The TEA Party laid down a marker regarding NY-23:

We are extremely disappointed that the Republican Party (and leaders like Newt Gingrich) has missed the message of the Tea Parties and continues to take conservative voters for granted. We applaud all courageous statesmen (Fred Thompson, Michelle Bachmann, and Dick Armey) and call on other GOP officials to put America’s values over traditional, often corrupt and morally bankrupt, power structures.

I understand the anger – in fact, I agree in principle with it. On the other hand, we need to have a care here. I’m a Republican and it will only by via the Republican Party that our nation will be rescued from Obama’s socialism and returned to our Founders’ constitutional republic. The Republican Party must stop recruiting RINOs on the theory that any “R” will do. The TEA Party movement must learn to be selective in expressing outrage.

As regards NY-23, this was (and is) an excellent means for the TEA Party to show the GOP establishment just how outraged the base is and how we’re not going to take having RINO’s foisted upon us by Beltway insiders who are afraid to fight it out in the realm of ideas. But to take some of the GOP establishment’s actions regarding NY-23 and apply it to the entirety of the GOP leadership is suicidal. Yes, Gingrich should have thought a bit harder – but he’s still one of us, and if we’re to get in to the game of condemnation for the slightest error, we might as well pack it in, go home and get ready for socialism. Meanwhile, in contrast to Gingrich there are many establishment GOPers who made the right choice – making blanket condemnations of the GOP for the failure of some just means we’d be cutting off the best of the best at the knees.

While our hero Barry Goldwater correctly noted that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, there is a vice in being intransigent. Don’t oppose just to oppose and don’t fly off the handle and condemn just because of a momentary lack of purity. Explain what you want; advise the erring why they’re wrong; work very hard for people who do get it – but leave the political suicide stuff at the door.

Its ok, you see?, he doesn’t work for just any, old greedy corporate behemoth, but for a government-bailed-out corporate behemoth:

The pay package given to Freddie Mac’s new chief financial officer should have sent a message from Washington to corporate America about how executive compensation standards must change. Instead, it did just the opposite.

The government-controlled mortgage finance company is giving CFO Ross Kari compensation worth as much as $5.5 million. That includes an almost $2 million cash signing bonus and a generous salary that could top $2.3 million.

Signing bonus? Is this a sports team?

Look, I don’t care how smart this guy allegedly is. I don’t care how much knowledge he’s supposed to have – I could do this job for, oh, $1 million per year…and if I needed some help keeping up with the books, I could take half my salary and distribute it amongst 5 accountants at 100 grand a pop and still leave myself an income more than sufficient to live as swank a life as anyone needs – especially if their pay is drawn out of the taxpayer’s pocket.

This is what is wrong with America: Big Government and Big Corporation simply don’t understand the lives of everyday Americans. Seriously – I’ll bet any amount that there isn’t single middle or lower income American who, if asked how much the CFO of Freddie Mac should make, would have come up with a figure greater than a few hundred thousand dollars. Its all the job is worth – and there is someone out there who would do a bang up job for such a salary. But people in Big Government/Corporation sat around and discussed the issue and figured that Kari needed $2 million just to walk through the door!

This is what we must fight against – we must make these cretins understand that they aren’t tin-platted little demigods living on a higher plane than the rest of us. They are just people who choose the path of least resistance – and thus work either in Big Government or Big Corporation where results are never really measured and the whole system is designed to hide incompetence. You can’t get away with this sort of nonsense at smaller firms – and a smaller government would inherently be more responsible with our money because they’d have less of it.

In 2010, we must start taking our country back – before the idiots who awarded a $2 million dollar signing bonus for a glorified accountant destroy us.

So much for hopeychanging us in to better foreign relations:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, initially dubbed Sarko the American for his pro-U.S. stance, is finding it much tougher to deal with Washington than he had anticipated and is recalibrating his policies accordingly.

Stung by perceived snubs from U.S. President Barack Obama and encouraged by the growing importance of the G20, Sarkozy is increasingly reaching out to non-aligned states in an effort to extend France’s international influence.

He has forged especially close ties with Brazil, is seeking alliances in central Asia and is intensifying his activities in the Middle East, using multi-billion dollar military and civilian nuclear trade deals as his calling card.

These initiatives are being played out against a discordant tone in Franco-American relations…

The only people Obama is nice to are our enemies – and they repay his truckling by spitting in our eye.

Ok, Democrats – we understand: you were told for years that if only Bush were nicer then things would get better. It was mindless, but you believed it; and now your guy has implemented what you were certain would work. Well, it hasn’t – I’d like to say “I hate to say ‘I told you so'”, but I do take great joy in saying it – so: I TOLD YOU SO!!!! And so did everyone else with any sense at all.

That out of the way, it is time for you to re-think your views. Perhaps it is better to try and work with allies and oppose enemies? I know – radical thought! But it has been tried before and has had some success (WWI, WWII, Cold War, Gulf War, Liberation of Iraq, eg) – I know that is a rather thin record to go on, but given the abject failure of Obama policy, how about giving it a try?

Per the President, it is:

President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, giving his health chief the power to let hospitals move emergency rooms offsite to speed treatment and protect noninfected patients.

The declaration, signed Friday night and announced Saturday, comes with the disease more prevalent than ever in the country and production delays undercutting the government’s initial, optimistic estimates that as many as 120 million doses of the vaccine could be available by mid-October.

Health authorities say more than 1,000 people in the United States, including almost 100 children, have died from the strain of flu known as H1N1, and 46 states have widespread flu activity.

I wasn’t aware until just now that 1,000 people have died of this strain of H1N1 – given we are just at the start of the flu season, this could be serious…on the other hand, I’ve heard lots of stories telling us to relax about the whole thing. Personally, I don’t know whether to be worried, or not.

Anyone out there got a better read on this?

• Weekly Recap (2009-10-17) http://bit.ly/35e4Ui #
• Sharpton Determined to Help Rush http://bit.ly/pSltZ #
• The Younger Reid http://bit.ly/L7t6u #
• MSM Starts to Admit TEA Party Viability http://bit.ly/5t3Lc #
• Green Whores? http://bit.ly/3GAGtr #
• Is Emanuel Testing the Waters for a Scuttle in Afghanistan? http://bit.ly/NqZ3C #
• Barry Milhouse Obama http://bit.ly/RuOMb #
• Dropping Out (and Tuning Out and Turning Off) http://bit.ly/cYRb7 # Continue reading →

But Obama says things are getting better:

he cascade of bank failures this year surpassed 100 on Friday, the most in nearly two decades. And the trouble in the banking system from bad loans and the recession goes even deeper than the number suggests…

…Bank failures have cost the FDIC’s fund that insures deposits an estimated $25 billion this year and are expected to cost $100 billion through 2013. To replenish the fund, the agency wants banks to pay in advance $45 billion in premiums that would have been due over the next three years.

The FDIC won’t say how deep a hole its deposit insurance fund is in. It can tap a credit line from the Treasury of up to a half-trillion dollars to cover the gap.

The list of banks in trouble is getting longer. At the end of June, the FDIC had flagged 416 as being at risk of failure, up from 305 at the end of March and 252 at the beginning of the year…

It was the end of June when the FDIC rated 416 banks at risk – its now the last part of October: anyone want to bet me the number has gone down? We can be pretty sure it hasn’t because if it had, the number would be out there. We can probably expect – given the number of Fridays left in 2009 – about 30 more banks to be seized…but that will leave hundreds at risk, and the FDIC is holding off on taking them over for lack of funds. Unless things turn around massively in 2010 – and there’s no indication they will – we’ll have several hundred bank failures next year.

But that’s not all – the supposed profits of the larger banks? Entirely bogus – they’d all be indicted for fraud except for the fact that Obama is protecting them. If you thought Enron’s accounting was corrupt, wait till you see what comes out in the by and by about our major financial institutions. They are all functionally insolvent and in 2010 as the smaller banks fall by the scores and hundreds, those big banks will be looking for another bail out. But where is the money for it to come from?

Its going to go from bad to worse – and made much worse by the happy talk out of the Administration and Wall Street which is convincing suckers to buy stocks. As long as we’re not creating new wealth – by increasing the amount we make, mine and grow – we’re just spinning our wheels and piling up more debt…

As an aside: for you liberals out there who will try to ignore this or spin it away, just for a moment be honest with yourselves and realize what you’d be doing if Bush were still President and we had 105 bank failures.

New Rasmussen survey:

For the first time in recent years, voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on all 10 key electoral issues regularly tracked by Rasmussen Reports. The GOP holds double-digit advantages on five of them.

Republicans have nearly doubled their lead over Democrats on economic issues to 49% to 35%, after leading by eight points in September.

The GOP also holds a 54% to 31% advantage on national security issues and a 50% to 31% lead on the handling of the war in Iraq.

But voters are less sure which party they trust more to handle government ethics and corruption, an issue that passed the economy in voter importance last month. Thirty-three percent (33%) trust Republicans more while 29% have more confidence in Democrats. Another 38% are undecided. Last month, the parties were virtually tied on the issue.

As the economy worsens – or, at best fails to improve – that last issue will become crucial. The GOP was justifiably hammered in 2006 for corruption – now the Democrats are in charge and more and more people are realizing that while the GOP had corrupt members, Democrats have an endemic problem with corruption coupled with a complete unwillingness to do anything about it (at least we GOPers gave our corrupt members the boot). In the normal course of events, the GOP would have picked up 20-25 House seats next year – a bad economy, a corrupt government and a near-revolutionary ferment in the body politic might make things vastly different.

It will still take GOP leadership to translate all of the elements in to smashing GOP victory – but the ground is being laid, the Democrats are being exposed…and all we have to do is summon the courage and conviction to do what is right.

And that is a bit scary:

On Thursday night, Reid went over to the White House for a talk with the president. The conversation centered on Reid’s desire to put Schumer’s national opt-out plan into the base bill. White House officials were not necessarily pleased, and they made that known. Everyone agrees that they didn’t embrace Reid’s new strategy. Everyone agrees that the White House wants Snowe on the bill, feels the trigger offers a safer endgame, and isn’t convinced by Reid’s math. But whether officials expressed a clear preference for the trigger, or were just worried about the potential for 60 votes, is less clear. One staffer briefed on the conversation says “the White House basically told us, ‘We hope you guys know what you’re doing.'”

The country sure is in the best of hands, right?

Remember the movie, Little Shop of Horrors, when Rick Moranis’ nerdy character finally found a way to be popular, with help from a man-eating plant who demanded to be fed? Even though Moranis saw how evil this monster was, his wanting to be popular overrode any pangs of conscience he felt toward feeding it.

And we all know how that turned out:

Well, in that vein, with regard to the DNC and their pet monster ACORN, life is imitating art:

WASHINGTON – During consideration of H.R. 3126, legislation to establish a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee voted to pass an amendment offered by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) that will make ACORN eligible to play a role in setting regulations for financial institutions.

The Waters amendment adds to the CFPA Oversight Board 5 representatives from the fields of “consumer protection, fair lending and civil rights, representatives of depository institutions that primarily serve underserved communities, or representatives of communities that have been significantly impacted by higher-priced mortgages” to join Federal banking regulators in advising the Director on the consistency of proposed regulations, and strategies and policies that the Director should undertake to enforce its rules.

By making representatives of ACORN and other consumer activist organizations eligible to serve on the Oversight Board, the amendment creates a potentially enormous government sanctioned conflict of interest. ACORN-type organizations will have an advisory role on regulating the very financial institutions from which they receive millions of dollars annually in direct corporate contributions and benefit from other financial partnerships and arrangements. These are the same organizations that pressured banks to make subprime mortgage loans and thus bear a major responsibility for the collapse of the housing market.

I guess the dems just can’t help it, can they? After complaint upon criminal complaint launched against ACORN, Maxine Waters still has the chutzpah to offer them a place at the table for regulating the financial industry.

Ain’t corruption grand?

From NRO’s Campaign Spot:

With his attendance at fundraisers for Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts today — boy, there’s a pair of popular incumbents — President Obama has now attended seven fundraisers since General Stanley McChrystal submitted his request for additional troops in Afghanistan.

Boy, it’s a shame Gen. McChrystal isn’t an unpopular incumbent Democrat; if he were, Obama might be more eager to help him out.

Your job, Mr. President, is to lead the nation – not bail out failing Democrats.