Blogs For Victory

Nothing good, to be sure – from NRO’s The Corner:

…Cheragh Daily also alleges that local authorities were complicit in the jail break. “Even if digging the tunnel was not a scenario to free the terrorists from prison as concessions to [Taliban] leaders, we cannot rule out involvement of powerbrokers and influential hands in the incident.” Ridiculing Hamid Karzai’s conciliatory approach to the Taliban, the paper asks the president to explain whether the escapees were “foreign elements” or “dissatisfied brothers.” The paper warns that all escapees will “return to their trenches and continue to kill defenseless Afghan people and troops.” Afghan daily Hasht-e Sobh writes that the escape of Taliban fighters could “boost the morale of the Taliban and weaken the confidence of security forces.”

Daily Afghanistan says the Afghan government has lost credibility and is riddled with corruption and bribery. To mask its incompetence, the paper writes, the government resorts to “complicated and dangerous” policies, referring to the government’s “one-sided” reconciliation efforts with the Taliban. It alleges that the Taliban and foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated the “senior ranks of the security apparatus.”…

It could be, of course, that Karzai is calculating the results of a US withdrawal – which is supposed to start this summer – and is simply covering his bases. Believing that if he goes easy on the Taliban, they’ll go easy on him when he’s no longer backed by direct US military aid. This would be a foolish hope on the part of Karzai or, indeed, any other Afghan leader. The Taliban are in it for the long haul and are playing for keeps. The best place for such captives – especially those rated most dangerous – is in Guantanamo Bay. But even though Obama won’t close it down (at least, not until after election day), he’s not willing to start filling it back up, again…another example of liberal fantasies wrecking any chance of rational policy.

Progress is being made in Afghanistan – you just don’t get to hear about it much because (a) the Obama Administration isn’t keen to talk about what is happening there and (b) the MSM no longer needs to keep a running tally of American dead because the President is no longer Republican. This is turning out to be a close run thing – can the military win this thing before Obama (and, now, the Afghan government) loses it? I hope our troops will pull it off – but I worry that even if we’re just an inch away from victory, Obama will pull the plug rather than risk the war going on in to the 2012 election campaign.

I mean, seriously; no rational person can argue in favor of our continued membership in this corrupt, moribund relic of the post-WWII era – from PJ Tatler:

Unless something intervenes to stop it, Syria is about to become a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council. It’s not necessary to belabor the absurdity of such a development, or the moral vacuity of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s refusal to discourage Syria’s election: “It’s a matter for the states,” he says. American opposition is likely but, on this matter, we have no veto…

The Syrian government is currently massacring their own people – and the UN is going to put that very same government on the human rights panel. This is the same thing as putting the Mafia in charge of fighting organized crime. It just makes no sense – each and every nation which either votes in favor of or abstains from voting on this is morally bankrupt…and I mean right down to the core. You have to be a complete cretin to think that Syria should be on this council…but, there they go.

Get us out of the UN. Get us out today. Have nothing to do with it – anyone who is involved in the UN is morally degraded.

Bit of news from The Pelican Post:

Academics and business leaders claim that the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), passed last year, has not corrected the underlying problem within the student loan system. Specifically, lax lending standards and artificially low interest rates for government subsidized loans exacerbate tuition increases, while academic achievement has remained stagnant.

SAFRA eliminated federally subsidized loans, instead using all federal student loan funding for direct loans. But continued easy money policies and growing applications provide little incentive for the government or universities to keep college tuition in check…

The reason SAFRA hasn’t cured the “underlying problem” is because the “underlying problem” isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. The whole purpose behind student loans is to allow colleges and universities to charge more than the market will bear. Think of it like this: back in the past, to choose a career in education was to choose a path of genteel poverty. Every now and again an academic could strike it rich, but most of them didn’t make too much money. For most academics, this was fine..their purpose was to provide education and, in general, expand the limits of human knowledge. But right about the time the baby boomers started to enter college careers, it all changed. All of a sudden just being a well-regarded scholar wasn’t enough…there had to be fame and fortune. But how can you get fame and fortune out of college? Its not like they make a product everyone wants and needs; the pool of customers just didn’t generate enough revenue…what to do? Presto! Student loans.

Student loans, you see, de-coupled going to school from the cost of going to school. If the students really had to pay for it, out of pocket, fewer would go – and those who did go would be more willing to take 6 or 7 years to get a degree rather than rush it through in 4 years. Right now, the most irresponsible person imaginable – an 18 year old kid – is placed in front of a college admissions sales rep (that is what they really are) and told all of the wonderful things which will come his way if he gets a college degree…and don’t worry about paying for it, you can just sign here and you’ll have a loan. And you don’t have to start paying back the loan until after you graduate. And don’t worry about that payback thing, because our college graduates earn, on average, $100,000 per year! It all sounds so good…and how is an 18 year old to fight against that? Heck, for his whole life in primary school he has been told that college is the thing you must do…now its being offered to him, with no initial pain and with bright pictures painted of the future.

Left out of the sales pitch are such things as the fact that if, on average, the graduates make 100 grand a year, this means that half the graduates make less than that. Older, warier people realize this…but, then again, we’re not the one’s being recruited in to college. Also left out of it is the fact that an 18 year old will very likely live another 60 years…no rush to get a degree. Quite all right if you get it at 25 rather than 22; you don’t need to borrow money…and, hey, can’t you do at least some of the courses at the community college or other places where the cost is vastly reduced? Such bits of wisdom are not imparted – they would, in fact, blow the whole scam.

The scam requires an ever larger number of kids being conned in to borrowing an ever higher amount of money to pay for the product. If the colleges can’t keep this up, then a whole lot of professors, administrators and various edu-crat parasites will have to be let go or suffer pay cuts (and so desperately do the people in education fight for their place at the trough that they’ll accuse a Republican of murder if he proposes spending cuts). And, guess what?, know what happened last year? Well, Uncle Sam took the whole shebang over. That’s right – as kids are suckered in to borrowing ever more money in order to obtain education which may or may not provide a high income, they’ll be owing ever more money to the government. Money which can never be discharged in bankruptcy, by the way – and that is no matter how broke the kids wind up.

This is the creation of a class of people who will be both dependent upon government and servile to same. After all, start bucking government demands and you might not get the student loans you have been convinced you need. Worse, if you worked out a payment plan in order to bear the burden of the debts you wracked up, how would you like to put that payment plan at risk by complaining about government policies?

There is a solution to this – cancel the student loan program. First off, it will free up the kids from potential government tyranny. Secondly, by taking away the the easy money aspect of higher education it will force colleges to reduce tuition charges. Finally, by making the kids directly pay for college (or, at least, by forcing them to earn scholarships) it will make the education more valuable to them – they will cease taking so many “soft” courses which allow you to cruise through school but don’t have much economic application post-college. We’ll get a higher percentage of graduates being doctors and engineers, fewer being students of post-feminist deconstruction theory or whatever garbage it is they’re pushing these days. An added benefit to all this that those who teach in the “soft” courses will be cut down in number and lose influence – and those are the hard-core leftists who have polluted education and made it anti-intellectual, anti-American and anti-human in character.

Whether or not we’ll have the courage to do this remains to be seen. After all, if you propose this you’ll be painted as “anti-education”. This is because liberals have set the terms of debate here – the only way to be pro-education is to agree to spend ever more money on it. But as soon as someone shows some guts and goes ahead and does it, the change will happen. Education costs will come down, education quality will go up, there will be less debt upon our people…all sorts of good things will come, all sorts of bad things will end. And the person or party who does it will reap the reward…but only if they show the initial courage.

Mission accomplished, Mr. President, mission accomplished.

HAT TIP: PJ Tatler

Seems that we already are:

HAT TIP: The American Catholic

According to the IRS, the bottom 50% of wage earners in the United States paid $27.9 billion in income taxes in 2008. The top 50% paid just over $1 trillion. The top 20% paid $890 billion. The top 10% paid $721 billion. The top 5% paid $605.7 billion. The top 1% paid $392 billion. Bottom line it – the bottom 50% paid less than 10% of the amount of income taxes paid by the top 1%. We are taxing “the rich”, then, right? Well, in a manner of speaking.

The problem with “tax the rich” is this:

We’re not really taxing them. We’re taxing high income earners, which are not necessarily the same as the super rich. Think fast – when someone says “rich” do you think of Bill Gates, or your local dentist? Obama and the liberals want you to think “Gates”, but they are going after the dentist.

Liberals refuse to get it through their thick skulls. When Obama says “we’re going to tax people making over $250,000.00 a year so those millionaires and billionaires will pay their fair share”, our liberals hear “millionaires and billionaires will pay their fair share”. It just doesn’t compute with them that Obama is leaping from “250,000 a year” to “millionaires and billionaires”. The reason for this is that millionaires and billionaires don’t have a lot of income – if any – exposed to the tax man. Moderately well-off people do. Obama is saying he wants to tax the rich when what he’s really doing is proposing to tax the upper middle class.

The reason for this is because the millionaires and billionaires don’t have enough money. Recently it was pointed out that if you confiscated every last cent from the rich, you could fund our government for about half a year – and that would be a one-time shot.

In the chart above, that trillion dollars extracted in federal income taxes doesn’t come from millionaires and billionaires – it mostly comes from middle class to upper middle class people. While a Bill Gates has $40 billion and that is, indeed, a lot of money…a million people who make $250,000 a year have $250,000,000,000 – more than 6 times Gates’ money, and it is available year after year rather than as a one-time pot of gold. Do you see, liberals? It makes no sense for Obama to tax Gates…he doesn’t have enough money. Of course, if Obama went and said “hey, we’re just going to tax the middle and upper middle class people because they’ve got the money” it doesn’t sound as good as “make the rich pay their fair share”. The truth shall set you free – though as it will also screw up Democrat tax plans, it isn’t welcomed to the debate.

Additionally, if you actually went after the super rich you’d wind up with a lot of angry, super-rich people. Super rich people who are angry with you don’t donate to your campaign; they might even donate to the other guy’s campaign; they become un-interested in shelling out big bucks for your post-Administration speaking engagements; they don’t want to donate to your Presidential library; they might be unwilling to employ your former aides in well-paid, corporate sinecures. Just no upside there.

And this is why I advocate our side doing the liberals one better – calling their bluff, as it were. Propose to tax the rich – the real rich; those with wealth in excess of $5 million. Don’t even look at income – do you have more than $5 million? Then out of every dollar over that, we want a dime. So, someone with a net wealth of $10 million would pay an additional $500,000 in tax (though, as you might recall, I put various supply side provisions in there to encourage them to “hide” their money in wealth-generating, private enterprise). I want to see the look on George Soros face when Obama sends him a tax bill for $1.4 billion – he of the class warfare, “yeah let’s tax the rich” liberalism; no more faking it, George…we’re really going to tax you! We could crush this class warfare nonsense now and forever…if we just call their bluff and propose what they will never, ever agree to…a real “tax the rich” plan.

Now the Asian Development Bank notices that, by golly!, prices are rising and they may even have a bad effect on people…especially poor people! Who woulda thunk it? From Bloomberg:

Asia faces a “serious setback” from surging oil and food prices that are fueling inflation and threatening to push millions into extreme poverty, the Asian Development Bank said.

The region’s growth may be reduced by as much as 1.5 percentage points should the pace of gains in oil and food prices seen so far this year persist for the rest of 2011, the Manila-based lender said in a statement today. Domestic food inflation in many Asian economies has averaged 10 percent this year, an increase in prices that may push an additional 64 million people into extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.25 a day, it said…

So, 64 million more people in Asia may be shoved under a buck and a quarter a day to live on. Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you that the Asian economy is bound to predominate…$1.25 gets you a soda at the convenience store here in America. In a lot of Asia, that is what you live on for a whole day. The Asian economy has done some good things but for the most part is is a scam – an exploitation of people in order to serve the needs of the global financial system, which has to keep costs low so returns are high enough to “beat the street” in the major financial centers. Of course, most of what Asians make is increasingly low quality crap…so, they are not really building as much wealth as the official statistics show.

But, here’s the kicker – some Asians have gotten quite fabulously wealthy in this economic bubble while most Asians have been able to hang on…now the people hanging on are finding their food and fuel costs skyrocketing while those who were raking it in are about to lose a massive amount of paper wealth as various bubbles (real estate, especially) go POP! This will not be pretty.

Not that we’re likely to do too well out of this – we are still (and will remain for the foreseeable future) the pivot of the global economy. But our problem is that we’ve ham strung ourselves. Taxes and regulations prevent Americans from creating wealth, but our large population and still relatively wealthy (compared, especially, to Asia) people provide the demand-engine for the world. But without new wealth, we cannot continue to import as much as we have been…and with prices rising and our wages flat or down, our ability to buy what the world wants – even on credit – will become increasingly crimped. Nice little economic death cycle, isn’t it? They need to sell to us in order to live, but the only way they can sell is if we keep up our de-industrialization policies…but if we don’t make/mine/grow stuff, we just don’t have the extra wealth to buy in sufficient quantity; not from them, and not even from ourselves.

The cure for us is easier – kick out Obama and the liberals and start creating wealth again. Asia’s problem is trickier because their “growth” for the past 30 years has been fueled by our wealth-destruction coupled with borrowing. Asia will find, after the crash, that there never really was a quick and easy path to wealth…just as it took us 100 years to rise from agrarian backwater to industrial power, so it will take them. You really can’t jam it in to 30 years and get a long term, good result.

It will be a long, hard road out of this fake money and borrowing mess – just get ready for it.

From National Journal:

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, whose outspoken libertarian views and folksy style made him a cult hero during two previous presidential campaigns, will announce on Tuesday that he’s going to try a third time.

Sources close to Paul, who is in his 12th term in the House, said he will unveil an exploratory presidential committee, a key step in gearing up for a White House race. He will also unveil the campaign’s leadership team in Iowa, where the first votes of the presidential election will be cast in caucuses next year…

Paul is 75 years old, so this will have to be his last effort – he’ll have to go with W. C. Fields advice: “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. And then quit; no sense being a d*****d fool about it”.

But he is a worthwhile entrant – libertarianism is running strong in America as we head towards 2012 and Paul can very often state “I told you so” about a lot of things. Additionally, he’ll force the rest of the field to edge towards small government and genuine reform, lest Paul run away with the vital TEA Party element of the center/right coalition.

From ABC:

A record 49 percent of Americans now disapprove of President Obama’s handling of the situation in Afghanistan, up 8 points since January. And those who disapprove “strongly” outnumber strong approvers by nearly a 2-1 margin.

With Obama holding his monthly national security meeting on Afghanistan today, the results show a significant drop in the president’s approval rating on handling the issue, down 12 points in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll from a year ago.

The change follows an ABC/Post poll last month in which a new low, 31 percent, said the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting. Sixty-four percent said it is not worth fighting, with 49 percent feeling that way “strongly,” both record highs in ABC/Post polls…

Public support atrophies for the Afghan campaign based partially upon the length and cost of the effort, but also on the growing assumption that the Afghan people are not worth fighting for.

The flaw in foreign and military Obamunism is the clear lack of conviction on the part of Obama for such efforts. It just doesn’t seem to matter to him if we win or lose. As long as Afghanistan (and Libya, for that matter) don’t promise to be a 2012 head ache, Obama is willing to just let matters drift. But drift in the executive is deadly – people are dying and there is not only no end in sight, but there doesn’t seem to be even so much as a desire to make an end. Obama won’t fight full tilt, nor will be engage in absolute surrender. We’re drifting – and the people are perceiving this and wondering why the blood of our best and bravest should be shed for such half-efforts?

Maybe high speed rail isn’t such a good idea.

Have you ever considered what Christ was doing on Saturday?

Standing up to the Islamists in Germany.

Have we mentioned lately just how lousy Obama is as President?

Liberalism at work: Butcher babies for a living, make Time’s Top 100.

Poll: 55% resigned to a quagmire in Libya.

Right now, Obama is exciting people the way a car with its brakes cut excites people.