It didn’t work before, so why not try it, again? From Reuters:

Democratic leaders called on Wednesday for new spending and tax cuts to boost the sluggish U.S. economy, setting up a fresh hurdle for bipartisan efforts to head off a government debt default this summer.

At the same time, a new report warned that the country could face a European-style debt crisis unless Washington cuts spending or raises taxes…

This is why we should not agree to any increase in the debt ceiling. If we do, Democrats will just spend more. Grasp the fact: we are out of money. There simply isn’t any left. Spending must be cut, and must be cut quite severely. Before you liberals get all huffy about it – yes, Defense has to be cut, too. While we daren’t cut in to training and supplies, we will have to carefully assess new weapons and only take those which are actually crucial to maintaining American superiority. Defense will have to take at least a 10-15% hit…but other departments and agencies (Labor, EPA and Commerce, we’re looking at you) may have to be cut in the 60-70% range. Overall, spending will have to come down to at least 2008 levels in order to start us on a path to economic sanity.

The liberal dream is a nightmare and it is time we end it – we cannot borrow and spend our way to prosperity.

From the President’s speech:

…The goal that we seek is achievable, and can be expressed simply: no safe-haven from which al Qaeda or its affiliates can launch attacks against our homeland, or our allies. We will not try to make Afghanistan a perfect place. We will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely. That is the responsibility of the Afghan government, which must step up its ability to protect its people; and move from an economy shaped by war to one that can sustain a lasting peace. What we can do, and will do, is build a partnership with the Afghan people that endures – one that ensures that we will be able to continue targeting terrorists and supporting a sovereign Afghan government…

But this isn’t the War on al Qaeda – it is a war on Islamism. Kill every last al Qaeda member and the war will still go on…we’re negotiating with the Taliban and pretending that the defeat of al Qaeda (and the death of bin Laden) finishes our effort. What we might be ushering in, however, is a new, Taliban-dominated Afghan government in alliance with Iran and Syria, which will also put Pakistan in a vise and could easily result in a full-blown Islamist regime there, as well. We’re setting up dominoes to fall.

The problem with the Obama plan has always been the fact that Obama is not seeking absolute victory. He has set the parameters of US involvement and our enemies are happily conforming to that – as long as it gets us out of there, they feel confident they can win it all in the long run. Only a Bush-life “we’re not leaving until we win” can do the trick – and Obama won’t do it. He’s got a liberal base to placate for the election…

From CNS:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday that a deal to raise the legal debt limit, which he expects to be completed in the next few weeks, will be only a short-term “down payment” on solving the nation’s debt problem, and that it would be “irresponsible” to reduce the massive federal deficit anticipated over the next ten years with spending cuts alone.

What is needed, he said, is a longer-term deal on a “balanced framework” that includes “revenue increases through tax reform.”…

So little Timmy figures we’re not paying enough taxes – how sweet. Pity he “forgot” to pay his own taxes. But, then again, taxes are for little people…

More importantly, this just shows that no liberal Democrat is ever going to get serious about deficit reduction. The plain fact of the matter is that if we dialed back spending to 2004 levels – hardly a year of tight budgets – we’d be running a surplus, or so close to it as makes no matter (certainly no where near the trillion dollar + deficits of the Obama years). We don’t have a lack of revenue – we have an excess of spending. For anyone to say otherwise betrays a conviction that Big Government is not only here to stay, but must always get bigger. And if you’re a tool of the Ruling Class, like Geithner, you can never envision a world without all the special deals, kickbacks and bribes which make the Big Government and Crony Capitalism worlds go ’round.

We need to hold firm – no deals; not now, not ever. Let them stew – the problems of liberalism are coming to a head (liberalism’s chickens are coming home to roost, as it were) and we dare not give them an escape hatch. Let them come in to 2012 having to justify themselves – let them argue on the campaign trail that higher taxes are necessary. We make a deal for “revenue increases” here in 2011 and we’ll have given away the store.

You’d think that America’s premier civil rights group – dedicated to uplifting black Americans, especially – would be ok with an effort to ensure more black children are born. You’d think that – but you’d also be thinking wrong. When push comes to shove, all the NAACP will ever do is what it’s told – in this case, by the pro-abortion groups – from Life News:

The NAACP is not happy with a new campaign sponsored by a black pro-life advocate that has new billboards placed in Atlanta, Georgia with the message “Abortion Enslaves Us” and “The 14th Amendment Made Us Members. Abortion Dismembers.”

The campaign is the brainchild of Ryan Bomberger, the head of the Radiance Foundation and the billboards were set up to celebrate Juneteenth (June 19th) and the liberation of black Americans from the shackles of slavery. They are meant to “expose the epidemic of abortion.”…

One thing you can say about the NAACP, they know who is in charge. These days, the pro-abortion fanatic position is in charge and when it says, “jump”, the NAACP asks, “how high?”. That abortion is disproportionately taking the lives of black children doesn’t matter. That Planned Parenthood’s founder deliberately intended to reduce the number of black births to cleanse America from “inferior” people is something never mentioned. The NAACP isn’t about helping black people but about helping itself – and if it wants to continue receiving crumbs from the table of liberalism, it had better darn well toe the line.

Perhaps some day the NAACP will return to it’s roots – back when it actually tried to help black people, rather than just advance the power and wealth of a mostly white, liberal elite. Anything is possible – in fact, we can even dream that this will one day be so.

As an aside, we should be pressing the celebration of Juneteenth – a much more authentic and genuinely American event than the liberal-manufactured Kwanzaa. But that is an issue for another day…

I’ve been following the back and forth regarding Maureen Dowd’s most recent anti-Catholic screed in the New York Times. In it, Dowd drags out the usual accusations against the Church – that it became a “haven” for pedophiles, that the ban on gay marriage is hypocritical, etc. Elizabeth Scalia answers Dowd very well, but it was a comment by a reader which struck home with me on a larger issue:

The First Commandment of the gay movement, and popular culture in America, is Obey Your Desires. If you have a desire (especially a sexual desire), and you can act on it without “hurting anyone else”, then our culture doesn’t just say You can obey your desire, but You Must Obey Your Desire–it’s a moral imperative. There is a generally-unspoken sense that we break/repress ourselves if we don’t obey, if we exercise self-control. Much of their folly stems from this one overriding assumption about human life. The gay community, where everyone has defined him/herself by his/her desires, is one of the most profound living examples of what happens when one’s Desire is treated as the first deity to be obeyed.

Over at the Las Vegas Examiner I wrote a bit about this event we have upcoming called the Electric Daisy Carnival. What is that, you ask? Well, here ya go:

…this event is an extravaganza which is designed to lure young people in to a place where they will dance all night long – over a three ngiht period – to loud, bizarre music, fueled by various drugs and other stimulants…

80,000 are expected. Over the years, there have been many injuries, many drug and alcohol related problems and several deaths. Naturally, the Powers That Be in Las Vegas figured this would be a swell thing to have. But think about what we are really doing – we are setting a stage where 80,000 young, inexperienced people will be shoved together with a gigantic amount of overt sexuality and readily available, mind-altering substances. This is a recipe for disaster, even if (as we hope) no one is actually killed. How many of these young people will end up making a horrible mistake over the three days? How many of them will have their lives thrown off course – perhaps in to complete disaster – because someone said, “let’s do this” and no one answered, “are you kidding?”.

But, as the comment above says, we must do what comes to mind. If we have a desire to do something, we must do it. If we don’t, then we’re repressed and some how or another living a lie. We’ve built a bizarre world where the least immoral desire has been elevated to an imperative – if we can conceive it, it must be done. No one is allowed to judge the action. No one is allowed to offer contrary advice (imagine what sort of a square you would be accounted if, when this was under discussion, you had objected to it on the grounds that it will lead kids to immoral behavior…). We have this immoral wrench which is continually twisted towards ever more depravity…and we must keep allowing it because the slightest slowing down of the screw is the most horrible oppression imaginable.

In a very real sense, we have become a society which insists upon immorality. Dowd (and many, many others) have their solution to the problem of sex scandals in the Church – don’t try to reform and call people to virtue; allow them to wallow in filth and call it being “true to one’s self”. Similarly the solution to homosexuality is not to even discuss what a homosexual should do; we are to positively encourage anyone who has the smallest attraction to members of the same sex to let fly and indulge fully their least fancy.

A society cannot live like this. And I mean that in the most crucial sense: if we go on like this, we will die. A society which does not enshrine high standards and continually call people to achieve them (even while knowing all will fall short) is a society which will grow so depraved that it won’t be able to continue itself. So many people will become so insistent that the smallest whim is a matter of vital importance that the real work of society won’t get done – the marriage of men and women; the raising of children; the creation of the goods and services we need to live. Look around you and see how far the rot has already gone – we are just barely hanging on to a morally sane majority right now; just a few more steps down this path and we’re done for, as a people.

Somebody has to start saying “no”. The next time someone suggests doing something stupid, there simply has to be someone who will say, “are you kidding?”. We need that finger in the dyke, that one call to stand firm on some ground, some where. If we don’t find it, then we’re doomed.

From the Guardian:

Barack Obama is set to reject the advice of the Pentagon by announcing on Wednesday night the withdrawal of up to 30,000 troops from Afghanistan by November next year, in time for the US presidential election.

The move comes despite warnings from his military commanders that recent security gains are fragile. They have been urging him to keep troop numbers high until 2013.

The accelerated drawdown will dismay American and British commanders in Kabul, who have privately expressed concern that the White House is now being driven by political rather than military imperatives.

“This is not something we feel entirely comfortable with,” a Whitehall official told the Guardian…

From what I’ve been reading, we have been gaining ground in Afghanistan but it is, indeed, fragile at the moment – that we’re just turning the corner and there is still very much to do before we can secure a peace which leaves in place some sort of decent regime which poses no threat to the United States. It could be that even after a draw down that our military forces will be able to keep up the momentum – but there is always the risk that we’ll lack sufficient forces to deal with the situation and the enemy will gain the upper hand.

But Obama needs to throw a bone to his anti-war left – they voted for him because he was supposed to end all of the Bush Administration efforts; thus far, Obama has batted zero in this. In order to keep the anti-war people from following some third party effort, Obama needs to show them that he’s still with them…a serious draw down of forces in Afghanistan would help Obama in this area. And what this means is that for personal, political motives, Obama might be getting ready to throw away everything we’ve fought for in Afghanistan.

From the AP:

Fewer people bought previously occupied homes in May, lowering sales to their weakest point of the year.

Home sales sank 3.8 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.81 million homes, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday. That’s far below the roughly 6 million annual sales rate typical in healthy housing markets…

Except in a few markets, I wouldn’t buy a home right now if you put a gun to my head. While the boosters are saying, for the nth time, that we’ve now reached the bottom, I don’t see it. I figure there is at least another 20% on the downside for home prices, and probably more in the worst hit areas. We won’t hit bottom until unemployment goes down – and even when that happens, there will be little or no upside to prices because there are (a) too many houses and (b) ever fewer people in the housing market as boomers retire and start to die off.

The long term good news here is that housing will remain affordable for quite some time – this will help those who are just starting out. The bad news is that all those people over the past 20-30 years who counted on their house as a retirement nest egg are out of luck.

From the Wall Street Journal:

…In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that’s as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China’s and India’s populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion. If the male number in the sex ratio is above 106, it means that couples are having abortions when they find out the mother is carrying a girl. By Ms. Hvistendahl’s counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world…

Do you want to see catastrophe coming right at you? Do you want some proof that tampering with life via abortion causes horrendous problems? Do you want to know why the Culture of Death – hiding behind “choice” – is an unmitigated evil? Well, here it is…all of the talk of abortion before it was legalized was predicated upon how it would help liberate women but it is, instead, ended up in the mass murder of women…and a global imbalance between men and women which absolutely dooms us to rapid demographic decline, with all the societal disruption that will bring. This whole thing is the same as if over the past 40 years we had led out 78,000 women a week and shot them.

Don’t talk to me about “life of the mother” when 163 million mothers have been deliberately and with malice aforethought murdered by the Culture of Death. Abortion is an absolute evil and must be banned – and only when we do so, worldwide, will any of us have the genuine right to be called civilized.

http://cdn.livestream.com/embed/jon2012?layout=4&autoplay=false

AWR Hawkins offers a suggestion:

…My point is not simply that Obama is out of touch and beatable, but that he is way out of touch and extremely beatable. Not, of course, by some moderate Republican, but by a conservative Republican: and particularly by Sarah Palin…

Hawkins ends his piece by going even further – asserting we need to start working on President Palin’s 2016 re-election bid. Now that is showing some guts in making a call. But, is he right?

In the sense that the GOP had better nominate a fighter, he certainly is. Perhaps Sarah Palin won’t be the person to lead us to victory – but if it isn’t her, it will have to be someone with her fire, energy and courage. If we nominate someone who is “electable” as defined by the MSM and the Ruling Class, then we will lose – and this is even if unemployment is at 15%. Remember, Obama is going to smear anyone the GOP nominates…a RINO will wilt under that assault and try to get Obama to like him; a Palin will just hand it right back to them, and pile on a bit more, in to the bargain.

Only the most vigorous and fearless campaign will bring us victory in 2012 – we have to get down in to the trenches, knock them over and then kick them when they’re down. Because that is the way they are going after us – if we don’t answer blow for blow, we’ll lose.

Palin, or someone like her – that is what we need in 2012.