Blogs For Victory

From Zero Hedge:

First Philadelphia, now San Francisco, and all in the same day. Fasten your seatbelts ladies, the muni maul is going mainstream.

Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded to Aa2 from Aa1 the rating on the City and County of San Francisco’s General Obligation Bonds and assigned an Aa2 rating to the city’s General Obligation Bonds (Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response Bonds, 2010) Series 2010. We have also downgraded by one notch our ratings on the city’s various general fund obligations, including its abatement leases and settlement obligation bonds. The outlook on the city’s ratings has been revised to stable…

I wonder if they mean “stable” in the sense that a corpse is “stable”?

This is the wages of liberalism – they spend, spend, spend and never take a thought for how it will all be made good. San Francisco is bloated with departments and boards and commissions, employing enough bureaucrats to staff an entire nation’s government.

This is just a slight foretaste of what is coming all around the nation. San Francisco is just one of many urban areas of the United States which have been, essentially, under one-party, Democrat rule for decades. They’ve spent themselves in to oblivion, and now the bill has come due. And come due at a time when the States are strapped and Obama won’t be able to get a cent in bail out money through the House.

From NRO’s The Corner:

Just checked in with a Republican source in the Senate about the state of play on the New START Treaty. Sen. Jon Kyl is being portrayed as a threat to national security for telling Harry Reid there’s not enough time to ratify the treaty in the lame-duck session. This source counters that the White House was slow to take Kyl’s calls for enhanced nuclear modernization seriously. It wasn’t until last Friday that the administration really began to engage him on modernization, flying officials out to Phoenix to brief him. It was only this afternoon that Kyl got a revised modernization plan from the administration…

Even if we get nuclear modernization – something we desperately need in order to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent – I still can’t see the worth of START. Russia is a dying nation, run by a megalomaniac dim wit who can’t see that playing bully-boy and tweaking our nose is doing nothing for Russia…China greedily eyes Siberia while Czar Putin pretends Russia is still a Great Power. Negotiating with Russia as if it mattered is just a waste of time.

At any rate, arms control treaties are pointless. Free nations don’t need such things between each other, while tyrannical regimes will cheat on whatever they negotiate. We’re expecting Putin to keep his word? On what grounds does anything suspect that Putin even knows what “honesty” means? For crying out loud, he’s a former KGB apparatchik!

Spike this stupid treaty and move on.

Just try it:

From Politico:

President Obama may have postponed the so-called “Slurpee summit” with Republican leaders originally planned for this Thursday, but 7-Eleven is still going ahead with theirs.

“Ours certainly isn’t postponed,” said Margaret Chabris, the director of 7-Eleven corporate communications told POLITICO Tuesday night. “We’re still on. We’re gonna spread the Slurpee love with or without this meeting.”

Chabris said the company is going ahead with plans to have Slurpee trucks outside of Union Station, where they will be handing out red, white and blue icy, sugary drinks as well as “Purple for the people” Slurpees…

…”We are still at their beck and call,” she said. “If they want us to cater the Slurpee summit or put Slurpee machines in the White House, we’re there.”

“We’re still hopeful,” she said. “We have the ‘audacity of hope.'”

During the next State of the Union, the GOPers should all have slurpees in hand during the speech.

From Gateway Pundit:

Get your popcorn…

The God hates F*** people will protest at the Islamic Center in Dearbornistan tomorrow…

From Bloomberg:

Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, said he is “not very” optimistic that the Bush-era tax cuts will be extended at this point.

Durbin said a preliminary discussion yesterday between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the chamber’s top Republican, “did not go well.” …

We’ll have to see how this plays out – refusal to extend the tax cuts will be an economic disaster for the United States. It would ensure that American business remains gun shy about expansion as well as eating up a great of American wealth and shoving it in to the black hole of government spending.

On the political side, Democrats’ refusal to extend will be a boon to the Republican party – come January, the new GOP House can send up a tax cut bill once a week and allow Democrats to either kill it, or agree to a popular, GOP proposal.

Allahpundit has a good bit about the issue of McCain vs Rand Paul on the matter of defense cuts and notes that no less than Allen West, retired Lt. Colonel and now Representative-elect, is also on board with defense cuts. So, too, will be any veteran who honestly remembers his military service. There is plenty of fat to cut in the Department of Defense.

That said, we should lay down a few markers. What can’t be cut is:

1. Military pay.

2. Supplies and other readiness items (spare parts, reserve ammunition, etc; the troops must have everything they need instantly ready for major combat operations).

3. Training budgets (the troops must be regularly exercised for combat).

4. No reduction in the number of aircraft carriers and attendant ships.

5. No reduction in the number of attack submarines.

6. No reduction in the number of first line fighter and bomber strength (we must maintain absolute aerial supremacy, regardless of cost – and this means staying a generation ahead of the competition).

With that, we can look to base closings, withdrawal of US forces from peaceful areas of the globe (Europe, save that which is necessary to support on-going operations; Japan, save ditto), reductions in civilian personnel; putting off new ship construction; and a general scrubbing of the military for any duplication and waste.

We need to get our budget balanced, and we’re not going to get to even step one on that with a liberal President and a Democrat Senate without offering up at least some substantial military spending. And, truth be told, all departments of government must be cut – without affecting readiness, the military must be made to work for less. It can be done – early in the 20th century, “Jackie” Fisher revolutionized the British Navy making it more powerful than ever at less cost than before. Big defense budgets don’t necessarily equal strong military forces.

Care will have to be taken, of course, to ensure that our liberals don’t gut defense – and for each dollar of defense cuts, we should insist upon two dollars of non-defense, discretionary spending cuts. The people, I believe, will be on our side in this – understanding the need for cuts, and willing to go far in such cuts, as long as they see that everyone is under the knife. If the Democrats try to play screw around on this, we’ll be able to hammer them in 2012 over it.

Now, to work.

A victory for law and common sense:

It’s a “victory for plain old common sense,” says a legal group in describing a court decision to keep the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

The case before the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would have stopped recitation of the Pledge in New Hampshire’s schools. But Eric Rassbach with The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty tells OneNewsNow the court gave a solid ruling late last week.

“They rejected what is the latest in a series of attacks on the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance — and specifically [targeting] the words ‘under God,'” the attorney explains…

As per usual, a group of anti-religious nit wits had brought suit holding that saying “under God” in the pledge violates the “separation of Church and State” – a thing which exists nowhere in the United States Constitution. Liberals, naturally, don’t care what is actually in there – and all too often find judges willing to agree. Here, fortunately, they ran up against some judges who, quite simply, refused to be stupid.

Still, we do need a Religious Liberty Restoration Act which would permit people to engage in religious practices – essentially, a law to enforce the First Amendments assurance of the right to freely exercise religion. We need to shut down the bigoted, anti-religious fanatics who would leave our public square naked of all that is decent…of all, that is, which makes our civilization worthy and vibrant.

The Revolution advances – from Politico:

Seeking to move past an intra-party squabble over earmarks, Senate Republicans on Tuesday night showed a united front and called on Democrats to join them in opposing the long-standing practice.

During a closed-door caucus meeting, Republicans passed by voice vote a two-year moratorium on earmarks, identical to one approved by the House GOP earlier this year. They also approved a resolution sponsored by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky challenging their Democratic colleagues to enact an earmark ban of their own.

A good step, but just a baby step – now the ball is in the court of Harry Reid and his corrupt Democrat Party. Be interesting to see how this plays out…

The good news:

Republican Joe Walsh has defeated incumbent Democrat Melissa Bean for Congress in Illinois’ 8th District with all absentee and provisional votes now counted.

County clerks in McHenry, Cook and Lake counties tallied up the remaining provisional and late-arriving absentee ballots today. Unofficial results indicate Walsh won by 290 votes out of more than 200,000 cast…

Makes for a total of 84 new Republicans and a net gain of 62. Still a couple more outstanding races which we have a chance of winning.