While Barack Obama was off schmoozing with Jay Leno and mocking the handicapped instead of governing it seems that popular anger was mounting at sloppily drafted Democratic legislation. Now apparently including the President's budget, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating that this year's deficit could be a wallet-boggling $1.845 trillion, four times George W. Bush's last irresponsible figure and larger even than Mr. Obama's projected $1.75 trillion. At this point in Washington they may be inclined to regard the nearly $100 billion difference as a mere rounding error... but if it was AIG bonuses they'd think it was big, and out in the hinterland folks might have that reaction anyway.

Today's big news, at least from my perspective, is the new line of "People for the Ethical Treatment of People" T-shirts launched by Andrea Mrozek and my wife over at Pro-Woman Pro-Life. Check it out.

This just in: speaking on the second reading of the Liberals' proposed Reform Bill in 1866, future Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli asserted that

"of course, the elements of the Commons vary, and must be modified according to the vicissitudes and circumstances of a country like England. Nevertheless, the original scheme of the Plantagenets may always guide us."

If anyone were to say anything of the sort in our Parliament today, the only reason they wouldn't be laughed right out of Ottawa is that no one would have any idea what they were talking about. Disraeli added

"We, who are the representatives of the Commons do not represent an indiscriminate multitude, but a body of men endowed with privileges which they enjoy, but also intrusted with duties which they must perform"

and also said

"I think that this House should remain a House of Commons, and not become a House of the People, the House of a mere indiscriminate multitude, devoid of any definite character, and not responsible to society, and having no duties and no privileges under the Constitution".

And a year later, introducing his own Reform Bill as prime minister, he said

"we live under a Constitution of which we boast that it is a Constitution of checks and counterpoises.”

All still propositions worth debating... if we can.

The Globe and Mail has a story headlined "Release of aid workers prompts calls for action on Darfur" that's actually about how Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae reacted to the Sudanese crackdown on humanitarian action in Darfur with a demand that

"Canada should be much more vocal. Brave Canadians and others defending humanitarian values have been singled out by the government of Sudan. We want our Canada to be speaking out for all of us in defence of real people who are making us all proud with their determination and their courage."

Now in the first place this is not a call for action but for empty verbiage. In the second place, while the headline speaks of "calls" the story only quotes or cites one person wanting us to send words to do the work of deeds. In the third place, the story says he made these remarks in an "interview" which may well mean the reporter called the Liberal foreign affairs critic to ask if he thought the government wasn't good and then printed the vapid response as if it were news.

In the fourth place, it was actually predictable that the ICC's unenforceable warrant for the arrest of the president of Sudan would prompt a crackdown on aid workers. Yet those who advocated it didn't seem able to predict it in advance, and now that it has happened their only response is to flap their tongues while Darfur burns, which seems neither humane nor intelligent. But I doubt anyone has asked Mr. Rae to comment on that.

Not an impressive performance on anybody's part.

Former enthusiasts are suddenly worried, the Daily Telegraph reports, that Barack Obama makes PR mistakes and is surrounded by smirking amateurs. Whoa, dude, who knew?

A freshly minted Conservative senator has just sent out a fundraising letter that, among other things, berates Michael Ignatieff for thinking about things. According to today's Ottawa Citizen, Senator Irving Gerstein wrote that,

"Over the course of his nearly four decades working abroad as a professor, pundit, and politician, Michael Ignatieff chose to focus on abstract constitutional, sociological and foreign policy issues while ignoring everyday issues such as the jobs and savings of Canadians."

Now I'm no fan of Michael Ignatieff and on actually reading some of his punditry back in 2006 I declared indignantly that he was "a windbag who takes three paragraphs even to get something wrong" and describd his manifesto as "a vapour of vapidity, a mist of mediocrity, a cumulonimbus of cliché" which, you may observe, is not unqualified praise. But my objection is that he did not think clearly about fundamental things, not that he allowed the attempt to think about them to distract him from the pressing task of making sure constituents had money.

Oh here's a surprise. Politicians hurling three quarters of a trillion dollars of other people's money at hard times in a panic didn't cause the U.S. economy to rebound so now, says the Daily Telegraph, Democrats in Congress want to spend more. Hey big spenders, why not a quillion dollars this time? Admittedly that's not a real number... but then again this isn't a real stimulus package either.

Ezra Levant has written a book called Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights which is about... well, it's pretty obvious, isn't it? I urge you to preorder it from Amazon, not only to discover, or remind yourself, what's going on but also to help Ezra fight it. He's been in the forefront of the battle for our rights and I think we owe it to him, and ourselves, to lend a hand.