It's Far From Over

In an article written for The American Thinker, Robert Simmons Jr. details ten reasons why conservatives should not be celebrating last weeks election.

On November 2, 2010, the liberals suffered a defeat at the hands of the people over their policies implemented over the last two to four years. As a result, Many Republicans and Tea Party supporters are jubilant in their celebration, and even the often morose Glenn Beck has been heard to be excited about what he calls a turning point. However, the cold, hard reality is that liberalism suffered a defeat but not a crushing one, and the war is far from won. In the past, victories in these minor skirmishes have resulted in people becoming complacent. The battles that are not making the headlines in the war on freedom continue to rage despite the victory.

The problem is this, we are in a war that cannot be resolved solely through the election ballot. The many-layered incursions against our freedoms have not been limited to legislation; much damage has been done through administrative fiat - much like a ukase - an Imperial Russian proclamation issued by the Tsar. Millions of pages of regulations have been rammed down the throats of American taxpayers, without a single vote other than Congress authorizing the creation of another regulatory agency. Instead, hearings are held in places where it is only convenient for lobbyists and bureaucrats to meet and discuss.

Mr. Simmons identifies ten distinct hurdles that must be addressed in order for our nation to return to a semblance of self-governance.

10) The aristocracy is still there in Washington.
09) The bureaucracy in Washington has never been more powerful.
08) The Federal Reserve still remains unchecked.
07) The spending obligations are still there, and the economy is still bad.
06) The unions still have control of the government.
05) The Republican Party hasn't become conservative yet.
04) They still are neither reading nor writing their own legislation.
03) It is still impossible to obey the law.
02) There is no animal quite as dangerous as a lame duck.
01) The socialists and Marxists still have your children.

More

I believe Simmons is right, we have a lot of work ahead of us.

"Shellacking" ...

has been nominated for one of the Top 10 Words of the Year to be Used by or About Our Adversaries.

Congratulations to "Shellacking."

What is the rest of the Top 10?

Pray on it and get back to us in the comments ...

Freedom isn't free...

I watched the flag pass by one day,
It fluttered in the breeze;
A young Marine saluted it,
And then he stood at ease.

I looked at him in uniform,
So young, so tall, so proud;
With hair cut square and eyes alert,
He'd stand out in any crowd.

I thought... how many men like him
Had fallen through the years?
How many died on foreign soil?
How many mothers' tears?

How many pilots' planes shot down
How many died at sea
How many foxholes were soldiers' graves
No, Freedom is not Free.

I heard the sound of Taps one night,
When everything was still;
I listened to the bugler play,
And felt a sudden chill;

I wondered just how many times
That Taps had meant "Amen"
When a flag had draped a coffin
Of a brother or a friend;

I thought of all the children,
Of the mothers and the wives,
Of fathers, sons and husbands.
With interrupted lives.

I thought about a graveyard
At the bottom of the sea,
Of unmarked graves in Arlington.
No. Freedom is not Free!

- Kelly Strong

10 Nov 2010

Happy Birthday to current and former Marines the world over ... and to all who love them, share their love of country, and are claiming both foreign and domestic beachheads in defense of liberty.

Semper Fidelis.

Playing With Pancakes

Question: What do you get when you add a wristwatch, a model bulldozer and a Strawberry Shortbrain doll?

Answer: It's time to play with your Jehadi Jane action toy set with KillerJooos Remote Control!

This photo was actually in last Sunday's New York Times with the following caption.

A lawyer for the Corries pressed the bulldozer operators with props, arranging a plastic toy bulldozer, an orange lump of putty and a Raggedy Ann doll.

The Corries are in the midst of a civil trial against Israel for the death of their activist daughter, Rachael Corrie, who was run over by an Israeli Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer in 2003.

Books, plays, videos and even an aid ship to Gaza have been dedicated to her memory and spirit, her focus on human rights and the plight of the Palestinians.

And don't forget the yummy pancake syrup too.

The day that Ms. Corrie was killed, her fellow activists sent two photographs of her to news agencies that were then transmitted around the world. The first one showed her standing in an orange jacket with a bullhorn addressing an approaching bulldozer, and the second showed her crumpled on the ground, near death. The clear implication was that the two pictures were sequential, whereas the first was shot hours earlier with a different bulldozer.

The Israeli Army investigation found that the drivers of the bulldozer that killed her did not see Ms. Corrie because she was standing near a high mound of dirt as it approached. The drivers, it said, had limited lines of sight inside their heavily armored vehicle, and that by placing themselves in the bulldozer’s path as human shields, the eight activists bore primary responsibility.

Pay Back

The Washington Post (of all things) produced this apocalyptic opinion piece on the fate of the Democrats.

There's really no gentle way to say this, so I'm just going to be blunt: In some ways, the political situation post-Nov. 2 is even worse for the Democrats than it may appear. And I am not just referring to the colossal losses they experienced in state legislatures -- a 650+ seat swing in favor of the GOP that has left the Dems in control of the fewest state legislatures since 1928. The resulting pro-GOP gerrymandering may lastingly blunt the demographic advantage Democrats could otherwise expect to reap from population trends such as the growth of Hispanic America.

There is a double whammy that Herr Lane is referring to. It is the loss of Democratic electors in the Electoral College.

No, what's really bad for President Obama and his party is the likely impact of the 2010 Census and ensuing House of Representatives reapportionment on the distribution of votes in the 2012 Electoral College. We can talk all day about whether a majority of voters would support Obama for re-election or not, but what really counts in presidential elections is the Electoral College. Each state's electoral vote equals its number of representatives in the House plus two, for its Senate delegation. And since the U.S. population continues to flow South and West, reapportionment will probably add House seats in red states and subtract them in blue states. Thus, the Census looks like a setback for Democratic chances to win the 270 electoral votes necessary to become president.

The Electoral College was established in Article II of the US Constitution and is now comprised of 538 "electors". Let's cut to the chase.

[...] Removing Ohio, Florida and Nevada from the analysis, because they are too unpredictable, it looks like Republicans can pretty much count on an additional 7 electoral votes (Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, 4 in Texas, and Utah, minus the loss of one vote in Louisiana) in 2012, while the Democrats can count on 7 fewer (losses in Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, offset by a gain in Washington).

As of January 2011, there will be seven fewer Blue State electors who will be picked up by Red States. Using the 2008 Presidential campaign where McCain (a weak candidate) grabbed 22 states for a total of 173 electoral votes, the Republican bottom line may be about to grow to 180. The magic number of 271 can be had by just holding on to six states that more often than not have swung Republican: Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana, Virginia and Nevada.

As it happens, all six of these states, except for North Carolina, will have Republican governors next year, and all six, except for Nevada, will have Republican state legislatures.

Get that fork ready. It may be that the Dems are finally done. And we can thank Obama, Reid and Pelosi for marinating their members, preheating the oven and selecting the spices. Even now they just can't figure out how to turn off the gas and cool the rheotric.

Life Imitates Elections

The wind blew and the Red Carpet flew.

Obongo's departure from Mumbai was marred by high winds that played havoc with the red carpet laid out for him in front of Air Force One. After several failed attempts to secure the misbehaving carpet, a decision was reached by the Presidential party to remove it. Employees at the airport promptly nicknamed the carpet, "Sahib Tea Party."

GNN EXCLUSIVE!

BREAKING NEWS

ONLY HERE AT GNN!

Just released by the White House Press Secretary:

There was a completely unexpected benefit to the removal of the carpet. The Presidential delegation was rife with worry that the unruly red rug made the First Lady's ass look big. They are still worried.

And now, for your listening pleasure:

I Went to Hell and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt!

Old Harry is something you would normally just scrape off your shoe. But we're stuck with the demented, wicked crank for another Senate term. I doubt that he'll make another complete term, due to mental issues, or a fatal error while putting on his strait jacket.

The Repubs have to go for his throat or so disable him by scorn, irony and parody that even the Donks will retch in his presence. His brief, despicable turn on the national stage is over; even the MSM hacks will eventually realize that he's not news.

Harry got together with Durbin and Schumer (now there's a trifecta from Hell), to proclaim THIS WARNING to Republican Senators. Well, Rubio by himself could intellectually knee-cap these three human stains in his sleep. Let the bloody and vicious partisanship begin! The Donks have much to answer for.

All Signs Point To Fail

I'd rather do knee-bends over a lit Bunsen Burner than read the financial news. This stems from my life-long hatred for Econ 100 and the Samuelson textbook, and from my youthful and phony indifference to money.

I've almost always had as much money and things as I needed, and have spent most of my adult life disposing of things I thought I needed when I acquired them. In fact, Self-Storage units have meant a lot to me, as well as yard sales (to get stuff), and land fills (to unload stuff).

Until now I always thought that I, and my family, would make out and make do. We'd survive no matter what. Even getting old, and some would say, sick, hasn't abolished this conviction.


However, it's under pressure now in Connecticut, where we replaced a Republican governor with a Democrat, through voter shenanigans. We sent a regulation Democrat Prog to Dodd's old seat, and we re-elected the entire Democrat delegation to The House in Washington. Our State House is huge majority Democrat. We're broke with the highest per-capita debt in the country, our bond rating has been downgraded by Moody's, and the ideologically inbred tribe that caused it still rules.

Listen to them, and your hair hurts. Nowhere in their northeast political orthodoxy is the awareness that consumers require producers, or that the "little guy" is little because he chose to be. Or that odious "Big Business" also creates "well-paying jobs" for "working families", that EVERY claim on society is a "special interest", and that the northeast is post, post, post-industrial. Heavy industries are in ragweed covered graves or moving to red states.


You hear these hacks, but you really don't. They're like painted shamans in the frothing stage of Talking in Tongues, reciting doggerel from temple carvings in a vanished language. They confuse you, but they also piss you off because the SEIU apes understand and treasure every word of it. It must be explained in Samuelson's chapter on The Endless Free Lunch. No one could be that stupid without being educated to it.

But someone is that stupid, and it's Ben Bernanke. Ben is going to print $600 billion and buy Treasuries with it - in the crazed belief that this will make Treasuries more attractive by raising their interest rate from nearly zero (to what?) cause a borrowing, and therefore a spending, boom while devaluing the dollar and monetizing the debt through inflation. If there's more let me know.

Ben is an economist retained by Obama, along with Tim Geithner. In a world where Paul Krugman can win a Nobel Prize in Economics, this isn't as freakish as it seems. If you want more on the economic disaster to come, search Instapundit for "Quantitative Easing", and see what it means to you. And remember these awful facts:

In 2009 the Federal government spent $3.5 trillion and received $2.1 trillion in revenue. They borrowed $1.4 trillion, or 40% of the budget and 10% of GDP. Our publically-held debt is $7.5 trillion, without Bernanke's lunacy. If the "recession" ended today, our annual deficit and borrowing requirement is $1 trillion for ten years. And at the current spending rate, by 2020 we'll be $20 trillion in debt with annual interest payments of almost a trillion dollars.

Take cover.

It Didn't Help Them

I was curious about the fate of 34 Democratic Congressman who voted against party lines and refused to support the ObamaCare bill last March.

It didn't appear to help them.

Out of the 34 who voted against ObamaCare, nearly two-thirds were fired by their constituents; 21 of these Democratics lost their jobs (62%) in the 2010 elections.

These are the numbers.
This means that about a third of last Tuesday's Republican pickup in the House of Representatives was comprised of Democrats who crossed party lines and voted against ObamaCare™.

Hmmmm. If this keeps up, 2012 will be the icing on the Conservative cake.

Our Hostile President

Can we do it? Can we maintain this level of involvement? We are at war, the President of the United States has already identified us - patriotic Americans - as his enemies.

We have to do it.

Perspective on the Morning After

Down here we want it all ... a veritable Super Slam breakfast every morning.

The irony is that, of course, "all" resides in the heavenlies.

I am reminded in times like these of the words of one of my law school professors: "A liberal wakes up every morning and says, 'Lord, what good can I do today?' and a conservative says, 'Lord, thank you that my throat was not slit last night while I slept.'" This was his New York way of saying that human nature and a fallen world beckon us to be grateful for even the little things. And furthermore, human nature oftentimes causes us to fail to appreciate the big and really good things, too.

Like you, I am bummed that Greenjeans escaped in Nevada. Every conservative feels this. There were some other near misses in the Senate; in the House, Barney Frank won ... and handily ... and Ruth McClung (what a candidate in AZ-7) narrowly lost in a gerrymandered Demo district.

But still, overall, I am much more than glad to have survived the night, for it was a very good night indeed. The repudiation of all things Obama/Demo at all levels of the federal and state governments was clear. The most Republicans hold office nationwide (federal and state) than at any time since the 1920s. Today, Rush said that 680 Republicans won elections in state legislatures nationwide, in large part due to Tea Party activism. And Sarah Palin? Of her Demo targets, 18 of 20 went down.

And look at the new red Midwest. And Republicans won in the Northeast. They are close even to winning the governor's mansion in CT. Rhod? Are you supervising the count?

As a result of the smashing success, even Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are talking the talk ... now, to ensure that they walk it. Actually, I believe they will do a much better job this time because folks are engaged.

I have seen reports that talk about the strange lack of celebration by Republicans and their supporters. I view this as an extremely good sign.

All this is to say our side is winning and acting like a winner, too. More reason to be optimistic.

You see, when your goal is a championship, a first down is no big deal.

So, let's appreciate the successes we have as we march down the field. Sunny side up, please.

Still, we keep our eyes fixed on the ultimate goal.

Such a focus will help us enjoy the first downs along the way even more.

Note: I am working on a post re: some lessons I think we conservatives can draw from Tuesday's results. There's been some interesting commentary out there, but none of it quite clears a landing zone like a Daisy Cutter.

A Little Post-Election Song

I'm a little tired this evening, but it's a good tired. I am proud that the people in this country have started ... yes, started ... to make a statement and get this government under control.

Here's the Tea Party Anthem, folks, with some nice clips interspersed.

Enjoy it, and enjoy these days of reflection on where we have come from the past two years:

Down Tingles, Down!

Ain't he cute?

Ahh, no, he isn't and the constant thrumming is ruining someone's crease. The fact that the election went as well as it did in spite of media opposition speaks volumes for the American people. So called journalists epitomized by the likes of Tingles and Olberman are not not capable of understanding the breath and depth of the disgust that is the foundation of yesterday's events.

Look at this map showing the results of the nation's House races:

The Dems are hemorrhaging and Obama says this is not any repudiation of his policies - it's just disappointment in the performance of the economy.

Thank you Lord for making our enemies blind - and that is the only thing that Obama got right. We, the free American people, are your enemies.

Give me that damn gavel!!

Folks, he (and many others) did it. Here is Lt. Col. Allan West's speech many months ago ...



I'll have some thoughts later on re: what all of this means, from my humble perspective.

But this we know: The Obama agenda is dead. And the Wicked Witch of the West? Under a house.

God bless America.

Demos: I won, I won ...

"Dude, the shark ate 1-1/2 of your legs."