Georgia is going against the grain, cutting taxes, Stephen Moore reports in the email-accessible WSJ.Com’s Political Diary.

Senate Majority Leader Dan Moody says: “We are trying to create a contrast with the overspending and overtaxing in D.C.” Jonathan Williams of the American Legislative Exchange Council adds: “We know from recent history that those states that cut their taxes will gain more jobs and will have a faster economic recovery.”

No soaking the rich down there, at least if the Republican governor goes along.

Gotcha, John Maynard:

John Maynard Keynes often employed flowery language like “animal spirits” and “liquidity trap” to describe things he did not understand. He was, after all, more of a bureaucrat than an economist. In fact, he would best be described as an anti-economist because he eschewed things like supply and demand and held the opinion that government could run the economy.

He be the devil-may-care proponent of our newly resurrected borrow-and-spend philosophy.  He may rest in peace again some day, but not yet.

Looking, acting, talking like a . . . duck?

President Obama showed his hand this week when The New York Times wrote that he is considering converting the stock the government owns in our country’s banks from preferred stock, which it now holds, to common stock.

This seemingly insignificant change is momentous. It means that the federal government will control all of the major banks and financial institutions in the nation. It means socialism.

Dick Morris cutting to the chase.

The view from Jerusalem:

[I]f Obama feels that he has to be the one to greet a man like Chavez, must it be with the kind of ear-to-ear grin that one might show girl scouts selling cookies? It must surely be disheartening for those who suffer oppression in countries like Venezuela, Cuba and Saudi Arabia to see the American president backslapping their oppressors when these victims have always looked up to the United States as their champions.

There was more, as we know, including:

the incident of President Barack Obama seeming to bow before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the G-20 summit in London. The president’s people denied it was a bow, but it certainly was a sign of great deference from the American president to the dictator of a country who just six weeks ago sentenced a 75-year-old woman to 40 lashes for having been secluded with her nephew after he delivered bread to her home.

And then there’s the overture to Cuba,

a country which engages in systemic human rights abuses, including torture, arbitrary imprisonment, unfair trials and extrajudicial executions. Censorship is so extensive that Cubans face five-year prison sentences for connecting to the Internet illegally. And not only is emigration illegal, but even discussing it carries a six-month prison sentence.

He’s too bad to be true:

While he was campaigning for the presidency, Obama promised, “As president I will recognize the Armenian genocide.” But in a press conference in Ankara with President Abdullah Gul, he refused to use the word “genocide” when challenged by a reporter on the issue. Yet, it was Obama’s early foreign policy adviser Samantha Power of Harvard who wrote A Problem from Hell, the definitive book on the American non-intervention in repeated 20th-century genocides, beginning with the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks which killed 1.5 million between the years of 1915 and 1923.

The book changed the writer’s life, he says, he being a Jew who does not want the world to forget the Holocaust.  He presents a scenario:

Suppose Obama succeeds in building friendships with Chavez, Castro, Ahmadinejad and the Taliban. What then? Does America still get to feel that it stands for something? Will we still be the beacon of liberty and freedom to the rest of the world, or will we have sold out in the name of political expediency? And do any of us seriously believe that presidential friendship is going to get a megalomaniac like Hugo Chavez to ease up on the levers of power, or are we just feeding his ego by showing him he can be a tyrant and still have a beer with the president of the United States? Will the Iranians really stop enriching uranium through diplomacy rather than economic sanctions?

And yet, oddly, the man prizes Obama’s “sunny optimism.”  That’s what it is?  Not lunacy?

Dumping signs on other people’s property has paid off for Pope, Hedges, Brewer, Lueck, Powell, Conway, Bracco, and Graves, who all won election or re-election yesterday.

It is their signs that festoon front lawns on the 300 South block of Oak Park Ave., west side — all apartment buildings, at least one owner of which was not informed ahead of time. 

Bully for them and their eager supporters, who, however, threw over the longstanding OP understanding that signs mean support by a household’s voters, rather than mere advertising.

We now await their collection and recyclying of these signs, now obsolete, from people’s front yards.  Hope-a, hope-a, hope-a.  Something we can believe in, peoples.

Heavy-duty yard signs turned up on multi-unit building lawns on the 300 South Oak Park Avenue block, for a high school board candidate (whose robo-call was received here a day or so ago) and candidates for village board and park district — seven or eight in all, to catch the busy, busy, southbound traffic.

At least one landlord was neither asked nor informed about the signs.  Dirty pool in Oak Park!  Illegal!

Later: I should have identified the candidates whose supporters are violating the longstanding unwritten rule that a lawn sign indicates voter support, not candidate’s self-support, being placed on a voter’s private property by the voter.

Shame! on people connected with:

* the VMA-related village slate

* the Bracco-Graves park district ticket

* OPRF board candidate Jacques Conway

This in addition to planting signs on property without owner’s consent, as happened in at least one instance, as mentioned above.