Can you imagine the nerve of her....

Megan McArdle:

I will stop referring to it as ObamaCare when we stop calling them the Bush tax cuts for the rich. It is an effective shorthand for a law that is otherwise unwieldy to describe.

Funny how they waited until AFTER the FDA bill was past - don't you think?

C.D.C. Offers Lower Estimate of Food Poisoning

Anti-Austerity Protest in Greece Turns Violent

Keep up the good work, fellas......If you do this long enough, you will all starve to death with no one to blame but yourselves (or, most likely, the Jews).

All of a sudden, the NY Times takes notice....

Business Executives Seek Spot in Obama Administration:

"Nearly halfway through Mr. Obama’s term, the dearth of business and Wall Street types in his administration rankles many executives, if only as a proxy for their unhappiness with his policies and occasional antibusiness political speech. And the White House has struggled to find such a person to fill the one spot about to open in Mr. Obama’s inner circle, the director of the National Economic Council, the job being vacated this month by Lawrence H. Summers."

Of course "that" was the idea all along....

Virginia Judge Strikes Down “Parts of” Obamacare:

"So what happens if the mandate is gone? Well, then Congress must either repeal the law or come up with another way to balance the books, and Obama must go along. And what if they can’t get this done? Things are not exactly going well on the taxation front, are they? So what if they don’t pass it.

Oh, and what if the entire health insurance industry implodes? Will the Democrats hope to argue that this proves that we need a public option?

And could that have been the idea all along?

It was never about "fairness" - it was always about hatred...

The Magic Bullet:

"We have lowered the marginal rates on high incomes four times since the inception of the income tax — in the 1920s, the 1960s, the 1980s, and the 2000s. In each case, the result was a much more prosperous national economy, lower unemployment, and higher tax revenues for the government. If you do A (lower marginal rates) four times, and four times, despite differing economic circumstances, B (increased prosperity) happens, a rational person might conclude, at least tentatively, that B is the result of A. Not liberals.

As I said, high tax rates on the rich is a religious principle with the left. If the poor have to suffer because of it, so be it."

And the Bullshit wheel spins ever onward... read it all.

Walter Russell Meade:

"Next to the bureaucrats and the White House, the real winners are the climate change skeptics. If you think that climate change is a myth or a naturally occurring phenomenon, Cancun helped you out. The UN process of endlessly negotiating a treaty which will either be so weak it is pointless or so controversial the US Senate will never ratify it (and will quite possibly be both) consumes time, money, energy and political capital that would otherwise go towards green efforts that might actually accomplish something.

The “success” of Cancun is a best case scenario from the skeptic’s point of view. The cost of funding endless UN gabfests in exotic tourist locations (next up: South Africa in 2012) is trivial compared to the cost of any serious efforts to deal with carbon emissions on the scale current scientific theory suggests would be needed. Bureaucrats will dance, journalists will spin and carbon will spew, and the greens will be unable to escape this dysfunctional UN process for years and maybe decades to come. More, the fact that axis of ankle-biter countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia use these conferences to flaunt their anti-American credentials — and seek to maximize their influence by threatening to veto the proceedings — ensures that both this process and anything it produces will be unpopular in the US. The more that the radical anti-American gasbags get mixed up in this process, the easier it will be to find 34 senators ready to kill a climate treaty. If you are a climate skeptic, a global warming hand-off to the UN is the best thing since the Hummer.

No sane green would want this result, but the greens have run up against a force stronger than climate change, more insidious than the desertification of the Sahel, more inexorable than the rising of the seas: the bureaucratic instinct for process. Processes and institutions once initiated cannot be allowed to die."

This is what happens when the "love of death" becomes institutionalized...

Good Advice from Amos Oz and Sari Nusseibeh:

"...this is a human tragedy that has already been left to fester far too long. That Palestinian leaders have held the refugees hostage to their maximalist demands for over six decades shows just how little they really care about their own people. And for all its fine talk of human rights, the “enlightened West” is evidently no better."

This was 2006 - How's that working out for ya'?

Nancy Pelosi's Comments on Oil Prices:

"Remember one thing: If you want to be energy independent ... and Democrats intend to achieve that within 10 years ... and if you want to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and therefore ... um ... improve our national security situation, you can't do it if you're a Republican because you are too wedded to the oil companies.

We have two oilmen in the White House.... The logical ... follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. There is no accident. It is a cause and effect.... a cause and effect."

Running On Empty

JustOneMinute:

I like the original Times headline:

Liu Nobel Is Awarded to Empty Chair

That is in keeping with last year's decision to award the Peace Prize to an empty suit.