Want to protest? Go to the polls, take a ballot and submit it blank. That will show that you are:

1) Unhappy with the situation of not having your candidate on the ballot.
2) Not apathetic. Getting yourself to the polling place is the hard part.

Just remember that whatever money Obama doesn't spend on the election, he gets to keep. He may be raising a $1 billion dollar war chest, but if it becomes clear that he is going to lose the election no matter how much money he spends, he is perfectly free to not spend the money and leave office with hundreds of millions of dollars in his pocket. That may actually be his strategy. Look at his personal behavior as President. He likes million dollar vacations. He'd love to live this way for the rest of his life. Who's to say that he's not working towards that end, not toward reelection?

What he is doing is siphoning money away from other Democratic candidates, which is good for Republicans. Let him keep raising all the money he can. Every dollar donated to Obama is a dollar not spent on an electable Democratic candidate.

The times have changed and the left doesn't really fully understand it. Yesterday I was watching a news helicopter video of riot police pushing a crowd of rioters back. What struck me was that there were maybe two dozen protesters, and at least a hundred people standing doing nothing but videotaping the scene on their cell phones. Cell phone cameras have completely changed the rules of the game. They have made it virtually impossible for anyone to control and manipulate the narrative because the truth is being continually video recorded around them from a dozen different angles. The left is still trying to play by the old rules, where they can fabricate the narrative and be backed up by the "unimpeachable" media. But it doesn't work anymore when dozens of youtube videos contradict the mainstream media.

Reagan almost had it right, but missed one point. You can't starve the beast until you cut up the beast's credit cards.

Lame duck session? This is a circular firing squad session!

The best explanation of the purpose of the color system I have heard is as follows. Potential suicide bombers are, by definition, not afraid of death, because they believe that their murder/suicide will bring them paradise. They are, however, terrified of being captured. This would mean an ignominous death in a jail cell of old age, and they would be denied their afterlife reward. As a result, AQ is said to be extremely skittish. If AQ believes that a plan has been exposed, they will scuttle the plan and go into hiding, sometimes for years.

The color system was designed to work in conjunction with the sort of intelligence we were getting -- where we knew from traffic analysis that an attack was likely about to be executed, but did not know the specifics. The idea was that the color level would be maintained at yellow, but when U.S. intelligence felt that an attack was imminent, but had no specifics, they would make a public announcement and raise the color level. This would, it was hoped, spook AQ enough for them to postpone or cancel the attack. Then, of course, there would be no attack, and the talk show hosts would mercilessly mock the government officials, who would have to console themselves with the knowledge that they had possibly saved hundreds or thousands of American lives, but not really knowing for sure.

The article gives no indication that the current Homeland Security understands the actual purpose of the system. They seem to be dismantling it for no other reason than that being mocked by the media rubs them the wrong way. I certainly hope that there are no more successful AQ attacks, but it is sobering to realize that the U.S. government is dismantling what may well be a very well functioning part of our national defense system because they find using it to be embarrassing.

> The accusation that recounts will be likely and messy is distracting.

So what happens if the popular vote is extremely close? Under the current system, we only have to recount one or maybe two states. Under a national popular vote, in a close race, every ballot in the United States would need to be recounted. Imagine Florida Bush vs Gore times 50. It would be chaos. Continually changing numbers. Broken voting machines in Tennessee. Butterfly ballots in Florida. Hanging chads in Illinois. "Missing" bags of votes turning up in Louisiana. It would be vote fraud run wild, and it would be impossible for anyone to keep track of it all. The media was barely able to keep up with the recount in one state. And you want national recounts?

No thanks.

The DOMA could have and should have been struck down on the Full Faith and Credit clause alone.

U.S. Constitution:

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.

DOMA:

`No State, territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage under the laws of such other State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such relationship.'.

There was no need to resort to equal protection. The law was unconstitutional on its face. You can't carve out exceptions to the Constitution by simply spelling out how a law is an exception to the Constitution.

You can tell that the judge is a liberal. Liberal judges love to show how personally compassionate and sensitive they are as they exercise their "privilege" of striking down laws that they personally disapprove of. They hate to strike down laws using methods that might prevent the government from passing similar laws against targets that they personally approve of. Conservative judges are the opposite. They love to demonstrate their objectivity by striking down laws on purely technical and procedural grounds, with no reference to the social utility or lack thereof of the law.

What will be interesting now will be to see if the Obama Administration fights the courts to put the ban back in place. I suspect he will, and he will tear open a rift in the left wing as a result.

> Under the Durbin “BP Bailout” amendment, giant corporations will no
> longer be required to pay their fair share of the costs of receiving these
> services. Consumers will now pay those costs.

I'm sort of missing something here. Don't consumers pay the costs anyhow? I mean, each BP retailer wraps their credit card costs into the pump price, right? So what if it's a surcharge for credit card users? Won't that bring the price down 1-2% for people who use debit or cash? That is a bad thing?

I'm from Chicago and I'm absolutely relieved that we didn't get the bid. Daley and his government are running the city into the ground financially. It's so bankrupt that they are selling off the infrastructure (parking meters, etc) just to keep paying yesterday's bills.

If Daley had gotten the bid, it would have set off an orgy of spending and corruption such as this city has never seen. The government would have run roughshod through neighborhoods displacing residents and tearing down perfectly good housing to build useless oversized Olympic facilities that the city could never afford to maintain after the games and that would have no tenants. The cost overruns would have swamped any potential profits and we would emerge from the games in a state of financial ruin.

Chicago needs to focus now on becoming a financially stable city. The Olympics would have put aside any attempts to bring the city budget under control in favor of a wild spending spree that would take decades to recover from.

Newsman Andy Shaw made an interesting comment on the radio following the announcement. Apparently the rumor is that all of the construction contracts for building the olympic facilities had already been secretly divided up among Daley supporters. They couldn't even wait for the announcement to finalize dividing up the loot. They weren't even interested in pretending to have a bidding process. The fix was in for months.

The Daley administration richly deserved a slap in the face.