Republicans run a political rookie against a veteran, a Catholic against an Orthodox Jew (in a heavily Jewish district of New York City). Democrats pour $500,000 and deploy Bill Clinton to the race. Result: GOP wins a seat it hasn’t held since the 1920s. Secret: It was billed as a referendum on Obama.

Got to catch up on the wrap-up. The past two weeks have been dizzying.

Warren Buffet said he’d be more than happy to pay more taxes. First of all, if he’d be that happy about it, there is absolutely nothing stopping him from just writing a check to the US Treasury. Second of all, he wouldn’t be fighting the IRS over unpaid taxes. How happy, really, do we think he’d be?

Evan Sayet is getting confused trying to keep track of all the different kinds of beliefs that cause the Left to label you "racist". The list keeps growing. (Note, this is a link to a Facebook post. If you don’t have an account, I don’t know if you’ll be able to see it.)

Another instance of where private, protected, Christian speech will get you suspended. (Note, this is too much even for the ACLU.)

You need an ID to get a job, fly on a plane, or buy liquor. But showing an ID to vote? Why, that’s a poll tax, says Rep. John Lewis (D-GA).

Planned Parenthood styles itself as a "family planning" service (at least, it does that when it’s trying to protect its government funding). But by their own numbers, 97.6% of pregnant women who went to PP in 2009 were sold an abortion. And that’s up from the year before. It’s an abortion mill, plain and simple. Follow the money. On top of that, would you consider "safe" a procedure that caused 28% of its patients to attempt suicide afterwards? Or one where patients had an 81% increase in mental health issues?

When the NY Times calls you liberally biased, you really need some self-examination. And yet this same "news" organization was chosen to moderate the recent Republican debate.

The government gives breaks from taxes and some laws based on religious affiliation. However, that determination seems to be getting rather politicized under Obama. When the National Labor Relations Board can decide if you’re "religious enough" (and claiming it based on specious authority), it’s chipping away at religious liberty.

The Washington Post’s "On Faith" section recently asked its contributors, "After millennia of religious studies, is it time for universities also embrace secular studies?" Richard Land, President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission answers with the obvious, "They already are."

A recent WikiLeaks document dump did not redact the names of informants to the US State Department. Now these people must fear for their lives. Is this what Assange supporters really want from their idol; pronouncing death sentences?

Civility Watch: New web-based video game lets you kill well-known Republicans. If a Republican is shot anytime soon, will the Left allow anyone to blame liberal incivility? (Hint: No.)

James Pethokoukis makes a strong case for the idea that what Obama did made the economy worse, not better.

In Obama’s jobs speech the other night, he claimed that all his spending would be paid for. No, sir, not based on your speech it won’t.

And finally, a thought on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. (Click for a larger picture.)

Submitted for your amusement, from a friend’s Facebook status.

I do not like this, Uncle Sam, I do not like this health care scam.
I do not like these dirty crooks, or how they lie and cook the books.
I do not like when Congress steals, I do not like their secret deals.
I do not like ex-speaker Nan, I do not like this ‘YES WE CAN’.
I do not like this spending spree, I’m smart, I know that nothing’s free.
I do not like their smug replies when I complain about their lies.
I do not like this kind of hope. I do not like it. Nope, Nope, Nope!

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.

Democrats  are falling all over themselves trying to paint the Tea Party as terrorists (civility watch!) and blaming them for the downgrade from Standard & Poors.

That’s like blaming Paul Revere for the British invasion.

John Hinderaker over at Powerline doesn’t think the administration can pin this on the Tea Party. In addition to noting that Obama never once provide his own version of a compromise, prior to that, when they had their chance, they did nothing.

What is most ludicrous is the Democrats’ effort to distract attention from the fact that they controlled Congress from January 2007 until January 2011. The first Congress that had any ability to be influenced by the Tea Party movement has been in office for only six months. Do the Democrats seriously expect anyone to believe that S&P’s downgrade of U.S. debt arises out of something that Republican Congressmen have done in the last six months? We expect the Democrats to appeal to ignorance at all times, but this is ridiculous.

[…]

Of the $14.5 trillion national debt, nearly $4.8 trillion–one-third of the total–was incurred during that four-year period when the Congress was exclusively controlled by the Democrats. Moreover, and equally important, during that time the Democrats did nothing to assure the markets that they have a long-term plan to deal with the country’s burgeoning debt. On the contrary, for more than two years the Congressional Democrats have refused to adopt or even to propose a budget! If you are looking for the reason why rating agencies have lost faith in the ability of our government to get its spending and debt under control, you need look no farther.

The Tea Party has whatever power it has in Washington precisely because of this. To call them terrorists is to say that of those Americans sincerely concerned over this unsustainable cycle of debt. Is that the way to woo voters? Is that compromise? Gary Kaltbaum, an investment author, echoes this.

Last I looked, the Tea Party has never spent a dime of taxpayer money. Last I looked, the Tea Party has not spent this country into a $16 trillion deficit. Last I looked, these average Americans are only interested in a better, more efficient, and taxpayer-concerned government. How terrible they are! It is disgusting to see these political hacks continue with their talking points. The good news is that it is backfiring on them. And by the way, John Kerry voted for all this deficit spending.

I have still not seen the most important question asked of the culprits. And it is simple:

"In the year 2000, federal spending was $1.788 trillion. Why are you and on what are you now spending double that amount this year — just a decade later? Please be specific!" Wouldn’t that be a simple question?

But Janet Daley, writing for the London Telegraph, asks what may be the most foundational question, "The truly fundamental question that is at the heart of the disaster toward which we are racing is being debated only in America: is it possible for a free market economy to support a democratic socialist society?" Ms. Daley thinks this question should be debated in Europe, where cradle-to-grave government guarantees are bleeding the Eurozone dry.

We have arrived at the endgame of what was an untenable doctrine: to pay for the kind of entitlements that populations have been led to expect by their politicians, the wealth-creating sector has to be taxed to a degree that makes it almost impossible for it to create the wealth that is needed to pay for the entitlements that populations have been led to expect, etc, etc.

The only way that state benefit programmes could be extended in the ways that are forecast for Europe’s ageing population would be by government seizing all the levers of the economy and producing as much (externally) worthless currency as was needed – in the manner of the old Soviet Union.

And this is what the Left, and even (and especially) the Christian Left wants to turn our country into. Daley’s article is brilliant, coming as it does from inside the mire that socialism has made of Europe, so please read the whole thing. She finishes with an observation that needs to be made known far and wide.

The hardest obstacle to overcome will be the idea that anyone who challenges the prevailing consensus of the past 50 years is irrational and irresponsible. That is what is being said about the Tea Partiers. In fact, what is irrational and irresponsible is the assumption that we can go on as we are.

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 Dalai Lama calls himself a Marxist.

An "unexpectedly" we could do with down here. "Canada Jobless Rate Unexpectedly Declines in May to Its Lowest Since 2009" It’s down to 7.4 percent. We’re adding government jobs and they’re adding private sector jobs. Our dollar is getting weaker while theirs gets stronger. “Our economy has one of the best records in the area of job creation in comparison with other industrialized countries and this is why we will continue to keep our taxes low,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper told lawmakers on June 8. Lessons to be learned  here.

Obama finally figures out, "Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected." Which is one big reason why the stimulus didn’t stimulate.

Civility Watch: “Good afternoon brothers and sisters. Welcome to Nazi Germany….Brothers and sisters, this is not going to be an easy fight,” he shrieked. “It took World War II to get rid of the last Adolf Hitler. It is going to take World War III to get rid of Adolf Christie. Are you ready for World War III?” Union leaders are setting the example in New Jersey.

Soaking the rich won’t work the way the Left intends. Historical tax rates vs actual receipts put the lie to the idea that raising rates will necessarily bring in more revenue.

When even actor Aston Kutcher comes to the aid of Sarah Palin, you know the media has gone way too far.

And speaking of which (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.