I found out something interesting over the weekend.  From the Washington Times:

It turns out that Harry Reid using the ‘N’ word in reference to Obama’s dialect (or lack thereof) is actually a statement “[I]n the context of saying positive things about Senator Obama” — according to Tim Kaine, DNC Chair.

Um… O.K.

So as long as we are using the N word in a *positive* context… and you are a Democrat… you are cool.  Everybody forgives you.  The Media accepts your apology and moves on.  Grace is extended to you and explanations of how you “really meant to say it in a positive context” are proffered from Liberal leadership.  If, on the other hand, you are Trent Lott, and you tell an old congressman that you are proud of him for his accomplishments… you are unquestionably a racist…  no apologies or excuses could possibly suffice.

Harry Reid should resign… Immediately.

Just wanted to RE-TWEET this blog post over at the American Enterprise Institute.   You wonder why our economy hasn’t turned around??  Well, it might be that nobody in the Obama administration has any experience in the private sector… and doesn’t have a clue how it works.  Here’s the Graph:

via Help Wanted, No Private Sector Experience Required « The Enterprise Blog.

I found this little gem in James Taranto’s “Best of the Web Today”.  When discussing Obama’s ‘unprecedented’ whining about the “mess” his predecessor left him… Taranto responds:

The blame-Bush mantra, of course, is an echo of Obama’s own rhetoric. So how do we renew and restore ourselves? Maybe by waiting till 2012 and electing a president who has the capacity to lead rather than pre-emptively make excuses for failure by whining about the “mess” he “inherited.”

Amen brother.  via ‘You’ve Taken the Words Out of My Mouth’.

This guy understands Obama.  From The Nation:

The truth is that Barack Obama has a penchant for these narratives and yet an inclination to rise above them. Two grand but antithetical stories about the same problem, awaiting him and his Olympian skill for the discovery of “common ground”: That is Obama’s favorite script. He regards himself as a kind of unprecedented referee between histories and philosophies. He likes to think that he can see what others cannot see and that, therefore, they must come to him if they wish to live in peace and with meaning. He did this with race in the Philadelphia speech, articulating what blacks see from their end of the periscope and what whites see from theirs. (Until, that is, he had to dump his minister from the campaign truck as a matter of survival. “Common ground” is sometimes not discovered so much as invented, or imposed.) A man of not especially discriminate empathy, he sees himself in the Whitmanesque sense of containing multitudes.

In addressing American intelligence and security professionals at the National Archives, the president again aimed at bridging differences by showing that apparent contradictions are not contradictions at all and that everything will go together, if only for as long as he is speaking. National security that never compromises national values? No problem. National values that guarantee national security? Say it and it will be done. Yes, we have values that elevate and restrict us at once, the ideal of free men and women that procedurally protects also the guilty and the wicked–and never mind that, absent energetic domestic and international defenses, these principles would be outmaneuvered and outclassed on both fronts. And again at Notre Dame, the same above-it-all structure of rhetorical conciliation was applied by Obama to the subject of abortion. “Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words.” Nice enough. But the debate on abortion will not be so tidily retired. All of this is rising above but not really reconciling.

via Narrative Dissonance.

Shelby Steele isn’t pulling punches on the Sotomayor pick.

[T]he Sotomayor nomination shows that Mr. Obama has no idea what a post-racial society would look like. In selling himself as a candidate to the American public he is a gifted bargainer beautifully turned out in post-racial impressionism. But in the real world of Supreme Court nominations, where there is a chance to actually bring some of that idealism down to earth, he chooses a hardened, divisive and race-focused veteran of the culture wars he claims to transcend.

I have called Mr. Obama a bound man because he cannot win white support without bargaining and he cannot maintain minority support without playing the very identity politics that injure him with whites. The latter form of politics is grounded in being what I call a challenger — i.e., someone who presumes that whites are racist until they prove otherwise by granting preferences of some kind to minorities.

via Sotomayor and the Politics of Race – WSJ.com.

It turns out that when you raise taxes on businesses… you push American jobs overseas.  Here’s Steve Ballmer yesterday:

June 3 (Bloomberg) — Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”

If we don’t provide a competitive tax environment for our businesses here in the U.S. then we will continue to loose jobs well into the next decade… far outpacing the 2.5 million jobs the stimulus supposedly ‘created’ (or was it 2.5 million saved?  who knows.)  The fact of the matter is that Obama has done NOTHING to reduce business costs…  NOTHING… even when those businesses are laying people off right and left.  In fact, he wants to RAISE the costs of doing business.

This is nothing more than economic ignorance on display.

via Ballmer Says Tax Would Move Microsoft Jobs Offshore (Update3) – Bloomberg.com.

Behold the folly of Central planning:

In today’s automobile fleet, the majority of the pollution comes from the oldest, dirtiest cars. In fact, the dirtiest 10% of the cars account for more than 50% of smog and carbon monoxide. The dirtiest one-third of the fleet accounts for more than 80% of the pollution… When it comes to smog, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and particulates that new SUV is a lot cleaner than an old, poorly-tuned compact…

An economic phenomenon called “price elasticity of demand” is well established when it comes to automobile purchases. In other words, if you raise the price of new cars, people will buy fewer of them or, at a minimum, put off the purchase for a year or so while they drive the old clunker for a few thousand more miles. And fewer new cars means more pollution, which can cause significant health problems. Yet environmentalists and the press have ignored this issue, so as not to inject a note of complexity or doubt into the chorus of glee that greeted the president’s attack on greenhouse-gas emissions….

The Obama fuel efficiency plan may also contribute to a significant increase in highway deaths as vehicles are required to quickly meet the new CAFE standard and will likely become lighter in weight as a result… Specifically, the NRC estimated that in 1993 there were between 1,300 and 2,600 motor vehicle crash deaths that would not have occurred if cars were as heavy as they were in 1976…

Well, one might argue, this would not be the case if everyone drove smaller cars. The NRC study considered this countervailing fact and included it in its estimates. But nearly half of all car crashes (more than 48% in the years studied) are one-vehicle crashes. Put another way: If your car hits a tree or a post or a bridge abutment, you are most certainly better off in a larger car.

via Light Cars Are Dangerous Cars – WSJ.com.

One of the fundamental economic and monetary protections we have in this country is in the area of secured, prioritized loans.  In fact, we have an entire area of law devoted to secured interests in property and how these interests take priority in bankruptcy proceedings.  This amounts to the RULE OF LAW.  THESE RULE PROTECT INDIVIDUALS… THESE RULES ARE SET IN STONE… ARTICLE 9 OF THE UCC… at least, they were, before Obama started dictating who the auto industry’s winners and loosers were going to be.

Recently, a number of Republican lawmakers have gotten concerned about the way in which the rule of law is being ignored and subverted by the Obama administration… and rightly so.   For those of you who care about being protected from the power of the federal government… who care about the rule of law… you should also take note of what is happening:

WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) – Four U.S. Republican lawmakers have complained to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that a plan to restructure automaker General Motors Corp (GM.N) subverts the rights of bondholders, according to a letter from the lawmakers obtained by Reuters on Friday

A proposed restructuring favors the claims of the United Auto Workers union “over the rights and claims of the company’s diverse group of bondholders, who collectively hold $7 billion more in General Motors debt than the UAW’s health trust and are equal members of the creditor class,” the lawmakers said.

“Bondholders must have a seat at the table during negotiations in how the company would be restructured,” said the letter to Geithner from Representatives Jeb Hensarling, Eric Cantor, Mike Pence and Pete Sessions.

“We are extremely concerned that in the name of restructuring General Motors, the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry … has begun waging what some believe amounts to a war on capital: contractual rights of investors are being trampled by the government under the rationale of ‘extraordinary circumstances,’” the lawmakers wrote.

Kudos to Jeb Hensarling, Eric Cantor, Mike Pence and Pete Sessions.  Way to stand up for those being trampled by the Obama administration.

via US House Republicans back GM bondholders in talks | Reuters.

I’m glad others are noticing the same thing I do:

Obama is following George W. Bush in making war, not love. Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan. Bush dropped bombs on those places, and all we heard about was gut-wrenching wailing and screaming from the Left for eight years because of all the innocent people who died. Now O is doing the same thing … and all we hear are the sounds of silence.

via American Thinker Blog: Liberals and O’s Afghanistan policy.

President Obama held a much ballyhooed town hall in Strasbourg, France, on Friday, touted by the White House as an outreach to Europeans on the second leg of the president’s “listening” tour.

But the first person he called on was an American — and the third, too. By the end of the hourlong session, not a single French citizen got to ask the U.S. president a question.

In all, Obama took just five questions from the thousands of people packed into a sports arena after delivering a lengthy speech read from a teleprompter. And the query topics were on the light side; one asked about the expected acquisition of a family dog, another about whether “you regret to have run for presidency.”

via Washington Times – CURL: In France, Obama takes no questions from French.