Blogs For Victory

From MSNBC:

Strained by rising demand and battered by bad weather, the global food supply chain is stretched to the limit, sending prices soaring and sparking concerns about a repeat of food riots last seen three years ago.

Signs of the strain can be found from Australia to Argentina, Canada to Russia.

On Friday, Tunisia’s president fled the country after trying to quell deadly riots in the North African country by slashing prices on food staples…

Once upon a time the United States could easily make up the difference – but a huge amount of our food production is going to perfectly useless ethanol (thanks, Greens!) and a lot of our land lies fallow because of government regulations preventing farming (either subsidies not to grow, or asinine things like shutting down California’s central valley to save a dratted guppy). Make, mine, grow – that is what the economy is all about…and we’re doing none of these things.

Actually saw a pinhead on TV explain that Americans will never manufacture again and our whole future is based upon “innovation”. Innovation of what? If we’re not making anything, what is the innovation for? Improved processes so China’s factories can better supply us with cheap, consumer goods? We’re awash with idiocy in our nation and around the world…and guess who is going to pay the highest price? The poor of the world who already spend half or more of their income on food, which is now shooting up in price.

We simply must change – we must become rational people, again.

From Jammie Wearing Fool:

Sadly, there are still the the diehard, far left relics who think it would be a good idea to pay more taxes to reduce the monstrous deficits racked up by Obama, Pelosi and Reid. Upside: It’s only 9% of the public.

A new CBS News poll finds that Americans strongly prefer cutting spending to raising taxes to reduce the federal deficit. While 77 percent prefer to cut spending, just nine percent call for raising taxes. Another nine percent want to do both…

My dirty, little secret here – I’m ok with some tax increases in order to close the gap. Not before we’ve done at least a 25%, across the board reduction of non-defense, discretionary spending (I’m ok with a 10% cut to Defense, but I don’t want to go lower than that…tight defense budgets lead to military disaster at later dates…if you ever get in to a mood to cut defense, read an account of what happened on Bataan); but, still, the debt is so entirely crushing that even the added burden of taxes is worthwhile in order to avoid the complete collapse we’re heading for. It should also be mentioned that the taxes I’d like to increase would hit the real rich – ie, the bankrolls of billionaire liberals who fund the left wing attempt to jack up taxes on the middle class. Sorry, Soros, but it is time to pay the piper for all the financial manipulation you’ve engaged in…

Be that as it may, this poll shows very clearly that the American people see through the Big Government scam. Its not that people necessarily want everything cut to heck and gone, but that they do realize two things:

1. There is a huge amount of waste built in to government and so people with courage and honesty could cut the budgets in all areas quite a lot without causing the least bit of harm to anyone who actually needs help.

2. If you give the government more in taxes there is a very strong chance the government will just waste that money, too…better, then, to have a round of stiff budget cuts before anyone talks up new taxes (this is much like the illegal immigration debate – we can eventually have at least some amnesty for part of the illegal population…but the people aren’t going to let the government do that until after the people are convinced that the border is secure).

As we head in to the budget debates – and especially the upcoming debate on raising the debt ceiling – Democrats will try to cast all cuts as cuts to grannies health care and juniors education. They’ll pull out all the stops to try and scare people off from budget cuts – and the MSM will be right there helping Democrats spread their message. We will have to fight back on this – we can still lose the debate if we just sit there and do nothing. As we cut, we must demonstrate why we’re cutting – citing corruption, fraud, waste, duplication and sheer idiocy time and time again to justify the need to cut. The good news here is that the Democrats are increasingly discredited, the MSM is losing viewers day by day, and the New Media is here to keep the people informed…and will be keeping a people already in favor of cuts informed about the battle to get the cuts they want.

And if we can win this battle, then we’ll win all down the line. We’ve never successfully cut the budget in the sense of having government actually spend less one year than it did in a previous year. If we can to this, even once, and show that the nation won’t fall apart if government spends a bit less, then we’ll have a snowball effect in our favor…the more we cut, the better the chance we’ll be able to cut more in the future…eventually balancing the budget, and then swinging the axe to de-fund the left (first, balance budget to save America from collapse…then, de-fund the left in order to prevent a repeat of the current disaster; it all works together, but first things, first).

On the GOP – from the Tennessean:

Tennessee tea party activists took to the halls of the state legislature Wednesday, warning Republican leaders not to misinterpret the results of the November election as a sign of implicit tea party support…

…Activists were on the Hill to let GOP lawmakers know the tea party’s next step in Tennessee is to influence legislation and to hold Republicans “accountable” on a variety of policy measures, including fighting federal health-care reform.

“That’s precisely why we are here, to hold our elected officials accountable,” tea party organizer Ben Cunningham said. “That’s what we’re all about.”…

This is the crucial Part II of this effort – once we get them in to office, we must keep intense pressure on them to make sure they do what they promised us in the campaign. We worked very hard to elect quite a lot of Republicans around the nation in 2010 and we want our payoff for the work – reduced budgets, lowered taxes, less government involvement in our lives. And if we don’t get it, we’ll make the GOP pay for it.

Contrast this to the supine nature of the Democrat rank-and-file. They do as they’re told and don’t dare set up grass roots efforts without leadership permission. The secret of American success is the engagement of regular, every day folks in the political process. For far too long we held our leaders in awe – as if they were some special class of people smarter than we are and deserving of power. I think we on the right have now learned our lesson – it remains to be seen if those on the left ever will.

From Politico:

…a billion dollar presidential re-election bid is unlikely to be launched or sustained for long exclusively with small donors. Even in 2008, Obama’s eye-popping online giving was matched with larger donations generated by roughly 700 big and small bundlers.

Rebuilding that half of his financial operation is critical to his prospects and talk of it dates back to before the midterms when the president hosted a string of late summer DNC fundraisers…

I still have my doubts that Obama really got all that much in small donations in 2008 – just too many stories of untraceable donations, including some which did appear to originate overseas (you know, illegal fund raising…its a Democrat thing). But Obama is looking for a big increase over his 2008 total of $750 million – and I wonder just where he’ll get it from?

Because he will get it. Make no mistake about it – Obama and his Democrats aren’t about to lose in 2012 for lack of funds, nor will they allow anything as piddling as US law to hold them back. Whatever is needed will be raised by whatever means prove necessary. For Obama and his Democrats it is really simple: if they win, they’ll see to it no one is ever prosecuted for breaking the law. If they lose, they count on GOPers to not bother going after them for breaking the law. There is nothing to hold Democrats back from illegal fund raising other than the sterling moral qualities we have grown accustomed to seeing in them…

2012 will be the most expensive, longest and most nasty political election in history. The whole ball of wax is at stake – if Obama and his Democrats lose, then they can count on being out of power for the balance of this decade, and perhaps far longer. So get ready for the fight.

Roger Simon over at The Tattler really hits the nail on the head:

One of the problems that conservatives have in attacking liberals is that liberalism doesn’t really exist. There’s no there there. It’s simply a masquerade for greed – a bunch of phony precepts no one really believes that are mouthed in order to get on unmolested with the business of material acquisition. Hollywood is a great example of this. So is Marin county, as shown in John Rosenberg’s PJM piece this morning on the county’s minority problem. A spinoff aspect of this is that when you attack phony pieties your adversary doesn’t really care. It’s only about cosmetics. Fix the cosmetics and you move on. They win by akido.

I’d separate it out a little bit – a good deal of the rank-and-file of liberalism really believes it. Think of the number of times I’ve tried to explain to our liberals that “tax the rich” rhetoric from liberal leaders never amounts to taxing rich liberals. I try to explain to them that the real rich – those with billions of dollars Pelosi says she wants to tax – skate on all liberal, Democrat tax proposals. Why? Because being a liberal means being in charge and being wealthy and never having to look back. And yet the rank-and-file times keep swallowing what the leadership vends.

They have fastened themselves upon us – and it will be hard to get them out, but we can do it. Mostly be de-funding them (they mostly get and remain rich off the taxpayer’s dime, in one form or another); but we can do it.

From Reuters:

The U.S. House of Representatives will resume action next week on repealing President Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare overhaul, a House Republican spokesman said on Thursday.

The House had been expected to act this week on the repeal bill, but the vote was postponed after a shooting spree in Arizona killed six people and critically wounded U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords…

We can’t allow what happened in Arizona to deflect us from our duty in this matter – the GOP was given victory in order to roll back Obama’s socialist programs, and we dare not fail in this task.

The Second American Revolution must continue – quite a lot of things need fixing in America. In fact, just about ever facet of American life needs reforming in order to purge us of liberalism. One may start where one wishes, in a lot of ways, but as it was ObamaCare which set the stage for our victory, it must be the first task be handle.

It wasn’t from Sarah Palin; it wasn’t from anyone on the right. It wasn’t from anyone on the left, either. No one person’s statement or acts made Loughner what he is. So, where did he come from? Marybeth Hicks over at Catholic Exchange explains:

…So far, only the Rev. Franklin Graham’s statement about the Arizona shootings suggests the cultural connection to the dark and disturbing persona that has emerged in Mr. Loughner‘s profile: “What frightens me is that our country has accepted murder, violence and rape as entertainment, which we see portrayed every day on TV, movies and video games … . If we as a nation are not careful, we could see the destruction of the foundation this nation was built upon.”

I can’t help but wonder if Jared Loughner may have grown into a deranged killer thanks, in part, to a popular culture that feeds not on vitriolic political speech, but on a fascination with death, violence and evil. High school friends say Mr. Loughner seemed relatively normal until his teen years, when one friend says he started to obsessively play video games, listen to music on his headphones and generally isolate himself. Others also recount that his headphones were fixtures in his ears…

Does this mean that everyone who plays video games and isolates himself with head phones will become a crazed killer? No; but a lot of people who do just that will become ever more evil as time goes on.

Sin works like that – it works to isolate the individual and throw him back upon himself. Cut off from God, a person who falls further in to sin eventually is also cut off from people, too. Just out there, spinning in a void, growing more desperate, despairing and self-centered by the minute until the whole world seems a conspiracy against the individual. Step by step, Loughner took that path – just as, step by step, so many others have…and in today’s age, it is easier than it has ever been. Our modern communications, paradoxically, allow us to isolate ourselves better than ever…and feed ourselves on images and sounds which drown out any sense of decency.

Curiously enough, Loughner is probably more sane and reasonable at this moment than he’s been in months, and perhaps years. While being interrogated, probed and prodded by police and psychologists, he’s having more human contact and thus having to adjust himself to the reality that other people live in the world. It is to be hoped that it will all wake him from his delusion so that before he faces the executioner he’ll see and understand his own evil, and beg forgiveness for it. But, that is not something we, on the outside of his life, can do much about. We can, however, take the real lesson from this tragedy.

We can’t live in a sewer and expect to be clean. We can’t, that is, have healthy minds and bodies if all we do, day by day, encourages diseased minds and weak bodies. While this will anger our liberals, the fact of the matter is that liberalism does bear a great deal of responsibility. Not for Loughner’s particular actions – all of us must bear responsibility for the things we do – but for convincing us, as a society, to throw over traditional morality and become tolerant of ever more brazen outrages.

Anger! I can feel it rising in liberal breasts as they read that. So be it. It was liberals who said that easy access to pornography is harmless. It is liberals who said that we can’t in any way, shape or form censor the glorification of crude sexuality and violence in popular culture. It was liberals who told us that the more garbage we allowed to be flouted in public the better we’d be – that if we did this, we’d lose all our hang-ups and become more relaxed, tolerant people. Well, we did just as liberalism instructed and look where it got us.

We must beat back the pollution in our society. We must become, once again, a nation which is truly horrified at rapes, murders and robberies. I defy anyone out there to tell me they were really shocked at what happened in Arizona. After scores of such incidents in the past 20 years, we’re all desensitized…it is routine; it is what we expect to happen. But now it is time to stand up and say, “no”. We must say no to those who insist that not only should we allow the current level of filth, but we must allow even more to be poured in. This is not a demand to draw a line in the sand, but a demand that we push the line back.

Or, we can just make noises about being outraged at this incident, do nothing and just wait for the next pile of corpses as we watch our civilization die. I asked my wife last night just what was it that I, a Christian man, had ever done to protect even one child from turning in to a Loughner? Not a thing – but, not any longer. Now I stand and fight.

Sorry, guys, I wasn’t able to write anything for the AM…suggested subjects of conversation are:

1. Anyone creeped out by last night’s memorial service/pep rally?

2. Inflation is up. This is planned. No, seriously, it is what Bernanke wants. How stupid is this?

3. New claims for unemployment rose. I guess we turned the corner back to bad news?

4. The Chargers are not in the playoffs, so who really cares about football right now?

From the AP:

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn defended a massive increase in state income taxes passed by lawmakers Wednesday and promised to quickly sign the measure to help heal the state’s ailing finances.

Lawmakers worked overnight to pass the increase to raise the personal income tax rate from 3 percent to 5 percent for four years — a 66 percent increase. Corporate income taxes also will rise, but Quinn rejected the notion that it would decimate businesses…

It was a lame-duck, Democrat legislature which passed the tax hikes – from what I understand, about 12 hours before the end of the session. Gov. Quinn appears to be upset at the GOP over this – probably because the GOP voted against and thus put the entire blame for this travesty in the laps of the Democrats. Democrats lost State legislative seats in November, but still retain their majority…but not a large enough majority, it seems, to raise taxes…so, they had to use people rejected by the voters of Illinois in order to ram through the tax hikes.

Still, the people of Illinois are responsible for this – they could have voted GOP for governor; they could have voted in more State legislative GOPers. They choose Democrats – and Democrats have given them what Democrats always give: bloated, wasteful government and higher taxes.

These tax hikes will severely punish Illinois families and businesses – businesses which can often move a few miles down the road to another, lower tax State; States which will be delighted to thrive while Illinois withers and dies. It is just astounding that anyone would think that tax hikes in a severe recession would help…but, I guess, that isn’t the point. Democrats don’t care if it helps – they just didn’t want to cut the wasteful spending.

One thing will be interesting about all this – we now have a set of States completely controlled by one side or the other. Almost all the States are in dire financial straights, and we’ll now get to see over the next two years which set of ideas works. Will taxing and spending bring the good times, or spending and tax cuts? The proof will be in the pudding – by 2012, we’ll know who has the better economic ideas.

Because violence is only something the right does:

An aide close to Sarah Palin says death threats and security threats have increased to an unprecedented level since the shooting in Arizona, and the former Alaska governor’s team has been talking to security professionals…

But we can rely upon it that if anything happens to Sarah Palin, the left won’t be calling for toning down the rhetoric. Why? Because, as I’ve observed, it isn’t that there is heated rhetoric from the right, but any rhetoric, at all, which the left has rued out of bounds. Liberals, on the other hand, can say whatever they want…even about bringing a gun to a knife fight, and that is fine..because liberals are good, and thus whatever they do is good.

Once you really get in to the pretzel thinking of liberals it is difficult to get out of it…

UPDATE: And let’s not forget that wonderful, loving, liberal Facebook Page, I Hate it When I Wake Up and Sarah Palin is Still Alive. 2,326 2,334 2,346 people like it – including a caring liberal who had this to say:

Sarah Palin days are numbered. It’s a matter of time. When it happens I will pop a bottle and toast to it.