I am sad to report that the Department of Homeland Security has announced plans to scrap the beloved five-level, color-coded terrorism advisory system in favor of a new two-tiered system that may or may not have colors.

To many Americans, the Homeland Security Advisory System has long been a force of comfort and guidance.

For the past nine years, I have woken up each day and immediately raced to the computer to find out if the security level had finally dropped from yellow (significant risk of terrorist attacks) to blue (general risk of terrorist attacks).

I have a bottle of champagne and some blow horns prepared for the occasion. I used to have blue helium balloons, too, but they shriveled back in 2004. Of course, I never expected to reach green (low risk of terrorist attacks) in my lifetime. Green is a utopian ideal to aspire toward like world peace or a cure for baldness.

Read the full article at CNN.com

A while back, I wrote a post entitled “Sarah Palin will always be funny. Always!” In it, I had this to say:

“I am shocked and offended that there are those out there that will say they are ’sick of Sarah Palin jokes.’”

Yesterday, here’s how Palin countered Obama’s use of the “Sputnik Moment” analogy in his State of the Union Address:

Readers,

Talking Points Memo Cafe is hosting a book club for Blowing Smoke. A couple of dagblog regulars, including Michael Maiello (destor23) and Michael Orion Powell (Orion) will be participating along with a few other experts in the field, so it should be a great discussion.

The book club will run until Friday. Please join the conversation at http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/tpmcafe-book-club/.

And don't forget to give the articles a rec for old times sake.

We saw the state of the union speech under unusual circumstances.

We need to reclaim our American system of limited government, low taxes, reasonable regulations, and sound money, which has blessed us with unprecedented prosperity. And it has done more to help the poor than any other economic system ever designed. That's the real secret to job creation -- not borrowing and spending more money in Washington. Limited government and free enterprise have helped make America the greatest nation on earth.

-- Paul Ryan, 2011

By adherence to the principles of decentralization, self-government, ordered liberty, and opportunity and freedom to the individual our American experiment has yielded a degree of well-being unparalleled in all the world. It has come nearer to the abolition of poverty, to the abolition of fear of want that humanity has ever reached before. Progress of the past seven years is the proof of it.

-- Herbert Hoover, 1928

Great minds think alike.

Hey everyone!

First, let me thank the Undecided Voters who have asked me to give this rebuttal - which is like a speech thing I'm told and is important.  Anyway, President Barack Obama's was talking last night was on a bunch of channels I'm told. I saw a little of it and thought his tie was kind of weird, but maybe it stood for something important like Barney.

Before I start this blog post, let me make one thing absolutely clear - I do not, under any circumstance, advocate armed insurrection against the United States. That, my friends, is totally not my scene.

In a short matter of time, Conservative thinkers have leaped completely over Libertarianism and moved on to full-fledged Nihilism. The New York Times' Ross Douthat leads the charge

:

So, Joe Lieberman is leaving. Or rather, Joe Lieberman is announcing that he's going to take his ball and go home, so that there's absolutely no way to get any leverage over him for the next two years. So I expect we'll all see much more written about him on the blogs.

So I got paid on the 15th and something bugged me about the number I took home.  It was lower than it was in December and yet it shouldn't have been.  This pay cycle was the first one where I benefitted from the 2% payroll tax holiday, something I believe I touted here before when Obama agreed to it.

Maybe that's a flip way to say it, but the one thing I remember most about the first Gulf War was all of the hyperbole around it.  Saddam Hussein was Hitler.  Kuwait was Poland.  If we didn't stop him then, we'd never be able to stop him as he rampaged throughout the region, taking over Saudi Arabia and Iran in the process.  Saddam Hussein had, we were told again and again, the fourth largest army in the world.

We've been talking a lot lately about civility, for obvious and painful reasons. And our public conversation on that topic tends to go astray pretty quickly, because we don't all mean the same thing when we say "civility," and often aren't even sure what we mean by the word ourselves.

SWEDEN - After a full decade of research, a team of Swedish scientists has confirmed that no matter how many guns a man owns, his penis will remain small and insignificant.

I haven't blogged about Tucson because it left me sickened and sad, and because Articleman said it all better than I could have. Anyway, I had nothing to say. Violence like this is a terrible, terrible thing. Everyone should be against civil bloodshed. What else could there be to say?

In his post from Tuesday, Nihilism in Action, "real" conservative Daniel Larison joins movement conservatives in rejecting any political attribution of the bald, smirking assassin :

I wrote this review for another site last May, but it seems pertinent now, so I'm reposting it here.

Although various leaks and a few other leaking groups are still cropping up in the news, Liberty and Solidarity offers the first argument I've seen that puts WikiLeaks in context as part of a larger, coherent movement.

Those inside Sarah Palin's inner circle have come forward to admit the ex-Governor of Alaska was truly heartbroken over the recent massacre in Arizona.

"Sarah is destroyed." said a Palin Associate. "She had a new ad with her holding a hunting rifle to Obama's head. It's a great ad. And harmless. But now she just can't use it.

As the big news agencies initially fumbled the Arizona Massacre story by reporting that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been killed by shooter Jared Lee Loughner, online news has shown its strength with numerous takes on the shooting, as well as breaking information.

Here are some stories you may be interested in from around the Web: