A COMEDY OF ERRORS STUPIDITY: follow the links embedded in this Instapundit post.

UPDATE: More here.

EAT HEALTHIER, say the Obamas -- as the president scarfs pastry and cheeseburgers. Vacation in the Gulf States, they say as they head off to Maine. Drive less and reduce pollution, they say as the 17-car motorcade travels four blocks to a speech.

Do as we say, not as we do ....

DOES THE PRESS deserve a bailout? Not only "no," but "hell, no!"

ONE GIANT LEAP -- 41 years ago today.

UPDATE: the moon landing video.

NOT SO FAST: Shirley Sherrod’s disappearing act. I wondered why she resigned so fast after the NAACP video surfaced.

The mainstream media will be over this like water on a hot frying pan.

FOX NEWS: how to hit a nude beach. Uh, take your clothes off?

BELTWAY ELITES lose touch with reality. This is news?

The poll is here.

AN UGLY PREVIEW OF OBAMACARE: “If you want a preview of President Obama's health care ‘reform,’ take a look at Massachusetts. In 2006, it enacted a "reform" that became a model for Obama. What's happened since isn't encouraging... In 1990, health spending represented about 16 percent of the state budget, says the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. By 2000, health's share was 22 percent. In 2010, it's 35 percent.”

A year ago, a state commission urged another approach: Scrap the present "fee-for-service" system. The commission argued that fee-for-service -- which ties reimbursement to individual services -- rewards quantity over quality and discourages coordinated care among doctors and hospitals. The commission recommended a "global payments" system to force hospitals, doctors and clinics to create networks ("accountable care organizations"). These would receive flat per-patient payments to promote effective -- not just expensive -- care. Payments would be "risk adjusted"; sicker patients would justify higher payments.

Remember HMOs? They’ll be back -- worse than ever.

REPUBLICANS ON SAVING: It’s like a broke guy saying “Yeah, I was planning on buying a new Ferrari, but then I changed my mind. What should I do with the $250,000 I saved myself?”

TARP AUDIT CLAIMS OBAMA ADMINISTRATION destroyed “tens of thousands” of jobs in dealer closures: “Let’s keep this in mind when Democrats insist that government can run industries better than the markets themselves. Not only did the White House purposely evade bankruptcy laws in cutting sweet deals for unions during the bailout, but they also destroyed jobs in the process out of incompetency. I’d bet that a number of union members are none too pleased with that outcome, even if the union bosses are.”

UNFAIR, UNBALANCED, and very afraid.

Linked from the Washington Examiner.

CHINA PASSES U.S. as world's biggest energy consumer: “China devoured a total of 2,252 million tons of oil equivalent last year, or about 4% more than the U.S., which burned through 2,170 million tons of oil equivalent. The oil-equivalent metric represents all forms of energy consumed, including crude oil, nuclear, coal, natural gas and renewable sources such as hydropower….China's total energy consumption has clocked annual double-digit growth rates for many years, driven by the country's big industrial base. Highlighting how quickly its energy demand has increased, China's total energy consumption was just half the size of the U.S. 10 years ago…. The U.S. is still by far the biggest energy consumer per capita, with the average American burning five times as much energy annually compared with the average Chinese citizen.”

WILL HILLARY RUN IN 2012? Only the Afghan war knows for sure.

DID JOE THE PLUMBER fix the oil spill?

Impossible. He’s not a “government-credentialed expert.”

WHY REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE solicitation calls go unanswered at my house. Candidates who promote or join a Tea Party caucus – and mean it – I’ll consider funding.

But not the Republican establishment.

THE LAW MEANS WHAT IT SAYS – except when it doesn’t.

After reading this, one necessarily thinks of pretzels ....

TO DEAL WITH DEBT, we have to stop lying about it. Reason’s Veronique de Rugy has some guidance for the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Obama’s deficit commission) in assessing the quality of the solutions it puts forward.

Do the recommendations really cut spending rather than focus on cutting the deficit?

Do the recommendations allow for political carve-outs?

Do the recommendations fix the budget gimmicks?

Will the debt commission have the guts to face reality? In a word, no. They’re politicians.

EASY CREDIT, hard landing.

Longish, but worth the read.

A DANGEROUS DISAFFECTION. John Hinderaker from PowerLine:

I think [there is] a growing conviction that America is governed by a political class that has its own agenda, involving its own enrichment as well as the endless expansion of its own power, and that this political class is contemptuous of the opinions of ordinary Americans and is determined to impose its will regardless of how Americans vote. I think this perception is in fact true.

To support that contention, Hinderaker’s prime exhibit is the historyy of federal spending, reproduced below.


Hinderaker comments: “You can vote for limited government, but you can't get it; the political class won't let you.” Or, as Alabama Governor George Wallace, running for President in 1968 said, "There is not a dime's worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican Parties!"

I didn’t believe him then. I do now.

YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH! That's the federal government's message to Americans seeking to learn the content of their own DNA.

More here.