WhatsAPundit

But just don't question the Progressive Left's patriotism:

NEW YORK (AFP) - Members of a close-harmony group from Yale University are recovering after being ambushed and beaten up while on tour in California.

Members of the a cappella Baker's Dozen were performing at a party in San Francisco at the new year when their rendition of the "Star Spangled Banner" apparently sparked taunts and threats from fellow partygoers.

As the group left the house, they were attacked by dozens of assailants, suffering scrapes, black eyes and concussions, said Connecticut's News Channel 8.

Where does the new Speaker of the House come from? I forget....

If you need it, a Direct Action overview.

It would take an Orson Wells to make a movie that would do justice to the Eliot Spitzer saga.

If any of the Spitzer daughters are reading this, please stop now.

There's an old saying that Conservatives think Liberals are stupid, and Liberals think Conservatives are evil.

Well, the House of Representatives today showed that it's not an either/or proposition.

No wonder professional Democrats never worry about raising taxes.

Apparently they believe only suckers pay them.

... to "It's not my fault!"

In his inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed "an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics."

It hasn't taken long for the recriminations to return -- or for the Obama administration to begin talking about the unwelcome "inheritance" of its predecessor.

Over the past month, Obama has reminded the public at every turn that he is facing problems "inherited" from the Bush administration, using increasingly bracing language to describe the challenges his administration is up against. The "deepening economic crisis" that the president described six days after taking office became "a big mess" in remarks this month to graduating police cadets in Columbus, Ohio.

Hope. Change. Whatever.

What everyone who says "the rest of the world has socialized medicine" forgets is that the rest of the world they admire was bombed into abject poverty during WW2. No one in it could afford anything for a generation, and governments stepped in. (Canada being the exception. I'll come back to that.)

We were the only non-communist (or soon-to-be communist) country left with an infrastructure. And when an infrastructure works the wise polis focuses on maintenance and not on plow-it-under-and-build-anew approaches.

Downside: wrecked economies get to build with state-of-the-art technologies, while those not-so-wrecked muddle through. (This is why Japan and France have bullet trains, and England and the U.S. do not. Of course, neither does the former USSR or did the pre-capitalist PRC. Some things simply can't be done unless people can actually make money doing it.)

But the United States HAS the state-of-the-art health care already. That's why top Canadian politicians come to the U.S. for heart surgery. (Canada having decided years ago that what was good for the Queen was good for her, I guess; now they pay the long-term cost.) And if you were really screwed before Obamacare, we had Medicaid, which is why visits to the emergency room have been so damned expensive.

The irony is of course that our current economy is so bad that fracking (translation: throwing 3000 pages of legislation at something) a sixth of it could really lead to a Great Depression scenario. But then again, one should never let a crisis go to waste, and if the political situation is dire, hell, one can always create a crisis.

Good luck, everyone. We'll need it.