Today’s the day.  “The Legacy” Mitt Romney is scheduled (yes, I said scheduled) to win today’s Republican Primary in the state which he now calls “home”.

Unionleader.com has the last minute details:

Mitt Romney’s rivals Monday turned up the heat during the final day of New Hampshire primary campaigning, trying to portray him as a heartless venture capitalist who, as head of Bain Capital, “looted” troubled companies and threw people out of work.

Romney’s campaign countered that it was “puzzling” to see Republicans engaged in “attacks on free enterprise.”

Primary eve was fierce on the campaign trail. It all comes to an end on Tuesday, when an estimated 325,000 Granite Staters are expected to go to the polls, with 250,000 of them expected to vote on the Republican side and 75,000 expected to vote in a Democratic primary in which President Barack Obama is not being contested by a major candidate.

To monitor potential voter election fraud and voting rights abuse issues throughout primary day, U.S. Attorney John P. Kacavas announced the Justice Department has set up a “primary day hotline” (603-491-7078).

Romney, who has led in New Hampshire throughout the campaign, appeared poised to become the first non-incumbent Republican in history to win both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.

While trying to stick to the message that has propelled him to his current standing, Romney poured gasoline on the fire over his Bain Capital years by saying in Nashua, “I like to fire people.”

It didn’t matter to one rival or some in the national media that he was not talking about workers and was referring to the ability many Americans have to switch health insurance companies if they are displeased with the service they receive.

By the way, when you go to the home page of The Union Leader’s website, you’re greeted with not only a Romney banner ad on the top, but a Romney ad in the body of the site, as well.

Per The Union Leader, 325,000 are expected to vote today.

Meanwhile, the Republican Candidates whom the citizens of New Hampshire are going to vote for, have not only ignored Reagan’s 11th Commandment, they’ve ripped its heart out and stomped that sucker flat.

The freshly suspended MSNBC Token Conservative, Patrick J. Buchanan, (more on that in a moment) elaborates:

There still exists a possibility that, come Jan. 20, 2013, we could have a Republican Senate and House, and a Republican president.

But there is also a possibility that a Goldwater-Rockefeller-type family bloodletting could sunder the party and kick it all away.

America is bored with Barack Obama. The young and the minorities are still with him but exhibit none of the excitement or enthusiasm of 2008.

Moreover, we have been through three years of 23-25 million unemployed or underemployed. Our national debt is now larger than the national economy, approaching Italian proportions. The class warfare rhetoric is beginning to grate. A huge majority believes the nation is on the wrong course.

Who wants four more years of this?

Democratic hopes for 2012 hence hinge on that party’s ability to portray the Republican alternative as unacceptable if not intolerable. And the Republicans have begun to play into that script.

The GOP field of candidates suddenly seems headed to a finale that will call to mind the last scene of Hamlet, the dead and dying everywhere, but no Fortinbras to restore order in the house.

In the Sunday debate, Jon Huntsman accused Mitt Romney of virtually questioning his patriotism, when Mitt asked how he could serve as Obama’s man in Beijing and be a credible opponent of Obama.

“This nation is divided … because of attitudes like that,” said Huntsman.

Newt Gingrich, who promised in Iowa not to go negative, now calls Mitt a liar. A super-PAC supporting Newt is about to paint Mitt as a Bain Capital corporate predator, a Gordon Gecko whose modus operandi was to swoop down on troubled companies, loot them, fire workers, leave a skeleton crew and move on.

Newt’s bitterness is understandable.

A month ago, he was surging. He had opened up a lead in national polls, moved ahead in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida, and, with the backing of the Manchester Union-Leader, was closing in on Mitt in New Hampshire.

From his crisp debate performances, Newt had steadily risen from his disastrous debut, while one after another of his rivals – Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain – had taken the lead and lost it.

Newt had engineered a spectacular comeback, seemingly peaking at exactly the right moment, only weeks before the Iowa caucuses.

Came then the Iowa blitz, round-the-clock air strikes from a Romney super-PAC. Millions were dumped into attack ads portraying Newt as a Beltway bandit who had exploited his speaker’s ties to enrich himself, pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac and millions more from Big Pharma to promote the Bush prescription drug benefit for seniors, the largest unfunded entitlement program of the century.

After weeks of unreturned fire, Newt’s poll numbers had been cut in half. He finished a distant fourth in Iowa. Having come back from the dead once in this primary season, it is hard to see how he resurrects himself a second time, given the depth of his fall, his seemingly uncontrollable anger and the little time he has left.

Five weeks ago, Newt looked like the GOP nominee. Now, his political career seems about over. Hence the desire for revenge. And with his friend Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson dumping $5 million into a super-PAC for Newt, his allies have the resources to exact retribution on Mitt for what Mitt’s friends did to Newt.

And this is only the second primary.

Concerning Pat Buchanan, he has been suspended indefinitely by MSNBC.  

…he essentially has been absent from the network since the release of his latest book about America’s heritage and history. And MSNBC President Phil Griffin said recently, “When Pat was on his book tour, because of the content of the book, I didn’t think it should be part of the national dialogue much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC.”

…The move was stirring an abundance of comment on the web, with the notation from Griffin as recently as this weekend that there was no decision on whether Buchanan would return.

Mediaite’s Frances Martel said the network’s statement was vague, but “The Week” said, “when you read between the lines, it’s rather obvious that he’s through.”

Chapters in Buchanan’s book include: “The End of White America,” and “The Death of Christian America.”

As far as Buchanan is concerned, you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.  

Romney should probably take note of Buchanan’s treatment by the folks that he wants to reach across the aisle to, but, he probably won’t.

He’s not a Conservative.

This past weekend, Americans had two opportunities to see the Republican field of candidates for nomination being grilled by Liberals.

Why does the G.O.P. subject themselves to that?  If they went in to the debates expecting objectivity, I need to meet these guys.  I have a couple of bridges over the MIssissippi River at Memphis to sell them.

New Hampshire front-runner Mitt “The Legacy” Romney, wound up being on the offense on Saturday night and on the defense on Sunday morning.

From dailymail.co.uk:

While Mitt Romney skated through last night’s [Friday’s] Republican debate largely unscathed, one of the debate’s moderators is being called out for an excessive and biased line of questioning.

George Stephanopoulos, who served as a top adviser to President Bill Clinton in the 90s, hammered at the GOP frontrunner on jobs and contraception with unsupported facts and figures during last night’s New Hampshire debate.

The ABC News commentator said: ‘I’ve read some analysts who look at it and say that you’re counting the jobs that were created but not counting the jobs that were taken away. Is that accurate?’

Mr Romney responded: ‘No, it’s not accurate. It includes the net of both. I’m a good enough numbers guy to make sure I got both sides of that.’

Mr Romney also tried to avoid answering a question by Mr Stephanopoulos about whether states should be able to ban contraceptives, insisting that they wouldn’t want to anyway.

He seemed perplexed by the question and suggested it was irrelevant and Mr Stephanopoulos’ characterization was too hypothetical.

Mr Romney drew applause from the audience while saying: ‘George, I don’t know whether a state has a right to ban contraception. No state wants to.

‘I mean, the idea of you putting forward things that states might want to do that no state wants to do, and asking me whether they could do it or not, is kind of a silly thing, I think.’

Contraception, he said to laughter, is working ‘just fine.’

Then, Sunday morning, while moderating the MSNBC/Facebook Republican Debate,  NBC News moderator David Gregory gave the candidates an opportunity to explain in front of everyone’s favorite flip-floppin’ Moderate why they thought Romney should not be the GOP nominee:

“There’s a huge difference between a Reagan conservative and somebody who comes out of a Massachusetts culture with an essentially moderate record,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has been on the blunt end of Romney’s media attack apparatus for weeks. “I think he’ll have a very hard time getting elected.”

Visibly frustrated after being slammed by Romney as a “lifetime politician,” Gingrich hit back on stage, labeling Romney’s claims about being a man of the private sector “pious baloney.” (Watch the clip below.)

“You’ve been running consistently for years and years and years,” Gingrich said. “So this idea that suddenly, citizenship showed up in your mind—just level with the American people, you’ve been running since the 1990s.”

The debate began just 10 hours after the ABC/Yahoo! debate ended in Manchester. During that event, candidates largely failed to chip away effectively at Romney’s record.

During the “Meet the Press” debate, Romney defended himself as a “solid conservative who brought important change to Massachusetts,” and touted his long list of endorsements, including those from several New Hampshire officials. “I’m very proud of the conservative record I have,” he said.

That’s when Santorum jumped in.

“If his record was so great,” he said, turning to Romney, “why didn’t you run for re-election?” (Romney served one term as governor of Massachusetts.) Santorum, facing tough re-election odds in 2006, ran anyway and was trounced by double digits. “Why did you bail out?” Santorum said.When asked how conservatives could trust him to promote their agenda, Romney replied: “They’ve got my record as governor.” That answer may come back to haunt him, offering an easy opening for attack over his support for a state-sponsored health care program.

MSNBC’s miserable excuse for a television host (one of several) Lawrence O’Donnell, said over the weekend, that:

Romney is the one they don’t want. They know they can beat anybody else. Romney, they think they can beat, but it’s a harder road.

Yeah, right.  And the Dems were scared of John McCain in 2008.  Gimme a break.

Remember Operation Chaos?  Rush Limbaugh asked his listeners to vote for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primaries, in an attempt to derail the “Lightbringer”, Barack Hussein Obama.  People actually complied with Rush’s wishes, and the results, will not leading to a Hillary victory, were noticeable.

Speaking as a Reagan Conservative, I firmly believe that the Democratic Party and their slavishly sycophantic Main Stream Media Lackeys, plus all of the 30-something year old Liberals, publishing blogs out of their Moms’ basements, could be attempting the very same political strategy that Rush authored in 2008.

Think about it.  If you wanted the opposition to elect someone that you thought would be a pushover for your candidate, what better way than to convince the opposition voters that you are deathly afraid of the candidate that you actually wanted to face your party’s representative?

All this buzz about Romney from the National Media, old and new, may be Operation Chaos – Progressive Style.

I always get the last word in with my wife.  It’s usually, “Yes, Dear.”

Apparently, it’s the same with President Barack Hussein Obama:

In a much-anticipated book about the first couple’s relationship, Michelle Obama emerges as a powerful, behind-the-scenes force committed to keeping President Barack Obama true to his campaign promises and willing to battle his top aides when she believed they were steering him off course.

The book, by Jodi Kantor of The New York Times, reveals the first lady’s deep ambivalence about her role in the White House, portraying her struggle with decisions as basic as whether to stay temporarily in Chicago with her girls after her husband moved into the White House.

It depicts her as the president’s compass on signature issues he pushed for in his 2008 campaign, including immigration and comprehensive health care reform — a constant reminder within the walls of the White House of his liberal vision of change, even as some of the president’s top advisers encouraged him to be more of a political realist.

And it reveals her clashes with senior advisers Rahm Emanuel and Robert Gibbs.

Gibbs, the president’s first press secretary, had an especially rocky relationship with the first lady and Valerie Jarrett, another senior adviser and a longtime friend of the first couple.

After Gibbs worked to knock down a report asserting that the first lady had told her French counterpart, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, that living in the White House was “hell,” Jarrett said at a staff meeting that Michelle Obama had concerns about the White House response. Gibbs responded with an expletive-laden explosion, Kantor writes.

“That’s not right, I’ve been killing myself on this, where’s this coming from?” he yelled. Jarrett stayed calm, which seemed to further infuriate Gibbs. Eventually, “the press secretary cursed the first lady — colleagues stared down at the table, shocked — and stormed out.”

Precious little flower, aint she?

Earlier this week, the little blossom showed more of her demure, self-effacing manner:

First Lady Michelle Obama is to make a guest appearance on an upcoming episode of the popular Nickelodeon show iCarly.

In the episode, which airs on January 16, the First Lady helps the show’s title character Carly get in touch with her father, an Air Force colonel who can’t make it home for his birthday.

Obama surprises the girl and her friends, which leads to her being called “Your Excellency” by Carly’s friend Sam Puckett.

After being corrected by a friend that you don’t call the First Lady that, Michelle Obama jumps in and says “No, no, I kind of like it.”

I mean, she’s just like the average American housewife, isn’t she?  She goes on shopping trips to Target, and takes the girls on small family vacations.

Remember this little jaunt?

Michelle Obama is under fire from her husband’s foes for the expense to American taxpayers of taking her younger daughter Sasha on a “girls’ holiday” with friends to a luxurious Spanish retreat.

Andrea Tantaros, a Republican party strategist, caricatured the First Lady as a “modern-day Marie Antoinette” in a scathing New York newspaper column. Some among a flurry of newspaper and television reports, have estimated the cost to the American taxpayer of her entourage’s trip at $375,000, drawing criticism as much of the US is mired in economic gloom.

Her stay at the lavish Villa Padierna in the hills above Marbella – where rooms cost up to $2,000 a night – has coincided with the news that the US lost 131,000 jobs last month, significantly more than expected.

President Barack Obama struggled to put a positive gloss on the numbers. “The road to recovery doesn’t follow a straight line,” he acknowledged on Friday.

But the blanket coverage of his wife’s five-star Mediterranean break – including private viewings of the Alhambra palace in Granada and an expected lunch with the Spanish royal family on Majorca today – could not have contrasted more sharply with the bad economic news being battled by the President.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, declined to comment on Mrs Obama’s holiday, saying “she is a private citizen and is the mother of a daughter on a private trip”. But officials have quietly been briefing that some reports of the costs are exaggerated.

We’re not worthy of Michelle.  

She told us how she felt about us, way back in February of 2008:

Speaking in Milwaukee, Wisconsin today, would-be First Lady Michelle Obama said, “for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”

Then in Madison, she said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”

Some conservatives out there seem to find Mrs. Obama’s quote offensive, wondering why a 44 year old woman never felt proud before today.

Asked for a response to the remark, Obama campaign spox Bill Burton said, “Of course Michelle is proud of her country, which is why she and Barack talk constantly about how their story wouldn’t be possible in any other nation on Earth. What she meant is that she’s really proud at this moment because for the first time in a long time, thousands of Americans who’ve never participated in politics before are coming out in record numbers to build a grassroots movement for change.”

Burton, a little weasel who is no longer employed by the White House, was wrong.  Michelle said exactly what she meant.

Her winsome demeanor and remarkable patriotism are just some of the lady-like qualities which have endeared her to all us peons…err…I mean the American public.

Since being First Lady is “Hell”, as she told Carla Bruni, I think that we should end her (and our) suffering by rewarding her with a long vacation…beginning January 21, 2013.

I’m getting a feeling of deja vu all over again, with a vision of a Trekkie future to go with it.

From the New York Times, published February 2, 1994:

President Clinton’s military budget for the 1995 fiscal year puts Pentagon spending in a holding pattern, canceling some weapons to finance better training and higher pay for military personnel.

Military spending would rise $2.8 billion in the coming fiscal year under the Clinton plan. Taking inflation into account, that represents a decline of slightly less than 1 percent from the budget for the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. The Administration plans a 5.9 percent cut for the 1996 fiscal year.

The $263.7 billion proposal submitted today has something for almost everyone to dislike. Some members of Congress want to cut more weapons programs to pay for social needs. Others fear the advent of a military unable to fight two major wars at once, a benchmark for Pentagon planners. A third faction sees the Pentagon’s budget not only as the bulwark of military preparedness but also as a jobs supplier, from soldiering to shipbuilding to software manufacturing.

Things didn’t turn out so well, per David Horowitz’s discoverthenetworks.org:

In 1994, troops were sent to Haiti, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Clinton asked for a Defense increase of just $2.8 billion but Congress approved a decrease of $17.1 billion. The shrinking budget caused sharp reductions at the Pentagon.

There were more peacekeeping missions to come, including in Somalia where 1,800 Marines provided cover for the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers. But the downsizing of the military continued with 40,000 troops removed from Europe. The Base Closure Commission recommended shuttering 79 more bases. Clinton’s budget request for fiscal 1996 was $10.2 billion lower than the prior year.

At this point, we are well into the Clinton presidency and the eleventh straight year of declining military budgets. The president and the Congress have slashed the defense budget to the point where, after adjusting for inflation, it is some 40% less than in 1985 during the second Reagan term.

The year 1996 saw cruise missile strikes against Iraq and 18,000 U.S. troops stationed in the Balkans as part of a NATO force. Clinton sent the U.S. aircraft carrier Independence and three other ships to the Taiwan Strait because of tensions between Taiwan and China. For 1997, Clinton sought another $10 billion reduction, though the bill he eventually signed set aside $244 billion for defense—finally halting the long string of declining budgets, but just barely.

It was a bit calmer overseas in 1997, though 8,500 Americans were still keeping the peace in Bosnia. The Defense budget rose to $268 billion but Clinton proposed more base closures. The Senate rejected the recommendation.

In 1998, the U.S. and Britain struck military targets in Iraq because Saddam Hussein refused to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors. Clinton also launched missiles against targets in Afghanistan and the Sudan. These attacks came on August 20, three days after Clinton admitted on TV that he had misled the nation about “that woman.”

Defense Secretary William Cohen had become concerned about his budget, and so he called for more base closings—and more money. The Joint Chiefs said that unless funding levels could be increased, some weapons systems or overseas deployments would have to be eliminated. In 1999, the budget was at $250 billion—the same year we were using our military to halt Slobodan Milosevic’s “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo.

For fiscal 2000, Defense requested $267.2 billion billion, including a pay raise for soldiers. The USS Cole was bombed and peacekeeping efforts continued in the usual spots like Kosovo and Bosnia. Clinton’s presidency was winding down and his final Defense budget totaled $288 billion with a supplemental bill of $6.5 billon to help pay for all the peacekeeping.

After Bush was elected and the country had suffered the 9/11 attacks, former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger said Clinton had cut back the military so much that we might not be able to fight a war on terrorism on several fronts. He listed the problems brought on during the Clinton years: lost air and sea lift capacity, two or three years during which nothing was procured for the military, and cuts in R&D.

Everybody sing:  “Everything old is new again…”

President Barack Obama unveiled a defense strategy on Thursday that would expand the U.S. military presence in Asia but shrink the overall size of the force as the Pentagon seeks to reduce spending by nearly half a trillion dollars after a decade of war.

The strategy, if carried out, would significantly reshape the world’s largest military from the one that executed President George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cyberwarfare and unmanned drones would continue to grow in priority, as would countering attempts by China and Iran to block U.S. power projection capabilities in areas like the South China Sea and the Strait of Hormuz.

But the size of the U.S. Army and Marines Corps would shrink. So too might the U.S. nuclear arsenal and the U.S. military footprint in Europe.

Troop- and time-intensive counter-insurgency operations, a staple of U.S. military strategy since the 2007 “surge” of extra troops to Iraq, would be far more limited, with the force no longer sized for large-scale, long-term missions.

“The tide of war is receding but the question that this strategy answers is what kind of military will we need long after the wars of the last decade are over,” Obama told a Pentagon news conference alongside Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

Panetta said the new strategy would mean the Pentagon would field a “smaller and leaner” military force but said the exact number of personnel would not be determined until the Defense Department finishes its proposed 2013 budget in the coming weeks.

Administration officials have said they expect Army and Marine Corp personnel levels to be reduced by 10 percent to 15 percent over the next decade as part of the reductions.

The Army’s current strength is about 565,000 soldiers and there are 201,000 Marines, meaning an eventual loss of between 76,000 and 114,000 troops.

Critics already are charging that the cuts are being driven by budget woes rather than U.S. defense needs but Obama and Panetta emphasized that the reverse is true. They did not divulge details of spending and cuts, which will be detailed in Obama’s upcoming federal budget for fiscal year 2013.

“Some will no doubt say the spending reductions are too big; others will say they’re too small,” Obama said.

There’s the Deja Vu.  Now, about that Trekkie future…

During the original Star Trek Series (1966 – 1969), there was an episode titled “Return of the Archons”:

The U.S.S. Enterprise is investigating Beta III, where the U.S.S. Archon disappeared over 100 years before.

When the landing party exhibits strange behavior, Kirk sends another party down to investigate. They find the culture on Beta III is quiescent, with no creative tendencies. The entire culture is controlled by a group of ‘lawgivers’ known as “The Body” which is, in turn, controlled by the omniscient Landru. The inhabitants change from normal, peaceful people to a violent mob at the coming of the Red Hour. This ‘Festival’ is the society’s only outlet for the tyrannical hold that Landru has over them at all other times.

Meanwhile, the U.S.S. Enterprise is being pulled from its orbit, its crew to be absorbed into the Body. This, they discover, is what happened to the U.S.S. Archon, so many years before.

Archon survivors have formed an underground of sorts to fight the Body, and they help Kirk and Spock reach Landru. Landru turns out to be an incredibly complex computer built by Landru, a scientist who lived 6,000 years before, who wanted to guide his people into a peaceful, civilized progress.

Landru had affected the computer with his scientific thoughts and memories, but not his wisdom. For centuries the computer, ‘Landru,’ has been interpreting his suggestions to the point that no one is allowed independent thought. Kirk tells the computer that instead of helping to nurture the culture of Beta III, it has harmed it. Landru destroys itself, leaving the Betans to work toward the sort of culture Landru had wanted so many centuries before. With the promise of Federation help on the way, Kirk and his crew beam back to the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Before Landru, there were probably Drones.

Answer:  When the Senate is not in Recess.

Looking as if he has aged 30 years in his 3 years in office, President Barack Hussein Obama yesterday decided to show Congress and the rest of the country Who’s The Boss:

President Obama used his recess appointment powers Wednesday to name a head for the controversial Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three new members to the National Labor Relations Board — moves Republican lawmakers said amounted to an unconstitutional power grab.

The president acted just a day after the Senate held a session — breaking with at least three different precedents that said the Senate must be in recess for at least three days for the president to exercise his appointment power. Mr. Obama himself was part of two of those precedents, both during his time in the Senate and again in 2010 when one of his administration’s top constitutional lawyers made the argument for the three-day waiting period to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Obama tapped former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the CFPB, and named three others to the labor board — all of which had been stymied by congressional Republicans who said Mr. Obama is accruing too much power to himself through those two agencies.

In strikingly sharp language, Republicans said the Senate considers itself still in session for the express purpose of blocking recess appointments, and the move threatened to become a declaration of war against Congress.

“Although the Senate is not in recess, President Obama, in an unprecedented move, has arrogantly circumvented the American people,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican.

GOP House Speaker John A. Boehner called the move “an extraordinary and entirely unprecedented power grab by President Obama that defies centuries of practice and the legal advice of his own Justice Department.”

“The precedent that would be set by this cavalier action would have a devastating effect on the checks and balances that are enshrined in our Constitution,” the Ohio Republican said in a statement.

The question is:  Will the Republicans in Congress have the intestinal fortitude to challenge Dear Leader?  Well, if they don’t, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce might:

The recess appointments President Obama announced Wednesday are “almost certain” to be challenged in court, according to a top official with the nation’s largest business lobby.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has not decided whether it will file a legal challenge to the appointments, according to David Hirschmann, who heads the Chamber’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness. But he said he’s confident that Obama’s precedent-shattering move will land the administration in court.

“We’ve made no decisions ourselves,” Hirschmann told The Hill. “What we do know is … it’s almost certain ultimately a court will decide if what the president did is legal or not.”

Regarding the three Imperial Appointments to the Labor Board, Obama’s buddies in the Labor Unions are overjoyed.  That’s always a bad sign.

Obama, in a prepared statement, said the nation deserves “to have qualified public servants fighting for them every day – whether it is to enforce new consumer protections or uphold the rights of working Americans.”

Labor unions, a bedrock of Democratic political support in this election year, had been pushing the White House to fill the seats.

“Some Republican members of the Senate have made a determined effort to cripple the NLRB and other government agencies by refusing to act on President Obama’s nominees, no matter how qualified,” said James Callahan, president of the International Union of Operating Engineers. “Leaving the NLRB without a quorum would penalize both labor and employers.”

Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi, top Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, called the White House move a sign of “its contempt for America’s small businesses.”

“The president has ignored the Senate’s confirmation and vetting process, ensuring that our struggling economy will soon be faced with two additional bureaucrats who will shackle America’s employers with new onerous regulations,” Enzi said.

Obama’s announcement of the new NLRB members came without fanfare in an afternoon press release. By contrast, Obama trumpeted his appointment of Cordray earlier in the day at a speech in Ohio, where he chastised Congress for standing in the way of consumer protection.

Block is deputy secretary for congressional affairs at the Labor Department. Griffin is currently the general counsel for the International Union of Operating Engineers. Flynn serves as chief counsel to the NLRB’s other Republican member Brian Hayes.

Flynn’s nomination has been pending for a year, but Block and Griffin were just nominated in December.

Per the Speaker of the House John Boehner’s website, it violates the Obama Administration’s own policy:

It turns out that the action not only contradicts long-standing practice, but also the view of the administration itself. In 2010, Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal explained to the Supreme Court the Obama administration’s view that recess appointments are only permissible when Congress is in recess for more than three days. Here’s the exchange with Chief Justice John Roberts:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: And the recess appointment power doesn’t work why?

MR. KATYAL: The — the recess appointment power can work in — in a recess. I think our office has opined the recess has to be longer than 3 days. And — and so, it is potentially available to avert the future crisis that — that could — that could take place with respect to the board. If there are no other questions –

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you, counsel.

As has been noted time and time again during Obama’s Imperious Presidency, all of Obama’s promises (and polices) come with expiration dates.

As I sit down to publish this blog this morning, I am greeted by an encouraging surprise:  Rick Santorum lost by the slimmest of margins to “The Legacy” Mitt Romney : 30,015 for Romney and 30,007 for Santorum .

While I haven’t quite jumped on  the Santorum Sleigh just yet, in terms of class, Santorum is still a winner.

For those of you who have not heard,  realclearpolitics.com has the story:

“Once they get a hold of the crazy things he’s said and done like taking his two-hour old baby who died right after childbirth home and played with it for a couple of hours so his other children would know that the child was real,” Democratic commentator Alan Colmes said on FOX News today [Monday].

“That’s a cheap shot, Alan. To say it’s crazy, something that’s that personal and hurtful as losing a child and to mock it like that is beyond the pale and beneath you,” Colmes’ conservative opponent Rich Lowry said after the personal attack.

“I even think some of the dastardly characters we have in the main stream media are not going to go as low as you just have Alan,” National Review editor Rick Lowry said later in the conversation.

Per biggovernment.com, Rick Santorum explained the situation thusly:

He and his wife, Karen, have seven children – including, as Santorum puts it, “the one in Heaven.” Their fourth baby, Gabriel Michael, died in 1996, two hours after an emergency delivery in Karen Santorum’s 20th week of pregnancy. The couple took Gabriel’s body home to let their three other young children see and hold the baby before burying him, according to Karen Santorum’s book of the ordeal, “Letters to Gabriel.”

Santorum’s wife described the aftermath to Gabriel’s death in a heart breaking way.

Gabriel Michael Santorum was born at 12:45 AM on Friday, October 11, 1996. He was a beautiful boy. He did not give a cry or open his tiny eyes. We baptized him, bundled him, and held him ever so close. We sang to him, held his little hands and kissed him. Gabriel lived for two hours. In those two hours something simple but profound happened. Rick and I became parents to a newborn baby and welcomed him into our family. That was all….but it was everything. His life was so brief, yet his impact so great. In two hours we experienced a lifetime of emotions. Love, sorrow, regret, joy—-all were packed into that brief span. To have rejected that experience would have been to reject life itself.

After Colmes’ idiotic remarks, evidently, over at Fox Headquarters, Mr. Murdoch called Mr. Ailes, who called Mr. Colmes…on the carpet.

Per theblaze.com:

On Twitter yesterday, the leftist commentator wrote, “just spoke to @ricksantorum. He and Karen graciously accepted my apology for a hurtful comment.”

Mr. Colmes is heard nightly on Fox News Radio and the Liberal Talk Station on XM Radio.  He formerly co-hosted the Fox News Television Program “Hannity and Colmes” with Conservation Talk Show Host Sean Hannity.

Now, we know why Hannity wasn’t too busted up when Colmes left.

This Liberal jackwagon’s comments , spoken with such insensitivity to a tragic situation, were horrible enough.  But, some of the comments I read Monday and Tuesday on the internet made me have an out-of-body experience.

Posters were agreeing with Colmes that the Santorum’s acted “weird” and said that the baby was an “unviable mass of tissue”.  These reprehensible comments came both from Liberals and self-identified “Fiscal Conservatives”.

Their comments would have made Dr. Josef Mengele proud.

For instance, this little gem:

life is challenging enough without having to take care of disabled children. having early term abortions of these children does not break my moral code.

in many ways we live our lives trying to take the easiest choices without breaking our moral codes.

i have a moral code its just not the same as yours nor its derived from religion. but i try as much as i can to follow it and feel guilty if i break it.

G.K.  Chesterton once wrote, “The danger when men stop believing in God is not that they will believe in nothing, but, that they will believe in anything.”

Comments like the one featured made me want to reach through the computer monitor and throttle them. (Did I just say that out loud?)

As the father of a wonderful, special 24 year old daughter, words cannot even describe how I feel.  And as mad and frustrated as comments like this made me, I can not even comprehend how the Santorums felt when Colmes opened his big, useless yap.

The Santorums took their baby home to perform a funeral for it, not to play with it.

Babies are not something that you’re “punished” with, despite what President Barack Hussein Obama said.  Babies are a gift from God, a special and holy trust, which we, are parents, are charged with “raising in the way in which they should go”.

Shallow individuals, who mistakenly think that they are great intellectuals, such as Colmes and the anonymous poster quoted above, think nothing of barbarically removing a precious life from the womb with a pair of tongs.

But, they stand at the ready to label a family mourning their baby as weird.

They are given over to a reprobate mind.

While it’s too early to make a prediction about the Republican Nominee, I can, like Carnac the Magnificent used to (look him up, kiddies) divine a possible answer for Santorum’s charge out of nowhere:

A Conservative backlash is building in this country.  The Political Pendulum has began a slow, inexorable swing back to the right.

…And it’s going to be fun to watch.

The Hawkeye Cauci happens this Tuesday, and, as I write this, Texas Congressman Ron Paul is polling in second place, with 22%, just 2 percentage points behind “The Legacy” Willard Mitt Romney.

Dr. Paul’s election strategy is as mystifying to the rational mind as is his popularity:

With polls giving Paul a chance to win Tuesday’s Iowa caucuses, the mercurial congressman has once again dismissed the conventional political playbook. He spent the last weekend before the 2012 voting begins at home in warm Lake Jackson rather than campaigning in the cold of Iowa.

It’s the latest in a long list of “He did what?” decisions that detractors point to when arguing Paul will be unable to build on a successful showing in Iowa and eventually capture the GOP nomination.

Supporters note his two decades of electoral invincibility in Texas’ 14th Congressional District. But some who live in Paul’s home district and know him best still question the viability of an approach and a political orthodoxy that would doom the average incumbent.

“His ideas are wonderful, but you wonder if you can really run the United States in 2012 with strictly those ideas,” said John Grotte, a Paul supporter and retired engineer. “He really hasn’t changed that much with the flow of the times. So you wish you could take about 60 percent of him, take another 20 percent of something, just a pure politician and stick them together, and you’d have a pretty jim-dandy guy.”

Paul has remained loyal to his brand of libertarianism while representing his coastal Texas district. When Hurricane Ike pummeled the Gulf Coast city of Galveston in 2008, Paul voted against money to help his imperiled constituents.

Officials at the district’s shipping ports try other members of the Texas congressional delegation when seeking money for dredging. Even neighbors who’ve carpooled with his children to swim practices and praise Paul’s principles say they wish he would have made some allies during all his years in Washington.

In his campaigns, Paul is true to his calls to shut down the Federal Reserve, return the country’s currency to the gold standard and halt all military interventions overseas.

Ron Paul is described as a “Libertarian”.  What exactly is one of these critters?  What does the modern Libertarian believe?  Is it just another form of Conservatism?

Per libertarianism.org:

Libertarianism is the belief that each person has the right to live his life as he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others. Libertarians defend each person’s right to life, liberty, and property. In the libertarian view, voluntary agreement is the gold standard of human relationships. If there is no good reason to forbid something (a good reason being that it violates the rights of others), it should be allowed. Force should be reserved for prohibiting or punishing those who themselves use force, such as murderers, robbers, rapists, kidnappers, and defrauders (who practice a kind of theft). Most people live their own lives by that code of ethics. Libertarians believe that that code should be applied consistently, even to the actions of governments, which should be restricted to protecting people from violations of their rights. Governments should not use their powers to censor speech, conscript the young, prohibit voluntary exchanges, steal or “redistribute” property, or interfere in the lives of individuals who are otherwise minding their own business.

Libertarian ideas are becoming increasingly influential. Philosopher Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia helped to revitalize political theory and to focus attention on the proper limits of state power. Classical liberal economists and social scientists have pioneered the understanding of processes of social coordination and change, many of them earning Nobel Prizes in the process. And the broad global trend toward economic deregulation, freer trade, limits on taxes, toleration of minorities, and greater personal freedom shows the influence of libertarian ideas and libertarian thinkers and activists.

Ronald Reagan defined Conservatism as being a three-legged stool, consisting of Social Conservatism, Fiscal Conservatism, and National Defense.

Today’s Libertarians misidentify themselves as Conservatives.  They discard two out of the three legs of the stool, identifying themselves as “Fiscal Conservatives”.

If you’re having a discussion with someone and they call themselves a “Fiscal Conservative”, 9 times out of ten, you’re talking to a Libertarian.

Dr. Paul is a Libertarian.  Among other arrows in his quiver, he wants to legalize marijuana.  That’s why the self-proclaimed “intellectual” college-age young folks, with their heads full of mush, want to vote for him.

That’s personal responsibility thingy is a pain, isn’t it, boys and girls?

I found myself in a discussion with one of these young followers the other day, who was posting his Paulian Praises on the Facebook Page of Conservative Pundit Michelle Malkin.  Needless to say, the young man got very frustrated with my insistence on remaining faithful to Reagan Conservatism and with my refusal to believe in the brilliance that is Dr. Ron Paul.  That young man called me ignorant and wound up his less-than-cogent argument by saying that my parents had never married, in a very crude manner.

Being a 53 year old  Son of the South, I must confess, I snapped and I proceeded to tell the young Paulnut the way the cow ate the cabbage:

Reality Check: Ron Paul is a old man, who has run for President several times. He is this generation’s Pat Paulsen (look him up). He is anti-semitic, pro-Iranian, and is a cranky, old isolationist nutjob, whom one would expect to find in a corner somewhere, with his underwear on top of his head, babbling , “I like cheese!” If he was the genius you idiots claim that he is, he would have won the presidency by now. Loosen up your tin foil hat, boy. It’s shaping your head into a point.

Now is not the time to redefine Conservatism.  Now is the time to vote for it.