And Harsanyi knows it:

There seems to be growing optimism among some Republicans that if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finagles the votes to pass Obamacare, the GOP will triumphantly sweep into power and immediately repeal it.

While short-term GOP gains are almost certain, there are numerous problems with this kind of quixotic thinking.

To begin with, there exists almost no historical evidence to suggest Republicans will possess either the fortitude or the power to undo a massive government entitlement program.

Can we trust them? Most of you will remember it was the Republican Party’s leadership that pressured conservatives to vote for the fiscally irresponsible Medicare Part D program in 2003. (Democrats like to argue that this illustrates GOP hypocrisy. Perhaps. With Obamacare, the GOP has a chance at redemption.)

Then there are conspicuous problems to consider. Republicans do not possess 60 votes in the Senate — and likely won’t for awhile. Best case scenario, they will have to deal with a president who will veto their efforts to undo the sole “accomplishment” of his presidency.

Obama spent last week campaigning for health care reform, at one point getting some college-age fans worked up about all the free stuff — “free” preventive care and “free” checkups, and so forth — they would receive if his version of health care reform passed.

Which brings us to another stumbling block. If health care is now a “right” and “free” to an ever-growing group of Americans — people who believe stuff can be had for “free” — are Republicans really going to snatch it away from them?

You can already picture the hideous debate, as Republicans fold in the face of accusations that they are working for the murderous profit-mongers against the underprivileged victims of a wretched capitalistic system. (Even today, Jim Bunning stood nearly alone.)

Hell, if Repubs were possessed of either smarts or integrity, they’d have realized long ago that the liberal propaganda machine is going to portray them as the ghastliest, most bloodthirsty monsters in all of history no matter what they do; if they advocated giving a million dollars to every man, woman, and child in the country, they’d be painted as uncaring ghouls for not offering the goodies to everyone in the world. They’d recognize this, and they’d act accordingly — maybe, oh, I dunno, seeking to expose the liars for what they are rather than futilely trying to suck up to them a la McCain.

Nah, never mind. That there’s just CRAZY talk.

Yep. Sure is.

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing some of the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

That’s a disappointment, but not really a surprise for fishing industry insiders who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force. These angling advocates have come to suspect that public input into the process was a charade from the beginning.

“When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) completed their successful campaign to convince the Ontario government to end one of the best scientifically managed big game hunts in North America (spring bear), the results of their agenda had severe economic impacts on small family businesses and the tourism economy of communities across northern and central Ontario,” said Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs for Shimano.

“Now we see NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the administration planning the future of recreational fishing access in America based on a similar agenda of these same groups and other Big Green anti-use organizations, through an Executive Order by the President. The current U.S. direction with fishing is a direct parallel to what happened in Canada with hunting: The negative economic impacts on hard working American families and small businesses are being ignored.

“In spite of what we hear daily in the press about the President’s concern for jobs and the economy and contrary to what he stated in the June order creating this process, we have seen no evidence from NOAA or the task force that recreational fishing and related jobs are receiving any priority.”

Consequently, unless anglers speak up and convince their Congressional representatives to stop this bureaucratic freight train, it appears that the task force will issue a final report for “marine spatial planning” by late March, with President Barack Obama then issuing an Executive Order to implement its recommendations — whatever they may be.

Hey, remember when liberals were so all-fired “concerned” about illegitimate rule by Executive Order, circumventing the usual legislative process in favor of despotic mandates from On High? Nah, me neither. And this item might not be federal, but it’s still tyrannical enough to fit in:

ALBANY, N.Y. (March  9, 2010) In an effort to reduce the amount of sodium in consumers’ diets, New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz has introduced a bill that would ban the use of salt in the preparation of restaurant food across the state.

Ortiz, a Democrat and a longtime proponent of menu labeling, said the salt ban would give more control to restaurant customers by allowing them to add salt to their own meals after they have been prepared.

“In this way, consumers have more control over the amount of sodium they intake, and are given the option to exercise healthier diets and healthier lifestyles,” Ortiz said.

Oh, screw you, you cheap dimestore dictator. You, everybody who thinks like you, and the diseased horses you all rode in on, too.

Who the hell do these meddlesome twerps think they are, anyway? And, as the proctologist once said: is there no end to these assholes?

DAILY!

“I ate the last mango in Paris
Took the last plane out of Saigon
Took the first fast boat to China
And there’s still so much to be done.”–Jimmy Buffett

Ken Blackwell:

[T]he White House is pulling out all the stops. One of their senior advisers told CNN’s Gloria Borger what President Obama’s people are telling wavering Democrats on Capitol Hill:

BORGER: Right. This isn’t going to be subtle at all today. I think this is it. I was speaking with one senior White House adviser just before I came on the air, and he said, “Think of it this way. This is the last helicopter out of Saigon, OK?”

It’s not the last helicopter out of Saigon.

It’s the first ambulance into Hanoi.

God. Damned. Fucking. A. RIGHT.

The most important amendment Republicans must propose for Obama’s Medi-Grab bill is a very easy one:

Resolved: that all federal and state employees must enroll in ObamaCare, without exception.

Any violation of this amendment will be punishable by a fine, imprisonment, and/or loss of federal or state employment. Enforcement of this provision will be overseen by a popularly elected commission, whose proceedings will be open to the public via the worldwide web.

“All federal and state employees” includes every member of Congress and the executive branch — those who currently have the finest medical insurance available in the country today (courtesy of you and me).

This is the key test for the Medi-Grab bill. Any member of Congress who votes against it reveals his or her true stand on America’s founding principles. Anyone who votes for it shows that he or she actually gets it. There are many terrifying parts of this Medi-Grab bill, but this is the simplest litmus test.

Glenn says “The more they go on about equality, the more they produce a system that’s run for the benefit of the nomenklatura.” True. Period.

Obama’s medical takeover bill is a monstrosity in many ways, but the biggest danger comes from the separate treatment it reserves for the ruling left compared to us ordinary folks. Obama’s Medi-Grab will force ordinary people into a medico-legal corral. But it exempts members of the ruling left, and by creating a political monopoly over medical care, it ensures that we must all go begging, hat in hand, to the bureaucracy for our very survival.

If Obama wins, Europe is our future. In Britain, Gordon Brown does not go to his local NHS clinic to get substandard medical care, nor does he go to the scandalously dirty hospitals in the Midlands. In Brussels, the European Union bureaucrats would just sneer at medical care for ordinary folks. They get nothing but the best. That hypocrisy is all over the American ruling left as it is emerging today: Obama and Al Gore both attended special upper-class schools from early on in life. Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar. They are special, these well-born rulers, not like you and me.

The “biggest danger” mentioned above? The certainty of violent revolution following sooner or later after the establishment of this let-’em-eat-cake system. Even as benighted a bunch of sheep as so many of the American people have become won’t put up with it for long. As bad as things have gotten, as weakened and enervated as we are, and as desperately as the asshole Left would like it to be so, this is not Europe. Not yet. Washington will burn in due course, and the only thing leavening the horror of it all even slightly will be the looks of shock and surprise on Congresscreature heads as they bear witness to the inevitable fate of tyrants in America, from their perch on the pikes of the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue fence.

These dicks-with-ears are hell-bent on traveling a road we’re all going to wish we’d stayed well the hell away from.

“The scariest words in the English language are “Hello, I’m from the government and I’m here to help. Press 1 for English…”"–Ronald Reagan

“You have sat here too long for any good you are doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”–MP Leo Amery, demanding Neville Chamberlain’s resignation

Coach Steyn:

It looked like one of those Obama-stimulus scarified repaving jobs out there. Those of us who do a little backwoods skating on North Country ponds and lakes know the damage you can do to yourself hitting a ridge even at low speed. So you don’t want to run into one at 40 miles per hour. The cameras and microphones caught furious coaches from the Netherlands to China expressing their disgust to officials at the amateurishness of the Vancouver organizers. The event was delayed, and the American skater Shani Davis eventually withdrew, not wanting to jeopardize his chances of a Gold in the thousand meters by taking a spill on the 500 meters’ scarified ice. You train for years, you build your entire life to this one moment, and then the politically correct eco-gimmick screws you over. Officials attempted to reassure coaches and skaters that a non-electric Zamboni would be flown in from Calgary to prevent further delays.

Still, at least nobody’s dead. In Australia, the Labor government, eager to flaunt its green credentials, instituted a nationwide environmentally-friendly roof-insulation program, using energy-efficient foil insulation. It certainly reduces the carbon footprint of many Aussies’ homes: At the time of writing, 172 of them have burned down. It reduces your personal carbon footprint, too: Four installers of the foil have been fatally electrocuted. As the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s Tim Blair noted, the foil-insulation program has a higher fatality rate than Oz forces in Afghanistan. And, if the electrician survives long enough to get the installation completed, the good news is that, unlike the electric Zamboni, the electric attic always has plenty of juice: Colin Brierley had the foil insulation put into his Gold Coast home and was electrocuted a week later. The environmentally friendly electric shock entered through his knees, exited from his head, and led to a nice stay in hospital in an induced coma.

Australians are not happy to discover their ceilings double as the Bride of Frankenstein’s recharge slab. Belatedly canceling the program, Peter Garrett, the Environment Minister, is nevertheless insistent that he bears no responsibility for the burnt-out rubble and charred citizenry. He is a celebrity politician, formerly the lead singer of the rock band Midnight Oil, but he has no intention of getting burned by what they’re calling “Midnight Foil”. As Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, breezily told a TV interviewer, “Peter Garrett can’t be in every roof in this country as insulation is being installed.”

They never are, are they?

And now Obama wants to do for Jobs what they’ve already done for Mortgages.

“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

COUNT DRACULA, TOO! (UPDATED)

Have you heard those Census commercials?

Not the $250-million TV commercials. But now that you mention it, it only cost $237-million to make Avatar . Shouldn’t Ed Begley, Jr. at least be blue for $250 million? Or at least bluer than normal?

No, I mean the radio commercials. The ones that say the reason you need to fill out your census is so you can get stuff from the Gummint, so you can get your “fair share”. Karl Marx couldn’t have said it much better. Because he spoke German. And he woulda’ done it for a lot less than $250 million.

The example they use is education funding.

As a pay-off to unions, and to exert liberal control over any runaway school districts that might somehow be suceeding, Jimmy Carter invented the Education Department. Because conservatives didn’t kill it when there was a chance, a generation later it is accepted wisdom that the Federal Government should pay for your teachers and textbooks.

And you should fill out your census, not for the civic duty and representation as we all agreed to in the Constitution, but to get your cut of the booty, including the stuff we’re printing in the basement and borrowing from the Chinese with interest.

And then there’s the form itself.

Now I’m not calling anybody a racist, but the form I got seemed more focused on race than Archie Bunker at a Death Row Records reunion. Here’s the Ten Question Short Form they sent me:

1.) Are you Hispanic?
2.) Are you Latino?
3.) Are you Chicano?
4.) Are you Meztizo?
5.) Are you Tejano?
6.) Are you Latin American?
7.) South American?
8.) Central American?
9.) Spanish?
10.) What–don’t you want your cut of the booty?

11.) Oh, yeah; we almost forgot–how many people live at your house?

I wouldn’t really care, except I know this is all about their obsessive fixation with Racial Bean-Counting in order to hand out Race Favors in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Martin Luther King Day comes but once a year–but Anti-Martin Luther King Day lasts all year long, thanks in part to the census.

But at least it’s not as detailed as the old Long Form:

4,983.) How long have you owned your pet gekko (to the nearest hour)?
4,984.) How did you meet? (Attach extra pages if necessary. No staples.)
4,985.) Your gekko’s bowel movements; would you describe them as
a.) rare
b.) intermittent
c.) frequent
or
d.) more often than Sandy Berger uses the little boy’s room at the National Archives.
4,986.) What–you don’t want your cut of the booty?

Remember when they wanted to use “statistical sampling” (a.k.a.; “guessing”) instead of the “actual enumeration” we all agreed to in the Constitution? Every program for the last 50 years was going to “pay for itself” or ended up costing 600 times as much as originally estimated. Except for the health care bill, which is planned to cost a thousand times as much. So pardon us if we don’t trust your mad guessing skillz.

But I filled mine out and mailed it in, and so should you. That way, when they finally figure out the true National Debt, they can divide it equally and send you a bill for your “fair share”.

What–you don’t want your cut of the booty?

UPDATE: Maybe government would be smaller if we had advertising campaigns about what government was going to take from you instead of give to you. That’s why you never see a $250-million ad campaign saying you owe part of the $250 million.

Say Anything:

“…Michele Bachmann [is] leading the charge in talking about how the census has far exceeded its constitutional mandate. But when a resolution urging Americans to take part in the census came before the House of Representatives only one member of Congress voted against it.

Ron Paul.

It’s more than a little disheartening to see Republicans, who are ostensibly proponents of limited government, supporting an unconstitutional census that per the government’s own advertising facilitates the sort of expansion in government programs that has led to the current bankrupt nature of our national budget.

And this is no small matter. Refusing to participate in the census doesn’t just mean that you may lose some of your representation in the government, they can actually fine you $100 per question you refuse to answer up to a total fine of $5,000.

That’s just it–there should only be one question.

And if you refuse to pay the fine you can be put in jail.

This is exactly the sort of overbearing government activity Republicans should be opposing. Sadly, far too many of them are too busy joining the Democrats in thinking about all the new spending the census count will let them do in their states and districts.

At the very least, the other census questions not having to do with the constitutionally-required head count should be entirely optional.

We agreed to be counted, not categorized. We support the count because it’s Constitutional, and oppose the categorization because it’s used against the Constitution; to subvert the Civil Rights Act and Equal Protection.

Good for Michele Bachmann; conservatives should run on a Repeal ticket.

And forget resolutions; Congress wrote those laws and Congress can unwrite them. One of the best ideas Newt had was to have Repeal Days, dedicated to undoing some of the damage already done, instead of just piling more shiny new laws on top of the last ones. And Ron Paul is still a dorf.

Ronald Reagan:

“Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, “What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power.”

And a little more information, too.

AS IF TO PROVE THE POINT…

Young Americans for Freedom:

Upon hearing Diaz address the liberal bias on the FAU campus, Blank stopped the meeting again and boorishly ordered the students to vacate the meeting room. Blank the shut off the room lights, tore down the group’s promotional posters, and called the campus police.

Ben Buck, an FAU student at the meeting said, “We were sitting in a peaceful meeting, just discussing a new organization, when we were approached by an administrator asking us to leave based on the content of our discussion regardless of previous verbal permission to talk on public property.” …

Diaz said, “If we were a Marxist, Socialist or Liberal group they would have let us finish our meeting, but the university officials and police harassed us because we are conservatives. This was the exact liberal bias on campus that I was discussing in the meeting that these future YAFers experienced firsthand. The university is no longer a place of open discussion and freedom of expression, but a breeding ground of intolerance for conservative beliefs.”

Big Government:

[N]ot long ago Florida Atlantic University hosted a whole slew of Islamic terror supporters on campus. In 2006, for instance, the Muslim students group at FAU hosted an event at which appeared Hamas and Hezbollah supporter, Al-Haaj Ghazi Khankan; alleged Neo-Nazi, William Baker; and potential co-conspirator of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Siraj Wahhaj.

Apparently it’s perfectly O.K., as far as the FAU administration is concerned, to have Islamofascist terror given full-throated support on its campus but it is a serious no-no to talk about organizing a patriotic American conservative student’s organization there.

This isn’t Galileo on trial or Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door. It’s not Pastor Niemoller’s “First they came for the Jews…”-speech or Rosa Parks on the bus.

But what the hell is it? Why at this late date would such a basic premise of Western Civ still be under assault–and at a university, of all places? These administrators doubtless see themselves as free-thinkers, when, in fact, they are more like German functionaries of zee State, demanding to see if your paperz are in order, in zee timeless language of bureaucrats everywhere.

The YAF is not some gang of radicals. It was founded in Bill Buckley’s living room in 1960, just as Barack Obama’s political career was launched in Bill Ayer’s. Ronald Reagan was a life-long board member. YAF co-founded CPAC.

University administrators demand funding from all the public, while trying to silence half of it, as if these were their private political fiefdoms where their philosophies can be imposed on the serfs in the old feudal style.

Your day is done.
Get out of the way.
You are dinosaurs–antique, obsolete Tyrannosaurus Wrecks.

And public universities are not your private property.

THE AWARD GOES TO

…American soldiers! (*wild applause*)

Or at least my award does.

While Hollywood was congratulating each other for their “courage” yesterday after the Academy voting, the Iraqi people voted, too–thanks mainly to the real courage and sacrifice of our servicemen and women.

Tigerhawk:

According to the BBC, which has never shown enthusiasm for Operation Iraqi Freedom or its aftermath, the good guys won. Or rather, they proved they won today:

“These elections will certainly be seen as a big success – despite the depressing level of violence, which demonstrates that it is still altogether untrue to suggest that Iraq is now a country at peace.

But it is reasonable now to include Iraq in the world’s list of democracies.” …

We did something great there, and its consequences have only begun to be felt.

Our Academy Awards correspondent Jules Crittenden, wearing a lovely Givenchy gown tonight, has major “Hurt Locker” issues:

I appreciate the fact that The Hurt Locker itself represents an evolution. Screenwriter Mark Boal of In the Valley of Elah fame has moved forward from presenting war-damaged vets as dangerous killers to almost accepting war-damaged killers as a necessary evil. No little irony in the fact that Hollywood’s latest ode to effed-up solders came the day of an Iraqi election that went ahead despite more violent efforts to derail it, and that is being seen as a sign, several elections in now, of the entrenchment of democracy in Iraq.

I suspect what we’re seeing out of Hollywood is a little Iraq War redemption, now that the job is largely done, and under new management. It’s OK to make a show of respect, if to a distorted, characterized hero, saluting soldiers who defuse the enemy’s bombs, even showing them hunting the enemy down, as long as the point is made that war will make you crazy.

This administration has always been a little too loud about their support for traumatized vets–”Thanks for your heroic service, even if it has left you a basket case, scarred for life!” It’s more anti-war and anti-military than pro-soldier. Joe Biden brags how Iraq will be a huge accomplishment for the administration; how about bragging on what our troops have accomplished for the nation? Hint: Rhymes with “Wictory”.

By all means, help our vets. And sweep nothing under the rug. But don’t paint vets as pure victims because of your “Blame America First”-ideology. And don’t you dare paint them as potential enemies, as Janet Napolitano did. And if they do have problems, you damn sure don’t send them to a Major Hasan for “counseling”, even if he is the Best Actor.

Artists and storytellers have their place.

But maybe we should have award shows for those whose art is freedom and whose stories are written on the hearts of a grateful nation.

THE CURE

“The liberties of our Country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have receiv’d them as a fair Inheritance from our worthy Ancestors: They purchas’d them for us with toil and danger and expence of treasure and blood; and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle; or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men. Of the latter we are in most danger at present: Let us therefore be aware of it. Let us contemplate our forefathers and posterity; and resolve to maintain the rights bequeath’d to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. – Instead of sitting down satisfied with the efforts we have already made, which is the wish of our enemies, the necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let us remember that “if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.” It is a very serious consideration, which should deeply impress our minds, that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event.”–Sam Adams in the Boston Gazette, October 14, 1771

“What a glorious morning this is!”–to John Hancock at the Battle of Lexington, April 19, 1775

A glorious morning…in which I get my first quote by Glenn at Instapundit and link by Capt. Ed at Hot Air, regarding this.

I’m such a show-off. I really should be ashamed. And I will be.

But first, I’d like to thank the Academy…

Cheers!

UPDATE: Speaking of spanking the Academy…

NO, NO

Dan Riehl:

Contemplate this as one of Obama’s big initiatives is throwing $4.3 billion more into notoriously failing schools across the nation.

Kansas City alone was awarded $2 billion in a desegregation case. Money gone, they’re left with an Olympic-sized swimming pool and recording studios, while the superintendent claims the diplomas from them “aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.” Now, they’re contemplating closing one-half of the city’s public schools because the city is broke. How much failure must taxpayers subsidize before it’s enough?

There’s a lesson here to learn, and it goes far beyond “Money doesn’t equal educational success”.

This is the famous case in which federal judge took over an admittedly underfunded school district and, well, lost his mind and his constitutional bearings, trying to build a gold-plated Socratic Empire.

Paul Ciotti wrote the book for Cato. A sample:

“…[by court order] 44 percent of the entire state budget for elementary and secondary education was going to just the 9 percent of the state’s students who lived in Kansas City and St. Louis.(34) Missouri was spending more on desegregation than it was spending on prisons, courts, the highway patrol, and the state fire marshal combined.(35)

To parents in the state’s 529 other school districts, it seemed extraordinarily unfair that Kansas City was awash in money while their districts had to cope two years in a row with funding declines that forced them to hold bake sales and car washes to finance programs, sell hot dogs and sodas to buy school athletic uniforms, and clip soup coupons to buy computers.

To replace the money that the state sent to St. Louis and Kansas City, other districts in the state had to cancel field trips and extracurricular activities, defer maintenance, fire teachers, and freeze salaries.(36) The decline in state revenue cost the Springfield school district $4 million–4 percent of its entire budget. As there was no slack in the budget, Springfield had to fire 19 employees; defer grouting the mortar on 100-year-old brick buildings; cancel public speaking classes; dispense with water safety courses; and beg for money to send students to the Civil War battlefield at Wilson’s Creek, an annual trip that had been made for decades. (37) In the meantime, the KCMSD was spending $50,000 a month to bring students to school in taxis, sending its fencing team to Senegal, and dispatching the district superintendent on a goodwill mission to Moscow.

…[Judge] Clark, taking matters into his own hands, ordered that property taxes in the district be doubled (from $2.05 to $4 for each $100 of assessed value). Later, to help pay for what would eventually become a 40 percent raise for teachers, he ordered a further increase–to $4.96.(42) He also ordered a 1.5 percent surcharge on income earned by people who worked in Kansas City but lived elsewhere. …

Eventually, the issue got to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, by a five-to-four vote, decided in April 1990 that (1) Judge Clark did not have the right to raise taxes by himself but that (2) he could order the district to raise taxes to satisfy its debt obligations.(48) Justice Byron White justified the tax increase with the argument that “a local government with taxing authority may be ordered to levy taxes in excess of the limit set by state statute where there is reason based in the Constitution for not observing the statutory limitation.”(49) In dissent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Antonin Scalia complained of the majority’s “casual embrace of taxation imposed by the unelected, life-tenured federal judiciary.”

Trying to build a Utopian Heaven on Earth, the judge ran this district into the ground. They couldn’t keep a superintendent or fire a teacher. The grandiose Olympic pool now costs $200 grand a year just to heat, money no one has. Meanwhile, the late judge retired in 2000.

And now the whole thing has crashed, a complete, total and utter failure, a monument to hubris, arrogance and power-hungry, money-grabbing central planners.

This is exactly what is happening with judges, terrorists and our national security. Its not their job, they don’t know what they’re doing, and whatever it is, it’s extremely dangerous.

Like Health Care, it involves a mad power-grab by a government that is incompetent to run vast segments of our economy or conduct social engineering experiments on citizens like a child with a trapped butterfly in a jar.

And even if it could, it shouldn’t.

Ask any skoolkid.

Oh, it’s a Klown Kar Administration, all right:

Despite his many flaws, Mr. Emanuel is the closest thing to a grownup in President Obama’s inner circle. The others in it share an adoration of Mr. Obama, malleable ethics and inexperience on the national stage.

Former Chicago Tribune reporter David Axelrod is a skilled media and political guy who is the Karl Rove of this administration. But Mr. Rove played little role in formulating foreign or economic policy. That Mr. Axelrod does indicates Mr. Obama is more interested in sizzle than in substance.

After Mr. Axelrod, the most influential aide is Chicago slumlord Valerie Jarrett, who encouraged Mr. Obama to travel to Copenhagen last summer in his embarrassingly futile bid to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago.

The key thing to remember about Mr. Obama’s aides is that he chose them. Shaking up a troubled presidential staff is mostly an exercise in reshuffling deck chairs on the Titanic because each administration takes on the characteristics of its chief. There is a reason why Richard Nixon’s chief aides were conspiratorial; that so many in the George W. Bush administration were mediocre; that so many in the Clinton administration were corrupt.

And why all the King’s men are incompetent, America-despising commies. This dead fish is definitely rotting from the head. And if His Majesty starts replacing people, there’s no reason to expect anything but more of the same — if not worse.

Assuming that’s possible.

Some of his usual tasty snark from Glenn:

“Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is boilerplate American history, and something that Americans — and, in particular, America’s political class — have long taken for granted.

But now things are looking a bit dicey. According to a recent Rasmussen Poll , only 21 percent of American voters believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed. On the other hand, Rasmussen notes, a full 63 percent of the “political class” believe that the government enjoys the consent of the governed.

It’s tempting to stress the disconnect here, and that disconnect is certainly huge. Unsurprisingly, the political class — which talks mostly to itself — thinks that it is far more popular, and legitimate, in the eyes of the country than is in fact the case. In this, as in so many things, America’s political class is out of touch with reality.

But forget the views of America — where, it seems likely, more people believe in alien abductions than in the legitimacy of our rulers — and look just at the more cheerful view of the political class.

Even among the rulers, only 63 percent — triple the fraction of the general populace but still less than two-thirds of the political class — regard the federal government as legitimate by the standards of America’s founding document. The remainder, presumably, are comfortable being tyrants.

Hell yeah, they are. And the other 63 percent are kidding themselves — and us, or so they think. Read the rest to see where the Schlitz reference comes in.

Larry Kudlow calls King Obama’s latest health-care lecture a “declaration of war” — and if it’s a war he wants, it’s a war he’ll get.

Oh, by the way, a government takeover of health care will cripple one of our most productive job-creating sectors. Over the deep two-year recession, while overall corporate payrolls fell by about 7.5 million, private health care firms created almost 700,000 new jobs.

And the health care industry is one of our fastest-growing, most technologically advanced areas. With constant breakthroughs in biotech, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and diagnostics, the growing demand for more health care could elevate this prosperous job-creating sector to a third of the economy in the decades ahead. What’s wrong with that? Why crush it?

Because FederalGovCo is currently in control of only about sixty percent of it. And like any other insatiable pig, it wants it all.

Health care reform also was supposed to slow down cost increases. But that will never happen until the third-party payment system, run by big government and big business, is replaced by true consumer choice and market competition.

Just give consumers the tax break and let them shop across state lines to find the right insurance plan. And young people who are already paying taxes into Medicare should not be mandated to pay more taxes into this entitlement plan.

The young will pay for health insurance when they’re ready to pay for it. Clearly this new New Deal, or new Great Society, or whatever it is, is the government selling a product that the rest of the country doesn’t want.

King Obama doesn’t care a fig what the country wants; that much is indisputable. He cares what he and the rest of the jackbooted Democrat Socialist advocates of supreme State power want: more power, natch. As for his phony “bipartisan” bullshit from last week, this NY Post subhed says it all:

The same rotten Rx
ObamaCare — now with GOP sprinkles!
With Plans A, B and C having failed miserably, President Obama yesterday unveiled his latest “new and improved” version of health-care reform. He says that this incarnation “incorporates the best ideas from Democrats and Republicans — including some of the ideas that Republicans offered during the health-care summit.” Unfortunately, its fundamental premise remains exactly the same — a government takeover of the health-care system.

Start with those “Republican ideas”: Though mostly not bad, they’re hardly game changing.

…At its heart, ObamaCare hasn’t changed. It still represents a top-down, centralized, command-and-control approach to reform.

The government would require everyone to have health insurance, would determine what benefits that insurance must include, would regulate insurance prices and physician reimbursement and would micromanage how medicine is practiced.

All this would be accompanied by higher taxes and, most likely, higher insurance premiums.

It is a plan that says the government knows best — when it comes to a sixth of the US economy and some of the most important, personal and private decisions in people’s lives. A few cosmetic concessions can’t fix that basic premise.

Nope. In the end, the war Democrat Socialists have declared on the American people and the Constitution they revere is the same one humanity has been fighting forever: the age-old, endless war of tyranny against liberty. Obamacare would undo once and for all the resounding (but temporary) victory of 18th century American patriots in that war — a giant leap backward indeed.

Update! Via Insty, just another disgusting reminder of the “improvements” the Democrat Socialists look forward to implementing here:

A man of 22 died in agony of dehydration after three days in a leading teaching hospital.

Kane Gorny was so desperate for a drink that he rang police to beg for their help.

They arrived on the ward only to be told by doctors that everything was under control.

The next day his mother Rita Cronin found him delirious and he died within hours.

She said nurses had failed to give him vital drugs which controlled fluid levels in his body. ‘He was totally dependent on the nurses to help him and they totally betrayed him.’ 

Another casualty of the Long War. It can happen here. It will happen here. And the Democrat Socialists will be to blame. When the time comes, real Americans ought to be ready to give them proper thanks for it…which will involve tar, feathers, pitchforks, torches, and rope. Lots and lots of rope.

A very interesting piece on music, culture, law, and — well, a whole lot of other things. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but it’s certainly thought-provoking, and some of his turns of phrase are pretty danged amusing. Examples:

Surely there are relevant things to be said about this which have a bearing not only on its value as music, but also on the moral condition of those who enjoy it without a problem. Older people tend to react negatively to this foregrounding of an excited female voice, regarding it as pornographic (though the lyrics, such as they are, seem to be more about death and drugs than sex). But that feature is not what is most striking to the musical ear. It is surely noticeable that the piece has no melody, equally noticeable that it is harmonically impoverished—most noticeable of all, the sounds responsible for what there is of rhythmic impetus are electronically made and do not reflect the body rhythms of the person producing them. These sounds, and the meter that they establish, are profoundly alien to the natural rhythms of the human body or to the expectations of the human ear. We are dealing with a kind of machine-made music which has been detached from the traditional source of music in human life, and in the impulse to dance and sing in company. The voice is suspended on electric wires, like the corpse of a galvanised frog.

After listening to the caterwaul he’s referring to — and as someone who decidedly ain’t a fan of techno in any of its insipid, droning subvarieties — all I can really say is: amen. More:

The phenomenology goes a little deeper than that implies. The rhythm in the Meshuggah piece is shot at you; the rhythm in the reel invites you to move with it. The difference between “at” and “with” is one of the deepest differences we know, and is exemplified in all our encounters with other people—notably in conversation and in sexual gambits. And the “withness” of the eightsome reel reflects the fact that this is a social dance, in which people move consciously with others. The human need for this kind of dancing is still with us, and explains the current craze for Salsa as well as the periodic revivals of ballroom dancing and Scottish reels.

…Metal is shouted at its devotees, and the loss of melody from the vocal line emphasizes this. Not that melody is entirely absent, of course; it is allowed in with the guitar solo, which is often a poignant reflection on its own loneliness—the ghost of the community that has vanished from this harshly enamelled world. The world of this music is one in which people talk, shout, dance, and feel at each other, without ever doing those things with them. You dance to heavy metal by head-banging, slam dancing, or “moshing” (pushing people around in the crowd). Such dancing is not really open to people of all ages, but confined to the young and the sexually available. Of course, there is nothing to forbid the old and the shrivelled from joining in: but the sight of their doing so is an embarrassment, all the greater when they themselves seem unaware of this.

As Chris Rock said: nobody wants to be the old guy in the club. You know the guy; he ain’t necessarily old, just too old to be in the club.

I ask again: if the liberal agenda is so all-fired right, why must it be advanced by lies, and, in this instance, outright character assassination? Related question: can’t ANY of you filthy liberal swine tell the damned truth? Just once? About anything at all?

“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. And the Burkina Fasoans and the Djboutians believe in Burkish Fascars and Didjabooty exceptionalism.”–Django Hussein Djingo

I hope you read Mike’s post on today’s Steyn column. A little more:

Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic. …The Democrats understand that politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but about everything else, too. … Look at it from the Dems’ point of view. You pass ObamaCare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years.

And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That’s a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout. … Because government health care is not about health care, it’s about government.

Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.

Here, Steyn talks about exceptionalism, in a quote that I love/hate:

Or take Scotland. Most anywhere you go around the planet, from Hong Kong to Hudson’s Bay, almost everything that works was created and developed by Scotsmen. Now the whole joint’s a statist swamp where government spending accounts for 75 percent of the economy and the menfolk idle away their days on a diet of drugs and fried Mars Bars with a life expectancy in the less salubrious parts of Glasgow getting down to West African standards. They’ll never make any contribution to the world again.

James Bennett:

Britons carried guns as casually. and as widely, as Americans well into the 20th century. The story of the Sydney Street siege in London, 1911, is illuminating in that regard. There, the unarmed police, finding themselves under fire by radicals barricaded in a building, armed themselves by asking random passers-by for guns, and so armed themselves rapidly. Gun control began exactly as it did in America and followed the same trajectory, only earlier. Looking at the history of socialized medicine, it is striking how few years separated the NHS in Britain (1948), nationalized health insurance in Canada (1962-1966), and US Medicare (1965). The left fully expected to finish the job by the 70s. It’s only since America’s great U-turn in the late 70s, when we stopped Carter, that we started to pull away from our cousins. How and why we took that U-turn is part of the story of American exceptionalism within British exceptionalism.

It’s important to understand exceptionalism correctly. We are not immune to following the same path as other English-speaking countries; we just have a few more speed bumps in our road.

Will bumping the speed be enough?

It’s on. It’s so very on.

Doc Zero:

He proposed to pay for these benefits from unspent “stimulus” funds. Hundreds of billions of dollars appropriated for the Obama stimulus plan haven’t been spent yet. It would be quite reasonable to use these funds and comply with the recently enacted PAYGO law, which requires government to pay for new spending as it goes instead of running up the deficit. The story could accurately have been reported as: Democrats break the law to hoard billions in slush fund cash for upcoming elections. …

Watching people like Dick Durbin snivel that the latest ten billion in unsustainable debt is an “emergency,” while trillions of tax dollars surge through the halls of Congress behind him, is disgusting. The Democrats promise they’ll get on that fiscal austerity diet tomorrow, but right now we need to shut up and let them scarf down a few emergency doughnuts, and how dare we mention the sea of candy wrappers and popsicle sticks littering the floor around them. …

Last week, Jim Bunning asked the architects of the most bloated government in American history if they could find a measly $10 billion in a $3.5 trillion budget to fund an extension of unemployment benefits. They howled in rage and declared they could not. Bunning isn’t the one who should be retiring.

Magnificent–and every word is true.

Yet Bunning shouldn’t have done it. Let me explain.

1.) Harry Reid could have taken care of this weeks ago. A real majority leader would have. But Reid chose to wait until the last moment, HOPING that Bunning would do this.

2.) The Ignorant Media kept calling it a “filibuster”. But it wasn’t. It was a denial of unanimous consent, which takes a couple of days and a few majority votes to overturn. Yet Reid never held those votes, despite all the crocodile tears about starving Granny. The Democrats chose the issue over the people they claimed were being harmed.

Yet Bunning still shouldn’t have bitten.

* Not because he wasn’t right on the principle. He is.

* Not because Democrats and their Press Lackeys weren’t planning to ruthlessly demagogue this, while cynically using the very people they claim to protect. They will always do that.

As Doc points out, if Health Care passes, and Republicans of the Future manage somehow to trim the program by $29.95, Democrats will see to it that trillions will still flow to the unions, while claiming that the loss of the thirty dollars causes them to cut off the lights in the middle of Little Johnny’s brain operation.

* Not even because it’s like Newt and the Government Shutdown; Newt was right–and he still got his brains beat out, to the detriment of electoral conservatism.

No, the reason why Bunning should have picked his battles is because of this:

With their Socialized Mortgage Meltdown, politicians have already wrecked the economy for millions of people. They have made people homeless, gotten them fired from their jobs, thrown their lives into turmoil, wrecked their savings, and filled their lives with worry. These working people didn’t do anything wrong, but politicians have screwed them over. Royally. I always regret it when I curse in print, so I’m not going to now–but I want to.

But the mother with kids who can’t pay the light bill just doesn’t need one more worry right now. Their dad doesn’t either. It’s that simple.

Jim Bunning is as right as rain. His motives are unimpeachable. His opponents are wretched liars and vile scum-sucking opportunists. But this adds to the worries of that mom, and of that dad. And that’s why.

In fact, as far as I’m concerned, they should go ahead and renew it for the next three years. Because I don’t see this economy recovering until we drag that Communist out of the White House.

I pray that I’m wrong about the economy, because I’m right about the rest.

Would Reagan vote for Sarah Palin? By Steven F. Hayward

Some excerpts:

You can’t assume the Reagan mantle simply by repeating his name ad nauseum or by bickering with primary opponents over who is more like him.

[H]is public style was a product of enormous discipline, hard work and calculation. …He knew from show business the power of leaving your audience wanting more. Is there a politician today who you wish gave longer speeches?

The second underappreciated aspect of Reagan’s statecraft is his idiosyncratic ideology — entirely a product of his self-study, much of which he concealed. Some of it was orthodox, small-government conservatism (he once stated that “the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism”), but it was leavened with an older liberalism, part of which he inherited from FDR.

[T]raditional, Edmund Burke-style conservatism…was not the idiom of Reagan; his belief in America’s dynamism was at the core of his optimism, and that dynamism can have profoundly un-conservative effects.

Reagan typically described conservatism in populist terms rather than formal ones. In his “Time for Choosing” speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential campaign, he sounded almost exactly like Glenn Beck does today. “This is the issue of this election,” Reagan warned: “Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that an intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

This populist undercurrent is why I am certain that Reagan would have been an enthusiastic supporter of the tea party movement. While the tea partiers confuse the media and annoy the establishments of both political parties, Reagan would have seen them as reviving the embers of what he called the “prairie fire” of populist resistance against centralized big government — resistance that helped touch off the tax revolt of the 1970s. That movement was often dismissed as a tantrum, but when The Washington Post called California’s 1978 antitax Proposition 13 “a skirmish,” Reagan replied that if so, then the Chicago fire was a backyard barbecue.

In 1974, Reagan turned down an invitation for a regular commentary on the “CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite” — a slot most politicians would have killed for — because he thought he’d be overexposed on television. Again, leave them wanting more.

Palin and the tea partiers … should also ask themselves: Why didn’t the Reagan revolution succeed in erecting lasting barriers to the government gigantism we are seeing today? Reagan, though usually remembered as a sunny optimist, also sounded a more ominous note: “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction,” he said in a 1967 speech. “It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”

Frustrated with his inability to control a sprawling government and anticipating a climate such as today’s, late in his second presidential term Reagan began arguing for a package of five constitutional amendments that he called his “Economic Bill of Rights.” … Reagan’s package included two familiar standbys he’d requested in nearly every State of the Union address he delivered: a balanced budget amendment and a line-item veto. But he added three more proposals: a federal spending limit (revived a few days ago by Republican Reps. Mike Pence and Jeb Hensarling), a “supermajority” vote requirement for Congress to raise taxes, and a prohibition on wage and price controls. …

To have a significant political effect, it is not even necessary that such an agitation succeed in getting the amendments adopted. After all, there is no chance that the current Congress would bring any of them to a vote. But advocating amendments securing new limits on government would put liberals on the defensive, just as the balanced-budget movement and tax revolt of the 1970s assisted the rise of Reagan and conservatives in the 1980s. …

Meaningful limits on the size of government is one such idea, and it offers a substantive opening for Palin and other would-be heirs to Reagan. To pull it off, one thing above all is required: Do your homework. Reagan did his.

BY PUDDY TAT

Sen. Robert C. Byrd, allegedly:

With all due respect, the Daily Mail’s hyperbole about “imposing government control,” acts of “disrespect to the American people” and “corruption” of Senate procedures resembles more the nether regions of Glennbeckistan than the “sober and second thought” of one of West Virginia’s oldest and most respected daily newspapers.

Byrd dropping the “Glennbeckistan”-bomb is less plausible than a George Clooney marriage proposal based on a White House budget assumption.

The first rule of a good staffer is to make it sound like your boss. Whoever the staffer was who wrote “the barkings from the nether regions of Glennbeckistan” didn’t make Byrd sound ironic and hip; all it did was point out that the guy can’t even write a letter-to-the-editor by himself anymore.

Besides, Glenn likes people barking at his nether regions.

As for the substance of the letter, it’s understandable that a guy who writes a letter at the Robert C. Byrd Federal Office Building and walks down Robert C. Byrd Boulevard to mail it at the Robert C. Byrd Post Office in the Robert C. Byrd State of West Virginia would not see the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase as a “‘corruption’ of Senate procedures”.

Byrd is supposedly a master of the Constitution–and compared to Obama and Biden, I suppose he is. He certainly knows some history and Senate tradition.

But in this letter, he claims that his reconciliation rules can be used to create Socialized Medicine.

And it’s the same with the Constitution; for Byrd, whenever the Constitution conflicts with the Democrats’ Big Government agenda, it’s the Constitution that must give way.

That’s not “barking”; it’s the purring of a tamed housepet.

McCarthy nails it yet again:

First, with a significantly bigger and more powerful government bureaucracy, there will be many avenues for leadership to reward Democrats who lose their seats after casting the unpopular votes necessary to enact the Left’s program. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who spent his post-Clinton wilderness months in alucrative sinecure at Freddie Mac, knows well how this game works — and, under Obama’s command, the economy is becoming one big Freddie.

Second, and more important, Democrats know the electoral setbacks will only be temporary. They are banking on the assurance that Republicans merely want to win elections and have no intention of rolling back Obamacare, much less of dismantling Leviathan.

For my money (while I still have some), that’s an eminently sound bet. The Bunning battle, in which the GOP was nowhere to be found, is the proof. Bunning just wanted Congress to live within its gargantuan means. Yet, the Washington Post ridiculed him: “angry and alone, a one-man blockade against unemployment benefits, Medicare payments to doctors, satellite TV to rural Americans and paychecks to highway workers.” That’s outrageously unfair, but it is a day at the beach compared to the Armageddon that would be unleashed upon any attempt to undo Obama’s welfare state on steroids.

As it turns out, Republicans didn’t have the stomach for a fight over wealth transfers that plainly exacerbate the problem of unemployment. Why would anyone think they’d take on a far more demanding war, in which Democrats and the legacy media would relentlessly indict them for “denying health insurance to millions of Americans”?

Even if the GOP gets a majority for a couple of cycles, even if President Obama is defeated in his 2012 reelection bid, Obamacare will be forever. And once the public sees that the GOP won’t try to dismantle Obamacare, it will lose any enthusiasm for Republicans. Democrats will eventually return to power, and it will be power over a much bigger, much more intrusive government.

Which brings us to Ye Olde Saturday Steyn:

Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect “conservatives,” as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha’penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.

Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it’s so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.

OK, then what? You’ll roll it back – like you’ve rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you’ve undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel’n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter?

I’ve been bandying comparisons with Britain and France, but that hardly begins to convey the scale of it. Obamacare represents the government annexation of “one-sixth of the U.S. economy” – i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary “comprehensive” health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out.

This “reform” is not about health care, and certainly not about “controlling costs.”

Just as the “stimulus” scam wasn’t about stimulating anything except already out-of-control government, and “climate change” alarmism isn’t about any actual danger from changes in the climate. As with everything else the Left promotes, it’s a subterfuge, a misdirection, and a lie. It’s all about tyranny, as both Steyn and McCarthy argue irrefutably.

Once the Democrat Socialists pass this un-American abomination, we’re going to need to find ourselves one of those reset buttons the incompetent radicals in the Obama regime are always blibbering about mighty damned quick — before the Left’s dismal tide swamps all American liberty and independence completely, and we all find ourselves reduced to nothing more than oarsmen on a slave ship that does nothing but go around and around following its own wake, in ever-shrinking circles.

YOUR KLOWN KAR KOMMISSARS AT “WORK”

When I was writing the previous post on unemployment, I knew in the back of my mind that it was Friday, and there simply had to be more news hidden by the Transparency Czars in the regular Friday Night News Dump.

And sure enough…

Wizbang:

In Stunning Reversal GM Asks Closed Auto Dealers To Reopen…

Having destroyed hundreds of businesses run by these dealers what we hear now is “Oops, we didn’t mean it. Please come back”. This reversal is a tacit admission of a monumental blunder (which is why it was released on a Friday afternoon). And this is the same administration that wants to control healthcare. Imagine yourself in the shoes of those dealers or their employees. After billions in losses, families thrown into turmoil caused by unemployment and lost wages, the government suddenly admits that part of its grand experiment in restructuring the auto industry was flawed.

This story should be filed as Exhibit A in the argument against ObamaCare and the government takeover of the healthcare industry.

This administration is already a Cargo Cult.

Now it’s the CarComeBack Cult, too.

“Operation: Kneecap Toyota” must be going better than planned.

HARRY’S BIG ADVENTURE!

Harry Reid:

“Today is a big day in America.”

Really? How big, Harry?

“Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good.”

uhh–yeah–that’s, uh, really good. Now if only a coupla’ hundred politicians lost their jobs, too, that would be really great.

“The Unemployment Rate around America has not changed.”

More great news. I guess.

“Prognosticators thought it would go up and it has not.”

Harry has hit on the key here. For the last year, experts have been telling us every month that unemployment was “unexpectedly” worse. This month, they say it’s “unexpectedly” better. But either way, they’re admitting they were wrong. But they never lose their jobs.

Therefore, we need to give the 15 million unemployed Americans jobs as…experts!

After all, as an expert, even when you’re wrong, month after month after month, you can’t be fired. Problem solved!

In “reality”, they sent straight man Larry “The Melting Snowman” Summers out last week to lower expectations. Harry was then supposed to deliver the punchline today, but the guy can’t tell a joke.

Maybe all those doctors in lab coats at the White House could look at the president’s eyes. He was supposed to “focus like a laser” on jobs, but he hasn’t even found the eye chart yet–except for the one growth industry:

The federal government hired 7,000 new employees. Celebrate!

“Back in the 1960s, when so many foolish ideas flourished simply because they were new, a New York Times columnist tried to make the case that we were all somehow responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That was considered to be Deep Stuff. It made you one of the special folks when you believed that, instead of one of the rest of us poor dumb slobs who believed that the man who shot him was responsible.”–Thomas Sowell, “Too Many Apologies“

This is nothing new.

Liberals have basically been off their rockers trying to blame conservatives ever since their failure to process the fact that a communist killed JFK.

Moe Lane knew it was just a matter of time. “Why, look, Auntie Em; here comes the old reliable Twelve o’ Two right now, on Track 911!”:

Peter Grier
Christian Science Monitor Staff writer / Professional Liar
March 5, 2010
Washington

John Patrick Bedell, whom authorities identified as the gunman in the Pentagon shooting on Thursday, appears to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent antigovernment feelings.

If so, that would make the Pentagon shooting the second violent extremist attack on a federal building within the past month. On Feb. 18, Joseph Stack flew a small aircraft into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. Mr. Stack left behind a disjointed screed in which, among other things, he expressed his hatred of the government.

No thanks, Petey. You can keep your own nuts.

Bedell was a Bush-hatin’, dope-growin’ Truther and Stack was a Bush-hatin’, Church-bashin’ Commie. Just because he hated taxes as much as Charlie Rangel and Tim Geithner put together doesn’t make him a Republican. Just because he bombs a federal building like he’s Bill Ayers doesn’t make him “right-wing”.

But if you’re really so anxious to connect politicians to extremism, here’s one for you:

As a congressman, he “represented the ‘hack’ wing of the Massachusetts Democratic party,” says longtime GOP consultant Charlie Manning. “If he’s done anything of note, I can’t think of it, other than hanging out with third-world thugs.” The Wall Street Journal called Delahunt a “Venezuelan subsidiary in Congress.”

Well, there was that one shining moment for Delahunt when, during a televised grilling of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, Delahunt hoped aloud that al-Qaeda was getting a good look at the man. “Well, I’m sure they [al-Qaeda] are watching, and I’m glad they finally have the chance to see you, Mr. Addington.”

Wow-that sounds like he was urging al-Qaeda to assassinate a federal employee! Why, you’d almost think Delahunt were a right-winger!

Ironically, his career began covering for the left-wing nutcase killer Amy Bishop as a political favor, and she has now ended his career by killing again.

But Frank Rich will soon emerge from his elegant bunker to explain how it’s all the fault of some Republican; namely, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Say–I heard he listened to the young Glenn Beck…

GREEN JOBS OF THE RADIANT HOUSEFIRE FUTURE!

Andrew Bolt:

What a great country this would be if the insulation bandits now robbing us blind actually ran it instead.

I look at the quotation book and pay sheets left behind at one more house stuffed with Kevin Rudd’s useless free insulation and think, boy, these blokes are sharp.

Certainly sharper than the politicians and bureaucrats who blew $2.5 billion of our money on this colossal spending spree that’s left four installers dead, 90 homes burned, 1000 more electrified, and another 240,000 fitted with insulation, much of it imported, that’s either useless or dangerous.

Via Slicing Up Eyeballs:

Ex-Midnight Oil singer Peter Garrett’s political career hasn’t exactly been going great lately, and things went from bad to worse today when Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd demoted the former rocker over a “bungled home-insulation scheme,” according to Reuters.

Garrett — who was elected to Australia’s Parliament in 2004 and appointed Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts in 2007 — was today stripped of responsibility for energy efficiency. According to Reuters, Garrett has been under fire because “his program to deliver free home insulation left more than 1,000 houses with unsafe roofs and was blamed for 93 fires and four deaths.”

Rudd today said, “There is no point sugar coating this. This does mean a different range and reduced range of responsibilities for Minister Garrett.” Garrett responded, in a statement, saying, “I welcome the opportunity to continue my work in the Environment Protection, Heritage and the Arts portfolio, focusing on key interests and passions of mine.”

Shut up and sing.

(Hat-tip: Ace)

To All Evil Minions:

There is a mandatory training session scheduled for all minions - and no, a dentist appointment or a family member’s funeral won’t get you out of this.

Why?  You can blame minions #43 and #52 for this – or take it out on their surviving family members.  Let me drop this little hint across your futuristic-styled helmets:

If you have the hero that is going to save the world from my plots, and you have him bound and gagged in an alpine chalet, and you are going to detonate the explosives to crush the chalet under an avalanche -

(a) shoot him in a vital spot like the head (the BIG head, you idiots – with your marksmanship you need directions like this); (b) start your snowmobiles before you trigger the avalanche.

If the Obama stimulus money wasn’t so good I would eliminate half of you and turn your corpses in for ‘Cash for Clunkers’ like the late, lamented OddJob did with a recalcitrant mafioso in that documentary I had you watch.

And any ‘Cash for Clunkers’ are not to be my Dubai registered vehicles.  Use your own craptacular Toyotas for that.