From the PJ Tatler:

Perhaps this will serve as a wake-up to those still hoping the Democratic Party of 2011 is the Democratic Party of 1986. Speaker Boehner’s home was targeted by a protest mob. Maybe this protest will drive home that the rules seem to have changed. Unleashing intimidating mobs to affect policy is nothing new to some. Ask officials with Waste Management Corporation who saw their 1988 meetings with local banks in Chicago illegally raided by howling mobs. Stanley Kurtz has documented these tactics throughout Chicago in the late 1980s and 1990s in his book Radical in Chief. That gangs of activists are now showing up en masse, whether at people’s homes, or at state capitals, shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been paying attention, and certainly won’t surprise Kurtz who devotes an entire book to these new rules of politics. The only question is whether Republicans still think the old rules apply.

Its the Chicago Way, my friends – or, to put it more accurately, the Gangster Way. This is what the left is all about – they know they can’t win with ideas, so they are hoping to win by intimidation. “We know where you live”; that is the purpose of showing up at the Speaker’s house…they are trying to make him worry about his family and, by extension, frighten away people from backing him.

The taxpayer-funded union stooges who showed up in Wisconsin are just par for the course…as is the extreme nastiness of their signs and slogans. While we’re far away from any such thing, it must be noted that the sort of tactics being used by Obama’s Democrats are the tactics of those who want a civil war. Rank and file liberal foot soldiers might not realize it – and probably don’t, as not 1 in 100 of them has any real familiarity with history; if they did, they wouldn’t be liberals – but their leaders are playing a dangerous game. When you go to extremes, you tend to generate extremes.

And before any liberals out there try to pass off any revisionist history, this nastiness in our modern politics was created by Democrats. Specifically, it was the late Senator Ted Kennedy who turned American liberalism towards the nasty, hate-filled tactics of the extreme left wing back in 1986. When Kennedy accused Robert Bork of wanting to bring Gestapo-tactics and back alley abortions to America we, as a nation, entered the realm of gutter politics…and liberal Democrats have, year by year since then, ensured we’d go further and further in to that sewer. What was once the province of unreformed Stalinists is now the run-of-the-mill tactics of the Democrat party.

We can still head this off – we can still restore civility to American political life. But we can only do so by utterly crushing the Democrat party. We have to stand firm and keep hammering them until we defeat them so badly that they will wake up and crawl back out of the gutter. A better day will come for America – and it will come faster the more badly we beat these liberals.

I just can’t believe it. No, scratch that. I can believe it. I can believe that a bunch of liberal Democrats would call out sick and then on the taxpayer’s dime – because if they are “sick” teachers, then the taxpayer is providing the sick pay – show up at the Capitol to say, “gimme, gimme, gimme”. The signs should say, “I want mine! Screw you!”. “I became a government employee so I can lord it over the taxpayer”. “How dare you say I should carry my own weight”.

And then there’s the Democrat State senators – demanding democracy while running away from both the voters of November and their own responsibility to vote on measures in the Senate. Never in my life have I seen such lack of civic virtue; such a complete negation of both democracy and basic decency.

We should also not ignore the extreme nastiness of these people – they are putting cross hairs not on a map, but on the face of Wisconsin’s governor. The are comparing the governor – freely elected just this last November by the people of Wisconsin – to Hosni Mubarak. A dictator of 30 years standing who was a greedy brute. What “new tone”? And, seriously, are these the sort of people you want a truce with on any issue?

Contemptible. The Governor should just up and fire every last government employee who cut out in order to demonstrate today. That should go a long way towards balancing the budget and teaching these cretins a lesson.

UPDATE: From NRO’s The Corner:

In an interview with Fox News host Greta Van Susteren tonight, Gov. Scott Walker emphasized that the thousands of protesters had not cowed Republican state legislators.

“If anything, I think it’s made the Republicans in the assembly and the senate stronger,” said Walker. “They’re not going to be bullied. They’re not going to be intimidated.”

“Democracy doesn’t come by hiding out in another state, avoiding any real debate,” he said, adding that if the Democrat senators came back, they could “take as much time as they want to debate [and] offer as many amendments as they want.”…

UPDATE II: The Democrat’s 2012 campaign song is ready:

Ten financial charts which show just how bad things are for us economically…and which illustrate my view that fake money and debt is at the heart of our problem.

If Napolitano and Kaine are the Democrats’ best hope of holding the Senate in 2012, then I feel pretty darn good.

Best for the GOP: lose in 2012 so that our stellar up-and-comers can clean up in 2016? My view: heck no. OMG – Obama Must Go!

A tale of two governors – a liberal Democrat who can’t get past his special interests and a conservative Republican who is leading his State to prosperity.

Our foreign policy just gets stupider by the day:

The U.S. informed Arab governments Tuesday that it will support a U.N. Security Council statement reaffirming that the 15-nation body “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” a move aimed at avoiding the prospect of having to veto a stronger Palestinian resolution calling the settlements illegal…

Allegedly we’re doing this so we won’t have to veto a different resolution which would call the settlements illegal. The proper policy is to advise the Arab world that if they want Israel to stop making or expanding settlements, they’d better hurry up and make peace and create internationally recognized borders…right now, you see, there is no border so you can’t say this area is Israel and that area isn’t…such defined territories are only possible between people who have made peace.

Yes, I realize that what the Moslems want, for the moment, is all of the 1967 West Bank (which means, by the way, not just an end to new settlements, but the destruction of whole towns where tens of thousands of Israelis live, some of them for decades, now). I realize that the ultimate goal for the Moslems is the destruction of the State of Israel. But what they tell us they want is peace – what we should tell them is, Ok; make peace. Get what you can – once you have a treaty, you’ll find the United States rigid in defense of your new borders…but don’t come whining to us when you still haven’t made peace.

You see, US policy has gotten it wrong from the start – we’ve continually acted as if the Moslems actually have a case; that they have a legitimate claim on Israel…that somehow those who launched repeated wars of aggression are owed something by the victors. A rational policy is to say, “hey, you lost; make the best deal you can and thank your lucky stars if the Israelis leave you even a square foot of the conquered land”. Or, start fighting again and see where that gets you – but don’t expect the United States to pressure our best ally in order to please those who despise us.

Such a policy has, I think, never even occurred to American leaders. We’ve always tried to walk between Israel and the Moslems…as if you can walk down the middle of a battlefield and not take hostile fire. Time to pick sides, for once and for all – and the side we should pick is the side of a fellow democracy which has, quite incredibly, managed to thrive in spite of repeated attempts to destroy her.

And, know what?, my bet is that if we went for reality rather than either “real” policy or a nauseating, politically correct view of things, our enemies over there would learn to respect us more and we’d be able to work out rational relationships with all parties. Not saying that a glory day of peace would arrive and all would be well, but at least we’d have a policy which is respected by friend and foe, and frees us from hypocrisy.

If we can’t identify the enemy, how can we fight them? From Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal:

…In this report, titled “A Ticking Time Bomb” and put out by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, there is a detail as dazzling in its bleak way as all the glowing misrepresentations of Dr. Hasan’s skills and character, which his superiors poured into their evaluations of him. It concerns the Department of Defense’s official report on the Fort Hood killings—a study whose recital of fact made no mention of Hasan’s well-documented jihadist sympathies. Subsequent DoD memoranda portray the bloodbath—which began with Hasan shouting “Allahu Akbar!”—as a kind of undefined extremism, something on the order, perhaps, of work-place violence.

This avoidance of specifics was apparently contagious—or, more precisely, policy. In November 2010, each branch of the military issued a final report on the Fort Hood shooting. Not one mentioned the perpetrator’s ties to radical Islam. Even today, “A Ticking Time Bomb,” co-authored by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) and Susan Collins (R., Maine), reminds us that DoD still hasn’t specifically named the threat represented by the Fort Hood attack—a signal to the entire Defense bureaucracy that the subject is taboo…

Liberal, political correctness has now become official military policy…and while the mid-level officers and the troops will be, at the moment, little affected by this nonsense, any officer who aspires to a star on his shoulder while Obama is President may be both knave enough to vend and fool enough to swallow this snake oil. This is just a hideous dereliction of duty – if the officers who wrote the reports were at all worth their salt, they would have resigned rather than put their names to such garbage.

But, make no mistake about it; there are always officers in any military who will trim their views to curry favor with their political masters. Not all of them who wear the uniform are like Rep. West who, as a Lt. Colonel, opined that he’d walk though hell with a can of gasoline for his men. We’ll have quite a lot of rebuilding to do once we get Obama out of office.

From Rasmussen:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 55% of Likely U.S. Voters say, generally speaking, that the president’s budget proposal cuts government spending too little. Ten percent (10%) say it cuts too much, while 26% say his budget cuts about the right amount…

And here’s the real kicker – 40% think that the GOP, which wants to cut more than Obama, is also cutting too little! I’m telling you, people, this battle is all ours – we’ve go the whip hand and should press it to the limit. Rework our budget and cut some more – the people are ready for it. We’ve been waiting for this opportunity for 30 years – a time when the people are out in front of us on fiscal issues; I hope to goodness they are paying attention in the House.

A rather surprising move:

In December of 2008, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), then the Committee’s Ranking Member, launched an investigation into Countrywide Financial Corporation’s infamous VIP and Friends of Angelo Program that exposed the inner workings of Countrywide’s efforts to buy friends in critical government and industry positions affecting the company’s business interests. Today, Chairman Issa issued a wide-ranging subpoena to Bank of America for all documents and records related to Countrywide’s VIP program…

What is unusual is that Republicans tend to let bygones be bygones – Dodd and some of the other biggies in this are out of politics and this is all old news. Democrats tend to count on this – they know that as a scandal breaks, it can hurt them…but they rely upon the GOP to not go back over things, later, to see what really happened. By looking in to “Friends of Angelo”, Issa is showing that he wants the full truth of our financial melt down to emerge. And that is bad news for Democrats.

To be sure, Democrat spin and MSM covering made the story out as a bi-partisan failure, but the reality is that the financial crash was created by the Democrats. They were the people who created the legal loopholes, who pressured the banks to get slack in underwriting, who took advantage of the bags of money for personal enrichment…and it was Democrats who resisted tooth and nail any attempts to head off the disaster. This isn’t about any one Democrat – no particular element of the corruption is all that important…but what is important is telling the truth about what happened, and punishing those who caused the mess….and, in to the bargain, instructing the people about just how lousy with corruption the Democrats have become.

This is a bracing, refreshing action by Issa, and I look forward to the results.

More and more good news keeps coming out of the House – from NRO:

…As of Monday early afternoon, House Republicans were officially undecided as to whether they’d take on entitlements when they write the budget this year. Fiscal-hawk extraordinaire Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, danced around the issue in a meeting with reporters. After trashing Obama’s budget for its failure to include entitlement reform, Ryan refused to say whether he’d include it in his own. Little did he know that just as he was reluctantly deflecting the question, House majority leader Eric Cantor was dropping a bombshell in a pen-and-pad briefing with reporters elsewhere in the Capitol: Republicans, Cantor said, are all-in on entitlement reform…

I watched Obama’s presser on Tuesday morning – or, to be honest, as much of it as I could stomach – and was just disgusted with both his dishonesty as well as his clear contempt for the people…and even for the reporters who were, on the whole, just asking the obvious questions (such as when Obama was asked how his “not add to the debt” pledge can be squared with the fact that his proposal adds debt for each of the next ten years). But what clearly emerged from it is that Obama is resigning the offensive on real budget reform to the GOP – whether its because of a conviction in favor of spending or fear of offending his grasping, leftist base, Obama simply will not address the actual fiscal crisis. That leaves the field to the GOP – and the GOP seems to be realizing that Obama’s retreat is a stunning opportunity for GOP victory.

The people are demanding that the government get its fiscal house in order – and no funny business! No pretend cuts and secret tax and spending hikes hidden behind a fog of budget-cutting rhetoric. Right now is the time for the GOP to act – to present a budget plan to the people which really does make the hard choices and genuinely brings spending under control. At that point, let Harry Reid block it in the Senate – and if we get it through there (and we probably will, on the votes of the “2012 Democrats” fearful of being defeated), then let Obama veto it. Democrats have dreams of a 1995-style government shut down redounding to their credit as it did to Clinton’s – but it won’t, because the New Media will ensure that the people know the truth of it, and that was absent in 1995. Additionally, people have heard it all before – not least in 1995: how budget cuts are about beating puppies to death with tire irons and spending is giving food to granny. We know – the people know – that those who don’t want to cut spending just want to keep the gravy train rolling.

Let’s have this fight – let’s do some deep cuts to spending and present it to the people. I believe they’re up to it – and if by some chance they reject us on it, then that works out ok, too. If the people reject steep budget cuts now and punish us in 2012, then when the final crash comes, we’ll have proven ourselves to be both correct, and courageous. At that point, it’ll be a no-brainer; they’ll turn to us, and give us the power to do what needs to be done. But I think they’re ready right now – that when it comes to a fight, and even a shutdown, the people will back the GOP.

More and more people are coming to the conclusion that, ultimately, we must have a hard currency which cannot be manipulated by central bankers and bureaucrats – here is an excellent run down of why from Davos Okst over at Zero Hedge:

…During one of these FOMC meetings Bernanke asked about a chart showing the value of our dollar losing 10 percent per year. Ask yourself: Just how that plays into the Fed’s dual mandate of maintaining price stability by preserving the value of “our” currency? Just where can you put the savings from your flat, circa 1970s wages, to work and get 10% per year?

No small wonder why gold was up 29% last year and silver was up 89%.

The long bond (30 year) is tanking, the 3 decade old bond bull market is finished! This is evident because the yield busted the 10 year moving average when it blew above 4.75%.

Money moves out of bonds when central banks print.

Money flows into hard assets, gold, silver and commodities when central banks go berserk…

People with money can be stupid in a lot of ways, but one thing you’ll find rich people clever about is ensuring that they remain rich no matter what happens. When the Federal Reserve prints up bags of money, then money will flow away from dollars and in to things which hold their value. But what about you and I? If you are worth millions, then you can still spend a million dollars buying gold at $1,300 an ounce…but what of the poor guy who’s only got $5,000 in the bank? Doesn’t work out quite so well for him.

Nor does it really work out for the economy. 100 years ago we were solidly in gold and silver currency and were the wonder of the economic world. There was no limit to our manufacturing capacity and there was no indication that our economy would ever be anything other than a powerhouse. Then we created the Federal Reserve and slowly went off gold…until we finally cut the ties in 1971. Fake money has been printed in ever large batches since then, the value of our money has dropped like a rock and easy money has led to reckless borrowing – not just by government, but by the people. Meanwhile, real wealth has been shipped out of the United States as the return on manufacturing, mining and farming has paled in comparison to the return on playing the markets, especially when making, mining and growing things is increasingly punished in the tax and regulatory codes. Why make a 3% profit in manufacturing when you can make 8% by shuffling money around on Wall Street? That its fake money doesn’t matter – if you pile it up fast enough, you can use it to buy real things, and too bad for the suckers who don’t pile it up fast enough to buy million dollar New York apartments and yachts.

The switch back to gold would not be easy, but it can be done. It will require a re-valuation of our currency (probably at a 100-1 ratio…turn in 100 fiat dollars to get 1 gold dollar). It’ll have to be managed with care to ensure that speculators are not able to take advantage of it. But it has to be done – we need to have assurance that a dollar today is worth a dollar tomorrow, and next year, and 50 years from now. Only this way can genuinely rational business decisions be made. Only this way can our economy become, once again, an entity which rewards hard work, savings and careful investment…and, once again, becomes the economic wonder of the world.

Not exactly fair to the GOP as the cuts really will be $100 billion, but you get the picture. And we can all use a drink, I think.