Blogs For Victory

As is usual these days, one horrible thing tends to drive out another. We’ve had a pretty long string of disasters lately, natural and man-made, so it is easy to forget this hideous things which were going on just before the latest bout. George Clooney and John Prendergast over at the Washington Post remind us of what has been happening in Sudan:

…the list of dishonored agreements and massive human rights crimes in Sudan is shocking in scope. In Darfur, the Khartoum regime has cleared millions from their lands, allowing ethnic groups allied with the government to move into the deserted areas. In the oilfield areas of southern Sudan in the 1990s, the regime strategically killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of indigenous residents to facilitate Chinese oil exploitation. In the Nuba mountains during the late 1980s and 1990s, the vast majority of locals were forcibly displaced by Sudanese government attacks, and hundreds of thousands died.

The international community threatened real consequences during and after these incidents and after other targeted crimes against civilian populations. But the consequences never came…

Clooney and Prendergast are, of course, good liberals and thus don’t advocate – at least right now – any military action against the Sudan regime. To that I ask, why not? Both men clearly know what a bestial regime it is, both know that no peace agreement will be honored by the regime. So, why not demand a punitive expedition against the regime? Because we’re afraid – plain and simple, we’re just afraid to do it.

This is not, by the way, a liberal or conservative thing – we’re all afraid. Right down to the ground, we’re cowards – we got a yellow streak a mile wide running down our backs. People have been, are and will be butchered by the Sudanese and other such regimes and we’ll do nothing, or next to nothing, about it (Libya being a demonstration of “next to nothing”). But it isn’t physical cowardice that holds us back – after all, even if any one of us does suffer from that, we’ve clearly got the men and women who can do the job. No, our cowardice is moral – as we have become a less and less moral people we have become progressively less willing to do the right thing.

Oh, sure – here come the objections. From some conservatives we’ll get the “we can’t nation-build” nonsense, while from some liberals will come the “we can’t be an arrogant power” silliness. From others there will be the objection that we’ll have another Iraq or Afghanistan on our hands. Yadda, yadda, yadda…all designed to ensure that we don’t do what we know is right. Remember, people are being mass murdered – women and children as well as men (and the women often raped in to the bargain). Suppose some group settled itself upon your community and started butchering all the people and burning the town? What would you do? What, moreover, would you demand that your fellow citizens do to help you? You know darn well you’d want it stopped…and you’d fully expect your fellow Americans to rush to your aid. But it changes because the people being killed are far away and foreign?

We know darn well it doesn’t. “They are foreign” is just a different way of saying “I’m too craven to help, so I’ll just look away and pretend it isn’t happening”. Right is right – we are supposed to do what we can, when we can. God doesn’t expect us to solve all problems in the world…but any problem we can solve, we should solve. And, yes, we should always see first if there is a peaceful way out. But once we’ve tried and tried and tried and the evil people keep being evil, then it becomes not a matter of “should” we go to war, but only a matter of “can we?”. If we have sufficient forces then we should do it – invade and conquer, and then kill all those responsible for the butchery…and without being too particular about rules of evidence. In such an action we are teaching a lesson – we would be instructing barbarians on the rules of civilization and that there comes a time when we’ll have enough of their beastly business, and we’ll start killing them all.

This is what moral men and women do – or, at least, used to do. More than a century of moral erosion and now its not something which is done. And, after all, they’ll soon be starting up the preliminaries for next year’s American Idol and Celebrity Apprentice…we’ve got things to do and places to go. So, who cares if some poor girl in Sudan is going to be raped and murdered today as a part of official government policy?

Heard Rush on this very point on Friday morning as I was driving out to Pahrump – the Virginian neatly encapsulates it:

In Obama we have a candidate with a record that includes:

20% under/unemployment.

$4.00 – $5.00 gasoline.

Skyrocketing food prices.

Dropping home prices…

Skyrocketing deficits measured in trillions, not billions.

ObamaCare that most people hate.

Promises of higher taxes.

Medicare going bankrupt.

Social security going bankrupt…

I would add to that an emboldened Islamism, Russia and China treating us as if we didn’t matter in the world and alienated allies. We’ve also got in Obama, himself, a man who is becoming an increasingly negligible quantity in affairs…other than those still blinded by The One, people are increasingly contemptuous of Obama. I hear it just walking down the street and listening to people talk. For instance, lots of Presidents go and visit foreign lands…but there is anger out there that Obama was (badly) toasting the Queen while Americans were suffering unique and devastating loss in Joplin.

People are tuning him out – and I think that Democrat leaders (if not Obama, himself) realize this. Their talk of being delighted at the prospect of a Palin nomination is just so much bluster. They are worried that their man is exceptionally vulnerable – and they know they have to make the issue of 2012 anything but Obama…if Democrats run on Obama’s record, they’ll lose; and they know it. They need to run, instead, on a theory that whomever the GOP nominates is so bad that even four more years of Obama is better…a hard sell, indeed.

From Michael Barone – Texas showing us how America should be governed:

…In those 10 years, Texas gained 732,800 private sector jobs, far ahead of the number two and three states, Arizona (90,200) and Nevada (90,000). The nation overall lost more than 2 million private sector jobs, with the biggest losses coming in California (623,700), Michigan (619,200) and Ohio (460,900)…

…The lesson of the previous decade seems clear: if you take a previously prosperous and creative state and subject it to high taxes and intrusive regulations, it loses 5% of its private sector jobs; if you take a previously somewhat less prosperous and creative state and govern it with low taxes and light regulation, it gains 9% more jobs, even as the nation’s economy is suffering…

By 2030, unless California gets its act together, Texas will be America’s most populous State..and it may come a lot sooner because while California had population growth 2000-2010, my bet is that most of it came before 2005 when things started to fall apart in that State. Could be, though we won’t know until 2020, that California is already starting to lose population. California is becoming like New York – governed by an entrenched, liberal Ruling Class…and the results will be like New York: islands of extreme prosperity surrounding by a sea of decay (Texas population grew by 18.8% over the past 10 years, California by 9.1%…New York by 3%).

You can’t be successful if your policies are liberal – it really is as simple as that. The more liberalism there is in government policy, the worse it will be for the governed. Liberalism is, as I have long said, based upon a lie – that Mankind is perfectible by the actions of men – and as it is based upon a falsehood it cannot get it right. Not in the long term, not in the sense of having continual success in making life better. It can make a splash from time to time and can even seem like its working over a few year period, but eventually it falls apart because it is false.

In the end, liberalism is a selfish compact with death – a deal in which those who are the self-selected elites get to rule and be rich while the people are drugged with welfare and pornography (of various types – not just pictures of naked women, but the pornography of greed, envy, instant gratification, voyeurism, etc; liberals call all this stuff “freedom”). The longer liberalism predominates, the worse things get – the more arrogant and elitist become the rulers, the more apathetic and grasping become the people. And that is why we must crush it completely – it isn’t enough to shove it in to political minority status, it must be torn out by the roots and ejected from American political life. Americans should argue between conservatism and libertarianism…liberalism has no place here as it is hateful of all that America stands for.

And we can do that – it must be remembered that liberalism retains its strength via government power. Take away that power – and the taxpayer funding that goes with it – and liberalism will dry up and blow away. No one seriously supports it…no one is going to man the barricades to preserve the Department of Commerce, or funding for NPR, or diversity grants to a college. As long as there is someone passing out the cash for those things, there will be people lining up to get it…but once the taxpayer funding of liberalism is gone, liberalism will be gone for good.

The really good news is that the fact that we have Texas and California governed so starkly differently – conservatism/libertarianism in Texas, liberalism in California – will demonstrate conclusively that liberalism is a complete failure, thus giving us the chance to really get rid of it for good and all. True, the task of a generation – but a task already well underway.

From the Wall Street Journal:

…If the Democrats’ millionaire surtax were to happen—and were added to other tax increases already enacted last year and other leading tax hike ideas on the table this year—this could leave the U.S. with a combined federal and state top tax rate on earnings of 62%. That’s more than double the highest federal marginal rate of 28% when President Reagan left office in 1989. Welcome back to the 1970s…

Our Democrats will, as usual, try to sell this as a tax on The Rich – this will be to convince people that they are going after Bill Gates and other bazillionaires. The truth is a bit different – naturally, because Democrats can’t do anything without lying about it. If they really wanted to tax The Rich, they’d propose not an income tax, but a wealth tax. They would impose an annual surcharge of 1% on all cash, stocks and bonds in excess of $5 million dollars. Then they’d be going after the wealth of Bill Gates…but also after the wealth of George Soros. And thus Democrats will never do that – they’ll never, that is, do anything to harm the wealth of the fat cat liberal financial sharks who donate heavily to the Democrat party.

If the Democrats got their way, these taxes allegedly on The Rich would actually fall most heavily on the middle class. And not just any, old part of the middle class but that part of the middle class which is the best educated, most enterprising and most useful to the American economy. If you want to state the truth, then the Democrats propose to protect the super rich while punishing the most hard working and productive part of our citizenry. And that is what we GOPers must make clear – and my plan, as stated a while ago, is to propose in Congress that surcharge on wealth…see how far it gets and when it goes down to flaming defeat, we’ll be able to educate the American people on how big a lie it is when Democrats say they want to “make the rich pay their fair share”.

It is time to call them out – to show the American people that the Democrats are just part of a corrupt Ruling Class with no other interest than personal power and wealth. They suck up the wealth of the most productive citizens so that they can live fat without having to work for a living. That is the true class war we’re having – and their side is winning it because we have failed to demonstrate to the American people just how false the Democrats are. But we can change it, if we but try – if we just have the courage to really box them in and force them to defend the most indefensible part of their program.

Will we do that? Sure, if we find the right person to lead us in to 2012…if we find a fighter who doesn’t care about hurt feelings or getting re-elected. Time will tell if we find such a person….but I think that person is out there, and I think I know who it is…

From CNBC:

Pending sales of existing U.S. homes dropped far more than expected in April to touch a seven-month low, a trade group said on Friday, dealing a blow to hopes of a recovery in the housing market.

The National Association of Realtors Pending Home Sales Index dropped 11.6 percent to 81.9 in April, the lowest since September…

And it was, you guessed it, “unexpected”…but I really do wonder, by whom? I mean, I’m not some real estate genius, but I figured it out that the likely outcome of all that has happened is continued recession in the housing market. It isn’t rocket science…but the “experts” were predicting a 1% drop. They were only off by a factor of 11 or so.

Housing won’t get better until the backlog of “shadow inventory” is cleared out and our economy starts to significantly create wealth, again. As long as the government and banks are playing mess-around with the backlog and as long as taxes and regulations remain anti-growth, this will not improve. To nutshell it, as long as Obama is in the White House and Bernanke is at the Federal Reserve, the economy will not improve to the point where the housing market will recover.

Once again have a busy weekend coming up – I’ll try to get some good stuff up for you all later, but meanwhile enjoy the chance to rant about whatever comes to mind.

Yes, they can! From Central Coast News:

On Wednesday, Soquel High School suspended at least two students. The students say it’s because of allegations, they’re part of a white supremacist group.

“All the girls wore pink, all the sports guys wore tank tops,” says Soquel High Senior Mikey Donnelly. “We were all going to wear white so that was the plan. Just wear white t-shirts to identify ourselves and look back and say that was our group of friends right there.”

Soquel High Senior Mikey Donnelly wore a white t-shirt for his senior class photo Tuesday. About 10 of his friends did the same. That decision may seem harmless. But Soquel High suspended Donnelly for three days because of it.

Donnelly said the school told him people were offended and intimidated by his group, claiming they’re a white supremacist gang…

One of the “white supremacists” is Asian…and, yes, he was suspended.

First off, even if the kids were part of a white supremacist gang, we’re not supposed to be punishing people for expressing opinions – even and especially if they are opinions we disagree with.

Secondly, the first time I saw gang colors was when I went to junior high school – that was back in 1977. I got used to seeing the “uniform” of a hispanic street gang, seeing gang graffiti and even used to being attacked by a roving band of junior-league thugs (as did a friend of mine). Political correctness even way back then prevented the school authorities from doing the logical things…but now all of a sudden we’re after the first obscure sign of something which may possibly at some point if a lot of things come together work out to be a the start of a gang-like group? No, I don’t think so – I’ll bet dollars to donuts that genuine gang emblems can be found on some of the kids in that school and no one does anything.

This is what liberalism brings – craven cowardice coupled with a refusal to think. Suppose someone did go to the school authorities and say they were offended by the kids in the white shirts…someone with some guts would have tossed the complainers out of the office; someone with the ability to think would realize that such complaints weren’t about the kids in the shirts, but an attempt to gain political muscle on the part of the complainers. No one things, no one has any courage…and so kids who weren’t doing anything illegal or immoral are suspended.

Liberalism must be crushed. It must be done away with, once and for all. It is a poison – a world view based upon lies and sustained by lies. It is incompatible with American ideals. It has to go – and if it takes a revolution to do it, then that is ultimately what we’ll have to do.

HAT TIP: The Other McCain

Good move by our side – from the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. Senate Republicans late Thursday declared victory in their effort to use a procedural maneuver to thwart the president from making any recess appointments during Congress’ Memorial Day break.

Congressional aides say the Senate will not go on a formal recess but instead will technically stay in session, making it highly unlikely that the president would use his constitutional power to make appointments while the Senate is on break…

This is good for two reasons:

1. While Obama is appointing, for the most part, a group of corrupt, leftist hacks to fill his Administration positions, he reserves his kookiest and most corrupt for “czar” and recess appointments. We’re avoiding the worst of the worst by doing this.

2. We have to press the Democrats to vote on as much of the Obama agenda as possible. Nothing would please Reid more than to not hold a single vote between now and election day, 2012…any vote he takes he’ll either have to see his side rejecting Obama or going along with an increasingly unpopular President. The more votes, the better the advantage for us.

So, don’t get too discouraged out there, GOPers…we do have some pretty good guys and gals in the House and Senate these days. Not nearly as many as we need, but we can correct that next year…meanwhile, some good work is getting done.

The thinking is that her tour means, for sure, she’s getting in…and there is, indeed, a good chance of it. But one must not be too hasty – it is always vital to remember that Sarah Palin is one of the smartest people in politics these days…it remains to be seen if she Reaganesque in her abilities, but she tends to leave all Democrats, most MSMers and quite a lot of GOPers in the dust.

Personally, I think this tour is a bit of a rope-a-dope – the MSM will breathlessly report on her, Democrats will go back in to attack mode, the more dim bulb, RINO part of the GOP will fire up the sneers…and then she’ll end her tour and do nothing…for a while. Back in to her Spring retreat to review the tour and the message and then make the final call about getting in to the race.

The key for Sarah Palin is timing – her name recognition is 100% among GOPers and nearly that among everyone else. She doesn’t need to introduce herself – but she does need to not be the Sarah Palin of 2008, just as Reagan in 1980 couldn’t just be a repeat of Reagan ’76. For a politician it is a matter of finding that element which turns a spark in to a conflagration. It can’t be just manufactured, it has to be coaxed and massaged in to existence. My bet is that Palin is best off announcing as late as possible – late enough, indeed, to make a loss in Iowa unimportant (it takes a lot of retail politics to win Iowa…I don’t think Palin can do it because anywhere she goes she’ll be thronged by the MSM and a host of fans as well as a band of haters…she’d never get the chance to really do Iowa politics; it is lesser known candidates who can use Iowa as a springboard, as Carter did in 1976). If she announces late after being out of the public eye for a couple months, it becomes a dramatic, late-breaking story…the kind of thing which can immediately build up momentum and allow her to do well in New Hampshire and win in South Carolina.

But, what do I know? We’ll see how it comes out…

From Politico:

The budget proposal released by the White House back in February didn’t win a single vote in the Senate on Wednesday— the final tally was 0-97. Senate Republicans pushed for the vote as a counterpoint to the defeat of Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan…

I mean, come on – not a single Democrat would get out there and vote for it. Why? Because no one wants to be on record in favor of that as 2012 approaches. Shows how entirely bogus the Obama budget really is…such a nauseating pile of dog poop that not even Democrats will vote for it.