A man after my heart:

While many have been critical of the stimulus because the it hasn’t been spent quickly enough to have the intended economic effect, Coburn urges caution. “The key point I would make is that speed isn’t near as important as accuracy,” Coburn said regarding preventing future stimulus waste. “I think we’ve had way too much speed and not enough accuracy in terms of where we’re spending the money. I understand the rush to get it out to stem the tide of the recession, but this is a five-year bill anyway.”

Finally, Coburn is adamant that the feedback from taxpayers is such that federal spending priorities need to be watched closely. “The mood in the country is ‘You’re spending money on things you don’t need. Stop it. You’re overstepping the bounds of the federal government. Stop it. You’re borrowing our children into the poorhouse. Stop it,'” he said.

Yes. Stop it.

Including health-care deform.

And it would sure be nice to get a conversation going about the proper role of the federal government.

“Seeking Answers on IG Firing, Sen. Grassley Asks About Possible Role of First Lady’s Office.”

Why should we be surprised? She’s from Chicago, too.

And of course, if a Republican president had fired an IG who was getting too close to a campaign contributor, it would be a huge scandal. But it wasn’t, so it’s not.

If true, this would be Michelle’s Travelgate. Except Hillary didn’t actually suffer that much from Travelgate. Because…you know…she wasn’t a Republican. Of course, it also helped that there were a lot of other Hillary scandals to distract from that one.

A Canadian government censor censors herself:

Any guest who pulls such a stunt deserves to be exposed for it. But a censor like Lynch, claiming to respect free speech and claiming to want a debate? Well the Orwellian hypocrisy was just too delicious for CTV to ignore. Clark opened with a powerful — but professional — timeline of Lynch’s bad behaviour. And he ended his interview with Dufresne with a pretty basic question: would you ever debate Levant? Dufresne pretended he didn’t hear the question — but tens of thousands of CTV viewers did.

The CHRC’s media magic at work!

I don’t understand why Harper’s government tolerates this. Doesn’t she work for him?

Well, now we know who the administration considers “terrorists:”

The important part comes at the end: an email exchange between Matthew Feldman, attorney on the President’s Auto Task Force, and Robert Manzo, Chrysler restructuring expert. Manzo is basically pleading to further negotiate to prevent bankruptcy, but Feldman is having none of it. Here is the exchange:

Robert Manzo, Chrysler restructuring expert: “I hope you think it’s worth giving this one more shot.”

Matthew Feldman, attorney on the President’s Auto Task Force: “I’m now not talking to you. You went where you shouldn’t.”

Manzo: “Sorry. I didnt’ mean to say the wrong thing and I obviously did. I was trying oto make sure that if we had to contribute to the solution you knew we had some room. Sorry I did not realize the mistake!!”

Feldman: “It’s over. The President doesn’t negotiate second rounds. We’ve given and lent billions of dollars so your team could manage this properly….And now you’re telling me to bend over to a terrorist like Lauria? That’s B.S.”

A terrorist like Lauria? Lauria represented a teacher’s pension fund in Indiana (among other bondholders), and had the temerity to insist that the government follow contract law.

Yeah, how dare he? And on top of that he had the audacity to point out that he was being muscled by thugs, Chicago style.

Meanwhile, the new director of the DHS says that terrorism doesn’t really exist — its just “human-caused disasters.”

Mark Steyn:

As Louis XV is said to have predicted, “Après moi, le deluge” — which seems as incisive an observation as any on a world in which freeborn citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are content to rise from their beds every half-hour every night and traipse to the toilet for yet another flush simply because a government bureaucracy orders them to do so. “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System — or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.

More important, there is a cost to governmentalizing every responsibility of adulthood — and it is, in Lord Whitelaw’s phrase, the stirring up of apathy. If you wander round Liverpool or Antwerp, Hamburg or Lyons, the fatalism is palpable. In Britain, once the crucible of freedom, civic life is all but dead: In Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, some three-quarters of the economy is government spending; a malign alliance between state bureaucrats and state dependents has corroded democracy, perhaps irreparably. In England, the ground ceded to the worst sociopathic pathologies advances every day — and the latest report on “the seven evils” afflicting an ever more unlovely land blames “poverty” and “individualism,” failing to understand that if you remove the burdens of individual responsibility while loosening all restraint on individual hedonism the vaporization of the public space is all but inevitable. In Ontario, Christine Elliott, a candidate for the leadership of the so-called Conservative party, is praised by the media for offering a more emollient conservatism predicated on “the need to take care of vulnerable people.”

Look, by historical standards, we’re loaded: We have TVs and iPods and machines to wash our clothes and our dishes. We’re the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: Every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we’re “vulnerable”: By definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively “taking care” of potential “vulnerabilities” is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.

And it’s an awfully hard process to reverse, once it “progresses” far enough.

…since 1984:

The Left has tried, and still does spasmodically, to pretend that the novel is not really anti-Soviet. But 1984’s Big Brother is undoubtedly Stalin, and the figure of Goldstein is Trotsky. Orwell had lived through such murderous events as the Communists turning on the Trotskyists and anarchists in the Spanish civil war, and the Hitler-Stalin pact. It is particularly penetrating to have invented the phrase of the Two Minute Hate to describe the totalitarian mechanism for falsifying public opinion to suit the ends of power. Two Minute Hates occur all the time. Just look at the way the Left switched from supporting Israel to lambasting it, or how the Shah’s pro-American Iran converted overnight into Khomeini’s anti-American Iran.

To travel in old days in Soviet Russia and the Soviet bloc was to find oneself deep in 1984. The hopelessness of daily life was exactly as Orwell had captured it. How sinister it was too, how thoroughly Orwellian. Everyone was against everyone else; under the all-encompassing propaganda about progressiveness there was no communal or social spirit, only the Party. One of the compulsory Intourist or KGB guides once told me proudly that she had renounced her mother for failing to be a Communist. “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.” Orwell’s imagination had been exactly right.

In light of contemporary events, it’s worth rereading.