The Washington Examiner’s Chris Stirewalt: […] there’s no doubt that hating the government and the powerful interests that pull Washington’s strings has gone from the radical precincts of the Right and Left to the mainstream. It turns out that watching Goldman Sachs, the United Auto Workers, public employee unions and a raft of other vampires drain the treasury at America’s weakest moment in a generation will make a person pretty

Dana Milbank, Washington Post: World leaders arriving in Washington for President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit must have felt for a moment that they had instead been transported to Soviet-era Moscow. They entered a capital that had become a military encampment, with camo-wearing military police in Humvees and enough Army vehicles to make it look like a May Day parade on New York Avenue, where a bicyclist was killed Monday by

This story uses a tone of dismay. But my question is, how can you be dismayed when good people stomp out loathsome bugs before they get into the walls where they can multiply and possibly infest the entire edifice? Let the ritual distancings commence! **** update: or not.

Byron York, The Washington Examiner: The Post Office is supposed to pay for itself, but in recent years has been covering its losses by borrowing from the Treasury. But now, GAO notes, the Post Office “is nearing its $15 billion borrowing limit with the U.S. Treasury and has unfunded pension and retiree health obligations and other liabilities of about $90 billion.” Labor costs are killing the Post Office. Wages and

At least somebody’s getting mileage out of the message. update: The Empire Strikes Back

On the previous post. Sometimes I wonder if those who profess “alarm” at the hateyness coming from the bipartisan tea party movement (who they’ve taken to characterizing as “the far right”) are equally alarmed by demonstrably illiberal attempts to shut down such hateyness. — Or is the shutting down of the “right wing” hateyness out of “earnest” hateyness of evil right wingers a good thing, given that the second hateyness

Are aggressive progressive policy initiatives actually a boon to legal conservatism? Michael Barone, Realclearpolitics: Some 14 state attorneys general are trying to raise the issue in court, and pending state laws outlawing mandates could raise the question, as well. Those state laws are obviously invalid under the supremacy clause unless the federal law is unconstitutional. Is it? I would expect an Obama nominee to decline to answer. But Republicans may

Michael Knox Beran, NR The two philosophies that animated liberalism in its prime were widely different in both origin and aspiration. Classical liberty is founded on the belief that all men are created equal; that they should be treated equally under the law; and that they should be permitted the widest liberty of action consistent with public tranquility and the safety of the state. The classical vision traces its pedigree