Interesting:

Right now, the race is close: according to a Democratic source, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has conducted an internal poll showing Case at 32%, Djou at 32%, Hanabusa at 27%, and 9% undecided.

The race is winner-take-all – so, with the Donks split, Republican Djou could win with 40% or so of the vote. Here is his website. If you live in Hawaii – get out there and help. If not, then donate.

It is not absolutely crucial that we win, but this would be quite a feather in our cap as we head forward in 2010. Democrats would tout a victory as proof that they aren’t toast – in spite of the fact that a victory would amount to holding one of their own in a very blue area of the country. A GOP win helps us to keep our fervor and momentum at a high pitch.

Victor Davis Hanson lists some possibilities:

So as the U.S. completes its metamorphosis into a much larger version of the EU, we should expect to see something of the following:

Karzai or Allawi will look more to Iran, which will soon become the regional and nuclear hegemon of the Middle East.

Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics had better mend fences with Russia.

The EU should finally start on that much-ballyhooed all-European response force.

Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea should strengthen ties with China.

Buffer states in South America had better make amends with a dictatorial, armed, and aggressive Chavez.

Israel should accept that the U.S. no longer will provide support for it at the UN, chide the Arab states to cool their anti-Israeli proclamations, remind the Europeans not to overdo their popular anti-Israeli rhetoric, or warn radical Palestinians not to start another intifada. (In other words, it’s open season to say or do anything one wishes with Israel.)

As for bankrupt, wannabe national defaulters, don’t worry — we are rapidly catching up, and have neither the credibility nor the desire to lecture you about artificial constructs like “debt,” “bonds,” “trust,” and other archaic financial euphemisms manipulated to protect the international capital of an overseer class.

Sowing a new crop takes a while, but the sprouting has begun and the bitter, 1979-like harvests will soon be upon us.

Which sounds about right – welcome back, Carter, indeed.

The one error we conservatives must not fall in to is to think of this as some sort of deliberate attempt by Obama to wreck the United States or run the world up on the rocks. It does risk both these things, but that doesn’t mean it is what Obama intends.

Always keep in mind just what sort of person Obama is – the product of elite, liberal education. Because of this, Obama believes that the source of conflict is not in evil men doing wicked things, but in misunderstandings – mostly on our part. If we would just reach out to our enemies – who are not really enemies, just misunderstood people – then we can usher in a new era of peace and cooperation.

Don’t get hung up on how monumentally stupid such a world view is – liberals have a way of completely insulating themselves from reality. It doesn’t matter what actually happens – to this day, Jimmy Carter doesn’t believe he was an utter failure as President. If anything was wrong, it was with us – people too stupid to see what a wonderful job he was doing. Iran could nuke Tel Aviv and Obama simply will not admit that his policies have failed – he’d blame Bush and pledge to press for Iran to not nuke Tel Aviv a second time, all the while asserting that the key to peace is nuclear disarmament and adherence to the non-proliferation treaty.

Our task – as patriots – is to back our President up in whatever firm policies he does undertake (thus our strong support for the campaign in Afghanistan) and for the rest of it, just pray that nothing really bad happens while Obama is in office. This is part of the price of defeat, fellow conservatives – we lost in 2008, and part of what we’re going to have to endure is a foreign policy completely divorced from reality.

UPDATE – Breaking News: President of Poland, senior Polish leaders killed in plane crash.

UPDATE II: Pajamas Media has a round up.

Seems that Ohio Democrats would rather become Republicans.

43% strongly disapprove of President Obama’s performance. This is becoming rather consistent in the Rasmussen survey. Its going to be hard for Obama to climb out, and as long as he’s down there, he’s a drag on all Democrats.

Liberal love and tolerance: NJ teacher wishes Gov. Christie’s death.

In more “booming economy news”, Wal-Mart is aggressively cutting prices to reverse a sales slump. But, but, but…they said that retail sales are increasing. How can the experts be wrong, again?

Mish reports:

Florida remains ground zero of the housing bust with an amazing 19.39% delinquency rate. The Tampa Bay area has a delinquency rate of 17%.

The St. Petersburg Times has the details in Nearly 17 percent of Tampa homeowners three months behind on mortgage.

Nearly 17 percent of Tampa Bay homeowners haven’t paid their mortgages for at least three months.

The February report by First American CoreLogic shows mortgage delinquencies rising steadily for more than a year. From February 2009 to February 2010, delinquencies increased from 10.84 percent to 16.96 percent of all residential mortgages, making mincemeat of such government anti-foreclosure measures as Making Home Affordable.

Florida’s 90-day delinquency rate was even worse at 19.39 percent. The U.S. rate was 8.78 percent.

This might not be strictly related to the economy – it could be a sign that Floridians are just bailing out on their “underwater” home loans. It would make sense: walking away is probably something which starts small, and then builds. As people see their neighbors giving up on underwater mortgages, it becomes more likely that they’ll do it, too, as whatever stigma is attached fades away.

I’m going to be watching things with care out here in Nevada – a lot of ARMs come due in the second half of 2010. These will be on houses which cannot be refinanced and which cannot be sold to cover the principal. The pressure to just walk away will, I believe, become irresistible. It might already be happening – housing prices continue to drop, which indicates more houses are coming on the market and I’ll bet dollars to donuts it is because of “short sale” actions (where a person puts the house on the market and the bank agrees to accept whatever the house brings).

There is really no easy way out of this – even if the economy really is in recovery, housing prices will not recover fast enough to bring home values back in line with mortgage balances. And if the economy really isn’t improving – and I think its all smoke and mirrors – then we just have a bad situation about to get very much worse.

The rumors are out there:

If Barney Frank Is Retiring, We’ll Know Soon

A candidate ending his campaign a little early isn’t always big news, but I find it interesting that Dave Sukoff says he was encouraged by Massachusetts Republicans to run in the state’s 4th District, against Barney Frank, in light of the rumors that Frank is thinking about retiring. Sukoff had been running against Rep. John Tierney in the 6th District.

I would note that if Frank is indeed retiring, we should hear a lot more buzz between now and the May 4 filing deadline. The only other Democrat currently on the ballot is a LaRouchie. Frank is way too loyal a Democrat to leave his party without a strong candidate as his successor, so my guess is we’ll hear about some state legislator getting his campaign set up in the coming weeks.

While beating Frank would be a very hard task, the fact of the matter is that its not impossible in 2010 – certainly, Frank could be given a run for his money. Now, if Frank sticks then he’s got a very hard fight and then might wind up as a mere minority-party back-bencher in 2011. Not a very appealing set of circumstances – and not at all appealing to have the power in GOP hands, which will mean that the machinery of the House will no longer be at his disposal to help cover up his corruption.

Might be better, in Frank’s view, to take a powder and angle for some easy appointment in the Obama Administration. We’ll have to see.

But, never fear, the “experts” are convinced that we are in a sustained recovery period and all will be well:

With unemployment still at a severe high, a majority of states have drained their jobless benefit funds, forcing them to borrow billions from the federal government to help out-of-work Americans.

A total of 33 states and the Virgin Islands have depleted their funds and borrowed more than $38.7 billion to provide a safety net, according to a report released Thursday by the National Employment Law Project. Four others are at the brink of insolvency.

One thing, though: weren’t the experts now telling us all is well once telling us that all was well, just before the crash?

A fairly easy task when one is a down-to-earth person facing off against a self-absorbed elitist:

President Barack Obama on Thursday made clear he was not going to take advice from Republican Sarah Palin when it comes to decisions about the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Palin, the former vice presidential candidate, has not been shy about criticizing Obama’s policies and this week weighed in on his revamped nuclear strategy, saying it was like a child in a playground who says ‘punch me in the face, I’m not going to retaliate.’

“I really have no response to that. The last I checked, Sarah Palin is not much of an expert on nuclear issues,” Obama said in an interview with ABC News.

Neither are you, Barry – and while you’ll try to sell this as something done under the advice of the SecDef, it still remains that you are the President and thus this boneheaded, ignorant and foolhardy new policy is all yours. As soon as President Pal…errmmm…I mean, as soon as a new President is sworn in, the military will breath a sigh of relief that they no longer have to salute policies they know make America unsafe.

What is really bad here is how clearly Sarah Palin has got under Obama’s skin – if his fellow Americans can rattle him this badly, imagine what our foreign enemies can do? A President who can’t graciously react to domestic criticism is not a President we can rely on in a foreign crisis.

Bad news:

More Americans unexpectedly filed claims for jobless benefits last week…Initial jobless applications increased by 18,000 to 460,000 in the week ended April 3, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington…

…Economists forecast claims would fall to 435,000 from a previously reported 439,000 the prior week, according to the median of 47 projections in a Bloomberg News survey.

Its still “unexpected”. Because the people who forecast simply lack the knowledge base necessary to make accurate predictions. In some cases, its simply a matter of the data being impossible to find – in other cases, it is because most people have been educated up in Keynsian ideology and simply believe the asinine view that government spending can spur genuine economic growth.

Until we start making, mining and growing things, we won’t get out of this. Period.

The news:

Consumer borrowing dropped in February, after increasing for the first time in a year during the previous month, according to a government report released Wednesday.

Total consumer credit fell a seasonally adjusted $11.5 billion, at an annual rate of 5.6%, to $2.448 trillion in February, the Federal Reserve reported.

Economists predicted a decline in total borrowing of $0.7 billion in February, according to a consensus estimate from Briefing.com.

“February’s decline reflects on the still dire state of the economy,” said Yasmine Kamaruddin, an economic analyst at Wells Fargo.

Yeah, no kidding, Yasmine. You figure that out all by yourself?

Anyways, not to get down on Yasmine – or any of the other “experts” who found this drop to be “unexpected” – we’re still in a bad way. And the January gain was just a mirage brought about by some screwy government action on student loans which made it appear that consumer credit grew in January when it really didn’t. Essentially, we’re now 13 months in to consumer credit decline.

In the long run, this is very healthy – the American people are de-leveraging and learning that they don’t really need instant gratification. Frills can wait, as it were. In the short run, however, this bodes ill for the Keynsian economic model we’re following. All these bazillions of bucks of government printing, borrowing and spending are supposed to ignite the economy – but it stubbornly refuses to catch fire.

I think its because we got badly burned in the housing bubble and we’d rather not torch up again. Slow and steady does get the job done – which means that we’ll only be able to spend money as we make it. The problem is that nothing in Obama’s policies encourage wealth creation – there is nothing in there to really encourage someone to open a mine, start a farm, build a factory. Until we start doing that, we’re just spinning our wheels – at best – or digging our economic grave – at worst (and I think its “at worst” – our debt is crushing us).

Going to be a long, hard road out of this – made harder by Obama and his Democrats. The good news is that they might wipe themselves out so bad that we need not trouble with them for a generation. And that’s a good thing because it will take us that long to clear up the mess.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

And puts the world in danger:

So one wonders—as Putin embraces Chavez and Karzai plays host to Ahmadinejad; as Russia asserts the right to repudiate any nuclear-arms reduction treaty and China gives us the bird on the yuan; as the alliance with India languishes and the one with Britain experiences unprecedented atrophy; as Israel expresses acrid disagreement with us and Japan seeks to rip pages out of its postwar rulebook—what all the pragmatism has really, truly accomplished…

…other than give our delighted adversaries a free pass and our friends a very rude wakeup call.

And, indeed, one does wonder – but not too much. This is just the way Obama was educated to view the world. This is liberal education over the past 25 years or so put in to practice. Obama likely really believes the stories – perhaps believes such things as the reason Iran is hostile is because we supposedly helped conduct a coup in the 1950’s, that Moslems hate us because we’re partial to Israel, and so forth. If you believe that American actions are a source – or, possibly, the source – of global conflict, then pretty much doing the opposite should reduce – or eliminate – conflict.

That it is all mind-bogglingly stupid and not based on a shred of fact is neither here nor there – Obama was taught it by people who asserted it stoutly, who had the apparent credentials to make such statements and, of course, made such statements without any dissenting views being allowed any where near. Obama’s mental view of the world is a product of a hot-house climate of liberalism.

So, what to do? Hunker down and wait for a new President – it is all we can do. Obama will continue to weaken the United States all through his Presidency and we’ll be at increasing risk of war until the day he leaves office. And let’s pray war isn’t thrust upon us while Obama is in office because he’d probably be worse than useless at that, too, as in all his education, there probably wasn’t even a moment when he considered military policy.

Long, rough few years ahead.

Cross Posted: Noonan for Nevada