Gotta hand it to him – he does know the mechanics of politics. In this case, he’s just taking his fellow socialist Stalin’s advice: doesn’t matter who votes, it only matters who counts the votes. From the Washington Times:

A small tax-exempt political group with ties to wealthy liberals like billionaire financier George Soros has quietly helped elect 11 reform-minded progressive Democrats as secretaries of state to oversee the election process in battleground states and keep Republican “political operatives from deciding who can vote and how those votes are counted.”

Known as the Secretary of State Project (SOSP), the organization was formed by liberal activists in 2006 to put Democrats in charge of state election offices, where key decisions often are made in close races on which ballots are counted and which are not.

The group’s website said it wants to stop Republicans from “manipulating” election results…

By “manipulating” these liberals mean “only ensuring that legitimate votes are cast”. You see, to a liberal an election is “manipulated” every time a Republican wins a close contest. All such races are supposed to go to liberals because liberals are experts at stuffing the ballot box with illegal votes. It is very annoying to them when we start bringing all that tedious bit about laws and citizenship…like it matters that we have a clean, legitimate vote when liberals know full well that only the result counts. As long as a liberal wins, it is a good thing, don’t you know?

In this case here, I think Soros and the liberals got a step ahead of us – and we need to counter with efforts to defeat liberal ballot box-stuffers. We’re winning the fight to ensure that voter ID is required, but if we’re not careful then the liberals will get around that by having the people who count the votes just “find” as many as they need for the liberal to win.

Not just the Secretary of State, but all officials who ensure the legitimacy of the vote must be, as far as possible, Republicans and conservatives. Only thus can we have a shot at ensuring that only citizens vote and that each of them only votes once. Democrats by their routine resort to voter fraud are undermining the entire American political system – Soros’ effort here is to cement that fraud and make sure that it is built in to the system. It must be stopped.

From Post Politics:

At last weekend’s Netroots Nation gathering in Minneapolis, liberal activists expressed frustration that they lacked the political power or media focus given to the conservative tea-party movement. Former White House environmental official Van Jones is hoping to change that with a new political effort dubbed “The American Dream Movement.”

Organizers are hoping to emulate the the success of the tea party, which became a significant force in the 2010 midterms…

I know that our liberals like to believe that the TEA Party was created by the Koch brothers and isn’t grass roots, but the facts are otherwise. No one person or group can be said to have started the TEA Party – and no one person or group speaks for it. As someone with a pretty good knowledge of history, I have never seen anything quite like it. Mass movements we’ve had a-plenty, but none arising so spontaneously from the people and so entirely resistant to central control. The leadership of the GOP and conservatism is still struggling to keep up…and to keep up not in line with taking over, but only of remaining at the forefront of organic, American political development.

Van Jones doesn’t understand this – he looks around and wonders why there isn’t a liberal TEA Party and so sets out to create one. But it can’t be done…you can’t create a spontaneous movement. For there to be a liberal TEA Party there would have to arise among liberal-minded people first a willingness to act without orders (liberals are the most unthinking and regimented people imaginable, when you get down to it…only a very few ever dare stray from the party line); secondly, there would have to be a conviction that liberalism, as such, is both vital and under existential threat. After Wisconsin a lot of liberals are still feeling the threat, but it is hard to consider liberalism vital in the sense of something to die for. The TEA Party feels that if it doesn’t win then the men who fought at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg and Normandy will have died in vain…liberalism works out to a whine about how life isn’t fair.

Van Jones is free to try his effort, but he won’t be able to do anything other than duplicate what liberalism already has – ponderous groups of liberal special interests who, in the end, are just bitching and moaning about the taxpayer not paying them more money. Meanwhile, the TEA Party will move on from victory to victory because it isn’t fighting for the special benefit of TEA Party activists, but for the whole of the United States of America.

Because the Obama Administration simply cannot allow the people to find out the “what did he know, when did he know it” of the Gunwalker scandal – from Pajamas Media:

Yesterday I reported Chairman Darrell Issa, (R-Calif.) of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a letter to the ATF warning them the were not to retaliate in any way against anyone who chose to testify.

They heeded the warning so well the David Cordrea over at Gun Rights Examiner is reporting they just fired Special Agent Vince Cefalu. Cefalu is one of the ATF agents who helped launch the Web site CleanUpATF.org.

One would hope Chairman Issa would hit the roof when he hears about this and start further investigations. ATF is a cesspool and it’s time to clean it out…

We don’t know if Gunwalker goes all the way up to the Oval Office, but it is getting abundantly clear that it at least laps around the feat of the Attorney General. This criminal action by our government – allowing guns to be bought by the Mexican drug cartels – must not be allowed to stand. We have to find out who did what and when…so here comes the AFT essentially stating, “if you talk, you’ll lose your job”. Lots of good and honest people work at ATF…but now a man has to think it over. Maybe he has a wife and kids and there aren’t a lot of jobs out there…do you tell the truth and risk your job, or just keep quiet?

One thing is certain in my mind – a criminal investigation will eventually have to be launched in to Holder’s “Justice” Department once we get a new President.

…at the New York Times?

…One measure, sponsored by Representative Thomas Rooney and apparently backed by the House leadership, would allow financing only for American surveillance, search-and-rescue missions, planning and aerial refueling. Republicans say that if it passes, the Pentagon would have to halt drone strikes and attacks on Libyan air defenses.

They claimed it would do minimal damage to the alliance and its campaign because the United States would still be providing some support. But the damage to this country’s credibility, and its leadership of NATO, would be enormous. Any sign that the United States is bailing out could lead others to follow…

But somehow, back in the day, when it was a matter of fighting or quitting in Iraq, the consideration of America’s position in a post-withdrawal world didn’t impress itself upon the Times. I wonder why?

Oh, I know – back then there as an R after the President’s name, now there is a D. Almost forgot – liberal opposition to war is, outside of a fringe, based entirely upon who is in charge. If a Republican was in charge of the least damaging war, ever, then it would still be a horror that must be stopped…a Democrat could go Attila the Hun on everyone and the Times would editorialize in favor.

The other effort mentioned in the Times article is a proposal by impeached judge (and now accused sexual harasser) Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) to merely authorize continued air and other support operations while prohibiting ground troops. My view is that both efforts are asinine – if you want an end to the war, you vote a complete cut-off of funds; if you want to fight a war, you authorize just that, no strings attached. It is for the President to decide how a war is conducted…not for Congressmen; but it is for a President to obtain authorization for war.

This whole thing stinks – a mixture of lawlessness and cowardice all around.

You might think that Greece is all fixed now – that the banksters and bureaucrats have got it fixed up just swell. The MSM says so, right? The truth is that they haven’t. All they’ve done is patch a small leak…but the dam is still falling apart. From Bloomberg:

Italian banks slumped in Milan trading amid concern the European debt crisis may spread just as lenders face scrutiny from regulators over capital levels.

UniCredit SpA (UCG), Italy’s biggest bank, and Intesa Sanpaolo SpA (ISP), the second-largest, led lenders lower, tumbling as much as 8.9 percent and 7.2 percent respectively. Both stocks were briefly suspended after breaching limits on intraday swings. Italian 10-year bonds fell, increasing the additional yield investors demand to hold the securities instead of benchmark German bunds to the most since the euro was introduced in 1999.

“Contagion fears keep re-emerging as long as credible, lasting solutions in Greece are pending,” said Christian Weber, a Munich-based strategist at UniCredit…

The trouble is that there cannot be a “credible, lasting” solution to Greece’s debt except by default. There aren’t enough Greeks – not if they dedicated themselves selflessly for a generation – to pay off Greece’s debts. They must default and eventually they will. What the Ruling Class types are fearful of – and it is completely justified – is that a Greek default will trigger an eventual Spanish and Italian default. So, do everything you can to keep Greece afloat even if everyone in finance knows it is BS (even with all this saving Greece going on, Greek 10 year bonds are at 16.8%…the US ten year rate is 2.94%, to give you a comparison: people paying attention know that Greece will default). But Spain and Italy’s problems are just as fundamental as Greece’s – far too much debt to be repaid in any reasonable amount of time.

As I’ve said, we can’t stop the crash – it must and will happen. It is the only way out. What we have right now is a government and financial elite using every expedient they can in order to keep things afloat…long enough for another fat bonus check, or past the next election cycle…whatever. The bad news, for us, is that the longer they kick the can down the road, the worse the crash will be when it happens (essentially, we’re piling up more debt in order to sustain unpayable debt).

HAT TIP: Mish’s

From CNS:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the House Small Business Committee on Wednesday that the Obama administration believes taxes on small business must increase so the administration does not have to “shrink the overall size of government programs.”…

Now, little Timmy is a good liberal, so he claims that if we have to cut it will only come from the stuff people actually want and need…but the truth of the matter is that Democrats only putty granny and junior on the chopping block to scare everyone in to making sure there is plenty of money for the kick backs to big, Democrat donors. I really love how, of late, we’re being told that cutting out waste, fraud and abuse won’t have a significant impact…as if it is only a tiny sum that is wasted…as if our dedicated, selfless government agencies are so on the ball that it is a rarity that one, little penny every now and again is misappropriated. I remember a story a few years ago about how government auditors couldn’t account for a trillion dollars over ten years…not that it was spent this way or that way, but that no one knew where the money went, at all.

A properly functioning government can provide all the necessary services at half the cost of today’s government. Graft is built in to the system – as was most recently shown with that Clyburn boondoggle in South Carolina (one thing to remember – if a project is being named after a living, serving Congressman, it is corrupt from start to finish…absolutely no doubt about that). Money pours of the government not to serve the people, but to enrich the connected, or buy the votes of layabouts.

Geithner did tell a bit of truth today – though probably not in the way he wanted. The truth is that we do have to shrink the overall size of government – national survival depends upon it. Sorry, Timmy, but the free ride for you and your bankster/bureaucrat buddies is over…

A small dose of sanity in an otherwise insane world – from CNS:

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) says that he is “close” to an agreement with sponsors of legislation that would repeal the 2007 ban on the ordinary incandescent light bulb…

This is Upton fixing his own mistake – he sponsored the original legislation banning incandescent light bulbs. The justification was to reduce our energy consumption – the actuality was to provide a bonanza for makers of alternative light bulbs at the cost of destroying jobs making incandescent bulbs. In other words, just par for the course Big Government interference in the market place.

Don’t get me wrong – my house is entirely lighted by the new bulbs. I like the energy savings and, unlike some, I am not bothered by the actual light produced (some people claim the new bulbs are hard on the eyes – I don’t experience that). But the main thing is that it is a consumer choice – and at the moment I can change my mind. Thanks to Big Government, by 2012 I wouldn’t be able to…no one would. And we’d pay through the nose for the privilege of having someone else decide how to light our homes.

We need more and more of this – more and more retreat by Big Government, more freedom for people to decide for themselves how to live. While government will always mean regulatory oversight, there has to be a careful balance struck…and the most important part of it is not to use government tax and regulatory policy to punish the free economic transactions of the people. When we get in to that, the ultimate result is always bad for the people, always good for the politically well-connected.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The drive for a major deficit-reduction deal entered a new phase Thursday when Republican negotiators pulled out of bipartisan talks, leaving it to President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner to resolve the toughest issues.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) said he was backing out of the talks for now because the group had reached an impasse over the question of whether tax increases should be included in the deal…

There must be no increase in taxes UNLESS there is already a bill passed and signed in to law cutting spending. And even then it really shouldn’t happen – but if Democrats want to insist that part of the problem is on the revenue side, they should first have to prove they are serious on the expenditure side. Give us $500 billion in cuts to next year’s budget and then, perhaps, we can talk about taxes…but, cuts first and foremost and far in excess of any tax increase (and, of course, if we do decide to go along with a tax hike, it should be my proposed “wealth tax”…let’s hit the Democrats where it really hurts, in George Soros’ wallet).

Democrats, though, aren’t serious – they are looking for campaign issues. They don’t care about America or what happens. They are hoping that Bernanke and the rest of the bankster-bureaucrat combine can keep the economy out of recession until November of 2012 and, meanwhile, counting on a fear and smear campaign to carry Obama to victory.

Our task is to press them relentlessly. We need to force the Democrats to go in to 2012 defending Big Government and tax hikes. And we can do it, too – provided we don’t allow RINOism to provide “bi-partisan” cover on a tax hike or only cosmetic spending cuts.

From a review of Centesimus Annus by George Weigel over at Crisis Magazine:

What else did Centesimus Annus teach that remains urgent and relevant today?

John Paul taught that what the Church proposes is not simply the free society, but the free and virtuous society. It takes a certain kind of people, possessed of certain virtues, to make free politics and free economics work toward genuine human flourishing. Democracy and the market are not machines that can run by themselves, so a vibrant public moral-cultural life is essential to disciplining both the market and democratic politics. In fact, in the Catholic vision of the tripartite free and virtuous society — democratic polity, free economy, vibrant moral-cultural sector — it’s the latter that’s most important over the long haul. The habits of heart and mind of a people are the best defense against their allowing their political and economic liberties to become self-destructive…

I was thinking of any way I could say that better, but I couldn’t – so there’s the quote. It really says it all. Details to be fleshed out, to be sure, but the most important thing is that morality rules all. Power and wealth without morality is destructive – including, ultimately, destructive of itself. If there is not a transcendent concept of right and wrong – of things which simply must or must not be done, regardless of what we might prefer at the moment – then anything we do will go wrong. There is no escaping this – and the moral collapse we’ve had, as well as the economic collapse hard upon it, reveals this truth.

By various means we rejected all morality – We thought we could have it all. We thought we could have unending power, ever expanding wealth and endless good times without engaging in hard work, without keeping our word (to spouses, family members, friends and fellow citizens), without a thought for the destruction going on all around us. We watched with indifference as our society became a moral sewer of welfare, pornography, rampant greed and callous disregard for life…the mess we’re in now (both in terms of our collapsed economy and our disgusting politics) is the natural result of what we’ve done.

All of our senses and all of our experiences are calling us back to right conduct. We can’t be free and we can’t be prosperous unless we are, in the main, good people. Whatever expedient you seek to fix the economic and political problems we have, we’ll never get anywhere until we start acting morally.

Doubt that these will pass, but it is at least a couple great ideas – and something we should make an issue of in 2012. From The Hill:

The Senate on Thursday will resume consideration of S. 679, a bill to streamline the presidential appointment process, and is expected to vote around noon on amendments offered by Sens. David Vitter (R-La.) and Jim DeMint (R-SC).

Vitter’s amendment would end the ability of the White House to appoint policy “czars,” and prohibit funds for salaries and expenses for appointed czars. DeMint’s would end the U.S. government’s authority to provide loans to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and rescind related appropriated amounts…

Loaning money to the IMF means we’re just going to be throwing our money down the rat-hole of Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy. The bottom line is that all of these nations will have to default and any money given to them now will just be wasted. The only thing the Ruling Class is trying to do is prevent a default in front of various European and American election cycles…there is no fix because these nations (and others around the world, as well) have more debt than they can ever repay.

As for the Czars – high time we ended the Presidential practice of appointing people to high position without Senatorial oversight. Down with the Czar(s)!. No more back door means for Obama to appoint the screwiest of kook leftists to powerful positions.

All in all, a great pair of good-government reforms. But, as I said, not too likely to pass…and if they do, very likely not to make it past a Presidential veto (Obama is committed to wasting our money bailing out the Greeks, while he’ll never give up his power to appoint ultra-pinkos without Senatorial approval). But the fate of these two measures in 2011 is not nearly as important as what we can do with them in 2012. We have to draw a bright, red line between our side and the liberals. Every opportunity must be seized to show the people that a continuation of Obama means four more years of debt, corruption and failure.