Blogs For Victory

There is much debate these days about what to do with social issues. With liberalism in melt-down mode, many voices are calling for a muting of social issues in our political discourse. It is said that we have to concentrate on economic issues, at any rate, and why bring up those contentious social issues which may allow our liberal friends a new lease on life?

All of such thinking is just so much rot – social conservatism is conservatism; the economic stuff is just icing on the cake. What matters if taxes are low and spending is cut if our society is disintegrating in a riot of immorality? What soldier fights for easy access to pornography and a healthy stock market?

Dave Hartline covers this issue excellently over at The American Catholic in a genuine must-read article. The fact of the matter is that if we give up the fight for basic morality – for basic truth, that is – then we surrender the field to liberalism. Hartline points out that those Catholic dioceses which have fallen in to the liberal swamp on social issues are lacking any spirit – they are dying away, even as they appear on the surface to remain large and powerful. Meanwhile, those areas where orthodoxy reigns are surging in strength and growing by leaps and bounds.

Our arguments about government spending, taxes and national defense will be quiet academic if we surrender the field to liberal morality. We might triumph over the next few election cycles on merely economic grounds, but if we are not also firmly engaged in the defense of morality, we’ll find our economic victories to be fleeting, at best. At the end of the day, we’ll find we have an empty shell of conservatism – something which looks impressive on paper, but which is wasting away for lack of a back bone.

I’ve said before that the most crucial issue we face today is abortion. Second only to abortion is gay marriage. These two fights are for the bedrock of our civilization. If we do not respect life and if we do not defend the traditional family, then we have lost everything, even if we gain 6% in GDP. A nation owned by the Culture of Death and pretending that a gay couple is the same as a straight, married couple with children is a nation which is doomed, no matter what else happens.

The merest glance at Europe’s disintegration and increasingly violent and aggressive Islamization is all we need to convince ourselves that their path must not be ours – but their path will be ours if we follow European conservatism down the path of “me too” on social immorality. Conservatism over there ceased to defend family and traditional morality – concentrating on the allegedly more important bread and butter economic issues. Now Europe can’t even defend itself; whole areas of European cities have become no-go zones of Moslem domination…and while European gays can marry, the majority of children being born in some areas are to Moslem parents.

Man does not live by bread alone – we don’t live by tax rates and GDP growth statistics. In order to live – really live, as men and women – we need a firm foundation of truth in our lives. That is what conservatism arose to defend, and must defend or simply have no point, at all.

Because if its a choice between academic freedom and indulging in continued hatred of President Bush, its really no contest:

Anti-war activists are protesting at the University of California, Berkeley to demand the removal of a law professor who used to craft legal theories for the Bush administration on waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques.

Monday is the first day of classes at UC Berkeley’s School of Law. The target of the protest there is John Yoo, who worked for President Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2001-03. The demonstators want Yoo to be prosecuted for war crimes…

Of course, these same demonstrators will never call for, say, Fidel Castro to be prosecuted – after all, he really did commit war crimes, but because he’s a socialist, its all ok. Be a Republican who merely offers some legal advice to a President you hate – up against the wall, you SOB!

From NRO’s Campaign Spot:

In the most recent Gallup poll, the generic ballot shows Republicans ahead of Democrats, 50 percent to 43 percent.

The GOP’s seven-point margin is the largest they have enjoyed since . . . the dawn of creation, according to Gallup’s chart.

Strangely, the GOP had a five-point margin in July 1994, but the generic ballot remained tied in August and November.

That last bit is very important – in 1994 with the generic ballot tied up, the GOP still scored historic gains. This is because of the oddity of polling – it always understates GOP strength. There are a lot of theories for this, none of them completely convincing – I don’t bother with them any longer: I just always mentally add 2-3 points to the GOP for polls of likely voters, 3-5 points for polls of registered voters and 5-7 points for polls of adults – it works very well.

Right now, with a 7 point lead, if the election were held today, the Democrats would be utterly crushed. Will this polling sustain itself in to November? No way to tell – but unless things turn around very fast for the Democrats, they are looking at some pretty serious losses on November 2nd.

From Legal Insurrection:

The Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has granted a stay pending an expedited appeal of the District Court Order which held that California Prop. 8 violated the U.S. Constitution. The Court specifically ordered the supporters of Prop. 8 to brief if they had standing to appeal…

A little surprised that the 9th would do this – after all, this is reasonable and just and entirely in accordance with the law…things not often seen out of the 9th. Could be, of course, that they just realized if the upheld the order then the Supreme Court would just issue a stay.

Bottom line – this delays the issue until after the election, and then shortly after that California may have a governor and/or attorney general who will do their darned job and defend the will of the people of California.

UPDATE: The brief which “smacked down” Walker is available here. A quote:

…to read the district court’s confident, though often startling, factual pronouncements, one would think that reasonable minds simply cannot differ on the key legislative facts implicated by this case. Again, however, the district court simply ignored virtually everything—judicial authority, the works of eminent scholars past and present in all relevant academic fields, extensive documentary and historical evidence, and even simple common sense—opposed to its conclusions. Indeed, even though this case implicates quintessential legislative facts— i.e., “general facts which help the tribunal decide questions of law and policy and discretion,” Langevin v. Chenango Court, Inc., 447 F.2d 296, 300 (2d Cir. 1971) (Friendly, J.)—the district court focused almost exclusively on the oral testimony presented at trial. See Daggett v. Commission on Governmental Ethics & Election Practices, 172 F.3d 104, 112 (1st Cir. 1999) (Boudin, J.) (legislative facts “usually are not proved through trial evidence but rather by material set forth in the briefs”); Indiana H. B. R.R. Co. v. American Cyanamid Co., 916 F.2d 1174, 1182 (7th Cir. 1990) (Posner, J.) (legislative facts “more often are facts reported in books and other documents not prepared specially for litigation”). The district court’s treatment of the trial testimony, moreover, was likewise egregiously selective and one-sided. The district court eagerly and uncritically embraced the highly tendentious opinions offered by Plaintiffs’ experts and simply ignored important concessions by those witnesses that undermined Plaintiffs’ claims. And it just as consistently refused to credit (or even qualify) the two experts offered by Proponents…

As I’ve said – he just ruled the way he preferred things to come out. That the MSM is retailing Plaintiff’s lie that the Proponents made a poor case doesn’t change the fact that it was the Plaintiff’s who were making absurd arguments. They made them, however, in front of a “judge” determined to find for them.

This judicial usurpation simply cannot be allowed to stand – and even a proponent of gay marriage who has an ounce of Americanism in his bones will demand that this ruling be overturned. It is un-American, unjust and hateful – if gay marriage is to be, it simply must not come about via a black robed tyrant.

When Tom DeLay was first accused of corruption, Mark and I saw the truth of what was going on: Democrats were desperate for power and the only way they knew how to get it was to attack Republicans. They waged a phony war against Republicans, with then Majority Leader Tom DeLay as their primary target. Why DeLay? What was his crime? He was an effective Republican Leader.

The shameless, false attacks on Tom DeLay inspired us to start a blog chronicling the real corruption in D.C., which later became our first book. Mark and I never doubted DeLay’s innocence, and now, finally, six years later, the Department of Justice has finally ended its investigation of Tom DeLay, clearing him of all charges.

The Justice Department has informed former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) that the government has ended a six-year investigation of his ties to the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to DeLay’s lead counsel in the matter, Richard Cullen, chairman of McGuireWoods.

The investigation lasted through two presidents and four attorneys general. Its demise provides a stark footnote to the lobbying scandals that helped Democrats regain the House majority they held for 40 years and lost in the Republican revolution of 1994, which eventually made the pugnacious DeLay one of Washington’s top power brokers.

“The federal investigation of Tom DeLay is over, and there will be no charges,” Cullen said. “This was one of the longest and expensive and thorough investigations in recent memory. DeLay took a tack right from the start that he had nothing to hide, and we have been in a routine and constant dialogue with [prosecutors].

Nothing can undo the damage Democrats caused; besmirching an innocent man, knowingly and without any remorse.

Now that this chapter has ended, a new one begins, and this one will bring about the rooting out of the real corruption in Washington D.C.

…besides his ego.

After the Senate passed that $600 million Border Security Bill yesterday, President Obama issued a statement asserting that securing the southwest border has been “a top priority” since he took office.
But if you think Mr. Obama can have but a single “top priority,” you’d be wrong. He’s got a load of them.

In an Address to the Nation two months ago, Mr. Obama declared “our top priority is to recover and rebuild from a recession that has touched the lives of nearly every American.”

More than any other issue, he has used the phrase “top priority” about digging the economy out of the recession and creating jobs. And on this issue, he drew a distinction between “a” top priority and “the” top priority.

And they go through a whole bunch of examples. It’s all bull, if you think about it. Obama spends a lot of energy pretending to care about this or that, without any real attempt of being engaged. The gulf oil spill being a prime example. Obama talks the talk, but time and time again doesn’t walk the walk. I have never believed a word he said ever, but I wonder how much people who did vote for him believe him anymore.

I at least can say I never believed that Obama would close Gitmo or get us out of Iraq. But a lot of people who voted for him did. How many are gonna fall for his lies again in 2012? Not nearly as many.

ABC news writes up the “class war” brewing between government employees and their employers – ie, you and me, dear taxpayer. While the report does cover some useful ground, it is an MSM report and thus does give plenty of space for the defenders of the status quo. The most absurd thing is a quote from a liberal pressure group and the AFSCME union stating that, on average, a public sector employee only gets $20,000 per year in pension benefits.

This is supposed to make us feel bad about the poor, little government employees. But as I recall, my dad was only getting about $14,000 per year from Social Security – and he only started getting that at 65. Public sector employees can start collecting their pension at 50, and keep collecting it until death, with regular cost of living increases, even if the cost of living doesn’t go up (say a person lives to 75 and retires at 55, even if its only 20k per year, that is $400,000.00…dad got about $238,000…and he paid for the guys getting 400k!). Additionally, public employee contributions to the plan are minimal…far less than, say, the SS taxes a private sector worker pays.

Additionally, I’ll bet dollars to donuts the figure is far higher than 20k. But aside from that, there are these two stark facts:

1. Public sector pensions are higher than the private sector pensions.

2. Public sector workers can retire much earlier than private sector workers.

That is the unfairness of it – the employees are getting more than the employers. If I hire someone to work for me, he gets paid less than me, period. It is absurd that someone I hire makes more than me – on average, public sector wages should be lower than private sector wages. Adjusted for State and local conditions, of course, but still lower on average.

Secondly, why does a public sector employee get to retire so young? I’ve got to slog it out until I’m 67 before I get my full social security benefits (supposing there even are such by 2031) – why doesn’t my public sector counter-part have to do the same? Heck, even on my employers pension plan, I don’t get it until I hit retirement age…even if I quit tomorrow.

Simple fairness requires a major reduction in public sector pay, as well as an end to early retirement. You can quit your public sector job after 20 or 30 years and keep your pension – but you don’t get it until you reach normal retirement age. No more 50 year old “retirees” living off the public dime or, as if often the case, taking new government employment while keeping the first pension (and thus building up a “double dip” pension in addition to the first).

We’re all supposed to be in this together – and it should be that public sector pay only rises after private sector pay, thus providing an incentive to government workers to increase the wealth of the private economy. To do otherwise is unjust, plain and simple.

Pat Toomey lays out the case for the GOP in 2010:

There seems to be serious consideration having Ted’s widow run for his old seat:

Nearly one year after Edward M. Kennedy’s death, prominent Democrats in Washington and Massachusetts are promoting his widow as the party’s best shot at winning back the Senate seat he held for nearly five decades.

Though she has seemed to bat down the idea of challenging Sen. Scott Brown (R) in 2012, Victoria Reggie Kennedy has been in some ways acting the part of a candidate. She has raised her public profile by campaigning for other politicians and appearing at events across the country…

A party so bereft of ideas and candidates that they can’t think of anything else in Massachusetts than to drag out another Kennedy is a party on its way down.

Good morning everyone – it is the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, today…for all you non-Catholics out there, this means its the day we celebrate Mary’s assumption in to Heaven. As Mary counted her blessings, it is a good day for all of us to count ours, and show some gratitude for them.

In Connecticut, the wrestling lady, Linda McMahon, has a decent shot at winning – which was unthinkable even a month ago in that heavily Democrat State.

Home equity lines of credit are becoming un-collectable. An odd phenomena, to be sure…but the most important part of it is how it indicates another raft of bad debt on banks’ books without an acknowledgment.

Palin leads among stoner-Republicans. Which might not be as helpful as our libertarian friends think…we don’t have nearly as many people stoned in our party as the Democrats do, at least if we take statements in the media as an indication.

Black and Right asks You Tube to ban the racism in comments.

Tired of the red/blue divide in America? Then perhaps we can change it to the “Free America” and “Sissy America” divide? Works for me.