From NRO’s The Corner:

It appears that the Department of Justice is playing politics with the Times Square bombing plot by refusing to brief Senator Kit Bond (R-MO), the Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. During a classified briefing on Thursday members of the intelligence community refused to answer one of Senator Bond’s questions, according to Bond “We called the agency of the intelligence community that should have that information, and they advised us that the Department of Justice is running it and they told us they should not share it with the Intelligence Committee.” Bond further noted that the stonewalling was directed at him personally, “The Intelligence Community has been told they should not speak to the Vice Chairman of the Intelligence Committee — that’s me.” Bond suspects politics is behind it, which isn’t a stretch given his criticism of the administration’s handling of the Christmas Day Bomber, and his comments on Wednesday that Shazad is not entitled to Miranda rights (a bit of a misstatement as, barring some exception, Miranda would be required if prosecutors want to use the fruits of a custodial interrogation against Shazad).

In any case, someone may want to tell AG Holder that absent some reason to believe that Vice Chairman Bond will disclose intelligence without authorization, the intelligence community is legally obligated to keep Congress “fully” and “currently” informed.

Indeed, someone should tell Holder – but I bet that Holder already knows this. The trouble is that if Bond is informed, it might come out that the Obama Administration was relentlessly incompetent in handling the affair and as we know, if anything hurts the Obama Administration, it must not come out.

Dissent might have been the highest form of patriotism back in 2008, but now we know that slavish devotion to Obama is the highest form or patriotism. Thus, Holder is just being patriotic in stonewalling Bond. Additionally, it is just as important to remember that “the people have a right to know” was only operational until January 20th, 2009. On that date, “the people don’t need to know” became the rule.

At least they aren’t letting out no-bid contracts to KBR, right?

Darn!

Read it and weep, liberals:

KBR Inc. was selected for a no-bid contract worth as much as $568 million through 2011 for military support services in Iraq, the Army said…

Why? Because putting it out to bid and transitioning to a new contractor would have cost an additional $77 million. You see, things don’t always work out in neat, little boxes.

Liberals were rabid about this sort of thing all through President Bush’s term – but the reason Kellogg Brown & Root got no-bid contracts was for this very reason: it was illogical and costly to not just give them the work.

And now that the shoe is on the other foot, what will our liberals do? Mostly ignore it – after all, the whole issue was just something cooked up to hammer Bush and/or condemn the effort in Iraq. It was never a matter of principle.

Per Moody’s:

In the wake of the financial crisis and recession, Moody’s Investors Service has brought new transparency to its sovereign ratings analysis — so much so that 2018 lights up as the year the U.S. could be in line for a downgrade if Congressional Budget Office projections hold.

The key data point in Moody’s view is the size of federal interest payments on the public debt as a percentage of tax revenue. For the U.S., debt service of 18%-20% of federal revenue is the outer limit of AAA-territory, Moody’s managing director Pierre Cailleteau confirmed in an e-mail.

Under the Obama budget, interest would top 18% of revenue in 2018 and 20% in 2020, CBO projects.

But under more adverse scenarios than the CBO considered, including higher interest rates, Moody’s projects that debt service could hit 22.4% of revenue by 2013.

What happens when we reach that point? Greece. And do keep in mind that Moody’s is a bit slack at this. They tend to downplay the bad news and pump up whatever positive is out there. We might already be worthy of a downgrade to AA.

There are two ways out of this:

1. Keep spending like mad and eventually have a Greece-like economic and political meltdown.

2. Balance the budget immediately.

If we go with 1, then it will be very painful and might lead to all sorts of dangerous complications here and around the world. There is no limit to how bad things could get if we spend ourselves in to oblivion.

If we go with 2, it will be extraordinarily painful, but only for a year or two. Once we’re balanced and starting to reduce debt, we can then proceed with no further fiscal problems, our bond rating will not only remain good but our whole financial outlook will improve as we’ll be the only healthy major economy in the world. Foreign money would pour in to our economy as we’d be the only safe haven for it.

Unfortunately, while Obama is in office, we’ll just keep spending. By the time we get him out, it might be too late to prevent the very worst from happening. Though we might get lucky.

Largely ignored by the MSM, almost completely ignored by the liberals, Tennessee has been suffering under epic floods. The reason for the MSM/liberal silence is because there is no way to unfairly blame a Republican for what happened – and thus the fate of millions of human beings are entirely unimportant.

Keep that in mind next time a Republican is President and liberals are screaming about an alleged GOP lack of compassion…

That said, it is time to help out – and a great place to start is with John Rich’s “Lend a Hand“. Rich has made a great, new song and he’s allowing everyone to download it for free – of course, it’d be great if everyone would kick in a few bucks, which you can do thusly:

Please text “RedCross” to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross for Flood Relief in #Nashville. Please help.

Mark Steyn notes:

Two months ago, the Labour government was exhausted and discredited, under an unpopular leader presiding over the ruins of an economic policy he was largely responsible for and which had finally caught up with him. “Dave” Cameron, on the other hand, had signed up to every shallow, pandering fancy the slickers had recommended (I seem to recall more than a few Republican “reformers” recommending the Cameronization of the GOP).

And what was that worth in the end? There was a swing of over six per cent against Labour, and barely three-fifths of that went to the Conservatives. I can’t say I’ve ever cared for Cameron, but, whenever I raised the point with Tory heavyweights, I was told that they didn’t personally care for him either but “he smelt like a winner”. As I wrote over four years ago:

This is dangerously close to the rationale of Democratic primary voters in 2004, when they told pollsters that what they liked most about John Kerry was his “electability”. Sadly, electability isn’t enough to get you elected.

It looks as though Cameron will be able to get in to Number 10, but at the price of Liberal-Democrat support…and this means he won’t be able to do even the slightest Tory thing. Any attempt to move even slightly right will cause the coalition to collapse – and given that Cameron did run as a centrist, get-the-job-done kind of politician, we can expect him to toe the Liberal-Democrat line in order to retain office.

This is the likely death of the Tory Party – they’ll get all the blame for everything which is about to go wrong and when a vote is held (probably only in a year or two as Britain does not have rigidly scheduled elections as we do) they’ll be wiped out. The only way to avoid this is for Cameron to eschew power – and he doesn’t seem to have the backbone to do this.

Why does this matter to us? Because what happened to the Tories is precisely what the liberals and RINOs want to happen to the Republican Party. They want us to mute our conservatism; move away from Evangelicals; drop the life issue; surrender on gay marriage; not be serious about border security. In liberal and RINO prescription, the only way for the GOP to save itself is to surrender core principle. Well, the Tories did that, and look what they got.

The key to victory is to stand firm – but even if it were the demonstrable recipe for defeat, it would still be the way to go. Liberalism is a dying creed. Its economic prescriptions have proven false and no matter how hard they try to juggle the books, the ultimate collapse of this fiat money economy is certain. They are also dying in the sense that they are the party of despair, dissolution and death. They are trying to import voters because they won’t got out and make them on their own. They are finished.

But they still dispose great resources of power – and thus they might be able to keep things going for a while and might even beat us at the polls. It makes no matter – their end is certain. And when that end comes, we want our side to be the blazing light of truth. We want it to be super abundantly clear that we had separated ourselves from liberalism and had nothing to do with it. We do that, and when the crash comes, our victory will be complete.

Or, we can RINO ourselves in to oblivion and allow liberalism to retain power by default. Not for me – I refuse to be a conservative who winds up conserving liberalism. I refuse the office of efficient manager of the welfare state. I stand firm, and await the final death of liberalism.

From, of all places, the New York Times:

Among the many reverberations of President Obama’s election, here is one he probably never anticipated: at least 32 African-Americans are running for Congress this year as Republicans, the biggest surge since Reconstruction, according to party officials.

Allen West is, by far, the most prominent (and if he doesn’t blow it in some manner, clearly has a governorship in his future…and maybe much higher office, as well), but well-known or obscure, it is heartening to have so many black Americans running as Republicans. It is a restoration – a sign that, just perhaps, one day black Americans as a whole will return to their ancestral political home, the Republican Party.

The Big Lie that the GOP is racist is being put to rest – we’ve all had it up to our necks with this slander, and if we can get West and more like him in power then we will be able to turn the tide. We’ll force Democrats to defend poverty-inducing welfare and having hucksters like Sharpton and Jackson while we Republicans have men of sterling quality like West.

I look forward to the future – and, remember, if we can just get 30% of black Americans to come home, then we’ve crushed liberalism for good.

HAT TIP: Crock Tock

The story:

Vintage High School students were suspended for fighting and burning a Mexican national flag during incidents on campus Wednesday, school Principal Craig Lewis said.

At 3 p.m., four female students were involved in a fight related to the burning of a flag, according to Napa police.

Thursday, school administrators found out the burned flag had been discarded on the school campus. They checked trash cans and found a partially burned Mexican national flag, police said.

Investigators believe two students burned it in protest for the celebration of Cinco De Mayo, police said. The investigation continues and school officials are dealing with the involved students.

This unhealthy state of affairs is 100% the fault of liberal political correctness. Had we not spent the better part of the past 20 years marching down the road of race-baiting this would not be an issue. No one would care about Mexico’s flag because there would be no threat in it…but because we’re being told, endlessly, that Mexico has some sort of legitimate gripe against us and that “tolerance” means truckling to Mexico, that flag has become a threat to the American identity.

To defuse this situation is rather simple – quit it with all the nonsensical “ethnic studies” programs; cease having official notice of foreign celebrations and start emphasizing American history over an above non-American. Poof, like magic, the problem would be gone.

This is the United States of America. Learning about foreign lands is good – but the primary purpose teaching things like history and culture in the public schools must be directed towards teaching our history and culture. This is just common sense – it is insane that we do otherwise.

Putting a positive spin on it, the State-Run Media is concentrating on the alleged creation of 290,000 jobs in April – but most of that is mere estimate. No one really knows how many jobs were created in April – the Bureau of Labor Statistics has this thing called a “birth/death” model which purports to predict how many jobs should be created at this or that period of the business cycle.

Today’s numbers presuppose an actual recovery – if we’re not in such, then BLS numbers are pretty much worthless. The bad news is that it’ll be about a year before we’ll find out if the BLS was right, or just pulling numbers out of thin air.

That said, while we’re up off the employment nadir of December, 2009, the fact remains that we’ve still lost a net of 7.8 million jobs since employment peaked in December of 2007, while since Obama became President we’ve lost about 3.4 million jobs.

And if, as I expect, this recovery is bogus…

UPDATE: Mish beaks down the jobs report.

Brits seem to have handed the most seats to Tories, but not enough to really get rid of Labour. This means that government will be really screwed up. Question: Will anyone in the UK notice the difference?

Hutaree case seems to have some problems – and so does the MSM narrative.

Democrats fear losing Murtha’s seat. Good. They also seem to be giving up on the Hawaii special election. Extra good.

Double dip? It isn’t just gloom and doomers like me saying it.

GOP dinosaur admits he’s in trouble. Now, if he’d just draw the proper conclusion, announce his retirement and campaign like heck for his replacement, he’d not only be a bit wise, but would make a bit of hero out of himself.

The news:

Florida’s Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio has shifted his stance and now says he approves of a new Arizona immigration law that has many others outraged.

Rubio said the Arizona Legislature went too far when it passed the original bill, but he says a recent tweak to the law makes him feel comfortable supporting it.

Boiled down, its a good law vitally needed for the safety and liberty of the people of Arizona. Complaints against it stem from either rank ignorance of its provisions, or a desire to inflame racial animosities for political purposes.

Rubio’s position puts and end to any attempt to rationally call the law anti-hispanic. This won’t stop liberals, of course, because they are irrational – but anyone with any sense at all will now have to seek other areas to oppose the law. Race just isn’t a factor either in the enactment or enforcement of the law.