Ed Morrisey over at HotAir has an amusing speculation - what if Obama doesn't run again?

Lets pretend Ed's right and Obama decides he's not into this anymore and announces in a few months that he's not running for reelection. Hillary and how many dozen other Dems are going to jump into a suddenly wide-open race? Gotta assume Hillary's the front runner. She'll suck up lots of "I'm so sorry I supported Obama and betrayed you Hill." Would Biden run? I can't imagine who else would jump in - rather, who wouldn't jump in?

And it would have an large impact on the Republican race - the guys more towards the center become stronger as the fight for the middle picks up steam.

_{^{(as a spectator sport)}}

Ok, this post sucked. I've got a better one!

Latest Obama Brain Storm - Free Lunches for Affluent students!

... the recent $4.5 billion expansion of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which will now provide free lunches to ALL - rich and poor, needy and non-needy - of Detroit’s 65,800 public school-students.

But the program’s logic is even more insane than the price tag: The administration says it is giving rich kids free food to eliminate the shame that less-fortunate students may feel in receiving free food. We’re not making this up.

"We’ve worked very hard to reduce the stigma," Aaron Lavallee, a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman,..."

"Now all students will walk through a lunch line and not have to pay," says Mark Schrupp, Detroit Public Schools COO. "Low-income students will not be easily identifiable and will be less likely to skip meals."

Again, we aren’t making this up.

... government has become a piggy bank for the Left to hand out favors to friends, subsidize third-car hybrid purchases for the rich, and test goofy theories about class stigma

Again, this is in Detroit! A city that doesn't need more bold social experiments.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 01:53 PM | Comments (306)
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That's the word, his last defenders laid down arms and he was killed in Tripoli.

We'll see.

Lots of updates here.

The war under the radar is flipping, and Obama is gonna get a chance to embrace the "you break it, you buy it" crap from the left.

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

UPDATE: Or.. negotiatin to save his hide.

ALSO: I'm gonna miss his totally fly "MC Hammer" robes and shit.

more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 01:00 PM | Comments (212)
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Get down. Make love.

You have your orders, soldier.
more...

Posted by: Monty at 11:54 AM | Comments (173)
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UPDATED below with a link to some historical stats, courtesy of dad29.

Good for the goose, right?

If the Left and their mouthpieces in the press are allowed to run ads and "news" stories portraying the Right pushing Granny off a cliff, then we need to be willing to muck it up with them.

Obama's end-run on Congress and the citizens of the U.S. vis-a-vis Cap 'n Trade continues apace. Expect energy bills to increase in January as producers are forced by the EPA to incur higher costs.

Oh, they assure us that the benefits far outweigh the costs. Government projections on the efficacy of bureaucracy are sacrosanct, after all.

Environmental groups praised the new rule because it would reduce acid rain and air pollution as well as help curb health effects from dirty air linked to coal plants. The EPA projected the rule will save up to 34,000 lives a year and prevent more than 400,000 asthma attacks as well as 19,000 admissions to hospitals.

I'd sure love to see an accounting of all EPA regulations forced on the U.S., in terms of how accurate the EPA projections were vs the cost to the economy. dad29 provides a link to Junk Science debunking some of the numbers.

But the EPA isn't in the "results" game. Besides - any data suggesting targets weren't met just mean more regulations are necessary. It's a hell of a scam.

So when your heat doesn't seem to want to come on next winter, for either lack of funds to pay your bill, or lack of energy production, please try to be warmed by this ageless remark from President SCOAMF :

"You would think they would be saying thank you."

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:57 AM | Comments (292)
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I've got a bunch of books in my backlog waiting to be read, but most of them are dense nonfiction things. I found myself in the mood for some escapism in the last week, so I started re-reading F. Paul Wilson's "Repairman Jack" series. I just finished The Tomb and am now starting Legacies.

I really enjoy Wilson's "Repairman Jack" books because, unlike many other series heroes, Jack is a fully fleshed-out character. He's not a combination of Superman, Batman, and James Bond. He gets hurt, he makes mistakes, he has feelings and personal problems. He has a sense of humor. I also like the mix of high adventure and supernatural mystery that Wilson weaves into the books -- he's pretty good at keeping you invested in the story no matter how outlandish it gets.

The only real problem with the "Repairman Jack" books (if you can call it a problem) is that the further you go in, the more necessary it is to have read the previous books. The books aren't exactly a series -- each one is a pretty self-contained adventure -- but they all happen in a single overarching timeline and mythos, and later books depend on knowledge of what happened in the earlier ones. Wilson works in a single mythos not unlike the Cthulhu mythos of Lovecraft, and all his stories drive towards a single point of culmination.

Don't let the supernatural angle of the "Repairman Jack" books drive you away if you're not into that kind of thing. The books are also just good adventure yarns, rather like Lee Child's "Reacher" books or John D. MacDonald's "Travis McGee" books. They're not art, but they're well-written and fun.

Another series I follow is Douglas Preston and Lincoln Childs' "Pendergast" books, and I just picked up Cold Vengeance. Agent Pendergast is one of my favorite fictional detectives -- a combination of Sherlock Holmes, David Niven, and Fox Mulder from "The X Files".

What's everyone else reading?

Posted by: Monty at 04:56 AM | Comments (128)
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"I'm smart and I can be really funny and interesting and I can go toe-to-toe with anybody in a conversation." -- Megan Fox

"To be stupid and selfish and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless." -- Gustave Flaubert

Posted by: Monty at 04:43 AM | Comments (250)
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Welcome to the Tenth and Last Day of Blogging After America. For those few of you who haven't already made their reservations at the finest Swiss euthanasia clinics, the epilogue lays out a plan of action to prevent the horrible things in the previous chapters from happening. If this works, Steyn's reward is that he will be called an "alarmist" as nothing he predicted in his book came true.

Previously in the series - Day One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine.

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." - Woody Allen

I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office. - Milton Friedman

Posted by: Open Blogger at 11:07 PM | Comments (47)
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Well, it is Caturday. more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:40 PM | Comments (536)
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This month, 50 years ago, the Berlin Wall went up and the Iron Curtain descended upon millions. In the early hours of Sunday morning, August 13, East German police and military forces executed a carefully planned maneuver to completely close off all access from the Soviet sector to West Berlin. Walter Ulbricht's Soviet-backed solution to stopping the mass exodus that was killing his Communist satellite state vision of East Germany was to pen them in and kill them if they tried to escape.

For 38 years.

East German soldier Conrad Schumann tosses aside his rifle and leaps over the barbed wire to escape to the west. Almost ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, suffering from depression and unreconciled differences with family and former comrades, Schumann committed suicide by hanging himself.

This was the month, 50 years ago, that communism had to admit its complete and total failure, so much so they penned in their people behind a wall, and enslave them. more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 11:42 AM | Comments (308)
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Moron in darkest England S. Weasel does some of the best Photoshops on the entire Interwebz. Like this one, for instance:

It seems tailor-made for this story: Obama accuses Congress of holding back U.S. recovery

A vacationing U.S. President Barack Obama accused Congress on Saturday of holding back the U.S. economic recovery by blocking "common sense" measures he said would create jobs and help growth.

I'd have sworn this was from The Onion, but RD's link in the sidebar clarified that right upfront.

Sir Golfsalot, from his vacation digs there in swanky Martha's Vineyard, calls out Congress for not enacting his detailed plan to spur the economy? No, really. This is beyond parody.

But it's pretty transparent, isn't it? After getting nowhere blaming inanimate objects like corporate jets, ATMs and Japanese earthquakes, little Barack looked around for someone with a worse approval rating than his and settled on "Congress." So you can expect to see much, much more of this tripe in the coming months.

As Ace has pointed out frequently, though, nobody votes for "Congress." They only vote for their individual congressmen. So good luck with the Alinsky tactics there, Barry.

Run against Congress all you want, but everybody knows you're a stuttering clusterfuck of a miserable failure. Since we all can't live in Paul Ryan's district, "congress sucks" isn't exactly a newsflash to most of us, you preening jackass. From right here in MA-4, home of Barney Frank, I enthusiastically agree and look forward to giving both of you the boot in 2012.

Consider this an open thread. I just liked that S. Weasel 'shop and wanted to share it. And be sure to visit her blog.

Posted by: andy at 11:22 AM | Comments (111)
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