Blogs For Victory

From the Wall Street Journal:

A new state law has emboldened the Detroit mayor and schools chief to take a more aggressive stance toward public unions as the city leaders try to mop up hundreds of millions of dollars in red ink.

Robert Bobb, the head of the Detroit Public Schools, late last week sent layoff notices to the district’s 5,466 salaried employees, including all of its teachers, a preliminary step in seeking broad work-force cuts to deal with lower enrollment…

…Mr. Bobb, already an emergency financial manager for the struggling and shrinking public school system, is getting further authority under a measure signed into law March 17 that broadens state powers to intervene in the finances and governance of struggling municipalities and school districts. This could enable Mr. Bobb to void union contracts, sideline elected school-board members, close schools and authorize charter schools…

Unions have utterly bankrupted the city of Detroit – as well as so many other cities (and some States) in the United States. And the corruption involved in the way unions gained control of elected politicians injected a terrible amount of irresponsibility and downright immorality in to our State and local politics. Something must be done to curb the unions – in Michigan, the decision has been to enact a law which empowers emergency financial managers to abrogate elected government and essentially re-do the entire system. I have to say, I don’t like this.

This is not an easy issue. What do you do when confronted with a political system which is so divorced from reality and so insensitive to the needs of the people that no improvement can be made? Do you allow it to continue – using an apathetic, bought or otherwise corrupted electorate to maintain itself in power and wealth while some of our greatest cities become sewers? Or do you just cut right across consent of the governed? Long time readers might recall a solution I had for Detroit – take the abandoned property out of city authority (and I mean really abandoned – property which, say, the city hadn’t been able to collect taxes on for 10 years), turn it in to, essentially, a Federal Territory and apply a revised “homestead act” to it; turning it over to any private citizen who would (a) stay on the property and (b) improve it for a period of at least five years. The idea was to turn wastelands in to productive property, thereby leading to a general revitalization of Detroit without the corrupt government being able to destroy things. Not the best solution, perhaps, but one which still allows for a maximum of local authority without that authority having the full ability to destroy.

This is a far cry from just announcing, one fine day, to the citizens of an area that their votes at the last election are null and void and a ruler has been appointed over them, no appeals allowed. It just rankles – and one imagines Barack Obama, armed with such power, abrogating the power of the government of the State of Nevada. While it is licit for a central government to intervene when a local government has proven incapable of ensuring justice, I worry greatly about the precedent and would prefer, if we are to do this sort of thing, at all, that any such laws have a sunset provision on them…and that any usurpation of local government be for, say, no more than two years (there is a precedent in republican and democratic governance for the appointment of a dictator in times of emergency…the Romans, especially, developed this power…and it did work for centuries; but not forever, as history shows…it is a dangerous thing to do).

In the end, the unions and the corrupt political establishment brought this upon themselves. One only has to note that the city of Detroit, with a population of 713,000, has an annual budget just about the same as the State of Nevada, population 2,600,000. It takes a gigantic amount of irresponsibility and corruption to get that much spending by that few people. And it further seems that the people of the city of Detroit either have no mind to change things, or don’t seem to mind societal disintegration. One way or another, change had to be made – it is highly regrettable that it was made this way, and we all need to think of a much better way to do it.

Gotta make sure we have as many abortions as possible, you know? From the Boston Herald:

A state-funded sex education Web site that tells teens an abortion is “much easier than it sounds” has drawn fire from outraged pro-lifers who say mariatalks.com is glossing over ugly truths, steering teens toward the controversial procedure and counseling them how to keep mom and dad in the dark.

“The commonwealth is using taxpayer money to tell kids how to get a secret abortion, and that’s wrong,” said Linda Thayer, a former Boston schoolteacher who is vice president for educational affairs of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, which this week took aim at the site…

The State can do this, but we can’t have a prayer before a high school football game? Such is the modern, liberal world view – killing is just an easy, convenient thing to do while prayer risks tumbling us straight to destruction.

This is why I say “no” to a truce on social issues. This is what liberals do – by every means which come to hand, they advance their cause. A State website which is allegedly there to provide basic information is being used to propagandize in favor of abortion. How much does anyone want to bet that it was a pro-abortion advocate who came up with the idea? They have to make money, they have to kill as many children as possible…never stop; never back down; keep pressing and pushing and taking everything you can. If 100 things are done and 99 of them stopped, 1 still went on. And then you do 100 more things. This is how liberalism – which has never been supported by a majority – has become predominant in the American Ruling Class.

We have to fight them all of the time and everywhere – never letting up for a minute. We have to start forcing them back – we have to start advancing 101 conservative thing for every 100 things they try. Find objections to every liberal program. File lawsuits against every liberal regulation. Investigate, harass and otherwise bother the liberals at every point possible – because if we don’t, they’ll keep advancing and we’ll find that while we thought we were heading for a conservative victory, they were building a Socialist America.

Do we want to win, or not? If we do, then no truce – not now, not ever.

Which, I know, doesn’t actually amount to “news”, but we must keep in mind just what they are – from Mediate:

Political humor website Wonkette has long been trending toward nihilistic snark for snark’s sake, but Jack Stuef’s column “honoring” Trig Palin’s birthday is about the most irredeemably vile, unfunny thing I’ve ever seen. As if jokes about Trig’s Down Syndrome aren’t bad enough on their own, Stuef goes the extra mile to pen kneeslappers about incest, child rape, and fetal alcohol syndrome. I don’t want to reproduce too much of it here, but this quote is fairly representative:

Today is the day we come together to celebrate the snowbilly grifter’s magical journey from Texas to Alaska to deliver to the America the great gentleman scholar Trig Palin. Is Palin his true mother? Or was Bristol? (And why is it that nobody questions who the father is? Because, either way, Todd definitely did it.)…

Can I get a show of hands out there on who thinks Mr. Palin has just been granted a license to beat the snot out of Stuef any time he likes? As long as Palin is modestly cautious (ie, does it in a red State), no jury would ever convict. Texas would probably be the best place to do it – there, he’s probably get an award.

What sort of diseased mind do you have to have to write something like that? I mean, seriously, is there any sense of shame or common decency in such a person? I guess not. Spend as much time as liberals do hating and after a while there is no sense – no judgment – which would bring such thoughts to a screeching halt before it made it to the page.

Just keep this in mind – this is what we’re dealing with: people who think like this. Remember that the next time someone says we need a “new tone” or that we should compromise.

UPDATE: Buycott Papa John’s! In the resulting fracas from the disgusting piece, a battle has developed over Papa John’s – they pulled their advertising from Wonkette after they were alerted to the article. Wonkette is now urging a boycott. I urge everyone to get a Papa John’s pizza some time this week.

…then this is one of the things to waste it on – from Politico:

For all the rhetoric about cutting government spending, NASA’s space mission remains sacred in Congress.

A handful of powerful lawmakers are so eager to see an American on the moon — or even Mars — that they effectively mandated NASA to spend “not less than” $3 billion for a new rocket project and space capsule in the 2011 budget bill signed by the president last week…

That $3 billion is 1/3 the cost of a Ford-class aircraft carrier. Three are projected right now, so we just put off the third one for a couple years and, presto!, the money is available for the space program and, at worst, the US Navy gets its third Ford two or three years later than expected. To me, the manned space program is a matter of national security – and every bit as important as our command of the seas. And as our command of the seas is absolute (China is set to launch their first carrier soon – but it is an old, Soviet carrier re-worked…China will pose no naval air threat to the United States for at least 10 more years; and even then only in limited form; it takes a generation to build a fleet air arm), I’m willing to forgo a bit on the seas in return for a bit in space (and, liberals, this is call prioritizing – you figure out what you really need and then you find the money for it…perhaps delaying some other thing you might want which is of less immediate importance).

We dare not let our manned space program atrophy – it is already bad enough that with the end of the shuttle program we will have no capability of putting a man in to space for some years. This is a terrible dereliction of duty on the part of our government as it allows time for China to catch up a bit. There is a time and a place to be cheap – manned space flight isn’t it. Cancel a few diversity coordinators, if you have to, but keep the rockets flying.

From the Wall Street Journal:

…Here are some Badger State numbers: Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide in 1973. The Wisconsin Department of Health has statewide figures on the annual number of abortions going back to 1975. Tot up the numbers through 1992, and you come up with 316,457.

Scott Walker won the governorship last year by a margin of 124,638. That may not be within the margin of abortion; after all, some of the missing 316,457 would have voted Republican had they existed, and many would not have voted.

But JoAnne Kloppenburg, the left-liberal state Supreme Court candidate who was supposed to save Wisconsin’s labor monopolies from Walker’s reforms, lost by just 7,316 votes, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (this figure is pending a possible futile recount). It’s almost inconceivable that the Roe effect alone is insufficient to account for Justice David Prosser’s victory…

Killing is really not the best policy prescription. On the whole, it seems that it is always better to have people alive rather than dead. This is, of course, on the understanding that we all must die, one day – but there does seem to be a negative effect in hurrying that date along.

Perhaps liberals will think this over a bit?

Sorry guys and girls, just couldn’t get together a good morning topic – feel free to discuss all the most important issues of the day. Such as…

1. Just how bad does Obama suck as President?

2. Could anyone, if they really tried, suck more?

3. If you took Jimmy Carter and combined him with Barack Obama, would a black hole of suckitude commence?

4. Is there any way we can clone Ronald Reagan?

5. Do nations age and die, or do they just get suddenly stupid after about 232 years?

Well, this is a bit frightening – from William H Gross over at PIMCO:

…Previous Congresses (and Administrations) have relied on the assumption that we can grow our way out of this onerous debt burden. Perhaps we could, if it was only $9.1 trillion, as shown in Chart 2. That would be 65% of GDP and well within reasonable ranges for sovereign debt burdens. But that is not the reality. As others, such as Pete Peterson of the Blackstone Group and Mary Meeker, have shown much better and for far longer than I, the true but unrecorded debt of the U.S. Treasury is not $9.1 trillion or even $11-12 trillion when Agency and Student Loan liabilities are thrown in, but $65 trillion more! This country appears to have an off-balance-sheet, unrecorded debt burden of close to 500% of GDP! We are out-Greeking the Greeks, dear reader…

Gross figures we have to have tax increases and/or benefit cuts to get out of this. I disagree – spending does need to be cut, but benefits do not need to take a hit. Taxation does need major reform, but rates actually have to become lower in some areas (especially on savings and investment in productive activities). But regardless of how you think we should get out of this, the glaring fact is that we’re in a heap of financial trouble.

Now, how can we cut spending without cutting benefits? Lots of ways. First off, whatever number of employees we have in the federal government, we can probably let half of them go. If those who remain say they can’t do the job with the lower staffing levels, then we fire them, too. And keep firing and hiring until we find the people who can get the job done at the staffing levels we like. There is a way – and it will be found by employees who have their jobs at stake in finding the way to do it. Secondly, we can do without all or part of the Departments of Commerce, Energy, Education, Labor and Housing and Urban Development (and, in fact, most of our 50% reduction in force should come from complete or partial shuttering of these departments). Finally, lots of programs which go on in the federal government are luxuries of prosperous and indulgent times – unless they protect the lives, property and liberty of the American people, they have to go. Period. End of story. No, sorry, but you can’t keep it no matter how wonderful you think it is – we’re broke.

After that, the reform of taxation and the elimination of regulations which inhibit the creation of productive enterprises will allow our economy to grow – and grow in terms of real wealth – fast enough to cover the debt; eventually to pay it all off. This is not something to happen in a day or even in 10 years. It is a generational thing. It took us a century to get in to this mess, it will take us a while to get out of it. Most important is that we get on it – and our trouble is that as long as Obama is in the White House, we won’t even make the first move. Which puts us in quite a pickle, indeed.

On the other hand, a bit of suffering can be good for the soul – and the country. We’ve been fat, dumb and happy for quite a long time and our younger generation, especially, is a bit flabby. Perhaps the pinch of poverty is needed to spur us to new heights? At any rate, the real Americans of our nation will endure whatever problems come down and will simply get to work and do what is right – so, in the end, no real worries.

Right now, the word is that after “quantitative easing, part 2” (ie, printing up money and giving it away to banks) is complete, there will be no more bags of free money. We’re going to start unwinding all the Federal Reserve actions which were designed to save us from utter economic collapse – and we’re going to do this because the Fed has finished rescuing us, all is well and so now we can stop doing it. And yet, rumors continue to persist that “quantitative easing, part 3” is coming. Graham Summers over at Zero Hedge thinks he knows why it will happen:

The reason that the 2008 debacle happened was very simple. The derivatives market, the largest, most leveraged market in the world.

Today, the notional value of the derivatives sitting on US banks’s balance sheets is in the ballpark of $234 TRILLION. That’s 16 times US GDP and more than four times WORLD GDP.

Of this $234 trillion, 95% is controlled by just four banks…

…The Fed HAS to continue pumping money into the system to support these firms’ gargantuan derivative exposure. Failing to do so would mean a disaster on the scale of four to five times that of 2008.

Remember 2008 was caused by the credit default swap market which was $50-60 trillion in size. The interest-rate derivate market is $200+ TRILLION in size…

The four banks are JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citibank and Goldman Sachs. I’m no financial expert; when I read up on derivatives what most struck me about them is their speculative nature – and thus their ability to distort true values. If someone has a way to explain how they are actually vital to the process of making, mining and growing things, I’m all ears.

While it might seem a bit absurd to state that there are $234 trillion dollars in derivatives out there, that does seem to be the case…which means we’ve speculated ourselves in to having financial instruments which exceed the monetary value of the world. We’re up to our eyeballs in financial risk which can only be accommodated as long as things don’t go wrong…such as a liquidity crisis leading to sovereign default in the European Union (not enough money out there for people to, say, actually buy the increasingly worthless bonds of Portugal so they can’t roll over their debt and thus can’t pay current bond holders who then dump all their Portuguese paper triggering a round of sell offs around the world, etc). How to avoid a liquidity crisis? Well, the best means is to not have more debt out there than you have assets to back it – but we’re waaaay the heck past that, already. So, the other way is just flood the market with money and hope that things don’t fall apart.

And, so, there is a strong argument that whether the Fed wants to stop printing or not, they’ll have to keep on doing it because the financial system is doomed unless they do. Of course, it is doomed if they do print, too. Eventually, all this money printing will destroy completely the value of the dollar and thus dollar-denominated assets will become worthless. That, in turn, would lead to all sorts of financial sclerosis – ie, the very crash the printing was supposed to prevent. We’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place here, my friends.

Does anyone out there (a) have any hope that we’ll just skate our way out of this or (b) have any suggestions about how we get out of it without pain? I just can’t believe in (a) and see no way for (b) to happen.

Not at all a good sign – from the Wall Street Journal:

Iran and Egypt’s new government signaled Monday they were moving quickly to thaw decades of frosty relations, worrying the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia that the overtures could upset the Mideast’s fragile balance of power.

Iran said it appointed an ambassador to Egypt for the first time since the two sides froze diplomatic relations more than three decades ago, the website of the Iranian government’s official English-language channel, Press TV, reported late Monday.

Also Monday, officials at Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that new foreign minister Nabil Elaraby is considering a visit to the Gaza Strip—an area controlled by Hamas, a militant Palestinian Islamist group backed by Tehran and until now shunned by Cairo…

And now the folly of dealing with tyrannical regimes is completely laid bare. All our agreements and arrangements in the middle east were predicated upon a friendly regime in Cairo. It is why we helped work out the deal whereby Israel would surrender the Sinai and control of the Suez Canal. It is why we agreed to the creation of an independent Palestine. We sold some of our most advanced weaponry to the Egyptians because we figured it would never be used against us or an ally. Well, guess what? The tyrant at the center of all this is gone – and is now replaced by people who don’t seem to want a cozy relationship with us. As of this moment, it would be better if the Israeli Army was still installed on the Suez and that Egypt was armed with obsolete Soviet military equipment and the West Bank and Gaza were still occupied by Israel.

As we go forward and try to repair the damage, our goal must be freedom. We should talk peace with any government out there, just so long as it is a government acceptable to American ideals. If it isn’t ruled by consent of the governed, then we shouldn’t bother. True enough, a free and fair election might result in a terrorist republic…so be it; they won’t ask for peace negotiations and if they want to try war, then that is what will be…and we’ll crush them and then see if they want to talk peace. And, of course, it just might prove that a free and fair election results in a popular government willing to make actual peace between peoples…not the peace between a people on one hand, and an un-elected tyrant on the other. No matter what results, it won’t be any worse than we’ve got now, and could be much better.

From Zero Hedge:

Nobody could have expected this. Certainly not the 112 hedge funds which hold GM stock on expectations the government, the Fed and GETCO would never let “that company” plunge this far. Next up: a congressional hearing for GETCO regarding charges of ponzi maintenance dereliction. As for the much touted “breakeven” on GM by the US government, the WSJ summarizes it best: “To break even, the U.S. Treasury would need to sell its remaining stake—about 500 million shares—at $53 apiece. GM closed off 27 cents a share at $29.97 in 4 p.m. trading Monday on the New York Stock Exchange, hitting a new low since its $33-a-share November initial public offering.”…

And you just gotta know that Obama will be touting GM as a success. He’ll make speech after speech in 2012 telling us that if it weren’t for him, GM would be gone. But unless we, the people who bailed them out, get our money back, it is a complete failure. We’re a bit more than $23 a share away from break-even. Anyone want to bet how long, if ever, it will take GM stock to climb that much? And what happens to GM auto sales if gasoline does go to $5 a gallon?

The government cannot fix the economy – ever liberal out there should be forced to write it 10,000 times. It is not possible for any government official to know what needs to be done – it just isn’t the thing government is for. To put in old-fashioned terms, government has not the competence; and no law or regulation or academic theory can change that.