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When you really look at the numbers, the percentage of workers who are genuinely "un/under-employed" is almost 16%

And to add insult, to injury, to irresponsible governing, the Democrats will simply "deem" a budget resolution to have passed so they can pork up federal spending even more ... read more

When the people wanted it to happen, the Constitution was amended 4 times in 8 years, from 1913 through 1920.

What all this means is that judges and the voting public have different roles. There is no reason why judges should "consider the basic values that underlie a constitutional provision and their contemporary significance," as Justice Stephen Breyer said in his dissent against the Supreme Court's gun control decision.

But, as the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, his job was "to see that the game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not."

If the public doesn't like the rules, or the consequences to which the rules lead, then the public can change the rules via the ballot box. But that is very different from judges changing the rules by verbal sleight of hand, or by talking about "weighing of the constitutional right to bear arms" against other considerations, as Justice Breyer puts it. That's not his job ... read more

The bill, as it then stood, had a net cost of $20 billion. Dodd and Frank wanted to make the bill revenue neutral. So, at 3:00 a.m., they slipped into the bill a provision that wasn’t in the legislation that passed the Senate or the House

... What’s amazing about this "assessment" is how arbitrary it will be, and how contrary it is to any recognizable principle of the rule of law in taxation. No rate for the tax is specified, as with a normal tax. No principle of equal treatment for similar entities is there to limit the Council’s arbitrary discretion. Rather, the Council is to review a bunch of vague criteria, including “the extent of the company’s leverage,” “the extent and nature of the company’s transactions and relationships with other financial companies,” “the nature, scope and mix of the company’s activities,” culminating in #13, “such other risk-related factors as the Council may determine to be appropriate.” The Council will weigh these criteria as it pleases, hit upon a figure for each firm, and simply impose it as an “assessment” on that firm ... read more

Suddenly, he's all thumbs, and every time he swings the presidential hammer he takes out another fingernail. The Muslims to whom he pays court like a cow-eyed teenager in pursuit of the homecoming queen have gone spectacularly sour on him. Fair or not, the Gulf oil spill is widely regarded as a government screw-up, and some Democrats are talking darkly of screwing up the screw-up. Bill Clinton wants the Navy "to go down there and blow up that well." Some of the president's economists are talking about another recession when we still haven't used up the one we've got, and it's hard to see how he could persuade even Michelle that a new recession would be George W.'s fault ... read more

It would mean an end to packaging descriptions such as eggs by the dozen, four-packs of apples, six bread rolls or boxes of 12 fish fingers. ... read more

"This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?"

Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses

... Well, he's a guy who was wafted ever upward from the Harvard Law Review to the state legislature to the U.S. Senate without ever lingering long enough to accomplish anything. "Who is this guy?" Well, when a guy becomes a credible presidential candidate by his mid-40s with no accomplishments other than a couple of memoirs, he evidently has an extraordinary talent for self-promotion, if nothing else. "What are his core beliefs?" It would seem likely that his core belief is in himself ... read more

On the face of it, this is pretty silly. The Daily Caller, in its tongue-in-cheek manner, explained the policy this way: “You cannot steal from us again for a VERY long time. But then you can!” And it seems unlikely that people who were not dissuaded from defaulting by a five-year waiting period will somehow feel compelled to pay up because the waiting period is seven years. ... read more

Last week, the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers teamed up to thwart efforts to build sand berms to protect the fragile Louisiana coastline. The excuse given for federal intervention was that the state was about to dredge sand too close to the Chandeleur Islands and that a bird habitat might also be affected. State officials reacted with outrage, suggesting the federal claims were bogus

... "In case you were wondering who's responsible," said President Obama at his May 28 press conference, "I take responsibility." That sounds about right - except that this time, a better phrase for "responsibility" would be "the blame." ... read more

The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career. Because of the corrupt nature of the dismissal, statements falsely characterizing the case and, most of all, indefensible orders for the career attorneys not to comply with lawful subpoenas investigating the dismissal, this month I resigned my position as a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney ... read more

... Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), who as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee led the effort in the Senate [said] "No one will know until this is actually in place how it works" ... read more

But on June 21, Associated Press reported the mortgage assistance program is "falling flat."

The broadcast networks supported the mortgage modification and housing bailout when Obama launched it in 2009, after criticizing Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's plan for not doing "enough" to fix the problem. ABC, CBS and NBC haven't mentioned the new figures since AP reported them.

"More than a third of the 1.24 million borrowers who have enrolled in the $75 billion mortgage modification program have dropped out," AP said. "That exceeds the number of people who have managed to have their loan payments reduced to help them keep their homes." ... read more

... The White House has, in effect, stacked the deck against lasting success in Afghanistan. In the process, it has placed its military leaders - Gen. McChrystal among them - in the untenable position of losing American lives to implement a strategy that, whatever the tactical successes in the short term, is increasingly likely to be a strategic failure in the long run ... read more

Liberals' ignorance of economics is deliberate. They are intent on a certain agenda and being reminded of such things as "unintended consequences" or "what happens next?" would spoil their fun. For liberals there is a negative payoff for knowing about the complexities of the economy. They have no real incentive for learning about economics. "My mind's made up. Don't bother me with the facts." In a recent column Thomas Sowell observed, "Those who are convinced that the government should 'do something' when the economy has a problem almost never bother to find out what actually happens when the government intervenes."

Another important reason for the left's disregard for economic understanding is their almost exclusive focus on intentions rather than results ... read more

... Over and over and over again in the succeeding years, the question of how to deal with America's Cold War enemies -- the Soviet Union, the Communist Chinese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, Eastern Europe, Berlin, Cuba and Communists in Latin America repeatedly surfaced the idea first writ large by the MacArthur firing: that Democrats could not be trusted with national security

... But what is being missed is the real political message that came through loud and clear in the Rolling Stone McCrystal article. The message?

That the American military thinks the Obama team is not up to the job of defeating Al Qaeda and winning a war which it is even terrified of calling by name. That those on the front line in a life-and-death struggle with a serious enemy think the President a wimp, the Vice President a blowhard, the national security adviser a "clown," Ambassador Richard Holbrooke a man consumed by the need for relevance, and that the French act like…well…the French.

The spirit of Douglas MacArthur and his fury at what he perceived as a weakness in fighting Communism resonates through every last word of McChrystal and his impolitic aides ... read more

Now think about what this means. He has had no experience in foreign affairs, intelligence gathering, the workings of the treasury, or any other aspect of the federal government. He does not know how to deal with a gigantic oil spill or, come to think of it, a small one. We are left thanking the stars in the heavens that this president has Joe Biden at his side! ... read more

Outside the courthouse, a lawyer for the Boy Scouts, Jason Gosselin, told Fox News the Scouts won on the most important issue, that of First Amendment rights. The jury found the city posed an unconstitutional condition on the organization by asking it to pay $200,000 annual rent on property it was leasing for a dollar a year, in a building the Scouts built and paid for themselves, all because the city felt the Scouts were in violation of Philadelphia's anti-discrimination laws ... read more

I'll never forget the look of blind hatred on that man's face. It communicated this: "I want what you have."

And: "If I can't have it, I'll destroy it." ... read more

“The reviews of Obama’s performance have been disappointing,” Zuckerman, publisher of the New York Daily News, writes in U.S. News & World Report, which he owns.

“He talks the talk but doesn’t know how to walk the walk.” ... read more

However, a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 51% disagree and think the United States has the better health care system of the two countries. Another 17% are not sure.

Rather than looking to Canada, most American voters (57%) believe that more competition and less regulation would be better for the health care system. Just 28% prefer less competition and more regulation. ... read more

One would think such small minded racist thinking would be limited to the uneducated, non achievers and welfare entitlement junkies ... read more

... Critics of KIPP — and other publicly funded but independently run charter schools — say KIPP attracts students who naturally excel or who have dedicated parents, and these elements explain KIPP's good outcomes.

The Mathematica study was designed to examine those issues, said Mr. Barth. People may assume that KIPP students are advantaged, "but that's just not the case," he said ... read more

“It’s kind of like a kid coming to school saying, ‘The dog ate my homework,’ ” Mr. Bush, this state’s former governor, said over lunch last week at the Biltmore Hotel. “It’s childish. This is what children do until they mature. They don’t accept responsibility.” ... read more

Yet the era of excellence in executive management emanates not from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., but from a triumvirate of governors from New Jersey, Arizona and Louisiana. More than any other men and women on the political scene today, they are giving voice to concerned, engaged Americans, who have rallied together under the banner of the Tea Party movement. They have become the iconic American political heroes of 2010 ... read more

If political ire is indeed the mother's milk of our elections, then the forces now building up against the Democrats are mighty indeed

... Obama's unpopularity has a lot to do with his party's troubles, and he is sinking fast. Voters disapproved of his policies by 48 percent to 44 percent, Gallup said last week

... This mounting opposition is now as thick and poisonous as the crude oil that's killing the fishing industry and disfiguring beaches and marshlands along the Gulf coast ... read more

The Justice Department is preparing to sue Arizona over its new immigration law. The president has stiffed Gov. Jan Brewer's call for meaningful assistance in efforts to secure the border. And the White House has accused Arizona's junior senator, Republican Jon Kyl, of lying about an Oval Office discussion with the president over comprehensive immigration reform. Put them all together, and you have an ugly state of affairs that's getting uglier by the day ... read more

June 22, 2010

Dear President Obama:

You will be the first American president that lied to the Jewish people, and the American people as well, when you said that you would defend Israel, the only Democratic state in the Middle East, against all their enemies. You have done just the opposite. You have propagandized Israel, until they look like they are everyone's enemy - and it has resonated throughout the world. You are putting Israel in harm's way, and you have promoted anti-Semitism throughout the world.

You have brought this to a people who have given the world the Ten Commandments and most laws we live by today. The Jewish people have given the world our greatest scientist and philosophers, and the cures for many diseases, and now you play a very dangerous game so you can look like a true martyr to what you see and say are the underdogs. But the underdogs you defend are murderers and criminals and want Israel eradicated.

You have brought to Arizona a civil war, once again defending the criminals and illegals, creating a meltdown for good, loyal, law-abiding citizens. Your destruction of this country may never be remedied, and we may never recover. I pray to God you stop, and I hope the people in this great country realize your agenda is not for the betterment of mankind, but for the betterment of your politics.

With heartfelt and deep concern for America and Israel,

Jon Voight

Soccer’s popularity overseas is probably less a ringing endorsement of the game than it is a statement about their lack of entertainment choices

... Soccer is, in fact, a useful metaphor with regard to American politics and foreign policy.

Americans are constantly being told that we should behave less like ourselves and more like people in other parts of the world

... The possibility of America being right, and the rest of the world being wrong, is never seriously considered. The fact that soccer is wildly popular in other, often less developed parts of the world does not reflect badly on soccer, we’re told-- it reflects badly on us ... read more

And being President isn’t something Obama is good at. In fact, he’s singularly maladept at it. This is likely the reason why he is strongly giving off signals that he’s not, in fact, all that interested in doing the job anymore. It’s pretty hard to be President, after all. You have to make big decisions that have ramifications on down the road. There’s more to it than just standing behind a teleprompter and bloviating. But as we all know, when the going gets tough, the wimps go golfing ... read more

Fifty-nine percent of 1,259 adults polled nationwide said the president does not have “clear plan” for combating the spill ...

Sixty-one percent say the president’s response to the spill was “too slow” ...

there is little confidence the spill will be plugged quickly or that Gulf Coast residents will get the help they need ... read more

Perhaps he is of the same mind as Bill Maher, that the authentic black man is one who is always armed and resorts to violence and loud-talking when things do not go his way. (Note to self: On the way home from the liquor store, I must pick up my Glock from the gun shop.)

Both Lee and Maher seem to share the opinion of a great many progressives that emotion is the same as leadership and that problems are most easily solved by decree ... read more

She also won 53 percent of the vote in a three-way Democratic primary in which her views were well-known and the Democratic establishment backed her opponent.

Time calls her an "Alvin Greene," but given that the local party clearly knew her views, and she did her best to make them known—she reportedly stood at a local intersection regularly with a "Save NASA, Impeach Obama" sign— they can't exactly plead ignorance on this one ... read more

York gets right to the most troubling possibility by asking what it would say about the president’s judgment – no matter who said such a thing – that President Obama actually believed that drilling for oil 5,000 feet below sea level is, in fact, “absolutely safe.”

Yet President Obama has expressed such unrealistic expectations before ... read more

And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico ... read more

State and local efforts—particularly in New Orleans, and Louisiana more broadly—interfered with what actions the federal government could actually take. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was late in ordering an evacuation and did not allow the use of school buses for evacuation, which could have saved hundreds of lives. President Bush had no power to change that decision.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is on federal offshore territory ...

The final difference is in the press handling of the two issues ... read more

Mr. Barbour, one of the few politicians whose standing was enhanced by his response to Hurricane Katrina, has eagerly taken on the post of de facto director of tourism for the Gulf Coast, a task only slightly less daunting or thankless than heading a public relations campaign for BP. He has complained bitterly about what he calls the news media’s exaggerations and distortions about the spill ... read more

What exactly is it doing besides presiding over these show trials? Doesn't it have oversight authority when it comes to the Minerals Management Service, which utterly failed to regulate the safety of BP's deep-water drilling operations? Why aren't more people talking about this?

And why in the world hasn't Congress suspended the Jones Act, thereby allowing foreign-flag tankers into the Gulf of Mexico area? What is it waiting for? We're basically two months into this never-ending disaster.

The gulf cleanup could have been greatly aided by at least 15 foreign countries that were instead spurned after offering their tankers and other equipment. Why aren't we accepting these offers of help?

And where, really, is the president in all this? Speaking to the nation from the Oval Office earlier in the week, he failed to declare a Jones Act waiver, and he made no call for a task force of hands-on oilmen from the likes of ExxonMobil and other big oil sisters who actually know what they are doing ... read more

The former governor of Alaska is apparently outraged over Emanuel telling ABC’s Jake Tapper on Sunday that Republican Rep. Joe Barton’s apology last week to BP was not a slip of the tongue, but a reflection of the “philosophy” of the Republican Party ... read more

He was on the ground in the Buckeye State for a total of 70 minutes. By another count, he was on Ohio soil barely 58 minutes, touting more what he sees as an economic recovery. (Obama had tickets to an evening White Sox baseball game back in Washington.)

In the interests of humor, the president of the United States also managed to slip in a reference to Vice President Joe "Big Effing Deal" Biden's notorious March expletive that they're selling T-shirts of.

Of those, say, 70 minutes in Ohio, a grand total of 10 were spent speaking in the middle of a closed street, a presidential photo opportunity designed to highlight construction jobs allegedly created by the $787- billion stimulus spending bill he signed in early 2009. Workers on the next-door construction site were unhappy because they were told to stay away from work for the president's visit -- and get an involuntary unpaid day off because of the president's 600-second appearance.

Ohio's unemployment rate stands at 10.7% ... read more

As noted in a story on Politico.com, "Tea Party forces are seizing on a new strategy in their attempt to purge Senate incumbents from office: the recall." In this case, we are talking about the Tea Party movement in New Jersey, and the target is Democrat Sen. Robert Menendez ... read more

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Denmark has the highest percentage of wind power and their experience is telling. As the National Post article reports, “Its electricity generation costs are the highest in Europe

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“Switching to biodiesel on a large scale requires considerable use of our arable area. Even modest usages of biodiesel would consume almost all cropland in some countries in Europe!”

...

Geothermal has potential but is limited in location and usually far from where it is needed. The same is true for hydroelectric and tidal power. If Obama really wants to solve the energy problems he should offer a prize for a method of reducing line loss, and another for a method to effectively store electricity

Solar power is no better
Spain has paid the price and has moved to stop the bleeding. “Spain is lancing an 18 billion-euro ($24 billion) investment bubble in solar energy that has boosted public liabilities choking off new projects as it works to cut power prices and insulate itself from Greece’s debt crisis.”

.. ... read more

The unprecedented, occasionally fawning effort to court the Islamic world apparently was based on the belief that dislike of the United States was rooted in the George W. Bush administration's failure to show proper respect to the people of the region. The new administration's plan to remedy this state of affairs included banishment of the phrase "Islamic radicalism" from the lexicon. It's no longer a "war on terrorism," it is an "overseas contingency operation."

This approach has not paid off ... read more

...

Lefty pundits can and will point to a year or two where the pressures of business ended the hope of a formal budget.

The president's pals in the press will be hard-pressed, though, to find any years in which the effort wasn't even begun, and there is no example of a year wherein a deficit like the one the country faces today went unaddressed by a national budget plan ... read more

BP knows how to do business with government. It's all about trading independence for protection.

For most American companies, it's different.

On the day that Attorney General Eric Holder announced a criminal investigation into the still-unchecked spill, an American oil company might have yanked its crews out and invited Holder to come put yellow police tape around the geyser of oil on the sea floor.

I also doubt that the president would have gotten such speedy submission from an American energy company. When Obama demanded the company pay up in advance with no legal framework in place, an American CEO might have said, "We'll see you in court."

That's what's happening now with the year's previous industrial disaster: the April 5 explosion that killed 29 West Virginia coal miners ... read more

There's no accounting for taste, but I think soccer is as dull as sawdust. There's a reason we got our kids involved with soccer. My wife and I figured it was a lot safer than football, and soccer parents don't get as hysterical as those in Little League. That's probably because they're bored senseless ... read more

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he could have demonstrated, as he and his energy secretary (whoops, Nobel Prize-winning energy secretary) have so signally failed to do, an understanding of what is actually happening 5,000 feet underwater and why it's hard to stop. Instead, lazy and incurious, this is what the technocratic mastermind offered: "Just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation's best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge - a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation's secretary of energy. Scientists at our national labs and experts from academia and other oil companies have also provided ideas and advice.

"As a result of these efforts, we've directed BP to mobilize additional equipment and technology."

Excellent. The president directed his Nobel Prize-winning head of meetings to assemble a meeting to tackle the challenge of mobilizing the assembling of the tackling of the challenge of mobilization, at the end of which they directed BP to order up some new tackle and connect it to the thingummy next to the whachamacallit ... read more

That's only bad news for opponents of charter schools who've been railing against them for years, claiming that such schools "don't work."

...

The implication is that because charter schools don't work, then we shouldn't have them. What the charter school bashers don't realize is that if this logic applies to charter schools, then it applies to failing public schools that aren't charter schools as well. They clearly aren't working; that's why proponents of charter schools support charter schools in the first place.

It would be more accurate to say "not all charter schools work." Chicago's Urban Prep Charter Academy is clearly one that does. ... read more

Austrian economist Don Boudreaux responds pointedly to the Samuelson Critique

...Mr. Samuelson profoundly misread Hayek’s book. Hayek said that “the planning against which all our criticism is directed is solely the planning against competition – the planning which is to be substituted for competition.” So because Scandinavian countries emphatically do not plan in this way, Samuelson was mistaken to say that their socialism is of the sort that Hayek believed paved the road to serfdom

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There's never been a better time for President Obama to put an end to the idea that he may be the next President Carter. He can head off inflation by taming federal spending and working with Congress to cut programs. And once that's done, he can cut taxes to stimulate the economy. Sadly, he won't. Obama sent a letter last week to leaders of the G-20, airing concerns over the decision of European leaders to start imposing austerity measures ... read more

The stimulus approach to economic recovery is not complicated. It is based on the belief that expensive make-work jobs funded by deficit spending will at some point lead to economic benefits beyond the fortunate few receiving the grants. It involves opening the spending spigots and then finding enough shovel-ready projects to spend the money on. It's a wonderful plan for those whose aspirations in life go no further than short-term employment involving shovels ... read more

Mr Emanuel, 50, enjoys a good working relationship with Mr Obama but they are understood to have reached an understanding that differences over style mean he will serve only half the full four-year term ... read more

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It is the nature of things that presidential mistakes metastasize into presidential character flaws. Bush’s inaction over Katrina comes across as insensitivity. Now Obama’s incompetence and inexperience is causing liberals to see him as arrogant, aloof, removed, conceited, suspicious of outside advice, and even lazy ... read more

Which brings us to President Obama's many claims about his health-care reform. Take his oft-expressed statement that if you like the coverage you have, you can keep it. That sounds good—but perverse incentives in his new law will cause most Americans to lose their existing insurance ... read more

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The best summation of the speech comes from our own Caleb Howe, who tweeted, “Let me be clear. Some oil spilled. But Katrina. And make no mistake. I’m having meetings. In conclusion, something about China. Windmills!” That, ladies and gentlemen, is the President’s whole speech in 140 characters ... read more

The President started by explaining that he assembled a team of experts soon after the crisis:

Because there has never been a leak of this size, at this depth, stopping it has tested the limits of human technology. That’s why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nations’ best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge.

In politics, a "bunker mentality" is an embattled frame of mind, often accompanied by an aggrieved sense of being unfairly under attack. The term is most often applied to American Presidents who suffer political reverses and assume a surly, defensive posture - all critics are enemies; if you're not for us you're against us; etc.

Sound familiar? ... read more

That was the claim of Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit

...

Could this be true? Even if Gheit's claim isn't true, or was misreported, every country in the free world must be cognizant of the catastrophic sea change that has taken place in the leadership of the free world -- as witnessed by events over the past year. Barack Obama took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and yet whether he is a Muslim or not, he has undeniably gone around the world promoting Islam and Sharia (Islamic law).

And now, if what Gheit says is true, we know why ... read more

Like their forefathers, they not only fail to protect women, but they put women in harm's way. Case in point: the Left's support for radical Islam, a culture tantamount to slavery for women. And a new generation of leftist women participate in their own destruction ... read more

Liberals were shocked that President Bush failed to get everyone tucked up in bed in a couple of days after Hurricane Katrina. They knew that a rational and efficient government, run by people like them who believed in government, could do better.

Now President Obama is busy proving them wrong ... read more

If they don't know, then what is all this political grandstanding about keeping their boot on the neck of BP, the Attorney General of the United States going down to the Gulf to threaten lawsuits— on what charges was unspecified— and President Obama showing up in his shirt sleeves?

Just what is Obama going to do in his shirt sleeves, except impress the gullible? He might as well have shown up in a tuxedo with white tie, for all the difference it makes ... read more

You have to lift their skirts to find out if they are women. You sure can’t find out by how they vote!

Oh, please. This is the kind of lazy, no-account attitude demonstrated by every panhandling bum on any street corner ... read more

But let's thing about this for a minute. Jim Demint, the Republican incumbent, is extremely popular and considered to be virtually unbeatable. To the point where Democrats didn't even try to run a credible candidate, which opened the door to Greene.

Why on earth would Republicans even bother with the risk of a plant? The political blowback of getting caught would be tremendous, so far beyond any imaginable benefit that it boggles the mind.

Imagine you've been put in charge of this mythical operation. Wouldn't you choose someone at least somewhat credible? Greene verges on being a cartoon. Face it, Mr Clyburn, the reason Greene won is because Democrats wrote off the race as un-winnable and you weren't paying any attention to it.

...time for a couple mini-vacations with golf, a dose of party fundraisers, healthcare town halls, TV interviews, a high school graduation, a festive White House lawn picnic with members of Congress, a Paul McCartney music hoedown, an ABC July 4th TV taping and a session with a key Palestinian leader.

Thursday Obama issued important statements celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau and King Kamehameha Day, and mustn't forget, Portugal Day.

But Obama hasn't found a few minutes to chat with Tony Hayward, the talkative CEO of BP, the petroleum protagonist in this environmental drama. Not even on the president's ubiquitous, magically-secure BlackBerry.

Almost eight weeks. What's he afraid of? ... read more

Lerner asks questions about what she saw, but does not remind her that the confrontation took place between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m., in the dark of night (IDF footage of the raid was carried out with night vision equipment) when she admits to being on another ship ... read more

On the surface, the argument makes sense, but only if you accept the proposition that our current representation is both experienced and competent. As many of us have seen in the last year, there is serious reason to doubt it. From passing laws they don't understand to criticizing laws they haven't read, it seems Washington is flailing about without a clue, from the president on down. Many statements from sitting representatives show an appalling lack of knowledge. Almost everyone is concerned more about grandstanding and keeping their job than addressing the serious issues facing our county.

The other false premise underpinning this argument is the notion that challengers are inexperienced and/or incompetent. In reality, many of these people have vast experience both in the real world of running businesses and in governance at local and state levels. No, governing is not simple, but it's not that complex.

Let's make a more appropriate analogy. We currently have plumbers who are in their 90s. They are consistently performing shoddy work, doing more damage than what they fix. We have some young plumbers with a good track record in other construction fields. Why keep the incompetents instead of letting the other guys take a shot?

Put aside the fact that this is pure, utter spin. The real reason he didn't place a call to BP is that he doesn't care and he doesn't want to get involved in, you know, actually running anything.

But the real irony is that this is the same man who has eagerly pursued (and maintained) utterly fruitless talks with Iran for months on end.

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This is causing the public to revisit concerns it's had about Mr. Obama since he clinched the Democratic nomination in March 2008. Then the ABC/Washington Post Poll reported that 46% of Americans found him too "inexperienced" to be an effective president, the highest number ever for a major party presidential nominee. In October, just before the election, ABC/Washington Post asked the question again: 44% called Mr. Obama too inexperienced. On issue after issue, Mr. Obama is providing plenty of evidence to validate those concerns ... read more

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Like Mr. Obama, John Lindsay had a messianic quality. He was the shining knight sent to slay the city's "power brokers." Sure of the rightness of his policies, Lindsay spoke in moralistic tones. But he could be prickly and thin-skinned and quick to impute base motives to political opponents. Well into his mayoralty, he continued to blame many of his problems on his predecessor

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In February 1969, a snowstorm brought the city to a halt. It took days to clear the snow from the residential streets of Queens.

The public frustration over the slow snowstorm cleanup was a symbol for larger frustrations with Lindsay: that he was out of touch with the concerns of average New Yorkers and that an administration that promised transformative change could not perform basic functions of city government.

One has to wonder whether the BP oil spill is President Obama's snowstorm ... read more

I suppose that depends on who "us" is. If it means skin pigment-obsessed, psychologically projecting liberal hand-wringers, then I might agree ... read more

First of all it’s important to remember that if you attack an armed man in a uniform, he will very probably shoot you ... read more

Pardon this interruption into tranquility, but does President Barack Obama seem to have an obsession with school children?

School children and university youngsters seem to be this president’s main captive audience and we need to be asking, “Why?” ... read more