Jonah Goldberg over at NRO wonders:

…For nearly a century now, the rules have said that tough economic times make big government more popular. For more than 40 years it has been a rule that environmental disasters — and scares over alleged ones — help environmentalists push tighter regulations. According to the rules, Americans never want to let go of an entitlement once they have it. According to the rules, populism is a force for getting the government to do more, not less. According to the rules, Americans don’t care about the deficit during a recession…

Mr. Goldberg should know better than that – this is easy. No, the rules haven’t changed. They are just as they were, oh, 100 years ago. The only thing has changed is the ability of a tiny elite to steam roller their agenda through. What has changed is how information is disseminated in public.

Did you know that there were demonstrations in favor of victory in Vietnam? No, seriously, there were. Some quite large, and they were organized at the grass roots level. Sort of like the TEA Party, ya know? Most people have never heard of this – because back during the war, when it was a choice of which demonstration to cover, the MSM covered the anti-war demonstrators (even, from what I understanding, coaching the demonstrators on how to make the best effect on television). The pro-war people weren’t covered and there was no way for them to get their message out – conservative media outlets were restricted to a few low-circulation magazines such as National Review, and just a handful of mid-sized newspapers which had conservative editors.

Until the rise of the New Media – and Rush was the start of this, back in 1988 – there was simply no way for large numbers of conservative/centrist people to find out that they weren’t an isolated minority. The election of Ronald Reagan was actually out of place, in a certain sense – and it really only happened because both the Democrats and the MSM were so convinced that they were correct that they figured the best way to beat Reagan was to get him on the air…to debate him openly. Once the people found out about him – and were coached in how to believe via the MSM – it was a sure thing Reagan would lose.

That didn’t work out – and once Reagan was in, the MSM tried to repair the error. Most people don’t realize where the response to the State of the Union Comes from. After all, the State of the Union is a Constitutionally recognized requirement of the Presidency…but the response is no where mentioned. But there it is. Why? Because the MSM wanted to give the Democrats a chance to steal Reagan’s thunder whenever he got up on the bully pulpit and spoke directly to the American people (it was also amusing in those days to watch the MSM and see them try to immediately spin what the President said – trying, as it were, to tell us all what we were supposed to think about the speech).

Reagan wasn’t going to come again, as far as the establishment was concerned. They would carefully control the debate and immediately pre-demonize anyone who showed up with an inclination to oppose the status quo. Robert Bork was a victim of this – but, also, one of the last. That was in 1986; two years later, Rush was on the air, and things started to change.

But it wasn’t until the internet really took hold that the power of the elite to script the debate was ended. Blogs, especially, spelled the doom of the old ways. When anyone could post any opinion they liked without let or hindrance and anyone could read that opinion for free, the fat was in the fire. When some of these bloggers turned themselves in to investigative reports, the elite’s goose was cooked.

So, no, the rules have not changed – it is just that the rule-breakers no longer can control the debate. The rise of the TEA Party and the revolutionary ferment among the citizenry is the result of the broad majority not only knowing that things are bad, but knowing that they are, indeed, the broad majority. It makes all the difference in the world – just getting the truth out there. And that is what has changed, not the rules.

It can be accessed over at Arizona Public Media tonight at 7PM Pacific time. It is probably worth a listen.

McCain has been an Establishment conservative but he’s had to toe the TEA Party line (as it were) in order to save his Senate seat. It’ll be interesting to see both how this primary comes out and whether or not McCain has really changed, or is just saying what is necessary to save his seat.

Its all part of the process – pressure is applied via primary, establishment candidate shifts towards us to win…then we have to keep a sharp eye out and always be ready for another primary challenge, if the politician gets off the ranch.

Angelo M. Codevilla over at the American Spectator has a fascinating article about just how our current ruling class arose, what it’s goals are and the perils for any group which would try to overthrow it and re-establish Constitutional government. Some of it is things I have already discussed and there are a few points of disagreement between myself and the author (most notably and the notion of bringing democracy to foreign lands on the point of a bayonet – I think we can and should, Codevilla feels otherwise…of course, I would do it differently from the way we’ve done it). It is, in my view, a must read article.

The pragmatic facts of life here are that we do have a ruling class. It comprises the overwhelming majority of elected Democrats as well as a substantial minority (and perhaps, at times, a plurality) – Ed. Note: this had said “majority”, but that was a typo, sorry for the confusion – of the Republican party. It absolutely dominates the permanent bureaucracy, especially on the federal level. It controls the unions, almost all institutions of higher education (especially in the prestige universities) and the MSM. It is culturally dominant in television and motion pictures.

It is very badly educated (especially in history and military affairs, while it wouldn’t know theology or philosophy if it fell on them) and yet claims for itself the mantle of an educated elite (this on the mere fact of having degrees, especially dumbed-down degrees from prestige universities). It is anti-Christian, anti-Jewish religion (to distinguish from those non-observant Jews who are members of the ruling class), anti-American and utterly contemptuous of the American people. It believes that it must rule because the American people, as such, are too narrow minded, ignorant, racist and stupid to govern themselves.

And it has to go – we must get rid of it before it destroys America and thus opens the path to war, conquest and a new Dark Age.

The changes we must advocate and carry out are, indeed, revolutionary. That we will be doing nothing other, in the end, than restoring our Founder’s government doesn’t make it any less revolutionary. We must think and act like revolutionaries – uncompromising in our demands and fierce in our denunciations of a usurping ruling class.

We must press our enemies and never let up. But we also must be wary of ever falling in to their methods. Codevilla points out how wrong it would be if, given a Congressional majority, we were to enact a Bill of Attainder against, say, Pelosi, Reid and Obama and then, per the Constitution, refuse authority to the Courts to review such action – we would be running rough shod over our own views and thus destroy ourselves.

But we must not shrink from the prospect of eventually putting all of them in jail for their violations of the law. Not that we will, but we must be prepared to do so – we must have an intensity of force which will leave no doubt that we are not going to be thwarted. They, on their side, have spent decades slowly transforming America in to a political freak show – we’ll want to switch it back to a constitutional republic in a matter of a few years, because any coalition of revolutionaries in favor of the Founder’s system will not be able to cooperate over even a ten year period, let alone the 80 or 90 years our ruling class has spent wrecking America.

Our advantage is in numbers and genuine enthusiasm for what we’re doing. Their advantage is in having control while also being a tightly disciplined minority. Victory will go to the side which keeps the goal most clearly in mind and which doesn’t lose faith even when things look darkest – fortunately, we are also the side with faith, so I do see our victory as certain, if we but show the will to try.

From NRO’s The Corner:

Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R., W. Va.) tells National Review Online that she will decide on whether to run for the U.S. Senate by early next week…

…Over the weekend, Moore Capito, a five-term incumbent, says she will “look at everything” and will continue to have conversations with GOP leaders in Washington. Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, tells C-SPAN that he has reached out to the Mountain State congresswoman. “I think we’ll have a competitive candidate,” he says. “Governor Manchin would have voted for the stimulus. He supported the health care bill. Those are unpopular policies in a state like West Virginia that has about a 35 percent approval rating for the president.”

The “stakes are big,” Moore Capito tells us, with the Obama administration “out of line” with West Virginian values…

That is all very true, but Democrat Governor Manchin is a very conservative Democrat (he’s even pro-life while Moore-Capito is reportedly pro-choice) and he’s tremendously popular with West Virginia voters. Beating him won’t be easy.

On the other hand, he can be beaten. Moore-Capito has shown herself to be a savvy campaigner and is also popular in her corner of West Virginia. West Virgnia, itself, is trending increasingly Republican on the national level and Obama is very unpopular in that State (it went for McCain in 2008).

It would be one of the most hotly contested races of 2010 – I would prefer a more pro-life GOP candidate, but I’ll also have to look further in to Moore-Capito’s position on that…there’s pro-choice and then there’s pro-choice, ya know? Meaning there are those who are just wary of banning abortion and then there are those who are pro-abortion. I’ll have to see where she falls on the scale.

The news:

Washington’s Senate race looks increasingly like a referendum on incumbent Democrat Patty Murray with two Republican candidates edging past her this month.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in Washington State finds Republican hopefuls Dino Rossi and Clint Didier both earning 48% support in match-ups with Murray. She, in turn, picks up 45% of the vote against the two GOP challengers…

Taking down Murray would be quite a feather in the GOP cap come November – she was, it should be recalled, one of the safe Democrat seats for 2010. As in so many other Democrat seats, even a win at this point is going to be disappointing because they’ll have to do it the hard way – large expenditures of money and effort which thus cannot be used to challenge GOP seats.

The lay of the political land has decisively turned against the Democrats. The November result cannot be known at this point, but the bottom line is that Democrats will need to catch a lot of breaks just to hold on this fall.

Interesting story from the Wall Street Journal:

Shirley Davis, a 66-year-old retired phone-company administrator who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., is more than $33,000 in debt, earns just $2,414 a month and filed for bankruptcy in June. Shortly before that, she ripped open an envelope from Capital One Financial Corp., which pitched her a credit card even though it sued her in 2006 to recover $4,470 she owed on a different card from the bank…

…Fannie Mae, seized by the U.S. government in 2008 to avert the mortgage company’s failure, launched an initiative in January that allows some first-time home buyers to get a loan with a down payment of as little as $1,000. Securities firm Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, a brokerage operation jointly owned by Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Inc., is offering some clients home-equity credit lines of as much as $2.5 million.

Credit-card issuers mailed 84.8 million offers of plastic to U.S. subprime borrowers in the first six months of this year, up from 43.7 million a year earlier, estimates research firm Synovate. Nearly 8% of loans for new cars in the latest quarter went to borrowers with the lowest range of credit scores, up from 6.2% in 2009’s fourth quarter…

I’ve seen it at my employer, too – keeping in mind that I work for a very large financial institution. I’ve seen us weaken underwriting on retail loans and issuing credit to people who in one way or another defaulted on a previous loan with us. I won’t name my employer because that would be inappropriate, but I was wondering what the bosses were up to.

Now, I just wonder even more.

Given that Fannie Mae is government owned, I wonder if there is a concerted effort, led by the government, to force-feed a borrowing frenzy upon the United States in order to get the economy back on track? Keep in mind that the last time we had a genuinely production-led recovery was back in the 1980s. In the recoveries since then, it has been debt driving the economic engine (the Fed tightened fiscal policy in 1980-81 to choke off inflation, so it took actual work and investment – opened up by Reagan’s tax cuts on wealth creation – to get the economy rolling…since then, each time we’re in a jam the Fed just eases rates, so people pile up debt to buy houses, cars, gadgets…all the while, our wealth is shipped to China, Mexico and Chile).

China’s alleged growth this past quarter was more than 10%. I say “alleged” because in that tyrannical society, there’s no way to know if the numbers provided are true. China got that number by doing one thing we did and then another thing we couldn’t. Like us, they printed up piles of money and handed it nearly free to the banks. Unlike us, China’s government could order China’s banks to lend. And lend they did – they are now in the grip of an acute housing bubble which is about to come crashing down…but, for the past year it has seemed as if China’s economy was humming right along, and that is all Obama and Co want for us, right now: the appearance of prosperity.

Here in the US, the money was handed off to the banks but the banks were wary of lending, while consumers were wary of borrowing. I sure as heck haven’t wanted to borrow any money in the past year. Have you? Anyone with a bit of wisdom right now is determined to get out of debt and get some money saved. If it turns out that the economy recovers, then it’ll just be nice to be out of debt and have some money in the bank – if the economy goes south, then being out of debt and having some savings will be even better. Who would borrow up a bunch of money right now and go on a spending spree?

Only the mos irresponsible among us. In other words, people who are lousy credit risks. And now comes this story – confirmed in my own experience – that at least some financial institutions are essentially encouraging the profligate to go on a spree. I can’t imagine anything more stupid than this – it won’t be enough to propel growth (no matter what: the total national debt is too high), but it will set up a huge increase in defaulted loans because if you’re loaning money to the irresponsible, its a cinch that a large percentage of the debts will go bad.

Remember, folks, for the government and the banksters (who owe the Democrats a great deal since the financial “reform” bill just passed does nothing to reign in irresponsible banking practices) the primary thing is to keep the economy in some sort of reasonable shape until after the election. They don’t want a crash before then – and so they’ll use whatever expedient they can find to push things up. Including lending money to people who can’t or won’t repay.

Democrats set the precedent, so if it turns out that 41 GOP votes go against cloture, Democrats will have no one but themselves to blame.

That said, we shouldn’t filibuster – on the other hand, if we can delay this we might be able to generate enough public opposition to make vulnerable Democrats think twice before voting to impose this leftist ideologue on the Supreme Court.

Kagan may be the nicest person in the world, but in terms of education, experience and ideology, she simply lacks any capability to rule on the law. We can expect her, once on the Court, to be slavishly devoted to whatever is the liberal fashion of the moment (thus we’ve seen her in the past attempt to bar the military over “don’t ask/don’t tell” while at the same time accepting violently homophobic Sharia as having a place in America – these are the sorts of mental twists we haven’t seen since the heyday of Stalin and his ever-changing party line). She’s free to be the advocate she wants to be – but she should not be a leftist advocate on the Supreme Court.

Another day, another devastating poll for the Democrats:

Democratic incumbent Russ Feingold and his chief Republican challenger Ron Johnson remain locked in a neck-and-neck battle for the U.S. Senate in Wisconsin.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in Wisconsin finds Johnson with 47% support, while the Democrat earns 46% of the vote…

This one will go down to the wire, I’ll bet – and, of course, one still have to put it as “lean Democrat” even though Feingold is clearly in trouble. But the real story is here is not that Feingold might pull it out, but the fact that Democrats will have to expend a lot of effort holding what should have been a sure-thing.

This is the story of 2010, so far: Democrats are in trouble. A lot of trouble. The glow of 2008 is long gone, and even popular incumbents such as Feingold (who has been a good fit for Wisconsin’s electorate) are going to have to fight hard just to hold on. The Democrat brand, as it were, is damaged goods – and we can rely on it that as it gets closer to November, ever more Democrats move away from the leadership in DC and try as much as possible to downplay their connection to the national Democrat party (much as Reid did in his 2004 run when he was “an Independent for Nevada”, and never so much as mentioned his party affiliation).

From the Wall Street Journal:

Oil stopped flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from BP PLC’s blown-out well for the first time in nearly three months. But BP and U.S. officials warned it was far too early to declare victory…

Indeed, I won’t call this a win for at least a few days – but it is good news that, at least for a while, there is no more oil leaking in to the Gulf.

This catastrophe has been marked by a whole series of grossly incompetent acts, from whomever put the faulty valve together, right up to the President’s lack of leadership and decision as the crisis grew. This never needed to happen, and it could have been fixed long ago – but BP acted just like a gigantic corporation is wont to act (ie, like idiots), while the President acted like it was someone else’s job to actually take charge and get things moving.

Our prayers for the continued success of this effort and for all the people of the Gulf who have been hurt so badly.

From Hot Air:

No, this is not coming from Rasmussen or an internal GOP poll, but from the normally Democrat-sympathetic Public Policy Polling. PPP pitted Barack Obama against five potential Republican challengers for the 2012 presidential campaign, and the only one Obama beat was … Jan Brewer. Even that, PPP admitted, resulted from Brewer’s lack of name recognition. The headline, though, is Sarah Palin’s dead heat with the President:

…He trails Mitt Romney 46-43, Mike Huckabee 47-45, Newt Gingrich 46-45, and is even tied with Sarah Palin at 46. The only person tested he leads is Jan Brewer, who doesn’t have particularly high name recognition on the national level at this point…

As Hot Air goes on to note, the poll samples Democrats 5 percentage points more than GOPers. This is a devastating poll for the man who won 53% of the vote less than two years ago. It is a long way to 2012, but its hard – very hard – for a President to recover lost popularity.

Additionally, as the MSM continues to lose influence and the New Media becomes larger, the narratives developed by the MSM for people such as Sarah Palin will become weaker. It took relentless hounding to develop the memes, and that relentless hounding is going to fade away as time goes on, allowing all of the Republicans to better craft their own public image. Meanwhile, Obama is stuck – as it were – in the White House where daily decisions are his and if things don’t get wonderful, he’ll be blamed for everything which goes wrong (its not necessarily fair that it works out that way, but it does – and we GOPers were on the heavy receiving end of it from mid-2005 on).