From Politico:

…At least 15 Democrats have said publicly that they have lost faith in her ability to lead — a number backed up by as many as two dozen more who are indicating the same thing privately, while others haven’t yet taken sides.

Liberal Reps. Peter DeFazio (Ore.) and Marcy Kaptur (Ohio) sent a letter to colleagues asking them to support a plan to forestall leadership elections until December — a clear effort to give the anti-Pelosi forces time to coalesce. Democratic leaders plan to go forward with the leadership contests Nov. 17, according to sources familiar with a Wednesday afternoon conference call…

Given that slavish devotion to the leadership is the modern hallmark of the Democrat party, I doubt these few rebels will get their way. Fear of offending the Powerful will, I think, get most Democrats to fall in line.

Still, there are clearly fissures in the Democrat party. We should do what we can to encourage them – nothing like a split Democrat party to stand against in 2012. Though, of course, having one united behind Obama, Reid and Pelosi won’t be bad, either.

Verum Serum takes a quote out of the odious Ted Rall’s new book, The Anti-American Manifesto:

…Christian fundamentalists, the millennial end-of-theworlders obsessed with the Left Behind series about the End Times, neo-Nazi racists, rural black-helicopter Michigan Militia types cut from the same inbred cloth as Timothy McVeigh, allied with “mainstream” gun nuts and right-wing Republicans, have been planning, preparing, and praying for the destruction of the “Godless,” “secular” United States for decades. In the past, they formed groups like the John Birch Society and the Aryan Nations. Now the hard Right has a postmodern, decentralized non-organization organization called the Tea Party.

Right-wing organizational names change, but they amount to the same thing: the reactionary sociopolitical force—the sole force—poised to fill the vacuum when collapse occurs. The scenario outlined by Margaret Atwood’s prescient novel The Handmaid’s Tale—rednecks in the trenches, hard military men running things, minorities and liberals taken away and massacred, setting the stage for an even more extreme form of laissez-faire corporate capitalism than we’re suffering under today—is a fair guess of how a post-U.S. scenario will play out unless we prepare to turn it in another direction…

I’m worried about the guy; the bile is obviously just spilling over in his heart. He won’t have to worry about the teabagger fascists taking over as he’ll have a heart attack long before we get ’round to that.

While Rall has always been extreme (stupid, too), he does speak the mind of the left – just more clearly and forthrightly than most of them are willing to go. They do think we’re a bunch of racist, redneck, fascist, hate-filled, bigoted creeps bent on destroying everything not like us. Which is just a bizarre view to hold – if I were like that, my primary enemy, as there are so many more of them than there are liberals, would be Protestants. What do I care about some freaky liberals in San Francisco when right down the street I might have people who deny the Real Presence?

But, I get along with my Protestant brothers and sisters. I even go as far as being enthusiastic for black candidates for office, and have a very high regard for some gay people. Our liberal friends refuse to understand this, because if they ever did, they’d no longer be able to hate us. And if they stopped hating us, they’d have to listen to our ideas, and then either agree with them or come up with rational opposition.

But, as we can see from Rall, “rational” doesn’t fit well with liberalism. Its an entirely attitudinal thing. Its about how you view yourself – and, more importantly, how you view yourself as a wonderful person, no matter if you’ve never done a decent act in your life. Some liberals have, to be sure, but to be a liberal means to feel morally superior even when you’re a complete creep. Rely on it, Al Gore is proud of himself – never loses a wink of sleep over the fact that he has a carbon footprint as large as a coal-fired power plant…he’s a liberal, and therefore wonderful, and there’s an end on it.

There’s not much we can do for the Ralls of this world, other than pray for them. But we must keep in mind this blinding, irrational hatred they feel. It may come out in violence, but it is more likely to just come out in a truculent effort to block us, no matter how clear and necessary are the policies we advocate. It will be unthinking opposition, and thus at times harder to fight (battling crazy people is always hard). But reason will always win over irrationality.

From the Telegraph:

A Christian woman has been sentenced to hang in Pakistan after being convicted of defaming the Prophet Mohammed.

Asia Bibi, a 45-year-old mother-of-five, denies blasphemy and told investigators that she was being persecuted for her faith in a country where Christians face routine harassment and discrimination…

Just a terrible crime – and yet another reason, if it is necessary, why Sharia law has no place in the United States.

Pray for this poor woman and her family – and for the barbarians who have sentenced her to death for nothing.

From Your Tango:

The number of American women without children has risen to an all-time high of 1 in 5, a jump since the 1970s when 1 in 10 women ended their childbearing years without having a baby, according to the Pew Research Center.

About 1.9 million women aged 40-44—or 18 percent—were childless in 2008, an 80 percent increase since 1976, when just 580,000—10 percent of those in that age bracket—had never given birth, the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey shows.

Childlessness has increased across racial and ethnic groups and most education levels…

Taxes, education, health care, war, gay marriage, global warming…all completely trivial and pointless debates next to the concept of not having children. Quite simply, if we don’t have children, we don’t have a civilization – don’t have anything, at all.

I realize that in this matter I’m a bit of Mr. Hypocrite – married late, have no children of my own. But given a choice between staying silent and watching my civilization die and the risk of being charged with hypocrisy, I’ll take the risk. We really need to get a handle on this issue, or there won’t be any issues to get a handle on.

We have diligently enacted polices and pursued social ideas which have been directly inimical to family formation and child-rearing. We’ve crushed the farming, manufacturing and mining jobs which form the basis of stable, long-term employment; we’ve turned people’s heads with propaganda for a life of luxury; we’ve allowed pornography and varied smut to pervade our society; we’ve degraded any sense of sexual honor among the young; we’ve provided welfare which cuts out the need for fathers; we’ve ceased to ostracize men who don’t live up to their responsibilities and women who will have children by a series of men they never marry…its like we’ve been on a mission to commit slow, national suicide.

And, in a sense, that is what we have been doing. Work of the Enemy, this is. It is the old, anti-Christian heresies of the past, rising again in the modern age and telling us that the material is evil, life is worthless, responsibility a mindless drudgery. In ages past, we fought these ideas off – in modern times, we’ve lowered all defenses, and all the destruction has flooded in to the world.

We’re dying off. Make no mistake about it – if we don’t start having children, again, then the story of our nation is told. A new Christian civilization will eventually arise over the ruins of the first, but there is no requirement that the United States and our unique way of life endure. If we want it, then we’d better change – better change back to a society of honor, decency and strict morality.

21 years ago, today, that wall came down:

From CNN Money:

As the U.S. economy struggles to recover from a deep recession, the number of Americans filing for bankruptcy continues to rise dramatically.

In the federal government’s fiscal year 2010, which ended September 30, more than 1.5 million non-business bankruptcy filings were processed, according to data released Monday by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. That’s up more than 14% from fiscal 2009, when about 1.3 million personal bankruptcies were filed…

Up and up and up it goes – people simply don’t have the money to cover all the debts wracked up during the bubble. And what is the government’s plan to fix this? Create another bubble by printing money and giving it away, willy nilly.

We are broke, my dear people – flat busted and disgusted. We must allow the crash to take its full course and then start anew from the real wealth we still retain. There is no quick fix, there is no painless way out of this. The longer government keeps up the printing presses and borrowing like mad, the longer the day of reckoning is put off and the worse the eventual crash will be.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

This article in the New York Times notes that the advocates of high speed rail in the United States were hit pretty hard by the November 2nd results. Most notably, the incoming Republican governors of Wisconsin and Ohio have indicated they’ll carry out their campaign promises to kill proposed high speed rail systems in their States. One does not wish to argue with the governors – the State’s have very bad finances right now and so large, expensive projects are not really doable. This is especially true when some of the proposals appear of dubious worth.

Overall, though, I am an advocate of high speed rail. For my State of Nevada, I’d like to see high speed rail lines coming in from San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco – mostly, of course, so we can steal business from that over-taxed, over-regulated and de-facto bankrupt State (sorry, Californians, but we’re going to be rather mercenary and predatory given the way you’ve elected to commit economic suicide by putting Brown back in the governor’s office. Goodness, what were you thinking?). I want Nevada to become a manufacturing and distribution center for the United States – high speed rail from the coast will make that possible…and, eventually, we extend the rail lines in to the east. I also want us to vastly increase our mining, farming and ranching industries – and all of these need the ability to move large, bulky items swiftly from place to place.

It is my view that our transportation system does need a major upgrade – especially in moving large quantities of goods over long distances at low cost. This will take some government action, but the best action government can take is to clear regulatory hurdles to setting up the manufacturing needed to make the trains as well as providing lost-cost right-of-way for the new network (which, though, will mostly follow the current rail lines…though the whole road bed will have to be re-engineered for the much higher quality needed for high speed rail). If there is a genuine economic need in this, private funds will easily pay for the overwhelming bulk of the direct, monetary cost. Anyone who says Uncle Sam or the States have to take a leading financial role merely means they want to build a rail line no one will use.

Of course, all of this is just part and parcel with a new economic paradigm which encourages the making, mining and growing of things. Productivity is the only way we’ll get out of our economic morass. And if we’re really going to do things which will allow us to compete price-wise with the rest of the world (and especially China) then we’re going to need vastly more efficiency throughout our economy. High speed rail fits right in with this – certainly on the major lines where the bulk of our over-land trade goes.

A new American economy requires us to cast aside the stale, dead policies of the past. No more boondoggles for favored groups; no more hand outs to corporations who grease the most DC palms; no more making things which don’t work. It is time to really think about what we want, and then about how to get it. High speed rail has its vital place in our new economy, but we daren’t let grafting politicians get hold of it, or we’ll have a 300 mph training running banksters and bureaucrats from New York to DC while useful goods amble along at 50 mph in the old system.

This time in Oklahoma:

A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order Monday to block a new amendment to the Oklahoma Constitution that would prohibit state courts from considering international or Islamic law when deciding cases.

U.S. District Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange handed down the order after an Oklahoma man filed a lawsuit claiming the amendment stigmatized his religion and would invalidate his will, which he said is partially based on Islamic Law, also known as Sharia Law…

And it should invalidate that portion of the man’s will which is based on Islamic law. Such law has absolutely zero place in the United States of America. You want your will to be Sharia-compliant? Then move to Saudi Arabia and have at it – the only thing you will can be in America is American-law compliant. There are not just sufficient elements of American law to ensure a just distribution of the man’s property but, actually, elements which are vastly superior to Islamic law, which treats women as second class citizens in matters of inheritance, as in all other aspects.

The more important issue, right now, is the fact that a judge issued an injunction against the enactment of a law passed by a Constitutionally valid majority of the citizens of Oklahoma – such an act, unless it is in clear violation of some provision of the United States Constitution, is the final word. I can detect nothing in the United States Constitution which prohibits a sovereign State from determining that non-American law has no place in an American court. No judge has the competence to rule on it plus or minus. If someone doesn’t like it, then they’re only remedy is to apply to the people of Oklahoma to re-amend their Constitution.

It is time to reign in the judges – to force them to mind their proper business and not forever intrude upon the legislative power, which rests entirely with the people or their elected representatives. If we have to amend the US Constitution to spell this out, then so be it – but we can probably do it via legislation as there are provisions in the Constitution for Congress to regulate just what sorts of cases federal courts can hear. Free people use judges to referee disputes at law, and for nothing else – where there is no dispute (and there can be no dispute on the legality of a legitimately enacted law which does not violate any specific Constitutional injunction), then the courts must remain silent.

From Politico:

A staffer for a congressional Democrat who came up short on Tuesday reports that a team of about five people stopped by their offices this morning to talk about payroll, benefits, writing a résumé, and so forth, with staffers who are now job hunting.

But one of the staffers was described as a “counselor” to help with the emotional aspect of the loss — and a section in the packet each staffer was given dealt with the stages of grief (for instance, Stage One being anger, and so on).

“It was like it was about death,” the staffer said. “It was bizarre.” The staffer did say the portions about the benefits and résumé writing were instructive…

Now we know the real problem with our Democrats – they’re panty-waist little wimps. For crying out loud, suck it up! Its not like we were all sunshine and lolly pops after 2006, but we didn’t need grief counselors. You lost an election, not a loved one…

But, then again, maybe it was a loved one? Maybe power and its privileges are the only thing Democrats really care about, and now they are bereft?

Well, is that is the case – then don’t get counseling: get on your knees and pray for forgiveness. Your ultimate business is not with political power in this world, but with the life of the world to come. Who is committee chairman won’t matter when that time comes around.

From Rasmussen:

…A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey, conducted after last week’s elections, finds that 58% of Likely U.S. Voters say tax increases will hurt the economy. Just 18% feel increasing taxes will help our economy, while 14% say it will have no impact. These findings show little change since early April of last year. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Similarly, a solid majority (58%) believe increases in government spending will hurt the country fiscally, while only 24% feel it will help…

We’ve largely won this debate – the American people are on our side as far as taxes and spending go. The trick will be to translate this in to practical policies.

As I’ve said before, we can’t just be “the axe-man cometh”. We can’t, that is, just demand spending and tax cuts – we also have to present a set of positive actions to the American people which will speak to their needs – more jobs, more wealth; a restoration of American prosperity. In this, our best bet is to not just find spending to cut, but find spending to re-prioritize – move money from wasteful, unpopular programs (which are usually just hand outs to leftist interest groups, anyways) to programs more in tune with American needs. Move money from some highway boondoggle to school vouchers, eg.

It will be tricky going forward – political land mines and pitfalls are strewn over the landscape, and some of them are Senators with an “R” after their name. But with a bit of grit and a bit of imagination, we can win all down the line – not only reforming America, but so discrediting Obama and his Democrats that in 2012 we are able to take the Senate and the White House.

Now, to work.