From Daily Press:

The leader of the free world may be coming to Williamsburg for some rest and relaxation if Congress is able to come to agreement on the budget. President Obama and the First Family are planning to visit the area this weekend in what the White House described Wednesday as a “long-planned family trip to Colonial Williamsburg.”…

I’m sure they’ll have a great time – and I’m sure the President’s daughters will enjoy themselves and learn a bit of American history (perhaps even how to be proud of America before your husband is a front-runner for President?)…but it does seems a bit insensitive. I mean, what with wars going on, the nation going bankrupt and more and more Americans not being able to afford a family trip due to the high cost of gasoline…perhaps Obama might have just sent the girls and stayed home, himself?

Well, here’s what we’ll do – we’ll work night and day from now on to ensure that Obama has plenty of time to spend with his family come 2013.

Michael Yon’s latest:

…Today, spring 2011, we are making net progress in Afghanistan. I first began writing from here in 2006. In these five years I’ve brought you unending negative news on the matter of how well the Unites States and our allies have succeeded in meeting our goals in the war. But now, for the first time, the tide may be turning. Different enemy factions in this theater have been taking a brutal beating.

This isn’t the endgame. But the battle for 2011 is unfolding before our eyes. Recent observations suggest that it will be the most deadly so far…

The bottom line seems to be that good things are getting done, it is very difficult and often bloody work and, in the end, we can come out of Afghanistan with a win – or, at least, as much of a win as we’re likely to get. The troops on the ground (and, it must be noted, the various contractors and aid groups, as well as a goodly portion of the Afghan people) are willing to do what it takes – what will decide the fate of Afghanistan is our political will to see it through. Will we keep it up?

2012 is coming. Obama clearly would prefer to have Afghanistan done before he gets deep in to his re-election mode. The American people are tired of war – and increasingly distracted by domestic woes. The Taliban will want to try and drag things out and continue to sap our political will to keep it up. Everything is balanced on a knife edge…

I pray for our troops, for our allies and for our leaders to show the wisdom and courage necessary to do the right thing.

May happen – from CBS:

The United States may consider sending troops into Libya with a possible international ground force that could aid the rebels, according to the general who led the military mission until NATO took over.

Army Gen. Carter Ham also told lawmakers Thursday that added American participation would not be ideal, and ground troops could erode the international coalition and make it more difficult to get Arab support for operations in Libya.

Ham said the operation was largely stalemated now and was more likely to remain that way since America has transferred control to NATO…

This is what comes of not moving at the right time. As I’ve said, had we moved early, a bit of air power would have been enough to topple Gaddafi when the rebels were right outside Tripoli. By the time we did move, air power was only sufficient to ensure that Gaddafi wasn’t able to roll over the rebels. At that time, ground forces should have been on the table – and right off the coast of Libya…and, at need, an airborne division and Marine regiment or two should have dropped on Tripoli as the rebels were advancing. That would have finished it. Now, air power is insufficient and we’d probably have a pretty nasty fight on our hands if we tried to get right in to Tripoli.

So what’s next? If we don’t just wash our hands of it, it will have to take a major ground force effort…both to back up the rebels as well as ensure they can advance. At least a division of troops (about 20,000 or so) will be necessary to finish this thing off – as well as the willingness to both take and lose lives. What will Obama do? I don’t know, but I’m not at all hopeful that we’ll either get out or go all the way in…my fear is that we’ll just hang around as things get worse.

As an aside, anyone besides me note how rebel movements in the Moslem world seem to have cooled down? Its like they no longer have any faith that the international community will help them, or something…

Hot Air has an ongoing thread of the stunning news coming out of Wisconsin where, on Wednesday, all and sundry figured the union-tool had eked out a victory over justice…but now things may have changed dramatically:

In a political bombshell, the clerk in a Republican stronghold released new vote totals adding a net total of 7,582 new votes in the tight state Supreme Court race to Justice David Prosser, swinging the race significantly in his favor.

Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said Thursday that she failed to save in her computer and consequently report 14,315 votes cast in the city of Brookfield, omitting them entirely in an unofficial tally released after Tuesday’s election. The new totals give 10,859 more votes to Prosser from Brookfield and 3,456 more to Kloppenburg, she said. Smaller discrepancies turned up in two other communities as well…

Liberals, naturally, are upset – and that is a good thing. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: From the comments over at Hot Air:

I’m very late to this thread, but does anybody else half-suspect that maybe the Republicans in Wisconsin finally did something on purpose in order to outfox the vote-fraud artists? Like — deliberately hold back thousands of ballots and claim that they had fewer votes than they actually did so that the fraudsters would adjust their vote counts to a figure that was too low?

If that’s what the Republicans did, then they deserve an “attaboy” for strategic thinking. 🙂

I did get the distinct impression on election night that someone had the slows in reporting the numbers from GOP strong holds…no evidence, just a sensation, as it were. This, to me, was good tactics – it is very hard for Democrats to steal an election when they don’t know how many votes they need. Regardless of what actually happened, the rule must be from now on that solidly GOP districts must not report until very, very late…count ’em by hand if you have to, but go as slow as possible. Make the Democrats shove their fraud through before they’re sure how many they need…that’ll put a huge spoke in their vote fraud wheel.

From The Economic Collapse:

#1 The Obama administration projects that the federal budget deficit will be approximately $1,600,000,000,000 this year. Right now the Republicans and the Democrats are fighting tooth and nail over budget cuts. The Republicans are proposing to cut the budget deficit by 3.8%. The Democrats only want to cut it by 2.1%.

#2 The U.S. economy actually grew more between 1930 and 1940 than it did during the decade that recently ended.

#3 Over the last decade, the number of Americans without health insurance has risen from about 38 million to about 52 million.

#4 Agricultural commodities are absolutely soaring. The price of corn has more than doubled over the last 12 months. Considering the fact that corn is in literally thousands of our food products, that is a very frightening statistic.

#5 Between 1999 and 2009, real median household income in the United States declined by 5.0%.

#6 It is being estimated that total U.S. government debt will grow by 42 percent by the year 2015….

It goes on for 21 more items…

The good news: this can all be fixed. Not easily. Not quickly. Not without a lot of pain. But, it can be fixed.

Cut taxes, balance the budget, cut off trade with tyrannical slave-labor regimes like China, start making/mining/growing things here at home…it can be done, if we have the will to do it.

HAT TIP: Zero Hedge

Making it clear that he (a) doesn’t understand what is going on out there and (b) will remain devoted to his idiotic “green energy” plans no matter what happens – from The Herald News:

…“I’m just going to be honest with you. There’s not much we can do next week or two weeks from now,” the president told workers at a wind turbine plant. It’s a theme Obama’s struck before as he tries to show voters he’s attuned to a top economic concern with gas prices pushing toward $4 a gallon…

…Obama needled one questioner who asked about gas prices, now averaging close to $3.70 a gallon nationwide, and suggested that the gentleman consider getting rid of his gas-guzzling vehicle.

“If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know,” Obama said laughingly. “You might want to think about a trade-in.”…

Does this idiot even know what mileage cars get these days? Let me clue you in, Barry, I get about 22 miles to the gallon…and it hurts, a lot, to pay $3.89 a gallon. Its going to hurt even more when it costs $4.00 a gallon. And here’s the real kicker, laughing boy, the more I have to spend on gas, the less I have to spend on everything else…which means your vaunted “recovery” starts to fizzle right quick.

And one other thing, chuckles, if you hadn’t started holding back on oil development in 2009 there would be more domestic oil available here in 2011…no, not enough to make us energy independent, but more than there is right now. We pay more for foreign oil than we do for domestic oil – or have you not noted the difference in price between “West Texas Intermediate” and, say, “Brent Crude Oil”? Guess what, the Texas stuff costs $108 a barrel, the Brent product is $122. And this leaves aside all the jobs and wealth creation we could have obtained by a full court press for oil starting a couple years ago.

Geesh, 2012 cannot get here fast enough…

John Fund at Opinion Journal:

http://s.wsj.net/media/swf/main.swf

The claim is that 10,000 more votes went for the Supreme Court race than were cast in other races in the liberal stronghold of Dane County – and I recall that in 2004 there were enough questions about the vote to convince me that Wisconsin was stolen for John Kerry. One thing certain, when you get a vote like this combined with the invariable Democrat practice of voter fraud, there will be lots of questions. The only real issue – do the Republicans in Wisconsin have the guts to really get in there and investigate?

Find out how many in-eligible votes were cast; find out of any felons voted; find out if any out-of-State liberal activists voted. Make an issue of it – don’t just take the loss and let is slide. Lets fight it out, right here and right now.

Too many bureaucrats being paid too much – and its not just that they make a lot of money. By simply existing and paying union dues – which go almost entirely to Democrats – we’ve got a massive, well-funded lobby always in favor of more spending and higher taxes.

Cutting back government is vital in all respects – to balance our budget; to pay off our debt; to restore our liberty; to free up our economy. Big Government must go.

From Pundit Press:

…For some reason one of the counties in the state is destroying ballots that ‘were not counted’ yesterday. Apparently this is a very bizarre and egregious move.

There is now a call for an injunction to preserve the ‘discarded’ ballots:

I have filed a Wisconsin Open records request with the City of Mequon demanding any ballot submitted but not cast in yesterday’s election, including any remnant of a shredded ballot. We have received reports Mequon poll workers destroyed submitted ballots before poll closing time, demanding a driver’s license number from the absentee voter….

More to come on this, I’m sure…

A pretty slick plan, actually – Rich Lowry explains at NRO’s The Corner:

…Boehner has rallied House Republicans behind a short-term, one-week CR that will cut another $12 billion and fund the military for the rest of the year. This move shows Republicans are aware of the first rule of a shutdown fight — don’t get blamed for the shutdown.

The short-term measure is going to put Harry Reid and the White House in a tight spot. By putting the ball in their court, it puts them in the position of making the affirmative decision to shut the government and do it while turning away a bill to fund the military. Also, in the context of a $1.5 trillion deficit, $12 billion seems piddling and — together with the prior $10 billion of cuts — it still falls short of the $33 billion Democrats have agreed to. If they reject the bill anyway, it’s going to make it easier to blame them for a shutdown; if they accept, Republicans will have gotten $22 billion in cuts even before a final deal…

That could be a way to do it – keep up the CRs but each time select a must-pass element to fund something for the rest of the year, throw in a ten or twenty billion in cuts and defy Reid to not hold a vote, or Obama to veto. The Democrats, of course, are quite happy with either an open-ended CR or, better, just some papering over the cracks deal to carry us through until 9/30/11. They really don’t want a shut down and, naturally, don’t want any real cuts. Time to force matters, and this might do it.

Keep in mind this is a tricky business – we very much don’t want to get actually blamed by the public for a shut down (Democrats and the MSM will, of course, blame us no matter what…but what they say is not, these days, necessarily what the people will agree to). This tactic by the GOP might force the Democrat to either clearly take the blame, or agree to at least do some more cuts…and then be faced with it, again. That, in turn, might slowly force them back and get them to agree to some real cuts…and, of course, the whole fight right now just leads up to the budget battle for FY 2012.

We’ll see how this comes out, but I’m cautiously optimistic that the GOP is starting to think about what they want to do and how to get it.