Planned Parenthood keeps breaking all its previous records in abortions performed.

Chavez is running out of people/things to blame for socialism’s failure. "[I]n a remarkable volte-face, for the first time this week Hugo Chávez admitted that the government was, after all, largely to blame for the electricity shortages and rationing that are hampering the economy, having previously tried to blame it on a drought, which dried up Venezuela’s hydroelectric reservoirs. That argument didn’t work so well this year, with torrential rains flooding much of the country."

Down’s Syndrome death panels are getting setup.

The debt crisis in Europe threatens to tear apart the EU. That’s not some conservative think tank talking, it’s the EU itself.

"If you love me, pass this bill!" Apparently, Mr. Obama has lost a lot of love in his own party, as Dems pick apart his jobs bill.

We spend more and more on public schools — in absolute dollars and per student — and yet SAT scores continue to fall. There are proven ways to deal with this, but Democrats are against all of them (predictably).

If poverty leads to crime, why is the crime rate falling during this recession (and the decade before it)? Is it because, perhaps, we’re actually keeping criminals behind bars?

Talk about over-regulation, here’s a CEO who was fined for hiring too many people and required to stop hiring altogether. When government calls the shots, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing (or even that there is a right hand).

Palin Derangement Syndrome: Joe McGinniss wrote an expose on Sarah Palin that was essentially (according to the publisher) filled with unproved “tawdry gossip” and rumors that lacked “factual evidence.”

The new 2011 version of the New International Version of the Bible strives for gender-inclusivity. Mary Kassian gives her 10 reasons why this is bad for women.

And finally, never mind abortion, Michelle Obama thinks you should have parental consent before getting French Fries. (Click for a larger version.)

Would a serious Democrat primary challenge for President help or harm the incumbent?

Remember it would be a platform and forum in which the general election (non-primary) would be framed and the lack of that will mean now till late spring will be dominated by the GOP primary race for which there is no corresponding activity on the Democrat side.

On the other hand, he could lose.

There have been more casualties in Afghanistan under less than 3 years of Obama than we did under 8 years of Bush. Additionally, in the first 3 years of the Iraq war, we had fewer casualties than two and a half under Obama. This is not to criticize Obama for these deaths; that’s what happen in war. But Reason magazine notes that this raises 2 questions. "First, where are the antiwar protests? And second, where is the press?" The "anti-war" protestors are, as I’ve said before, more anti-Bush (or anti-Republican) than anything else. And the press are tied up trying to dig up dirt on Sarah Palin. It’s a full-time job, y’know.

Unions hand-picked 6 of the most vulnerable Republican state senate districts to target for recall. They just needed 3 wins to take control. They could only manage 2. Granted, recall elections have been notoriously difficult to win over the years, but if Democrats and the unions that sponsor them can’t get their base energized over their own referendum on alleged "anti-worker" sentiment in hand-picked districts, that doesn’t say much about how the public views them.

Atheists seem to believe that if humanity would just get rid of this archaic religion thing, violence would drop and peace would reign. Just ask Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, or even John Lennon. Yeah, well, how did that work in the Soviet Union, where atheism was essentially the national religion? Or in Europe today, especially Britain, where religion is on the decline?

And speaking of ideas not working, how’s that gun ban in Britain working out for those store owners in the middle of the riots?

Remember the spontaneous "You lie!" outburst by Rep. Joe Wilson of S. Carolina during an address by President Obama about his health care bill? Joe said that after Obama said, "There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms — the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally." Well guess what? Turns out Joe was right.

Why do we need voter ID laws? To keep this from happening; overenfranchised Democratic voters. And how about this bit of irony: "While NAACP President Benjamin Jealous lashed out at new state laws requiring photo ID for voting, an NAACP executive sits in prison, sentenced for carrying out a massive voter fraud scheme."

Dale Franks of Questions & Observations has some great points about our economic situation. A couple of paragraphs, from one post talking about the hole we’re in:

And don’t come back at me with some lame "Our GDP:Debt ratio was 120% at the end of WWII" silliness.  Yes it was. And you know how we fixed it? We cut Federal spending from $92 billion in 1945 to $38 billion in 1949. For 2011, 40% of the federal budget was financed with borrowed money: We’ll spend  $3.818 trillion, of which  $1.645 trillion is borrowed. If we funded only defense, Medicare/Medicaid, and Social Security, and interest on the debt, we’d still have a deficit of $673 billion. Just to balance the budget this year—forget paying off any debt—we’d have to cut an additional ~25% from Health, Defense, and Pensions. Follow the link and download the CSV file, open it up in Excel, and run the numbers yourself. The magic number to balance the budget this year is the revenue of $2.174 trillion.

That’s $2 trillion this year, not over 10 years.

And from another post, noting that tax increases alone, even historic tax increases and an incredibly rosy set of other assumptions, aren’t going to do it. Spending cuts, substantial cuts, must happen.

In order to pay off this year’s share of the $61.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities, the government will have to collect $4.261 trillion in revenues.  With an estimated 2011 GDP of $14.922 trillion, that comes to 28.6% of GDP. If we assume government revenues rise to the historical average, the we’ll need the government to take 31.6% of GDP in tax revenues. Happily, because we’re assuming a 3% rise in GDP and revenues for every year over the next 30 years, that percentage will decline slightly every year, until, in 2041, we’ll only need to collect 20.5% of GDP in tax revenues to pay off the last installment, assuming, again, 14.8% of GDP covers the operation of government.  If we go back to the 17.8% figure, then we’ll have to collect 23.5% of GDP in revenues.

Either way, for the next 30 years, we need to collect substantially higher tax revenues than we have collected at any time in the nation’s history, and we have to do it every year for 30 years.

The point being, this is probably not possible, economically or politically. This is how bad our situation is, and how much action we need to take now on spending.

And yet, who gets blamed for trying to bring sanity back to the budget? (Click for a larger version.)

Things have been extremely quite from the supposedly "anti-war" Left ever since Obama sat down in the Oval Office. Protests over Afghanistan and Iraq evaporated. One could say that they were already too far under way to stop quickly, and thus it’s of little use now to protest. OK, but that doesn’t explain the silence over Libya. One person exhibiting what seems really to have been an anti-Bush sentiment, rather than some moral concern over war, is Harold Koh.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH, the former dean of the Yale Law School, has been one of the country’s foremost defenders of the notion that the president of the United States can’t wage wars without the approval of Congress. During the Bush administration, he was legendary for his piercing criticisms of “executive muscle flexing” in the White House’s pursuit of the so-called war on terror.

Even more, he was described by those who knew him as the inspiration for a generation of human rights activists and lawyers passionately committed to a vision of a post-imperial America as a model of constitutional restraint. His colleagues viewed him as not only a brilliant scholar but a “liberal icon.”

Suddenly, though, Mr. Koh seems to be a different person.

Just over two years ago, he became legal adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department, and in that job, he has become the administration’s defender of the right to stay engaged in a conflict against Libya without Congressional approval. He argues that the president can proceed because the country is not actually engaging in “hostilities.” Because “hostilities” is “an ambiguous standard,” he has argued, the president need not withdraw forces to meet the resolution’s requirement of an automatic pull-out, 60 days after “hostilities” begin, absent express Congressional approval for the war. The conflict is in its fourth month, and no such consent has been given.

Mr. Koh’s allies, speaking more in sorrow than in anger, are mystified and disheartened to see their hero engaging in legalistic “word play.” To them, it’s as if he has torn off his team jersey, midgame, and put on the other side’s. Mary Ellen O’Connell, a Notre Dame law professor who has known Mr. Koh for a quarter-century, is seeking an answer to this question: “Where is the Harold Koh I worked with to ensure that international law, human rights and the Constitution were honored during the Bush years?”

He’s probably in the same place he always was; playing partisan politics to his party’s advantage, and making use of anyone blind enough to believe what he’s selling.

But Mr. Koh surely doesn’t run the anti-war movement. They could be out in the streets at any time of their own accord, being true to principle over politics. That they are not speaks volumes about their real intentions.

According to this expert, what the Democrats are proposing — new taxes to deal with the budget crisis — is the absolute wrong thing to do.

“First of all, he’s right. Normally, you don’t raise taxes in a recession, which is why we haven’t and why we’ve instead cut taxes. So I guess what I’d say to Scott is – his economics are right. You don’t raise taxes in a recession. We haven’t raised taxes in a recession.”

[…]

“We have not proposed a tax hike for the wealthy that would take effect in the middle of a recession. Even the proposals that have come out of Congress – which by the way were different from the proposals I put forward – still wouldn’t kick in until after the recession was over. So he’s absolutely right, the last thing you want to do is raise taxes in the middle of a recession because that would just suck up – take more demand out of the economy and put business further in a hole.”

This economics "expert" is the August, 2009 version of President Obama. That was then, this is now.

In a 75-minute meeting Sunday night, President Obama once again demanded that more than $1 trillion in tax increases be part of any deficit reduction package attached to a vote on the debt ceiling. In the session, Obama rejected a Republican proposal to seek $2.5 trillion in spending cuts and reforms, and insisted on higher taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals.

Apparently, economic principles have an expiration date.

Relative bias in the media vs actual bias. A new book from a UCLA political science professor demonstrate how, because the media is so generally slanted to the left, outlets like Fox appear more right-slanted, when in reality they’re far more centrist.

Rosalina Gonzales had pleaded guilty to a felony charge of injury to a child for what prosecutors had described as a "pretty simple, straightforward spanking case."

Trevor Phillips, chairman of Obama’s Equality and Human Rights Commission accused Christians, particularly evangelicals, of being more militant than Muslims in complaining about discrimination, arguing that many of the claims are motivated by a desire for greater political influence. Hmm, define "militant".

What if Charles Schultz had done cartoons of Doctor Who characters? The result would probably have looked like this.

"Smart" diplomacy; cozy up to dictators, snub our friends.

Democrats pilloried George W. Bush for "not listening to his generals" when he made decisions counter to the Pentagon. When Obama does it, not so much.

Would ID requirements for voting amount to a Jim-Crow-style poll tax on blacks? E. J. Dionne thinks so. James Taranto wonders if ID requirements for Amtrak, hotels, air travel and employment are equally as "racist"?

Nancy Pelosi said that they had to pass the bill before we could find out what’s in it. Apparently, some surprises are buried in there.

President Barack Obama’s health care law would let several million middle-class people get nearly free insurance meant for the poor, a twist government number crunchers say they discovered only after the complex bill was signed.

The change would affect early retirees: A married couple could have an annual income of about $64,000 and still get Medicaid, said officials who make long-range cost estimates for the Health and Human Services department.

Whenever there is a budget shortfall, taxes are always on the table. How about we take them off just this once?

Medicare spending is unsustainable, and the CBO itself admits that its tools for determine any consequences from Obamacare are flawed. Yeah, that should "fix" health care.

And finally, define "emergency" (click for a larger version):

The Democratic National Committee has someone new at the helm, and she’s off to a great start.

In the four weeks since she succeeded Tim Kaine, Wasserman Schultz has been called out by four nonpartisan fact-checkers for mischaracterizing the GOP’s Medicare plan.

She’s accused Republicans of wanting to reinstate segregation and of waging a “war on women.” She has asserted, somewhat nonsensically, that the GOP wants to make illegal immigration — by definition against the law — “a crime.” She’s also been mocked for driving a foreign car after pounding Republicans for not supporting the American auto industry.

A rank-and-file member of Congress typically wouldn’t get noticed for inflammatory language and rhetorical slip-ups. But Wasserman Schultz has a higher profile now — and was hired precisely because of her skills as a communicator.

On the bright side, she has nowhere to go but up.

Medical

UK cancer survival rates are the worst in the Western world. And yet another example of Sarah Palin’s death panels, "And the elderly are routinely denied surgery or drugs to remove tumours because doctors think it is not worthwhile."

Politics

President Obama brings bi-partisanship to Washington. "Crossing party lines to deliver a stunning rebuke to the commander in chief, the vast majority of the House voted Friday for resolutions telling President Obama he has broken the constitutional chain of authority by committing U.S. troops to the international military mission in Libya.

Obama wouldn’t defend federal law in court (DOMA), wouldn’t abide by the War Powers Act, and is now ignoring a law intended to protect Medicare.

Medical & Politics

You can keep your current insurance under ObamaCare…unless your employer is one of the 30% that say they’d drop it.

Under a Republican administration, this would be considered a church/state entanglement. For a Democrat, free pass.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius asked black pastors and clergy members to help the administration fight what she called “mistruths” about the health care reform law President Barack Obama signed into law last year

Middle East

When 90% of folks in the Middle East hold an unfavorable opinion of Jews (Jordan 97%, Palestinians 97%, Egypt 95%, Lebanon 98%), you gotta’ wonder how possible peace is between them. You also gotta’ wonder how much is prejudice. Once you get to know those Jews, attitudes turn around. "By contrast, only 35% of Israeli Arabs expressed a negative opinion of Jews, while 56% voiced a favorable opinion."

Iran suggests that the day after their first nuclear test would be no big deal. They are floating the trial balloon. Will the world notice?

And finally, some sacrifice is shared rather unequally. (Click for a larger version.)

Some links of interest for your weekend reading:

Four words: He made it worse.

Making a case for tort reform.

The candidate who can win.

Time to end Medicare.

Baseball players are better athletes.

In addition to the doctor shortage the US is going to have when us Baby-Boomers hit retirement, Obamacare is going to make the problem even worse, based on current trends, how socialized medicine "works" elsewhere, and the government’s own numbers.

In 2005, when the press was enamored with Cindy Sheehan, Chris Matthews suggested she run for Congress. Yeah, how about now? Cue the crickets chirping.

Seal Team Six was an evil, secret, assassination squad manipulated by Dick Cheney. At least, that’s what it was when a Republican was President. Today, under a Democrat, they’re heroes, and not associated with Obama or Biden in the slightest. What a difference a "D" makes.

And speaking of contrasts, we have Nancy Pelosi on bin Laden, then and now.

Michael Barone notes that, to get bin Laden, Obama relied on policies he decried.

You know that kids that had George W. Bush in their classroom on 9/11? This is a good TIME magazine article on what they were thinking at the time when Bush was given the news, and what their reaction is now.

Over half of the country pays no income tax. But "the rich" still don’t pay "their fair share", eh?

While the bin Laden story stole the front page, the Conservatives in Canada won historic victories. Later, the Liberal Democrats in England suffered their worst losses in 30 years.

The conventional wisdom on salt intake may not be right after all.

Civility Watch: "So when does Seal Unit 6, or whatever it’s called, drop in on George Bush?"

"Democrats blame Bush for high gas prices"? No, not now; back in 2006. And in 2008, Nancy Pelosi blamed the "oil men" in the White House. They’re much quieter now.

A reform to watch: Indiana lawmakers OK broadest voucher plan in US.

It’s so very sci-fi-sounding, but some physicists believe that something from emanating from the sun is now causing radioactive decay to occur faster.

Worst of all, if the decay rates of matter are being mutated then all matter on Earth is being affected including the matter that makes up life.

The mutation may go so far as to change the underlying reality of the quantum universe—and by extrapolation-the nature of life, the principles of physics, perhaps even the uniform flow of time.

In fact, some evidence of time dilation has been gleaned from close observation of the decay rate. If particles interacting with the matter are not the cause—and matter is being affected by a new force of nature-then time itself may be speeding up and there’s no way to stop it.

And finally, a history lesson from Tom McMahon. (Click for the blog entry.)

Proving that he indeed was born in Hawaii, President Barack Obama finally released his long-form birth certificate today, taking one huge bit of ammunition away from the so-called “birthers”, sabotaging Donald Trump’s main campaign issue, killing sales of a forthcoming book on the subject even before its release, and probably doing absolutely nothing to keep someone somewhere from continuing to drum up controversy over this. I imagine now we’ll need a photograph of President Obama’s parents standing in front of Kapiolani hospital with a copy of the August 4, 1961 edition of the Honolulu Star Advertiser in one hand and a complete genome in the other. Personally, I’m still waiting for authentication from Dan Rather.

However, we also now know what he’s been spending all that money on lawyers trying to hide. Under “Favorite Band”, he listed “Backstreet Boys”. So now that this thorny issue is behind him, he can concentrate on not doing anything about Syria.

If this doesn’t wake up Democrats, and the Americans that vote for them, to the real, actual unsustainability of more and more spending, what will? If the last remaining superpower can’t keep its financial house in order, then what comes next? Are we "spreading the wealth around" so much now, that too many are unwilling to give up their government dependence?

Should the rich pay more? If so, please say how much more, specifically? Should we go back to 91% rates? The problem is, when more that is taxed, it isn’t used to pay for existing debt and spending; it instead spurs on new spending. Our problem is not how much revenue the government is getting; it’s the amount of spending going on.

This is a bi-partisan problem; both parties have contributed to this. The Republicans, however, spurred on by the Tea Party, are making the first real effort in decades to do something about the problem. Nothing was done on this until Republicans won a majority in the House, and even now, Obama and the Democrats are making only token gestures.

Man oh man, I hope the independents are watching, and will remember in 2012. I hope some fiscally responsible Democrats are, too.

OK, lots of questions above. I would love to hear any answers in the comments.

It’s been a little while since I had an update, but that doesn’t mean the incivility hasn’t been happening. John Nolte at BigJournalism.com chronicles "20 days worth of the death threats, vandalism, and intimidation practiced by pro-union thugs opposed to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill". None of which the MSM will ever hold the Left accountable for.

Six out of ten politicians in don’t think you know enough about the issues facing Washington to form a reasonable opinion. More telling to me is that, broken down by party, most Republicans trust you but way more Democrats don’t.

Another example of why it’s hard for government to cut spending (and why conservatives try to hard to hold back increases); Between 400,000 and 500,000 protest against government spending cuts in the UK.

Media Matters becomes a parody of itself, ignoring the media in general and concentrating solely on Fox News. James Taranto wonders:

Does a group that proclaims its purpose to be industrial sabotage qualify [for tax-exempt status]? It’s hard to imagine the answer is yes. Could, say, AT&T set up an organization to sabotage Sprint and do the whole thing free of taxes?

Did you know that opting out of Medicare (not asking for your tax money back, just not taking advantage of it and paying the tab yourself) will cause you to forfeit Social Security? Big, big government, anyone?

The European Union has an idea for clean air; ban all cars.

Irony Alert: President Obama accepted a transparency award from the open government community, in a closed, undisclosed meeting at the White House.

Barack Obama was against wars against brutal dictators that did not directly threaten the United State or its interests, before he was for them.

A salute to the men and women of Japan — the Fukushima 50 — who are putting their health and, indeed, lives on the line to bring the reactors under control.

Speaking tearfully through an interpreter by phone, the mother of a 32-year-old worker said: “My son and his colleagues have discussed it at length and they have committed themselves to die if necessary to save the nation.

“He told me they have accepted they will all probably die from radiation sickness in the short term or cancer in the long-term.

And finally, "regulating relationships". (Click for a larger image.)

American cruise missiles struck Libya over the weekend after French war planes flew in first as a show of force, shooting down a Libyan MiG. (That’s something I never thought I’d write; the French went in to harm’s way first, followed by America lobbing missiles.)  This was in preparation for enforcing a no-fly zone over the country. Y’know, George W. Bush had two fistfuls of UN resolutions and Congressional approval before he went into Iraq, and he was called a war criminal. Obama has 1 resolution and nothing from Congress to back him up. One wonders if the Left will get just as anxious this time. While there have been some rumblings so far, it’s nowhere near what Bush had to put up with.

President Obama explained why he was attacking Libya:

"We cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people there will be no mercy," the president said from Brazil, where he is starting a five-day visit to Latin America. "We must be clear: actions have consequences."

Saddam Hussein did that for years, and the Left would not let the US, nor any other nation, lift a finger to help.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, there have been photos released that make Abu Ghraib look tame.

Commanders in Afghanistan are bracing themselves for possible riots and public fury triggered by the publication of "trophy" photographs of US soldiers posing with the dead bodies of defenceless Afghan civilians they killed.

Senior officials at Nato‘s International Security Assistance Force in Kabul have compared the pictures published by the German news weekly Der Spiegel to the images of US soldiers abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq which sparked waves of anti-US protests around the world.

They fear that the pictures could be even more damaging as they show the aftermath of the deliberate murders of Afghan civilians by a rogue US Stryker tank unit that operated in the southern province of Kandahar last year.

As much as Bush was blamed for Abu Ghraib, I wonder how much Obama will be blamed for this happening on his watch.

The Left is really going to have its consistency challenged in the coming weeks. As I said, some bloggers and some members of Congress have spoken out against Obama going into Libya, but if all he gets is token resistance, their moral authority will be severely questioned. The biggest question will be, is it moral authority they’re exercising or merely political authority?