.

HAH: Koch Responds to Buffett's Call for Tax Hikes.

MARK STEYN: "Not only does the president’s left hand not know what the right hand is even supposed to do, but his left hand cannot even issue a cheap self-serving whine about something his right hand has failed to do without blowing gazillions of taxpayer dollars."

YOU CAN'T make this claptrap up: "The administration says it is giving rich kids free food to eliminate the shame that less-fortunate students may feel in receiving free food."

Giving? Or forcing?

EXXON FIGHTING regulatory “pirates” in Gulf of Mexico.

"Regulatory pirates." What an appropriate turn of phrase to describe the Obama administration's hyper-overregulation of the American economy.

OBAMA QUIT? We should encourage the idea.

MAXINE WATERS: "The Tea Party Can Go Straight to Hell." Save us a seat by the fire, Maxine.

RASMUSSEN, 22 August 2011.


It's not (yet) a new low.

ANOTHER UNSCIENTIFIC POLL: Click through the tabs to see what Washington Times readers think.

JEFF JACOBY: When 'inconsequential' means 'better'.

ANOTHER CASE OF PROJECTION from those who believe money comes from printing presses.

WASHINGTON POST columnist Alexandra Petri thinks it's 'cute' to slap around rural post offices and their patrons.

Well, I have a suggestion. Since cities and major urban areas are so well wired (and "wirelessed'), lets close down all the urban post offices and replace them with ATM-like kiosks in the Starbucks latte lounges.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: The Special Litigation Section Strikes Out.

YA THINK? Maybe Ed Schultz is the racist.

AMERICA HAS BECOME A TRAIN with too many cabooses and not enough engines, and our government is riding the brakes with anti-competitive taxes and regulations.

Read it all.

A NEW OBAMA MANDATE: agreeable jobs.

FUZZY MATH: Delusions of grand expenditures.

It is amazing the way the establishment media has largely overlooked the fact that more than half of the Democrats voted against the budget-ceiling compromise, for the most part, because they did not like even the small cutbacks in spending. But a smaller percentage of Republicans voted against the bill because they correctly saw it as insufficient to deal with the budget problem, and yet they are called “delusional.” Who are the ones really denying reality?

Read it all.

MARK STEYN on the Imperial Presidency.

HEH: Costco to Remove Electric Car Chargers Because Nobody's Using Them.

Could it be that people who shop at Costco can't afford them?

A SAD DAY for U.S. wheat growers.

RAHN: Democracy’s spending curse. We're already at the tipping point -- if not beyond.

CORRECTION: "He thinks he's the smartest guy in the room...."

WOMAN: supersize me. 20,000 (government-subsidized) calories a day. [Eyeball warning: the link contains pictures.]

THE 'KILLER RABBIT' STRIKES AGAIN: when you've lost Charles Blow, you've lost.

DEROY MURDOCK: Hope, change and free birth-control pills. "Thanks to Obamacare, Americans 'with cancer, a heart ailment, or a major injury will face co-pays and deductibles, but anyone who wants to go on the Pill or rent breastfeeding equipment won’t incur any personal cost - and nobody will be free to decide otherwise.'"

POWER LINE: the oblivious vacationeer.

QUOTATIONS from Robert Heinlein seem to very popular these days. Here are some of my favorites:

Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why. Then do it!

Most “scientists” are bottle washers and button sorters.

A generation which ignores history has no past—and no future.

In a mature society, “civil servant” is semantically equal to “civil master.”

There are hidden contradictions within the minds of people who “love nature” while deploring the “artificialities” with which “Man has spoiled ‘Nature.” The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of “Nature” -- but beavers and their dams are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima-facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver damn (erected by beavers for beaver’s purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purpose of men) the “Naturist” reveals his hatred for his own race -- i.e., his own self-hatred. In the case of “Naturists” such self-hatred is understandable; they are such a sorry lot. But hatred is too strong an emotion to feel toward them; pity and contempt are the most they rate. As for me, willy-nilly I am a man, not a beaver, and H. Sapiens is the only race I have or can have. Fortunately for me, I like being part of a race made up of men and women -- it strikes me as a fine arrangement and perfectly “natural.” Believe it or not, there were “Naturists” who opposed the first flight to old Earth’s Moon as being “unnatural” and a “despoiling of nature.”

Beware of altrusim. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity!

Political tags -- such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and. so forth -- are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

From "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long" in Robert Heinlein's 1973 novel Time Enough for Love.

IT'S TIME for a red-tape rescue.

ANOTHER FAIL: With the New York Times, it's routine.

KRAUTHAMMER: Bad luck? Or bad faith?

RICK PERRY: "I love my country more than I care about Obama's feelings."

ABOUT TIME: Judge Tosses Iffy Class Action – Says Plaintiff Can’t Claim She’s Too Stoopid To Understand Policies.

WHITE HOUSE faces political dilemma on health law challenge. The very fact that the Obama administration may try to delay the Supreme Court decision beyond the 2012 election is a pretty clear indication that they don't believe they will win.

YEAH, RIGHT: I'm from the government and I'm here to help you ....

VERIZON UNION WORKERS bused to CEO's home for protest. Verizon's response: "Union bosses surely can find more constructive things for their membership to do than waste taxpayer dollars, public safety resources and their membership’s time with these cheap theatrics.”

THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE, expressed through Congress, appears to mean nothing to the Obama administration.

THOMAS SOWELL: Social Degeneration.

GOOD LORD: Now the Left are eating their unicorns. What's next? Drinking the rainbow KoolAid?

KEEP THE FIRES BURNING: it creates jobs for arsonists.

PAUL GREENBERG: Who's in; who's out? Greenberg seems to favor 'electability'; this year, I want a "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" candidate.

"A MAN'S GOTTA KNOW HIS LIMITATIONS." But a President doesn't.

MICHELLE MALKIN: Who are the real racists?

NO TOILET FOR TIANGONG. Will the outhouse have one of those cute little half-moons on the door?

More on the Chinese space station here.

EDUCATION SECRETARY ARNE DUNCAN: “I feel very, very badly for the children there,” referring to children in Texas.

Sorry, Mr. Duncan, but as husband of an elementary school teacher who taught in both Texas and California and father of two children, one of whom graduated from high school in Texas and the other of whom graduated from high school in California, I can confidently assert that Texas schools are far superior.

But I will grant that teacher salaries and perks are better in California.

UNEXPECTED: Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises. Now the Democrats are chiming in.

DAY BY DAY: hunting predators. And don't forget there's already another hunter on the election trail.

ALLEN WEST: "I'm here to lead blacks off the Democratic Party 'plantation'."

This has long needed to be said publicly. I'm glad that West was the one.

More here.

WISHFUL THINKING? "A team of American researchers ... speculate that extraterrestrial environmentalists could be so appalled by our planet-polluting ways that they view us as a threat to the intergalactic ecosystem and decide to destroy us."

THE ANKLE-BITERS are getting tiring.

TECHNOLOGY: Medical tattoos and hacking humans.

DOGS ARE DEMOCRATS; CATS ARE REPUBLICAN; and both are smarter than the average Congresscritter.

PAULA DEEN ON ANTHONY BOURDAIN: "[S]omeone ... peed in his bowl of cereal...."

WHEN YOU CAN'T WIN THE ARGUMENT, demand your opponents be silenced.

OPTIMAL WEIGHT? Government hasn't a clue how much you should weigh.


It's about control; obesity wouldn't be an issue if the government hadn't decided to pick up the tab for medical care.

MYRA ADAMS: The Divided State of America Can Not Stand. Read the comments; 'compromise' has no votes....

SO WELFARE is stimulative and chronic unemployment is just an extended vacation?

Bull.

ALLEN WEST: "We have not overcome."

"32 MONTHS AFTER HIS INAUGURATION, 28 months after the unemployment rate first surged past 9 percent -- Obama will propose a "very specific" jobs package. In September. Following a well-deserved vacation."

Well deserved?

SOLVING A NON-PROBLEM: "President Obama issued an executive order Thursday intended to coordinate a 'government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce.'... According to the OPM, minorities represented 38.8 percent of the federal workforce last year, while 43.9 percent of the federal workforce was female."

Obama in action (inaction).

PERRY PLAYS Obama, media like a fiddle. Preston is a Perry supporter, but if his interpretation is even remotely correct Perry will be a formidable candidate.

NOTHING NICE: What Obama’s Brush with the Tea Party Reveals About Him.

SOUND ADVICE: "Don't always believe what you hear."

OPERATORS OF THE GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM have brought a decommissioned satellite back to life to replace an ailing craft in the precision navigation network.
Here's a thought: why not use the International Space Station as an on-orbit refuel, repair, and maintenance station?

"THE MORAL SEEMS TO BE that relief is like aspirin, best prescribed in small doses. Take two, and your headache gets better. Take the whole bottle, and you end up in the emergency room, having your stomach pumped. Which is what we are doing right now."

UNEXPECTEDLY? The Justice Department is investigating whether the nation’s largest credit ratings agency, Standard & Poor’s, improperly rated dozens of mortgage securities in the years leading up to the financial crisis.

SHEPARD SMITH on Rick Perry responding to the little boy's (mother's) question about evolution and science: "That may play well in Texas, but what about the rest of America?" This on the Fox Report tonight.

Watch for the snotty SOB to get bashed tomorrow.

NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORP., the nation’s second-largest military contractor and last aerospace company headquartered in Southern California, is moving their headquarters to Virginia. Only 300 members of the corporate staff will be moving to Virginia. Most of the firms 30,000 jobs will stay in California ... for now. The only reason for staying in California is the huge capital investment in place there. Don't expect any more until after California goes bankrupt.

LOCKHEED MARTIN took its Samarai handheld aircraft for its first public spin as the vehicle, which is 16 inches long and weighs less than half a pound, gets closer to prime time. Here's
the video.

THE LUNACY NEVER STOPS (CONTINUED): Democrat says fracking causes venereal disease.

BIZJET OWNERS ARE FIGHTING BACK: Rally Held To Stop Administration's Attacks On Business Jets.

ANN COULTER: Liberals Aren't Funny, They're A Riot! More here and here.

I'M ALL FOR REDISTRIBUTION -- as long as its someone else's being redistributed.

THIS MORNING I was thinking "Damn the torpedoes, I'll go ahead and begin the major home upgrade projects I've been planning for over a year." Then the stock market plunged another 400 points....

MUSIC TO MY EARS: "I'll work every day to try to make Washington, DC, as inconsequential in your life as I can."

GENE SIMMONS: Imported American Pride.

THE LUNACY NEVER STOPS:


You can read about it here.

MAYBE FOAM CUPS aren't so bad after all.

CNN WINS the "Perry makes us miss Bush" contest. Best comment: "Who does Obama make us miss? Stalin?"

AND YOU WONDER why we need (much) smaller (much) less intrusive government?

AND THE IDIOT LETTER WRITER OF THE WEEK AWARD goes to A.L. Cynton of Laguna Beach, CA. Look, I don't care if the Congressional "supercommittee" is made up of little furry purple trisexuals from Neptune. All I care about is getting spending under control and the national debt reduced.

BRITISH AUTOMAKER to build ultra-luxury SUV: "Pricing has not been announced, but given the nature of the vehicle your Ford Explorer trade-in probably won't cover more than the sales tax."

HEY, YOU GET 99 WEEKS OF VACATION. I only get 10 days.

LOOK HERE: Are aliens trying to show us something on the surface of Titan?

BUT ONLY THE LITTLE PEOPLE WERE HARMED: Firearms from ATF sting linked to 11 more violent crimes.

KIRSTEN POWERS: Stop Attacking Evangelicals! There's a lot of misinformation out there.

IS CALIFORNIA'S HIGH-SPEED RAIL a boondoggle? Well, yes.

REPUBLICANS ARE RACISTS, and we'll manufacture whatever evidence we need to prove it.

THEY CAN'T WAIT to make idiots of themselves, can they?

TOBACCO FIRMS SUE FDA over new graphic warnings. They ought to take a page from the Left's playbook and sue on the basis of the Left's most fundamental right -- the right not to be offended. I'd also suggest that the warnings constitute "hate speech" against an (un)protected class: smokers.

HISTORY REPEATS: cartoon from 1934.


From my email. And no, I'm not saying the current administration is communist; I'm saying the same dumb ideas keep repeating themselves.

OBAMA: I have a plan.

AS EXPECTED: Seattle's 'green jobs' program a bust.

THE POWER of the debt side.

IN A COMMENTARY damming Gov. Rick Perry with faint praise, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen must have hurt to write this: "Perry may turn out to be no Ronald Reagan. But then he doesn’t have to be. After all, Barack Obama has turned out to be no Barack Obama."

PAUL GREENBERG comments as the GOP field narrows.

LOCKHEED MARTIN'S Samarai drone to debut at upcoming conference. Interesting looking little bugger.

MICHELE BACHMANN and the submissive question. I suspect the question will continue to dog her, but I also don't believe that President Bachmann's first name will be Marcus.

'DOOMSDAY' DEFENSE CUTS loom large for deficit committee. "For committee members such as Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., the threat of Pentagon cuts is an incentive to come up with $1.5 trillion in savings over a decade. Failure would have brutal implications for hundreds of thousands workers back home." It will be interesting to watch Patty Murray. Will she be loyal to her state or her party?

THOMAS SOWELL: Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has had the courage to tell the plain, honest truth about race:

"Pull up your pants and buy a belt 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt," he said. "If you walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you? They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy," the mayor said. He added: "You have damaged your own race."

Read it all.

FROM MY EMAIL:

If you consider that there has been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theater of operations during the past 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000 soldiers.

The firearm death rate in Washington, DC is 80.6 per 100,000 for the same period. That means you are about 25 per cent more likely to be shot and killed in the US capital, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the U.S., than you are in Iraq.

Conclusion: The U.S. should pull out of Washington.

I don't know about the statistics, but I like the conclusion.

MAYBE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE are ready to believe that liberal policies always succeed unless they’re unlucky and that conservative policies always fail unless good luck intervenes. That could happen. The alternative is that Obama is about to become a one-term president.

OBAMA TO CARMAKERS: You Can't Just Make Money on SUVs and Trucks. Translation from ObamaSpeak: "You can't make money."

OH, JEEZ. Another high-speed, er, low-speed car, er, fork-lift chase....

PERRY FOR PRESIDENT: thoughts from Andrew Klavan and Roger L. Simon.

DENIAL STILL ISN'T A RIVER IN EGYPT: Eugene Washingtion holds nose, walks among the unwashed masses in Iowa.

JAY LENO: "President Obama is off on his three-state bus tour this week. I believe the three states are Confusion, Delusion and Desperation." Let's see ... we now know the names of 53 of his 57 states. What are the names of the remaining four?

OBAMA: If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all.

DOES THIS MEAN THAT GOLD has to be returned to the country from which it was mined?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Liberal Psychoses. Read it all.

MARK STEYN: Another Cabinet Department to Abolish.

STILL VOTING 'PRESENT': How about I show you my economic plan next month?

NOW THAT the 'debt crisis' is over, the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne is in full spin mode again.

[Obama] believes his old speech declaring there is neither a red America nor a blue America, and he trusted his capacity to bring left and right together — an imprudent presumption, given the nature of the current GOP.

See? It's the Republicans' fault -- never mind that the President's approval rating is below 40%. Somehow I have a hard time wrapping my mind around Dionne's evident assertion that over 60% of the populace are theos evil Tea Party Republicans.

STARBUCKS CEO urges other CEOs to stop donating to U.S. political campaigns. What I find amusing is that "In 2000 Schultz donated $50,000 to the DNC, and since has donated thousands to Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell, President Barack Obama, then presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards...."

NANNY STATE MADNESS: "When California’s elected officials come back from their month-long recess they face a mountain of proposed legislation (almost 900 bills are lined up and waiting), including a new law (SB432) that would require hotels to eliminate flat sheets. Not having fitted sheets on hotel beds would now be a crime in California. This is not a joke...."

FLAMEOUT: 'Car of the Future' crashes in the present.

THAT LITTLE? Study finds women gossip five hours a day.

THAT'S SOOO 2008. Paul Krugman: What this economy needs is a space alien invasion!

THE OBAMA BUS TOUR: "A Big Ol' Hunk of Nothing on Two Thick Slices of Nada."

ROBERT REICH: Obama's policies "are just not big enough to make much of a difference." I'm surprised -- Obama has policies?

HOW ABOUT A DEPARTMENT OF (MY) JOB?

STOP CODDLING THE SUPER-RICH. Warren, you and your fellow millionaires and billionaires can always write a check to the Treasury. Have you?

OBAMA EMBARKS on job-saving tour. Yeah, his job.

LET'S NOT REDUCE THE DEFICIT; let's redistribute it.

HOPE YOUR BACKYARD GARDEN IS DOING BETTER THAN MINE: CAFE standards for big rigs.

HARRY REID: Yep… That Tea Party’s Going Away Any Day Now....

Reid could speed up the process by 4 years by resigning now.

OBAMA IN WONDERLAND: It's a warship, stupid.

A LESSON FOR THE WILLFULLY IGNORANT: Corporations are people, too.

From the comments: "The Mittster meant that all corporations are made up of people: their employees and owners (who usually overlap substantially). People like to talk about corporations as if they’re some nefarious exogenous force from beyond the moon, but that’s just wrong. Romney’s correct; corporations aren’t just people: in the age of mass investing, corporations are us."

EVEN A STOPPED CLOCK ....

To any environmentally conscious American, building the Keystone XL oil pipeline doesn’t sound like a great deal: a new pipeline that would transport dirty tar sands crude from Canada, over the Great Plains and to the Gulf Coast. Why would America “double down” on Canadian oil, when it takes more water and energy — which means more pollution — to extract? Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will decide before the end of the year whether to approve the project, has to answer that question.

Here’s what she should say: Even if the U.S. government adopts stringent policies to cut oil use, the United States will be dependent on crude for decades. Oil demand across the world, meanwhile, is rising, which applies upward pressure on prices — and makes it economical to extract oil from Canada’s tar sands. Canada will produce its oil. We will burn a lot of it, no matter what, because there’s still spare capacity in existing U.S.-Canada pipelines. But when Canada produces more oil than it can send south, the Canadians won’t just leave it in the ground; they will ship it elsewhere. And America won’t be kept from importing and refining more low-grade crude oil; the United States will just get it from the Middle East, the Energy Department has concluded.

Washington Post editorial, linked from Hot Air.

The Hot Air website also has a three part series on the Canadian oil sands, well worth reading.

WAS IT REALLY only 832 days ago?

Linked from the PJ Tatler.

THEIR PROJECTION IS ASTONISHING: "Much of the [Democrats'] criticism is focused on describing the [Republican presidential] candidates as lackeys to the Tea Party, which establishment Democrats have classified as right-wing zealots bent on destroying the U.S."

HEALTH TIP: Walk or bike to work. Right ... 29.6 miles (each way).

RESIGN: How can Obama get CEOs to hire?

MARK TWAIN: God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.

ANOTHER DAY, another diatribe from E.J. Dionne. Read the comments to see how the welfare community reacts.

EVEN VIRGINIA IS HAVING PENSION PROBLEMS: "Forced by state lawmakers to delay payments into the Virginia Retirement System during the financial crisis two years ago, local school officials now worry they will have to cut and strain to pay off the bill that is coming due in 2013."

Luckily, my wife retires in 2012, so she should get at least one year's pension....

SAVING SMART METERS from a backlash. Zachary's argument is a strawman. The backlash isn't due to the wireless meters; it's about what the wireless meters can do -- control the user's power consumption.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The problems we face today are there because the people who work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living." We're not there yet, but getting damned close.

From my email.

CONGRATULATIONS, BRITAIN: You've barbarized your citizenry, without regard to race, gender or physical handicap!

MY CURRENT CHOICES FOR 2012: Perry/Bachmann (either order) and Sarah Palin for Secretary of Energy after she completes her first job -- dismantling the EPA.

RECYCLING ELECTRONS: a novel approach to solar cell design. The real question -- still unanswered -- is whether or not it is competitive with fossil fuels. I suspect it is not.

A DIGITAL DARK AGE: Will your grandchildren know what you look like as a child? I'm not convinced that preserving today's trivia is worth the time and effort. I also know I'm likely in the minority.

GOV. RICK PERRY: America needs new leadership.

INSANITY: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

DOGS AND CATS.

This is Tigger: he's a 100 lb golden retreiver who has been 'visiting' our house for the last few days.


This is Daisy: she is our 14 lb part-Siamese cat.


The bed on which Daisy is sleeping used to be Tigger's -- which may explain his morose expression.

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S really bad week.

LANNY DAVIS: Are you Tea Partiers happy now? You shouldn't be.

Well, I'm not exactly happy, but happier than I was. There's still much more work to go.

BELLADONNA ROGERS scatters liberal twerp parts all over the landscape. Bravo!

A WHIFF OF GRAPESHOT: "A society that does not have the will to defend itself is doomed."

IS GLOBAL WARMING melting Al Gore's brain? No -- you can't melt a vacuum.

GOV. PERRY announces; Chris Matthews continues to prove himself an idiot.

CLOSE THE BS GAP: shut up.

SEAL THE BORDER!

ANOTHER HIT: ObamaCare mandate is ruled unconstitutional by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Too bad they didn't invalidate the whole damn thing. Next stop: the Supreme Court.

THEY'RE BELOW ZERO? Surprise: Olbermann's ratings hit new low.

A LOOK THROUGH THE WAYBACK MACHINE: I just noticed that I have now been blogging over 5 years. Here's my first post from August 4, 2006. My webmistress, Daisy, is now approaching middle (cat) age, as feisty as ever.

It took a bit over 2-1/2 years to reach my 350th post, on March 28, 2009.

This post is my 6,271st, a number I still find hard to believe.

"I'LL BE LAYING OUT MORE PROPOSALS IN THE DAYS AHEAD." But Obama did not spell out any new initiatives beyond renewing his call for Congress to extend a payroll tax cut, advance trade pacts with South Korea, Panama and Colombia, and deliver patent reform.

As I wrote earlier, Obama is a broken record.

JUST GO.

Mr. Obama is the most arrogant, self-absorbed and self-obsessed president in U.S. history. Nothing is ever his fault. He blames everyone and everything for America’s economic woes - Tea Partyers, Wall Street, Japanese earthquakes, insurance executives, oil companies, millionaires and corporate jet owners. He lashes out at imaginary enemies without ever taking personal responsibility. In his mind, he is - and always will be - the Anointed One.

As Instapundit has repeatedly pointed out, a Carter-like presidency is a best-case scenario.

SPIRITED DEBATE leaves the Republican field unaltered. Agreed. It was a good debate, but I left without it altering my tentative candidate preferences.

More links to debate opinion here.

GOVERNMENT PRICE CONTROLS produce cancer drug shortages. And shortages produce rationing, which in turn causes drug prices to go up. What a surprise.

LINDA CHAVEZ: Ingratitude, Insolence and Entitlement -- Brought to You by the Welfare State.

THIS IS GOING TO GET VERY UGLY.

IF YOU THOUGHT GOVERNMENT WAS TOO BIG, here's why.

TURN OUT THE LIGHT; the party's over. It may be turned on again after the 2012 election.

THE 'BROKEN RECORD' RETURNS: taxes on millionaires, billionaires, corporate jet owners, and oil companies. Won't dumBO ever learn?

LIVING IN THE GOVERNMENT ZOO:

[W]hat if a man were born in a zoo? Like a baby tiger born in a zoo, he would not see the zoo as a trap. His needs for food, shelter and even procreation would be satisfied.

However, he would not learn how to build himself a shelter because he would have a temperature-regulated exhibit area. He would not learn to defend himself because there would be nothing threatening in his artificial environment. He would not learn to hunt and prepare his own meals because zookeepers would bring dishes of food to him. He would never learn to work. He would own nothing and be responsible for nothing. If he had children, the zoo would provide for them also.

He would learn to scratch at the walls and howl when he wanted his zookeepers. He would learn sloth.

Sound familiar?

THE LAW can't make everyone love you.

IS THE TEA PARTY OVER? Nope; it's just begun.

SO A GARDENING BROADCAST would be 'inappropriate' in New York City?

HOMEOWNERS’ ASSOCIATIONS becoming unavoidable and quasi-governmental. Yes. Unavoidable in large part because the government permitting process makes it almost a developer requirement in order to protect his investment until the housing development matures. And supra-governmental rather than quasi-governmental in that there are not the checks and balances that restrict government action.

WHY NOT IN 2012?

HAVE YOU NO SHAME? No, I'm a liberal.

BUMPER STICKER. I saw this one on a car in Manassas the other day.

ONE NATION
Under Surveillance

The bumper sticker was tongue-in-cheek (I hope), but since it was just after MSNBC's faux apology for leaving out the phrase "under God" in a Pledge of Allegiance during the U.S. Open, the bumper sticker got me thinking. One might see a bumper sticker reading

ONE NATION
Under God

and reasonably infer that its owner was conservative in nature. The other, though somewhat sarcastic, seems to me as one that leans left. It strikes me that both are essentially religious in nature, with only the deity changing -- the Left's god being an omniscient government.

OBAMASHARE



[Added thought]: I just coined the word "ObamaShare" to caption the cartoon, but thinking about it, ObamaShare is to the President's tax "redistribution" policies as Sarah Palin's "death panels" was to ObamaCare.

THE HELLO KITTY: super federal budget calculator. Shadow likes it.

Linked from Instapundit.

FUNDING HINGES ON CLEARER NASA VISION? It's time to stop planning and start doing. Congress and the President need to pick a goal and stick with it, or get out of the way and quit interfering.

THE DOWNGRADE: a rebuke Obama richly deserved.

AND DEMOCRACY IT ISN'T: Obama Advocates For New Form Of Government For America.

OVER-REGULATION? What over-regulation? Notice an Obama administration theme beginning to emerge? If we can't get higher taxes, we'll get the money by imposing mandatory "fees".

PETA wants future Mars colony to be vegan. I'd support that if all PETA members were required to move to Mars.

IF PEOPLE HAD JOBS, they'd be less likely to vote for a welfare state: Why the President Doesn’t Present a Bold Plan to Create Jobs and Jumpstart the Economy.

FACTS DON'T MATTER; it's the narrative.

JAPANESE RESEARCHERS levitate train on a cushion of air.


A video of a prototype is at the link.

MICHELLE MALKIN provides a well-deserved slap to the face of the mainstream media.

MORE RANDOM THOUGHTS:

Taxpayer: someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert , in five years there'd be a shortage of sand. ~ Milton Friedman

From my email.

KICK ASS and take names. A most excellent 'fisking' of a Der Spiegel editorialist.

EXCELLENT: EPA set to miss deadline on ozone rules.

DEER IN THE HEADLIGHTS: and that truck is getting mighty close.

A WARNING TO EARTH? Get your act together lest I decide to start over.

WE CAN HOPE: "The GOP holding onto the Wisconsin Senate is a major blow to Big Labor, maybe their biggest setback in a generation. The big unions will not go quietly, but go they will, eventually."

"THE HARDEST OBSTACLE to overcome will be the idea that anyone who challenges the prevailing consensus of the past 50 years is irrational and irresponsible. That is what is being said about the Tea Partiers. In fact, what is irrational and irresponsible is the assumption that we can go on as we are."

I KNOW TEXAS IS A BIG STATE, but Antartica is a part of Texas?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Crashing Chariot of Our Young Phaethon.

WE SHOULD BE SO LUCKY: Should Obama Resign?

EPA ECO-RADICALs Are Hurting Families at the Tap. Er, don't tell the EPA that I draw my water from a personal well on my property.

And that there are beavers just down the road.

RICK PERRY got C's and D's in college. Real C's and D's are more comforting to me than O's affirmative action A's and B's (assuming his transcript showed them).

JUNK THE BUDGETING PROCESS: the insanity of baseline budgeting. Hannity was all over this in the week leading up to the debt deal, and correctly so. I don't base my annual budget on what I overspent last year plus an inflation factor; I base it on what I reasonably expect my income will be next year.

TEN REASONS for having children.

And reason #11: children are more likely to help you when your Social Security checks quit coming.

SARAH PALIN: "We are the sons and daughters of that Greatest Generation who stormed the beaches of Normandy, raised the flag at Iwo Jima, and made America the strongest and most prosperous nation in the history of mankind. By God, we will not squander what has been given us!"

That's the message I want to hear from my next President.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Inexplicables.

Plus this observation about Vanity Fair's James Wolcott: "Usually his postings are crass, poorly written, and unimaginative, and they seem to have little value other than offering revelations of the psychodramas and angsts of a small insular class of admittedly irrelevant and talentless New York insiders."

SAVE MONEY JUST LIKE UNCLE SAM: "I was going to buy three, but I just bought one." Read the text before you click on the video.

DOWNGRADE DENIERS. Be sure to read the comments - here's an example: "The lead democrats strike the pose of some among us who are up to their eyeballs in credit card debt - the solution that is obvious to them is to secure another credit card and keep on spending. This is as tenderly insane as believing in the existence of perpetual motion machines and unicorns that excrete jelly beans and pink lemonade."

THE LOCAL DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION did me a big favor today. As I entered the subdivision where I live, there was a giant sign: "Warning - slow moving vehicles ahead". Now I can drive (slowly) in peace.

RANDOM THOUGHTS:

President Obama often talks about wanting to raise taxes on "millionaires and billionaires" but -- in his actual tax proposals -- higher taxes usually begin with couples earning $250,000 between them. Apparently that makes you a millionaire or a billionaire.

Three little words -- "We the people," the opening words of the Constitution of the United States -- are the biggest obstacle to achieving the political goals of the left. For that, they must move decisions away from "We the people" -- from individuals to government; from elected officials to unelected judges; and from national institutions to international institutions like the United Nations -- all safely remote and insulated from "We the people."

At one time, it was well understood that adversity taught valuable lessons, which reduce the probability of repeating foolish decisions. But, today, the welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.

More here.

TEA PARTIERS are stupid Americans.

THIS IS WHAT AMERICA NEEDS. My vote will go to the Republican candidate who presents the most optimistic message.

THE REAL BITTER CLINGERS.

FACTS DON'T MATTER to Democrats. They believe in rainbows and unicorns.

AL GORE needs the peace and quiet of a padded cell.

OBAMA'S MESSAGE: Hey, it's not a depression. But he's working on it.

SHOULD CONGRESS RETURN? Well, there's plenty to be done, for sure, but frankly I think I'd rather they stayed away until after the 2012 elections. The risk of them doing something bad outweighs the risk of them doing nothing.

EVEN THE BIGGEST GUN isn't terribly fearsome when it's out of bullets.

A SUGGESTION for the Tea Party: "Since Reuters and other establishment media types embrace the moral relativism of the 'one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter' nonsense, why not hoist them with their own petard, and start referring to 'Tea Party freedom fighters'?"

THE BEST POLITICAL AD YET. And he's not (yet) a candidate.

CAN WASHINGTON do anything about jobs? Well, yes, they're pretty good at destroying them.

AS I'VE LONG SUSPECTED: the market long ago factored Obama's total incompetence into their business strategy and are now totally ignoring him.

HERE'S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE about a potential commercial race to the moon. I'm impressed by the inventiveness of the entrepreneurs, but they've missed a possibility from Heinlein's novel The Man Who Sold the Moon: selling the right to place advertising on the lunar surface. Heinlein sold the right to not advertise; but I suspect advertising would be more lucrative.

JUAN WILLIAMS: Is Ann Coulter right about the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King?

You have to give Coulter points for shrewdly using the words of one black liberal civil rights icon to indict another liberal black liberal civil rights icon. She has a conservative agenda and she is a world-class provocateur who knows how to inflame her liberal critics.

Coulter and I disagree most of the time, especially on her regular use of harsh, partisan hyperbolic language to caricature people. Her tirades against liberals get lots of media attention and sell books but they overshadow the serious insights she has into American history. And when Ann is right, Ann can be devastatingly right.

Read it all.

I'VE GOT AN IDEA: Let's air drop them over the Mid-East and let them put their violent tendencies to good use.

CARTOON OF THE DAY.


More here.

CAN CONTRACTORS COME ALONG? Boeing Workers Will Fly to ISS Aboard Their Company's New Spaceship.

ORIGIN OF THE DEBT SHOWDOWN: Of course it was all the Tea Party's fault.

And it wouldn't have happened if the then-majority Democrats had voted to raise the debt ceiling before the new Congress convened. Big mistake.

FOR THE FIRST TIME in Obama’s national political career, [he has] an opponent who can fight back.

ELECTION 2012: Let the ballot-stuffing begin.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?



It's located on YouTube here.

DEADLY REGULATIONS and drug shortages. A problem which I can easily verify -- when my wife and I had to take the post-exposure rabies series, there was exactly one place in Prince William county where we could get the vaccine, and it was in short supply there. I expect the vaccine cost alone will be well north of $10,000 (assuming we can ever get a correct bill).

DON SURBER'S cartoon of the day.

INSPIRED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA, the Smithsonian Institute launched a blog called “Department of Innovation”. As they describe it:

Seems a long time ago, but it was only back in January when Barack Obama told us that America had reached a “Sputnik moment.” He was referring to the competition with China to be the Big Dog of the 21st century global economy, but the subtext was that the country needs an attitude adjustment, that we need to start channeling Silicon Valley, a place where people may pledge to “Do no evil” but the true religion is innovation.

It made for one fine sound bite. But it hasn’t exactly inspired a bunch of innovation rallies and bake sales. So in the spirit of banging the drum for new ideas and fresh thinking, this blog will track all things innovative, not just in science and technology, but also in how we live, how we learn, how we entertain ourselves.

Here's the "Department of Innovation" logo:


Now take a careful look: the three interlocking gears cannot move -- they're locked in place.

Congratulations, Smithsonian. You've managed to perfectly describe the Obama administration.

Linked from Michelle Malkin.

ANOTHER SMALL BUSINESS isn't happy with Obama.

The YouTube link is here.

AOTW AWARD: the acronym is obvious; the language is, er, "salty."

INSTAPUNDIT got it wrong. Just like Standard & Poor, he used the wrong baseline. Using the correct baseline (zero), President Obama just saved or created 10,810 Dow points.

OBAMA'S SPEECH TODAY: “Standard and Poor’s are a bunch of stinky poopie heads, and the US still has a AAA rating with the Silent Majority.”

ARROGANCE: "If the American people don't agree with him it's because they're stupid, and our experiment in self-government cannot possibly survive such stupidity."

Read it all.

DARPA INTENDS to award up to $500,000 in seed money to a group that proves it would do the best job of developing the necessary technologies — whatever they may be — for interstellar travel.

Read it all first, then ask yourself two questions:

How do you know a proposal is "up to snuff?"

Would Heinlein written "Time for the Stars" or Verne written "From the Earth to the Moon" on a DARPA contract?

I want manned interstellar spaceflight, but postulating and solving all the potential problems before "bending tin" doesn't strike me as a plausible approach.

DOW OPENS 234 points lower. There goes another year of retirement.

[Update & bump] Correction: make it two years; the Dow Jones Industrial Average is now down 500 points.

[Another update] Make that three years; possibly 4. The DJIA closed down 635 points.

HEH: Fair trade coffee worse than regular coffee.

It's called 'gaming the system'.

MEN NEED NOT APPLY: Government sets aside contracts for women-owned firms only. And in practice, the rule is rather easy to get around. Back in the late 70's, when I was in graduate school and SBA preferences were first granted to women-owned businesses, a friend of mine and another doctoral candidate used the opportunity to put his little business in his wife's name to get a competitive advantage. At the time of his death in 2009, he was President of the same business he started in 1976.

For more information on women-owned set-asides, go here.

WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' CONGRESS: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced Friday that he will unilaterally override the math and reading proficiency requirements of the No Child Left Behind law.

PRESIDENT OBAMA will speak to the nation at 1 p.m. EDT today. Does any one not expect him to announce that the Department of Justice will open an investigation into the rating agencies for downgrading the U.S. bond rating?

[Update] It's 1:45 p.m. and the President is still in his bunker.... And Bret Baier (Fox News broadcast) just made the same point I've been making: my 401K is nearing a 201K.

[Update II] Well, I was wrong -- he went back to "tax the rich" again.

OUR CHILDREN respond to our debt crisis solution.

PRESIDENT OBAMA is bringing the Left and Right together -- both hate his policies.

EARNED SUCCESS, not unearned income.

RYAN LIZZA has a profile of Rep. Michele Bachmann in the latest New Yorker. Lizza says Bachmann’s rise “is based on a collection of right-wing convictions, beliefs, and resentments that she has regularly broadcast from television studios and podiums since 2006, when she was first elected to Congress.”

Hmm. Then could her current popularity be the result of leadership as opposed to the President's followership?

GOES TO SHOW how important the Washington Post has become. When I went out to pick up the newspapers this morning, I found I hadn't bothered to pick up yesterday's Post (the Washington Times doesn't publish on weekends).

IT ISN'T CIGARETTES.

HMM. I just checked my Shadow's World sitemeter, and since 8:47 a.m. EDT and I've had a total of 5 hits (in less than an hour) to this post from last April. Could it be that there are a lot of internet users out there who are keyword searching "escape plan"?

IT'S A TEA PARTY DOWNGRADE. Oh, really?

Let’s take a walk down memory lane. What did the Democrats do with respect to federal debt during the four years they controlled both Houses of Congress? Here is a summary of the deficits the Democrats racked up during that time:

FY 2008 — $460 billion
FY 2009 — $1,410 billion ($1.4 trillion)
FY 2010 — $1,300 billion ($1.3 trillion)
FY 2011 — $1,600 (estimated) ($1.6 trillion)

Of the $14.5 trillion national debt, nearly $4.8 trillion–one-third of the total–was incurred during that four-year period when the Congress was exclusively controlled by the Democrats.

Read it all.

WHY REPUBLICANS must win in 2012.

THE SCULPTOR: Sometimes you have to pay attention to detail.

WHY IS OBAMA so clueless about the Tea Party?

He's not clueless; he's scared.