There are lots of things going on at present, but rather than pick one and launch into a long diatribe on it, we’ll scattershoot a little…

– This James Jay Lee guy who met his end at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters yesterday is being styled a nut. And from the published rants and manifestoes he produced in his time among the living, it’s hard to argue in favor of his sanity.

On the other hand, watching coverage of his meltdown yesterday and hearing his brother-in-law discuss his situation, it’s pretty clear that Lee was your typical anti-social lefty, only with a bit grander ambition. Incapable of steady work, mooching off his family, decrying an unjust system he refused to participate in and fancying himself smarter than those around him, Lee was more or less a caricature of the type. And while his manifesto is an exercise in pathological insanity, how different is it really from standard Progressive dogma once you strip away the friendly Madison Avenue language?

• Malthusian “overpopulation” theory? Check.
• Abortion? Check.
• Anti-technology and anti-industry? Check.
• Anti-oil? Check.
• Anti-religion? Check.
• Global warming theory? Check.
• The American economy as a force for evil in the world? Check.
• “Affordable  housing?” Check.

Lee isn’t much of a writer. But if you could dress it up a little, his manifesto sounds like the Democrat Party platform. Maybe his biggest mistake was that he showed up at the Discovery Channel. He should have made his demands on MSNBC instead; they’d probably have let him guest host for Ed Schultz.

– This attempt by the Left to paint the majority of Americans as bigots – which incidentally seems to happen every time things turn south for the Democrats and has never really worked – looks like it’s more wide-ranging and determined than in the past. Take, for example, the all-out effort by the NAACP to paint the Tea Party as racist. Now, there’s a web site dedicated to those accusations which partners the NAACP with Think Progress and Media Matters in an effort to prove that all those constitutional conservatives out there are bigots and troglodytes. One wonders what they think they’ll accomplish, other than preaching to the choir while firing the Tea Party up even more for November than they already are.

But that’s not all. Obama’s Labor Department bureaucrats are engaged in demonizing Republicans as hating Hispanics. Your tax dollars at work.

– Do yourself a favor and read Michael Barone’s latest on Obama’s economic policies. He posits the theory that Big Units (Big Government, Big Labor, Big Business) are a mid-20th century concept which proved themselves static and unworkable in the 1970’s and the country has moved beyond them – and yet the ideology the president and his advisors are trying to employ in dealing with our current situation is dependent on Big Units to deliver prosperity. You can figure out how well this is working, so the question is whether the Republicans have a more realistic solution on hand.

– Christina Romer ejects tomorrow, as she’s gone from the president’s Council of Economic Advisors. Yesterday at the National Press Club she more or less admitted defeat. Says the Washington Post:

She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn’t understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn’t have much of an idea about how to fix things.

Yet Romer did say that while tax cuts are a good idea, we need even more stimulus.

This is scandalous. These people are supposed to understand economics, and yet they come off like a bunch of high school kids in over their heads on a group science project. Only with the science project the only thing really at risk is a grade.

– Reason Magazine has this exactly right:

– Finally, Jay Cost’s latest in the Weekly Standard discounts Gallup’s 10-point GOP generic Congressional ballot lead. But he says the GOP’s advantage on all the key issues in another Gallup survey is enormous. It’s worth a read, even if it gets a little technical on the polls.