From the AP:

Days after the U.S. officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq’s ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the center of Baghdad on Sunday. The fighting killed 12 people and wounded dozens.

It was the first exchange of fire involving U.S. troops in Baghdad since the Aug. 31 deadline for formally ending the combat mission, and it showed that American troops remaining in the country are still being drawn into the fighting…

Which is almost inevitable now that we’re no longer on a combat mission. The war will not be amenable to liberal conceptions – it will be fought as a war, until one side or the other wins. You don’t just “end” a war.

Obama made a grave error in making a big speech about the supposed end of our combat role. Our combat roll ends when the last American soldier leaves – until then, the combat goes on. The speech should have been saved to welcome the last troops home – which probably could be accomplished fairly swiftly, except that now our actions have encouraged the enemy and caused a bit of political drift in Iraq as they are unsure of their position.

The President must start to understand that our goal is not to end the fighting, as a thing. Our goal is to win – President Bush understood this and thus we were able to crush the Islamist insurgency. Now the remnants of that are trying to re-start, hoping that our draw down and the clear desire to be done with it on the part of Obama have given them a chance to re-establish their presence. A firm declaration that we are, as we were before, committed to victory will be the best means of heartening our allies in Iraq and discouraging our enemies.

Let’s hope Obama sees the light here.

Humility is an important virtue:

Who can know God’s counsel,

or who can conceive what the LORD intends?

For the deliberations of mortals are timid,

and unsure are our plans.

For the corruptible body burdens the soul

and the earthen shelter weighs down the mind that has many concerns.

And scarce do we guess the things on earth,

and what is within our grasp we find with difficulty;

but when things are in heaven, who can search them out?

Or who ever knew your counsel, except you had given wisdom

and sent your holy spirit from on high?

And thus were the paths of those on earth made straight.- Wisdom, 9:13-18b

Keep that in mind in all things – and remember that if you suddenly come up with the brilliant plan which saves the day, it was because God gave it to you, you listened and acted.

The Israeli ambassador to the United States claims Hezbollah has 15,000 rockets in Lebanon. As the Israelis and Palestinians start talking peace, remember that Israel does so knowing that at any moment, death can rain down from the skies on them.

Poll: People, on the whole, prefer a GOP new-comer to any other type of politician, including over GOP incumbents. What have I been saying all year? People are rejecting the establishment: the Ruling Class. The GOP will do very well November 2nd, but a good deal of this is just having more outsiders running than party-in-power Democrats. If the GOP doesn’t make good on the peoples’ desires, then there will be a huge price to be paid (H/T: Mish’s)

Analysis: GOP will clean up in governorships, too. This is very important with redistricting upcoming. Could mean another dozen or so GOP seats in 2012 – and untold numbers at the State level.

Religion in the modern world – very funny, but my goodness it is as bad as all that, now isn’t it?

A bit of analysis on why liberals hate.

Iowahawk: Barack, can we talk?

Tyler Durden over at Zero Hedge notes an interesting fact and draws the logical conclusion:

One of the most peculiar observations of this depression (which) started in December 2007 is that while the total US population has increased by 6.8 million from 303.3 million to just over 310 million in July 2010, over the same 32 month period, the civilian labor force has declined from 153.9 million to 153.6 million…

…the cumulative differential between the labor force as reported, and as calculated has hit an all time record of 3.7 million: this is a number that has to be added to the 7.6 million directly tabulated unemployed to get a sense of just how many jobs have been lost assuming a reversion to the mean for the US economy. In other words, after eliminating the statistical voodoo of the BEA and the Census Bureau, the US has lost just over 11.2 million jobs since the start of the recession…

Which, in turn, means that the job “growth” Obama and Co have been crowing about is really non-existent. Even the BLS report this past Friday that 67,000 private sector jobs were created is just so much fluff – its really just a made up number; an estimate. And its piled on top of other estimates and suppositions and, presto!, we get official government numbers which are increasingly worthless in determining what is going on. Much better, than, to look at hard data – how many people are living here; how many are working; how many used to work here. Taking a look at that and you get a very grim picture.

This is why on the economy the roof is caving in on the Democrats. They can give us all the “recovery summer” propaganda they want and their allies in the MSM can tell us over and over again that things are getting better, but the people know better. I know better – I can see economic catastrophe all around me, as I drive around town. I’m sure any of us can say the same thing.

We can get out of this. Not without pain and not without hard work and sacrifice – but we can get out of this. Unfortunately, standing right in our path to recovery is Obama and his Democrats and their allegiance to worn out, failed Keynesian economic theory…

Desperation:

As Democrats brace for a November wave that threatens their control of the House, party leaders are preparing a brutal triage of their own members in hopes of saving enough seats to keep a slim grip on the majority.

In the next two weeks, Democratic leaders will review new polls and other data that show whether vulnerable incumbents have a path to victory. If not, the party is poised to redirect money to concentrate on trying to protect up to two dozen lawmakers who appear to be in the strongest position to fend off their challengers…

This is a clear indicator that the Democrat leadership has got their own polls and they see the writing on the wall – a last ditch, desperate attempt is going to be made to save 218 House seats. This is also both logical and pointless – by pulling the plug on what are perceived to be lost causes, all the Democrats will end up doing is freeing up funds for the GOP to more strongly challenge less vulnerable Democrats.

I love smell of Democrats melting down in the morning. It smells like…victory!

Interesting article in, of all places, the New York Times about the effect of the repeal of blue laws on happiness in women. To nutshell it, the study indicates that a repeal of the blue laws (which, among other things, dictated that retail stores be closed on Sundays) led to a decline in church attendance and a decline in female happiness.

This, in and of itself, is interesting, but it also allows one to open up the subject – have the repeal of the blue laws improved our society? This study tends to indicate there is a concrete, measurable detriment to society in such actions. Lots of suggestions are made in the article as to why this should be – I go with the suggestion that a open store as a temptation to stay away from church leads to unhappiness as we human beings are supposed to be turned towards God. Turning away from Him in order to get 15% off at the mall is inherently disastrous. But even leaving aside such matters of faith, I still believe that the blue laws should be re-instated.

Our modern, always on the go society is suffering from what amounts to a spiritual hernia. The demand for the instant and for the inexpensive – ginned up by advertising campaigns which stimulate both our greed and our self-regard (how many commercials have you seen where it is asserted you “deserve” some item? Truth is, as Shakespeare put it, if we were treated as we deserved, none of us would ‘scape whipping) – have turned us in to a people of no time. No time to pause and reflect. No time to just sit and read a book. No time for family. No time for anything except working to earn the money to spend – and then borrow when we don’t have enough to spend at the moment.

I experience this at my own employment for a major, international financial firm. I will be at work tomorrow, on a Sunday. Because it is felt (quite erroneously, given the state of the economy) by senior management that there might be a flood of people looking for credit for purchases. I’ll also work on Monday, a holiday, for the same reason. There are people at my employer working right now – and there will be people working there ’round the clock, every day of the year (they do graciously still allow us off on Christmas and Thanksgiving day – but we have foreign outfits who can take the calls on those days). While I’m not there at the time,, I do come across the people who had called or e mailed at 2AM their time asking for a credit limit increase. If you’re looking for money at 2AM, then you’re doing something you shouldn’t…but, we’re there for you! Bankrupt yourself – exhaust yourself; you’ll always find one of our friendly people available to help!

This is good? This is necessary? No, it isn’t. What is necessary is time for human beings to be just that: human beings. And that means taking some time off. Even in the days when most humans worked from dawn until dusk in backbreaking, agricultural work, there were still plenty of holidays (which, by the way, should be noted as a mere contraction of Holy Days…feast days of the saints, and such, added to the Sabbath, so that everyone got enough time to rest and relax). We should be by and large closed for business on Sundays. And on holidays.

To be sure, the business of life does require that some work be done every day of the year. And, of course, you’ll never get Las Vegas casinos to close (though they really should – I mean, seriously, how much money is the casino really taking in at, say, 4AM on a Tuesday morning? Is it really enough to justify keeping the staff up all night?). But we should strive for a general stoppage of work at least one day a week – and as we are a nation of deeply Christian background, the logical day for it is on Sunday. And we should do a bit of enforcing holiday closures – don’t have people’s holidays wrecked because a company decides it can squeeze out 0.01% more profit if they open up at midnight, Thanksgiving rather than waiting until 9AM or so on Friday.

Old fashioned? You bet – but as has been pointed out by men much wiser than myself, if you’ve gone wrong then some times the only way to get back on track is to go all the way back to where you messed up. We messed up in becoming a relentlessly consumerist, 24/7 society. It is time to step back and become more human – and more happy as a result.

From Reuters:

Republican Meg Whitman has opened up a 7-point lead over Democrat Jerry Brown in their closely watched race for California governor, the latest poll of likely voters showed on Friday…

Not being from California I really can’t say exactly what is happening out there, but I suggest the following: an increasingly corrupt and out of touch California government is about to be punished at the polls. I think Whitman understands this – taking a page off the scandal of local government pay, Whitman has been running ads (which I heard when I was out there dealing with my brother) pointing out that Jerry Brown, when mayor of Oakland, lavished pay on his staff.

It is a devastating and unanswerable critique and exactly geared towards an election which a revolt of the people against the government. And it is things like this – a GOPer 7 points ahead in what has been a very blue State – which tells me that we should throw out the political rule books. All the pundits and polls and prognostications need to be taken with a grain of sale – no one really knows what is going to happen on November 2nd. Other than in the general sense that Democrats, holding more offices than the GOP, will lose more.

But don’t be surprised by any turn of events – the only thing we can do is just work for our side and just let things play out as they will. The people are in charge of America’s politics – not the politicians and now the “experts” who presume to tell us how things will be.

From Big Peace:

Geert Wilders has just learned that an Australian imam named Feiz Muhammad has issued a fatwa calling for the Dutch politician’s beheading. Our Flemish correspondent VH has translated a couple of Dutch-language articles on the topic, and includes additional material about Mr. Muhammad from various Australian sources…

Do click on the link and read the translated articles – they express a savage worldview.

What this tells us is that we continue to be at war. Our current leadership might not want to admit it. Politically correct liberals hate the idea of it. It would be temporarily easier if we just wrote such things off as aberrations. We can hide from the truth, but the truth remains. The terrible fact is that around the globe a subset of Islam has taken it upon itself to conquer and forcefully convert the whole world – and the rest of the Moslem world either will not or cannot bring itself to destroy the subset.

Personally, I think it is “will not” – while we get “moderate” Moslems who will, at times and after especially horrific crimes, make some noises about condemning the Islamists, I don’t believe that the bulk of Moslems really views Islamist actions as wrong. Perhaps unwise, but not wrong – at some level, almost all Moslems have a tolerance of and, perhaps, an admiration for, those Moslems who choose the jihadist path.

We will only stop the Islamists by a combination of raw, military force and a steady pressure on the Moslem world to reform. In the end, they will have to become more like us. More tolerant, less exclusive – and genuinely horrified at violence against innocent people without all the “an Israeli killed a Palestinian so its ok for an Algerian to kill Spaniards” nonsense. The one thing we can’t afford to do is let our guard down – or allow people like Feiz Muhammad to live unmolested. People such as him who make such statements will have to be taken or killed.

Free speech? Of course we have that – but we also have in our free speech the understanding that an incitement to violence is not protected…and a statement from an Imam that a person should be beheaded is an incitement to violence. We must get realistic about things – the Islamists who attack us don’t get written orders from an al Qaeda command post to carry out attacks…it is all done in a very decentralized way. And one of the things required for terrorist attacks is some statement from a respected (by Islamists) Imam that such and such action is in the interests of jihad. Now that this Imam has made the pronouncement, it will be up to some Islamist cell some where to carry it out. And they will try – of that we can be sure.

This is a serious business we’re dealing with – and the longer we carry on in a fog of political correctness and references to “man-caused disasters” the worse the situation will become.

Krauthammer quoted over at NRO’s The Corner:

… I think it’s the kind of arrogance and contempt that was shown by the Democrats.

Look, when you had the election in Massachusetts where a Republican wins a Senate seat held by the Kennedys since 1952, it means something. But it was ignored. And after it happened, Democrats shoved a health-care proposal down the throats of the Congress and the people even though it was unpopular, even though the Brown election of Massachusetts largely hinged on that and was a message about it. It was a demonstration of [Democrats saying]: We have an ideology. We won the election in ’08. We’re going to do it, and we don’t care.

And that I think is what stokes the anger of the electorate, and the energy of Republicans…

It isn’t, either, that it was just this one instance of Obamacare – that was the straw which broke the camel’s back. After decades of government ignoring the expressed will of the people, to see the raw exercise of power used to shove Obamacare through was just too much.

The people are furious with an out of touch, corrupt government all to clearly controlled by special interests. And the people, I think, will turn that government out as far as possible on November 2nd.

Because the ruling elite is becoming both more out of touch and more arrogant all the time – from the AP:

The California Assembly this week began enforcing a long-forgotten rule that constrains media coverage of legislative debates by prohibiting audio or video recorders without permission.

The rule requires reporters, television stations and even lawmakers themselves to receive advance permission from the Assembly speaker’s office before recording Assembly sessions…

In the era of TEA Parties, New Media and, most importantly, You Tube, it seems that the Democrats of the California Assembly (and they absolutely dominate that body) would prefer to not have a ready supply of direct quotes on video and audio. Such things make it hard for dimwitted politicians to deny their idiocy – so, better not to have them, at all.

A small matter – and the rule seems to have been suspended because of an uproar – but still very important. Like all collapsing power elites, ours are trying desperately to hold back the tide. They are hiding and hoping we’ll stop coming after them.

Won’t work; not even for a minute.

From Yahoo:

While the rest of the political world is preoccupied with the midterm elections, Chicago dentist William DeJean is hatching plans for 2012. He shelled out $5,000 to create an ad encouraging Americans to back a Hillary Clinton presidential run in 2012. He says the spot will run in New Orleans, Washington, New York and Los Angeles…

This is something which in any sort of normal political climate simply would not happen – but, this isn’t a normal political climate.

To be sure, if Hillary were to challenge Obama for the nomination, she’d almost certainly lose. If by some chance she were able to defeat Obama in the primaries, she’d probably lose the general election as a divided Democrat party gets crushed by a united and surging Republican party. So, why would Hillary do it?

The answer is, “because she figures she could divide the GOP – or senses that the GOP is becoming divided and thus thinks she can pull it off”. How would the GOP become divided? That would happen if we go through all the trouble of electing a new GOP Congressional majority only to find them RINOing it all to heck and gone. In other words, if they shy away from attempting to repeal Obamacare or don’t ruthlessly block the confirmation of liberal judges…then the GOP rank and file just might get very, very angry and start casting about for a Third Party alternative.

Could be a very interesting couple of years – our first sign of a Hillary run coming would be her resignation as Secretary of State by about March of 2011…giving her enough time to both distance herself from Obama and build up her campaign team on the sly.