AS what? ASW – Navy-speak for Anti-Submarine Warfare. As far as I’m concerned, we should make this a live-fire exercise – from PJ Tatler:

The Fars news agency, which is run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, reported today that Iran has launched its first ever Iranian built submarines to the Red Sea. This is the first time such deployment has been attempted by the Iranian navy…

Iran’s government, having no legitimacy by American standards (which are the only standards that matter), it is not licit for the Iranian regime to even so much as have a navy…and having a submarine is just too risky. Cruel, corrupt and dishonest as the Iranian regime is, it is madness for us to sit idly by while they build and deploy weapons which will only be used for evil. So, treat this vessel, and any like it, as pirate ships…hunt it down and sink it. What if the Iranian government reacts? Let them – it would give us a ready-made excuse for taking our their nuclear facilities.

The bottom line, for me, is that we should start acting in the real world…no more pretending that un-elected, corrupt regimes of anti-human brutes are worthy of our respect or consideration. No more of this absurd dance – time to start doing the right thing, all the time and everywhere.

Andrew Breitbart will be attending the RightOnline conference right in my backyard in Minneapolis, Minnesota on June 17-18. Along with Breitbart will be Governor (and presidential candidate) Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Malkin, Congresswoman (and presumed presidential candidate) Michele Bachmann, businessman (and presidential candidate) Herman Cain, Senator Mike Lee, Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, Congressman Thad McCotter, and many more. There will also be several tracks for breakout sessions, including effective use of social media, blogging, and more. If you can spare the dough (not much, really; $99 gets you in the door and includes meals) you’ll get a whole lotta bang for your conservative buck. I’ll personally be blogging at the event for Blogs for Victory. Hope to see some of you there.

Ok, liberals – this is the chart that your side produced in early 2009 showing what was supposed to happen with and without the Obama recovery program…as you can see, not only did it not perform as desired but things are actually worse than your side predicted they would be if we did nothing in 2009. So, what is the plan, now? Tax more? Spend more? Borrow more? Print more?

How about we face reality, instead? How about instead of searching for some Big Government, socialist solution we just admit to bankruptcy, balance our budget, pay off our debts and free up the economy by cutting taxes and slashing through anti-wealth regulations? I realize that such a program would take 20 years to get us fully back on our feet but that is just the way the world is. There is this tedious, old-fashioned rule about things: if you don’t work hard and save carefully, you’ll never get ahead in the long run.

I know, I know…there is no room for instant gratification in that. Also no room for government grants for perfectly worthless activities. A lot of you liberals out there would have to enter the private sector and there it gets even more annoying because it demands actual results for a day’s work. But, you can get used to it – I promise: it’ll only hurt at first. Why don’t we all give it a try?

HAT TIP: Zero Hedge

Hey, its not me saying it – its the Washington Post:

…We take no view on whether the administration’s efforts on behalf of the automobile industry were a good or bad thing; that’s a matter for the editorial pages and eventually the historians. But we are interested in the facts the president cited to make his case.

What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan…

Our President – the used car dealer of liberalism. Step right up folks, I’ve got a great program for you: a 1933 New Deal with only 14 trillion miles on it! And you can have it for the low, low down payment of 1.6 trillion dollars!

From the Washington Post:

…New Post-ABC numbers show Obama leading five of six potential Republican presidential rivals tested in the poll. But he is in a dead heat with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who formally announced his 2012 candidacy last week, making jobs and the economy the central issues in his campaign.

Among all Americans, Obama and Romney are knotted at 47 percent each, and among registered voters, the former governor is numerically ahead, 49 percent to 46 percent…

When you’re trailing a GOPer who, to say the least, hasn’t even locked down the GOP base you are clearly starting to suffer from an “anyone but you” attitude among the electorate. Its not that people are wild for Romney, but they are getting wild to replace Obama.

Now, the economy could undergo a major turnaround over the next 12 months and Obama could end up being popular, again…but if the economy is in the same or worse shape come June of 2012, then he’s going to be in very serious political trouble.

Sorta puts the nauseating cherry on top of the ObamaCare poop sandwich, doesn’t it? From DC Caller:

The Daily Caller has learned the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) never had the authority to issue waivers from Obamacare’s annual limit requirements.

Language granting HHS that power was never in the original law. Instead, through new rules and regulations, HHS gave itself the power last summer using a broad interpretation of certain parts of the law…

Liberals – just making it up as they go along. This is no surprise, at all. Once you understand that liberals don’t know what “law” means you are prepared to see all manner of shennanigans. To a liberal, a law is whatever a liberal wants it to be at the moment…and, so, abortion is found in a constitution which never even so much as mentions “privacy” and “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” means “only the police and army are allowed to have guns”; people who illegally cross the border didn’t break the law, they are just “undocumented”… Trust me on this one, if the liberals decide that wearing purple on every second Tuesday is good, they’ll find the requirement in what they call “law”.

Nancy said we had to pass the bill to see what was in it – a more accurate statement would be “we have to pass the law so we can find what we want in it”. They could have passed a law with 2,000 blank pages and you would have got the same thing…and now that I think of it, has anyone seen the actual bill which was passed? I’m not talking a copy or a summary, but the actual bill, itself? Boehner should go ask Nancy where it is…maybe it is just 2,000 blank pages!

Repeal and replace, that is the only way to go: an absolute requirement, in fact, because if we don’t repeal it then liberals will still continue to find whatever they want in it. Doesn’t do any good to just modify it…if you take away the individual mandate in sub-section C, page 96, paragraph Z.1, they’ll just find it, again, in sub-section D, page 114, paragraph A.5.Z-57.6. Or they’ll get a judge to rule that the “general welfare” statement in the Constitution’s preamble requires ObamaCare to be the law of the land. Repeal and replace…and then seize all copies and burn and bury, just to be sure.

Lance Robert over at Zero Hedge says, “yes“:

The media has been replete lately with a variety of different government officials saying that there will not be a third round of Quantitative Easing. Even the great Ben Bernanke himself on April 27th spoke against the possibility of QE 3. This isn’t surprising, of course, because in order for something like QE to have the most effect it needs to be, well, a surprise.

However, I am throwing down the gauntlet and making the call – there will be Quantitative Easing, and a big one most likely, by the end of summer. There I said it; of course, I have actually been saying this for the last couple of months and it doesn’t take much of a real genius to figure it out considering that we are heading into a presidential election year. However, it most likely won’t be called QE 3 since the term QE is now politically and socially almost taboo…

I can’t dissent from that view, at all. The one thing the banksters and bureaucrats cannot handle is an economy in recession in 2012. To their way of thinking, Obama is a sure-thing unless the economy tanks (personally, I think a lot of people are putting too much stock in Obama…even if the economy is better in 2012 than in 2011, he’s very much beatable because so many Americans are growing contemptuous of him; but, we’ll leave that aside, for now) – and, so, they have to keep the economy from tanking. While Democrats talk up more stimulus, the fact of the matter is that the House GOP would have to become suicidal to agree to any such thing…and even if they did, there is no assurance it would get through a Senate filled with Democrats fearful of losing their re-election bids in 2012. Thus, classic tax and spend efforts to “cure” a recession are out…only thing left is to fire up the printing presses.

As the linked article notes, in order for any such printing to have a noticeable effect on GDP growth and employment, it would have to be a pretty large amount. The author guesses in the range of $2 trillion. I can’t say, myself…but if you do dump $2 trillion on the economy all of a sudden, it will have a big effect. The people doing it hope for a lot of short-term, good effect…with the bad stuff only showing up after Obama is safely re-elected. The last two rounds of money printing worked out just like that – short term boost to the economic numbers, giving the appearance of economic recovery, as long as you ignored such bell weathers as the price of housing, new home construction and labor force participation (most of which is rather arcane information that most Americans don’t know about). It certainly blew a hole in my predictions – I didn’t think Bernanke and the boys could keep it up nearly this long.

But will it work like that, again? I’m not so sure. Printing up money is, after all, a way of kicking the problem down the road. It doesn’t solve anything – and, in fact, in the long term it makes things much worse. While some good will be perceived, the fact of the matter is that more money printing will immediately cause oil and other commodities to spike in price, thus forcing consumers to pay more for essentials. Whatever “oomph” we might get from “free” money may be immediately eaten up by the “tax” of rising inflation. Maybe a quarter or two of improved numbers, but then a resumption of the crash – and at an accelerated rate. Do it in July and you carry us through to January…and we fall back in to recession right about the time Obama gives his acceptance speech to the 2012 Democrat convention (on the other hand, if they wait until January then we may be back in full-blown recession and Obama’s numbers may have so badly cratered that even if there is “recovery” by September of 2012, it will be too late). I don’t like the prospects of it – mostly because fiat money is just bad…but doubly bad this time as we might only be allowing the most speculative of money men to make a killing for a short while.

The thing is, if Obama were to change course right now and admit that stimulus and money printing don’t work – and then told us we’ve got four or five bad years to get through but if we get busy making, mining and growing things, then we’ll be back on our feet, he’d probably get re-elected. The refreshing honesty and the “let’s all get together to endure the rough times” would likely boost his appeal to an American people increasingly weary of big promises and small results from government. I doubt that Obama has the courage to make such a move – or, indeed, the wit to see that it is necessary. And all the banksters and bureaucrats can see is rank fear…fear that someone like Palin or Cain or Santorum will win and proceed to gut Big Government, including the “private sector” parts of it (ie, big corporations like GM, big banks like JP Morgan). Fear and ignorance…because make no mistake about it, the people who rise highest in corporate or bureaucratic America are the people least versed in how real life is lived. They simply don’t know what they’re doing – but the theory they were taught in college says spend, spend, spend your way to prosperity.

It’ll be interesting to watch out this plays out. Clueless people running a government off track and an economy which has been strangled. They want this dead cat to get up and walk, and the trick just can’t be done. Meanwhile, frustration and anger grow among the American people and revolution is distinctly in the air. 2012 will be the most crucial election since 1932…and at this point in time, no one can say what, really, will happen.

Gotta say, I like what I hear – he understands the problem. He has hard words for all of us – our sense of entitlement to government benefits is firmly condemned. Our requirement to do our duty – to God, country and fellow man – is emphasized. Whether or not Santorum becomes the next President of the United States remains to be seen – what cannot be doubted is that the next President, if he is to reform America, must agree with Santorum’s understanding of the problem.

Now, the hard part – putting forth a reform plan which will turn Santorum from a dark horse candidate in to a potential nominee. He can’t leave that hanging…he has to tell us what he plans to do, in some detail, or he’ll just be one of a half dozen people vying for TEA Party backing…and lacking money and national clout, he’ll never emerge from the pack. The plan is the thing for Santorum…we’ll see if he delivers.

Victor Davis Hanson explains:

Nemesis is always hot on the trail of hubris, across time and space, and the goddess has been particularly busy in destroying the carefully crafted images of Bono, John Edwards, Timothy Geithner, Al Gore, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Weiner, and a host of others. What do their tax hypocrisies, sexual indulgences, and aristocratic socialist lifestyles all have in common?

Collectively, they represent a self-appointed or elected global elite that oversees, lectures about — in sanctimonious fashion — the ethical responsibilities of the redistributive state…

The reason our Founders sought to limit the power of the government was not because they feared a jack-booted Gestapo kicking down our doors – the Founders knew of no such things – but because our Founders were incredibly wise to human nature. These were, for the most part, practical men of affairs. Well off, as far as things went in 18th century America, but not fabulously wealthy – men who had to work and scramble to get ahead and thus understood the weakness of humanity. Our inflated opinion of ourselves; our willingness to rationalize our desires; our slowness to give credit where it is due; our penchant for falling in to financial or sexual corruption…men are weak, so don’t give them too much power over other men.

What we have done wrong over this past century is that while men have remained as weak as ever, we have assigned ever more power to them. This is why, in practice, all Big Government programs fail – even if you really could work out to a nicety exactly what should be done, you’d still have to confide the execution of the plan to people just like you…in other words, people who are likely to mess up again and again and again. Remember that – best plan in the world put in to place with the best of intentions: it will still be screwed up. Just can’t get around it – just can’t get around the fact that people will have to carry it out. And the more authority you assign to these screwed up people, the greater the scope of the disaster. Consign a company of soldiers to a dimwit and you might get a company of soldiers wiped out by an error…put an army in to such hands and you might have an entire war lost. See how it works?

But it gets even worse…an army commander still doesn’t command the whole of the country. Now take that witless army commander and put him in charge of health care; of manufacturing; of the legal system…worse and worse and worse it will become. This is why the Catholic Church, quite a long while ago and at the dawn of the super-State ruled that “subsidiarity” must be the rule. Having no illusions about the nature of Man, the Church held – and still holds – that action must take place at the lowest level possible. This is because the closer you are to a problem the more likely you are to find the right solution – and the smaller the error will be if you mess it up on the lowest level possible. There was a reason the Psalmist wrote:

I Put no trust in princes, in mere mortals powerless to save.

When they breathe their last, they return to the earth; that day all their planning comes to nothing. – Psalm 146:3-4

Trust God, but for heaven’s sake don’t trust your fellow men – not even yourself – with too much power. Even if it means something doesn’t get done, better that it should be so than risk putting a complete scoundrel in charge…and you will get that complete scoundrel the more you repose your trust in men.

The good news is that we can fix this – by returning our government to its Constitutional norms. Are you tired of all the Weiners out there making a mess of things? Then take away their power and give it to no one…then you will have seen the last of them. Oh, they’ll still be there…but they’ll only be ruining their own lives, not all of ours.

Just got this feeling that some big news will come out today – but as I have to work and then have a Knights of Columbus meeting later, I might not be able to write something up until late in the day. So, use this thread to discuss all the big stories of today…or to comment on how boring it was this Monday.