A big win for Governor Walker, the Wisconsin GOP and liberty – from JS Online:

Acting with unusual speed, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday reinstated Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to all but end collective bargaining for tens of thousands of public workers.

The court found a committee of lawmakers was not subject to the state’s open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when they hastily approved the measure and made it possible for the Senate to take it up. In doing so, the Supreme Court overruled a Dane County judge who had struck down the legislation, ending one challenge to the law even as new challenges are likely to emerge…

And you can count on that last bit – remember, for liberals the war is never over until they win, which is why we have to fight them until they are utterly destroyed as a political force in the United States.

But, still, this is a victory, and a major one – not only a win on the specific issue of being able to curb the corrupt public sector unions (which shouldn’t even exist – my goodness; allowing public employees to essentially conspire against the public for higher wages and benefits! It is just absurd…), but also putting a crimp in the way liberals find themselves a friendly judge and get the ruling they want. The fast strike-down of this will make liberals more wary of using it for fear not only of losing on the particular issue, but if eventually getting State and federal Supreme Court rulings striking down whole swaths of liberal laws and jurisprudence.

Celebrate the day – but remember that tomorrow and every day there is another battle to be fought.

HAT TIP: Don Surber

Thank goodness for that stimulus – from CNS:

Twenty-eight months after Congress passed President Obama’s signature economic stimulus law, and nearly one year after he declared the summer of 2010 to be “Recovery Summer,” 1.9 million fewer people are employed.

In February 2009, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that 141.7 million people were employed. By the end of May 2011 – the last month for which data are available – that number had fallen to 139.8 million, a difference of 1.9 million…

But, wait, you say – jobs have been created, haven’t they? Sure – but if the BLS says “X number of new jobs” were created in 2010, that doesn’t mean it was a net gain. The report does note that there are slightly more people working since December of 2009, the overall effect of the first two years of Obamunism is a smaller number of people working in the United States.

Why is this? Because as anyone who thinks about it realizes, the government cannot create a job – and this is because government cannot create wealth. Its like this: if I start up a business growing watermelons I have just created one job (for myself) while also creating the wealth to pay for that job (the watermelons for sale); if I do well then I might hire another person and pay them with wealth that never existed until I started up the watermelon farm.

Along comes Uncle Sam and says, “the economy is not good, so we’ll start some shovel ready stimulus to create jobs”; he then taxes me and regulates me and prints up money and I’m forced to let my employee go…who is then hired to build the road past my now abandoned farm. Government “created” a job only by destroying another one. You can some times and for very short periods of time get a net increase in jobs by doing the government route…but as the wealth for government jobs must be extracted from the wealth used for other, private sector jobs, it is always – at best – a wash. Often it is a net loss because government starts to absorb so much wealth that there is not enough surplus left over for a money man to back a new idea…and so jobs which would have happened never get started.

The quicker we get government out of the equation, the better it will be. Its no about the idiotic liberal dichotomy of “are you in favor of helping the poor or are you a callous bastard”…its a matter of understanding that the poor are better served by a genuine free market…a market free of government interference as well as crony capitalism. That is the ideal to head for – and that is where the wealth to re-employ Americans will be created.

For goodness sake:

Yes, it is an opinion piece…but it is an opinion piece that passed editorial muster on CNN, which claims to be an unbiased news source. This headline over at Daily Kos or Huffpo wouldn’t cause a stir…but it does cause a stir when an outfit which pretends to be a trusted news organization lets it out.

It is, however, useful that it came out like this – if you had the slightest doubt that the MSM would be in the tank for Obama and the Democrats in 2012, this should dispel that notion.

HAT TIP: Hot Air

I didn’t watch it – I tend not to watch actual politicians on stage because I let my political-junkie mind get in the driver’s seat. I’m always looking at it like someone who actually cares about a position one of them took 6 years ago on some obscure issue – but that is not how these things should be viewed. They should be viewed by people of intelligence, character, good basic knowledge but no dog in the hunt: in other words, the view of Joe or Jane Average American. My usual victim to have watch these things is thus the Mrs. It was the Mrs, after all, who tipped me to Obama early on – playing a large role in my prediction in September of 2007 that Obama would be the Democrat nominee. But she was busy, so no one in the house to watch this particular debate. I have, however, read after-action reports from people I respect and, on balance, it doesn’t look like it was a stellar performance by anyone.

Mark Steyn takes note of the debate, and hits upon a very important point over at NRO’s The Corner:

…I also agree that the answers on Afghanistan about deferring to the commanders in the field were pathetic – for a couple of reasons:

First, as I said in NR a couple of issues back, you can’t win a war unless you have war aims – and war aims are determined by a nation’s civilian leadership. So, if Romney & Co mean what they say, it helps explain why America has nothing to show either for a decade in the Hindu Kush or for three months over Tripoli.

Alternatively, if they don’t mean it, then they’re just pandering in a bumper-stickerish “I So Totally Support Our Troops I’ll Take My Orders From Them” kind of way. And this political season ought to be one not for panderers but for tellers of hard truths.

That is extraordinarily true and the answers given by the gathered GOPers were, from what I can see, uniformly weak – except for Ron Paul’s “get ’em out” point of view, on the grounds that it was at least a decision. I believe Paul is wrong, but I’d rather have a President who will flat out surrender than one who is so afraid to make a decision that we neither surrender nor fight to victory. Victory is always preferred, but if you won’t fight to win then you’d better pack it in before a lot of lives are lost. To defer to the military on whether or not to begin or terminate any military operation is to fail at the core aspect of Presidential leadership. At the end of the day, this is the function of the President – to decide what should be done.

President Obama routinely fails this test. We don’t move at all, or we move too late, or move with too little, or move with no clear goal in sight. This is making a hash out of things with Russia, Libya, China, Syria and Egypt…and Obama’s fat is only being pulled out of the fire in Afghanistan (and that only tenuously) because of the magnificent courage of US and allied soldiers. Like all too many leaders in history, Obama just doesn’t want to lose – but he’s afraid to make the decisions which would ensure victory. Afraid? Aren’t you being a little unfair there, Noonan – what do you mean by “afraid”? I mean precisely that – but don’t get me wrong, most political and military leaders prove, in the crisis, to be afraid. Those who aren’t turn out to be history’s great leaders and captains.

We cannot know if any of the potential GOP candidates have this rare thing – the courage to make decisions when the risks are high. It could be that all of them would fail as badly as Obama has. But one or more of them might also prove to have the stuff it takes. Only time and circumstance will ever tell that – but as it relates to the 2012 election and the necessity of getting Obama out of office, it is vital that the GOP candidate be someone who can at least articulate what is wrong with Obama’s leadership. And in this context it means setting a series of policy goals and then showing a willingness to do what proves necessary to achieve the goal. Do you want to pull out of Afghanistan? Then you’d better give us the why, give us the how you plan to do it and, additionally, tell us what you’ll do in the aftermath of a precipitate US withdrawal. Do you want us to stay in Afghanistan? Then you’d better tell us why we should stay, and what you’ll do to obtain the result you desire.

We need to point out Obama’s failures – but we can’t do so simply by echoing polling data which is showing things like Afghanistan and Libya to be unpopular. Doing that is just pandering for votes – but to win decisively over Obama we have to explain where he’s gone wrong, what we want different and how we’ll do it. These GOP candidates have it within them to offer a reformed America – the real hope and change we wanted in 2008, but were swindled out of by Obama’s slick campaign. But we can’t get there from here by saying, “bad Obama” over and over again…we have to offer someone for President who demonstrates superior Presidential ability…and that means having the courage to state what you want and what you’ll do to get it.

Hopefully there will be a major back-bone implant in to the GOP field by the time the next debate is staged – they need to do it, we need them to do. There is still plenty of time – it is beyond waaaay early right now. But it can’t be put off, forever…one of these fine people will have to start acting like a President…or someone else out there will have to get in and show how its done.

From Rasmussen:

…A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 26% of Likely U.S. Voters feel the United States should continue its military actions in Libya. Forty-two percent (42%) are opposed and 32% are undecided…

This is the result of not going through normal procedures for a war – it is the result of having NATO and the UN decide if we will fight, rather than having Americans decide, for themselves, if war is the answer. The war in Libya is the strongest evidence to date of Obama’s fundamental contempt for the United States, its people and our form of government. To an uber-liberal like Obama, transnational organizations like NATO and the UN are inherently superior in judgment to the American people, as well as their elected representatives. To have consulted the people – or Congress – would be to put the wise and far-seeing judgment of UN apparatchiks at the mercy of a nation of bitter clingers.

The really sad thing about it is that intervention in Libya is in America’s best interest – and I also believe that Obama could have easily secured popular and Congressional approval for the action, had he sought it. He refused to take us in to his confidence and presented us, instead, with a fait accompli…almost daring us, now, to pull the plug on the adventure. He knows that on his side there will be many who simply won’t want to cross a Democrat President, while many on our side won’t want to undercut an ongoing military operation. President Obama has placed us all in a very bad position and has gravely weakened the United States…we neither have the leadership to seek total victory nor the political will to terminate the effort.

All we can say to this is that 2012 cannot get here fast enough…

This is just plain weird:

Just one day after the author behind a popular Syrian lesbian blog admitted to being a married, American man named Tom MacMaster, the editor of the lesbian news site Lez Get Real, with the tag­line “A Gay Girl’s View on the World,” acknowledged that he is also a man.

“Paula Brooks,” editor of Lez Get Real since its founding in 2008, is actually Bill Graber, 58, a retired Ohio military man and construction worker who said he had adopted his wife’s identity online. Graber said she was unaware he had been using her name on his site…

It is a strange world we live in, to be sure – and while the internet has been tremendously helpful in a lot of ways, it also has its very dark side. One of the darker aspects of it is the ability it provides to pretend you are other than you are. We’ve seen it here on Blogs for Victory – people coming back under different names and presenting different biographies, all designed to lend credence to a series of opinions. The man in question here states that he wouldn’t be taken seriously as an advocate for gay issues unless he was perceived as gay. This, then, is also an example of what happens when the liberal “divide and conquer” strategy is implemented over the long term: many people really do feel that only a gay person can represent gays, just as some hold that only a black man can represent blacks, etc.

I can understand a desire to hide behind a different name on the ‘net – I decided when I first started commenting on line that I would always use my real name. This has been a cause for regret at times – I have been stalked and not only is dirt dug up on me and spread around, but it has also harmed other people named “Mark Noonan” as dirt has been dug up and spread around on them, as well, in an attempt to get at me. Some times I do wish that I had picked a “nom de poste” and never let anyone know who I am or anything about me. On the other hand, I do believe there is a worth in having people perceive a real person behind the words.

To me this all just exemplifies the way that lies, hatred and fear have been deeply ingrained in our society. At the end of the day, we’d better throw ourselves at the feet of God and beg forgiveness – we will not forever be permitted to go on as we are…we’d better start telling the truth.

The prediction is being made David Rosenberg over at Bloomberg, quoted by Mish:

Bloomberg: How Certain are you that we may be headed for a recession

Rosenberg: I think that by 2012, I would give it a 99% chance. I say that because as an economist, you have to be part historian. When you have a manufacturing inventory cycle recession, they are usually separated 5 years apart. But when you have a balance sheet recession, credit contraction, asset deflation (for example residential real estate), the downturn tends to be separated every 2 to 2.5 years. … Economists call this a soft patch. It’s not like this is a soft patch. Basically, when all the stimulus is gone, you get to see what the emperor looks like disrobed. It’s not a pretty picture.

The reason why you’ve seen a switch over from “everything’s going swell” to “gee, things are starting to get rocky” in the MSM and Administration statements (I know, same/same) is because they know this is true. They know once stimulus and money printing ends, the alleged recovery ends with it. Not wanting a recession as we head in to 2012, Obama and the Banksters have decided to stampede us all in to agreeing to increased debt (thus the push for a debt ceiling increase) and another round of “quantitative easing” (money printing). They figure if we get frightened enough that things will get worse, we’ll go along with them…alternately, if we hold firm then Obama and his allies will blame us for the renewed recession – “those darn Republicans: we had everything fixed but then they wouldn’t let us go further in to debt!”.

My advice is do get ready for the renewed recession but don’t buy the BS that it was anything other than tax and spend liberalism which caused it. We’re in for a rough time but the good news is that it will happen at just about the perfect moment – it will help us greatly in ejecting liberalism from power. Whether or not this will lead to GOP leaders who have a clue remains to be seen.

Excellent and timely point by Peter Hitchens in the Mail:

Why is it so bad to draw a line between the deserving and the undeserving poor? I have searched the Sermon on the Mount for the words ‘Blessed are the Spongers’ and I cannot find them – or anything remotely like them.

So why does the Archbishop of Canterbury speak as if it was obvious that we should treat people who can work, but won’t, in the same way as we treat those who are truly in need?…

We do see this quite a lot. Naturally from our liberals, but a bit more surprisingly from our religious leaders – including some of my fellow Catholics. It has become almost an article of faith among some that the justness of a society is to be judged by the amount of money expended on the poor. What this had brought us is a bloated welfare State which allows millions of people to live idly when they could be doing something productive.

To make it clear, if a person cannot work to support himself, I believe we have a moral duty to ensure that person a decent standard of living – adequate food, clothing, housing and medical care. No one should suffer lack of necessities through no fault of their own. We are certainly, even in our current financial bind, wealthy enough for that. But we’ve gone way past that – we’ve set up a system which is more about dodging work and responsibility than helping the poor.

We need to differentiate between those who are really helpless and those who are just looking for a free ride. We can’t just pass out the cash to anyone who shows up. First off because we can’t afford it, but more importantly because a culture of dependency is poison for a free society. The more people get on welfare the less likely they are to think about the future of the nation – all such people tend to care about, over the long term, is who promises to provide the most benefits. But the nation cannot live if the work doesn’t get done – and anyone who can work must work…and if they won’t do it while they are at all capable of working, then they should get nothing from the public treasury.

Yes, this is a hard thing – but an act of love is not always a mushy act. Some times love is quite hard; and it is those whom we truly love that we won’t allow to wallow in indolence. Think about it – what parent is really showing love: the parent who prods the child to get a job and get out on his own, or the parent who allows a 30-something layabout to continue sponging off mom and dad? Charity is a moral requirement, but no where are we commanded to be suckers.

From Gateway Pundit:

In 2008 The LA Times withheld a video that contained footage of Barack Obama celebrating with a group of Palestinians who were openly hostile towards Israel. Barack Obama reportedly even gave a toast to a former PLO operative, Rashid Khalidi, at this celebration. This was something the LA Times hid from the American public before the election. The media refused to release the video…

…The Los Angeles Times released 24,000 Sarah Palin emails today.

The MSM – a mere arm of the DNC. This is what they do – they support liberal Democrats all the time and everywhere. They will only report negative news about them when it is absolutely required and even then will try to splice it with stories of GOP failures. And, of course, any GOPer out there who in any way, shape or form can possibly threaten the electoral success will have the MSM digging deep in to their background and, as necessary, the reporting of what is found will be malicious.

As 2012 comes in, we can expect this to rise to absurd levels – we can fully expect that flat out, bald faced lies about the Republicans will be retailed as fact by the MSM. There is nothing we can do to stop this – but we can use the New Media to counter it. So, get ready.

(Ed. Note: I promised this to Spook and others for “after Church” on Sunday – I do apologize for not getting to it sooner but the Mrs needed me to sand down this used coffee table she wants to refinish and then there was a bit of swimming in the pool, beer drinking and carne asada eating to do…but, anyways, here it is, now: a thread to discuss the overall economic situation and how we get out of our current mess).

First off, a bit of gloom and doom noted over at Zero Hedge:

Just under a year ago, we got the tax fraud, and the only remaining member of Obama’s economic Titanic, praising the US recovery. His timing top ticked the economy, preceded the Hindenburg Omen by 10 days, and ushered in QE2. Now, we get his sidekick, long since departed after totally failing (we use the more polite F-form of the word) up at his job, writing the follow up, from the cushy confines of academia, warning America that unless there is a major fiscal stimulus (because presumably the monetary stimulus which everyone praised in the form of QE2 has now been proven to only be a boost to the stock market and a bailout of European banks), this once great country which once exhibited the world’s reserve currency is on its way to another “lost decade.” We wish Summers well: perhaps 3 of those who read the following drivel will take him seriously. Two of them are Krugman and Koo. We are taking bets as to who the third one will be…

So says those who believe in the current system. Don’t get too angry with them. After all, they were raised up in a Keynesian world. Their education was in accordance with it. Their life experience has indicated the necessity of it. They simply don’t know of an alternative – they don’t know, that is, that there can be a world in which money is of fixed value, inflation is non-existent, deflation is a good thing and investment is for the long term. They – and we – are living in an income taxed, usury-based, debt-financed economy. It was called in to being back in 1913 (when we created the Federal Reserve and enacted the income tax) and it has become just the way things are.

But must it always be so? Hasn’t it proven itself a success – isn’t the apparent lack of success over the past two years just an aberration and thus calls for even more of the same? More money printing and more borrowing? Not at all . In fact, the economic system we have has never worked – it failed from day one. No economy based upon money losing its value and where debt is just a part of life can work in the long run. To be sure, you might get some short term “growth” out of such things, but you get it by dooming yourself to eventual bankruptcy. That is where we are now – just a few years away from having more debt than we can ever hope to repay. In other words, just a few years away from default. And we might get a bout of hyper-inflation thrown in, just for fun, because money of no intrinsic value has, guess what?, no intrinsic value…it is worthless and only accepted as long as people figure they can exchange it swiftly for things which do have value. Come a time when people figure they can’t do it and our money will become wallpaper.

We had a bit of debate here at Blogs for Victory on the subject of whether or not tax cuts help the economy. Liberals, of course, say they don’t – they just allow filthy rich people to get even richer while spreading poverty because there are insufficient funds available to help the poor rise. Conservatives take the view that if you free up money for private enterprise, you’ll get a net gain in wealth and thus an increase in the wealth of even the poorest. Liberals are flat wrong, but conservatives only half right. To be sure, if we were to cut taxes right now it would help – but it would not fix the fundamental problem we have: fake money and lots of debt.

Fake money and debt allow for people to get rich by making rather stupid investment choices. For instance, a US hedge fund manager might pour his fake money in to industrial schemes in China – and he’ll get a good return on his fake money and get a big bonus. But he’s sawing off the branch he’s sitting on. Unless the US economy is growing in productivity – ie, in the making, mining and growing of things – then what underpins the hedge fund manager’s life is being eaten away. And that fat bonus check won’t amount to much if the United States crashes headlong in to Great Depression territory. The reason we haven’t hit the wall just yet is because while we’ve been using the fake money, we have been able to borrow enough to make it appear that we’re doing ok. This is not just government borrowing – it is the people borrowing as well. As long as we could keep borrowing money to buy the goods being made by the hedge fund manager’s investment in China, everything was great…but eventually you do have to actually pay back the debt and if that time arrives when you have drastically reduced your ability to produce wealth, you’re screwed. And we, dear fellow Americans, are pretty badly screwed, at the moment.

The most important things we can do for our economy, at the moment, is to revert to a hard currency and to reduce our debt. A hard currency has traditionally been a gold-backed currency, but it can be backed in other ways. The main thing is to have something of fixed value – something which ensures that a dollar in 2011 is worth the same as a dollar in 2061. This removes the need for 8-12% returns which require banks and investors to make risky, speculative financial bets rather than careful investments.

The second thing to do is eliminate any tax or regulation which inhibits people from entering the marketplace whenever they choose. There are, in any society, a certain number of people who just delight in making things happen – we’ve been ham stringing them for a couple generations, especially with environmental regulations and anti-business taxes. Remove those and the natural, creative energy within the American population will get to work – and we’ll start building up the wealth necessary to discharge the debts we’ve piled up, public and private.

The final thing to do is to make it impossible for government to pile up debt and very difficult for average Americans to do so. Debt is poison – it allows governments and people to kick the can down the road. It allows people to be idiots – and greedy idiots, at that – right now while putting off indefinitely the day of reckoning. Indefinitely, but not forever. The day, as I’ve said, has now arrived…and our debt will utterly crush us. So, let’s get rid of it. For government, it means a balanced budget amendment – for the people, it means establishing strict underwriting requirements in order to obtain debt. The requirements should be so high that it is next to impossible to get unsecured debt (credit cards) and difficult to get secured debt (home loans). Only the most sober and thrifty should be able to obtain credit – and that is how it used to be (though, of course, loan sharks have always been available for the profligate…we call them “payday loans” now).

The over-arching consideration must be that only via hard work, saving and careful investment can we economically advance. There is no short cut; there is no easy way to riches (at least, for most of us – you can luck out with the rich uncle or the winning lottery ticket, but 99.9% of us simply won’t have that – and our policy should be based upon the reality for the 99.9%). Unless and until we set in place policies which reflect these truths, we’ll not only not get anywhere, but we’ll ensure a worse collapse when it comes. It is time for us to grow up and start acting like Americans, again – start, that is, to act like people who are realistic about themselves and the world.

Now, what do you think?