Blogs For Victory

From Politico:

Republicans are on the verge of broad wins next week for one big reason: independent voters are ready to boot Democrats from office, according to a new POLITICO/George Washington University Battleground Poll.

Expressing deep dissatisfaction with President Obama’s policies and performance, independents have increasingly sided with conservatives in the belief that government grew too large, too fast under Obama—and that it can no longer be trusted. In the final pre-election Battleground Poll, Republicans hold a 14-point edge among independents and lead overall, 47 percent to 42 percent, in the generic ballot match up…

Energize your base all you want, Democrats; that and $2.50 will get you a cup of coffee…though you might want to dig deep for about $20…you’ll be needing a bottle of whiskey come November 3rd to drown your sorrows.

You lied to the American people and you are about to pay the price for those lies. You told us Obama was a centrist. You told us you’d be transparent. You told us that you’d clean up the corruption. You told us you’d get spending under control You lied, Lied, LIED!!! You were just saying whatever you thought would work to get elected.

Well, you got elected – you “won”. Congratulations – now, how does that 2008 victory taste?

UPDATE: Rasmussen shows the GOP maintaining a 9 point lead in the “Generic” ballot. To bring us back down to earth, however, it also looks like the Maryland governorship is slipping away from us. We won’t win it all, fellow GOPers…we’ll just win a whole lot.

Obama keeps using his lame and incorrect metaphor that Republicans “drove the economy in a ditch” to try to energize his equally delusional base, but he may have taken it a bit too far.

He said Republicans had driven the economy into a ditch and then stood by and criticized while Democrats pulled it out. Now that progress has been made, he said, “we can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.”

Aside from the metaphor fail, what really sticks out here is that Obama is saying he is completely unwilling to work with Republicans to fix the bad economy that Obama and the Democrats keep digging us deeper into.  You know, I used to think that we all had the same goals, just different ideas on how to we got to that goal. But, let’s face it, Obama doesn’t want what Americans want. He wants whatever will placate his ego.

We should want a government with people with different views who look for the best solution out of all the options. Obama and the Democrat-controlled congress have no interest in that.

First off, something to put Democrats off their breakfast…

Will the Fed’s “QE2” be $4 trillion? If it is your best investment will be in gold – and canned goods and shotguns.

More good economic news – China about to collapse in a mountain of inflation.

A drop in the bucket: California cut 37,000 government jobs in September. There will be more – though if Brown is elected, his puppet-masters will work out some financial shennanigans to put off the day of reckoning for at least a few months.

Gay voters abandoning the Democrats? Be interesting to see how that comes out – especially as the Democrats will need a huge turnout in this demographic to save Boxer, among other endangered Democrats. Can’t say as I’d blame them for staying home – backing any of the gay rights agenda is, to say the least, problematic for a Conservative Catholic, but even I’m incensed at the way Democrats play up to homosexuals for votes and donations, and then drop dime on them the day after the election. I just don’t like dishonorable behavior – if you say you’re going to do something, then do it…don’t pander and then betray.

Beware of late polls – Ace takes a PPP poll to task for its obvious bias; lesson here is to not dwell on polls right now. The task at hand it GOTV – if you can volunteer for that, do it; take nothing for granted, fight for every vote. We’re all hopeful for a big (indeed, stupendous) GOP victory on November 2nd, but what will be will be – our job is just to do what we can and let the chips fall where they may. In light of this, if you don’t know where you should direct your time and money, Dick Morris has a handy guide.

Keep in good spirits this week; don’t let the fools grind you down (and they are going to try and grind you down, day by day). We know we’ve already won the battle of ideas, but we also know that no matter what result happens, the battle for political power has only just begun. Right makes might, and we’ve got them on the run.

Military Archbishop Timothy Broglio explains:

…Archbishop Broglio explained to CNA what he sees as the basic flaw in Judge Phillips’ ruling, which declared that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” denied homosexual soldiers their rights to freedom of speech and due process. The archbishop explained that while individuals may have a legal right to declare their sexual preferences, they have no comparable “right” to serve in the military at the same time.

Rather, he said, the military reserves to itself the right to deny individuals that privilege– just as soldiers may forfeit the privilege of military service in many other ways, through their speech and behavior…

This points out a large problem we have in our modern world – too many things are cast in terms of “rights” when they are nothing of the kind. If a person has an inherent – ie, endowed-by-God – right to serve in the military, then the military may not reject anyone for service…no matter what condition they are in, and regardless of the manpower needs of the military. Military service is a privilege, highly revocable, which not everyone is granted.

This doesn’t mean that gays cannot serve openly in the military – it just means that whether or not gays shall so serve is something to be decided upon the merits of the case, not based on a supposed right to military service. My personal view is that the thing can be done – provided certain actions are taken to secure good order and discipline within the military. The most important of these would be a strict order against sexual fraternization among active duty military personnel – the military can’t become a dating service. If you want to serve, then serve – but seek your mate outside of the military and if you do find yourself irresistibly drawn to a fellow service member, then one of you is going to have to get out. And be forced out dishonorably, if illicit activity is detected.

It is high time we started to free ourselves from a lot of falsehoods in our debates. We have to start approaching things as they are. Ultimately, given the nature of this case, the decision on whether or not to employ openly gay people in the military must be made by active duty officers. Only they can really determine if full combat efficiency can be maintained with such a change. If they say it can’t be done, then we shouldn’t do it – we must not permit military service to become the means of cheap, political grand standing on the part of liberals currying favor with special interest groups. The safety of the United States rests upon the military, and we dare not weaken it because some pressure group wants this or that change.

Her new ad:

While the recent polls showing Brown with a big lead are bogus, the fact remains that Brown is ahead and Whitman has yet to convince California voters that she’s the better alternative. Can she do it? This ad lays out a clear choice – and it will now come down to Californians deciding whether they really think a re-tread, has-been former governor is the best answer to California’s impending bankruptcy, or that Whitman, a successful business woman, might have a better plan?

After all is said and done, Californians will get the government they deserve – if they choose Brown, California will go bankrupt as there will be no way to pass any sort of State bailout through Congress in 2011 and there is no chance Brown will make the deep spending cuts needed to save California. If they choose Whitman, they’ll get a lot of initial pain as she clears out the mess, but then prosperity will return. We’ll see what the Californians do.

From Wired:

By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But for years afterward, WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction…

Which is not entirely news – we’ve known for years that quite a lot of WMDs were found in Iraq. What wasn’t found was brand, new stockpiles of WMDs…but, they were there; as it turns out, at the end of the day, the intelligence services were right in that Saddam retained WMDs and was working to reconstitute his WMD program. Now that a pinko site has put the word out, will liberals admit they were slandering Bush over the issue?

I doubt it.

P. J. O’Rourke provides the answer:

…They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any. Democrats hate men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, straights, the rich, the poor, and the middle class.

Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats…

Behind the joke there is the truth – that when you wallow in moral depravity for long enough, you start to think it worthy. In other words, if you become a creep and work at it, creepiness will eventually be seen by you as a virtue. Democrat leaders lie all the time, they use slander whenever necessary, they cheat at the ballot box at every opportunity…and they think this is good.

So, our job is to boot them out of power – hopefully, once they are out, they’ll start to think about things and come back to a sense of honor.

Over at Zero Hedge, Jim Quinn has an excellent piece which explodes the Keynesian myths about the Great Depression, as well as those myths being peddled today as a cure for the current one. The crucial thing to remember is that the mechanism which got us in to the Great Depression is the same which got is in to our current mess:

…They don’t call the 1920s roaring because money wasn’t flowing freely and consumers were practicing frugality. The newly created Federal Reserve expanded credit by setting below-market interest rates and low reserve requirements that favored the big Wall Street banks. The Federal Reserve increased the money supply by 60% during the period following the recession of 1921. By the latter part of the decade, “buying on margin” entered the American vocabulary as more and more Americans overextended themselves to speculate on the soaring stock market.

The 1920s marked the beginning of mass production and the emergence of consumerism in America, with automobiles a prominent symbol of the latter. In 1919, there were just 6.7 million cars on American roads. By 1929, the number had grown to more than 27 million cars, or nearly one car for every household. During this period banks offered the country’s first home mortgages and manufacturers of everything – from cars to irons – allowed consumers to pay “on time.” Installment credit soared during the 1920s. About 60% of all furniture and 75% of all radios were purchased on installment plans. Thrift and saving were replaced in the new consumer society by spending and borrowing…

Sound familiar? Its pretty much what we did from 1993 until 2008; vastly increase money supply and go on a borrow and spending binge (public and private) which boosted the economy with a false glow of health, but all the while catastrophe was impending as the bills came due. Do keep in mind that there is plenty of Republican as well as Democrat blame to go around here; don’t get too hung up on blame games. Fundamentally, it was the economic system – erected by the Federal Reserve – which got us in to the Great and current Depression.

The article goes on to note that the “cure” for the Depression (old and new) has been the same…massively increasing the same sorts of activities which caused the problem. Hoover is blamed in dishonest histories of the era as sitting there doing nothing and it took FDR’s big spending New Deal to get us moving – as the linked article points out, Hoover increased per-capita federal spending by 88%; it didn’t work, and all FDR could think to do was double and triple down (as Obama seems to want to do now) on the same failed, easy money policies. They will have the same effect now as they did then – a temporary boost to GDP which will lead to further and worse disaster down the road.

It was, ultimately, the disruptions of the First World War which set in train the economic crisis which the Federal Reserve (and other central banks) set to “cure” by easy money policies. Wealth having been massively withered away by war, populations having lost between war and disease at least 60 million fit, young people (a majority of them in the most advanced, industrial societies), there was no chance the world was going to get out of it without at least a generation of strained economics. This was not something completely new to human experience – in post-Napoleonic Europe, there was economic depression for 15 years. You don’t just walk past earth-shaking events without getting a scratch…though the Keynesians (old and new) believe you can.

We got lucky post-WWII in that there was a population boom which stimulated American production allowing us to build up real wealth for the first time since pre-WWI. But as the population boom leveled off and the global economy rebuilt itself (especially Japan and Germany, which had been literally blown to pieces in WWII), the strain resumed on the American economy. We had a choice – hunker down, retrench and continue to build wealth until we were past the crunch, or go on another binge of easy money. The Federal Reserve (with the gleeful agreement of the Banksters and Bureaucrats) opted for a binge of easy money. Lowered tax rates in the 1980’s helped rebuild a bit of American wealth, but starting during that time and accelerating in the 90’s, we started to move our wealth to Third World nations while using easier and easier monetary policy to keep up an illusion of wealth here at home.

As I’ve said before, we can only work our way out of this. First, we must admit that we’re broke – not only out of money, but massively in debt. We have to retrench – balance our budgets, slash our taxes, ease our regulatory burden. We have to allow asset prices – home, stocks, everything – to reach their real value (which is still a lot lower than they are now) and then we have to get to work making, mining and growing more of our own stuff. It will take a generation to get back up to genuine prosperity – the generation we should have given in 1919, but have continually put off for nearly a century. The piper must be paid, and while we can whine and moan that we’re stuck with the bill, there’s just nothing for it but for us to do the right thing.

And especially if the possible law breaker is the brother of Kentucky AG and Democrat Senate candidate Jack Conway:

A Jefferson County prosecutor was tipped off by Louisville narcotics detectives twice in the past two years that he was under investigation for possible drug use or trafficking, according to police records obtained by The Courier-Journal.

When investigators learned of the leaks and interrogated the two detectives and the prosecutor last March, all three initially gave false or misleading statements about what happened, those records show. The statements of Matthew C. Conway, the prosecutor, were made under oath…

While Jack Conway is asserting that his only involvement was to advise his brother to seek legal counsel, that just doesn’t ring true. Matthew Conway is an attorney: he knows to consult an attorney when the cops are snooping around. What, other than tipping his brother off to the investigation, could Jack Conway have said to Matthew? Meaning, what could he have said to his brother that his brother, as an attorney, wouldn’t already know?

Something is mighty fishy here and the people of Kentucky have a right to all the facts before November 2nd.

From Clear Capital:

Clear Capital (www.clearcapital.com), is issuing this special alert on a dramatic change observed in U.S. home prices.

“Clear Capital’s latest data shows even more pronounced price declines than our most recent HDI market report released two weeks ago,” said Dr. Alex Villacorta, senior statistician, Clear Capital. “At the national level, home prices are clearly experiencing a dramatic drop from the tax credit-induced highs, effectively wiping out all of the gains obtained during the flurry of activity just preceding the tax credit expiration.”

This special Clear Capital Home Data Index (HDI) alert shows that national home prices have declined 5.9% in just two months and are now at the same level as in mid April 2010…

As we all – and I really think it was “all” conservatives making this point – said back when the tax credit was enacted and then extended, all it was going to do is advance home sales a bit, provide a short boost to prices and then move in to a big drop in home prices. Here’s something a little bit new, I guess: we’re not going to say, “I don’t want to say ‘I told you so'” because, well, we really, really want to say, “I told you so”. Because we did. Because anyone who believed the tax credit would actually help the housing market was a fool.

So, there!

Now, what do we need to do? We need to essentially have our housing market go through a bankruptcy reorganization. Early on, I strongly favored a “cram down” of home mortgages to fit market value, but now that values have dropped so much (and I bet there’s at least a 20% further drop coming), it is likely too late for any such action to be effective. The reason I advocated that was as a means of keeping houses off the market and thus sustaining over all housing prices. The crash (or re-crash, if you prefer) is here and I don’t think we can stop it. So, now I’m of the opinion that we should just let things fall where they may and look to other means to clear out the vast supply of housing which is going to not only continue to drive down prices, but prevent any rebound.

As I explained over at Noonan for Nevada, my preferred solution for lowering supply is to set up mechanisms which will induce people – investors and former home owners – to enter in to long term leases of the foreclosed properties (long term is at least 2 years, but I’d really prefer it to be 5). This gets people in to a home (or keeps them in it if we simply allow the banks to lease the house back to the foreclosed home owner, if he can afford it, at all) and gets that home off the market for 2 to 5 years – supply is greatly lessened, downward pressure on prices drops and there is a chance for recovery of value (though we’ll never, in our life times, see home prices back to their 2005-07 level in real terms).

Whatever we do, it can’t be another subsidy for a failed system. You can blame whomever you wish for the mess (me? Banksters and Bureaucrats working on human greed at all levels caused the problem), but assigning blame doesn’t fix the mess. We need to think anew and act anew to get out of this – we need real change, not “please save the idiot banks” band-aids.

HAT TIP: Mish’s