We on Sharpe in the Morning appreciate this infographic listing the AZ state legislators who joined with Governor Brewer and Democrat legislators to ram through an expansion of Medicaid using unprecedented, Chicago-style tactics.  Shame on them.  Please remember these names during the 2014 primaries . . .

I'm troubled.  Politico's chief political columnist (and Facebook friend of mine) Roger Simon posted the following to his page on the social media platform this afternoon:

"I am torn between wanting airlines to fly on time & feeling guilty that only the flying public will get a break from sequester."

Hopefully it's pretty clear that the troubling phrase here is "get a break from the sequester".  It clearly demonstrates that he buys into the statist thinking that Americans must be made to suffer - they must be punished until they holler uncle and submit to high taxation in order to pay for wildly out-of-control governmental spending.  Of course, we'll be told that he only means for the wealthy few who travel by air to be disciplined - what is it, The Two Percent? The One Percent? Anybody with annual family income over $250K? Or is that now down to $200K, or $150K? How long before it's $50K?  Irrespective of the semantical games pertaining to income and the definition of wealth, Mr. Simon has made it clear that it's hard for him to decide whether certain Americans should be punished by the government because they work hard and make a good living.

I wonder what color the sky is in Roger Simon's world.

It's now been established that the "flight delay crisis" was likely contrived - the FAA's budget is larger even after sequester than what the president requested.  Even if this crisis was not artificially manufactured, the funding necessary to avoid flight delays (which actually harm the economy, despite appearing to be a mere inconvenience to "wealthy" travelers), was no huge sum of money, and could have been realized by defunding any number of pork and/or entitlement expenditures.  And there's even direct evidence that government agencies have been instructed to leverage sequestration to inflict maximum pain on Americans.

I'm not a big fan of Rush Limbaugh - I agree with him maybe half of the time - but he has one major notion exactly right - his "Limbaugh Theorem", which fundamentally declares that statists (represented in our government by Democrats) wish to inflict suffering upon us to force us to accept high taxation.

We have a serious problem when the statist elements of our government stand to gain by our pain.  I can't think of an example at any time in US history of a president deliberately inflicting suffering on Americans in order to break our will and force us to capitulate to his will.  And make no mistake - that is precisely what is currently happening.

The government serves at our consent - the Constitution insists that power be concentrated in our hands (see political cartoon above).  How is it that we have acquiesced, handing power to the government?  It seems that we are seeing some very dangerous developments, and they are coming rapidly.  Are we going to wake up one day and finally realize, like a boiled frog, that it's too late to regain control of our former constitutional republic?  American Spectator Senior Editor Quin Hillyer vastly understates the problem in today's "Harm Offensive" post, saying that the president's behavior is "offensive".  It goes way beyond that.

Roger Simon is no friend to freedom.  He carries water for those who seek for power to be concentrated in the hands of the Washington elite.  I do appreciate, however, that he so openly and honestly made it clear today that he's torn over whether you should get a break from sequester.  Every once in a while, the mask slips a little, lending us a glimpse of what's really happening.

Actually, I'm not just troubled.  I'm sick at heart for the future my children face.

Last week when we were in Washington, DC for the FAIR "Hold Their Feet To The Fire" conference, Jim Sharpe was quoted in the New York Times.  We were all ready to jump up and down and call attention to it and brag and dance and show off . . . when these insensitive Islamic terrorists went on a rampage in Boston, raising Cain and stealing Jim's thunder.  Now that we're back home and settled in, we simply wanted to call your attention to Jim's high achievement.  So NOW we will jump up and down and brag and dance and show off.  Well done, Jim Sharpe . . . well done . . .