Friday various & sundry

PhRMA hearts Harry and has produced a campaign ad as a way to say thanks so much! for ramming "healthcare" "reform" down the throats of America. J-Ru:

This seems to be a significant weakness in the Democrats’ newest populist campaign rhetoric — they are the ones getting bouquets from insurance companies, banks, and big drug companies. They must think the public won’t notice.

I think we're noticing. Harry's numbers are in the toilet.

But isn't it great the way Obama has put the brakes on all that lobbying? Timothy Carney reports: Lobbying figures are in: $10 million a day

You might notice that the top six entities all sided with Obama in supporting the legislation, as did nine of the top ten. That makes it hard to swallow Obama’s claim that passing the legislation represented “standing up to the special interests.”

We're not supposed to notice that, either.

Even CNN's Jack Cafferty has noticed that there's something wrong with Obama's response to Arizona's illegal alien crisis:

Arizona's tough new immigration law hasn't even gone into effect yet and it's already working. Mexico has issued an alert for Mexicans traveling to Arizona. Mexico urging its citizens to be careful that they may be harassed and questioned without further cause at any time should they go to Arizona.

That's not the case at all, of course, but it's ironic, isn't it? Travel warnings usually work the other way around with various countries warning their citizens not to go to Mexico because of all of the drug-related violence there.

However, no good deed goes unpunished. The Obama administration says it might challenge Arizona's new law in court. They're apparently concerned the law would take away resources needed to target criminals.

How utterly absurd. There are 460,000 illegal aliens currently inside Arizona's borders, and the reason they're there is that the federal government refuses to enforce our immigration laws. [. . .]

Shouldn't President Obama be embarrassed by some of this? This is a federal job. They're not doing it.

Oh dear. Does this make CNN the cable channel of fascists?


James Taranto notices something wrong with a study reported by Newsweek which finds that "the [tea party] movement's supporters are more likely to be racially resentful." The problem:

As for the claim that conservative views on these questions reflect "racial resentment," however, the survey provides no evidence one way or the other. It did not plumb the emotions of the participants, who were given a prepackaged assertion and permitted only a binary response. It's possible that agreement with a statement like "Blacks should do the same without special favors" reflects a resentful spirit, but it could also reflect a respectful one--a confidence that blacks are as capable as anyone else.

When Parker asserts that tea-party sympathizers are "racially resentful," then, he is imputing to them his own emotional reactions to the questions. The entire exercise illustrates only that political liberals are predisposed to believe that politically conservative views on racial matters are the product of resentment. It would not surprise us if this belief is true in some cases, but by conflating viewpoint and motive, this survey merely presupposes what it purports to prove.

Charlie Crist declares 'system broken,' announces independent run. Larry Thornberry calls this "nonsense on steroids" and makes the case that what's really broken is Charlie Crist and his political career. This Rubio ad will ensure that Florida voters notice Crist's flaming duplicity.


Michelle Malkin takes notice of Obama's "peculiar definitions of what he called the 'American way' and the profit motive":

If there were any doubts left about the Obamas’ ideological commitment to wealth redistribution and a command-and-control economy, those doubts have been thoroughly removed. We have a commander-in-chief who presumes to know when you have earned “enough,” who believes that only those who provide what he deems “good” products and services should “keep on making it,” and who has determined that the role of American entrepreneurs is not to pursue their own self-interest, but to fulfill their “core” responsibility as dutiful growers of the collective economy.

That famous mock-up poster of Obama as the creepy socialist Joker has never seemed more apt.

Power Line's Scott Johnson responds to that: At Some Point You Have Grabbed Enough Power

James Madison and others held that the "first object of government" was to protect the right of property. Numerous provisions of the Constitution and Bill of Rights were incorporated to protect the property rights of citizens from the power of the government.

Whatever else might be said about him, President Obama operates on a different philosophy of government from that of the Founders. As Michelle Malkin observes, he spoke the most revealing and clarifying 10 words of his administration this week: "I think at some point you have made enough money."

The Founders thought that at some point the government had enough power. Obama, however, is a devout believer in unlimited government. The common denominator among so-called health care reform and financial regulatory reform as well as Obama's other big proposals is the augmented power they confer on the government in general and the executive branch in particular.

RTR.

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