Washington Post columnist George Will, a rabid baseball enthusiast, would appreciate this metaphor: Dude knocked it out of the park with this, his latest piece in the Post.

WASHINGTON — In societies governed by persuasion, politics is mostly talk, so liberals’ impoverishment of their vocabulary matters.

Having damaged liberalism’s reputation, they call themselves progressives. Having made the federal government’s pretensions absurd, they have resurrected the supposed synonym “federal family.” Having made federal spending suspect, they advocate “investments” — for “job creation,” a euphemism for stimulus, another word they have made toxic.

Barack Obama, a pitilessly rhetorical president, continues to grab the nation by its lapels but the nation is no longer listening. This matters because ominous portents are multiplying.

He continues:

For two years, there has been one constant: As events have refuted the Obama administration’s certitudes, it has retained its insufferable knowingness. It knew that the stimulus would hold unemployment below 8 percent. Oops. Unemployment has been at least 9 percent in 26 of the 30 months since the stimulus was passed. Michael Boskin of Stanford says that even if one charitably accepts the administration’s self-serving estimate of jobs “created or saved” by the stimulus, each job cost $280,000 — five times America’s median pay.

The economic policy the “federal family” should adopt can be expressed in five one-syllable words: Get. Out. Of. The. Way.

Instead, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, whose department has become a venture capital firm for crony capitalism and costly flops at creating “green jobs,” praises the policy of essentially banishing the incandescent light bulb as “taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”

Better to let the experts in his department and the rest of the federal family waste other people’s money.

Indeed.

Read the full column right here.

It's past the point where I need to set up a Charles Krauthammer clip.  The man's an intellectual powerhouse and as insightful as they come.  Here's the big guy talking about what kind of president Barack Obama has been up to this point.

Chuck, you're something else. I couldn't agree more.

After months of speculation, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) has officially entered the race for the White House.

From The Chicago Sun-Times:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Texas Gov. Rick Perry joined the 2012 GOP race for president Saturday with an announcement sure to reverberate halfway across the country as his rivals competed in Iowa for the support of party activists.

“I full well believe I’m going to win,” Perry told South Carolina voters on a conference call about an hour before he planned to kick off the campaign with a speech in Charleston.

In a posting on his new campaign website explaining why he wanted to take on President Barack Obama, Perry contended that “America’s place in the world is in peril, not only because of disastrous economic policies, but from the incoherent muddle known as our foreign policy.”

If "the economy" is going to be the #1 issue in this upcoming election cycle, then Rick Perry's credentials as the head of one of the only states to see economic growth during the recession ought to impress American voters (of all ideological stripes).  Hear the Governor talk economic shop in this clip from Your World W/Neil Cavuto:

Personally, I've always wanted Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) to be the pick, but the big guy insists he isn't running this time around.  So be it.  I don't really know a lot about Perry, but I intend to do my homework in coming weeks.

There's little chance now that someone like Mitt Romney can secure the nomination, so for all intensive purposes, it has become Rick Perry's to lose.

Here we go.

Last night the president offered some remarks to the nation regarding the on-going budget-ceiling debate.  It was predictable, condescending, and, as Dr. Charles Krauthammer puts it, thoroughly cynical.

Chris Christie 2012!

In the fall of 1980, in a debate between President Jimmy Carter and former California governor Ronald Reagan, this famous question was posed by The Gipper:

Reagan's rhetorical line of questioning might well be used in the America of 2011 and 2012.  So says Wall Street Journal's Bill McGurn:

These days parts of America feel like a rerun of the 1970s, with Washington emanating malaise and Americans told to ratchet down their dreams and expectations for the future. Yes, the White House is correct that we shouldn't draw too many broad conclusions from any one or two jobs reports. But the challenge facing the president is that the jobs numbers reflect a larger unease about where things are headed.

Moms and dads, for example, know that they are paying more to put food on the table. They are also paying nearly $4 per gallon when they fill up their cars. Even those who have jobs are scared—some because they might lose them, others because the lack of strong economic growth means that they have fewer opportunities to move up the ladder.

The official response from all the president's men is not likely to dispel these fears. When asked about the latest numbers, Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, stated that the best-case scenario for 2012 will be an unemployment rate of 8.2%. If so, lots of people will remember that 8.2% is still higher than the rate was when Mr. Obama entered office, notwithstanding all his spending and all those promises of jobs "created or saved."

Mr. McGurn continues:

In a recent post on his Washington Post blog, Chris Cillizza provided the likeliest answer Mr. Obama would give to the "Are you better off?" question. According to Mr. Cillizza, President Obama's argument on the economy will boil down to 10 words: "You should have seen how bad it would have been."

How different that is from 2008. In 2008, Mr. Obama was the man of the future, the candidate of change who declared that his nomination would mark the moment "when the rise of oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Alas, instead of assuring us that a brighter future is just ahead, these days the president seems focused on painting the past in ever darker colors.

I lament the fact that so many Republicans and so-called conservatives spent money in the 2000's like their ship was going down.  I lament the fact that on a grander scale, with each passing decade since The Great Depression, we have given more and more control to fewer and fewer people in Washington.  Real change will not come from one election, putting one Republican man or woman into office.  Our problems are deep and systematic.  They are cultural, moral, and yes, even spiritual.

Barack Obama means well.  I truly believe that.  His vision for this country is sincere, but sincerely wrong.  Bush made mistakes; Obama's core convictions are mistakes.

Maybe Americans who believed Mr. Obama when he said unemployment wouldn't go past 8% if we passed his stimulus will now be persuaded by his explanation that his job was tougher than he or his economists expected. Maybe that's the only way to get around the "Are you better off?" question.

Whatever you call it, it's a long way from "hope" and "change." And the more the president tries to justify the nagging unemployment and sluggish economic growth by rewriting the past, the more he leaves the argument over the future to his GOP rival.

Presidents can't "fix" an economy, but they can either help or hurt.  The current administration is most certainly hurting, but the only reason they are where they are, and promising the nonsensical collectivist freebies they are promising, is because of us: because of the citizenry.

Along with the "Are we better off?" question, Americans would do well to begin asking themselves (and one another) "Are we more informed than we were four years ago?  Are we more engaged?"

I realize that I'm a tad Andrew Breitbart-crazy as of late, but I cannot overstate how important he is to the conservative movement currently.  Two other things I wanted to share you guys.

First, here is a rousing YouTube clip of Breitbart confronting union-paid protesters outside a conservative event in the Chicago-land area last fall.  It speaks for itself.

The second Breitbart-related I wanted to share was this interview he gave to The Adam Carolla Show podcast back on May 11th.  Carolla has the most downloaded podcast on the internet (and of all-time), and for the most part sounds to be somewhere in the vicinity of a libertarian atheist.

Here's a re-cap from the man himself as to what exactly he and Adam Carolla yapped about for an hour:

Keep up the good work, Breitbart.

Barack Obama won a majority of the electorate in 2008 en route to becoming the first black president.  He had spent the previous four decades of his life cultivating and promoting a decidedly progressive-Left understanding of economics, politics, and foreign policy.  He (somehow) was permitted to shed a lifetime of radical views and behavior when he ran in 2008 as a "centrist" and "new breed" of politician.  It has taken a few years, but the American people are finally waking up to the fact that the community organizer from Chicago is, well, a community organizer from Chicago.

From the latest Rasmussen Reports:

Most voters still believe President Obama is more liberal than they are, while just one-out-of-four say they share the same ideological views as the president.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 54% of Likely U.S. Voters think Obama is more ideologically liberal than they are, while only 13% view him as more conservative. Twenty-four percent (24%) say their political views are about the same as the president's. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

The number who see the president as more liberal than they are stayed at 57% in three-out-of-four previous surveys conducted since August of last year.  That number climbed to 61% in late February.  The number who view the president as more conservative ranged from nine percent (9%) to 12% in that same period.

The number of voters who say they share about the same political views as the president ties the lowest result measured since August and, interestingly, compares exactly with the number who say the same of Congress.  Only 24% of voters hold about the same ideological views as the average Republican member of Congress, and another 24% feel that way about the views of the average Democratic congressman.

The country is NOT liberal.  Plain and simple.  However, the country is largely disengaged from the political process.  There are too many under-informed and dis-interested Americans out there.  Anyone with an internet connection and/or library card could have read Barack Obama's own description of his progressive worldview in 2007 and 2008.  He wrote two books about it.  YouTube has hours of footage of Obama's public statements on everything from Israel to the U.S. Constitution to abortion.

You're not a racist if you don't care for President Obama's politics.  You're simply not part of the 19% of Americans who embrace modern liberalism.

Remember that come November 2012.

Literally.  I have to hand it to the guy (aka "his writers"): his performance at The White House Correspondence Dinner last weekend was very funny.

The president nailed the jokes that were written for him and showed that he already has Trump on the brain.

The crazy thing is, the president knew that an operation to kill Osama bin Laden was planned for that day (Saturday), had been scrapped due to weather, and was waiting to be carried out the following day. That takes concentration to be able to deliver Lion King and The Apprentice jokes with that information in the back of your mind.

In the past two weeks we have seen political fireworks in Washington D.C. over both the 2011 and 2012 federal budgets. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid Democrats that were in charge before January failed to procure a budget last year and that was what the whole hub-bub between President Obama and now-Speaker of the House John Boehner was about. That was what the controversial vote last week was all about.

But now we're moving on to the battle over Fiscal Budget 2012. The most promising and serious plan for not only 2012, but the next decade, comes from the office (and mind) of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). Aptly named "The Path to Prosperity," Ryan's plan received attacks from the political Left before it was even released.

As only he can, syndicated columnist Dr. Charles Krauthammer assess the strengths of Ryan's economic road-map and the weakness of the counter-proposals being made by the president and leading Dem's.

Krauthammer begins his insightful piece by acknowledging the primary charge levied at the Ryan plan: it focuses on spending cuts and not on raising any taxes. Democrats say that while Republicans may talk a good game about dealing with our debt, the reality of our fiscal situation is such that we must adjust tax rates.

What say you, Chuck?

But the critics miss the point. You can't get there from here without Ryan's plan. It's the essential element. Of course Ryan is not going to propose tax increases. You don't need Republicans for that. That's what Democrats do. The president's speech was a prose poem to higher taxes – with every allusion to spending cuts guarded by a phalanx of impenetrable caveats.

Ryan reduces federal spending by $6 trillion over 10 years – from the current 24 percent of GDP to the historical post-World War II average of about 20 percent.

Now, the historical average for revenues over the last 40 years is between 18 percent and 19 percent of GDP. As we return to that level with the economic recovery (we're now at about 15 percent), Ryan would still leave us with an annual deficit in 2021 of 1.6 percent of GDP.

It's very simple: tax revenues must match budgetary expenditures. Right now, and for a long time, the latter has been higher than the former. We need a way to bridge the gap.

The critics are right to focus on that gap. But it is bridgeable. And the mechanism for doing so is in plain sight: tax reform.

Real tax reform strips out exclusions, deductions, credits and the innumerable loopholes that have accumulated since the last tax reform of 1986. The Simpson-Bowles commission, for example, identifies $1.1 trillion of such revenue-robbers. In one scenario, it strips them all out and thus is able to lower rates for everyone to three brackets of 8 percent, 14 percent and 23 percent.

The commission does recommend that, on average, about $100 billion annually of that $1.1 trillion be kept by the Treasury (rather than going back to the taxpayer) to reduce the deficit. This is a slight deviation from revenue neutrality, but it still yields a major cut for the top rate from the current 35 percent to 23 percent. The overall result is so reasonable and multiply beneficial that it rightly gained the concurrence of even the impeccably conservative (commission member) Sen. Tom Coburn.

That's the beauty of tax reform: It is both transparent and flexible. That flexibility and transparency can be applied to the Ryan plan. If you need a bit more deficit reduction to bridge the 1.6 percent GDP gap that remains after 10 years, you can get there by slightly raising the final rates.

Preach it, Dr. K!

Cut spending. Cut tax rates. Vote responsible people into office and hold them accountable.

From CBS News:

In what he thought was a private chat with campaign donors Thursday evening, President Obama offered the most revealing behind-the-scenes account to date of his budget negotiations with GOP leaders last week.

CBS Radio News White House correspondent Mark Knoller listened in to an audio feed of Mr. Obama's conversation with donors after other reporters traveling with the president had left the room.

In the candid remarks, Mr. Obama complains of Republican attempts to attach measures to the budget bill which would have effectively killed parts of his hard-won health care reform program.

"I said, 'You want to repeal health care? Go at it. We'll have that debate. You're not going to be able to do that by nickel-and-diming me in the budget. You think we're stupid?'" recalled the president of his closed-door negotiations on the bill to fund the federal government until September. (listen to the remarks in the video at left)

Mr. Obama said he told House Speaker John Boehner and members of his staff that he'd spent a year and a half getting the sweeping health care legislation passed -- paying "significant political costs" along the way -- and wouldn't let them undo it in a six-month spending bill.

Well played, Mr. President.

Always gracious in both victory and defeat, the president is the consummate professional.

As if we needed further proof that the Left is just as ideologically committed to its convictions as we are to ours, the president's candid remarks are a stark reminder of the up-hill battle we have if we're to un-do Obamacare.  It should also highlight in your mind the absolute necessity of taking back both houses of Congress in 2012.  (And the White House would be nice too.)