WHERE'S THE BENEFIT?

Most Americans want health care reform if it will bring cost down and maintain quality.

So our president and his Democratic allies - possibly in another teaching moment - filled our news media and Congressional Budget Office with a pile of proposals. And because Americans are optimistic, we jumped in and started digging through the pile, even though that pile looked and smelled like manure. But we figured that with all that manure, there had to be a pony in there somewhere.

We kept digging through the Democrat proposals in search of the pony. But there was no pony.

But the good news is that there's plenty of manure.

SAVE $155 MILLION ANNUALLY

And the suck-up award winner is ... the National Endowment for the Arts.

There is a new president and a new NEA. The president first. This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.

Why is this hosanna appearing on an official government website? Has it become the job of the NEA to communicate how wonderful our Dear Leader is?

Why are America's taxpayers funding this tripe to the tune of $155 million annually?

Mark Steyn piles on.

MSM FACT-CHECKING

From the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web (scroll down to Accountability Journalism):

An Associated Press dispatch, written by Erica Werner and Richard Alonso-Zaldivar, compares the House and Senate ObamaCare bills. We'd like to compare this dispatch to the AP's dispatch earlier this week "fact checking" Sarah Palin's new book. Here goes:

Number of AP reporters assigned to story:
• ObamaCare bills: 2
• Palin book: 11

Number of pages in document being covered:
• ObamaCare bills: 4,064
• Palin book: 432

Number of pages per AP reporter:
• ObamaCare bill: 2,032
• Palin book: 39.3

On a per-page basis, that is, the AP devoted 52 times as much manpower to the memoir of a former Republican officeholder as to a piece of legislation that will cost trillions of dollars and an untold number of lives. That's what they call accountability journalism.

And the AP also created a ”word cloud” of Going Rogue, which presumably means ... some of the 11(!) AP researchers had too much time on their hands.

PRESCRIPTION FOR AMERICA

DON’T MESS WITH ME

"The sheriff's deputy asked why I shot at them seven times," said Gifford. "I told him I ran out of ammunition.”

The moral of the story: Always keep a spare magazine handy.

Via Don Surber.

SWEET WORK

The U.S. government hands out millions of dollars each year to various environmental organizations to help protect fish, wildlife and other aspects of the environment. And every year, those same groups spend millions suing the government over everything from forest policy and carbon emissions to water quality and wolf habitats.

Nice work if you can get it ... biting the hand that feeds you.

NARCISSISM

Our troops. Just another photo op.

$1.8 TRILLION!

The true 10-year cost of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s $849 billion health-care bill is well over twice that: $1.8 trillion. Yes, trillion with a ‘T’.

And yes, I trust the New York Post far more than I trust Harry Reid. I know Harry Reid lies.

NOT UNEXPECTED

President Obama's approval rating has hit a new low of 46 percent, even as a majority of Americans says he is providing the kind of leadership they expected.

Yes, his leadership performance is lousy, and yes, I expected it to be lousy.

THIS IS JOURNALISM?

Even in the Washington Times: “Hundreds turn out to cheer at GOP darling’s book tour,” referring to the first stop in Sarah Palin’s book tour in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

GOP darling. How, um, ... snotty.

At least the Times was embarrassed enough to change the sub-headline; by mid-morning it became “Hundreds turn out to cheer at GOP's former vice presidential candidate.”

JUST GO

Time for the power elite on both sides to get up and get out.

A TASTE OF THINGS TO COME

Government’s done so well with the swine flu pandemic:

In the metro area, free swine flu shots are only being made available to people in priority groups: pregnant women, people who live with or care for children younger than 6 months old, health care workers, anyone 6 months to 24 years old, and those age 25 to 64 who have health conditions that put them at higher risk for complications from the flu.

"The vaccine supplies that we have received are not ample enough to vaccinate the general public," says Mary Anderson, spokeswoman for the Montgomery County Health and Human Services. "Eventually, there will be plenty of vaccine so that anyone who wants to get a vaccination will be able to get one."

Yep. About the time the flu season ends.

PALIN-ODES?

Victor Davis Hanson assessing the Palin phenomenon:

I would trust the judgment of someone with Palin’s background on matters of Iran or Honduras or Putin far more than I would someone of Obama’s resume.... We know now that you can do nothing and still finish as the head of Harvard Law Review, or win a Nobel Prize, but if you miss an antlered moose, or run out of gas in the tundra, or fall overboard on a salmon boat, there is no Norwegian committee or Harvard Law Dean to bail you out.

And a point I’d like to see repeated over and over again:

[W]hat I learned over years of farming—dealing with California labor, environmental, legal, and tax regulations, pruning, tractor driving, listening to my grandfather, and handling unsavory characters, understanding plant physiology and fruit-production, etc.—I think gave me a different, but in the long run as good an education as a BA/PhD in Classical languages.

Better, I’d say. The snobbery of the non-productive “elite” is damning.

KISS YOUR FREEDOMS GOODBYE

Andrew Napolitano:

We do not have two political parties in this country, America. We have one party; called the Big Government Party. The Republican wing likes deficits, war, and assaults on civil liberties. The Democratic wing likes wealth transfer, taxes, and assaults on commercial liberties. Both parties like power; and neither is interested in your freedoms.

Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn't care about the Constitution, it doesn't care about your inalienable rights, it doesn't care about the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, it doesn't even read the laws it writes.

Read it in full.

PALIN DERANGEMENT SYNDROME

Newsweek advertised its cover story on the release of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” by asking, “How do you solve a problem like Sarah?”

But the real question is ”How do you solve this problem without Sarah?”

By the way, who has better legs?

And yes, I am a dirty old man.

ROAD TRIP

I-66 from Manassas to Washington DC suffers from severe congestion daily. So what does the Virginia Department of Transportation do? Build more roads, or commission yet another study on how to get commuters out of their cars?

Three guesses; the first two don’t count.

Something might get done if the entirety of Congress were forced to live in, say, Haymarket and be required to be in their offices at the Capitol every day at 8 a.m. sharp.

EYES WIDE OPEN

From my email ...

Little Mary had a box of very small kittens that she was trying to give away, so she had them out on the street corner with a sign 'FREE KITTENS' next to them.

Suddenly a line of big black cars came up with a policeman on a motorcycle in front.

The cars all stopped and a tall man stepped out from the biggest car. It's President Obama.

"Hi, little girl, what do you have there in the box?" he asked.

"Kittens" Little Mary says. "They're so small, their eyes are not even open yet."

"What kind of kittens are they?" he asked.

"Democrats," says Little Mary.

The tall man smiled, returned to his car and they drove away.

Sensing a good photo opportunity, President Obama called his Press Manager and told him about the little girl and the kittens.

It was planned that they would return the next day, have all the media there and tell everyone about these great kittens.

The next day, Little Mary is standing out on the corner with her box of kittens with the 'FREE KITTENS' sign and the big motorcade of black cars pulled up with all the vans and trucks from ABC, NBC, CBS, BET and CNN but no FOX News for some reason.

Everyone had their cameras ready and then, President. Obama got out of his limo and walked up to Little Mary.

"Now, don't be frightened," he said, "I just want you to tell all these nice news people just what kind of kittens you're giving away today."

"Yes sir," Mary said, "They are all REPUBLICAN kittens."

Taken by surprise, President Obama said, "But yesterday, you told me that they were DEMOCRATS."

Little Mary says, "Yes, I know. But today, they have their eyes open."

Cats are smart.

WORSE THAN TAXES: SPENDING

John Stossel: "I don't think [a tax revolt] will happen until more people see the ruling elite for what it is: a gang of arrogant bullies that has the audacity to believe that they know how to direct our lives better than we do.... The politicians' spending schemes represent presumptuous interference in our lives. They are an assault on our autonomy."

Read it all.

WALKING AWAY

The Democrats are getting worried as independent voters begin to jump ship.

Mounting evidence that independent voters have soured on the Democrats is prompting a debate among party officials about what rhetorical and substantive changes are needed to halt the damage.

And what changes are needed?

"[W]e’ve got to do a better job of messaging. There’s a lot of work to be done to get independents more comfortable with what we’re doing.”

Messaging? Isn't it just barely possible that independents are fleeing the Democrats precisely because they are uncomfortable with what the Democrats are doing?

FACT-CHECKING "GOING ROGUE"

The Associated Press (AP) has assigned eleven (11!) reporters to 'fact check' Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue.

Palin responds:

Imagine that – 11 AP reporters dedicating time and resources to tearing up the book, instead of using the time and resources to "fact check" what's going on with Sheik Mohammed's trial, Pelosi's health care takeover costs, Hasan's associations, etc. Amazing.

Conservatives for Palin is fact-checking the fact-checkers. And winning.