Terrible news:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s wife and daughter were hospitalized Thursday — the wife with a broken back and neck — after their minivan was rear-ended by a tractor-trailer truck on an interstate highway in suburban Virginia, authorities said.

Reid’s wife, Landra, 69, and the couple’s daughter, Lana Barringer, 49, were taken by ambulance to Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va. Neither woman’s injuries appeared to be life-threatening, and the daughter was expected to be released from the hospital Thursday night, Reid aides said. Mrs. Reid was listed in serious condition, an aide said, but she was not expected to require surgery.

Our prayers for Senator Reid, his wife and daughter and our hope for a speedy recovery.

We’re finally getting through to them:

House Republicans approved a conference-wide moratorium on earmarks on Thursday, one day after a House committee enacted a ban on for-profit earmarks.

The Republicans’ moratorium is more extensive than the House Appropriations Committee’s ban in that it applies to all earmarks for all members of the caucus…

…House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (Ind.) hailed the decision in an interview on Fox News.

“Republicans did something very dramatic today that’s going to make it very uncomfortable for business as usual,” he said. “So now House Republicans are going to the American people and saying we want a clean break from the runaway spending in the past. And that’s going to be quite a contrast from this Congress and the administration.”

We’ll have to keep after them and be rather merciless with any week kneed types who try to get around this. Our Republican demand is that no longer will the money of the American taxpayer be used to buy a politician re-election. No more ear marks – not ever again; that should be our ultimate demand.

This is also why I think we’ll do well in November no matter what happens – Democrats are praying for 8% unemployment and 5% GDP growth. They figure that will save them. It won’t. The people are not upset at the economy, but at government. Which ever party captures the mantle of revolutionary change in the way government business is done will win – and win very big – in November.

Writing off 2010, but warning us Republicans that we’re going to get clobbered in 2012:

The Republicans who won in ’94 mistakenly believed that Americans had ratified their right-wing philosophy, when voters had simply been using the GOP as a protest vehicle. When 1996 rolled around, the economy was stronger (thank you, 1993 budget), the Republicans’ brand was tarnished (voters came to loathe the Gingrich Congress), and Clinton was again able to charm the country with his sunny demeanor.

The story of Clinton’s first term, in other words, is the story of the difference between midterm and presidential elections.

Except that it wasn’t the 1993 budget but the 1995 budget which really got things rolling – and 2000 showed that even peace and prosperity doesn’t necessarily win continued power for the guys in charge. Gingrich was, indeed, loathed but that was because the New Media simply wasn’t there – we had Rush Limbaugh, a few magazines and that was it. You can’t quite as successfully vilify a Republican in 2010 as you could in 1996 – especially now that MSMers are held in increasing contempt by the electorate. And Clinton was charming – but he also adopted huge swaths of the GOP agenda in order to win re-election in 1996 (welfare reform – opposed tooth and nail by Democrats – was key to Clinton’s victory).

Can Obama be re-elected in 2012? Certainly. Its always very hard to get an incumbent out. In 1980 it was because we had the till-then worst President America ever had in office battling it out with the man who is arguably third after only Washington and Lincoln. In 1992, the ruling party’s vote was split (in 1996, as well – people forget that Clinton never won a popular vote majority; that Obama is the first Democrat to win such a majority since 1976). Prior to Bush I and Carter, you have to go back to 1932 to find a sitting President voted out of office. Its not something which happens on a regular basis. Anyone seriously handicapping 2012 has to put it “leans Obama”.

But, will he? That will depend upon a lot of factors:

1. Is the economy good or bad?

2. Is there a foreign crisis calling in to question the President’s leadership ability?

3. Has there been scandal?

4. Is there a third party to siphon votes away from the President?

In the normal course of events, the economy would be better, foreign affairs would be quiet, there wouldn’t be a major scandal and no third party…but these aren’t very normal times, and we might be wallowing with 10%ish unemployment for years, foreign affairs are getting brutal and not likely to calm down, there already is all sorts of scandal bubbling under the surface and already some leftists are exceptionally angry with Obama.

Lots can happen. Its a long ways away. But to try to extrapolate out from 1994/96 is foolhardy.

They are getting extremely desperate out there:

House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter is prepping to help usher the healthcare overhaul through the House and potentially avoid a direct vote on the Senate overhaul bill, the Chairwoman said Tuesday.

Slaughter is weighing preparing a rule that would consider the Senate bill passed once the House approves a corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate version.

Which just opens up all sorts of Constitutional questions – but which also shows that if they are even thinking of this, they haven’t got the votes to pass, and know they won’t get them.

This is what our “Democrat” party is reduced to – using anti-democratic tricks to advance their cause…

Turns out, it was DC and environs sucking all the money out of the country:

Loudoun ranks as the richest county in the United States, immediately followed by Fairfax and Howard counties, while Montgomery, traditionally one of the wealthiest, is now 10th.

Forbes magazine ranked eight other Washington-area counties in its list of the nation’s 25 wealthiest counties, far more than any other area in the country. The rankings are based on 2008 median household income data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Government is too big and too many people are getting rich off the taxes paid by the middle class. Ask Reid – he’s become a millionaire while “serving” in government. Pelosi has done pretty well out of it, too. Lots of people have – but that is not the way its supposed to be. Service in government is supposed to be a sacrifice – your love of country and sense of duty is supposed to move you to public service, and if you did it right, you should come out of it financially worse off than when you went in.

Our nation is bankrupt and the people who bankrupted it are rich. You know, it is time for a tax increase – a 50% surcharge on non-military, government incomes in excess of 200% of the American median. The government types can get a raise – once the median income of Americans goes up.

Big bunches of money just disappearing at a record clip:

The government racked up a record-high monthly budget deficit of $220.9 billion in February, the Treasury Department announced today.

The latest flood of red ink brings the total deficit for the first five months of the current fiscal year to $651 billion, far exceeding the $589 billion shortfall for the same timeframe in the last fiscal year.

The government ended the 2009 fiscal year with a record $1.4 trillion shortfall. The Obama administration has forecast a $1.56 trillion deficit for this year.

Now, remember, there hasn’t actually been a big bunch of new spending – not a lot of TARPs and supplemental war funding bills since October. In other words, on the expenditure side, things have been pretty much gonig as planned for FY 2010.

So, why is the deficit rising so high? Could it be that revenues are down. And if revenues are down, economic activity is down. And if economic activity is down…then the whole economic “recovery” simply isn’t happening…

This, when coupled with the continuing, rapid decline in sales tax revenues at the State level is a more solid indicator of the true state of the economy than all the stats and happy talk in the world.

Unemployment rises in 30 States – how does the MSM headline it?

State unemployment picture brightens

Why “brightens”? Because in 9 States, the unemployment rate went down. You know, like in Michigan, where it plummeted from 14.5% all the way down to….14.3%…

I’m sure they’re feeling double-plus-good in Michigan about this brightening employment picture…

UPDATE: Reading some business news on this front, it seems that a lot of people are claiming March will be a banner month for employment and will signal the turn-around in our unemployment picture, and thus the real end of the recession. Do keep in mind that whatever numbers come out in March will be highly inflated by temporary Census workers – those jobs will disappear by summer.

We’ll see – but there has to come a crunch time when either the Statist, keynsian model is going to work, or come crashing down. They’ve told us that all this TARP and stimulus is fixing the economy. If so, then people will be swiftly getting back in to wealth creation and thus start creating jobs. If, on the other hand, March isn’t a banner month and/or if April turns out to be a dud, then the game is over.

Biden: Its just easier to condemn Israel than to fight terrorists.

British hero.

Brazilian President: Pretending Brazil is an important world player more important than stopping insane fanatics from obtaining nuclear weapons.

American hero.

Reid and Son officially start to annoy Nevadans.

Government employees now make more than taxpayers who support them.

Iowahawk strikes again: “For he to-day that sheds his approval ratings with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er entangle in scandals so vile”

Among the many dreadful things modern liberalism will bring, this is one of the worst:

A new United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report released March 8, entitled “Power, Voice and Rights: A Turning Point for Gender Equality in Asia and the Pacific,” and coinciding with International Women’s Day, highlights the fact that sex-selective abortion continues to increase the gender imbalance in developing countries.

Under the heading “more women than ever are disappearing,” a press release from the UNDP announcing the new report says, “The problem of ‘missing girls’ in which more boys are born than girls, as girl fetuses are presumably aborted, and women die from health and nutrition neglect – is actually growing. Birth gender disparity is greatest in East Asia, where 119 boys are born for every 100 girls.”

The report found that “China and India together account for more than 85 million of the nearly 100 million ‘missing’ women estimated to have died from discriminatory treatment in health care, nutrition access or pure neglect or because they were never born in the first place.”

Seeking the death of the innocent is never the answer. For all of liberalism’s alleged concern for the plight of women, the real result of liberalism is death for women – at all stages of life, but especially when in the womb.

This is demographic catastrophe – China and India, still with growing population, are about to enter first a rapid aging of their population, then a rapid decline of total population.

The aging will put a huge strain on economies which are still poor and primitive in spite of great strides over the past few decades. Then will come the simple lack of young people to man the industries which have been built up over the past 20 or so years. Europe has plugged the gap by importing Moslem youth – proving ever more indigestible and, moreover, only a temporary fix as Islam has also been infected by the Culture of Death and is undergoing a rapid decline in birth rates (in Iran and Tunisia, its already below replacement level, and only barely above it in Turkey and Algeria). China and India have no practical place to import youth from.

This is death for the world – but only for part of the world. And the meek, it seems, really shall inherit the Earth.

Just another branch of Liberal Fascism – in this instance, trying to stop fishing. Yes, including recreational fishing:

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

This announcement comes at the time when the situation supposedly still is “fluid” and the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force still hasn’t issued its final report on zoning uses of these waters.

That’s a disappointment, but not really a surprise for fishing industry insiders who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force. These angling advocates have come to suspect that public input into the process was a charade from the beginning…

The wilderness, you see, is for the elite – they can afford to the extra charges necessary to be “green” by definition of environmentalists. The wilderness is not, however, for you and me – us knuckle dragging Bible- and gun-clingers are actually a nuisance out there. How can the fabulously wealthy be expected to enjoy, say, Lake Tahoe if a bunch of middle class cretins are there fishing and hunting and driving boats around the lake?

I doubt much that Obama is even aware of what is going on – sure, in the general sense he’ll always mouth whatever is fashionable at the moment vis a vis the environment, but the real drivers of this are the screwball leftists he’s appointed lower down in the bureaucracy. They are determined to reshape environmental policy and they will not shape it towards the benefit of the majority of Americans (if the majority of Americans benefit from it, the environmentalists will feel they’ve failed).

Whether its something as simple as a weekend angler, or something major like grabbing millions of acres and setting them off limits, the whole thrust of these Enviro-Fascists is to “protect” America from Americans. If they can make it more expensive, more difficult or downright impossible for Americans to use our common lands, they’ll do it. They know best, you see?

We won’t be able to undo this until we beat Obama in 2012 – but once we do we have to be sure that the next Republican President rescinds Obama’s regulations and executive orders whole sale…better to be safe than sorry, and as we don’t know what bits of liberal fascism will be inserted in the fine print, our best defense will be to get rid of them all.

Then we pass a law requiring a 2/3 vote in Congress before public lands can be placed off limits to public use and development…