Spend

With the unemployment rate zooming toward 10 percent and belt-tightening occurring all across the country, the Democrats' key response can be summarized in one word: spend. What's wrong with this picture? Now comes word that as banks are trying to return taxpayer-provided TARP money ASAP, the Democrats are looking at the money not as a way to pay down some of this avalanche of new debt, but as a new spending windfall. If the Democrats aren't stopped, we'll be bankrupt as a nation.

Afghanistan

As the Marines and some Afghan troops move to reestablish control in Afghanistan, I confess to a feeling of foreboding. The Left has complained for years that Iraq is a quagmire, even as we begin to turn the country over to a competent government. It's hard to see how we turn Afghanistan back over to its people-but I hope we can. Perhaps that will happen after we leave Germany or Korea.

Clown at the Party

Al Franken, the unfunny comedian and loud-mouthed liberal, has been declared the winner of the disputed Minnesota Senate seat. Democrats, after picking up their coveted 60th seat in "the world's greatest deliberative body," may yet rue this "victory." It's hard to see how this clown can improve the public's perception of the party.

New Haven Decision

The New Haven decision is a victory for equal rights under the law and a defeat for Sonia Sotomayor and Barack Obama, who foolishly nominated this race-conscious jurist for the Supreme Court. Give him enough time, and he will pack the court with such unaccomplished ideologues. Or is he smart enough to rethink this nomination and truly be a nonracial president?

File Footage

You know you need to lose weight when you are file footage for a news broadcast's from-the-neck-down obesity shots.

Extremism

With the economy continuing to shed jobs, with automakers declaring bankruptcy, and gasoline prices climbing, what is Team Obama's response? A carbon tax. (The Democratic-controlled House passed it yesterday.) This tax, of course, will make everything more expensive and will hit the poor and unemployed especially hard.

And for what? To possibly have a marginal effect on global warming (er, "climate change")? This is the very definition of environmental extremism: to be so wedded to a worldview without evidence and with little hope of a real payoff and still not care whom you hurt to address it.

Unhealthy Audacity

What will drive private businesses out of the insurance business, cost trillions, ration care, and still leave millions uninsured? If you answered "the Obama healthcare plan," you are right. But I call it "The Audacity of Dopes."