STRANGE INEPTITUDE: “The news that the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension committee has postponed consideration of Labor Secretary nominee Hilda Solis because her husband only yesterday paid off tax liens, some of which had been pending for up to 16 years, confirms that there’s an inexplicable, widespread problem in the Obama vetting process (as if Geithner, Daschle, Richardson, Killefer, et al hadn’t already demonstrated that). . . . Either Obama and his nominees aren’t easily embarrassed, or the vetters have tin ears the size of satellite dishes.”

Related thoughts from Nathan Moore: “The problem here, at least in my view, is not so much that Solis’ husband had some rather antique tax liens hanging around, but that the Obama administration’s vetting process has revealed itself to be decidedly incompetent. Or, more accurately, arrogant, which really is just a subform of incompetence. . . . The message is clear, no matter how earnestly the president employs Newspeak rhetoric in a vain attempt to muddle it – there are two sets of rules, one for us, and one for them. If they truly believed there was one set of rules, the administration would have taken it upon itself to weed out the tax-encumbered nominees from the process, but they didn’t – and that speaks volumes.”