Tell me what's wrong with this picture. The first lady is serving meals in a government, i.e. taxpayer, funded soup kitchen to homeless indigents:
The fellow taking her picture is using what I'm told is a Black Berry that costs about $500. How many people do you know who can afford a $500 cell phone?
So what are we doing buying this guy dinner? I wonder if we also bought him his cell phone.
RLC
Given that President Obama is not going to nominate to the Supreme Court an originalist (a Justice who seeks to determine the original intent of those who wrote the Constitution) what's the best those who don't want another activist (a Justice who legislates from the bench) on the Court can hope for?
The New Ledger nominates Cass Sunstein:
I start with the obvious: Cass Sunstein would not be my pick for the Supreme Court were I President of the United States, simply because he and I do not share the same judicial philosophy. I want my judges and Justices to adhere to original public meaning jurisprudence, and Cass Sunstein is not an originalist. As such, my view is that his approach to interpreting the Constitution is not the best approach. (Doubtless, he would say the same thing about my approach.)
But I will follow up with something just as obvious: Cass Sunstein is plenty bright and plenty learned enough-to say the least!-to be a Supreme Court Justice. While originalists like me disagree with him, we can still find areas of doctrinal commonality between us. A Justice Sunstein would be both a worthy opponent for originalists, and, perhaps more often than some might expect, a valued ally. For this, his nomination to the Supreme Court by President Obama to fill the seat being vacated by Justice Souter, ought to be desired across ideological lines.
Read the rest of The New Ledger's case at the link. I don't wish to prejudge the President's pick, but I'm doubtful that Cass Sunstein would pass muster in the current White House. He's neither a member of a minority group nor is he female. It's a sad fact that one of the qualifications for being appointed to the most important court in the land is a biological trait over which one has no control and which has nothing to do with one's fitness for the office, but that's the world in which we now live. In our postmodern society racial and gender identity are considered every bit as important - if not moreso - as the keenness of a candidate's legal mind.
RLC
The Washington Post offers a graphic illustration that compares the projected deficits under President Obama to those under President Bush. It's pretty stark ... and frightening. Imagine that you owed far more on your credit card than you could ever pay and every month the interest kept increasing the total. Your credit rating falls as you fail to pay your bills, you lose your home, car and insurance coverage, you're unable to buy clothes or food for your children and no one will lend you any more money.
This is the situation we will soon be in as a nation when the bills start arriving from President Obama's great spending spree. Astonishingly, he himself admitted last week that our debt is unsustainable. Here's part of the Bloomberg story:
President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending "unsustainable," warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.
"We can't keep on just borrowing from China," Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. "We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children's future with more and more debt."
Holders of U.S. debt will eventually "get tired" of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. "It will have a dampening effect on our economy."
Earlier this week, the Obama administration revised its own budget estimates and raised the projected deficit for this year to a record $1.84 trillion, up 5 percent from the February estimate. The revision for the 2010 fiscal year estimated the deficit at $1.26 trillion, up 7.4 percent from the February figure. The White House Office of Management and Budget also projected next year's budget will end up at $3.59 trillion, compared with the $3.55 trillion it estimated previously.
It makes me wonder if Mr. Obama suffers from multiple personality disorder. Who does he think is responsible for plunging us into this debt? Is he battling some other personality for control of his spending impulses? Is there no one in his administration who can urge him to be more responsible? Is there no one who could manage the equivalent of taking a scissors to his credit cards?
The man should be attending meetings of the governmental equivalent of shoppers anonymous, but instead he keeps running up massive debt while warning us that we just can't afford it any more. This is how an alcoholic behaves. The addict keeps on drinking while bemoaning the fact that he's ruining his life and killing his body.
In the President's case, however, it's not his life he's ruining. It's our children's lives which are being devastated by his profligacy. This is what one gets when one votes for someone just because he promises Hope and Change.
RLC