President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is encouraging the public to create video advertisements that explain why federal regulations are “important to everyone.”

H/T Mitch P.

Those horned Nazi demonsharks have cannons mounted on their backs– but they don’t stand a chance against the Soviet navy!

Have no fear comrades, we have returned job growth to zero!

On the Organizing for America website there is a place to enter your email and zipcode, for the purpose of “joining the fight for economic recovery”.  Who exactly are we fighting?  Republican Fat Cats who want to steal money from unemployed factory workers?  Prosperity-hating racists?  Maybe global warming is attacking our economy. 

"He is to blame for the war!"

 This isn’t another senseless post about “that guy I don’t like is just like Hitler”.  It seems like every side of every political debate has found a way to compare their opponents to Hitler, most without having any understand of what they are talking about.

The point is that when your government starts encouraging you to “join the fight against unemployment/hunger/global warming/poverty/racism/conservative extremists/the Jews”, it is important to understand what is really happening.  It means the government wants to use you for its own purposes.

In the case of the US economy, where exactly is the fight?  We all want our economy to be healthy and strong.  America decided to hand both the legislative and executive branches of governemnt to the Democrats.  We let the administration spend about $800 billion on their plan to fix the economy.  Where in all of that is the struggle?  The only struggle I see is Liberal Economic Policy vs. Reality – but that’s been a nasty fight for a long time.

Conservatives believe that minimizing the tax burden and creating a stable regulatory environment allows Americans to help themselves out of hard times.  Liberals believe that deficit spending and government jobs drag an economy into prosperity.  But this is not a fight, it is a policy disagreement, and a very important one.

Our country only works because out of the marketplace of ideas, we reach a consensus that hopefully approaches an effective solution.  Right now we have a president who believes that “bipartisanship” means everyone must agree with him.  Everything is a fight these days.  Obama’s glorious vision of the future vs. George Bush and his “failed policies”.  Dick Cheney vs. Joe Biden.  Health insurance companies vs. “hardworkin’ folks”.  America is a cooperative effort, but the tactics of this administration are splitting us apart.  Maybe it’s time to stop fingerpointing and deal with $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities and a nuclear Iran.

Revolting revolutionary.

The Guardian (U.K.) interviewed Pizza the Hutt. The Hutt was in rare, self-aggrandizing form:

My films don’t have instant impact because they’re dense with ideas that people have not thought about.

I already suspected that Michael Moore never reads, possesses no historical curiosity and indulges in sheer intellectual sloth, but now he seems determined to prove it. These are ideas that “people have not thought about”? Nonspecific collectivism? Vague platitudes about equality and democracy?

Here, again Michael Moore giddily imagines he is leading some kind of radical vanguard:

“Wow, they’re afraid of this movie [Sicko], they believe it can actually create a revolution.” The idea that cinema can be dangerous is a great idea.

I think Joseph Goebbels might take exception to the Hutt’s belief that he is a trailblazer in producing political films that promote “dangerous” ideas.

As I have written here before, Michael Moore’s radicalism is just a sloppier and more Twitter-friendly iteration of a collectivist impulse that dates back to antiquity.

(One more thing. The Guardian does not allow comments on their articles and I was not able to find a way to contact the author. I simply wanted to tell them they had mistaken the name of the insurance company whose former executive appeared on Bill Moyers. It is CIGNA, not Sigma. But that took about 20 seconds of Internet sleuthing, and I couldn’t reasonably expect the storied Guardian to do such a thing.)

via NewsBusters.

Via Jake Tapper:

I will say this. I have seen some far crazier comments today — comments from people like John Boehner. Here’s what I would suggest for John Boehner. Call up Leon Panetta or Denny Blair at the CIA or the director of national intelligence. Ask them if he can come down and watch a video put out by Al Qaida senior leadership like — the names that we recognize, (Ayman al-) Zawahiri. Thirty-two times since 2001 and four times this year alone, senior Al Qaida leadership in recruiting videos have used the prison at Guantanamo Bay as a clarion call to bring extremists from around the world to join their effort.

Let me get this straight. The idea is that because they hate something we do and they use it in their propaganda, we should cease doing it?

But why stop at the prison at Guantanamo Bay (which after all is only being relocated)? They seem to really hate infidels, too– I’d institute a non-voluntary conversion of all Americans to Islam.  And the ensuing Inquisition? Sounds like jobs to me!

From Patrick Courrielche via Big Hollywood:.

I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to take part in a conference call that invited a group of rising artist and art community luminaries “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”

Now admittedly, I’m a skeptic of BIG government. In my view, power tends to overreach whenever given the opportunity. It’s a law of human nature that has very few exceptions. That said, it felt to me that by providing issues as a cynosure for inspiration to a handpicked arts group – a group that played a key role in the President’s election as mentioned throughout the conference call – the National Endowment for the Arts was steering the art community toward creating art on the very issues that are currently under contentious national debate; those being health care reform and cap-and-trade legislation. Could the National Endowment for the Arts be looking to the art community to create an environment amenable to the administration’s positions?