42 people dead; communities iced in and without lifesaving power for heat and cooking; conditions worsening — and FEMA nowhere to be found.

This isn’t a lefty caricature of disaster-response under the Bush administration; it’s real-life unresponsiveness under the leadership of President Obama (whose accession was supposed to mark a “return to competence” in government).

“In some parts of rural Kentucky, they’re getting water the old-fashioned way — with pails from a creek,” writes Associated Press reporter Bruce Schreiner. “There’s not room for one more sleeping bag on the shelter floor. The creative are flushing their toilets with melted snow.”

Schreiner continues:

Local officials were growing angry with what they said was a lack of help from the state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In Grayson County, about 80 miles southwest of Louisville, Emergency Management Director Randell Smith said the 25 National Guardsmen who have responded have no chain saws to clear fallen trees.

“We’ve got people out in some areas we haven’t even visited yet,” Smith said. “We don’t even know that they’re alive.”

Smith said FEMA has been a no-show so far.

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According to FoxNews.com:

It took four years for Google to address the “Google bomb” that was lobbed at former President Bush.

But it took the Internet behemoth only a few days to defuse the same attack on President Obama. …

In 2003, President Bush’s detractors successfully gamed the Google search engine by arranging to have countless Web sites link the words “miserable failure” to Bush’s official biography on the White House Web site.

The result was that when someone typed the search term “miserable failure” into the Google search box, Bush’s bio rose to the top of the search results. …

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Mitch McConnell has spent a decent amount of time in the last week speaking about “his path to a “post-partisan” era,” which involves, in his eyes, “both sides…reject[ing] their party’s extremes and govern[ing] from the middle.” Doing this will somehow, according to the Senate Minority Leader, reverse the GOP’s current course toward being “a regional party.”

Amidst all the bipartisan, permanent-minority mumbo-jumbo, MCConnell has stumbled onto one very important fact: that “common-sense conservative principles aren’t regional,” but that the GOP’s “sales job has been.”

The term “bipartisan,” which has recently been replaced by President Obama and his supporters in the media with the term “post-partisan,” has but one meaning in common usage: a compromise forged by Republicans abandoning their conservative principles on any given issue and meeting Democrats on their staked-out liberal turf.

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Over at the Arena, Democratic strategist Lanny Davis had some interesting comments about the RNC Chairman’s race. He said:

Michael Steele was positively my last preference for RNC Chair — since he was, and is, by far, the most effective, articulate center - right voice of the Republican Party, with a firm but friendly manner on TV and, thus, the best possible choice for the GOP to appeal to the broad middle of American society. For all those reasons, I hoped the RNC would not elect him. I am surprised that a party that currently has Rush Limbaugh as its leading voice (my personal preference for Republican Chair) would be wise enough to reject Mr. Limbaugh and elect Michael Steele.

As a Democrat, I am very disappointed.

This brings up what is, to me, an interesting point. I agree with Lanny Davis — whose honesty and good humor about the race for RNC chair I appreciate — that Michael Steele is the best choice the committee’s members could have made from the field of candidates, and I applaud their doing so.

As to Rush Limbaugh, though, Davis apparently had knowledge of a Limbaugh Shadow Candidacy for Party Chairman that I did not. As far as I had been aware, Rush was no more running for RNC chair — despite Davis’s good-humored preference for him as opposition apparatus leader — than he has been running for public office (a fact that, as noted yesterday, hasn’t stopped the DCCC from taking time and resources that could be used to target actual Republican candidates and directing them at him).

Further, despite Democrat claims to the contrary, Rush Limbaugh isn’t the leader of the GOP; rather, he’s the leading voice for the conservative grassroots of a party whose elected representatives all too often act as though they have an acute case of anterograde amnesia when it comes to recalling who it is they represent, and why it was they were elected.

As such, the committee’s election of Steele as chairman wasn’t in any form a repudiation of Rush Limbaugh, who has spent the last twenty years, and will continue to spend the forseeable future, acting as the most effective spokesman the conservative grassroots have.

As Davis so graciously pointed out, Michael Steele is very well cut out for his new postition as Chairman of the Republican National Committee; further, Rush Limbaugh continues to be extremely effective as a voice for common-sense conservatives. Between the two of them — one a leader, the other a spokesman of sorts — the GOP will be in very good hands for the next two years.

That’s the amount the entire district is on the hook for– over $2.5 billion. You can see how the rest country’s GOP districts break down here (all averaged out to $2,761 per person); a sample of those numbers is below:

AZ-2: $2,474,391,634.00
FL-5: $2,334,577,355.00
GA-7: $2,334,199,098.00
UT-1: $2,325,954,752.00
CA-45: $2,263,658,309.00
TX-3: $2,233,546,843.00
(See the rest here)

At least the entire Republican caucus (along with eleven Democrats) had the good sense to oppose this additional debt being levied on their constituents for the sole purpose of funding legislators’ pet pork barrel projects.

Unfortunately, we’re about to get saddled with the cost — and lack of benefit — anyway.

The DCCC’s anti-Rush ad is a wonderfully laughable effort. What office is Mr. Limbaugh running for? Who is the Democrat opposing him?

For the last eight years, the Left’s efforts were almost uniformly focused on demonizing former President Bush; now, with him out of the picture, it appears that Mr. Limbaugh is next on the list to be targeted.

That’s fine; every dime and minute spent targeting Mr. Limbaugh is a dime and a minute spent neither opposing a Republican actually running for office, nor articulating a vision for actually leading America forward.

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The corrupt Democrat Governor of Illinois has been convicted by unanimous vote and removed from office by the state Senate.

According to MSNBC, “The governor said he would like to apologize, but couldn’t because he didn’t do anything wrong.”

According to the Chicago Way, I’m sure he didn’t do anything wrong — except get caught. That’s the cardinal sin when working in (let alone leading) as corrupt an institution as the Illinois Democratic apparatus.

Michael Hirsh has a typically asinine column in today’s Newsweek, in which he berates Republicans for being unwilling to “compromise” (read: abandon conservative principles and flock to President Obama’s pork-filled big-spending “stimulus” proposal) and follow Obama’s lead in putting “childish things” (like core beliefs) behind them and focusing on making America more socialist.

For the purpose of this post, I’ll just quote the final portion of the column:

In his Inaugural Address, Obama proclaimed “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.” He said he wanted to move beyond “stale political arguments … The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.”

That sounded about right to me, at least in terms of dealing with the crisis nature of the times. It is also smart, at this dire moment, to be trying to learn a few lessons from the past.

Obviously we don’t want to go back to the excesses of the long era of Democratic dominance and overspending—the New Deal-Great Society/Vietnam continuum—but neither can we simply return to the Republican era of Reaganite deregulation (especially of financial markets). It’s clear we need to do some serious rethinking of the best ways to make capitalism work, moving beyond both FDR and Reagan.

Get that? “Obviously we don’t want to go back to the excesses of the long era of Democratic dominance and overspending—the New Deal-Great Society/Vietnam continuum,” says Hirsh. Hm — if $800 billion in pork barrel giveaways isn’t “overspending,” what, in his opinion, would be?

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat-Electable, Nevada) came out today and bragged that some Senate Republicans would vote for the awful so-called “stimulus” bill despite the fact that:

(A) It’s a massive, wasteful pork-barrel bill that won’t stimulate anything or anyone (except those who get really, really excited at the prospect of huge transfers of borrowed cash from larger governments to smaller governments); and

(B) doing so would provide the Democrats with bipartisan cover which they only need in order to have someone else to point the finger of blame at when this proposal goes down in flames like the Hindenburg.

I fully expect Republican Main-Streeters like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter to vote for this monstrosity which borrows and transfers more money than there is total currency currently in circulation; however, I’m hereby challenging every one of them and their colleagues to prove me wrong.

The House sent a powerful message yesterday by standing united against this terrible proposal. They have a long way to go before they’re redeemed for the last several years of mismanagement and Democrat-lite behavior, but yesterday served as a very good first step.

Call your Senator and tell him or her not to abandon the House GOP on the Front Lines of the current battle for Congress and for America’s future.

The Democrats have enough votes to pass this and every other rotten item on their agenda without Republican help. Let’s make them do it — and, through that, make them own every single negative outcome that results from their awful policies.

What say you? Are you with me?

Earlier this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-CA) said the following:

I pledge to you–let us all pledge to the American people that: we will look forward, not backward; we will join hands, not point fingers; we will rise to the challenge, recognizing that our love of country is stronger than any issue which may divide us.

Let us listen to each other. Let us respect every voice and view. And then together, let us act.

As we in Congress pledge to reach across the aisle, we recognize that history will measure this decisive moment not just by what we do here in Washington – but by how we reflect and respect how all Americans work together for the common good to strengthen America’s future and faith in itself.

As you’d probably expect, that attitude lasted all the way until the first actual debate on legislation (which sadly wasn’t SCHIP, but the so-called “stimulus”), when she 180°ed on the post/bi/nonpartisan act and said the following:

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Update: Drudge agrees:

***

They chose…wisely.

The final vote was 244-188, with 177 Republicans and 11 Democrats voting against (1 GOP member had to leave early).

The Democrats passed the bill, but couldn’t keep their caucus together — and the GOP managed to keep every single member in line.

Well done, Reps. Boehner, Cantor, and the rest of the House Republican caucus.

There’s an event coming up he might be interested in:

The author bios included in the release from “Third World Press” (”Progressive Black Publishing Since 1967″) read as follows:

Bill Ayers is a distinguished professor of education and a senior university scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher and Fugitive Days, a memoir about his life with Bernardine Dohrn.

Bernardine Dohrn is the director of the Children and Family Law Justice Center and a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law. She is the co-author of A Century of Juvenile Justice and Zero Tolerance. They live in Chicago.

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There’s no such thing as a pro-life Democrat, as my good friend Leon Wolf has repeatedly demonstrated here on RS.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped the besotted Doug Kmiec from continuing in his effort not only to convince conservatives that the radically pro-abortion President Obama is, in fact, pro-life (because he “listens,” of course), but to transfer his unofficial ambassadorship on behalf of Obama to conservatives and, more importantly, to the Church, into a similar but official role — in other words, to be Obama’s personal (sycophantic) mouthpiece to the Vatican.

According to the Catholic News Agency:

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Last I checked, the Democrats held the White House and had nearly 60 votes and over 250 in the House — more than enough to pass and sign this $800B monstrosity of a pork-barrel giveaway they call a “stimulus” (as well as every other pet project they want to put into law). So why don’t they shut up and do it already? Why are they wasting time trying to bring some Republican votes on board (even adopting a GOP amendment to the bill — albeit the one out of 18 total which would have no material effect on the legislation outside of commissioning a post-passage panel to study it)?

From where I sit, the answer to that question is pretty obvious: the Democrats know exactly what a terrible bill this is, and want some GOP votes to give them “bipartisan” cover (and someone else to point the finger of blame at when this behemoth utterly fails to fulfill its supposed purpose of stimulating the economy and creating jobs).

What the GOP should do here is obvious: every single Republican in the House and Senate should vote NO on this bill. Every. Single. One. No making speeches about how bad it is, then voting for it (I’m looking at you, Senator Cornyn). No voting on the side of utter fiscal irresponsibility and economic backwardness for whatever reason (memo to the 40 GOP Reps who supported the awful SCHIP expansion proposal). No excuses whatsoever — just vote no.

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It should come as no surprise that the Senate’s version of the “stimulus” bill is being kept under lock and key by the Appropriations Committee, lest the opposition — let alone America’s great unwashed as a whole — get a chance to pick away at the litany of new, unstimulative spending programs. After all, the government can’t go about its business of doing what it knows is best for us in spite of, well, us, if they have to spend all their time actually answering questions and explaining themselves to the mindless rabble that makes up the majority of the unenlightened U.S. population.

Despite the heavy security measures, the folks at ReadTheStimulus.org managed to get a hold of a copy — and I stress the word copy — of the Senate bill. It should tell you something that the only copy we were able to obtain was a paper duplicate which was Xeroxed at least once, then scanned to a computer.

Oh, and the file we finally obtained was corrupted, meaning it can’t be put online and converted into a searchable database as was done with the House version over at ReadTheStimulus.org. Well done, Senate — you’ve created a secret, corrupt bill that simply can’t be made accessible to the American people.

As Andrew Moylan wrote over at the NTU’s blog, “Maybe all those toxic earmarks it was stuffed with corrupted the file once and for all.”

That sentiment isn’t exactly a surprise; however, the fact that McDermott was referring to an amendment that dropped the tax liability on unemployment benefits makes this a bit more of a head-scratcher. Then again, reality is whatever these folks and their willing accomplices in the media want it to be these days.

Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX): Mr. Chairman, just yesterday President Obama said he agrees with that concept, and that we shouldn’t be taxing people on their unemployment benefits. I would hope that it’s an oversight on y’all’s part, and [that you] would accept this amendment.”

Rep. “Baghdad Jim” McDermott (D-WA): “Certainly Mr. Johnson’s amendment has press appeal, but it follows an old pattern of giving the tax benefit to the people on the top of the income scale, even though they only get 34% of the benefits. If you don’t pay taxes, you get nothin’ out of this amendment. It is not good for people on the bottom who are the ones who are most likely to be affected by the unemployment insurance….[inaudible]”

On behalf of those who are receiving unemployment benefits because they lost their jobs in this economy and need the income to get by while looking for some other opportunity to feed their families, I have to ask: What the heck is McDermott talking about?

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That’s the question Politico asked yesterday; my answer is, in short: “It shouldn’t be.”

This so-called “stimulus” package, all $850 Billion, 334 pages, and counting of it, contains very little by way of actual economic stimulation, and very much by way of massive pork barrel giveaways to be paraded as an “I got mine!” monetary victory in Senators’ states and Representatives’ districts — all at taxpayers’ expense.

Testifying Thursday before the House Ways and Means Committee yesterday, Thomas Barthold, head of the Joint Committee on Taxation, couldn’t promise one single job would result from the Democrats’ proposal, which makes one wonder what the point of all this spending really is in the first place. While earmarks like $1,000,000,000 for new Censuses, $400,000,000 for “habitat restoration and migration activities,” $150,000,000 for “bridge removal,” $800,000,000 more for Amtrak, and $200,000,000 for the “leaking underground storage tank trust fund” may be deemed necessary to some (particularly those who have a stake in each of those projects), none are actually stimulative to the economy.

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According to The Live Feed:

Nielsen Media Research says 37.8 million TV viewers watched Tuesday’s coverage — the largest inaugural audience in decades.

Obama’s viewership is bigger than any presidential inauguration in 28 years. It’s 27% higher than Bill Clinton’s in 1993 and 30% larger than George Bush’s in 2001.

Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration in 1981 drew a larger tally, however, with 41.8 million

.

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Ranking Ways and Means member Dave Camp (R-MI) presses Thomas Barthold, head of the Joint Committee on Taxation, on the number of jobs that will be created by the Democrats’ nearly $1T “stimulus” plan:

For the first time in 23 years, Michigan’s unemployment rate is in the double digits — 10.6% to be exact, a figure one-third higher than the national average.

That number is an increase from November’s rate of 9.6%, according to the state Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth (DELEG). Between November and December, “total employment dropped by 68,000 and unemployment rose by 47,000, as the state labor force declined by 21,000 over the month,” according to DELEG. A year before, in December 2007, the rate was 7.4% — 2 1/2 percentage points higher than the national average.

According to the Detroit Free Press:

The last time Michigan’s jobless rate was in double digits was September 1985, when the rate was 10% on its way down from a height of 16.9% during the depth of the 1982 recession.

As of November, Michigan had posted the worst unemployment rate of any of the 50 states. The federal government will report state jobless rankings later this month.

You’ve got yourself a winner of a state government there, Michigan. Add the failing automakers to the disastrous Granholm tenure, and you’re looking at a single-state depression looming.