(H/T: Instapundit) Well, she does occasionally hit the target.
The past several days of Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s life have been painfully amusing to watch.
Painful because Booker, a rising Democratic star, is such a good guy. Amusing, because rarely are Americans treated to such premier seats in the political theater of truth and consequence.
That is, tell the truth and beware the consequences.
Continue reading #rsrh QotD, Kathleen Parker Broken Clock Watch edition.
Off of the Saving Private Ryan soundtrack.
Glenn’s right. Naked guy, chewing on somebody’s head, ignored the cops and had to be taken down with multiple shots… this is not good, people.
Order it now, folks.
George Will, gently explaining to Senator Patrick Leahy – a man who, as Will puts it, “probably no longer knows when he sounds insufferably patronizing” – why he’s probably going to be swinging and missing when it comes to trying to break Chief Justice John Roberts to what we will charitably call Sen. Leahy’s ‘will:’
Leahy intimated that overturning Obamacare would be as momentous, as divisive of the nation and as damaging to the court as was Bush v. Gore, which he asserts “shook the confidence of the American people in the Supreme Court.” But surely a striking fact about that decision is how equably Americans accepted it. This testified to the court’s durable prestige, which is a function of the court’s immunity to pressures from politicians. Public approval of the court is above 50 percent, that of Congress below 20 percent.
I’ll add the obvious point that Leahy is himself one of the reasons why Congress is loathed so much. Thirty-plus years in the Senate, and what is he going to be best-remembered for? Being an extra in The Dark Knight. Which is admittedly cool, but all the things that he’ll be worst-remembered for – including Obamacare, if we’re not lucky – are going to kind of overwhelm it…
(H/T Hot Air Headlines)
In the process of noting the bizarre nature of the publishing industry (throwing fundraisers for the President whose administration is suing them*), the National Journal makes this comment:
Consider Robert Caro, who just released The Passage of Power, the latest in his Pulitzer Prize-winning multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. It is project that Caro has been working on for close to 40 years. Before that, Caro won a Pulitzer for The Power Broker, a biography of urban planner and developer Robert Moses.
Caro had to sell his house to get the money to finish The Power Broker, and without the advances and editorial support given him by the Knopf publishing company, he could never have taken on the challenge of capturing a figure like Lyndon Johnson, with all his rich complexities.
If the publishing industry collapses, will Amazon or Apple pay the kind of advances that allow a writer like the young Robert Caro to tackle such an ambitious project, with no guarantee of success? Continue reading #rsrh The publishing industry keeps missing the point.
…when it pops, it’s going to end up with the federal government holding the NON DIS-CHARGEABLE BY BANKRUPTCY loan papers on several micro-generations of students – definitely to the tune of over 400 billion, very likely to that of 500 billion, and very possibly even higher. This will not topple the government, but a bunch of voters are about to discover that what Uncle Sam giveth, Uncle Sam can taketh away… and that Uncle Sam is a lot more hard-nosed about the latter than the former.
Via @iowahawk.
I’m going to go do stuff; I entreat others to do likewise.
The Wall Street Journal, on the Democrats’ Obamacare oopsie:
The drafters and defenders of the health-care law have only themselves to blame for this mess. With a filibuster-proof Senate and total domination of the House, they did not trouble to build the consensus necessary for transformative legislation of this scope.
More importantly, they did not take seriously their obligation to legislate within the limits set by the Constitution. Indeed, when a reporter asked in October 2009 what the constitutional basis was for the statute, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissively responded, “Are you serious?”
Either the drafters of the legislation should have stayed within the generous bounds of authority established by prior precedent, or the administration’s lawyers needed to offer a legal defense for going beyond those precedents that does not do violence to fundamental structural features of our Constitution. They could hardly expect the independent judiciary to write Congress a blank check of plenary regulatory authority, without discernible limit.
Although, to be fair to the Democrats: the judiciary had been more or less doing precisely that, up to now. Of course, that just encouraged Congress to spiral more and more inward, until it reached a point where the judiciary got alarmed.
Moral of the story: don’t get grabby.
The video below isn’t from Memorial Day weekend itself, but I have to agree with AoSHQ: hands down but this was the best part of the whole thing. Background: former Rep. Anthony Weiner was caught on Twitter showing his, there was two weeks or so of people doing their best to deny that fairly straightforward piece of objective reality, Weiner eventually decided to do a press conference when the naked truth came clear, and – he showed up late for his own press conference, presumably so that he could do some last-minute spin-planning. Only… Andrew Breitbart happened to be there, and the press decided to take the time to ask a few questions.
And hi-jinks ensued. Remember: the below took place while Anthony Weiner was apparently hiding offstage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=msUZHBTZVtk
