Visiting the troops who are, after all, engaged in our most important effort:

Air Force One landed in darkness at Bagram airfield north of the Afghan capital, and Obama was whisked by helicopter to Karzai’s palace in Kabul, where he was greeted by the Afghan president and a band playing the U.S. national anthem.

“I want to send a strong message that the partnership between the United States and Afghanistan is going to continue. We have already seen progress with respect to the military campaign against extremism in the region,” Obama told Karzai in front of reporters inside the palace.

“We also want to continue to make progress on … good governance, rule of law, anti-corruption efforts — all these things end up resulting in an Afghanistan that is more prosperous, more secure, independent,” he added.

Karzai said he hoped “the partnership will continue in the future toward a stable, strong, peaceful Afghanistan that can sustain itself, that can move forward into the future.”

Perhaps a little less concentration on the fundamentally flawed health care and a bit more on the War on Terrorism and the economy? This, at least, would be some change we could believe in.

The troops are having a hard fight in Afghanistan. They will win, if we just back them up properly. Remember them in your prayers.

The Facebook group “I bet we can find 1,000,000+ people who disapprove of the Health Care Bill“, have found its million+ people.

We’ve got Searchlight video.

Reno’s “Obamaville” given permission to stay.

Paul Ryan for President boomlet.

Iran thumbs its nose at President Obama. Again.

Is it just me, or has the clear failure of ObamaCare to gain post-approval traction making our liberals even more shrill and stupid than usual?

When Bush made recess appointments to three “controversial” nominees in 2007, Democrats went ballistic. Senator John Kerry called it “abuse the power of the presidency.” Senator Chris Dodd said it was “an abuse of executive authority.” Senator Joe Lieberman said recess appointments “show disrespect” to the Senate.

When Bush used his authority to appoint John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, Senator Harry Reid said Bush “abused a presidential power,

When Bush used a recess appointment to put William Pryor on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2004, Senator Charles Schumer was highly critical:

“The president is on shaky ground with the hard right and is using this questionably legal and politically shabby technique to bolster himself. Regularly circumventing the advise and consent process is not the way to change the tone in Washington. The only solace we have is that Mr. Pryor will be off the bench in 10 months.”

Yet, that didn’t stop Obama from making 15 recess appointments, including the highly controversial Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board. Where’s the outrage from Democrats? Oh right… there isn’t any! No accusations of abuse of power. Nothing.

Just thought I’d point that out.

The news:

Former first lady Barbara Bush has been admitted to a Houston hospital, according to a spokesman for former President George H. W. Bush.

“Mrs. Bush is in for routine tests as she hasn’t been feeling at the top of her game. We anticipate her release soon,” spokesman Jim Appleby tells Fox News.

She was admitted at the request of her doctor to Methodist Hospital, according to KTRK.

This is the second time she has been admitted to the hospital in the past two years. She underwent surgery for a perforated ulcer in Nov. 2008.

Our prayers for Mrs. Bush and the entire Bush family.

Just back from Searchlight and our crackerjack tech team is working on the raw footage I took. We’ll have that up as soon as possible.

When I arrived in Searchlight at about 9:30 am, the line of cars waiting to get in to the site (which is no more than a cleared field in the desert right outside of Searchlight) stretched back more than a mile from the gate. Initially, the police were advising that anyone who parked on the shoulder would be ticketed and towed…but by the time a thousand or so people had engaged in a grand act of civil disobedience, those threats vanished. Bottom line – cars were packed in tight for a couple miles away from the gate. Got that? People parked their car and walked a mile or two to get in.

I have no count of the number of people who came but it greatly exceeded 10,000, and one unofficial estimate I heard was of 30,000. People just kept pouring in – at no time from the moment I arrived to the time I left (after Palin’s speech) was the road in clear…scores of people arriving every minute, for about three and a half hours.

The crowd ranged from infants to extreme elderly. Everyone was in a good mood and in spite of a diligent search for hatred and/or racism, I failed to detect even the slightest indicator of such. Either the haters stayed away, or the false-flag lefties who pretend to be hateful TEA Party activists didn’t want to make the trip out to the middle of the Nevada outback.

These are the folks. Just regular Americans – no one special. The backbone of our nation showed up and let their beliefs be heard.

Naturally, Sarah Palin generated a great deal of excitement. She gave a rousing speech which was received with frequent, thunderous applause as she outlined the crucial issues – whether or not we, the people, will control our own destiny. The strongest sensation regarding her appearance is that if she wants to run for President in 2012, she’ll not lack for enthusiastic volunteers.

As for the overall effect of the demonstration – it was astounding. I tried to record some video of the trip out to give an impression of just how “middle of nowhere” this place is. To say its off the beaten track is to put it mildly. And yet many thousands of people – on their own time and dime – took it upon themselves to make the long trip. This is an indicator of the depth of feeling of these patriots.

They will not fail. This sort of courage and determination will not be denied – and it certainly won’t be beaten by the corrupt, political machine headed up by Obama, Reid and Pelosi (aptly described as the three stooges on one sign). The left will hurl their invective; the elite will show their contempt – but in the voting booth, this November, these people will be heard.

UPDATE: Picture of the crowd about half an hour before Palin arrived. Please note the people still arriving – it was like that for hours, non stop.

UPDATE II: Fox News reports “more than 10,000”.

UPDATE III: MSM reports are up to 20,000 attended.

UPDATE IV: We finally got video up.

Cross Posted: Noonan for Nevada

He’s wrecking the nation. Maybe he doesn’t realize it – but conscious or not, he’s set us on a path to complete financial melt down:

President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation’s economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

In its 2011 budget, which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Feb. 1, the administration projected a 10-year deficit total of $8.53 trillion. After looking it over, CBO said in its final analysis, released Thursday, that the president’s budget would generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the next decade.

It can’t be sustained – and I’ll bet that the CBO numbers, themselves terrible, are likely to end up far more rosy than the actuality. It is not a matter of should we balance the budget but of must. And don’t think you can tax your way out of this – if you every last cent from the wealthy – and even if such an action didn’t kill the economy – then all you’d do is put off the day of reckoning a little bit.

And its not like it would be hard to balance the budget – just dial everything back to 2004 spending levels, and we’re back in surplus. And money can be moved around – if you liberals out there still insist on spending more on your pet projects, you can: but you’ll have to prioritize and pick a couple that you really want, and leave aside the others. It won’t last forever – balance the budget and keep it balanced for 5 or 10 years and we’ll at least be out of the worst of it.

Eventually there simply won’t be any money left in the world for us to borrow – save, perhaps, at ruinous interest rates. When that comes, we won’t be able to service our debt because we are essentially paying the interest on our debt with borrowed funds. Such an eventuality will require crisis budget cutting, economy-killing taxation and all sorts of financial melt downs as institutions holding US bonds seek to dump them as swiftly as possible.

I’m telling you, liberals: its either give up some of the social spending now, or be forced to give almost all of it up five years from now.

It just piles up – one corporation after another announcing the massive costs they’ll incur for ObamaCare.

AT&T Inc. will take a $1 billion non-cash accounting charge in the first quarter because of the health care overhaul and may cut benefits it offers to current and retired workers.

The charge is the largest disclosed so far. Earlier this week, AK Steel Corp., Caterpillar Inc., Deere & Co. and Valero Energy announced similar accounting charges, saying the health care law that President Barack Obama signed Tuesday will raise their expenses. On Friday, 3M Co. said it will also take a charge of $85 million to $90 million.

Funny, but the insurance and pharmaceutical companies don’t seem to be hurting all that bad. In fact, from what I can see, they are set to do pretty well. Almost as if ObamaCare is actually going to be a net benefit to them.

But that can’t be true, can it? I mean, Obama said we had to stop the big, mean, old insurance companies, right?

Or, are we just stuck in the biggest piece of political feces in human history?

If you believed that the so-called stimulus was going to target areas that needed an infusion of money to boost their economy, you were wrong. An analysis by BigGovernment.com shows that almost double the stimulus money was sent to Democrat districts over Republican districts on average. Now, this can mean one of two things… Either the local economies of Republican districts are doing much be better economically than their Democrat counterparts, or that stimulus dollars are more about stimulating the Democratic Party than the economy.

Now just who is out there with the over-heated rhetoric?

At a time when most of America is celebrating historic health care legislation that’s been a century in the making, a few narrow-minded tea party nut jobs are trying to tarnish this great achievement.

But if you think these vile two-bit wing-nuts are just gonna slink back into whatever century they crawled out from now that health care reform is the law, think again…

…In fact, the slimy thugs at the Republican National Committee already raised $1,494,084 in their “Fire Nancy Pelosi” campaign…

…We gotta take this fight right to those Republican special interests and right-wing extremists determined to bring back the failed policies of the past…

…We already dealt those tea party crazies a big blow by putting health care reform into the history books…

Thanks,

James Carville

All of you liberals who complain about any thing we Republicans do: go jump in a lake. I don’t want to hear it.

UPDATE: Threats to murder Sarah Palin placed on Twitter. Lots of them.

The “Beck Effect” on American politics.

Are you within 300 miles or so of Las Vegas, NV? Then why not come out to the Showdown in Searchlight on Saturday? Step One in kicking Reid out of the Senate.

Democrats using bogus threats as a means for fund raising. No more proof needed that the Democrats are likely behind the actions.

Social Security will start to go bankrupt – in 2010.

US bond sales are sluggish. No surprise: with SS going broke and Obama piling on the debt, an investor is going to want much higher rates of return…and so our bonds will go begging until we offer it…which means, of course, that we’ll spend even more in paying interest on our debt, which means even less money for other things. Its a terrible thing – and all done because Democrats are dunderheads who can’t see that the party is over.

Liberal fascist on MSNBC wants to extend liberal fascism to talk radio. They really want us to go away, boys and girls.

In an act of liberal love, pro-life offices are getting nasty calls from pro-abortion fanatics. We shall pray for them.

Father Groeschel Reflects on the Healthcare Vote.