You should check out Black and Right’s blog, by the way.

This time in Pennsylvania:

The embattled government of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s capital, will avoid default on a $3.3 million bond payment this week because of $4.4 million in last-minute state aid.

With Harrisburg’s city council scheduled to meet Tuesday to explore filing for bankruptcy, Gov. Ed Rendell announced Sunday that he was speeding up state funds and grants to the financially-strapped capital…

Harrisburg is bankrupt – it simply cannot pay all of its bills. In fact, it has already not paid some of them. Municipal bankruptcy is really the only way out…but that would harm the city’s bond holders. So, riding to the rescue, Governor Ed Rendell (D-PA). Mish wonder’s how connected the city bondholders are to the Governor – I wonder, too, because this sort of bail out is a monumentally stupid waste of money. It just kicks the can down the road for the city…but it does allow the bondholders some time to try and dump their holdings while the markets are thinking the bail outs will continue indefinitely.

What is really rich is that while a Democrat governor is using taxpayer money to bail out bond holders, one of Harrisburg’s city council members is claiming this is a Wall Street vs Main Street fight…the bond holders are demanding that the burden be put on the taxpayers! For crying out loud, it was the city council who put the burden on the taxpayers – the bondholders are just demanding repayment for money lent. This isn’t a people vs powerful moment but an idiots vs morons scenario. Idiots who bought municipal bonds as if city governments have an endless supply of cash, morons in city government who kept issuing bonds as if ditto.

Go bankrupt. Default on the bonds. Vote Republican in November. That is all Harrisburg can do at this point.

From AFP:

Economists peddling dire warnings that the world’s number one economy is on the brink of collapse, amid high rates of unemployment and a spiraling public deficit, are flourishing here.

The guru of this doomsday line of thinking may be economist Nouriel Roubini, thrust into the forefront after predicting the chaos wrought by the subprime mortgage crisis and the collapse of the housing bubble.

“The US has run out of bullets,” Roubini told an economic forum in Italy earlier this month. “Any shock at this point can tip you back into recession.”…

My only quibble is with “back in to recession” – I don’t think we ever left. The official statistics keepers appear likely to decide that it ended in July of 2009…but do any of us really feel like it did? Or is it that a mass of printed and borrowed money just gave the US economy a temporary bloom of health? And at the cost of worse problems down the road because of the printed and borrowed money?

New policies are needed – the Keynesian model followed by Obama in emulation of FDR has failed. Well, not really “failed” as in “it worked once, but didn’t this time” but more as a “you frickin’ moron: how could you ever think that stupid idea would work?”. For crying out loud – printing money to pick the pockets of the poor and middle class combined with borrowing money the private economy desperately needs for investment…that is an economic model? Did anyone ever check to see if Keynes was drunk when he thought that up?

Time for a change – it is the only way to avert economic catastrophe. We have only a few years left to get our act together, or we’ll face a generation of economic crisis. Step one comes on November 2nd.

We’ll easily forgive the Castle endorsement – this guy just gets better all the time:

This via Gay Patriot:

Obama Attacks Boehner; NYT runs Page One article attacking House Minority Leader for Lobbyist Ties

Coincidence? I don’t think so…

Neither do I – the two events are too close together for it to be coincidence. Apparently, having failed in their effort to run against President Bush in 2010, Democrats are instead hoping to run against Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff…bringing us back to the 2006 campaign, which got the Democrat ball rolling.

Naturally, the MSM is going to play along with whatever instructions Obama and his Democrats provide. It is what they do because for many years now, the MSM has been the merest adjunct of the DNC. Get ready for some interesting smear campaigns as November approaches. Everything including the kitchen sink will be thrown at us.

From the New York Times:

…From street markets to corporate offices, consumers and executives alike in China are trying to cope with rising prices. The National Bureau of Statistics announced on Saturday that consumer prices in China were 3.5 percent higher compared with a year earlier, the largest increase in nearly two years.

To make matters worse, inflation over the short term also seems to be accelerating. A seasonally adjusted comparison of August prices to July prices showed that inflation was running at an annualized pace closer to 4.8 percent.

Prices are rising in China for reasons that many Americans or Europeans might envy. The economy is growing, stores are full and banks are lending lots of money, according to other statistics released by the government on Saturday. Compared with August of last year, industrial production rose 13.9 percent last month, retail sales increased 18.4 percent, bank lending climbed 18.6 percent and fixed-asset investment surged 24 percent…

Look for more stories soon about the Chinese economy and how we can learn from it. China’s economy is “growing” because of massive government money-printing and banks lending money like there’s no tomorrow. Trouble is, tomorrow is coming – and China, already filled with empty offices, empty malls and even empty cities is simply force-feeding itself in to the appearance of growth. As long as the bills never come due this will continue to work.

This, of course, is what Obama and Co hoped would happen to the US economy – shovel a lot of money in to it, and watch growth take off. What killed the concept was the amount of debt we already carry – government and personal. China had relatively low debt at the start of the crisis…but they are massively increasing it, and placing the debt on a fundamentally weak economy (weak because most of the people live in grinding poverty or a sort Americans can’t even imagine). This won’t be pretty once that bill comes due.

I figure the bill is probably going to be presented for payment pretty soon…

HAT TIP: Mish’s

From his Twitter feed:

I’m proud to endorse Christine O’Donnell for US Senate in Delaware. She will stand strong for the principles of freedom.

As I’ve said, better to lose with a conservative than win with a RINO. If you could prove to me that Mike Castle, and only Mike Castle, would assure us of 51 GOP Senators in January, then I’d still back O’Donnell…better to be a strong, conservative minority than a weak, RINO majority.

This promo video was put out for the St Louis 9/12 event – but it’ll do for the whole nation:

And, of course, there will be a march in DC, as well. This is the kick off for the final push – the battle for November.

The future of our nation is at stake – if we can win, we can start reforming our nation and stave off complete disaster. If we fail, then America will pay a high price. Time to get in to the trenches.

From Walter Russell Mead:

…The greatest victory we have won in this war came on one of its most questionable battlefields: in Iraq. It was not a military victory, though it opened the door to military progress. It was a moral victory. And it was not something that Americans imposed on Muslims; it was a choice that Muslims made…

…They decided that the future of their families, their children and their values was better served by aligning with the United States against the terrorists and against the fanatics.

What those Sunni Arabs in Iraq came to understand is the basic truth of this conflict. The war unleashed nine years ago is not a clash of civilizations between Islam and the west. It is a clash between civilization and barbarism, and in that clash the Americans and true Muslims are on the same side…

I put a bit of a different spin on it – they didn’t so much decide to fight alongside us as recognize that they finally had a chance to settle accounts with those who had alternately bamboozled and brutalized them for the benefit of a tiny minority. Once in Iraq it has been Saddam and his henchmen, after Saddam it was al-Qaeda and other such groups trying to take over. We offered them the chance for no one to take over -for them to be able to live their lives as they see fit.

They took the chance and, so far, its working out.

Mead goes on to note that in the Moslem world, there is a lot of anger over this, that or the other American policy. I can imagine that most Moslems are horrified at some of the gross immorality on display in the West. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that when they think of “democracy” they don’t mean “hey, lets build a combination San Francisco/Las Vegas here in the Middle East”. Furthermore, I’m sure they’ve still got a bit of a learning curve on what real religious toleration is all about – the Christian minorities in the Moslem world have it very rough, even under the best of circumstances. But, and this is crucial, they are people who want to live their lives without let or hindrance from others – and in that, they are 100% like the rest of us, and thus our natural allies.

I talk about this theme from a different angle over at Noonan for Nevada – to nutshell it, we are faced not with a nation in arms against us; not with a war of Islam vs West. What we have are various, small minorities which wish to gain absolute power in order to advance whatever cause they think best regardless of what everyone else wants. My personal view is that the goal of 90% of the enemy is personal wealth and power – but even if I’m wrong on that, I’m right in my contention that decapitating the tiny minority is the key to victory.

How we go about finally getting rid of all the leadership of the enemy is an empirical question – you take a look at the particular circumstances for the leaderships of the nations and groups which battle us, and work out the best means of taking or killing them. But getting them out of they way is the only path to victory – because it is the only means of having the broad masses of the Moslem world able to take charge of their own lives…and once they do so, I’m certain they won’t be terribly interested in having their sons blow themselves to bits just on the off chance they might kill a few Israelis or Americans.

Victory, peace and freedom beckon us – if we’ll just understand what we’re faced with, and steel ourselves to the necessary actions.