I bet it would work on democrats, too.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

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The federal government has nearly doubled the no-fly list since the Xmas bomb attempt.

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“There goes my life’s work.” George Monbiot (the original moonbat) laments the impact of Climategate. The experts, he observes, are “Like squabbling evangelical churches in the 19th century, they can form as many schismatic sects as they like, nobody is listening to them any more.”

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The recent New Yorker profile of Paul Krugman features some particularly fine examples of superbia.

“We were the only textbook that incorporated the financial crisis, as we were chronically late. We were supposed to have the manuscript delivered in August or September, and by October we were still working, and we just said, ‘We can’t send it out like this, too much is going on.’ We were really in nail-biting territory, because you have to get it to the printers by a certain date or you miss the academic year.”

“We were right in the middle of that when the Nobel Prize committee called, and Robin’s reaction was ‘We don’t have time for this! …

“Paul is really averse to being drawn into a social network, to being groomed,” Wells says. “He doesn’t go to Washington because he doesn’t want to fall into that. As a spouse, you have your little list of things that you jokingly won’t forgive your spouse for. Right after he started writing for the Times and attacking George Bush, we got an invitation to have dinner with Paul Newman and his wife, but he wouldn’t go. And now he’s dead.”

“It was inconvenient,” Krugman says. “I just don’t get any joy out of thinking, Oh, here I am with the movers and shakers. It would have required really discombobulating my schedule just to be able to say I’d had dinner with Paul Newman, and it’s not worth it.”

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Richard Murphy explains to his readers why he fights.

Tory parliamentary candidates have undergone training by a rightwing group whose leadership has described the NHS as “the biggest waste of money in the UK”, claimed global warming is “a scam” and suggested that the waterboarding of prisoners can be justified.

This is the reality of the libertarian right – openly hostile to humanity at large, embracing abuses of human rights, putting profits before else, contemptuous of the needs of the majority, denying facts when it suits them, seeking to destroy society as we know it, and wishing to make life for most considerably worse than it is now to advance their own enrichment.

That’s why I take them on here – and the bogus economics some of them use to support their arguments.

Bury the health care bill in an Obama t shirt.

Byron York marvels at a president who stoops to this kind of tasteless emotional manipulation. The democrat crowd laughs uneasily because even they don’t quite know how to take the president’s story.

(around 8:25 in this 10:46 video)

I got a letter — I got a note today from one of my staff — they forwarded it to me — from a woman in St. Louis who had been part of our campaign, very active, who had passed away from breast cancer. She didn’t have insurance. She couldn’t afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed. And she had fought a tough battle for four years. All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it. And she insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.

Personally, I think the story is so strange that I tend to doubt it is even factual. And, beyond that, there is something downright disturbing about encountering a public figure who is not actually embarrassed at the idea of such an expression of such macabre personal devotion. Obama’s vanity is without limit or reason.

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Donald Boudreaux retorts:

What have we here? A politically successful multimillionaire stands idly by as an employee – who seems also to have been Mr. Obama’s personal acquaintance – dies because she cannot afford proper medical care. Then Mr. Obama deploys this tale of woe not to apologize for, or to criticize, his own refusal to help a friend but, instead, to criticize millions of other people who never met this woman for their refusal to be forced into ponying up for her health insurance.

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UPDATE 2/7:

Tom Maguire links a story explaining that the lady actually did have catastrophic health coverage with a high deductible but skimped on routine exams.

James Lewis remarks upon the vanity, pretension, and obvious mendacity of the current leader of the Free World.

The President of these United States recently expressed his love for “the Urdu poets,” a piece of inspired BS that nobody in their right minds believed for a second. But then the P was narrowcasting to Pakistan, he thought, and Americans weren’t supposed to be listening. Yet character is revealed in those little snippets of Obama’s mind — his glorious fantasy life, his everlasting hope that somebody will fall for another piece of schtick, and his essential fraudulence as a human being.

Obama’s biggest audience is himself, and no doubt he preened and pranced in his mind’s eye when he told the nation of Pakistan about his deep love and understanding of Urdu. Love ya, baby! all those sixty million Pakis were shouting, marveling at our polyglot president. Waddaguy! At least in Obi’s fantasy life, that is. Because that Zeppelin-sized ego of his needs to be pumped up a little bit more every single day. …

That’s Obama’s sore spot, his biggest character flaw. It’s right out there for the world to see. It explains everything about this administration, and foreshadows its inevitable comeuppance. Meanwhile all the shrewdies in the world, from Putin to A’jad, are getting it. They’ve seen it before. Been there, done that. All they have to do to seduce the President of the United States is to pump up that beautiful ego balloon a little more, and he will just sag over with abject gratitude. He needs his ego supplies, this guy. He’ll do anything to get just a little bit more.

If you’re China or Russia or a blood-stained mullah you’ve seen this flick before. The last Shah of Iran used to call himself “King of Kings,” a Biblical phrase that goes back to the Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great. Grandiosity is familiar to all the ancient empires of the world. So is the art of flattering kings. They’re pros at this.

It’s just Americans who don’t get it — yet.

But they will, they will. The only question is how much the country will be damaged, by the time the voters catch on.