COAST GUARD shuts down oil-skimming barges due to ...


... lack of life vests onboard.

Thanks to Chris Muir for the appropriate visual response.

CAPTAIN KICKASS AND COMMANDER PASSBUCK knew the Deepwater Horizon story.

WORSHIPING BP? The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, on learning that some (horrors!) Republican called the Gulf oil spill an “act of God”, immediately declared that Republicans must think that “BP is ... God” and called for divine retribution from the Obama administration – which, by analogy, would make it the Democrats’ God.

Quoting Bugs Bunny, the most eloquent social commentor on the state of the liberal mind, “What a maroon.”

MORE: Milbank gets his comeuppance for another moronic editorial.

Via Instapundit.

SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.
- Anonymous

I prefer magic.

DEMOCRATS’ LAME DUCK STRATEGY? This is worrisome. The voters may well throw the Democrats out of office in November, but they'll still have time to do real damage before they go.

OBAMA THREATENS to follow in FDR's economic missteps. Democrats never learn.

A LESSON IN COMMON SENSE: Thoughts about immigration, ‘racism,’ and political correctness.

THE ROAD TO SERFDOM IS A LONG ONE, but I fear that we are well on our way.

AND NOW THERE ARE THREE: Earlier I posted an Instapundit interview with J. Christian Adams, the former Department of Justice Civil Rights Division lawyer who resigned to protest the dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case.

There’s much, much more – including statements by former DOJ lawyers backing Adams.

ANOTHER REASON not to trust the major media.

NEW BLACK PANTHER CHAIRMAN Malik Shabazz praises Osama bin Laden.

EXCELLENT HEALTHCARE “is by definition redistributional." So said Dr. Donald Berwick, Obama’s recess appointment to be the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

You can see why President Obama couldn't allow senators, Democrats as well as Republicans, to ask Dr. Berwick what he meant by such a ditzy remark. "Excellent health care," as everyone else understands it, is health care that makes a patient well, or at least better. A quack understands that much.

Obama wants to control healthcare, not improve it.

MORE on Dr. Berwick. Watch the video clip.

INSTAPUNDIT ASKS: “What would Earth look like if it stopped spinning?”

More likely, Washington, D.C., and its environs would float off into outer space because of all the hot air. That could be good.

MALLARD FILLMORE on cats.


Trust me. When dinnertime approaches, you’ll know they’re there.

HMM. Satellite photos support testimony that Iraqi WMD went to Syria.

This one still bothers me. There was near-unanimity in the world’s intelligence agencies prior to the onset of the war that Iraq had, at least, a WMD research program and yet nothing was ever found.

OBAMACARE WORKS! “In fact, it works so well that it works ex post facto! Either that, or our health care system was delivering excellent outcomes and effective preventive care without requiring a government intervention to do so.”

I suspect the latter.

GONE GALT: from full-time to part-time to on-call (read as effectively retired) in just over a year. The moves were voluntary, but inevitable, driven by a poor economy and lack of corporate interest in keeping a senior staff member fully employed.

CAN BLACK AMERICANS AFFORD OBAMA? Walter Williams asks an unsettling question.

Early indications suggest that the Barack Obama presidency might turn out to be similar to the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter. That's bad news for the nation but especially bad news for black Americans. No white presidential candidate had to live down the disgraced presidency of Carter but I'm all too fearful that a future black presidential candidate will find himself carrying the heavy baggage of a failed black president.

I’m afraid he’s right.

WHEN YOUR ONLY TOOL IS A HAMMER, all your problems start looking like nails. Richard Fernandez writes on the Obama administration. While the article is much broader, citing several points of insanity within the administration, the key graf is this:

They are the Peter Principle writ large: they have been promoted past their level of competency.

What really frightens about this administration is that its only guiding principle is expediency in an unrelenting pursuit for unlimited power. All else is window dressing.

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE WITH GOVERNMENT-FREE SCHOOLS. “Separation of church and state has made America an exemplar of religious pluralism and tolerance. Imagine what separation of school and state could do for education.”

Imagine what separation of marketplace and state could do for the economy.