The bit of good we’ll pull out of the coming financial crash (temporarily delayed by European governments stealing from their people to cover the losses of gamblers dressed up as investors):

What we’re seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn’t Greece’s problem alone, and that’s why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven’t fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies.

Americans dislike the term “welfare state” and substitute the bland word “entitlements.” The vocabulary doesn’t alter the reality. Countries cannot overspend and overborrow forever. By delaying hard decisions about spending and taxes, governments maneuver themselves into a cul de sac…

We’re not as deep in that cul de sac as Greece, but Obama is hustling us down the road as fast as he can. But, also, don’t work yourself up too much blaming him – he’s clueless about economics and is merely carrying out the socialist/Kenyesian instructions of others. It sounds like it should work, and so off Obama goes – keep in mind that a bit of the money being picked from pockets to pay off Greek bond holders is coming out of your pocket…Obama made no objection to IMF funding for Greece, and that means your tax dollars are now at work in Europe.

Fun, huh?

Anyways…

The whole concept of a welfare State was never workable. When it was first proposed, the idea was that if you gave everyone a middle class income it would spur such growth as to pay for itself. Ok, ok – stop laughing. Seriously, that is how it was sold…

Of course, what happened was lower productivity, increased dependence, vastly greater expenses than anticipated, and lower economic growth resultant upon higher taxes on productive enterprise. That didn’t stop it – in fact, it was just expanded more and more. Europe got even further in to it than anywhere else because they could gut their military spending and rely on the United States to pick up the slack.

But now the proverbial poop has hit the fan – there simply isn’t enough money in the entire world to cover all the debt and promises. Something has got to give – and it will have to be either sovereign default followed by financial collapse, or financial collapse followed by sovereign default. There is no easy way out of this – the piper must be paid.

The breaking news:

President Barack Obama will nominate U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan to serve as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, NBC News’ Pete Williams reported late Sunday night.

Kagan, 50, served as the Dean of Harvard Law School from 2003 to 2009. Obama nominated her to serve in her current post as solicitor general early in 2009, and she won Senate confirmation by a vote of 61-31. She is the first woman to serve as solicitor general of the United States.

There will be a lot of hoopla, but in the end she’ll just be another mindless drone for the left on the Court.

UPDATE: Sessions says Kagan had a hand in banning military recruitment at Harvard Law. If this proves the case, then she is unfit to serve on the Supreme Court.

Republicans got rid of Bennett in Utah – will Democrats in Pennsylvania get rid of Specter?

Not A Bad Weekend At All for Congressman Joe Sestak, who’s opened up a 4-point lead (46-42percent) over U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter in the daily Morning Call/Muhlenberg College tracking poll.

With just about 10 days left until the primary, 12 percent of the 404 likely primary voters in the daily canvass are still undecided.

And as the poll, itself, has a margin of error of +/-5 percentage points, this is still a toss up race. But I think that even Democrats are getting a little tired of the party bosses deciding who gets to run. Who is Specter to life-long Democrats?

To be sure, he was a tolerable Republican who could pull in some Democrat votes from time to time, but he was obviously never near and dear to the hearts of Democrats. But then he had to switch or get blown out of the water in the GOP primary – and the Democrats, desperate to get their 60th Senate vote – snatched him and up and tried to suppress primary opposition.

Well, that 60th vote thing didn’t work out as well as they hoped – and now it seems that at least a lot of Pennsylvania Democrats would prefer to have a Democrat as their candidate. DINOs and RINOs both seem to be on the endangered species list.

(Ed. Note: please remember that I have no use for an uber-liberal like Sestak…but I am highly sympathetic to Democrats who don’t wan to be saddled with Specter; I still hope that Specter pulls it off, because that make our victory almost existentially certain…but we can beat Sestak, too.)

From Reason:

…The “one-off” attack line came from the highest official in the American government charged with preventing attacks exactly like Shahzad’s: Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.

Napolitano’s rhetorical slip is a little too serious to be palmed off with some linguistic woolgathering. She has made clear repeatedly that she believes people with Gadsden flag bumper stickers are a greater threat to domestic tranquility than out-of-the-closet terrorists who receive training and material assistance in foreign terror centers. She has been wrong about this every time, and she will continue to be wrong until Americans actually die.

And it will, unfortunately, take more corpses before we can get Napolitano out. And even then it won’t be because of the dead, but because of her increasing political liability. Democrats don’t care about what happens except as it relates to electoral results – as long as you don’t risk a lost vote, you’re ok as far as Democrats go.

So far, we’ve lucked out incredibly since Obama took office – but we won’t luck out forever. Eventually, they’ll get through – and all of the “engagement” and glad handing of our enemies will be exposed for the fraud it is.

Obama just seems to hate everything…

US President Barack Obama lamented Sunday that in the iPad and Xbox era, information had become a diversion that was imposing new strains on democracy, in his latest critique of modern media.

Obama, who often chides journalists and cable news outlets for obsessing with political horse race coverage rather than serious issues, told a class of graduating university students that education was the key to progress.

“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter,” Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.

Kind of ironic, given that Obama last year was unable to give up his Blackberry.

It must still be a big diversion for him, as he apparently is playing on Blackberry more than he is paying attention to the economy, or national security threats.

From NRO’s The Corner:

It appears that the Department of Justice is playing politics with the Times Square bombing plot by refusing to brief Senator Kit Bond (R-MO), the Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. During a classified briefing on Thursday members of the intelligence community refused to answer one of Senator Bond’s questions, according to Bond “We called the agency of the intelligence community that should have that information, and they advised us that the Department of Justice is running it and they told us they should not share it with the Intelligence Committee.” Bond further noted that the stonewalling was directed at him personally, “The Intelligence Community has been told they should not speak to the Vice Chairman of the Intelligence Committee — that’s me.” Bond suspects politics is behind it, which isn’t a stretch given his criticism of the administration’s handling of the Christmas Day Bomber, and his comments on Wednesday that Shazad is not entitled to Miranda rights (a bit of a misstatement as, barring some exception, Miranda would be required if prosecutors want to use the fruits of a custodial interrogation against Shazad).

In any case, someone may want to tell AG Holder that absent some reason to believe that Vice Chairman Bond will disclose intelligence without authorization, the intelligence community is legally obligated to keep Congress “fully” and “currently” informed.

Indeed, someone should tell Holder – but I bet that Holder already knows this. The trouble is that if Bond is informed, it might come out that the Obama Administration was relentlessly incompetent in handling the affair and as we know, if anything hurts the Obama Administration, it must not come out.

Dissent might have been the highest form of patriotism back in 2008, but now we know that slavish devotion to Obama is the highest form or patriotism. Thus, Holder is just being patriotic in stonewalling Bond. Additionally, it is just as important to remember that “the people have a right to know” was only operational until January 20th, 2009. On that date, “the people don’t need to know” became the rule.

At least they aren’t letting out no-bid contracts to KBR, right?

Darn!

Read it and weep, liberals:

KBR Inc. was selected for a no-bid contract worth as much as $568 million through 2011 for military support services in Iraq, the Army said…

Why? Because putting it out to bid and transitioning to a new contractor would have cost an additional $77 million. You see, things don’t always work out in neat, little boxes.

Liberals were rabid about this sort of thing all through President Bush’s term – but the reason Kellogg Brown & Root got no-bid contracts was for this very reason: it was illogical and costly to not just give them the work.

And now that the shoe is on the other foot, what will our liberals do? Mostly ignore it – after all, the whole issue was just something cooked up to hammer Bush and/or condemn the effort in Iraq. It was never a matter of principle.

Per Moody’s:

In the wake of the financial crisis and recession, Moody’s Investors Service has brought new transparency to its sovereign ratings analysis — so much so that 2018 lights up as the year the U.S. could be in line for a downgrade if Congressional Budget Office projections hold.

The key data point in Moody’s view is the size of federal interest payments on the public debt as a percentage of tax revenue. For the U.S., debt service of 18%-20% of federal revenue is the outer limit of AAA-territory, Moody’s managing director Pierre Cailleteau confirmed in an e-mail.

Under the Obama budget, interest would top 18% of revenue in 2018 and 20% in 2020, CBO projects.

But under more adverse scenarios than the CBO considered, including higher interest rates, Moody’s projects that debt service could hit 22.4% of revenue by 2013.

What happens when we reach that point? Greece. And do keep in mind that Moody’s is a bit slack at this. They tend to downplay the bad news and pump up whatever positive is out there. We might already be worthy of a downgrade to AA.

There are two ways out of this:

1. Keep spending like mad and eventually have a Greece-like economic and political meltdown.

2. Balance the budget immediately.

If we go with 1, then it will be very painful and might lead to all sorts of dangerous complications here and around the world. There is no limit to how bad things could get if we spend ourselves in to oblivion.

If we go with 2, it will be extraordinarily painful, but only for a year or two. Once we’re balanced and starting to reduce debt, we can then proceed with no further fiscal problems, our bond rating will not only remain good but our whole financial outlook will improve as we’ll be the only healthy major economy in the world. Foreign money would pour in to our economy as we’d be the only safe haven for it.

Unfortunately, while Obama is in office, we’ll just keep spending. By the time we get him out, it might be too late to prevent the very worst from happening. Though we might get lucky.

Largely ignored by the MSM, almost completely ignored by the liberals, Tennessee has been suffering under epic floods. The reason for the MSM/liberal silence is because there is no way to unfairly blame a Republican for what happened – and thus the fate of millions of human beings are entirely unimportant.

Keep that in mind next time a Republican is President and liberals are screaming about an alleged GOP lack of compassion…

That said, it is time to help out – and a great place to start is with John Rich’s “Lend a Hand“. Rich has made a great, new song and he’s allowing everyone to download it for free – of course, it’d be great if everyone would kick in a few bucks, which you can do thusly:

Please text “RedCross” to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross for Flood Relief in #Nashville. Please help.

Mark Steyn notes:

Two months ago, the Labour government was exhausted and discredited, under an unpopular leader presiding over the ruins of an economic policy he was largely responsible for and which had finally caught up with him. “Dave” Cameron, on the other hand, had signed up to every shallow, pandering fancy the slickers had recommended (I seem to recall more than a few Republican “reformers” recommending the Cameronization of the GOP).

And what was that worth in the end? There was a swing of over six per cent against Labour, and barely three-fifths of that went to the Conservatives. I can’t say I’ve ever cared for Cameron, but, whenever I raised the point with Tory heavyweights, I was told that they didn’t personally care for him either but “he smelt like a winner”. As I wrote over four years ago:

This is dangerously close to the rationale of Democratic primary voters in 2004, when they told pollsters that what they liked most about John Kerry was his “electability”. Sadly, electability isn’t enough to get you elected.

It looks as though Cameron will be able to get in to Number 10, but at the price of Liberal-Democrat support…and this means he won’t be able to do even the slightest Tory thing. Any attempt to move even slightly right will cause the coalition to collapse – and given that Cameron did run as a centrist, get-the-job-done kind of politician, we can expect him to toe the Liberal-Democrat line in order to retain office.

This is the likely death of the Tory Party – they’ll get all the blame for everything which is about to go wrong and when a vote is held (probably only in a year or two as Britain does not have rigidly scheduled elections as we do) they’ll be wiped out. The only way to avoid this is for Cameron to eschew power – and he doesn’t seem to have the backbone to do this.

Why does this matter to us? Because what happened to the Tories is precisely what the liberals and RINOs want to happen to the Republican Party. They want us to mute our conservatism; move away from Evangelicals; drop the life issue; surrender on gay marriage; not be serious about border security. In liberal and RINO prescription, the only way for the GOP to save itself is to surrender core principle. Well, the Tories did that, and look what they got.

The key to victory is to stand firm – but even if it were the demonstrable recipe for defeat, it would still be the way to go. Liberalism is a dying creed. Its economic prescriptions have proven false and no matter how hard they try to juggle the books, the ultimate collapse of this fiat money economy is certain. They are also dying in the sense that they are the party of despair, dissolution and death. They are trying to import voters because they won’t got out and make them on their own. They are finished.

But they still dispose great resources of power – and thus they might be able to keep things going for a while and might even beat us at the polls. It makes no matter – their end is certain. And when that end comes, we want our side to be the blazing light of truth. We want it to be super abundantly clear that we had separated ourselves from liberalism and had nothing to do with it. We do that, and when the crash comes, our victory will be complete.

Or, we can RINO ourselves in to oblivion and allow liberalism to retain power by default. Not for me – I refuse to be a conservative who winds up conserving liberalism. I refuse the office of efficient manager of the welfare state. I stand firm, and await the final death of liberalism.