Down Is Up

From WIND in Chicago.

Continuing the series. The original article is appropriately named, Leviathan Grows.

Estimated regulatory costs, while “off budget,” are equivalent to over 48 percent of the level of federal spending itself.
The 2011 Federal Register finished at 81,247 pages, just shy of 2010’s all-time record-high 81,405 pages.
Regulatory compliance costs dwarf corporate-income taxes of $198 billion, and exceed individual income taxes and even pre-tax corporate profits.
Agencies issued 3,807 final rules in 2011, a 6.5 percent increase over 3,573 in 2010.
Of the 4,128 regulations in the works at year-end 2011, 212 were “economically significant,” meaning they generally wield at least $100 million in economic impact.
822 of those 4,128 regulations in the works would affect small businesses.
The total number of economically significant rules finalized in 2011 was 79, down slightly from 2010 but up 92.7 percent over five years, and 108 percent over ten years.
Recent costly federal agency initiatives include the Environmental Protection Agency’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards Rule and the Department of Transportation’s Fuel Economy Standards.

Remember all the vitriol about Bush’s wire-taps a few years back?

Where’s the ACLU now?

The federal government is moving quickly to open the skies over America to drones – both for commercial and government purposes

The Divider-in-Chief has been successful in creating issues out of non-issues.

Anything to divert the conversation from the economy.

Great piece from Molotov Mitchell. Go about 3:25 into it to when he starts talking about the recent murder-suicide in Arizona and the media’s approach to it. They have done this before, remember?

Great lines from the video include the following

you don’t have to be in Mensa to see the emerging pattern here. we don’t have a gun problem. we have a liberal problem. they believe they are monkeys and behave accordingly. they even murder their own young, so why are we surprised they murder us.

enjoy!

Great column from Michelle Malkin regarding “Julia.” I hope she’s a Michelle!

My story? I’ve founded three web ventures over the past eight years without a penny of taxpayer money or government venture socialism. We free-market-centered small-business women can “grow the local economy” and raise our children and improve our schools just fine without the meddling, patriarchal hand of President Obama taking credit for our every last success.

After hyperventilating for months about the Republican “war on women,” Democratic new-media gurus have inadvertently exposed the real Barack Obama: a chauvinistic control freak who would tether every last woman and child to his ever-expanding, budget-busting nanny state.

Mamas, for the sake of your family’s freedom and our republic’s survival, don’t let your babies grow up to be “Julia.

When you hear folks speak about how politics have become too divisive, it’s usually in the context with how Republicans are sticking to their principals. You could even say they’re digging in their heels. This is, of course, followed up with sort of a “tut tut” with a question on how we can get Washington to work together to go along with Obama’s or Pelosi’s policies. What they’re really saying is “why can’t Republicans just agree? Why do they have to be so divisive?”

This is a topic that we have spoken about this here before. And it was that concept that caught my eye in this article about the career-politician from Indiana being shown the door.

a very active Lugar supporter in Indiana tells me (by e-mail): “Lugar’s votes for Sotomayor and Kagan were critical to the outcome. Mourdock and Club for Growth hammered Lugar for those votes. Those votes were as big as any other issue in his defeat.”

There should of course be no surprise here, as the political mobilization of conservatives on Supreme Court and other judicial nominations over the past decade or more has transformed the judicial-confirmation process. The Left mobilized first, during the Reagan years, most notably in the defeat of Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination in 1987. Even in the aftermath of the Bork and Thomas hearings, Republican senators continued to invoke the principle of deference to the president, as they voted overwhelmingly in favor of President Clinton’s nominations of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (confirmed 96-3) and Stephen Breyer (87-9*) in 1993 and 1994. But conservatives came to recognize that a unilateral, unreciprocated embrace of that deference model amounted to abject surrender in the battle over the courts, and most Republican senators saw fit to change course. But not, alas for him, Senator Lugar.

Curiously, Lugar was one of the nine senators who voted against Breyer’s nomination.

Emphasis added. I wouldn’t count the Tea Party out yet.

Democrats do not want to reach across the aisle, they only want Republicans to do so. They want Republicans to surrender the battle over the courts. And the battle over the Constitution. And the battle over Big Government. Just roll over, you silly conservatives, so we can rewrite the fabric of this country.

This is just too funny. On many levels.

The defense attorney who wore a traditional Islamic outfit during the rowdy arraignment of the accused Sept. 11 terrorists is defending her courtroom appeal that other women in the room wear more “appropriate” clothing to the proceedings — out of respect for her client’s Muslim beliefs.

Makes me sick. As someone wiser than I (and a frequent commenter here, known as LL) said,

it is highly amusing and ironic that they are using women as lawyers to begin with!! Aren’t women useless and to be uneducated and beaten when they get out of line??

Too true! Too true!
Hopefully the judge keeps his sensibility and doesn’t kow-tow to this daft attorney.