Latest from Libya:

The Gaddafi regime has issued a defiant warning that the “time for action” had arrived as a sustained military assault forced the defeat of Libyan rebels in the strategically important town of Zawiya and their retreat from Ras Lanuf.

Amid squabbling among EU and Nato leaders on the eve of an emergency European summit on Libya in Brussels, Muammar Gaddafi’s son said that a new offensive would be launched within days…

Read in the news that France is urging military action against the Libyan regime – which is a grand thing, but one wonders if France had the capability of projecting sufficient power that far from home? The United States does – but I also read that our Secretary of State is waiting for the world to decide what we should do. Meanwhile, Libyans are butchered and the situation spins out of control.

I have to say that in all my life I’ve never felt more humiliated than I did when I read all that – France is leading the way while the United States hangs back! In the governments of the world the United States is being marked as a blind, stumbling giant…and as long as Obama is President, a negligible quantity in world affairs. If we won’t act like Americans when we’ve got a carrier battle group and Marine Expeditionary Unit right where we need them, when will we act?

If at all, probably too late. Obama will screw himself up to a decision right about the time it becomes moot…and then, even worse, we might strike as the rebels are being crushed, just in time for the United States to share in the defeat. Goodness, it is going to be a long 22 months until we get that poltroon out of office.

From Bloomberg:

As European Union leaders haggle over their second plan to stem the financial crisis, traders are betting Greece won’t be able to pay its debts.

Greek 10-year bond yields rose to a record this week and it costs more than ever to insure against a default, even though the nation received a 110 billion euro ($153 billion) bailout from the EU and the International Monetary Fund last year. Two- year yields exceed 10-year levels, suggesting a restructuring may come before the three-year aid program expires…

My bet is that those who bought Greek bonds at the time of the bail out are now looking for the exits – my personal feeling about that is: serves ’em right. What kind of idiot would buy a Greek bond when demographics ensure that the Greek debt cannot ever be paid off? Greece’s population is going in to terminal decline – there will be, year after year, fewer and fewer Greeks around earning any income with which to pay off bonded debt.

It is to be hoped that Greece will default – and swiftly be followed by the rest of the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain). The debt cannot be repaid – profligate governments, short-sighted and/or lazy populations, ossified socialism and declining birth rates ensure that any money lent to such nations is so much cash down the drain. The European model has failed – even thus-far strong Germany still has the massive, structural problem of too much welfare and too few children being born. They are weathering the storm better than the rest of Europe because they have been far more sensible…but a people not reproducing itself while providing lavish welfare is doomed.

Default is the only way out of the economic mess – it will clear the decks and at least allow economic life to resume. They’ll be poorer, but perhaps a bit wiser. And with the loss of the European dream – socialism plus hedonism – perhaps the European people will also recover their sanity. Perhaps they’ll start working, saving and, who knows?, maybe even going back to Church and experiencing faith…and having children. Anything is better than just continuing on, hoping that one more bout of fiat money and one more chop at the tree or morality will do the trick…

HAT TIP: Mish’s

From NRO:

Union leaders predicted up to 25,000 would protest at the Indiana Statehouse today.

Instead, about 8,000 did. Many of them weren’t even Hoosiers: Indiana blog Capitol & Washington reports that about half of the buses carrying protesters came from Illinois and other states…

The union bosses and their lapdogs in the Democrat party are promising revenge for Wisconsin. They will put union issues on State ballots and, in general, press the issue in a major way in 2012. The only question I have is – when do I get to donate for this effort? Nothing would please me more than for the corrupt unions to be leading the left side of the campaign as we enter 2012…it’ll allow us to fill the world with the absurd stories of union corruption and insane union contracts. Obama has to some how win back Independents in order to win in 2012 – he won’t be able to so that with the SEIU, AFSCME and the NEA hanging ’round his neck, forcing all Democrats to make pro-union statements in the press.

We’ve won the argument – and the longer the left and the unions keep up the drum beat, the more we’ll win at the ballot box.

From Texas Insider:

Members of the Project 21 black leadership network strongly disagree with the President’s contention, as reported in the new book Family of Freedom: Presidents and African Americans in the White House, that the tea parties are motivated more by the color of Obama’s skin than the content of his agenda.

“As a keynote speaker at numerous tea party events around the country which has allowed me to meet tea party activists from all walks of life, I know it is Obama’s progressive politics and not his race that motivates these patriotic Americans to protest our nation’s slide toward socialism,” said full-time Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli.

“By engaging in race-card politics, Obama shows he is willing to follow the lead of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to ignite racial tension as a means of maintaining power and furthering his agenda.”

Its going to get harder and harder for the left to sell the notion that Republicans and conservatives are racists. They won’t stop trying, of course, but it will have less and less effect. Part of this is the fact that “racism” has been grossly over used by liberals – especially by people like Sharpton and Jackson. Use a word too much and it starts being less potent. But in addition to that there is the fact of a rising generation of black and other non-white leaders in the conservative movement…hard to call a white GOPer a racist when he’s donated to Allen West and is thinking that Cain might make an excellent GOP nominee.

The tide has turned; we are winning this.

A bit more hope and change for you all – from Bloomberg:

Bill Gross, who runs the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co., eliminated government-related debt from his flagship fund last month as the U.S. projected record budget deficits…

…Gains in so-called headline inflation matter more for the U.S. economy than Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke suggests and rising oil prices may cut U.S. gross domestic product by a quarter to half a percentage point, Gross said March 4 in a radio interview on “Bloomberg Surveillance” with Tom Keene.

“Bernanke tends to think this doesn’t matter — at least in terms of headline versus the core — we do,” Gross said…

It is rather absurd to hold any government debt, at the moment – and even someone like Gross is still doing that; he just doesn’t want to hold our debt because returns are too low and risks are too high. But even the allegedly strong economies out there really aren’t. Its all a bubble – fueled by central banks around the world printing money like mad.

But here’s the thing – US debt was once upon a time the most secure investment anyone could make. You could absolutely bank on it that you’d get your money back with interest. Now, no one is really sure that you will. Buy a ten year bond today and you can’t really assert that by 2021 the United States will be in a position to pay principal and interest. There is just too much debt and while Obama is in the White House and Reid is running the Senate there is no chance for any of the structural reforms necessary to get it under control – let alone get us to a position where we’ll actually have less debt at the end of the year than when we started.

And the window of opportunity for us to fix this short of default is rapidly closing. I figure we’ve got, at the outside, until FY 2015 (which starts October 1st, 2014) to start debt reduction in the United States. If we don’t get to that point by that time we’ll probably have to go through some form of default by 2016 or 2017…and the longer we hold off making the hard choices, the worse it will get when the default happens. Learn this lesson – do lay this to heart – you cannot borrow and print yourself to wealth…only hard work, savings and careful investment can do that. In the end, debt is an economic killer.

This action by Gross is just a shot across our bow. We ignore it at our peril.

And as a former Marine, he’s worth listening to – from the Kansas City Star:

…A former Marine and former assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, West has little use for the strategy as applied in Afghanistan or for its key proponents: Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Gen. David H. Petraeus. In citing the strategy’s limitations, West offers vivid accounts of the war from ground level and an unsparing analysis of the chances for U.S. success.

While prosecuting this 10-year conflict, West argues, the U.S. has created a culture of dependency and entitlement among the Afghan civilians as the risk-averse Afghan military prefers to let the U.S. Marines and soldiers do the fighting – and the dying. It doesn’t help, West writes, when Gates gives yet another speech that seems to put a higher priority on “nation-building” than in confronting the enemy. Of one Gates speech, West says: “That was obfuscation, not guidance. No commander can carry out a mission that the secretary of defense cannot define.”

West is not opposed to counterinsurgency in all places, at all times. In fact, his earlier book, “The Village,” about Marines living with and fighting alongside Vietnamese villagers, is one of the seminal texts of counterinsurgency: It’s required reading for Marines bound for Afghanistan. But as West sees it, in Afghanistan, politicians and “political generals” have mated counterinsurgency with nation-building, with disastrous results…

While not the bloodiest type of fighting one can engage in, counter-insurgency is certainly the most morally difficult. It requires not just high courage and foresight, but also patience and a determination to stick it out over a very long term. Successful counter-insurgency campaigns always take years. Given this, I won’t subscribe to West’s apparent conviction that we’re not doing it right in Afghanistan – while West certainly knows his business, he is not placed where he can render absolute judgment on the effort. Only the commanders in the field can do that, and only absolute success or failure will demonstrate the wisdom or folly of their strategy.

That said, I am worried that the Obama Administration has set up a situation in which victory is impossible – much as Johnson did in Vietnam. Never fall for the idiocy of an unwinnable war – anyone who says a war is unwinnable is as much an idiot as someone who says a war can’t be lost. All wars are winnable and losable – whether you win or lose depends no your strength, your courage and your intellectual capacity. Our soldiers are certainly strong enough to win; and of courage there is no lack – but I do wonder if at the top of the leadership there is the intellectual capacity necessary.

Celerity of movement and suppleness in planning are the pre-requisites for any successful military strategy. You have to be able to move very fast and be able to swiftly adapt to fluid conditions. All too often in military campaigns the leaders commit the cardinal sin – “forming a picture”; that is, figuring the enemy will do a particular thing when he may, in fact, do something very much different. I am concerned that we got ourselves a plan in Afghanistan and we’re going to carry it out on a time line – looking to meet a mythical end date set by the political leadership – regardless of actual conditions on the ground. But the plan, even if was great when first implemented, is almost certainly to need major adjustments as time goes on – as the enemy reacts to our moves and tries to foil our plan with plans of his own.

I have absolute faith in the troops, and I hope the leadership – especially on the political side – is worthy of the sacrifices of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. While Afghanistan may be off our political radar, an American defeat in that country would be devastating to our position around the world. We simply must win, regardless of cost or how long it takes. But we can’t just keep banging away at it – we need to have a vision for victory and then allow the troops the resources and flexibility necessary to achieve it. Does Obama’s Administration provide that? Only time will tell.

In a never ending quest of how best to sell the lie:

Climate Change Rings “Truer” Than Global Warming

American skepticism about whether the world’s weather is changing depends partly on wording. More believe in “climate change” than “global warming,” a new study by the University of Michigan shows.

Three of four people, or 74%, thought the problem was real when it was referred to as climate change, while 68% thought it was real when it was called global warming, according to questions posed by U-M psychologists on a RAND-conducted survey of 2,267 U.S. adults..

“Wording matters,” study co-author Jonathon Schuldt said in announcing the findings, which will be published in the upcoming issue of Public Opinion Quarterly. “While global warming focuses attention on temperature increases, climate change focuses attention on more general changes,” he said. “Thus, an unusually cold day may increase doubts about global warming more so than about climate change.”

What is really interesting is how this study breaks down by political affiliation:

The study found the differences were due almost entirely to participants who identified themselves as Republicans. While 60% of Republicans said they thought climate change was real, only 44% said they believed in the reality of global warming. In contrast, 86% of Democrats thought climate change was a serious problem, regardless of wording.

“It might be a ceiling effect, given their high level of belief,” co-author Sara Konrath, a U-M psychologist, speculated. “Or it could be that Democrats’ beliefs about global climate change might be more crystallized, and as a result, more protected from subtle manipulations.”

So, democrats are more ‘protected’ from ‘subtle’ manipulations. Like those manipulations from IPCC and East Anglia college.. you know, subtle manipulations, like admissions of fudging the data upon which much of the global warming–err climate change studies are based.

Yeah. Those subtle manipulations.

The real difference between democrats and republicans with respect to climate change is not necessarily which percentage of which political bent believes that some sort of climate change is happening. Rather, the real difference between democrats and republicans lies in how each group attributes the cause of that change, and the underlying motives behind those assumptions.

According to the study above, 64 percent of Republicans (supposedly conservative) believe that the climate is changing. I also happen to believe that the climate is changing. The Earth’s climate has never been stagnant, and has been changing since the Good Lord created it. The $64,000,000,000 question that the study fails to ask is whether 64% of Republicans believe that anthroprogenic activity is responsible for the climate changing; or, for that matter, whether climate change is really that catastrophic of an event. An educated guess tells me that the percentage on both counts is very, very low.

On the other hand, 86% of democrats (supposedly liberal) believe in climate change. And it is another educated guess that the vast majority of that 86% believe that man is causing it. East Anglia, and all other contradictory data be damned. To the liberal democrat, climate change, specifically the concept of anthroprogenic climate change is not as much scientific fact as it is a matter of godless dogma, held on to with every bit of zealotry as Christians hang on to the notion of the Second Coming of Christ. But the zealotries on each side are played out with very different motivations, which I will explain in the following paragraphs.

As religion is a vehicle through which Man navigates the world so as to attain a one-ness with the Divine with the goal of a glorious afterlife shared with the Divine, global warming/climate change is a vehicle utilized by the god-less Left in a vain attempt to attain a socialist utopia here on Earth. As religion is the great equalizer between rich and poor in the afterlife, global warming is seen as a great equalizer to legitimize the vast redistribution of wealth between rich and poor, both individually and collectively, and to achieve what in reality is unachievable; the socialist utopia of a classless, milquetoast society, egalitarian in both resource and outcome. God-less democrats, disillusioned by the non-prospect of Divine reward, (as there is no true belief in the Divine), attempt themselves to play the Divine, with disastrous consequences.

Even the so-called “religious left” have no real interest in the afterlife, or even in the Divine. Oh, they may call themselves Catholic or Evangelical Lutheran, or Unitarian, but just like the Global Warmers (oftentimes, the two are interchangeable), the ‘religious’ left utilize religion as a vehicle not to lead people to the Divine so as to achieve their Heavenly reward, but rather to vainly attempt to achieve heaven on earth, forgetting that Christ Himself said, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36). To the Left, religion, like Climate Change propaganda, is utilized as but a cloak of legitimacy to advance an un-godly agenda antithetical to which they purport to champion.

So it is without wonder that a majority of democrats will hang on to the hideous lie that is anthroprogenic global warming, no matter the moniker. As I stated before, when the Divine is cast aside, man attempts to fill the void; with invariably disastrous consequences.

From the AP:

The Wisconsin Senate voted Wednesday night to strip nearly all collective bargaining rights from public workers, approving an explosive proposal that had rocked the state and unions nationwide after Republicans discovered a way to bypass the chamber’s missing Democrats…

This was actually expected – and one wonders why the GOP didn’t do it sooner. The apparent way Wisconsin law works on this is that fiscal matters require a quorum while things like stripping out collective bargaining which don’t have a direct fiscal impact (though, long term, this is the best means of ensuring fiscal responsibility) can be passed by a simple majority. Republicans should have done this a week or two ago – rather than let these un-American clowns on the left go off on a rampage (yes, I called them un-American…because they are: an election was held, the GOP won…running away from office is un-American, as is backing such actions).

Now we’ll see what the Democrats will do – allegedly, this was the bone of contention and now refusal to return means refusal to address the fiscal issues Democrats said they were ready to move forward on. Of course, this action has stirred up the rank and file liberals and got them donating, so Democrats might try to keep this thing going for a while.

UPDATE: In response to this Democrats lie and act like thugs. So, business as usual…

UPDATE II: With liberal thugs trying by main force to prevent the Wisconsin legislature from meeting tomorrow – in other words, trying to shut down our democratic government – a comment from over at Instapundit:

I guess that this means the new civility bullshit is officially over?

Yes, it is. You want this kind of a fight liberals, we’ll give it to you.

UPDATE III: And here’s a good place to start – a National Right to Work law has been introduced by Senate Republicans.

Some thoughts on Ash Wednesday here.

A good quote from G K Chesterton on those who would have us worship Mother Nature:

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a stepmother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate.

That in response to the absurd view that becoming “green” should be part of our Lenten efforts.

Boiled down, about 1/3 of all wages are paid by government in the form of welfare and other transfer payments. Liberals like this; conservatives realize that as government doesn’t actually produce anything of value, it is really can’t work…as our impending national bankruptcy shows.

Mish has an update on the Eurozone financial crisis. Trust me, folks, it ain’t over…in fact, the very worst is yet to come.

Poll: Maine Republicans are tired of the Snowe job they’ve been getting…bet that Sen. Snowe draws a primary challenger but I’m not sure if she’ll pull an Arlen on us. You see, even if she did and won, she’d just wind up in the minority party come 2013…Arlen did his flip so that, in his hopes, he’d stay in the majority party. For Snowe, it is very tricky but I bet she stays GOP. Whether or not she’ll win the primary is another matter…

A women’s rights demonstration in Egypt comes out just as we should expect – Moslem men going bonkers and abusing the women.

How to make an Obama appearance more appealing to high schoolers.

From the PJ Tatler:

Up to 4,947 non-citizens may have voted in Colorado in November 2010

That’s the conclusion from a report issued today by the Colorado Secretary of State. Here is the money line: “For the reasons discussed above, however, it is likely that many of the 4,947 voters were not citizens when they cast their vote in 2010.”…

No surprise – voter fraud is built in to the system by Democrats because they like it. A lot. How do I know? Because they do it all the time. I bet that a full investigation of voting fraud in the United States will reveal that in every single election contested by a Democrat there is voter fraud at least at some level. They cheat “just in case” – always having some fake votes in the mix in case the vote comes out real close with a Democrat slightly behind.

But in order to build a system which allows this endemic fraud, you have to have it be a system which allows anyone to vote – including foreigners not eligible. A real voter system would carefully screen out anyone not eligible and would strictly ensure that everyone who shows up on election day is supposed to be there – there would be strict requirements for voter registration, stiff penalties for anyone committing even the mildest forms of voter fraud (such as ACORN submitting thousands of bogus registrations), a requirement for picture ID at the voting booth…Democrats, naturally, fight tooth and nail against any such things because it would prevent them from cheating.

But we really must correct this – if the people ever lose faith in voting because of fraud, then our democratic liberties will be gone. If elections become a battle of who can cheat the best, then there is no reason to vote, at all…and people will start to follow those who promise to “get things done” regardless of what laws and voting require. Freedom is not something assured – it has to be carefully tended, day by day, lest it die…Democrats are poisoning the roots with their insistence upon voter fraud, and it must be brought to a halt.