From tonight’s State of the Union address:
“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections,” Obama said. “Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign [...]

Virgina Senator Jim Webb offers up one of the best perspectives on Scott Brown’s win tonight:
Calling the race “a referendum not only on health care reform but also on the openness and integrity of our government process” Webb said Democrats need to hold off on further action until Brown is formally sworn in to the [...]

Democrats are addicted to saying that there is a right to health care, and subsequently hammering anyone who opposes their disastrous reform bill as opposing that right. The truth is, there is a right to health care, and it is consistently opposed by the left, not the right.
Put simply, each person has the right [...]

When you hear Democrats celebrating their victory in getting 60 votes, remember that it’s not just a victory over those evil Republicans. It’s a victory over logic; it’s a victory over responsibility; It’s a victory over the Constitution; and it’s a victory over the people.
That’s quite a thing to celebrate, aint’ it, Harry?

In the lead up to the vote on H.R. 3962, the “Affordable Health Care for America” Act (scare quotes intentional), Barack Obama offered this encouragement to legislators to vote for the bill:
“This is their moment, this is our moment, to live up to the trust that the American people have placed in us,” Obama told [...]

So it is done: 220-215. Two-hundred and twenty United States Representatives put their support behind 20 pounds and 2,000 pages of abusive legislation in the form of innumerable mandates enforced by 110 new government agencies.
One of those mandates, though, cuts so violently to the core of our freedoms that it cannot go unanswered: [...]

Democratic Congressman Earl Blumenauer is seeking to inflict yet another tax on the American people. This one, though, is far more insidious than the average tax thought up by Congress:
The “Road User Fee Pilot Project” would be administered by the US Treasury Department. This agency in turn would issue millions in taxpayer-backed grants to well-connected [...]

In addition to my own take, there are two other takes on the speech I’d like to highlight as being dead on. The first is from Cato@Liberty, which offers us a look at Obama’s speech in plain English:
Translation: I, Barack Obama, ignoring thousands of years of failed price-control schemes, will impose price controls on [...]

Tonight’s speech on health care was a doubling down on the part of the administration. All the bad policy, all the economic voodoo, and all the flat out repression remain in the President’s platform. So does all the newspeak:
Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to [...]

Juan Carlos Hidalgo asks the question of the day in a post at Cato@Liberty:
What Principle is Guiding Obama’s Honduras Policy?
The Obama administration is threatening not to recognize the result of Honduras’ presidential election in late November unless Manuel Zelaya returns to the presidency beforehand.
The presidential poll was already scheduled prior to Zelaya’s (constitutional) removal from [...]

From former GAO head David Walker in the WSJ:
Mr. Walker’s own speeches are vivid and clear. “We have four deficits: a budget deficit, a savings deficit, a value-of-the-dollar deficit and a leadership deficit,” he tells one group. “We are treating the symptoms of those deficits, but not the disease.”
Remember, this is from someone who has [...]

If one looks at Barack Obama’s principles for health care, the basic ideas are right. His three principles are:

Reduce Costs
Guarantee Choice
Ensure Quality Care for All

Unfortunately, the health care measures the president is backing shows he clearly doesn’t understand the main problem with American health care.
In America today, doctors rarely answer to patients. Instead, [...]

The news out of Sacramento appears good for the California middle class:
The good news, Schwarzenegger glowed, is no new taxes.
Digging a little deeper, of course, reveals the truth:
REVENUES
* Accelerate income tax withholding — $1.7 billion
* Increase estimated tax payments for businesses and the self-employed — $610 million
Between now and the end of the year, $2.3 [...]

Instapundit links to a NYT Magazine propaganda piece about governing California, and the part about taxation reads as if it were written by Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, right down to euphemistically renaming taxes “revenue”:
In the view of many, the origins of the mud slog began with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, the landmark [...]

Politicians are usually most revealing when speaking off-the-cuff, and so it was with Karen Bass:
Q: How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature’s work?
A: The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: “You vote for revenue and your [...]

Imagine a private school where students sat in a math class for weeks misbehaving and learning nothing. Imagine that school gets on TV news because the administrators suspended the young lady who blew the whistle by taking a cell phone video and giving it to her mom who confronted them. Do you think [...]

So, the FTC is coming after bloggers who make money and don’t adequately disclose it:
New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers – as well as the companies that compensate them – for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of [...]

…forever.  But, if San Francisco’s most famous street vendor has anything to say about it, that boot will be well-shined:
He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up from [...]

Yesterday morning I was sent an article written by Michigan House Representative Paul Opsommer regarding the Department of Homeland Security’s push to implement Enhanced Drivers’ Licenses:
The Department of Homeland Security is coming to Detroit to push their new “Enhanced Drivers License” (EDL) program on Tuesday as a way to make Michigan licenses compliant with the [...]

Dear Representative Schakowsky -
I’m a taxpayer.  The Tea Partiers are also taxpayers.  We are the people who make the enterprise of government possible.
People in government would object to that statement.  They would say that the US Government has multiple revenue streams:  the income tax, other federal taxes, the Social Security Trust Fund, other intergovernmental funds, [...]