Pretty much everything I have to say about the matter is here.

Or, indeed, much of anything happening these days in politics – Roger Kimball writes:

…The hatred and contempt lavished upon Sarah Plain, from certain conservatives as well as from the Left, presents a dispiriting and, to me, hard-to-fathom spectacle. That is, I understand that the Left would regard her as a political threat and would therefore dislike her. But why the contempt? And why the contempt (and hatred) from the Right? I have several times explained why I admire Sarah Palin. Please note that I did not say I want her to run for the Presidency. But what (a locution that comes up often among her admirers) a breath of fresh air she is! Here you have a woman from a working-class background who, by dint of her own energy and ambition, becomes Governor of her state—a good Governor, too, by all account not tainted by The New York Times. She espouses good conservative principles: self-reliance, fiscal responsibility, a strong national defense. And, on top of all that, she is a courageous and loving mother to a passel of children.

What’s not to like? That she chose to keep and love a Down Syndrome child? That sets the teeth of many on edge, I know, though they are loathe to come right out and admit it. Granted: She’s not a lawyer. She’s not from the Ivy League. She’s not part of the Washington Establishment. Heavy liabilities, what? I acknowledge that her performance in front of Katie Couric and other barracuda-like interviewers was poor, embarrassing even. But put that and all the other charges in the scale on one side, then put her virtues on the other: which side wins out?…

Of course, to the left as a whole – and elitists conservatives, as well – it is the very fact that Palin lacks either a degree in law or journalism which is a flaw. Additional flaw: having more than one or two designer children. Really bad flaw: being married to a regular guy whom every other regular guy in the US wouldn’t mind going fishing/hunting with while not being willing to go within a country mile of, say, Al Gore (if she does become the GOP Presidential nominee there will be fierce competition among outsdoorsy GOPers for the VP slot…fishing trip to the Alaskan outback with Mr. Palin via Air Force One, anyone?). Final flaw: she doesn’t care what the left and sundry elites think of her.

Anyways, they won’t understand her. They are incapable of such comprehension because to understand Sarah Palin – and her appeal – is to understand the United States out side of the elite enclaves. It’ll be very fun to watch how this pans out over the next two years.

How on earth did we get saddled with such a fool at Treasury?

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said the U.S. isn’t in danger of losing its AAA debt rating even though the Obama administration has predicted a $1.6 trillion budget deficit in 2010.

“Absolutely not,” Geithner said, when asked in an ABC News interview broadcast yesterday whether a downgrade is a concern. “That will never happen to this country.”

Yes it darn will, you two-bit tax cheat! All you have to do is keep spending more than we take in and its a certainty…and even if your boss is promising “deficit reduction”, all that does – at best – is delay the day of reckoning. Foreigners don’t have to park their money in US securities – heck, they are probably only doing it now out of habit and the only reason we’re not already downgraded from AAA is because no one wants to be the first to declare the United States bankrupt.

We’re broke and this is the economic leadership we have – people who’s only goal must be to keep the ball in the air until their own assets – and the assets of their friends – are safely parked in things which wills survive a second Great Depression.

Is right here:

Egyptian activists have protested in front of parliament and called for legislation giving Christians equal rights as Muslims to build houses of worship.

The demonstrators, both Muslim and Christian, were also protesting Wednesday against sectarian strains in the country, particularly in light of a Christmas Eve slaying of six Coptic Christians and a Muslim guard outside a church in southern Egypt.

The government maintains that sectarian harmony prevails in Egypt and says the January 6 attack had no religious dimension.

The ten percent of Egyptians who are Coptic complain of being denied equal citizenship rights.

A very big thank you to those Egyptian Moslems who showed up in favor of Christian liberty – that took rare courage.

But the fundamental conflict is this: that Christians, as such, are considered a pollution by many powers in the Moslem world. Jews are,too – as are any non-Moslems. There can be no real, lasting peace between Islam and Christians (and thus Islam and the West) until all Moslems respect the right of Christians to worship freely and gain converts in the Moslem world. And this includes in places like Mecca and Medina. Until there is this change in Islam, any peace will be the merest papering over of the cracks.

Just wanted to send out our congratulations – great season, great game!

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Sorry I was remiss on the writing, guys and gals, but we had the party last night and after four or five beers, I’m probably not in shape for political discourse…

Sarah Palin’s TEA Party speech on You Tube.

Sarah Palin: Smarter than her opponents.

The GOP is encouraging new comers to run for office – a smart, but risky move. Smart because it brings new blood in and taps voter anger with the political maching; risky because you might get the odd bad apple in there…

Gore Vidal called a “crackpot”…read to find out who, apparently, was the last person on earth to figure this out.

Following the money on Climategate.

Climategate – a failure of Old Media journalism.

Mark Steyn: “The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in Spaceballs (which seems the appropriate comparison) called ‘Ludicrous Speed.’”

And the Saints win it by 7.

UPDATE: The Tebow ad. Leftist, pro-abortion people are idiots, ya know?

My, goodness, that’s a lot:

Gay, Mentally Challenged Biracial Male Cheerleader Claims Discrimination

No more problems, though – every corporation in America will be seeking to hire this guy to fill a score or so affirmative action slots…

This is, as I said, getting more and more fun all the time:

Not just any generic Democrat either. Debra Medina, businesswoman and “tea party acitivist,” 41; Bill White, mayor of Houston, 38.

She’s not an “official” tea-party candidate, of course, since there’s no such thing — for the moment.

Gonna be a really fun year…

Told ya so:

There’s a reason why Americans who don’t happen to work for the government or directly benefit from its largesse are not sensing an economic recovery. For them, it’s mostly not happening. ADP’s January employment report showing 22,000 private-sector jobs lost, the last available jobs-related information available when this column was written, only confirms that feeling.

A look at what has happened to the nation’s inflation-adjusted gross domestic product (GDP), the value of all goods and services produced in the economy, during the last six quarters is sadly instructive. Comparing the fourth quarter of 2009 with the second quarter of 2008, we see that:

* Even after six months of “recovery,” the economy as a whole has shrunk by almost 2%.
* Uncle Sam’s level of annualized consumption and “investment” has grown by 8.5%.
* Despite the incessant pleadings of poverty by most state and local governments, their consumption and “investment” have hardly changed.
* What remains, i.e., the private sector, is over 3% smaller.(emphasis added)

Its all smoke and mirrors – Uncle Sam, via the Fed, magically created money out of thin air and has used it to “invest” in the economy resulting in GDP numbers which appear to be growing…but the real economy, where wealth is created, continues to shrink. And this means we are net poorer than we were before Obama’s spendulus was enacted.

We must balance the budget. We must cut taxes. We must remove the regulations which prevent wealth creation via making, mining and growing things. If we don’t do this, then we’ll just flop around – increasingly impoverished and ultimately heading for a crash which might result in a default on our sovereign debt.

If we follow Obama and his Democrats then we are just following them off a cliff…

Geesh:

Harry Knox, a member of President Barack Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, has stood by his past comment that Pope Benedict XVI is “hurting people in the name of Jesus.”

Knox, a former licensed minister of the United Methodist Church and a leader with the homosexual activist group Human Rights Campaign (HRC), originally made his comments in March 2009 in response to Pope Benedict’s comments about the effectiveness of condoms in fighting AIDS in Africa…

…In March 2009, Dr. Green told CNA that researchers cannot find an association between more condom use and lower HIV rates. He has also written that programs to increase fidelity in relationships and to reduce the number of sex partners are effective.

Previously, Knox has described Pope Benedict XVI and certain Catholic bishops as “discredited leaders” because of their opposition to same-sex “marriage.”

Though acknowledging the Knights of Columbus’ “good works,” he also called the Catholic fraternal order’s members “foot soldiers of a discredited army of oppression” because of the organization’s support for the successful California ballot measure Proposition 8…

Way to change the tone, there, and bring us all together. I feel the love. Is there anyone in the Obama Administration who isn’t an ass or a fool?

Anyways…

We know the drill – for the left, the way to cure the problems caused by immorality is to make immorality more prevalent. Thus the leftist response to teen pregnancy is to teach teens how to have sex and their response to the spread of AIDS is to work out ways where African men can remain promiscuous but feel like they are safe. We’re the “discredited army of oppression” because we dare to point out that the sure fire way to cure the problems caused by immorality is to try and be a bit more moral.

While we are called to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect, in practical terms we are only expected to try, day by day, to do a little better than the day before. Liberals bought the lie that we can be as gods, and when this boomerangs on them their response is to get angry with those of us who pointed out the error. Meanwhile, people are dying – but that is ok because they are poor, brown-skinned people that liberals never meet in Manhattan or DC or San Francisco…their deaths might be bad, but more important is to adhere to the notion that self-control is the worst thing possible.

And, of course, these people have found a home in the Obama Administration. How am I, as a Catholic, supposed to work with such people? I realize that no matter how gross the insult I am to forgive – and that is something I can and will do. But when Obama says he wants people like me to join him in partnership to make America better, what am I supposed to do? Grin like an idiot when some fool makes a bigoted statement about me and mine?

I don’t think so. There are many steps President Obama can take to make it more likely that Christians of an orthodox stripe will give him a hearing – and one of the first he can do is get rid of Harry Knox.

The news:

Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) — Non-performing loans in China have risen into the “trillions of renminbi” because of poor lending practices, an insolvency lawyer said.

“We work really closely with SASAC, the state-owned enterprise regulator in China, and there are literally trillions and trillions of renminbi of, frankly, defaulting loans already in China that no one is doing anything about,” Neil McDonald, a Hong Kong-based business restructuring and insolvency partner with Lovells LLP, said at an Asia-Pacific Loan Market Association conference yesterday. “At some point there’s going to be a reckoning for that.”

What is happening? Well, the truth is that no one really knows – least of all the Chinese government. Think of it like this: the Chinese government at the start of the year says that growth will be 8% this year. Are you going to be the apparatchik who sends up word that there was actually a contraction of 10%? Only if you want to get shot.

The only thing we do know for certain is that a huge amount of fiat money has been shoved in to the Chinese economy. The government made the money and then ordered China’s banks to lend it – and lend they did. And the Chinese people borrowed like mad and bought property and stocks in a gigantic, speculative bubble. Is that bubble bursting right now? Impossible to tell.

China’s government – at least officially – is concerned about this and is allegedly taking steps to reign in the borrow and spend binge before it gets entirely out of control. But there still is the fact that if you’re in charge of anything in China, you’d better show growth. And if a higher up wants a loan, you’d better give it to him. Its a huge mess – the lid is kept on, for the present, because the Chinese government is willing to use extreme measures to crack down on any unrest sparked by this…and, of course, a lot of western financial institutions, invested to the hilt in China’s stock and property bubbles, have a vested interest in convincing everyone that all is well…just as they had such interest in the US housing bubble…and we remember how well that worked out.

This will blow up in everyone’s face. Do not for a minute believe those who are selling the story that China has developed a new economic paradigm which is destined to over take the United States and become the model for the world. China is a communist dictatorship – corrupt, hidebound and fundamentally unstable, as are all regimes which don’t base their power upon consent of the governed. We heard the stories of a new paradigm with Germany in the 60’s and Japan in the 80’s – each of those nations was also supposed to have permanently figured it out and was going to outstrip the United States. This one is worse than Japan and Germany because, of course, the entire Chinese economy is a confidence game.

Get ready for the crash – now, next week, next month, next year; it will come.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

Love this headline over at Gay Patriot:

Sh**load of Global Warming Set to Cripple Northeast USA

UPDATE: India proves itself smarter than us.

Not at all surprising:

The Gallup Poll reports that a majority of Democrats, 53%, have a “positive” image of socialism, which includes independents who lean toward the blue party.

Only 17 percent of Republican and GOP-leaners hold socialism in a positive light. In total, more than one-third of Americans, 36%, have a positive image of socialism.

Also viewing socialism positively: 61% of liberals, 39% of moderates and 20% of conservatives.

So, perhaps Obama’s plan is really just a Bolshevik plot, even though he denies it?

Well, the new numbers are out… Unemployment remains teetering around ten percent – even though Obama said it wouldn’t go above 8 percent — and even the though the unemployment edged down a bit, 20,000 jobs were lost, we’ve still lost 8.4 million jobs in this recession. How many jobs “saved or created” does that come out to?

 Is Barry proud of this? Is this a solid B-plus economy? Is 16.5 percent underemployment the best this administration can deliver?

UPDATE: Past Deficits vs. Obama’s Deficits in Pictures

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: Mish breaks down the job numbers:

In the continuing theater of BLS absurdities, the unemployment rate fell to 9.7% in spite of a 25th consecutive month of job losses. Some stopped counting at 22 months in November. However, I find November questionable.

This month professional services contributed 44,00 jobs to the plus side, but 52,000 of them were part-time jobs. Amazingly a table below shows the number of part-time workers decreased by 849,000 from last month. Go figure.

Moreover, the so-called 64,000 rise in November can be attributed to the seasonally adjusted hiring of 94,000 temporary workers…

Read the whole thing.

Me: I’m doubtful about this 9.7% number – it just doesn’t make sense given that we’re still shedding jobs and I can’t imagine that many people getting discouraged while there was a recent extension of unemployment benefits (once your benefits run out, you’re no longer counted as unemployed, even if you haven’t got a job). There’s always been a bit of BS in the unemployment numbers but it still has been a useful metric because it used the same methodology all the time, and thus you could at least spot the trends (ie, is unemployment going up, or going down?)…but now, I’m not so sure. I wonder if someone is playing around with the number of discouraged workers? The more such there are, the better the official unemployment rate looks…and who really gets to say who is “discouraged”? Given the rank dishonesty of the Obama Administration, its easy to believe they are faking the numbers.

Have to make my world famous, Noonan-family recipe spaghetti sauce – an old recipe first worked up by my grandmother in the 1930’s and refined ever since first by my father, then by myself. We’re having a get-together tomorrow, and so I have to make the sauce today (because spaghetti sauce always tastes better the second day, ya dig?).

Anyways, this pre-empts the morning writing time, so have at it – and remember, if you ever meet me and get a chance to sample the sauce, it means you are exceptionally lucky. It really is good stuff.

What you get when you cobble together a bunch of stagnant, socialist economies stuck with relentless population decline:

The Greek debt crisis has spread to Spain and Portugal in a dangerous escalation as global markets test whether Europe is willing to shore up monetary union with muscle rather than mere words.

Julian Callow from Barclays Capital said the EU may to need to invoke emergency treaty powers under Article 122 to halt the contagion, issuing an EU guarantee for Greek debt. “If not contained, this could result in a `Lehman-style’ tsunami spreading across much of the EU.”

Credit default swaps (CDS) measuring bankruptcy risk on Portuguese debt surged 28 basis points on Thursday to a record 222 on reports that Jose Socrates was about to resign as prime minister after failing to secure enough votes in parliament to carry out austerity measures…

…Mr Callow of Barclays said EU leaders will come to the rescue in the end, but Germany has yet to blink in this game of “brinkmanship”. The core issue is that EMU’s credit bubble has left southern Europe with huge foreign liabilities: Spain at 91pc of GDP (€950bn); Portugal 108pc (€177bn). This compares with 87pc for Greece (€208bn). By this gauge, Iberian imbalances are worse than those of Greece, and the sums are far greater. The danger is that foreign creditors will cut off funding, setting off an internal EMU version of the Asian financial crisis in 1998.

You’ve got to live like human beings – and that means working a lot, having some children and not building up a welfare State. We’ve caught a great deal of this disease, too, but not nearly this bad. Obama, of course, thinks it would be a swell idea to follow right along down this path, but I think that the American people will prevent him from doing it. And not only prevent him, but change the political landscape to the point where we can roll back the socialism which has infected our body politic.

The real lesson of this entire crisis – really, the lesson of the past 100 years – is that we went severely off course and if we want to live, at all, we’d better go back to where we screwed up and start afresh. We must heed Solzhenitsyn’s diagnoses – we “forgot about God” in the 20th century century, and even when we didn’t fall in to absolute evil, yet we still fell away from that rational living which is only possible among people who have the humility to understand that God is ultimately in charge; that we cannot set up entirely on our own but must give proper due to the laws of God.

It is a hard lesson, but well learned. At least, it has been learned by some of us – for others, I fear, only death and complete destruction will bring them to understanding.

And its really rather sad:

The national director for Generation Life says it comes as no surprise that liberal groups are upset over a Super Bowl ad featuring Tim Tebow and his mother.

Focus on the Family produced the 30-second spot, which is slated to run during the CBS broadcast on Sunday and reportedly will feature Pam Tebow recounting her decision to carry Tim to full-term, despite a doctor’s advice to have an abortion due to health concerns.

Liberal and feminist groups were quick to denounce the ad, even though it has yet to be previewed, and Brandi Swindell, founder and national director of Generation Life, contends the heated opposition shows the liberal groups’ true colors.

“They’re not really pro-choice organizations — they are pro-abortion organizations,” she contends. “So it’s disappointing when you see ads that pretend to be pro-woman, that at the end of the day are completely anti-woman. And we see them being very pro-abortion, very anti-woman as they protest and are so angry over this ad.”

The National Organization for Women has criticized the network’s decision to air the ad, saying it (is) “life threatening” and “extraordinarily offensive and demeaning.” To which, self-described pro-choice sports columnist Sally Jenkins replies : “If the pro-choice stance is so precarious that a story about someone who chose to carry a risky pregnancy to term undermines it, then CBS is not the problem.”

And there is the final truth of the matter – while plenty of people, as individuals, are pro-choice, the so-called “pro-choice” movement is actually pro-abortion. They are on the war path against this ad because it is an effective ad – it shows that even in the most trying of times, where there is life, there is hope. The leaders of the “pro-choice” movement are worried that the ad will just continue a long-standing trend – of more and more women choosing life and hope over death and despair.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two motivators for the “pro-choice” movement: greed and guilt. Greed, on the part of some who make bank off either performing abortion or running “pro-choice” groups. Guilt, on the part of those who have obtained, performed or assisted in abortion – or, by advocacy, have clearly advanced abortion – and now carry about the knowledge that they are complicit in murder of the unborn. The real pity is that they don’t realize that forgiveness and redemption are just a prayer away – they can get the burden of death off their shoulders and become people of Life, just by asking.

But pride isn’t a deadly sin just for the heck of it – it is, in my view, the deadliest of the deadly sins because it prevents us from rejecting all sin, and from accepting any salvation. People don’t like to admit they are wrong – it hurts the pride to have to humbly admit to error. And this especially true of those errors which remain after we’ve excused ourselves 10,000 times because of circumstances, and now are face to face with that error which clearly and absolutely our fault. Something we did which we know was wrong before we did it. As long as Pride hangs around such an error, the prideful person will never let it go.

And so the pro-abortion stones will continue to be cast, though it is clear that the Culture of Life is slowly winning the battle. This is natural because life is natural – we’re built for it and eagerly accept it; to reject it and to seek its end for trivial reasons just goes against the grain.

Acting like ClimateGate and UN-Gate never existed, the tone-deaf anti Quixotes over at the LA Times continue to tilt at windmills:

Even before Republican Scott Brown’s stunning election to the Senate in traditionally Democratic Massachusetts last month, it was proving hard to corral moderate Democrats to support a bill capping greenhouse gas emissions. Now they’re afraid to back anything that could be perceived as harmful to the economy. “Realistically, the cap-and-trade bills in the House and the Senate are going nowhere,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told the New York Times. That’s a distressing comment coming from one of the three senators supposedly crafting a compromise climate bill that’s capable of achieving a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

President Obama has backed down too. On Tuesday, he signaled that cap-and-trade could go the way of healthcare reform’s “public option,” saying it could be removed from the climate bill. That would eliminate the market mechanism for pricing greenhouse gas pollution — and without setting such a carbon price, other measures under consideration, such as a national renewable energy standard, won’t go far enough to significantly slow global warming.

And whatever will the Billy Goats Gruff do about the troll that remains under the bridge?

The gig is up. The party is over. Nobody buys your claptrap anymore.

Go back to the drawing board, warmers–time to come up with another scam.

Because they never existed:

The U.S. may lose 824,000 jobs when the government releases its annual revision to employment data on Feb. 5, showing the labor market was in worse shape during the recession than known at the time.

I like that; “during the recession”, as if we’re actually out of it.

Anyways…

What happened here is that bureaucrats, looking through their rose-colored glasses, figured that a certain number of jobs are being created. How do they figure this? Best I can figure is that they guess – whether its a guess they work out on paper or just pull out of their rear end, I don’t know. Anyways, they say that – even in the midst of the worst economy since the Depression – people are just out there creating jobs right, left and center. Meaning that the employment picture is not as bad as it might look if you merely pay attention to that trivial fact of massive job cuts all across the economy. Eventually, though, they have to square the guess with reality – and thus, we’re going to see the jobs shrink by 824,000.

This won’t change the unemployment rate – that rate has its own series of guesses which ultimately prove laughably false. But it does show that nothing good was happening in 2009. As I’ve said, all the “recovery” has been is smoke and mirrors. And I’m holding firm to my contention that the economy continues to contract – that we are getting net poorer by the day here in the United States. I base this on the simple fact that there is no incentive to create wealth right now, even if the prospect is there (which its mostly not), and when you factor in growing population, you get a net loss, even if the dollar value of the economy doesn’t shrink (though I think that is happening, too).

We can get out of this – but only if we lay off half the government, cut taxes, cease borrowing and remove those regulations which make it hard to make, mine and grow things. Until we do that, we’ll just be digging ourselves a deeper hole.

HAT TIP: Gay Patriot

I love it.

One sign that Washington, D.C., had been home to Obama Mania was the number of independent retailers selling all sorts of Obama merchandise. Every street corner, it seemed, had Obama wares (or Obama wear) for sale
. Now, however, most of the winter caps for sale are not emblazoned with the Obama logo. T-shirts depicting our president as a dunking Michael Jordan, a victorious Muhammad Ali, or saber-baring Luke Skywalker (yes, these shirts all existed) are nowhere to be found.

This time last year, the Obama Store was teeming with customers. Ideally situated in the basement of Washington’s Union Station, the store was filled with consumers eager to buy anything with Obama’s likeness while others took pictures of the life-size cut-outs of the president and first lady. Now, the Obama Store is boarded up.

How quickly things change in a year.

So, we got Democrats in reelection battles distancing themselves from Barry, and now Obama merchandise is becoming dollar store junk items. Hard to believe? Well, given the absolute failure of his administration, it is actually quite understandable. After all, in 2012, when he runs for reelection, his new slogan will have be “No, We Couldn’t” and that just doesn’t have the same appeal as “Yes, We Can.”

This is going to make our liberals scream:

Well, here we go. Remember the number of articles bemoaning the fact that Europeans are stupefied by Bush’s arrogance, or whatever (or words to that effect)? Well, now we get a huge front-page headline in Le Monde saying Europeans Shattered by Obama’s Indifference (Les Européens ébranlés par l’indifférence d’Obama)…

…an editorial in Le Monde bemoans the fact that Europe has been snubbed — again (this time, it is Barack Obama’s refusal to participate in José Luis Zapatero’s USA-Europe summit). As for Arnaud Leparmentier and Corine Lesnes’ article, it starts with these words:

Bush n’était pas le problème. Obama n’est pas la solution…

If any of you liberals out there don’t understand French, I’ll venture to translate that, if asked.

Anyways, we’re always happy to say, “we told you so”. Obama never should have been nominated, let alone elected. He’s completely out of his depth. Compounding the problem is that the whole Obama Administration – and the whole American left – doesn’t understand the complexities of global politics. I know you on the left think you do, but you really don’t – it takes hard nosed, American realists to see what you blinded yourselves to.

It isn’t about Bush being a “cowboy”. It isn’t about “unilateralism” (an absurd claim given that we never did anything without partners). It isn’t about US support for Israel. Its not about any of your liberal talking points – its all about power: who has it, who wants and and what is to be done with it. President Bush understood this, Obama doesn’t and thus Obama can’t even keep European leftists happy with US policy.

The Europeans are waking up – wonder when our own liberals will?