Blogs For Victory

With an uber-liberal governor and an uber-liberal Legislature, the normal course of events would be to just hike taxes to cover the budget shortfall…but California requires a 2/3 vote in the Legislature to raise taxes…and the liberals are just shy of that sort of majority:

California’s Senate Republicans blocked Governor Jerry Brown’s plan to erase a $10 billion deficit as closed-door talks remain snagged on his demand for higher taxes as a deadline to pass a budget looms.

Republicans oppose the governor’s proposal because it would extend tax and fee increases set to end June 30. The so-called bridge tax would preserve the revenue measures pending the outcome of a voter referendum, planned for September or later, to keep them for five years. Republicans said the extensions would harm California’s economy. Brown said he doesn’t want to raise taxes without voter support.

“The Democrats have moved the goal post,” Senator Bob Huff, the Budget Committee’s Republican vice chairman, said in a telephone interview. “Now they are saying they need the taxes and then they will let the voters decide. But if the voters say ‘no,’ they still get stuck with another nine months of taxes.”…

Recent polling shows that Californians are not willing to raise taxes on themselves via ballot initiative…so, the Democrats will just have to find $10 billion more to cut. Naturally, they’ll say that this means junior will starve and granny will be kicked out on the street…but the reality is that California’s bloated, over-paid bureaucracy will just have to be slashed. The funny thing about this is that the Republicans are doing things which will allow Jerry Brown to be a successful governor…if he agrees to the GOP plan (which is not just for no new taxes, but also various pension and regulatory reform) then California will start to get back on track. Employment will increase, revenues will flow in to the government and everything will work out well…and Jerry Brown will be hailed as a genius for it.

Ah, well, we can’t have everything. It was GOP policies which rescued Clinton in the 90’s but the nation did benefit from it, even though we got stuck with Clinton for an extra four years. The good news here is that Brown is already 73 – perhaps he won’t run again in 2014…

For us conservatives, of course, the weakness is to try and wrap ourselves in the flag when we’ve screwed up…that doesn’t work for liberals quite so well. And, so, Weiner is now “ill” and needs “treatment – from the New York Post:

Weiner’s pulling out — for a little while, at least.

Serial-sexting Congressman Anthony Weiner headed off to rehab and will seek a leave of absence, as Nancy Pelosi and other Dems demanded he quit following his admission to sending private Twitter messages to a 17-year-old girl.

Weiner’s office said the randy rep left this morning for “professional treatment,” and will take a leave of absence from the House as he tries to become a better family man…

What a crock. And what a sad spectacle. The poor man is twisting in the wind and doesn’t seem to realize that he’s just making it worse.

I know that Weiner is not Catholic, so he cannot avail himself of Reconciliation (what you out there know of as “Confession”), but the basics of it can be done, even if not as a sacrament. What Weiner needs to do is confess not to “errors of judgment” or of “bringing pain to my wife” or “disappointing my constituents” but to being a sinner. It goes like this – “I confess to Almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do”. That goes on a bit more but it gets pretty Catholic after that point…but, you get the picture.

We all screw up – I’ve got a whole list of reprehensible things I’ve done that I wish I had never done and pray God I never do again. But the longer you go without saying “I did wrong” without any excuse-making, the worse it gets. Confess the sin and beg forgiveness and even though it remains a badge of shame while you live in this world, it doesn’t pile up…it becomes a lesson, not a stepping stone to perdition. I understand Weiner’s point of view – he’s done wrong but doesn’t want to surrender all he’s built because of it. Too bad – and, in fact, it is better for him to surrender it. He can build it back – not exactly as he hoped, but perhaps better than he ever dreamed…if he gives up the defense of his sins and just gets rid of them.

I’ve been saying lately that I might have to start drawing pictures to get liberals to understand – fortunately, someone else did. From Investors Business Daily:

You see, liberals, it doesn’t work. This is pretty much “black and white” – as government spending has shot through the roof we should have seen big gains in employment. That is what, according to liberal, Keynesian economics is supposed to happen. It is what Obama and all the liberals and all the kept financial “experts” said would result from the spending. As you can see, it hasn’t happened…at best it kept employment from dropping even further, but even that comes at the cost of galloping inflation and a fast-approaching risk of debt-induced financial meltdown.

You cannot borrow and spend your way in to prosperity. You can only get prosperous by hard work, thrift and sobriety. Those very old fashioned notions were true before, they are true now and they will always remain true. If anyone says there is some other way to do it they are either fools or liars.

We can get out of this. We can rebuild America in to absolute economic supremacy in the world. We retain the un-tapped wealth and we still have the skills necessary to exploit the un-tapped wealth. All we have to do is get to work – but to do that we’ll need to balance the budget, cut taxes and get rid of all those liberal regulations which make it impossible to build wealth. Once we do that, we’ll get rolling again – if we never do it, we’ll not only never get better, but we’ll continually get worse.

From Marketwatch:

We all think it’s a panacea. If you don’t have enough money saved for retirement, you’ve got a few ways to close the gap between what you have and what you need in your nest egg: Save more, invest more aggressively, and/or work longer.

Well, it turns out that working longer is indeed an option, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute latest study. The only problem is that the latest research shows that you’ll have to work much longer than you anticipated. In fact, many Americans will have to keep on working well into their 70s and 80s to afford retirement, according to the study, titled “The Impact of Deferring Retirement Age on Retirement Income Adequacy.”…

Lots of reasons for this, but the primary reason is that we don’t produce enough wealth – we’re not making, mining and growing enough of our own stuff to build up the wealth necessary to allow the elderly to not work. Officially, I’ll get to retire at 67…but taking a look at one thing and another, it is looking more like 70 for me, and that is only if things go well.

Until we start producing more wealth, however, this condition will just get worse and worse. You really can’t sustain an economy if you are outsourcing all the hard, dirty work. An economy has to be geared towards the production of things of value – “innovation” and taking customer service calls over the phone just doesn’t cut it.

From the AP:

Amid increasing calls for Rep. Anthony Weiner to resign, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi says the decision should be up to the congressman and his New York constituents.

The former speaker said in San Francisco that she believes the decision should be made by “the individual member” and the people in his district…

Pelosi must have seen that Marist poll which states that 56% of Weiner’s constituents are opposed to his resignation. I haven’t seen the breakdown of the poll…but, it is Queens, so it might well be truly reflective of how mindlessly Democrat Weiner’s constituents are.

But shouldn’t Pelosi still call for his resignation, as a matter of principal? You forget who we’re dealing with – Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat leader. As Matt and I explained in Caucus of Corruption, no Democrat will call out a fellow Democrat unless there is a risk of electoral loss. If Weiner risked losing his seat next year, Pelosi would drop on him like a ton of bricks…but as long as he can win and will do as he’s told, Pelosi will never make a move against him.

So, Pelosi gets to keep her Weiner – and will continue to do so unless and until something comes up which might cost the Democrats Weiner’s seat.

It was reported and then vigorously denied – though I took the denials with a grain of salt because, well, the Clinton’s are inveterate liars and so anything they say, or authorize to say about them, must be taken with a grain of salt…if by “grain” we mean “mountainous pile of sodium”. So, no surprise that we’ve got the MSM sticking by the story:

…”Hillary Clinton wants the job,” said one source who knows the secretary well.

A second source also said Clinton wants the position.

A third source said Obama had already expressed support for the change in her role. It is unclear whether Obama has formally agreed to nominate her for the post, which would require approval by the 187 member countries of the World Bank.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney denied the discussions. “It’s totally wrong,” he told Reuters.

A spokesman for Clinton, Philippe Reines, denied Clinton wanted the job, had conversations with the White House about it or would accept it.

People familiar with the situation, told of the denials from the White House and State Department, reaffirmed the accuracy of the report…

It is a good fit for Hillary. The World Bank is just the sort of elitist, Ruling Class entity which appeals to liberals who want to shape the world to fit their ideology. Additionally, t will provide power and money without having to really answer to anyone…the corrupt deals the Clinton’s have engineered can keep going and whole, new worlds of sleazy deal making will open up. I can see her wanting this job – and wanting to bail out on Obama before the wheels completely come off the cart.

How’s that recovery thing working out for you?

…the current 6 week drop, which is the longest in the last 9 years, or since 2002, may just be the beginning. And while our prediction that 2011 is a replica of 2010 is now confirmed, the far scarier possibility is that the next comparison to 2011 is 2002 – if that year is any indication, the SPX will drop to ~1000 before rebounding: obviously at that point the Fed will have no choice but to proceed with QE3, or the downward momentum will accelerate in what may then become a repeat of October 2008, and all those predictions for an S&P 400 would promptly be validated.

As for me, I fully expect some financial hocus-pocus from both Treasury and the Federal Reserve to reverse this. In the end the hocus-pocus might not work even in the short term, but I bet they try…they just can’t go in to 2012 with a recession raging across Obama’s polling numbers (and that is all they care about – not you, not me, not the country…just getting Obama re-elected, so that the bankster/bureaucrat gravy train can keep rolling).

They are certainly trying their best – from the Wall Street Journal:

Richard Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, dropped by our offices this week and relayed a remarkable fact: Some 37% of all net new American jobs since the recovery began were created in Texas…

Texans, all told, don’t even make up 10% of the American population, yet they have created 37% of the new jobs in America. That is a remarkable achievement. How has it been done? By conservative, Republican economic policies – low taxes, low regulations, business friendly. Additionally, tough on crime; tort reform; being pro-family. In other words, Texas is governed in a manner best suited to meet the needs of average, everyday people who just want to work and get on with their lives – it isn’t a plaything for liberal crackpots.

As an aside, this is just about the best sort of news the Texas governor can have, if he’s really thinking of running for President…

Forget about the Dow, the economy, the wars – we’ve got bigger fish to fry! Sarah Palin’s gubernatorial e-mails have just been released! The cracker-jack MSM is on the case – and is calling on you, regular Americans, to help them sift through the data.

Here is a quote from this trove of vital information:

I just read the article…Sheeeesh, Harris is saying some very foolish things in there.

Please discuss the terrible implications of this.

Keep pace with this hyper-important story on the Twitter feed.

var VideoID = “15271”; var Width = 425; var Height = 344;

People are angry – as I’ve been saying for a while, disgust for what is going on is rising. And it cuts across party lines – to be sure, people in the center and right tend to be more angry than people on the left, but even a lot of leftists are getting frustrated…after all, The One was supposed to do so much, and has done nothing, really. Its not that anyone wants a riot or a civil war, but if genuine reforms to help average Americans are not swiftly forthcoming, then it will get dicey, to say the least.

For a person losing their home there is something just flat wrong about seeing a bailed-out bankster make a huge bonus, or seeing the First Lady go on a lavish vacation, or seeing the President tell Brazil that he hopes they get a lot of oil jobs…things need to change: people who work hard and play by the rules need to be the winners…and if they aren’t, then we’re going to have some trouble.