THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: The Buck Never Stops With Them. White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew on Sunday television:

On MTP: “Well, one of the things about the United States Senate that I don’t think the American people realize is that it takes 60 not 50 votes to pass something.

On CNN: “We also need to be honest. You can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes and you can’t get 60 votes without bipartisan support.”

That is simply false: “The budget resolution…requires only a majority vote to pass, and its consideration is one of the few actions that cannot be filibustered in the Senate.”

Confusion when it comes to the budget law is nothing new for this Administration. The President’s budget request tomorrow is already past the deadline set by the 1974 Congressional Budget Act, the latest in a lengthy string of violations of their legal obligations.

Has the White House bothered to ask their party’s leaders in the U.S. Senate the real reason they refuse to prioritize the American people’s tax dollars? Is it that they can’t admit to how much more they want to take from hardworking American families in order to fuel their spending appetite?

Not can't admit; won't admit.

BUMMER: Pollution Related to Electric-Cars May Be More Harmful than Gasoline Cars.

Linked from Instapundit.

TRUE LIES: the Obama budget.

JUST PEACHY: my tax money being spent to pay for an 'Occupy' protest in favor of raising my taxes.

WELCOME TO THE 2013 BUDGET: Mr. Obama, we don't have a tax problem, we have a spending problem.

Obama just won't take "No!" for an answer. In 2013, he won't have an option.

COMPROMISE? What compromise?

EXPLAINING WHY ObamaCare is an abomination.

[T]he individual mandate inevitably leads to full-blown socialized medicine.... When the government mandates that you have to buy health insurance, then it has to specify what health insurance is required to satisfy the mandate. This means politics is involved in deciding what must be included and covered by that insurance.

And once politics is involved, that means you can't leave anything out, as that would be taken as an offense and a slight to both the consumers and the providers of the excluded service. Mental health benefits and counseling, drug rehab, maternity benefits (even for men and seniors), abortion -- everything must be covered.

Some related thoughts here.

CRONY CAPITALISM: Corruption ... is not a byproduct of big government; it is its essence.

CUT SUBSIDIES -- just not my subsidies.

RANDOM THOUGHTS from the retirement lane: the ‘obesity epidemic’ is proof that Americans are telling the nanny-staters to mind their own business.

IF MY CATS COULD TALK, they’d tell the author to stick her opinion where the sun don’t shine.

JEFF JACOBY: The Third Jihad.

OBAMA’S ‘TRANSFORMATIVE’ PRESIDENCY: ”The question raised by the Catholic Church's battle with ObamaCare is whether anyone can remain free of a U.S. government determined to do what it wants to do, at whatever cost.”

Older Americans have sought for years to drop out of Medicare and contract for their own health insurance. They cannot without forfeiting their Social Security payments. They effectively are locked in. Nor can the poor escape Medicaid, even as the care it gives them degrades. Farmers, ranchers and loggers struggled for years to protect their livelihoods beneath uncompromising interpretations of federal environmental laws. They, too, had to comply. University athletic programs were ground up by the U.S. Education Department's rote, forced gender balancing of every sport offered.

With the transformers, it never stops.

WHAT A SURPRISE: World Bank Report Shows Large Public Sectors Reduce Economy. Mitchell is wrong on only one point: the real solution is not to restrain government growth, but to reduce government size in absolute terms.

OLIVER NORTH: Freedom from religion for our military. And then what?

RADICAL ISLAM: If You See Something, Shut Up: “Criticizing Islam is now a punishable offense in several European countries.” It’s close to that in the United States.

LATEST MORTGAGE BAILOUT: Victims get 6%; ‘profiteers’ get 94%.

ED FEULNER: A Job Too Good to Be True. If you live in or near D.C., the disparity is obvious.

NO BIRTH CONTROL LEFT BEHIND: ‘To Stop the Multiplication of the Unfit’. There’s more than just women's health and religious freedom at stake.

DREAM CHASER, a possible Shuttle replacement, is in Louisville, CO, for final assembly in preparation for testing at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center. It is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program to eventually deliver supplies and people to the International Space Station.