Ruth Marcus, RCP: The state of the union is . . . leaderless. Sounds harsh, but when it comes to digging America out from what President Obama calls its “mountain of debt,” I’m becoming increasingly worried that this assessment is accurate. The president talks the talk about fiscal responsibility. But the evidence suggests he’s not willing to spend the political capital to translate that talk into action. […] In his

It’s the new “competition”: the federal government gets to decide who wins and who loses, and if you want to be among the winners, you know what you need to do. It’s the Chicago way: While some 500 groups got waivers for a healthcare reform provision setting annual coverage requirements, about 50 requests for such exemptions were denied, the Department of Health and Human Services told The Hill Thursday. A

At what point is your insistence of someone else’s idiocy forever undermined by being your being so consistently wrong every time you purport to illustrate it? (h/t geoffb)

Tom Harkin: “If the people elect these crazy Tea Party people to come in here and they vote to do these wacko things…” So what you’re suggesting, Mr Harkin, is that, say, Rand Paul is crazy for wanting to streamline government and return us to our Constitutional mandates, but your having lied about flying F-4 and F-8s in combat missions over North Vietnam when you were really flying them out

Indeed. Even Michael Savage is starting to warm up to Palin and her unflinching willingness to call a spade a spade. So to speak. And not there’s anything wrong with that. Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media, fresh off its hectoring of Republicans to renounce their violent, hate-filled rhetoric (a hectoring issued without a hint of irony after that same media rushed to blame a senseless murder spree on conservative rhetoric) is

Howard Rich, ALG: “The saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time,” Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland wrote more than seventy years ago. And obviously the most dangerous assaults on liberty come not from sweeping edicts – but rather gradual incursions born out of the opportunism

CNSNews: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports that Social Security will effectively run a $45-billion deficit in 2011 and continue to run deficits totaling $547 billion over the coming decade. The admission comes in the CBO’s semi-annual economic review that projects federal spending, debt, and economic growth. In the report, the CBO also examines the impact of projected economic performance on the trust fund that nominally funds Social Security. “Excluding

Civility! Hey, Meghan. I realize you fancy yourself a relevant, common-sense Republican — a pragmatist, if you will, and something of a GOP maverick, in the sense that, like your father, you spend much of your time proposing statism and cheering on Dems — but what you really are is a kind of silly mascot the left trots out when they want to try to pre-condition the tweens to champion

Civility! Comity! Working together! — If the end result we’re working together toward is socialized medicine, that is. Which, if you think about it, is nothing more than an “investment” in our bureaucracies, stimulating their growth. What, did you misunderstand the President’s message last evening?