The primary motivator for the Democrats right now is lay blame on the Republicans for whatever happens. In spite of being firmly in control of both houses of Congress until January, Democrats are trying to write a script where they just want to be helpful to everyone (extend unemployment benefits, extend middle class tax cuts, etc), but those bastard Republicans are insisting upon tax cuts for billionaires.

The primary requirement for the GOP is to ensure that whatever comes out, it doesn’t add to the deficit. We need not worry about one particular Democrat talking point – that extending the cuts will increase the deficit. The people aren’t buying that line – they know the deficits aren’t high because we’re taxed too little, but because we spend too much. But if we agree to an un-paid-for extension of unemployment in order to obtain all or most of the Bush tax cuts, we’ll have betrayed the primary desire of the voters who elected a GOP House – getting government spending under control.

To me, our position on taxes should remain as is – we want them all extended, because it is foolish in the extreme to raise taxes on anyone during bad economic times. Let the Democrats raise taxes, if they wish, over our objections. What we must stand firm on is on spending – in fact, we can double down and say we’re in favor of a six month extension (couching it in terms of “helping our unemployed have peace of mind about their benefits”), provided that the money for it comes out of some other program – penny for penny. The broad majority, I think, will see the sense of this and will back it firmly as it is simply the right thing to do. And if Democrats refuse to allow a vote on such a thing, so much the better. Bottom line – no deal on taxes, at all: just vote on them and let the chips fall where they may. No new spending without equal or greater cuts elsewhere.

Keep it to that simple a message and then allow the people to judge who is doing right and who is playing politics. Our only hope, fellow Republicans, is in the matter of being seen to be spending cutters – that is what is the people want, and it is what we promised them.

Once we actually take the House majority, then we can start on advancing our cause – right now, as the Democrats are in charge, it is all about preserving our reputation as Democrats dash themselves to pieces on the rocks of folly they have built for themselves.

Excellently illustrated in this Rasmussen survey:

…Republicans (79%) and unaffiliated voters (74%) overwhelming favor a plan to cut the federal payroll by 10% over the next 10 years. Democrats are less enthusiastic: 48% of those in President Obama’s party favor the concept, while 39% are opposed…

Obama’s cynical and purely cosmetic “freeze” on federal payrolls is in response to this. After massively running up the number of federal workers and lavishly increasing pay, he now has to take a bow to the fact that the people want a reduction in government.

It is stunning that overwhelming majorities of Republicans and Independents favor such cuts, while Obama’s Democrats can only muster a bare plurality in favor of such a common sense action. Keep in mind that a 10% reduction over 10 years can be done by attrition – no need to immediately fire a large number of employees. A wiser policy would be to immediately reduce personnel by 10% – a first step in controlling government and a small down payment in reducing our deficit. That Obama offers us a mere freeze means is just his way of trying to score some points without having to substantially change course.

We can expect more of this from Obama. Some are convinced that he will now triangulate to position himself for 2012. My view is that he will pretend to do so – just as he pretended to be a centrist in 2008, all the while keeping up the leftward march in actuality. Incompetent and ignorant of a lot of basic facts, Obama appears to retain a conviction of his own excellence. He’s going to thrust ahead unabated, and use tricks to bamboozle people in to thinking he’s something other than he is…and he’ll use these tricks because he’s convinced that our opposition is because we’re stupid, and thus we can be easily tricked in to going along with him.

In the end, I don’t expect this to work – there was an absurd glow about Obama in 2008 and heading in to 2009. Here in late 2010, the shine has worn off…and The One has become rather shopworn. I don’t think he can rekindle the magic, nor fool a populace which has turned decisively away from him. Only a miracle turn around in the economy can save him at this point – and then only barely.

This video will cause liberals to go blind, but that’s ok.

Legal Insurrection observes:

…There have been many comparisons of Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter, focused on the economy. But the continuing leak of documents by Wikileaks has become for Obama what the Iranian hostage crisis was to Carter.

The Wikileaks folks trot the globe with impunity and funnel documents to the press at will, for the purpose of damaging U.S. relations with other countries, our war efforts, and our intelligence capability. And we do almost nothing about it…

According to the linked article, we did send a letter – asking Wikileaks, pretty please, to not release the data. A more forceful, do-it-and-we’ll-kill-you letter might have been better, but didn’t seem to commend itself to the Obama Administration.

The world is a serious place full of people who want to do real things – the Obama Administration is a world of make-believe in which the mindless drivel of ill educated yet credentialed elites is taken as absolute and acted upon in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Enemies out there want our blood. Supposed friends want to use us for their own purposes. Our few real allies wonder if we’ll be there when push comes to shove. And here’s Obama, who will “condemn in the strongest terms”, but won’t actually do anything.

If we’re lucky, by 2012 it will only be as bad as 1980 for us.

While all conservatives have their gripes with Senator McCain, he is a genuine class act:

On CNN’s State of the Union this morning, host Candy Crowley asked Senator John McCain what he thought of Sarah Palin’s recent firestorm of media attention — her new book, new reality show, and all the other publicity she has been receiving recently. When Crowley asked if McCain felt Palin might be divisive, he responded: “A guy named Ronald Reagan used to be viewed as divisive.”

“She’s doing a great job. I think she’s motivated our base,” McCain added. “She had a positive impact on the last election, and I’m proud of her.”

McCain is a man without fear, and thus even though he is in large measure “establishment” in his views, he’s not going to run and hide from something like the Palin phenomena. Its just part of politics, folks – and you have to be the biggest chicken poop in the world to think that in some way Palin must be “stopped”. Don’t stop her – battle her. She’s a big girl; she can take it – and may the better ideas and candidate win.

And, as it turns out, I think she’s got the better ideas; not entirely sure, yet, that she’s the better candidate. We shall see.

Interesting note over at Zero Hedge about the Irish bail out:

Today the myth of a popular, democratic government in Ireland collapsed for good. After an impromptu poll of 500 people nationwide found that a “substantial majority” of the people, or 57%, wants the State to default on debts to bondholder, what it ended up getting was precisely the opposite. Why? “Last night that the Irish delegation negotiating with the EU-IMF last week raised the issue of default. “The Europeans went completely mad,” a senior government source said.” Of course, this is a reason for the Europeans not to want an Irish default, not for the Irish…

Which is very true – and with elections upcoming in Ireland, will the Irish people give a big “FU” to the EU? They should – I mean it; they should vote in droves for whomever promises to default…and then, default.

I realize that we, the regular folks of the world, played our role in the economic melt down. No one put a gun to our head and forced us to go in to credit card debt, buy houses we couldn’t afford or, in general, get slack and want a high life without earning it. In payment for this idiocy, we are massively in debt, underwater on our homes and facing a long, grim climb back to prosperity. But it takes two to tango – and we were dancing with the banksters all the way to the poor house. And now we, out of our taxes and the future earnings of our children are to do, what? Bail out the banksters?

I don’t think so.

I’m not saying that default won’t hurt. In fact, the sudden end of the usurious, fiat-based economic model will be painful. If we here, in the United States, pulled the plug on all this asinine “stimulus” and TARP garbage, we would probably see unemployment skyrocket, maybe even as high as 25%. But that would only be temporary. An economy is not something orchestrated by government and the Federal Reserve. It is something which happens when people live – we all gotta eat, have clothes and some place to live. Unless you are a complete bum, you’re going to strive for what you need, especially if you’ve got a spouse and kids to look after. Faced with the stark choice, we’ll just get to work.

And if we don’t have a gargantuan government coupled with behemoth corporations standing in our way, we’ll do it. We’ll make things, mine things and grow things – and the things we need, not the useless feces which is shoved at us through advertising.

I do hope the Irish do this vital task – this first European step in telling Big Government and Big Corporation to get stuffed. We did it here in the US on November 2nd. Prayers and fingers crossed that they don’t let us down.

Just how bad has it gotten out there? From the Wall Street Journal:

492: The number of days since the average borrower in foreclosure last made a mortgage payment.

Banks can’t foreclose fast enough to keep up with all the people defaulting on their mortgage loans. That’s a problem, because it could make stiffing the bank even more attractive to struggling borrowers…

A neighbor of mine not only defaulted on her mortgage but completed her bankruptcy filing…five months later, she just moved because she was tired of waiting for the bank to get around to evicting her. There are so many defaulted loans out there that the banks just can’t keep up – and now with the robo-signing “foreclosuregate” slowing things up even more, it’ll just get worse.

What this does is put a big incentive on people to just give up if their houses are underwater. You can go 16 months without paying mortgage or rent, save money and move on. The credit hit? Big, freaking deal – anyone in credit will tell you that you can finesse your way around that in two to three years (though the negative credit report will remain for 7 years – 10, if you file bankruptcy).

Things in housing will, I think, get a lot worse before they start to get better – there are millions of houses in the “shadow inventory” (foreclosed on, not on the market) and millions more will join them as unemployment remains high and the desire to stay in underwater homes becomes weaker. The bottom, I think, won’t be reached before 2013.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

He will be missed – Infectious Greed found an excellent tribute:

Here is the New York Times justification for publishing the most recent Wikileaks information. In it, we get the scope of what is being released:

…The documents — some 250,000 individual cables, the daily traffic between the State Department and more than 270 American diplomatic outposts around the world — were made available to The Times by a source who insisted on anonymity. They were originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to exposing official secrets, allegedly from a disenchanted, low-level Army intelligence analyst who exploited a security loophole. Beginning Sunday, WikiLeaks intends to publish this archive on its Web site in stages, with each batch of documents related to a particular country or topic. Except for the timing of publication, the material was provided without conditions. Each news organization decided independently what to write about the cables…

A couple things:

1. I begin to doubt that it was really one, low-level analyst. This is just too much data from too many sources for one person to have obtained it all. Unless our security is completely worthless, this is the act of several people. We really need a thorough investigation of how this happened – and, unfortunately, it must be an investigation we learn nearly nothing about because we can’t fix this problem in the open.

2. The person or persons who have done this have earned a trip to the firing squad. The level of damage to our ability to operation – with its resultant certain loss of life among allied peoples – calls for the most extreme measures. Keeping in mind that I’m opposed to the death penalty – but we must instruct people that doing this sort of thing, which will lead to so many deaths in the future, will result in the perpetrator dying.

3. The world is a much more dangerous place than official, government communications make it out to be. Just in the fact that Iran has obtained missiles capable of striking Europe from North Korea – and missiles which were originally designed to carry nuclear warheads – indicates that the world is under grave threat from the tyrannical regimes of the world. We must begin to act with extraordinary force against the tyrants – they are growing too strong and too willing to play with fire.

This is the biggest intelligence mess since the Rosenberg’s gave the atomic bomb to Russia. The world will pay a high price for this.

UPDATE: Roger Simon notes that some of the documents being leaked reveal Obama’s State Department to be chock full of nincompoops. I tend to agree – if this is “smart diplomacy”, then I want some of GW’s idiocy back.

It does make sense:

…While psychopaths are theoretically capable of committing murder and other acts of cruelty without remorse, the definition of a psychopath is much broader than the image evoked by popular culture. According to mental health professionals, a psychopath is someone who is fundamentally lacking in human empathy, who sees other human beings as mere objects of manipulation. The relationships of a psychopath are typically superficial and fluid, and are often sexually promiscuous. The psychopath has a fundamentally egoistic, selfish personality, unable to transcend his own personal sense of self to recognize the dignity of others…

Does someone who says abortion is ok have or lack empathy for human beings? I’m not talking about people bamboozled in to being pro-choice – I’m talking about those people quite strident in advocating abortion in the public square. Its one thing to be, in a sense, more sympathetic to the mother you can see while forgetting the unborn child you can’t…quite another to be as some pro-abortion people are, with their use of de-humanizing terminology (“tumor”, “mass of cells”, etc) to dismiss the unborn children from thought. When you think about it, doesn’t it occur to the mind that we have people who are viewing other human beings as objects of manipulation?

Remember the “Roe” of “Roe V Wade” – just a poor girl used by pro-abortion fanatics to advance their case. They didn’t care what was going on with the pregnancy – they just wanted someone to sign and affidavit so that they could start a lawsuit against pro-life laws. Furthermore, think of some of the arguments they use – that a woman might need an abortion because she was raped. As if executing the child was the rational response to her father being a rapist! But it manipulates people…makes them worry, “what if it were me? My daughter? Would I want her to carry the child of a rapist?”. Anything to get people to stop thinking about human decency and start reacting to manipulation.

It would also explain why such people are impervious to fact and logic – psychopaths usually are, after all. Have you ever come across anyone more thick headed and impossible to talk to than someone who is really advocating for abortion rights? Once again, not talking about people suckered in to being pro-choice – this is about the very strange people who, say, try to insert federally funded abortion in to health care reform, or are trying to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions. When you come up against such people, all you can do is shake your head in sorrow – you can’t talk to them, you can’t reason with them; they are mind-numbed and just determined to have their way.

This really does explain a lot and is worth rolling over in the mind – truth always opens the door, and if we can get to the truth about the people advocating abortion, we’ll have them boxed in.