Blogs For Victory

Geesh:

The Sun recently found that the three local governments receiving most of the money sent to the valley to buy, fix and resell foreclosed houses had been able to close deals on only five houses to date even though the program is nearly halfway into its 18-month time frame.

The U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department-funded project is aimed putting brakes on the decline of neighborhoods, and the plan locally had been to buy hundreds of homes.

And they’ve got excuses, of course. But if you have $140,000.00 you can buy a large house with a nice pool here in Las Vegas. If you’re going after distressed houses – those needing repairs – you can probably have them for $50,000.00 or less. Lets say 20% of the $60 million was legitimate overhead. For the remaining $40 million, HUD should have got – making a generous allotment of $200,000 per house (purchase and repair) – about 200 houses. They got 5.

And the liberals want to try more of this. We need no more proof of the ultimate triumph of ideology over reality in liberal thinking.

The scandal spreads – eventually, I expect a very large portion of the left’s leadership will be found culpable to at least some extent:

Lift up a rock and another snake comes slithering out from the ongoing University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) scandal, now riding as “Climategate”.

Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU’s unfolding Climategate scandal. In fact, according to files released by a CEU hacker or whistleblower, Holdren is involved in what Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball terms “a truculent and nasty manner that provides a brief demonstration of his lack of understanding, commitment on faith and willingness to ridicule and bully people”.

A very large number of people have been lying about climate change and the higher up the food chain the worse the lies and the greater the personal culpability. Do not for a moment think that people are incapable of such a breath taking scale of lies – people are quite capable of it and have done it, repeatedly, throughout history (though much more commonly since leftist thought first started to infect our public debates).

The left is ideology – it is, indeed, the triumph of ideology. Once someone subscribes to it all critical thinking is suppressed and all independent thought forbidden. The rewards for obedience are many – comradeship; special privileges; help in careers; praise – while the punishment for apostasy is complete exile coupled with slander. The leftists who have renounced their faith in the past – most notably people like Whittaker Chambers – have found that their friends of yesterday are the quite vile enemies of today. So, once in leftists tend to stay in and go along with ever more enormous lies.

This one, though, may play a key role in unraveling the left and giving us our opening to completely remove the left from any influence on American politics.

The story:

A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.

Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them – but could make no sound.

‘I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,’ said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegatative state.

‘I dreamed myself away,’ he added, tapping his tale out with the aid of a computer.

Doctors used a range of coma tests before reluctantly concluding that his consciousness was ‘extinct’.

But three years ago, new hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.

Mr Houben described the moment as ‘my second birth’. Therapy has since allowed him to tap out messages on a computer screen.

The Culture of Death will be dismayed by this.

Honestly, people, we must always err on the side of life. Those who are insistent upon killing or allowing to die people we might perceive as being “brain dead” or what have you are making assertions of impossible knowledge. If someone’s heart is beating and his other vital signs are normal, then that person is alive – and for all we know is thinking deeply about his current condition while we think he’s vegetative.

We must not kill the innocent – or allow the suffering to die. We know a great deal about our brains, but even in that are our knowledge is still limited – and we know nothing of the mind which uses the brain to manipulate things in the natural world. We’re making judgments based on partial knowledge – and for entirely ideological reasons. Because some people want to think that a human being is just the accidental result of blind, materialist-determinist evolution, they will insist we kill those humans they believe are not up to snuff.

With stories like this, any person of good will must come down hard on the side of life – if someone is to die, then they will die…with more or less suffering, but entirely outside of our control. Our duty is to do as well as we can by the suffering and then leave the rest in the hands of the Author of Life.

Various proposals are making the rounds to increase taxes to pay for the campaign in Afghanistan and, once again, to institute some sort of draft – this last bit the product of a curious bit of leftist thought that if we have a conscript army, we’d be more wary about going to war (in response to this, I offer WWI, WWI, Korea and Vietnam – all fought with conscript armies and, in my view, made longer and less successful by that very fact). What are we to make of this?

That the left is up to its usual, dishonest tricks. The left doesn’t care about paying for government and certainly doesn’t want larval leftists taken out of ACORN and put in to uniform where they might learn things such as discipline, independent thought and personal honor. No, this is all just a gambit to get the war lost and over with as soon as possible. Once again, the left sees an American defeat in war as the preferred option.

On the face of it, none of us could have the slightest argument with an increase in taxes to pay for war – but, if we are to make paying for the war out of current accounts the paradigm, then we have to admit that mere taxation, alone, won’t do the trick. In the end, we’ll also have to cut non-defense spending. This would not only mean no health care reform, but deep cuts in non-defense, discretionary spending. My candidates for the axe are Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, Agency for International Development, Agricultural Marketing Service, AMTRAK, Appalachian Regional Commission, US Access Board, Bonneville Power Administration, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Industry and Security, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee, Department of Commerce, Commission of Fine Arts, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Community Planning and Development, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Corporation for National and Community Service, Council of Economic Advisers, Council on Environmental Quality, Denali Commission, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Labor, Department of Transportation, Domestic Policy Council, Office of Economic Adjustment, Economic Development Administration, Endangered Species Committee, Energy Department, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Export-Import Bank of the United States, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Consulting Group, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Federal Executive Boards, Federal Inter-agency Committee for the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds, Federal Trade Commission, Federal Transit Administration, Foreign Agricultural Service, Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Innovation and Improvement Office, Inter-agency Alternative Dispute Resolution Working Group, Inter-agency Council on Homelessness, Japan-United States Friendship Commission, Joint Board for the Enrollment of Actuaries, National Bi-partisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, National Economic Council, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Indian Gaming Commission, Rural Development, Surface Transportation Board and the Susquehanna River Basin Commission. Bet none of you had heard of most of those agencies.

Once the left gets serious about getting our spending under control by massively cutting these organizations, then we can sign on for tax increases. Heck, if the liberals would agree to the elimination of a random one of three of the above agencies, I’d agree to a 25% increase in my income taxes – I’d come out ahead just in the increased liberty and economic growth which would result from having that many government busy bodies no longer bothering people and wasting taxpayer money. Remember, most of these agencies grew up haphazardly – piled one on top of another by Congresses and Presidents making political hay by using the creation of a new agency or department as a means of pretending to be taking action.

Reform doesn’t necessarily mean adding something new – it can be re forming the government; making it back in to what it was before. A bit of weed whacking on the federal agencies would go a long ways towards getting our government under control as well as freeing up funds for other activities considered more pressing at the moment. But the left doesn’t want that – they just want to force us on the right to provide more funds for the insatiable maw of Big Government, and they will hold our troops in Afghanistan hostage until we agree.

We here at Blogs for Victory wish all of you a happy Thanksgiving. If you’ve a mind to discuss anything while we’re eating turkey, then have at it.

And now, bless the God of all,

who has done wondrous things on earth;

Who fosters people’s growth from their mother’s womb,

and fashions them according to his will!

May he grant you joy of heart

and may peace abide among you;

May his goodness toward us endure in Israel to deliver us in our days. – Sirach 50:22-24

Keep in mind that this is one of the States the GOP thought entirely out of reach:

Democratic incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand may have a serious problem on her hands if Rudy Giuliani gets in next year’s race for the U.S. Senate in New York State.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of voters in the state finds Giuliani, the former Republican mayor of New York City, leading Gillibrand by 13 points – 53% to 40%. Four percent (4%) like some other candidate, and just two percent (2%) are undecided.

2010 will be an interesting year, to be sure.

We seem to get stupider about everything by the day:

Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges, sources told FoxNews.com.

The three, all members of the Navy’s elite commando unit, have refused non-judicial punishment — called an admiral’s mast — and have requested a trial by court-martial.

Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the military code-named “Objective Amber,” told investigators he was punched by his captors — and he had the bloody lip to prove it.

Now, instead of being lauded for bringing to justice a high-value target, three of the SEAL commandos, all enlisted, face assault charges and have retained lawyers.

Matthew McCabe, a Special Operations Petty Officer Second Class (SO-2), is facing three charges: dereliction of performance of duty for willfully failing to safeguard a detainee, making a false official statement, and assault.

Petty Officer Jonathan Keefe, SO-2, is facing charges of dereliction of performance of duty and making a false official statement.

Petty Officer Julio Huertas, SO-1, faces those same charges and an additional charge of impediment of an investigation.

Boys, if you need money for a defense attorney, you just let me and all other patriotic Americans know…we should be able to raise as much as you need in short order. As for me: word of terrorist vs word of SEAL…think I’ll believe the SEAL. At all events, this is war, not some childrens game – if all he got out of it was a fat lip, then the terrorist should count himself lucky.

We need to stop this sort of thing – we need, that is, to stop persecuting our own because of alleged slights to our enemies. Good discipline must be maintained in the military, but only the most serious infractions should be even brought before higher authorities – a fat lip, if it happened, should have resulted in a verbal reprimand from the SEALs CO, and that be the end of the matter.

Unfortunately, in Obama’s America we are unlikely to see any rationality on this – even the Bush Administration shied away from protecting our troops from this sort of nonsense…Obama’s people might take pride in such a thing.

About time:

Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal — for nearly three years — to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding “Climategate” scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries’ freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer code, and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s East Anglia University.

All of that material, and that sought for years by CEI, goes to the heart of the scientific claims and campaign underpinning the Kyoto Protocol, its planned successor treaty, “cap-and-trade” legislation, and the EPA’s threatened regulatory campaign to impose similar measures through the back door.

The jig is up, boys and girls – I think we’re going to be able to entirely destroy the environmentalist movement.

Environmentalism was the back door for totalitarian control of our lives – unable to win at the ballot box and unable to conduct an open coup, the left used concerns about pollution to gain increasing regulatory control over our lives. Global warming was just the finishing touch – it was to be the tool whereby recalcitrant Americans were finally put in their place and forced to live short, impoverished, miserable lives while the ruling elite lived in the lap of luxury.

Well, the truth always comes out, in the end – and now we merely have to keep pressing this issue, and the whole thing will fall apart.

This has gotta hurt:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 27% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -15. This is the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for President Obama.

Now, Obama is going to give his Afghan speech next Monday – that will be an interesting event. Provided he shows even the slightest bit of backbone, a lot of Americans – including me – will rally ’round him on the Afghan issue. I wonder, though, if such an event will translate in to any significant upswing in the President’s approval rating? I’m sure he’ll get a bump out of it – but will it be a large bump? Will it have any legs?

Time will tell – but if there is no bump, a small bump or a short bump, then Obama is in much worse trouble than anyone thinks.

The left is insistent that death be an integral part of Obamacare:

I’m getting a lot of constituent mail forwarded to me from family and friends in California. I thought I’d share this letter to a constituent from Rep. George Miller (D-CA), co-author of the House version of health care reform, and one of the most odious and dutiful representatives of the abortion industry in Congress.

The positive thing about this letter is that Rep. Miller is uncharacteristically polite about his enthusiasm for the legal killing of unborn children – the chief sacrament and concern of the Democratic Party’s California delegation. The politeness masks the fact that he’s basically telling the constituent that the Stupak Amendment is DOA if it returns to the House and he’ll help kill it…

…While I did not support the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, it was necessary to allow the amendment to be considered on the House floor in order for the overall health care bill to move forward. That was clear. But I do not believe the final health care bill that emerges from Congress should include language as restrictive as the Stupak-Pitts Amendment and I will work to find language that will guarantee no federal funds can be used for abortion but that protects the safety and rights of women who might need access to such services…

Without “Stupak”, NARAL and Planned Parenthood were ok with the abortion language in the bill – which means they knew that the federal funds would be flowing to the abortuaries. Miller, typical of culture-of-death stooges, is being dishonest.

We still have quite a battle on our hands – a battle for the basic humanity of protecting innocent, unborn life.