EDIT:  CORRECTION:  BACKING AWAY FROM THE LEDGE: Is the National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order Too Much Power? Probably. Did Presidents Have That Before Obama Signed it? Definitely.

We're getting close.  " But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security"

This might do it: Obama Prepares for "National Emergency": nationalize everything (even you) w/o congressional oversight

Didn't follow the link?  Don't have the time?  Here's the short version:

It calls for a draft, but not just a draft. A civilian draft, of “persons of outstanding experience or ability” without compensation. If they think they need you, they can compel you to work for the government for nothing.

They can, under this order, restrict civilian travel by any mode, including (probably) foot travel. They can ration food. They can restrict water usage, even from private wells. They can ration any and all drugs, including OTC and vitamins. They can collectivize farms. They can take over all energy production, including home solar units.

It also allows for drafting civilians. If they have need of your skills, they can compel you to work for no compensation.

All this not in a time of war, but in time of “National Emergency” (several EO national emergency states already in place) or even in Peacetime.

And he hasn't even won re-election ....... yet. One can only imagine what the saboteur has in store for us.

Executive Order: National Defense Resources Preparedness hat tip Free Republic (thanks to Cathy D)

President Obama thoughtlessly repeated a bogus quote falsely attributed to President Rutherford B. Hayes in order to slander his opponents and (almost as an afterthought) Hayes himself:

“One of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone: ‘It’s a great invention but who would ever want to use one?’” Obama said. “That’s why he’s not on Mt. Rushmore.”

A quick bit of fact-checking uncovered that the quote — as has been long known to anyone with a passing knowledge of history — is just an urban legend.

If he were an Elph this would be further evidence that he was an incompetant ninny. But instead the drive by media looks the other way.  No so the internet.  Here then is a collcetion of takes:

WAPO FACT-CHECK: Obama’s whopper about Rutherford B. Hayes and the telephone. “It’s bad enough…

Bad Smell Blanketing The DC Metro Area. “Reports of a really bad odor blanketing the metro area have been reported from downtown D.C. to Fairfax County to Oxon Hill!”

Related thoughts from Don Surber.

Probably should have posted tis a month ago  but IMHO a Santorum Presidency wold be almost as bad as a second Obama term.

ROGER KIMBALL: How the Liberal Mind Works, WaPo edition.

The moral: if you are a liberal think tank, advocacy is OK because you are advocating the right ideas. If you are a conservative think tank, advocacy is not OK because it is “divisive,” “partisan,” and lacks “objectivity.”

The good news is that the double standards are increasingly obvious.

Each of us disagrees with every other one of us about SOMETHING.  Sometimes it's a big thing.  Sometimes not.  And to me the importance isn't WHAT we're diagreeing about, but why.  What vital piece of information do you have that I lack (or vice versa?)  And so it was with a plethora of belly laughs that I read Aaron Powell's take on an article by someone named Michael J. Sandel.

Mr. Powell observes

After assuming that his readers are as shocked—shocked—by this as he is, Sandel writes, “Over the past three decades, markets—and market values—have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.”

And here’s his first—of many—missteps. Because of course we did arrive at this condition through deliberate choice. Every item bought and every item sold in his preamble was bought and sold through deliberate choice on the part of those doing the buying and the selling. Sandel’s argument thus is not that there wasn’t any deliberate choice involved but that the deliberative chooser wasn’t who Sandel thinks it should’ve been—and the choices made weren’t what Sandel himself would’ve chosen.

In other words, it’s not that we haven’t chosen. Rather, we haven’t chosen the way Michael J. Sandel would have. (Sandel seems to believe that “deliberate choice” would lead to preferences matching his own. He never appears to consider that people like having the freedom to decide for themselves what they can buy and sell with consenting participants.) Michael J. Sandel decidedly would not choose markets in many instances where willing buyers and sellers obviously have. For one, Sandel thinks markets breed inequality. Those with money can buy more than those without. Second, “putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them.”

Go read it all

Sitting behind one of the baskets in the student section of the University of Dayton arena, Dave and Barry talked March Madness, chowed down on all-American Michelle Obama-banned hot dogs, granted a half-time interview, and got chummy with college students.

In the process, the President proved that just like the rest of America, he is able to have an economical night out with a buddy – even if struggling taxpayers are forced to pay a whopping “$365,000, not including the staff costs and other expenses,” to fly the two men there and back.

Sexual Assault at Occupy New Haven, Suspect Arrested

I suppose that this should come as no surprise considering the signals that have come from the very top of the Democratic establishment:

At the exact moment Jon Favreau is receiving high praise in pre-inaugural media puff pieces, the 27-year-old chief speechwriter for President-elect Barack Obama (not Jon Favreau, the Hollywood actor/ director) finds himself in a minor mess over a photo from a recent private party showing him groping the breast of a cardboard cutout of Hillary Rodham Clinton as an unnamed pal wearing an “Obama staff” T-shirt kisses and feeds her beer.

If you haven’t seen it, imagine the early stages of the barroom rape scene of “The Accused” with Jodie Foster. Or think prosecutor Mike Nifong’s graphic (though false) descriptions of the Duke lacrosse party. Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson danced to a similar tune at the 2004 Super Bowl.

Fraternities have been closed for less.

Here’s the pic, in case you’ve forgotten.

and it pretty much defines this Presden't foreign policy: