Sadly, we come to the end of the week and are faced with yet another pathetic Friday ONT. I know itÂ’s a hard thing to deal with, and I didnÂ’t like writing it any more than you like reading it, but soldier on we must. Hopefully we can endure this atrocity and make it through the night with as few mental scars as possible.

Some inspiring words:

More dregs below the dregs here above the fold...

(I'm piddling around tonight, which is why the ONT is late. I've got a couple of things to add but figured I might as well let you apes get started on your shiny new thread) more...

Posted by: Genghis at 06:30 PM | Comments (739)
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This is the same judge who already found the Interior Department in contempt of court for its shenanigans with the summer's drilling moratoriums. Now he's ordering the Interior Department to start issuing permits (or permit denials) within a reasonable time instead of just sitting on permit applications:

“Not acting at all is not a lawful option,” Judge Feldman wrote, adding that the delays are “increasingly inexcusable” and were causing drilling companies to relocate their rigs to foreign waters.

The interior secretary, Ken Salazar, imposed a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the gulf immediately after the Deepwater Horizon explosion in April, which killed 11 workers and spilled nearly five million barrels of oil into the ocean. Judge Feldman declared the drilling ban illegal in June, but Mr. Salazar modified it slightly, and it remained in place until the department lifted it in October.

However, despite the official end of the ban, Mr. Salazar and the agencyÂ’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement have not issued any deepwater permits.

The Interior Department has 30 days to make a decision on five permits.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:24 PM | Comments (382)
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If you shift the budget window from the fairytale the Democrats used to the real world..Behold!

By repealing those coverage provisions of PPACA and the Reconciliation Act, over the 2012-2021 period H.R. 2 would yield gross savings of $1,390 billion and net savings (after accounting for the offsets just mentioned) of $1,042 billion.

A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon it's real money.

Philip Klein has more in his Twitter feed, scroll around for more include the tax hikes that wouldn't happen if it's repealed

Posted by: DrewM at 01:58 PM | Comments (71)
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Oh man, the Ronulans are back in force. Outraged at YAF's expulsion of Rep. Ron Paul from its national advisory board, Cato Institute's foreign policy director Christopher Preble suggests that YAF be expelled from the conservative movement.

Who is Preble? Just so you know where he's coming from, Preble wrote a book entitled How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free. He's a self-described libertarian who, in his own words, "is neither a conservative, nor have I ever been a member of Young Americans for Freedom." That doesn't stop him from suggesting that YAF be purged from the conservative movement.

His op-ed in the Daily Caller is a not-very-well-crafted compilation of non sequiturs and logical fallacies. I take it apart below the fold, not because it is particularly worthy of response, but because I want to remind readers that a Paulbot is just a Paulbot, whether he's a greasy-haired student bussed into CPAC to vote in a straw poll or he's stuffed into a suit and called "director" at a libertarian think tank. more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 01:08 PM | Comments (94)
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This, I guess, is the new $22 billion needed to get the cuts up to the promised $100 billion, and they blocked it.

More than half of the Republican conference backed the measure in opposition to two party chiefs, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who voted with every Democrat against it. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) did not vote, as is traditional for Speakers.

The partyÂ’s fourth-ranking member, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), supported the measure, as did dozens of Republican freshman. Yet there was division even among the first-term, Tea Party-backed lawmakers. Rep. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.), an elected freshman representative on the leadership team, opposed the bill, while Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.), the freshman class president, supported it.

Like no previous proposal, the heated debate over the amendment drew a bright line through the GOP conference, pitting conservatives pushing the deepest spending cuts against senior Republicans who denounced them as “misguided,” “indiscriminate” and, in the case of Rep. Daniel Lungren (R-Calif.), “lazy.”

Republican committee chairmen like Lungren, Appropriations chief Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) and Jo Bonner (Ala.) made a rare stand alongside Democrats, while Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), a former chairman of the GOP conference, spoke in strong support of the measure.

I don't even know what to say.

Read on and you will hear Rodgers, who needs to be gone as soon as possible, claiming that automatic across-the-board spending cuts are "lazy." By this, he means that this is the only fair way to make these cuts which will actually be politically palatable, and so he opposes this measure. He wants to weight each cut individually so that each constituency can come out one-by-one to demagogue the cuts and prevent them.

Okay, I give up. I wanted to give this two party system a try. Forget it. It's time for a third party, the Tea Party.

The GOP is dead to me. Hal Rodgers and posturing lying phony Eric Cantor need to be replaced.

The Republican Party

If you like your ruinous behemoth tax-parasite government, you can keep your ruinous behemoth tax-parasite government.

And that is is promise we will definitely keep. Because, in the end, that's the one thing that matters to us.

By the Way: Defunding ObamaCare was always symbolic because money has already been appropriated for that, in the last Congress, so only a positive law would stop that, and the Senate won't agree to that, and Obama would veto it.

So it was purely symbolic, for the suckers. (Chris Wallace just explained this; I wasn't in on the con.)

So the sucker thing that is pure political theater they did. The real thing, cutting other stuff, they won't do.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:20 PM | Comments (567)
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And Planned Parenthood.

The House voted to defund President Obama's health care overhaul on Friday during a sustained burst of floor activity on amendments to a temporary spending bill that would keep the government lights on but impose deep cuts on domestic programs.

The House approved the amendment in a 239-187 vote.

Among the other actions the House took was to reject a controversial plan to end the Pentagon's sponsorship of a NASCAR team and to vote for a ban on federal aid to Planned Parenthood.

The proposals were among more than 120 amendments remaining for the House to vote on as Republican leaders wind down a week of frenzied action on the spending bill.

The overall bill is the first step in an increasingly bitter struggle between Democrats and Republicans over how much to cut federal agencies' funding over the second half of the budget year that ends Sept. 30. Current funding runs out March 4 and a temporary spending bill will be needed to avoid a government shutdown.

The news is not all good. A lot of Republicans defected on defunding the COPS nonsense, and what I guess was supposed to be a temporary Homeland Security payout to first responders (in the wake of 9/11) which has now become, like all government programs, permanent. And commenters say they haven't cut Amtrak yet (but they're offering amendments so they might) and you've got Dan Lundgren whining about cutting his staff budget.

Toughen up, buttercup.

I don't really think he's threatening to quit the caucus as the Washington Examiner claims. They're very nearly making that up. But he is whining like a schoolyard bitch, as Champ Kind would say.

I don't get these people. How do they politically think they can sell "shared sacrifice" if they insist on no sacrifice at all for themselves?

What the hell? What part of the sentence "We all must sacrifice" is throwing you there, Dan? Which word in that sentence is the read-bump causing your eyes to spin out of control?

I don't want to sound like Jim DeMint here but this is the mathematical fact: We only need 218 House members, plus say a dozen as spares and back-ups.

We can do anything we want with that many. We do not need more. If some of these assholes find this is too difficult for them, I support and encourage their defection to a third party. We will beat them next cycle.

Or not. Who cares. That's the wonderful thing -- it doesn't matter if we beat them or not. We only need 218 (230 for cover and backup).

Posted by: Ace at 11:45 AM | Comments (89)
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Related news: Obama's greenish, soft stools are among the exemplars par excellence of greenish, soft stools in the history of the universe.

Even Obama's cowardice and irresponsibility is, it turns out, brilliant and even noble.

President Barack Obama's proposed budget this week raised a key question about how he governs: Can he lead without getting out in front?

Obama says the government has to fix Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to avoid fiscal disaster. He just doesn't think he should be the first one to say how.

That, Republicans say, is an abdication of leadership. Obama says it's smart leadership, that if he made a specific proposal now on how to fix those politically charged programs, it would just become a target for critics, feed talk-show shouting and make real negotiations impossible.

He may be right. Where leaders such as FDR and LBJ once could send specific legislation to Congress and see it enacted, things changed in recent decades. Bill Clinton proposed a detailed health care plan in 1993 — and cartoonists had a field day lampooning it, lobbyists ganged up against it and Congress gave up on it. George W. Bush tried to propose major changes in Social Security in 2005, and Democrats ripped his plan to pieces.

Ah, you see? Previous presidents attempted to lead on difficult issues and were punished for it. That means not that this attempt to lead was admirable, but that they were wrongheaded. See, Obama's figured this out. He knows the best way to lead is to not lead at all. The best way to do his job is to not do his job at all. The best way to make choices is to make no choices.

Okay. Sure. Makes sense.

I guess that means I'm like the all-time best orgasm-provider in history. My "new, crafty" method of bringing a woman to orgasm is to be so inept at it she buys a reliable vibrator.

Yay me.

Now comes the Obama model.

Oh it's a "model." I though it was just chickenshit, but now I see it's a "model."

He never sent specific health care legislation to Congress, yet managed to enact sweeping changes in a law that his party had sought since Harry Truman. He proposed only broad principles for financial regulation, and got what's arguably the most ambitious regulation of Wall Street since the 1930s.

Let's add in he never proposed what he wanted in a stimulus bill and let Nancy Pelosi write it. That worked out about as well as ObamaCare -- yes, with supermajorities in both houses of Congress they both passed, but they are both failures.

Liberals, determined to lower the bar ever lower for the Man-Boy Who Can't Do Anything Right, are now claiming that simply passing a bill is a success.

The bill's merits and results are entirely irrelevant. He passed it. He won.

Changing entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security will be harder: He faces a Republican-led House of Representatives on this one. And he'll eventually have to offer more specifics to drive the debate, analysts say. But he's clearly trying to forge a new model of presidential leadership adapted to a new age.

What, the new age of chickenshit?

"It's a potentially effective strategy for Obama," said Bruce Buchanan, a scholar of the presidency at the University of Texas. "Leadership has always been changeable across presidential history."

By the way: There is nothing "new" about being a pussy. Other people have tried fecklessness, cowardice, and selfishness as a "leadership" model. The only thing "new" here is the Make Believe Media's rush to credit Obama with yet another unprecedented triumph.

Thanks to Hot Air. Good Lord. Jaw drop.

Also at Hot Air is this made-up liberal nontroversy over Congressmen sleeping in their offices. Skip down to the second video, of Lawrence O'Donnell, if you need a laugh. He repeatedly calls Zev Chavetz a "tax criminal" for sleeping in his office in DC (on a modest cot), and just will not relent with the idiotic attack.

One thing is that he seems like he's on the edge of laughing at how stupid he's being himself, but he's selling this crap to the left seriously. It's not ironic.

Chavetz, meanwhile, just keeps laughing in his face.

It is astonishing that these people will brand FoxNews as "right wing media" when the rest of the media takes silly crap like this off left-wing websites on pushes them as "news."

Posted by: Ace at 11:33 AM | Comments (75)
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It is meant to look like some sort of grassroots movement, but it isn't. They have phone banks, union thugs, social media--the works.

Organizing for America, Obama's campaign arm now under the umbrella of the DNC, has been mobilizing union members and supporters to rally against a proposed Wisconsin budget measure that would strip workers of collective bargaining rights and force them to contribute more for benefits.

Leaders have initiated phone banks and on-the-ground canvassing, and relied on a social media blitz on Facebook and Twitter to build turnout.

DNC Chairman Tim Kaine also reportedly spoke with Wisconsin union leaders and state legislators ahead of the protests, the Huffington Post reported, signaling his direct involvement in coordinating the effort.

Once again, the Community Organizer of the United States ("COOTUS") inserts himself into local politics. Not very presidential.

Posted by: rdbrewer at 10:52 AM | Comments (202)
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Serving all people. That's what they do, they neutrally serve all the taxpayers paying them.

Posted by: Ace at 09:57 AM | Comments (119)
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It's a whole lot easier to pick up an open seat (especially in a purplish state) than against a long time incumbent.

Bingaman had been mulling whether to run for a fifth term for months and, if he had, would have almost certainly been re-elected.

His retirement, however, creates an open seat contest that both national parties will almost certainly target. Democrats should start the race with an edge, however, given President Obama's 15-point victory margin in the state in 2008.

Bingaman is the fourth Democratic (or Democratic-aligned) Senator to announce that he will not run for re-election in 2012, joining Sens. Jim Webb (Va.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Kent Conrad (N.D.) on the sidelines.

Two Republicans -- Sens. Jon Kyl (Ariz.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas) -- are not running for new terms.

Dems are seeing the writing on the wall...winning your race but then coming back to be in the minority is no fun.

New Mexico just elected a Republican Governor, Susana Martinez, so the idea of picking up a statewide seat there isn't beyond reach. The question will be candidate recruitment. Hey, doesn't Don Rumsfeld live in New Mexico?

Posted by: DrewM at 09:03 AM | Comments (91)
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