FAT TAXES may kill you.

WHAT MAKES MASS MURDERERS TICK? It's not as obvious as we may have thought.

I AGREE with his argument except that social engineering is most emphatically not engineering.

OBAMA'S INAUGURATION SPEECH:

He included the invocation of the military as an example for us to follow when resolving our political differences. He cast as heartless villains anyone who wanted to reform any of our welfare-state programs. He did at least acknowledge that we must reduce our deficits, but in the same breath expressed an absolute refusal to do anything but raise taxes to solve the problem.

The best we can hope for is 4 more years of gridlock.

A LESSON IN BIG GOVERNMENT: Government scientist gets fired for telling the (politically incorrect) truth.

LAUNDRY CAT:



There's more here.

PEGGY NOONAN: No one has good faith but Obama.

PENNSYLVANIA GIRL, 5, suspended for threatening to shoot schoolmate with pink toy gun that blows soapy bubbles.

Disciplinary action is required, but not against the little girl. The school administration, principal, and teachers involved should be canned immediately, their teaching certificates lifted, and they should never be allowed on a school campus again.

FORGET THE GUN CULTURE. What about the fatherless culture? "Dads, by getting up and going to work each day, send a powerful message every day to their children: Hard work wins. There are no short cuts. The outcome is unknowable. But the effort is entirely within your control."

NO MORE boring home improvement projects: the DeWalt AR-15 nail gun.

Yes, it's a fake (nail gun).

WHY ARE AMERICANS WORKING LESS? "While there are a number of factors, the phenomenon is due mainly to a variety of public policies that have reduced the incentives to be employed: food stamps; Social Security disability; unemployment insurance.... As the burden of government spending increases, this creates an ever-growing incentive for more and more people to figure out ways of riding in the wagon while simultaneously imposing higher and higher costs on those pulling the wagon."

REACTION ENGINES: An interesting video, but there is no 'there' there.

STEVE CHAPMAN: Gun Control's Potemkin Village.

DAY BY DAY: Strike while the iron's hot.

I CHOSE to go to the shooting range today rather than be beseiged by the Inauguration hoopla on radio and television. I wasn't alone; all the shooting positions were filled the entire time I was at the range. Talking around, one of the employees at the gun shop agreed with Edwin Olwin in the Minnesota Star Tribune: "Obama has been the best gun salesman around."

NEWT GINGRICH: House Republicans must use the power of the purse.

“The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse — that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government. This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”

Real negotiations can only begin after the House has defunded parts of Obama's government.

A REMINDER (from my email):

The Food Stamp Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is proud to be distributing this year the greatest amount of free meals and food stamps ever, to 46 million people.

Meanwhile, the National Park Service, administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior, asks us... "Please Do Not Feed the Animals." Their stated reason for the policy is because "The animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves."

Our government cares more for animals than humans.

GUN APPRECIATION DAY at my local gun range.

Not having been there today, I'm not sure the crowd was any larger than normal for a Saturday; on weekends, waiting time to get a shooting station is usually at least a half-hour or so.

FLUSH TWICE and other crappy products courtesy of the green movement.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Second-Term Reckonings.