COUCH RUG I wish I could have gotten a picture of Shadow's scowl at having his nap interrupted, but the infrared rangefinder would cause him to close his eyes just as I took the picture.

A TREE FALLS IN MANASSAS. We've been having some dead trees taken out on the property, and this one proved interesting. Because of its nearness to our neighbor, the tree service decided to drop it vertically by attaching it to a nearby tree, cutting it at the base, and then winching it down about 4 feet at a time. Here it is just after the first cut was made ....

And here it is about three cuts later as the crown is about to be removed.

It started raining shortly after this photo was taken or the tree would be firewood by now.

ALL ABOARD THE BULLET TRAIN TO BANKRUPTCY: Sarah Palin at a Tea Party event in Madison, WI. A bonus in Andrew Breitbart’s introduction.

UPDATE: the view from Althouse.

UNYIELDING IDEOLOGUE on the federal budget: “Obama ... made it clear that nearly everything that he ‘believe[s] in’ should remain untouched. Anything else would reflect a lack of ‘patriotism’."

NEAL BOORTZ: “I’ve got my escape plan and yes, it does involve suitcases.” So do I, and it involves a language other than English. There are givers and there are takers - and right now the takers seem to be winning.

HAVE THE U.S. AND NATO given up on Libya?

I think we’re seeing two things going on here. First, NATO is not willing to step up to the plate in the absence of U.S. leadership. a result of too many years of letting the U.S. be the world’s policeman. And, second, that the Obama administration has no principles whatever.

SHOULD I BE SURPRISED? Obama is just plain bad at politics.

WHY IS OBAMA’S SUPPORT slipping among Blacks and Latinos? Answer: it's the economy, stupid. Gasoline prices. Food prices.

IT’S NEVER JUST THE ECONOMY, STUPID: the moral high ground is not the place to be when your enemies are armed.

HOW THE NATURE CONSERVANCY undermines property rights and expands government control. But it’s for your own good.

A UNIFIED THEORY OF OBAMA:

I wondered if it would be possible to explain the many contradictions of Obama and the mystery of his origins and incomprehensible nature of his domestic and foreign policies to better understand him and predict why he seems to be steering the ship of state onto the shoals. I think I've finally got it .... Barack is not one person. The man we know as Barack Obama is really two people, identical twins.

It’s an interesting read, but not original. There was a short story, I believe in a 1960’s-ish issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, based on exactly the same premise. A “Kennedy-like” patriarch raises multiple identical siblings to be the eventual president of the United States. Each sibling was educated specifically for one aspect of the presidency (foreign policy, domestic policy, campaign policy, etc.) and one was chosen to be the face of the President while the others remained hidden.

The difference with Feldman’s hypothesis is that, in the story, the multiple siblings were competent.

BUMPER STICKER OF THE DAY

Milk Sucks! Got Margaritas?

SPACEFLIGHT GAP IS BIGGEST NASA CHALLENGE: "The most distressing challenge for NASA ... is the looming gap in human spaceflight that will be created once the shuttles are no longer available to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station." You don’t say. Read it all, especially former NASA administrator Michael Griffin’s comment that the government should retain some capability even after commercial human spaceflight becomes extant. Griffen’s loss was a huge blow to NASA.

SACRED COWS, third rails, and the scope of government.

The debate over cutting federal spending has so far concentrated on shrinking the size of the federal government, not necessarily its scope. Even if Republicans prevail in cutting some spending and reforming entitlements, the federal government will still be involved in a wide swath of American life. There really hasn’t been a serious discussion (outside of votes on funding for NPR and Planned Parenthood) of shrinking the breadth of governmental spending, activity, and involvement. Continued failure to do so would be a serious substantive and strategic error. Merely reducing spending in certain areas while leaving the departments, agencies, and programs intact ensures that those departments, agencies, and programs will soon resume growing and even metastasizing. It’s the Washington way.

I love the use of the term 'metasticize.' Government is a cancer on the body politic. It’s time to start excising the cancer.

TAX HIKES? Nope; 'spending reductions in the tax code'.

I’d like to commend President Obama for his backhanded honesty on this, though. He has finally admitted that he thinks the money that you work for belongs to the government before it belongs to you. He just had to utter the most Orwellian phrase ever spoken by an American president to get the admission out there.

You're just a temporary custodian.

THERE ARE MEN; there are ‘girly men’; and then there are these doofi (plural of doofus).
Watch it if you have the courage. ADDED: Bingo!

BOEHNER WON THE VOTE, but lost the trust of conservatives. I’ve written off the Democrats long ago; now it seems to be time to write off the establishment Republicans as well. Bring on 2012.