Col. West, Republican candidate for Congress, gets this headline over at Politico:

Bombastic West rakes in cash

Bombastic? Can you imagine any MSMer, anywhere, describing any on the left side of the aisle as “bombastic”? Of course not. But, they have to do something about a black man who is extraordinarily knowledgeable, speaks very well and and who is conservative to the core…and is, as they say, raking in the cash:

West, a former Army colonel challenging Democratic Rep. Ron Klein, raised $1.4 million in the second quarter of 2010 – an astonishing number that puts him in the same league as Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, the inflammatory conservative who raked in $1.7 million over the same period, and Florida Rep. Alan Grayson, the caustic liberal cable news fixture who vacuumed up $800,000 in the first three months of 2010. (emphasis added)

You catch that? West is “bombastic”; Bachmann is “inflammatory”; but Grayson is “caustic”. Two quotes:

Liberty is about each and every person having the abiliy to do what they want with the fruits of their labor but tyranny is when someone else comes in and tries to make the decision about what you should be doing. – Lt. Col Allen West (Ret.), July 4, 2010

And:

How about tracking down every person who said ‘drill, baby, drill’ and putting them all in prison? – Rep. Allen Grayson (D-FL), June 4th, 2010

Is West “bombastic”? It Grayson merely “caustic”? No, West is merely stating first principles – bedrock, American beliefs. Grayson is calling for the jailing of people for holding certain opinions – and if you listen to the audio, its clear he’s not joking and that quote is not out of context: Grayson is of that leftist type who views opposition to leftism as criminal behavior.

This is the media bias – essentially slandering a Republican by making him out to be terrible when he’s not; white-washing the downright evil being said and done by Democrats.

Given that a recent poll shows 55% of Americans agree that Obama is a socialist, this is a great time to have a good example of just what we’re dealing with regarding socialists:

From Pajamas Media:

…Our current Department of Justice is anxious to encourage the obligations to get everyone registered, but explicitly unwilling to enforce federal law requiring states to remove the dead or ineligible from the rolls.

In November 2009, the entire Voting Section was invited to a meeting with Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes, a political employee serving at the pleasure of the attorney general. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Motor Voter enforcement decisions.

The room was packed with dozens of Voting Section employees when she made her announcement regarding the provisions related to voter list integrity:

We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.

As I’ve said before, once we do get back in to power we’re going to have to steel ourselves to the task of ruthlessly investigating the rampant criminality in the Obama Administration and the Democrat party and start sending a lot of people to jail. For too long now we Republicans can been unwilling, when able, to fully enforce laws against political corruption. This fear must stop – we are now reaping the whirlwind of not strictly enforcing the law.

The problem of corruption in the Democrat party fundamentally stems from the fact that Democrats either heartily approve of corruption, or are unwilling to stop anything which might, by some means, advance their cause. While corruption has always existed in both parties, the problem became endemic with the Democrat party when Clinton got away with perjury and Gore got away with “no controlling legal authority”. Once Democrats saw them both prosper after clear violations of the law, the flood gates opened.

For the sake of our Republic and, indeed, for the sake of the Democrat party, this must be brought to an end. Once we get back in to power, anti-corruption must be a top priority.

Let’s face it, the Nevada battle is America’s battle – if we can’t get rid of Reid, we can’t get rid of liberalism.

The good news is that Reid, even after quite a lot of smear efforts against Angle, still trails badly.

Now he’s brought Obama out – and we’ve seen how well that worked out elsewhere.

And she’s raised more than $1.6 million since the primary.

From Rasmussen:

Over one-third of current homeowners say they owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth, and outlooks for the housing market in the short and long-term are growing more pessimistic.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of homeowners shows 53% report the value of their homes are worth more than the amount they still owe on their mortgages. But 35% report the opposite and say they owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth…

This probably understates the full picture – unless you actively think about it and look in to housing prices, you wouldn’t really know. The other day I saw a new sticker on a new home development sign…prices start at $130,000.00. When I first saw that sign, I think it was starting in the low 200s. Been watching it drop all year. A friend of mine who bought a “bargain” house last year for 210k just had her neighbors house sell for 140k or some such.

And there is still the “shadow inventory” of, perhaps, a couple million homes nationwide being kept off the market by the banks for fear of a complete collapse of home prices. Eventually, though, they’ll have to disgorge…I fully expect my house, which I bought for 396k, to drop to less than 100k before its all said and done.

Just part of Great Depression II, good people.

The “Mom Awakening”…

Keep in mind they are still terrified of her – and with good reason

This may go down to the wire:

Florida’s Senate race remains all about Republican-turned-independent Charlie Crist and likely GOP nominee Marco Rubio.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in Florida finds the two candidates neck-and-neck again this month, with Rubio earning 36% support and Crist, the state’s current Republican governor, capturing 34% of the vote. Prospective Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek remains a distant third, picking up 15%. Fourteen percent (14%) of the state’s voters remain undecided…

Absolutely this is anyone’s race – except Meek’s; he might as well write his concession speech early and start lobbying for an Administration job.

Crist’s eroding approval rating as Governor might eventually tell the tale for him here – he’s down 7 points since Rasmussen’s last survey, and that can probably be traced to the continuing bad economy in Florida coupled with the increasing disaster along Florida’s Gulf coast; that oil swings ’round to Miami, and that might be all she wrote for Crist.

Rubio’s problem is to get better with GOP voters – Democrats are splitting fairly evenly between Meeks and Crist and as election day nears, there is a chance that this Democrat support for Crist will both solidify and grow. Rasmussen has Rubio with 60% support among Republicans – it’ll probably take at least 70% of them to secure Rubio’s victory, unless Crist really melts down over the next couple months.

The key is to remind Florida Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents that a vote for Crist is a vote for Reid and Obama – Crist is certain to back the Democrats in organizational matters and will vote with them most of the time. If that can be driven home, then the overwhelming bulk of GOP voters will come home and what will then be a split Democrat vote will ensure GOP victory.

Ready to rumble with the TEA Party on the National Mall.

Have at it, Shabazz, you twit. You’ll find that the TEA Partiers are not pants-wetting liberals who tremble in fear of loud mouthed morons.

Battles there are aplenty these days – a continual and increasingly rancorous argument proceeds in our nation. Depending on one’s point of view, we have to get at the conservatives, the liberals, the progressives, the socialists, the TEA Partiers, the Republicans, the Democrats, the Islamists, RINOs, DINOs, racists, homophobes, Christians, fundamentalists, heretics…and on and on. Over at Zero Hedge a post by a gentleman named Mike Krieger brought this to my mind: whom do we fight?

Those who have read my stuff over the past couple of years will find some similarity between some of my views and some of Mr. Kriegers’s. But there will also be that clear demarcation – he’s one of those convinced that the two party system is one party and the whole thing, combined with banksters and bureaucrats, are leading us to ruin. Deliberately. Us vs Them in such theories comes down to “people who agree with me vs those who don’t”. If you don’t agree, you see, it means you’re just a willing or blind tool of “them”.

Now, to hold that the two-party system is corrupt and, often, results in the same sort of disaster no matter who is in charge has a long and honorable history – but it has also picked up some disreputable hangers-on from time to time. Chesterton and Belloc, representing the best of this theory, argued cogently from personal experience – they had fought a campaign against political corruption only to find both parties white washing the results – that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Britain’s Tories and Liberals. In a very real sense, this was (and is) correct – both parties are made up of people who want to be in power and will make all manner of intellectual and moral adjustments to do just that.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a difference. It doesn’t mean that, for instance, had McCain won that we’d be in the same plight we are today. That we’d likely be in a bad way is almost certainly true – McCain had no more idea of what ails the US economy than Barack Obama – or George Bush. Or, for that matter, 999 out of 1,000 people in government. But things would be different.

For instance, we wouldn’t be heading for a massive tax increase in January. McCain would have worked out at least a partial extension of the cuts. We wouldn’t have ObamaCare metastasising through our government. We wouldn’t have a half-war, lets-not-lose-too-fast campaign in Afghanistan. Things would be different, even if not entirely better – and this in spite of the fact that, yes, McCain is firmly part of the socio-political elite who are often as alike as peas in a pod and who are joined together in, at least, an unwillingness to fundamentally change things.

On can read too much in to things. And by so doing, one can make far too many enemies and thus make victory impossible. At its worst, believing in such terms (ie, that the parties are the same and “they” are out to get us) can lead to bizarre conspiracy theories and easily fall in to racism or Jew-baiting or survivalism or some warped combination of these things (you’ll note that Jew-baiting is becoming common on the left…its not a matter of conservatives will fall for this and liberals will fall for that…anyone who starts to think too much in “us vs them” terms can fall for the same sorts of things, just from different angles).

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the people we battle are not working from a master plan. We are not dealing with a wicked, knowledgeable, global conspiracy against us. We’re mostly dealing with purblind idiots who simply don’t know what they’re doing – this wouldn’t be so entirely bad, except that they additionally hold positions of wealth and power. Being in such positions they – remember, they are idiots, mostly – have convinced themselves they are extra wise and good (how else could they have wound up with wealth and power, after all?) and thus cannot get it wrong and must retain power, lest un-wise and un-good people get in to power (and they are certain their opponents are bad because if they were good, they’d be just on the side of the current socio-political elite…a great deal of circular psuedo-reasoning is going on in there, boys and girls).

There is, though, the leavening of wickedness in there, as well. Stupid/wicked people combined on a 1 to 100 ratio with stupid/well meaning people. Think of it as 1 George Soros for every 100 Dennis Kucinich. What unites them is a lack of thinking – and that, ultimately, is what we’re really fighting against: people who don’t think. Stupid people, as it were.

And, yes, some of the stupid people hold the same party label as the rest of us. Some times, my dearest of friends, the stupidest person in the room holds the face we see in the mirror each morning. It isn’t enough for us to say “we’re going to fight them liberals” or “we’re gonna whack them RINOs” or (as some might put it) “we’re going to get those Republicrats”. Doing that abdicates thought, and once we do that we’ve become the enemy. Most of our enemies, most of the time, will conveniently congregate around the labels of “liberal” or “Democrat” as lack of thinking on a consistent basis leads to those points of view – but even among them, we must be prepared for those moments of thought when we can get them on the good side. Anyone who thinks is on our side, anyone who refuses to do so, is the enemy.

More often than not, I’m going to find someone who thinks under the label of “conservative” as opposed to under the label of “liberal”. More often than not, I’m going to find someone who thinks under the label of “Republican” as opposed to under the label of “Democrat”. To chuck the whole thing is to cease to think, altogether, and thus is the work of the enemy. I’m in this to win, not become a pure pillar or steel – and armored not just from head to toe, but from ear to ear. I battle against irrationality – my enemy is insanity; not the inability to think, but the unwillingness to do so.

I will think and I will come to a rational conclusion. It is after thinking things over that I am what I am. Our world is being wrecked by people who refuse to think – by people who really do just take things on absolute faith, when even the most faithful Christian will stand aside and say, “God gave you reason, Man; you are to use it”. I will use it – and by so doing, I’ll know who my friends and enemies are.

The bad news keeps coming – from CNBC:

Unemployment has shifted from a lagging indicator to a leading one…

…More than half the labor force out of work for more than 26 weeks, the average length of unemployment at greater than 35 weeks, and the unemployment rate of 25.7 percent for 16- to 19-year olds.

“These are structural aspects which cannot be solved overnight, cannot be solved with a cyclical mindset,” El-Erian said. “And they are worrisome because they make the unemployment rate not only a lagging indicator but also a leading indicator.”…

El-Erian goes on to get it wrong about the “new normal”. He seems to expect just a wallowing around in slow growth – I fully expect Great Depression II. Too much debt, my friends – we just owe too much money and with Obama running the show, we won’t even start on those structural changes to the economy necessary to start digging out of it.

I’d like to say I hate to sound like a broken record, but I don’t hate it at all – I’ll keep yammering on about it until everyone agrees with me. We need to start making, mining and growing things here in the United States and to that end, we need to clear out all the taxes and regulations which make it difficult to do these things.

We need to return to the gold standard – or, at least, some thing of measurable value to back our currency. We need to abolish the Federal Reserve. Get rid of the FDIC. Figure out a way to reward handsomely those who hold a particular stock for a least a year. Restructure the housing market to make it less likely to get in to speculative bubbles. Forbid Congresscritters and their staffers from working in federally regulated industries for 10 years after they leave federal office/employment.

Lots of things to be done. I’ll be writing a book about it. Meanwhile, we’re pretty much in the soup. Get ready for a long, hard economic road.