1. Joe Barton’s Folly – Congress Has Nothing More Important to Do Than to Run College Football?

2. A Chain of Command No-Go on the New Afghanistan Strategy

3. Howard Dean: I Love This Compromise, Which I Thought Up, Because it Empowers Bureaucracy & Leads to Single-Payer

4. The Bailout That Never Ends

5. Democrats declare war on West Virginia. Again.

6. Ted Kennedy, Pro-Lifer

1. Joe Barton’s Folly – Congress Has Nothing More Important to Do Than to Run College Football?

I honestly don’t know what happens to these people when they get to Washington. That city really is a deadly disease.

Congressman Joe Barton (quasi-R – TX) apparently has so much time on his hands that he is teaming up with like-minded big-government nationalists to try to tell the American people and colleges around the nation how it must determine it’s college football national champion. Indeed, his bill has passed out of the House Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee – and Barton has had “good conversations” with those bastions of limited government, Henry Waxman and Barack Obama, about moving the bill forward.

Well, thank goodness these guys are on the ball, or how would we survive? How could we possibly sort this out without the wisdom of Washington, D.C. – those great men and women who have given us the over $12 Trillion in debt, the TARP program, Katrina-relief and now want to tell you what health care you can have.

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2. A Chain of Command No-Go on the New Afghanistan Strategy

In my previous life; one of my jobs was to teach leadership and tactics to students at the US Army Ranger School. In this course students are placed in a simulated combat scenario, given a mission to complete and then graded on their units actions to carry out the mission. In a platoon size scenario, there are several graded positions. If the student makes one or more major mistakes they fail the mission. If they fail too many missions they don’t pass the phase and are either dropped from the course or recycled through that particular phase or through the whole course.

None of these are fun, and in some cases failing the course can be a career threatening event. Mindful that the Army needs Ranger School graduates, and that a failed student is a loss in training resources, and trying to be fair, the instructors try (even if former Ranger students don’t believe it) to be judicious when assigning a “No-Go” to a student. But, occasionally something would happen (or not happen) that was so bad, so utterly unacceptable, that instructors would fail the entire chain of command for a patrol. This was a serious event. The battalion commander for that Phase of Ranger School would have to be informed and the entire instructor chain of command would be involved in a review of the reasoning behind the grade and the facts of the case. It was not a casual action.

I thought of that when I read a Washington Post article dated December 6, that described the process of creating the new Afghanistan strategy. In it, there was this account . . .

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3. Howard Dean: I Love This Compromise, Which I Thought Up, Because it Empowers Bureaucracy & Leads to Single-Payer

While others have reported that a bipartisan group of Senators arrived at the current Senate compromise all on their own, Howard Dean says that’s not true. It seems that he’s responsible for the proposal currently being considered in the Senate.

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4. The Bailout That Never Ends

The $700 billion Wall Street bailout last year proved exceedingly unpopular with regular Americans. Nevertheless, House Democrats, with their tin ears to the ground, are looking to make bailouts the status quo by creating a permanent bailout fund.

The financial regulation bill cooked up by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the “Barney Bill,” offers a smorgasbord of bad policies that will affect every American. The Barney is yet another leg of the Giant Government Takeover of major industries pushed through the House this year. If your appetite for bigger government wasn’t satiated by the Car Takeover (GM and Chrysler), the Energy Takeover (cap and trade) or the Health Care Takeover, Barney has something designed just for you: The Financial System Takeover.

There are many reasons to oppose the financial regulatory overhaul bill on the floor this week, but the major reasons are that it will further tighten credit, allow bureaucrats to chop up U.S. businesses they deem “too big,” cost consumers more and kill jobs.

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5. Democrats declare war on West Virginia. Again.

Well, it’s not like the state voted for the current President anyway. The often-strained history between West Virginians and national Democrats stretches back to 1863. Still, this is a little… petty… of the Democratic party, isn’t it?

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6. Ted Kennedy, Pro-Lifer

An observant reader notes that my description yesterday of Ted Kennedy’s support for legal abortion as “lifelong” is an overstatement. In fact, early in his public career, even Ted Kennedy had not yet embraced the casual cruelty of his party towards the defenseless unborn; indeed, Kennedy’s rhetoric in those early days, displays genuine compassion for the defenseless unborn. Given Kennedy’s centrality to Democratic strategy on this issue – he was the leader of the fight against the Bork nomination – it’s interesting to look back. Here’s Kennedy during his 1970 campaign for a second full term in the Senate . . .

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