Seems that House Democrats are starting to figure out that while Obama’s personal numbers remain relatively high, Obamunism is falling flat, and taking Democrat popularity down with it:

President Obama is running into stiff Congressional resistance to his plans to raise money for his ambitious agenda, and the resulting hole in the budget is threatening a major health care overhaul and other policy initiatives.

The administration’s central revenue proposal — limiting the value of affluent Americans’ itemized deductions, including the one for charitable giving — fell flat in Congress, leaving the White House, at least for now, without $318 billion that it wants to set aside to help cover uninsured Americans. At the same time, lawmakers of both parties have warned against moving too quickly on a plan to auction carbon emission permits to produce more than $600 billion.

The unwillingness to embrace some of the major White House tax and revenue proposals has frustrated administration officials. They note that lawmakers, many of them supporters of the president’s ambitious agenda, clamor to hold down the deficit while balking at the proposals to finance his program.

Democrats liked the “tax cut for 95% of Americans” and want to run in 2010 on that…they don’t want to run on a trillion dollars in new taxes, as well as the likely double-digit unemployment we’ll still have in November of 2010. Remember, the prime motivator for senior Democrats is the retention and expansion of the power of senior Democrats – they might love Obama to distraction, but that won’t stop them from running for the hills if Obama’s plans will make it harder to retain and win seats in 2010. Democrat leaders are very aware to too swift and embrace of Clinton’s policies in 1993 played a large role in dooming them in 1994. Whatever else Pelosi, et al may want, what she wants most of all is to still be Speaker in 2011.

What I suspect will happen is a very large amount of bovine end products – Democrats will pass the laws for Obamunism and will just cook the books to show that they didn’t need a massive tax increase to pay for them…because Obama wants his plans in law, he’ll go along with it…and we’ll start printing money like no tomorrow. The only question, really, is when do we get hit with hyper-inflation – the economy is pretty dead right now, so you can print a substantial sum of money and not appear to be firing up inflation. For a while – eventually a massive increase in the money supply has to be matched by wealth or devaluation…ie, inflation.

Oh, there is one other question – will we GOPers return to power swiftly enough to prevent Obama from wrecking the country?

Clearly a rightwing extremist:

Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples’ liberty’s teeth. – George Washington

The left feigned outrage when President Bush revealed that he didn’t read newspapers or watched television for news, but got his news from other sources.  I am sure you can remember the criticisms he got. Anyway, it appears that Obama isn’t getting any news from anyone, because the White House claims that Obama was “unaware” of the tax day tea parties.

Apparently Obama is either the world’s biggest incompetent or worst liar, because he is apparently unaware of a lot of things.

Today marks an infamous date in history: The day when a highly placed elected U.S. official, with U.S. men and women in harm’s way (including my son, at the time), declared that we lost the war in Iraq:

He did this, of course, to give aid and comfort to those fighting our soldiers, ahead of the Bush-led surge in Iraq, so as to effect more U.S. troops coming home in body bags, so he could turn it to his and his party’s political advantage.

Why this traitor hasn’t been removed from a high-ranking leadership position in the United States Senate, or better yet, placed in a stockade, is beyond reason.

What a scumbag.

That is how our liberal friends describe the Tea Party crowds…and our liberals are right about everything, so the picture of “Black People Against Obama” poses a real difficult problem for us. We’ll have to just shove it down the Memory Hole as we daren’t have such double-plus-ungood thoughts….

Hey, they’re just buying shares in one of the best Senators money can buy:

U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd, who has won praise from consumer groups for taking on credit card providers over predatory lending practices, has collected thousands of dollars in donations from people affiliated with the so-called payday loan industry.

The Democratic senator raised more than $44,000 from pawnshop owners and other businesses that provide high-interest loans, often to those with bad credit, according to campaign finance reports. The amount, while a fraction of the $1.05 million that Dodd brought in during the first quarter of 2009, nevertheless raises questions among those who scrutinize the link between fundraising and public policy.

Dodd is chairman of the Senate banking committee, and a bill being fought by the industry that would cap the annual interest rate on consumer loans at 36 percent has been referred to the committee.

I work in the credit card industry and the highest I’ve seen on any of our credit cards is about 33%…so, capping us at 36% wouldn’t actually cause a problem and that, of course, brings into question whether Dodd is fighting for the little guy or fighting for his usurious donors? Given the amount of donations Dodd has received from the financial and loan-shark industry, I’m going to tend towards it being an eyewash for the people, payoff for the donors effort.

There certainly does need to be a major overhaul in how lending institutions do business. From my experience with my employer I figure the major problem is that the corporate bosses are frightened rabbits. Under desperate pressure to produce profits or lose their cushy jobs they try expedient after expedient to squeeze every penny they can out of the borrowing public. This resulted, ultimately, in the practice of sub-prime lending which wasn’t just confined to home loans – banks were also issuing credit cards to people with 500 FICO scores (during the worst part of this lending spree I was tempted many times to ask some of our “valued clients” if they realized that when a bill comes, payment is expected…)…charging them fees out the wazoo and essentially making glorious profits by soaking the poor. Now that things have gone south, the frightened rabbits are trying desperately to cut losses (while our formally “valued clients” with the lousy credit are laughing at us when we expect repayment)…and so, scattergun, they are shutting down accounts willy-nilly for the most trivial of reasons. Which means that clients with decades of good payment history can lose their credit if they are late a day or two.

I’m so disgusted with my industry that I’d like to quit – but jobs are scarce and the bills do have to be paid. So, I’ve got a couple irons in the alternate employment fire, but for now I’m stuck trying to clean up the mess created by fools afraid of cretins. And, of course, said cretins do decide where the big political bucks go, and so their goal is to ensure that whatever happens they are protected in their ability to demand that high quarterly profits remain the holy grail of American corporate life. So, regulate the heck out of them, right? Are you kidding? You want to change profit-motivated cretins for power-motivated bureaucrats? Where’s the upside?

The key to success is to get the Dodds out of the mix and get the banks to cease being multi-national conglomerates and become, once again, the servants of local business enterprise. We won’t have to regulate Citi if it ceases to exist and becomes, instead, a score of regional and local banks looking after local and regional interests rather than trying to compete with other global monstrosities (whom do you think I trust more – Bank of America, or Nevada State Bank?). As long as we keep going down the route of more government regulation, the longer things will get worse. Dodd isn’t going to fix things – he doesn’t know how and isn’t interested in that, anyway. His only concern is getting himself re-elected next year and he figures that if he builds up a large enough war chest he’ll be able to demonize his opponent, put out huge amounts of BS about what a swell guy he is and then count on the special interests who’ve bought him to do the rest. Waiting for Dodd to help the people is like waiting for organized crime to voluntarily go out of business in a fit of public spirit.

Rightwing extremist? Heck, this is the thinking of a madman:

Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery. – Calvin Coolidge

Al Franken and his Democrats are 90% complete with stealing this seat, but its not quite over, yet:

…after the recount and panel-findings, the 312-vote margin separating the two men equals about .01% of the 2.9 million votes cast. Even without any irregularities, this is as close to a “tie” as it gets. And there have been plenty of irregularities. By the end of the recount, the state was awash with evidence of duplicate ballot counting, newly discovered ballots, missing ballots, illegal voting, and wildly diverse standards as to which votes were counted. Any one of these issues was enough to throw the outcome into doubt. Combined, they created a taint more worthy of New Jersey than Minnesota.

The Coleman camp pushed for resolution of these problems during the recount, but it was stymied by a state canvassing board that cared more about preserving its “Minnesota nice” reputation than about making tough calls. The state Supreme Court also punted difficult questions. The mess then landed with the three-judge panel overseeing Mr. Coleman’s contest trial, a panel that seemed out of its depth.

Case in point: the panel’s dismal handling of absentee ballots. Early in the recount, the Franken team howled that some absentee votes had been erroneously rejected by local officials. We warned at the time that this was dangerous territory, designed to pressure election officials into accepting rejected ballots after the fact.

Yet instead of shutting this Franken request down, or early on issuing a clear set of rules as to which absentees were valid, the state Supreme Court and the canvassing board oversaw a haphazard process by which some counties submitted new batches to be included in the tally, while other counties did not. The resulting additional 933 ballots were largely responsible for Mr. Franken’s narrow lead.

In the end, I expect that Franken will get the seat – Minnesota is a pretty Democrat-heavy State and thus the State Supreme Court is almost certain to have a majority in favor of the Democrat winning, come what may (in long research into politics one of the few absolutes is the certainty that any leading Democrat will be primarily motivated by increasing Democrat power). The fact that Fraken – a nasty, bitter partisan who claims we GOPers are relentlessly dishonest – will likely win by cheating is just one of those ironic things…of course the irony will be lost on Democrat rank-and-file who were easily convinced that Gore’s attempt to steal Florida was an attempt by Bush to steal what he already had.

Democrats get away with this sort of thing because the MSM is friendly to them (and thus won’t expose them for the election cheats they are) and because Democrats are relentless and brazen…if they’ve got a close race, they’ll never really quit and if they have to manufacture votes in extremely absurd ways, they’ll just go right on and do it, feeling no shame at all. What this points out is that once we GOPers do regain national power, we will have to force through a modification of the Voting Rights Act to require, at least for Federal office, that those who vote prove they are eligible to vote as well as enacting very severe penalties (we’re talking at least 20 year sentences) for anyone who in any way, shape or form (ACORN, we’re looking at you) in putting fraudulent voters and votes into the electorate.

The only way democracy can work is for the voters to feel reasonably certain that the vote is fair – Democrats have a long and exceptionally dishonorable history of ballot box stuffing but of late it has become worse than ever, and the very foundations of our republic are being shaken…merely in order to allow an extra Democrat or two to hold office. We can’t shame them into stopping (might as well try to shame a whore about dressing like a slut), so we must bring the hammer of the law to bear on them.

Its a Catholic thing – but its not something that you non-Catholics can’t understand. Essentially, Divine Mercy Sunday is a feast of God’s mercy. I pray that all will turn towards God and allow his endless flood of mercy to overcome all those things which hold a person apart from God.

Eternal Father, I offer You the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.

For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.

God bless one and all.

Via Mark Steyn at NRO’s The Corner – one of the liberal complaints about conservative Christians is that we are, allegedly, trying to tell them what to do in the bedroom. This is an absurd accusation – if we were telling them what to do, they’d be doing it properly and we’d have a higher birth rate…but, still, it is what they say we are trying to do. So, imagine the shock liberals will get out of this:

Pierre Lemieux is an economist whose most recent book, Comprendre l’economie, just won the prestigious Prix Turgot in Paris. When it comes to guns, he’s a hobbyist, not a lobbyist, but in his spare time he has been trying to make the authorities comprehend something about the relationship between public safety and his love life. Not because he thinks there’s a nexus, but because the government does.

Before renewing his gun permit in 2007, the authorities decided to inquire into Lemieux’s bedroom history. Did he divorce anyone in the last two years? Did he break up with a girlfriend? If yes, use a separate sheet to explain.

Pardon me? Explain?

Well, it was nothing personal . Apparently, Canada’s government feels it ought to know the romantic status of all firearm owners. Hmm. Didn’t someone say the state had no business in the nation’s bedrooms?

Yes, liberals did – and do; endlessly. Actually, they are rather tiresome about it. But here come the liberals sticking their nose into a citizen’s bedroom because he wants to have a weapon. If M. Lemieux was proposing to have a mass orgy with goats in his bedroom, he’d probably get an award from some liberal group…but because he wants a gun, liberals want to know all the details, just in case there’s something in his sex life which can be used to justify denying him a permit.

Mark Steyn goes on to note how the pervasive ability of government to pester us runs the risk of just grinding us down. Because Lemieux essentially told the Canadian government – in a letter to the Prime Minister – to jump in a lake, the government denied his permit. M. Lemieux is still fighting, but how many people are really willing to go to the bother of fighting off Big Brother? Just as in that famed and prescient novel by Orwell, its not that the thing wanted is illegal, but government wants to know why you want it…and in the asking of why, you can find yourself caught in the jaws of a government meat grinder. For Lemieux, if he really loved Big Brother, he wouldn’t want to have a gun because he knows that BB will protect him…its rather double-plus disturbing, this desire to own a gun, isn’t it?

Canada is, of course, Canada – but Canada’s ideas of government is precisely what President Obama wants to bring to the United States. Will we fight it off, or just give up because tedious bureaucrats can just endlessly annoy us? Time will tell.