How Did It Happen?

I believe that while many have profited from extreme distortions in the home mortgage market, it has been self-serving long-term government policy that fueled wildfire that has burned the American dream. The not-quite-stated goal of home ownership for those who cannot afford it is both blatant pandering for votes, as well as another hard elbow in the ribs of those who try to do things the right way. 

Surprise Crisis Threatens Liberal Benefits

Some of the subtlies of economics may still be up for debate, but I am quite amazed how the results and impact of long-term demographics can come as a surprise. This ugly situation has been building over our lifetimes and is simply reaching it’s inevitable conclusion.

The Fruits of Weakness

My understanding of uranium is that every refinement, for whatever reason is a step closer to a bomb. Our experts know this. Collectively, we seem to buy into this new agreement at face value as some type of step forward.

Charles Krauthammer makes the case that our entire foreign policy is not only not taking steps forward, its a total rout and tumble into 3rd world status. 

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

 I don’t often make posts based on Ann Coulter’s articles, but I must be on her wavelength lately. While the liberal democrats are doing horrendous things, I think the Republican mainstream is gearing up to completely mis-read the situation and miss any real opportunity to make a difference.

Enough Money

This article by Thomas Sowell highlights a disturbing trend in the liberal agenda. I particularly like his line:

“You are opening the floodgates to arbitrary power. And once you open the floodgates, you can’t tell the water where to go.”

The New Deterrent

As Obama moves the US away from the use of nuclear deterrence, a new and very disturbing trend is emerging.

I predicted several years ago that battlefield robots (of which the drone aircraft is one) would change the face of American warefare. What I did not see is exactly in what way. A lead article in the NY Times today details how Obama used this new technology to execute an American citizen far from any battlefield with absolutely no due process.

The article goes into background and detail but this was a point-and-click execution with absolutely no risk to any US personnel and no judicial oversight. I have no love for those who incite and plan Jihad, but our citizens do have rights! Our government needs to respect those right regardless of inconvenience.

The nuclear deterrence Obama abhors works best when you don’t use it. The drone based deterrance works best when you do use it. When we unleashed the power of the atom on that fateful day in New Mexico our target was a well documented enemy in a declared war.

Bill Clinton did have a habit of sending cruise missles toward those who annoyed him. W’s response in Iraq was quite obvious (and absolutely no secret). This drone activity is much less a shotgun blast or a publicly considered response, than the work of a highly trained executive-branch sniper in a gory video game.  The targets of this new technology seem to be  secrets in a conflict with an enemy which Obama refuses to even name in pursuit of political correctness. But the real victim is our Constitiution.

Technology for the GOP

“For the Internet prophets on the right, who’ve been nudging Republicans in this direction for years with varying success, 2010 represents the long-awaited alignment of grassroots energy, new technology, and necessity that—dare we say it?—make change possible. A new, young professional class of right-leaning techies is starting firms and notching wins.”

This is a quotation from Mary Katharine Ham’s excellent recent post on the use of Internet technology by winning GOP candidates. Ham covers the Brown (MA) and Perry (TX) campaigns in some detail as well as a more general discussion of how texting, Facebook and other social services are used. Please read the original article to understand the full picture and perhaps how to get involved. This is powerful stuff.

These two sections, simple ideas really, were of particular interest to me:

From Brown -

The use of mobile technology, which Harris said never really hit its stride on the McDonnell campaign, became invaluable for the Brown campaign. Every time their opponent Martha Coakley appeared on a radio show, Brown’s campaign texted supporters with the phone number of the radio station. When Coakley started taking calls, the first few were always Brown supporters. This changed the perception of the race for radio listeners, and succeeded in rattling Coakley, who wasn’t expecting such vocal opposition in the deep-blue state.

From Perry -

The Perry campaign created almost 40,000 “Perry Home Headquarters”—a brigade of volunteers who talked up Perry in their homes and daily lives. Those volunteers were connected not to a field office but to a field officer with whom they interacted online and in person.

The approach bothered some voters, the staff admitted, but it also invigorated voters they didn’t expect. “We cornered these nontraditional Republican primary voters,” Johnson said. “A lot of November Republicans came to vote.”