"Late last week JPMorgan Chase announced that it had lost some $2.3 billion, and possibly more, as a result of bad investment decisions made by its risk-hedging operation. ...

The federal government borrows more than $2.3 billion every day. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to government failure and stupidity. The federal government will spend $668 billion this year on 126 separate anti-poverty programs, but fail to reduce poverty. The federal government will spend another $67 billion on education, but fail to educate our children. Government job-training programs actually leave workers less prepared for employment than before they received the training. ...

"Where’s the accountability? Where’s the outrage? Who is being fired? The government drops $535 million on Solyndra (roughly a quarter of what JPMorgan Chase just lost), but Energy Secretary Steven Chu still has his job. The new health-care bill turns out to cost far more than advertised, adding hundreds of billions to the federal deficit, and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is hardly asked a tough question."

"The current issue of Newsweek has a photo of President Obama with a rainbow-colored halo superimposed over his head and the title 'The First Gay President.' 

"Nonsense. Obama is not the first gay president. He is the first female president. 

"Consider his activities on Monday: He sat down to tape a session with the ladies of ABC’s 'The View' — his fourth appearance on the talk show by women and for (mostly) women. He accepted an award from Barnard College and gave the commencement speech to graduates of the women’s school. Heck, he even appeared in public wearing a gown."

"Staggering under an avalanche of bad news regarding the economy, Obama’s presidential campaign took another hit over the weekend as the New York Post detailed divisions amongst Democrats and radicals, including charges that Obama tried to buy the silence of his controversial Chicago pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright.  
 
"Author Edward Klein in his new book The Amateur writes that Obama offered his long-time radical preacher and pastor $150,000 in hush money for staying out of the spotlight during Obama’s 2008 run for president."

"[I]n the middle of the night of May 7-8, 2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shocked his country by bringing the main opposition party, Kadima, into a national unity government. Shocking because just hours earlier, the Knesset was expediting a bill to call early elections in September. ... 

"Netanyahu forfeited September elections that would have given him four more years in power. He chose instead to form a national coalition that guarantees 18 months of stability — 18 months during which, if the world does not act to stop Iran, Israel will. 

"And it will not be the work of one man, one party or one ideological faction. As in 1967, it will be the work of a nation."

"The intertwined strands of evil DNA - Obamanomics and Obamacare - will determine the outcome of the 2012 election, and Barack Obama knows it. That’s why he desperately wants to talk about something else. Anything else. A failed stimulus. Shovel-ready jobs that even President Obama later admitted don’t exist. Auto takeovers. Bank bailouts. Mythical green jobs. And a historic American credit downgrade. Obamanomics has become the science of downward-sloping graphs. ... 

"The 2012 election will be the most consequential of our lifetimes, probably of our children’s and our children’s children’s lifetimes. We will choose between Mitt Romney’s opportunity society and Barack Obama’s government-centered society. Voters deserve an election that addresses rather than avoids the important issues that will determine the difference."

"Throughout her career and political campaign, Elizabeth Warren has found victims everywhere she looked, including when she looked in the mirror and saw an alleged descendant of one of the most historically victimized groups, Native Americans.  
 
"In what may be the ultimate and cruelest irony, not only is it unlikely that Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great grandmother was Cherokee, it turns out that Warren’s great-great-great grandfather was a member of a militia unit which participated in the round-up of the Cherokees in the prelude to the Trail of Tears."

"As economic freedom declines, EU member states are becoming less and less competitive on the world stage, while emerging economies from Asia to South America are gaining ground. Decades of big government policies have now brought several European economies to their knees. Soaring taxes, spiraling unemployment, mountains of red tape, stifling labour regulations, and ruinous levels of public spending needed to fund vast and unsustainable welfare states and entitlement programmes have created a perfect storm of economic malaise. ... 

"The European Project has become a yoke around Europe’s neck, a symbol of rampant supranationalism and big government intervention, and a warning to the United States if it chooses to go down the same path as the European social model."

"Another depressing statistic: The nation’s companies are generating more output than before the recession started — suggesting the 5 million workers they shed have become redundant. Who in Washington has an answer for that?  
 
"Unemployed Americans desperate to support their families deserve action. They deserve leadership. They deserve jobs."

"Does the United States still stand as a beacon of hope to the oppressed around the world? Human-rights lawyer and Chinese folk hero Chen Guangcheng thought we did. That’s why he risked his life to get to the United States Embassy in Beijing. But it was there he was betrayed for a few trillion shekels of yuan.
 
"Human-rights activists around the world rejoiced when Chen -- blind since birth -- managed to escape house arrest and reach the perceived safety of the embassy. That relief turned to shock six days later, when the United States pressured Chen to leave, promising that they would stay with him in the hospital as he received treatment for injuries sustained during his escape.

"Yet, Chen told CNN that once he reached the hospital the U.S. officials disappeared. Remember: he’s blind. The U.S. Embassy staff left an injured blind man who is an enemy of the state in the custody of his totalitarian oppressors. ...

"If only this was just incompetence. It seems so much worse."

"While President Obama’s been busy on his globe-spanning 'OBL: I Got Him!' victory tour, the fragile U.S. recovery seems to have been crashing into the rocks.

"Wall Street economists spent yesterday taking a second and third look at their forecasts for tomorrow’s (now) much-dreaded April employment report — because job-tracker ADP said yesterday that companies hired a paltry 119,000 people last month. It was the smallest gain in seven months and way below the 177,000 that analysts were expecting.

"Even worse, new orders for factory goods in March showed their biggest decline since 2008, smack in the middle of the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

"Too bad Obama can’t plausibly take a victory lap for his stewardship of the economy other than to try and argue, 'I kept us out of a depression.'"