All Partisan Scorched Earth, All the Time

In the Washington Examiner, Conn Carroll has a good line:

It is going to be all partisan scorched earth all the time, again, for four more years.

Obama will have changed Washington. But for the worse.

Read the whole thing.  Further excerpts:

Liberals, including Obama, love to cite Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s, R-Ky., line that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” They claim it proves that Republicans were never willing to work with Obama from day one. But McConnell did not utter that line until October 2010, 22 months after Emanuel said, “F[   ] ’em.” Republicans were willing to work with Obama. He just wouldn’t let them.

SOPA and PIPA: Or, Why Web Sites Have Black-out “Censorship” Bars Today

You may have noticed big Web sites like Google or Wikipedia (which Jonah Goldberg thinks is hilarious) or WordPress wearing dramatic black-out bars today and wondered what was going on.

My Hero!

While doing research for work, I ran across this picture on the Web site of the Council on Environmental Quality.  

A number of commentators have remarked on President Obama’s tendency to try to stay aloof and detached from the details of crafting policy, preferring to wait until members of Congress have done the hard work and then either jump on the bandwagon or criticize them for doing it wrong (e.g., in the health-care debate a couple of years ago, and in the budget debate now).

New Patch on Old Cloth?

(Or do I just want to teach an old dog an old trick?)

The Constitution originally provided that, while the members of the House of Representatives would be elected directly by the people, members of the Senate would be chosen by state legislatures.  This part of the Constitution remained unchanged for most of our country’s history.  Then, about a hundred years ago, the Seventeenth Amendment made senators directly elected, like congressmen.

Makes a Most Careful Count

(Summary for if you don’t have time to read this whole post:  I am angry but you should still fill out your Census form.)

You may have heard the recent ads on the radio or elsewhere trying to persuade you to fill out the 2010 Census form.  The one I heard most often said something like (coudn’t find a transcript online, going from memory here), “Imagine that our town has a hundred children.  We need about five teachers to teach them and two school buses to pick them up for school.  But what if our town grows and now we have hundreds of children?  Without the Census, we wouldn’t know how much we’ve grown. 

Celebrate Good Times

Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley yesterday in the race for the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, 52% to 47%.  If you haven’t been following it, here’s the skinny:

This probably means that Democrats no longer have enough votes (60) to overcome Republicans’ filibuster of the health-care bill in the Senate.  That means that the Democrats’ version of health-care “reform”—already getting less and less likely as time went on, given that they hadn’t passed it before this year, an election year—is probably now dead.  We won.  Thank You, God, and a big thank-you to the people of Massachusetts.