I Want My Money Back

From PJ Media via H/T at Instapundit:

After more than seven years of “hope and change” not just the US but the world seems to have arrived at a strange and unexpected destination. Peggy Noonan, who endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, asks her readers if they’ve looked around lately and noticed how strange the scenery is.

Have you had your 2016 Moment? I think you probably have, or will. … My Moment came a month ago. I’d recently told a friend my emotions felt too close to the surface—for months history had been going through me and I felt like a vibrating fork. …

Because my country is in trouble. Because I felt anguish at all the estrangements. Because some things that shouldn’t have changed have changed. Because too much is being lost. Because the great choice in a nation of 320 million may come down to Crazy Man versus Criminal. And yes, I know this is all personal, and not column-ish.

But that was my Moment.

You’ll feel better the next day, I promise, but you won’t be able to tell yourself that this is history as usual anymore. This is big, what we’re living through.

As Richard writes, “The significance of Peggy Noonan’s 2016 moment is not only that it so perfectly coincides with the end point of seven years of progress towards Hope and Change, but it marks the moment when the penny finally dropped for the American upper middle class.”

But even at this late date, Noonan still can’t see that already chose the Crazy Man once, back in the fall of 2008.

Despite being a speechwriter in the 1980s for a man who spent decades doing his homework to transition from Hollywood studio system actor to president, Noonan didn’t recognize in 2008 that the DNC-MSM myth machine had created a fictitious construct as thoroughly fake as an movie character. Given a choice between someone whose narrative was as entirely contrived as a cartoon superhero posing in front of Styrofoam Roman columns, versus an earnest war hero and then-Alaska governor, Noonan, like many elites, went with the cartoon superhero. She apparently forgot to heed David Mamet’s warning that “If you’re in the con game and you don’t know who the mark is … you’re the mark.”

And apparently having that moment, experiencing that epiphany, is still too painful for her.

It's a matter of ego, she' can't admit she was so easily fooled.

Queen refuses to return to London to meet President Obama

From The Daily Mail UK via H/T at Instapundit:

Lame duck is a dish best served cold.

Instead, accompanied by his security circus, he’ll trundle to Windsor in his bomb-proof, seven-ton limo* for lunch…‘he’d be well advised not to give a pro-EU sermon over lunch after the row about the Queen supporting Brexit,’ says my source.

Obama-Backed Solar Plant Could Be Shut Down For Not Producing Enough Energy Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/03/17/obama-backed-solar-plant-could-be-shut-down-for-not-producing-enough-energy/#ixzz43OvwhVVw

From The Daily Caller:

California regulators may force a massive solar thermal power plant in the Mojave Desert to shut down after years of under-producing electricity — not to mention the plant was blinding pilots flying over the area and incinerating birds.

The Ivanpah solar plant could be shut down if state regulators don’t give it more time to meet electricity production promises it made as part of its power purchase agreements with utilities, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Ivanpah, which got a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Obama administration, only produced a fraction of the power state regulators expected it would. The plant only generated 45 percent of expected power in 2014 and only 68 percent in 2015, according to government data.

And it does all this at a cost of $200 per megawatt hour — nearly six times the cost of electricity from natural gas-fired power plants. Interestingly enough, Ivanpah uses natural gas to supplement its solar production.

Another unproven technology given the green light for large scale use only due to government subsidies.

Notice Grassley’s Not Flinching on Supreme Court Nominee Hearings

From National Review:

(H)is willingness to take the criticism for this stance is worth noting for two reasons. First, there was a time when Grassley was more likely to be more conciliatory to President Obama, to be seen as “bipartisan” and so on. He was perceived as a “moderate,” voted to confirm Eric Holder, and was, for a while, trying to work out a compromise version of the Affordable Care Act. Years of Obama being Obama, trolling and mocking and ignoring Congress, have demonstrated to Grassley there’s no point in trying to appear “bipartisan” or conciliatory.

Second, if there were signs Grassley was willing to hold hearings or support an Obama nominee, the conservative grassroots would raise hell and support a primary challenger. So if there’s willingness to denounce and punish deviations from the conservative position, why isn’t there corresponding willingness to praise and support a lawmaker who takes the conservative position, particularly when it’s tough?

Well, that would require consistency from an unbiased media. So it's not gonna happen.

Barack Obama is a graceless man

From Betsy's Page Blog via H/T at Instapundit:

He has never disguised his arrogant sense of moral superiority to those with whom he disagrees politically. And now he carries that arrogant gracelessness beyond the grave. First he skipped Justice Scalia’s funeral instead opting for a very brief drop-in at the viewing at the Court. And now he’s skipping Nancy Reagan’s funeral so he can go speak at a music festival. It’s as if he not only wants to snub the first lady of another party, but he just doesn’t like to be at an event where he is not the star. Even going to Nelson Mandela’s funeral became an occasion for a bored Obama to take selfies.

Plus this, as part of Betsy’s aggregation of today’s links: “for all their pearl-clutching at Donald Trump, Democrats have their own authoritarian impulse. They just think their motives are pure so it doesn’t matter what methods they use.”

Graceless, or just new dictionary definition/example of a narcissist.

Obama’s SCOTUS confirmation petard

From Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker Blog:

There’s a lot of hoisting ahead for President Obama, the Senate Democrats, and their media allies when they try to force confirmation of a justice to replace the late Antonin Scalia. Courtesy of Scott Ott, we have this video of Senator Barack Obama making the point that the Senate should examine more than the intellectual capability and moral character of a nominee. Examination of a judge’s philosophy, ideology, and record – that’s right: philosophy and ideology – is important for the Senate to apply.

Whoops! The Dear Leader has just given the Republicans the justification for doing the SAME thing to his appointments.

And now Jim Geraghty of National Review has dug up the New York Times’ editorial board arguing that when voters hand control of the Senate to an opposition party in a midterm election, they have every right to resist a presidential nomination to SCOTUS.

The President’s supporters insist vehemently that, having won the 1984 election, he has every right to try to change the Court’s direction. Yes, but the Democrats won the 1986 election, regaining control of the Senate, and they have every right to resist. This is not the same Senate that confirmed William Rehnquist as Chief Justice and Antonin Scalia as an associate justice last year.

As Geraghty dryly notes, “this is not the same Senate that confirmed Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan…”

If Obama Really Wants to Reduce ‘Meanness,’ Now Is His Chance

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review:

In Springfield, Ill., last week, President Obama commemorated the ninth anniversary of his bid for the White House. He admitted that one of his “few regrets” was his inability “to reduce the polarization and the meanness in our politics.”

To conservative ears, Obama’s comments fell somewhere between risible and infuriating. Obama has always done his best to demonize and marginalize his opponents. Either the president honestly cannot see that, or he’s cynically pretending that the fault lies entirely with his critics. If only there were some way to figure out whether he’s sincere.
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Chances Obama will go this route? Zero. Instead he’ll pick a liberal whom he’ll call a moderate and insist on an up-or-down vote. He’ll also probably pick a minority, making it that much easier for supporters such as Staples to paint opposition as bigotry.

The Dear Leader is about as sincere and truthful as a Clinton.

Obama evolves on filibustering SCOTUS nominees

From The American Thinker: Yesterday, Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)'s conveniently contradictory positions on a lame duck president filling a Supreme Court vacancy, which depended on the party of the lame duck president, got some attention.

Digging a little further, it turns out that our self-described constitutional scholar president, Barack Hussein Obama (D), he who was editor of the supposedly prestigious Harvard Law Review, despite some mystery about his grades also has changed...er, evolved in his attitudes about filibustering and rejecting Supreme Court nominees.

Randy DeSoto at Western Journalism nicely sums up Obama's hypocrisy on I was for filibustering until I was against it as "poetic justice."

Back in 2006, while Obama, a newly elected senator from Illinois, was biding his time until he could secure the nomination for president, then-president George W. Bush (R) nominated Samuel Alito to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Speaking to George Stephanopoulos (formerly of the Clinton administration) on the Sunday morning program This Week, Obama stated that because Alito did not have the proper judicial philosophy – i.e., Obama's – Alito wouldn't be independent of the White House. Therefore, Obama would:

... be supporting the filibuster because I think Judge Alito, in fact, is somebody who is contrary to core American values, not just liberal values, you know. When you look at his decisions in particular during times of war, we need a court that is independent and is going to provide some check on the executive branch, and he has not shown himself willing to do that repeatedly.

Pot calling the kettle black.

Hillary -- Doing What Obama Did To Alito To Obama's Nominee is Racist

From Ace of Spades HQ via H/T at Hot Air:

The thought leaders on the Left had no problem with Senate obstruction when it came to blocking Republican nominees to the Supreme Court, and not just in 2006. The New York Times editorial board thought that Senate midterms overrode deference to presidential prerogative in 1987. When the shoe was on the other foot in the final 18 months of the Ronald Reagan presidency, the Paper of Record made it clear that the voter mandate that counted when it came to Supreme Court nominations was the sixth-year midterm, not the fourth-year re-election. Guy Benson dug up this gem from the NYT archives:

The President’s supporters insist vehemently that, having won the 1984 election, he has every right to try to change the Court’s direction. Yes, but the Democrats won the 1986 election, regaining control of the Senate, and they have every right to resist. This is not the same Senate that confirmed William Rehnquist as Chief Justice and Antonin Scalia as an associate justice last year.

And now, this is not the same Senate that confirmed Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor earlier in Obama’s term. People elected a Republican majority in the Senate, and according to NYT’s standards in 1987, that gives Republicans every right to resist. Now, if Obama wants to consult with Senate Republicans and pick someone who passes muster with this Senate majority, perhaps that could be arranged. Otherwise, the GOP will just play by the rules set by the Left and four current and former members of the Obama administration.

Well of course it is, the shoe is on the other foot.

Your Rules, Democrats

From National Review:

The belief that the Constitution says whatever it is that Democrats want it to say at any given moment is illegitimate as a legal philosophy for Supreme Court justices. Democrats long ago established that ideological disagreement is a perfectly valid reason for blocking a Supreme Court appointee. Senator Schumer spelled out the political case for preventing a lame-duck president from filling a vacancy. Senator Obama demonstrated the technique.

Your rules, gentlemen. Your rules.

Gotta hate it when your own words are used against you.

Eight Thoughts On Scalia

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review via H/t at Instapundit:

3. The double-standard for Republicans is not shocking but it remains galling. As Jim Geraghty notes in today’s Jolt, Chuck Schumer took exactly the same position on any further Bush appointments in 2007. I don’t seem to recall the shock and outrage we’re seeing today.

4. On that note, Ruth Marcus — an often independent-minded liberal — offers some classic concern trolling of the GOP today in her column. She writes:

Finally, a Senate work stoppage would, in fact, be bad for Republicans. In the nation’s capital these days, everything is political, every institution politicized. That may be inevitable and irreparable, yet tables here have a way of turning. One party’s obstructionism ends up hurting it down the road.

Marcus is surely right that tables can turn. What she leaves out is the simple, glaring, fact that the tables are turning on Democrats who’ve been playing outrageous games with appointment process for a quarter century. When Robert Bork was defenestrated by Joe Biden, despite having said he would have no choice but to vote for someone so well-qualified, he was setting the tables for payback. When Harry Reid pulled the trigger on the nuclear option (on lower court appointments) he was warned that this would come back to haunt him. When Democrats disgustingly blocked Miguel Estrada from the bench solely because he was a Hispanic, they set the table to be turned. When Barack Obama voted to filibuster Alito, he set the table to be turned.

Cry me no tears now that Republicans are finally putting their shoulders to the table.

And note this: “If Scalia’s interpretation of the Constitution held sway in the land, the Court and the government would have much less power over our lives. And that, more than anything else, explains why the left hated him so much.”

Read the whole thing.

First President in US History to Have Voted to Filibuster a Supreme Court Nominee Now Hopes for Clean Process

From ABC News via H/T at Instapundit:

President Obama’s expressed hope today in his weekly address “that we can avoid the political posturing and ideological brinksmanship that has bogged down this (Supreme Court nomination) process, and Congress, in the past” runs against another historical first for the 44th president: his unique role in history as the first US President to have ever voted to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee.

So while there is little indication Republicans intend to filibuster President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the GOP will likely invoke the President’s unique history whenever he calls their tactics into question.

Just a reminder of where he used to stand.

Hypocrite, but that not new news.

Don't Let Obama Fill Scalia's Seat

From The American Thinker:

Congress has frittered away virtually every constitutional power save one: the power of the Senate to deny presidential appointments to the federal bench. If Senate Republicans expect conservatives to ever trust them on anything, then they must decline to consider Obama's nominee to replace Justice Scalia.

There is precedent for this. In 1968, when Republicans were a Senate minority possessing only the power of filibuster, Everett Dirksen prevented Lyndon Johnson from appointing Associate Justice Abe Fortas to replace retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren and then appointing Homer Thornbury to take Fortas's seat as an associate justice.
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The stakes are monumentally high. Winning the presidency while delivering the Supreme Court to a radical leftist majority means guaranteeing that the drift of our nation into secular humanism and unconstitutional arrogations of power to judges, federal administrators, and others who are immune to our wishes will continue toward a cataclysmic end of the America we have known.

Moreover, this is a battle that we can win, if those Republican leaders who seek our help every election cycle will stand boldly against the left. It has been a long, long time since Republican leaders in Congress have actually given conservatives anything like a political victory. If these Republicans cannot or will not do so now, then it is truly time for conservatives to abandon the Republican Party and form, instead, around a political party and movement that are serious about what happens to our nation.

The timing, in some ways, is awful for conservatives, but in other ways it is perfect. Do this one thing – let the next president and next Senate fill this seat – and we will begin to trust you again. Fail, and there is no reason for conservatives to ever trust Washington Republicans again.

Here Here!

Mitch McConnell - Supreme Court Vacancy Should Be Filled After Election

From Breitbart's Big Government:

Senate Republican Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Saturday that a replacement for deceased Justice Antonin Scalia should not be confirmed until a new President is elected and in office.

“The American people‎ should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” McConnell said in a statement. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.”

Hello Mitch - It's your job to delay the vote, period.

Obama Vows Supreme Court Nomination After Justice Scalia's Death

From Breitbart's Big Government:

President Obama reacted to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia after wrapping up his golf game in California this afternoon.

“Tonight we honor his extraordinary service to our nation and remember one of the towering legal figures of our time,” Obama said, describing him as a “brilliant legal mind with a pugnacious style, incisive wit, and colorful opinions.”

The president made his statement at Rancho Mirage, California.

But Obama quickly vowed that he would nominate a replacement to the Supreme Court and expected the Senate to confirm his choice.

The Republican Senate MAJORITY better 'Bork' anyone who is NOT a best a moderate. If they are liberal in any way, the message should be, "Try again, Mr. President."

The Week in Pictures -- Trumpless Debate Edition

From the guys at Powerline Blog:

Lunch between the French and Iranian leaders is CANCELLED after President Hollande refused to take wine off the menu for his meeting with Muslim counterpart Rouhani

From The Daily Mail UK via H/T at Instapundit:

Department of things you never thought you'd say: I agree fully with the action taken today by French President Francois Hollande.

A lunch between the French and Iranian presidents in Paris was scrapped today because France refused to remove wine from the menu.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has been on a tour of Europe, signing billions of pounds worth of business deals with different nations, after economic sanctions against the country were lifted.

He was due to dine with President Francois Hollande at an upmarket restaurant in the French capital.

More like this, please.

You know the world is really messed up when one has more respect for the French President than the American one. President Hollande also has a much better set than our Dear Leader.

Obama administration needs to abandon its Petraeus obsession

From Victor Davis Hanson at National Review:

In politically driven moods, the ancient Romans often wiped from history all mention of a prior hero or celebrity. They called such erasures damnatio memoriae.

The Soviet Union likewise airbrushed away, or “Trotskyized,” all the images of any past kingpin who became politically incorrect.

The Obama administration seems obsessed with doing the same to retired General David Petraeus.

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter is now thinking of retroactively taking away one or two of Petraeus’s four stars. The potential demotion in rank, opposed by the Army, is intended as further punishment for the misdemeanor to which he pleaded guilty last year. Petraeus accepted two years of probation and paid a $100,000 fine for allowing his mistress, Paula Broadwell, to read classified information for research on the biography she was writing about Petraeus.

So you have to ask yourself, why?

Petraeus has lost his reputation. He resigned his job as CIA director. He pled guilty to a misdemeanor. He was fined. He was put on probation.

Enough is enough with Petraeus. It is time to move on for an administration that threw away a stable Iraq — once saved by the man it still hounds.

That's it. Destroy the man who stabilized Iraq before the Administration , the Dear Leader's Regime, the one who let that victory slip away. It they manage to destroy him, his victory will be forgotten.

Hillary Thinks It’s A ‘Great Idea’ To Appoint Obama To The Supreme Court

From The Daily Caller:

Hillary Clinton says it would be a “great idea” to appoint President Obama to the Supreme Court.

Tuesday, during a campaign rally in Decorah, Iowa, Clinton looked gleeful when asked if she would consider appointing Obama to the bench, for life, saying, “Wow, what a great idea. No one has ever suggested that to me, I love that, wow.”

This comment alone should disqualify Hillary for President. The Dear Leader has made decision after decision that he claims are Constitutional, only to be shot down by SCOTUS 9-0 time after time. He was NOT a Constitutional Law Professor, but a lecturer.

The Other Reason The Washington Elite Hate Ted Cruz

From The Federalist via H/T at Instapundit:

Because the threat smart members of the Washington political elite truly believe in is not Ted Cruz, but the model he represents: that the path for an ambitious freshman politician to achieve leadership of the Republican Party in this day and age is not the normal give and take and deference to leaders and precedent and the way we do things around here, but instead to take a flamethrower to this system from day one. Regardless of whether Cruz wins a general election, his nomination could fundamentally transform the political incentives of the Senate and change the internal dynamics of the Senate Republican Conference. It shows that you can get a shot at the presidency not by playing along, but by playing your own game.

The potential of every two years having someone walk through the door in each new Senate class who thinks they could be the next potential Ted Cruz is an absolute nightmare for those who have thrived in their cushy lifestyles as stewards of the world’s most exclusive club. And that is why his nomination is unacceptable.

Wait, I thought it was perfectly fine for a relatively unknown politician to stop by the Senate for a cup of coffee, then immediately hit the campaign trail uttering larger than life pronouncements in front of Styrofoam columns. But then, whether the RNC chooses Trump, Cruz or Rubio, as Glenn has noted, Beltway Elites chose the form of their Destructor in 2008.

This could explain why the Dear Leader has no friends in the Senate.