Obama’s Campaign That Never Ends is finding that peoples’ enthusiasm for endless campaigning has limits:

It’s not so surprising that activity [on the campaign list-servers that served so many of the campaign’s communications needs last year] is way down from the election. In one Gmail inbox I used to track groups in swing states, MyBO group emails went from 4,200 messages in October to just under 300 in the last 30 days — a decline of 93%. However, the content too is considerably less upbeat. Here’s part of a message I got to my local group summing up recent election results and looking forward to the June Virginia primary:

Let’s prove that 2008 wasn’t a fluke because of the cult of Obama….the long term demographic trends are in our favor but WE CAN’T BRING CENSUS AND POLLING DATA TO THE BALLOT BOX and declare victory.

So far this year there have been several special elections in Virginia and the results haven’t been good….WE RECENTLY LOST TWO CITY COUNCIL SEATS IN ALEXANDRIA (voted 72% for Obama) and came close to losing Brian Moran’s Delegate seat and Rep. Gerry Connolly’s Chairmanship of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors (home of 1 million people).  Because of EXTREMELY LOW TURNOUT these races came down to a handful of votes as the ELECTORATE OF THE “PAST” DECIDED THE WINNER.

On a similar note, PRESIDENT OBAMA NEEDS US to get involved in the upcoming HEALTH CARE REFORM BATTLE.  So, keep in mind that elections might require the most work for the “community organizer” in us, but WE NEED TO STAY ENGAGED IN OUR COMMUNITY TO GET THE RESULTS WE WANT after our candidates get elected.

The all-caps exhortations seem kind of…. forced, no? Like it isn’t as easy anymore without Obama on the ballot. As the e-mail accurately notes, there is a partisan realignment of sorts going on in Northern Virginia local elections, with Republicans coming within one percent of capturing the chairmanship of the Fairfax Board of Supervisors, a Republican picking up the supervisor seat of the newly elected chair in a quite Democratic, close-in district, a pickup of two seats on the Alexandria City Council, and the almost inexplicable near-win of Brian Moran’s old House of Delegates seat.

I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of talk about Obama swinging formerly “red” States in 2012, at this rate.

I would hope that a wise White descendant of north-woods white trash with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a New York Times reporter who hasn’t lived that life.

Oh, hell – it’s like potato chips.  Once you start, you can’t stop.

Sotomayor’s comment (“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life”) promted me to wonder – is the nominee being taken out of context?

The NYTimes, America’s official gatekeeper of record, says no, not really:

In her speech, Judge Sotomayor questioned the famous notion — often invoked by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her retired Supreme Court colleague, Sandra Day O’Connor — that a wise old man and a wise old woman would reach the same conclusion when deciding cases.“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” said Judge Sotomayor, who is now considered to be near the top of President Obama’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees.

Her remarks, at the annual Judge Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, were not the only instance in which she has publicly described her view of judging in terms that could provoke sharp questioning in a confirmation hearing.

This month, for example, a video surfaced of Judge Sotomayor asserting in 2005 that a “court of appeals is where policy is made.” She then immediately adds: “And I know — I know this is on tape, and I should never say that because we don’t make law. I know. O.K. I know. I’m not promoting it. I’m not advocating it. I’m — you know.”

I would hope that a wise conservative guy with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who takes anything said at  Berkeley seriously, who hasn’t lived that life

And Sotomayor on the bench explains a big, nasty consequence – the SCOTUS equivalent of the “consequences” of hitting a bicyclist in your car while driving recklessly and being introduced to your new roommate in jail, big, lonely Otis…

…oh, my.  That took an ugly turn.  Let’s refocus, shall we?

Sotomayor’s take on judicial activism:

“Court of appeals is where policy is made…and I know, I know this is on tape and I should never say that, courts don’t [makes scare quotes in the air] make law, I know [growd giggles as she regroups].  I know, I know, I’m not promoting it, I’m not advocating it, I know…

Not really [Mitch makes scare quotes in the air] condemning it, either, are [more scare quotes] we?

Rove breaks Sotomayor down [video].

UPDATE:  Rumor has it that Sotomayor is so far to the left on the Second Amendment, Amnesty and other issues that the Administration knows she can’t get confirmed, even with the libs’ headlock on the Senate.  Sotomayor is, so the theory goes, a campaign sop to Latinos.

Scott Johnson gives Obama’s National Archives speech the death of a thousand cuts, where the “thousand cuts” are administered by a jackhammer:

Where was the brilliant Lincolnian rhetoric Professor Goldsmith finds in Obama’s deep thoughts? Where the Rooseveltian diplomacy? Perhaps it was in the ascription of irrational “fear” to the Bush administration and “foresight” to himself that Obama ascended the heights Goldsmith finds in Obama’s musings. Professor Goldsmith, is this what you were talking about?

Read the whole thing.

Everyone, myself included, has a list of the things the GOP needs to do to repair itself an the nation.

J Ewing, writing at True North, correctly notes that it may be just as important to have a list of things to undo:

I propose that the most positive and effective message Republicans can have for the 2010 election is “The Undo List.” This would be similar to a Contract with America, but would consist only of those things in which Democrats have overreached, and tried to solve the problems created by big government with even bigger government intrusions. If it were to be announced immediately, it could even be effective during debate on these issues, demonstrating to Democrats that “the people” do not agree with their proposals and will punish them at the polls for their perfidy. Democrats HATE that, even more than they hate to cut spending… ever.

We will never “get our country back” until we can undo what the Left has done to us over the last many years, and that will require Republicans to field candidates, at all levels, with the political courage to oppose our socialist drift (now a tide) AND the political power to undo it, one piece at a time.

The list could be as long as the federal budget.

Heck – the list could be the federal budget.

To: Minnesota D”F”L

From: Mitch Berg, keen analyst of satire.

Re: Dayton’s showing

Dear DFL,

Please, please please – take these results and run with them for next year.  I beg of you.

Former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton comes closest to out-polling Gov. Tim Pawlenty in a theoretical match-up in the 2010 governor’s contest, according to a new SurveyUSA poll commissioned by KSTP (Channel 5). 

I hereby promise I’ll give $50 to ACORN or International ANSWER or the Comintern or the Symbionese Liberation Army or whatever charity you folks are supporting these days if you please, please  run with this poll.

Thank you.

That is all.

So, other than that whole “pro-infanticide speaker at a “Catholic” institution” bit, how was President Obama’s speech?
Father Richard Landry on Cthe full theological ghastliness of Obama’s address:

The most audacious part of the address was when the President tried to change the meaning of the Christian faith and draw erroneous conclusions from the false notion. “The ultimate irony of faith,” the president declared, “is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen.” He seemed to be quoting from Hebrews 11:1, one of the most famous definitions of faith found in Sacred Scripture, but, whether intentional or not, he got its meaning completely wrong. The passage reads, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith is not a “belief” in things not seen — which would be tautological and nonsensical — but the “substance” or “evidence” of things not seen. Faith leads not to doubt, nor merely to subjective conviction, but to objective truth discoverable through revelation and grace.

The whole thing is worth a read.

I dug out a copy of a commencement speech by leading Holocaust denier Brandon Feltcz, given to the commencemetn for the class of 2006 at Yeshiva Polytechnic Institute in Eilat, Israel.

I thought the parallels were…interesting?

Now, understand — understand, Class of 2006, I do not suggest that the debate surrounding the Holocaust can or should go away. Because no matter how much we may want to fudge it — indeed, while we know that the views of most people on the subject are complex and even contradictory — the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature.Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words. It’s a way of life that has always been the Yeshiva Poly tradition. Rabbi Dennis Diesestayn has long spoken of this institution as both a synogogue and a delicatessen.  A synogogue that stands apart, shining with the wisdom of the Jewish tradition, while the deli is where “differences of culture and religion and conviction can sit and gnosh over a knish and coffee with friendship, civility, hospitality, and especially love.” And I want to join him and Rebbe Diesestayn in saying how inspired I am by the maturity and responsibility with which this class has approached the debate surrounding today’s ceremony. You are an example of what Yeshiva is about.

Of course, people who’d dissented to Feltcz’s visit – saying that Yeshiva, a university in a nation founded by survivors of the Holocaust, should have had no interest in civilly entertaining Feltcz’s views (set forth in his books The Treblinka Fraud and Auschwitz: Hot Air, Not Zyklon), much less granting them pride of place at their commencement.

US Department of Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano noted that she’d put those dissenters on her list of potential right-wing terrorists, although critics noted that the dissenters were Israeli citizens speaking in Israel, and not subject to DHS jurisdiction.

Oh, yeah; the story is entirely fake.  But with an an aggressively pro-infanticide President speaking at “Catholic” Notre Dame yesterday, anything’s possible.

Look; I don’t disagree with the President.  People across the aisle should tolerate other points of view on issues, including abortion – when it comes to politics.

But Notre Dame isn’t (supposedly) part of our political process. It is a Catholic school. And while we as Americans have to be tolerant of many different points of view to run a civil society, “tolerance” does not extend to browbeating people into accepting things the consider absolute moral wrongs in their civil, to say nothing of religious, lives.
There are cases for using the bully pulpit to demand tolerance – tolerance of things that one can’t control, at least.  Racism, attacks on gays,things that nobody controls, certainly.

Demanding tolerance of abortion – a 99-percent-and-change-preventable thing that is only on the national agenda because a group sympathetic to the President has elevated it to full symbolhood – from a Catholic university is..

…well, I’m straining to come up with an analogy.

I feel so much safer with the new administration. Don’t you?

According to a report, while recently attending the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, an annual event where powerful politicians and media elite get a chance to cozy up to one another, Biden told his dinnermates about the existence of a secret bunker under the old U.S. Naval Observatory, which is now the home of the vice president.

Good news for General Electric, owner of NBC: Saturday Night Live hardly needs to hire writers anymore.

Pelosi throws underlings, colleagues and/or predecessors under the bus:

“I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.

What has that woman been doing for the past four years, besides browbeating the Air Force for nicer planes for her trips home?

President Obama campaigned on the promise he would end earmarks, one of the political lead balloons that brought Republicans from the sky and confused the electorate as to who the conservative party is.

Obama promised to change…

Mr. Obama had campaigned against earmarks, even saying he would cut them back to levels before 1994, the start of the Gingrich-GOP interregnum. Now here was Obama as president signing a bill soaked in earmarks.

…his mind. Again.

The Teleprompter-in-Chief offers this unmasked subterfuge:

“Individual members of Congress understand their districts best, and they should have the ability to respond to the needs of their communities.”

In a short 100-some days and counting, the President has broken promise after promise, putting a spit shine on and extending Bush policies he rallied voters against and clearly establishing his status as a another garden-variety liberal politician (save the magnitude), making chumps of those who voted for him and leaving the rest of us wondering:

Where is the rage now? Where is the outcry?

And…where’s the Change^®?

For those of you who think Nan Pelosi, despite her being speaker of the House and a longtime powerful figure in the Democratic Caucus, only dipped her toe into the torture issue?

Bon appetit! (it’s a video with audio).

Obama is going to keep the military tribunals. The ones he campaigned against.  The ones the hard-left took out second loans on the Volvo to try to bring pressure against.

Obama administration officials — and Mr. Obama himself — have said in the past that they were not ruling out prosecutions in the military commission system. But senior officials have emphasized that they prefer to prosecute terrorism suspects in existing American courts. When President Obama suspended Guantánamo cases after his inauguration on Jan. 20, many participants said the military commission system appeared dead.But in recent days a variety of officials involved in the deliberations say that after administration lawyers examined many of the cases, the mood shifted toward using military commissions to prosecute some detainees, perhaps including those charged with coordinating the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The more they look at it,” said one official, “the more commissions don’t look as bad as they did on Jan. 20.”

And we have a “Most Transparent Administration Ever!” alert:

Several officials insisted on anonymity because the administration has directed that no one publicly discuss the deliberations.

Prediction: when lefties say they’ll discontinue military tribunals, it means that halfway into their term they’ll have Citizens Committees carrying out drumhead trials and executions on the street.

Moe Lane notes that Rasmussen shows the Democrats’ Trust-On-Issues numbers are dropping faster than President Obama before Saudi royalty:

I’ll break down the declines; see the article for the original numbers:

• Economy – Down 12%
• Govt Ethics – Up 1% (who are these people?)
• National Sec. – Down 10%
• Education – Down 6%
• Healthcare – Down 2%
• Taxes –  Down 11%
• Iraq – Down 7%
• Social Security – Down 3%
• Abortion – Down 9%
• Immigration – Down 1%

Lane:

As you can see, back in October it was fairly clear that Democrats were enjoying consistent leads over Republicans when it came to how much the public trusted them on various issues. It’s also fairly clear that in most cases, those leads have been savaged.

Part ot it is the inevitable attrition that comes from being in power and having to implement you campaign promises.

Part of it is that their campaign promises and other ideas are just so wrong.

I run into this over and over again; Democrats in debates or discussions who accept as a matter of faith that “republicans are the party of the rich, and the tics are the party of the working people”.

I ask them why, then, that the Plains states and the West – which are, demographically, very disproportionally “working people” – vote so reliably Republican.  They usually respond by calling me a racist and a sexist and asking why I hate children.

But I digress.

The claim, of course, beggars all the evidence.  My favorite factoid; in the 2002 Senate campaign, the average Coleman contribution was about a fifth that of the average Wellstone donation – but they raised about the same total.

Of course, plutocrats like Warren Buffet, George Soros and Bill Gates, to say nothing of a uniform cross-section of Hollywood’s super-wealthy, have long supported the Democrats; for the fantastically wealthy, a regulated society is a predictable (and, for currency speculators like Soros, exploitable) one.

And in the last election, Wall Street contributors backed Obama over Mac.

There might be a bit of morning-after remorse from that last, though:

Wealthy Wall Street financiers and other business figures provided crucial support for Mr Obama during the election, backing him over the Republican candidate John McCain as the right leader to rescue the collapsing US economy.But it is now dawning on many among them that Mr Obama was serious about his campaign trail promises to bring root and branch reform to corporate America – and that they were more than just election rhetoric.

A top Obama fundraiser and hedge fund manager said: “I’m appalled at the anti-Wall Street rhetoric. It was OK on the campaign but now it’s the real world. I’m surprised that Obama is turning out to be so left-wing. He’s a real class warrior.”

The bad news is that people on Wall Street seem to be very stupid.

The good news?  Michelle Obama’s campaign claim that our best and brightest go into hedge funds rather than teaching and nursing would seem to be wrong.

“These big companies are based in New York Boston, Seattle and Silicon Valley, where Democrats dominate,” [Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute] said. “Obama’s tax plan is already cleaving him from his big corporate supporters,” he said.Mr Obama made no secret of his plans to raise taxes on the “working rich” (individuals earning more than $200,000) by imposing a top income tax rate of almost 40 per cent, and there is little surprise that those plans remain on track, even during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Note to self and world; next time, let the whole gabbling bunch of Brooks-Brothers-clad cretins go bankrupt.

After running a campaign that harped on “vision”, Obama’s administration desperately lacks it:

President Barack Obama is about as visionary as the guy who invented Dippin’ Dots, Ice Cream of the Future. Far from sketching out a truly forward-looking set of policies for the 21st century, as his supporters had hoped, Obama is instead serving up cryogenically tasteless and headache-inducing morsels from years gone by.On issue after issue, Obama has made it clear that instead of blasting past “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long,” (as he promised in his inaugural address), he’s moving full speed ahead toward policy prescriptions that already had less fizz than a case of Billy Beer back when Jimmy Carter was urging us all to wear sweaters and turn down our thermostats. Instead of thinking outside the box, Obama is nailing it shut from the inside.

My theory – and I’ll stand by it – is that much of Obama’s electorate is too young or too complacent about politics to know that “different from Bush” isn’t really “different” in the great scheme of things.

Obama’s big schtick so far seems to be counting on populist Macguffins  both vague (“hope and change”) and specific (“green jobs”, “raising taxes on the wealthy”, “high speed trains”) for his actual policy substance:

Consider the president’s recent “major” speech about transportation, yet another Castro-like exhortation in which Obama boldly rejected the failed policies of the past in favor of the failed policies of the future.

“Our highways are clogged with traffic,” he noted, before unveiling his big fix: Shiny new trains that go almost twice as fast as cars. Forget that, as urban historian Joel Garreau has long documented, our country has been decentralizing its living and working patterns for decades now, migrating from virtually all urban centers (except maybe for booming Washington, D.C.) to relatively low-density suburbs. In a big, spread-out country where individualized service at the coffee stand, on cable TV, and in your computer is the new normal, our chief visionary officer is talking about a one-size-fits-all solution that will surely bomb even bigger than NBC’s Supertrain.

It’s an axiom of economics that “making someone pay more or less for a good or service than they would on their own causes grievous unexpected consequences”.  I suspect that the same holds true for trying to chivvy, shame or coerce people into living where they ordinarily won’t would work about the same.

Remember for the past eight years?  When “Rendition” – grabbing a terror suspect and sending them quasi-legally to a country with more casual laws about coercion and suspects rights, was the subject of boundless ire?  And even a Meryl Streep JDAM of a movie?

No?

Either does The One’s Attorney General:

Cautioning Holder that any potential investigation into the Bush administration’s torture program could result in Democrats being roped in, “Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Richard Shelby of Alabama pressed Holder on the CIA’s ‘rendition’ program that moved terrorism suspects from one country to another,” reported Domenico Montanaro with MSNBC.“Didn’t that happen during the Clinton administration?

“Yes, Holder said.

“‘How many did you approve?’ they asked.

“Holder said he’d check the record.”

Despite frequent condemnation of the practice around the world, rendition — the secret capture, transportation and detention of suspected terrorists to foreign prisons in countries that cooperate with the U.S. — remains in the CIA’s playbook, thanks to a Jan. 22 executive order issued by President Obama.

Given The One’s reversals on Guantanamo, coercive interrogation and tribunals, expect to see…:

1. A media/administration campaign showing that terrorists are bad people who don’t deserve due process, and
2. Hollywood movies that show terrorists killing Americans, possibly (although this is unlikely) without the aid of secret vatican orders or groups of rural fundamentalist Christians.

Count on it.

100 Plus days in and America’s first half-African American President is proving to be everything and more of what conservatives warned he’d be…and has reneged on so many campaign promises to his liberal supporters that one loses count.

the handwriting is on the wall regarding our new leader’s game plan for America.  Spend other people’s money like a Madoff on steroids.  Let every enemy on the planet know there’s a wimp in the White House. Let every ally know the wimp in the White House will do nothing to help them when push comes to shove. Let the 50 states know there’s a power coup in play that strips them of constitutionally guaranteed liberties.  Let every company know that neither they nor their non-union employees are safe from Chicago-Way thugs and their mouthpieces in the media. Let the 300 million American citizens know that the rule of law, applied equally to all, is about to be replaced by special favoritism in the form of “empathy.”

If asked for a word to describe an Obama voter, there is only one that any sentient person could offer: SUCKER.

They’re the kind of voters that every crooked politician has drooling dreams about every night of the year.

Three weeks ago, hundreds of thousands of Americans, driven by a campaign that started on Twitter, drew endless defamation from the mainstream and lefty (pardon the redundancy) media; some, when not taking part in juvenile giggling, insinuated that the Tea Parties had roots and followers with various violent groups (indeed, the DHS report was released just in time for the run-up to the media’s suspiciously synchronous campaign of defamation).

Nationwide, the arrest figures were extremely low – about half a dozen, mostly for the kind of petty-drunkenness and public urination sorts of things that’ll happen anytime 600,000 people get together around a nation like this; the typical evening at “Drinking Liberally” draws more drunk and disorderly and public urination arrests.

Compare with The One, threatening a group of legal investors, with all sorts of extralegal sanctions, including siccing his mobs of drooling fanboys and fangirls on them:

A group of lenders to troubled automaker Chrysler asked a bankruptcy court judge Tuesday to keep their identities secret, saying they could face “public attack” and “threats to their safety.”The petition was filed by the group that objected to a government plan to reduce the ailing company’s debt to help create a partnership with Italy’s Fiat…Represented by lawyer Gerard Uzzi of the firm White & Case, the group said its members may be subjected to threats and intimidation in part because of comments made by President Barack Obama, who chastised the opponents of an attempted deal to keep Chrysler out of bankruptcy.

“Never before has the president of the United States announced a chapter 11 filing in a national address,” the petition said.

“The president publicly chastised these secured creditors for having the temerity to enforce their constitutional rights in this court of law…”

Hinderaker:

It is important to understand what is happening here. Many think that Obama is merely engaging in crony capitalism, favoring his political supporters (most notably the Auto Workers Union) at the expense of others. That’s true, of course, but it is much worse than that: Obama has tried to bully those who have not bought his favor–Chrysler’s non-TARP secured creditors–into giving up their legal rights by threatening to use the powers of the White House to damage their businesses. This sort of lawlessness is common in some of the more corrupt Third World countries, but it is brand new to the United States.

We just spent eight years with the left claiming conspiracies against the Constitution under every rock – and now we have an Administration that’s actually giving them to us; the DHS blacklisting Americans; the government running roughshod over the law and, let us not forget, looking for loopholes to carry out the very same policies (tribunals, “aggressive interrogation”) that the left spent the last eight years howling about.
Just remember Berg’s Seventh Law; “Whenever lefties defame conservatives’ ethics or commitment to liberty, they are projecting”.

Young Israelis Ydon’t trust Barack Obama as far as they can throw him, according to an Israeli public opinion poll.

“This poll has revealed that Israelis make a distinction between the United States and President Obama and his policies. They have less fondness for him than they have for the US, and display a certain degree of mistrust in him,” the professor said.  

 

Gilboa said the poll largely resembled a similar survey carried out in 2007 during former President George Bush’s tenure. Only 38% of the respondents in the new poll said they believe that Obama’s attitude towards Israel is a friendly one, compared to 73% in the 2007 poll regarding Bush.

Good to know that our staunchest ally is nervous about Obama’s commitment to them, huh?

The MSM are abuzz with their assessments of Brack O’Bama’s first one hundred days and as my Blog Boss so aptly pointed out, they are missing the real story here.

Ever notice how you’re not seeing as much public opinion polling about the President these days?  Especially in the MSM?

There’s a reason for that:

According to Gallup’s April survey, Americans have a lower approval of Mr. Obama at this point than all but one president since Gallup began tracking this in 1969. The only new president less popular was Bill Clinton, who got off to a notoriously bad start after trying to force homosexuals on the military and a federal raid in Waco, Texas, that killed 86. Mr. Obama’s current approval rating of 56 percent is only one tick higher than the 55-percent approval Mr. Clinton had during those crises.

Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll tells a very different story from what the Obama Broadcasting Network would have you believe.

Jimmy II is in trouble.

Polling among those that “Strongly Approve” of the President thus far remains relatively steady ranging from 44% at Inauguration to 35% as of today.

That’s not surprising. Liberals don’t know what’s hit them yet….the broken campaign promises, the rapid erosion of what is left of our nation’s financial resources, the vast expansion of The Entitlement Society^™, the socialization nationalization of everything within arm’s reach…they still have the “Change Has Come” commemorative plates on their mantles and are still being instructed to harbor anger for (i.e. blame) the Bush Administration for all ills domestic, foreign and individual.

The real movement underlying the erosion of Che Obama’s approval ratings is among those who “Strongly Disapprove”; doubling from an Inauguration Day low of 16% to 32% as of today. It’s only a matter of time before one spills into the other as America wakes to the leftist agenda of our President and his thugs.

Rasmussen’s daily poll tracks the differential between the “Strongly Disapprove” and the “Strongly Approve” results.

Does this movement translate into Conservatives growing some cojones or is it a groundswell of both parties’ constituents realizing the error of their choice last November? Most likely a little of both.

In any case, it would appear the pendulum is swinging back to reality.

And fast.

Change^® is coming.

Mike Dorf on the Dhidden technicality that salvages some good news from Specter’s defection:

Does Arlen Specter’s defection from R to D strengthen the President’s hand in Congress? Perhaps overall but not on judicial appointments because breaking (the equivalent of) a filibuster in the Senate Judiciary Committee requires the consent of at least one member of the minority. Before today, Specter was likely to be that one Republican. Now what?

Now, you expect the media to do to Lindsay Graham what they did to Chuck Hagel,and John McCain before him; make him their bestest lil’ buddy on the right, to try to entice him into a faustian bargain, selling his political soul for a little approving big-media spotlight.
Graham is suspect – he was on the Gang of 14 – but made of sterner partisan stuff than the hamster Specter.

Upshot: Specter may have paved the road to hell on every front but the Supreme Court.

To paraphrase the sage: “Conspiracy-wacko Liberal FREAK OUT in 3 … 2 … 1 … “

Vice President Joe Biden, toughened by his years on the mean streets of Scranton and in the coal mines of Wilkes-Barre, went all Sir Robin on us:

Vice president Joe Biden said today he would tell his family members not to use subways in the U.S. and implied schools should be shuttered as the swine flu outbreak spread to 16 states. His remarks quickly caused a stir, drawing a rebuke from New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and later leading the White House to apologize.

The World Health Organization has raised it's classification of the swine flu outbreak to Phase Five, one step away from a worldwide pandemic.

The uproar began when Biden appeared on NBC's "Today" show and said he would advise against riding the subway or taking commercial flights and implied schools should be shuttered amid confirmation of the first swine-flu relation death in the U.S.

The National Associaton of Prison Shower-Room Nancyboys released a statement in response, telling Biden to "quit being such a friggin' pansy".

Seriously - this could still mutate into a bad epidemic.  The Spanish Flu of 1918 took one relatively mild pass through the population before it mutated into one of the worst plagues ever to hit mankind, 91 years ago, killing 50 million around the world including hundreds of thousands of Americans.

But we're not there yet, and we won't be for quite some time!

Biden must, indeed, be a living insurance policy on Obama's life.

Vandal – someone who does wanton damage,and then scampers away.

Just saying:

That wasn’t me,” President Barack Obama said on his 100th day in office, disclaiming responsibility for the huge budget deficit waiting for him on Day One. It actually was him — and the other Democrats controlling Congress the previous two years — who shaped a budget so out of balance.And as a presidential candidate and president-elect, he backed the twilight Bush-era stimulus plan that made the deficit deeper, all before he took over and promoted spending plans that have made it much deeper still.

To be fair, he probably only voted “present” for all of it.