Still trying to catch up on my reading, as I’m still swamped with a lot of work from a new client, but I just had to share this outstanding commentary from Monday’s JWR, by master columnist and editor Mark Steyn.

I’ve been a little behind on my reading due to occupational overflow, so I just now got around to reading this great column by James Lileks that was in Thursday’s JWR online.

Fast, on-point, fun read…

I have been kindasorta out of things the last several days as I finally did something about the disappointment of DirecWay satellite broadband:

Despite their self description as “high speed Internet”, they are barely any faster than dial-up and infinitely slower than DSL, yet more than twice as expensive as the latter. They are not as Windows friendly as one might hope, and I observed that the first time I ever ran into any identity theft programs, in this case some asshat in Miami using my card info to make and attempt to make online purchases, was after I began using DirecWay — so much for any kind of ISP security, and the security system I employ on my computer is among the best.

So I’ve just divested myself of DirecWay(unfortunately, I had to purchase the satellite dish and modem when I signed up), but when I cut off the service I informed them that I will not pay them the early cancellation fee, even if I have to spend 10 times the amount fighting them in court. Since I had to close out the card I was using in order to curtail future fraud on my account and it was the same one I was using for Direcway, they’ll have to go after the fee the hard way if they want to try and collect it.

I now have Road Runner, and it’s awesome, even faster than DSL.

That said, I’ve been catching up on my reading in the Blogosphere, and simply must point you to a purrrrfect commentary on the impact of illegal criminal immigration on America, posted on 28 February by my blog sister RomeoCat over at Cathouse Chat.

Marianne Jennings has an accurately definitive column up on today’s MSM.

To exerpt,

The problem with the mainstream media is that they lack the collective wisdom of the red states. Those in the red states know the difference between stupidity and rights. They know that fault cannot always be assigned. They look at the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of media teeth on how Mr. Bush’s ties to Halliburton caused Hurricane Katrina and realize that the press may not be parring the hole on insight, intelligence, or analysis.

The indignation over the release of information on the Veep’s quail hunting accident is something beyond the usual and well documented media bias. The mainstream media have become unhinged. So great is their dislike of Mr. Bush and so strong their desire to have a Watergate office-removal scandal that they cannot distinguish between relevant and irrelevant, material and immaterial. Blinding rage is destructive.

Talk about a well hammered nail!

The Washington Times’ Tony Blankley’s latest column presents a good analysis of the Democratic Party as it now stands, citing the relationships between some of George Bush’s statements in Tuesday evening’s SOTU address and the folks on the left side of the aisle.

During an election campaign, political operatives are fond of seeking to induce in their opponent a negative “defining moment.” That is to say a highly publicized moment when their opponent portrays everything that is wrong with him. In 2004 John Kerry provided that moment when he said he voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it.
Surely, at the State of the Union address the Democratic Party provided such a moment when, as has already been well commented on by others, they wildly applauded President Bush’s statement that Congress failed to pass Social Security reform last year.
As the party of reactionary inertia — as the party that not only doesn’t have any solutions to today’s dangers and problems, but denies that such problems exist — the Democrats on the floor of the House Tuesday night demonstrated a flawless, intuitive sense of its new, disfunctional self.
The Democrats’ wild applause on behalf of doing nothing was more than a merely tactical political blunder. It displayed a deeper truth about them.

It sure did. It seems like ever since Bush beat Gore in 2000, the Democrats have put all other issues, in fact their very minds on the back burner in order to prosecute their War On Bush.

If one recalls, last year the official position of the Democratic Party was not only that they opposed President Bush’s Social Security reform. They also argued there was no crisis — no major problem that required rectification.
(In fact Social Security has four trillion dollars of unfunded liability, and if major changes are not made quickly, will only be able to pay the retired baby boomers about 70 cents for each dollar of promised benefits.)
Social Security is the single most iconic Democratic Party issue of the past hundred years — the Democrats created Social Security in 1935 and have won countless elections since then by beating up Republicans for allegedly not supporting it. It was the Democratic Party’s sacred virgin. They would lie for it, die for it, steal for it, demagogue for it — but never cheer its demise or harm, even sarcastically.
Their collective decision to cheer the failure of the body politic to provide for sufficient revenues to pay the benefits was an act of historic shame for the Democratic Party.
Worse than that for the Democrats, it shows how severely degraded their political instincts have become. Tip O’Neill’s Democratic Party of 20 years ago would never have cheered the failure of Social Security — even to try to make a small political point. To be sure, they would demagogue the issue ruthlessly, but never be seen to be walking away from the sacred program.
Until George Bush became president the Democrats, for better and for worse, were a liberal party. Deformed by hatred of the current president, the Democrats have become a nihilist party.

Yeah, well, thanks to alternative media and the Democrats’ own obvious lack of either unity or direction, their uselessness as a political entity is costing them more and more public support, despite the misleading reports to the contrary by the liberal mainstream media.

The Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress and we have a strong conservative in the Oval Office, and the numbers can only increase on the right as the nation realizes long before this November that the left hasn’t a clue about anything, they’re standing at a $25.00 minimum table with four $5.00 chips.

I had meant to link to this great Op-Ed column by author and City Journal Senior Editor Brian C. Anderson a few days ago when it was first published in WSJ’s Opinion Journal, but for the last several days I’ve been swamped with issues involving my new house and a few other things I seem to be getting out of the way –finally!

Mr. Anderson discusses campaign finance reform and how it targets free speech, particularly that of conservatives.

The rise of alternative media–political talk radio in the 1980s, cable news in the ’90s, and the blogosphere in the new millennium–has broken the liberal monopoly over news and opinion outlets. The left understands acutely the implications of this revolution, blaming much of the Democratic Party’s current electoral trouble on the influence of the new media’s vigorous conservative voices. Instead of fighting back with ideas, however, today’s liberals quietly, relentlessly and illiberally are working to smother this flourishing universe of political discourse under a tangle of campaign-finance and media regulations. Their campaign represents the most sustained attack on free political speech in the United States since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. Though Republicans have the most to lose in the short run, all Americans who care about our most fundamental rights and the civic health of our democracy need to understand what’s going on–and resist it.

It came as no surprise when Senator John McCain was behind one of the most offensive “campaign finance” acts in modern history. That aisle straddling, self seeking, in-name-only Republican distinguished gentleman is… No, this time I will avoid my usual flair for digression…

The most imminent danger comes from campaign-finance rules, especially those spawned by the 2002 McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act. Republican maverick John McCain’s co-sponsorship aside, the bill passed only because of overwhelming Democratic support. It’s easy to see why liberals have spearheaded the nation’s three-decade experiment with campaign-finance regulation. Seeking to rid politics of “big-money corruption,” election-law reforms obstruct the kinds of political speech–political ads and perhaps now the feisty editorializing of the new media–that escape the filter of the mainstream press and the academy, left-wing fiefdoms still regulation-free. Campaign-finance reform, notes columnist George Will, by steadily expanding “government’s control of the political campaigns that decide who controls government,” advances “liberalism’s program of extending government supervision of life.”

Ah, yes, there is that, indeed. George Will hit the nail right on the head with the last, “liberalism’s program of extending government supervision of life.” It beats me how a bunch of folks whose political handle stems from the word “liberty” can be so set on taking away our liberty, that concept-cum-reality earned for us by patriots who fought, died, sacrificed nearly two hundred thirty years ago so that theirs and future generations might live free.

Liberty to go about our lives without the very government control the liberals are attempting to force feed us through Congress and the courts, and are largely succeeding.

McCain-Feingold, the latest and scariest step down that slope, makes it a felony for corporations, nonprofit advocacy groups and labor unions to run ads that criticize–or even name or show–members of Congress within 60 days of a federal election, when such quintessentially political speech might actually persuade voters. It forbids political parties from soliciting or spending “soft money” contributions to publicize the principles and ideas they stand for. Amending the already baffling campaign-finance rules from the 1970s, McCain-Feingold’s dizzying do’s and don’ts, its detailed and onerous reporting requirements of funding sources–which require a dense 300-page book to lay out–have made running for office, contributing to a candidate or cause, or advocating without an attorney at hand unwise and potentially ruinous.

Not for nothing has Justice Clarence Thomas denounced McCain-Feingold’s “unprecedented restrictions” as an “assault on the free exchange of ideas.”

Because political blogs are mostly conservative, reporting and commenting on important news issues that the liberal mainstream media either downplays, spins or ignores and have become a formidable “new media” power all their own, these “reformers” have now cast their jaundiced eye on the blogosphere.

Campaign-finance reform now has the blogosphere in its crosshairs. When the Federal Election Commission wrote specific rules in 2002 to implement McCain-Feingold, it voted 4-2 to exempt the Web. After all, observed the majority of three Republicans and one Democrat (the agency divides its seats evenly between the two parties), Congress didn’t list the Internet among the “public communications”–everything from television to roadside billboards–that the FEC should regulate. Further, “the Internet is virtually a limitless resource, where the speech of one person does not interfere with the speech of anyone else,” reasoned Republican commissioner Michael Toner. “Whereas campaign finance regulation is meant to ensure that money in politics does not corrupt candidates or officeholders, or create the appearance thereof, such rationales cannot plausibly be applied to the Internet, where on-line activists can communicate about politics with millions of people at little or no cost.”

You can’t blame the left for seeing the right thinking bloggers on the Internet as a threat to their previously enjoyed media monopoly…

The FEC thus has plunged into what Smith calls a “bizarre” rule-making process that could shackle the political blogosphere. This would be a particular disaster for the right, which has maintained its early advantage over the left in the blogosphere, despite the emergence of big liberal sites like Daily Kos. Some 157 of the top 250 political blogs express right-leaning views, a recent liberal survey found. Reaching a growing and influential audience–hundreds of thousands of readers weekly (including most journalists) for the top conservative sites–the blogosphere has enabled the right to counter the biases of the liberal media mainstream. Without the blogosphere, Howell Raines would still be the New York Times’ editor, Dan Rather would only now be retiring, garlanded with praise–and John Kerry might be president of the U.S., assuming that CBS News had gotten away with its falsehood about President Bush’s military service that the diligent bloggers at PowerLine, LittleGreenFootballs and other sites swiftly debunked.

…but they can be blamed for trying to replace our American right to freedom of speech with intrusive government regulation.

Read Brian Anderson’e entire commentary here.

Rabbi Avi Shafran has a column in today’s Jewish World Review that, while directed primarily toward a Jewish readership, discusses a topic that should be of concern to all.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision concerning Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law was really about whether a federal drug-control law provided a U.S. Attorney General the authority to punish a state’s doctors for acting in accordance with a state statute. But by contending that physician-assisted suicide is a “legitimate medical purpose” for the prescription of a drug, there can be little doubt that the ruling helped bring the idea of abetting suicide a bit closer to mainstream thinking. That’s a deeply unfortunate thing.

As it happened, the decision came exactly seven days after a New Jersey nurse who has confessed to killing 29 people decided to stop cooperating with investigators. Charles Cullen maintains that he has killed up to 40 people, many of them old and ailing hospital patients whom he injected with lethal doses of drugs — like those that Oregon doctors have used to end the lives of more than 200 people.

Read the rest here.

In yesterday’s Opinion Journal’s Review & Outlook is a look at the mega-positive effect of Reaganomics on the economy over the last quarter century.

Twenty-five years ago today, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States promising less intrusive government, lower tax rates and victory over communism. On that same day, the American hostages in Iran were freed after 444 days of captivity. If the story of history is one long and arduous march toward freedom, this was a momentous day well worth commemorating.

All the more so because over this 25-year period prosperity has been the rule, not the exception, for America–in stark contrast to the stagflationary 1970s. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the success of Reaganomics is that, over the course of the past 276 months, the U.S. economy has been in recession for only 15. That is to say, 94% of the time the U.S. economy has been creating jobs (43 million in all) and wealth ($30 trillion). More wealth has been created in the U.S. in the last quarter-century than in the previous 200 years. The policy lessons of this supply-side prosperity need to be constantly relearned, lest we return to the errors that produced the 1970s.

Good read, the column is here.

Mark Steyn, one of my favorite all time columnists, has got an awesome Op-Ed at the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal titled It’s the Demography, Stupid.

I won’t even comment on it, because it speaks completely for itself.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007760