A recent report on the cost of freedom – from the AP:

In the summer twilight, a crowd gathers on a baseball diamond in Seattle, candles in hand, to remember a sailor who not long ago ran this dusty path.

In a California church, a young widow reunites with friends she saw just nine months ago at her wedding – this time, though, they’ve come to bid farewell to her soldier-husband.

And in a Tennessee high school, a family friend remembers the eager boy who grew up counting the days until he could don an Army uniform.

Day after day, the war in Afghanistan comes home…

Remember that every day while you and I sit safe and dry here at home, our best and bravest are out there putting their lives on the line. In this, it doesn’t matter your opinions – your opinions mean nothing to a 20 year old soldier on patrol in Afghanistan. All that soldier wants is the knowledge that you’ll back him up, and honor him by living the liberty he secures for us.

Don’t let a day go by without thinking of them – praying for them, and for the victory which will allow all of them to come home.

From AFP:

Israel has “eight days” to launch a military strike against Iran’s Bushehr nuclear facility and stop Tehran from acquiring a functioning atomic plant, a former US envoy to the UN has said.

Iran is to bring online its first nuclear power reactor, built with Russia’s help, on August 21, when a shipment of nuclear fuel will be loaded into the plant’s core.

At that point, John Bolton warned Monday, it will be too late for Israel to launch a military strike against the facility because any attack would spread radiation and affect Iranian civilians…

The longer the world waits to genuinely confront Iran’s nuclear program, the narrower the options become while any action becomes increasingly dangerous. The time really is now – to strike now, before Iran has any functioning nuclear facilities. If we wait – if the world waits – then we’ll one day be confronted with a nuclear-armed Iran, with all that means in terms of terrorist and other threats.

Is the world listening? We’ll soon find out.

From CNBC:

U.S. bankruptcy filings have reached the highest level since 2005, government data released on Tuesday show, as the economy slows and the unemployment rate hovers just below double digits.

There were 422,061 bankruptcy filings between April and June, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, up 9 percent from 388,148 in the prior three-month period, and up 11 percent from 381,073 a year earlier.

For the year ended June 30, there were 1.57 million bankruptcies, up 20 percent from 1.31 million a year earlier.

But the economy is all better now – Obama and Co say so. The stimulus worked! Trust us!

I don’t know about anyone else, but it seems to me that rising bankruptcies indicate a worsening economic situation. It really is the last resort for people who simply cannot carry the debt load anymore – anyone filing bankruptcy now probably went through savings, 401ks, life style reductions…everything they could think of before taking this step. And here’s the really bad news – business bankruptcies have risen 9% over a year ago.

Much worse times are coming, fellow Americans – we can tough it out as poverty really isn’t the worst thing which can happen. But we do need to get rid of the Ruling Class clowns so that we can start rebuilding.

But only a little bit – from Yahoo News:

A federal jury found former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich guilty on Tuesday of one count of lying to federal agents, and the judge said he intends to declare a mistrial on the more serious remaining 23 counts…

This is probably the ultimate result of the prosecutor moving on the case before the full scale of the scandal was uncovered…and, of course, before it became close enough to Obama people to result in indictments.

Blago will now probably get a slap on the wrist, and a pardon on January 19th, 2013…and Chicago corruption will continue on its merry way.

HAT TIP: Sister Toldjah

Gotta protect their meal ticket, don’t you know?

Sen. Robert Casey (D., Pa.) and Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D., N.D.) are pushing legislation that would commit taxpayers’ dollars to bailing out the Teamsters’ retirement pension fund. The financial crisis and the Great Recession may have upset your retirement plans, but that’s not reason that politically connected union thugs have to share the pain…

…This is worrisome for a lot of reasons, as Vernuccio points out: First, it establishes a precedent for taxpayer-funded bailouts of union pensions. As galling as it would be to bail out the Teamsters and their other private-sector union buddies — whose meatheaded management of their pensions has left them with as much as $165 billion in unfunded obligations, according to Moody’s — things would immediately get much, much worse if that precedent were used to justify a bailout of the public-sector unions, whose unfunded pension liabilities run into the trillions…

This is the price of continued union donations to the Democrat party – make sure the unions, public and private, are parked on the taxpayer’s dime, forever. Unions know they are getting politically toxic and also know that the private sector just can’t afford the lavish union benefits…so, hook them up to Uncle Sam’s teat! After all, its only taxpayer money! That grows on fricking trees!

Do understand that our entire nation is being sold down the river by a political class which only wants to keep itself in power for one more election cycle…that is all they care about. If they manage to bamboozle us in 2010, then their whole goal will be to keep in power for yet another cycle. Whatever it takes, they’ll do it…and they don’t care, even if they realize, that this is bankrupting our nation and leading us on a path to destruction…all they want is their personal power and wealth to be ever increased.

There is much debate these days about what to do with social issues. With liberalism in melt-down mode, many voices are calling for a muting of social issues in our political discourse. It is said that we have to concentrate on economic issues, at any rate, and why bring up those contentious social issues which may allow our liberal friends a new lease on life?

All of such thinking is just so much rot – social conservatism is conservatism; the economic stuff is just icing on the cake. What matters if taxes are low and spending is cut if our society is disintegrating in a riot of immorality? What soldier fights for easy access to pornography and a healthy stock market?

Dave Hartline covers this issue excellently over at The American Catholic in a genuine must-read article. The fact of the matter is that if we give up the fight for basic morality – for basic truth, that is – then we surrender the field to liberalism. Hartline points out that those Catholic dioceses which have fallen in to the liberal swamp on social issues are lacking any spirit – they are dying away, even as they appear on the surface to remain large and powerful. Meanwhile, those areas where orthodoxy reigns are surging in strength and growing by leaps and bounds.

Our arguments about government spending, taxes and national defense will be quiet academic if we surrender the field to liberal morality. We might triumph over the next few election cycles on merely economic grounds, but if we are not also firmly engaged in the defense of morality, we’ll find our economic victories to be fleeting, at best. At the end of the day, we’ll find we have an empty shell of conservatism – something which looks impressive on paper, but which is wasting away for lack of a back bone.

I’ve said before that the most crucial issue we face today is abortion. Second only to abortion is gay marriage. These two fights are for the bedrock of our civilization. If we do not respect life and if we do not defend the traditional family, then we have lost everything, even if we gain 6% in GDP. A nation owned by the Culture of Death and pretending that a gay couple is the same as a straight, married couple with children is a nation which is doomed, no matter what else happens.

The merest glance at Europe’s disintegration and increasingly violent and aggressive Islamization is all we need to convince ourselves that their path must not be ours – but their path will be ours if we follow European conservatism down the path of “me too” on social immorality. Conservatism over there ceased to defend family and traditional morality – concentrating on the allegedly more important bread and butter economic issues. Now Europe can’t even defend itself; whole areas of European cities have become no-go zones of Moslem domination…and while European gays can marry, the majority of children being born in some areas are to Moslem parents.

Man does not live by bread alone – we don’t live by tax rates and GDP growth statistics. In order to live – really live, as men and women – we need a firm foundation of truth in our lives. That is what conservatism arose to defend, and must defend or simply have no point, at all.

Because if its a choice between academic freedom and indulging in continued hatred of President Bush, its really no contest:

Anti-war activists are protesting at the University of California, Berkeley to demand the removal of a law professor who used to craft legal theories for the Bush administration on waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques.

Monday is the first day of classes at UC Berkeley’s School of Law. The target of the protest there is John Yoo, who worked for President Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2001-03. The demonstators want Yoo to be prosecuted for war crimes…

Of course, these same demonstrators will never call for, say, Fidel Castro to be prosecuted – after all, he really did commit war crimes, but because he’s a socialist, its all ok. Be a Republican who merely offers some legal advice to a President you hate – up against the wall, you SOB!

From NRO’s Campaign Spot:

In the most recent Gallup poll, the generic ballot shows Republicans ahead of Democrats, 50 percent to 43 percent.

The GOP’s seven-point margin is the largest they have enjoyed since . . . the dawn of creation, according to Gallup’s chart.

Strangely, the GOP had a five-point margin in July 1994, but the generic ballot remained tied in August and November.

That last bit is very important – in 1994 with the generic ballot tied up, the GOP still scored historic gains. This is because of the oddity of polling – it always understates GOP strength. There are a lot of theories for this, none of them completely convincing – I don’t bother with them any longer: I just always mentally add 2-3 points to the GOP for polls of likely voters, 3-5 points for polls of registered voters and 5-7 points for polls of adults – it works very well.

Right now, with a 7 point lead, if the election were held today, the Democrats would be utterly crushed. Will this polling sustain itself in to November? No way to tell – but unless things turn around very fast for the Democrats, they are looking at some pretty serious losses on November 2nd.

From Legal Insurrection:

The Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has granted a stay pending an expedited appeal of the District Court Order which held that California Prop. 8 violated the U.S. Constitution. The Court specifically ordered the supporters of Prop. 8 to brief if they had standing to appeal…

A little surprised that the 9th would do this – after all, this is reasonable and just and entirely in accordance with the law…things not often seen out of the 9th. Could be, of course, that they just realized if the upheld the order then the Supreme Court would just issue a stay.

Bottom line – this delays the issue until after the election, and then shortly after that California may have a governor and/or attorney general who will do their darned job and defend the will of the people of California.

UPDATE: The brief which “smacked down” Walker is available here. A quote:

…to read the district court’s confident, though often startling, factual pronouncements, one would think that reasonable minds simply cannot differ on the key legislative facts implicated by this case. Again, however, the district court simply ignored virtually everything—judicial authority, the works of eminent scholars past and present in all relevant academic fields, extensive documentary and historical evidence, and even simple common sense—opposed to its conclusions. Indeed, even though this case implicates quintessential legislative facts— i.e., “general facts which help the tribunal decide questions of law and policy and discretion,” Langevin v. Chenango Court, Inc., 447 F.2d 296, 300 (2d Cir. 1971) (Friendly, J.)—the district court focused almost exclusively on the oral testimony presented at trial. See Daggett v. Commission on Governmental Ethics & Election Practices, 172 F.3d 104, 112 (1st Cir. 1999) (Boudin, J.) (legislative facts “usually are not proved through trial evidence but rather by material set forth in the briefs”); Indiana H. B. R.R. Co. v. American Cyanamid Co., 916 F.2d 1174, 1182 (7th Cir. 1990) (Posner, J.) (legislative facts “more often are facts reported in books and other documents not prepared specially for litigation”). The district court’s treatment of the trial testimony, moreover, was likewise egregiously selective and one-sided. The district court eagerly and uncritically embraced the highly tendentious opinions offered by Plaintiffs’ experts and simply ignored important concessions by those witnesses that undermined Plaintiffs’ claims. And it just as consistently refused to credit (or even qualify) the two experts offered by Proponents…

As I’ve said – he just ruled the way he preferred things to come out. That the MSM is retailing Plaintiff’s lie that the Proponents made a poor case doesn’t change the fact that it was the Plaintiff’s who were making absurd arguments. They made them, however, in front of a “judge” determined to find for them.

This judicial usurpation simply cannot be allowed to stand – and even a proponent of gay marriage who has an ounce of Americanism in his bones will demand that this ruling be overturned. It is un-American, unjust and hateful – if gay marriage is to be, it simply must not come about via a black robed tyrant.

When Tom DeLay was first accused of corruption, Mark and I saw the truth of what was going on: Democrats were desperate for power and the only way they knew how to get it was to attack Republicans. They waged a phony war against Republicans, with then Majority Leader Tom DeLay as their primary target. Why DeLay? What was his crime? He was an effective Republican Leader.

The shameless, false attacks on Tom DeLay inspired us to start a blog chronicling the real corruption in D.C., which later became our first book. Mark and I never doubted DeLay’s innocence, and now, finally, six years later, the Department of Justice has finally ended its investigation of Tom DeLay, clearing him of all charges.

The Justice Department has informed former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) that the government has ended a six-year investigation of his ties to the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to DeLay’s lead counsel in the matter, Richard Cullen, chairman of McGuireWoods.

The investigation lasted through two presidents and four attorneys general. Its demise provides a stark footnote to the lobbying scandals that helped Democrats regain the House majority they held for 40 years and lost in the Republican revolution of 1994, which eventually made the pugnacious DeLay one of Washington’s top power brokers.

“The federal investigation of Tom DeLay is over, and there will be no charges,” Cullen said. “This was one of the longest and expensive and thorough investigations in recent memory. DeLay took a tack right from the start that he had nothing to hide, and we have been in a routine and constant dialogue with [prosecutors].

Nothing can undo the damage Democrats caused; besmirching an innocent man, knowingly and without any remorse.

Now that this chapter has ended, a new one begins, and this one will bring about the rooting out of the real corruption in Washington D.C.