WELL, IT'S BETTER THAN 'DANGEROUS': Now it's 'Obama the irrelevant'.

BELLADONA ROGERS: Advice to conservative women.

WHY WASHINGTON is shocked ... shocked! ... by Newt Gingrich's rise. Truer words have never been spoken. The beltway Republican establishment does not (yet) understand that real Republicans are as thoroughly pissed at them as they are Democrats.

CRYSTAL WRIGHT: Oh, What a Joke the DC Council Is. Your government at 'work'.

WHO CARES ABOUT FACTS when you're fighting to make America safe for cynicism?

ATF USED "FAST AND FURIOUS' to make the case for additional gun controls. Those innocents who died weren't 'collateral damage', they were marketing costs.

SHOCK (or at least a startle): Liberal recommends Kagan recuse herself from Supreme Court's ObamaCare case.

PELOSI: "Unemployment benefits should not be 'paid for'." So we'll use monopoly money instead?

AN OBSERVATION from the retired lane:

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing.

A systems engineer is one who knows less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything.

Based on observing the Obama administration for three years, this conclusion is inescapable: a mediocre engineer is far more valuable to society than is an accomplished expert.

BUT OTHER THAN THAT ... Obama's Hypocritical, Incoherent, and Unpresidential Economic Speech.

YOU/VE GOTTA BE KIDDING ME! Unfortunately, no. Time Magazine names Occupy Wall Street the #1 news story of 2011.

EXCEPTIONAL AMERICA: Is the United States simply one nation among many — or is it the leader of the world?

This characteristic ability of the United States to respond to challenges, reinvent itself, and rebound is not to suggest that American preeminence is guaranteed in the coming decades. Rather, it means only that our destiny is in our own hands, should we have leadership that is intent on ensuring American predominance. The current rise of world hegemons like India and China recall similar warnings of a Nazi Germany in the 1930s, a postwar Soviet colossus of the 1950s and 1960s, a supposedly dominant Japan, Inc. during the 1970s, and a purportedly more moral and vibrant E.U. of the 1990s and 2000s. In every instance, the new ascendant rival eventually proved wanting in comparison to the United States. In other words, it is our decision whether China becomes our master or recedes, as did former twentieth-century competitors to the United States such as Germany, Russia, Japan, and the European Union.

In 2012, the public should ask the presidential candidates whether they believe America should accept a new role as merely one of many, or will they take the necessary steps to ensure our country’s traditional preeminence—as our perennially rebounding nation has done so often in the last seventy years.

It should -- and will again -- be leader of the free world.

SEVEN TIPS on how to ruin your life.

I KNOW NOTHING: "It’s easy [for the Obama administration] to remain scandal free if you just deny knowledge of everything your administration and fundraisers do. Doesn’t hurt to have the the liberal mainstream media watching your back, either."

OUTRAGE! (registration required; it's easy)

TANKING -- Obama's economy. The numbers in the PJ Tatler post seemed a bit off to me, as I've been tracking my retirement accounts for well over 10 years, using the DJIA index as my metric. So I checked myself, using as my metric as the percentage increase/decrease in the index from the first trading day of the year in question to the first trading day in the following year. Here are the results, compared to the Club for Growth study quoted in the PJ Tatler link:


My numbers, computed as the percentage change from the first trading day of the year in question to the first trading day of the following year, are clearly different from the Club for Growth numbers, but the conclusion remains the same: President Obama's third-year economy is clearly the worst since 1971.

BOSTON MAYOR TO OCCUPY CAMPERS: Take a hike.

THE PROBLEM “is not that we are overeducating ourselves ... it’s that we are spending a fortune to undereducate ourselves.”

IS RAINWATER an industrial pollutant? If so, will I need an EPA permit for the mulch bed I use to channel rainwater away from my basement door?