What happened to President Obama? His wax wings having melted, he is the man who fell to earth. What happened to bring his popularity down farther than that of any new president in polling history save Gerald Ford (post–Nixon pardon)?

The conventional wisdom is that Obama made a tactical mistake by farming out his agenda to Congress and allowing himself to be pulled left by the doctrinaire liberals of the Democratic congressional leadership. But the idea of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pulling Obama left is quite ridiculous. Where do you think he came from, this friend of Chavista ex-terrorist William Ayers, of PLO apologist Rashid Khalidi, of racialist inciter Jeremiah Wright?

But forget the character witnesses. Just look at Obama’s behavior as president, beginning with his first address to Congress. Unbidden, unforced, and unpushed by the congressional leadership, Obama gave his most deeply felt vision of America, delivering the boldest social-democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president. In American politics, you can’t get more left than that speech and still be on the playing field.

….read more HERE.

On Friday, I had the rare honor of appearing in the pages of the New York Times, apropos President Obama’s plans to beam himself into every schoolhouse in the land in the peculiar belief that Generation iPod will find this an enthralling technical novelty. As Times reporters James C. McKinley Jr. and Sam Dillon wrote: “Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and political commentator, speaking on the Rush Limbaugh show on Wednesday, accused Mr. Obama of trying to create a cult of personality, comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader.”

Oh, dear! “A Canadian author”: Talk about damning with faint credentialization. I don’t know what’s crueler, the “Canadian” or the indefinite article. As to the rest of it, well, that’s one way of putting it. Here’s what I said on Wednesday re dear old Saddam and Kim: “Obviously we’re not talking about the cult of personality on the Saddam Hussein/Kim Jong-Il scale.”

….read more HERE.

California is in the midst of an enormous stupidity crisis. Californians have been sitting in the dark because … they didn’t turn the lights on.

They say they’re short of electricity. Yes, they are. Between 1988 and 1998, California’s electricity consumption increased by 15 percent. Meanwhile California’s capacity to generate electricity shrank by five percent, even as the state hesitated to build new power lines to tap into neighboring states’ power supplies.

Californians didn’t want dams across their rivers, derricks on their ocean, power lines across their borders, or fossil fuel smoke in their sky. These might interfere with all the smart things Californians do, such as hang-glide. California was going to rely on “negawatts” – dramatic power conservation. (But California regulators put price controls on electricity that lowered prices, and even Californians weren’t dumb enough to skip a bargain.) And California was going to rely on alternative power generation.

With all the puffery from Silicon Valley dot.com start-ups, wind farms wouldn’t be a problem. But it turns out that alternative power generation is an alternative, mostly, to generating power.

…read more HERE.