Blogs For Victory

This could get very interesting – from NRO’s The Corner:

This is interesting. On the tax deal, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) told us that “support is eroding” among House Republicans.

Earlier today, Rep. Dan Boren (D., Okla), a Blue Dog, spoke to National Review Online about liberal Democrats’ opposition to the deal, and said the same thing. “Every day it’s eroding,” he said. “Every day this thing lingers on you’re seeing more and more liberals coming to the realization that this is the best deal possible. They don’t want to be blamed for raising taxes in a recession.”…

In a lot of ways, I’d prefer this deal to be killed – it is a big-spending Son of Spendulus bill, for the most part. What keeps me on board with it is that with energy and food costs rising (regular unleaded hit $3.09 a gallon in Las Vegas, today) I’m growing ever more concerned about the economy. Adding a higher tax bill to rising prices for basics is just the sort of thing to tip us over in to complete economic depression – something I’d rather avoid. We still might well get that – in fact, if we don’t get our fiscal house in order, we will definitely get a Great Depression, eventually – but I see no reason for us to jump off the economic cliff.

I don’t think, actually, that I’ve ever been more worried about the state of the nation and the prospects for the future in my life time…its grim, getting grimmer and I don’t think anyone in DC other than a few Republicans has the foggiest notion of what to do.

This is just too horrible – it cannot be allowed:

More than 20% of Detroit’s 139 square miles could go without key municipal services under a new plan being developed for the city, with as few as seven neighborhoods seen as meriting the city’s full resources.

Those details, outlined by Detroit planning officials this week, offer the clearest picture yet of how Mayor Dave Bing intends to execute what has become his signature program: reconfiguring Detroit to reflect its declining population and fiscal health. Yet the blueprint still leaves large legal and financial questions unresolved…

What this means is no street lights, no garbage collection, no police patrols in 20% of Detroit’s area. This is being pushed because Detroit, utterly bankrupt, simply cannot afford to take care of itself. This is the final end of liberal governance – liberals refusing to give up power, but not at all being concerned about the people living under the government. Such areas of the city, resigned from government control, will become gang land war zones – and that will spill in to adjacent neighborhoods and communities.

It is time to call a halt to this – the city of Detroit has failed; people and government. After all, the people keep electing these clowns. Time to just shut it down, appoint someone to govern and completely rebuild the city. Transform it from a municipality to an un-incorporated territory of the United States, appoint a territorial government and re-do the whole thing.

Once we’ve knocked down the blight, got rid of the bloated government, rebuilt the police, fire and sanitation departments, and assisted businesses by low taxes to revive the local economy, then we can hold new elections for a new city government. I know this is harsh, but I can’t see how relying on the people who killed the city will allow the city to revive.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

From NRO’s The Corner:

Senate Republican leaders have lashed out at the 1,924-page omnibus spending bill introduced today, and chided Majority Leader Harry Reid’s announcement that the Senate would stay in session “no matter how long it takes” to address the remainder of the Democratic agenda.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) called the bill “inappropriate” and said the situation was “eerily reminiscent of last year,” when Democrats introduced a 2,700-page bill spending late in the session that few members had seen, much less had time to review. “This is exactly what the American people said on November 2 they did not want us to do,” he said. “This bill should not go forward.”…

Indeed, it should not – it is criminal of Democrats to even try such a thing. There is no way anyone can familiarize themselves with the provisions of this bill prior to passage. Because of this, it is clearly designed for corrupt purposes – an honest bill would be no more than a couple dozen pages bare-bones laying out what spending will happen. 2,000 pages means you’ve buried the truth under massive verbiage in the hope that no one will figure it out until after passage.

The GOP should stand firm against this monstrosity.

UPDATE: McCain is tweeting some of the pork in the bill.

UPDATE II: Allahpundit notes the growing GOP revolt over this bill.

UPDATE III: Two things here – Democrats are trying to shove through whatever they can before the lose the ability to do anything, at all and they are probably thinking 1995 – hoping that if we oppose this and government shuts down, we’ll get blamed for it. I say – go for it: I don’t think the American people will be fooled in 2010 on this issue as they were in 1995, before the rise of the New Media allowed the truth to get out fast and wide.

UPDATE IV: One bit of great news in the bill is that we Nevadans will now get help with our coastal salmon issue…each year, after all, we Nevadans head to the border with California to watch the Pacific salmon leap over the Sierra Nevada mountains on their way to our great State…and the really cool thing is that they come in wrapped in plastic and ready to eat. Cool, huh?

All in a day’s work:

Why I’m Posting Bail Money for Julian Assange

By Michael Moore

Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail…

Moore’s contention is that if Wikileaks had been around ten years ago we wouldn’t have had BUSH LIED!!! cause the 9/11 attacks as a means of attacking Iraq to steal their oil. The whole world would be a better place if Wikileaks had existed back then! The Taliban would still rule in Afghanistan; bin Laden would still be training his terrorists; Libya would still be working on nuclear weapons; Pakistan’s nuclear-arms bazaar would still be up and running; Moore’s beloved Saddam would still be in power in Baghdad! Can you imagine how much better the world would be if only?

This is the guy who gets awards for films – he’s not just incapable of telling the truth, he doesn’t appear to know what truth is.

From NRO’s The Corner:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) tells NRO that a standalone ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ repeal has enough votes to pass.

“We now have more than 60,” he says in an interview. With the House moving to proceed on such a measure today, Lieberman says the cause has “momentum.” He points out that behind the scenes, the bill has support from a handful of Republicans…

We shall see – but it is, still, absurd to be spending so much time on such a minor issue when our fiscal house is crashing down ’round our ears.

Looks like the California town highlighted in the movie doesn’t suffer from an increased level of cancer – from Reason:

Hinkley, California, the town made famous in the Oscar-winning Julia Roberts movie Erin Brockovich, does not show any evidence of an increased rate of cancers.

Pacific Gas and Electric, which released a toxic plume of hexavalent chromium 6 from a Hinkley-based natural gas pipeline station, paid a record $333 million to settle a class-action suit in 1996. But the California Cancer Registry has now completed three studies that show cancer rates remained normal in from 1988 to 2008…

You can rely upon it that if a trial lawyer is making money out of it anywhere along the line, you will not get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. There is little money for trial lawyers in truth – especially given that most accidents are just that: accidents – no one is at fault and no one should have to pay a bazillion dollars to a lawyer over it.

A great deal of what we believe these days is just the sort of nonsense we saw in Erin Brockovich. These fairy tales of wicked corporations deliberately poisoning the wells – just a modern re-casting of the old stories of witches or Jews ruining the crops or causing infertility. Just a means by which some get to live well off the wealth others – stirring up mobs to hate and loot the target, with most of the loot, however, winding up in the pockets of the few.

Always be on guard – always consider, when you hear a story alleging that some particular group did a bad thing, whether anyone spreading the story stands to make money or, at least, fame off of it.

Naturally, the concept comes to us in modern America in the form of a lawsuit:

…The U.S. Supreme Court could decide as soon as today if justices will hear a case on whether those disparities violate the principle of “one man, one vote.” Justices were scheduled to discuss the case behind closed doors Friday.

The lawsuit, Clemons v. U.S. Department of Commerce, seeks a court order to force Congress to add more members so that the sizes of congressional districts would be more equal.

Last July, in a decision that quoted liberally from the Founding Fathers, a special three-judge panel ruled against changing the current system. “We see no reason to believe that the Constitution as originally understood or long applied imposes the requirements of close equality among districts in different states,” it ruled…

Attentive readers will remember that I’m in favor of this – have been, for a long time. In fact, not only do I want the size of the House increased, I’d like to see us break up some of the larger States and thus increase the size of the Senate, as well.

As the linked article notes, changing the size of the House was a routine exercise in American politics up until 1910. After that, we fixed the size of it at 435 members. The Senate increased in size pretty steadily through American history as new States were added. But since 1910, we’ve been at 435 House members, and since 1960 at 100 Senators (and there was a big gap in time between getting to 96 and going to 100 – Arizona became a State in 1912 and Alaska and Hawaii weren’t admitted until 1959). The nation has trebled in population during this time and part of the reason for the government becoming remote and arrogant has been the fact that vastly increased numbers of people are represented by a relatively small number of elected officials.

I know there is an ingrained opposition to adding more Congresscritters to bother us – but a democratic republic only works if the government, and especially the legislative power, is close to the people and to their interests. Representatives of lower population districts will be more in tune with the people – and smaller States will have Senators who genuinely represent the interests of the States.

Think of it like this – whom do California’s Senators represent? The interests of California? Heck, no. They represent Los Angeles and San Francisco…carry those areas, and you’ve got it made…but, meanwhile, the rest of the State doesn’t have a voice in the Senate and thus mining, logging, manufacturing and farming have been left to whither and die. San Francisco’s Senator doesn’t get much mileage out of helping a California farmer…and, so, California should be broken up – at least in to two States, but perhaps as many as four.

Meanwhile, over in the House, how can a Representative really look after the needs of 700,000 people? That is the size of the districts coming up. How can someone with little money break in to House politics when there is that large a number of people to get to know and attempt to convince? As we have seen, in most elections most of the incumbents win re-election and “name recognition” plays a key roll in that…just because the person is known, the person keeps getting re-elected…while the vast size of the district’s population works against a new comer. An entrenched political class has developed – and increasing the size of the House would be a good way to break it up.

I figure we should have at least 100 more House members – and the States ripe for breaking up (California, New York, Florida and Texas) would add at least 8 new Senators, and maybe more depending on just how they are broken up. No party would gain an insuperable advantage over this as, say, if you broke California up in to West and East California the Democrats would do well in West and the GOP in East…same situation if you broke up Florida along the Panhandle, and broke off NYC and Long Island from the rest of the State (as for breaking CA in to four – that would be North California {north of SF Bay to Oregon}, South California {Orange County to border}, West California {coastal counties plus Sacramento) and West Nevada (rest of the State}).

What we dare not do is think of our way of government as static. What is immovable in American politics is our Declaration of Independence – our Constitution and our States are creations of politics and subject to being altered or abolished as the people decide. Just because that is the way it is should not dictate how it always shall be – that isn’t conservatism; that is being reactionary (and, please note, it is our liberals who are reactionary – demanding that we keep everything as it is with the only change allowed being that which strengthens the status quo). We’ve got a lot of problems in our nation, and our thinking should not run in the old, familiar grooves – we need to think anew and act anew to reform and restore our nation…and part of that thinking anew means taking on the current power structure and seeing if we can really shake it up.

From ABC News:

Coinciding with a federal judge’s ruling invalidating a key element of the health care reform law, an ABC News/Washington Post poll finds support for the landmark legislation at a new low – but division on what to do about it.

The law’s never been popular, with support peaking at just 48 percent in November 2009. Today it’s slipped to 43 percent, numerically its lowest in ABC/Post polling…

…More also continue to “strongly” oppose the law than to strongly support it, 37 percent to 22 percent…

No one wanted it when it proposed; no one wanted it when it was debated; no one wanted it when it was passed – and no one wants its now. The judge ruling it unconstitutional just makes the case even stronger – it is time to repeal and replace. The American people are in no mood for an unconstitutional power grab by Democrats.

Wonder how this will play out – from Sky News:

…The president of football’s international governing body was speaking at a news conference in South Africa, arranged to discuss the legacy of this year’s tournament.

He was asked what he would say to gay football fans who want to go to Qatar for the 2022 competition, given that homosexuality is banned in the Middle East country.

Grinning, he said: “I would say they should refrain from any sexual activities.”

Mr Blatter went on to insist that he believed discrimination would not be an issue in Qatar by 2022, saying “we are living in a world of freedom”…

Yeah, freedom – except that you’d better not draw pictures of Mohammad, and we’d better start imposing Sharia law in the West ’cause, well, we don’t want to offend Moslems and get them all angry, and what not. What is more likely to happen over the next 12 years – Qatar becoming tolerant of homosexuality or Sharia forcing homosexuality back in to the closet in Europe?

Time will tell.

From ABC News:

Richard Holbrooke, a forceful presence in American diplomacy for more than 45 years, died tonight in Washington, D.C. He was 69…

A blow to our policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan which will now hang a bit in limbo as a replacement is found – one of the few adults in the Obama Administration; his counsel will be missed, I fear.

My prayers for his family during this tragic time.