All we need do from now until November is just keep playing the Democrats in action. These guys are just caught in a vise – they are so used to being relentlessly dishonest and never getting caught at it that they simply don’t know what to do when the truth comes out.

Lots of things have happened, but the most important political development of the past 10 years has been the rise of the New Media – powered by low cost, easy-use technology. Over the years I have read many books and it is a curious thing, now, to apply modern insight in to past events – would Joe McCarthy really have been run out of politics had the New Media existed? Would the MSM have gotten away with calling Mao an “agrarian reformer” if the New Media existed back then?

Carry it further: would LBJ have gotten away with the Gulf of Tokin Resolution? Would Tet have been considered a US defeat? Would Richard Nixon have been able to bamboozle conservatives in to backing him over Reagan in 1968? On and on and on it goes – we used to have an MSM which controlled the terms of debate…and while they are still as relentless in their defense of the establishment, they no longer control the debate. Its entirely outside of anyone’s control – as long as someone can record things on a phone and post them on the web in minutes, the truth will come out.

And the truth really does set you free.

My plan was, no matter what happened this year, that I’d keep the reporting about GOP prospects low key or negative. Lower expectations. Never put a bright face on things. Always assume disaster was just around the corner.

What this has done is made it very hard for me to write – can’t find negative stories to tell about GOPers, can’t find any positive stories about Democrats to counter any good news for the GOP. For crying out loud, the entire political system is crashing and burning and Democrats are running ’round like chickens with their heads cut off. Yesterday I saw a House Democrat get up on TV to condemn the Obama Administration suit against Arizona!

Sure, that is triangulation. She’s probably in a swing or GOP-leaning district and is trying to save her bacon…but, goodness, to step out 18 months after Democrats came in to power in a stunning, crushing victory over the GOP? This is a political turn around never seen in American history. It was a long, slow build to 1994 – took Newt Gingrich and the House GOP a decade to set that up. We’re in political over drive.

One wonders: how much more incompetent can Obama prove himself? Can Congressional Democrats become even more corrupt and out of touch? Will idiots at the NAACP and in the New Black Panther Party further alienate Independents from the Democrat party? The Democrats and liberals in general are proving an invaluable ally in undoing the liberal victory of 2008!

Just a great year to be a Republican – but, still, we’ve got to work like we’re 5 points behind and its two weeks before election day. Don’t let up for a moment.

I am shocked to find that in Washington, DC, there is no memorial dedicated to those who served our nation in the First World War – it turns out that I wasn’t the only person who didn’t know:

In March 2008, Frank Buckles, the last surviving American veteran of World War I, visited the District of Columbia War Memorial, on the National Mall in Washington DC. He observed that this peaceful, secluded memorial, dedicated in 1931 as a memorial to the 499 residents of the District of Columbia who gave their lives in that war, sits neglected and in extreme disrepair, and that there is no national memorial to World War I. Mr. Buckles issued a call for the restoration and re-dedication of the D.C. memorial as a National and District of Columbia World War I Memorial.

I have seen that memorial and it is actually quite a moving place – though it is in great disrepair. And it would make an excellent memorial to all those who served – and this includes my grand-father and all of his brothers, as well as a couple sisters who served as nurses. They are all gone now, but the centennial of the First World war is little more than four years off and it would be fitting that the veterans receive a memorial worthy of their sacrifice – and as a permanent reminder to future generations of those Americans who went “Over There” to fight for freedom.

This link is to a petition which urges Congress to appropriate the money necessary to make this a reality. I hope you will sign and join in remembering the veterans of the First World War.

This is the first instance I know of a dead person voting – for a Republican, at least:

If Nevadans want to honor Charlotte McCourt, they shouldn’t vote for Harry Reid.

That’s the message in the 84-year-old’s obituary, which ran Tuesday in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

“We believe that Mom would say she was mortified to have taken a large role in the election of Harry Reid to U.S. Congress. Let the record show Charlotte was displeased with his work. Please, in lieu of flowers, vote for another more worthy candidate,” states the obituary…

When Democrats start losing the votes of Cadaver-Americans, you know things are looking pretty grim for them. It speaks volumes that in the era of Obama – he of Chicago’s high cemetary-turnout elections – that those who have shaken off this mortal coil feel compelled to act against Democrats, usually the best friends of room-temperature voters.

Yes, we will be making a lot about this.

From Charles Krauthammer via NRO’s The Corner:

Every question [administration spokesmen] get on the economy, their answer is “Bush drove us into a ditch.” I think they ought to wear it on a t-shirt, and in that way they could have an interview and not have to say anything. They could have a sandwich while being interviewed.

It’s no answer. It’s also no answer to say that big business is cynical and unprincipled. That’s not news. But what is news is an administration that is adding not just costs but uncertainty.

There are three major areas a corporation, small or large, has to worry about: health-care costs, energy costs, and the cost of money. In each of these, the administration either has or is planning regulations worth thousands of pages which are going to raise costs, as we know, but also are going to interact in ways that nobody understands and that are going to create uncertainty…

Some things are certain – higher taxes in 2011 as the Bush tax cuts expire, so businesses are front-loading economic activity in to 2010. Cash for clunkers and new home tax credits also encouraged early economic activity. Trouble is, all that is stolen from future action – which means that we’ll have even less economic activity in late 2010 and early 2011 than we would have expected.

But the uncertainty is probably the worst economy-killer we’ve got. No one can say, from day to day, just what is coming down the pike. As Speaker Pelosi said, we had to wait until ObamaCare was passed to find out what is in it – and the more we learn, the more costly it becomes. Meanwhile, minimum wages are still being hiked, taxes are going up (States are raising taxes in desperate, foolish attempts to close budget gaps) and while Cap and Trade, Card Check and other liberal idiocies are still on deck, there’s just no way anyone is going to invest heavily in long term projects. Better to just hunker down, save what you can and see what comes up.

If someone planned to make the downturn of 2008-09 in to a Great Depression, he couldn’t have scripted it better than to say, raise taxes, increase regulation, increase government debt and don’t tell people what you’re really going to do. Its the perfect storm for complete economic collapse, and everyone who is in business knows it. So, people freeze in place, and no one is going to do anything until at least the middle of 2011 – and by then it may be too late to avert a Great Depression.

Huh? Subsidiarity? What’s that? Well, its this:

The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co- ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”

Boiled down, what is meant is that you should leave things to be done on the lowest social level possible. We are burdened – in government and business – with behemoth organizations which simply grind up society. Can a bureaucrat in DC really tell what sort of assistance is needed in Omaha? Not at all – but the bureaucrat’s rules dictate what the people of Omaha will have to do, regardless of how absurd, expensive or counter-productive it is.

Similarly, can a CEO based in New York City really tell what the business needs are in Boise? Not a chance – but down will flow the dictates and the people in Boise will try to implement a business plan drawn up by people who have never been within 500 miles of the place. It just doesn’t work.

Remember, it was the considered decisions of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, AIG, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the United States Treasury which got us in to our current mess. Nothing small in any of that – nothing which was actually in touch with the day to day needs of average people. Its not surprising it failed – it is surprising that it didn’t fail, sooner.

I bring this up because Deal Hudson over at Inside Catholic writes up how Governor Christie of New Jersey is implementing governing ideas based upon subsidiarity:

…At a time when most prominent Catholic politicians — Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and John Kerry — have advocated federal government solutions to problems like health care, Gov. Christie is pushing in the opposite direction by releasing a New Jersey Privatization Task Force Report.

In the 57-page report, the Task Force proposes privatizing the state’s motor vehicle inspections, housing construction inspections, turnpike toll booths, state parks, psychiatric hospitals, as well as contracting for highway maintenance work, and outsourcing worker’s compensation claims and all pension, payroll, and benefit payments systems…

That is subsidiarity with teeth. The concept here is not, as our liberals would say, that we’re abandoning the poor. They want to believe that because they can’t imagine a world without a government bureaucrat telling them what to do – but we imagine a world in which people take care of themselves and their neighbors. Which is the sort of world we used to have, before we started first creating monster-sized corporations, then created a double-monster-sized government to be the senior partner of a two-headed, society-eating dragon.

A new – or, more accurately, a revived – America must come of this crisis. As with all problems, it is moral – theological – at its base. What sort of society do we want? Do we want to be free men and women who look after each other? Or do we wish to be slaves – slaves to the super-State using the super-Corporation as its enforcer? I choose to be free – and I am delighted that in people like Governor Christie, we’re seeing at least some in leadership start to get it.

From Allahpundit at Hot Air:

The text’s not online yet but it sounds like they scaled back the accusation from the entire movement to simply certain unspecified people within it. Which is the safe route, of course. Smearing everyone would go too far even by the standards of some liberals, including The One…

From this point on, anyone with any sense of decency should have nothing to do with the NAACP. The TEA Party is not racist – and given what we see here, it is likely there are more racists in the NAACP than in the TEA Party. I am sick to death of this – I am not racist; I do not associate with racists; I do not tolerate racism – when some liberal says groups I belong to has racist elements they are essentially saying that I am a racist. I’m furious at this sort of thing.

A once proud and useful organization has gone entirely in to the gutter. Shame on them.

UPDATE: Sarah Palin weighs in:

I am saddened by the NAACP’s claim that patriotic Americans who stand up for the United States of America’s Constitutional rights are somehow “racists.” The charge that Tea Party Americans judge people by the color of their skin is false, appalling, and is a regressive and diversionary tactic to change the subject at hand…

Agreed.

Drug and rape a teenager – that, apparently, gets you forgiven in Europe.

From the Associated Press:

Republicans in the Senate are backing a plan to shave $20 billion from President Barack Obama’s budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

The cuts amount to about a 2 percent trim from the $1.13 trillion requested by Obama for agency budgets annually funded by Congress. Senate Budget Committee Democrats have proposed a $4 billion cut…

A $20 billion cut is, of course, not enough – but still contrasts sharply with the Democrat’s absurd $4 billion cut which is nothing more than a campaign gimmick designed to allow threatened Democrats to say they voted to “reign in out of control government spending”.

We need to start thinking in terms of a 25%, across-the-board reduction in spending – and that is just a start. Unless we very swiftly get our budget under control, we face absolute national bankruptcy and complete economic collapse. If we don’t do this, dear people, then we face a future of not just 10 or 15% unemployment, but 50%…not just three or four years of recession, but decades of Depression.

It is really that serious. We cannot sustain this debt and eventually the time will come when we can’t borrow any more – and if we’re not balanced by then, the whole thing falls apart. Money will go in to hiding, everyone will be afraid to make any economic move, at all – government will freeze up (normally, a good thing but in such a circumstances, it would actually be bad). The have announced that our deficit has been $1 trillion through June – how much longer does anyone thing we can keep that up? A year? Two?

The Republican move is long-awaited, not nearly enough and should start the real debate about what we will do about our debt.

Conservative class warfare.

Economic optimism is insane.

GOP maintains lead in “generic ballot“.

Update on Catholic professor fired for teaching Catholicism in a class about Catholicism.

NRA – becoming part of the Establishment? Rumbles on the right about the NRA’s possible endorsement of Reid, and other outrages.

Michelle Obama proves that idiocy in her family is not combined to President Obama.

Berwick: our government-funded Dr Death.