Congratulations, Mr. President – you’ve brought us back to 1997:

The number of customers applying for a mortgage to purchase a property fell to the lowest level in 13 years last week, a sign the housing market is struggling without government incentives.

Purchase volume declined 5.7 percent and is at its lowest point since February 1997, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Wednesday.

Overall mortgage application volume, which includes loans for purchases and refinancings, dropped by 12.2 percent during the week ending June 4, compared with the previous week. Refinance volume tumbled 14.3 percent…

A strong pitch is being made behind the scenes for a renewal of the $8,000 home purchase tax credit – the real estate industry is facing complete disaster, and they want their federal subsidy. Never mind that it will make things worse in the long run – the people running the real estate show only care about the next month or two. Fortunately, for them at least, our government seems incapable of looking even a week in to the future, so the credit might well be renewed.

The longer we put off the drop of home prices to actual market value, the worse it will be when we are finally forced to allow it to happen. National bankruptcy is, at most, only five years away – some time between now and then it will become absolutely impossible to sustain current home price levels, and crash they’ll go (personally, I don’t think they can keep it up much longer – but Obama, Bernanke and the boys are determined to keep trying).

This is the change we can really believe in – only its for the worse.

Tuesday saw a surge of pro-life women candidates:

Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser called Tuesday’s victories for pro-life women candidates “the greatest affirmation of our mission in the history of the organization,” and “proof that Americans are responding to authentic, pro-life feminism.”

“We applaud Americans in California, New Jersey, Nevada, South Carolina and South Dakota for taking steps to support authentic, pro-life feminism with their votes,” said Dannenfelser. “Now more than ever, we need pro-woman, pro-life leadership. These women will usher in the year of the pro-life woman and win back critical pro-life margins in the House and Senate.”…

The liberal feminists were, if anything, in continual war against all that women stand for. Faith, family and home are words of insult on the left – but now women who are smart, strong and successful while at the same time pro-life and pro-family are rising to the top.

It is a sign of political health that such women as Sharron Angle and Carly Fiorina can rise so high – especially when some of the women who won on Tuesday were written off early on in the primary campaign (at one point, Angle polled a mere 5%). This is now the real Year of the Woman – the pro-life, patriotic, independent and courageous woman.

The world is being turned up side down – and at the end of this year, nothing will ever be the same in American politics again.

A necessary statement from the floor of the House:

The Turks and the rest of the Islamists must be made to understand that Obama and Co are a passing thing in the United States – Israel’s friends are legion, and we will get back in to power in the by and by.

The lady has pull:

Some of Sarah Palin’s riskiest endorsements scored major victories Tuesday for the former Alaska governor, showing off her power in Republican primaries.

Palin had four primary endorsements in play – Carly Fiorina, Nikki Haley, Terry Branstad and Cecile Bledsoe – and three won or moved on to a runoff.

Palin served different roles for each candidate – sometimes spotlighting conservatives not well known to the national scene while at others validating conservative credentials to an unsure grassroots and even stepping in to deflect nasty attacks.

Whether she decides to run in 2012 or not, she’ll be carrying a lot of political weight all through the 2012 campaign. In a time of political upheaval, someone who’s conservative/populist credentials are spotless like Palin’s will be able to use her endorsement again and again to either defend someone against attacks or shoot them in to public notice. Especially if, as I expect, her actions secure a lot of GOP victories in November, she will be a king maker in the Republican party.

This, on the whole, is good for the party – we need someone who can stand up for principle. And in the long run, this might be a better service to us than even her being President.

Excellent idea, but dangerous:

Although most of the recent talk regarding flotillas has revolved around ships sailing toward Gaza, at least two plans have emerged for “reverse flotillas” – from Israel toward Turkey – to highlight what organizers have labeled the Turks’ “shameless hypocrisy” in their criticisms of the Jewish state.

The most ambitious of the two plans has been devised by members of Israel’s National Student Union, who this week announced their intention to set sail toward Turkey, in an effort to bring humanitarian aid to the “oppressed people of Turkish Kurdistan” and to members of the “Turkish Armenian minority.”

Which is all quite true – the Turks have behaved brutally with the Kurds and Armenians; far worse than anything the Israelis have done to anyone. No notice is really taken of it because the Turks aren’t Jewish or American, and thus there’s no upside to talking of their savagery. You get no notice in the press, no invites to human rights conferences and, of course, given that the Turks are Moslem there’s always that chance you’ll wind up dead if you look cross eyed at them.

Given the nature of the Turkish government, I would advise these young Israelis not to actually carry it out. The IDF was forced to defend itself against terrorists and 9 people died – the Turks might well massacre everyone in the flotilla even if no resistance is offered. Its a grand gesture, but I can never support a move where innocent people might be killed to no good effect – it won’t stop the lies about what is going on in Gaza, nor will it stop what is truly happening in Turkish occupied Kurdistan.

And this is from Fox News, and so demonstrates how even in a place where they are trying to be fair, they still slip in to inaccuracy in favor of a pre-set story line – the headline:

Mexican Teen Killed by U.S. Border Patrol Agent

So, the story is about a Mexican killed by a US Border Patrol Agent, right? Well, that is the story if you follow the “America defending the borders is bad” meme – but here’s the real news, noted only in the 7th paragraph:

The official, who agreed to discuss the matter only if not quoted by name, said the video also shows what seem to be four Mexican law enforcement officers driving to the edge of the dry but muddy bed of the Rio Grande, walking across to the U.S. side, picking up an undetermined object and returning to Mexico near the area where the boy’s body was. Like their U.S. counterparts, Mexican law officers are not authorized to cross the border without permission.

Law enforcement officials of the Mexican government illegally entered the United States – and did so in order to manufacture evidence that US Border Patrol agents had crossed in to Mexico to shoot a Mexican citizen! That is the story! The story we’ve heard again and again – but always kept quite: Mexican officials, including allegations of armed Mexican soldiers, crossing our borders.

But, it doesn’t fit the MSM story line – and so its buried in the story and not given any context. Until we get an MSM – an entire MSM – which will tell the truth and the whole story, we will continue to be ill-served by the organizations which allegedly inform us of the day’s events.

The audio:

Sure thing, Rosie – but your money, first.

Just terrible:

…Running a first-rate campaign, Obama and his supporters argued, showed that Obama could run the federal government, even at its most testing moments. He could set goals, demand accountability, and, perhaps most importantly, bend the sprawling federal bureaucracy to his will.

Fast forward to 2010. The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is gushing out of control. The Obama administration is at first slow to see the seriousness of the accident. Then, as the crisis becomes clear, the federal bureaucracy becomes entangled in itself trying to deal with the problem. “At least a dozen federal agencies have taken part in the spill response,” the New York Times reports, “making decision-making slow, conflicted and confused, as they sought to apply numerous federal statutes.”…

Its all been a muddle – no one knows what to do. No one knows who is really in charge – or, indeed, if there is really one person you can go to for a hard and fast “yes” or “no” answer. Absurdities like Holder talking criminal prosecution rise the forefront of an Administration which doesn’t know how to make a decision, but does know how to lawyer up. At this point, the fix will come more as an accident than as part of a plan – eventually the gang which can’t shoot straight will hit the target, but only by pure, dump luck.

The spill, itself, is not Obama’s fault – but the abject failure to see the threat and set up a group for dealing with it shows for all the world to see that we have a government incapable of decision. They react to events and their primary concern seems to be assigning blame rather than resolving issues.

We’re stuck with this President until at least January 20th, 2013 – but let this be a lesson to all of us about the wisdom of electing a community organizer from the hard left.

Shaping up to what could be one of the major battles of 2010:

Spurred by state budget crunches and an angry public mood, Republican and some Democratic leaders are focusing with increasing intensity on public workers and the unions that represent them, casting them as overpaid obstacles to good government and demanding cuts in their often-generous benefits.

Unlike past battles over the high cost of labor, this time pitched battles over wages and pensions are being waged from Sacramento to Springfield to New York City and the conflict is marked by its bipartisan tone, with public employee unions emerging as an intransigent public enemy number one in cities and state capitals across the country.

There is a reason the public sectors unions are viewed as an intransigent public enemy – this revolves around the fact that they are, well, an intransigent public enemy.

As long as the gravy train kept rolling along, public sector unions could remain untouched. This is especially true of police, firefighter and teachers (especially teachers!) unions. The strength of propaganda in favor of what these entities represent entirely trumped the reality of what some of them were doing. To argue for any sort of budgetary reform of education, for instance, allowed the unions – spending vast sums on politics extracted from the membership, even when the members were Republican or Independent – to paint a person as “anti-education”.

Regardless of what one thinks of individual policemen, firefighters and teachers (and majority of these are hard working and dedicated to their vocations), substantial minorities of these are time-serving wastrels. This wouldn’t be bad except for the fact that the unions have become organizations dedicated to the protection of the wastrels – fighting fiercely to protect them as sources of union dues, with the unions being defended in this by the primary recipient of union political donations, the Democrat party.

What has resulted from the mutual political back scratching of unions and the Democrat party is that we’ve got a hopelessly corrupt government over-staffed by over-paid bureaucrats who can retire quite young on fat pensions and health care benefits for which they contributed little or nothing. And all of it paid for by an increasingly impoverished population which can only dream of the benefit package most government employees obtain (and think about this government workers get paid, on average, more than private workers…think of the insanity required to have the employees paid more than the boss!).

All around the nation, cities and States are functionally bankrupt. As you go from city to city and State to State, you’ll find it invariable that public employee pension and health care benefits are at the center of the budget crunch. Some local and State governments might be forced in to actual bankruptcy. What is the union response to this? Demands for tax increases to keep not just the current levels of pay, but to actually increase pay (what are the New Jersey bureaucrats angry with Christie over? That he wants to freeze pay – not cut it, just freeze it, and they are up in arms).

Public sector unions have become job-destroying parasites on the productive economy and they must go – each and every union will have to give in to demands for cuts, or be crushed completely. Personally, I would go back to a system where government employees were forbidden to be in unions. You want to work for government? Fine, but you do it at our pleasure – and if you don’t like it, go get a job in the private sector. People, I think, are starting to understand this – and thus the growing popular animosity towards unions.

For the sake of our nation, come what may, we must have this fight. If you want to tackle Big Government, your main obstacle is Big Union. The time has come to call and end to government employee unions and the corruption and waste they generate.