Typically excellent breakdown of the nation’s taxing and spending habits from Bill Whittle:

The Democrats goal is to defend the unsustainable spending. Republicans have been trying for decades to trim it, but they have the harder argument. It’s always easier to sell free stuff than it is to sell fiscal austerity and responsibility. By exploiting the difference, Democrats remain in power at the nation’s expense.

He checks himself, almost:

I think this is what he was going for:

Yesterday I noted that another green energy investment by the Obama administration had gone bankrupt. I posted video of the Vice President visiting the company. Today I’ve got video of the President touting his green investment in Indiana, including the now bankrupt EnerDel. This is from August 2009:

This is from February 2011:

A year and a half ago this administration made a judgment. We decided it’s not sufficient to create new jobs, we have to create whole new industries.

And that’s worked out so well hasn’t it? First Solyndra lost half a billion dollars of taxpayer money, now Ener1 has filed for bankruptcy just a year after the Vice President’s visit:

The Energy Department in 2009 approved a $118.5 million stimulus grant for EnerDel, a subsidiary of the company that develops lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles. The company has so far spent $55 million of the federal funding.

“While it’s unfortunate that Ener1, the parent company, has entered a restructuring process, the new infusion of $80 million in private capital demonstrates that the technology has merit,” Energy Department spokeswoman Jen Stutsman said in a statement.

At a time of unprecedented debt, this administration has decided to speculate with your money.

He’s bashing America so I guess he’s still alive:

Fidel Castro lambasted the Republican presidential race as the greatest competition of “idiocy and ignorance” the world has ever seen in a column published Wednesday, and also took shots at the news media and foreign governments for seizing on the death of a Cuban prisoner to demand greater respect for human rights.

Castro’s comments came in a long opinion piece carried by official media two days after Republican presidential hopefuls at a debate in Florida presented mostly hard-line stances on what to do about the Communist-run island, and even speculated as to what would happen to the 85-year-old revolutionary leader’s soul when he dies.

It really would be much easier to just have one President for, say, 40 years. No messy voting to worry about.

What do you do when your party has been on the wrong side of a critical issue for 30 years? If you’re Howard Dean you pretend it’s all crazy talk:

[HT: NewsBusters]

I’m not a Maddow fan, but on this one issue we can perhaps agree. Politifact is full of crap:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If Maddow was a bit more honest she’d admit that it wasn’t just last year’s lie of the year that was questionable. But, hey, it’s Maddow, what did you expect.

That’s the conclusion of Paul Gregory at Forbes:

The IRS publishes detailed tax tables by income level. The latest results are for 2009. They show that taxpayers earning an adjusted gross income between $100,000 and $200,000 pay an average rate of twelve percent. This is below Buffett’s rate; so she must earn more than that. Taxpayers earning adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 to $500,000, pay an average tax rate of nineteen percent. Therefore Buffett must pay Debbie Bosanke a salary above two hundred thousand.

Sounds like Debbie is going to take a hit if Obama ends the Bush tax cuts for top earners. But here’s the question that interests me even more than her exact salary. Given that Bosanake has become a campaign surrogate for the President on the issue of her earnings and taxes, why hasn’t anyone in the media demanded answers to these questions? Seems pretty relevant to the discussion to me.

Drudge has done a full oppo-dump on Newt, though in fact he’s just aggregating the oppo coming in from around the web. Most of it doesn’t strike me as that significant, but this bothers me:

I don’t get how he could be wrong about something this personal in a forum this public. Either he was clueless on the #1 topic of that day’s news or he was lying. Neither option endears him.

This isn’t the first time he’s said something in a debate and later backed off of it when questioned. I don’t want to see a pattern here but this is giving me pause.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin via Twitter for this. “Irate” is the word used in the airport incident report, but I guess irate doesn’t mean what I thought it did. That’s Sen. Paul in the grey sweater, lower left:

Looks like the TSA is covering its own ass again (while demanding to see everyone else’s).

I was stuck by a statement Romney made at an appearance in Florida today which echoed my own impression of the SOTU last night:

Romney: What he didn’t say last night is that we’re spending too much and borrowing too much and that America is on a collision course with debt and that if we don’t get off this course we could sink the American economy and go into calamity. We’re, if you will, a virtual Titanic and he’s saying “full speed ahead.”

So you can see why this caught my attention, here’s my take last night:

Obama’s at the wheel now and he’s looking at the gauges showing all the holds rapidly filling with water. It’s an unprecedented disaster, but the one thing that fixes his complete attention is that bilge pump #1 should be putting out 3% more. It doesn’t seem to matter to Captain Obama that the whole ship is in danger of going down. Doesn’t seem to matter that even with that extra 3% from pump #1 the holds will be filling up much, much faster than the pumps (collectively) can empty them.

And so, on a night like tonight, Captain Obama goes up on deck, gathers everyone’s attention and tells them they have a bright future and mostly everything will be fine if bilge pump #1 can be tapped for another 3%. He doesn’t even bother to mention the gaping holes Medicare and Social Security have torn in the hull, like that’s not even worth thinking about.

This is the first time I’ve ever truly felt like, maybe, Mitt gets it. He says stuff that sounds good all the time but he has a slick quality combined with a record that makes me wonder if he’s just mouthing the right words. I know I’m not the only conservative to feel that way.

So this little coincidence may be just a personal one, but it makes me think that maybe he does get it. Doesn’t mean I’m rooting for him, but it does alleviate some of the dread that his victory would be a complete disaster.

Sorry but I see no downside here. People who kidnap Americans (or anyone else) for a living deserve whatever they get.

Even if you never saw the show, or barely did, you know one line from it “Danger, Will Robinson!”

Tufeld was a narrator on two other Irwin Allen shows. He also did a lot of ad work such as this charmingly kitschy Zenith TV ad from 1965:

RIP, Mr. Tufeld.