IT HAS A MIND? The mind of a looting apologist.

THE OBAMA FAN CLUB just got bigger. Or is it smaller?

One more makes 54. Democrat Mary Landrieu loses to Republican Bill Cassidy in the Louisana senate runoff.

STAND WITH HILLARY; then laugh your ass off. I can understand the Vince Foster suicide comment; as one who enjoys country music, the video is painful to watch....

NO JOBS for burly men because the Democrats' base consists of girly men.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

I have never been comfortable with the idea of having to pay 'protection money' for the right to be employed.

POWERLINE: Energy flotsam and jetsam.

Even though Koningstein and Fork are writing from within the framework of climate orthodoxy, their call for the development of market-oriented disruptive energy technologies that don’t need government diktats is a refreshing departure from the totally unserious happy talk about wind and solar and banana peels and unicorn flop sweat we get from most of the climatistas. What I think they fail to appreciate, however, is that if such technologies do come about (say, cheap fusion), the bulk of the environmental establishment will oppose it, because it would be another triumph of capitalism.

I posted on the IEEE article here. My take is a bit different.

HE COULDN'T PLAY GOLF TODAY, so Obama underwent a CT scan for a sore throat. Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll be told to shut up for a while.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: The criminalization of everyday life. Put the blame where it properly belongs; not on the police, but on the nanny-staters who proposed - and passed - these incredibly stupid laws.

MOSES, YOU'RE NOT: Come back down the mountain, Barack.

ERIC HOLDER'S national 'conversation' about race.

BAD OATHKEEPERS: You're preventing us from rioting.

THE ECONOMY MAY BE RECOVERING; how can the Obama administration stop it? With another executive order, of course.

DREAMING OF A WHITE CHRISTMAS? That's racist!

FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: Deja vu all over again.

BACK TO THE FUTURE: Consumer-driven healthcare a more sustainable way to contain spending. Back when I was young, my parents paid for our sore throats and runny noses; their insurance paid for my polio and my sister's appendectomy. Life was simpler - and cheaper - without 'healthcare' and with health insurance.

THE NEXT JAMES BOND will drive a Peugeot.

NO BALLS. Why Social Justice Warriors like girly men.

AND YOU THOUGHT there is no longer any pork in the budget? Can Sen.-elect Joni Ernst start a bit early?

POWERLINE'S Week in Pictures is up. I have two favorites this week:

Go see the rest.

FROM MY EMAIL: The Lawyers' Party.

Barack Obama is a lawyer. Michelle Obama is a lawyer. Hillary Clinton is a lawyer. Bill Clinton is a lawyer. John Edwards is a lawyer. Elizabeth Edwards was a lawyer. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate). Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school.

Look at the leaders of the Democrat Party in Congress: Harry Reid is a lawyer. Nancy Pelosi is a lawyer.

The Republican Party is different: Former President Bush is a businessman. Former Vice President Cheney is a businessman.

The leaders of the Republican Revolution: Newt Gingrich was a history professor. Tom Delay was an exterminator. Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.

Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against Ronald Reagan in 1976.

The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work, who are often the targets of lawyers.

The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers. Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Bush and Cheney, or who heal the sick, like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history, like Gingrich. The Lawyers Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America.

Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail?.Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation. This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers. Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, in this case the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side.

Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation. When politicians as lawyers begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all-consuming. Some Americans become adverse parties of our very government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit. We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.

Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives. America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked. When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big.

When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.

Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.

The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 66% of the world’s lawyers!

Tort (Legal) reform legislation has been introduced in congress several times in the last several years to limit punitive damages in ridiculous lawsuits such as spilling hot coffee on yourself and suing the establishment that sold it to you and also to limit punitive damages in huge medical malpractice lawsuits. This legislation has continually been blocked from even being voted on by the Democrat Party. When you see that 97% of the political contributions from the American Trial Lawyers Association go to the Democrat Party, then you realize who is responsible for our medical and product costs being so high!

A lawyer with a [government] briefcase can steal more than a thousand men with guns. Or as Instapundit has more succintly put it, fewer laws mean fewer opportunities for graft and corruption.

THAT WAS THEN, this is now.

OBAMA'S GOVERNMENT: This 'scale model of the U.S. government' is on display at Cotton Ginning Days in Dallas, NC on October 11, 2014. Powered by a 1920's vintage hit and miss engine, it doesn't do anything except make noise and lots of lost motions and is costly to run.