[UPDATE] “Say what you will about George W. Bush, he had a skin whose thickness wasn’t measured in Planck lengths.” I really wish that I had written that.

Because he’s sounding just a little bit self-conscious on the subject:

Obama targets tea bags at town hall

At his 100th-day town hall meeting in St. Louis Wednesday, President Barack Obama took direct aim at the anti-tax “tea party” demonstrations that have cropped up over the last month and took a veiled shot at the Fox News Channel, the cable news network closely associated with the protests.

[snip]

“Those of you who are watching certain news channels on which I’m not very popular, and you see folks waving tea bags around, Obama said, “let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we are going to stabilize Social Security.”

See also (originally noted via FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog) the video below the fold:

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One of our correspondents sent a link to this post on the DC voucher program with a very brilliant idea:

if the Republican Party is serious about doing something to reach out to the black community by making a gesture on behalf of the 1,700 minority kids Obama has consigned to the worst public schools in America, they’d spearhead an effort to revive the DC voucher program using private funds. $15 million is not a tremendous amount of money to raise if RNC chair Michael Steele would throw his weight behind an effort to get it done, and I would suggest every GOP Senator and Congressman could use their fundraising prowess to fill the coffers of a private program replacing the one Obama killed to great effect.

There are 219 Republican members of Congress (House and Senate); raising $15 million if all of them were to get behind the program would require $68,000 or so from each. These guys do that in one dinner on a good night; and raising money for a private charity to fund a DC voucher program wouldn’t be restricted by campaign fundraising limits.

If raising the money could keep the program going, I think the GOP should do it. It’s for a very worth cause.

I have a bunch more, and I will be putting them up, but four and I’m bleary-eyed. They’re also mostly after the fold.

This is Rebecca Wales, one of the organizers of the event, and also affiliated with Smart Girl Politics. She had a busy day.

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Senator Durbin, why do you want to throw these kids out of their schools?

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York has been a self-styled education mayor. He’s made all sorts of proposals and tried several different angles — some good some not so good — to improve the education of the kids of New York. He has, though, been a proponent of school choice and this advocacy looks to be a success, at least for the kids of Harlem’s District 5.

Recently District 5 sponsored the first ever Harlem Education Fair at which 5,000 parents and kids turned out to see what opportunities for school choice can be employed to improve their children’s education. 50 different schools, traditional as well as charter, competed for parents’ attention and the public money that will follow their children.

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In response to my first post, there were too many issues raised to deal with all of them, but several merit a response.

First, and most importantly – the phrase “let’s do something” raised in one comment is precisely the disease that too often engulfs Congress and the rest of Washington. It is almost never necessary to “do something.” It is almost always VERY BAD to “do something.” The Banks are failing – “do something.” The economy is in trouble – “do something.” A museum is needed for Woodstock – “do something!!!!!” The idea that we cannot survive without Congress “doing something” is the biggest problem we face today…

With respect to this issue – DC representation – it’s hard to believe that with terrorists running amok (many more soon thanks to Democrat control), an economy in bad shape, a completely broken immigration system, and a looming Social Security and Medicare crisis, that the DC representation issue is the most pressing matter… particularly considering it is not exactly a new issue!

Speaking of… and to my second point, the “taxation without representation” line is tired and overused in this context. Besides the obvious point that only a small portion of the residents even pay taxes in the first place, consider that this issue is not new and was addressed by Chief Justice John Marshall in an 1820 opinion:

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