Only 234 years late, but better late than never:

The inaugural British Tea Party will take place on Saturday in my home town of Brighton, and I’ll be speaking….

Labour has raised more than a trillion pounds in additional taxation since 1997. Yet, unbelievably, Gordon Brown has still managed to run up a deficit of 12.6 per cent of GDP (Greece’s is 12.7 per cent). A far lower level of taxation brought Americans out in spontaneous protest last year.

If you happen to be coming to the Conservative Spring Conference, do please pop in: the Tea Party is five minutes’ walk from the conference venue. It is, however, outside the security zone, and anyone is welcome to come. Oh, and this being England, we’ll be serving actual, you know, tea. I hope to see some of this blog’s readers there.

The Revolution continues to spread – people have had it with government and the pathetic whiners who live off of it.

Its time to clear out the crooks and then get back to work – no more free rides and no more fairy tales from the left telling us how they’ll make it all better…

The sad truth of government health care:

Patients ‘routinely neglected’ at NHS hospital where hundreds died in squalor

Not a single official has been disciplined over the worst-ever NHS hospital scandal, it emerged last night.

Up to 1,200 people lost their lives needlessly because Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust put government targets and cost-cutting ahead of patient care.

But none of the doctors, nurses and managers who failed them has suffered any formal sanction…

…The inquiry found that:

• Patients were left unwashed in their own filth for up to a month as nurses ignored their requests to use the toilet or change their sheets;

• Four members of one family. including a new-born baby girl. died within 18 months after of blunders at the hospital;

• Medics discharged patients hastily out of fear they risked being sacked for delaying;

• Wards were left filthy with blood, discarded needles and used dressings while bullying managers made whistleblowers too frightened to come forward.

I’ll try to explain this to you liberals one more time:

A national health care system is going to be run by regular folks – not by a collection of saints willing to sacrifice themselves for the comfort of others.

Now, if you get your ultimate wish – which is some sort of single-payer program; with ObamaCare just being a down payment – you’ll have our hospitals run by government bureaucrats who simply won’t be able to devote full effort to patient care. It will be a matter of choosing between patient care and giving a pay raise to that annoying union always threatening a strike – as the patients aren’t dying in the bureaucrat’s office, while the union rep is there all the time, it is a natural thing that the patients will get it in the shorts.

Meanwhile, at the front end of health care, the actual workers can use self-sacrificial zeal in treating everyone who walks through the door, or they can realize that they’ll get paid the same no matter if they see one patient or one hundred in a day. So, guess how many they’ll see? As few as possible, of course. And, needless to say, where is the upside on keeping conditions good for the patients – you won’t get extra pay for doing it, and its not like you’ll be fired if you don’t.

Each socialized medicine scheme breaks down upon the rock of human nature. It doesn’t matter how much thought you give to it or how much money you lavish upon it, the thing won’t work. The only way to make for a good health care service is to have that service dependent upon providing good care in order to attract and retain customers – and that means a private system.

UPDATE: And here’s a video collection of Democrats from Obama on down denouncing GOP efforts to circumvent the filibuster back when. There is no bottom for them – no matter how low they are in the gutter, they always manage to find one more step down.

Per Rasmussen:

Voter unhappiness with Congress has reached the highest level ever recorded by Rasmussen Reports as 71% now say the legislature is doing a poor job.

That’s up ten points from the previous high of 61% reached a month ago.

Only 10% of voters say Congress is doing a good or excellent job.

I just can’t believe that 10% really think its doing a good or excellent job – its got to be some sort of goof on the part of Rasmussen.

Can’t you just feel that Obama recovery?

Sales of new homes in the U.S. unexpectedly fell in January to the lowest level on record, a sign that an extension of a government tax credit may not be enough to rekindle demand.

Purchases declined 11 percent to an annual pace of 309,000, below the lowest forecast in a Bloomberg News survey of economists, figures from the Commerce Department showed today in Washington. The median sales price dropped 2.4 percent from January 2009 and the supply of unsold homes increased.

Its happening because a tax credit to get people to buy homes just advances the purchase date a little bit. People who were thinking about buying a home went ahead and did it to cash in on the tax credit – and that is fine and good for them. But that doesn’t increase actual demand – and it leads, inevitably, to a big slump in sales because the demand for the future is now reduced. Cash for clunkers did the same thing for auto sales.

We can’t increase aggregate demand until we increase wealth and we can’t increase wealth until we start making, mining and growing more things here in the United States. The only way to pry the necessary funds out of investors hands and put it to work in such enterprises is to make such investments highly lucrative – by cutting capital gains taxes; by cutting business taxes; by cutting corporate income taxes; by reducing or eliminating regulations which put a huge burden on starting up or expanding a factory, farm or mine.

There is no other solution to our economic problem. We can’t print our way out of this. We can’t borrow our way out of this. We can’t tax our way out of this. We can’t pick and choose from on high who gets government goodies our way out of this. We can only work our way out of it.

Toyota – known far and wide for its excellent quality – suddenly has a spate of alleged quality break downs. Then the executives get hauled before a Congressional committee to be grilled by…well, paid tools of the United Auto Workers, which has never been able to unionize Toyota’s factories:

Thirty-one House Dems quizzing Toyota execs got UAW campaign cash

Two committees in the U.S. House of Representatives are holding hearings this week concerning allegations of sudden acceleration problems in Toyota cars and trucks sold in this country.

Among the witnesses appearing today at the hearing of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was Toyota CEO Akido Toyoda, grandson of the company founder. On Tuesday, James E. Lentz, Toyota USA’s top sales executive, appeared before the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

There is a combined total of 59 Democrats serving on these two panels, which hold potentially life-and-death power over Toyota’s ability to continue offering its products to American consumers. So far this year, 31 of the 59 have received re-election campaign contributions ranging from as low as $500 to as high as $10,000 from the United Auto Workers union.

And, of course, the stories of Toyota failing in quality is making that company out to be as bad in quality as General Motors – now partly owned by the UAW.

Anyone else smell a democRAT here?

From Rasmussen:

For the second straight week, Republican candidates lead Democrats by nine points in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.

The new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 44% would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate while 35% would opt for his or her Democratic opponent.

Democrats haven’t led the “generic ballot” at Rasmussen since June 21st, 2009. If this holds true though November, then it will be a very fun and interesting election night.

Democrats still can turn this around – at least to the point where GOP gains are kept to the “first midterm” norm, which would not be enough for the GOP to capture either house. To turn it around, however, would require an abandonment of ObamaCare as well as a clear move on the part of Democrats to clean up government.

You see, its not just ObamaCare and the economy driving this. What is turning the usual weakness of the “in” party in to a potential meltdown is the perception among the populace that the government is corrupt and only out for itself and the well-connected. Pelosi promised the most ethical Congress in history while Obama promised transparency and a new bi-partisanship. Not only have they not delivered on their promises, but they’ve actually made corruption and partisanship worse than before.

Trouble is, they can’t really do it – as Pelosi and Reid are hip deep in the corruption and influence peddling of DC, while Obama simply doesn’t recognize that there is actually another party out there he has to work with (Chicago has been under one-party rule for many decades, and that is where Obama learned politics). To do the things necessary to save the Democrat’s day is beyond the capability of the Democrat leadership – and thus the hocus-pocus about “party of no” and other such political tricks. They can’t change and thus earn renewed power, so they are hoping to bamboozle the people.

It won’t work – the people are awake.

Because for them, abortion is more important than anything else:

New undercover footage shows staff at a Milwaukee, Wisc. Planned Parenthood abortion clinic apparently breaking the law by counseling a purportedly 14-year-old statutory rape victim not to tell anyone about her 31-year-old boyfriend, and coaching her how to obtain an abortion without her parents’ consent.

The new video, the seventh in a series from Live Action documenting similar behavior in 5 other states, comes amid recent controversy about Planned Parenthood’s compliance with state laws regarding minors and abortion.

After hearing that the girl is 14 and her boyfriend is “much older,” the counselor in the video says that whether or not the situation will be reported by clinic workers “depends on the person you’re disclosing that information to.” When the girl says that her boyfriend is 31, the counselor tells her, “You don’t have to say anything” about the statutory rape and instructs her, “Just give them the information that’s needed.” The counselor also confirms that the 31-year-old “boyfriend” will be paying for the abortion.

In Wisconsin, sex between an adult and a minor under age 16 is a felony, and health care professionals are required to report such cases to law enforcement immediately. The law specifically includes abortion providers in this requirement.

When you get in to dispensing death for pay, there isn’t any lower down the moral scale you can do. And so we see this again and again – and, remember, this is just the investigation of the practice. The reason this is being done is because of all the real cases of child abusers disposing of the strongest evidence against them via abortion.

Planned Parenthood still gets federal funding – what should be happening is prosecution as precursor to the dissolution of this criminal, anti-human organization.

As I’ve said, it is endemic to the Democrat party:

Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D-Texas) has accepted tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of trips to China from a development corporation in his hometown that he aided by securing earmarks and other federal assistance worth millions of dollars.

Ortiz has also traveled on at least one of these trips with his former chief of staff, Lencho Rendon, who was working for Ortiz when he secured a $5 million earmark for the Robstown Improvement Development Corp. The corporation has now hired Rendon as a consultant. Robstown Improvement is a nonprofit, city-chartered corporation that uses sales tax revenue to try to spur economic development in the city.

Just more of the usual back-and-forth. Ortiz claims he’s just being helpful – in which case, he wouldn’t have had money spent on himself to go to China. But, hey, a vacation is a vacation and who could pass up the opportunity to have one paid for by the organization you lavished taxpayer funds on? This more fun than a traditional bribe as you’re essentially bribing yourself – and with taxpayer money!

In an era of growing public anger over earmarks and lavish travel for Congressmen, that Ortiz would even think of doing this sort of thing indicates both how out of touch Democrats are as well as their supreme confidence that the rank-and-file Democrats will not punish them for it. Is there to be a primary challenger to Ortiz? Extraordinarily doubtful. The almost-certain outcome of this is that Ortiz will be re-elected and continue to do this sort of thing – and provide an example for all other Democrats on just what you can get away with if you have a “D” after your name and will make noises about social justice and such nonsense from time to time.

Its a taxpayer funded bonanza and the Democrats are living it up. We do, of course, have a chance to change this in November.

Which isn’t anything new, but this is rather brazen:

Perhaps the most widely repeated Democratic talking point in advance of tomorrow’s health-care summit is that the Republicans have yet to offer an alternative plan of their own…

Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that if the Republicans posted an alternative to Obama’s plan, he’d be happy to post it on the White House web site:

“The president posted ideas of his on the White House website today. We hope Republicans will post their ideas either on their website, or we’d be happy to post them on ours, so that the American people could come to one location and find out the parameters of what will largely be discussed on Thursday,” Gibbs said.

But as Politico quickly discovered, Gibbs “may need to read the White House website more closely.”

Turns out the House Republicans’ plan has been online since October and already has its own link on the White House website. The White House encourages readers to “read more about House and Senate ideas from both parties on their websites.” The link sends readers to a House GOP website that includes a one-page summary sheet and the legislative text of their proposals.

Congressional Republicans were also quick to answer with a post of their own: “Where is the Republican health-care plan? Right here, CBO scored.” …

Why are Democrats advancing this lie? Because they know they’ve got a dog of a bill on their hands and may not be able to pass it – so the program now revolves around an attempt to run against a “do nothing”, Republican Congress which won’t even put up its own plan. The level of absurdity here is astounding – with massive majorities, Democrats are planning on running as if they were in the minority and if only the people will put Democrats in charge, progress can be made. Look for ads joining House and Senate GOP candidates to George Bush to complete this effort.

For Democrats, it is forever 2006-08.

Will it work? It will with the Democrat rank-and file, but I think that Independents are eyes open on all this sort of thing. It might have worked back in the pre-New Media days, but it won’t work, now.

That good, old Obama “Recovery” just keeps chugging along:

The number of “problem” U.S. banks jumped 27 percent during the fourth quarter of 2009 to 702, the highest level since 1993 and a sign the industry’s recovery is still shaky, regulators reported on Tuesday.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp said the industry overall eked out a profit of $914 million for the quarter, benefiting from a healing economy, but said the improvement was concentrated in the largest banks.

The largest banks, of course, got the taxpayer money – and the printed money. Everything is great for the Banksters thanks to their men at Treasury and the Fed. For the mid- and small-sized banks, not so good. A lot of reasons for this, but one which will be crushing – indeed, already is becoming crushing – is noted by Mish:

Over the next few years, a wave of commercial real estate loan failures could threaten America’s already-weakened financial system. The Congressional Oversight Panel is deeply concerned that commercial loan losses could jeopardize the stability of many banks, particularly the nation’s mid-size and smaller banks, and that as the damage spreads beyond individual banks that it will contribute to prolonged weakness throughout the economy.

One key take away is the huge numbers of banks at risk of failure…. There are 358 banks in the size of $1 to $10 billion with excessive CRE (Commercial Real Estate loan) concentrations. There are an additional 2,115 banks in the size of $100 million to $1 billion with excessive CRE concentrations. Only 1 of the top 20 banks (greater than $100 billion) has excessive CRE concentrations. However, because of size, that 1 is important as well.

Certainly not all of those banks will fail, but hundreds of them will. Moreover, of all the banks, a whopping 2,988 out of 8,108 have excessive CRE concentrations. With inadequate loan loss provisions…

As I’ve said – the “recovery” is all smoke and mirrors. Its a bunch of money printed up out of nowhere or borrowed from the Chinese and shoved through the largest financial institutions, thus making it appear they have returned to profitability. It isn’t happening. The actual economy – the part which makes, mines and grows things – continues to contract. Unemployment continues to spread – both in numbers and duration.

How long can the Powers That Be keep the ball in the air? I don’t know – could even be another year or two. But next week, next month or next year, the crash is coming. There is no way to avoid it – policy can only make it a bit better, or worse, than its already set to be. The party is over – the time of printing fake money and borrowing against the future is finished. It doesn’t work. It never worked. It was an idiot idea put together by people who never understood that the real economy is make up of tens of millions individual actions which are collectively smarter than even 1,000 gathered Nobel Prize winners in Economics.

If we balance our budget right away and cut taxes on wealth creation, we can avoid the worst of what is coming. Or we can continue to try and borrow and print our way out of this – and have a 20 year long recession, which at times will look like the Great Depression. The choice is ours – and our best means of affecting the outcome is this November.