Blogs For Victory

They are afraid, over in Obama-land, that things might go haywire…so they carefully control what information they provide:

NewsBusters and the Weekly Standard’s Mary Katharine Ham are not the only critics of the Obama administration for its failure to transcribe, publish and archive the daily press briefings held by press secretary Robert Gibbs.

A Web site called WhiteHousePressCorps.org is running a graphic at the top of its main page which reads, “Waiting on the official release of the 1/22/2009 Press Briefing transcript for” followed by a ticker counting up from January 22. You can also track them on Twiter @whpresscorps.

The site, which features archives of White House press gaggle and briefing transcripts dating back to February 2006, describes itself as “an independent media watchdog source providing information and commentary on the relationship between the press and the White House” that is not affiliated with the White House Correspondents’ Association.

One of the really useful things at President Bush’s White House site was the ability to get every press conference, press gaggle, briefing, speech or what have you – it was tremendously useful in refuting lefty accusations which twisted what Bush or aides said…lefty would say, “Bush Said EVIL Thing”, a check of the White House website would easily reveal that Bush said no such thing. President Bush and team weren’t afraid, it would seem, of people going back over what they said – Obama and Team are seemingly quite fearful that things they said won’t look good in retrospect, so they are only putting out the bits they like best.

This is cowardly. This is the act of a tyrant. This is the work of someone who holds the American people in actual contempt. If Obama is worth anything at all, he’ll quickly change policy here and put every word uttered up on the White House website for all to see right through to the end of his term in office.

UPDATE: Seems someone at the White House reads blogs:

Checking back at the site a few minutes ago, the Obama White House now has a press briefings section with the Briefing Room portion of the site. You can find it here.

This morning I discovered that the Obama administration’s WhiteHouse.gov is indeed transcribing and maintaining its daily press briefings featuring Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. Of course you pretty much have to know where to find them since there’s no link to an archive section from either the main page or the “Briefing Room” page.

This will take careful monitoring to ensure the White House doesn’t star to “forget” to keep these things updated.

It is nice to see that Minnesotans are not about to allow the sleazebag politics of the Democratic party to hijack a Senate seat without a fight:

Minnesota voters testified Tuesday their ballots had been unfairly rejected as Republican Norm Coleman argued thousands of disqualified absentee ballots should be counted in the U.S. Senate race.

“Perhaps my signature is not as good as it once was,” Gerald Anderson, of St. Paul, told the three-judge panel hearing Coleman’s lawsuit. “It gets cloudy and crooked. I am 75 years old.”

But that shouldn’t have disqualified his vote, he said: “I want it back. I’m entitled to my vote.”

A statewide recount gave Democrat Al Franken a 225-vote edge. The personal stories that Anderson and five other voters told are just one front on Coleman’s effort to have more votes counted.

And so much for “count every vote” – that only applies when Democrats are behind. Once the Democrat gets in the lead, then all the votes are counted, no matter what.

Has there been a more disgusting spectacle out of the 2008 campaign? Here is Al Franken, the man who routinely accuses Republicans of being lying bastards, attempting to steal a Senate seat he couldn’t win on the square…how do liberals sleep at night?

Its only fair – from NRO’s The Corner:

Rep. John Carter, a Texas Republican, sent out a press release earlier today about his innovative new bill:

“Rangel Rule”

All U.S. taxpayers would enjoy the same immunity from IRS penalties and interest as House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY) and Obama Administration Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, if a bill introduced today by Congressman John Carter (R-TX) becomes law.

Carter, a former longtime Texas judge, today introduced the Rangel Rule Act of 2009, HR 735, which would prohibit the Internal Revenue Service from charging penalties and interest on back taxes against U.S. citizens. Under the proposed law, any taxpayer who wrote “Rangel Rule” on their return when paying back taxes would be immune from penalties and interest.

Liberals do consider themselves above the laws – heck, above the rules of basic decency, for that matter (as in the way they slandered President Bush for 8 years and now get upset when conservatives offer even mild criticism of The One). But we really can’t have that. Of course, with liberals in charge it will be impossible to bring liberals to justice (anyone out there really think that Obama’s Justice Department will go after Rangel?) – so, we bring justice to the people, instead…just allow them to skate as easily as liberals do.

That this will result in a massive drop-off in government revenues is just one of those things we’ll have to put up with, since we want to be fair about things. Unless, that is, liberals want to start holding their own side accountable?

They are becoming a self-parody:

Berkeley’s public library will face a showdown with the city’s Peace and Justice Commission tonight over whether a service contract for the book check-out system violates the city’s nuclear-free ordinance.

The dispute centers on a five-year, $63,000 contract the library wants to sign with 3M, an international technology company based in Minnesota, to service five scanner machines library patrons use to check out books.

But 3M, a company with operations in 60 countries, refused to sign Berkeley’s nuclear-free disclosure form as required by the Nuclear Free Berkeley Act passed by voters in 1986.

As a result, the library’s self-checkout machines have not been serviced in about six months. Library officials say 3M is the only company authorized by the manufacturer to fix the machines, which were purchased in 2004.

The library asked the Peace and Justice Commission for a waiver, but at its Jan. 5 meeting the commission voted 7-1, with two abstentions, to reject the request.

Some of you younger people won’t realize what happened here – back in 1986, in order to stick to Ronald Ray-Gun (as our loving, tolerant liberals called him – when they weren’t using obscenities), Berkeley passed its utterly worthless nuclear free act…but given the way liberals work, even stupid things are continued on as if they made sense. Reagan is dead, the USSR is no more, the nuclear threat which ultimately cause the ruckus has faded (we no longer fear mutually assured destruction, but rogue weapons, instead…for which we don’t need nuclear weapons in Berkeley to defend ourselves)…but the liberal idiocy goes on, and now is hamstringing the library because a corporation doesn’t want to open itself up to lawsuits by signing the absurd disclosure…

A legislative proposal to re-instate the “Mexico City Policy” so eagerly renounced by President Obama in his first week in office:

Congressman Chris Smith was joined by Congressmen Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), in introducing H.R. 708, aimed at restoring the abortion-neutral Mexico City Policy. This 25-year old guideline establishes a wall of separation between abortion and family planning by ensuring that U.S. international family planning funds directed to foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) could not be used to actively promote or perform abortion as a method of family planning…

…”One of President Barrack Obama’s first acts in office was to issue an executive order to allow U.S. taxpayer money to flow to groups that perform abortions or actively work to overturn pro-life laws all over the world,” said Smith. “It’s a sad statement about his list of priorities. With Americans facing an economic crisis the likes of which we’ve not seen in generations, he chooses to enact a policy that will redirect funds to foreign organizations promoting and conducting abortions.

“The Mexico City Policy represents common ground,” Smith said. “It has allowed the US to substantially fund international family planning without padding the budgets of radical groups intent on spreading the scourge of abortion. Under Mexico City policy, funding for family planning was not reduced one penny. The President’s decision will shift U.S. funding from true family planning programs to programs that provide and promote abortion with little or no regard for the sovereignty of democratic nations that oppose abortion as a method of family planning.”

One does wonder – why this ardent desire on the part of the pro-abortion fanatics to have US taxpayer money pay for abortions and abortion advocacy in the Third World? Why does the entire United States have to be dragooned into supporting such a thing? And why, if they think it such a worthy object, have they not tried to get public funding of abortion passed through Congress?

Well, because abortion in an inhuman horror and even its proponents are nauseated by what they do…unfortunately, the human stomach can put up with a lot, so the clear violation of all that is good and true which is involved in each elective abortion doesn’t move proponents to change their ways, but it does make them run an hide and seek the dark, nasty corners of American life to do their dirty work. Working to abort more brown-skinned babies in the Third World is in keeping with Planned Parenthood’s original goal of reducing the number of “inferior” children, while it also is something which can be done, for the most part, outside the glare of publicity which follows abortion in the United States…after all, the Chinese government very conveniently prevents anyone from filming a forced abortion in China…abortion proponents can get on board with this and as most people won’t know about it, they can still be accepted in decent company in the United States. Nothing like being nasty and invited to A-list parties in Manhattan and Los Angeles, huh?

Some have said that conservatism has to ditch the life issue, or at least radically de-emphasize it. That is all a load of bull, of course: conservatism is pro-life, or its not conservatism. Period. The reason for this is tied up in what conservatism is conserving – Judeo-Christian civilization, which places a supreme value on the individual human life. Ditch that, and what you have left might be a lot of things, but conservative won’t be one of them.

We do need a reworking of strategy in the pro-life movement, but the ultimate thrust still has to be full speed ahead towards an eventual ban on this hideous practice.

The nearly $1 trillion “stimulus” package passed the House... but without a single Republican vote. Toby Harnden at the Telegraph (UK) says (and I agree) it is a slap in the face to Barack Obama.

President Barack Obama got the $825 (or $1.2 trillion over a decade) stimulus package through the House of Representatives but the 244 to 188 vote is a hollow victory indeed. Without a single Republican voting for the bill, his high-profile visit to Capitol Hill on Tuesday came to exactly naught – at least on the House side.

Obama vowed to change Washington and usher in a new post-partisan era. The the mood music and optics were pitch perfect as he trekked up to the Hill. Republicans praised his gesture, welcomed his sincere demeanour and appreciated his willingness to listen.

Problem was, he wanted only to listen and did not want to act on what Republicans said. When he was asked if he would re-structure the package to include more tax cuts, he reportedly responded: “Feel free to whack me over the head because I probably will not compromise on that part.”

He apparently added: ” I understand that and I will watch you on Fox News and feel bad about myself.”

That’s fine. No doubt Obama will indeed get beaten up on Fox News. But his failure to get even the squishiest moderate Republican  – including the 11 entertained in the White House by Rahm Emanuel last night – to back him is not merely a big score for Rep Eric Cantor, Republican Whip, and the rest of the GOP leadership.

Take that Barry.

Hadn’t even thought of that – this is our first recession with the Boomers in full charge of our nation:

If anyone wished to know what the baby-boomer generation would do when, in its full maturity, it hit its first self-created, big-time recession, I think we are seeing the hysterical results. After two decades of unprecedented economic growth, rampant consumer spending, and unimaginable borrowing to satisfy our insatiable appetites, we are suddenly going into even larger debt and printing trillions of dollars in paper money to ensure that someone else after we are gone pays the debt. As if the permanent solution to a financial panic and years of spending wealth we didn’t create were a government take-over of the economy in the manner we currently witness in Spain, Italy, and Greece—or the high-tax, high-spend ethos of a bankrupt California.

The reaction to the economic panic was sort of analogous to the call to ‘charge it!’ after 9/11 (cf. Ike’s fights about the surtax to pay for Korea), or to the Iraq 2006 upsurge in violence, when suddenly our leaders declared the war lost, blamed the nebulous “they” for tricking them into voting for the war, and calling for immediate withdrawals and retreats. Ditto the Stalag-Gulag Guantanamo that, by January 19, had ruined the Constitution, shredded the Bill of Rights, and forever tarnished our reputation. Yet, on the 20th, it was suddenly complex and problematic, and required a “task force” to do a year-long inquiry into the bad and worse choices confronting us. At some point in all this serial hysteria, we are beginning to see the problem is not in the stars of the economy or of the war, but in ourselves—a weird generation that, when it finally came of age, proved to be just about what we could expect of it from what we saw in its youth.

Whom are we bailing out? In large measure, we are bailing out middle-aged Baby Boomers who have essentially been in charge of messing up the nation since about 1964. They can’t get anything right, and lacking any sense of proportion, they went on a binge of borrowing and spending and now that the bill has come due – and Mom and Dad no longer being able to bail them out – they simply want the government to cover for their error.

The reason I’m really on the “sobriety and solidarity” kick is because we do need to pay the price of our foolishness and learn our lesson well. We can’t borrow and spend our way to wealth. We can’t have a great economy if we don’t grown, mine and make things (sorry, environmentalists, but we will need to cut some things down and dig some things up – and then turn said things into products people want). Usury might be good for a short bit, but the reason God warned us off it was because its both predatory and stupid. We can’t farm out child-rearing to schools and day care centers. We can’t all live like kings. It is high time we grew up.

Our liberals are great at showing their solidarity with others – but the problem is they are just showing, they are not being. We need to be in solidarity with each other – and we need to be sober about what we do. Being in solidarity with our fellows doesn’t mean going to a demonstration or making a donation – it means actually going out there and doing for others, at no thought to the cost to ourselves and with not only no expectation of reward, but a downright insistence on not being rewarded.

75 or so years ago FDR and the liberals of the day said we can have it all – we can take time off and still be rich. All it took was fiat money, high interest rates and government spending as much as it could. For a while there, it seemed to work – but even when it was apparently working, this was the residual effect of the hard work still being done and the economic rationality still remaining from the pre-New Deal economy. We’ve been scammed – or, more accurately, we scammed ourselves. We wanted to believe that we could have it all, because believing such a thing is far easier than the difficult task of actually doing something for others. Its all come smashing down, and it won’t get genuinely better until we, as a people, take full responsibility for our errors and insist upon doing the right thing from now on.

A House GOPer takes issue with Rush:

Responding to President Obama’s recommendation to Republican congressional leaders last week that they not follow Limbaugh’s lead, the conservative talkmeister said on his show that Obama is “obviously more frightened of me than he is Mitch McConnell. He’s more frightened of me, than he is of, say, John Boehner, which doesn’t say much about our party.”

Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., did not take kindly to this assessment in an interview with Politico Tuesday.

“I think that our leadership, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, are taking the right approach,” Gingrey said. “I mean, it’s easy if you’re Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich to stand back and throw bricks. You don’t have to try to do what’s best for your people and your party. You know you’re just on these talk shows and you’re living well and plus you stir up a bit of controversy and gin the base and that sort of that thing. But when it comes to true leadership, not that these people couldn’t be or wouldn’t be good leaders, they’re not in that position of John Boehner or Mitch McConnell.”

There is a great deal of truth in that – the critic does have the easier job than the guy in the trenches. On the other hand, the guy in the trenches should be working diligently to avoid criticism from his own side. Meanwhile, the job of the critic is, well, to criticize. Rush’s whole existence as a talk show host is built around offering a critique about how things are done in government. To try and say that Rush should butt out is to say that Rush shouldn’t say anything, which is absurd…though in keeping with Obama Administration policy.

It is going to be tricky for the GOP over the next six months – right now, Obama is riding high on a wave of optimism. He is, of course, sowing dragon’s teeth which will eventually cause his Administration to crash, but it isn’t for the GOP to get out in front of what will eventually be popular dismay with Obama. Obama needs to screw up badly before the GOP starts jumping on him – and we need only be patient, and Obama will screw up badly. Meanwhile, the job of the Congressional GOP is to offer warnings about the idiocies of the Obama-Pelosi-Ried Golly-Here’s-Another-Dollar-To-Spend! national bankruptcy “stimulus” bill; offer alternatives out of the core GOP economic playbook and then just wait for it all to go smash, and then argue for the prescriptions we offered earlier.

But this doesn’t mean Obama gets to coast – far from it. Out here in the blogsphere and talk radio, our job as conservative commentators is to severely and regularly hammer Obama and his Democrats, as well as buck up the GOP base during what will be a lean time. And part of this will entail some shots at the Congressional GOP, especially if we’re not seeing anything in the way of strong, principled opposition to the Obama plan. So far, the GOP critique has been muted – we need supply side, Reaganite red meat…and all we’re getting is go-along-to-get-along tofu.

So, my advice to Gingrey – grow a pair and reserve your public ire for our Democratic opponents. To Limbaugh – keep doing what you do. To Obama – keep doing what you do, as well, because that is our sure fire ticket back to power.

That is the real cost of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Bankruptcy Now! “Stimulus” Plan:

We’re talking about the interest charges that will be required to finance the $825 billion cost of the debt bill. We learned this today in a letter that Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas W. Elmendorf sent to the senior Republican on the House Budget Committee, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

Here is the relevant part:

Under CBO’s current economic assumptions and assuming that none of the direct budgetary effects of H.R. 1 are offset by future legislation, CBO estimates that the government’s interest costs would increase by $0.7 billion in fiscal year 2009 and by a total of $347 billion over the 2009-2019 period.

So when you hear politicians talk about the $825 billion ten-year cost of this legislation, keep in mind that it masks these unavoidable interest costs, bringing the total ten-year cost to at least $1,172,000,000,000.00.

The debt that gives rise to $53.6 billion in interest costs in 2019 alone, moreover, will not magically disappear in 2020 or beyond. Thus, the real cost of the debt bill will grow and compound over the years so long as that debt remains unpaid.

And do keep in mind that this is in addition to the debt we’ll pile up in the regular budget, year after year, under Obama’s plan to spend, spend, spend us into prosperity ’cause everyone knows that the way to wealth is through profligacy.

Yes, liberals, I know; we GOPers failed in this test, too…but because we failed after you failed previously that doesn’t mean we have to fail again. It is time to retrench – figure out what we can do without (Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, Commerce Department and Agriculture Department immediately spring to mind…at least for me) and the axe the budget of all these un-necessary expenditures. If, after we’ve taken the butcher’s knife to spending and really, really, cut it down to bare bones (“bare bones” means we’re paying to protect ourselves and make certain no one starves/freezes to death – outside of that, its a luxury we might not be able to afford) we find that we’re still in deficit, then we’ll just have to raise taxes to cover it. Long and painful would such a process be – but we’d emerge at the end of it out of debt and with our nation founded upon fiscal sanity, once again. And, also, wiser for being chastised for our idiocy 1933-2009.

Something just occurred to me – given that theory of anthropogenic global warming is a hoax, once we’ve got a couple year cooling trend hitting its stride, leftist pinheads will start crediting Obama’s environmental policies for “curing” global warming. These idiots might actually get away with their hoax!