'This is Vintage Sanchez' — Rep. Loretta Sanchez Slurs Congressional Republicans as Dim-Witted Southern Hicks

At The Blaze, "‘Well Loretta It’s Unconstitutional’: CA Rep. Sanchez Mocks Congressional Tea Party Republicans as Slow for Caring About the Constitution (With Bigoted Southern Accent!)":

And according to the Latino Politics Blog: "This is vintage Sanchez — she loves to do voices." Now, if the shoe were on the other foot, and Republicans slurred Latino Members of Congress as illiterate immigrant day-laborers, we'd be having civil rights marches and demands for resignations.

WWII Bombers Over Arizona Landscape

Via Theo Spark:

Rule 5 Hilary Rhoda — Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2011

First, a shout out to Blazing Cat Fur.

Plus, American Perspectives has Lisa Rinna's lips, interestingly enough, although I'd prefer Carrie Underwood, at Maggie's Notebook: "Rule 5 Saturday Night: Oklahoma’s Carrie Underwood."

And of course, Linkmaster Smith for updates. .

Anyway, here's some link around action: Amusing Bunni's Musings, Astute Bloggers, Bob Belvedere, CSPT, Dan Collins, Eye of Polyphemus, Gator Doug, Irish Cicero, Left Coast Rebel, Mind-Numbed Robot, Legal Insurrection, Lonely Conservative, PA Pundits International, Pirate's Cove, Proof Positive, Saberpoint, Snooper, WyBlog, The Western Experience, Yankee Phil, and Zion's Trumpet.

Plus, top it off with Theo's Bedtime Totty.

More later, and drop me a comment if you're looking for some linkage.

Lady Gaga's 'Born This Way'

Well, staying with the pop culture blogging, both R.S. McCain and Dustbury got trippin' on Rihanna, so here's Lady Gaga to keep up the momentum:

FWIW, I like Britney better, so more on that later ...

Sarah Palin and the Birthers

From PACNW Righty, "Palin and the "Birther" Movement":

Palin did herself no favors by jumping on Trump’s bandwagon ...

RELATED: From Freedom's Lighthouse: "GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann: Every Candidate for President Should “Put their Birth Certificate on the Table”."

NewsBusted — 'If gas prices are too high, get a new car, says Obama'

Via Theo Spark:

George W. Bush Speaks at 4% Project on Driving Economic Growth

At LAT, "Bush defends taxpayer bailout of Wall Street":

Calling the TARP decision one of the biggest quandaries of his term, the former president says he has no regrets about it. Speaking at a Bush Institute conference in Dallas, he waves off speculation about his legacy.

And at Dallas Morning News, "George W. Bush calls for backing off government involvement in padding economy":

People can spend their money better than the government can, former President George W. Bush told a receptive audience at an economic conference hosted by his policy institute Tuesday.

“It's a cornerstone of a lot of debate that's going on in Washington,” Bush said, referring to the showdown between the White House and Congress over spending.

Bush made the remarks at the beginning of a two-day conference hosted by his policy institute at SMU.

“Some of the people here helped pass tax cuts. Some helped me form free trade agreements,” Bush said, adding that one of his toughest decisions was the move to bail out Wall Street.

Bush defended that decision but said government involvement should be unwound as quickly as possible.

The conference launched a three-year Bush Institute initiative called the “4 percent Project.’’ Institute officials say they will examine the public and private sector actions necessary to drive gross national product by 4 percent annually.

Institute officials acknowledged that goal may seem daunting in the current economic environment. “While 4 percent annualized GDP growth might seem a stretch, it can be achieved,’’ according to Bush Institute materials prepared for the conference.

“With modern information and industrial technologies, as well as deep capital investment in productivity tools across the economy in every industry, the United States can grow much faster than economists currently predict – as long as the best policies are in place,’’ the materials said.

Hamas' New Russian-Made, Laser-Guided Anti-Tank Missiles Shift Balance of Forces at Gaza-Israel Border

Seriously.

Do these people even want peace?

At Fox News, "Hamas' Powerful New Weapon Alters Strategic Calculations Along the Gaza Strip."

This is why Israel maintains the blockade. Last December reports indicated that Iran and Syria were sending in laser-guided missiles, and the Fox report says that Hamas militants are hardened for battle. See also The Australian, "School bus attack may spark Gaza war":

THE possibility of another Gaza war heightened yesterday after Hamas used an anti-tank missile to hit a school bus in Israel and fired a further 50 rockets.

What Debt Ceiling Fight Means For You

At ABC News, "Debt Ceiling Fight Takes Center Stage: What It Means For You: If U.S. Debt Limit Isn't Raised, Interest Rates Would Surge and Markets Would Crash."

Read it all at the link, but mostly sounds like doom and gloom to me. More on this later. Meanwhile, at Hot Air, this is good: "Two ObamaCare programs, four czars eliminated in budget cuts."

Mitt Romney's RomneyCare Albatross

I like Mitt Romney. I wouldn't be unhappy if he became the nominee. But he's got liabilities, especially his Massachusetts healthcare program that's being dissed as "RomneyCare" (an allusion to "ObamaCare").

Sean Hannity read Holly Robichaud's brutal Boston Herald essay on air the other night, "Just one more reminder that Mitt Romney can’t win." And here comes Michael Graham with another slam on Romney at the Herald, "Romneycare a big bust." What remains to be seen is how this plays out. In 2004 Democrats nominated John Kerry so they'd have a candidate with both veteran and antiwar creds to challenge a sitting war president. Problem was that Kerry couldn't get any traction on the war, since he wasn't going change much of the Bush policy on Iraq: "Why change horses in midstream"?

Will the same thing happen to Romney? Healthcare should be Obama's albatross, and it is, except if Romney's the nominee he'll have to try to differentiate what he did in Massachusetts with what Obama's done with the Affordable Care monstrosity. But it wont' work. Michael Graham's essay above says that ObamaCare and RomneyCare are joined at the hip in the public's mind, so Romney --- and Republicans --- are screwed on that issue. Maybe the Ann Coulter scenario would be better, to have Chris Christie throw his hat in the ring, but who knows at this point? Romney could be dead in the water? But Christie ain't running? And Sarah Palin could be hangin' loose until 2016? Hey, I'll take Michele Bachmann! We need a woman president!

Ann Coulter on Donald Trump's Birtherism

It's pretty big news, although I think the most interesting thing Coulter says is how big donors are holding back to see if Chris Christie enters the race. If it ain't him it'll be Romney, who'll win the nomination and lose to Obama. Daily Caller indicates that Coulter's throwing water on Trump, but she's actually digging it:

Equal Pay Day — Oops, There Goes the Feminist Narrative!

From Carrie Lucas, at Wall Street Journal, "There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap":

Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.

The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.

Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.

Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.

Hmm. I doubt Amanda Marcotte's going to be pleased, and don't even get me started about Sady Doyle!

'Internationalism Run Amok'

From Gov. Jan Brewer's statement denouncing the 9th Circuit's ruling yesterday. And here's some internationalism run amok:

Rihanna S&M

Allan Bloom warned that rock and roll --- and the Walkman and MTV commercial culture within which it was embedded by the 1980s --- was "life made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy." Well, I doubt he would have anticipated the cultural fantasies of today, which with Rihanna, for example, is masturbational fantasies on exponential steroids:

She looked lovely on the cover of the latest Rolling Stone, in any case, "Rihanna Opens Up Like Never Before in Rolling Stone Cover Story."

This might be too hot for Rule 5, so I'll do something for a roundup later.

More Neoconservative Backlash

I don't know if Dan Riehl was as big a Bush-backer on Iraq as was David Horowitz, but Dan's written another interesting repudiation of neoconservatism. See, "Why Neo-Conservativism May Represent a Serious Concern For Israel":

Old line Reagan conservatives have always been something of a firewall for neo-conservatives, siding with them over more isolationist factions within the GOP. The thanks we most often got for that was either to have been ignored, or taken for granted - and now, it seems, even marginalized, as Jennifer Rubin is doing.

I'm not suggesting traditional conservatives will abandon Israel, or one of the three legs of Reagan Conservatism - national defense, most particularly. However, it is going to have to re-assess its positioning as regards neo-conservatism and the more isolationist elements of the GOP cited above. Unfortunately, they are not always a best friend to Israel.

As a result, what the aforementioned third leg of conservatism might look like given some new alignment, or dynamic, within the conservative movement is hard to predict. But with mounting debt and three wars going on, it's most likely to not be a very adventurous one, however hawk-ish it might remain in theory.

That, in the end, could prove to be a serious concern for Israel, one coming at the same time the Middle-east is unraveling thanks to Obama - a time when it can least aford any new concern. Yet, ultimately, neither they, nor anyone else, would have anyone to blame but neo-conservatism. Thanks to their policies, combined with a lack of respect and regard for traditional Reagan conservatives over a decade, or more, neo-conservatives may be bringing about the very thing they most oppose: a more isolationist grassroots conservative movement rising to take control of the Republican Party.

They may even have to revert to being Democrats before long. And one can only imagine the reception they'd get there. Given budget constraints and Obama's own current international adventurism, it's quite possible that neo-conservatism as a driving ideology won't even have a place in any next Republican administration. And that may happen, even if they are successful in helping to elect the next establishment Republican they are bound to find themselves endorsing in 2012 and, or 2016.

That's a block quote from the second half of the essay, so readers need to RTWT for the full argument. I'm not sure if it's just Jennifer Rubin that's the most painful thorn here, or something larger. If you check the links you'll see that Dan's fuming mad at Rubin's hoity-toity dismissal of grassroots conservative concerns on the budget deal. Rubin comes off as a beltway moderate completely out of touch with the ideological currents of limited-government conservatism. And I write this as a fan of Jennifer Rubin. But Dan's got a good point. The tricky thing here is not to throw all the "neocons" in one basket when hammering Rubin. I don't read her as much as I'd like, but she was at Commentary for a while, and she's about as aggressively Zionist imaginable. Perhaps Dan will want to flesh out his argument further in an additional essay. If by "Neo-Conservatives" he means William Kristol and perhaps Charles Krauthammer ... well, they're as beltway as you can get, and with Kristol, sometimes his fervent advocacy of the freedom agenda seems to overtake his better judgment. He's consistent, so give him that. But folks who might otherwise be attacked as "neocons" have been very cautious on change in the Middle East and the effects on Israel's interests. David Horowitz most obviously comes to mind, with his highly publicized renunciation of the democracy promotion agenda in Egypt and so forth. But Victor Davis Hanson personified neoconservative foreign policy on the Iraq war, and he had an inside line to the White House back in 2003, but he's now one of the biggest skeptics on the Obama administration's foreign policy, calling for a degree of realist restraint that's the antithesis of the the neoconservative paradigm.

And that's to say nothing of the domestic neoconservative agenda, especially on social policy going back to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the folks at Public Interest under Irving Kristol. And the Reagan years are probably a little more of a complicated comparison in any case, considering President Reagan's appointment of Jeanne Kirkpatrick to the U.N. after her breakout article on dictatorships in foreign policy at (the neoconservative policy journal) Commentary.

Anyway, my money is on the neocons remaining a key force on conservative policy circles well into the future. On Israel and isolationism alone, the paleocons will be out to pasture. The real debates will be more on whether we'll see ideological purists within the conservative movement prevail over the moderate progressive-appeasers in the GOP. I'm thinking Newt Gingrich on latter, despite his otherwise grand vision for the Republican Party. No more Dede Scozzafavas, thank you.

Anyway, Dan might head over to Cato Institute to read the batch of essay at the series, "The Rise and Fall of Neoconservatism." And I'd also recommend going easy on Jennifer Rubin for a while. Check her out again after the budget battle dies down a bit. She's a good lady. A lot of us, like myself, were previously on the left, hence "neoconservative," but we're among the most passionate defenders of the Reaganite vision in conservative circles today.

Ninth Circuit Rules Against Arizona's SB 1070

The main story's at WaPo, "Court upholds block on parts of Arizona immigration law" (via Memeorandum). Also, William Jacobson has the court's ruling: "9th Circuit Upholds Injunction Against Arizona Immigration Law."

But see Andrew Malcolmn, "Next move in the Arizona illegal immigration law fight: An immediate Supreme Court petition?"

One next move might be to get back out to Phoenix for some protests. Those were the days:

Photos: "'Phoenix Rising' for SB 1070 at Arizona State Capitol."

Rock Bottom

Read Neptunus Lex, "The Elephant in the Room" (via Dan Collins). Say a prayer and count your blessings as well.

Not 'The Largest Annual Spending Cut in Our History'

I read Spree's post earlier, "Note To The Far Right : CUT. IT. OUT... Pretty Please." She's arguing for pragmatism regarding the GOP's compromise on the Obama budget, but she's got another post where I'm linked and I'm reminded that I promised to fact-check Barack Pinocchio's claim that the deal included the "largest annual spending cut in our history." I didn't believe when I heard it, and turns out I'm not the only one. See David Boaz, "Not the Biggest Cut in History. Not by a Long Shot" (via Instapundit):

The president might be technically correct in this sense: In none of those years did federal spending fall by as much as $38 billion in nominal dollars. But any real comparison would use inflation-adjusted dollars or percentage of the budget, and by those standards there are no “big, big cuts” here. (Boehner specifically called it the “largest real [that is, inflation-adjusted] dollar spending cut in American history,” which is so clearly wrong that it must surely have been a misstatement.)

The fundamental point here is that federal spending rose by more than a trillion dollars during Bush’s first seven years, and then by almost another trillion in barely three fiscal years. And then we had a titanic battle over whether to trim $38 billion.

The idea that the Democrats “have shown that they heard the message that government spends too much” or that the Republicans—the party that increased federal spending by a trillion dollars while nobody was looking during the Bush years—have “imposed a small-government agenda on Washington” is ludicrous. After these meager cuts, the federal government will spend more than twice as much as it did when Bill Clinton left the White House.

See? Obama's a liar. But progressives are liars, so it shouldn't be surprising. What is surprising is that Speaker Boehner was going along with the lie, as Boaz points out. Progressives are calling him a "hostage taker" and a "street hoodlum" who will "kill your kid." These are hardly the kind of folks to whom you want to give in.

So, I'm disagreeing with Spree a little bit here. These aren't big cuts and conservatives shouldn't go too easy on the GOP leadership. The tea party scored a victory, but it's just a start. Backing off now with breed complacency. Keep the pressue on.

France's Burka Ban Takes Effect

At New York Times, "France Enforces Ban on Full-Face Veils in Public." And from Telegraph UK, "France’s burka ban is a victory for tolerance":

Despite some high-profile protests, France’s banning of the burka is enormously popular with the public. Unfortunately, as in Britain, almost anything politicians do that the voters approve of tends to be denounced as populisme – a particularly dread charge among the over-earnest French political class – and instead of enjoying the deserved benefits, President Nicolas Sarkozy has found himself on the defensive.

Sarko’s modest measure (the burka is forbidden only in public places, the fines are piffling and the enforcement procedures incomprehensible) has led to much talk of sledgehammers and nuts, warnings of an apocalyptic Muslim backlash and claims that the Republican tradition of liberté is being compromised in a seedy ploy to combat the resurgence of the hard-Right Front National under its new leader Marine Le Pen.

Almost anything, in fact, than an acknowledgement that the public overwhelmingly sees the ban as right for France, beneficial to its Muslim communities and justified – if on no other grounds – as a statement in support of liberalism against darkness. Approval runs right across the spectrum, with Fadela Amara, the Algerian-born former housing minister in Sarkozy’s government, calling the burka “a kind of tomb, a horror for those trapped within it”, and André Gerin, the Communist MP who headed the commission investigating the grounds for a ban, describing it as “the tip of an iceberg of oppression”.

Mme Amara is Fadela Amara, "the Algerian-born former housing minister in Sarkozy’s government ..."

That part about Muslim women not having a choice isn't something that progressive leftists want to talk about. Frankly, the burka ban is apparently evidence of French "discrimination."

The Birther Bandwagon! Palin Backs Trump on Obama Birth Certificate

The story's at National Journal, "Palin on Trump's Birtherism: 'More Power to Him!'." And Freedom's Lighthouse has the video.

And here's Trump on Fox & Friends responding to David Plouffe:

More later ...