He was 46 years old when he drugged and raped a 13 year old. Nothing else matters – he knew what he was doing.

Send him to jail.

The story:

Stimulus funds boost number of federal jobs

The $787 billion economic recovery package also is stimulating growth in the federal government as agencies hire thousands of workers and spend millions of dollars to oversee and implement the package, according to government records and spokesmen.

Fourteen of the top federal agencies responsible for spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act say they’ve hired about 3,000 workers with stimulus money. That’s helped fuel the continued growth of the federal government, which increased by more than 25,000 employees, or 1.3%, since December 2008, according to the latest quarterly report. During that time, the ranks of the nation’s unemployed increased by nearly 4 million, Labor Department statistics show.

Overall, there are about 2 million federal workers, the data show.

In a time of economic crisis, we shouldn’t be adding workers to the government…but that, of course, is all liberals know how to do. After all, they find it distasteful to do work outside government…unless it is in media or education. How are we to employ the next crop of liberal, ivy league graduates if government employment shrinks? They can’t all work at NPR, ya know?

This, by the way, isn’t a bug – its a feature. Its the whole point of the exercise. There are now 25,000 more people to provide union dues to AFSCME, which will then lavish the funds on Democrats; and if the Democrats do lose, there is a pool of 25,000 more government employees who can, perhaps, be convinced to sabotage a GOP government from the inside (remember that 2007 NIE which asserted Iran had stopped its nuke program years earlier? Well, that got the issue off the front plate all through 2008…only now we know it was a bald-faced lie when it was written…and it was written, I am certain, on purpose in order to undercut the GOP). Essentially, this is just one more step in the liberal plan to lock themselves in to un-elected power while also increasing overall dependence on govfernment – thus making it ever less likely that people will bite the hand which feeds them and vote GOP.

We’re being slowly enslaved – and the liberals are using our own money to purchase us. We really, really have to stop them…and that means not just winning, but cleaning house from top to bottom when we do win. We might have only one more shot at this, fellow Americans…once more liberal after Obama and we’re cooked.

What are the liberals really up to?

When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating. – Frederic Bastiat

From NRO’s The Corner:

The Law Library of the Congress of the United States (LLC) has issued an opinion on the removal and expulsion of Manuel Zelaya as president of Honduras. The LLC’s conclusion: Zelaya’s removal was legal but his deportation from the country was not.

Here is the summary of the opinion:

The Supreme Court of Honduras has constitutional and statutory authority to hear cases against the President of the Republic and many other high officers of the State, to adjudicate and enforce judgments, and to request the assistance of the public forces to enforce its rulings. The Constitution no longer authorizes impeachment, but gives Congress the power to disapprove of the conduct of the President, to conduct special investigations on issues of national interest, and to interpret the Constitution. In the case against President Zelaya, the National Congress interpreted the power to disapprove of the conduct of the President to encompass the power to remove him from office, based on the results of a special, extensive investigation. The Constitution prohibits the expatriation of Honduran citizens.

And, so, all that talk about a coup and the Honduran government being “de-facto” and how we all have to help Honduras resolve its internal issues is just so much BS. It was all put out, of course, because Zelaya is a darling of Chavez and Castro…and we know how the American left views these men. The left was hoping to have yet another leftist regime to oppose the United States.

Obama owes the people and government of Honduras an apology – but, I doubt one will be forthcoming. Obama doesn’t apologize for his own actions…

The title of her upcoming memoir. And it is, indeed, a bit of what we all need to do…heard today that Wall Street is showering money on Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in order to buy protection against regulation. Anyone want to bet on whether or not they’ll get it?

Only new people from outside the establishment can make this right…

As night follows day:

New companies will be crucial to the strength of any economic recovery. Businesses in their first 90 days of life accounted for 14% of hiring in the U.S. between 1993 and 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But this recession is taking a particularly heavy toll on business creation, as sources of small-business funding dry up…

And why are sources of small business funding drying up? Two things:

1. Government is on a borrowing binge…each dollar borrowed by Obama is a dollar which can’t be borrowed by a new business.

2. By bailing out the big banks, all we did was allow them to cover their losses…and they are holding on to what we gave them, because they’ve got even more losses to come in the next wave of home foreclosures and the surging commercial foreclosure rate.

Now, bailing out the banks was a bi-partisan bit of idiocy, but Obama is driving the last nail in the coffin by soaking up all remaining funds for his various “stimulus” projects. We’re taking away money for new start ups and giving it to people to buy cars they don’t immediately need, thereby hiring back – for a few weeks – a few thousand auto workers at the same, old dinosaur companies. Ditto with the credit for new home buyers – its nice to help youngsters in to homes, but people need jobs more than new homes right now: we can get new homes once the economy is back on track.

On and on it goes – its all just a waste of time. Of course, Obama and Co are getting ready to scream “recovery” at the top of their lungs once the numbers for the third quarter come in…I mean, just wait for it. As far as the left and the MSM will be concerned, this will be the biggest boom in human history, all ushered in by Obama and his Spendulus. Relentlessly it will be hammered home that everything’s great and we all owe Obama our very lives…meanwhile, the concerns about rising unemployment and continued contraction by everyone not receiving a government hand out will be ignored or downplayed.

And it all may work, for a while – Obama’s popularity might rise, Democrats might start feeling a bit bullish about the political future…and then its all going to come crashing back down. We can’t spend our way to wealth, and when you’re broke, the worst thing you can do is borrow more money. This is not opinion – this is basic, common sense.

Are you listening, liberals?

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says it’s a mistake to set a deadline to end American military action, as some liberals have sought, and that a defeat would be disastrous for the U.S.

In a stern warning to critics of a continued troop presence in Afghanistan, Gates said the Islamic extremist Taliban and Al Qaeda would perceive an early pullout as a victory over the United States as similar to the Soviet Union’s humiliating withdrawal in 1989 after a 10-year war.

“The notion of timelines and exit strategies and so on, frankly, I think would all be a strategic mistake. The reality is, failure in Afghanistan would be a huge setback for the United States,” Gates said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Hey, how ’bout that? Just like Iraq, huh?

Our problem is that the liberal meme about Afghanistan (ie, “Iraq bad, Afghanistan good”) was just a talking point. A convenient means of hammering President Bush and attacking John McCain in 2008 – none of them, from Obama on down, probably believed their own words. Perhaps they just hoped that Afghanistan would prove easy…it seemed to be as much, even going in to late 2008. But, as it turns out, the campaign in Afghanistan changed as the enemy grew bolder and now we’ve got a long, hard fight ahead of us.

Liberals don’t want to fight it.

I think what our liberals would prefer is some way to scuttle Afghanistan in time for it to be forgotten by 2012…much as Clinton’s pulling the plug early on Somalia made it a non-issue by 1996. Afghanistan is a much more difficult and much more dangerous campaign – in fact and in effect around the world – than Somalia ever was, but our liberals are always willing to look in to ways and means of surrendering, especially if they can then ignore the issue on the campaign trail. The trouble is, scuttling Afghanistan won’t be something like Somalia – that surrender did, of course, encourage bin Laden and led by stages to 9/11, but the most important thing (to liberals) is that it didn’t cause them to lose in 1996. To quit on Afghanistan means certain Taliban/al Qaeda victory in that nation, and perhaps in Pakistan, as well…and this in addition to the massive encouragement it would give for jihadists to attack us here, at home.

The hard task for us conservatives, then, is to some how stiffen Obama’s spine – to work diligently for American victory, even though this would work to Obama’s credit, in the long run. Now, if it becomes completely clear that we can’t push Obama to fight for victory, then we will have to re-think what is best for our troops and our nation…it’ll be a choice between continuing a bloodletting in the hopes that in 2013 we can get new, victorious policies in place, or agreeing to a withdrawal. Neither of those outcomes is good for America – we’ll be deciding which is least-worst. Better, then, to work to keep Obama up on the rails vis a vis the War on Terrorism and the Afghan Campaign.

A difficult task, but we must do it.

What is justice?

Justice is a certain rectitude of mind whereby a man does what he ought to do in the circumstances confronting him. – St Thomas Aquinas

So much for all those green shoots:

Employers took 2,690 mass layoff actions in August that resulted in the separation of 259,307 workers, seasonally adjusted, as measured by new filings for unemployment insurance benefits during the month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Each action involved at least 50 persons from a single employer. The number of mass layoff events in August increased by 533 from the prior month…Over the year, the number of mass layoff events increased by 803…

So, gigantic increase from the previous month, gigantic increase from the same time a year prior. This is an economy which is getting worse, not better – and its like a ratchet. The more people laid off the lower the consumer spending – both by the unemployed and by people more fearful of losing their jobs (such as, for instance, me and my sudden desire to save as much as I can). And this, in turn, shuts down demand for goods – even for Chinese goods, for all those money men who are hyping up China as the savior of the economy.

Its going to get a lot worse before it gets any better – and this is in spite of government numbers which will come out in the next few quarters alleging that the recession is over. Buckle up tight and get ready to ride it out – the money men are in for the biggest and final crash, and then we’ll have done with them along with their enablers in Big Government.

Here’s one place you can go – its a Catholic retailer and thus very, well, Catholic in its product line…but at least its a start. More groups need to pay heed to this:

We believe that by purchasing products from China we would be contributing to the things mentioned here. Because of this, we refuse to carry most statues and pretty much anything porcelain that’s made today. We have been able to find sources for products in other countries. They may cost a little more but we rest better at night knowing that our money isn’t helping to support forced abortions and the persecution of Christians in China.

As I’ve said before, I used to be an ardent Free Trade advocate – but now I’m a proponent of Freedom Trade. This is the concept that we should have free and open economic activity with all the free peoples of the world, and absolutely zero traffic with the tyrants who enslave their own populations. If we are to buy cheap, consumer goods overseas, I’d rather we bought them from, say, the free people of India than the slaves of China’s corrupt oligarchy. And, yes, this means I also want to stop all imports of oil from Saudi Arabia, before anyone out there accuses me of inconsistency…if its an unfree nation, not one American cent should go there.

We who are free must stand together – and by standing together, we’ll bring closer the day when all men are free and able to pursue Truth, unfettered by tyrants. The cost of liberty might be high, but it is a price well worth paying.