Politics and other nightmares

Most political observers say the GOP field is set by now. But what if it really isn't?

If you've been anxious about your farm dust, sorry, but it's still, er, up in he air. The House yesterday approved legislation aimed at curbing "EPA overreach" by forbidding the agency to issue any new rule governing "coarse particulate matter," or "nuisance dust." But the Senate is not likely to consider the Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act, and President Obama has said he would veto it anyway. This is interesting:

This is supposedly a business-friendly state, but we could do better. According to the Small Business Survival Index 2011, Indiana ranks 20th when it comes to policy environments for entrepreneurship. Next-door Ohio does better at 7th. Kentucky is 22nd, and Michigan comes in at 29. Illinois, predictably, is in the bottom 15 at No. 40. What does it take to make it to the top 15?

A federal judge in Oregon has ruled that a Montana woman sued for defamation was not "a journalist" when she posted nasty comments about a lawyer in a bankruptcy case:

Regular readers will know of my ambivalence about the death penalty. There is much that is troubling about capital punishment, including the fact that it gives far more power to the state than any of us should be comfortable with. But some crimes are so depraved that nothing short of the ultimate punishment seems appropriate.

How in the world do you "misplace" so much money?

Indiana's governor announced Tuesday that state officials have found $300 million that went untouched even as lawmakers made deep cuts to education and slashed vacant government jobs while it weathered the recession.

Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels said the money was collected but never transferred to the state's general spending account, which lawmakers use to allocate funds to various programs and departments.

Amen:

Pssst!

The distate that Barack Obama, the community organizer who spent a year "behind enemy lines" in the private sector, feels for the corporate world is obvious. It has also become clear that he has no concept of the dynamics of capitalism:

Everything old is new again:

As President Obama travels to John Brown's old stomping ground in Osawatomie, Kansas where Theodore Roosevelt made his New Nationalism speech in 1910, Newt Gingrich has announced that he is a Theodore Roosevelt Republican.

An interesting and underreported phenomenon is the movement of some conservatives to the drug-legalization position. A recent convert is columnist Mona Charen, who cites Milton Friedman's opinion that the war on drugs keeps the price of drugs artificially inflated and amounts to a favor by the government to drug lords.