HOFFA AT OBAMA RALLY: We need to take these tea party sons of bitches out. And President Obama, who was there, never said a word.

[Update] The reaction begins....

[Update II] GAME ON! "It’s a fight they want, those who call us barbarians and sons of bitches; a fight they will lose and lose badly. They have no f#%*ing idea whom they are calling out, not a clue of the distance we will go to preserve the freedom so valiantly won and preciously guarded by those who fought before us. Game on and games over, you filthy socialists. Get your bags packed."

From the comments here.

IT'S AMAZING to see what happens when you tell progressives to pay for it yourselves.

MORE ALASKA: our flight over Denali National Park.

Our floatplane: getting ready to board.

My daughter, preparing for takeoff (she was copilot by dint of getting the right seat).

Approaching McKinley over the tundra. The blur is the aircraft's propeller.

Flying through -- not over -- the mountains. We never flew over 8,000 feet. Mt. McKinley is (as I recall) about 13,000 feet. Many times we flew through canyons with sheer mountain walls on both sides of the aircraft.

Looking down on one of the many glaciers remaining.

This photo was taken by my daughter across the aircraft in front of the pilot. The rock wall towered above us, and was about 50 feet beyond our left wingtip. There were several times I thought I could just reach out and touch the walls as we went past.

Homeward bound: turning final on our approach back to Fish Lake.

WHAT A MAROON: According to E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post, capitalists don't work.

THE INVENTIVENESS OF NANNY knows no bounds. Mock them.

NEW YORK TIMES OpEd columnist Joe Nocera writes “A fair minded person would have to acknowledge that the N.L.R.B.’s action is exactly the kind of overreach that should embarrass Democrats who claim to care about job creation.” That's clearly a Republican and Tea Party position. But this 'fair-minded' person also wrote that "Tea Partiers are terrorists".

An example of Orwell's doublethink.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: a side benefit of automation.

IT STARTED JANUARY 21, 2009: Can a president truly become irrelevant?

WHAT COULD possibly go wrong ... go wrong ... go wrong?

JEFF JACOBY on New York Times editor Bill Keller's anti-religious essay. Among other idiocies, Keller wrote:

"I do care if religious doctrine becomes an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises."

Of course Keller spoke out when Obama's Rev. Wright was in the news ... oh, he didn't?

TOP AL QAEDA OPERATIVE caught in Pakistan. "The arrest -- made public five days before the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 -- is seen as a key blow to Al Qaeda."

Uh, guys ... 5+5 is 10, not 11.

RANDOM THOUGHT: You must be a progressive if no price is too high to pay with other people's money.

WELL, THE CURRENT ONE ISN'T: Must a President Be Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?

SAVE AMERICAN JOBS. Buy Canadian:

To show her support for American workers, President Obama’s labor secretary, Hilda Solis, has junked the standard black limo and purchased a new Chevrolet Equinox to ride around Washington in.

The problem: the crossover SUV is built and assembled in Canada from parts also made in Canada.

From my email.

A MONKEY WRENCH in Hope n' Change.

THE PROS AND CONS of wind energy. The cons have it: transmission and storage. Until those problems are solved, wind energy will remain uneconomical.

SHOULD TEXAS secede from the Union as Governor (and Republican presidential candidate) Rick Perry once suggested? Actually I think the reverse is already true: the United States of Obama has already seceded from Texas.

CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS Democrat stands by hate-filled anti-Tea Party comments.

It never ceases to amaze me that if a conservative were to speak of progressives as Rep. Carson did, he or she would be immediately denounced as a racist, (pick your own noun)phobic, bigoted, knuckle-dragging terrorist. But for Rep. Carson, this is 'civil' speech.

IS SOCIAL SECURITY a Ponzi scheme? Maybe, maybe not. But that's not the point:

[F]ighting over an analogy gives both sides too easy an out. What Americans should really be wrestling with is not whether Social Security is or isn't a Ponzi scheme, but whether its all-important surpluses are wisely invested. Or whether, to be precise, they are invested at all.

Which is exactly the argument for privatization.

TEDDY ROOSEVELT is reputed to have said "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Well, for conservatives, the time for speaking softly has passed: "It’s about time that someone stood up with a bludgeon and beat back against Obama progressives who are pushing the rest of us around because they can’t think of anything better to do."