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."

HEADS, I(RS) WIN(S), TAILS, YOU LOSE: taxes explained.

WEATHER REPORTING: all hysteria, all the time. I've given up on expecting anything useful from the weather reports. From Irene, we got a little bit of mulch (from the leaves and twigs that were ground up by the mulcher today) and 2-1/2 inches of badly needed rain.

IS OBAMA COMING TO HIS SENSES? One Down; 4,256 to Go. One thing the environmentalists always seem to miss is that the only way to get an atmosphere as pristine as it was 1,000 years ago is to live like our ancestors did 1,000 years ago. Maybe they like the thought, but I'm not keen on the idea.

THANK YOU, SARAH PALIN. Well, not Sarah Palin exactly, but somone who lives in her home town of Wasilla. During my recent vacation there, I used my card at a local bank's walk-up ATM to get cash and apparently left the card behind. When I discovered the loss a couple of hours later and called to report the card as lost, I was told that the card had already been found, reported as missing by the person who found it, and my replacement card would be mailed the next day. It was waiting when I arrived back home two days later.

If that had happened in Washington, DC, the card would have been found, sold, and used long before I discovered it missing.

Thanks, Alaska. I look forward to coming back.

TWO VIDEOS: watch this video -- if your stomach is strong enough (mine wasn't). Then watch this response.