Interesting story from the Wall Street Journal:

Shirley Davis, a 66-year-old retired phone-company administrator who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., is more than $33,000 in debt, earns just $2,414 a month and filed for bankruptcy in June. Shortly before that, she ripped open an envelope from Capital One Financial Corp., which pitched her a credit card even though it sued her in 2006 to recover $4,470 she owed on a different card from the bank…

…Fannie Mae, seized by the U.S. government in 2008 to avert the mortgage company’s failure, launched an initiative in January that allows some first-time home buyers to get a loan with a down payment of as little as $1,000. Securities firm Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, a brokerage operation jointly owned by Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Inc., is offering some clients home-equity credit lines of as much as $2.5 million.

Credit-card issuers mailed 84.8 million offers of plastic to U.S. subprime borrowers in the first six months of this year, up from 43.7 million a year earlier, estimates research firm Synovate. Nearly 8% of loans for new cars in the latest quarter went to borrowers with the lowest range of credit scores, up from 6.2% in 2009’s fourth quarter…

I’ve seen it at my employer, too – keeping in mind that I work for a very large financial institution. I’ve seen us weaken underwriting on retail loans and issuing credit to people who in one way or another defaulted on a previous loan with us. I won’t name my employer because that would be inappropriate, but I was wondering what the bosses were up to.

Now, I just wonder even more.

Given that Fannie Mae is government owned, I wonder if there is a concerted effort, led by the government, to force-feed a borrowing frenzy upon the United States in order to get the economy back on track? Keep in mind that the last time we had a genuinely production-led recovery was back in the 1980s. In the recoveries since then, it has been debt driving the economic engine (the Fed tightened fiscal policy in 1980-81 to choke off inflation, so it took actual work and investment – opened up by Reagan’s tax cuts on wealth creation – to get the economy rolling…since then, each time we’re in a jam the Fed just eases rates, so people pile up debt to buy houses, cars, gadgets…all the while, our wealth is shipped to China, Mexico and Chile).

China’s alleged growth this past quarter was more than 10%. I say “alleged” because in that tyrannical society, there’s no way to know if the numbers provided are true. China got that number by doing one thing we did and then another thing we couldn’t. Like us, they printed up piles of money and handed it nearly free to the banks. Unlike us, China’s government could order China’s banks to lend. And lend they did – they are now in the grip of an acute housing bubble which is about to come crashing down…but, for the past year it has seemed as if China’s economy was humming right along, and that is all Obama and Co want for us, right now: the appearance of prosperity.

Here in the US, the money was handed off to the banks but the banks were wary of lending, while consumers were wary of borrowing. I sure as heck haven’t wanted to borrow any money in the past year. Have you? Anyone with a bit of wisdom right now is determined to get out of debt and get some money saved. If it turns out that the economy recovers, then it’ll just be nice to be out of debt and have some money in the bank – if the economy goes south, then being out of debt and having some savings will be even better. Who would borrow up a bunch of money right now and go on a spending spree?

Only the mos irresponsible among us. In other words, people who are lousy credit risks. And now comes this story – confirmed in my own experience – that at least some financial institutions are essentially encouraging the profligate to go on a spree. I can’t imagine anything more stupid than this – it won’t be enough to propel growth (no matter what: the total national debt is too high), but it will set up a huge increase in defaulted loans because if you’re loaning money to the irresponsible, its a cinch that a large percentage of the debts will go bad.

Remember, folks, for the government and the banksters (who owe the Democrats a great deal since the financial “reform” bill just passed does nothing to reign in irresponsible banking practices) the primary thing is to keep the economy in some sort of reasonable shape until after the election. They don’t want a crash before then – and so they’ll use whatever expedient they can find to push things up. Including lending money to people who can’t or won’t repay.

Democrats set the precedent, so if it turns out that 41 GOP votes go against cloture, Democrats will have no one but themselves to blame.

That said, we shouldn’t filibuster – on the other hand, if we can delay this we might be able to generate enough public opposition to make vulnerable Democrats think twice before voting to impose this leftist ideologue on the Supreme Court.

Kagan may be the nicest person in the world, but in terms of education, experience and ideology, she simply lacks any capability to rule on the law. We can expect her, once on the Court, to be slavishly devoted to whatever is the liberal fashion of the moment (thus we’ve seen her in the past attempt to bar the military over “don’t ask/don’t tell” while at the same time accepting violently homophobic Sharia as having a place in America – these are the sorts of mental twists we haven’t seen since the heyday of Stalin and his ever-changing party line). She’s free to be the advocate she wants to be – but she should not be a leftist advocate on the Supreme Court.

Another day, another devastating poll for the Democrats:

Democratic incumbent Russ Feingold and his chief Republican challenger Ron Johnson remain locked in a neck-and-neck battle for the U.S. Senate in Wisconsin.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in Wisconsin finds Johnson with 47% support, while the Democrat earns 46% of the vote…

This one will go down to the wire, I’ll bet – and, of course, one still have to put it as “lean Democrat” even though Feingold is clearly in trouble. But the real story is here is not that Feingold might pull it out, but the fact that Democrats will have to expend a lot of effort holding what should have been a sure-thing.

This is the story of 2010, so far: Democrats are in trouble. A lot of trouble. The glow of 2008 is long gone, and even popular incumbents such as Feingold (who has been a good fit for Wisconsin’s electorate) are going to have to fight hard just to hold on. The Democrat brand, as it were, is damaged goods – and we can rely on it that as it gets closer to November, ever more Democrats move away from the leadership in DC and try as much as possible to downplay their connection to the national Democrat party (much as Reid did in his 2004 run when he was “an Independent for Nevada”, and never so much as mentioned his party affiliation).

From the Wall Street Journal:

Oil stopped flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from BP PLC’s blown-out well for the first time in nearly three months. But BP and U.S. officials warned it was far too early to declare victory…

Indeed, I won’t call this a win for at least a few days – but it is good news that, at least for a while, there is no more oil leaking in to the Gulf.

This catastrophe has been marked by a whole series of grossly incompetent acts, from whomever put the faulty valve together, right up to the President’s lack of leadership and decision as the crisis grew. This never needed to happen, and it could have been fixed long ago – but BP acted just like a gigantic corporation is wont to act (ie, like idiots), while the President acted like it was someone else’s job to actually take charge and get things moving.

Our prayers for the continued success of this effort and for all the people of the Gulf who have been hurt so badly.

From Hot Air:

No, this is not coming from Rasmussen or an internal GOP poll, but from the normally Democrat-sympathetic Public Policy Polling. PPP pitted Barack Obama against five potential Republican challengers for the 2012 presidential campaign, and the only one Obama beat was … Jan Brewer. Even that, PPP admitted, resulted from Brewer’s lack of name recognition. The headline, though, is Sarah Palin’s dead heat with the President:

…He trails Mitt Romney 46-43, Mike Huckabee 47-45, Newt Gingrich 46-45, and is even tied with Sarah Palin at 46. The only person tested he leads is Jan Brewer, who doesn’t have particularly high name recognition on the national level at this point…

As Hot Air goes on to note, the poll samples Democrats 5 percentage points more than GOPers. This is a devastating poll for the man who won 53% of the vote less than two years ago. It is a long way to 2012, but its hard – very hard – for a President to recover lost popularity.

Additionally, as the MSM continues to lose influence and the New Media becomes larger, the narratives developed by the MSM for people such as Sarah Palin will become weaker. It took relentless hounding to develop the memes, and that relentless hounding is going to fade away as time goes on, allowing all of the Republicans to better craft their own public image. Meanwhile, Obama is stuck – as it were – in the White House where daily decisions are his and if things don’t get wonderful, he’ll be blamed for everything which goes wrong (its not necessarily fair that it works out that way, but it does – and we GOPers were on the heavy receiving end of it from mid-2005 on).

All we need do from now until November is just keep playing the Democrats in action. These guys are just caught in a vise – they are so used to being relentlessly dishonest and never getting caught at it that they simply don’t know what to do when the truth comes out.

Lots of things have happened, but the most important political development of the past 10 years has been the rise of the New Media – powered by low cost, easy-use technology. Over the years I have read many books and it is a curious thing, now, to apply modern insight in to past events – would Joe McCarthy really have been run out of politics had the New Media existed? Would the MSM have gotten away with calling Mao an “agrarian reformer” if the New Media existed back then?

Carry it further: would LBJ have gotten away with the Gulf of Tokin Resolution? Would Tet have been considered a US defeat? Would Richard Nixon have been able to bamboozle conservatives in to backing him over Reagan in 1968? On and on and on it goes – we used to have an MSM which controlled the terms of debate…and while they are still as relentless in their defense of the establishment, they no longer control the debate. Its entirely outside of anyone’s control – as long as someone can record things on a phone and post them on the web in minutes, the truth will come out.

And the truth really does set you free.

My plan was, no matter what happened this year, that I’d keep the reporting about GOP prospects low key or negative. Lower expectations. Never put a bright face on things. Always assume disaster was just around the corner.

What this has done is made it very hard for me to write – can’t find negative stories to tell about GOPers, can’t find any positive stories about Democrats to counter any good news for the GOP. For crying out loud, the entire political system is crashing and burning and Democrats are running ’round like chickens with their heads cut off. Yesterday I saw a House Democrat get up on TV to condemn the Obama Administration suit against Arizona!

Sure, that is triangulation. She’s probably in a swing or GOP-leaning district and is trying to save her bacon…but, goodness, to step out 18 months after Democrats came in to power in a stunning, crushing victory over the GOP? This is a political turn around never seen in American history. It was a long, slow build to 1994 – took Newt Gingrich and the House GOP a decade to set that up. We’re in political over drive.

One wonders: how much more incompetent can Obama prove himself? Can Congressional Democrats become even more corrupt and out of touch? Will idiots at the NAACP and in the New Black Panther Party further alienate Independents from the Democrat party? The Democrats and liberals in general are proving an invaluable ally in undoing the liberal victory of 2008!

Just a great year to be a Republican – but, still, we’ve got to work like we’re 5 points behind and its two weeks before election day. Don’t let up for a moment.

I am shocked to find that in Washington, DC, there is no memorial dedicated to those who served our nation in the First World War – it turns out that I wasn’t the only person who didn’t know:

In March 2008, Frank Buckles, the last surviving American veteran of World War I, visited the District of Columbia War Memorial, on the National Mall in Washington DC. He observed that this peaceful, secluded memorial, dedicated in 1931 as a memorial to the 499 residents of the District of Columbia who gave their lives in that war, sits neglected and in extreme disrepair, and that there is no national memorial to World War I. Mr. Buckles issued a call for the restoration and re-dedication of the D.C. memorial as a National and District of Columbia World War I Memorial.

I have seen that memorial and it is actually quite a moving place – though it is in great disrepair. And it would make an excellent memorial to all those who served – and this includes my grand-father and all of his brothers, as well as a couple sisters who served as nurses. They are all gone now, but the centennial of the First World war is little more than four years off and it would be fitting that the veterans receive a memorial worthy of their sacrifice – and as a permanent reminder to future generations of those Americans who went “Over There” to fight for freedom.

This link is to a petition which urges Congress to appropriate the money necessary to make this a reality. I hope you will sign and join in remembering the veterans of the First World War.

This is the first instance I know of a dead person voting – for a Republican, at least:

If Nevadans want to honor Charlotte McCourt, they shouldn’t vote for Harry Reid.

That’s the message in the 84-year-old’s obituary, which ran Tuesday in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

“We believe that Mom would say she was mortified to have taken a large role in the election of Harry Reid to U.S. Congress. Let the record show Charlotte was displeased with his work. Please, in lieu of flowers, vote for another more worthy candidate,” states the obituary…

When Democrats start losing the votes of Cadaver-Americans, you know things are looking pretty grim for them. It speaks volumes that in the era of Obama – he of Chicago’s high cemetary-turnout elections – that those who have shaken off this mortal coil feel compelled to act against Democrats, usually the best friends of room-temperature voters.

Yes, we will be making a lot about this.

From Charles Krauthammer via NRO’s The Corner:

Every question [administration spokesmen] get on the economy, their answer is “Bush drove us into a ditch.” I think they ought to wear it on a t-shirt, and in that way they could have an interview and not have to say anything. They could have a sandwich while being interviewed.

It’s no answer. It’s also no answer to say that big business is cynical and unprincipled. That’s not news. But what is news is an administration that is adding not just costs but uncertainty.

There are three major areas a corporation, small or large, has to worry about: health-care costs, energy costs, and the cost of money. In each of these, the administration either has or is planning regulations worth thousands of pages which are going to raise costs, as we know, but also are going to interact in ways that nobody understands and that are going to create uncertainty…

Some things are certain – higher taxes in 2011 as the Bush tax cuts expire, so businesses are front-loading economic activity in to 2010. Cash for clunkers and new home tax credits also encouraged early economic activity. Trouble is, all that is stolen from future action – which means that we’ll have even less economic activity in late 2010 and early 2011 than we would have expected.

But the uncertainty is probably the worst economy-killer we’ve got. No one can say, from day to day, just what is coming down the pike. As Speaker Pelosi said, we had to wait until ObamaCare was passed to find out what is in it – and the more we learn, the more costly it becomes. Meanwhile, minimum wages are still being hiked, taxes are going up (States are raising taxes in desperate, foolish attempts to close budget gaps) and while Cap and Trade, Card Check and other liberal idiocies are still on deck, there’s just no way anyone is going to invest heavily in long term projects. Better to just hunker down, save what you can and see what comes up.

If someone planned to make the downturn of 2008-09 in to a Great Depression, he couldn’t have scripted it better than to say, raise taxes, increase regulation, increase government debt and don’t tell people what you’re really going to do. Its the perfect storm for complete economic collapse, and everyone who is in business knows it. So, people freeze in place, and no one is going to do anything until at least the middle of 2011 – and by then it may be too late to avert a Great Depression.