Lather, rinse, repeat.

Now, to be sure, we can’t and shouldn’t try to merely duplicate Reagan – but here is the basics of what we want: freedom, small government, America governed by the Constitution.

HAT TIP: Hot Air

They really, really want the New Media to go away – from Wired:

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved a bill that would give the Attorney General the right to shut down websites with a court order if copyright infringement is deemed “central to the activity” of the site — regardless if the website has actually committed a crime. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) is among the most draconian laws ever considered to combat digital piracy, and contains what some have called the “nuclear option,” which would essentially allow the Attorney General to turn suspected websites “off.”

COICA is the latest effort by Hollywood, the recording industry and the big media companies to stem the tidal wave of internet file sharing that has upended those industries and, they claim, cost them tens of billions of dollars over the last decade…

“Unanimous” means Republicans voted for it – why, I can’t imagine. First off, why help Democrats, at all; secondly, why do anything which in any way, shape or form might stifle the New Media which is the GOP’s only hope of getting the message out? Yes, I realize that Hollywood and the recording industry have spread a lot of cash around DC to get this bill through, but since when do Republicans give a darn about Hollywood? Anything which harms Hollywood just harms our opponents, actual or prospective. If anything, we on our side should be looking to pass bills making file sharing even easier.

And I understand that we don’t want people who make movies and music to lose their just profits for their work. If you can show me a website which is actually profiting off the sale of other people’s work, then I’ll agree to jail time for the perpetrators…but if it isn’t that, then I don’t want to hear whines from millionaire rock stars and billionaire movie executives. What this bill would do is allow the Attorney General to pretty much shut anyone down at any time without a conviction in a court of law. This is the definition of tyranny as no one will ever know if they are violating the law until the AG’s bully boys show up to shut things down.

No, no and ten thousands times no on this – and those GOPers who backed the bill should be ashamed of themselves.

Can we please just get to profiling? This is getting ridiculous..

Is when you borrow too much money, and then your “friends” fix your problem by loaning you more money – Mish notes the Irish bail out which has temporarily halted the Eurozone slide to destruction:

Market participants are giddy today on the great news that Ireland will go deeper in debt in a foolish attempt to bail out the German and UK bondholders who were in turn foolish enough to lend ridiculous amounts of money to Irish banks in various real estate schemes.

The Irish government was of course foolish enough to guarantee all of this foolishness which means that Irish citizens many of whom were sucked into buying property at foolish prices are now on the hook to bail out the bondholders, rubbing salt into the wounds of Irish taxpayers, not all of whom were foolish enough to freely participate in the general foolishness.

Got that?…

Yes, I do – though, usually, when some one does that to me I’d at least like to get flowers afterward.

Mish goes on to note that European banks are on the hook for $650 billion in loans to Ireland – a nation of 6.2 million people and a GDP of $228 billion. THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE. The money cannot be paid back – all they’re doing is moving the disaster from one place to another; in this case, from the idiots banks to the European tax payers.

Default is the only way out – not just for Ireland, but for the whole world. There is too much debt chasing too little wealth – and, as I keep yammering on about, the longer we stave off the crash, the worse it will be when it hits. They might have plugged the dike for now, but the flood waters are still rising.

From NRO’s The Corner – some claims of voter irregularity:

…The Miller campaign has posted on their site three affidavits from voters concerned that irregular activity occurred at their polling places. One says that, although he was the tenth voter at his location, he saw a ballot box stuffed with “hundreds” of ballots. Another claims that the 15 write-in ballots she reviewed had Sen. Lisa Murkowski written in in what looked like similar enough handwriting that it could be from the same person.

“Our campaign has sworn affidavits identifying unsecured ballot boxes, other precincts where numerous ballots appear to be in the same handwriting, others where there is 100 percent voter turnout and still other precincts where the ballots were sent to the Division of Elections presorted by U.S. Senate candidate,” said Miller spokesman Randy DeSoto in a statement. “These and other irregularities give our campaign pause. Alaskans must be able to trust the results of its elections.”…

Precincts with 100% turnout are so unlikely as to be circumstantial evidence, in and of themselves, of voter fraud. People die and move away – the chances of 100% of the people in a precinct’s voter roll showing up to vote are vanishingly small…and if it is further discovered that they cast their votes disproportionately for one candidate over another, that is just more evidence of fraud. If Miller really has the goods here, then we’ve got something that needs very close examination.

NRO notes a liberal over at HuffPo who also have questions about the ballot – including the oddity of surprisingly different vote numbers for different State-wide races (I have the same question about our Nevada Senate race which got 15% more votes than other State-wide races, though HuffPo says the oddity is that the AK Senate race got far less votes than the AK gubernatorial contest. I eagerly await precinct level vote totals being made available – the NV SecState says we’ll have them soon).

We’ll have to see where this leads and if I were Miller and had credible evidence of voter fraud, I wouldn’t give up, either…even if the votes were clearly going against me. Voter fraud cuts at the heart of our democratic form of government and must be rooted out.

Iraqi President Talibani has no objection:

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said on Wednesday that he has no objection to form a special province for Christians in Iraq.

“There are regions with Christian majority in Iraq and we do not have an objection regarding forming a special province for Christians in Iraq,” the president told France 24 television.

“Protecting Christians is a holy duty for Iraqi government and all political blocs,” he continued, asserting that Shiites have expressed their readiness to form armed teams to help and protect Christians…

This is an act of wisdom and justice on the part of the Iraqi President and I applaud him for it. This is also the fruits of liberation in Iraq – in most Muslim nations the merest thought of Christians being able to rule themselves in an outrage. The fact that in Iraq people now have to try and live and build in a society at least partially free means that such things as anti-Christian persecution cannot be swept under the rug.

A province of Assyria (which I assume it would be called – most Iraqi Christians are Assyrian), would provide a safe haven for Iraqi Christians, allow them to prove their loyalty to the nation of Iraq by working for Iraqi peace and prosperity, and give weight to efforts elsewhere in Iraq to protect the Christian minority. I hope our government engages the Iraqi government on this issue and offers whatever aid is necessary to bring it about.

Michael Medved ably states my point:

…With or without the current urgings of some tea party and gay rights personnel, Republicans should continue to emphasize the economic concerns and small government priorities that brought them their victories earlier this month. But the impulse to segregate fiscal and social issues ignores the way that economics and values inevitably interact, and the importance of sturdy middle-class virtues as the basis for both durable families and free-market prosperity.

The only real alternative to government as a source of assistance, authority and a functioning civil society remains the “little platoons” described by Edmund Burke — families and communities shaped by attitudes that count as both economically and culturally conservative.

The two halves of conservatism cannot exist one without the other – and, in fact, the social aspect of conservatism is far more important, long term, than the merely fiscal. After all, if we are not a society of life, sobriety, hard work and thrift, then we won’t be a society for very long. Low taxes and free trade won’t amount to much in a dying America.

It is a false separation that both liberals and some conservatives are trying to create – to say that we, on the right, must only go after the fiscal issues. Liberals want this because the understand that the crucial battle isn’t over tax rates and spending, but over morals and manners. Some on the right have been suckered in to going along with this thinking because, let’s face it, discussing issues like abortion and gay marriage makes some people very uncomfortable…and it is going to be difficult, no matter how you slice it, to fold in to overall conservatism something as odd as gay conservatism.

But the trick can and must be done – and we social conservatives must show respect of and love for our fellow conservatives who are not entirely with us on the social issues. We need them just as they need us. United we stand, divided we fall – unless you want Nancy Pelosi and her successors destroying both family and business, we’d better all figure out a way to work together.

From Zero Hedge:

First Philadelphia, now San Francisco, and all in the same day. Fasten your seatbelts ladies, the muni maul is going mainstream.

Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded to Aa2 from Aa1 the rating on the City and County of San Francisco’s General Obligation Bonds and assigned an Aa2 rating to the city’s General Obligation Bonds (Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response Bonds, 2010) Series 2010. We have also downgraded by one notch our ratings on the city’s various general fund obligations, including its abatement leases and settlement obligation bonds. The outlook on the city’s ratings has been revised to stable…

I wonder if they mean “stable” in the sense that a corpse is “stable”?

This is the wages of liberalism – they spend, spend, spend and never take a thought for how it will all be made good. San Francisco is bloated with departments and boards and commissions, employing enough bureaucrats to staff an entire nation’s government.

This is just a slight foretaste of what is coming all around the nation. San Francisco is just one of many urban areas of the United States which have been, essentially, under one-party, Democrat rule for decades. They’ve spent themselves in to oblivion, and now the bill has come due. And come due at a time when the States are strapped and Obama won’t be able to get a cent in bail out money through the House.

From NRO’s The Corner:

Just checked in with a Republican source in the Senate about the state of play on the New START Treaty. Sen. Jon Kyl is being portrayed as a threat to national security for telling Harry Reid there’s not enough time to ratify the treaty in the lame-duck session. This source counters that the White House was slow to take Kyl’s calls for enhanced nuclear modernization seriously. It wasn’t until last Friday that the administration really began to engage him on modernization, flying officials out to Phoenix to brief him. It was only this afternoon that Kyl got a revised modernization plan from the administration…

Even if we get nuclear modernization – something we desperately need in order to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent – I still can’t see the worth of START. Russia is a dying nation, run by a megalomaniac dim wit who can’t see that playing bully-boy and tweaking our nose is doing nothing for Russia…China greedily eyes Siberia while Czar Putin pretends Russia is still a Great Power. Negotiating with Russia as if it mattered is just a waste of time.

At any rate, arms control treaties are pointless. Free nations don’t need such things between each other, while tyrannical regimes will cheat on whatever they negotiate. We’re expecting Putin to keep his word? On what grounds does anything suspect that Putin even knows what “honesty” means? For crying out loud, he’s a former KGB apparatchik!

Spike this stupid treaty and move on.