Karl Rove makes a lot of good points here:

Hot Air points out that this “sexist RINO establishment ogre” is spending millions to help Angle win in Nevada.

Sorry, Karl. Not good enough. Your years of service to the GOP don’t make up for your insistence on speaking your mind about a candidate who has a bunch of explaining to do about a bunch of odd problems. Excommunicated.

Next!

UNITY!!!

How far are we willing to take the “principles over election results” argument? For some, this far:

Here’s my most candid admission: I don’t care if Constitutionalists / classical liberals / fiscal conservatives lose the next 10 elections — provided they stick to their principles. The media and the reality on the ground can only fool the electorate for so long — and a break in the action where conservatives are out of power takes away the left’s ability to lay blame at the feet of the right for every ill it creates and perpetuates.

The next 10 elections? Why not the next 20? Or 30? Or 100?

I’m all for sticking to principles. But my governing principles are rooted in the Constitution. Which is interpreted by a Supreme Court. Whose nominees are chosen by the President.

When we lose elections, the Constitution gets rewritten.

So let’s play out this scenario of losing the next ten elections. We would lose:

2010 — Congressional election lost to Democrats
2012 — Presidential election. 4 more years of Obama!
2014 — Congressional election lost to Democrats
2016 — Obama replaced by a Democrat
2018 — Congressional election lost to Democrats
2020 — Obama’s Democrat replacement re-elected
2022 — Congressional election lost to Democrats
2024 — Yet another Democrat elected president
2026 — Congressional election lost to Democrats
2028 — Democrat re-elected president

That Democrat would be in office until at least 2032 — 22 years from now.

Chief Justice Roberts would be 77. Justice Alito would be 81. Justice Thomas would be 84. Justices Scalia and Kennedy would be 96 — or, more likely, dead or retired. Justice Stevens lasted until he was almost 90. That was unusual.

Realistically, the best possible scenario is that conservatives would be outnumbered, 6-3. And we would not get the majority back for decades. We’d all be dead before we saw conservatives in the majority again.

And — just as the current conservative majority is bound by Roe v. Wade and a host of Warren court precedents — the precedents set by the early 21st Century Court would last for generations.

This matters. Think about the cases that we have barely pulled off 5-4. Preserving the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Banning partial-birth abortion. Allowing corporations to engage in political speech through donations. The list goes on and on.

What good is the Second Amendment, for example, if the Supreme Court is going to write it out of the Constititution?

We can’t afford to lose a generation’s worth of presidential elections, just for the satisfaction of saying we never voted for candidates who didn’t share our principles to the nth degree.

If we take that view, we’ll lose our Constitution, forever. We’re close enough to losing it as it is.

It’s the largest city audit of stimulus dollars to date, and the results aren’t pretty:

CITY CONTROLLER RELEASES AUDITS OF HOW LOS ANGELES HAS USED FEDERAL STIMULUS MONEY

$111 Million in ARRA Funds Has Only Created 55 Jobs So Far

Continuing her efforts to ensure that taxpayer money is spent efficiently and effectively, City Controller Wendy Greuel released two audits today of how the City of Los Angeles has used American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds. The audits looked at the how the two departments that have received the largest amount of ARRA funding so far – the Department of Transportation (LADOT) and the Department of Public Works (DPW) – have used those funds and how many jobs were created. Los Angeles becomes the largest City in America to conduct an audit of how ARRA funds have been expended.

DPW has received $70.65 million and created or retained 45.46 jobs, though they are expected to create 238 jobs overall (the fraction of a job created or retained correlates to the number of actual hours works). LADOT has been awarded $40.8 million and created or retained 9 jobs, though they are expected to create 26 jobs overall. Overall, the Departments have received $111 million in federal stimulus funds out of the $594 million the City has been awarded so far and created or retained 54.46 jobs.

$111 million for 55 jobs. That’s $2 million per job.

Even if you look at the number of jobs they expect to create (“or save”), it’s only 264. $111 million for 264 jobs is about $420,454 per job.

Hey, can you guys create a 56th job for me? I could use $2 million.

Failing that, can you return my tax dollars that you wasted?

UPDATE: Thanks to Instapundit for the link, and congratulations to Drew for getting his comment quoted!

[Guest post by Jack Dunphy]

I have a new column up today at Pajamas Media dealing with the recent police shooting of a knife-wielding man near downtown Los Angeles. It begins as follows:

Everyone knows there are few certainties in life. Yes, you always hear about death and taxes, but recent events here in Los Angeles have revealed other certainties which are, perhaps not coincidentally, related to the first two.

The first is this: If it is your custom to spend your afternoons getting drunk, wielding knives, and menacing passers-by on busy street corners, and if, after the police have arrived as they must when this behavior has been brought to their attention, you fail to drop your knife when ordered to do so, and if then you further tempt fate by advancing toward a police officer with the knife raised in such a way that the officer reasonably believes his life is imperiled, it is as close to a certainty as this world can produce that you will be shot and maybe even killed.

So discovered — too late — one Manuel Jamines (a.k.a. Manuel Ramirez, a.k.a. Gregorio Luis Perez, a.k.a. heaven knows what else) on the afternoon of September 5 at the corner of 6th Street and Union Avenue, just west of downtown Los Angeles.

We are now facing the odd spectacle of illegal immigrants trying to dictate how the police department in America’s second largest city should conduct its affairs. What’s especially odd is that if some of the people protesting the shooting engaged in similar conduct in their home countries, they’d probably be put up against a wall and shot.

Read the whole thing.

–Jack Dunphy