The little messiah goes RINO hunting

This could ruin their reputation: President-elect Barack Obama Tuesday evening attending a dinner party at the home of conservative columnist George Will, attended by fellow conservatives William Kristol and David Brooks.

The press pool following the president-elect reported that he left his temporary home at Washington’s Hay-Adams hotel Tuesday evening and arrived a short time later at Will’s home in the Maryland suburbs. A press pool photographer shot a photo of Kristol, an editor of the Weekly Standard, and Brooks, a columnist at the New York Times.

The "conservative" guests at this dinner are all inside-the-beltway RINO's or borderline RINO's who, for the most part, care far more about being invited to appear on the Sunday shows - and the right cocktail parties - than they do about the fate of either the nation or the Republican party.

As far as I'm conserned the little messiah is welcome to them.

Rebranding the GOP

The People's Cube understands the modern Republican Party:

Having successfully shed the burden of conservative values, the Republican National Committee has retooled and is now launching a new ad campaign to let the American people know that Democrats aren't the only party of empty slogans and slick marketing techniques. We offer you a sneak preview of the new RNC stickers, print ads, and promotional items you will be seeing a lot in the coming months. ~

Why repair the damaged national brand with conservatism when you can cheaply spray-paint it with liberalism and gain power by out-Democrating the Democrats?

Support Our Candidate!
Buy The McCain-Fingers-Crossed T-Shirt

This shirt can mean two things:

1. What McCain does behind his back when he says he's a lifelong conservative and promises to secure the borders.
2. What you do behind your back when you vote for McCain and hope he'll appoint strict constructionist judges.

Welcome To The New and Improved Republican Party!

G-d, I weep for the future of this nation.

Just another tax-and-spend liberal "Republican"

I was sent a link to a post on the blog Arkansas Journal this morning which contained this video clip of Mike Huckabee begging the Arkansas legislature for a tax increase, any tax increase:



This was Arkansas Journal's commentary:

May 5, 2003-Governor Mike Huckabee addressed the Arkansas General Assembly, pleading with them to pass a tax, any tax. He ticked off a list of various taxes that he would find acceptable, a tax on tobacco, a surcharge on the income tax, a sales tax... "I will very happily sign that," he proclaimed.

Jump forward to the present day, Mike Huckabee running for the Republican presidential nomination has signed a no-tax pledge and jumped on the Fair Tax bandwagon.

You'd never know that as governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee's solution to every government spending "need" was higher taxes. He never suggested using funds we had from the tobacco settlement. He never suggested cutting wasteful spending. To him, most of the time, there was no such thing as wasteful spending. In fact, there wasn't enough spending. He pushed hard to make sure that the state would keep giving taxpayer funded benefits to illegal aliens and even advocated giving illegal aliens college scholarships. The list is goes on and on.

All of this is a far cry from the image of the Mr. Conservative that candidate Huckabee is trying to create. "I want to get it on the record," he said then. Well, he got his wish. I bet he wishes it wasn't on the record, now.

This video is exclusively available as a service from the Arkansas Journal, Arkansas's #1 Conservative Blog.

Many thanks to Arkansas Jorunal for posting this clip to YouTube.

Clearly Huckabee is no more a conservative than Rudolph Giuliani and for him to be out there laying claim to that title makes him a hypocrite as well as a liberal.

There are some Republicans you just don't need

From The New York Sun:

In a rare move, Mayor Bloomberg will make an endorsement today in an out-of-state, local election, throwing his support behind a moderate Republican clinging to her state Senate seat in Northern Virginia. At a joint appearance near the Dulles International Airport, Mr. Bloomberg will endorse Jeannemarie Devolites Davis, a state senator from Fairfax whose husband is Rep. Tom Davis, the former chairman of the House Government Reform Committee.

The Devolites Davis campaign announced the endorsement yesterday afternoon.

The key issue is guns, where Ms. Devolites Davis has broken with her party to support increased background checks for gun owners, and the National Rifle Association has even endorsed her Democratic opponent, J. Chapman Petersen. …

Ms. Devolites Davis’s campaign said she has supported efforts to keep criminals from buying weapons at gun shows and has backed allowing local governments to ban firearms on school property. Most importantly for Mr. Bloomberg, however, would be her vote against a bill in the Virginia legislature outlawing the sting operations that New York City conducted against gun shops that engaged in illegal straw purchases. …

Mr. Davis and the mayor have known each other for a long time and said to hold similar views on many issues.

Here is one of her television spots:



The NRA has endorsed her Democrat opponant (does NOW or the NAACP ever show that kind of independace?).

There are some politicans whose presence in your party is just too expensive to endure.

H/T: The Bitch Girls

Cry me a river

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 — There are times in the life of George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president of the United States and father of the 43rd, that people, perfect strangers, come up to him and say the harshest things — words intended to comfort but words that wind up only causing pain.

“I love you, sir, but your son’s way off base here,” they might say, according to Ron Kaufman, a longtime adviser to Mr. Bush, who has witnessed any number of such encounters — perhaps at a political fund-raiser, or a restaurant dinner, a chance meeting on the streets of Houston or Kennebunkport, Me. They are, he says, just one way the presidency of the son has taken a toll on the father.

“It wears on his heart,” Mr. Kaufman said, “and his soul.”

I have no sympathy for George H.W. Bush. I have a great deal of sympathy for George W Bush. Even though I have never hesitated to criticise him when I thought he was wrong, as he is about immigration, I also have never hesitated to defend him when I think he is in the right, as he is about Iraq.

I have also never hesitated to counterattack against the president's opponents when I thought their motives were unworthy. For example, the Democrat congressional leadership which commits treason by actively giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the US, who our soldiers are fighting on the battlefield even as I type this, in order to engineer an American defeat for no other purpose than to improve their electoral chances in 2008.

There used to be an unwritten rule that former presidents did not attempt to insert themselves into the current political mix and attempt to undermine their successors. Jimmy Carter was the first to violate this gentleman's agreement when he established his "Carter Center" and began to use it as an alternate State Department formulating a foreign policy which he attempted to impose by freelance negotiations with foreign governments against the wishes of the sitting president and the overall interests of the nation.

Clinton has never done anything quite that craven (probably because it would take too much time away from earning millions of dollars by giving speeches and chasing women) but he has never passed up an opportunity to stick his mug in front of a camera and bad-mouth current US policy.

Through all of this George H.W. Bush has walked around in this brain-dead patrician fog resolutely determined to follow the old ways and not seek the spotlight. He has even compounded the error of his silence by partnering himself with Bill Clinton on a number of occasions for various charitable causes and went so far once as to state that Clinton was becoming like a second son to him.

So I have no soft spot in my heart for the addle headed old RINO. If he doesn't like the situation now he needs to realize that he helped create it.

Speaking of those we'd be better off without

Yesterday I was reading the blog Knowledge is Power when I ran across a post by SondraK where she mentioned that another blog was compiling a list of conservatives that we could do without. I followed the link and wound up on the blog run by Miss Priss (something I would not have done if I had known - there was warning there, but with over 70 million blogs on the Internet there must be thousands run by people named Steve).

Here are the conservatives who Priss thinks we can do without:

1. Pamela Geller, who bloggs at Atlas Shrugs. Pamela is Jewish and her blog is centered on the Global War on Terror, Israel and the growing antisemitism of the American and European Left. Pamela is also an attractive woman who makes no attempt to hide that fact. This sends some female bloggers, like Priss and at least one of her friends, into paroxysms of foaming madness and has led them to try to hang the nickname "Atlas Juggs" around Ms. Geller's neck.

2. Joel Surnow, creator and executive producer of the television series 24. Priss's reason for adding Mr. Surnow to her list is a good example of why she has earned the nickname of Miss Priss, "What the hell were you thinking? Weren't you rich enough WITHOUT making the entire right wing look like bigoted pinheads who laugh at bad jokes and have sexual fantasies about torturing terrorists?" In other words all that icky violence makes her have nightmares.

3. Ann Coulter. Miss Ann earns Priss's ire because she called Arab Islamofascist terrorists "ragheads" and implied that the Breck Girl might be a "faggot". Or at least that is what Priss says she doesn't like about Ann. I think that what really has her panties in a wad is the knowledge that Ann, as well as Pamela Geller and just about every other woman who has ever been born is more of a man than she is. You know that Misha posts things far more "outrageous" than Ann has ever said every single day yet Priss has never attacked him. You know why? Ann is a giant with her string of NYT best selling books and her widely read newspaper column and her frequent appearences on television. She would need an electron microscope to even detect something as small as Priss and her blog and her failed book. Misha, on the other hand, is just another blogger and might well notice Priss and come to Florida and kick her ass. This is the kind of thing that causes Priss to lose control of her bowels.

4. Jim Robinson of Free Republic. After all the people who post at Free Republic have testosterone and that makes people like Priss cry.

5 & 6 are Roger Simon and Glenn Reynolds and they earn their place on Priss's list because of the way that Simon treated Dennis The Peasant in the creation of Pajamas Media. It is a long and involved story, but after reading Dennis's blog for some time I have about come to the conclusion that they kicked him out just because they didn't want to be in business with such a raging asshole. That doesn't mean that he was treated fairly, but I'm definitely not going to from a judgement based on his word alone.

7. Michael Savage. Since I don't listen to Savage I can't make a judgement, however if you can know a man by his enemies . . .

8, 9 & 10 are Ron Paul, John McCain and Arlen Specter. None of them belong on a list of conservatives. Paul is a libertarian, McCain is an amoral opportunist with no true ideology other than self promotion and Specter is a liberal.

Priss then closes with this:

". . .add to the list if you want. And just in case you think it's witty to put me on it, let me disembowel the joke by mentioning it in advance. Now go ahead."

Don't worry Priss, nobody's going to put you on a list of conservatives - even bad ones. Now if we were compiling a list called "simpering mincing effeminate failed authors who the world could do without" you'd be right at the top.

How John McCain saved America

From NRO:

In a truly roundabout way, the immigration deal was sunk by John McCain.

The Arizona senator, one of the key dealmakers and supporters of the measure, voted for cloture — cutting off debate to proceed to a vote — of course. But the controversial bill was so delicate that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had to bring the bill up with a controversial “clay pigeon” amendment show. The obscure procedure was leadership’s last best hope to keep the bill from being changed in any way that would make supporters jump ship.

On Wednesday, the Senate considered several amendments under the clay-pigeon setup, beginning with the ones considered relatively easy to defeat. But they included an amendment by Max Baucus (D., Mont.) that would prohibit “Real ID,” contending that digital ID cards represent an unreasonable government intrusion into Americans’ private lives. But when the 15 minutes of voting had passed, the Baucus amendment still had enough votes to avoid being tabled, or killed.

Holding the vote open for 40 minutes, Reid and deal supporters put extraordinary effort into arm-twisting to table Baucus’s amendment, which threatened the delicate balance they thought they had a handle on. Reid and bill backers found themselves one vote short of the 50 needed to dismiss Baucus’s amendment. There were two senators missing: Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota, still recovering from brain surgery, and McCain, out of town at a fundraising event.

Had McCain been there, he would have been the 50th vote, the amendment would been killed, and the clay-pigeon process could have continued. With that, perhaps, the bill might have been able to scrape together the 60 votes needed for cloture. Without the 50th vote, Reid released the senators, and Baucus’s amendment survived, 52-45.

As it was, no further amendments could be considered before cloture, as unanimous consent was required to move to another one. Opponents were quick to object.

“Reid’s staff knew at that point, they were toast,” said a GOP Senate aide. “I don’t think Reid knew it. He asked what they could do at that point [on the floor], and somebody on our side yelled, ‘You can’t do anything! See you at cloture!’”

This is simply too good to be true. If crazy John McCain had not been off in a desperate effort to raise money for his hopeless presidential campaign he would have been present on the Senate floor and just might have been able to save his amnesty bill.The image of an egomaniacal politician driven by hubris to pursue two massively difficult goals, only to see his devotion to each destroy his ability to achieve the other so that he winds up completely bereft and ruined is the stuff of a Sophocles tragedy.

I guess the chorus is represented by the right-wing blogosphere.

Of course there is more than irony worthy of the Moirae themselves here. There is also the useful information that Baucus amendment passed 52 – 45, meaning that a majority of Senators do not want businesses to have what would probably be the single best tool to help them determine the legality of any prospective employee.

Another lesson here is that Republicans must not be afraid to support real conservatives in primary challenges to RINOs. Arlen Specter was one of the Senate’s Republican movers and shakers behind the amnesty bill. At one point he even complained that several Senators were voting the way their constituents wanted them to vote rather than the way the Senators themselves wanted to vote. He was even heard to huff and puff about how in a confrontation between the Senate and the people the “will of the Senate” would and should prevail.

Arlen Specter is a man who by all rights should not even be in the US Senate. In his last campaign for reelection he faced a serious primary challenge from conservative Pat Toomey. It appeared all but certain that Toomey would displace Specter on the ballot in the general election.

Specter was saved at the last minute by the decision of George W Bush (who was campaigning for his own reelection at the time, a campaign he was destined to win with a comfortable majority) to use his popularity to campaign for Specter. Bush’s support, which also brought the RNC in against Toomey and in support of Specter, was enough to tip the balance in Specter’s favor.

This was only possible because Pennsylvania Republicans allowed themselves to be persuaded to support Specter. Republicans must not open themselves to such persuasion in the future. In my opinion the best place to start is in South Carolina. Palmetto Republicans must seek out a conservative challenger to Lindsey Graham. Then they must support that conservative in spite of all the efforts that the RNC and big name Republicans will bring to Graham’s defense.

Good riddance!

(CBS) NEW YORK CBS 2 HD has learned New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is leaving the Republican party and has announced he is currently unaffiliated with a political party.

The move will clearly begin advancing rumors that the mayor is gearing towards a presidential run, which he has denied in the past.

In a statement, however, the 65-year-old billionaire mayor indicated this doesn't change his plans for his political future.

"I have filed papers with the New York City Board of Elections to change my status as a voter and register as unaffiliated with any political party. Although my plans for the future haven’t changed, I believe this brings my affiliation into alignment with how I have led and will continue to lead our City."

On Tuesday, Bloomberg was in California attending a conference at the University of Southern California along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The pair appeared on this week's cover of Time magazine.

The California trip is part of a recent series of out-of-state trips, which has added to the speculation that he may run. On Monday, he visited the Google Inc. campus in Mountain View, Calif., a trip that four other announced presidential candidates have made.

He was also in Los Angeles on Monday where he bashed partisan politics in Washington, saying it was putting "our future in jeopardy." He hinted at the problem with party affiliation when said the nation's "wrong-headed course" if politicians could work together across party lines.

In his statement Tuesday, Bloomberg went on to discuss his progress in leading New York City.

Excellent! One less rotten RINO lumbering around knocking stuff off the shelves and leaving big steaming piles of dung on the carpet.

Our lord and master is angry

I can't swear that this is true, but callers on both the Andrew Wilkow and Mike Church shows today said that Trent Lott had the phones in all his offices in Washington DC and Mississippi off the hook today.

It would seem that he simply doesn't want to hear from the great mass of jumped up sheep that seem to have gotten the idea that he is supposed to serve them rather than the other way around.

“Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”

- Trent Lott (R-Mexico)

There! Dealt With!!

H/T: Knowledge is Power & Boazo

Will they airbrush Gigot out of staff photographs next?

It looks like The Wall Street Journal has removed the video clip of their editorial board meeting where they were discussing their support for the amnesty legislation currently before the Senate. Apparently they figured out that it wasn't helping their cause - or the reputations of the various WSJ staff who appeared on the video clip.

This does not seem to be the first time that the WSJ has sought to suppress information which doesn't fit with their agenda as this CNN report shows:



I guess the WSJ's motto is "all the news we're not afraid for you to see".

More ranting about amnesty

Heather Mac Donald, who is my new hero and will continue to be until she starts hyping Julie Annie for president again, has more to say on the amnesty bill:

To observe the sentimental fantasy and ruthless political calculation that fuels the Bush administration's immigration plans, one need only turn to Michael Gerson’s most recent Washington Post column. Former Bush speechwriter Gerson was a powerful voice in the White House, especially on the matter of injecting faith into policymaking; his May 25 column provides a window into how the administration deals with facts.

[. . .]

But Gerson’s column is flawed on another front as well: It recycles open-borders bromides that have nothing to do with the truth. In warning against a rejection of amnesty, Gerson states: “If the Republican Party cannot find ways to appeal to natural entrepreneurs, with strong family values, who are focused on education and social mobility, then the GOP is already dead.”

What planet is Gerson living on? Far from being “focused on education,” Hispanics have the highest drop-out rate in the country — 47 percent nationally, and far worse in heavily Hispanic areas. Schools in illegal-immigrant-saturated southern California spend enormous sums trying to persuade Latino students to stay in school and study, without avail. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, just 40 percent of Hispanics graduate, and those students who do finish school come out with abysmal skills. A controversial high school exit exam in California would require seniors to correctly answer just 51 percent of questions testing eighth-grade-level math and ninth-grade-level English in order to receive a diploma. Naturally, immigrant advocates have fiercely opposed this all-too-meager measure for school and student accountability. The California Research Bureau predicts that the exam will result in a Hispanic graduation rate of below 30 percent.

Behind Hispanic educational failure rate lies an apathy towards learning, as the Manhattan Institute’s Herman Badillo argues in One Nation, One Standard. Hostility towards academic achievement is higher among Hispanics than among blacks. Factor in gang involvement and teenage pregnancy, and the Hispanic drop-out rate looks almost inevitable. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that a whopping 15 percent to 20 percent of illegal immigrants may not qualify for the proposed amnesty because of their criminal records, according to the Wall Street Journal. Gerson’s claim of a culture “focused on education” is pure delusion.

Gerson’s hackneyed invocation of Hispanic “family values” is equally laughable. Nearly 50 percent of all Hispanic children are born out of wedlock, compared to 24 percent of white children and 15 percent of Asian children. Black out-of-wedlock births are higher — 68 percent — but the black population is not growing rapidly. And the fertility rate among unmarried Hispanic women is the highest in the country — over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women. The Hispanic teen-fertility rate also far outstrips other groups. Among Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, the teen birthrate is 93 births per every 1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 white girls, 17 births for every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for every 1,000 black girls. As conservative policymakers such as Gerson should know, there is no better predictor of future social pathologies than out-of-wedlock childrearing.

Low levels of education and high levels of illegitimacy help explain why, contrary to Gerson’s myths, Hispanics are not showing the “social mobility” of other immigrant groups past and present, as Harvard’s George Borjas has documented and City Journal’s Steve Malanga has reported.

Gerson’s disregard for basic accuracy makes his Machiavellian view of the law all the more troubling. He claims that Republicans must do whatever it takes to capture a portion of the “fastest-growing segment of the electorate” (of course, what is growing fastest is the illegal population, who as of yet are not entitled to vote). “At one level,” writes Gerson, “any immigration debate concerns a raw political calculation: Who ends up with more voters?” Such “raw political calculations” clearly govern White House machinations, but here are some factors that influence less partisan observers of the immigration mess: respect for the rule of law and a desire to show fairness to foreigners who comply with our immigration policies. In the American heartland, it is illegal aliens’ disregard for U.S. immigration rules that most infuriates the public. Conservatives usually embrace the rule of law as a central component of their ideology — except, apparently, when the primacy of law interferes with more important objectives, such as getting elected. Had Democrats used Gerson’s political calculus in deciding whether to support civil rights in the 1960s, they would have held on to power in the South, to be sure, but at the cost of principle .

Pace Gerson, it is not nativism, but facts and principle that lie behind opposition to the Senate’s latest amnesty proposal. Playing the nativist (read: racism) card allows propagandists like Gerson to ignore both.

I have to disagree with one of Ms. Mac Donald's fundamental points. In the end it is about who gets elected. The fact is that the nation has already progressed so for toward the left side of the political spectrum that we are in danger of crossing the point of no return. At least the point of no peaceful return.

Nearly half the people in the country receive some kind of check from the government. For some it is a paycheck and we know that the public employee unions are among the most fanatical supporters of the Democrat Party and its socialist agenda. For some it is a Social Security check and seniors will vote for the party which they believe to be the most likely to protect that check. Some get welfare in its many forms and it is no secret who they support.

About the only groups of people on the public payroll who reliably vote Republican are police and active duty and retired military. And the cops are moving to the left inch by inch. There is a widespread mindset among law enforcement that they represent a special class of people who should have rights and privileges above and beyond what the average citizen processes. Which political party will people like that wind up in if given enough time?

As for the military, the 29 Palms Survey demonstrates that loyalty to the Constitution is much lower among younger officers than among the older ones. This means that the military is soon going to be led by men who would willingly serve as tools of repression.

The sad fact of human nature is that people will generally perceive their personal best interests to be aligned with who or whatever supplies them with their daily bread. The natural yearning of the human spirit is not freedom, as Rush Limbaugh endlessly asserts, but security. Convince the average man or woman that if they stick with you that they and their kids will always be well fed, clothed and housed and they will be your property as surely as if you had bought them at a slave auction. More even because they will be serving you voluntarily.

When more than half the people in the United States get their living from the government in one form or another freedom is dead. Not one word of the Constitution will be changed; it will simply be ignored or reinterpreted. If you doubt that can happen try this experiment. Walk into your local courthouse with an M-16 assault rifle slung over your shoulder and see what happens. The Second Amendment says you have every right to do this so see how impressed the deputies guarding the building are with your constitutional rights. See what the judge says at your trial. Appeal it all the way up to the Supreme Court and see what they say.

To paraphrase Buford Pusser if they can do this to one of your rights they can do the same damn thing to any of the others.

That is why I say it's all about who gets elected. If the left keeps winning we will very soon cross the point where the only thing that can salvage anything of the Founder's vision will be a military coup. And the door on having a military that would do the right thing once they have taken over may be closing (see the 29 Palms business).

It is vital that any legislation which includes amnesty in any form be killed. It is vital that any kind of open borders legislation be killed. America can not survive as a free and prosperous nation if we get millions of new voters who will see their self interest being served by more big activist government. We are going to have to realize that we are in a fight just as fierce, for stakes just as high as the Marines fighting their way up Mt. Suribachi or the soldiers landing on Utah Beach 63 years ago yesterday.

Politics is no longer a gentleman's game which can be laid aside at the end of the day and everybody go for drinks at the country club. It is now a knife fight in a sewer and the nation lives or dies on the outcome. The Democrats have already internalized this truth. Republicans had better catch up or our choices will be pressing one for Spanish and two for Farsi.

More on the amnesty bill

Rich Lowry discusses the amnesty bill over on NRO:

The bill gives pretty much every illegal alien here immediate legal status in the form of a probationary Z visa. That’s the amnesty. Then come all the things meant to make the amnesty deniable: a $1,000 fine and $1,500 processing fee for an actual Z visa, which lasts four years; then, it has to be renewed for a $500 fee for another four years; after which, a green card is available with another $4,000 fine; and five years after that — the possibility of applying for citizenship!

Some of the obstacles are clearly for show. Once someone has a Z visa, he has to go back to his home country to apply for a green card. This is pointless. The original purpose of this kind of “touch-back” provision was to make sure an illegal alien was home — not here in this country — when applying for legal status. Then, if his application was denied, he’d already be deported. But these green-card applicants will already have been legal for years and presumably back in the U.S. while their application is processed.

Cynical politics and economics play a role here. Republicans don’t want formerly illegal immigrants voting anytime soon, since poor, low-skilled households aren’t going to produce many GOP voters for a generation or so. And business doesn’t care about citizenship one way or the other, as long as it gets its cheap labor. That’s why employers support the indentured-servitude-style guest-worker program in the bill.

The black slaves were given their freedom by a Republican president and were made citizens with the right to vote by a constitutional amendment rammed through the states by a Republican congress. All of this happened 150 years ago and blacks still vote Democrat by margins anywhere between 88-90%. Are there are really Republicans who think that in "a generation or two" Latinos are going to start pulling the lever for the GOP?

What the frak are these people smoking?

The last thin thread binding George W Bush to the conservative base has been cut

Peggy Noonan writes a conservative post-mortem of the Bush presidency:

What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker--"At this point the break became final." That's not what's happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.

The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.
I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they're defensive, and they're defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill--one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions--this is, always and on every issue, the administration's default position--but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate.

They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!

If they'd really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done--actually and believably done--the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.

There were people who said that George W Bush would ruin the Republican Party. I do not think that things have gone that far only because of the resistance which is being shown to his betrayal on illegal immigration. The Party has too much fight left in it to be dead. But it is in trouble.

I do not agree with those who think that it would have been better to let Gore or Kerry win because the good things that Bush has done, like lower taxes and go to war against the Islamofascists, would not have been done in a Democrat administration and the bad thing (actually the amnesty bill goes far beyond "bad") that he is trying to do would have already been done in a Democrat administration.

However the Republican Party can not take any more damage and survive. That is why it would be better to elect Hillary Clinton than allow Rudolph Giuliani to become president. If the Republican Party has to spend another eight or even four years fighting off attacks on its core values from its own leadership it will go the way of the Whigs.

I pray that Fred Thompson enters the race and takes the nomination then wins the White House. Absent that, and absent one of the acceptable second tier candidates like Duncan Hunter or Mike Huckabee or Tom Tancredo managing to pull off a come from behind victory in the primaries, I will - with some reluctance - support Mitt Romney. A politician who has changed his stand on an important issue to get elected will usually stay changed at least as long as he is in office. I don't completely trust him, but he's better than Hillary and he will not put the final nail in the Republican Party's (and thus the United State's) coffin.

Enough "social" conservatives might hold their nose and pull the lever for Julie Annie on the theory that he is better than Hillary. But after four years of governance by someone with the lifestyle and domestic agenda of a Manhattan liberal the only people in the Republican Party will be Lindsey Graham, Olympia Snow and Sean Hannity (John McCain will implode and collapse into a micro black hole upon losing the nomination in Feb. '08, otherwise he would be there too).

Of course it will not matter who gets elected in 2008 if the amnesty bill passes. Even if it is Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney that will just mean that they will go down in history as the last Republican president of the United States of America.

90 degrees in DC! OMG we're all doomed!

From The Washington Post:

Yesterday, as the temperature pushed toward 90 degrees in the capital, global warming caused a meltdown in the Bush administration's message machine.

Just as President Bush was about to wheel out his "new international climate change framework," the NASA administrator, Michael Griffin, declared that there is no need to take action against global warming.

"Whether that is a long-term concern or not, I can't say," he said in an interview with National Public Radio, adding: "I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with." In fact, Griffin found it "rather arrogant" to suggest that global warming is a bad thing.

A couple of hours after the broadcast, Griffin's boss took the stage at the Ronald Reagan Building to endorse just such arrogance -- an initiative aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. "The United States takes this issue seriously," Bush said.

Well global warming must be a proven fact after all it was 90 degrees in Washington DC! It never gets that hot in Washington DC, at least not in the summer! Its not like Washington DC was built on land that used to be a malarial swamp or anything!

I just have one question for you. Who has more credibility a literal rocket scientist from NASA who is risking his job by speaking an unpopular truth or a politician with low approval numbers who is pandering to the soccor moms who don't know any better than to believe what the mainstream media tells them.

The Republican Party needs illegal aliens like a drowning man needs an anchor

Heather Mac Donald eviserates Jeb Bush and Ken Mehlman today in NRO:

Proposition 187 drove Hispanics from California’s Republican party! So argue Jeb Bush and Ken Mehlman in today’s Wall Street Journal, recycling one of the most cherished myths of the open-borders lobby. According to this nostrum, had Californians, fed up with the costs of providing free public services to illegal aliens, not voted to require legal residency to receive those services, California would today, in Bush and Mehlman’s phrase, still be “Reagan country,” its burgeoning Hispanic population reliably pulling the lever for Republicans.

Too bad they didn’t read their own op-ed. No Republican presidential nominee has won California since 1988, they report. Prop. 187 must be one powerful toxin, if it can alienate Hispanics six years before it even exists.

In fact, California’s transformation from “Reagan country” to labor-union country is the far more likely consequence of the growing Hispanic population per se and the corresponding outflow of white Republicans to other states. In 1990, California was one-quarter Latino and 57-percent white; in 2000, it was 32-percent Latino and 47-percent white; in 2005, Latinos constituted 35 percent, and whites 43 percent, of the population. Those shifting demographics have been accompanied by the growing clout of the Democratic party, and of California's public-service unions, not because of some vestigial memory of 187, but because they appeal to low-wage, low-skilled Hispanics. Los Angeles politics are now closely intertwined with the unionized Left, now that Latinos in 2005 made up 47 percent of the population and whites, 30 percent. The idea that Prop. 187, now 12 years old, is driving this massive shift is fanciful. California provides a glimpse of the likely political future if poor Hispanics continue to be the fastest-growing demographic in the country.

Exactly! The weird fantasy that all we need to do to make Mexicans into Republicans is give the alien criminals among us amnesty for their crimes is a break with reality so profound that I have to suspect some kind of Red Chinese Manchurian Candidate style mind control.

I know why Democrats are pushing this legislative abortion on us. It would give them perpetual control of the country so that they could happily set about destroying it. But what in the name of all that's holy are the Republicans playing at?

I know that some of them really are stupid enough to believe this bullshite about how the hard working family oriented Mexicans are a natural Republican constituency (idiots like Lindsay Graham come to mind here), but George W Bush and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and Rudy Giuliani have to be smarter than that. Don't they?

Well George W Bush might really believe it. Not because he's stupid but because he's the kind of man who, once he gets an idea in his head believes it with a stubborn tenacity which is immune to any fact or logic.

But not the rest of them. All the Senate and House Republicans who are supporting this thing (other than the Lindsey Graham short bus crowd) must have some ulterior motive. But what can it be? What can be so important to them that they would destroy not just their own political careers and their own political party but their own nation over it?

Nails it!

Political quote of the year. From Riehl World View:

Republicans were given a wake up call in 2006; they've opted to hit snooze.

Let's have a glass of wine and watch the world end together

From The Brussels Journal:

The French electorate preferred Nicolas Sarkozy as President of the Republic over the Socialist candidate Segolene Royal. Their preference for Sarkozy clearly showed that they want a right-wing government. Will they get what they voted for? It seems less likely by the day.

In his victory speech on election night (6 May), Sarkozy stated that his “primary battle” will be “against global warming […] because what is at stake is the fate of humanity as a whole.” Frenchmen who had expected that Sarkozy’s first priority would be to reassert the authority of the Republic over its lost territories, where criminals and/or Islamist fundamentalists hold sway, will have to wait until their President is able to beat the sun. Let us hope for a cold, miserable summer in France this year. Perhaps that might bring Nicolas Sarkozy back to his senses.

Then, last Wednesday, in his inaugural address, the new President announced that he is “going to fight for a Europe that protects, because the meaning of the European ideal is to protect the citizens of Europe.” Unfortunately, protecting the French citizens in the Republic’s lost territories, or “zones urbaines sensibles,” seems less important than protecting the citizens of Europe against “the ravages of globalization.”

Today, Sarkozy presented his new government. He has chosen the maverick socialist Bernard Kouchner, a former minister under Mitterrand and “Europe’s most important humanitarian-activist politician [...] on issues from Kosovo to AIDS,” as his Minister of Foreign and European Affairs – a “bold choice” according to the BBC. Kouchner, though supporting the war in Iraq, is a liberal.

It is worth pondering whether Ms Royal, had she won the elections, would have appointed a right-winger or a maverick conservative as Foreign Minister. The answer undoubtedly is no. If people vote for the Left they get a leftist government. If in France they vote for the Right they get a partly leftist government, too.

For a while it looked as if Mr Sarkozy could become the French Margaret Thatcher. Apparently, it is his ambition to be the French David Cameron.

Americans have something in common with the French. We thought we were electing a conservative government too. Instead we got George W Bush and his amnesty for alien criminal legislation.

It looks like pretty soon the last best hope for freedom in the world will be India. I hope they do better than Europe and America did.

Goodbye Florida, it was great while it lasted

From The New York Times:

MIAMI, April 5 — Gov. Charlie Crist persuaded Florida’s clemency board Thursday to let most felons easily regain their voting rights after prison, saying it was time to leave the “offensive minority” of states that uniformly deny ex-offenders such rights.

Crist will be Florida's last Republican governor.

The change is a major step for Florida, which bans more people from the polls than any other state, but it did not go as far as Mr. Crist had hoped. Two of his fellow Republicans on the clemency board rejected his original plan to grant speedy restoration to everyone except murderers and sex criminals.

So if you beat someone almost to death you can get your voting rights back, but if you get caught with a 35 year old prostitute in a consensual sex act you can't?

Florida has as many as 950,000 disenfranchised ex-offenders — far more than any other state — the vast majority black. Other states have repealed or scaled back similar bans in recent years, but roughly five million felons remain barred from the polls nationwide.

And they're all going to go out and vote Republican? Jeb Bush, despite having the last name Bush, was a smart man and a good governor. He was as much a real conservative as his father and brother are RINOs.

What happened in Florida over the past few years? Did the number of Yankees moving down from New Jersey, New York City, Chicago and other points north finally reach the electoral tipping point and start the state on the politically correct death-spiral?

Whatever the reason the fact that the state's politicians now have to pander to the mostly minority criminal class can be reasonably expected to have repercussions for the people of Florida. The first thing I expect to see is the repeal of Florida's version of the "Castle Doctrine", which is the best in the nation. No more will one be able to legally stand their ground in any place where they have a legal right to be and no more will persons found to have shot in self defense be immune from civil suit from the wounded criminal or the dead criminal's family.

I would next expect to see Florida's "shall issue" policy toward concealed weapons permits to be modified back to a "may issue" status. This will be the natural inclination of the left-wing Democrats which the state's new voters (otherwise known as the new "margin of victory") will elect. The fact that the states new voters will have learned to fear and hate armed citizens even more than police by the experiences gained during their criminal careers and the educations they will have received during their enrollment in the nation's criminal universities (otherwise known as state prison) and the fact that any politician (outside of the panhandle, anyway) who wishes to be elected will have to pander to them will guarantee it.

Crist and his fellow RINOs on the clemency board have bent the state of Florida over and are giving it a royal reaming and they aren't even bothering to use a condom or K-Y Jelly. I hope all the sane Floridians have enjoyed the golden age that they have just lived through, because it is at an end.

There's a moonbat in the room. Who left the window open?

From The New York Times:

MIAMI, April 2 — Hinting that a remarkable turnaround in state policy was near, Gov. Charlie Crist said Monday that he hoped to persuade members of the Florida cabinet this week to end the practice of stripping convicted felons of their right to vote.

Florida is the most populous of three states whose constitutions require withdrawal of voting rights from all convicted felons, and it has the nation’s largest number of disenfranchised former offenders. The other two states are Kentucky and Virginia.

Felons in Florida who have served their prison and probation time can apply to have their voting rights reinstated, but the process can be time consuming and complex. Only a few hundred have their rights restored each year in Florida, where the American Civil Liberties Union says 950,000 remain disenfranchised.

Mr. Crist, a Republican, said that to win the support of some cabinet members, he might require former felons to pay whatever restitution they owe to victims before regaining their rights. Some civil rights groups, including the A.C.L.U., oppose such a compromise, but Mr. Crist said he had little choice.

“I want to do the doable,” he told reporters in Tallahassee. “I’m pushing as hard as I can to get as much as I can, but there’s a point beyond which I cannot go.”

And this asshat is a Republican!

Also note for the record that the ACLU is even opposed to making the return of the franchise dependant upon the criminals paying restitution.

Doesn't Christ realize that the pool of convicted thieves and drug dealers and robbers and murderers is second in size only to illegal aliens as an untapped (mostly) reservoir of Democrat votes?

Does this moron want to be the last Republican governor of Florida?