The news:

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, mounted stiff resistance tonight to any swift bailout of Greece, as a rift opened up between European capitals over how best to tackle the risks posed to the euro.

Despite a show of Franco-German unity on the crisis and the first statement from EU leaders pledging to safeguard the currency’s stability, hopes on the markets of a German-led rescue plan to shore up Greece’s critical public finances were dashed by Merkel, who repeatedly emphasised that Athens would need to put its own house in order and brushed aside all questions of financial support.

“Germany is stepping totally on the brakes on financial assistance,” said a senior EU diplomat. “On legal grounds, on constitutional grounds and on principle.” Another senior diplomat said of the Germans: “They’re not waving their chequebooks.”

Even if Germany wanted to, she can’t – there isn’t enough money in Germany to bail out all the troubled nations of the Euro-zone. Spain is actually in worse shape – while Portugal, Ireland, Italy and a host of other nations in Europe teeter on the brink of disaster. They’ve taxed, borrowed and spent themselves in to oblivion – and not having children over the past 30 years hasn’t helped, either (you know, if they had some kids in Europe they’d have workers and innovators and such…).

The ball cannot be kept in the air forever – and while Germany is healthier than all other European nations, it is on the skids to financial disaster, too. In fact, all nations pretty much are – or, at least, any nation which runs a regular annual government deficit. Even if we wanted to suppose that government spending can stimulate the economy (it can’t; not in any meaningful sense, but lets grant it for the sake of argument), this would only work in short spurts. Well, aside from a couple odd years, all the major economic powers of the world have spent the last 70 years “stimulating” their economies via deficit spending.

What we have, now, is a situation where there isn’t enough wealth to tax to make up for the shortfall – only massive reductions in government spending offer a way out of the mess. And this is precisely what short-sighted politicians don’t want to do because it will really anger an electorate to have its baby-bottle ripped away. This could result in the biggest nightmare a politician has – losing election. Politicians hope never to face such a thing – they hope to keep things going and that, some how, an exhausted, bankrupt economy will produce the funds to paper over the fiscal cracks.

But it cannot go on. Eventually, you not only have to balance the budget, you have to keep it balanced until such time as you are out of debt. Think in terms of decades of no deficits – or, at worst, very small deficits which will be made up within a year or two. There is nothing left.

The party is over.

The bill has come due.

Patrick Kennedy to bow out?

Wow, Patrick Kennedy not running for re-election? Maybe he thinks he’d be the voter’s next whipping boy?

WASHINGTON — A Democratic official says Rep. Patrick Kennedy has decided not to seek re-election for his seat representing Rhode Island in the U.S. Congress.

The official spoke to The Associated Press only on the condition that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak ahead of the official announcement.

The decision by the eight-term congressman comes less than a month after a stunning Republican upset in the race for the Massachusetts Senate seat his late father, Edward Kennedy, held for almost half a century…

Such a reliably liberal (and equally reliably foolish) Democrat quits in a very blue State?

The times, they are a-changin’…

UPDATE: More blood in the water?

And given this, its bound to come out that one or two of them are bastards:

Now, the Obama-Biden pair that opposed the Iraq war and its tactics and predicted their failure is prepared to accept credit for its success.

It seems that Biden, who’s from Delaware when he’s in Delaware and Pennsylvania when in Pennsylvania, is certain now that Iraq will turn out to be one of the Obama-Biden administration’s greatest achievements.

No, really.

Here’s how Biden put it to Lar:

I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration.

No, Joe, Iraq is not one of your achievements or Obama’s achievement. Victory in Iraq is brought to you by the magnificent men and women of our armed forces under the courageous leadership of President George W. Bush. Blowhards like you had and have nothing to do with this – had we followed your drooling-idiot advice on Iraq (or, worse, followed Obama’s!) we’d have a catastrophe in that area of the world.

This just burns me up.

Michael Yon has the latest from the campaign in Afghanistan.

Say a prayer for our troops.

Is anyone surprised?

President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.

Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” the president said in the interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”

Obama repeatedly vowed during the 2008 presidential election campaign that he would not raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 and households earning less than $250,000 a year.

He gave us his word – his most solemn promise. Of course, he’s already broken many such promises.

Naturally, Obama sees the middle class as a ripe target for taxation – they already strongly oppose him and he’ll call it “taxing the rich” to play up to the idiot envy of the poorer leftist base…meanwhile, Obama’s rich, bankster buddies will continue to rake it in.

I’ve read some policy points of various Republican candidates for office. One of the most common refrains is something about cutting spending – working towards reducing the deficit; repeal Obama’s bail outs; bring fiscal responsibility to government. On and on – but I’ve yet to read one which makes this simple statement:

“A nation $12 trillion dollars in debt cannot afford any more debt; I will not introduce, sponsor or vote in favor of any budget which is not balanced.”

This is the proper complement to the various tax pledges most Republican candidates will sign. They are two sides of the same coin. A no tax pledge is a promise not to take any more money from the people of the United States – but it is a false pledge if the money will just be taken in the form of borrowing from the future.

The United States is in fiscal crisis – for decades we have talked about “out of control spending”, but never really did anything about it. Now, we must. The debt we are currently piling up threatens our ability to maintain a first class military, to pay for high skill law enforcement, to maintain the roads and harbors we need for commerce. We must stop piling up debt. Right now.

Now, our liberal friends – seconded, as always, by RINOs – will protest that the drastic cuts necessary to balance the budget will cause the most vulnerable to suffer. This is a flat out lie – it isn’t budget cutting which threatens the vulnerable, but there is the fact that the supposed tribunes of the vulnerable who will see to it they suffer as a means of getting the budget restored.

The United States government is shot through with waste, fraud and abuse. No one knows just how much money really flows through the government agencies in a given year. Investigations have shown that literal tens of billions of dollars have gone missing over the years – missing as in “no one knows where it went”. Right now, President Obama and his Democrats are set to spend, in deficits alone, $1.6 trillion dollars in 2011. There is no way to wrap one’s mind around such a sum – but one can easily understand that with such large amounts, a lot of chicanery is sure to be going on.

If you go to the A-Z Index of US Government Agencies, you’ll find the following: Domestic Policy Council, Economic Business and Agricultural Affairs; Economic Development Administration, Economic Adjustment Office, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Economics and Statistics Administration and the Economic Research Service…with all that, just found in a short glance, our economy should be booming. Right?

Wrong – and of course we know its wrong. How much duplication of effort is there in all that? How much entirely wasted effort? How many people could be let go in there and still get the vital job done? If there are any vital jobs contained therein, at all. This is the monster we’ve fed for nearly 80 years now. It grows by leaps and bounds and adds agency to bureau to department and it never stops growing and things, once grown, never dies away.

Our opponents will lie and say we are determined to kill granny or the children or what have you with our draconian cuts – but we know we would not be doing that. And now, in 2010, I think that the people are willing to hear and act upon the brutal truth. It is my bet that at least half the non-defense and law enforcement personnel of government could be let go with no negative effect on the day to day lives of the American people, including the most vulnerable. What is more, I’ll further bet that you, reading this, will admit to it (even if, as liberals, some of you will still stoutly deny what you know to be true). Finally, I think the American people in general know this, as well.

If we wish to save our nation, it isn’t good enough for us to pledge to tinker around the edges of the problem. The sad facts of life are that, as far as government goes, all we conservatives have managed to conserve is FDR’s New Deal. It is now time for us to conserve America and our Constitution – and that will require a revolutionary change, and a complete end to the false promises of the welfare state.

If we whittle away at liberalism, then it will eventually grow back – we must hack at it, root and branch. We must have done with it, for good. To do this, we must pledge ourselves not to merely being not-Democrats, but being true conservatives set on a revolutionary rescue of our nation and our people. Plant that flag of liberty, defend it ferociously, and let the chips fall where they may because in this year of 2010, I think the chips will all fall our way.

They just can’t help themselves, it would seem:

The Department of Homeland Security admitted today that it improperly conducted a threat assessment on pro-life and pro-abortion groups in Wisconsin. The assessment came before an expected rally last year in response to the University of Wisconsin Hospital board decided to allow abortions.

In February 2009, pro-life advocates planned to protest the hospital’s decision to open up a new Madison Surgery Center doing abortions.

The Associated Press reported today that the department said in a memo that it “destroyed all of the copies of the assessment after an internal review found it violated intelligence gathering guidelines about ‘protest groups which posed no threat to homeland security.'”

AP indicated the assessment was reportedly only shared with the director of Wisconsin’s intelligence-sharing center and local police in Middleton, Wisconsin, the site of the rally.

Today, a pro-life organization in Wisconsin informed LifeNews.com of its concerns.

In response to an open records request by the Alliance Defense Fund and Pro-Life Wisconsin, the Middleton Police Department and the Wisconsin Department of Justice, along with the Department of Homeland Security all refused on February 4 to release copies of the threat assessment.

Probably because they don’t want to look like a bunch of fools. I really don’t blame the cops on this – it was probably liberal, political higher ups who ordered it done. Because you know how we gap toothed, knuckle dragging Bible-clingers are ready to go off on a violent rampage at a moment’s notice.

We simply must return to the Constitutional order of things – this is getting entirely out of hand.

More and more fun stuff about 2010:

..Fox has the list of donors, which comprises a set of interlocking slush-type funds that pay for the anti–Tea Party campaign. The largest of these is the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME,) which has kicked in a total of $9.9M in a single year to two funds that provide the cash for the non-grassroots movement. Yes — government workers’ money is being used to fend off Tea Party protesters.–

It seems that the Tea Party movement, once defamed and derided, now poses a threat to the liberal establishment, so much so that they are collecting millions to undermine it. Conservatives shouldn’t object to political speech — which this is. But there is certainly grounds to object to the chicanery, the lack of transparency, and the pretense that the opponents of the Tea Parties are themselves grassroots activists. They aren’t — this is Big Labor and assorted liberal-interest groups once again doing the bidding of the Democratic party. And if not for Fox, no one would be any the wiser.

In defense of our liberals, this is what constitutes “grassroots” in liberal-land. Being completely servile in mentality as well as rather lazy in effort (you think that the AFSCME employees of government are wellsprings of innovation and efficiency?), it takes uber-liberals to set things up so that liberal rank-and-file people can get going. There never has been a liberal movement which sprang spontaneously from the people – all liberal movements have always been the result of careful planning and lavish funding (where do you think the concept of “walking around money” comes from?).

As for conservative movements – well, there have been only two and the one led directly to the other, with a slight interruption. Buckley fueled the first conservative movement in the 50’s which culminated with Reagan while the likes of Rush, Hannity and TEA Party activists have created the second movement (yes, there have been conservatives long before – but prior to Buckley, conservatism was all about what you’re against; with Buckley, it started to be about what you’re for. Big difference; to counter-act liberal fascism, we now have conservative revolutionaries. Strange world, indeed).

We’ll see how this plays out – this is Liberaldom gearing up for the battle. They mean to smash the TEA Party and, at the least, hold Democrat losses to a bare minimum in November – confident that liberalism will eventually become the default position once they get 50% plus one dependent on government.

And we, of course, mean to smash them – to me, this is where we draw the line. We’ve let things slide – we’ve now got people actually advocating for government-funded sex-change operations: at this point, we either totally destroy liberalism or be destroyed, ourselves. And by “destroy”, I mean just that – we roll it all back and restore the Constitution and undo all the liberal idiocy…or lose it all, for good.

Great battle; well worth fighting – and I intend to be in the thick of it.

As, again and again, 2010 gets more fun all the time:

Oh. My. God:

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

(Blasphemy deleted). This is something I’d expect Bush to say. And yes, I mean that as the worst possible insult.

Hey Obama: THE TAX PAYERS DIDN’T SPEND HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO BAIL OUT ALEX RODRIGUEZ. This is an important distinction that bears repeating…

…Man, (expletive deleted) it. I’m now officially on the Palin 2012 bandwagon. Because if this country’s going to crash, I want it to crash hard and fast so we can just start over.

What is really funny: This liberal is only just now figuring out that the Banksters and liberal leaders are on the same side, even when they are not one in the same person.

Liberal fascism in Australia – fighting for bigotry against free speech: the New Liberal Order.

MoveOn moves on to lying about the environment (been thin pickings, I guess, since they no longer have a Clinton to defend or a Bush to slander).

China’s military urges selling of US bonds to punish the US. I say, “go ahead, make my day”.

Stocks rallied yesterday on the news that nearly bankrupt parts of the Euro-zone will come to the rescue of the completely bankrupt parts. This is the global financial elite just trying to keep the ball in the air and hoping that the global economy will some how improve before the hot checks hit the bank.

And, now: have at it.