Phrase of the Day

Beware collectivist solution:

…I think that habit of dealing with men in the mass, not merely on abnormal occasions, as in a war or a strike, but in normal circumstances and as a part of ordinary social speech, is a very bad way of trying to understand the human animal. There are only a few animals, and they are not human animals, who can be best judged or best employed in packs or herds. Some may compare the workers of a Communist state to a pack of wolves; I should very strongly suspect that they bear more resemblance to a flock of sheep. But neither of these animals can be said to have a very complex or entertaining type of mentality; few of us would be eager to listen, even if we could, to the flowing and continuous reminiscences of a sheep; and St. Francis seems to have been the only man who was ever on intimate terms with a wolf. It is precisely because man is the most interesting of the creatures that he finds his proper place among those creatures who dig a domestic hole or hang up an individual nest; and the disgrace of our society is not when he has not a hive or an ant hill; but when, among so many nests and holes, he has no where to lay his head. – G K Chesterton

Free men and women owning their own homes – that is to be our goal, now and forever. Because only if we are such, will we be free men and women.

State and Local Unemployment Hit Records

Here in Las Vegas, its 13.1% an all-time high; in California, 11.9%, a post-WWII record; in New York, 9.6%, a 12-year high.

Obama and his Democrats can take their “green shoots”, “stimulus” and “hope and change” and shove ‘em. We don’t want bail-outs for failed banks and businesses, we want an economy where people can work to build their dreams.

UPDATE: Bernanke and the Stimulators claim to have saved the world. Mish’s explains that they are, well, insane.

UPDATE II: Steyn notes that never in the course of history has so much been borrowed from so many to benefit so few.

1,000 Recess Rallies Planned for Tomorrow

Gateway Pundit has the details including a link where you can find a rally in your area. Let’s have at it and let these liberals know that their tenure in power is limited – that we will take our country back from them and bring real reform to our nation.

The Failure of Obama's Home Loan Modification Program

The Baseline Scenario has an excellent run-down on the mechanics of what went wrong – months after we geared up to modify loans the fact is that delinquencies and foreclosures are rising.

There are various things going wrong here – banks are looking out for themselves, especially the servicing banks as opposed to the note holders; note holders are wary of going in to a modification because it might just be better to let the house go short sale/foreclosure and get the bird in the hand rather than two in the bush; the people who are running the modification show at the banks are not experienced and may not have proper underwriting skills (if this is the case, I nominate my friend who blogs under the name of Nevada Pundit as National Home Mortgage Underwriting Czar – he does actually know what he’s doing and it’d be a cool gig for him) – but, for me, the largest, single obstacle to this is the fact that we’re not admitting that not only have home values dropped, but that they’re not going to come back to what they were in 2005 – at least, not for 10 to 20 years (and my view is that in real terms, they never will). We need to reorganize America’s housing industry as it is undergoing national bankruptcy.

I’ve talked about this (well, by now it should be characterized as “yammered on endlessly”) – we need to find means of number-crunching the home values and figuring out, within 15% or so, what their real value is, and then applying that value to the mortgage. It’ll be hard, it’ll hurt – but it must be done as its the only way we can provide a floor underneath our home values and bring in a bit of price stability which will convince the millions of currently negative-equity home owners to stay in their home. Among all my friends – and there are a lot of them – I can only count two whom I know are probably certain to have positive-equity in their homes. One because she bought a long time ago and didn’t go in for serial refinances during the boom, the other because I’m pretty sure she bought it outright, or at least with 50%+ down. As long as we trundle along letting banks try to finesse themselves out of their mortgage jam, we’ll get nowhere – and foreclosures will continue to rise until a point is reached where major banks are, once again, faced with bankruptcy.

It is time to think anew and act anew – we can’t just sit here, Micawber-like, and hope that something turns up. Time for a bit of courage – and a bit of real hope and real change.

Phrase of the Day

Can’t just sit there hoping Obama’s warmed-over FDR/Carterism will do the trick:

As our case is new, we must think and act anew. – Abraham Lincoln</blockquote

Time to shake off the shackles of a century of liberalism and start heading in a new direction – and some times, in order to go forward, one must go back to where one screwed up and choose the right path, this time.

Cindy Sheehan Learns the Depth of Leftist Cynicism

Always felt sorry for her on two counts – loss of her son and the cruel way the left exploited her sorrow and naivete:

Just a few years back, she was the media’s darling. Cindy Sheehan, mother of a soldier slain in Iraq, led the anti-war charge against George W. Bush. Egged on by the mainstream media and left-wing activists eager to put a “face” to their cause, she camped out in front of Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. The entire situation became a media circus, with Sheehan at its epicenter. We saw her getting her hair cut at “Camp Casey,” saw her visiting her son’s grave with media flunkies in tow, and watched her get up close and personal with Hugo Chávez. Feted and celebrated, she could do no wrong; she held what has been called an “absolute moral authority card.”

So what exactly happened? Where is Sheehan today? She said she was quitting public life back in 2007 when, according to her post on Daily Kos, her cutting ties with the Democratic Party got her “trashed on such ‘liberal blogs’ as the Democratic Underground. Being called an ‘attention whore’ and being told ‘good riddance’ are some of the more milder [sic] rebukes.” Just a year later, though, she tried to unseat Nancy Pelosi. Perhaps having had a taste of the limelight, she couldn’t help herself. But, as one could have predicted, she was beaten handily by San Fran Nan — receiving less than 18 percent of the vote.

You might think that Sheehan had given up entirely and gone back to the quiet, placid existence that most Americans live, but you’d be wrong. It’s just that the left and the media have finished with her. Having wrung every ounce of moral authority and celebrity out of the poor woman that they could, they’ve moved on to greener pastures. It’s an era of hope and change, you know, and now that The One™ is in office, Sheehan’s brand of anti-war activism is no longer a welcome diversion — it’s more of an unwelcome distraction.

The alleged fierce, moral urgency of being anti-war during the Bush years has been replaced by the fierce, moral urgency of slavish devotion to executive power. In this Sheehan is no longer needed, and so she’s frozen out. A few die-hard pacifists still hang around, but the rest of the left has no more use for her – it was never about the war, Cindy, or your heroic son…it was all about bashing President Bush with whatever club came to hand.

It must always be kept in mind that when dealing with the left, power is the central thing – the retention and expansion of same for leftist leaders. If, by some strange chance, doing the right thing coincides with this, then that is ok. But for most of the time, “right thing” and “leftist power” are in opposite corners and so a ruthless, cynical manipulation is necessary to make it appear there it a bit of “right thing” in leftist actions. Sheehan hasn’t entirely figured it out as she’s officially blaming Bush for the lack of funds she suffers under – but, once upon a time she was proud of her hero son and took comfort from President Bush’s strong, moral stance on the war….perhaps she’ll wake and go back to that.

Whatever else happens, Sheehan provides an excellent object lesson for anyone who wishes to join the left. You can do so and gain a lot of wealth and fame – but as soon as you are no longer needed, you will be discarded like yesterday’s trash.

Obämerdämmerung

Who knew that the liberals new, tin-plated demi-god would fall so far, so fast?

The Spell is Broken. Cap-and-trade, the mega-deficits, the apology tours, and the sleaze of some appointments and congressional grandees (cf. Rangel, Dodd, Murtha, etc.) were stimulants, but not in themselves enough to awaken the somnolent American people from their collective trance. Yet health care was like a shot of adrenaline that jolted the patient out of his slumber. Suddenly hope and change no longer worked like the swinging watch and “you’re getting sleepy” lingo. Voters are feeling they’ve been “had” and were mesmerized into being used for an extremist agenda.

Who made the following decisions? 1) to propose a 1,000 page bill that no one had read, much less could explain?; 2) to ram down the greatest change in the US economy in fifty years by the August recess?; 3) to talk loosely of the “uninsured” without knowing why they were not insured, how much it would cost to insure them, or whether they currently in fact find some sort of care?; 4) to reference Rahm Emanuel’s doctor brother as a source of wisdom? 5) to demonize the health-care industry as greedy?

(NB: Does Obama really believe that illegal aliens do not possess 200-300 dollars a month to buy catastrophic health coverage, when they send on average at least that amount back to Mexico on the assumption the emergency room here is free, for everything from injuries to natal care? Does he believe that a 25-year old does not gamble that his robust health means he prefers his I-pod, DVDs, and nights out to squirreling away cash each month for health insurance? There are flaws in our system that must be corrected, but the notion of conspirators in black hats who plot to prevent health care for the “uninsured” is fallacious.

If Pelosi had really cleaned House – especially of people like Rangel and Murtha; if Obama had really been transparent; if there had been a genuine attempt to reach across to the defeated right…if, if if…as Churchill once observed, “the terrible ‘ifs’” have accumulated. Its not just been one mis-step; it has been a whole series of terrible tactical and strategic errors and there is no evidence to date that anyone, from Obama on down, realizes how badly they’ve screwed up. In fact, we’re getting indications that the left, including Obama, merely wants to double-down…to press even harder for a leftist agenda, apparently in firm conviction that America really did turn left in November and the opposition really is just “astro-turf” corporate shills and right wing die-hards. The left will be disabused of this notion.

Now, this doesn’t mean that Obama can’t climb back up a bit – heck, it doesn’t even mean he can’t be re-elected in 2012. But the bloom is off the rose and he’ll never get it back. You don’t get do-overs in politics. Regardless of the merits of the case, once the Katrina response was tagged as a miserable failure, President Bush could never recapture that aura of firm executive competence he had built up – Obama will never again be the savior-like political figure he was in November of 2008.

Ultimately, the failure of the left lead by Obama must be laid at the door of the rank and file of the left – for decades the left has been warned that their leaders are actually corrupt hacks who are merely using leftist rhetoric as a means to power, and power is to be used for personal gratification and enrichment. Overly-concentrated on the relatively rare and usually small-time corruption of various Republicans, the left failed to notice that, via legislation and regulation, leftist leaders have been systematically robbing the people of the United states – robbing them of their wealth and their freedom. This, in turn, all stems from that fundamental flaw of the left – built on the false premise that Mankind is perfectible via man’s actions, the only way it can be sustained over times is by dishonesty…and once you head down that route, you’ll just get worse and worse about it.

Obämerdämmerung – the twilight of the liberal gods. Its all gone wrong, and they won’t be able to get it back. As long as we hold firm and press our agenda, we will sweep them in to the ash heap of history for good.

Acorn/MoveOn Swamped by Patriots

Leftist astro-turfing meets genuine grass roots effort:

We beat the MoveOn/union/Acorn pro-ObamaCare crowd like a big bass drum.

Scheduled for 7pm, the other side was trying to get there before us, but failed; 20-30 intrepid Tea Partiers grabbed the best (shaded) space by 4:15pm, leaving the 5-6 starting MoveOn troops out in a very hot sun. Later they gave up and moved past the entrance to some shade. By 5pm, we had them beat 10-12 to 1, after which both sides seem to grow pretty proportionally. since ours were actually there for the town hall, many of ours went on inside after awhile, so we had a fluctuating population, while they stayed out, desperately trying to do anything to look less pitiful, even going back to the ZCM tactic (Zombie Circular March). By the time Session started the town hall, somewhere between 1,800-2,000 citizens. And, from the partisan applause and cheering to questions and answers, the entire audience was also 10-12 to 1 supporting the protection of our healthcare system.

The government healthcare advocates couldn’t be happy; about a dozen of theirs were Communication Workers of America and the left as a group before the MoveOn and others. Not many- if any- of the Government Healthcare advocates that were protesting actually went in for the town hall. Not interested in actually discussing the topic.

That is from North Texas TEA Party. Our liberals – from Obama on down – are denigrating this popular movement, but they are doing so at their own political peril. Additionally, any elitist, insider-the-beltway GOPer who also discounts this movement is playing with fire. This is the American people rising up, at long last, against a corrupt system built and maintained for the well-connected.

Thursday Open Thread

Going to be taking care of some personal business and so blogging will be light this weekend (which starts today, for me). I’ll do the best I can, but it will be a bit spotty. Meanwhile, have at it on the open thread.

And, yes, trolls, I will be in often enough to thwart you – so don’t go thinking you’ve got a free ride.

Building a Moral Economy

At least one banker is getting it:

The president of Etica Bank in Italy, Fabio Salviato, said this week that the new encyclical by Pope Benedict XVI, “Caritas in Veritate,” is a guide for redefining the world economic system.

In an interview with Vatican Radio, the 51 year-old executive and author said the encyclical is a “guide that can enlighten us in this phase of individualization of a new economic and financial system.”

He noted that the new encyclical calls for “a cultural change founded upon the centrality of the person.”

“By responding to the needs of the person, fighting against poverty, and respecting the environment a redefinition of the economical financial system will emerge,” he added.

“I believe the Holy Father has truly offered us not only a light but also a great gift, a guide for economic leaders,” Salviato continued. “And not only for them but for all those who bear responsibility in the world of politics, finance and civil society. It is a cultural point of reference and directory, of almost a technical nature, on how to build, or rebuild, the new system after this crisis and these difficulties,” he said.

There is nothing wrong with being rich but there is very much wrong with the way we’ve attempted to get rich – and if we are to build a dynamic, prosperous and equal opportunity economy, we must attend to core, moral principles in our economic dealings. We must remember that we are stewards of the things we are given – even when we assert ownership of, say, property we are really holding it in trust for the actual owner, God. We must learn that an 8% return is worthless if we haven’t actually served others by gaining it.

The error our socialist friends make is to presume that the economy is a zero sum game and that if some are well off they have done so invariably at the expense of others. This attitude leads to appeals to envy while attempting to “fix” things with programs which invariably make things worse. While there are financial sharks out there who do profit off the un- or partially-requited toil of others, we must not fall in to the immoral trap of assuming that all men who are well off are the beneficiaries of ill-gotten gains. We additionally cannot presume that all people who are poor are mere victims – some people are, indeed, shiftless. Our economy should be built to honor hard work and give such work its proper reward – even if this means that some people will have vastly more wealth than others. As long as the person is the central motivator in economics, we’re at least some what on the right track. As soon as mere accumulation of money becomes central, we’ve lost our way.

Among the things which will be noted in a moral economy is that there will be no corporations “too big to fail” – in fact, a properly functioning economy won’t have any of the monstrous, multinational corporations today’s economy has. How can a CEO in, say, New York know what the needs are in his subsidiary in Calcutta? He can’t – and he’s bound to make policy which will not help, even if it doesn’t directly harm, the people in the remote corners of his economic empire. We conservatives have correctly identified big government as the main culprit in today’s ills – but big corporation is also a problem and, in reality, big government and big corporation go hand in hand…knock out the one, and the other goes with it. We can see in the servile way that big corporations are lining up for Obama’s largesse just how closely intertwined the two things are.

We can and must build a moral economy – an economy built for people, not for bureaucrats, corporations and the manipulators of same.