Blogs For Victory

Boo!

As it comes from al Jazeera via the Guardian, I take this with a grain of salt…but it is something to be looked in to:

Armed westerners have been filmed on the front line with rebels near Misrata in the first apparent confirmation that foreign special forces are playing an active role in the Libyan conflict.

A group of six westerners are clearly visible in a report by al-Jazeera from Dafniya, described as the westernmost point of the rebel lines west of the town of Misrata. Five of them were armed and wearing sand-coloured clothes, peaked caps, and cotton Arab scarves…

If they aren’t American, then they are no direct concern of ours – but if they are American, then we get in to all sorts of legal issues stemming from the War Powers Act. The French and British do have plenty of good special forces to do this sort of thing, so it does no good to jump to conclusions…but if Obama has US troops on the ground in Libya after he’s ignored the time limit in the War Powers Act, then we’d have one heck of a problem. We’ll have to see where this leads.

From the Washington Times:

t’s no secret that members of Congress qualify as political insiders, but a new report strongly suggests that they also may be insiders when it comes to trading stocks.

An extensive study released Wednesday in the journal Business and Politics found that the investments of members of the House of Representatives outperformed those of the average investor by 55 basis points per month, or 6 percent annually, suggesting that lawmakers are taking advantage of inside information to fatten their stock portfolios…

I know you are just shocked, shocked to hear this news.

But does everyone, now, begin to understand? Can’t you see it? Can you see why there is such a powerful effort to preserve and expand Big Government? It is because those who are juiced in to it make bags of money off it. Sure, they’ll throw the regular folks a welfare bone, but that is just to keep them thinking that the purpose of Big Government is to help the people. Its not – the purpose, from start to finish and without exception, is to enrich those on the inside.

It is said that democracies perish when the people figure out they can vote the property of others in to their pockets. This is not exactly accurate – democracies perish when small minorities of people figure out how to bribe the majority in to ignoring the fact that the small minority is having a rake-off. Think of it – if we voted to have the Federal Reserve print up $3 trillion and divvy it up amongst the people, we would essentially be stealing from ourselves and each of us (ever man, woman and child) would have got $10,000. That would have been bad, but at least fair…but what happened was that the $3 trillion was that it was diced up among probably just a few million people…with the rest of us getting either nothing, or a few hundred a week in unemployment benefits. But all those who said “don’t do it” were accused of wanting to stop the unemployment benefits. It worked like a charm.

This bit of sharp practice in the stock market is just a tiny portion of the money being stolen by the Ruling Class. Honestly, it is probably the least destructive bit of theft they engage in. Vastly larger sums are taken by unionized government contractors; colleges and universities; Non-Government Organizations; people and corporations who donate heavily to politicians.

The cure for this is not a thicket of new laws or a new government organization – all that would do is bring more people in to the scam to steal. What needs to be done is to reduce the size of government. The fewer things government does, the fewer people government needs, the less they can steal. This does not have to mean cutting the amount of direct benefits to the American people – it just means that government should not be disbursing the benefits; should not be over regulating the market place; should not be continually tinkering with the tax code. If, for instance, you want to provide health care for the poor then your best bet is to ask the charity hospitals out there to get together and map out the amount of resources they need to provide basic and major medical care to the poor…and then just give them the money. You can rely on it that more poor people will get better care at far less cost than it is today…because there won’t be a bureaucrat and/or a crony capitalist having a rake off between taxpayer and beneficiary.

The solution is simple, though very difficult – anyone who thinks it over knows that the solution is to get the government out of the way. The hard part comes in where those who live off of government don’t want to go away…and that they have managed to convince millions that if the government doesn’t take care of them, they will die. But the trick can be done – and, as a matter of fact, it must be done…we’re bankrupt; all our money has been stolen and there’s simply none left. They say the thought you are to be hanged in a fortnight concentrates the mind wonderfully…hopefully the fact that we’re teetering on the edge of financial ruin will concentrate our minds.

TIME Magazine’s Joe Klein made a rather ridiculous claim this past weekend while on Chris Matthews’ show.

JOE KLEIN, TIME MAGAZINE: The other thing is there’s still tension between [President Obama] and Petraeus about what exactly, how exactly to close out Afghanistan. I’d say the relationship is pretty good, very, better than it was with Bush because the military hated the fact that he wasn’t really doing the job in Iraq.

It is worth noting that in the same discussion, Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times mentioned how “the military was not behind the Libya campaign.”

One can’t help mentioning two more things in response to this absurdity.

First, a new Gallup poll shows that veterans and active-duty military personnel give Obama lower marks than non-military Americans.

Second, I present this:

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:

Regarding that Gallup poll Matt linked to – Obama is just no Commander in Chief – the troops will do as they’re told because they’re good troops, but one thing veterans demand of those who put them in harm’s way is a conviction that there is no substitute for victory. Obama doesn’t have that conviction, and the military and veterans know it.

Can a chick in leather who rides a bike become President? Time will tell…

UPDATE: From the comments over at Hot Air:

Something most people will not say is this. At this point Palin is not indebted to any special interests. She has made no deals for cash, no quid pro quo. all of her money more or less has come form small donors, she funded her 2010 campaign with small doners, she is funding this RV tour with small donations etc. She owes nothing to no special interest yet. She can do what she wants if she gets the nomination. And that more than anything is what scares the power brokers. they don’t have a leash ove rher because she doesn’t need them yet…

Precisely – and they are afraid of her. The entire Ruling Class – including the GOP part of it. They are frightened out of their wits that she – or someone like her – will get in to power and not give a hoot about the system.

Remember why they fought and what they died for:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. – Abraham Lincoln

Heck of a job, Barry. Of course, our liberals would say that if we’d only spent another three trillion it all would be better…

HAT TIP: Zero Hedge

From the AP:

There’s less money this summer for hotel rooms, surfboards and bathing suits. It’s all going into the gas tank.

High prices at the pump are putting a squeeze on the family budget as the traditional summer driving season begins. For every $10 the typical household earns before taxes, almost a full dollar now goes toward gas, a 40 percent bigger bite than normal.

Households spent an average of $369 on gas last month. In April 2009, they spent just $201. Families now spend more filling up than they spend on cars, clothes or recreation. Last year, they spent less on gasoline than each of those things…

The recent drop in gasoline prices will help on this, but I believe the reprieve is temporary. This is because the Federal Reserve will, in my view, likely do some sort of “quantitative easing” after the current round ends in June…just can’t afford, in the bankster view, a risk to Obama’s re-election effort. Stop the money printing and we slide back in to full-blown recession…so, something will be done to keep the “free” money flowing to the banks…and thus to commodities, like oil. The bottom line, though, is that people are having to spend more for the basics than they did before – and for some people the amount they spend for the necessities is coming out of a lower overall budget. This means that there is less money to spend on non-essentials…like vacations, new cars and a replacement washer/dryer.

The damage is in large measure already done – just as the damage of $4 a gallon gasoline in 2008 didn’t show up for several months, so will this current bit of damage not show up in the official statistics for a little while. Think of the Spring’s run up in gasoline prices as a sudden tax increase – and a tax increase which fell most heavily on the poor and middle class. The worst part of it is that this was generated by an effort to save the wealth of those who have the very most – and, yes, it was a bi-partisan effort, but it was massively advanced by liberals like Obama; the GOP, for the most part, seems to have learned its lesson. The Democrats haven’t – or, at least, they simply don’t care because their entire focus is on winning the White House in 2012, and if it takes policies which will bankrupt us in 2013, it is a price they are willing to have us pay.

I’m telling ya, boys and girls, the President is being held in ever greater contempt by the American people. Not only can we beat him, we can beat him very easily…if we nominate someone who is a stark contrast and who will get down in the trenches and fight. Its really a matter of winning with Cain/Palin/Santorum/Palenty/Etc or losing with a McCain retread…

HAT TIP: PJ Tatler

From The Aspen Times:

Aspen Mountain will reopen for skiing this weekend with a better base depth of snow on Memorial Day than it had on New Year’s Day.

The base depth has hovered around 70 inches at the mountaintop since the Aspen Skiing Co. announced last week it will extend the skiing season. The base was 38 inches on Jan. 1…

Meanwhile, the average high temperature for Las Vegas, NV on May 29th is 93 degrees – the forecast high for tomorrow is 67.