You have to feel sorry for Monty Python alumnus Terry Jones.  Here's he's spent his post-Python years making his reputation as a serious scholar on Medieval Times and other matters, and along comes this bumbling buffoon of a Koran-burning pastor to make his name a joke again.  All that effort shot to H_ll...

“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic violence.”

What we have, then, is the closest thing you get to consensus in a democratic republic like ours. Perhaps what Justice Breyer meant was that the individual right interpretation is not supported by a consensus of Ivy League law professors or of the National Lawyers Guild. Perhaps also this is what you get when you have a Supreme Court Justice whose name rhymes with “liar”.

"Beliefs about Obama's religion are closely linked to political judgments about him. Those who say he is a Muslim overwhelmingly disapprove of his job performance, while a majority of those who think he is a Christian approve of the job Obama is doing. Those who are unsure about Obama's religion are about evenly divided in their views of his performance.

How can President Barack Obama be so right about the mosque and yet get it so wrong?

Here's how: He is so supremely confident in his intellect that he forgets, on his way to the correct decision, to slow down and pick up not-so-gifted stragglers."

Last week I saw Speaker Nazi Pelosi on Fox News, talking about the imminent expiration of the Bush tax cuts. She said that the tax cuts had been only for the rich (false), that they had had no positive effect on the economy (demonstrably false), had not had any positive effect on job creation (clearly false), had increased the deficit (false, if you review the revenue collections before and after the cuts), and had caused the monstrous deficits we face now (wildly, incredibly false).

I'm not sure which worries me more – the fact that we have a Speaker of the House who is so willing to lie so consistently and with such impunity, or the cold dread I feel when I realize that our country may have a Speaker of the House who is so insane as to actually believe all of the above.

Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer declared that if the Bush tax cuts expire, it will be a Republican tax increase, since the tax cuts were passed with a ten-year sunset proviso. (Hoyer conveniently omits, of course, that the Democrats had insisted on said proviso.) So, by the reasoning of the House Democratic majority's leadership, the Republicans are responsible for the favoring-the-rich, useless- in fact damaging tax cuts, and if they are allowed to expire, the voters should blame them for that, as well. A better example of “damned if you do, damned if you don't” could hardly be devised.

Quick quiz – who said the following:

“I am a human being first and foremost, and as such I am in favor of what benefits the human race as a whole.”

The above quote was spoken by Malcolm X. Just think, if Malcolm X were around today and said something like that, he'd be accused of being “insufficiently black”. Of course, he also would have spat upon Affirmative Action and “set-asides” if they had been offered to him. His attitude was the classic American attitude – I don't want your help, just get out of the way!

It's become fashionable during the last few months for certain limp-wristed Republicans and conservatives to declare oh-so-reasonably that all presidents “abuse the recess appointment power”, and try to point to President George W. Bush as an example. This is false, and fairly easy to disprove. President Bush only used the power when the Democrats refused to grant up-or-down votes to nominees like Miguel Estrada (remember him?) and John Bolton. These and other Bush nominees would have easily won confirmation if the Democrats had not prevented votes before the whole Senate. (The handling of the Bolton nomination in particular was one of my greatest disappointments of the Bush years, but I intend to address this on another day.)

BO, by contrast, has used the appointive power to appoint nominees who are so radical that they very likely would be unable to obtain confirmation even from this Democratic-majority Senate. The most obvious examples are Craig Becker at the NLRB and Dr. Donald Berwick as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He used the power to avoid the Senate's Constitutional power of advise and consent. The Republicans, in fact, were and are eager to schedule confirmation hearings for the radical Dr. Berwick in particular.

We've read ad nauseum that BO was a “Constitutional Law professor”. Ambrose Bierce in the Devil's Dictionary defined lawyer as “one skilled in circumvention of the law.” Apparently in the case of BO, a Constitutional Law professor is one skilled in circumvention of the Constitution.

The Cycle of Corruption – Example 1

I just heard Rush Limbaugh discuss Senator Robert Casey Jr.'s proposal to have the federal government

(meaning we taxpayers) bail out the Teamsters' pension plans. This presents a useful opportunity to explain one of the rackets the Democrats and their various interest groups have set up to perpetuate their power and profitability. This particular cycle runs like this:

Union sets up pension plan for its members, taking money usually from both the employees and the employers.

Union then sends much of the money collected to selected politicians' (re-) election funds. Said politicos are nearly always Democrats.

Enough of the selected candidates win election to push through legislation.

Legislation is passed to bail out the pension plans that were raided to give the original “donations”. Further legislation is passed to keep union spending reporting requirements imprecise, so that outside (and even inside) observers can't see what's happening.

Further legislation and regulations are passed and implemented to force more workers into unions.

Cycle repeats.

Neat, is it not?

In case I forgot to mention this previously, Kathleen Parker, who is a pseudo-conservative syndicated columnist, won her Pulitzer Prize for one reason only. The reason is that she ceaselessly attacks the charismatic true-blue conservative ex-Governor Sarah Palin. This means that there may be Pulitzer hopes for catty conservatives like Debbie Schlussel and Peggy Noonan, too.

New York's favorite dumb blonde, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, aka Schumer's Second Vote, has come out in favor of the Ground Zero Mosque. She said that the people on the board who approved the building of the Mosque de Triumphe are the people of the area who suffered the pain and terror of the 9/11 attacks. The actual people of the area have been fiercely opposing the building of the mosque, in several demonstrations and rallies outside of committee meetings. This would be the perfect opportunity for the Republican candidate for Gilly's Senate seat to go on the attack, but I don't even know that the most feeble state Republican party in America has even put up a nominee.