You’re on your own, Trump.  Now get lost and stop embarrassing the right.

According to a recent survey by the Associated Press, none of the major potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates or Congressional leaders put any stock in the antiquated, Democrat-devised conspiracy theory known as birtherism, besides Donald Trump.

As quoted in the article, “John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor… say they are satisfied that Obama was born in Hawaii…  Mitt Romney and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania have been the most direct in rejecting the birthers’ claims…  Haley Barbour accepts the president’s word…  Tim Pawlenty told an Iowa audience, ‘I’m not one to question the authenticity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate…’  Michele Bachmann… said: ‘I take the president at his word…’  Sarah Palin… [said], ‘I think that he was born in Hawaii…’  Mike Huckabee has dismissed claims that Obama is foreign-born…”

Other than that, GOP luminaries are unanimous: Obama was born in Kenya!

In addition, we’ve had the following adamant denunciations of the Obama-is-foreign-born theory from prominent right-wingers:

Senator Lindsey Graham: Birthers are “crazy.”

Glenn Beck: The birther theory is “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Senator Ron Paul: “From my viewpoint, obviously [there's nothing to it], because I never bring it up.”  read more »

In honor of Tax Day 2011 and Democrats’ impeccably timed renewed push to raise taxes on high income earners, behold the following lessons we’ve learned about economics from liberals in recent times:

•    The most innovative and wealth-generating company in the history of the world, Apple Inc., destroys jobs.  So sayeth Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., an iPad owner, who blamed Steve Jobs for taking away jobs from textbook manufacturers and paper mills.  In other news, a Democratic Representative from West Virginia excoriated the “automobile” for killing off the horse-and-buggy industry.

•    Cutting $352 million from a proposed $3.7 trillion budget is “the functional equivalent of bombing innocent civilians.”  This according to D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was fuming over the possibility of a government shutdown two weeks ago.  Given liberals’ complaints about the size of the military industrial complex and the expense of war, this is quite a bargain.  How can we harness this technology of “Miniscule Republican Budget Cuts” to defeat Moammar Kaddafi’s forces in Libya?

•    Constraining teachers’ unions’ ability to award themselves extravagant pensions and health care packages no one in the private sector has, thereby continuing to bankrupt states by keeping entitlement spending astronomically high, is good for union members.  In contrast, making slight cuts to bloated benefits programs in order to prevent massive layoffs hurts the little guy.  This bit of wisdom comes courtesy of the delusional, demonic mobs who swarmed outside the Wisconsin State Capitol trying to undermine Governor Scott Walker’s implementation of his nefarious campaign promise to balance the state budget.  read more »

The deal Congressional Republicans made with Democrats last week to cut the federal budget and avoid a government shutdown is the scam of the decade.

Mainstream media, conservative commentators, and Republican politicians call it a grand victory for the GOP, showing as it does Speaker of the House John Boehner’s suave negotiating skills, the GOP’s ability to nudge Democrats from their opening position, and Republicans’ luck in getting $6 billion more in cuts than Boehner had asked for.

FOX News’ Carl Cameron crowed, “Who Won the Shutdown Showdown?  It Wasn’t Even Close…  Democrats claimed they met Republicans halfway after the $10 billion in cuts that already passed this year were approved.  They settled late Friday night at three and a half times more.  Boehner came in $8.5 billion higher than the halfway point between his high offer of $61 billion in cuts and the Democrats opening bid of zero cuts.”

All of these numbers are meaningless, constituting as they do microscopic slivers of the federal deficit.

To put the cuts in perspective, CNS News reported that the federal debt jumped $54 billion in the eight days before Congress approved the $38.5 billion in cuts.  The cuts leave the 2011 budget $773 billion greater than the 2008 budget, higher by about the same amount as the Democrats’ 2009 stimulus bill.  read more »

On Saturday President Obama magnanimously announced that he was willing to support cutting $33 billion from 2010 federal spending levels for 2011—which, for the mathematically challenged, is about 1% of infinity.

Congressional Democrats screamed that these cuts were way too large.  Republicans countered that the cuts didn’t go far enough and should be extended to $61 billion, which amounts to about 2% of infinity.

With current spending set to run out this week, the federal government faces a shutdown on Friday night unless Congress can agree on which of these piddly sums to cut from the budget.

Tea party supporters have been rightly insulted by these farcical negotiating positions, arguing that hundreds of billions could be saved just by, for example, eliminating redundant programs.

As Rasmussen reports, a majority of Americans haven’t been snookered into thinking these microscopic doses of fiscal austerity will do a thing to address our long-term budget crisis.

Meanwhile, the only Congressman clear-eyed enough to appreciate the extent of the crisis, knowledgeable enough to propose a plan to resolve it, and brave enough to stand up for his proposal in the face of Republican wishy-washiness—namely, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan—and also not crazily isolationist on foreign policy (Ron and Rand Paul) has offered a blueprint called “A Path to Prosperity,” modeled after his 2008 “Roadmap for America’s Future.”  read more »

With the news that Frank Rich and Bob Herbert have left The New York Times, the selection of my 20 free Times articles a month couldn’t be less strongly affected if Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd decided to quit.

Recently John Gruber of Daring Fireball deconstructed the imbecilic, overly complicated pricing structure the non-business-adept Times has spent a year-and-a-half and tens of millions of dollars devising to undergird its new digital subscription plan.

The Times’ business model, in addition to being extraordinarily confusing, includes the following giant loophole: “Readers who come to Times articles through links from search engines, blogs and social media will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit.”

So if you find a story on the Times site that looks worthwhile (suspend your disbelief for a moment), but you’ve reached your monthly limit, you can just copy the title, paste it in a search engine, and click on it from a site that links to it.

Admittedly, this is too much work for most people to bother to find out, say, Dowd’s opinion on the rise of Mormons in popular culture, but some tenacious fans will undoubtedly make the effort.

Perhaps The Times hopes its free backdoor policy will lead more social media outlets to link to their articles.  Maybe they’re afraid they won’t easily be able to regulate access from third-party sources.  But either way, doesn’t this aspect of their plan defeat the purpose of limiting content in order to make people buy subscriptions?  read more »

Here’s a fun fact regarding President Obama’s Saturday announcement that the U.S. would finally be getting around to joining the international coalition to use military force against Libya’s Colonel Moammar Qaddafi in retaliation for his having unleashed government firepower against rebels.  Guess how many times Obama used any of the following words in his speech: victory, victorious, win, winning, defeat, right, just, moral, triumph, success, good, evil.  (Hint: it’s the same number of controversial NCAA Final Four picks he made last week.)  That’s right—0!

In contrast, he managed to squeeze in all of these words and phrases: international (10 uses), allies (6), partners (6), community (5), United Nations (3), not acting alone (3), coalition (2), league (2), council (2), coordinate (2), agree, join, meet, part, and union.

With so little emphasis on what we’re actually doing in Libya, how we’re going to do it, and with what expected results, an alien visiting Earth might be forgiven for wondering why we need to engage in so much coalition-building to do it.

What kind of corporation launching a new product deemphasizes: the product, the technology required to develop it, the need for it in the market, and the projected sales; yet fills up their business plan with reams of details on which contractors they’re going to generously give business to, which stores they’re going to offer their product to, which companies’ toes they’re going to avoid stepping on, and which corporations they might someday merge with?  read more »

In the wake of the horrific March 11 earthquake and subsequent nuclear power plant accidents in Japan, environmentalists have been chomping at the bit to use this opportunity to relegate nuclear power to the dustbin of history.

The Japanese earthquake and Fukushima Daiichi power plant explosions were a double propaganda victory for greens, because it allowed them to not only bash nuclear power but also blame the earthquake on global warming.

Cameramen captured a dramatic explosion at Fukushima Unit 1 on Saturday that left the top of the reactor building exposed.  A similar explosion took place at Unit 3 on Sunday.  Mainstream media news outlets have been tossing around the comparison of Fukushima to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant explosion and radiation leakage in 1986.

In fact, Fukushima is nothing like Chernobyl, for the same reason modern-day Japan is nothing like the late Soviet Union.  The former is far more technologically advanced and better run, thus capable of anticipating and mitigating the effects of high-tech disasters.

The level of uninformed hysteria over Fukushima recalls the ignorant cries bandied about after 9/11 that terrorists in this country might try to set off a nuclear explosion at a power plant (which is physically impossible).

According to scientists who understand the physics of nuclear power generation, the construction of the Fukushima plants, and the nature of the explosion, there has not and will never be any harmful level of radioactivity released into the environment.  read more »

On Monday President Obama offered a creative, efficient method for prosecuting terrorists affiliated with the 9/11 attacks or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: namely, military tribunals in a secure island compound you may not have heard of called “Guantanamo Bay.”

Back on the home front, Representative Peter King, Homeland Security Committee Chair, has planned a hearing for Thursday on whether al-Qaeda is trying to recruit young Muslims in the U.S. and whether Muslim Americans are sufficiently cooperating with federal officials to ensnare would-be domestic terrorists such as American-born Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan.

The most infamous failed attack on American soil in the past several years was U.S. citizen Faisal Shahzad’s attempted car bombing in Times Square, which was thwarted only because a suspicious hot dog vendor happened to be looking in the right direction at the right time.

Naturally, last Sunday hundreds of willfully naïve, politically correct New Yorkers gathered in Times Square, steps from where Shahzad tried to kill hundreds of New Yorkers, to protest King’s hearing as racist and Islamophobic.

In an effort to dilute the impact of King’s investigation and make it harder for the nation to ask honest questions about the threat of Muslim youth recruitment, Obama had his national security advisor speak at a mosque in northern Virginia to assure Muslims that the federal government was not disproportionately examining Islamic groups.

Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. House, declared on Sunday that focusing on one religion more than any other was wrong, though he graciously allowed that it was OK for us to scrutinize “radicalization.”  Radicalization of what?  Lady Gaga’s fashion sense?  read more »

President Obama announced last week that his Attorney General Eric Holder would no longer be defending the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which passed in 1996.

His declaration may have had something to do with the fact that Ninth Circuit Court Justice Stephen Reinhardt and federal trial judge Joseph Tauro of Massachusetts ruled across three separate cases in 2009 and 2010 that DOMA was unconstitutional.

Obama’s Justice Department will be submitting its official response next week to two fresh lawsuits against DOMA filed last year in New York and Connecticut.  The Department is not expected to argue in favor of the law’s constitutionality.

Constitution-revering conservatives have responded to Obama’s announcement by howling that there is no precedent for his declaration in all of American history, that Obama is overturning DOMA just because he doesn’t like it, and that his actions may be grounds for impeachment.

Jonah Goldberg of National Review claimed Obama has “thrown in the towel on the Constitution.”  On her radio show, Monica Crowley stooped to the level of Wisconsin pro-union protestors by labeling the president “Oba-Mubarak.”

Newt Gingrich declared that Obama’s actions could lead to a constitutional crisis.  He offered the hypothetical counterexample of President Sarah Palin declaring that she doesn’t like Roe v. Wade, thinks it’s unconstitutional, and will no longer allow the executive to enforce the right to an abortion.  read more »

In the spirit of the decade-long procession of Eastern European and Middle Eastern upheavals in which oppressed peoples have gathered en masse to protest the brutality of their tyrannical leaders, I hereby suggest we christen the current Wisconsin uprising the Government Cheese Revolution.

We gave poetic names to recent revolts based on the colors of their countries’ flags or their native specialties, such as the Rose Revolution, the Cedar Revolution, the Tulip Revolution, the Green Revolution, the Jasmine Revolution, and the Lotus Revolution.  Wisconsin markets its cheddar as being orange, and protestors have filled the state capitol wearing ugly orange Working Families T-shirts, but unfortunately the Ukraine has already snagged the title “Orange Revolution.”

Newly elected Governor Scott Walker and the freshly majority Republican Wisconsin state legislature recently proposed a bill that would eliminate the ability of most public sector union members to collectively bargain.  It would prevent unions from forcing members to pay dues, require annual secret ballots on whether to remain unionized, and ask members to contribute a pittance toward their lavish pensions and health care plans.  The bill would help obviate Wisconsin’s projected $3.6 billion 2013 budget deficit.

Wisconsin public employees have demonstrated their rock-solid work ethic and indispensable contribution to the community by calling in sick to gather at the capitol and dub the governor Hosni Mubarak and Adolf Hitler.  Due to thousands of teachers’ absence from work, the largest Wisconsin public school districts have been closed for almost a week.  read more »