Blogs For Victory

Change we can believe in, huh?

The Obama administration wants to increase taxes on Americans earning more than $200,000 by almost $970 billion over the next decade and take in an additional $400 billion from businesses even as it retooled a proposed crackdown on international tax-avoidance techniques.

The budget released today would reinstate 10-year-old income tax rates of 36 percent and 39.6 percent for single Americans earning more than $200,000 and joint filers who make more than $250,000 as part of a broad $1.9 trillion tax increase proposal. It proposes to eliminate preferences for oil and gas companies, life-insurance products, executives of investment partnerships and U.S.-based companies that operate overseas.

This, of course, would be more taxes on “the rich”. Now, I know that some of you might think of “the rich” as being people like, well, President Obama, Senators like Kerry and Rockefeller, zillionaire leftists like George Soros and such. Well, you’re wrong – they are not part of “the rich”. “The rich” is a very select group of people – those who earn $200,000.00 or more per year. If you have millions or even billions of dollars you’re sitting on, you’re not “the rich”…if you’re a plumbing contractor who grosses $500,000.00 per year by the sweat of your brow, congratulations – you’re “the rich”.

What Obama is really taxing is the middle class – because that is where income taxes can be levied. The real rich don’t make a lot of income – what they make is hidden away in various funds and used by various dodges which allow them to live fabulous lives while paying as little as possible in income taxes. And, of course, the vast wealth they have is mostly untaxed by the Federal government. But Obama has to feed the maw of government and pretend he’s working towards fiscal discipline.

He could have proposed a tax on wealth – say, asking Senator Kerry to sell one of his mansions in order to pay a “you have a lot of mansions, Senator” tax. But that wouldn’t work. That would cause opposition from liberals, like Kerry, who are always taking about “the rich” having to pay their “fair share”, but who never seem willing to sacrifice their own wealth. Wealthy people don’t like to be taxed – its such a bother, ya know? Better to tax the middle class.

And thus is laid bare the dishonesty of the left – they are the party of the real rich, and they protect their own. While leftist rank-and-file people are spoon fed anti-capitalist propaganda, they never realize that what they’re doing is punishing the hard working people who get things done, while the idle rich run the liberal show and never pay the piper.

I’d ask them to wake up and smell the coffee, but I think their stupor has gone on too long.

The Democrat weakness spreads far and wide:

Senator Chuck Schumer’s once rock solid approval rating has taken a slide. For the first time in nearly nine years, Schumer’s approval rating has fallen below 50%. According to the latest Marist Poll in New York, 47% of registered voters statewide report Schumer is doing either an excellent or good job in office. 31% rate the job he is doing as fair, and 17% view him as performing poorly. This is Schumer’s lowest job approval rating since April 2001 when 49% of voters approved of the job he was doing.

This doesn’t mean the GOP wins the seat, but any incumbent who polls below 50% in an election year is having some trouble. If the GOP can get a strong candidate and run a good campaign, then Schumer could, in the end, be beaten – time will tell if the NY GOP is capable of such a task.

But the bottom line is that even in Democrat strongholds and among long-term Democrat leaders, there is increasing weakness in the Democrat brand. Even if Schumer prevails in November, he’ll have to fight hard to do it – and while he’s fighting hard and spending lots of money to re-elect himself, he’s got that much less time and money to spend on other Democrats.

Spread the field, run against Obama’s policies, challenge every seat – if the GOP does that, then we’re bound to have a good November.

There’s a case to be made for it:

Patrick Ruffini offers an unexpected, and compelling bit of news: in Hawaii, an upcoming special House election — yes, I know, it seems like there’s always a special election coming up somewhere — has the potential to be “NY-23 in reverse.”

Hawaii has no special primary elections, and all candidates run in the general election. A simple plurality is required to win. Currently, the HI-1 field features two well-known Democratic candidates (with another on the way in), and one competitive Republican candidate, Charles Djou…

The Djou campaign is taking nothing for granted and has a vote goal of 50.1%. Charles Djou is prepared to take on a single major Democratic candidate. But we do note that the Democrats’ ability to consolidate around a single candidate is clouded by the presence of two well-known Democrats from different factions of the party who are unlikely to drop out and endorse the other. In the Blue Dog corner is former 2nd District Rep. Ed Case, and representing the liberal base is State Sen. Colleen Hanabusa who has been resoundingly endorsed by organized labor and EMILY’s List. A third candidate has recently emerged, State Sen. Will Espero, who is likely to further split the Democratic vote.

If Ruffini says it can be done, then it can be done – doesn’t mean it will be, but it can be. Now, our job is to help out as much as we can. So, go here and help out as much as you can.

The really cool thing, guys and gals, is that HI-1 is the House district Obama grew up in. A win here, as Ruffini points out, drives home the “no Democrat is safe” message.

When Blogs For Bush became Blogs For Victory, we switch blogging platforms. Blogs For Bush was Movable Type, while Blogs for Victory, it was decided, would be WordPress. Since then, it has been my intention to migrate the old content from Blogs For Bush into WordPress… but the huge amount of content made the export/import process very cumbersome.

Around mid-December, I tried to give it another shot. Slowly but surely, I managed to import the content, small chunks at a time. As of this now, I have imported all of the content from the launch to the end of 2004. I still have all the archives from 2005-2007 to do, but I am pleased to present to you, for now all that has been restored.

So, for our longtime fans who has stuck with us, and to our new fans that are interested in the origins of Blogs For VIctory, I present to you, Blogs For Bush: October 2003 to December 2004.

And as this involves Dianne Feinstein, its doubly disappointing – she’s one of the few adults in the Democrat Senate caucus:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation early this year to channel $25 billion in taxpayer funds to a federal agency that had just awarded her husband’s firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties.

The California senator sought the additional funds for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to boost the agency’s efforts to avert home foreclosures – a huge issue in her home state.

But as the Washington Times first reported Tuesday, Feinstein’s intervention came around the same time the FDIC was awarding a multimillion-dollar contract to CB Richard Ellis Group (CBRE) – the commercial real-estate firm chaired by her husband, Richard Blum.

People are hurting and need help – but a Democrat smells the chance to make some money on the side and just can’t resist it.

So very sad – and there’s only one cure for it: beat the Democrats very badly in November.

This clueless:

Let’s go through the president’s fascinating logic here, shall we? The Republican nobility has completely misrepresented the king’s intentions, thereby creating a most unfortunate situation where the peasants don’t trust him and his Democratic court anymore. And what’s more, these common folk are in such a tizzy that they have left the Republican noblemen in Congress with absolutely no wiggle room; for if these Republicans concede anything now in an effort to improve the lot for all, they will be in hot water back home.

Earth to Barack Obama: It isn’t the Republicans on Capitol Hill that have blocked your attempts to put America on the path towards government-run health care. It was the American people — the same people that punished your party in 1994 when they tried to pull this stunt the last time. And it wasn’t because they were told that it was “some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of [their] lives,” or that “this guy is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that’s going to destroy America.” They figured that stuff out on their own.

Obama – and the rest of the Democrats – do seem to be laboring under the assumption that the TEA Party was created and controlled by the GOP. The believe this because they know that no one on the left is permitted to form a grass roots organization without the specific permission of leftist leaders. Not understanding how the people can self-organize, our Community Organizer in Chief is all at sea about what is happening.

Obama seems to have gone to that GOP retreat in the hopes of getting the GOP to call of the dogs. To get our side to calm down the TEA Party people and allow some version of Obamacare to go through. Sorry, Barry, it can’t be done. Two reasons:

1. We don’t want to do it – or, at least, those in the GOP who want real reform rather than “bi-partisanship” don’t want to do it.

2. Couldn’t do it, even if we wanted to. If you’ve got a phone number to the Grand Poo-Bah of the TEA Party movement, you let us know…as far as we can tell, its a disparate group of patriots working independently on a common cause. If it has a leader, its Sarah Palin – but even she doesn’t call the shots.

The American people are in revolt against the government – Rasmussen’s latest polling for Presidential job approval shows a marked improvement for Obama on the “Strongly Approve” metric since the SOTU. The problem is that all he’s done is win over Democrats – Independents are less supportive now than they were before the SOTU. No one is buying the liberal line any more – and no one is fooled by MSM attempts to paint the TEA Party as some sort of extremist fringe.

The times, they are a-changing. Get used to it, liberals.

And it’ll work, I bet:

Jonathan Martin reports:

A tactic that would have seemed far-fetched a year ago, when the new president was sworn in with a 67 percent job approval rating, is now emerging as a key component of the GOP strategy: Tie Democratic opponents to Obama and make them answer for some of the unpopular policies associated with the chief executive.

This is, of course, the mirror image of what occurred in 2006, when Democrats ran against George W. Bush. Martin adds: “The challenge will be to link Democrats with the administration on such issues as spending, bailouts, healthcare and cap-and-trade while not personally attacking Obama, who remains personally well-liked even as his standing erodes.” It’s not much of a challenge, really; all Republicans need to do is look at the campaigns of Bob McDonnell and Scott Brown, who ran against Obama policies but made no personal attacks on the president.

Heck, even if Obama were personally unpopular, I’d still eschew attacks on him, personally – its Obama policies which are driving people away from the Democrats. Obama can be all puppies and butterflies in the public mind, but as long as Democrats are identified with the health care debacle, “cap and trade” and bank bailouts, it won’t matter. We need to hammer it home that a vote for a Democrat is a vote for Obama policies – and we should hammer it home in all 435 districts. No Democrat should go unchallenged.

Of course, this won’t completely do the trick. We also need a clear plan of our own, vigorously presented to the American people. And it can’t just be tax cuts and such – it has to be a revolutionary pledge to clean up government from top to bottom. If we do that and, even more, if we fully carry it out, we’ll secure a generation of power for conservatism, and thus the means to restore America to the Founder’s vision.

The absurdity grows:

The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine…

…In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.

The data has been fake, at times and now it seems that some of the “data” was akin to “stuff I overheard at a party”.

As I’ve said before – people need to go to jail over this. Vast sums of money have been spent and a few con artists have made out like bandits – and all for a completely idiotic theory ginned up by people who wanted to scare us in to socialism. Enough is enough.

UPDATE: And now the global warming claims about damage to the rain forest are coming up bogus.

This is the must read economic article of the month. Read it, and know what is going on – fail to read it, and be ignorant. Its as simple as that.

Sorry, guys and gals, I’ve just got nothing in the brain worth writing about at the moment…have fun with this open thread and I promise something good for you in the evening (as long as “good” is defined by me, ok?). :o)

Oh, I know – we can do Super Bowl predictions! I’m rooting for the Saints…odd for an AFC man, like me, but I just love a Cinderella story…

UPDATE: Here’s something to talk about – the TEA Party moves to take over the GOP at the grassroots level.