NOT A CHANCE: Why can't Maureen Dowd and her fellow liberals grow up?

SO WHO NEEDS the federal government anyway? "Larimer County [CO] Sheriff Justin Smith, worried about the economic impact of shuttering Rocky Mountain National Park in the wake of a federal budget stalemate, today said he’ll provide law enforcement and emergency services to help keep the park open." And the National Mall will remain open. "Anyone can happily walk down the National Mall anytime they want, rain or shine, millions of cherry blossoms or none, whether the government is running or not. There’s no price of admission, no gatekeeper to keep anyone locked out."

WOULD YOU BUY a new car from this man? Hell, I wouldn't buy a used car from him - assuming I could find one.

SHUT IT DOWN: "Let the hacks go out and make things, like the rest of us. If they can’t, they’ll starve."

Read it all.

DEMOCRAT LOSES WISCONSIN ELECTION: “My suspicious, cynical side says that the Republicans delayed the full count to flush out any Democrat tricks. God bless ‘em, I hope they’re just that smart.”

Instapundit would be ‘very surprised’ if they were that smart. I think they’re probably smart enough, but I’d be surprised to find they actually had the cojones to do it.

SPRING SPRANG. The first 3 trees (of 100's) in my yard are showing green. It's about time. The green is barely visible above the house.

LIGHT POSTING for the next few days; I've finally started filling out tax forms. So far, I've used Form 1040, Schedules A, B, D, M, and R, most of the worksheets in the 1040 Instruction booklet - and I'm less than half through!

It's going to be a long weekend ....

POLL: Americans want a new President. Only for about the last 2-1/2 years.

HEH. JOE BTFSPLK is the “only non-essential federal employee left and hence the only one directly subject to the horrors of a government shutdown.”

OBAMA ON GAS PRICES: it’s your fault for not buying a Prius.

UPDATE: the media tried to scrub the story; they didn’t quite succeed.

NEW 'GREEN' LIGHT BULBS are causing mercury pollution. There are at least two natural laws at work here: the Law of Unintended Consequences (there will be; usually bad) and the Law of Insanity (doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results). I don't know whether to laugh (at the unintended consequences) or cry (at the insanity), or both.

WHAT IF THE GOVERNMENT SHUT DOWN ... and no one cared. My favorite comment:

[T]hink of government workers like teenagers. You pay them an allowance, but do you get any work out them? They eat the food, put their feet on the furniture and complain loudly whenever they are unhappy.

Read it all.

THE TROUBLE, of course, is that progressives are unable to learn from experience.

BARACK 'HUSAME' OBAMA. Read it all - the pun is in the last line.

WHY WEARING a baseball cap backwards is dumb. Ah, yes, it is, but on the bright side, it allows you to identify them much more quickly.

WHITE HOUSE blasts Ryan budget proposal. So where is their counterproposal?

SO CAN I OPT OUT? Sure, you can opt out of receiving ... you just can't opt out of paying.

SIMPLY ORWELLIAN: Center for American Progress blogger Matt Yglesias on why Ryan's Medicare reforms wouldn’t affect those 55 and older:

The idea here is that today’s old people—a very white group that’s also hostile to gay rights, and thus sort of predisposed to like conservative politicians—will also get to benefit from an extremely generous single-payer health care system. But younger people—a less white group that’s friendly to gay rights and thus predisposed to skepticism about conservative politicians—will get to pay the high taxes to finance old people’s generous single-payer health care system, but then we won’t get to benefit from it. This is in part in order to clear headroom in the budget so as to make gigantic tax cuts for rich people affordable.

Yglesias' youth and inexperience show. Plans for reforming entitlements exempt those at or near retirement because "older Americans have built their lives around the existing system and don't have the opportunity to adjust to changes, whereas younger workers do." I would add that they will also not live to benefit from the improvements either.

PROMISES KEPT, and those to expect again.

MORE: Change - it's worth waiting for.

BUT IT’S your wealth and power she’s dividing, not hers.