A few things

I've been very busy lately with family matters and a long-overdue spring cleaning. (Spring really does hang you up the most.) I'm still too busy to focus much on the news, but here are a couple of things I would talk about if I had time:

- How great Mark Steyn was subbing for Rush yesterday. I'm glad I spent most of the broadcast cleaning my bathrooms, where no young ears would hear him comment (repeatedly) on this really stunning story, a testament to the iron grip of political correctness, its corruption of science, and the fundamental dishonesty of feminism. Unreal.

Mark talked about this, too:



I'm not sure how I'll be able to listen to Mark again today; I'm running out of dirty bathrooms.

Other items:
- Liberals stalk Rep. Paul Ryan in a weak and dishonest attempt to spin the illusion of grass-roots outrage toward his plan. Pathetic.

- Kudos to Sen. Mitch McConnell:

“I understand that the Majority Leader would like to have a vote on the House-passed Ryan budget and we will,” Mr. McConnell said in a statement. “But we’ll have a vote on the President’s budget at the same time. Since there is no Democrat budget in the Senate, we’ll give our colleagues an opportunity to stand with the President in failing to address the problems facing our nation while calling for trillions in new spending, massive new debt and higher taxes on American energy, families and small businesses across the country.”

Must run. Have a great day.

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Various & sundry

Nine Americans were killed in Afghanistan yesterday. Was it the Taliban or a man distraught over "financial troubles"? The L. A. Times:

Eight U.S. troops and an American contractor were killed early Wednesday when a veteran Afghan military pilot fired on trainers during a meeting in a military compound near Kabul International Airport. [. . .]

The pilot, identified as Ahmad Gul Sahebi, 48, was from the Tarakhail district of Kabul province and had served in the Afghan army for decades, according to a man who claimed to be his brother.

Dr. Hassan Sahebi, a Kabul neurologist, described his brother as a dedicated soldier who was not affiliated with the Taliban or other insurgents. He said in a telephone interview that his brother had been wounded four or five times in the line of duty, and once was so severely injured in a plane crash that he underwent 22 surgeries.

"My brother was a little depressed recently, but he had served with Afghanistan's national army for 20 years," Sahebi said. Earlier, in a television interview, Sahebi said his brother had recently been forced to sell his home.

"He loved his country and his people," he told The Times. "He was a good man."

A Taliban spokesman offered a different account. He said that the shooter, whom he called Azizullah, was an insurgent from the conservative Arzan Qimat neighborhood on Kabul's outskirts who succeeded in posing as a pilot with help from Afghan security forces.

Spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said Azizullah contacted Taliban leaders two years ago and had been feeding them information. He planned his attack for five months, but it wasn't approved until Tuesday because he was a valuable source.

Other items:

Betsy McCaughey on our real Medicare choices:

Will Americans now in their 40s and 50s choose to put their health care in the hands of this cost-cutting board, or pick their own health plan when they retire? Whatever decision the nation makes should not turn on the false claim that President Obama has protected Medicare.

Read the rest.

Paul Krugman, punchline:



Et tu, Superman? "Truth, justice, and the American way -- it's not enough anymore.  (Hat tip: HotAir)

At long last, renegade Chicago priest Michael Pfleger's priestly faculties have been suspended. The weak, fearful, politically-correct hierarchy has had a great hand in creating the decades-old scandal that is Pfleger. But better late than never, I guess.

Don't call them "critters," "beasts," or even "pets" -- it's "derogatory." And if you'll pardon the insensitive metaphor, they're nuts:

It goes on: “We invite authors to use the words ‘free-living’, ‘free-ranging’ or ‘free-roaming’ rather than ‘wild animals’

“For most, ‘wildness’ is synonymous with uncivilised, unrestrained, barbarous existence.

“There is an obvious prejudgment here that should be avoided.”

Prof Linzey and his co-editor Professor Priscilla Cohn, of Penn State University in the US, also hope to see some of the more colourful terms in the English language stamped out.

Phrases such as “sly as a fox, “eat like a pig” or “drunk as a skunk” are all unfair to animals, they claim.

“We shall not be able to think clearly unless we discipline ourselves to use less than partial adjectives in our exploration of animals and our moral relations with them," they say. 

If this is an example of "thinking clearly" I'll stick to my judgmental metaphors. Read the whole thing. It could've been lifted straight out of the Onion.

Also nuts, but a handy tool for eco-freaks: legal property rights for animals:

Australian research lecturer Dr John Hadley from the University of Western Sydney (UWS) said under his proposal, particular animals would be given legal property rights, and human guardians would be appointed to represent them in court.

Wesley Smith:

I know it is tempting to say, “This will never happen,” and move on.  But five years ago, would not the same thing have been said about “nature rights,” now legal in two countries and heading for a UN debate?  Wouldn’t it also have been said about granting intrinsic dignity to individual plants, now embodied in the Swiss Constitution?  Wouldn’t it have been said about the Great Ape Project that seeks to create a “community of equals” among humans and gorillas, chimps, orangutans, etc., which is now the public policy of Spain? In fact the best way to make sure these things do happen, is to assume they never will.

We're living in the age of anything goes and we should all understand that by now.

One more thing: Don't miss Mark Steyn as he fills in for Rush today and tomorrow. You can listen live here.

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Obama Trumped

Um . . . that was weird. While I was busy with real life this morning, the president called a surprise press conference to announce the belated release of his birth certificate. In a chiding tone, he announced that neither we nor he have time for such "silliness." Then he declined to answer substantive questions about changes in leadership at the CIA, dashing off to hop on Air Force One for a jaunt to Chicago and New York. Apparently taping an interview with Oprah and attending a political fundraiser are weighty presidential matters worthy of his time and atttention (and our tax dollars).

I've never been much of a birther but I have always wondered why Obama refused to release his birth certificate. I figured it must contain some bit of inconvenient truth that might embarrass our thin-skinned president. I guess not. You can view it here.

But you don't have to be a birther to wonder, why now? Wouldn't it have been more appropriate to release it sometime before November, 2008? Were Trump's incessant proddings more than Obama's fifth-rate temperament could bear? So it seems.

From the Corner, some interesting reactions from various members of the GOP:

Sarah Palin:

Media: admit it, Trump forced the issue. Now, don’t let the WH distract you w/the birth crt from what Bernanke says today. Stay focused, eh?

House speaker John Boehner’s spokesman Kevin Smith:

This has long been a settled issue. The Speaker’s focus is on cutting spending, lowering gas prices, and creating American jobs.

Newt Gingrich to Talking Points Memo:

All I would say is, why did it take so long? The whole thing is strange.

House majority leader Eric Cantor to Fox News:

I have criticized members of my own party for making this some kind of an issue and so I am really surprised that the White House is actually doing the same. … If the White House press secretary says that this is a sideshow, why aren’t we treating it as such and dealing with the bigger issues? … This is an issue that does not belong in the debate. There are much more important issues for us to be dealing with.

Heh -- Trump gloats that he is "proud and honored" that the president has finally been compelled to release the document, and now he wants Obama to release his college transcripts, too. Just to be clear, I'm no fan of Donald Trump, but this is becoming amusing. Score: Trump 1, Obama 0. The president had better add The Art of the Deal to his summer reading list.


Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

While we worry about fueling our cars, Obama hops Air Force One to tape Oprah

Andrew Malcolm has compiled a long list of our tone-deaf, ego-driven president's PR blunders. I suspect Obama's belief is that if the story is about him, it's all good. Not really:

Any one of these apparent missteps is inconsequential. However, accumulated over his 118 weeks in office, they create the impression of carelessness at best or, worse, arrogance.

What the White House issues are photos of a tieless, laughing Obama, feet up on the historic Oval Office desk, chatting on the phone system that he complains is so decrepit.

What the public sees, while it frets over stubborn unemployment and soaring gas prices, is a diffident Democrat who takes a 17-vehicle motorcade of SUVs and limos to be seen looking at clean-energy cars.

A pontificating president who suggests that one worried commuter buy a new car instead of complaining. [. . .]

To be sure, other presidents have played golf. Maybe not during three simultaneous wars with the awful accompanying human tolls.

Not likely working the putter the day after a colossal combined earthquake/tsunami natural disaster hit as close an ally as Japan. Or canceling a trip to the funeral of Poland's president and hitting the links.

It's one thing to urge Americans to vacation on the troubled Gulf coast last summer, while your wife flies off to Spain with a planeload of pals.

It's another to spend much of Earth Day in a 747 jumbo jet flying 2,300 miles cross-country back from a slew of multimillion-dollar West Coast fundraisers, as Obama did last week. [. . .]

But here's a selection of other Obama activities scheduled this week: Wednesday he and wife Michelle fly to Chicago on Air Force One. They will be there for three hours. The sole purpose: to tape an Oprah show. Obama will then fly to New York City. The sole purpose: a political fundraiser.

Air Force One costs the government $181,000 an hour to operate.

Let the little people agonize over the high price of gasoline and how they allocate every precious drop; Obama has an effective carte blanche over our tax dollars and will waste them as he sees fit.

When asked, "What can you do right now, immediately, to bring sanity to gas prices?" the president replied:

“We’ve got a real problem here,” he said. “This is obviously something that is affecting everybody. And we are looking at every option that is out there in terms of dealing with it. Now I tried to be honest with the American people when I made a presentation a couple weeks ago and I said there’s no silver bullet.”

He told you before: his power's not limitless! So quit nagging him. And remember what he said about a trade-in, schlubs.

The president said that there are a few things that have been done to help broadly speaking and more long-term -- including working with the auto industry to increase fuel efficiency standards on cars, and making investments in alternative fuel vehicles.

Er, I don't think that's helping. Gasoline is almost $4.00 here. But a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

“And we’ve got to continue to increase production,” Obama added, “We can do that in a safe and effective way. We don’t want to repeat of the oil spill that we had in the Gulf last year. But we’ve got to continue to make sure that US production is strong.”

I've got a feelin' he's foolin' with that last bit.*

But he has prepared some talking points to try to deflect the flak toward the nasty,
profit-making oil companies instead of toward Himself. So there's that.

*Update: EPA Blocks Oil Drilling in Alaska:

There are an estimated 27 billion barrels of oil waiting to be tapped in the Arctic Ocean, off the coast of Alaska. But after spending five years and nearly $4 billion, Shell Oil Company has been forced to abandon its efforts to drill for oil in the region.

With gas at $4 per gallon and higher, one might think that more oil would be a good thing. So what’s the road block? The Environmental Protection Agency. Fox News reports that the EPA is withholding necessary air permits because of a one square mile village of 245 people, 70 miles from the off-shore drilling site.

H/t: Doug Powers at MichelleMalkin.com

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

"Obamaflation"

Jeffrey Lord makes a prediction:

President Obama will not be re-elected. Period.

Why?

Obamaflation has arrived, and this is what it looks like.

Milk. A gallon of skim. At the local Giant in Central Pennsylvania:

January 11, 2011: $3.20
February 28, 2011: $3.24
March 6, 2011: $3.34
April 23. 2011: $3.48

That would be a 28 cent rise in a mere 102 days, from January to April of this year. The third year of the Obama misadventure.

Then there's the celery. Same sized bag. Same store.

January 11, 2011: $1.99 a bag.
March 6, 2011: $2.49 a bag.

A rise of 50 cents in 54 days.

And the gas price during the administration filled with those who think "drill baby drill" is so yesterday? As one internet photo [here] had it, the numbers for regular, premium. and diesel were replaced with "LOL," "OMG," and "WTF!" Thus be it to governments who seem not to understand that energy is what makes the economic engine -- and your car -- hum.

What does this mean? It means Barack Obama is not going to be re-elected president of the United States. Period.

But the president's not worried:

At a fundraiser in Southern California last week, where pump prices are the highest in the country, Obama acknowledged the political peril of high gas prices. He said, “My poll numbers go up and down depending on the latest crisis, and right now gas prices are weighing heavily on people.”

He tried to show that he feels motorists’ pain. “I admit, Secret Service doesn’t let me fill up the pump anymore,” he said. “But it hasn’t been that long since I did.”

He's not an elite! Really! And he feels your pain:

“It’s just another burden when things were already pretty tough,” he said.

But it's much more than "just another burden," because high gas prices affect the cost of everything we buy. And regular people, who must drive to get to work, school, and the grocery store, are feeling it. This man's expression says it all.

***

Update: I didn't quite know what to do with Obama's nonsensical "fill up the pump" remark. But Mark Steyn did. (For the smartest guy on the planet, Obama doesn't always make a lot of sense, does he?)

***

Please read the comments. As people are being painfully squeezed by Obama's energy policies, he searches for the real killer. Maybe that's why he spends so much time on the golf course.

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

A stupid DCCC ad for ignorant people

The Party of Ideas on the Ryan plan to fix Medicare:



Targets of this nonsense should be insulted. No argument, no facts, no acknowledgment of the central problem, that Medicare as we know it is literally unsustainable. But I guess this approach works just fine for a profoundly ignorant populace who's more interested in getting a few lame yuks from an old man making a fool of himself than in becoming informed about the nature of the problem and the plan to solve it.

The Ryan plan tries to fix Medicare by putting something better in its place; the Democrats deny that the problem exists. They can't both be right. So who's telling the truth? Instead of reflexively "liking" the DCCC's "save Medicare!" petition and moving on, liberals might try spending five minutes finding out what the Ryan plan is actually about:

The open-ended, blank-check nature of the Medicare subsidy threatens the solvency of this critical program and creates inexcusable levels of waste. This budget takes action where others have ducked. But because government should not force people to reorganize their lives, its reforms will not affect those in or near retirement in any way.

Starting in 2022, new Medicare beneficiaries will be enrolled in the same kind of health-care program that members of Congress enjoy. Future Medicare recipients will be able to choose a plan that works best for them from a list of guaranteed coverage options. This is not a voucher program but rather a premium-support model. A Medicare premium-support payment would be paid, by Medicare, to the plan chosen by the beneficiary, subsidizing its cost.

In addition, Medicare will provide increased assistance for lower-­income beneficiaries and those with greater health risks. Reform that empowers individuals—with more help for the poor and the sick—will guarantee that Medicare can fulfill the promise of health security for America's seniors.

But whatever you do, don't listen to the president. FactCheck.Org finds Obama's characterization of Ryan's plan to be just a bit off:

President Barack Obama misrepresented the House Republicans' budget plan at times and exaggerated its impact on U.S. residents during an April 13 speech on deficit reduction.

-  He said the GOP plan would replace Medicare with "a voucher program that leaves seniors at the mercy of the insurance industry." That's an exaggeration. Nothing would change for those 55 and older. Those younger would get federal subsidies to buy private insurance from a Medicare exchange set up by the government.

Et cetera. Sigh.

H/t: Gateway Pundit

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Video: Easter Parade

One of the sweetest numbers from any musical ever:



And Mark Steyn has done a special Song of the Week podcast on this Irving Berlin classic. Learn the genesis of the song as well as the history of Easter bonnets and parades. Also some background on this remarkable song:




Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

He is not here, but is risen

But on the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came to the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled back from the sepulchre. And going in, they found not the body of the Lord Jesus.

And it came to pass, while they are astonished in mind at this, behold two men stood by them in shining apparel. And as they were afraid, and bowed down their countenance towards the ground, they said to them:

Why seek you the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.

Image taken from the SJC website.

Happy Easter. Enjoy your feast. Here's one for the ears: the gorgeous Kyrie from Haydn's Missa in Angustiis (Mass in Time of Trouble or Nelson Mass):



Other parts here, here, here, here, and here.

Bonus: The Sanctus from Haydn's Little Organ Mass:



Once upon a time in Chicago, I had the joy of listening to the choir practice this over and over again in the darkened, empty church.

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

"Not bad for a 3-year-old"

RS McCain nails it:

Let’s face it, folks: When it comes to exposing liberal media bias, Trig Palin has probably accomplished almost as much as Brent Bozell. Not bad for a 3-year-old.

His observation was in reference to this video (content warning for the kiddies):



Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Big government and the damage done

Whether the partially-awakened American people will force the government to reverse course in time remains to be seen. I'm not feeling very hopeful right now.

Steyn on the damage done by way too much government:

What plans have you made for 2023? The average individual attempts to insure against future uncertainty in a relatively small number of ways: You buy a house because that's the surest way to preserve and increase wealth. "Safe as houses," right? But Fannie/Freddie subprime mumbo-jumbo and other government interventions clobbered the housing market. You get an education because that way you'll always have "something to fall back on." But massive government-encouraged expansion of "college" led Americans to run up a trillion dollars' worth of student debt to acquire ever more devalued ersatz sheepskin in worthless pseudo-disciplines. We're not talking about the wilder shores of the stock market – Internet start-ups, South Sea bubbles and tulip mania – but two of the safest, dullest investments a modestly prudent person might make to protect himself against the vicissitudes of an unknown future. And we profoundly damaged both of them in pursuit of fictions.

RTR. John Hinderaker rightly calls it a Ponzi game. Also from Mr. Hinderaker, Obama's scam to deflect blame for the painful (to consumers) rise in gas prices under his  administration:

It is getting hard to keep track of all of the disgraceful things Barack Obama is doing, but we shouldn't overlook his effort to blame high energy prices on "speculators." In fact, the high price of petroleum, which in turn raises the cost of everything else, is due to a combination of market forces and the Obama administration's terrible energy policies. When you have an administration that openly wishes for higher energy costs, it shouldn't be a surprise when prices go up.

But Obama doesn't want to take the blame for the consequences of his policies, so he follows his usual Alinskyite policy--fabricate a villain and demonize him. Here, the villain is a group of nameless "speculators" who supposedly are driving up the price of oil. Obama has now gotten the Department of Justice and other agencies into the act.

Andy McCarthy on that:

As the “Arab Spring” spooks the market, and Obama’s economic, monetary and energy policies increase inflationary pressure, gas prices keep pushing upward, now well over $4/gallon in many places. So, rather than look in the mirror, President Obama has reached again for his dog-eared copy of Rules for Radicals and searched out a culprit to demonize. And the winner is … those bad “traders and speculators,” who, he suggested yesterday, could be “taking advantage of American consumers for their own short-term gains.” [. . .]

There is no need for a task force on gas price gouging. The Federal Trade Commission already is a task force on gas price gouging. As the Congressional Research Service reported in 2007, the FTC has long been responsible for monitoring gas prices. In 2005, the Energy Policy Act tasked the commission to investigate whether gas prices were being “artificially manipulated by reducing refinery capacity or by any other form of market manipulation or price gouging practices.” Following Hurricane Katrina, the gouge-hunting mandate was further enhanced. And the extensive FTC scrutiny is separate and apart from investigative action in most states, which already have gas price-gouging laws.

What the president gave us yesterday was pure theater: Make a show of aggressively investigating a phantom — one that is already scrutinized to a fare thee well — in order to obscure the real problem: the president himself.

RTR.

I'm inclined to agree with this assessment:

Obama will not survive this, no matter how slick talking and toothy grinnin he is. He should be hearing the creaking of the coffin lid right about July. When average Joe is paying $80 a fill-up and he hears about subsidies to South America so they can “drill, baby, drill”, Obama will be chased into the windmill with flaming clubs.

But . . . I wish I were so sure. Because we still have the disgraceful, integrity-free liberal media, doing everything they can to protect their guy from blame. Even when the cost of everything we buy is going up, when our wallets are empty and we can't get from point A to point B without serious planning and sacrifice, public opinion is heavily driven by the media, and they're still grossly biased. They drove the demonization of Bush and continue to prop up their savior. See Media Blamed Bush for Rising Gas Prices, Fail to Blame Obama for Similar Hike in Costs. Shameless.

Many thanks to MichelleMalkin.com for the link.
Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

State of Massachusetts pushes abortions on the young

The child-devouring monsters are on the loose in the state of Massachusetts in the form of a website created by the Mass. Department of Public Health and targeted toward the young. Michael Graham:

As the Herald reported yesterday, the Patrick administration is using your money to promote abortion. Not merely to educate or inform, but to push the abortion “choice” itself — in particular, abortions without parental knowledge or consent.

This taxpayer-funded Web site is MariaTalks.com. And boy, does “Maria” love to talk. About sex. Maria talks to girls in ways that have gotten Pittsburgh Steeler Ben Roethlisberger in trouble with the law.

Actually Maria doesn’t exist. She’s a computer-generated character on this state-funded Web site who “answers questions” from teens. The Herald focused on “Maria’s” (aka “The Department of Public Health’s”) comments about how abortion is “more common than you might think” and “safe and effective, though some people may experience temporary discomfort.”

Maria apparently studied writing in the Obama White House. In the spirit of “spending reductions in the tax code,” she describes an abortion as a procedure “when the contents of the uterus are removed.”

As for the contents of this Web site, how the heck could anyone in the Patrick administration sign off on this? MariaTalks.com doesn’t just explain abortion, it encourages teens to make this life-and-death moral decision. It downplays the emotional aspects, ignores research on possible long-term negative effects, and as for going off to get an abortion without telling your parents, MariaTalks.com says:

“I know it sounds crazy . . . this really can be done and young women do this all the time here in Massachusetts.” [. . .]

There’s a lot of “crazy” talk on this Web site, and on the MariaTalks.com Facebook page, too. (Of course there’s a Facebook page. This is for kids, remember?)

On “Maria’s Going Out Guide,” girls get suggestions about what to bring on dates. Condoms — at least two — and lube. Maria also suggests girls should be prepared to say “no.”

“I know this seems crazy but like if there is something I don’t want to do I say no,” our tax-funded avatar tells teens. Imagine that — a guy wanting a high school girl to do something she doesn’t want to do. Why, that’s just plain crazy!

And if you're a kid with questions about about "GLBTQ,"  Maria offers these pearls of wisdom: ". . . either way is cool, as long as it feels right for you" and "Ignoring your feelings just keeps you from discovering yourself." Abortion, too, should be decided on the basis of "what feels right." What could go wrong?

Why "Maria"? Could it be that the state of Massachusetts thinks hispanic girls are having too many live babies?

If this all sounds a little familiar, you might be thinking of the city of Philadelphia's campaign to promote sex among eleven year-olds.

H/t: The Corner

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Images of Holy Week

The Altar of Repose at St. John Cantius in Chicago:

Crucified:

Praying at the tomb:

Click here for many more images of Holy Week at SJC in 2010.

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Trumpisms

I linked to this Jonah Goldberg column earlier but in case you missed it, here's a sample of the Awesome Clownishness of Trump:

Check out his recent interview with CBN’s David Brody. Discussing his religious beliefs, he volunteered, “I think the Bible is certainly, it is the book. It is the thing.” That sounds more like a Larry King blurb than a declaration of faith. And can you just feel the passion when asked how often he attends church? “As much as I can. Always on Christmas. Always on Easter. Always when there’s a major occasion. And during the Sundays.”

Oh well, “during the Sundays.” Never mind then.

Haley Barbour can’t win because he’s too southern and it’s a bad look for a good ol’ boy with a drawl to run against the first black president. Well, we’re in luck. Because as Trump explained last week, “I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”

That may be true. But how will “the blacks” feel after the DNC starts distributing excerpts of Trumped, an unofficial biography by a former employee who writes that his old boss hated having a black accountant because “laziness is a trait in blacks,” and, “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

He's got a million of 'em! Another great idea from the Donald:

I called up the White House about a year ago," the boisterous billionaire told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos. "And I saw that they were having lots of functions for people like the president of China … and I said, 'Listen, every time I see a function, you put an old broken canvas tent that they probably pay some guy, some local guy a fortune for.' I said, 'I will build you, free of charge,' to a very high official at the White House, 'one of the great ballrooms of the world,' " Trump said.

The official was David Axelrod, who confirmed with ABC that the proposed ballroom would be a lot like the gaudy white-and-gold spectacle at Trump's 118-room, 65,000-square-foot-plus Palm Beach, Fla., estate, Mar-A-Lago.

I think Trump is running for the wrong party's nomination. Combining as he does the narcissism and fraudulance of Obama with the buffoonery and blabber-mouthedness of Biden, he's the liberal dream ticket rolled into one man.

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Thursday various & sundry

Via Nice Deb, the White House Dossier sheds more light on Obama's priorities:

 President Obama is opting not to visit the tornado-ravaged areas of the South, choosing instead to embark today on a three day tour out West where he will try to boost his political standing by talking up his approach to the deficit and raise millions for himself and fellow Democrats.

The tornadoes, part of a storm that rampaged though six states Saturday, resulted in one of the worst disasters of any kind in the United States since the Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Scores were left injured or homeless while 45 people were killed – about four times as many as died in the Gulf oil rig explosion and the subsequent oil spill last year. In North Carolina alone, there were nearly two-dozen storm-related deaths Saturday, with 130 homes destroyed and an estimated 700 more damaged.

Read the rest. This is consistent with Obama's usual response to crises. He ignores them for as long as he can. If, at some point, he gets a heads-up from his handlers that he needs to say something, he'll then reluctantly take time out from leisure or campaigning to make a weak attempt at a placatory statement.

He wasn't into that whole "work" thing as a college student, either. Power Line:

Obama's historical ignorance could be a full time beat for somebody who does this work for a living, and it tells us something truly important about Barack Obama. His ignorance is as broad as it is deep. Not that you couldn't deduce that on your own from his performance on the job.

Yesterday he was at it again, in his peevish interview with the feisty local broadcast reporter from Texas. Why are you so unpopular in Texas? the reporter asked. Obama being Obama, he was unable to laugh off the question and say he'd do better next time around. Obama responded: "Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons."

Has the guy ever heard of LBJ? You know, the fellow who first brought us socialized medicine? Has he ever read a single volume of Robert Caro's monumental biography of LBJ? It's hard to miss the extent to which the Democratic Party dominated Texas politics for the duration of LBJ's (long) political career.

Yes indeed. Read the rest. Pretty shocking level of ignorance of recent political history, no? I never thought Obama was a guy with any genuine intellectual curiosity. That's just part of the myth. First and foremost, he's an opportunist.

Along those lines, David Kahane's latest: The Country's in the Very Best of Hands

Which is why I think the Punahou Kid needs a time out, a rest period. Not another vacation, exactly — a few more fact-finding missions to check out the thong bikinis at Ipanema and even the staunchest lefties, such as myself, Eric Alterman, and the fetching Sally Kohn, are finally going to figure out that Hussein really enjoys only the Head of State part of the presidential gig, and would prefer to outsource the Head of Government unpleasantness to some other, lesser royal, such as Maerose Prizzi of the Baltimore Prizzis, or Horseless Harry Reid of the Rory (No Last Name) Reids, or Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground Ayerses.

No, I was thinking more along the lines of a limited-run Broadway revival/reworking of Li’l Abner, only this time with Btfsplk as the real main character. We keep the score by Gene De Paul and of course the lyrics by Johnny Mercer, except we spread the wealth around, which means giving all the best songs to our title character, Li’l Barry:

Read on.


In a profile of Rep. Paul Ryan on the road in Wisconsin selling his budget plan, Christian Schneider makes a logical argument for a Ryan presidential run in 2012 (emphasis added):

Ryan’s budget plan will continue to be debated in congressional office buildings, at family barbeques, and on street corners. But if there is one weakness in the recent public rollout for the “Path to Prosperity,” it is that it is a singular document tied to a singular man — one with a preternatural ability to explain it. In order to sell Paul Ryan’s plan, you have to be Paul Ryan.

Thus, if the consequences for the nation are as dire as Ryan predicts, it may not be hyperbolic to say the weight of the world rests on his shoulders. Without his dogged determination, the desire within Congress to avert fiscal Armageddon simply wouldn’t exist. And if Ryan were to be caught in some kind of scandal, his plan would likely never cross the lips of another member of Congress.

But it is his willingness to be the nation’s fiscal whistleblower that has catapulted Ryan into the political stratosphere. He is now the nation’s foremost Obama nemesis — and although he’s eight years younger than the president, Ryan looks more and more like the adult in the relationship. In a presidential debate, Ryan would be the last candidate Obama would want to see walking across the stage to shake his hand.

Which is why Ryan’s constituents still think there’s a chance he’ll run for president. They believe that if the path the nation is on is as dire as he says it is, Ryan has an obligation to run. Allowing Obama to veto all his good ideas until 2016 belies the budgetary urgency Ryan has been pitching indefatigably since being made budget chairman.

I don't think he'll run but I wouldn't mind if he did.

Along those lines, can we all now move on past the absurd notion of Donald Trump as a conservative?


Passing a law is one thing; getting compliance is another. DC Mayor Vincent Gray gets a letter from Congress:

Senate and House Republicans are urging Democrat Vincent Gray, the mayor of the District of Columbia, to “immediately” and “faithfully” implement the Hyde amendment in Washington.

In a letter to the mayor obtained by National Review Online, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah), Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.) and others press Gray to ensure that “no further taxpayer funds are expended for elective abortion.”

The lawmakers also ask Gray to provide Congress with “detailed information about abortion funding in the District during the period in which the D.C. Hyde amendment was not in place.” The mayor, they add, should respond “no later than May 6, 2011.”

The corrupt DC government isn't known for its respect for the law. Why should the Hyde amendment be any different?


Lowlife: Wonkette Goes After Trig Palin Again, Again. Maybe someday Jack Steuf will be ashamed of himself. I hope so.


Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Get ready for more corrupt campaign financing in 2012

It worked so well the first time. Why change anything?

We knew at the time that Obama's 2008 campaign donation machine was corrupt. But as another campaign gets underway, here's a reminder from Michelle Malkin:

Subsequent digging by conservative bloggers found that the Obama campaign’s donor website appeared to intentionally disable security protocols and facilitate illegal donations with bogus names, shell addresses and untraceable credit cards. Among Obama’s online “donors”: Bart Simpson, Family Guy, Daffy Duck, King Kong, O.J. Simpson, Mr. Doodad Pro, John Galt, Della Ware, Crazy Eight and Adolfe Hitler.

Michelle follows up on the FEC's investigation, and the findings aren't pretty: Obama’s crooked campaign cash-o-matic machine

Last week, the laggard watchdogs at the Federal Election Commission announced an audit of the Obama 2008 campaign committee — which raised a record-setting $750 million. White House flacks are downplaying the probe as a “routine review.”

But there’s nothing routine about the nearly $3 million Obama has spent on legal expenses to address federal campaign finance irregularities and inquiries. Roll Call reports that Obama’s campaign legal fees have exceeded all other House and presidential campaign committees, including members of Congress under ethics investigations.

There’s nothing routine about the whopping $6 million that Team Obama has refunded to individual donors since Obama took office.
And there’s nothing routine about the 26 warning letters to Obama for America totaling “more than 1,500 pages of questions and data that outlined compliance concerns — including the longest one ever sent to a presidential candidate,” according to Roll Call.

Read the rest. What's to stop this from happening again? Obama's scruples? An FEC audit three years after the fact? Something is seriously wrong with this system.

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Campaigning isn't leading

This is what we have to look forward to from now until November 6, 2012: a fresh packet of lies to parse through every day. Before a community college crowd today, Obama lied about the cause of the 2007 Minnesota bridge collapse:



Ed Morrissey calls it "dishonest in the extreme": 

But being from Minneapolis, the implication that the St. Anthony Falls bridge collapse in August 2007 had to do with infrastructure spending isn’t just ignorant of basic civics, it’s downright false and offensive.

The bridge collapse occurred because of a design defect, a conclusion reached by the National Transportation Safety Board. The bridge was designed and built in an era when engineers thought that redundant systems were both unnecessary and inefficient.  Gusset plates installed at the time of the bridge’s building were too thin, and without any redundancy to account for a major failure on a single point, it was a tragedy waiting to happen from day 1.  It had nothing to do with any lack of maintenance, and in fact collapsed because of scheduled maintenance to the deck that inadvertently destabilized it to the point of collapse.

It’s dishonest in the extreme to use this tragedy as an argument that we neglected our infrastructure, and ghoulish to use the dead for a false political point. Obama should be ashamed of himself.

Never in life. His examples and anecdotes invariably turn out to be false. It's his modus operandi. He also totally misrepresented the Ryan budget plan and impugned the motives of its supporters:

The president whittled the debt debate to a matter of basic philosophy. He said he wants shared sacrifice and Republicans do not.

“We can’t just tell the wealthiest among us, ‘You don’t have to do a thing. You just sit there and relax and everybody else, we’re gonna solve this problem,’” he said.

Sigh. Par for the course, almost not worth mentioning. But not only is he lying here; he's refusing to deal honestly with the looming economic crisis. The president won't even consider a course correction. Instead, he's going on about potholes, high speed rail, and broadband. Frankly, he should resign if he's not prepared to lead on this.

Linked at MichelleMalkin.com -- thanks!
Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

A mess in Misrata

What President Obama said on March 18, 2011:

Qaddafi must stop his troops from advancing on Benghazi, pull them back from Ajdabiya, Misrata, and Zawiya, and establish water, electricity and gas supplies to all areas. Humanitarian assistance must be allowed to reach the people of Libya.

Let me be clear, these terms are not negotiable. These terms are not subject to negotiation. If Qaddafi does not comply with the resolution, the international community will impose consequences, and the resolution will be enforced through military action.

What's happening today in Misrata via Leila Fadel:

For the 500,000 residents of this once-prosperous port city, there is nowhere to run.

The city is surrounded by forces loyal to Moammar Gaddafi. His snipers lurk on rooftops and peer from open windows. Entire neighborhoods are off-limits because of indiscriminate artillery and mortar fire. Hospitals are overflowing with the wounded, some of them children.

For residents, it is not just a question of whether to fight, but how long they can survive. After living under siege for nearly two months, many are reaching their breaking point as Gaddafi escalates his attacks and supplies become ever more scarce. Lines for bread and gasoline go on for blocks. Sewage has seeped into the water system. Most of the city is run on generators or has no power. Cellphone service has been cut.

Obama's "non-negotiable" demands were just bluster. The consequences he has been willing to impose aren't enough to force Qaddafi out, protect civilians, or allow humanitarian assistance in. The situation is terrible, and consistent with what many predicted  when Obama announced his non-war:

Among residents, there was mounting anger at what they saw as the international coalition’s failure to protect them against Gaddafi’s barrages.

“We are officially let down and disappointed by NATO,” said Mohammed, a city council spokesman who uses only one name for safety reasons. He said there apparently were no airstrikes in the area in the past three days, allowing Gaddafi’s forces to intensify their shelling of the port and the city’s residential and industrial areas.

“What is the mandate of NATO? It is protection of civilians, but civilians are dying in Misurata,” he said. “If they cannot do it, they should say they cannot do it.”

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Texas messes with Obama

And he doesn't care for it:



In Case Obama has Forgotten, He Lost Texas by 11.7 Points

Mean streak: Obama is not as nice as he looks

H/t: Hot Air headlines
Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Escalating decline

Steyn on signs of decline:

Likewise, the escalators. In “developing nations,” they’re a symbol of progress. In decaying nations, they’re an emblem of decline. In pre-Thatcher Britain, the escalators seized up, and stayed unrepaired for months on end. Eventually, someone would start them up again, only for them to break down 48 hours later and be out of service for another 18 months. It was always the up escalators. You were in a country that could only go downhill: All chutes, no ladders. 

Mark goes on to mention DC Metro's dysfunctional escalators. Sure, many of them don't work at all, but it's worse than that. After the Stewart-Colbert rally last fall, an escalator at the L'Enfant Plaza stop, overloaded with sanity-restorers, lost braking function and gave them an insane, gravity-enhanced ride to the bottom, where they were dumped in a heap:



The DC escalators have some another quirk; every now and then they like to eat people. When riders least expect it, a portion of an escalator will collapse, opening up an inconvenient gap, sometimes at the top --

When Michael Murphy, 51, got off the train, he noticed that two of the three escalators servicing the station were not working. The one that was working was not surprisingly bringing people downstairs, and of no help.

So Murphy and some other commuters did what any of us would have done in the situation: walk up the stationary escalator (Do you call them stairs?). What was a small inconvenience escalated (pun intended) quickly:

Gaping in front of him was a 4- or 5-foot-long gap where several escalator steps normally would have been at the top of the conveyance.

According to the post, the only way across was a few highly greased, one-inch wide rods. Apparently it was a dramatic trip over the gap, but all made it unscathed.

-- and sometimes at the bottom, during operation, swallowing a couple of hapless commuters:

The bottom two or three steps of the escalator literally collapsed! They fell through leaving a gaping hole at the bottom of the stairs. Two or three people fell in. I would say it was about a three foot drop into jagged steel from the overturned stairs, not to mention whatever else is underneath the escalator. The people managed to pull themselves out and didn't look seriously injured, but one woman was pretty shaken up.

Steyn:

Incremental decline is easy to get used to. I’m sure a few of my correspondent’s fellow commuters are equally droll about it and a few more get angry, but untold thousands more just shuffle uncomplainingly up and down, scuffing shoes and bumping backpacks. That’s the trick with decline: persuading people to accept it.

A bit of that drollness:

More Peeps dioramas here.

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

The real death panel

Stanley Kurtz on IPAB:

They’re back. Rationing, death panels, socialism, all those nasty old words that helped bring Republicans victory in 2010, and that came to seem so impolite after November of that year. They’re back because of IPAB. Remember that acronym. It stand for The Independent Payment Advisory Board. IPAB is the real death panel, the true seat of rationing, and the royal road to health-care socialism. President Obama won’t admit to any of that, but his speech in response to Paul Ryan’s plan did push IPAB out of the shadows and into public view, however briefly. If Republicans don’t seize the IPAB issue and run with it, they’ll be losers in 2012. Policy wonks and political junkies may know a bit about this health-care rationing panel, but most Americans have barely heard of it. That has got to change. And the only way to expose and explain the dangers of IPAB is to tell the truth about Barack Obama. [. . .]

A month ago here at NRO, my EPPC colleague James Capretta described the real plan by which the president and his allies aim to close the fiscal gap. Their goal, says Capretta, is to work by stealth, so voters never fully realize that the government has adopted their strategy. The first part of the plan involves taxing “the rich” for Medicare and health insurance, but without Reagan-style indexing of taxes to inflation. That way, inflation-driven “bracket creep” will raise health-care taxes on the middle class without congressional Democrats ever having to vote for new taxes. (See Ross Douthat on this today.)

The second part of the plan involves IPAB-imposed price controls and the large-scale rationing of health care that implies. But to work, IPAB’s authority has got to extend beyond Medicare. The idea, says Capretta, is to wait until the massive financial strains brought on by Obamacare bring calls for cost control. That’s when the Democrats will push for IPAB’s authority to be extended beyond Medicare to all of Obamacare, at which point we’ll be very close to a single-payer health-care system with Canadian-style rationing.

Read the rest and pass it on.

***
Then read Congressional Democrats Buck Obama, Call for IPAB’s Repeal. Excerpt:

Democratic representative Allyson Schwartz (Pa.) has released a letter “strongly” urging her colleagues to support legislation to repeal the IPAB.  Drawing attention to the constitutionally dubious nature of delegating quasi-legislative power to a largely unchecked body of 15 bureaucrats, Rep. Schwartz writes, “Congress is a representative body and must assume responsibility for legislating sound health care policy for Medicare beneficiaries, including those policies related to payment systems.”

“Abdicating this responsibility,” she continues, “would undermine our ability to represent the needs of the seniors and disabled in our communities.” She adds, “I cannot condone the implementation of a flawed policy that will risk beneficiary access to care.”

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

No cheers for longer school day

Hooray for state-funded all-day kindergarten in Indiana?

My Man Mitch just announced that due to a forecasted increase in state revenues over the next two years, full-day kindergarten will now be provided by public schools. That’s personally awesome for me, because Mr. Mock and I were preparing to budget for the $1900 it would have cost starting this fall to send Mini-Mock to full day kindergarten. But more importantly, it’s fulfilling one of Mitch’s campaign promises. And in addition to that, money is also being set aside for performance-based rewards for the best teachers.

Daniels deserves high praise for Indiana's solvency. And I understand why he campaigned on making all-day public kindergarten more available; it's a popular move among parents who would otherwise have to pay for daycare or private kindergarten to fill out the hours between 9:00 and 3:00. Free money!

But I don't know why conservatives are cheering. That $1900 isn't a tax cut which allows the family to keep more of its own earnings; it's tax dollars spent to extend the state's reach into our kids' lives. Lest we forget, public schools aren't politically neutral environments. Sure, lots of parents want what Daniels is providing. That's part of the problem. They have the obvious financial interest gleefully admitted to by the blogger above, and they reflexively swallow the more-school-is-better theory, or at least pay it lip service. One Indiana parent:

Giving them that opportunity to get used to being in an all-day classroom structure is a huge advantage in preparing them for first grade and beyond.

And why not full-time "school" for four year-olds (or three, or two?), to prepare them for the long slog of kindergarten and the drudgery "beyond"? I don't buy the argument that a longer day at an earlier age gives kids more "advantages" than would a few more hours spent at home drawing pictures, reading stories, playing with brothers and sisters, and generally living life in a family instead of in an institution.

President Obama and Arne Duncan would like to make state-run preschool universal, extend the school day even further, and put an end to the summer vacation. An alarming number of children are already consuming three meals a day at school. It's a pernicious anti-family trend that conservatives should resist.

Secretary Duncan:

“Where students have longer days, longer weeks, longer years — that’s making a difference.” 

Longer days and years make better drones and weaker families. Yeah, I'm biased. See also:
Government school is bad for kids
Why public schools can't get better
Public indoctri-cation (linked above)

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Sunday reads: Liberals are tolerant to a fault

Good one from Sally Kohn at the Washington Post -- Liberals are just too tolerant for their own good:

The real problem isn’t a liberal weakness. It’s something liberals have proudly seen as a strength — our deep-seated dedication to tolerance. In any given fight, tolerance is benevolent, while intolerance gets in the good punches. Tolerance plays by the rules, while intolerance fights dirty. The result is round after round of knockouts against liberals who think they’re high and mighty for being open-minded but who, politically and ideologically, are simply suckers.

Ooookay then. Let's review one week's worth of liberal tolerance, courtesy of Nice Deb:

Ed Markey (D-ranged): GOP “Trying To Destroy The Whole Wide World”

Tingles: “30,000 People Will Die Because of Paul Ryan’s Budget”…

Bill Maher To Rachel Maddow On The GOP: ‘I Hate Them As Much As You Do’

Newsweek: “GOP Views Poor As Parasites”…

DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz: GOP Budget Plan Kills Seniors

Olbermann: S.E. Cupp Should Have Never Been Born, Proves ‘Necessity’ of Planned Parenthood

Jim Wallis Says Paul Ryan Is a Bully & Hypocrite Who’s Never Been Around Poor People and Has No Courage

Chris Matthews Mocks Fox News as a ‘Roach Motel,’ Admits He’s Gone Easy on Colleague Donald Trump

Democrat New Tone: Pa Politician Asks If She Can Kill A Colleague, ‘Blow His Brains Out”

See Nice Deb for the details and vote for your faves! (Bonus tolerance: New Tone: Videos show “tolerant” left wingers hurling racist and sexist slurs at Tea Party rally)

On Ms. Kohn's bizarro planet, Obama is just too nice a guy:

Yet, this is the essence of what Obama, the community organizer, came to Washington to do: not to push an agenda but to change the culture of the capital to be more inclusive, open-minded, civil and democratic. Unfortunately, there are no points for playing nice.

Wow.


Other items:

I like this title: President Whatever finds things not going his way


Ed Driscoll on a Detroit barrister's idea on how to save his dying city: stop enforcing certain laws and “We would attract young people. You make Detroit a fun city. A place they want to live and they would flock here.”


In a Maine school district, iPads are required, books are optional:

All kindergarten students in the city of Auburn, Maine, will be receiving an iPad 2 beginning in the next school year, according to online reports. A school official called the iPad 2 "more important than a book."

The website for the CBS affiliate WGME in Portland, Maine, reported that last Wednesday the schools committee for the Auburn School District approved the plan at a cost of $200,000 for the 2011-2012 school year.

District Superintendent Tom Morrill is quoted in the story as saying that the iPad 2 from Apple Inc. is a vital learning tool: “What we’re seeing is that this is an essential tool – even more important than a book. It’s a learning tool they need to have.”

Because before we had computers no one was able to learn how to read or do math.

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Music break: 'S Wonderful

The Gershwin classic:




Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Dude, where's my cool phone?

Oh man:

"The Oval Office, I always thought I was going to have really cool phones and stuff," he said during a small fundraising event at a Chicago restaurant. "I'm like, c'mon guys, I'm the president of the United States. Where's the fancy buttons and stuff and the big screen comes up? It doesn't happen."

What wit! In style and content, he's fourteen twelve nine years old.

H/t: Michelle Malkin

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Saturday various & sundry: Trump, et cetera

Your Saturday Steyn:

But the United States Postal Service has now gone the Hollywood apocalyptics one better and produced a somewhat subtler image of civilizational ruin. The other day the post office apologized for its new stamp honoring Lady Liberty. Due to an unfortunate error, the stamp shows not the 19th-century Statue of Liberty that stands in New York Harbor but the 1990s replica that stands at the New York–New York Casino in Las Vegas.

An ersatz statue of pseudo-liberty standing guard over the world’s biggest gambling operation: What better way to round out a week in which the Republicans pretended to pass the most historically historic budget cut in history while the president pretended to come up with a plan to address the debt?

RTR.

Dan Riehl on the joke that is the Trump candidacy:

Seriously, the future of the nation hangs in the balance and some morons want to saddle up with a rich, self-promoting, rodeo clown? Please just turn in your voter registration, or join the idiots on the progressive side, now. That's precisely who you would be helping with this nonsense.

RTR. I haven't been able to figure out why we're supposed to accept Trump as a conservative just because he says he is. Or why in the world anyone would want to replace one unqualified narcissist for another. Or why Rush Limbaugh keeps giving him airtime. It would be nice to have a capitalist in the Oval Office again, but surely we can do better than a blow-hard who lives for the spotlight. 

Via the Right Scoop, Mark Levin "rips Donald Trump to shreds":

Levin points out many things about Trump that show he is no conservative, but a few of the glaring ones are the fact that he support Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio twice, as well as calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush, accusing him of lying to get us in the war. Oh yeah, and he supported Universal Health Care in America, the Canadian style.

Audio here. A third-party candidacy would be sure suicide for conservatives in 2012, which at least explains why the media is trying to promote him as a legitimate candidate.

Steyn on Trump:

MS: Well, I think he is serious about it. And you know the strange thing about this is that the Republicans play into his hands. The more they go the John Boehner line, the more they’re up on TV trying to explain to us why the most historic budget cut in the whole of historic history actually increases spending, the more people roll their eyes and say to hell with, a plague on the entire political class, let’s just take a guy who’s a proven success at something, even if it’s only real estate and reality TV shows, and take a flier on him. And so I think any kind of Trump phenomenon is in a sense a response to the sort of tentativeness and lack of ability to make things happen that the Republicans are currently demonstrating.

HH: Any doubt in your mind, though, that if it was a Perot reprise, and Trump was the third party candidate, he would siphon off enough to just hand the presidency back to Barack Obama?

MS: Oh, yes, I think that’s true. But I think undoubtedly, that a Trump third party run guarantees an Obama second term. But you know, at some point, real Republican candidates have to get in this game, have to get into this game for real. And this is no time, this is no time for the tentativeness we’re seeing from the Republican establishment. That will just, that’s just driving traffic to the Trump end of the spectrum. 

Are you listening, Mike Pence? You can still change your mind.


Qaddafi's back and sporting a stylish new look.


I had totally forgotten Obama's pledge to simplify taxes. And so has he:

When Barack Obama was running for president, he promised voters a simpler tax code. "When I'm president," he said, "we'll put in place a system where 40 million Americans . .. can do their taxes in less than five minutes."

But President Obama hasn't made good on that promise. Not only is there no five-minute tax form, but since he took office the byzantine tax code has grown increasingly complex. This year, it will take the average taxpayer 23 hours just to fill out form 1040 — up from 21 hours last year, according to the IRS. It now takes seven hours to fill out the so-called 1040 EZ.

Read on for the gory details.


Obama's new deficit commission is just silly. Allahpundit:

What’s the difference, you ask, between this and the Bowles/Simpson Deficit Commission whose plan went nowhere last year? I … don’t know. The members are different, for one thing. Plus, the Deficit Commission was designed to let Obama avoid leadership on the debt crisis during his first two years in office. The deficit “working group” is really more designed to let Obama avoid leadership on the debt crisis during his second two years in office. So, there’s a difference.

Even Congress thinks it's dumb.


For the record, I'm skeptical and unfit to evaluate these brain studies. But I'll go along with the conclusion (already generally accepted) that Shakespeare is good for the mind. According to a researcher, his rule-breaking, verbal virtuosity stimulates brain activity:

Consider these examples, in which Shakespeare grammatically shifts the function of words:

An adjective is made into a verb: 'thick my blood' (The Winter's Tale)
A pronoun is made into a noun: 'the cruellest she alive' (Twelfth Night)
A noun is made into a verb: 'He childed as I fathered' (King Lear)

May we call it grammar-shifting? Steyn just did it above, with his use of "apocalyptics." And kids do it all the time, especially turning nouns into verbs, as in "friending." One of my toddlers once told me his pancake-flat pillow "didn't have any comf in it," making up his own brand new noun from the adjective "comfy." I've teased my sons a bit for their propensity to stick -ed's and -ing's on the ends of anything and everything -- like "prestiging" in Call of Duty. But I will no longer mock -- it's a sign of a lively mind, and downright Shakespearean:

For Davis, we need creative language "to keep the brain alive." He points out that so much of our language today, written in bullet points or simple sentences, fall into predictability. "You can often tell what someone is going to say before they finish their sentence" he says. "This represents a gradual deadening of the brain."

Quick, somebody, get Obama's lazy, brain-dead speechwriters a copy of this --

Last item: The Trig Truthers are still out there. Yeah, they're nuts.


Linked at MichelleMalkin.com -- thank you.

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Obama refuses to defund czars, flips on signing statements

Wow is right:

One rider – Section 2262 — de-funds certain White House adviser positions – or “czars.” The president in his signing statement declares that he will not abide by it.

He doesn't care for other riders as well. Jake Tapper:

Another rider bans the use of federal funds to transfer detainees from Guantanamo to foreign countries unless certain conditions are met.

“Requiring the executive branch to certify to additional conditions would hinder the conduct of delicate negotiations with foreign countries and therefore the effort to conclude detainee transfers in accord with our national security,” the president wrote.

Another rider denies the ability of the Obama administration to prosecute Gitmo detainees in criminal court.

“The prosecution of terrorists in Federal court is a powerful tool in our efforts to protect the Nation and must be among the options available to us,” the president wrote. “Any attempt to deprive the executive branch of that tool undermines our Nation's counterterrorism efforts and has the potential to harm our national security.”

The president said in his statement he will work with Congress to repeal those provisions.

Tapper notes that Obama saw things a bit differently in 2007 -- "Then-Sen. Obama said he would 'not use signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law.'" -- and HotAir posts this video in which Obama invokes his expertise as a Constitutional scholar in condemning the use of signing statements and "promising" not to use them.



Add that to the infinite list of Obama's politically expedient reversals.


Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

Bush tax cuts "buffer the strain" of high gas prices?

Good one from the president:

President Obama said Thursday that the White House is monitoring rising gasoline prices “very closely” while adding that last year’s tax-cut extension deal will help ease the strain on families paying more at the pump.

But extending the Bush tax cuts was merely an extension of the status quo. So it doesn't actually counter the effects of spending twice as much on gas as we did before Obama took office, does it? I paid $3.85/gallon this morning. How about you?

Since the president's last offensive statement on how to deal with hope-n-change era gas prices -- trade in your gas-guzzler, you pathetic schlub -- he's apparently been given a heads up about the existence of all those little people who need cars and gasoline to drive to work. So he's cooling it on the arrogance and turning on the faux empathy:

“That’s tough. You know, if you’ve got to drive to work every day and you don’t have an option, in terms of the car that you’re driving, and it’s taking more and more out of your budget, that’s a problem,” Obama said in an interview with ABC World News.

Eureka! The man is a genius.

“Now, one good thing that we did was in December, an example of compromise that a lot of people didn’t think was going to be possible, with Republicans — we were able to pass a package of tax cuts that has helped to buffer some of that strain on families. So the total amount of tax cuts that we passed to boost the economy this year will probably be higher than the additional gas costs,” Obama said.

What was that? Tax cuts boost the economy?

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.

"A nation of potholes"

Obama  piles it on at a fundraiser in Chicago. That speech on the budget, the one that vilified Ryan, his "vision," and his intentions, wasn't partisan:

“The speech I gave yesterday was not a partisan shot at the other side,” Obama said to supporters at N9NE Restaurant in Chicago. “It was an attempt to clarify the choice that we have as a country right now.”

At the next event, the president reiterated what he said today back in Washington to George Stephanopoulos – that his speech yesterday on the deficit and the budget plan Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) offered was not a “critique,” but was rather a “description.”

And then he went on to provide a critical description of that plan.

“Under their vision, we can’t invest in roads and bridges and broadband and high-speed rail. I mean, we would be a nation of potholes,” the president said of the investment called for in the Republican budget plan. “And our airports would be worse than places that we thought -- that we used to call the Third World, but who are now investing in infrastructure.”

. . . Also showing up to support perhaps the most famous Chicago White Sox fan – Chicago Cubs legend Ernie Banks.

Et tu, Ernie?

Other items:

Jonah Goldberg: I Am The Spring Mammal and I’ve Come to Give You a Spring Spheroid "Oh, and they're not spherical either."


The abolition of childhood (Steyn's phrase) continues apace. James Lileks: Eleven is the new eighteen

Behold: the City of Philadelphia’s website for sexually active teens, If the kids feel “weird” about going to a teen center to get a pack of French Letters, don’t worry: the city will mail them, free, to anyone who’s eleven or older. That's what the page says. Eleven.

Eleven.

A friendly reminder: if you oppose this public expenditure, you want children to die of AIDS.

But call in the food police if kids buy junkfood on the way to school. In the nanny state, kiddie sex is a-okay but Twinkies are verboten.

*Update: Actually, what they're doing in Philly is worse than that. See videos intended for children here.

Out of time. Have a great morning.

Most recent posts here. Twitter feed here. Amazon store here.