Good Lord, man, get a grip! Who, exactly, is paranoid here? Conservatives are making, every day, serious public policy arguments on issue after issue that resonate with most Americans. Liberals like Klein, meanwhile, can’t formulate an argument to save their lives, but fulminate impotently against conservatives, with invective substituting for analysis at every turn. For the last fifteen months, Klein’s Democrats in Washington have pursued policies that are ill-advised and deservedly unpopular. They will pay, to a degree as yet unknown, at the polls in November. No amount of hysterical snark by liberal journalists will change those facts.

via Power Line – The Paranoid Style of American Liberalism.

If the Obama administration has its way, the gospel of climate change will be coming to a pulpit near you. That at least seems to be the dream of the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships—a 25-member group of leaders from across the religious spectrum that is part of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Last month, the council spent a day at the White House briefing senior administration officials on its “final report of recommendations” for improving collaboration between the government and religious organizations. The 164-page document, entitled “A New Era of Partnerships,” takes up the “priority areas” identified by President Obama—Economic Recovery and Domestic Poverty, Fatherhood and Healthy Families, Environment and Climate Change, Global Poverty and Development, and Interreligious Cooperation.

Poverty, families, interreligious co-operation: All pretty standard. But what does an office created to help better provide social services to the needy have to do with climate change?

via The Green Shepherd | The Weekly Standard.

“The Democratic Party is closer to corporate America — and to Wall Street in particular — than many Democrats would care to admit.”

“In fact, Goldman is not opposed to Obama’s Wall Street Bailout Bill at all. As a Goldman official told Politico Monday: “We’re not against regulation. We’re for regulation. We partner with regulators.”

“Obtaining a carve-out isn’t rocket science. Just give Chairman Dodd (D-CT) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) a ****load of money.” And loads of money is what Wall Street has been giving to the authors of the Wall Street Bailout Bill. The Wall Street banker at the center of Goldman’s SEC fraud complaint recently solicited money from his banker friends for Sen. Schumer describing him as “one of the few members of Congress that has consistently supported the hedge fund industry.”

via Morning Bell: The Crony Capitalist Threat to Our Economic Freedom | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News..

BTW: Dodd is the one who designed the enhanced regulations now being debated. Did YOUR special interest give his campaign as much money as Wall Street?

The whole article is very informative. It shows how easy it is to manipulate a populace by getting them to demand we “just do SOMETHING” in response to endless waves of crisis after crisis.

Joe Scarborough: “Should the Federal Government get involved in this issue?”

Chuckie: “Well, sure! We regulate airlines, we regulate everything else. Why can’t we regulate something that people want?”

Morning Joe: Schumer on financial reform and banning carry-on fees.  (about 1:18)

I think the idea to charge fees for carry-on bags is idiotic, but so’s the checked bag fee. Let’s be serious, though: The airlines cut the costs as much as possible to stay competitive with each other. therefore, they advertise lower basic (discount) fares to attract passengers, then recoup their costs in the add-on fees. One airline will offer a flight for $149 and charge an additional $45 for a bag. The next will charge $225 for the flight and offer free carry-ons. The first will be more attractive to the passenger who has no need for a carry-on, the latter will lure the passenger who can’t go without.

People like Chuckie somehow think that a government regulation will force the first airline to pass up the additional fee, and STILL offer the $149 fare. I think the new law would make it more likely that all the airlines will wind up charging the $225 fare (and higher).

We can fly coast-to-coast for a pittance because of competition between airlines, not because of government regulations. Extra laws only provide corporations with shields to hide behind, while they work through the loopholes.

“President Obama believes that diplomacy is the ultimate intellectual tool to solve world problems,” Lehman tells us. “What he doesn’t realize is that diplomacy is the shadow that is cast by a strong and capable military and an administration that knows how to use if effectively. It’s not some blunt instrument.”

–John Lehman, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy

via Lehman: China Gives ‘Naive’ Obama the ‘Slow Roll’ – Robert Costa – The Corner on National Review Online.

The Kremlin realized that the question of how much shale gas Poland will be extracted will depend on which political party wins the next elections there. One option: the party of late Polish President Lech Kaczynski. He was an ardent nationalist, populist, anti-Communist and a man who experienced deep personal pain over the Katyn massacre. Kaczynski made a point of attending commemorations at the site every year.

The other option is the party of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a pragmatist who is ready to be friends with everyone, except Kaczynski — the two refused to even speak to each other.

And then, three days before the commemoration, the two prime ministers — Putin and Tusk — met at Katyn. They especially came in advance so as not to invite Kaczynski and to outflank him.

Three days later, Kaczynski — the unpopular, bad-tempered and despondent man whom opinion polls indicated would lose his re-election bid to any other contender  — flew to Smolensk. He took the entire Polish elite with him in hopes that his personal visit would outdo the pre-emptive showing by the archrival Tusk and the despised Putin.

And when he was told that dense fog shrouded the area and that flight controllers were attempting to reroute the airplane to an alternate airport, it was undoubtedly Kaczynski who gave the command to land anyway, suspecting that the fog was just a political ruse instigated by Putin to disrupt Kaczynski’s participation in the Katyn ceremony.

Putin and Tusk landed at the same Smolensk airport just three days before Saturday’s crash to participate in their own Katyn commemoration ceremonies. For their arrival, special navigation equipment was brought to the Smolensk airport to provide additional safety. It is possible that this equipment was removed before Kaczynski’s plane landed. That would add even more fog to the mysterious crash.

via Scent of Shale Gas Hangs Over Katyn | Opinion | The Moscow Times.

Of course, how credible is the Moscow Times?  I dunno.  Better than Pravda?

Reader, help me here: one of two things seems to be going on. The more a state sets down rules, the more they are simply ignored, to such a degree that basic and necessary zoning and health statutes become more laxly enforced than in red-state, small government cultures.

Or is it  that the state regulators feel enforcement of  myriad of rules would be unfair to, or impossible with, the illegal alien Hispanic community? I rode by one compound, counted five extraneous homesteads of sorts behind the main frame house, a dozen dogs, and all sorts of illegal wiring schemes—a regulator’s dream? My hunch is that the bureaucrat regulator would rather spend time in the Sierra hassling a compliant cabin owner I know for putting on a new metal roof that was without the properly-approved tint.

via Works and Days » A Tour Through Recession America.

VDH notices here something I’ve also seen.  As our legislators churn out countless new laws and regulations every year, it becomes impossible to know or enforce all of them (many are actually contradictory).  This leaves it to the regulators to decide arbitrarily which rule is enforced, and which citizen is regulated.  They exercise their discretion in these matters to control the populace, ignoring infractions of supporters, cracking down on opponents.

Hayek points out in a footnote to “The Road to Serfdom”:

According to the classical exposition by A. V. Dicey in The Law of the Constitution (8th ed., p. 198) the rule of law “means, in the first place, the absolute supremacy or predominance of regular law as opposed to the influence of arbitrary power, and excludes the existence of arbitrariness, of prerogative, or even of wide discretionary authority on the part of government”.

The sheer number of laws out there weigh heavily upon the concept of the Rule of Law, tipping it so severely it threatens to collapse.