Such is the situation in parts of Europe, in particular France and Greece. The fiscal crisis is upon them, and rather than face up to it and take their medicine they refuse to believe that anything must change.

If we allow our current situation to continue we will go the way of France and Greece. It is not too late, I think, to recover some sense of fiscal sanity, but every day we allow liberal Democrats or Republicans to hold office brings us one yard closer to the edge of the cliff.

The European Revolt Against Reality
What will it be: "Mitterrand for All" or "Schröder Does Europe"?
Wall Street Journal
May 9, 2012, 4:05 p.m. ET
By Josef Joffe

Forget for a moment François Hollande, who sent Nicolas Sarkozy packing on Sunday. Set aside, too, the triumph of the radical left and the neo-Nazis in Greece who together captured one-third of the vote.

Look instead at Europe's real mess: the sickly state of the EU-15, the core of the Union, most of which today uses the euro: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

In the 1970s, their average growth clocked in at 3.2%, in the 80s at 2.5%, in the '90s at 2.2%--and in the '00s, 1.2%. Yes, the 2008 crash was bad for everybody, but Europe is still heading down. This year, growth is likely to end up at an anemic 1%.

Europe has been falling back for decades, and this is the source of all its trouble. Yesterday's economic wonderland, with its ever growing list of benefits and privileges, is losing it. While the U.S. share of global GDP has held steady at around 26% for two generations, the EU-15's share has dropped to 26% from almost 35% in 1970.

The reality is that just about the least brave thing you can do in America today is be in favor of gay marriage. Do so and the liberal media outlets (which is to say, most all media outlets) say wonderful things about you on their editorial pages and treat you favorably in their news section. TV personalities throw softball questions at you. The Hollywood crowd invites you to their exclusive parties and the rich and famous wine and dine you.

Come out against gay marriage, on the other hand, and all of the above call you a "bigot," intolerant, extremist, and racist and sexist for boot. The media treat you like a throwback to the 19th century, and if you get on their TV shows you'll get insults and hardball questions. The Hollywood crowd wants nothing to do with you.

Part of me, though, doesn't blame Obama for lying waffling dissembling, er "changing his mind" about the issue. After all, liberal politicians are caught in a terrible bind.

His platform includes these promises:

* Hiring 60,000 teachers
* Raising taxes on big corporations, banks, the wealthy
* Imposing a 75% tax on income above 1 million euros a year
* Bringing the official retirement age back down to 60 from 62
* Gay marriage/adoption
* Creating subsidized jobs for young people
* Recruitment of 5 000 judges, police officers and gendarmes.
* Construction of 500 000 homes per year
* Less electricity from nuclear plants and more "renewable energy"

And, get this

* Balancing the budget

In short, free ice cream for everyone, and let the good times roll!

sources here and here

Full "The Life of Julia" slide show here at barackobama.com

Follow the link and watch the whole thing, but the short version is that the Obama campaign concocted a mythical "Julia" and follows her through her life, from age 3 to retirement at 67. At every step along the way Julia's success is because she takes advantage of of an Obama-created or perpetuated government program. Far from doing anything on her own without government assistance, everything she does is with government assistance.

Either the creators of this monstrosity didn't know that "Julia" was the name of Winston Smith's girlfriend in Orwell's 1984?

It is not clear that violence is periphera to the Occupy movement, and it may well be integral to it. Witness the following:

Violence, arrests at Seattle May Day protests
Seattle Times
Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Black-clad protesters using sticks and bats smashed stores and automobile windows during May Day demonstrations that turned violent in Seattle, and police recovered homemade incendiary devices made from toilet paper rolls and fruit juice boxes.

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn issued an emergency order Tuesday, allowing police to confiscate items that could be used as weapons. By Tuesday night, police had seized about 70 such items, including one with at least a dozen cigarette lighters taped together.

Illinois is running out of time and money
by George F Will
April 25, 2012

After trying to tax Illinois to governmental solvency and economic dynamism, Pat Quinn, a Democrat who has been governor since 2009, now says "our rendezvous with reality has arrived." Actually, Illinois is still reality-averse, so Americans may soon learn the importance of the freedom to fail in a system of competitive federalism.

Illinois was more heavily taxed than the five contiguous states (Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin) even before January 2011, when Quinn got a lame-duck legislature (its successor has fewer Democrats) to raise corporate taxes 30 percent (from 7.3 percent to 9.5 percent), giving Illinois one of the highest state corporate taxes and the fourth-highest combination of national and local corporate taxation in the industrialized world. Since 2009, Quinn has spent more than $500 million in corporate welfare to bribe companies not to flee the tax environment he has created.

Victor Davis Hanson, has the details in an excellent article in National Review today. Following are the highlights, but follow the link and read the whole thing:

Obama's Undiplomacy
Community-organizing skills don't cut it on the world stage
April 24, 2012
By Victor Davis Hanson

Most of the criticism of the Obama administration's foreign policy concerns the failure of "reset diplomacy," the inability to deal with Iran or North Korea, or the sense that we are ignoring allies and appeasing enemies.

All true. But under the radar, there are several developments that are far more disturbing than we seem to realize.

Take the RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone that went down in Iran in December 2011. The U.S. chose neither to attempt to retrieve it nor to bomb the wreckage. Why? Who knows? But it seems that, as in the case of the administration's silence when Iranians hit the streets in protest during the spring of 2009, Obama was worried about provoking an Iranian response. Although Iran brags that it will reverse-engineer the drone, it is not likely to actually do so. However, it will very probably sell off key components to the Chinese and the Russians, who will duplicate it or at least find far more effective ways to neutralize its use.

Buffett Rule Baloney

The Buffett Rule: Free-Lunch Egalitarianism
Obama's disguised tax hike on capital gains
National Review
April 12, 2012 8:00 P.M.
By Charles Krauthammer

...Let's do the math. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates this new tax would yield between $4 billion and $5 billion a year. If we collect the Buffett tax for the next 250 years -- a span longer than the life of this republic -- it would not cover the Obama deficit for 2011 alone.

As an approach to our mountain of debt, the Buffett Rule is a farce. And yet Obama repeated the ridiculous claim again this week. "It will help us close our deficit." Does he really think we're that stupid?

Yes and no.

In his 2006 book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It , author and columnist scared the daylights out us with his portrayal of a Europe that is in steep decline, with the inevitable result the the United States will soon be left alone in the world to deal with the barbarians. Last year Steyn unleashed the sequel, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, which he may as well have titled using the inscription at the entrance to Hell in Dante's Divine Comedy; "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." This book is meant to remove any doubt for anyone who thought that an "America alone" could survive.

The problem is not that armed adversaries are waiting to bomb out cities to oblivion, though it may come to that. Nor is it that our Navy and Air Force can't destroy the likes of the People's Republic of China's Navy (PLAN), though they are getting stronger relative to us. No, most of our wounds are self-inflicted. On the surface our problem is fiscal, but the root of it is moral and cultural.

A book that simply laid out the facts would be useful but so horribly depressing as to be almost unreadable. But Steyn is one of the most clever and witty authors around. Many passages are laugh-out-loud funny, and many more will evoke a giggle or snicker. Even when you're shaking your head at the insanity of our world and the (perhaps) inevitable decline and end of America as we know it, the reader can't but chuckle at the writing.

I've seen a number of liberals on blogs insist that we need a trial "to get the the bottom of this" or "to determine the truth." But that's not why we have trials in this country. Prosecutors only bring charges when they are absolutely certain the person in question is guilty. An indictment is a formal accusation that a person has committed a crime. For a group that prides themselves on adherence to civil rights (just ask them), they sure don't understand much about the process.

I have no idea whether George Zimmerman is guilty of any crime or not. At first it looked pretty clear-cut that he was, but then after a few days mitigating evidence came out that seemed to indicate self-defense. Now some of that is under question, and what exactly did happen unclear. Where this is headed I have no idea. On to Mr Hanson:

Walking Back the Trayvon Martin Hysteria
By Victor Davis Hanson
April 5, 2012 1:19 P.M.

1) If one suggests that there may not be, at least as yet, enough evidence to overturn the initial police decision of not charging Mr. Zimmerman with a crime, then one is a de facto racist.

In other words, the liberal position of letting all the evidence be reexamined in a dispassionate fashion is now illiberal. And the illiberal one of charging someone with a felony without established probable cause is liberal. But just arresting and charging a suspect to let a judge or jury post facto decide whether there was ever probable cause for such an arrest is neither liberal nor consistent with American jurisprudence.

Cause or Effect?
February 22, 2012
by Richard Fernandez

The Heritage Foundation has a series of graphs which appear to depict two trends: an ever increasing dependency of the American population on government transfer payments and a narrowing income tax base. It writes, "it is the conjunction of these two trends--higher spending on dependence-creating programs, and an ever-shrinking number of taxpayers who pay for these programs--that concerns those interested in the fate of the American form of government."

The 2012 publication of the Index of Dependence on Government marks the tenth year that The Heritage Foundation has flashed warning lights about Americans' growing dependence on government programs. For a decade, the Index has signaled troubling and rapid increases in the growth of dependence-creating federal programs, and every year Heritage has raised concerns about the challenges that rapidly growing dependence poses to this country's republican form of government, its economy, and for the broader civil society. Index measurements begin in 1962; since then, the Index score has grown by more than 15 times its original amount. This means that, keeping inflation neutral in the calculations, more than 15 times the resources were committed to paying for people who depend on government in 2010 than in 1962. In 2010 alone, the Index of Dependence on Government grew by 8.1 percent. The Index variables that grew the most were:

Housing: 13 percent
Health Care and Welfare: 13.1 percent
Retirement: 3.1 percent.

The increase from the previous Index means that the Index has now grown by 60.7 percent just since 2001. One of the most worrying trends in the Index is the coinciding growth in the non-taxpaying public. The percentage of people who do not pay federal income taxes, and who are not claimed as dependents by someone who does pay them, jumped from 14.8 percent in 1984 to 49.5 percent in 2009. This means that in 1984, 34.8 million tax filers paid no taxes; in 2009, 151.7 million paid nothing.

Regardless of the eventual ruling, opinion around the political spectrum is in universal agreement that the solicitor general's attempt to defend ObamaCare was an unmitigated disaster. Donald Verrilli was raked over the coals by justices from the right, left, and center, and left flailing in the wind. There are a zillion good articles to choose from which summarize the situation, but John Podhoretz, writing in the New York Post, is as good as any:

Yesterday, Rick Santorum said of Mitt Romney that, "Pick any other Republican in the country. He is the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama." After the speech, New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny approached Santorum, asking for clarification. A heated exchange ensued, with Santorum insisting he had meant that Romney was the "worst Republican" on the issue of Obamacare to run against Obama, and finally telling Zeleny, "Quit distorting my words. It's bull--- " Video of the exchange:

Ugh.

He tried to defend his tirade this morning on Fox and Friends:

To be sure, Ryan's plan is not all that I would want it to be. It does not cut spending nearly enough, and so does not balance the budget for a few decades. It does not touch Social Security and Medicare reforms are put off for ten years.

All of this makes liberal protestations both funny and sad. While the Ryan plan seems a good place to start, the tragedy is that if implemented is not that it would starve the poor and elderly, but that even it may not be enough to prevent a debt crisis.

I'd love to take a few hours, analyze his plan completely... but have no time. So once again I'll have to let someone else to my talking for me.

Paul Ryan Leads
National Review
The Editors
March 21, 2012

Representative Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, has produced another bold budget. He knows that President Obama and the Democrats will not allow his budget plan to become law this year, but he wants to recommit the Republican party to spending restraint, tax reform, and a strong defense.