From the PJ Tatler:

In Tunica, Mississippi, ten guilty verdicts of voter fraud were returned yesterday against NAACP officer Lessadolla Sowers. She was sentenced to five years for each count without the possibility of parole and will serve the terms concurrently. Sowers manipulated the absentee ballot process in the 2007 election. Absentee ballots in Mississippi are notoriously subject to voter fraud…

What is surprising is that there was a prosecution. Democrats don’t prosecute voter fraud because they benefit from it; Republicans shy away from it for fear of being called “racists” or some such nonsense. Naturally, the MSM will not cover this – they’ll be too busy covering Obama’s asinine claims that oil companies are responsible for high oil prices. But voter fraud is important – it goes right to the heart of our American institutions. If the vote isn’t fair, then our democratic republic is a sham.

Each and every case of irregularity in the vote must be investigated and anyone who commits even the slightest bit of voter fraud must see the inside of a jail. Our ability to vote is a trust given to us by men and women who died for it – we dare not allow it to be cheapened so that corrupt political groups can gain power.

From the NY Times:

…Disapproval of Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy has never been broader — at 57 percent of Americans — a warning sign as he begins to set his sights on re-election in 2012. And a similar percentage disapprove of how Mr. Obama is handling the federal budget deficit…

What I wonder – how can 43% either be supporting or neutral on this? The guy is turning us in to Zimbabwe; we’ll be lucky if we get out of this with anything left.

2012 can’t come fast enough…

Gary Johnson. He was governor of New Mexico. No, really. Anyways, he’s running for the GOP nomination for President. From an e mail:

…Today, from the steps of the New Hampshire Capitol, I am announcing that I am formally declaring myself a candidate; I will be actively, passionately seeking the Republican nomination for the office of President.

In announcing my candidacy for President of the United States, I am setting out on the long path ahead, but I am not alone. I’ve always enjoyed climbing mountains, but this one is unique. I’m looking forward to this challenge…

So, what is Johnson’s claim to fame? Actually, a pretty worthwhile thing for the 2012 campaign:

…I had to veto over 750 bills in my quest to limit the growth of government, and many of those vetoes were of bills that were Republican-sponsored. It isn’t always easy to go against your own party, but I felt that my primary duty was to the hard-working, taxpaying people of New Mexico. I felt that our state would prosper with a smarter, more efficient government, and I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish during my 8 years in office…

I don’t know too much about Johnson – I do recall that not too long ago he annoyed me with an e mail in which he lent credence to the absurd stories that “wikileaker” Bradley Manning was being ill-treated in military custody. This view of Johnson’s probably stems from his uber-libertarian streak…perhaps he really believes that governments are not supposed to have any secrets and that any two-bit cretin with a gripe should be able to broadcast to the world whatever he wants, to heck with the consequences. A lot of libertarians are like that – failing to recognize that it isn’t right for an un-elected official to spill the beans on his own hook. Regardless of what you think of Manning or the leaks, the fact is that Manning, himself, did not have the competence to decide if the information should be made public.

Aside from that – and, for me, it puts a gigantic question mark on Johnson’s overall judgment – Johnson’s main thrust could run very strong in 2012. Being anti-establishment, being anti-Big Government, being willing to rock the leadership…all of that will resonate with the voters, especially Republican voters, most especially with TEA Party activists. As I’ve been saying, anyone can come along and win it all in 2012. It could be someone we’ve know for years, it could be someone we never heard of. The main criteria for victory in 2012 is whomever will fight the hardest and put out the boldest reform plan – that is who will both win the GOP nomination and win the Presidency. In this, Johnson is playing his currently weak hand well – and we’ll see where he winds up.

From Reuters:

President Barack Obama said on Thursday the U.S. attorney general was assembling a team to root out any fraud and manipulation in the oil markets that might be contributing to higher U.S. gasoline prices…

…”The Attorney General’s putting together a team whose job it will be to root out any cases of fraud or manipulation in the oil markets that might affect gas prices – and that includes the role of traders and speculators. We are going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain,” Obama said.

Investigate yourself, Obama – “short-term gain” is what Obamunism is all about. In order to make it look like the economy is improving we’ve borrowed and printed trillions of dollars. We’ve essentially manipulated our whole economy in order to get stock prices higher, bail out failed banks and give you some GDP numbers which look like a recovery. But the cost of this, among other things, has been a crashing value of the US dollar – and that is why oil is at $110 a barrel and gold at $1,500 an ounce. It is also why our food prices are higher. Because, Barry, the problem is that when people make something of value they’re not going to take less value for their product…and as you have made each dollar less valuable, those who make, mine and grown real things want more of them for each item.

This isn’t brain surgery – and, in fact, people warned of this from the get-go. People were sending up flares, writing it up on walls, shouting from the roof tops – you can’t borrow and print your way in to real prosperity. It was said – all you’ll get for your printed and borrowed money is a few quarters of bogus “growth”, followed by a renewed crash. Well, just as was predicted, we got our few quarters of growth and now the economy is sputtering…but now not just in bad shape, but getting hit with a bout of inflation, in to the bargain. It’s called “stagflation” – and I predicted this result as far back as March of 2009.

And now that Obamunism has come a cropper, what does The One do? Naturally, he tries to sucker us in to thinking that oil companies – ie, enterprises which actually create wealth – are responsible. Not Obama. Not the Federal Reserve. Not Big Government. Oh, no – none of them are responsible. They were just there, minding their own business, wallowing in hopey-changiness and, whammo!, out of nowhere those SOB oil companies decided to force the price of oil higher just for the heck of it…just because they are mean and nasty and, at any rate, wasn’t Bush in the oil business? Don’t fall for it – the economic mess we’re heading in to originated in Washington, DC and is the result of deliberate policy choices made by the President of the United States of America.

About a year or so later than he should have – but he’s calling it quits. My thoughts on this over at Las Vegas Examiner.

So says the Obama Administration – but not so, says reality. From the Washington Times:

The signature crimes of the most violent drug cartel in Mexico are its beheading and dismemberment of rival gang members, military personnel, law enforcement officers and public officials, and the random kidnappings and killings of civilians who get caught in its butchery and bloodletting.

But this disparate band of criminals known as Los Zetas is no longer just a concern in Mexico. It has expanded its deadly operations across the southwestern border, establishing footholds and alliances in states from New York to California. Just last year, federal agents tied a cocaine operation in Baltimore to the Zetas.

“Those of us who live and work along the border know they’re already here,” said Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr., whose Texas county lies on the Rio Grande 50 miles southeast of the Zetas’ stronghold of Nuevo Laredo. “There’s already been killings and many residents here are living in fear.”…

Once again, because we refuse to control the border, the Mexican drug gangs have taken it over – and just as they first controlled the Mexican side of the border and then extended their power to the Mexican interior, so they are now moving in to the American interior after gaining control of our side of the border. These men are deadly serious – they want absolute control over everything because the more control they have the more money they make. They will not put up with people, police or military forces standing in their way. They will brutally murder anyone who stands in their way. They are outlaws in the fullest sense of the word.

And they are coming to a neighborhood near you. They will first attempt to bribe local officials in to compliance and those who are not willing to be bought will be killed. Along with their families, as an object lesson to anyone else who might want to contest the drug lord’s power. After a while, they will control everything…and though they might fight amongst themselves from time to time for “market share”, the main thing is that a very large part of American territory will no longer be under US law. Through this drug lord territory will flow all manner of criminality – not just poor bodies looking for work in the United States, but gangsters, thugs, murderers, pimps, slave dealers (yes, there are such) and anyone who wishes to make a buck illegally in the United States. And in addition to these common criminals will come the Islamists terrorists, bent on killing as many Americans as possible

Do you think I’m kidding? Do you think I’m being alarmist? Fine; go ahead and believe that. But it is what is coming to America – unless we stop it. Because we can stop it – all it takes is the will to seal the border, to find the right men to kill the drug lords and to deal with the illegals already in country. It could all be done over a 12 to 24 month period and then we’d never have a serious problem from the border or from illegal immigration ever again. It wouldn’t be easy, but it is fairly simple.

But, the trouble is that our President and his party simply don’t care if criminals control parts of America. As long as they get the votes and donations they need, all is well…and if they have to consign people to criminality in order to get a few well-heeled, race-baiting “immigration” groups on side for 2012, they’ll do it. Additionally, if reality requires them to violate the smallest bit of multi-cultural political correctness, they’ll ignore reality. In fact, they’ll attack anyone who brings up reality.

This could get grim. Lots of people will die. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to correct.

From the Wall Street Journal:

A new state law has emboldened the Detroit mayor and schools chief to take a more aggressive stance toward public unions as the city leaders try to mop up hundreds of millions of dollars in red ink.

Robert Bobb, the head of the Detroit Public Schools, late last week sent layoff notices to the district’s 5,466 salaried employees, including all of its teachers, a preliminary step in seeking broad work-force cuts to deal with lower enrollment…

…Mr. Bobb, already an emergency financial manager for the struggling and shrinking public school system, is getting further authority under a measure signed into law March 17 that broadens state powers to intervene in the finances and governance of struggling municipalities and school districts. This could enable Mr. Bobb to void union contracts, sideline elected school-board members, close schools and authorize charter schools…

Unions have utterly bankrupted the city of Detroit – as well as so many other cities (and some States) in the United States. And the corruption involved in the way unions gained control of elected politicians injected a terrible amount of irresponsibility and downright immorality in to our State and local politics. Something must be done to curb the unions – in Michigan, the decision has been to enact a law which empowers emergency financial managers to abrogate elected government and essentially re-do the entire system. I have to say, I don’t like this.

This is not an easy issue. What do you do when confronted with a political system which is so divorced from reality and so insensitive to the needs of the people that no improvement can be made? Do you allow it to continue – using an apathetic, bought or otherwise corrupted electorate to maintain itself in power and wealth while some of our greatest cities become sewers? Or do you just cut right across consent of the governed? Long time readers might recall a solution I had for Detroit – take the abandoned property out of city authority (and I mean really abandoned – property which, say, the city hadn’t been able to collect taxes on for 10 years), turn it in to, essentially, a Federal Territory and apply a revised “homestead act” to it; turning it over to any private citizen who would (a) stay on the property and (b) improve it for a period of at least five years. The idea was to turn wastelands in to productive property, thereby leading to a general revitalization of Detroit without the corrupt government being able to destroy things. Not the best solution, perhaps, but one which still allows for a maximum of local authority without that authority having the full ability to destroy.

This is a far cry from just announcing, one fine day, to the citizens of an area that their votes at the last election are null and void and a ruler has been appointed over them, no appeals allowed. It just rankles – and one imagines Barack Obama, armed with such power, abrogating the power of the government of the State of Nevada. While it is licit for a central government to intervene when a local government has proven incapable of ensuring justice, I worry greatly about the precedent and would prefer, if we are to do this sort of thing, at all, that any such laws have a sunset provision on them…and that any usurpation of local government be for, say, no more than two years (there is a precedent in republican and democratic governance for the appointment of a dictator in times of emergency…the Romans, especially, developed this power…and it did work for centuries; but not forever, as history shows…it is a dangerous thing to do).

In the end, the unions and the corrupt political establishment brought this upon themselves. One only has to note that the city of Detroit, with a population of 713,000, has an annual budget just about the same as the State of Nevada, population 2,600,000. It takes a gigantic amount of irresponsibility and corruption to get that much spending by that few people. And it further seems that the people of the city of Detroit either have no mind to change things, or don’t seem to mind societal disintegration. One way or another, change had to be made – it is highly regrettable that it was made this way, and we all need to think of a much better way to do it.

Gotta make sure we have as many abortions as possible, you know? From the Boston Herald:

A state-funded sex education Web site that tells teens an abortion is “much easier than it sounds” has drawn fire from outraged pro-lifers who say mariatalks.com is glossing over ugly truths, steering teens toward the controversial procedure and counseling them how to keep mom and dad in the dark.

“The commonwealth is using taxpayer money to tell kids how to get a secret abortion, and that’s wrong,” said Linda Thayer, a former Boston schoolteacher who is vice president for educational affairs of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, which this week took aim at the site…

The State can do this, but we can’t have a prayer before a high school football game? Such is the modern, liberal world view – killing is just an easy, convenient thing to do while prayer risks tumbling us straight to destruction.

This is why I say “no” to a truce on social issues. This is what liberals do – by every means which come to hand, they advance their cause. A State website which is allegedly there to provide basic information is being used to propagandize in favor of abortion. How much does anyone want to bet that it was a pro-abortion advocate who came up with the idea? They have to make money, they have to kill as many children as possible…never stop; never back down; keep pressing and pushing and taking everything you can. If 100 things are done and 99 of them stopped, 1 still went on. And then you do 100 more things. This is how liberalism – which has never been supported by a majority – has become predominant in the American Ruling Class.

We have to fight them all of the time and everywhere – never letting up for a minute. We have to start forcing them back – we have to start advancing 101 conservative thing for every 100 things they try. Find objections to every liberal program. File lawsuits against every liberal regulation. Investigate, harass and otherwise bother the liberals at every point possible – because if we don’t, they’ll keep advancing and we’ll find that while we thought we were heading for a conservative victory, they were building a Socialist America.

Do we want to win, or not? If we do, then no truce – not now, not ever.

Which, I know, doesn’t actually amount to “news”, but we must keep in mind just what they are – from Mediate:

Political humor website Wonkette has long been trending toward nihilistic snark for snark’s sake, but Jack Stuef’s column “honoring” Trig Palin’s birthday is about the most irredeemably vile, unfunny thing I’ve ever seen. As if jokes about Trig’s Down Syndrome aren’t bad enough on their own, Stuef goes the extra mile to pen kneeslappers about incest, child rape, and fetal alcohol syndrome. I don’t want to reproduce too much of it here, but this quote is fairly representative:

Today is the day we come together to celebrate the snowbilly grifter’s magical journey from Texas to Alaska to deliver to the America the great gentleman scholar Trig Palin. Is Palin his true mother? Or was Bristol? (And why is it that nobody questions who the father is? Because, either way, Todd definitely did it.)…

Can I get a show of hands out there on who thinks Mr. Palin has just been granted a license to beat the snot out of Stuef any time he likes? As long as Palin is modestly cautious (ie, does it in a red State), no jury would ever convict. Texas would probably be the best place to do it – there, he’s probably get an award.

What sort of diseased mind do you have to have to write something like that? I mean, seriously, is there any sense of shame or common decency in such a person? I guess not. Spend as much time as liberals do hating and after a while there is no sense – no judgment – which would bring such thoughts to a screeching halt before it made it to the page.

Just keep this in mind – this is what we’re dealing with: people who think like this. Remember that the next time someone says we need a “new tone” or that we should compromise.

UPDATE: Buycott Papa John’s! In the resulting fracas from the disgusting piece, a battle has developed over Papa John’s – they pulled their advertising from Wonkette after they were alerted to the article. Wonkette is now urging a boycott. I urge everyone to get a Papa John’s pizza some time this week.

…then this is one of the things to waste it on – from Politico:

For all the rhetoric about cutting government spending, NASA’s space mission remains sacred in Congress.

A handful of powerful lawmakers are so eager to see an American on the moon — or even Mars — that they effectively mandated NASA to spend “not less than” $3 billion for a new rocket project and space capsule in the 2011 budget bill signed by the president last week…

That $3 billion is 1/3 the cost of a Ford-class aircraft carrier. Three are projected right now, so we just put off the third one for a couple years and, presto!, the money is available for the space program and, at worst, the US Navy gets its third Ford two or three years later than expected. To me, the manned space program is a matter of national security – and every bit as important as our command of the seas. And as our command of the seas is absolute (China is set to launch their first carrier soon – but it is an old, Soviet carrier re-worked…China will pose no naval air threat to the United States for at least 10 more years; and even then only in limited form; it takes a generation to build a fleet air arm), I’m willing to forgo a bit on the seas in return for a bit in space (and, liberals, this is call prioritizing – you figure out what you really need and then you find the money for it…perhaps delaying some other thing you might want which is of less immediate importance).

We dare not let our manned space program atrophy – it is already bad enough that with the end of the shuttle program we will have no capability of putting a man in to space for some years. This is a terrible dereliction of duty on the part of our government as it allows time for China to catch up a bit. There is a time and a place to be cheap – manned space flight isn’t it. Cancel a few diversity coordinators, if you have to, but keep the rockets flying.