Hugh Hewitt rattles off the bullet points. A successful midterm campaign would capture each one of them, and make the best use of all. That’s not asking too much is it?

First, the government takeover of private life is deeply alarming. The massive thrusts of Washington, D.C. into the control of health care, the car business, the banks generally and the home loan industry specifically — all these are obvious and disquietingly huge intrusions of the federal government’s presence into private life.

Americans hate to be pushed around, especially by the federal government. The president’s plans for even more power grabs via the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior using “global warming” as an excuse haven’t yet touched most Americans, but they are out in the open and coming. Only a rebalancing of power in D.C. will forestall further metastasis of government.

A second reason to rebalance the House and Senate by voting for the GOP is the simple fact that must be repeated again and again: Lower taxes equal job growth. Whatever minor improvement in the unemployment numbers that emerges in 2010 — if any — will be threatened by the looming lapse of the Bush tax cuts in 2011 unless Congress obliges the president to abandon his “spread the wealth” gospel that views every tax increase as a form of economic justice, regardless of the cost in real jobs.
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The endless blaming of George W. Bush has also become an obvious dodge of responsibility, a childish complaint that satisfies only the hard Left. The president has played that card so often and in so many circumstances that the mention of Obama’s predecessor by any senior administration official has become a laugh line or a cue in a drinking game.

Big Government:

From the time he launched his campaign for president three years ago, Barack Obama had to consider how he would react to the first serious act of terrorism during the campaign, or if he won, on his watch. His fellow Democrats had been thinking about the moment even longer – since the September day in 2001 when attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon defined George W. Bush’s presidency and gave Republicans a decisive advantage on a defining political issue.

And yet the White House’s response to last week’s attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit could rank as one of the low points of the new president’s first year. Over the course of five days, Obama’s Obama’ reaction ranged from low-keyed to reassuring to, finally, a vow to find out what went wrong. The episode was a baffling, unforced error in presidential symbolism, hardly a small part of the presidency, and the moment at which yet another of the old political maxims that Obama had sought to transcend – the Democrats’ vulnerability on national security – reasserted itself.

Hat tip to Jawa Report.

It’s an even bigger weakness when you stop to consider what it will take to turn it around: The democrat method of fighting terror, has to succeed in a situation in which it can be asserted, in fact it is undeniable, that the opponents methods would have manifestly failed.

Which means — we have to actually see certain disaster averted because some Great Compromiser had the courage to sit down and Talk Out Our Differences With Our Enemies. The “Picard Maneuver” has to actually work in practice, not just continue to drift around as a theory among those who live out pathetic lives to avoid confrontation.

In other words — it’s not changing. And if anyone is tasked with the job of changing it, they should ask themselves who they pissed off to get that job.

Blog geniuses at work:

I sent my fifty predictions for 2010 off to Cassy Fiano on New Year’s Eve Day, as she requested. It would appear the last of those, #50,

California to become our first bankrupt state. To be followed by New York.

…may end up the first one to come true. If we are to go by the word of this Review & Outlook column in the Wall Street Journal.

Remember how $200 billion in federal stimulus cash was supposed to save the states from fiscal calamity? Well, hold on to your paychecks, because a big story of 2010 will be how all that free money has set the states up for an even bigger mess this year and into the future.

The combined deficits of the states for 2010 and 2011 could hit $260 billion, according to a survey by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Ten states have a deficit, relative to the size of their expenditures, as bleak as that of near-bankrupt California. The Golden State starts the year another $6 billion in arrears despite a large income and sales tax hike last year. New York is literally down to its last dollar. Revenues are down, to be sure, but in several ways the stimulus has also made things worse.

This is so much bigger than Barack Obama. It is the peril of investing authority in those who are most fun to watch.

See, for the fun-to-watch to be actually electable, they have to have some idea about what they’re going to do when they got in. Even Obama had a little tiny bit of this going on during the campaign. Just enough. And their ideas have to be fun too.

What makes an idea fun? Well, it has to be theoretical. Which means it has to be untested. “Put water on that burning house” is not sufficiently theoretical because it is not sufficiently untested. Therefore it isn’t fun.

And, sadly, it has to have some irony involved too. It has to have an element of “you wouldn’t think this would work, but…” In this case, the irony is that we can get ourselves out of a fiscally unsound situation by spending lots of money on bullshit. You wouldn’t think that would work, but… And that’s the plan.

Well, more than half the time the initial impressions are correct. Bailing water into a sinking canoe is not an effective way to keep it from sinking…spraying gasoline instead of water on a house fire is not a good way to stop the fire…spending lavish sums of money on nonsense is not a good way to cure a financial headache.

The irony doesn’t serve us well. But it is fun, so we keep doing it. And we’ll do it some more, until Prediction #50 is fulfilled.

Blogger friend Cas wants our predictions for the year ahead. The Congress stuff seems so easy, that in my reply I just stayed away from it entirely and still spouted off fifty other items. Republicans will take back the House; they’ll fail to take the Senate, although it’s a practical impossibility for them not to pick up seats. The media will instruct us to believe that this is not, repeat not, a repeat of 1994 because of this failure to take back the Senate.

President Obama won’t really do anything besides give wonderful speeches and spend money. He’ll talk a lot about what “we” have done wrong; He and His friends aren’t included in that, they do everything perfectly. Anyhow, that’s the government policy throughout 2010, give wonderful speeches and spend lots of money. On the media side, it’s do a lot of ooh-ing and aah-ing about how wonderful the speech was and that it was the BEST ONE EVAR.

Those aren’t even predictions. They’re just observations of a stationary object. They involve no calculation-of-trajectory, no risk.

These are predictions. They were so much fun, I had to send along a thank-you-note when I finished with them.

1. Obama’s popularity to dip some more, especially among the extreme left, over gay-marriage, the Nobel speech, the public option thing.
2. Janet Napolitano will head home to spend more time with her family. It will become a popular figure of speech to say “this is so bad Janet Napolitano would say it’s perfect.”
3. GOP will become more fractured over is the earth burning up…is Sarah Palin stupid…is profiling wrong…
4. Speaking of Palin, she will stump for five GOP candidates, four of them will win, everyone will talk about the one who didn’t.
5. Morgan and his gal will go out to a nice restaurant with Cassy and her guy.
6. Oprah will have lots and lots and lots of farewell tours, just like Barbra.
7. We’re going to have some kind of environmental action, as Obama seeks to repair relations with His base.
8. Lots and lots of new jobs that don’t actually produce anything…”green” jobs…career bureaucrats…union hacks.
9. Some new bailout plan will be passed, for institutions of higher learning, and for newspapers.
10. Lots of scandal plaguing democrats and Republicans. All the Republicans will be forced to step down, all the democrats will survive.
11. Gold will pass $1750 an ounce.
12. A new reality teevee show is introduced, revolving around the family of the “Balloon Boy.” Yes, there is an injunction or parole condition that checks this, but they’ll get around it somehow.
13. Hooters loses a lawsuit and has to hire male waitresses in all their restaurants.
14. A new “health craze” is going to emerge, by way of a new book, that revolves around not-overthinking things. This has actually been going on for quite some time now, but in 2010 it will become overt and in-your-face. It will be something like what the running craze was in the 1970’s. Emotions will become much more important. Self-centeredness will become the new currency. “Mood rings,” in some form or fashion, will come back in style.
15. The Government will commission some software designer to come up with adware that pops up reminders to computer users that they need to work harder at leaving a smaller carbon footprint. It will be illegal to sell computers that don’t have this installed, or to try to remove it. The Commerce Clause will be cited as the constitutional authority for this kind of regulation.
16. Speaking of constitutionally questionable regulation, Someone will be fined and jailed for failing to buy health insurance, and only the bloggers will talk about it. Keith Olbermann and Andrew Sullivan will make fun of us. Then Sarah Palin will put up a Facebook entry mentioning it, and they’ll make fun of her too.
17. 2010 will be all carbon, all the time. The democrats will understand they have squandered all the politcal capital they ever had, and more, passing ObamaCare, and they’ll see the climate “crisis” as the one way they can get more.
18. Iraq could go in either direction. But if it is neutralized as a safe haven for terrorists, Obama will get the credit, and if it turns into a meat grinder it’ll all be Bush’s fault.
19. Iran will chug merrily along building nuclear weapons. This won’t work out to a horrible climax just yet, they’re going to be biding their time throughout 2010.
20. Those scooters people use when they’re genuinely handicapped — or just plain fat and lazy. They’re going to start putting chemical toilets into them. Just like that guy’s easy-chair in “Idiocracy.”
21. Voice recognition software will be built into keyboards. It will become as common as webcams, so everyone has it. And they’ll use it. You’ll walk into a coffee shop and the cacaphony of people “typing” will completely overwhelm you.
22. There will be some kind of successful court action that is the first step to getting “IN GOD WE TRUST” off of our money.
23. There will be some kind of congressional action making it illegal for anyone under a certain age to enter a national park, accompanied by an adult or not. Because of this, Boy Scouts will no longer do any hiking or camping, and will become an urban sing-a-long.
24. Womens’ fashions will become awful yet one more time. No bare legs, no elegant dresses, no skirts of any kind. Baggy sweat pants will be all the rage, even at formal occasions. Any woman not wearing a frumpy sweat shirt will be hissed at by other women, and said to be “dick-whipped” by her boyfriend or husband.
25. Speaking of which, they’ll make a Wonder Woman movie and she’ll be wearing ugly overalls. The story will be like one half of “Thelma & Louise,” crossed with “Erin Brockovich.” She’ll stop a mega-corporate conglomerate led by some evil man that is conspiring to (somehow) make a zillion dollars overnight by dumping toxic sludge into a river making all the adorable woodland creatures sick. Her sexuality is no longer a mystery and they make sure it’s clearly established that she’s a les[bi]an every ten minutes.
26. Oh, and ditto for Tomb Raider. She, too, will stop some middle-aged white guy who wears nice suits in the middle of the night from dumping toxic sludge into the river killing all the woodland creatures, and she’ll be out-and-proud gay.
27. Foreclosures will plateau out and then they will spike again as the interest rate goes up and up and up.
28. The occult will become popular, as people feel a need to believe in something, and feel stigmatized from believing in anything else.
29. Gene[a]logy will make a comeback. Look for a remake of “Roots.” Google will release a web-based app that will store and organize the results of personal research.
30. Watching movies at work will become commonplace, as employment fulfills less and less of a practical purpose.
31. Delivery services will become “clouded,” just like “cloud computing,” meaning there will be companies in the business of providing the delivery of groceries, bottled water, hot coffee drinks, etc. provided by other companies. And then we’ll be on the fast track to becoming the bloated floating egg-humans in Wall-E.
32. The “bonus czar” will absolutely, positively be reviewing “executive bonuses” for all firms, whether they received bailout money or not, be they publicly traded or not. And then the definition of “executive” will trickle down. And then it will be salaries, not bonuses. The government will be wanting to review resumes of network engineers and systems analysts to see if they’re worth their salt, before it’s done.
33. We’re going to try out France’s failed program of forcing everyone to work 30 hours or less per week, in an effort to force companies to hire more people.
34. The U.S. Mint will issue yet *another* awkward dollar-coin with a woman’s image on the face of it…and, just like the last three, it will be unpopular, awkward, refuse to work in vending machines the way it’s supposed to. It will be recalled and the feminists will complain. Bitterly. Again.
35. There’ll be some crisis in the middle east, gas will get more expensive, and then they’ll advertise it by the liter to make it look affordable.
36. Obama will put a solar panel on the White House. Welcome back, Carter.
37. They’ll make another Superman movie, and this time he’ll — all together now — ACTUALLY FIGHT SOMEBODY.
38. The Atlas Shrugged movie, on the other hand, will see another year come & go without getting made.
39. A talented young black guy who looks kind of like a white girl will appear on the scene and will be vigorously promoted as “The Next Michael Jackson.”
40. Secretary of State Clinton will resign, and start writing a tell-all. She’ll be responsible for starting a whole new wave of feminism, to be informally known as “Our Turn” feminism or “We’ve Waited Long Enough” feminism. It’ll have all the paranoia of all the previous waves of feminism.
41. Timothy Geithner, adieu.
42. Modesty Blaise movie.
43. They’re going to breed an even smaller dog. It’ll be informally known as a “pocket puppy.” They’ll make special sweaters for stupid girls and women who can tuck several pocket dogs away along the length of their arms. And she will have music wherever she goes…
44. Because the people who make Saturday morning cartoons absolutely loathe parents, these forms of entertainment will become even louder and more headache-inducing.
45. It will become fashionable to remake period classics, like Of Mice and Men, and Tale of Two Cities, for the present time, just like that fad of remaking Shakespeare plays for the present during the early 2000’s. In this version of Grapes of Wrath, look for the Depression to be George W. Bush’s fault. Tom Joad will be played by Ice Cube.
46. “Obama” will become a popular slang term to describe a manager who is constantly giving wonderful speeches and organizing “summits” but never actually doing anything to improve any situation besides spending lots of money.
47. Apple will come out with a new device that can store as much music as an iPod, but clip in place behind the ear so you can’t tell if someone’s listening to you or rocking out.
48. Employers will be forbidden from discriminating against people who can’t show up on time.
49. Cable television companies will be required to make sure no more than 50% of their channels are in English because that’s racist.
50. California to become our first bankrupt state. To be followed by New York.

Jules Crittenden is among those happy to see the last decade go. He has many strong arguments on his side, including some personal tragedies, and some others having to do with things that happened to us all. They’re all based on truth.

And the common thread amongst them is this: In the last ten year we seem to have become awfully fond of the idea that all others must agree with us on this issue or that one — lock-step — or else they’re evil. And, of course, this divisive situation is all the other fellow’s fault. Where’d we get this? Since Y2K, this funny idea has been in a full, and none too pleasing, bloom.

What is it? Did Bush vs. Gore really do that to us?

God damn the naughts.

God damn the Naughts. It was a perverse decade, in which that thing so many responsible people had agreed was the right thing to do, the removal of a dangerous, mass-murdering dictator, was strangely rendered not just unnecessary but an evil act, by an unexpected twist of fate. The accusations of lies were themselves lies, all of it built on a tyrant’s framework of lies, that together became an unquenchable fire that just burned hotter. It was as revolting as the stench of death, the way they tried to make it meaningless and wrong. Except that death is honest.
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God damn the Naughts.

It was odd, how people turned to the kind of naivete that got us into all of that in the first place. Maybe they expected a cheap kind of messianic deliverance. That’s not so odd. In dire times, people have always wanted the easy out. I remember as well the unexpected feeling of relief when they had their way. They wanted it, let them have it, as one friend said. That feeling wouldn’t last long.

Hat tip to blogger friend Buck.