Politics and other nightmares

Group think is alive and well:

Whoops!

Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) was prepped for an appropriations hearing on the defense budget when he took his turn Wednesday afternoon, flipping papers on his lap, reading from them and commending the witness for his department’s prompt response to a letter Coats had sent about a military accounting office in his home state.

Wod. Did the temperature in hell just drop dramatically? Barack Obama and Sarah Palin are in complete agreement on something. Via The Corner, Here's Obama on the GOP budget:

The president paid a visit to Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Mich., today as part of his push to increase the minimum wage.

Time for one of my periodic "the nanny state wants to hold our hands from cradle to grave" libertarian rants.   Driven by consumer demand for more safety features, auto manufacturers have started making rearview cameras standard equipment -- the cameras are already standard or optional equipment on 85 percent of model 2014 cars.

Heh:

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!

Wow. Leave it to a teenager. In the Pittsburgh area, 14-year-old Suvir Mirchandani did a sicen fair project on how his school district could save money on ink, which is the most expensive component of printing (about $75 an ounce, compared with $28 an ounce for Chanel No. 5). He calculated the district could save 24 percent, or as much as $21,000 a year, by switching to Garamond type, with its thinner stroke for letters. So what if this were applied to the federal government?

I was strongly against media  shield laws when they were being proposed by Republicans like Mike Pence, so I guess I can be strongly against Chuck Schumer's version with being accused of partisan hackery. Sen. John Cornyn, the Senate minority whip, correctly complains that the bill would amount to government licensing of journalists, which would go against everything the First Amendment stands for:

Aaaarghh!

The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation on Thursday announced the 41st U.S. president, father of former President George W. Bush, is co-recipient of the 2014 Profile in Courage Award for making the politically difficult choice to raise taxes two years into his first term.

I remember being surprised if not downright shocked when William F. Buckley, at the time the most prominent conservative thinker around, not only softened his stand on marijuana but even went out beyond the three-mile limit and actually tried the stuff. Now we have Michelle Malkin, no slouch when it comes to conservatism, rethinking the issue for personal reasons:

Guess things are even tougher than we thought:

Between 30% and 50% of parents steal money from their kids piggy bank or savings account, surveys show. Is this anyway to set an example?