When Gas Is Outlawed…

DailyMail — Breaking wind is set to be made a crime in an African country. The government of Malawi plan to punish persistent offenders ‘who foul the air’ in a bid to ‘mould responsible and disciplined citizens.’

I’m surprised that to see a complete lack of references to global warming in this article. Isn’t methane supposed to be a bigger contributor to the Earth’s temperature than the cycles of the sun itself?

But locals fear that pinning responsibility on the crime will be difficult – and may lead to miscarriages of justice as ‘criminals’ attempt to blame others for their offence. …

I can’t wait to see the Malawi high courts deciding upon which guiding principle to follow: “He who smelt it, dealt it” or “He who denied it, supplied it”.

True the Vote!

This one is from J. Christian Adams at Pajamas Media:

This past weekend, citizens from across Texas held a summit in Houston to help protect the future integrity of the electoral process. Called “True the Vote,” this amalgam of tea party groups and interested citizens met to learn about how they can fight voter fraud when their governments won’t. … Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes instructed the Department of Justice Voting Section that federal laws requiring voter rolls to be free of ineligible voters won’t be enforced. Former Voting Section Chief Christopher Coates testified that Fernandes and other Obama appointees spiked at least eight investigations into states with voter roll problems. The Obama DOJ hasn’t brought a single case to require a state to remove dead and ineligible felon voters from the rolls. Fernandes spiked these investigations because she is ideologically opposed to enforcing laws protecting election integrity – and she relishes the partisan benefits of inaction. …

Well, of course the Obama Department of “Justice” isn’t going after voter fraud. Not only do the Democrats benefit from it, but they (up to and including Obama himself) work hand-in-hand with the unions and other groups (ACORN) who perpetrate voter fraud. One of George Soros’ little projects was one to get corruption-friendly Democrats (but I repeat myself) elected to the Secretary of State position in as many of the fifty-seven states as possible because they’re the ones who certify the vote. Had the 2010 midterms been conducted without any fraud of malfeasance, the GOP wave would have been even higher.

Don’t Need an SOTU Drinking Game to Drink

I generally quote Rush (the Canadian band) more often than I quote Rush Limbaugh; but I can’t argue with him here, referring to tonight’s State of the Union pep rally:

“Who wants to sit there and listen to somebody lie for an hour and fifteen minutes?”

2012 Senate Races

(This article was last updated on 13 May 2011.)
It’s probably too early to spend too much time talking about the Senate races of 2012, but I’m going to anyway – Primarily because I want to get down a list of Senators whose terms end in almost two years for future reference. Then, as more and more drop out, I can update the list. Here’s the Class of 2006, Senators who last faced the electorate during Bush’s midterms and rode a wave of anti-Bush sentiment. Since the country’s mood is now running in the opposite direction, those Democrats who were elected in normally conservative/Republican states will have a difficult time keeping their seats.

The Next Domino Falls

I just wrote about Senators Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) throwing in the towel for 2012. Here’s a third, and certain not to be the last.

NYT City Room – Senator Joseph I. Lieberman will announce on Wednesday that he will not seek a fifth term, according to a person he told of his decision. Mr. Lieberman, whose term is up in 2012, chose to retire rather than risk being defeated, said the person, who spoke to the senator on Tuesday. … A longtime Democrat who lost a bitter primary battle to Ned Lamont in 2006, Mr. Lieberman won re-election as an independent that year, largely benefiting from a weak showing by the Republican candidate, who received less than 10 percent of the vote. But Linda McMahon, the wealthy pro-wrestling tycoon who spent $50 million on an unsuccessful Senate race last year, has already signaled she may run again in 2012. … On Tuesday, the state’s former Democratic secretary of state, Susan Bysiewicz, announced on her Facebook page that she intended to run for Senate next year. A person close to Representative Christopher Murphy, a three-term Democrat from Connecticut, said he was considering a run for Mr. Lieberman’s Senate seat and would announce his intentions in the coming weeks.

But I’ve Got the Tar and Feathers Ready!

A lot of Democrats chose to retire last year rather than have their asses handed to them in the election. I was not strongly in favor of this. Sure, I wanted the bums out of Congress as much as the next guy, but I didn’t want them to retire. I wanted them to LOSE. I wanted them to try their hardest, I wanted them to fight to keep their perks, I wanted them to want it bad, and I wanted them to go down in flames. Still, watching them bow to the inevitable and chicken out was a preferable “Plan B” to having them run for reelection and WIN. (Seriously, Nevada, what the Hell is wrong with you? Although I still think Reid might have lost in a fair fight, which the 2010 Nevada Senatorial election clearly was not. But I digress.)

The Fix — North Dakota Democratic Senator Kent Conrad announced today that he will not seek reelection, creating a potentially prime pickup opportunity for Republicans in a GOP-leaning state. “After months of consideration, I have decided not to seek reelection in 2012,” Conrad said in a letter to constituents. “There are serious challenges facing our state and nation, like a $14 trillion debt and America’s dependence on foreign oil. It is more important I spend my time and energy trying to solve these problems than to be distracted by a campaign for reelection.” (H/T: RightNetwork and Pi Guy)

Actually, Kent, I’m pretty sure your party is the one creating and exacerbating the challenges currently facing our nation, which is why you know that you’d lose if you ran.

They’re Better Than Us

“We’ve had some incidents where TSA authorities think that congresspeople should be treated like everybody else.” –James Clyburn (D-SC)

Oh noez! Horrors! How dare anybody expect that high and mighty congresspeople, the democratically elected servants of the people, actually be treated in the same way as the rest of us peons? Didn’t the TSA authorities get the hint from the way Congress regularly exempts itself from everything it inflicts upon the rest of us?

We need an ironclad rule that Congress is required to live under any and all regulations and laws (including ObamaCare, Civil Rights legislation, airport security, etc.) that the rest of America labors under. No more special immunity. They are not an aristocracy, and they have no right to exempt themselves from the unintended (and intended!) consequence of their own actions.

I realize that something like this was implemented after the “Republican Revolution” of 1994; but since very Congress sets the rules under which it operates, that restriction is long gone. It only lasted as long as there was a Congressional leadership willing to endure it. The only way to make this stick is with a Constitutional Amendment.

Bread and Circuses

InstaPundit has a running series called “Why They’d Rather Talk About Sarah Palin“, listing all of the other stories which the media could be spending a little time telling us about, but won’t. Examples include Investors Have Been Fleeing Municipal Bonds, Unemployment In The U.S. Is Actually Worse Than Pakistan, Soaring Global Food Prices, Over 1 million Americans seen losing homes in 2011, and U.S. On The Way To Losing AAA Credit Rating. (H/T: Spin, Strangeness, and Charm)

Applause!

We already know about the branded t-shirts that were available at the Tucson Memorial Service Democratic Pep Rally, but it goes even beyond that. The White House (and their apologists) have been claiming that the University of Arizona is solely to blame for the shirts and the propaganda campaign. Even if that were true (and I didn’t believe it for a second), the White House still chose to join in and participate in this festival of bad taste. The President never ever just “shows up” anywhere; there are advance teams that get sent out to prepare the venue for the President long before his arrival, and to make sure that the appearance goes as scripted. So, even if one charitably assumes that the White House had no part whatsoever in planning the Wellstoning that occurred, there is no way whatsoever that they were ignorant of it, and no way whatsoever that they could not have stopped it if they had wanted to. They could have even chosen to appear somewhere more appropriate than a college in the first place. So regardless of the spin, there is no way to hold the White House blameless for the appalling celebration of exploitation and finger pointing in which they happily took center stage.

However, it turns out (“Surprise, surprise!”) that White House Press Secretary “Baghdad Bob” Gibbs was lying (his lips were moving, after all) when he said that they were surprised by all of the applause.

“…I read the speech several times and thought that there wouldn’t be a lot of applause if any. I think many of us thought that.”

One has to wonder, therefore, why they Jumbotron at the arena, preloaded with Obama’s speech, had calls for applause? (Yet another completely unsurprising thing happened when this picture started making the rounds on the internet, and the leftist who took the picture at the rally immediately took it down and started threatening to sue conservative blogs for displaying it. Fortunately, screen captures had been taken; because once you put something online, you can never be sure of taking it back down again everywhere and forever. (H/T: Gateway Pundit)

Amazingly Non-Surprising News

You know liberals, and only liberals, were “surprised” every single solitary week of 2010 when the unemployment figures came out and the fictitious “Obama Boom” persisted in not ever actually happening? Well, here’s some other news that should come as a complete lack of surprise to you:

AOL News — When the Republican House leadership decided to start the 112th Congress with a reading of the U.S. Constitution, the decision raised complaints in some quarters that it was little more than a political stunt. The New York Times even called it a “presumptuous and self-righteous act.” That might be true, if you could be sure that elected officials actually know something about the Constitution. But it turns out that many don’t. In fact, elected officials tend to know even less about key provisions of the Constitution than the general public. For five years now, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute has been conducting a national survey to gauge the quality of civic education in the country. We’ve surveyed more than 30,000 Americans, most of them college students, but also a random sample of adults from all educational and demographic backgrounds. … But those elected officials who took the test scored an average 5 percentage points lower than the national average (49 percent vs. 54 percent), with ordinary citizens outscoring these elected officials on each constitutional question. Examples:

• Only 49 percent of elected officials could name all three branches of government, compared with 50 percent of the general public.
• Only 46 percent knew that Congress, not the president, has the power to declare war — 54 percent of the general public knows that.
• Just 15 percent answered correctly that the phrase “wall of separation” appears in Thomas Jefferson’s letters — not in the U.S. Constitution — compared with 19 percent of the general public.
• And only 57 percent of those who’ve held elective office know what the Electoral College does, while 66 percent of the public got that answer right. (Of elected officials, 20 percent thought the Electoral College was a school for “training those aspiring for higher political office.”)

Overall, our sample of elected officials averaged a failing 44 percent on the entire 33-question test, 5 percentage points lower than the national average of 49 percent. (H/T: Weasel Zippers)

The test is available here if you’d like to test yourself against our elected officials. (I got all of them right. RoboMonkey in 2012!)

Halfway There

The Foundry — …the newly elected governors of Ohio, Oklahoma, Maine, and Wisconsin have all decided to sue the Obama administration in hopes of stopping Obamacare. Specifically, Gov. Mary Fallin (R) of Oklahoma has announced that the Sooner State will pursue its own case against the law, while Govs. John Kasich (R) and Scott Walker (R) (of Ohio and Wisconsin respectively) will add their states to Florida’s multi-state suit. And yesterday, newly sworn-in state Attorney General William Schneider announced Maine would also join the the Florida litigation. That brings the number of states on the Florida suit to 23 and the total number of states suing to stop Obamacare (which includes Virginia and Oklahoma) to 25. (H/T: Weasel Zippers)

“Blood Libel”

“… Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence. …” –Charles Krauthammer

Sarah Palin’s response (from Vimeo):