"The first lady of the United States is on a whirlwind publicity tour for her hefty new food and gardening book ($30), which the White House hopes will bolster Team Obama's favorability ratings. I'd say it's a classic recipe for rank campaign hypocrisy and media double standards. 

"While journalists savor chummy chitchats with Mrs. Obama about beets and Beyonce, FLOTUS is once again escaping hard questions about her cronyism, junk science and generous junkets at taxpayer expense. ... 

"My prediction? As soon as the fawning media frenzy dies down and Mrs. Obama's book rises to the top of The New York Times best-seller list, POTUS will go back to claiming that FLOTUS is a 'private citizen' who should be left alone. The Obamas' Chicago strategists have long enjoyed invoking selective immunity for the first lady without challenge. Lapdog reporters have assisted in creating an impenetrable bubble of political protection around the profligate, policy-meddling first lady."

"As the campaign heats up, one problem is that we continue to meet lots of different Barack Obamas — to such a degree that we don’t know which, if any, is really president. ...   

"One Barack Obama crisscrosses the country warning us that a sinister elite has robbed from the common good and must atone for destroying the economy. Another Barry Obama hits the golf links in unapologetically aristocratic fashion and prefers Martha’s Vineyard for his vacation. So I am confused about the evil 1 percent. Obama 1 feels they have shorted the country and must now pay their fair share, while Obama 2 feels they are vital allies in helping the poor by attending his $40,000-a-plate campaign dinners. 

"Barry Obama respects those who make billions from Berkshire Hathaway, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook, but Barack Obama does not respect those who make billions from oil, farming, and construction. Is Wall Street the source of our national problems or the source of the president’s political salvation? There is an Obama who runs against a prep-schooled mansion-living member of the elite; there is another Obama who was a prep-schooled mansion-living member of the elite."

"I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free. 
And I won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me.
And I gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today.
'Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land ~ God Bless the U.S.A."

"Democrats leapt at the chance to use Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to send a message to all the budget-cutting, union-busting conservatives across the land: If you mess with Big Labor, there’s a heavy price to pay. 

"But if you shoot at the king, you’d better not miss. 

"And with Walker suddenly looking as if he might survive the recall, it appears he’s only been grazed. 

"Now, instead of tacking Walker’s pelt to their door as a warning to any who would follow him, there’s a prospect the whole thing might backfire by elevating Walker into a tested-by-fire, conservative cult-hero and exposing the limits of the Democrats’ ability to exact revenge in the next statehouse where they’re wronged."

"Trying to figure out Valerie Jarrett’s mysterious hold on Barack and Michelle Obama is a favorite guessing game in the parlors and dining rooms of Washington. No other White House official in history has enjoyed such a unique relationship with both a president and a first lady, and yet the mainstream media have ignored Jarrett’s enormous influence over the shape and direction of the Obama administration. ...

"In the White House pecking order, Jarrett has more clout than the president’s chief of staff. During the savage internecine warfare between Jarrett and Obama’s first two chiefs of staff — Rahm Emanuel and Bill Daley — Obama sided most of the time with Jarrett, a classic limousine liberal who believes that Obama was elected president in order to engineer social change. Ultimately, Jarrett emasculated Emanuel and Daley and forced them from their jobs.
 
"She has also been responsible for much of the incompetence and amateurism that have been the hallmarks of Obama’s time in office. Indeed, Jarrett has been on the wrong side of practically every consequential issue to come across the president’s desk."

"This week Catholic bishops are heading to federal courts across the country to defend religious liberty. On Monday they filed 12 lawsuits on behalf of a diverse group of 43 Catholic entities that are challenging the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) sterilization, abortifacient and birth-control insurance mandate. ... 

"The main goal of the mandate is not, as HHS claimed, to protect women's health. It is rather a move to conscript religious organizations into a political agenda, forcing them to facilitate and fund services that violate their beliefs, within their own institutions.

"The media have implied all along that the dispute is mainly of concern to a Catholic minority with peculiar views about human sexuality. But religious leaders of all faiths have been quick to see that what is involved is a flagrant violation of religious freedom. That's why former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, declared, 'We're all Catholics now.'"

"Over the past three years, Obama has pursued the goal of higher tax rates as relentlessly as Captain Ahab pursued the great white whale.
 
"Never mind that by some measures the United States, even with the 'Bush tax cuts,' already has the most progressive tax system in advanced economies. About 40 percent of federal income tax revenues come from the top 1 percent.
 
"And we know from experience that when top rates are increased above Bill Clinton's 39.6 percent, the intake is always less than projected. Since World War II, federal revenues have never risen much over 20 percent of gross domestic product, whether the top rate was 28 percent or 91 percent."

"'If time be of all things the most precious,' Benjamin Franklin said, 'wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.' But he had never heard of a status update. ... 

"Facebook is the world’s foremost purveyor of information you shouldn’t care about. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is to uselessness what Henry Ford was to the automobile. He has mastered it on an industrial scale and is riding it to a vast fortune. ... 

"Facebook has transformed oversharing from an annoying habit of the poorly socialized into the very stuff of daily interactions. No thought is too banal, no event too minor, no mood too passing, no photo too embarrassing to be posted on Facebook."

"It’s always dangerous to ascribe singular purpose to a collective entity like 'the media.' Of course, there are individual figures who, despite whatever personal biases they may have, are trying their best to be fair. But as a generalization, the mainstream media are so deep in the bunker for Obama, they could ride out a nuclear war without having their Jenga tower fall over. 

"... In football, they sometimes refer to the cheerleading and noise from the fans as the 'twelfth man' on the (normally eleven-man) team. The media are revving themselves up to be Obama’s twelfth man, and the time is coming for Romney to call them on it, with passion."

"Late last week JPMorgan Chase announced that it had lost some $2.3 billion, and possibly more, as a result of bad investment decisions made by its risk-hedging operation. ...

"The federal government borrows more than $2.3 billion every day. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to government failure and stupidity. The federal government will spend $668 billion this year on 126 separate anti-poverty programs, but fail to reduce poverty. The federal government will spend another $67 billion on education, but fail to educate our children. Government job-training programs actually leave workers less prepared for employment than before they received the training. ...

"Where’s the accountability? Where’s the outrage? Who is being fired? The government drops $535 million on Solyndra (roughly a quarter of what JPMorgan Chase just lost), but Energy Secretary Steven Chu still has his job. The new health-care bill turns out to cost far more than advertised, adding hundreds of billions to the federal deficit, and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is hardly asked a tough question."