If you can honestly answer, “yes”, then you are doing great…if you can’t, then its time for some self-examination.

From C-Span via Instapundit:

There’s no possibility that I would ever go to a debate and have Olbermann or Chris Matthews asking questions. I watched the debate a couple of years ago and it was an embarrassment because they were so relentlessly hostile and they were so left-wing that every question they asked of the Republicans was designed to embarrass and divide the Republicans. And every question they asked the Democrats was designed to make them look good. Well why would we participate in that?

Precisely – why would be do that? We have to just fully admit that the MSM is the merest arm of the DNC. While its ok to go on their shows, there is no sense in just putting ourselves at their mercy.

How this will work out is that we can’t set the 2012 debates with an allegedly impartial MSMer calling the shots. Whatever the DNC/MSM brings to the table must be countered by one of ours – and no kook lefties like Matthews or Olberman anywhere near the place.

Of course, the best way to have a debate is to have the candidates ask each other the questions – without any advance notice and only with someone around to keep time. The Democrats like talking points and taking cheap shots – our path to victory lies in explaining how we’re different from the Democrats. The more there is real debate, the better we do.

Junk touching update.

Britain aborts her future.

Old women do absurd thing, show themselves up as people who have never grown up, never will.

Sarah Palin offer an excerpt from her new book.

The Other McCain warns us against allowing pinko groups to stampede us in to certain actions. In this case, the Southern Poverty Law Center is trying to scare the GOP off of voting for Saul Anuzis as new RNC chair. Pinkos are trying to slander Anuzis – likely because Anuzis would be effective, and the left doesn’t like that. We must never listen to the left – even if an iota of truth comes out of them, it is just in the service of another liberal lie.

EPA over-reach? Of course – we’ve got an ultra-liberal President who has let environmentalists run wild.

The Other McCain says it may be so:

As noted in my last update about Renee Ellmers’ victory in NC-2, Republicans are now at 240 House seats and they haven’t had 241 seats since 1949. And Sam Foster at Left Coast Rebel reports that Ann Marie Buerkle is 411 votes ahead of Dan Maffei in NY-25 after the count of absentee ballots from Onondaga County.

The Buerkle campaign says victory is a “mathematical certainty,” and the Lonely Conservative headlines it: “Buerkle Lead Can’t Be Beat.”

C’mon, Ann Marie. This one’s for the history books, sweetheart…

It might be a mathematical certainty, but Democrats cheat – so it might be a fraudulent uncertainty. Still, it does look good for 241 Republican House members – making 24 the magic number the Democrats would have to win in 2012 to get Nancy back in the Speaker’s chair. This isn’t impossible, but it is unlikely given (a) re-districting will heavily favor the GOP and (b) voting Democrat would put Nancy back in the Speaker’s chair (thanks, Democrats, for keeping her on!).

Not just finding ballots, but discovering entire voting machines – from Legal Insurrection:

We all have heard of ballots being found in the trunks of cars, and elsewhere during recounts. In a hotly contested race for the State Senate in New York, Democrats have gone one better, and found two new (and uncounted) voting machines…

Democrats are at risk of losing the State Senate – and with it their ability to have New York’s redistricting entirely in their hands. Things are already looking pretty grim around the country for Democrats and I guess they want to squeeze out what they can from New York. Trouble is, if they lose the Senate, they’ll have to contend with Republicans in carving up the electoral map.

This long after the vote, it would be hard – even for Democrats – to manufacture believable votes to tip races to their side…so, the new gambit appears to be in “finding” whole voting machines. And how much do you want to bet that there will be just enough votes in there to give the Democrat the win?

Just more proof that we really need to go after this. A very large number of Democrat officials need to go to jail over the rampant voter fraud committed by Democrats. We know they’re doing it, but we don’t really do anything about it. We have to press hard on this issue – starting with House investigations where we can force people to testify. While Holder is in charge of Justice there simply won’t be any moves to prosecute…but we can at least set the stage, and hope that in 2013 we have an AG interested in enforcing the law. One thing certain, if we don’t forcibly stop the Democrats from cheating, they’ll keep doing it, and that puts our whole democratic form of government at risk.

You can read it here – to nutshell: roll back spending to 2008 levels, freeze it there and allow no tax increases. Given CBO numbers, this balances the budget by 2015 (though a liberal quibble about it would put off the balanced budget to 2017). Do read the whole thing – it is the sort of fiscal thinking we need to get out of this hole.

As for me, I’d roll FY 2012 spending back to FY 2004 levels and just balance the budget right away. This would be painful, but it means that by FY 2013 we’re running a surplus and starting to pay off debt – and that, in and of itself, would provide massive stimulation to economic activity. Couple this with regulatory reforms to take away all the Big Government/Big Corporation roadblocks to new, small and mid-sized business and we’d be back in an economic boom by 2014…and completely cured of the past century’s idiocy by about 2030 (ie, debt paid off, US back to a manufacturing/mining/farming powerhouse, liberalism de-funded and no longer bothering us, big banks a long dead nightmare from the past).

We can get out of this. It will be very painful at first. It will take a lot of hard work. It will take genuinely shared sacrifice (not, as our liberals would have it, sacrifice on the part of the middle class while Big Government/Big Corporation skates). But it can be done – the missing ingredient to date has been the courage to act. Unfortunately, we aren’t likely to see it in President Obama, though we might see some of it in the new House GOP. In the end, we might just have to try and find someone in 2012 who is perfectly willing to risk being a one-term President and will just do it, regardless of the 70% disapproval rating it might generate.

This will be “What Media Bias? Part 182.

In a new book about Pope Benedict XVI, he is asked about the Church’s stance on the use of condoms as a means of slowing the spread of AIDS. Here is how the MSM – in this case, the New York Times – covers it:

Pope Says Condoms to Stop AIDS May Be Acceptable

Pope Benedict XVI has said that condom use can be justified in some cases to help stop the spread of AIDS, the first Vatican exception to a long-held policy condemning condom use…

Now, what did the Pope actually say? Fortunately, the good people over at The Catholic World Report got the excerpt in question:

…As a matter of fact, you know, people can get condoms when they want them anyway. But this just goes to show that condoms alone do not resolve the question itself. More needs to happen. Meanwhile, the secular realm itself has developed the so-called ABC Theory: Abstinence-Be Faithful-Condom, where the condom is understood only as a last resort, when the other two points fail to work. This means that the sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalization of sexuality, which, after all, is precisely the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves. This is why the fight against the banalization of sexuality is also a part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man’s being.

There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.

Are you saying, then, that the Catholic Church is actually not opposed in principle to the use of condoms?

She of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution, but, in this or that case, there can be nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality…(emphasis added)

In other words, condoms don’t really stop the spread of AIDS; harping upon condom distribution likely just makes things worse – but in some cases, for some people, the use of a condom may be the first step towards a moral attitude about sex – and, of course, the development of sexual morality is the only 100% sure way to stop AIDS. So, no actual change in Church position – in fact, not even the slightest modification of it – but because the Pope didn’t explicitly condemn condom use, the MSM is having a field day with a “Pope says condoms ok” meme. Look for them to wonder in editorials if this means that ordination of women and gay marriage are right around the corner.

The problem for a Catholic dealing with liberals – or, indeed, any Christian in dealing with anyone on the left – is that you’re dealing on the left with un-thinking people who are astoundingly ignorant of Christianity. If any one on the left would just spend some time reading Christian writing rather relying on third-hand anti-Catholic propaganda, we’d get a lot further.

In this whole debate – since the 1980’s – the left has held to a stupid idea that if we just pass out condoms, we’ve got the whole AIDS issue licked. As if the technique of immorality can be changed to make it harmless. Sorry, liberals, but doing things wrong is doing things wrong. While it is, obviously, better if an AIDS infected person uses a condom, it is 10,000% better if such a person just doesn’t engage in sex, at all. AIDS and every single sexually transmitted disease in the world can be eliminated in a generation if everyone, for the next 20 years, just follows Christian sexual morality.

Because people won’t do it doesn’t mean we stop urging it – because if we can just get one person to adhere, then we might save a thousand lives over the years, as a whole string of people never get ill, and never have their hearts ripped to shreds by sexual immorality spreading from one person to another. Ours is the counsel of life and hope – theirs is the counsel of death and despair; and its a pity that some people with bone headed stubbornness just refuse to see it.

http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/eyeblast.swf?v=hdSUqGSUDk

A civil rights icon defends Rangel based upon what? The fact that once up a time Rangel did the right thing…and West answers that particular tactic.

Seems that some prosecutions are coming down the pike:

The feds are drawing up insider trader charges that could shake the financial industry like never before, according to a published report.

Federal prosecutors in New York, the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission have conducted a massive three-year criminal and civil investigation targeting consultants, investment bankers, traders from hedge funds and mutual funds as well as analysts across the nation, the Wall Street Journal reported today.

Investigators are looking into whether multiple insider trading rings pulled in tens of millions of dollars in illegal profits, according to the paper…

The only trouble is that, dollars to donuts, no politicians will be implicated in this. I hope there will be, but I doubt it – following the law, as has been seen by the Rangel case, is really only optional for politicians. I further bet that no one close to Ben Bernanke – let alone that Fraudster in Chief, himself – will be indicted.

While these prosecutions, if they come off, will be useful,until we attack the ultimate source of the problem – which means, the government end of it – we really wont’ get anywhere. Just as in financial scandals past, some crooks will go to jail, while the rest of the crooks learn to obey the new rules while still robbing everyone blind. We have to get them all, and all at once, in order to fix the problem.

From Reuters:

…Despite a number of options — including renewing all tax cuts or only those for the middle class or tying any extension to a renewal of jobless benefits — there is no indication a consensus is near.

“How the hell should we know when we will figure this out?” said a senior Senate Democratic aide. “This is the Democratic Party,” long known for internal struggles and diverse views.

“It seems like no one is on the same page,” said Chris Krueger of MF Global, a private firm that tracks Washington for investors. “It has the potential to be a train wreck.”…

It is hard for the left to contemplate any extension of the Bush tax cuts – remember, for the past 8 years the left has lied endlessly about the effect of the tax cuts. To listen to them, all our fiscal problems stem from the tax cuts – they’ve painted themselves in to a corner where if they agree to an extension, they betray their own actions and statements over the past 8 years. It is, though, hard for Democrats up in 2012 – especially those “red State” Democrat Senators – to not extend the cuts; they are desired by the people, required for growth and failure to act would be suicidal for such Democrats.

Its a nice, little quandary they’ve got themselves in to – and the best part about it is that they’re there because they lied. Had they just never lied about the effect of the tax cuts, they could just go along with their extension for two more years and have done with it. Ah, the tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive! There is no good way out of this for them – and no matter what happens, we Republicans will come out smelling of roses.