I’ve got your March Madness right here.

We have a Supreme Leader in this country who is living fat off the land while the rest of us struggle through the worst recession in our lifetimes. All of this while the media sings his praises and ignores his opulent spending, vacations, parties, extravagance, golf outings, Kobe beef flown in from Japan, workout coach flown in from Chicago twice a week, and his stone ear to the will of the people.

Aren’t these some of the things that got those dictators in the Middle East in hot water?

While the Middle East is on fire, Japan is under water and shaking to its core, Dear Leader is busy filling out his NCAA Tournament Brackets for ESPN. March Madness. This past weekend he went golfing for the 61^st time since he took office and held a basketball party at the White House. Not to mention a State Dinner for a Communist Dictator (oh—I guess I did just mention it.)

Nobody thinks our President should be living the life of a pauper with sackcloth and ashes as his daily garb, but I can’t be the only one out there noticing what’s going on here. Let me make a prediction here, and this prediction comes from three decades in the media. When Obama leaves office the activist old media will let a few stories like the one I’m writing now ooze out there like they had learned this through osmosis, or something. They will even try to take a bit of a hard line mentioning how Obama fiddled while Rome burned, or something similar. Truth to power? Once he is out of power they will have an epiphany. They might even question other ideas with Obama that they dismiss as bizarre conspiracy theories today—-this absolutely will happen and they will act like they knew it all along.

Yes, this is the same Dear Leader who vacationed in Hawaii while the east coast was buried in the worst snow storm in years. As I pointed out in a Big Journalism column earlier this year, the media had the perfect opportunity to draw a contrast/connection between “Obama in the Surf” and “East Coast in the Snow,” and those who strain to make segues sing, choose to do otherwise.

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In a new article, Marc Ambinder, politics editor of The Atlantic, asks: Have Conservatives Gone Mad?  He says yes.

Serious thinkers on the right have finally gotten around to a full and open debate on the epistemic closure problem that’s plaguing the conservative movement. The issue, to put it in terms that even I can understand, because I didn’t study philosophy much in college: has the conservative base gone mad?

Here are his main points:

• Conservative journalists, including TV personalities (obviously referring to FOX), but excluding those few “serious thinkers” among conservatives, have become “untethered” from the “real world.” Correspondingly, the Republican base – he doesn’t define it – “seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking.”
• The “most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama today comes” from the left. He cites MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann among several examples.
• Meanwhile, the media – meaning the only true, authentic and professional journalists like those who work for ABC where Marc once worked, and at CBS where he is now chief political consultant – are reasserting themselves as “gatekeepers.”  That begs the questions: When and why did its assertion cease? And is one journalist, Jake Tapper, sufficient proof of a collective “reassertion?”

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California has long had the reputation of being trend-setter to the nation. The Golden State was practicing Obamanomics back when Barack was still called Barry. And now its ways are catching up to it like a hard partier who looks in the mirror one day and sees the portrait of Dorian Gray staring back at him.

Get ready America: California’s unsustainable path is echoed by the federal government. One will crash before the other, giving us all a preview of things to come.

Part of what is slowly destroying California is its move from a land of plenty to a land of locusts. The state taxes and regulates resident companies to such an extreme extent it has driven many of them, and many tax-paying citizens, to other states. For decades California was a place to migrate to. Now it’s suffering an exodus. The fault lies in a political shift from being a conservative, low- tax state to a statist, high-tax nanny state. Californians used to be the freest people in the United States and the world, and now? Not so much. (more…)