Can jobs be found in Plato's Cave and other interesting questions for a lazy January afternoon

  By now, you've heard that our president's paradoxical speech will cover two topics: 1) the need for more jobs   2) the need to spend more money. 
  So obviously, those jobs are going to be more government jobs, an idea whose time has surely come, after all the tea party protests, the concern over our tremendous burden of debt and the over-regulation of business.
  Hinderaker at Powerline suggests the motivation behind that idea might be doling out more money for Obama cronies. Read it here.
  The eloquent Clarice at American Thinker has a few thoughts on the pillorying of Sarah Palin, with relation to the Plato's Allegory of the Cave:

In my view, the media tarring of Sarah Palin respecting the Tucson tragedy is an event which -- perhaps not this week, but soon enough -- will be remembered for having exposed the political class and cultural elites as the puppeteers projecting their own ignorance and violent hatred of Sarah onto her.  Those who uncritically followed the media will come to see that they have spent too much time in the cave and need to get out into the sunshine and face some realities.

Bill Jacobson pointed out that for all the contrived bleats of Sarah's detractors that they want more civility in public discourse, it is Sarah who has been the target of the most vile calumnies and death threats.

  Victor David Hanson wonders how our president can be quiet while his cronies and supporters pillory a woman like Palin, while at the same time calling for civility long after it would do any good:

How can a president subtly distance himself from the macabre and revolting behavior of his left-wing base while simultaneously editorializing on unhinged invective in general (e.g., without an embarrassing extreme, there is no occasion to call for moderation from others)?

Why did five days of presidential silence follow the shootings (so unlike instant editorializing about the Mutallab and Hasan incidents), when the likes of Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Andrew Sullivan, Sheriff Dupnik, and the New York Times rushed in to scavenge political capital amid the carnage .

Kevin at Hillbuzz has a theory about Governor Abercrombie's mysterious pursuit of the ever elusive birth certificate of a prominent politician:

The fact that Obama was adopted by Indonesian Lolo Soetoro in the 1970s, and his name was legally changed to Barry Soetoro at that time, is most likely the reason he is spending millions of dollars to hide his birth certificate. He never filed the papers to change his name back to “Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.”, so any birth certificate produced by the state of Hawaii would list him as “Barry Soetoro”. 

And a word from The American Spectator about the disappearance from the silver screen of one Keith Olbermann:

He was our national scold, our angry leftist father who bitterly denounced our right-wing sins. Who can replace him?

Well, apparently, MSNBC is going to have another angry leftist, Lawrence O'Donnell, take over Olbermann's 8:00 time slot.

  The admission must be made that the first thought upon hearing Olbermann was leaving was where the heck will he go? It now seems Olbermann left voluntarily, he's precluded from taking a contract at any other station or from talking about his circumstances.
  No one has ever had the illusion that Olbermann was anything but a loudmouthed pompous left wing hack. I never watched him, so his presence did not grate on me any more than any other O'Donnell, O'Connell or Maddow. Though good riddance is certainly in order, free speech and capitalism are the order of the day, although one certainly wonders how any rational capitalist could have gained much from Olbermann's audience.
  And American Thinker has a great article about another leftist attempt at murder....literal murder, not figurative.  This is another circumstance of the MSM's lack of interest in leftist violence.
  Oh, and as Weasel Zippers points out, the crazy leftist was trying to slit the throat of what he thought was the GOP Governor of Missouri.
  Oh, and be sure to catch the NY Daily News report on the fight between the renowned NYC public schools and the charter schools who need more space for their thriving and successful franchise. The teachers represented themselves very well with a terribly misspelled sign in support of their endeavors, which read: "Charter schools are like Hitler, tyrents trying to take what's not thiers!" and which they promptly blamed on the efforts of the students they had instructed. Huh. 
  Losing battle, that one.