Obama certainly looks down his nose in a condescending manner. Why do I hear "KNEEELLLLLLLLL BEFORE ZOD!!!" from Superman II in my ear?

In opening the State of Union, Obama mentioned the Speaker of the House, the Vice President and the American people. What, no acknowledgement of illegal aliens? Obama apparently is not as tolerant as made to appear.

Isn't Chris Matthews forgetting that Obama is Black more offensive then Harry Reid saying "negro dialect"?

By invoking Bull Run & the Bloody Sunday of the civil rights movement in the State of the Union, Obama implies disagreement with him is racist.

Obama claimed he took office amidst growing government debt. It's getting even worse under him.

Biden certainly seemed gleeful about hosing the banks. Biden looked like a bobblehead the way he couldn't keep his neck still.

Guess we’ll see at tax time if Obama is blowing smoke up our rears about not raising taxes.

If Obama is supposedly one of the greatest orators of world history surpassing Bush’s limited elocutionary abilities, why did he use the word “cops” rather than “police”?

President plans to toss $30 billion here; $30 billion there. Reminds me of the Simpsons bit about Internet stock.

And what if the job bill Obama demands “without delay” is delayed?

I guess all that clean energy technology China is inventing was the cause of all that smog at the Beijing Olympics.

Will Obama really allow offshore drilling or is this a phantom promise like clean-coal technology?

Pelosi’s grin is scarier than the Joker’s.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Naplotano applauds like a lethargic Walrus.  read more »

The full text of the State of the Union address and interspersed commentary is provided below the fold. The response provided by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell in the chamber of the oldest legislative body in America was brilliant and a stark contrast to the address by President Obama. In Richmond, an address of optimism belonging to a free people who are capable, self sufficient and generous and who can govern themselves at government which is close to and response to them. In Washington, an address of a petty tyrant, that national government is the only answer to all problems for a people who are dependent serfs. Comments are shown offset by breaks and contrasting color.

Our Constitution declares that from time to time, the Presidentshall give to Congress information about the state of our union. Fortwo hundred and twenty years, our leaders have fulfilled this duty.They have done so during periods of prosperity and tranquility. Andthey have done so in the midst of war and depression; at moments ofgreat strife and great struggle. 

It's tempting to look back on these moments and assume that ourprogress was inevitable – that America was always destined to succeed.But when the Union was turned back at Bull Run and the Allies firstlanded at Omaha Beach, victory was very much in doubt. When the marketcrashed on Black Tuesday and civil rights marchers were beaten onBloody Sunday, the future was anything but certain. These were timesthat tested the courage of our convictions, and the strength of ourunion. And despite all our divisions and disagreements; our hesitationsand our fears; America prevailed because we chose to move forward asone nation, and one people.   read more »

Those still not convinced should ask themselves before they run off and join such groups how much control they want to cede over their lives to the beneficence of the collective. For once one signs over the very right to ownership to one’s dwelling and possessions, where does it end?

Willing to relinquish rights to the conjugal affections of your spouse to the group? Don’t snicker.

In many cults, those not willing to surrender their spouses to the group are labeled as being insufficiently devoted to the group or "too individualistic" in orientation. Interestingly this allegation is invoked increasingly in the churches of today as they totter ever closer to the edges of apostasy and unbelief.

Those enamored with their own smug progressivism will claim such excesses are more characteristic of the religious mindset. Secularists would never stand for such outrages and the infringement on the most basic of relationships?

Think so do you? Though he might have started off religious, before the last drop of Kool-Aid was slurped, Jim Jones' position on the Scriptures and the beauties of socialism had more in common with the National Counsel of Churches than Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition. And for those that think Marx is the cat's whiskers, what do they have to say about this thinker's proposal that the individual family and private marriages should be abolished?

And even if one happens to have a proclivity to these bizarre living arrangements without all the kinky wifeswapping and such, on what grounds does one object when these compounds lay claim to your children? Some of these COMMUNITIES conspire to undermine familial bonds between parents and offspring in a group setting or by minimizing the time parents spend alone with their biological progeny.  read more »

Yesterday Democrats suffered a mortifying trouncing in Massachusetts’ special Senate election, in which Republican Scott Brown zoomed from 17 points behind Democrat Martha Coakley in the polls less than two weeks ago to winning by a handy 5%.

As AP reported, “Brown’s victory was so sweeping, he even won in the Cape Cod community where Kennedy, the longtime liberal icon, died of brain cancer last August.”

To be fair, Coakley did manage to capture 84% of Cambridge, Amherst, and Provincetown, which tend to serve as bellwethers for—well, themselves.

Coakley’s complaint that her poll numbers started to drop right after the Senate passed its version of the health care bill on Christmas rang a bit hollow, given that she campaigned vociferously to vote for that very health care bill if elected to Congress.

In the wake of the clear message sent to them by the people of Massachusetts, Democrats are slowly backing away from their suicidal insistence on passing a bill only 33% of Americans favor and that even they don’t like, considering more bipartisan/free-market solutions, and resolving to address healthcare reform in a more piecemeal fashion.

Gotcha!  Actually, Democrats are considering a number of insane, Mission Impossible-style workaround strategies to thwart the will of the people and pass their health care bill without a filibuster-proof Senate.  These include:

•    Forcing the House to pass the Senate bill, word-for-word, with nary a change in punctuation.  This option would throw out all of the heatedly negotiated agreements between the two chambers conducted in the past few weeks, including the major union employee exemption to the excise tax on “Cadillac plans.”  It would also ignore many of the other differences between the bills for which Democrats in the House say they cannot accept the House version as is, such as language on abortion funding.  House Democrat Bart Stupak, author of the Stupak Amendment, reported on Monday that “House members will not vote for the Senate bill.  There’s no interest in that.”  He added that when the notion was proposed at a caucus meeting among Democrats, “It went over like a lead balloon.”  read more »

Supporters of the Democrats’ health care bill offer the following take on Tuesday’s special election in Massachusetts between Republican Scott Brown and Democrat Martha “Kennedy” Coakley, a plea they hope will draw on voters’ sense of fairness and magnanimity:

If Brown wins, the health care bill will not be passed.  It is a terrible shame that something this nation has frittered away a year debating and Congress has spent a year drafting, something that may not get another chance again—if at all—for a whole generation, could be dismantled because of the obstinacy of one man who wins a special election in a tiny state.  Brown may even derail Obama’s entire agenda.

As if it will do any good, here’s a point-by-point rebuttal of this selfless appeal by Democrats to our leftist instincts:

(1) The point of a debate is to have two sides present their cases and see which makes the better argument.  The outcome is not predetermined, much as Democrats would like it to be and have tried to make it so.  Republicans spoke, Democrats spoke, and the American people made up their minds: Republicans won.

(2) The fact that we spent a year debating this horrendous bill, in all its myriad forms, is indeed deplorable, when we could have been talking about how to encourage the Iranian protestors, win in Afghanistan, or abolish the Department of Education.  But just because gallons of ink have been spilled and billions of megabytes have been transmitted and trillions of cubic feet of C02 have been exhaled thrashing out numerous claims made by Democrats and debunked by Republicans, doesn’t mean we have to embrace the fallacy of sunken costs and pass something that stinks just to rationalize our squandered effort.  read more »

Weighing in on the controversy surrounding the Senate Majority Leader’s racially insensitive remarks about candidate Barack Obama, Kanye West declared at a recent benefit for Haitian earthquake victims, “Harry Reid doesn’t care about dark-skinned black people with Negro dialects!”

Oh, wait—sorry, he didn’t.  According to Harry Reid’s electability criteria for black Democratic candidates—“light-skinned” with “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one”—I notice that the following are all A-grade presidential material: Hillary “I Don’t Feel No Ways Tired” Clinton, Rod “I’m Blacker than Barack Obama” Blagojevich, and Bill “Our First Black President” Clinton.

On the taboo list are Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Marion Barry.

Also forbidden because of their complexion are many dark-skinned black Republicans, such as Clarence Thomas, J. C. Watts, and Alan Keyes.

Democrats’ response to Reid’s outrageous remarks, as revealed in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s new book “Game Change,” was to get angry at… Trent Lott.

Last week my column “Liberal Syntax: A Noun, a Verb, and a Bush Smear” offered a rule that characterizes liberals’ defense of their mishandling of national security and the economy.  For more general purposes, such as their defense of Reid’s remarks, I propose replacing “Bush” with “Republican.”

Since they brought up Lott’s comment, let’s drag it out into the light again and compare it to Reid’s sentiments.  Lott: “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him.  We’re proud of it.  And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.”  read more »

When conservatives correctly point out that one disastrous terrorist attack and another catastrophic but thwarted attack both happened during President Obama’s first term in office, because his agencies either overlooked the perpetrators’ jihadist intentions or failed to act on relevant intelligence, liberals respond with an argument that was discredited nearly a decade ago: “But 9/11 happened on George Bush’s watch!”

Obama supporters mocked Rudy Giuliani’s recent claim to George Stephanopolous “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” stubbornly avoiding Giuliani’s obvious implication that he was speaking post-9/11.  Until last week, Democrats loved to excoriate Giuliani for making endless references to the terrorist attack that occurred while he was mayor of New York; now they claim he forgets it happened.  Which is it?

Conservatives’ point is that Obama has forgotten the lessons of 9/11, which Bush did not have available to him until, surprisingly—9/11.  The Ft. Hood and Flight 253 attacks happened in the first year of Obama’s administration, and 9/11 happened in the first year of Bush’s administration, but Obama had the example of 9/11 to learn from, and Bush did not.  (Even if you count the thwarted attack by the shoe bomber in December 2001, that bomber tried to strike just months after 9/11, when fully revamped security procedures were not running as smoothly as they are now; also, the bomber used the novel, unprecedented technique of wearing the bomb on his person so that it would not be detected by luggage screeners.)  read more »

Each of the two ratified versions of the health care bill currently sitting in Congress was barely passed, by virtually the slimmest margin possible, in a hectic last-minute stampede.  Dozens of harsh compromises had to be hammered out to cobble together the fragile framework now standing in each chamber.

The two bills are like delicate Jenga towers, swaying nerve-wrackingly in the breeze, that must now be reassembled by a team of 535 clumsy attention-seekers into a single tower twice as tall.  And legislators across the two chambers—and even within them—are not even speaking the same language.

Here are a few of the myriad discrepancies legislators must reconcile to ensure that their monument to Obama’s greatness doesn’t tumble to the ground:

In the House version of the bill, a government-run insurance exchange is created on a national level and includes a public option.  In the Senate version, exchanges are created on the state level and do not include a public option.  Virtually identical!

The House completely bans the practice 0f charging those with preexisting conditions higher premiums.  The Senate allows insurers to offer unlimited discounts for customers who engage in subjectively defined wellness activities: say, exercising, eating healthy, not having contracted lung cancer.

Insurance exchanges are implemented in 2013 in the House bill and 2014 in the Senate bill.

In the House version, employers are forced to provide insurance for their employees and pay a fine if they do not.  In the Senate version, employers are not required to provide insurance, but pay a fine for employees who opt for government-run insurance and receive federal subsidies.  The House has higher penalties than the Senate.  read more »

So much for the lie that poverty causes terrorism.

Despite the mainstream media’s refusal to accept it, there is one factor more reliable than any other in predicting whether an individual will engage in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies:

(1) It’s not whether he lives in third world poverty and resents being overshadowed by the imperialist West.  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, was the son of a prominent, wealthy Nigerian bank chairman.  Abdulmutallab attended the British School in Togo and University College London, the latter of which cost as much as Obama shells out for his daughters to attend a semester at Sidwell Friends.  Abdulmutallab’s college dorm was a $6 million apartment in London’s West End.

If poverty caused terrorism, then a corollary of this argument is that a country’s efforts to relieve poverty should prevent terrorism.  Yet the U.S. provided Arlington, VA-born Major Nidal Malik Hasan with a free medical education worth tens of thousands of dollars, which apparently did not console him enough to prevent him from murdering fellow soldiers on his military post in Ft. Hood, Texas.  Indeed, Hasan planned and carried out the attack after having been promoted from captain to major, despite miserable performance reviews.

John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and San Anselmo, California and attended a “California Distinguished School” in the Tamalpais Union High School District.  read more »