PROSECUTOR, TOO!

Eric Holder has personally repealed President Ford’s ban on assassinations and ordered American forces to kill Osama bin Laden on sight, even if he’s unarmed, surrendering and offering to tell us everything about future terror plots. It must be in those Invisible Geneva Conventions That Only Liberals Can See.

Jules Crittenden:

“Let’s deal with reality,” Holder said. “You’re talking about a hypothetical that will never occur. The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom. That’s the reality. … He will be killed by us, or he will be killed by his own people so he’s not captured by us. We know that.” …

I’m not sure what they call that kind of logic in law school, never having been, but from a semi-educated civilian perspective it sounds like “talking in circles.”

What an embarrassment. Holder has no legal principle other than “What’s the most left-wing position I can get away with?” If you can’t defend your position, by definition it’s indefensible.

Truth is, he’s painted himself in a corner, and his answer is to pretend the room is round and the paint is Kool-Aid. What a joke.

EVERYBODY NEEDS SOME

To me and to so many others, Ronald Reagan is like tonic.

Just seeing him in footage or in photos cheers people up. That’s why this billboard is so cool. Even Keith Olbermann enjoys Reagan films!

Spending a little time reading his words clears the fog away and leaves you feeling better and thinking sharper than when you began, the exact opposite of so many other politicians.

Yet he was no Pollyanna. In 1964, he said what we all feel today:

“Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.”

But he also had an unshakeable optimism about America. That tells me we need both his “eternal optimism” and eternal vigilance.

If you find yourself a little short on hope in these tough times, Ronnie will be happy to give you some of his:

1952: “I, in my own mind, have always thought of America as a place in the divine scheme of things that was set aside as a promised land.”

1964: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.”

1977: “Our task now is not to sell a philosophy, but to make the majority of Americans, who already share that philosophy, see that modern conservatism offers them a political home. We are not a cult, we are members of a majority. Let’s act and talk like it.”

1980: “[The Democrats] say that the United States has had its days in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith.… My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view.”

1981: “The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization.”

1981: “I hope the people on Wall Street will pay attention to the people on Main Street. If they do, they will see there is a rising tide of confidence in the future of America.”

1982: “To be young in my generation was to feel that your future had been mortgaged out from under you, and that’s a tragic mistake we must never allow our leaders to make again.”

1984: “We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.”

1984: “In this springtime of hope, some lights seem eternal; America’s is.”

1986: “The American people brought us back — with quiet courage and common sense; with undying faith that in this nation under God the future will be ours, for the future belongs to the free.”

1994: “In closing, let me thank you, the American people, for giving me the great honor of allowing me to serve as your president. When the Lord calls me home, whenever that day may be, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future. I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”

And since we need a laugh, too, our old friend Scrappleface:

Genocide Declaration Spurs UN to Send Troops to 1915

New Tax Credit to Incentivize Business to ‘Make Profit’

Obama Urges Straight Up-or-Down Vote on Constitution

Another bill they haven’t read. heh. I feel better already.

And not much more than just those things:

This two-votes-in-one gambit is a brazen affront to the plain language of the Constitution, which is intended to require democratic accountability. Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution says that in order for a “Bill” to “become a Law,” it “shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate.” This is why the House and Senate typically have a conference committee to work out differences in what each body passes. While sometimes one house cedes entirely to another, the expectation is that its Members must re-vote on the exact language of the other body’s bill.

Yes, self-executing rules have been used in the past, but as the Congressional Research Service put it in a 2006 paper, “Originally, this type of rule was used to expedite House action in disposing of Senate amendments to House-passed bills.” They’ve also been used for amendments such as to a 1998 bill that “would have permitted the CIA to offer employees an early-out retirement program”—but never before to elide a vote on the entire fundamental legislation.

We have entered a political wonderland, where the rules are whatever Democrats say they are. Mrs. Pelosi and the White House are resorting to these abuses because their bill is so unpopular that a majority even of their own party doesn’t want to vote for it. Fence-sitting Members are being threatened with primary challengers, a withdrawal of union support and of course ostracism. Michigan’s Bart Stupak is being pounded nightly by MSNBC for the high crime of refusing to vote for a bill that he believes will subsidize insurance for abortions.

Democrats are, literally, consuming their own majority for the sake of imposing new taxes, regulations and entitlements that the public has roundly rejected but that they believe will be the crowning achievement of the welfare state. They are also leaving behind a procedural bloody trail that will fuel public fury and make such a vast change of law seem illegitimate to millions of Americans.

Did somebody say illegitimate?

RALEIGH – I’ve been arguing the case against ObamaCare for more than a year. I’ve argued that it will raise costs, reduce freedom, and federalize the funding and regulation of a sixth of the nation’s economy. I’ve also pointed out that it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of why medical costs are rising, and would destroy the only trend working against health care inflation – the rise of consumer-driven health care.

But now, I’ve lost my passion for continuing the debate. I’ve lost my motivation to identify the bill’s flaws and failures. I’ve even lost my anger at the arrogance of Washington politicians who think they know best how to manage my medical care and rearrange my personal finances.

Why? Because it’s becoming clear to me that I and other critics of ObamaCare have already won the intellectual battle. We’ve already succeeded in informing the public about the particulars of the bill, and the public now strongly opposes ObamaCare. The more President Obama shouts into his microphone, the more the public comes to oppose his plan. There is no conceivable way that the president or the leaders of Congress can legally enact their legislative monstrosity.

Instead, they are going to cheat.

They are going to employ some kind of legislative trickery to pretend to pass a bill that, they now realize, will never become law through constitutional means. They may use the now-infamous Slaughter Rule, which would allow House members to claim to have voted to amend the objectionable Senate bill without actually having passed it through the House. Or they’ll come up with an even-zanier scheme, including a subsequent reconciliation process in the Senate designed to overcome the very filibuster they’ve used to block conservative bills and nominees in the past.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not planning to recognize such a result as legally binding. I’m not going to pretend to obey any dictates from federal health-care bureaucrats that have never been authorized by a constitutional vote of both houses of Congress. I will not submit to any extra-constitutional order to dismantle the consumer-driven health plan I have set up for my employees.

I will not comply. If the government tries to make me comply, I’ll sue. And I’ll win.

This is not (yet) a banana republic where constitutions are seen as inconvenient impediments to the rule of the despot. This is not (yet) a European-style welfare state where some powerful parliament can exercise legislative, executive, and judicial power all in one stroke. This is a constitutional republic in which government power is divided, its exercise is strictly limited, and our rights are not some generous gift of those in power, to be withdrawn at their whim, but are instead a permanent check on their power.

If the House fails to hold a straightforward vote on the Senate bill that was passed a couple of months ago, that bill can neither become law nor be amended by future congressional action. It will have died. There will be no ObamaCare bill, no new taxes or regulations, and no unconstitutional mandate that Americans buy health plans approved by politicians.

The president and his allies may claim otherwise, but that won’t change the reality of the situation. If they command the rest of us to pretend they have passed the bill, I will not comply.

This won’t be the only edict passed down from our regal Imperium to which the only response appropriate for real Americans to consider will be noncompliance, resistance, and rebellion, whether open or clandestine. I’ve been wondering for a while now if going Galt, in Glenn’s parlance, will be enough. I wonder if maybe it might not be time to contemplate a sort of Cloward-Piven strategy of our own, as a nonviolent means of turning this misbegotten system of welfare-state dependency and servitude back on itself, with an eye towards destroying it from within — to wreck the wreckers, as it were, by using their own diabolical stratagems against them. In fact, I wonder if perhaps the time has now come to start trying to monkeywrench this soft tyranny by any and every means of resistance at our disposal.

Although such would go against the natural tendencies of real Americans, the Democrat Socialist refusal to govern according to established Constitutional requirements amounts to an abdication of any claim to the continued loyalty of their subjects. There’s more than one side to this brazen power grab of theirs, whether they know it or not. If they haven’t thought all this through till now, or if they just assume that they’ve castrated the entire American flock of sheeple with decades of lies, propaganda, and incrementalism, they might want to give it some careful consideration now — if they aren’t too blinded by hubris and drunk on their own power to allow for it.

I wonder.

Well, I suppose this answers, at least in part, the question, “what the hell are they teaching these kids in school nowadays?” The wit, wisdom, attention to detail, and plain-spoken accuracy of this child’s in-depth analysis merits some sort of grant for further scientific inquiry, I think. Lord knows his research could end up helping to get us all on the path to a deeper understanding. This junior genius’s conclusions are at least as important to his specific field of study as Newton’s breakthroughs were to physics, I’d say.

Update! Almost forgot: found this via Matenloch.

JACK SHELDON

…your country needs you!

“But Schoolhouse Rock Said a Bill Had to Get Voted Upon to Become a Law!”

Kill the Bill, deemit.

I’ve always thought the hard core left of the Democrat party was delusional. I mean like, full-on-in-need-of-medication-batshit-barking-at-the-moon crazy. Turns out I was right.

The president will refuse to make fund-raising visits during November elections to any district whose representative has not backed the bill.

Ummm….dude? That’s a feature, not a bug.

See?

Maybe you could just set aside your unusually high self-regard for yourself, just for a moment mind you, and admit you’re poison right now. Well, don’t take it from me, just ask John Corzine, Martha Coakley, or Creigh Deeds.

Say what you want about George Bush (and I know you all will…) at least he knew when to stop digging when it came to elections. When his numbers were in the toilet, he stayed home and away from elections. Seems the current crop in the White House doesn’t know when to stop digging no matter what the issue – elections, cap and trade, Israel, Iran, health care – you name it.

I’m sooooooo looking forward to the electoral blow out in November. So is Michael Moore, come to think of it.

Oh, and in a related case of projection and delusion, Mr. Axelrod also entered his two cents.

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, said that “the lobbyists for the insurance industry unions have landed on Capitol Hill like locusts, and they are going to be doing everything they can in the next week to try and muscle people into voting”.

(There, fixed that for you, David. I know what a stickler for accuracy you are.)

I mean, they just keep bringin’ da funny. I think these guys oficially entered SitCom status this week. I wonder if MSNBC will pick up the option on it.

THE WORLD TURNED DOWNSIDE-UP

Seth Leibsohn:

Blazoned across the NYT today is the headline: “Israel Feeling Rising Anger From U.S.”

How I just pray for the headline someday that reads ”Iran Feeling Rising Anger From U.S.” or “Venezuela Feeling Rising Anger From U.S.” or “Cuba Feeling Rising Anger From U.S.” or “Myanmar Feeling Rising Anger From U.S.” or “Sudan Feeling Rising Anger From U.S.”

Not from this crowd, Seth. It’s all “Punish your friends, reward your enemies!”

By the way, that Times headline is a bald-faced lie;

Gallup: Support for Israel in U.S. at 63%, Near Record High.

The only “rising anger from U.S.” is from US terrorist-coddling politicians in this administration.

Bibi was blindsided by a trouble-making cabinet-member of a different party, who announced new construction in a Jewish neighborhood during Biden’s visit. The administration jumped on the chance to portray themselves as deeply “insulted” in order to wring more unconditional surrenders to the Palestinians from Netanyahu.

If it’s any consolation, guys, these liberals have wrecked the home-building industry here in America, too.

The administration is even trying to pin US casualties in the Sandbox on…Israel! They keep on asking themselves “Why do they hate us?” and answering “Because of Jew!” It’s getting awfully crowded under that bus.

Meanwhile, and speaking of busses, the “moderate” Palestinians named a town square after a mass-murderer who killed dozens of civilians on a bus, including 13 children and an American.

Biden was so deeply “insulted”, he hugged Abbas around the neck. And kissed him.

Building homes–bad. Celebrating terrorist–good.

That’s what friends are for?

…BUT DON’T QUESTION THE PATRIOTISM!

“I believe that a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only possible way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches us that the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of any one country, because he is the citizen of the world, is in fact usually and exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the world he happens at the moment to be in. In the dim future all moral needs and moral standards may change; but at present, if a man can view his own country and all others countries from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him, just as it is wise to distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate view of his wife and mother. However broad and deep a man’s sympathies, however intense his activities, he need have no fear that they will be cramped by love of his native land.”–Teddy Roosevelt

Ed Morrissey:

Army Times: The Obama administration says flying the flag could give Haiti the wrong idea.

“We are not here as an occupation force, but as an international partner committed to supporting the government of Haiti on the road to recovery,” the U.S. government’s Haiti Joint Information Center said in response to a query about the flag.

In the immediate aftermath of the quake and our initial response, France accused the US of conducting a de facto “occupation” of Haiti. Not surprisingly, Venezuela and Nicaragua followed suit. Ironically, the French don’t seem terribly concerned with flying their flag over Haiti despite their status as its original colonizer.

The decision not to fly the flag is an embarrassment of weakness on the part of Obama. Our nation has conducted relief efforts for decades through our military, saving millions of people from death, disease, and starvation. Like France, Britain, and Croatia, we have flown our flag during those operations not to note occupation but to represent the American people’s solidarity with those suffering from disaster. That historical record is answer itself to the lunatics in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and even France who indulge in paranoid hysteria.

Fly the flag, Mr. President. Let our actions speak for themselves, but demonstrate that we aren’t ashamed to arrive anywhere in the world with that flag flying proudly.

But they are ashamed of the flag, Ed. Those 13 stripes and 57 stars of Old Gory represent centuries of oppression to them. We’re just lucky they haven’t already designed a “Please Tread On Me!”-banner for our troops in Haiti.

In the battle between Flags of Our Fathers and Dreams From Bill Ayer’s Father, the nightmare is winning.

For now.

Yet another Obama stage prop fails to stand up to scrutiny:

Natoma Canfield, the cancer-stricken woman who has become a centerpiece of President Obama’s push for health care reform, will not lose her home over her medical bills and will probably qualify for financial aid, a top official at the Cleveland medical center treating her told FoxNews.com. 

Though Canfield’s sister Connie Anderson said her sibling is afraid she’ll lose her house and Obama warned at an Ohio rally Monday that the patient is “racked with worry” about the cost of tests and treatment, she is already being screened for financial help. 

Lyman Sornberger, executive director of patient financial services at the Cleveland Clinic, said “all indications” at the outset are that she will be considered for assistance. 

“She may be eligible for state Medicaid…and/or she will be eligible for charity (care) of some form or type. … In my personal opinion, she will be eligible for something,” he said, adding that Canfield should not be worried about losing her home.

“Cleveland Clinic will not put a lien on her home,” he said. 

So let’s see now: this bint hasn’t worked in 12 years, is already receiving care above and beyond what she’d get in any socialist shithole, is in no danger of losing her home, and most likely won’t have to pay for much if any of the treatment she’s getting now.

And this is our lying Marxist Pee-resident’s example of how horridly broken and inhumane our health-care system is, and his justification for glomming limitless power over citizens’ private lives by taking over said “broken” health-care system.

Oh, we do need Change! in this country, all right. Comprehensive Change!, Change! we can really believe in. Starting right at the top of this illegitimate, contra-Constitutional ruling junta, and working all the way down through to the least DC bureau-rat. And the sooner, the better.

Floundering, flailing, faltering, failing:

Silverstein’s Ground Zero towers would go a long way toward alleviating the scarcity of first-class office space in a city where more than 65 percent of all buildings are at least 50 years old and useless to today’s large, electronically-oriented companies.

But the PA (Port Authority) and Silverstein are arguing over when to build the towers and how to pay for them. In January, after ruling largely for the PA on a ground-rent dispute, the arbitrators gave the two sides 45 days to agree on a “detailed construction coordination plan and development schedule” — or the panel would impose its own solution.

That opens up a Pandora’s box of dangerous outcomes that could delay the towers indefinitely, reduce their number or even kill them off for good — contingencies never envisioned when the arbitration option was included in a November 2006 Master Development Agreement between the developer and the agency.

What’s plainly needed is an intervention from on high — but New York is without a functioning governor to broker a deal.

Back when the parties signed the development agreement in 2006, everyone believed things were finally on track. The PA would see to the Freedom Tower (now 1 WTC) and Silverstein would build three more.

The arbitration option was there to mediate the kinds of incidental disputes likely to arise between long-warring parties at an overcrowded construction site. But no one expected the global economic meltdown — which shut off the lending spigot for large developments.

We can only hope, should everything wind up back in arbitration, that the panel notes that the PA’s obstinance and failures before and after the 2006 agreement were clearly of a piece. Acknowledging those wasted five years is indispensable to understanding why Silverstein’s towers remain stuck in the mud.

In the first round, the arbitrators bought the PA’s line that its failure to meet excavation deadlines after 2006 didn’t matter because Silverstein couldn’t have gotten construction loans in any event. Talk about blaming the victim: It was mainly the PA’s prior delays that pushed the projects back again and again, until lending disappeared.

Gee, the government screws up, then blames the free-market entrepreneurs for their own failure. Sounds oddly familiar. What’s clearly needed here is more government intervention.

If New York tried to build a subway system now, New Yorkers would be walking to work (and everywhere else) for the next hundred years or so.

“Pity the poor American car when Congress and the White House get through with it — a light-weight vehicle with a small carbon footprint, using alternative energy and renewable resources to operate in a sustainable way. When I was a kid we called it a Schwinn.”–P.J. O’Rourke, Driving Like Crazy

You shouldn’t joke like that, P.J.; this administration has a habit of legislating the punchlines.

Our beloved government has just solved the Unintended Acceleration Crisis.

Also the Obesity Crisis, the Crowded Highway Crisis, the Parking Crisis and Tom Friedman’s “We’re Not Enough Like China”-Crisis. Not to mention the “We’ve Just Got Too Many Darn Jobs!”-Crisis.

Let’s kick the tires and look under LaHood:

Today, I want to announce a sea change. People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.

From Shopfloor, the blog of those evil businessmen who want to impose jobs on all of us the National Association of Manufacturers:

Treating bicycles and other non-motorized transportation as equal to motorized transportation would cause an economic catastrophe. If put into effect, the policy would more than undermine any effort the Obama Administration has made toward jobs. You can’t have jobs without the efficient movement of freight.

Pedicabs will not overcome those bottlenecks.

Now normally here we’d put in a statement about how bicycles are great, we need to fund infrastructure for bikes, federal support, blah, blah, blah. And, sure, more power to them. But c’mon! A great nation and modern industrial economy cannot operate if executive branch agencies are incapable of making a distinction between bicycles and trucks.

Obama has seen the future–and it looks like a weird mixture of Leave It To Beaver’s neighborhood and 1970’s China.

Those vaunted Green Jobs of the Future? Rickshaw drivers and newspaper delivery boys.

(This will be helpful when the government takes over the newspaper industry, too. Officially, I mean.)

Look at from their point of view; there are just too many car and truck-makers anyway.

Clearly, the government is poised to take over the bicycle companies on behalf of the United Bike Workers union. So when the inevitable wheel-rationing begins, I’ll be ready–I’m learning to ride a unicycle now.

UPDATE: One of the bicycle’s many bonuses: they’re not susceptible to unintended acceleration takeovers caused by cosmic rays. Except for takeovers caused by “Cosmic” Ray LaHood, naturally.

International laughingstock, all-around buffoon, and pseudoscience SUPERGENIUS! ManBearPig is still doggedly hanging in there, blaming all weather events everywhere on his cherished delusion. Give him points for his crackskull perseverance…and absolutely nothing else:

If there’s a drought – it’s global warming. When there’s a hurricane – it’s global warming. If there are heavy snows or even blizzards – it’s somehow global warming. And amazingly, the latest round of rainy and windy weather in the Northeast, well that’s consistent with this phenomenon as well, so says former Vice President Al Gore.
 
Gore, the self-anointed climate change alarmist-in-chief, told supporters on a March 15 conference call that severe weather in certain regions of the country could be attributed to carbon in the atmosphere – including the recent rash of rainy weather.
 
“[T]he odds have shifted toward much larger downpours,” Gore said. “And we have seen that happen in the Northeast, we’ve seen it happen in the Northwest – in both of those regions are among those that scientists have predicted for a long time would begin to experience much larger downpours.”
 
But Gore had a specific example in mind. He explained this recent soaking in the Northeastern United States was “consistent” with what global warming alarmists were projecting.

It’s just pitiful at this point, really. There there, big fella; have a nice soothing cup of shut the fuck up and fade on into well-earned obscurity, willya?

(Via JWF)

Coffee Party USA, Communist Party USA — what’s the diff?

Tell me again the one about how they ain’t lying, sneak-thief, America-hating, totalitarian shitbags, each and every one of them. That one’s my favorite.

Hey, didn’t we already defeat communism once, a while back? Seems to me I have some recollection of that, somehow. Guess not.

(Via AP)

DEMOCRITUS BANKRUPTICUS

Ed Driscoll (circa last summer) quotes LA cash cow exploiter of the workers greedy polluter businessman Rick Newcombe:

“I never could have imagined that, after living here for more than three decades, I would be filing a lawsuit against my beloved Los Angeles and making plans for my company, Creators Syndicate, to move elsewhere.

But we have no choice. The city’s bureaucrats rival Stalin’s apparatchiks in issuing decrees, rescinding them, and then punishing citizens for having followed them in the first place.”

Socialism: if you build it, they will leave.

It’s the Wrath of Grapes.

Wizbang:

“It certainly puts us in a position of looking like deadbeats,” said Sen. Mike Jacobs, an East Moline Democrat who got an eviction notice last year from a longtime friend who has rented the same building for years to the senator and his father before him. Payment eventually arrived — nine months late…” …

“When they can’t pay the rent of a Senate office, there’s no way they’re going to be able to pay the hundreds of millions of dollars in bills that they have back due,” Duffy said. “It just shows what a tragic crisis we’re in and how far out of hand this is.”

The voters can’t point the finger at state government as if they had nothing to do with their state’s current mess. They must share some of the blame for continually reelecting those bozos.

Now that the Democrats have spent Illinois back to the stone age, Illinois’ Democrat governor Pat Quinn wants to raise the state income tax by a third, from 3% to 4%. Not only are the Democrats irresponsible spenders, they’re irresponsible taxers, too. …

The Democrats’ terrible management of the Illinois state budget makes me think of a sign I used to see in a few offices of people I used to work with a number of years ago:

Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.

Actually, it’s so bad that it might rise to that level.

And in the face of this, Congress is trying to pass the Most Expensive Program In the History of the World.

UPDATE: Yahoo:

Social Security to start cashing Uncle Sam’s IOUs

For more than two decades, Social Security collected more money in payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits — billions more each year.

Not anymore. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes — nearly $29 billion more.

Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg. Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds — which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg’s municipal offices. …

They are stored in a three-ring binder, locked in the bottom drawer of a white metal filing cabinet in the Parkersburg offices of Bureau of Public Debt. …

“Those bonds are protected by the full faith and credit of the United States of America,” Kennelly said. “They’re as solid as what we owe China and Japan.”

Yeah–that’s what we were afraid of.

UPDATED UPDATE: Weekly Standard:

Albany, a political “enterprise zone,” is a paradise for lawmakers who have gone into business for themselves. In a state which between 2000 and 2008 experienced a domestic outmigration of 1.5 million people—the highest in the country—almost the only job growth has come from the rapid rise in the number of lobbyists. Between 2000 and 2007 the number of lobbyists doubled from 3,000 to 6,000, while money spent on lobbying grew even faster, jumping from $66 million to $171 million. That makes New York the lobbying capital of America with 24 lobbyists per legislator. Illinois, the land not of Lincoln, but of Blagojevich, is a distant second with 12. And of course since lobbyists need people to lunch with, Albany has the second largest legislative staff (after Pennsylvania) in the United States. Albany’s 212 legislators employ 2,751 staffers, that’s 650 more than California which has almost twice the population.

UPPER PENINSULA UPDATE: the Mackinac Center:

In explaining his refusal to vote on a resolution that would cancel a 3 percent raise for state employees, State Sen. Bruce Patterson, R-Canton, cited the opinion of the state’s budget director that such an action would constitute an “unfair labor practice.”

This is simply not so. …

The bottom line is the Legislature has always had the authority to prevent pay raises authorized by the CSC, and collective bargaining agreements between the state and unions representing its employees have always been subject to the Legislature’s acquiescence. Because this override has not been used up until now, the confusion is forgiveable.

How it’s done; Gov. Christie:

“The defenders of the status quo will start chattering as soon as I leave this chamber. They’ll say the problems are not that bad. The governor is overblowing it. Listen to us, we can spare you the pain and the sacrifice. This has been the siren song for too long, and we know that it is simply not true. New Jersey has been steaming toward financial disaster for years due to that kind of attitude.”

And this won’t be death by natural causes, either; it’s murder most foul, at the hands of a despicable class of poltroons, grifters, liars, thieves, and Leftists — sorry for the redundancy. Credit a lazy, uncaring, ignorant serf class who are by and large “just not into politics, man” with an assist.

And could we please dispense at long last with the Pollyanna-ish “they don’t have the votes” denialism? They don’t need the votes; they don’t CARE about the damn votes. Voting on this or any bill, for these collectivist revolutionaries, isn’t a sacred duty and trust; it’s a subterfuge, a dumb-show, an outmoded and unnecessary process to be manipulated on the irresistible march to the “correct” outcome, which henceforth will be a series of foregone conclusions in our Politburo.

The Democrat Socialists should be known forevermore as the American Tyranny Party; their attempt at taking over the health-care system has now degenerated from a crooked, cynically-manipulated legislative process to a sneaky, bloodless coup d’etat. They can’t grab the power they lust for so intractably by Constitutional means, so they’re perfectly willing to just cast the Constitution aside if that’s what it takes. And that’s exactly what they’re preparing to do. This is certainly the first time such an attempt has been made; if they’re allowed to get away with it, rest assured that it will NOT be the last.

Mark Levin is perfectly correct to call for the ouster of Tyranny Party crawly thing Louise Slaughter. But she is by no means the only one that ought to get the heave-ho. These miserable statist worms took an oath to a Constitution they despise, an oath they never had any intention of fulfilling in the slightest degree. It was just an assemblage of meaningless syllables puked forth as a necessary nuisance on the way to the ultimate goal not of public service (what a sad, passé notion that’s become), but of grubbing piggishly in the despot’s slop trough. They have betrayed that oath, again and again. They need to pay for that.

One way or another, this is not the America you grew up in, not the America the Founders intended. It never will be again, unless those of us who still revere the Constitution as written rise up against the Democrat Socialist tyrants and send them packing for good. Because win or lose this week, as long as there is even a handful of those vermin left in national office, they’ll be daydreaming of and plotting the course towards the frabjous day when our liberty is finally revoked by taking over the health care system, with all the control over our freedom of choice that comes with it.

The Democrat Socialist Party as currently constituted is not just un- but anti-American; like the nation itself, it bears little or no resemblance to the Democratic Party you grew up knowing. Until it is reborn, it will remain the enemy of freedom and Constitutional government — probably the most dangerous and certainly the most insidious one we’ve ever faced. A day of serious reckoning is coming; as Ed says, the wheels have begun to fly off the entitlement juggernaut, and that’s but one of the many self-created problems we have that are only going to get worse. We’re all about to find out what we’re really made of…and whether the American experiment in self-government will endure much longer.

Dan Riehl has been absolutely on fire lately, culminating in this:

The reality is, the government, not the individual, will ultimately have to choose in an effort to strike a balance that purportedly works for the whole in Pelosi’s world. That’s statism and there will never be enough room for true individual liberty in such a system. It simply cannot exist.

When challenged, the statist’s argument does not hold in the minds of free men and women. They know better than that. They do not live everyday in utopia, they live in the free but often tough world. And that is why ObamaCare is instinctively repulsive to the majority of Americans who give it any real thought. There is no such thing as having everything – and at a lower cost, at that. The concept just doesn’t ring true.

But the Left’s political arguments must be confronted forcefully, even outrageously at times if that’s what it takes to get through. Think of it in terms of what Andrew Breitbart is doing in the world of media activism today.

He is calling them out, confronting them, exposing them for what they are and what they believe. And when you prick them like that, they do bleed. Figuratively speaking, if we don’t make them bleed, we will lose. We have been playing politely for decades now. And America has only continued its slide to the Left. And in the face of a pending vote on Obama Care, there is no more room left to give.

I’m not advocating violence. But I am advocating confrontation.

Amen to all that. Read this one, too. Nice work all around, Dan.

“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

No, it doesn’t.

And worse, it doesn’t sound like what went on back then, either. What it does sound like, though, is a regular guy who became a fat, pampered Hollywood star, who somehow lost the plot, got way too full of himself and now spews slanders about the very men he chronicles in his latest movie. …..

My grandmother was a small, spry woman.

She could get into the confined spaces of aircraft to inspect them without ever getting a stain on her starched white shirt. These planes were the Arsenal of Democracy, and they had to be right before they were sent overseas, where young men’s lives hung in the balance.

My grandfather was in the Navy then. My other grandfather was already too old–besides, he’d already been to Kaiser’s Germany as an Army mule-skinner. My uncle went ashore at Normandy. My father served on an aircraft carrier during Korea.

And they didn’t do it because they hated little yellow people.

In fact, Hanks gets his history exactly upside down; it was the Nazis and the Bushido militarists, not the Allies, who went to war for “racial purity”. Or does Hanks want to smear Navy vet JFK as a bigot, too? Or John Dingell, who credits Harry Truman with saving his life as a young officer scheduled to invade Japan?

Lemuel Calhoon:

I will give The Pacific a chance. If it is anywhere as good as Band of Brothers it will make a fine addition to our nation’s library of WWII cinema. I will expect the American Marines who are fighting the Japanese to refer to them with various derogatory epithets like “Jap” and “Nip” because that is historically accurate. If that is the extent of the racism that Mr. Hanks finds in our conduct of the war it will not ruin my enjoyment of the series.

However if Hanks depicts Roosevelt in the White House ordering Marshall and King to exterminate the yellow dogs because they worship the sun goddess I’ll pop in a DVD of They Were Expendable and cross Hanks off the list of people whose work I respect.

Now I’ll watch “Pacific” with my political antennae up. I hate that.

I don’t know when Tom Hanks became a “Blame America First”-crank, but his history sucks. And his current events aren’t any better. The soldiers serving us today are not genocidal maniacs engaged in a Race War, but as fine as any this nation has ever produced. I should know–those are my family, too.

If the Tuskeegee Airmen could love and serve America like they did, it should be child’s play for us today. You need to look at your own history, Tom. Maybe you’ll want to return to the time before slanders against America–and Americans–rolled off your tongue like a Hollywood promise.

BUT THEY’RE LONG ON ARROGANCE

“Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it…it shall become a Law. But in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by Yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House…”–Article 1, Section 7, The Constitution. Yes–of the United States. Yes–of America.

If you are going to pass a law, pass a law.

You don’t pass a rule that says you passed a law, when you didn’t. And further, “deems” it as signed by the president in order to facilitate the shortcut of the first part.

Heritage:

First, they came up with a strategy to get Obamacare passed in the House without the House ever voting on the bill, now they have come up with a strategy and a ruling to get the Obamacare bill to qualify as law without the President signing the law.

Red State:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has scheduled a vote next week on a House rule to get ObamaCare passed without one Representative having to vote on the bill.

… I have to be careful not to say that “Pelosi will schedule a vote on ObamaCare,” because the plan right now is to pass the Senate version of ObamaCare without a vote in the House. The procedure is purposefully confusing because liberals in Congress hope the American people don’t figure out this procedural fraud until it is too late. So much for the Constitution that says that a bill does not become a law until the House and Senate pass identical bills, and then the President signs that legislation.

Doug Ross:

In the Slaughter Solution, the rule would declare that the House “deems” the Senate version of Obamacare to have been passed by the House. House members would still have to vote on whether to accept the rule, but they would then be able to say they only voted for a rule, not for the bill itself.

Thus, Slaughter is preparing a rule that would consider the Senate bill “passed” once the House approves a corrections bill that would make changes. Democrats would thereby avoid a direct vote on the health care bill while allowing it to become law! …

According to Levin, James Madison himself gave special care and attention to this clause in the Constitution.

Levin: And do you want to know why? Because this clause goes to the heart of this Republic.

This clause goes to the heart of how our representative body, that is Congress, makes laws. And so I want you to [observe] how particular the Framers were… They have to pass a Bill to present it to the President…

This is one of the most exacting clauses in the Constitution.

Some try to dismiss this as mere “process”. Newsflash: The Constitution is process.

“Full Faith and Credit”: process.
No unreasonable search without a warrant: process.
“Congress shall make no law…”: process.
“Advice and Consent”: process.
“Due process”: …process!

That “process” is our liberty, and not to be toyed with by a Gangster Government hellbent on imposing Chicago Rules on an unwilling country.

Dan dares to ask the question that ought to be on everyone’s mind right about now:

Isn’t It Time To Euthanize Reid’s Wife?
I’m not sure I quite understand this, given that cost is so important as a burden to taxpayers when it comes to health care. If Democrats want so badly to abort babies because of it, why are we bothering with someone who has a broken neck and back at 69? It sounds to me like she’s pretty well used up and has probably been living off the taxpayers for plenty of years to begin with. Aren’t we at least going to get a vote on it?

I realize her crook of a husband and his pals in Congress have excluded themselves from the mess they’re going to compel everyone else to join, but we’re still paying the bills, are we not?

Ahh, Dan, Dan. Our role as serfs is to pay the bills and keep quiet.

The compassionate Left took a few moments from calling for the painful death and exulting in the misfortune or poor health of anyone and everyone that ever disagreed with them about anything to condemn this OUTRAGEOUSLY OUTRAGEOUS OUTRAGE!, naturally. Fuck ‘em. In the liver. Railroad spike. Sand in the grease. You know the drill.

If so, may I ask why, exactly?

Well, the patrol car didn’t slow down the Prius; the bumpers never touched. The officers used a loudspeaker to tell Sikes to use the brakes and emergency brake together. He did; the car slowed to about 55 mph. Sikes turned off the engine and coasted to a halt. He stopped the car on his own.

There wasn’t anything wrong with the transmission or the Prius engine button either.

Over a 23-minute period the 911 dispatcher repeatedly pleaded with Sikes to shift into neutral. He simply refused and then essentially stopped talking to her except to say that he thought he could smell his brakes burning.

“I thought about” shifting into neutral, Sikes said at a televised press conference the day after the incident. But “I had never played with this kind of a transmission, especially when you’re driving and I was actually afraid to do that.” Sikes, who has driven the car for two years, also said “I figured if I knocked it over [the gear knob] the car might flip.”

Reading that, you might assume the guy is just a garden-variety moron (like 99.999 percent of the other “sudden acceleration” victims knuckleheads), and you wouldn’t be wrong. But read the rest; he’s also a longtime con artist as well. Not that any of the Officially Licensed Journalists™ and layers upon layers upon layers of fact-checkers and responsible editors in the State-Run Media will be interested in reporting any of that, naturally; doesn’t jibe with their primary mission of helping out FederalGovCo any way they can, you see.

Can’t wait to see what these totalitarian frauds dream up to do away with Ford. Hopefully, they’ll come up with something that’s entertaining, at least.

(Via Insty)

So pathetic it doesn’t even merit a “nice try, assholes.”

(Via Insty)

Update! Meanwhile, dishonest attempts to undermine the Tea Party movement go right on as usual.

FIRE SALE

From Mark Steyn’s letters page:

Last year in February, the state of Victoria was hit by a spell of hot, dry weather which prompted several weeks of horrific bushfires. Some 173 people died, most on a single afternoon, when one of the biggest blazes swept through a slice of outer suburban Melbourne called Kinglake. Kinglake has a local council dominated by Greens who enforced with draconian penalties any clearing of trees— and even banned the collection of fallen limbs from the side of the road and the cutting of native grasses. People could not flee because the roads were lined with flames 90 meters high from all that fuel and their homes went up one after the other. Of the 173 people who died, some 140 lived in the Kinglake area.

But that was not all. The council actually paid people to uproot non-native trees— oaks, elms and the like, which do not burn readily— and replace them with eucalypts (tinder, essentially). Furthermore, they encouraged residents to make the trees shade their homes to lower cooling costs and the reduce carbon emissions from the air conditioners. One plant they encouraged, burgan, is known as “petrol bush” because it practically goes up in flames if you look at it the wrong way.

The environmentally-aware state government accepted and gazetted all these local government by-laws, which produced a vegetation mix that was (a) dangerous and (b) nothing like a natural mix and (c) overran areas that were pastures and orchards only 40 years ago. Yet the same state government, because it took the power of self-defense away from local residents, proved utterly useless at protecting its citizens. Fire command centers argued amongst themselves about who was in charge of which zone while the people they were supposed to be protecting perished.

Australia, Victoria in particular, is one of the world’s three worst fire zones; it has burned repeatedly and the perils of the burning bush are well known. There is nothing new about the fire threat, so you would think we would be good at coping with it by now, like Americans are with tornadoes. Instead, one of the smaller fires in the state’s history (in terms of area burned) claimed the largest number of lives— by far.

The state’s multi-million dollar warning system failed. Its emergency bureaucrats didn’t know who was reporting to whom or who was in charge of what. All this has been proven by the testimony and preliminary findings of a royal commission, which continues to uncover evidence of official incompetence on a daily basis.

The icing on the cake? When it came time to apportion blame, the politicians and local council and academics were in agreement: It wasn’t their fault, it was the doing of— you guessed it— global warming. Therefore, they say, more effort must be put into making the bush even thicker and more heavily loaded with fuel in order to store atmospheric carbon.

You would laugh if so many people were not dead.

J T Bosco
Australia

We’ll never dislodge this Global Warming Fraud if it becomes the Official Scapegoat(tm) for all the utter failures of liberals. There are simply far too many failures.

SHUT UP AND ACT

On second thought, just shut up.

Because for somebody who makes a living communicating, Sean Penn sure does like to silence others, like this reporter gal.

Just the other day, Sean “William” Penn said this:

“[E]very day, this elected leader (Chavez) is called a dictator here, and we just accept it! And accept it. And this is mainstream media, who should – truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.”

There is such a standard; whether or not one lives in Venezuela.

(UPDATED)

“To love their country has been considered as virtue in men, whose love could not be otherwise than blind, because their preference was made without, a comparison; but it has never been my fortune to find, either in ancient or modern writers, any honourable mention of those, who have, with equal blindness, hated their country.”–Samuel Johnson

“John Adams”? Lawyer, please. “The Addams Family”, maybe.

The British soldiers defended by Adams before the Revolution were functioning as police. The Boston Massacre was essentially a police brutality case. When was the last time one of these clowns defended a cop–for free?

Nor do I recall Adams stripping to his underwear in town square to prove how horribly his American-killing clients were mistreated, or comparing the Continental Army to Nazis. Thomas Joscelyn:

The comparison is absurd for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that Adams did not represent America’s enemies during an actual war, as the lawyers in question have.

Nor did Adams stalk government employees on behalf of terrorists.

Nor did Adams defend his clients secretly. Eric Holder was asserting that these lawyers who went straight from representing terrorists into the Justice Dept. had a lawyer-client privilege to keep their lawyer-client relationship a secret. And then, as government policy-makers, to be exempt from criticism.

These aren’t military lawyers or public defenders assigned to a case. No, they actively sought to defend these enemies out of a sympathetic worldview. Even mob lawyers only do it for the money, not the love.

The most pertinent Revolutionary Era case is not the Boston Massacre, but the military tribunal of the spy Major Andre. He was caught, tried and hanged by Gen. Washington in a matter of days.

I suppose you could say that these lawyers are like Adams in that he became a revolutionary, too. But he was a revolutionary for America.

Truth is, there’s no real analogy; we’ve never before in history had such an arrogant, ungrateful, morally-retarded educated class who so despised the country that has given them everything.

UPDATE: Advocating for the enemy is a modern anomaly, not a proud tradition by Andy McCarthy.

Geraghty:

If the FBI’s Organized Crime Unit started taking advice from mob lawyers, you would be concerned.

If the SEC hired a bunch of lawyers who represented Enron and Bernie Madoff to set some policies, you would be worried.

If the EPA hired the lawyers who represented Joseph Hazelwood, captain of the Exxon Valdez, and put them in charge of pollution enforcement, you might furrow your brow.

If the Secret Service hired the legal counsel who represented the Salahis, you would begin to wonder what was going on.

So when the Department of Justice hires lawyers who represented al-Qaeda members, and Attorney General Eric Holder refuses to release that information, and forgets to mention his own work on behalf of Jose Padilla, who is suspected of plotting a dirty-bomb attack and was convicted on charges of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim overseas, conspiracy to provide material support for terrorists, and one count of material support for terrorists . . . why are we supposed to shrug our shoulders and conclude, “No big deal”?