Sarah Palin’s July 4th resignation, with little explanation beyond, “Many just accept that lame duck status, and they hit that road… They draw a paycheck. They kind of milk it. And I’m not going to put Alaskans through that,” seems strange. The AP headline suggests she’s gearing up for a presidential campaign. As usual, Mark Steyn offers a far better postulation.

I’m a fan of Sarah Palin, but I hope she doesn’t run in 2012. I’m also a Romney fan, and we know what a short memory the press has. Aware that Palin’s damaged goods after the ravaging media and Hollywood elites put her through last year, how much you wanna bet she suddenly becomes the quirky underdog versus Romney, capitalist tool with a soul as black as night?

Not like it matters. No GOP candidate will get much face time in 2012, with the networks (and any newspaper still in business) so busy trumpeting the glorious achievements of Obama’s first four years. Maybe in 2016… though I’m not as optimistic as Victor Davis Hanson that Palin can grow from a refreshing conservative talker to “a charismatic Margaret Thatcher type heavyweight.”

My bigger concern is the health of the nation’s elite. What if Sarah Palin announces she’ll never run for national office again? With Dubya at home on the ranch and the Republican party in a state of disarray, on whom will our progressive betters loose their bile? I fear we’d more likely see a spike in ulcer-related deaths in California and D.C. than any acknowledgment that Obama is an arrogant statist, Biden’s a horrendous VP, or Democratic Congressmen are at least as dumb as Republicans.

If you’re not fired up about government health insurance, foreign policy dictated by the UN, and environmentalist control of the economy - start getting fired up. Our centrist President is not going to drop any of his big-government plans, and the GOP is barely going to slow his stride. We can at least hope that harsh realities in Iran, North Korea, or Pah-kee-stahn will draw President Obama’s attention away from… hah! Just kidding.

While Boehner, Cantor, and several others repeat a consistent message about prudence and personal responsibility, their fellow Congressmen and governors have better things to do.

The GOP faces long odds at getting a message through the national media in the best of circumstances. And while prominent Republicans keep fooling around? Maybe our problem is that we ask too much. We want our elected officials to govern well and legislate wisely, but who has time for either when you’re juggling an affair? And how is the media supposed to dedicate any time to Republican proposals, with Obama Obama Obama and GOP scandals to chatter about?

Only crazy neocons want to foist republican principles upon the wonderful countries who know better, but that doesn’t mean foreigners nabbed overseas shouldn’t be treated as party to our Constitution.

Change we can believe in, if we really insist on being that stupid.

Little by little this administration is turning things around. We’re going to kill ourselves our enemies with kindness!

Can’t you picture it? Some raging Imam in Riyadh or Peshawar or Detroit is halfway through a rant shrieking for “Death to the Great Satan!” and the guy in the third row stands up to say, “Actually, America treats Arab fighters dressed like civilians as if they were covered by the Geneva Conventions, and even reads them Miranda rights! It’s like they think jihadists captured overseas deserve the same protections as American citizens!” The audience laughs off their former grumpiness, then they take the Rabbi across the street to the local Ben & Jerry’s to watch the weekly Obama Success Hour on ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, or HLN.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama promised Monday to deliver more than 600,000 jobs through his $787 billion stimulus plan this summer, with federal agencies pumping billions into public works projects, schools and summer youth programs.

Obama is ramping up his stimulus program this week even as his advisers are ramping down expectations about when the spending plan will effect a continuing rise in the nation’s unemployment.

Note the word I’ve taken the liberty of  highlighting in bold. I do not think that word means what the Associated Press thinks it means. I expect President Obama’s spending to have the long-term effect of additional unemployment. I doubt any Associated Press columnist expects the same.

Correct usage would be, “Obama is ramping up his unicorn improvement plan even as advisers downplay whether the Mystical Flying Horse Package will affect the nonexistence of mystical flying horses.”

Now more than ever it’s obvious the pundits were right - President Obama is boatloads smarter than President Bush:

“America and Islam are not exclusive,” he said, “and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

All the right people are taking notice of the pretty things President Obama says and the pretty ways he says them.

“There is a change between the language of President Obama and previous speeches made by George Bush,” said Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas.

This from a Hamas representative. Hamas, whose charter includes such gems as “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.”

Golly, this Barack character must be a top-notch thinker, if he can warm the cockles of even a Hamas spokesman’s heart. Whereas famous quotes from President Bush include*, “There ain’t no Muslims in Am-uhr-ica,” and “We’s gonna bomb them thar Islamics,” President Obama is a beacon of enlightenment for his countrymen. Being a Muslim is not the same as being a terrorist! Not all Muslims participate in or condone violence as a means of enacting sharia law!

Now that we’ve worked those things out, it’s just a matter of getting the jerk-bag Israelis to quit whining about “Muslim extremists” suicide bombing their “women” and “children.” Why, just because the Palestinians have used every new piece of land as additional rocket launching ground, the Israelis think they have a right to stop giving Palestinians land!

But as he presses Netanyahu for concessions, Obama has to be looking over his shoulder toward the powerful Israeli lobby in the United States and the many deeply conservative Christian organizations that back Israeli policy without question.

Emphasis mine. Doggone Christians, supporting The Jews (cue scary music) without thought or hesitation. They could learn something from the populations of the world’s free, competitive, advanced Muslim countries!

* Oh wait, President Bush mostly said the same things President Obama is saying, minus the constant preening about how magnificently multicultural he was for saying them.

For all her fresh and wonderful big government positions, Nancy Pelosi is apparently too dumb for the standard political hedging. I’ll not pretend this is a habit unique to the Democrats of the past decade, but the example of the Iraq war comes to mind: leading Democrats had heaps of fun talking about the threat of Saddam, and the war resolution easily passed both houses of Congress. But, when it became more politically important to protect “our children” from being sent to war, the only reasons for war were Bush’s blood-lust and avarice.

So, too, with “torture.” When briefed on techniques the CIA felt were important to get information from known terrorists, Nancy Pelosi either saw the prudence of letting them carry on as intended, or was too baked to know what was happening around her. Yet Pelosi was at the forefront when the media decided waterboarding was a fate worse than death and it was time for the Warm And Fuzzy Party to hop aboard the latest circuit of the Dubya hate train.

The irreplaceable Andy McCarthy wrote on the topic earlier this evening,

Unless a victim is killed by torture such that the death penalty comes into play (which is not alleged here), American law regards conspiracy to commit torture as something exactly as serious, punished exactly as severely, as actual torture. As it happens, I don’t think waterboarding as administered by the CIA was torture. But Pelosi says she does. If that’s where you’re coming from, how do you get off the hook by saying you only knew about a plan to torture but not actual torture?

What Representative Pelosi is doing here is digging herself a deeper and deeper hole. The last thing Team Obama needs right now is a foreign policy distraction from their glorious plans to fix all aspects of American business and culture while tending to the every need of the American poor!

From the Associated Press:

The United Auto Workers union would appear to be the big winner in the Chrysler bankruptcy saga, having exercised its considerable political muscle to win a 55 percent stake in the country’s third-largest automaker.

You win …a company that you’ve helped run into the ground. I so wish President Bush had been a less compassionate Conservative and let the UAW’s house tumble around them. Sure, the union bosses wouldn’t be the ones getting screwed, but a few more years’ union dues later and most of the hourly employees will be out of work anyway. The lifeline Bush threw was long enough that now President Obama gets to act tough about saving us money while arranging juicy deals for the UAW and framing poor fuel economy as the reason for all woes.

On the bright side, the German and Japanese carmakers can hire more American workers using all the advertising money they no longer need to spend. With 2/3 of domestic manufacturers run by the unions and the federal government, competition won’t exactly be at an all-time high.

The Heritage Foundation noted the UAW’s shortsightedness… in 2006:

The slow demise of General Motors (GM) is visibly intertwined with the inefficient labor contracts that the United Auto Workers (UAW) secured in decades past. Regular media stories showcasing problems at GM and Delphi send a potent signal to other U.S. workers that big labor’s ideal business model is a bust.

Then again, who knows. Maybe after the Democrats have tackled universal healthcare they can implement a program where the wealthiest 2% pay another tiny slice of their pie so every American gets a new Government Motors car every couple years. Sounds crazy, but the union’s earned it! The UAW has paid over $2,000,000 to Democratic candidates in each of the last ten election cycles.

From the original AP story:

The UAW started making concessions during 2007 contract negotiations and that helped in negotiating the stakes they stand to gain now. At the time, both GM and Chrysler had huge labor cost disadvantages compared with Japanese automakers, mainly because they have far more retirees and had agreed to pay their health care bills.

For GM, the health care tab is projected to total $46.7 billion over the lives of about 350,000 retirees and spouses. At Chrysler, it’s $10.9 billion for around 82,000 retirees.

The UAW pushed GM and Chrysler towards bankruptcy to score political points and maintain control of their constituents by “guaranteeing” unsustainable benefits. Hmm…. why does that sound so familiar?