As long as you are criminally supporting Obama, its all good:

Career lawyers overruled on voting case

Black Panthers had wielded weapons, blocked polls

Justice Department political appointees overruled career lawyers and ended a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense of wielding a nightstick and intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place last Election Day, according to documents and interviews.

The incident – which gained national attention when it was captured on videotape and distributed on YouTube – had prompted the government to sue the men, saying they violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by scaring would-be voters with the weapon, racial slurs and military-style uniforms.

Career lawyers pursued the case for months, including obtaining an affidavit from a prominent 1960s civil rights activist who witnessed the confrontation and described it as “the most blatant form of voter intimidation” that he had seen, even during the voting rights crisis in Mississippi a half-century ago.

The lawyers also had ascertained that one of the three men had gained access to the polling place by securing a credential as a Democratic poll watcher, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Washington Times.

The career Justice lawyers were on the verge of securing sanctions against the men earlier this month when their superiors ordered them to reverse course, according to interviews and documents. The court had already entered a default judgment against the men on April 20.

One thing to keep in mind, as things go where they’ll go, is that the left does tend towards a criminal conspiracy against the United States of America. This is what Obama wants out of that fascist militia he has planned – people who can go around intimidating people, keeping them quiet and making sure that only the “right” votes get cast. Be wary, and be ready to defend your liberty.

If you’re an idiot, anyway:

The U.S. economy sank at a 5.7 percent pace in the first quarter as the brute force of the recession carried over into this year. However, many analysts believe activity isn’t shrinking nearly as much now as the downturn flashes signs of letting up.

The Commerce Department’s updated reading on gross domestic product, released Friday, showed the economy’s contraction from January to March was slightly less deep than the 6.1 percent annualized decline first estimated last month. But the new reading was a tad worse than the 5.5 percent annualized drop economists were forecasting.

The second sentence in the first paragraph is the “we can’t give bad news without a qualifier as long as Obama is President” bit of MSM cheer leading. The reality, of course, is that we’re collapsing…and those alleged signs of rebound? Not really happening – though the MSM will try to keep people misinformed on just how bad it is because the truth hurts…Democrats, that is.

Which is a strange trick, and best not tried at home:

What comes after the United States ceases to be the central point of free-market economic power? We may shortly get the answer to that question. As the United States increases its borrowing for greater government spending, willing buyers of American bonds increasingly grow more scarce, and the “full faith and credit” of the United States will soon lose its cachet as the rock-solid foundation of the international market.

Warning signs abound. Earlier this month, the Treasury discovered that demand had significantly decreased for its long-term bonds. In order to get buyers at its regular auction – the device by which the United States runs on deficit spending – it had to hike the interest rates it pays the bondholders. It signaled a lack of confidence in America’s ability to sustain its debt expansion, which has the effect of worsening it through heavier debt service payments on the bonds they managed to sell…

…Right now, the United States has responded to a lack of demand for its Treasuries through a questionable and disturbing method: we’re buying our own debt. That allows the yields to remain low, but buying our own debt is somewhat akin to creating your own credit card. Eventually, you have to acknowledge that the money you create on the books never really existed, unless the United States plans to simply print money to pay off all the bonds. That would create a level of inflation not seen in the West since the Weimar Republic, and will effectively force the rest of the world to avoid U.S. currency and investments as unsound. It would, for the first time in decades, put the United States on the financial sideline.

Will we have hyperinflation? I’m not ready to make such a prediction, but something eventually has to give – either we have to have a sudden and massive reduction in government spending in the next couple years, or we’re going to have to print money until we’re able to depreciate our currency to the point where hyperinflation results. This is bad news – and the worst part about it is that we’re doing this sort of nonsense just so President Obama and his Democrats don’t have to face up to the fact that the tax-and-spend, New Deal party is at long last, over. We spent and spent and spent, and now its time to reap what we’ve sown – a generation of stringency, if not abject poverty, while we build our self out of the hole we’ve dug. The sooner we face up to our bankruptcy the better – and the less painful it will be.

We have to stop being afraid of big banks and other big corporations failing; we have to draw together and dedicate ourselves to hard work and frugal living while we right the wrong we’ve done. We have to genuinely make the hard choices and go for the real change which Obama and Co talk about, but have not the slightest inclination to do. We can do this – we can retrench and still ensure national defense, law enforcement, basic health care, education and infrastructure…but it means that millions of government employees will have to be let go, thousands of do-nothing groups will have to be cut off from the government teat, millions of people who currently slide by on the government dole of one type or another will have to start doing productive work. It will be hard, but it will be salubrious – and it will fix the problem.

The explanation for why our society is so sick:

Man cannot live without joy; therefore when he is deprived of true spiritual joys it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal pleasures. – St. Thomas Aquinas

On stark display:

A local pastor and his wife claim they were interrogated by a San Diego County official, who then threatened them with escalating fines if they continued to hold Bible studies in their home, 10News reported.

Attorney Dean Broyles of The Western Center For Law & Policy was shocked with what happened to the pastor and his wife.

Broyles said, “The county asked, ‘Do you have a regular meeting in your home?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you say amen?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you pray?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you say praise the Lord?’ ‘Yes.'”

The county employee notified the couple that the small Bible study, with an average of 15 people attending, was in violation of County regulations, according to Broyles.

Broyles said a few days later the couple received a written warning that listed “unlawful use of land” and told them to “stop religious assembly or apply for a major use permit” — a process that could cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Aside from the prospect that the group was targeted because they are Christian – something we can’t discount – the fact that anyone would even care that a dozen people or so gather to do whatever the heck legal activity is proof that government has gotten way out of control. And government is what our liberal friends want running or health care – they can’t even be reasonable about a Bible study class!

Its time to return government to its proper – and small – numbers and functions; time for adults to just run their own lives.

Perhaps, Barry, you can lay off a bit on the fundraising while we’re stuck in the worst financial crisis in 75 years?

President Obama has the star power to raise millions of dollars for the candidates and organizations he graces with his stump speech.

But when the president hit the road Tuesday for a two-day fundraising tour to pack the party coffers, he also was racking up a $265,000 partisan bill for just one leg of the trip, according to a watchdog group — part of which taxpayers, regardless of party affiliation, will have to pay.

The White House is some pretty swell digs, ya know? Maybe you can stick around the place and attend to the nation’s business?

Just a thought…

That its wrong? Not good enough. I need the real argument – I need someone to tell me, with precision, why human sacrifice is wrong.

There once was a time when Western man would simply not tolerate such a thing as human sacrifice. Chesterton, trying to describe just why the Romans were so bitterly opposed to the Carthaginians, asked us to understand that what the Carthaginians did in their highest religious ceremony was to put on their Sunday best and go watch a baby being roasted alive. Hernan Cortes is usually cast as a villain in modern accounts of the conquest of Mexico, but there was once a time when most people would say that even if Cortes and his men were base and greedy, they did do the world a favor by destroying the Aztec Empire with its horrific record of human sacrifice. It took modern liberals to find redeeming qualities in people who cut out the hearts of their living victims, and then ate them. We only have to wait a while, I suppose, and liberals will find good things to say about Pol Pot’s activities in Cambodia.

While we wait for our liberals to find the thus far unheralded benefits of Potism, we can pause and ask about that re-write of Mexican history which has the Europeans who stopped human sacrifice be in the wrong. We must presume that the argument against human sacrifice was found insufficient to excuse Spain’s conquest of Mexico. It is really no surprise, when you get down to it. After all, the arguments against abortion, infanticide and euthanasia have all, in their turn, been found wanting when confronted with the benefits liberals believe are conferred on society by the once abominated practices. If one can contemplate ripping an unborn baby out of a womb merely because it is inconvenient, how much thought would one then spare for people 500 years ago who had their hearts ripped out of their chests? At least they were recycled, you understand?

So what to do when someone comes along and says he must sacrifice a human being to propitiate the gods of the rain forest? That he doesn’t have a willing victim? Perhaps, but given that Jim Jones convinced more than 900 people to commit suicide with him, how hard will it be for some crank to convince just one person that the rain forest is so important that we must sacrifice a human being in its name? The willing victim is tied to the altar, the Goobagumba of the Swamp Goddess has his knife poised to strike – what do you say? What argument do you marshal against the blade?

Now, some redneck on a hunting trip might come along at that point, size up the situation, shoot the Goobagumba and send the victim off to psychiatric counseling. But that is because rednecks are just like that – they don’t understand the subtle nuances. What do our highly nuanced liberals say?

Perhaps, in the end, our liberal will just have to fall back on the fact that it is wrong – and he might be able to do it without realizing that he’s referred to a universal standard outside of human control, and thus acknowledged that there is right and wrong. It would be a dicey proposition, of course, because it could lead, in the end, to belief in God and, worst of all things, to conservatism. Given the risks, it might be that some liberals will allow the blade to fall…

I couldn’t have described it better than this:

Mediocrity breeds corruption. The business world is crawling with affable, industrious, intelligent people with nothing to distinguish them from ten thousand other affable, industrious and intelligent people, but who very much would like to be rich. Except by winning the equivalent of a lottery or marrying up, their chances of becoming rich are quite poor. They join a fraternity at college to make contacts, and went to business school to network. They have no friends, only contacts, as their entire social life from freshman year onward has been a struggle to get to know people who might help them. They live in silent terror that they will fall off the corporate gravy train and never have the chance to clamber back on.

These are the people most inclined to cheat, for they know that they have nothing unique to offer the world, and their ascent depends either on luck or unfair advantage. They cheat in every way possible, whenever they have a chance. One way they cheat is to steal from the stockholders by front-loading profits and back-loading risks. That is what destroyed the banking system. At the top of the market in 2006-2007 when risk compensation was stupidly low, bank managers made their return-on-equity numbers by adding leverage on top of leverage. Every one of them knew that it was a dumb and dishonest thing to do, but they all hoped that they would be promoted by the time the problem blew up in someone else’s lap…

That is the diagnoses of the disease – here is the cure:

…There is only one truly effective way to control corporate corruption, and that is through creative destruction. Let the wild men, the warped geniuses, the chip-on-the-shoulder mad entrepreneurs loose on the established corporate world. Let big corporations go bankrupt right and left. Drive out mediocrity with the scourge of innovation. Let new companies emerge, and then go bankrupt when something better comes along. Real genius, as Heinrich Heine once rhymed, pays cash at the bar. The oddball entrepreneurial types don’t cheat. They see life as a game and want to play it by their own rules. They are out to prove that they are smarter than their peers, and to cheat would be to miss the point of the game.

For the average business school graduate, an entrepreneurial economy is a hell, presided over by a devil like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, whose job is to subvert complacency. This sort of economy has its own bubbles and crises, like the dot-com catastrophe of 2000. But that was a minor blip compared to the present mess, because it wasn’t done with leverage.

Large government bureaucracies, large unions and large corporations all have one thing in common – a determination that no one come along and dislodge them from their position of power and privilege. The people who man these entities want to climb to the top, and thus don’t want to make waves; the people at the top don’t want to have to work to stay there. The reason the tax and regulatory structure of the American economy is so byzantine is because its written precisely by these groups and for these groups…they like overly complex, hard to understand and difficult to avoid systems which only work as long as no one makes waves.

Unless we change things – unless, that is, we force through an economy based on farming, manufacturing and mining, and curb the power of government bureaucracies, as well as corrupt unions – this will all just happen again…because they don’t know, and don’t care. They want their fancy toys and their exclusive clubs and their ability to think of themselves as superior to the poor, little rednecks and hicks who are doing the work of America…they view us as suckers; fools who actually work for a living when we could manage for a much better living. Force them out, put ourselves in – that is what we must do.

By not allowing the Powers That Be to force an uncongenial candidate upon his party:

Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) is privately telling supporters that he intends to run for Senate, TPMDC has confirmed.

“He intends to get in the race,” says Meg Infantino, the Congressman’s sister, who works at Sestak for Congress. “In the not too distant future, he will sit down with his wife and daughter to make the final decision.”

The move would constitute a primary challenge to Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA), who intends to run for re-election in 2010, after having switched parties earlier this year.

Earlier today, a Sestak volunteer and contributor received a handwritten note from Sestak himself, announcing his intent to run and asking for a contribution.

The Democrats had no business accepting Specter – its fine if Specter wants to switch parties, but there should have been no attempt by Democrat leaders to say that the PA Senate race was settled on the Democrat side. No Democrat picked Specter and until Specter passed muster with the Democrat electorate, he shouldn’t be the Democrat candidate. And just who in heck wants a turn coat, anyways? I mean, suppose the GOP gains a majority or even a very strong minority in 2010 – do Democrats think that Specter would remain loyal to them? Don’t bet on it – his party switch, alone, shows that he’s an unprincipled opportunist.

I, for one, am sick of these power players – in both parties – trying to tell the rank and file whom shall be the nominee. Right now, there are moves on the GOP side to find someone other than GOP front-runner Toomey to be the GOP candidate next year. Nonsense – anyone who is a GOPer is free to enter the contest, but there should be no pressure of any sort by the national party to try and force things one way or the other. There is no such thing as a sure loser in politics, no more than there is a sure winner – for any GOPer (Hatch, we’re looking at you) to decide that this or that GOPer can’t win is to absurdly pre-judge a case and presume to absolutely impossible knowledge. And even if it could be demonstrated by irrefutable argument that a certain candidate could not possibly win, it is still for the people to decide whom they’ll pour out there sweat and treasure for.

I hope that this proves true, that Sestak will run – he’ll get a small donation from me; not because I want to cause trouble for Democrats, but because the principle here is too important. We, the people, are supposed to rule this nation, not a bunch of self-selected leaders and “experts” who presume to know better than we do.

In light of recent events, some truth must be told, again and again:

We must have great respect for these people who also suffer and who want to find their own way of correct living. On the other hand, to create a legal form of a kind of homosexual marriage, in reality, does not help these people. – Benedict XVI