In an excellent article on the water shortage in the Golden State, Max Schulz gives a brief background on how massive irrigation projects helped transform the desert of the San Joaquin Valley “into a paradise, providing much of the fruits and vegetables and dairy products Americans consume.”  Today, with the help of the entire Democratic caucus of the United States Senate, including the two senators from California, environmentalists may well succeed in using federal law to turn the region back into a desert.

The process began with “litigious environmental groups” going to court, suing under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) on behalf of a variety of species in order to “dismantle the infrastructure of California’s State Water Project (SWP) and the federal Central Valley Project (CVP).”  Finally, with the delta smelt, a minnow that rarely gets bigger than three inches, they hit pay dirt:

In 2007, U.S. district judge Oliver Wanger ruled that the pumping that annually sent about 6 million acre-feet of water to Kern County and beyond was threatening the delta smelt’s existence by disrupting water flows for the fall spawning season. Citing the protections accorded by the Endangered Species Act, he ordered pumping for agricultural uses curtailed by one-third until the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could evaluate the situation. After studying the issue for more than a year, the USFWS determined last December that pumping by the SWP and CVP “was likely to jeopardize the continued existence of the delta smelt and adversely modify its critical habitat.”

Water that would have fertilized fields across the Central Valley, providing jobs to tens of thousands and producing food for (potentially) millions just flows out to sea.  Fields lay fallow, jobs are lost.

Environmental rulings have cost the region as many as 32,00o jobs, with 50,000 more to come if restrictions intensify.  Not just that, the “lack of produce from this formerly successful agricultural area,” Ed Morrissey writes, “will hike prices across the nation — and could make us more dependent on agricultural imports.”

You’d think the Senators representing the people in this region would be concerned.  But, as Sonicfrog notes, it took a South Carolina Senator to do what the Golden State Senators would not:

After watching the Hannity show broadcast from the Central Valley on Thursday, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint decided to do something about it. Today he introduced a provision in a bill that would basically suspend the Endangered Species Act in regard to the Sacramento Delta for one year, which would prevent Federally mandated restrictions from shutting off water flow from the Sacramento Delta to the San Joaquin Valley, which has cause a severe shortage of water to farmers on the west side of the valley.

This would not be the first time the Senate suspended the ESA.  Six years ago, it did so “for parts of New Mexico so that people would still get water.”   So, instead of considering an amendment which could have said jobs and increased the food supply, the Senate voted to table the amendment, with both California Senators voting to sideline.

I guess to Mrs. Boxer, it matters more to toe the left-wing environmental line than to look out for her Central Valley constituents.

(H/t Michelle Malkin for Senate vote tails and Schulz article.)

Earlier today (Tuesday), I received an e-mail from Geoff Kors, Executive Director of Equality California (EQCA), urging me to join a boycott a certain hotel to pressure its owner, Doug Manchester, to “make a public apology” for donating “$125,000 in critical seed money to put Prop. 8 on the ballot.”  Reading it, I realized that Kors has learned nothing from his involvement in the unsuccessful effort to defeat that ballot measure enshrining the tradition definition of marriage in the state constitution.

Kors even faults Manchester for “trying to buy off EqCA with a $25,000 donation”!

I don’t see what he accomplishes by throwing this public temper tantrum because the “wealthy hotel owner” won’t do exactly as Kors wants him to do.  Nor do I see what a public apology would accomplish.  Will it somehow make it seem that those who pushed Prop 8 had sinister motivations which at least one of their number is only now (finally!) acknowledging?  Or, will it just make Kors and his cronies feel good to humiliate someone who spearheaded an effort they just plain didn’t like and didn’t want to make the effort to defeat.

Why not take that $25,000 and use it to help further their campaign to educate California voters about gay marriage?  To his organization’s credit, EqCA has attempted to reach out to voters in the “red” counties of the Golden State, with field offices in Republican-leaning regions as Fresno, Riverside and San Diego as well as Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco.

But, unless they learn to talk in the same language as the people who reside outside “blue” regions and stop acting like spoiled children when the world doesn’t work out exactly as they’d like it do, they’re not going to do much to change minds and win votes (to overturn Prop 8). (more…)

The unhappy Barney Frank is at it again.  Like many Democrats, this mean-spirited man from Massachusetts, has such faith in the power of government to right all wrongs that his House Financial Services Committee is moving forward on legislation to expand the reach of the Community Reinvestment Act.  Yup, you read that right.  So, what if that legislation contributed significantly to last fall’s financial meltdown.  Barney’s fellow Democrats think it just needs a broader reach so, his committee

. . . is holding hearings on legislation supported by the Obama administration that would bring insurance companies and credit unions under the umbrella of CRA, placing new lending demands on these groups and opening them up to protests and pressure tactics by organizations like Acorn. As proof that Washington is a looking-glass world where basic values and logic get perverted, proponents of the new legislation claim we need more CRA to rein in the bad practices of the housing bubble, which is sort of like arguing that the cure for alcoholism is another martini. Any review of the history of the affordable mortgage movement in America demonstrates the power that CRA had in helping to shred mortgage underwriting standards throughout the industry and exposing us to the kind of market meltdown we’ve experienced.

It was, as Steven Malanga (who wrote those words above), the CRA who got ACORN “into the mortgage business.”  The controversial left-wing group used the Carter-era legislation “as a cudgel to force lenders to lower their mortgage underwriting standards in order to make more loans in low-income communities.”

Andith the CRA, Congress pressured the Department of Housing and Urban Development which, in turn pressure the Government-Sponsored Enterprise, Fannie Mae, to buy up “billions of dollars worth of CRA loans.”  Johnson’s bill, Byron York informs us, “would ensure more of that by applying CRA’s lending requirements not just to banks but to non-bank institutions like credit unions, insurance companies, and mortgage lenders.”

I guess for Democrats one financial meltdown just wasn’t enough.

But, it’s not just in trying to expand this one program which had disastrous consequences for our economy where Democrats act as if history begins with their good intentions. (more…)

Perhaps the most telling comment in today’s Washington Post roundup of the reaction or various “political experts” to the President’s “medis offensive” on health care this weekend was this comment from Lanny J. Davis, Special Counsel to President Bill Clinton from 1996 to 1998, one of the two Democrats surveyed:

Now it is time for him to endorse a specific proposal — either one of his own or one already introduced in Congress — and defend that plan, while showing a willingness to compromise to gain Republican support. His media blitz should help solidify support among Democrats — but the White House needs to appeal to people (like myself) who are on TV wanting to defend and promote a national health-care bill. We need something specific on the table from the president.

H/t: Jennifer Rubin.  Emphasis added.  This jibes with a point I made last week, wondering if it were presumptuous of the president with all his pontificating on health care, he “still hasn’t come forward with a particular plan with specific details.”  Rubin wonders why no one in the White House has the courage to say as much to the President:

But I think what’s really going on is that we have a White House devoid of a single brave soul with the influence and courage to say, “Enough Mr. President. Figure out what you want and then go on TV.” This media bombardment suggests a level of narcissism that puts a premium on placing the president at the center of every snippet of coverage, as opposed to getting down to the hard work of crafting positions, negotiating deals, and even meeting with the opposition.

Emphasis added.  Guess the White House staff is too busy engaging the public (especially through independent federal agencies) to get behind the President’s health care plan, they don’t have time to actually craft that plan. (more…)

As I have been reading the transcript of the conference call coordinated by the White House and the supposedly non-partisan National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), various bloggers’ reactions to this attempt to use art to promote the president’s agenda, I have scribbled a number of notes for a potential on the topic.  But, the thing that strikes me more than anything else, particularly as I review that transcript is this: what is a person like Buffy Wicks doing working in the White House?

As we learn more about her background (which includes ties to ACORN), we help confirm Michael Barone’s point that “Most of Obama’s top White House staffers are politics operatives, not policy wonks.”  She has activism and political agitation in her blood.  No wonder they renamed the office where she works Office of Public Engagement (it had been the Office of Public Liaison).  Her record suggests she’s all about using her government job to mobilize the masses.

As do her actual words in the conference call:

I’m honored to be on the call, and I just, you know, it’s been a long road I know for a lot of us, and we’re really just beginning. I, first of all, want to thank everyone for being on the call and really just a deep, deep appreciation for all the work that you all put into the campaign for the two plus years that we all worked together. . . .

And, you know, we won and that’s exciting, and now we have to take all that energy and make it really meaningful. I’m in the White House now and . . . I’m really realizing that, and I’m also appreciative of the way in which we did win and the strategy that the campaign shows, which is really to engage people at a local level and to engage them in the process, because we need them and we need you, and we’re going to need your help, and we’re going to come at you with some specific asks here. . . . . (more…)

It seemed sweetly serendipitous that barely forty-eight hours after speculating about the potential for “Perot voters” (those particularly concerned about the exploding federal debt) to decide the 2010 — and possibly the 2012 — election that I would chance upon a Gallup poll showing that Americans are more likely than ever to say the government is doing too much.

The strategy for GOP rebuilding is clear, focus on diminishing the size and decreasing the scope of the federal government.

And when we make our pitch, should doctrinaire libertarians and conservative absolutists complain that the GOP has failed them in the past, ask them if they have a better alternative.  For better or worse (and sometimes I do think it’s worse), we have a two-party system.  Some new third party is not going to arise and supplant one or the other.  Sure, it’s happened before, but that was just over a century and a half ago.  And yes, it’s happened in other nations, but it’s unlikely it will happen here.  We’re not Canada.

The GOP thus represents the best hope to stop the Obama Democrats rush to statism.  And on the whole, the party has acquitted itself quite well these past eight months, voting almost unanimously against many of the big-government boondoggles the Democrats have attempted to (and often succeeded at) ramming through.

But, if the GOP wants to win, it has to be more than hope.  It must do more than offer lip service to small-government ideology.  Leaders must craft a platform around which people can rally and which taps into the sentiment for less government intervention in the economy (and in our lives).  For free-market solutions to our nation’s problems. (more…)

Wonder why Vice President Joe Biden sounded so desperate at a fundraiser for outgoing Democratic Congressman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) in Greenville, Delaware, fearing what might happen were Democrats to “lose 35 House seats they currently hold in traditionally Republican districts”:  ”If they take them back, this is the end of the road for what Barack and I are trying to do.”

Given how much you guys have been spending and regulating, Joe, that’s the idea.  It’s interesting that Biden held the fundraiser for Mrs. Giffords in Delaware.  Don’t think he’d find such a ready welcome in Arizona.

At the fundraiser, the gaffe-prone Vice President repeated the Democrats’ dishonest talking point that Republicans are bereft of solutions to our nation’s problems:  ”Biden said Republicans are ‘moribund in terms of ideas’ and had not offered reasonable alternatives to the nation’s problems.”

Maybe the reason he fears Democrat losses and ignores those ideas is because he’s beginning to recognize the American people aren’t warming to Democratic plans and would likely prefer Republican alternatives if they were made aware of them.  They just plain don’t like the Democrats’ big-government approach. (more…)

During the fall campaign and into the first months of Barack Obama’s Administration we heard much about this Democrat’s “political genius.”  And while I credit him with a powerful presence and a way with words (especially when speaking those appearing on a teleprompter), after watching his first eight months in office, I don’t see much evidence of that genius.

In the campaign, he had precisely the right slogan for the time, “change.”  During the financial crisis, he demonstrated the right demeanor for the job at hand, calmness (especially in contrast to the erratic behavior of his rival for the White House).

But, as President, few of his moves seem particularly skillful.  He had outsourced the drafting of his Administration’s policy initiatives to Congress.  And when they present their packages to them, he often just puts his stamp of approval on them, even if he had little say in their drafting.  He may increasingly come to be seen as a creature of Congress.  And those folks aren’t particularly popular.

I just wonder why he, like his predecessor, constantly caves into the legislative branch, not asserting his executive authority, particularly when he was polling (in his first few weeks in office) in the stratosphere.  Can you imagine how he would have flummoxed Republicans, if when Democrats presented him with the $787 billion “stimulus,” he had said that he understood Republican concerns about the cost and thought they should send him a new bill, including only expenditures for the current fiscal year and promised to revisit the other provisions of the bill should they become necessary.  (And if they sent back the same bill or one with only slight modifications, well, he’d veto it.)

He might not have secured all the handouts to favored interest groups, but he would have defined himself as a powerful force in Washington and appeared to be the man he claimed to be in his campaign.  And might even have a few Republicans praising him for standing up to a spendthrift Congress, while winning media accolades for listening to Republicans.

And showing strength by offering to veto a big spending bill.

41% of Minnesota Voters Give Franken Positive Ratings

H/t RealClearPolitics blog where Kyle Trygstad offers, “After just three months in office, nearly one-third of voters say Franken is performing poorly.”  Independent voters are evenly divided, with 34% giving Franken positive ratings and the same number saying he is doing a poor job.  Wonder if the former funny man is doing so poorly because of his nasty nature or maybe it’s not him, it’s just a general discontent with Congress.

Wait, that can’t be it.  ”Fifty-six percent (56%) of voters give” the state’s senior Senator Amy Klobuchar “good or excellent ratings.”

Maybe it’s just that living voters just aren’t comfortable backing a man who owes his victory to dead voters, er, pardon my political incorrectness, the formerly living.

Since President Obama took office in January, every poll (I’ve seen) measuring popular support on the relative levels of federal spending shows a substantial majority or considerable plurality preferring reducing the size of the government to increasing expenditures.  The latest Gallup poll confirms what we’ve been observing these past eight months (and even before):

57% of Americans say the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to businesses and individuals, and 45% say there is too much government regulation of business. Both reflect the highest such readings in more than a decade.

Frank Newport, who wrote Gallup’s analysis of these statistics notes that the

57% level of public concern about big government in this survey is, among other things, coincident with an extensively increased government involvement in the economy, and the extensive focus on a large-scale government effort to reform healthcare that was underway as this survey was being conducted.

So, it does seem the Tea Parties represent a genuine grassroots movement, representing the real concerns of Americans.

In a second question, a plurality (45%) though there was too much government regulation of business and industry whereas 24% thought there was too little.  Of those, Newport notes that all ”of the change [since the September 2008 poll] in the ‘too much regulation’ direction came among Republicans and independents.”  A sign that Republicans and independents are now moving in the same direction.  And a reminder to Republicans to return to those ideas the Gipper championed in his political career (in which he never lost an election to a Democrat). (more…)

As we bloggers pore over the tape and transcripts showing Obama Administration officials attempting to use the National Endowment for the Arts to further its political ends, I got to wondering how much of this politicking goes on in the various departments and agencies of the federal government that has not been recorded?

I’m betting there is a lot of this going on in the Obama Administration.   Only this time, someone with access to conservative media was in on the call.

UPDATE:  I expect to blog on this matter later today, but the thought just struck me as I was reading the blogs and the web and preparing my posts for the day.

UP-UPDATE:  Best stuff I’ve read so far is Roger Kimball’s piece on the renaming of the NEA as the National Endowment for Propaganda (via Glenn) and John Hinderaker’s long post (but well worth your time).*  Like me, John wonders why Buffy Wicks (of the Orwellian-sounding Office of Public Engagement) hasn’t been let go or reassigned:

First, if Yosi Sergant was “reassigned” for sending out the email [announcing the call], how about Ms. Wicks? The NEA’s reassignment of Sergant was an acknowledgement that the effort by a government agency to enlist artists in support of a partisan agenda was improper. The NEA’s mild disciplinary action suggests that the call was the action of a relatively low-level employee who got carried away. But it wasn’t. It was sponsored by the White House and was led by the deputy to one of President Obama’s closest friends and advisers. This was no marginal, rogue operation. It was, rather, an element of Barack Obama’s political strategy.

Second, the operation may well have been illegal. Public funds are not supposed to be expended to support partisan projects. Beyond that, it is unconstitutional to grant or deny federal funds on the basis of the recipient’s political actions or opinions.National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley.  The NEA is the single largest funder of the arts, and several participants in the August 10 conference call had recently received NEA checks. It would have been entirely reasonable for those on the phone call to conclude that future NEA funding could be influenced by their willingness to play ball with the Obama administration’s political agenda.

My expectation is that Buffy’s will be soon joining Van Jones in the nonprofit sector.  As Mr. Sergant’s reassignment should be to a job where he is not on the public payroll.  Conservatives should not let up until the White House says bye, bye to Buffy.

UP-UP-UPDATE:  Talented artist Jude (I’ve heard him sing, really quite good) offers:

This whole administration really needs to stop campaigning and start governing within the boundaries set for government within our society. . . .

These people don’t play by the rules because they believe they are right and the rest of us be damned.  Or, they may not even know they’re not supposed to be doing this stuff and just think they’re running the high school now, so there.

Read the whole thing!

*And I’ve only just begun to scan the blogs.

This was a grassroots-generated concept springing from this year’s Tea Parties across the USA. [Emphasis added by me below.]

We, the citizens of the United States of America, in order to protect our country from those who seek power and authoritarian control under the false guise of compassion and altruism, call upon our elected representatives to sign this Contract and by doing so commit to upholding the principles herein:

Individual Liberty

Our moral, political, and economic liberties are inherent, not gifts from the government. It is essential to the practice of these liberties that we be free from restriction over our peaceful political expression and free from excessive control over our economic choices.

Limited Government

The purpose of our government is to protect our liberties by administering justice and ensuring our safety from threats arising inside or outside our country’s sovereign borders. When our government ventures beyond these functions and attempts to increase its power over the marketplace and the economic decisions of individuals, our liberties are diminished and the probability of corruption, internal strife, economic depression, and poverty increases.

Economic Freedom

The most powerful, proven instrument of material and social progress is the free market. The market economy, driven by the accumulated expressions of individual economic choices, is the only economic system that preserves and enhances individual liberty. Any other economic system, regardless of its intended pragmatic benefits, undermines our fundamental rights as free people.

I’ve signed up.  You should too.  And take it to your Member of Congress to sign.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Here’s the news Dan was referring to earlier today.

The NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] and the White House did encourage a handpicked, pro-Obama arts group to address politically controversial issues under contentious national debate. That fact is irrefutable.

This practice has never been the historical role of the NEA. The NEA’s role is to support excellence in the arts, to increase access to the arts, and to be a leader in arts education. Using the arts to address contentiously debated issues is political subversion. And the fact that the White House played a role in encouraging the arts to address contentious issues should also be considered a government overreach.

Three days after the conference call a coalition of arts groups, led by Americans for the Arts, a participant on the conference call per the meeting contact list and recipient of NEA grants, sent out a press release with the heading “Urgent Call to Congress for Healthcare Reform,” which called for the creation of “a health care reform bill that will create a public health insurance option.” Eleven days after the conference call, Rock the Vote, another participant on the call, announced a health care design contest. “We can’t stand by and listen to lies and deceit coming from those who are against reforming a broken system,” they stated in their announcement. “Enough is Enough. We need designs that tell the country YES WE CARE! Young people demand health care.”

These may both be coincidences and I am not suggesting that the NEA or these groups definitively violated the law in these efforts. That’s for others to discuss and investigate. As I’ve stated in various television interviews, the organizers never discussed any specific policies.

Oh.. NOW I UNDERSTAND.  It is Andrew Breitbart and his team that are doing those jobs that the American mainstream media won’t do.

People will go to jail over this corruption. It is just a question of who and how deep within the White House.

UPDATE: BigHollywood’s Nick Gillespie adds:

It’s ironic that official attempts to use artists have come to light only weeks before the 20th anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the German Democratic Republic, a regime that spent an enormous amount of time, energy, and resources creating fake culture to bolster its political agenda. “Official” culture is always unseemly, especially when the connections between officials and the ostensible creators are hidden from the audience.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Those who read conservative (and libertarian) blogs know by now, Andrew Breitbart, who through his BigGovernment.com website released the videos which drew the corruption at ACORN to the attention of the nation, says we should preepare for a “blockbuster” “from left field” next week.

Patterico thinks it will involve the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) where an Obama appointee was caught “seeking to use government funds to promote Obama administration initiatives.”  That the leading post on Big Hollywood (as I write this post) is a “Pregame report” on the “NEA Conference Call” does seem to bear him out.

No wonder Tom Maguire is in Patterico’s camp, speculating that we might “be treated to tapes of undercover reporters posing as artists and proposing over the top Obama-boosting ‘art’ to enthusiastically nodding NEA grant directors.”  Mickey Kaus, while calling ACORN a bad apple, offers that it’s “apparently not another” story about the controversial left-wing organization.

Whatever it is, I share Patterico’s prediction that just “as the media was caught flatfooted by the ACORN scandal, so too will they be rocked back on their heels by the next bombshell.”

As Jim Hoft says, “get the popcorn.”  Fasten your seat belts fellows, it’s going to be a bumpy week.  And far bumpier for the MSM than it will be for bloggers.  So, let’s let Bette help get us ready:

Recall how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took an inaccurately-translated reset button to her first meeting with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. Obama Administration’s foreign policy was going to be different from that the previous Administration. Unlike Bush, Obama wasn’t going to go it alone, but instead engage in “smart diplomacy” and cooperate more closely with other world leaders.

Of course, that notion was premised, in large part, on the falsehood that the former President did not have good working relationships with world leaders.

And now, it sometimes seems his entire foreign policy is based on the premise that everything his predecessor did was wrong and must be undone.  Even when our predecessor had been worked closely with our allies on certain issues.

Scrap a missile-defense agreement with eastern European allies that Bush had signed, as if he wouldn’t offend those allies who also signed it.  The negotiations carried out between our government and theirs don’t really matter because, well, you see, the team of a bad man with a go-it-alone foreign policy, worked out the details of those agreements.  And since the American people elected Obama, well, past agreements don’t matter much any more.  Even those made with some of our most steadfast allies.

Obama seems to have developed a foreign policy whose twin premises are (1) whatever my predecessor did was wrong and (2) it’s better to appease our enemies than our allies.

And despite the President’s charismatic presence and fawning press abroad, his strategy doesn’t seem to have yielded much in the way of results: (more…)

Nearly two weeks ago, I suggested the President let go of his fixation on overhauling of the nation’s health care system and focus in the economy.  If he did so, I argued, he’d reverse his slide in the polls and leave Republicans clueless.

Now, a recent helps to confirm my hypothesis.  In the FoxNews poll I referenced on Friday, 76% of voters thought “fixing the economy and creating jobs” should be a “higher priority for the federal government” than reforming health care.  Only 12% thought health care should be the priority.  (H/t to Jennifer Rubin for highlighting this statistic.)

Rubin also seems to think voters may want the President to focus on job creation:

Obama wants to talk health care, but voters in 42 states may wonder why he isn’t talking about jobs: “Forty-two states and the District of Columbia lost jobs last month, confirming that the nation’s labor market continues to deteriorate even as more ‘green shoots’ are sighted in other areas of the economy. Fourteen states and the District suffered double-digit jobless rates in August as the unemployment rate increased in 27 states and the nation’s capital, the Labor Department reported Friday. As a result, states whose budgets have been battered by soaring unemployment, rising social spending and collapsing tax revenues took another big hit in August even as the nation appeared to be climbing out of recession.”

Here on the West Coast, nearly 1 out of every 8 Californians are out of work.  I wonder if our junior Senator, who is up for re-election next year, has any plans is currently pushing any policies designed to increase employment in her jurisdiction.  On her home-page, she links a video promoting Hate Crimes Prevention, but has nothing on jobs.   (more…)

While Andrew Sullivan, despite his lurch to the left these past five years, remains a gifted writer, he, more often than not uses his verbal and literary gifts to conceal an increasingly incoherent political philosophy.**  He claims to be a “small government” conservative, but has been almost unstinting in his praise of a big-government liberal Administration.  And while he regularly blasts conservatives, often in quite impolitic language, he lectures the right on the “civil and civilized way” to oppose Obamacare (while ignoring those conservatives and Republicans who have done just that).

Like many of his fellow travelers on the left, Andrew describes the right not in its manifold manifestations, but by its most extreme elements.  And if there’s an aspect of or individual on the right he doesn’t particularly like, well, he dresses it or her up as a extremist to suit his fancy — and so he can make his point, even if it’s more imagination- than reality-based.*

He calls himself a conservative and yet on nearly every significant issue facing the country these past five years, six months and twenty-seven days, he has sided with the leading left-wingers of our day, often repeating their hysterical accusations and imitating their breathless tone.  And one of those accusations is that many of their ideological adversaries on the internets silently acquiesced in the big-spending domestic policies of then-President George W. Bush.

At the same time, he congratulates himself as being the lone conservative voice for fiscal sanity in those dark days of the Bush-Administration.  And as a reader of his blog in 2003 and 2004, I can attest to his regular criticism of the then-President, often in the most civil of terms, for his budgetary imprudence.  Yet, he was far from alone.

Indeed, such criticism was rampant on right-of-center blogs throughout Bush’s second term, with most conservative bloggers agreeing that Republicans lost Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008 because the GOP, when in power, had failed to restrain domestic spending. (more…)

Like my fellow right-of-center bloggers, Dan Riehl and Betsy Newmark, I’m not much of a fan of Glenn Beck’s program.  (His style is a little too “breathless” for me.)

I do, however, share the radio and TV talk show host’s libertarian leanings and am impressed by how quickly the audience for his show on FoxNews has grown.  Having moved to the network the day before Obama was sworn in, Beck is now the third largest draw in cable news, behind only Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.  More people watch his program than watch Keith Olbermann’s and Rachel Maddow’s combined.

But, you needn’t look at the latest cable ratings to see how well the guy is doing; you could probably guess it just by noticing the increasingly hysterical media coverage of the man.  For the picture of Beck to accompany its cover story, Time magazine tapped a photographer who last year had bragged about distorting pictures of John McCain for an Atlantic cover last year.

And they’re not alone.  Everyone on the left seems out to get Glenn Beck these days, as if he is the defining voice of the Republican opposition.  And heck, the guy isn’t even a Republican, having repeatedly attack George W. Bush that Republican was in office.

Whatever Glenn Beck’s faults, he has tapped into something in America.  And yet, as, with their coverage of the Tea Parties, the media seek to denigrate and attempt to discredit the man rather than understand the phenomenon he (along with many others) has come to represent.

(Via Ed Driscoll.)

Writing about an article in the Washington Post on Attorney General Eric Holder’s attempts to cover himself on CIA prosecutions, Michael Barone makes an interesting observation about the letter that seven former CIA directors wrote to the President, urging him “to call off Holder’s investigation“:

That [letter]’s mentioned, briefly, in the second and third paragraphs. And the article mentions as well that the seven directors served under presidents of both parties, but it denies the reader the information that the seven include all living former CIA directors except the nonagenarian Stansfield Turner and former President George H. W. Bush. Turner may be in no position to sign such a letter, while Bush, like living former presidents of both parties except for Jimmy Carter, can be presumed to be adhering to a policy of not criticizing the current incumbent.

Recall, how back in March, H.W.’s son refused to criticize the incumbent President, his successor, saying he “deserves my silence.”   Like Jimmy Carter, H.W. was voted out of office by a decisive majority (62.5% ) even greater than the percentage rejecting Jimmy (59%) and yet he managed to befriend his successor.

Why is it the Georgian, alone among ex-presidents, has continued to nurse his sour grapes.  It’s like a child throwing an extended temper tantrum . . . but for 28 years?

Well, Jimmy’s petulance does have some precedent.  Achilles refused to fight in the Trojan War for some time, nursing his grudge against Agamemnon.  But, in depicting the great warrior’s childish behavior, Homer means him to look petty, sulking while his fellows suffer and died.  The poet is setting his hero up for his ultimate transformation at the end of the epic (The Iliad).  Perhaps, Mr. Carter will experience a similar metamorphosis.

But, to do so, he must first see the folly of his ways.   Perhaps, were he not such a bitter man, filled with bile against Jews, he could learn from what we do this time of year, engaging in T’shuvah, reviewing our deeds, atoning for our faults, our sins and taking action to better ourselves.