Blogs For Victory

Treat people with disrespect, and this is what can result.

Talk about carrying the fight to the enemy:

Hot Air points out that the district is rated D+23 – in other words, the conventional wisdom is absolutely no chance for a Republican to win the seat.

But I think there is – in fact, I don’t think any seat is out of range for the GOP. Some are a lot harder than others, of course, but a well done campaign can move the ball – and, just maybe, produce a GOP victory anywhere on the map.

To me, two things are important in politics – that each office holder have a primary challenger and that each seat be contested. No one gets comfortable – everyone has to continually re-state their views and win support.

Joel Demos has the second hardest political task in 2010 (the hardest is for the GOPer running against Nancy Pelosi, John Dennis – a pro-gun, anti-Fed, gold-standard, pro-gay rights, anti-war, libertarian Republican), and as he asks in the video – let’s help him out.

A horrible tragedy for which the perpetrators have never expressed full remorse:

…Late on Tuesday morning, when Nanking had been in Japanese hands for thirty-six hours, former Tokyo secret police chief Nakajima and his 16th division rolled in to town through the Water Gate in trucks and armored cars. he had been delayed by the capture of some 10,000 prisoners at the last moment. All through night his men has been busy herding the prisoners drove by drove to the edge of the Yangtze. They had worn their fingers to the bone pressing machine-gun triggers. At least 6,000 of the prisoners had died. Now in the flat drear light of the next noon, Nakajima’s men began a systematic search inside Nanking for Chinese soldiers who had run away, taken off their uniforms, and vanished. The orders from Prince Asaka, the Emperor’s uncle, were explicit: kill all captives…

…The 80,000-odd soldiers turned loose in Nanking by Muto, Nakajima and Prince Asaka would have raped, killed, stolen, and burned if left to their own devices. In the event they acted under the guidance of their officers; they worked at being drunk and disorderly; they ran amok, but systematically. Their rape of Nanking began when Nakajima entered the city on December 14; it continued for six weeks; and it was not stopped, despite world-wide protest, until Prince Konoye admitted to Hirohito that there was no longer any hope of unseating Chiang Kai-shek…

…In all, according to figures accepted after two years of hearings by a panel of eminent jurists from many lands, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East which sat in Tokyo from 1946 to 1948, 20,000 women were raped in Nanking and its vicinity and over 200,000 men, a least a quarter of them civilians, were murdered. – David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, Volume 1

Kind of puts that atomic bomb thing in to perspective, doesn’t it? As William Manchester once wrote, while time has blurred the jagged edges of Japan’s Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere it should be remember that the Japanese were a savage foe. After 14 years of Japan committing crime after crime and resisting our advance with fanatical determination even after it was clear the war was lost, it is no surprise that America’s leaders in 1945 opted for the atomic bomb.

…she thinks I’m a piano player in a whore house:

…A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 23% of Adults share a favorable opinion of members of Congress. Seventy-two percent (72%) have an unfavorable view of congressmen. These findings include five percent (5%) who have a Very Favorable impression and 45% who have a Very Unfavorable view of the legislators…

That guy you saw slipping in to town with the hat pulled down over his eyes? That was your Representative. If he was a Democrat, he also had on a false mustache.

From CNBC:

U.S. employment fell for a second straight month in July as more temporary census jobs ended while private hiring rose less than expected, pointing to an anemic economic recovery…

Its not even an anemic recovery – it is no recovery, at all. The only reason the unemployment rate held steady at 9.5% is because the BLS says that labor force participation continues to drop. In fact, labor force participation is down to levels last seen in 1983. If we put the 3 million or so people who left back in to the mix, unemployment would be in the 11%+ range (whether or not BLS is fudging the participation rate to keep us officially below double-digit unemployment is an open question and if there is a GOP Congress next year, it should be looked in to).

We’re in a bad way and only a complete change in economic policies will allow us to start climbing out of the hole.

UPDATE: Zero Hedge decided to re-crunch the numbers using the labor force participation rate of 2000 instead of the much reduced rate of 2010. This makes sense – even given that a large number of people have left the labor force since 2000 through retirement or death, the growing population would indicate at least that number of people able and willing to work. The unemployment rate if we use that participation rate? 14.7%.

The change we can believe in:

Social Security will pay out more this year than it gets in payroll taxes, marking the first time since the program will be in the red since it was overhauled in 1983, according to the annual authoritative report released Thursday by the program’s actuary…

We warned about this and President Bush attempted to fix it. Democrats refused and, in fact, did everything they could to demonize the very concept of SS reform. Now, its going broke.

We had a window of opportunity for a few years to reform SS without undue pain – now we’ll shortly be forced to reform it and it will be very painful. We might be forced to benefit cuts and/or tax increases just to keep the current and soon recipients ok while we cast about for some sort of long term reform. This is the wages of first buying a system which was bound to fail, and then playing politics with it.

From Zombie:

Combined, the new 2010 allegations and the original 1974 allegations accuse Shirley and Charles Sherrod of:

• Paying farm workers as little as 67¢ per hour, far below minimum wage for the era.

• Employing underage children to perform hard labor.

• Compelling their employees to work in unsafe conditions, including getting sprayed with pesticides.

• Firing any workers who acted as whistleblowers.

• Forcing employees to work overtime in the fields at night with practically no advance notice.

• Having a capricious payscale under which employees doing the exact same jobs were paid different amounts according to the whims of the managers.

• Being unwilling to address the abuse even after it was raised by union representatives.

• Seriously mismanaging the farm to such an extent that it went bankrupt…

I saw the original article over at Counter Punch (certainly one of the most entertaining hard-left websites around, but never take everything they say at face value), but held off on talking about it. I tried to get the author of the original article to clarify a few things for me (I wanted to know if government money was used, as well as a few other things), but I received no reply. It is a searing indictment of the Sherrods – and this latest update just makes it more so.

It is a sad fact that while liberals often talk a great game of helping the poor they often end up being the most ruthless exploiters of the poor out there. And this is for both political and economic exploitation. Liberals have always had this problem of not being able to take the poor as they are – as people who have their own ideas, dreams, fears and needs. The Sherrods wanted to help – and the people would be helped, no matter how much it hurt, it would seem.

Such is the long, sad tale of liberals who are always trying to create a utopia for others. Shirley Sherrod is more than just a face on a video, it would seem – she’s a hard-left operator who has a trail of troubles running out behind her. The big question now is: just how did she get hired for anything, given her record?

So, Elena Kagan was confirmed to the Supreme Court today, largely on party lines.

You know, I look back on the election, and realize that McCain didn’t even get as many votes as Bush did in 2004. So, there was a sizable number of potential Republican voters who chose not to vote in 2008 because McCain “wasn’t conservative enough” for them.

We have had judges in recent days and weeks overturn the will of Arizona voters and California voters. Presidential elections have consequences. With two vacancies in the Supreme Court in the past two years, which were expected, perhaps those who stayed home in protest should have thought about the consequences of electing Obama would be.

And you can’t blame me, I voted for McCain.

Is Christianity a failure worthy of renunciation, or do some people choose to renounce rather than reform?

Poll: 30% still entirely suckered by Obama.

Does the minimum wage increase unemployment? It would seem so.

What drives the unemployment rate? Lots of things, and Mish covers them well.

IMF: US real estate problems could bring on second wave of the financial crisis. Which is definitely possible. It could also be brought on by sovereign default. Or collapsing Chinese bubbles. Or a liquidity crisis in Europe. I could go on, literally, for a long time with this.

Government subsidies for bloggers? I vote “yes” on that and will provide easy instructions for where to send the $1,456,957,345.56 I think my blogging is worth. But, seriously, should we be talking about subsidizing the MSM?

Money keeps flowing away from mutual funds. But the economy is fine. Obama says so. Biden does, too. And Bernanke, as well. And none of them would have the slightest interest in hoodwinking us about this.

Confident of victory in November? I am.

From Boston.com:

The number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a record 40.8 million in May as the jobless rate hovered near a 27-year high, the government reported yesterday.

Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 19 percent from a year earlier and increased 0.9 percent from April, the US Department of Agriculture said in a statement on its website…

But don’t feel down about – Her Majesty, Michelle Obama, is off on another swank vacation with 40 of her closest friends. And that should make all you poor, little people feel better…after all, poor people like to see their betters having a good time, gives them someone to look up to!