New for this Christmas! It's My First Delivery. It even talks!

More evidence of Mr. Obama's vaunted intellect.

In each of 20 political speeches over the last two months, Mr. Obama has included a riff in which he portrays GOP leaders as sipping Slurpees while hard-working Democrats struggle to pull the economy out of a ditch…

Though I’ve asked a number of times, I can’t get an answer from the White House yet on how and why the president came to portray top Republicans as Slurpee sippers.

Lou Holtz is smiling

Last night he picked Notre Dame to beat Pittsburgh and the South Carolina Gamecocks to upset Alabama. His colleagues snickered. SC 35 Alabama 21. Great game to watch.

Hope!

Or is it Change! Middle Class Slams the Brakes on Spending

Middle-class Americans made their deepest spending cuts in more than two decades, slashing spending on such discretionary items as restaurant meals and alcohol during the recession.

Households in the middle fifth of the population sliced their average annual spending to $41,150 in 2009, the Labor Department said Tuesday in its annual spending breakdown. That was down 3.1% from 2007 and 3.5% from 2008, the steepest one-year drop since records began in 1984. The drop came even as those households' after-tax income remained relatively stable over the two years, at an average $45,199.

We're hunkering down to wait out this administration. So the Democrats can play hell and astroturf Google and accept illegal foreign donations all they want, but people aren't buying their nonsense. They're looking at the trillion dollar deficits and they know that they mean higher taxes and desperate times ahead. If the Republicans can just contain their own idiocy and take a lesson from the tea parties they could put an end to this, but whether they will or not remains to be seen. Just please, no third party.

The founding fathers? They wrote 200 years ago. Why pay any attention to a bunch of dead white guys?

Welcome to the Hotel L. Ron Hubbard

There they stood in the doorway;
I heard the mission bell;
And I was thinking to myself,
"This could be heaven or this could be hell." [. . .]

"Relax," said the night man,
"We are programmed to receive.
You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave!"

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

So not much has changed.

Harry Reid tells a parable:

“I was a very selfish little boy, and I was upset that my mother had to go through all this. Whose fault is this? And that’s what people are going through. I didn’t know who to blame but I wanted to blame somebody.”

So he went into politics so that everybody could have Christmas presents from Uncle Sam?

No. What he's saying is that we're all children for blaming the bad economy on him. Of course, if things were booming, he'd be claiming credit. You can't have it both ways. He's still very selfish and immature as he's demonstrated repeatedly over the past 10 years, and if he loses he'll want to blame somebody other than himself.

Charles Krauthammer indicts Obama and the Democrats:

Here the Democrats failed the simple test of effectiveness. The economy is extraordinarily weak, unemployment is unacceptably high, and the only sure consequence of the stimulus is nearly $1 trillion added to the national debt in a single stroke.

And yet, to these albatrosses of ideological overreach and economic ineffectiveness, the Democrats have managed in the past few weeks to add a third indictment: incompetence.. . .

That's not all. Congress has not passed a single appropriations bill. To keep the government going, Congress passed a so-called continuing resolution (CR) before adjourning to campaign. The problem with continuing to spend at the current level is that the last two years have seen a huge 28 percent jump in non-defense discretionary spending. The CR continues this profligacy, aggravating an already serious debt problem.

The real mystery of this years elections is why more Democrats aren't being tossed out.

Peggy Noonan is starting to catch on:

The coming [?] rebellion in the voting booth is not only about the economic impact of spending, debt and deficits on America's future. It's also to some degree about the feared impact of all those things on the character of the American people. There is a real fear that government, with all its layers, its growth, its size, its imperviousness, is changing, or has changed, who we are. And that if we lose who we are, as Americans, we lose everything.

This is part of what's driving the sense of political urgency this year, especially within precincts of the tea party.

Meet the New Boss

Obama will rely on executive powers and regulations if Congress goes Republican

"It's fair to say that the next phase is going to be less about legislative action than it is about managing the change that we've brought," White House senior advisor David Axelrod said in an interview.. . .

With healthcare and financial regulatory packages passed, the Obama administration is now focused on putting the measures in place, which could change the way Americans get medical treatment, take out mortgages and deal with banks and credit card companies.. . .

So the best arena for Obama to execute his plans may be his own branch of government. That means more executive orders, more use of the bully pulpit, and more deployment of his ample regulatory powers and the wide-ranging rulemaking authority of his Cabinet members.

Meanwhile, with all the King's horse and all the kings men he hasn't been able to get the economy going. As long as people are wary about what his next move will be, no business in its right mind is going to take any risks like hiring new workers. It isn't that they don't have the money, it's that they don't have a sense of what taxes and the cost of benefits are going to be. In fact, they have two choices for dealing with Obamacare, drop insurance benefits or ask for a waiver, but there won't be too many of those, or the whole scheme is vitiated.

Bring it on.

A Republican majority would threaten policies to stabilize the economy, the president says during a radio interview, part of an effort to rally key Democratic constituencies.

Progressive are like termites.

This link from the last post deserves some more notice.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s decision to hire nine Ebonics translators for the Southeast region has briefly reignited a 40-year debate over whether African-American speech constitutes a separate language.

Learning U.S. history with rap. What could go wrong?

Here's an example:

White men getting richer than Enron.
They stepping on Indians, women and blacks.
Era of Good Feeling doesn't come with the facts.

Andrew Jackson, thinks he's a tough guy.
Killing more Indians than there are stars in the sky.
Evil wars of Florida killing the Seminoles.
Saying hello, putting Creek in the hell holes.
Like Adolf Hitler he had the final solution.
'No, Indians, I don't want you to live here anymore.'

"The Oklahoma City School District has spent about $10,000 so far on the music and corresponding textbooks, Springer said. The Oklahoma City School Board authorized the district to spend up to $97,000 in federal funds on the program."

This strikes me as sealing these kids into the poor, violent hip-hop culture, rather than helping them into the mainstream of culture.

For more samples, check out the Flocabulary website, yo.

And I thought Ebonics was dead.

Waivergate?

Instead of enforcing the ballyhooed standards and mandates for insurers that Congress passed in ObamaCare, Kathleen Sebelius and the White House blinked in the face of bad press and exempted dozens of companies from the law.

No 'triangulation' for Obama!He'll double down on executive authority. The term 'Dictator' comes to mind.

They're everywhere!

Global warming theory in chaos after report finds increased solar activity may COOL the Earth

Or Global Warming is caused by the Sun! Take your pick!

Personally, I think GW is caused by donations to environmental groups.

The Rise and Fall of Obama's empire

It was . . . by following the lead of Rome's greatest emperors that Obama won (temporarily) America's awe and devotion.

There are plenty of parallels between Obama's image-building and those used by ancient emperors, but more current examples are there, as well, as the public art of the Nazis and Communists illustrate. I don't think the similarities to the images of Lenin and Stalin are coincidental.

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson discusses the same scenario, but as a Greek tragedy. The difference is that in Greek tragedy, the hero was noble, but aside from that quibble, Obama fits the pattern, in which the hero undergoes a terrible downfall, brought about by his own hubris, unkind fate or the will of the gods.

The result was that our Oedipus/Pentheus rushed headlong into socialized medicine, mega-deficits, needlessly polarizing appointments of the Van Jones type, and various federal takeovers, coupled with quite unnecessary editorializing about largely local matters — from the Skip Gates mess to the Arizona immigration law and Ground Zero mosque.

In each case, the supposed uniter deliberately weighed in on these controversies to quite unfairly demonize his opponents — “stupidly” acting police, Arizona xenophobes picking up children on the way to buy ice cream, Islamophobes wanting to deny religious liberty, etc. A thousand other nicks, from Eric Holder’s “nation of cowards” to Obama’s musings that at some point one needs no more income, ensured continual bleeding as his poll numbers fell by nearly 30 points in just 20 months.

The result was that the president soon lost the moral capital to push through an unpopular agenda — to such a degree that his out-of-the-mainstream views and his polarizing style of governance might well destroy Democratic congressional majorities for a decade.

Sadly, he has carried out enough of his agenda to bankrupt the country and take two decades to undo the damage.

Representative Phil Hare calls the deficit and national debt a "myth."

Oops! Does anybody really think that Rahm's not being a legal resident of Chicago will really keep him from running for Mayor?

I mean, it would be highly entertaining if it did, but this is Chicago we're talking about.

Instapundit:

IF YOU ORDER IT, THEY’LL JUST HAVE TO BUILD IT: White House Wants Up to 62 MPG Standards by 2025. That’s how economies run best, you know. When smart people at the top decide what we need, and order it built.

He links to this article at Gas2.org, but I agree with one of the commenters that the energy density of gasoline is hard to beat.

From solidarity to diversity

as the slogan for Big Labor.

The union presence was so ubiquitous and so organized that it made for a kind of color coding in the crowd. Looking around, there were large groups of people bunched into separate areas, all wearing the same color T-shirts to mark their union affiliation. There were groups wearing the purple SEIU shirt, others wearing the red CWA shirt, others wearing the blue AFT shirt, and still others wearing green shirts and yellow shirts and so on. There were long rows of tables where union workers sat waiting to get people connected to their groups and their buses. There were thousands of union-printed signs.

Frank Rich. Pot. Kettle

One America, different from the one most of us live in.

Otherwise, she has impeccable progressive credentials

Former St. John's U. dean charged with using students as personal servants.