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GOP Mafia Produces Cochran Win in Mississippi

Wednesday, June 25th, 2014

Haley’s Helot

There really is something deeply wrong with the GOP establishment, and as nearly all conservatives have always suspected, it’s this: Despite all of the GOP establishment’s haughty talk about moderation, they are willing to do anything, no matter how repulsive, to achieve their political ends in order to maintain power.  In Mississippi, Thad Cochran held onto his seat by the slimmest of margins over conservative Chris McDaniels.  Had there not been a laundry list of out-of-state, center-left interests pouring money in on Cochran’s behalf, this race would have come out differently, but what I want dispirited conservatives to know is that despite the loss, you won.  It might be hard to see at the moment, but there’s really something to be said for your accomplishments in this race.  The truth is now plain to see, and for those who doubted it before, the veil should now be thoroughly lifted:  The GOP establishment is comprised of a mafia-like element that will use any tactic necessary to keep its scumbags in office, and in this election, it was revealed in full, but this was only possible because conservatives pushed them to the brink.

Thad Cochran has been in political office nearly all of my life.  Now he faces an election for a seventh term, and if he succeeds, he will have served in the US Senate for forty-two years by the time the new term expires.  This is despicable.  What makes it all the more disgusting is the manner of his primary victory.  He did not win on the strength of his record, which is sorely lacking.  He did not win on the merits of his legislative proposals.  He did not win because Republicans in his state favor him.  He did not win even because Republican voters though McDaniels was an inferior candidate.  No, he won on the strength of contributions from his center-left connections, shady endorsements, and because his campaign’s proxies illegally urged Democrats to cross over and vote for him in the Republican primary.  They gave “walking-around money” to would-be Democrat voters, and they basically called McDaniels and the TEA Party “racists” who were out to get Barack Obama. Take a look at this flier, circulated prior to the primary run-off(H/T John Fund at NRO):

Despicable Cochran flier that circulated days before the run-off

Let me say this clearly.  Thad Cochran is a scumbag, and that he would employ such an outrageous tactic merely speaks to his unfitness for office.  Were I a Mississippi conservative, there is no way I would vote to re-elect this dirtball.  Instead, I would vote for the Democrat.  You might ask: “But Mark, if the Democrat is elected, we might not retake the Senate,” to which I must respond with a question: “We?”  Who comprises any “we” in any of this?  It is not Republicans and conservatives.  It is not TEA Party and constitutionalists.  The only “we” who will run the Senate, even if the Republicans win a majority in 2014 is the GOP establishment mafia.  I’d like Mississippi conservatives to think about that.

Haley Barbour and his extended gang, including Michael Bloomberg, Karl Rove, the Chamber of Commerce, a Facebook executive, and a legion of GOP establishment thugs were willing to use ginned-up Democrat support to steal this seat away from Mississippi conservatives.  Mississippi conservatives and TEA Party activists should know that there can be no restoration of the constitutional government they hope to promote so long as a gang of criminal cronies own their Senator.  The worst of it may have been the last-minute use of a sickening tactic of soliciting Democrats to support Cochran even if they would not vote for him in the Fall.

Listen to the following recording for a sample of what establishment Republicans(!) did to secure victory:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpp6cYZrrcs]

This call went out to black Democrats to get them to vote in the Republican primary.

This is the establishment of the Republican Party.  They’re every bit the statist, mafia-like dirtbags the Democrats are, and as you can see, they will work with Democrats whenever necessary to maintain their grip on power.   What is my suggestion to the conservatives and TEA Party folk in Mississippi?  Either run McDaniels as an independent in November, or simply go out to support the Democrat.  Yes, I actually suggest supporting the Democrat, because since Cochran is willing to invite Democrats into the primary campaign, Mississippi conservatives should turn the table on him and give him a dose of his own medicine.  Yes, this means the Democrat will sit in office for six years, but to quote Hillary Clinton, “what difference does it make?”  You now have a six-term RINO running for a seventh term who is firmly in Haley Barbour’s and Karl Rove’s pocket.  This November, for much the same reasons, I am voting for anybody but the RINO liar John Cornyn(R-TX.)  If we’re going to take our country back, we’ll first need to surrender a few things, and in this case, it means giving up the illusion of a Republican-led Senate that wouldn’t be the least bit conservative anyway.

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Posted in Activism, Congress, Featured, GOP Establishment, News, Politics, RINO Alert, Senate Races, Tea Party, Tokyo Rove | 3 Comments »

IRS Scandal Follow-up: The Show Must Go On

Sunday, June 22nd, 2014

…But nobody actually asked Koskinen about the Sonasoft contract. Wonder why?

On Saturday, it was revealed that the IRS has been contracting with Sonasoft for the back-up of emails since 2005, and indeed, looking at Sonasoft’s clients list, listed there is the Internal Revenue Service.  Adding to my list of things about which the Republicans should seek testimony (if they’re serious,) the specific details of the performance requirements of this contract must now be considered.  Undoubtedly, in soliciting bids for back-ups, there must have been a policy for back-ups the bidder must have been prepared to fulfill.  These details would have been dominated by a records retention schedule that would have been designed to comply with statutory minimums. In any event, such a contract would have been carefully vetted for specific performance requirements, the methodology by which performance could be verified, and the chain of responsibility for those on the government side of the contract to make sure performance was fulfilled, or to seek remediation if the requirements were not met.  There would be a schedule of audits of the performance, and there should be no excuse for pretending somebody hadn’t known their specific duties, on either side of the contract. Here’s the point: We very likely have an organized criminal conspiracy, and if the Republicans don’t begin to immediately turn over rocks to find the culprits, the evidence will be destroyed, but that may be precisely what the GOP leadership wants.

People continue to question whether I’ve entered the realm of “tinfoil-hat-wearing” conspiracy kooks, because I doubt the seriousness of the intent of the House Republican leadership in pursuing this scandal.  After all, they ask, why would the Republicans seek to cover the scandal?  Let’s be blunt, shall we?  As long as this scandal has been going on without serious investigation, how much evidence has been destroyed in the interim?  It is true that if there is a cover-up, there will always be some evidence of that, because it’s impossible to completely cover the tracks of what has been done.  Permitting a delay of the investigation would allow the culprits to destroy the evidence so that any crimes perpetrated in the original scandal would be hard to substantiate to the satisfaction of a jury, or an impeachment proceeding, even if the evidence of a cover-up would be harder to conceal.  In the end, however, let us imagine that there had been a few Republicans who had wanted to hammer the TEA Party, like John Boehner, or Mitch McConnell.  They’ve said as much in open contempt for the TEA Party.  By permitting the administration and its lackeys to destroy evidence, the evidence of their own complicity would be hidden too, and all that would remain are the allegations and evidence of a cover-up of something, in which the Republican leadership would not be implicated.  After all, they’ve been conducting an investigation, right?

If this sounds too conspiratorial to you, consider that these are the same people who invented voting for a thing before voting against it.  John Cornyn had no problem voting for cloture on the Senate Amnesty bill last year before coming home to Texas to tell voters he had voted against the final bill, which he had.  He repeated the procedure at the time of the government shutdown last October, again voting to bring the bill for a vote, so that he could vote against it thereby claiming “conservative credentials” all the while have enabled the bill to see the light of day in the first place.  They bank on we voters remaining largely ignorant of their scandalous manipulations, so that a less-than-vigorous investigation wouldn’t provide much of a surprise. By the way, and by way of evidence of the establishment’s thesis in operation, John Cornyn won his primary by pretending to be a conservative while relying on the longterm detachment and ignorance of voters.  Still, roughly forty percent of the Republican electorate in Texas was able to see through his nonsense, but not enough to replace him as our Senator.

My point to you is this: It may be too late to salvage the data, because this has been left withering on the vine for much too long.  The list of particulars I provided yesterday should have been exercised more than two years ago, and it should have been done with vigor.  If there is no active complicity by Republican leadership, there is at least gross incompetence verging on the criminally negligent.  Are we to believe that none of the people in leadership had any idea, and that none of their staff had any idea how to approach such a scandal?  Are we to believe they had no access to any person with sufficient technical understanding who would have apprised them of the sort of things that would need to have been done to “disappear” such data?  Are we to believe that those who were conducting the preliminary investigations on behalf of House committees could not imagine to immediately contact people specializing in data recovery?  Why has it taken until yesterday to discover that the IRS had contracted with Sonasoft?  What were these investigators investigating?  Didn’t they look at the IT expenditures and contracts of the IRS for clues?  You see, once you consider all of this, it’s easier to understand how an observer could reasonably conclude that the Republicans didn’t want to investigate, and having been forced into it by public pressure, have done a half-hearted job of it.

How can we be nearly three years into this investigation, and we’re only now finding there had been a back-up company contracted?  I will not be surprised to learn that the IRS contract with Sonasoft required them to hold emails for a period of only three years, so that by now, Lois Lerner’s emails have fallen off the archive due to age.  A serious investigation would have immediately discovered the existence of a contract with Sonasoft, and those records could have been pulled three years ago.  What will we get as a result?  At best, some underlings who were a part of the cover-up will be burned, but the chain of command to the top will be obfuscated, and then we will get some dog-and-pony IRS Reform bill that will require the agency from this date forward to maintain all emails for ten years, or some such thing.  Then it will all go away, and the original participants in the scandal of targeting TEA Party groups and their members will be forgotten, and life will go on in Washington DC, with we being the only victims, now poorer and less free, and deprived of justice.

The questions I’ve posed over the last thirty-six hours are the sort I would expect of a serious investigation.  To date, we’ve had a lot of finger-waggling by Republicans asking questions of witnesses, but we’ve gotten no meat from these bones.  Certainly, it does not help that we have a Department of Justice that is led by a crook and crony, and it does not help that the media covers everything up on behalf of this administration, but if the Republicans had been serious about getting to the bottom of this scandal, they would have taken significantly more exhaustive steps by now, but to date, all they’ve done is generate ominous soundbites that tend to feed the red-meat aspects of politics, yet have resulted in no arrests, no indictments, and no justice.  In three years?  This scandal is well on its way to becoming a cold case, and that’s just how Washington DC likes it.

Update: The Daily Caller reports that the IRS cancelled its Sonasoft contract only weeks after Lois Lerner’s hard-drive “crash.”

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Posted in Activism, Barack Obama, Congress, Featured, GOP Establishment, IRS Scandal, News, Politics, Tea Party | 5 Comments »

John Boehner’s Dog and Pony Show

Saturday, June 21st, 2014

On Friday, the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives continued its wholly political, and ultimately theatrical investigation of the IRS Tea Party-targeting scandal.  Chairman Dave Camp’s(R-MI) committee brought current IRS Commissioner John Koskinen before the committee to testify as to the loss of Lois Lerner’s emails, among other misdeeds.  You may argue that Paul Ryan(R-WI) was very aggressive in his examination of the witness, but that entire exchange was mere political theater that will evince nothing at the end of the investigation.  Had the Republicans in Congress the first inclination to get to the bottom of this scandal, they would begin by taking the following series of steps:

  1.  Bring before the committee the entire IT staff that supports the IRS, particularly its executives.
  2. Audit the purchase records and replacement schedule of equipment used to support Lois Lerner’s computer usage. Congress should want to know how old her computer had been when the hard disk “died.”
  3. Require IT staff managers to testify as to the method of email archiving, email storage, email backups, and the entire email system used by the IRS.
  4. Seek a federal court order requiring the production of all existing equipment that is currently, or has ever been in use by the IRS in storing email,over the period of the last six years, including particularly SAN devices and servers.
  5. Seek a federal court order requiring the immediate production of all backup media on which IRS files and email may have been copied.
  6. Form a select committee with broad investigatory powers to pursue the entirety of this affair, particularly with an eye toward fraud, destruction of government records and data, as well as political influences brought to bear on the IRS from any branch of government or outside interest groups.
  7. Bring in experts to audit access records for servers and storage devices to discover when anybody interacted with the equipment in question. These devices and servers maintain extensive logs of the commands issued from administrators. Knowing who did what will be a key to cracking this case. The government may well have logging servers to which all events are reported.

For those of you who are less than technically inclined, I will be glad to explain to you why this whole “lost hard drive” claim is a dodge, and for those who may have less than a strong understanding of the politics, I’ll be glad to explain to you how I know the Republicans are playing a game for show, but do not want the truth to come out.

As an information systems professional, who works with storage systems, backup systems, networks, servers, and workstations every day, and who works with the applications and databases which is the purpose of all of that lovely, grotesquely expensive equipment, let me tell you a few things you won’t read in the media.  You might even take a moment to learn a bit more about your own computer.

First, the email system the IRS uses is almost certainly an IMAP or MAPI variant.  This means that on the most basic level, emails are not stored on the client, except as a temporarily cached copy.  Deleting it may cause the email to appear deleted for that user, but the mail archiving functionality will maintain a copy for a period as prescribed by policy, usually determined in applicable statutes and regulations. Most corporate and government environments will not even permit users to store mail in local folders(email folders solely on your local computer) unless they are first archived in the email archiving system, which is generally part of the same overall system. Nevertheless, examining the event viewer in Windows will offer some insight into what may or may not have been done on a given workstation or server. Linux and other operating systems have similar logging facilities.  (If you have Windows, you can get an idea by going to your Control Panel, then to Administrative Tools, and Event Viewer. You will be surprised what you can learn about your computer’s routine operations.)

In the second place, the number of servers used for an email system to support an organization the size of the IRS must be quite large.  It undoubtedly consists of multiple servers, at multiple server farms, in a redundant scheme of some sort intended to prevent the loss of data.  You, the taxpayer, has spent billions upon billions since the advent of email to provide these facilities for our federal bureaucracy.

Third, since email storage in such an environment is bound to be monumental in scale, there are undoubtedly many storage blades of some form, probably Storage Area Networks(SANs) to handle the storage needs of the mail system servers.  These are also geographically dispersed for reasons of data security, and what you should know about these technologies is that if your Storage Administrators are doing their jobs, there is virtually no credible fashion in which data of this sort could be lost simply because somebody’s office computer’s hard disk died.

To put it in context, consider one of the leading manufacturer’s systems.  Called an ISE2, it’s made by X-IO and it can contain two datapacs that contain what are essentially a stack of hard disks that are effectively “self-healing,” and in common usage, contain more than fourteen terabytes of data in each datapac.  By design, such a device already creates a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks(RAID) by virtue of its design, permitting the administrator to choose either RAID 1(mirroring) or RAID 5(a form of quasi-mirroring).  The way these devices are used is to create storage volumes in the datapacs and attach those volumes to servers.  They can be swapped in and out, and they can be mirrored as individual entities across other devices.  The servers in question see these volumes as hard-drives, and in effect, they function in precisely that manner.    I would be stunned to find that the US Federal government is not using such an arrangement, whomever the vendor, and there are many.  Chances are high that wherever the server farm is that operates the IRS email system, there are likely to be many SAN units, or other storage containers that have similar functionality.

Putting of all of this into simplest terms, the series of failures that would be required to disappear Lois Lerner’s emails, along with those of six other IRS executives, is an astonishing string of virtual impossibilities and displays of incompetence and malfeasance that should result in the ouster of every IT manager supporting the IRS.  It’s not that I don’t believe there are incompetents working in government, or that I don’t believe there are some slothful folk administering systems for the IRS, but that the totality of this loss of data represents a complete failure at virtually every level and every step of the organization.  Even in a clunky, bureaucratic, top-heavy organization like the IRS, there are still some competent people who keep it working despite all the obstacles placed in their way. The manner in which their storage systems and server farms are designed tends to preclude the chance that something so seemingly innocuous as the loss of one person’s email(or seven) is even a remote possibility.

Knowing how such systems work, and knowing that the government spends more money on the core computing technology than any entity on the planet, their claim to have lost the email due to a hard drive failure on a client machine is an absolute farce.  To claim even that no data was recoverable on that hard drive is pretty hard to believe too, since I’ve seen data recovered from hard disks that have been in computers essentially destroyed by fires.  In fact, given the nature of the data I have handled over the course of my computing career, it is common that when a computer reaches the end of its service life, organizations resell the computers but strip the hard drives out of them for mechanical destruction so that no data may be recovered from them. (In many cases, this involves drilling holes through the platters, using a cutting torch, or other methodology designed to destroy the actual storage media in the drive, which is generally very hard metal platters.)

All of that doesn’t matter in the least, however, as the servers and archive servers and storage devices in the systems are apt to have contained one or more(probably many more) copies of the target emails. Then there are backup tapes or other backup devices. No, ladies and gentlemen, if the administration’s hacks like Mr. Koskinen come forward to tell you in smug tones that the data was irretrievably lost, they are lying.  It may have been irretrievably destroyed, but that would require a conspiracy because no one computer technician could possibly have access to all the relevant systems in an organization so large.

The technician who was responsible for maintaining and repairing Lois Lerner’s computer is not the same technician who administers the email system.  That administrator is not the same person who operates and maintains the bulk data storage containers, nor is that the same person who operates all backups and certainly not the same person who maintains and administers the network on which all of this computing takes place.  It’s not plausible in an organization the size of the IRS.  In many cases, data is duplicated and moved off-site for disaster recovery purposes.  No, if this data is unrecoverable, it is because it was ordered to be placed in that state.  Knowing this, and knowing what would be entailed in literally destroying any trace of these emails, I can only conclude that this administration is lying, and is an active participant in a criminal conspiracy and cover-up of crimes that would tend to place Lerner and her superiors in jeopardy of long jail terms, and this president in the direct path of impeachment proceedings.

At the beginning of this article, I explained to you that I believed that the claim about the emails being “lost” is nonsense, and a lie.  I hope I’ve managed to illuminate a few of the reasons why you should not believe such claims, but I also contended that you should not believe that the Republicans are very serious about uncovering the truth, despite their harrumphing to the contrary.   You see, if the Republicans in Congress were serious about all of this, they would issue subpoenas to the entire IT staff.  They would drag them in, one at a time, starting at the top, and working their way down to the lowest technician.  They would have questions, specific technical questions, prepared for them by people like me, or actually those rare birds who designed such systems, and they would begin the grilling.  Under oath.  Somebody would crack.  A lie of this sort cannot be hidden if there is a consistent and tireless effort to uncover it.

The problem may be that to uncover Lois Lerner’s email would reveal something no Representative in that committee hearing room wants you to know:  Lerner may have been receiving emails from both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill urging audits and investigations into Tea Party groups.  The IRS was used in this instance to quell a peaceful, political uprising by making the formation of a group so painful and problematic as to frustrate into capitulation all but the most insistent and persistent persons.  The Republicans tried first to co-opt the Tea Party phenomenon, making it their own, but when they found they were unable to control the myriad of organizations springing to life around the country, their next motive was to destroy it because they posed a serious challenge to the orthodoxy of establishment power in Washington DC.  Most Republicans in Washington DC want the Tea Party buried, some of them more fervently even than the Democrats.

If the Republicans in the House cannot muster a select committee to look into this and other matters of extreme government corruption, it is only because they do no want the truth discovered.  If they will not bring an endless string of witnesses to testify as to their role in the email “losses” and the system design of the email and data facilities of the IRS, then they don’t want an answer.  Paul Ryan and others can put on one Hell of a show in the committee room, but the truth is that saying “I don’t believe you” in an exchange with an IRS commissioner isn’t going to turn over many stones.  If you want the truth, you bring in the subject matter experts and responsible parties, and you grill them and continue to remind them of their oaths.  At some point, some junior flunky intern who was told to ditch a hard disk in the Potomac is going to squeal, because he doesn’t want to go to prison.  Then you bring back the person who gave him that order, and then the person who issued that order from higher on the food chain.   Work your way down to get them on the record, until somebody cracks, and then work your way back up, exposing lies until the scheme is revealed in full.

If the Congress won’t do this, they’re not serious about the matter.  It suggests strongly that they don’t want the truth revealed any more than the administration.  There are plenty of smart people on Capitol Hill, and they have plenty of contacts who understand such systems and could provide technical advice both in the formation of questions and in the manner by which to challenge the credibility of the answers.  Those behind this atrocious abuse of government power must be held accountable and jailed for their crimes.  Make no mistake about it: Grievous crimes were committed both as a part of the targeting, as well as during this extended cover-up.  If the Republicans now fail to uncover those crimes and see this investigatory process through to a just ending, you can be sure that they hadn’t wanted the truth to be discovered, because their fingerprints are all over this too.

 

 

 

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Posted in Activism, Barack Obama, Featured, GOP Establishment, IRS Scandal, News, Politics, Taxes, Tea Party | 11 Comments »

Three Courses Among Which None Wish to Choose

Saturday, January 25th, 2014

Easier not to choose?

I’ve remained still these last weeks waiting to see the outcome of things in my own world.  My wife suffered a heart attack in early December, and while she survived and is on the mend, it put me into a pensive mood during which I’ve said little while simply absorbing what’s going on in the world around us.  I don’t have all of the answers, but what I do know is that we have a choice to make.  It struck me with a certain clarity when I realized that for all the efforts of good and conscientious conservatives, we’re barely making a dent.  The American people are thoroughly dispirited in a way not seen since Carter, and maybe even the pre-war era of FDR’s long and loathsome administration.  Nothing is improving.  Jobs are scarce.  The printed currency is piling up, and with it a stack of IOUs that would reach from Earth to the no-longer-planet Pluto.  What strikes me most is the unwillingness to choose, perhaps because all of the options seem so depressingly bad.  We are now at a stage in our civilization’s collapse that we must fight, reform, or surrender.  Make no mistake about it, as while we defer the choice, the available options only become more severe in their fullest meanings.  In time, the choice will be taken from us, and surrender will be replaced by slavery, whether we’d choose it or not. Even now, the embrace of the police state is transforming from a gentle, confidence-instilling hug into a death-grip from which it seems there may be no escape.

Maybe it’s time you had that blunt bit of talk with loved-ones who may not realize what’s afoot.    I know I’ve tried.  Some never listen because it’s too painful.  More often, because it is a complicated problem with implications that will reach into every life, most refuse to consider it.  Our nation is well on its way to becoming Rome.  We witness now the harbingers of our moral collapse, with an unconscionable display of motherly pride in a son who literally prostituted himself to homosexual pornography to support her household.  Lot’s wife had at least the advantage of a husband who would tell her to avert her eyes.  This scandalous decline in our cultural moral standards has left us with a nation that is rudderless not only in Washington DC, but in Everytown, USA, where plain, ordinary citizens no longer seem to muster much moral indignation about anything of consequence, while others rush to uphold the vile, the obnoxious, and the nonsensical.

Don’t misunderstand me: There are still many Americans who feel as I do, and you may well be among them, yet we are a declining proportion of a population overwhelmingly beset with endless distractions that will mean nothing when they find themselves at some future date languishing in the gutter.  I don’t believe it must end this way, but if we don’t choose another course, and soon, it will end this way.  As one friend constantly reminds me, “nothing ends well or it would never end.”  There’s a certain pragmatism to that view against which I would like to rebel, but like most of my readers, I feel the crushing weight of history pressing down upon us.

Will we fight?  Will a beleaguered people take up arms?  Many an American has made oaths, not all of them idle, about the nature of how they will go down, but I wonder if when faced with it, how many will simply fold.  More, one could wonder if this is not precisely what certain statist elements are attempting to provoke.  Against the combined forces of the modern government, who could long endure?  Who would desire this sort of outcome?  Who would want a fractured nation consumed by civil war?  Still, if it became the only viable option for our survival, I wonder how many would stand and fight, and for what they’d be fighting.

Will we surrender?  Will we yield to the historic march of statism, giving up first the last measures of our personal sovereignty; our property, such slim wealth as we may have managed to preserve, and all personal discretion to a police state that will command our every action, and make our every choice?   The evidence today would suggest that this shall be our path.  Despite its clear predatory aims against our liberties, observe the fact that at least one-third of Americans still believe the failed roll-out of the monstrous “Obama-care” should continue.  Such people do not deserve freedom, and will not long cling to it, precisely because such measures of freedom they tend to demand are merely vestiges of the concept.

Will we reform?  Here lies the last option for salvaging the nation, yet it is also the historically slimmest probability. The singular advantage we may possess when compared to all the collapsing civilizations that have before us descended into ash is that our basic law has been so difficult to amend that it has succeeded only twenty-seven times in more than two-hundred years.  What this means is that some vital portions have been left intact, leaving to us an escape-clause of sorts, and a method by which to reach from the grave’s brink at the last moment to reform our dying civilization.  This makes us undeniably unique with respect to opportunity, but the question remains as to whether we can summon the character in sufficient numbers to reach for that constitutional kill-switch.

I have become convinced that while we may tinker around with this office or that, and while we may occasionally elect a competent, sincere conservative, the federal authorities in Washington rule almost without respect to our laws, never mind our wishes.  Mark Levin has stated often and with growing impatience that we will almost certainly fail to reform by focusing on the federal government and its elected office-holders.  We must reach into the constitutional tool-kit and utilize its most powerful weapon against the centralization of power in Washington DC: Article V. holds the entire mechanism for reforms we seek.  It is not an easy road, and there will be no instant gratification, but if we are to overcome the gaping maw of the all-powerful government now consuming us, it is upon the authority of Article V that our salvation may rest. If you’ve not yet read The Liberty Amendments, I would urge you to consider picking up a copy soon.

Even now, we can observe the Obama administration’s predatory, despotic intentions.  While a review board declared that the NSA’s spying on US citizens should cease, the Obama administration rejected the board’s conclusions.  While we watch, the Obama administration makes it plain that they are checking their enemies list and checking it twice, and the only way to escape it is to be perpetually nice to the administration and its aims.  No dissent of any sort will be tolerated, whether you’re Dinesh D’Souza or a Tea Party activist.  Worse, the Republicans on Capitol Hill are joining in, with Mitch McConnell saying the Tea Party needs a punch in the nose.  There is really no longer any question about it: The war on the American people, their culture, their traditions, and their dreams is in full force, never mind the complete destruction of any prosperity they had once known.  There is no accident in it, and it’s all going according to plan.  My question for you remains: Will we submit to this historic script, with our part as helpless victims played to the hilt?

It’s time for us to consider whether we will be led down that same old path.  We’re barely more than nine months from the mid-terms, and the evidence is that we are yielding momentum as the Republicans in Washington DC continue to throttle our efforts. One might wonder how this can be, but I understand it: We are exhausted, our morale has taken a beating, and more and more of us find we’re under an economic strain that makes other efforts seem too tiring.  Some of us have noticed the expanding police state, deciding it best to lie low and to refrain from open activism.  Myself, I feel as though I must now get all of my personal effects in order, in the manner of a soldier preparing for a deployment to war.  Sometimes, I wonder if that’s merely my perception, but something tells me I’m not alone.

Like any other movement, it’s time to assess our position, our options, and our next move.  Waiting for the “Republicans” to save us clearly won’t yield any fruit, so we must ask whether we now huddle in darkness waiting for the end, or instead rise in some fashion. I credit Mark Levin for reminding us of the one way out of all of this that remains, but now the challenge is before us:  We have a choice, and we’d best make it before it’s made for us.

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Posted in Activism, Featured, Mark Levin, News, Obama, Politics, Tea Party, War | 44 Comments »

Independence Party Makes Inroads in UK

Sunday, January 5th, 2014

Same thing, only different…

It’s been nearly two decades since it was established, but the U.K.’s Independence Party(UKIP) isn’t going away, and indeed, it has begun to make inroads, particularly at the local level.  The larger reason for this opportunity may be that the establishment Tory party, long considered the UK’s “conservatives,” have abandoned conservative policies in favor of progressive ideas.  If that sounds familiar to you, it should, because in many respects, our own Republican party, long-portrayed in media as virtually synonymous with “conservative” has been behaving like liberals.  Of course, the Tories in the UK have always been more slanted to the left than had been our Republicans, but lately, they’ve all but abandoned any pretense to conservative thought.  As this has happened, it has had a curious effect on the Independence Party, swelling its ranks lately and giving it a real foothold in local elections.  UKIP seems to understand this is a fight over the long run, and not a battle to be won in an election cycle or two.  Their leader, Nigel Farage, made clear in an interview with Foxnews what is the UKIP’s aim:

“We want to take back our country, we want to take back our government, and we want to take back our birthright,”

If this sounds familiar to Tea Party activists, it should.  Just like the Republicans here, the Tories have begun to fully embrace National Healthcare, and all sorts of left-wing ideals, including liberal immigration policies, and the whole slate of liberal policy preferences advocated and advanced by their Labor Party. the U.K.’s equivalent to our own Democrats.  The largest strategic difference between the Tea Party and the UKIP is that rather than seeking to influence the Tories, the Independence Party is in direct competition with them.  They are not trying to work on the party from within, but instead making a full frontal assault on the establishment “Conservatives.” While not precisely like the Tea Party in all respects, in terms of a movement, it is quite similar in its grass-roots orientation.

Naturally, they are dismissed as “racists” and “kooks” and all sorts of demeaning labels by both the traditional parties, but that isn’t stopping them from moving ahead.  Dishonest labels only work so long, as does the attempt to define the whole of the party by the bombastic or outrageous statements of a few individuals within it. More, the UKIP has focused on an issue that seems to a majority of voters across party lines: Membership in the EU.  UKIP opposes it while both Labor and the Tories favor it, despite the fact that a clear majority of the populace stands in favor of withdrawing from the EU.  With this on the table in 2014, UKIP stands to make further inroads as the only party pushing in the same direction as the populace.

This is in many respects like the arguments on two issues we face domestically. The first is Obama-care, and the second is immigration.  In both cases, the US population is opposed by strong majorities to any sort of amnesty and continuance of the health-care law.  While there are still some Republicans who are opposed to amnesty, and a few more in favor of repeal of Obama-care, the fact remains that a large number of Republicans in both houses of Congress are in favor of an amnesty deal, and distinguishing by their votes, have been only too willing to fund and thereby continue Obama-care.

If UKIP manages to pull off some electoral victories, it may offer a hint to Tea Party activists in the US: It may be time to put up its own slate of candidates, completely independent of the Republicans, and it may be time to formally register as a political party.  The sorts of clear issues in which the American people are at odds with both major political parties may be reaching a climax, at which one party or the other must disappear.  This is what happened to the Whigs one and one-half centuries ago, and it may be the end in store for the Republicans if Tea Party activists can get their act together.  Like more and more voters in Britain, Americans may discover that they have no need of both a conservative party and a fake conservative party. If this comes to be the case in the U.K., it  may evince hope for a resurgence of the Tea Party, perhaps under a new banner independent in all respects of the Republican Party.

It may be time for the Tea Party to take that leap.

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Posted in Activism, Featured, Healthcare, Immigration, News, Obamacare, Politics, Tea Party | 5 Comments »

Cruz or Lose: What’s Really at Stake if Our Leaders Won’t Fight

Thursday, September 26th, 2013

Just Once, Use It!

The truth of the matter is actually rather simple: Obama-care could be de-funded any time John Boehner decided to find his…voice…and do something concrete that is entirely within his power.  The House, led by Speaker Boehner, could initiate the process of sending individual appropriation bills to the Senate, one after the next, for all the essential programs and budget items that would fall under the ordinary budgetary process.  Send a defense spending bill.  Send a Social Security spending bill, and up the ante by giving a 4% raise in the cost of living adjustment, one time, “to account for the effects of inflation not considered in the CPI”(Consumer Price Index.)  Do the same with other big spending programs, but simply withhold one on Obamacare.  Dare Harry Reid to hold up the bills, or the President to veto them should they pass the Senate.  Go on television and explain why all spending measures must begin in the House, and the House has passed each and every one of these individual things, and throw down the list on the table.  Tell seniors: Harry Reid is holding up your Social Security check.  Tell soldiers that the President, their commander-in-chief, is preventing them from being paid.   Just tell the truth: Because the President and his party are more interested in buying votes than in funding the essential functions of government, the President is willing to see Grandma eating dog-food and soldiers in the field being denied beans and bullets.

I predict that with his increasingly tenuous grasp on the support of the American people, Obama would cave.  Tie each bill to the debt ceiling.  Make it impossible for government to spend more than its receipts.  This can all be accomplished if the House of Representatives merely exercises its prevailing constitutional authority over the purse.  You might want to know that Obama is probably a good deal more nervous about this than you might guess.  This is because government has been illegally borrowing money in excess of the current debt ceiling since early summer.  To me, this is an unconscionable circumstance, and part of the reason Boehner is going along is because the President has succeeded in buying his silence through Boehner’s complicity.  The US government is already in a sort of insurrection against its own laws.  Why do you suppose the debt clock has remained frozen these months, just shy of the legal borrowing limit?  Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is still lending money into existence to somebody.  Any rational person can guess the real answer here, and if there isn’t a continuing resolution and a corresponding increase in the debt ceiling soon, Obama and all those assisting him will be in deep…water.

There is a conspiracy of silence in Washington DC, and the American people are its first and foremost victim.  The truth is that at the current rate of government borrowing, no program is sustainable.  It’s now so bad that they’re suspending investments and re-investments of Federal Employee retirement funds.  That’s how bad it really is, and it’s the reason that John Boehner isn’t saying a word.   It’s the reason nobody really wants to push on de-funding Obama-care, and it’s the reason Washington DC is hoping they’ll pass a continuing resolution to fund the government and this will all just quietly go away… for now.

Ladies and gentlemen, you should know that there is no chance whatever that we will succeed in slowing this runaway government unless we lean very heavily on our elected representatives.  There’s no chance that as long as stooges like John Cornyn(R-TX) are willing to betray us that we can expect any change in direction.  We mustn’t let these rotten liars continue.  Yes, it’s as bad as that, and everybody should know it.  How many conservatives are aware of what’s been going on with our debt?  How many conservatives realize the implications?  When and if they re-start that debt clock, you will watch it wind up more quickly than ever, at blinding speed as it lurches to catch up with all the debt the government has illegally accrued in the last several months.  There is treason in Washington DC, and if you want to know why Speaker Boehner will do nothing about it, it’s because he’s in on it too.

On Friday will come the vote for cloture on the bill now pending before the Senate.  Reid must not succeed, which means you must turn up the volume on all Senators beginning first thing in the morning.  If you can fax them, do so. Their fax numbers are listed on the Senate’s website.  Just select your state in the upper right-hand corner, and if your own senators are pretty solid, check in with some of the others, including the Minority leader’s(Mitch McConnell of Kentucky) and the Minority Whip’s(John Cornyn of Texas).  Also hammer some of the red-state Senators who are up for re-election in 2014.  There’s some evidence Senator Manchin of West Virginia is beginning to crack under the pressure.  It’s time for maximum effort and maximum exertion from this moment until we win or lose.  This will almost certainly move back to the House, in which case we’ll need to get after Boehner and the establishment phalanx there.  Let us not squander the momentum and the good start Senators Ted Cruz(R-TX) and Mike Lee(R-UT) have provided.  We’re in for one hell of a fight, and our country’s future is at stake.  This is no time for hesitation or waffling, and we must demand our elected leaders show the character and fortitude we expect.  The country is in real danger now, much worse than the DC class will tell you, and it’s time we let them know that we see what they’ve done, what they’re doing, and what we intend to do about it.

Editors note: You will notice on the Senate homepage that there is an article celebrating 100 years of direct election of the Senate, complete with a propagandist puff-piece about the passage of the 17th Amendment.  Mark Levin’s book must really be getting to them, since he proposed repealing the 17th.  Coincidental? You decide.

Congressional Switchboard: 202 224 3121

 

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Posted in Featured, News, Obamacare, Politics, Statism, Tea Party | 5 Comments »

Time for Conservatives to “Go Rogue” on Amnesty Advocates

Monday, August 5th, 2013

Our Only Option

Enough is enough. Readers will surely remember how in the summer of 2010, we nearly stopped Obama-care with great turn-out at town-hall events at which we grilled members (of both parties) on the matter of the “Affordable Care Act.”  Members of the House and Senate rose each morning to find new Youtube videos of their colleagues being outed as fools and charlatans.  Since then, many have gone to a system of tele-Townhalls in order to avoid such spectacles, but that shouldn’t stop us.  We need to know where these fence-sitters on immigration will be holding their town-hall events, and we need to know even where amnesty’s open supporters will be taking questions from constituents, even if it’s on the streets going in and out of meeting locations.  We need to show up in order to make a fuss.  No violence.  No foul language.  We’re polite people, but we shouldn’t be push-overs.  Just ask the damning questions and demand answers:

“Given that this legislation is likely to create 20-30 million new US citizens over the next decade, and given that seven in nine new immigrants register and vote Democrat, how do you propose that Republicans will ever have even a chance at future electoral victory?”

“Why do you insist on pretending that the House immigration bill now working its way through committees will be anything other than a Trojan horse for the treasonous Gang-of-Eight bill that has passed the Senate?”

“Do you think we’re stupid?”

“What do you expect this bill will do to the American people?”

“Why would you go along with what is essentially a treason against the American worker?”

“What are you being offered or promised to support this treason?”

“If letting in 12-30 million people predominately from Mexico and points South will be good for the American economy, why isn’t their remaining in place good for the economies of their countries of origin?”

“Teen unemployment is over fifty percent this summer.  Unemployment among African Americans is at stunningly high levels.  How does infusing the economy with 12-30 million mostly low-skill workers assist our unemployed fellow-Americans who are struggling to make ends meet?”

“Why does Congress and this President together refuse to enforce the laws on the books today?”

“Why does the compassion and concern of members of Congress extend to illegal immigrants, but not to US Citizens?”

“Can you comment on the political influence of large corporations and unions in pushing this immigration bill?  The US Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO joining forces to help craft the Senate bill can’t possibly be good for America(ns.) What is your position on that bill? I ask, because it seems that House efforts are aimed at passing something so the Senate bill can be substituted in its entirety in conference.”

“Is it true that any House bill that passes could be essentially replaced by House-Senate conferees with the Gang-of-Eight bill?  Yes or no?”

“What is your position on the so-called “Hastert rule?” Do you believe Speaker Boehner will apply that rule to any immigration conference bill? What is likely to happen if he doesn’t?”

I’m sure you can come up with your own, but the simple fact is that these people need to be held to answer for this mess. We know what they’re trying to do, and it’s time we put a stop to it.

If you know where your Congressman is holding a town hall meeting, please post it in comments.  This will help other readers get to the meetings.  I will create a posting with as many of them as readers provide.  We need maximum participation.  What we will need to succeed on this and other issues is to put these men and women who we’ve elected to represent us on the spot.  They need to be able to explain their positions on immigration reform, but more, on the process by which the process will come to a vote.  They need most of all to explain how any House bill won’t become a Trojan horse for the Senate bill.

The truth is that they won’t be able to explain it away, so we must hold their feet to the fire on this issue by demanding they answer the hard questions.

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Posted in Activism, Amnesty, Congress, Featured, Illegal Immigration, Immigration, Politics, Tea Party | 3 Comments »

Beating Back the Progressive Republicans With Their Own Bludgeon

Sunday, July 7th, 2013

A New Kind of Tea Party

There has been a great deal of discussion over the last week concerning the remarks made by Governor Palin in answer to a question from Josh Painter, regarding the possibility of a new party to supplant the GOP.  As Steve Deace covers in his own cost/benefit analysis of the idea, there are a few practical considerations to leaving the Republican Party that make for a gargantuan series of problems, including effectively surrendering the whole governance of the country to the Democrats in the short run.  As Deace also explains quite effectively,  if we don’t change the direction of the country, it won’t matter much because with the current supine and tepid leadership of the GOP, we have arrived already in that effective condition.  What opposition to the Obama agenda do conservatives see from the GOP?  There has been little evident among establishment Republicans, often behaving more like collaborators than opponents.  This conflict has been a long time in coming, but I believe we must face it squarely or surrender to  statism.  If we are going to conquer our political foes, we must clean up our own house, refusing to abandon it to the slumlords of the GOP establishment.  For once, let us do the unexpected, turning tables on them: We must build a party within the Party as the means by which to take it over, but this time, for keeps.

Ever since the days of the progressive era, there has been a class of Republicans the members of which don’t hold republican ideals.  Their manner of coming to dominate the GOP was a form of stealthy infiltration and guile.  They looked like conservatives, and they used many of the appropriate conservative buzzwords in speeches and articles, so that it was somewhat harder to recognize them.  They gained influence by building their own parallel mechanisms within the Republican Party, all aimed at supplanting conservative ideology and philosophy with their own.  Cronies were inserted all up and down the Republican totem pole, giving them vast power with which to override any conservative sentiments.  Time after time, they managed to keep conservatives out, and the few times they failed, they almost always managed to sabotage them somehow.  When Barry Goldwater(R-AZ) sought the Republican nomination in 1964, they submarined him, the Rockefeller Republicans withdrawing virtually all support, barely managing to pretend they would support Barry Goldwater.

In 1980, the same crowd finally lost another round of the RNC nomination fight, having nearly lost it four years earlier.  Ronald Reagan wasn’t getting much establishment support early on, even immediately after the nominating convention, but when they saw that the train was going to leave the station without them, they hurried to climb aboard, pointing to moderate VP choice George HW Bush as the thing that made Reagan “tolerable.”  The truth is, they saw Reagan as a plausible vehicle to install their own people at the highest levels of government, for later use, but also as a way to confound and steer the Reagan administration.  America would have its first conservative president in generations, but the establishment Republicans were going to use every bit of influence they could to turn it to their advantage. They did this as they always do, establishing their own chain of cooperation and control within the Reagan administration.  The amnesty bill of 1986 was probably the greatest evidence of their scheming, a bill that contributed to the loss of Republican control of the Senate that year by depressing conservative turnout, much as what happened in 2006 when Republicans lost the Congress after that year’s amnesty attempt.

We conservatives should take a few lessons from this, and I believe if we’re attentive to the details, it will be easier to understand what must be done and how we must do it.  Others have written extensively about how to carry out a virtual overthrow inside the Republican Party, so I won’t expend too much of your time on that.  Instead, I wish to talk about the character of what you must do.  What we need is a party within the party.  Rather than trying to become our own free-standing party, a solution we already know will take many years and even decades to complete, let us create a subset of the Republican Party and we can call it the “Freedom Faction.” Freedom of association being what it is, I’m sure the Republican Party won’t mind if some of its members are simultaneously members of another group over which they have no control.  Well, perhaps they will not mind too much, but if they do, to devil with them. They’re who we mean to defeat firstly.

This is what the Tea Parties has been, with the singular distinction that they were not officially a subset of the Republican Party, and did not seek to be.  This has permitted them independence of action and advocacy, which is a critical thing common-sense conservatives need, but it is also a detriment inasmuch as it is more difficult for them to guide the direction of the GOP.  In fact, most of us who are most desperately frustrated with the direction of the Republican Party are precisely the Tea Party folk, meaning many can merely adopt the “Freedom Faction” and move in.  My point is that despite all that has been said about the Tea Party, many of them soldier on in spite of the way they’ve been treated by Democrats and Republicans alike.  The left likes to say that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” so since they consider Tea Partiers “terrorists,” let us instead be freedom-fighters.  That’s what we really are, and that’s what our movement must embrace. We’re small “r” republicans who constitute the Freedom Faction of the Republican Party.  It was always our party, despite the RINOs and the establishment hacks, and it can still be our party if we simply act to take it back, but to do so, we’ll need to build a party within the party so that as insurgents, we can place our own in the places of influence.

The Republican Party is willing to except Democrats in open primary states to help them select establishment nominees, and since they haven’t demonstrated the will to stop that, I doubt they’ll muster the sentiment to stop us, although we do pose the larger threat.  What do my small “r” republican readers think?  Is it time to build our Freedom Faction and use it as a platform from which to recapture our party? It will take discipline, teamwork, and a broad coordination, all things of which we are capable, but which are are somewhat alien to our general dispositions. We are demonstrably an independent lot.  The establishment will know something is afoot, and they will try to thwart us, but we have an advantage demonstrated by Romney’s miserable election day ground-game: We’re more agile and fluid, while they are grinding cogs in a hopelessly malfunctioning machine.  They won’t want us.  They don’t have a choice.  Will they show their true colors and banish us from the party?  Not likely. Will they try to control, infiltrate and sabotage us?  Absolutely.  Will they send Karl “Tokyo” Rove to attack us? I can’t wait.

If a party is free to makes its own rules, it seems to me that a party within a party should be able to do the same.  The establishment Republicans never seemed to have a problem setting up rules and procedures to their liking, or rigging conventions four years in advance.  Of course, I’ve never built a party before, though I may have a few useful ideas. Nevertheless, to bring this to fruition will take more than one anonymous curmudgeon on a blog site.  If you’re interested, let me know at freedom-faction@markamerica.com. I’d love to read your ideas! Some of you have decades of experience in local political activism, so that your wisdom will be needed by younger activists who wish to establish a Freedom Faction.  If we hope to take control of  the Republican Party, while avoiding the daunting problems of simply abandoning it for a new party, I think building an explicit faction within the party is a great idea.  After all, that’s what the establishment, RINO Republicans have been doing to us for ages.  Is it not time to turn tables?

The DC insiders say the Tea Party is dead, but I don’t believe that.  I think they’re about to run into a “Tea Party” the  likes of which they’ve never imagined, and it may just be out to clean up Washington DC with a vengeance.

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Posted in Activism, Conservatism, Featured, GOP Establishment, News, Politics, Tea Party, Tokyo Rove | 3 Comments »

How Much Did Establishment Republicans Know About IRS Targeting?

Friday, June 28th, 2013

Remember This?

Given their clear penchant for betraying conservatives, and given the half-fast approach they have taken to the investigation into the IRS Tea Party-targeting scandal, and also considering the apparent reluctance of some House Republicans to seek a special prosecutor on this and related matters, I have begun to wonder if perhaps our Republicans in Washington DC are “un-indicted co-conspirators” in this IRS scandal too.  We already know that Republicans have been aware since early 2012, and perhaps a good deal sooner, but one must wonder how much they knew.  They have happily trotted-out a number of requests sent to the IRS by Democrats asking for audits of Tea Party groups, but I wonder what would be revealed if IRS correspondence with Republican members is scrutinized at some future date.  Would we find that Republicans, particularly of the Tea Party-averse establishment stripe would suddenly materialize before us?  Back in July 2011, I may have been more right than I had dared to suspect when I wrote about the bi-partisan war against the Tea Party.

It became fairly clear in the aftermath of the 2010 mid-term elections that something wasn’t quite right.  In the Spring and Summer of 2011, Tea Parties began to raise Hell even with wavering Republican members over the debt ceiling issue.  It was at this time that the split between the conservative base of the party and the establishment intelligentsia began to widen.  This is purely speculative, but I wonder if we shouldn’t insist on finding out who on the Republican side might have had a hand in the effort to quell the Tea Party.  After all, among Washington DC and establishment Republicans, there is no feeling of unity with the Tea Party, in purpose or motive, and in many cases, it would be fair to say there is some substantial enmity.   Why didn’t Darrell Issa(R-CA) throw up some sort of red flag in 2012 when the Treasury Department informed him of the problem in 2012?  More, as it turns out, Issa specifically requested that the audit be limited to IRS groups, even though there were others acknowledged to be on the so-called BOLO(Be On Look-Out) lists.  Why narrow it?  Could it be that there was far more targeting going on, perhaps directed from both sides of the aisle?

Again, while I have no direct evidence to support such an allegation, we do know with certainty that the initial foray by the House into the matter of Tea Party-targeting by the IRS was tepid, and slow in coming.  We also know there exists scant love for Tea Partiers on Capitol Hill.  Could it be that these same treacherous Republicans who have conspired to destroy the country by amnesty for illegal immigrants might also have taken part in this effort at targeting the Tea Party?  Time will tell, but if you assume the GOP establishment in Washington DC wouldn’t resort to such tactics, you may be in for a shock.  I surely hope that a special prosecutor is brought on, despite the fact that I have my doubts about any willingness on the part of the Obama administration or the Holder Justice Department to diligently investigate anything, but because I know that is and has been impossible to trust Beltway Republicans, I’d just as soon learn the truth if they had a hand in it.  Some may complain that I don’t have anything like a bullet-proof case, but the problem is that we conservatives can no longer trust the GOP in Washington, so we mustn’t take anything for granted.

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Posted in Activism, Featured, GOP Establishment, News, Politics, Tea Party | 7 Comments »

Immigration Reform Bill a Death Warrant for America

Saturday, April 27th, 2013

The Immigration Reform bill pending in the US Senate is monstrous document, and the results of its passage would be catastrophic for our nation.  Politically, it’s the death-knell of conservatism, but fiscally, it will accelerate the demise of our economy and usher in a new condition we might call: “Third World America.”  You might be skeptical of this claim, and I’d understand if you asked for some kind of evidence.  According to the group Numbers USA, this bill enacted would bring at least thirty-three million people to our country over the next ten years, but it may be far worse.  At the same time, it has been admitted by the US Department of Agriculture that their foodstamps program does not check the immigration status of applicants, actively advertising  in Spanish in borders states and even in Mexico.  As if this is not bad enough, the traitorous Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, is now professing the view that immigration to the United States is a human and civil right.  This legislation comprises an attack on our birthright, our financial health, and our political sovereignty.  The costs of this bill are too high to be borne by any people,and we must fight like Hell to defeat it.

Ladies and gentlemen, this really is the moment to draw a line.  As many as ninety-five percent of newly minted American citizens vote for one party: The Democrats.  I would like for you to understand that if thirty-three million people are added to our voter rolls over the next decade, chances are exceedingly high, a virtual numerical certainty, that they will add thirty-one million new Democrats.  What will happen to your “Red States” under this circumstance? The answer is simply: “Think Blue!”  Republicans, never mind conservatives, will find themselves unable to be elected in any place at any time. Remember in 1995 when the avalanche of Democrats changed party affiliation to Republican?  All of those and more will be going back. With them will go what remains of your principles of limited government, individual liberties, and fiscal responsibility.  We will see the nation as a whole become like California, and locales like California will become political analogs to Venezuela.

Your birthright is being stolen by the process of political dilution.  You will on some future day awake to find yourself in a foreign nation.  These ruthless bastards in Washington DC are intent upon stealing your nation from you.  In imagining US citizenship as some sort of human or civil right, what they are really saying is that they are going to throw open the doors to any who will come.  How many of the world’s billions of desperately poor will flood to our nation under the rules these people now imagine?  How will we feed them? How will we feed ourselves?  This immigration bill isn’t a recipe for reformation of a broken system, but instead a recipe for radical transformation of a civilization.

Some will insist that I am too harsh or caustic in my appraisal, but what would they have me say?  Shall I pretend that this bill represents only a “speed-bump” in the language of our President?  Shall we accept the claims of Senator McCain who tells us these illegal immigrants come only to “pick our lettuce?”  Let me explain to you what the sell-out anti-Republicans in favor of this bill are really trying to obtain:  You demand they behave and vote as conservatives, but they wish to be freed from those constraints.  In their states and districts at present, a Democrat could not win. Therefore, before they can change party and flip the bird at conservatives for good, they must set up a circumstance in which a Democrat could win in their states or congressional districts.  It is at this point that you must think very carefully and clearly: The easiest way for them to make conservatives irrelevant is to out-number them.  You’ve stirred-up so much trouble for them with your Tea Parties and your conservative activism that the only way to ignore you is to import a political force larger than you.  That is the purpose of these millions of immigrants they wish to bring to our country: To replace and supplant you as the dominant political force in the nation.

Who will insist now that I had been too harsh? Could it be that I’m over-stating the political impact of this mass migration bill?  According to Byron York, writing in the Washington Examiner, this legislation includes a number of loopholes that will fast-track many illegal aliens to full US citizenship.  Writes York:

“A little-noticed exception in the Gang of Eight bill provides a fast track for many — possibly very many — currently illegal immigrants.  Under a special provision for immigrants who have labored at least part-time in agriculture, that fast track could mean permanent residency in the U.S., and then citizenship, in half the time Rubio said.  And not just for the immigrants themselves — their spouses and children, too.”

“A second provision in the legislation creates another fast track for illegal immigrants who came to the United States before they were 16 — the so-called Dreamers.  The concept suggests youth, but the bill has no age limit for such immigrants — or their spouses and children — and despite claims that they must go to college or serve in the military to be eligible, there is an exception to that requirement as well.”

Have I been unnecessarily caustic in my appraisal, or does this bill offered by the “Gang-of-Eight” constitute a treason against the people of the United States?   Imagine if you will, my own state of Texas, under the constructs of this legislation: Inside five or six years, it will have become impossible for any office-holder at any level of government to maintain his or her position while remaining in the Republican Party.  The whole miserable lot will either retire, or merely change parties as happened in 1995.  Do you see it now?  Do you understand the dire meaning of our current situation?  We are headed for one-party rule, and your conservative principles will be swept aside in the building of the new Democrat hegemony.  If rank-and-file Democrats had any discernment, they too would be terrified, because they would understand that the only thing that offers any possibility of keeping their politicians honest is the competition of at least two vital parties.  For conservatives and Republicans, this immigration bill is a death warrant not only for the sake of politics, but for the sake of the nation.  Do you like losing?  If this bill passes, you had better become accustomed to the concept.  It will become a permanent condition for what will become a rapidly declining number of conservative office-holders, and indeed, for conservatives across the country. What you had known as America will be left in ashes.

This bill represents a threat against the American people far worse than that of al-Qaeda, because it will demolish the United States from the inside.   Those who have advanced and advocated  this bill knew or ought to have known its implications.  It’s intentional, and it is far worse than we had dared to imagine.  This one really is for all the marbles: We can be a sovereign nation that stands some chance of remaining a constitutional, representative republic, or we can fall into the abyss of a century of one-party rule and Third-World devolution.  The choice is ours, but if we permit them to enact this bill, it may be the last substantial political choice we are ever permitted to make.

.

Call, write, and fax your Senators. Emails are nice, but they go largely ignored.  Visit their home-state offices. It’s time for you to show up, again.  Call your Congressmen. Tell them that if they pass this bill(or any like it,) they won’t be left in office long enough to switch parties, because in 2014, you will send them home, while you still can. Tell every person you know what the game is, and what is being done. If we are to preserve this nation, this must be stopped.

 

 

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Posted in Activism, Featured, Illegal Immigration, Immigration, News, Politics, Tea Party | 3 Comments »

Rubio Joins Forces With Norquist, CATO on Immigration Lie

Monday, April 22nd, 2013

Breitbart is reporting that a number of secret emails demonstrate that Senator Marco Rubio(R-FL)  is conspiring with Grover Norquist and the libertarian, pro-open-borders CATO Institute on messaging for the upcoming Immigration Reform bill.  Incredibly, they actually intend to use the Boston Marathon Bombers as an argument for the legislation, rather than as a condemnation of it. In this article, the talking points of Senator Rubio are outlined. From the article, H/T Breitbart:

The message contained three talking points from Sen. Rubio, the first of which argued that the immigration bill would prevent people like the Boston Marathon terrorists from getting into or staying in the country.

“These terrorists came here under the existing system, the one opponents of reform want to leave in place,” Sen. Rubio wrote in his first talking point.

The second Rubio talking point argued that the terrorists “didn’t cross the border” to get into America.

In his third talking point, Rubio argued that authorities only know who the terrorists are because they came here legally to begin with.

Let’s take these one at a time. These terrorists did indeed come here under the existing system, as the talking point asserts, but what the talking point leaves out is that the last four presidents’ administrations have done nothing but undermine the existing laws in a grotesque dereliction of their duties to uphold the law.

Rubio would argue that the terrorists “didn’t cross the border.” What he’s suggesting here is that they were in the country legally, but as a matter of fact, anybody who enters the US is crossing the border, whether they do it legally or illegally.  If our immigration laws had been enforced, they might well still have made legal entry, but after the domestic violence conviction, the elder Tamerlan Tsarnaev would have been deported at the very least.  Rubio’s twisted attempt to dismiss these facts by dishonestly characterizing the problem with the bombers actually exposes the fatal flaws in his proposed legislation: One would have to believe that this president (or any other) would actually act in earnest execution of that office to deport criminals.  We have more than two decades of evidence that this would not happen.

Rubio’s last argument is the most preposterous of all.  He implies that by legalizing various people, we would know “who they are” but the fact is that we knew who the two Boston bombers were and it did nothing to prevent their criminal, terroristic acts.  He pretends that  “knowing who they are” would have improved things, but the salient truth is that because we were not tracking or monitoring them as immigrants, we didn’t know who they were with respect to these bombings and other crimes until they were identified by virtue of footage at the scene of their crimes.  It is an embarrassing attempt to deflect criticism of the immigration bill, in part because  all he offers is excuses for how the new proposal would improve security despite all the evidence that makes it plain his proposition is fanciful at best.

It’s not uncommon for Charles “Chuck-U” Schumer(D-NY) to lie to the American people, and to attempt to push bad law on the basis of worse arguments, but to see Senator Rubio joining in this tactic is disappointing to say the least.  If Senator Rubio had any sense, he’d flee from this as quick as quick can, but it seems as though he’s been captured rather quickly by the Washington DC establishment that rules against the will of the American people.

The  plain fact is that the terrorist bombings in Boston should act as a natural brake on this immigration reform bill, but once again, it’s easier to lie to the American people and push ahead with a law they are bound and determined to shove down our throats.  I’m sick of it.  I’m sick of the betrayals.  I’m sick of finding that alleged “Tea Party Senators” are nothing of the kind when it comes to the issues.   Where is Senator Rubio’s jobs bill?  Where is his budget-cutting proposal?  Did he have secret emails with Norquist and CATO over those issues?  Hell no.  No,  instead, he conspires with the likes of Lindsey Graham(anti-Republican, SC) and Chuck-U Schumer(Communist-NY) to give us a “bipartisan bill” that is really an example of one-party rule.  It’s the Party of Washington DC, and they generally win, while the American people lose and get stuck with the bill…and the bombings…and the bodies.

 

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Posted in Featured, Illegal Immigration, Immigration, News, Politics, Tea Party | 3 Comments »

Karl Rove Still Trying to Decide for Conservatives

Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

Shrugging-Off Levin

Karl Rove appeared on Hannity on Tuesday night to deflect criticism that he’s an agent of the establishment at war with the Tea Party.  I don’t buy it, and I believe his own professions in this clip should give you a sense of how he views the rank-and-file conservatives in the country.  You see, he explains that it’s the goal of his “Conservative Victory Project” to support “the most conservative candidate who can win.” You may well notice that there exists a mile of wiggle-room in that statement, and it’s made from a deeply held sense of arrogance that is simply undeniable.  If you watch carefully, at roughly 3:43 into the clip from Hannity’s show, as Sean asks him a question about the reaction to the Time article, you will see what “Tokyo Rove” thinks of Mark Levin, shrugging him off in derisive dismissal(screen-capture at left.)  Watch the segment:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne9aYtgFn1A]

Rove attacked the motives of a wide range of people in the Tea Party movement, both in the blogosphere and in activist endeavors, as seeking some financial end.  The irony of such a claim is galling.  Mr. Rove insists that his new group exists to support “the most conservative candidate who can win.”  This prompts a few questions in my mind, and I’d like to see them answered by Mr. Rove or any of his numerous establishment apologists:

  1. Who decides what constitutes the “most conservative?”  According to whose standard?  Karl Rove’s?
  2. Who decides who is able to win?  According to whose calculations? Karl Rove’s?
  3. What do we know about Mr. Rove’s success rate in his selections of candidates?

You see, when I answer these questions, I come to several conclusions, and none of them support Mr. Rove’s fanciful explanation on Hannity’s show.  Karl Rove has shown no understanding of conservatism.  His relentless appeal for immigration reform, his attacks on other conservative causes, candidates or efforts, and his involvement in the Bush administration with the passage of very liberal programs suggest to me quite strongly that Karl Rove is not an appropriate or even qualified judge of conservatism in any respect.

Since when is Mr. Rove the final arbiter on who is able to win?  He told us throughout the primary season that only Romney could win, and through the general campaign that Romney would win, and that it might be a big win(though he did not quite go down the fantastic rabbit-hole with Dick Morris who predicted a Romney landslide.)  Still, if 2012 is the measure of Mr. Rove’s ability to pick winners and losers, I’d say he did pretty poorly, and on his performance in 2012 measured against his own predictions and his own direction of funds, I would suggest that a blind-folded ape flipping  coins could have done as well, and probably much better.  For somebody who now indicates he supported Steelman in Missouri, it’s funny that he twice refers to her as “Deb,” though her name is Sarah.  I can’t say it adds much to his credibility.

Hannity’s apologetic interview with Karl Rove does nothing to convince me that Rove intends anything but that which has already been said.  His history of efforts against the grass-roots of the Republican Party are evidence enough for me that what he’s after is not conservatism, and certainly not victory.  Translated, “the most conservative candidate who can win” means: “Vote for the people we recommend, or we’re going to destroy your candidate, depriving your candidate of just enough votes to make them lose.” It’s clear to me that Rove and his bunch would just as soon lose as have an actual conservative win office, and I’m not inclined to believe a word Mr. Whiteboard has to say in his own defense.  Sure, the article at the beginning of this latest flap appeared in the New York Times, and I’m certain there’s a bias there, but it hardly excuses Rove’s past actions, and doesn’t explain away his current ones either.  One of these days, conservatives will begin to catch on that an “R” following somebody’s name doesn’t necessarily imply the first damned thing about their philosophical leanings.

 

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Posted in Activism, Conservatism, Featured, GOP Establishment, Mark Levin, News, Politics, Tea Party, video | Comments Closed

Truth in Advertising? Rove Creates “Conservative Victory Project”

Sunday, February 3rd, 2013

The New York Times is reporting that long-time establishment insider and Bush confidante Karl Rove has created a new political action committee called “Conservative Victory Project,” an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak if ever there had been one.  Since there’s only the slightest hint of conservatism in Rove’s past, and since we know he has no intention of permitting real conservatives to win anything, sabotaging and undermining them at every opportunity, it’s laughable that he and Steven J. Law, (President of Crossroads GPS, President and CEO of American Crossroads, as well as former Deputy Labor Secretary under George W. Bush, among postings of lesser note) have combined forces in order to play a bigger role in selecting Senate candidates.  Breitbart is also reporting this as an effort to fully undermine the Tea Party’s influence, and as I and other conservative have long suspected, implied in all of this is the role Rove played in helping defeat various Republican Senate candidates in 2012.   Rove is part of the reason the GOP is a feckless, useless gaggle of insiders who do not serve their constituents, but more than this, he and his ilk are part of the reason conservatives continue to lose. It’s not accidental.

Let’s be blunt about Rove’s activities, and admit that he is no friend to conservatives. According to the Times article’s opening lines, the “Conservative Victory Project” is being created with a single purpose, and it isn’t conservative victory:

“The biggest donors in the Republican Party are financing a new group to recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and Tea Party enthusiasts who Republican leaders worry could complicate the party’s efforts to win control of the Senate.”

With the Times inserting the descriptor “far-right,” what we’re really talking about is mainstream conservatives, who are regarded by the New York Times as extremists.  Less obvious is that Rove and his band of merry moderates see conservatives in precisely the same way, substituting their own version of statism for the concept of conservatism.  It became plain to me that this would be Rove’s direction once he appeared on Fox News this week to explain conservatism in terms solely of fiscal and economic considerations.  He’s trying to re-cast “social moderates and fiscal conservatives(a contradiction in both ideology and terms) as “conservatism” (Full stop.)  By claiming the mantle of conservatism as their own, the hope is to scavenge and cannibalize the unaware and uninformed who tend to follow the Republican crowd, but who are not exactly devoted students of political philosophy or ideology, and so may not realize that there can be no such thing, in fact or in logic, as a “fiscal conservative and social liberal/moderate.”

As Ben Shapiro, writing for Breitbart explains, much of this is Rove’s fight for relevance and credibility in the wake of the 2012 disaster:

“But victory for conservatives isn’t Rove’s goal. He’s a political insider par excellence, and he’s playing for his political life in the aftermath of 2012. If that means declaring war on the Tea Party, so be it. “

Rove once thought to use the Tea Party, but when they didn’t particularly respond to his strategy, he decided they were more trouble than they were worth.  His decision to submarine Christine O’Donnell was a calculation in favor of demolishing the Tea Party, and from that point forward, Rove has done nothing but undermine actual conservatives at every turn, while propping up long-time DC insiders and establishment hacks. Rove represents the well-heeled, nanny-statist wing of the Republican party, a group of people who generally feel more at home among liberals than with anybody who meets the definition of “conservative.” Through various Super PAC activities in 2012, Rove and his friends spent more than a quarter-billion dollars in pursuit of their agenda.  They lost big, but only insofar as their candidates lost.  What they succeeded in doing was to assist a number of Republicans in losing, but more importantly, in putting up another place-holder into the Presidential nomination who they fully expected would not win, despite their fairy tales to the contrary.

Conservatives won’t be surprised at any of this, but what they must not do is to permit Rove and his pals to claim the label of mainstream conservatism, because they represent no such thing.  If Rove had any integrity, he would relabel his latest effort “the Moderate Victory over Conservatives Project,” or “The Mini-Dem Victory Project,” because the only win they’re likely to obtain is one against conservatives, particularly if they fall for his siren’s song again. Rove is poison to actual conservatism, and despite all the money and prestige, we should at last come to view him as a destructive force of the liberal faction of the Republican Party.  He doesn’t speak for conservatism, he doesn’t like conservatives, and he would rather that Democrats win than to let actual conservatives achieve victory.  After all, if he can see the defeat of a few conservatives in traditionally red states, he may be able to defeat the Democrat with any old RINO in the next cycle.  Consider Indiana the model, as you can bet that come 2018, he’ll have Mitch Daniels or some other popular Hoosier-State moderate ready to challenge the first term Democrat incumbent who his pals in Indiana helped to defeat Richard Mourdock.

As Breitbart’s article points out, they’re after Steve King(R-IA) who they will try to paint with notions of extremism.  It’s the Rove way: Attack and defeat conservatives so their former seats can be later back-filled with GOP establishment types.  The “fiscal conservative and social moderate” schtick of the GOP establishment is a demonstrable loser, and only Rove and a few like-minded DC insiders seem unconvinced by that fact.  We mustn’t permit them to lead conservatives astray once more.  It’s time to send Rove packing.  He’s the persistent architect of conservative defeat.

 

 

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Posted in Activism, Conservatism, Featured, GOP Establishment, News, Politics, Tea Party | 3 Comments »

Message to Congressional Republicans

Tuesday, November 27th, 2012

Beohner Re-Elected Speaker

I’ve listened to this mewling bunch of whiners tell us they’re “one-half of one-third” until I can stand it no longer.  It’s true that Obama was re-elected, and it’s true that Harry Reid still runs the Senate, but it’s also true that Republicans still control the House, and it’s about damned time they begin to behave like it.  All, I repeat ALL, spending and taxing measures must originate in the House.   This is no time for tears, and no situation for surrender.  If we are to hold off these statist loons, we must begin now, and we must begin here, at the cliff’s edge. These slack-jawed losers-in-waiting had better understand reality, if they can see it through all of those tears:  You were sent to Congress to STOP OBAMA, and I’m sick and tired of Republicans who have all the spine of overcooked spaghetti, and who will not live up to THEIR mandate.  I’m not one to cast unnecessary or pointless profanity into the public sphere, but you squishy whiners in the House had better get your acts together.  I have one message for House Republicans: SACK UP or GET OUT!

If you’re not willing to do the work you were elected to do, I expect you to tender your resignations now.  Conservatives no longer wish to listen to the excuses.  If you surrender on taxes to make a deal with Herr Obama, you will be blamed when the economy goes into recession.  If you refuse, and he plunges us over this so-called “fiscal cliff,” you’ll be blamed.  So be it.  You’re going to be blamed either way, so you might just as well summon the testicular fortitude to do what is right and stand on a principle.  My apologies to the ladies in the House Republican Caucus, but I think some of you are more capable of leading, and you’ll need to do so, because you’re surrounded by Republican eunuchs.  They haven’t the equipment or the gumption to do what is needed, but a few among your number have.

You people have let this thug-in-chief control the narrative for far too long.  While he and his henchmen have castigated Republicans for the alleged “war on women,” he’s been conducting a real war on America.  It’s time you say so.  While you permit him to get away with alleging that all of your opposition owes only to his race, you’ve let his party machine toss out one of your number who happened to be an African-American, and it’s not coincidental that none of you seem all too unhappy about it, because he dared to oppose some of your deal-making.

Back in 2011, as your so-called “speaker” was making deals with Harry and Barry behind closed doors, selling-out both principle and country, you sat on your hands and made no fuss as this entire debacle was shoved down your throats.  You took it.  You let it happen.  You went along with it.  Now, some sixteen months later, you’re surprised to find Obama still controlling the situation?  If you rest on your laurels, as you did throughout the campaign season of 2012, what did you think would be the likely result?  Your short-sighted deal-making of July 2011 has set this stage, and you’re to be held responsible for it.

Now the president intends to run the table on you, and your answer is “Let’s make a deal?”  DEAL???  Let me tell you the real deal, and let’s make it clear: Do you remember in 2006, when you lost the House?  2014 is right around the corner, and if you don’t find your stones for this fight, you might just as well go home.  In fact, why wait?  If you’re unwilling to make a stand now, why don’t you simply surrender altogether?  Why don’t you quit your nifty offices, with all your staff and goodies, and make a run for the border…of your home state?

This is not good enough.  It’s not nearly good enough.  The “fiscal cliff” is a joke.  The monetary cliff is real, and the money-printing must stop, but the only way to do that is for you to put the brakes on it.  ALL spending and taxing measures must originate in the House.  Simply don’t originate any.  Why aren’t you out in front of the White House making a spectacle?  Why aren’t you down there marching and yelling?  When will you learn that if you don’t have the ball anyway, you might just as well keep it in his court and let him field it?  I’ll tell you why: You people have grown too comfortable, and besides, he’ll let your pet earmarks through so long as he can get his agenda into law.  It’s time to set all this aside now.  Where are your tears for the US Constitution, the destruction of which you are enabling?

Dare this president to spend one nickel without your authorization.  Dare him to spend one cent beyond the debt ceiling.  Dare him.  Where is your courage?  Will you stand for nothing?  Will you fall for anything?  When will you realize that this clown can only make traction when you let him?  He is impotent if you take the purse away.  Impotent.  If he tries, impeach him for high crimes and misdemeanors.  There’s simply no other purpose for which you exist in your offices.  If you fold, there will be no coming back, and there’s no time to argue about it.  If you won’t do what is necessary to preserve this union, then we must replace you.  You have compromised your last if you expect to return to office in January 2015.

It’s time for Congressional Republicans to act as though they’re in charge of the House, and if they won’t stand, we must send them home.  What is the point in fighting to have a majority that once installed will not fight for the principles on which it was elected to lead?  Even now, Obama is trying to incite public support for his legislative tax-and-print agenda, but what is John Boehner doing?

This madness needs to end, but it won’t end until the adults in the room learn to say “no” and stick to it. Who will be the adults?  It will need to be we conservatives.  We conservatives need to think of this entire situation as an emergency, and as a war, but rather than become despaired at the current situation, we need to think in terms of warfare.  That’s how the enemy thinks, and until we realize that it is only the outcry of we conservatives who can make these cowardly Republicans in Congress fetch some resolve, we’re going to be in for a tough time.  The country is not nearly so overwhelmed as these election results might indicate if viewed only through the lenses of whining losers.  We need to buck-up first, and then we need to hold Congressional Republicans’ feet to the fire, and we need to let them hear us.  If we don’t do it, who will?  If now is not the time to stand, when shall we?

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Posted in Activism, Barack Obama, Congress, Conservatism, Featured, News, Politics, Tea Party | 8 Comments »

WTF? Romney Camp Removes Two Florida Rules Committee Members

Tuesday, August 28th, 2012

Ladies and gentlemen, stop, look and listen! Read this story at FreedomWorks: Romney Camp Removing Rules Committee Members

This is absurd.  Now we have the spectacle of Romney’s camp pushing out Committee members?  What’s next?  Is Mitt Romney going to be the Republican version of Barack Obama?  Dictator?

I’m sorry to use such caustic language, but this is madness.

Go here, find your state’s rules committee members on this .PDF, and call, email and raise hell.  You have probably 90 minutes to save the GOP, if you still believe it’s worth saving.

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Posted in Activism, Conservatism, GOP Establishment, Mitt Romney, News, Politics, Tea Party | 2 Comments »

Ted Cruz Wins Texas Run-Off!

Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

On to the General Election!

Ted Cruz won Tuesday’s Senate run-off against Lt.Governor David Dewhurst in convincing fashion, defeating the Austin moderate by a margin of nearly ten points.  That’s a stunning win given how his campaign was outspent by Dewhurst, and it speaks to the commitment of activists all across the state, and a few notable conservatives who showed up to campaign for Cruz, including Sarah Palin, and Jim DeMint, but also that big voice on the evening airwaves, Mark Levin.  Tea Party Express worked tirelessly to get out the vote, and Amy Kremer must be ecstatic and exhausted.  Nevertheless, Cruz must still win the general election in November, but it’s a refreshing change to see that Austin insider David Dewhurst didn’t walk away with the nomination.  Texas conservatives and Tea Party patriots won a huge victory Tuesday over the Austin establishment!

Twitter was awash in comments all evening, and when various media outlets began to call the race, it was quickly a party of sorts as faithful re-Tweeters spread the word and celebrated.

Meanwhile, at 9pm central, Governor Palin took to the airwaves on Greta Van Susteren’s “On the Record” on FoxNews, and just before going on, she posted a note of congratulation to Ted Cruz on her Facebook page:

“Congratulations to Ted Cruz! This is a victory both for Ted and for the grassroots Tea Party movement. This primary race has always been about the kind of leadership we need in D.C. Our goal is not just about changing the majority in the Senate. It is about the kind of leadership we want. Ted Cruz represents the kind of strong conservative leadership we want in D.C. Go-along to get-along career politicians who hew the path of least resistance are no longer acceptable at a time when our country is drowning in debt and our children’s futures are at stake. The message of this race couldn’t be clearer for the political establishment: the Tea Party is alive and well and we will not settle for business as usual. Now, it’s on to November!”

For his part, Ted Cruz thanked Governor Palin, Senator DeMint, and all of his supporters and endorsers via Twitter immediately after the race was called, and Texas conservatives were able to bask for the remainder of the evening in the warm glow of victory!  Saturday, in attendance at a small, hastily assembled Cruz campaign stop in Waco, he noticed my Texas4Palin t-shirt, plastered with Cruz buttons, and he said: “Governor Palin really energizes a crowd, doesn’t she? She’s really terrific!” It was easy to see that he was thankful for her support, and appreciative of all the Texans who turned out for him at his stops around the state.

For my part, thanks to all of those who have re-tweeted my messages on Twitter in support of Ted Cruz, and thanks on behalf of a grateful state to Governor Palin, Senator DeMint, Mark Levin, Amy Kremer, and all of the others who so tirelessly labored to get our candidate the win.  It’s grass-roots activism at its finest, and I have had the great privilege of helping in a cause in which we dared not fail.  Thanks to the candidate himself, who ran a clean campaign in the face of withering, fraudulent attacks and dirty tricks from his opponent.  Congratulations to all!

Way to go Texas!  Now let’s help conservatives in other states as well!

 

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Posted in Activism, Featured, Mark Levin, Media, News, Politics, Senate Races, Tea Party | Comments Closed

Sarah Palin Rocks The Woodlands For Ted Cruz!

Saturday, July 28th, 2012

Revving The Crowd for Cruz!

On Friday, I drove the two-and-one-half hours from my home to the Ted Cruz rally at The Woodlands, just North of Houston.  The venue was Town Green Park and the speakers included a number of Tea Party leaders, like Amy Kremer, and also Senator Jim DeMint(R-SC.)  Ted Cruz gave a very encouraging, impassioned speech about what he would do if elected to the Senate, and he appropriated Barack Obama’s catch-phrase “Yes, We Can” in a little dialogue with the crowd, asking the crowd “Can we repeal Obama-care?”  On cue, the crowd responded with a thundering “YES WE CAN!”  Cruz exuded confidence, but the truth is that with early voting now ended, the real crunch is on from now until Tuesday to turn out the vote across Texas on his behalf.  In her customary form, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin made her speech to thundering applause and enthusiastic support.  It was a remarkable speech, and Palin was fiery with the energy and passion that have made her the premiere speaker in the Republican party over the last four years.  Conservatives turn out for Sarah Palin, and there’s simply no escaping that fact.

(Note to GOP establishment: You may want to rethink this plan to exclude her from the convention in Tampa next month.)

I was also heartened to see so many of my friends from TxO4P on hand, including Josh Thuma, who was so enthusiastic in Indianola, Iowa last September, so it was no surprise that at The Woodlands, he followed up in similar form, waving signs and cheering-on all of the speakers.  I saw Cynthia Dixon and Del Parker, and some other faces I recognized, so I decided that rather than spending my time trying to capture the event, I would simply join in the fun.  It was a good time for all, and Jim DeMint gave an excellent talk about needing help in the Senate, meaning he want more constitutional conservatives.  He went on to extol the virtues of Ted Cruz, introducing the candidate to great applause, and Cruz made mention of the effort to repeal Obama-care, saying he would work every day until it had been repealed, killing off the notion of replacement: “Every last word…” must be repealed, vowed Cruz.  The crowd roared in approval.

Hearing the Roar

Cruz went on to introduce Governor Palin, and the crowd’s cheering was so loud from my vantage point that I couldn’t hear the first few words of her speech.  As always, when Governor Palin speaks at such an event, she speaks as much for those gathered as to them.  This event was no different, and she focused in particular on three themes, including the wreck Obama has made and is making of the country, and the intractability of the permanent political class in the mission to restore our constitution, and naturally, how Ted Cruz will be an important player in that fight.  She mentioned that she intended to try out Chick Fil-A on her way back to the airport, and as always, Governor Palin made good on her word, later posting this on her Facebook page:

The Palins Stop at Chick Fil-A

She wore the boots  Governor Perry gave her on a previous visit to the Lone Star State, saying “at least in that one case he made a good decision,” but also gently chiding Perry for his present support of David Dewhurst in the primary against Ted Cruz.  She mocked Obama’s assertion of last week in Texas that he’s seeing “shades of purple,” implying that the state might one day go Democrat.  With the amnesty-by-executive-order that Obama has put in place, there can be little doubt that is part of his aim.  Governor Palin exhorted the crowd to not let Texas go purple or blue.  Said the Governor:

“There will be an Alaskan-sized blizzard on the Brazos before Texas turns blue for Barack.”

“Damn straight.”  (So said many in the crowd.)  She also went after the “lap-dogs in the media practicing yellow journalism,” but then she shifted her focus to the permanent political class in Washington DC that has managed to confound some of the efforts of the Tea Party patriots who sent more conservatives to the House in 2010, managing to co-opt some of them.  She was brilliantly on point as she made clear that politicians in both parties have failed to carry out their constitutional responsibilities, passing Obama-care over the objections of the American people, and failing to enact a budget in four years, but she reminded the crowd:

“There’s nothing wrong with America that a good, old-fashioned fair election can’t fix.”

She then explained that she was supporting Ted Cruz because he is a common-sense, constitutional conservative, saying “Ted Cruz represents the positive change we need.”

Sarah Palin, Ted and Heidi Cruz, Jim DeMint

You can watch the video here, courtesy of  the BarracudaBrigade:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CPFyYHRV_o]

As has been the case at events in which Gov. Palin speaks, after the conclusion of her remarks, and to the cheering of the crowd, she and Todd went off-stage and to the rope line, where she signed autographs for a long while, and as usual, the rope-line was mobbed.

I don’t have a firm grasp on how many people were in the park for the event, but I would guess there had been well over one-thousand, perhaps closer to twice that number, despite the sweltering heat.  One thing is certain: Texas really is Palin country, and all who want to support a common-sense, constitutional conservative in this election ought to follow Governor Palin’s lead.  With early voting over across the Lone Star State, what remains is election day, Tuesday, 31 July.  Let’s get out the vote and put Ted Cruz over the top!

 

 

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Posted in Activism, Featured, News, Palinistas, Politics, Sarah Palin, Senate Races, Tea Party, Texas Politics, video | 4 Comments »

Texas Conservatives: Have You Voted for Ted Cruz Yet?

Monday, July 23rd, 2012

Time to Vote!

Early voting has started today across the Lone Star State.  We don’t need any more RINOs in Washington DC, so don’t procrastinate. David Dewhurst is pulling out all the stops, and hurling more garbage at Ted Cruz.  Sarah Palin posted a message to Facebook earlier today reminding us to support Ted Cruz and you should check it out. Remember, you can help Ted Cruz overcome the disinformation of David Dewhurst by going to his website here.

Now get out there and vote, Texans!

 

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Posted in Activism, News, Politics, Sarah Palin, Senate Races, Tea Party, Texas Politics | 1 Comment »

Texas Conservatives: Make a Stand With Ted Cruz

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

A Conservative for Senate

If you’re a Texas conservative, don’t forget that early voting begins next Monday, and runs through Friday.  We have a run-off between Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, a big-time insider who is spending money like it’s going out of style, to smear his opponent, Ted Cruz, who has been endorsed by Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Jim Demint, Ron Paul, many other serious conservatives in the Republican Party and the conservative movement.  It’s time to stand up, it’s time to be counted, and while you’re at it, you can join the latest Levin Surge, by heading over to TedCruz.org to donate.  Every little bit helps, and remember, Ted has pledged that should he win on July 31st, he will immediately go to work raising money and lending support to other constitutional conservatives, not just here in Texas, but around the country, so that we can re-take the Senate and stand some chance of repealing Obama-care, and restoring our Republic.

I have my doubts about whether we can save the country at this late date, but if we can, it will only be by pushing the RINOs aside and carrying the ball across the goal-line ourselves.  It’s time to mobilize if you haven’t already, and if you’re a Texas conservative, or if you’re an American who simply wants conservatism to prevail, and take our best chance at reversing our decline, here’s your chance to truly make a difference.

Visit TedCruz.org to contribute. Let’s put Ted over the top!

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Posted in Activism, News, Politics, Senate Races, Tea Party, Texas Politics | 2 Comments »

Why Is Paul Gosar in Congress?

Saturday, July 14th, 2012

 

Paul Gosar(R-AZ)

WesternJournalism.com ran this story, with accompanying video, in which Representative Paul Gosar(R-AZ) participates in a panel discussion over the question of adherence to the US Constitution.  The Congressman said that we can’t adhere to it, since fifty percent(or more) of the American people don’t wish to live within its confines.  This admission by a US Representative, allegedly a conservative from a relatively conservative district, demonstrates the serious trouble we’re in, and also why the Republican party simply cannot be relied upon as the vehicle conservatives would use to restore a healthy respect for the Constitution, and a restoration of our republic.  This congressman seems to be one of Boehner’s boot-lickers, undoubtedly sold on the notion that after all, Republicans control only one-half of one-third of the government.  My question for a congressman who exhibits this pathetic attitude, and all the surrender-monkeys like him in the Republican party in Washington DC, and elsewhere around the country is simply this: If you will not stand for the constitution, why in Hell do we need you?  We don’t need excuses for your inaction.  We don’t need more sad stories.  We need people who are willing to lead, and to fight if need be.  Is Congressman Gosar one upon whom we can rely?

Here’s the video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U46MkU_-_wE]

Somebody please offer the Congressman a tissue, and a pair of…  Look, I realize that I have been rather surly about all of this lately, but the fact of the matter is that somebody in his district needs to get in touch with this moral coward and let him know that while the party’s establishment may be following in the mold he and other squeamish Republicans are wont to do, there are plenty of Americans who are becoming convinced by such displays as his that the Republican party needs to die a sudden death.  We all know the realities, but I have a question for Congressman Lie-Down-and-Be-Depressed:  If he is not willing to make a stand when he has the opportunity, truly, what sort of fraud must he be?  This is the nature of much of the Republican party in Congress.  They come home to rally the ‘troops’ but all they’re really doing is to let us vent a little of our frustration in the hope that we will stay in line through yet another election, since they see it all as futile anyway.  They all swear an oath to uphold and defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and too many of them either join or simply yield to the latter.

I’ve got a proposition for Congressman The Undescended:  If you believe you can’t win while adhering to the constitution, then why don’t you have the guts to go home and tell your voters that?  Why don’t you have the guts to go home and tell them that in order to restore their sacred constitution, which ought to be your touchstone too, they(and – fat chance – you) may well need to resort to actions rather than words?   You see, with this wilting tendency that has overtaken the Republican Impotency in the House, the sad truth is that we don’t even have one-half of one-third of the government.  It’s bad enough that the Republican nominee has all the fight of this morning’s oatmeal, that their majority leader in the Senate seems to need a dose of starch in order to stand erect behind a podium and make another display of impotent finger-waggling,  and that the Speaker of the House cries ceaselessly about the obstacles and “realities” in Washington, but when rank-and-file members find they cannot serve and uphold their oaths, what they should do is resign their offices, tell their constituents the ugly truth about the state of the Republic, and then lead them into battle, but I don’t mean politics.

What I hope readers will note is that if it is as bad as this Congressman claims, there can be only one course remaining.  If  that is so, why will this Congressman not say so?  The dear ladies in the video are precisely correct, particularly the latter, Stephani Scruggs, so permit me to say a word in her defense, since so few in this emasculated culture will do so with the requisite vigor:  When she says we are slaves, she is in all ways correct.  When she alleges that our constitutionally guaranteed liberties have been stripped from us, she in no way exaggerates the matter.  If anything, to save time, she understated the list by some number, but she did not underestimate the gravity, and to her credit, that much was unmistakable: In order to save liberty, we may be called upon to risk every bit as much as our founders before us. In fact, it seems certain.  If the Congressman’s assertion is correct, and it is not out of line with my own analysis of the futility of the tax argument, then our question to him and all those like him must be: “So what are you going to do about it, now that you’ve noticed?”

All the “moderates” who tell me I’m “too extreme” should instead offer my readers a solution that is workable, but does not consist of more pie-in-the-sky, “silver-linings” rhetoric.  Tell us, bluntly if you dare:  How do we reverse this now that we’ve created the beast?  All along the way, the “extreme” conservatives warned that this would be the result of an uninterrupted string of surrenders dressed up as “tactical retreats.”  If this Congressman is right, you might defend him on the basis that he’s merely being pragmatic.  As I would point out to him, pragmatism of that sort leads to chains, and in fact, it has.  We wear them now, you and I, each working, productive American.  If this can be turned around with something short of violence, let the Congressman explain the methodology, because what he seems to propose is more of the same: Slinking, slithering retreat from battle, all in order to live to fight another day that never arrives.  How does that restore our Constitution?  How does that repair our republic?  How does that loosen the bonds that increasingly weigh us down and must ultimately crush us?  Will any Republican be honest enough to say what may be necessary?  If our founders had been men like these, we would still kneel before the crown, irrespective of our current President’s penchant for bowing.  If we continue to elect representatives who will offer no more vigorous an opposition than this, it’s clear we still do, though the throne may have changed addresses.

 

 

 

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Posted in Conservatism, GOP Establishment, News, Philosophy, Politics, Tea Party, Video | 6 Comments »

Scapegoating Conservatism: Post-Defeat Planners Redux

Saturday, May 5th, 2012

Conservatives?

One of the things I’ve already noticed is the start of the excuse-making on the part of the Republican establishment.  They shoved Mitt Romney down our throats, but some of us have vomited him out of our mouths because we simply cannot tame the bile-raising nausea we feel in the pits of our stomachs.  The immediate response of the GOP establishment has been to manufacture a narrative that will effectively blame conservatives if Romney loses.  They won’t blame his lack of conservatism.  They won’t blame his duplicity or his negative primary campaign.  They won’t blame their own complicity in setting us up with a candidate we don’t want, but what they will do is blame we conservatives, and it’s starting already.

I don’t play that game.  If they wanted to win this election, they could have supported a conservative candidate for a change, but they are very much a take-it-or-leave-it crowd.  You see, if they don’t get their way, they take their ball and their donations and go home, all while they insist we conservatives are to blame if we respond similarly, leading to the defeat of their chosen candidate.  The problem the establishment faces is that conservatives still remember Ronald Reagan, and they know too well that genuine conservatism wins.  They can continue to scapegoat conservatism, but we shouldn’t accept their excuses any longer, and we shouldn’t fall into the trap that this year’s crop of post-defeat planners are already laying.

If I owned a hot-dog stand and after years of selling barely palatable wieners,  I go to something even worse, my customers will likely find them disgusting, causing them to flee.  Do I blame them for their lack of “loyalty?”  I might even cry “but you’ll starve without my hot-dogs,” but will they?  I might appeal to their sense of loyalty as customers of long-standing, but if they don’t like my product because it’s terrible, who is to blame?  Them?  Or me?   In making the loyalty argument, I must purposely evade a concept my customers would be right to throw in my face:  If I were loyal to them, I wouldn’t try to feed them bad product, and rather than worsening it, would concentrate on improving it.

They may even appeal to my patriotism: “How can you let Obama win?”   As with the loyalty argument, I again turn it around:  How can they offer us a candidate who they know many of us will not be able to support, if they care about the country?  In a free market, such intransigence would soon lead me to go out of business, and the fact of the matter is that the same is true of the GOP establishment.  Of course, they’ve tried to rig the market in their favor, but it’s really not possible in the longer run.  They use their influence, given them by means of our votes, to solidify their hold on the “market” of political ideas, and it is our willingness to do so that enables them to continue.

The good news is that we can still make gains from this election cycle.  We can still elect conservatives to all of the down-ballot seats, and as is now plain from polling data in Indiana, where Richard Mourdock is now leading Dick Lugar despite a multi-million dollar campaign against him, it’s evident that we conservatives can still turn the tables on the establishment.  In Texas, we’re having a bit more of an uphill battle as the establishment guy, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst continues to run slightly ahead of Ted Cruz and a whole slate of lesser-known candidates, but with less than a month to go, it’s still close enough that it’s anybody’s race and we may well wind up with a run-off, in which case Cruz looks stronger.

The basic point is that irrespective of the Presidential race, we can still have a significant impact in 2012.  If we can sweep away some of the liberal Republicans in the Senate, and replace a number of the Democrats who are up this year with conservatives, we can stymie President Obama and aggressively pursue him should he continue to use illegitimate executive powers to run an end-around on Congress even if Romney loses.  If Romney wins, it will leave us with some means by which to exert control over him.

Of course, the establishment won’t go quietly.  They will continue their game, and part of their play is to make you feel as though you must support their guy.   Once you realize this, it’s easier to understand how it is that they can sell you a lower quality hot-dog, and you will be forced to swallow it, disgruntled though you may be.  In the end, they know that while they are not really the sole source, or the sole choice, they are the sole choice you can bring yourselves to make.  It’s true in both parties, but what this really means is that in most respects, our country is ruled by a political oligopoly that wishes to leave you with no other alternative.  They can afford to wait you out in most cases, because even if you sit out an election or two in protest, you’ll eventually be ripened by some issue to come back to them for harvest.  This is why they’re willing to lose elections in order to punish you.  After all, it won’t hurt them much, but let’s examine who loses what, and under which circumstances the losses really occur.

If Mitt Romney loses in November, does the GOP establishment lose?  I contend to you that they not only win, but they have set up the manner by which they will win big in 2016.  By then, assuming the country endures(and I believe it will,) they will have managed to create some substantial sense of Obama-fatigue.  Its early manifestations are already showing up in the polls, but you see, for the elites of the GOP establishment, none of it will make any difference to their immediate health, safety, or prospects for continuing profits.  In short, they won’t be hurt because their money insulates them.  Your farms may go down, your businesses may crash, your jobs may disappear, or you may find yourselves in other calamities, but none of that will bother them.  In fact, it will tend to make you more compliant with their desires and demands in the future.  If you’re starving, you’ll take my low-quality hot-dog any way I wish to serve it.

It’s for this reason that they don’t mind losing an election or two(or ten.)  If it serves their long-run interests, it may even be preferable to victory.  It also gives the Republican establishment an opportunity to defame conservatives[again.]  This makes it easier for them to win in the future, because if they can succeed in painting conservatives as heartless, inflexible ideologues who would rather lose than compromise, it makes it all the easier to sell the American people a “compassionate conservative,” who does not actually exhibit the first substantially conservative trait once examined closely.   It’s for this reason that I believe the Republican establishment will be happy to see Mitt Romney lose, because in 2016, you’ll be only too thrilled if they offer you Jeb Bush.  At that point, you’ll vote for the most liberal Republican they throw at you if only you can get rid of the Democrats.

Viewed in this manner, the GOP establishment knows it has conservatives over a barrel, and that’s what they’ve been working to do throughout this election cycle, and in perpetuity.  I realize that the choices they offer us are abysmal, because that’s the nature of their game.  Where I will not budge is on this notion that conservatives will have been at fault if they do not support Mitt Romney in November.  Viewed as any other business competing for customers or clients, the Republican Party has a responsibility to put forth an acceptable candidate.  Failing that, it is they who are to blame, and it is they who are culpable in any defeat suffered.

Of course, that assumes they want to win(in 2012,) but given Mitt Romney’s record as Governor of Massachusetts, I’m not convinced that’s the case.  They have intentionally put forward a man who is a veritable “poison pill” for many conservatives, and I don’t believe it’s accidental, or somehow the result of political happenstance.   Besides, from the GOP establishment point of view, this allows them to kill off a whole flock with a single stone.  Conservatives and Tea Partiers will take the blame, and they’ll be able to sell us on almost anybody in 2016 when they’ll have an easier time winning the Oval Office because it will soon be vacated anyway.  That’s Win, Win, and WIN from their point of view.

Conservatives and Tea Party types should be prepared for the moment when the blame game begins in earnest.  They’ve already begun to push this narrative, and that’s to be expected, but should Romney lose(and many are fairly certain he will,) you can bet that the morning of November 7th, the questions will commence on FoxNews and other establishment outlets:  “What’s wrong with conservatives?  Why are they so hard to please?  What will we do about the Tea Party?”  Bank on it. Even now, the recriminations are beginning, softly, gently now, but they will build to a crescendo by November the 7th.  I actually had a telephone call from one conservative campaign fund call and urge me to contribute on the basis that Mitt Romney probably cannot win, so we need to shore up the Congressional side, and yet there are those conservatives who say I am a gloomy guy?

On the other hand, if Romney manages to win, this will be an even bigger victory for the GOP establishment:  They will have been able to put up a liberal Republican, and out of sheer desperation, have conservatives support him.  Game over! At that point, conservatives will have no means by which to restrain a Romney administration, because they will have been a paper tiger.  This is the dilemma we conservatives face, which is why I still hold out hope, slim though it may be, for a brokered convention.  There’s a reason Romney is having a closed-door meeting with Santorum, and you’d better believe it’s about trying to get more support.   I don’t think conservatives can afford for either Obama or Romney to win, whether out of desperation to rid ourselves of Obama, or in order to avoid the inevitable scapegoating.  In particular now, it seems the GOP establishment is going after Palin supporters.  Ah well, yes, most of us are accustomed to that, as the same crowd tried to make a scapegoat of Sarah Palin in 2008.

The simple fact remains:  I can’t see how Mitt Romney’s supporters or the GOP establishment will be able to carry off such scapegoating with any credibility.  After all, how unpalatable must a candidate be to lose to an incumbent who has unemployment at around 8%, has record deficits, has added trillions of dollars to the national debt, has overseen the devaluing of the dollar, starved us of fuel and energy resources, hobbled our military, aided our enemies, abandoned our allies, and generally made a wreck of things?

Just how bad must a Republican be to lose in that kind of environment?  How thoroughly must he have been disliked, not only in the general electorate, but in his own party in order to lose despite such conditions?  How thoroughly has his campaign offended some sizable number of conservatives?  Should he expect such voters to shut up and eat the week-old hot-dog he’s selling? Are you ready to paste your palate with that stale, low-grade bun that’s been in the steamer rack four times this week?  The GOP knows what it’s doing.  You still believe, innocently, that they want to win, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent to me that they do not, and I’m not willing to let them off the hook by playing the role of scapegoat, and I won’t eat sorry hot-dogs for a notion of loyalty that is clearly unidirectional.

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Posted in Activism, Conservatism, Election 2012, Featured, GOP Establishment, Mitt Romney, News, Politics, Tea Party | 27 Comments »

A Conservative Calls for a Third Party Palin Run

Sunday, April 1st, 2012

Would it work?

Over at Westernjournalism.com, Kriz Zane has written an interesting piece suggesting that the way for conservatives to get out of the Romney predicament is for Sarah Palin to run as an independent.  Zane seems to have gone through a genesis on this campaign not unlike my own, in that originally, Sarah Palin was Zane’s chosen candidate, but when that campaign didn’t materialize, the switch ultimately went to Newt Gingrich. What Zane argues, and I’m not entirely certain I agree, is that it seems for some reason that Gingrich is simply not acceptable to too many people, and of course, much like me, Zane finds Romney deplorable at best, and certain to get Obama re-elected.  What is a conservative to do?  Zane has decided to ask that Sarah Palin seek the presidency as a Tea Party candidate.

Zane sets aside the conventional wisdom that a third-party candidacy would merely split conservatives making it easier for Obama to defeat them.  The idea is that Palin would be a transformational figure who would attract support from the Tea Party folks, and effectively make the GOP candidate moot.  While it’s an interesting idea, the problem is that I don’t know the mechanics of how one would put such a candidate on the ballots in all fifty states even if the candidate were inclined to run at all, never mind as an independent.  Of course, it can be rightly said that Sarah Palin surely has an independent streak, but I think the first step would be to see if the candidate has any such interest, and there’s no word from Zane on that question.

The other point made is one that I’ve repeated often, inasmuch as Mitt Romney simply doesn’t have what it takes to get the job done.  Conservatives are unhappy with the prospect, and Zane focuses on a letter read aloud by Rush Limbaugh from a friend on the subject.  You can see Rush read the letter below, H/T Rightscoop:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiQl-a31i8I]

This is a perfect example of the things that most conservatives are saying about a Romney nomination.  They simply don’t want him, and the truth is they’d rather go down fighting with a conservative nominee than to simply have another establishment candidate.  This angst is not unfounded, as we have seen what happens when the GOP establishment puts up their kind of candidate.  Most of the time, they lose.

The reason is simple, and it’s the same justification Zane relies upon for the theoretical Palin independent campaign: Conservatives simply won’t turn out with sufficient fervor to push Romney(or anybody like him) over the top.  Of course, the GOP establishment has its own view, which would roughly equate to “their way or the highway.”  Let’s face facts: The Republican establishment largely consists of people who expect to be immune from much of what Obama may do in a second term, so they may be more inclined to lose than to support an actual conservative, and I think that they have done so before.

For these reasons, I understand the horns of the dilemma on which Zane and so many other conservatives now sit, and I am surely among their number.  While Zane presents an intriguing idea, I don’t know how we get from here to there.  Of course, if there’s any politician in America who could pull off succh a move, it would almost certainly be Governor Palin.  As of Saturday, the story had bbroken that she would be co-hosting the Today Show on NBC, Tuesday, going head-to-head against Katie Couric on Good Morning America, and when asked about that aspect of the scheduled appearance by Breitbart.com, she reportedly answered simply: “Game on!”  With an attitude like that, it’s small wonder that so many conservatives have such high hopes for Governor Palin, and after all, who knows?

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Posted in Featured, Media, News, Politics, Sarah Palin, Tea Party | 16 Comments »

What is the Difference Between the Left and the GOP Establishment?

Monday, March 26th, 2012

How Friendly Are They?

I find it bothersome that when I listen to some of the obvious establishment hacks, what I hear from them sounds suspiciously like the things I hear coming from the left.  They attack Sarah Palin, and as Breitbart famously pointed out, it’s almost like a membership card that people in the GOP establishment throw down to prove their credentials with the leftist media and cocktail crowd. Those who want in must pay the toll, and that will mean running down actual conservatives whenever possible.  They tell us it’s because we are all blithering idiots, and that’s evidenced because we don’t understand the art of compromise, but that too has the suspiciously similar ring of disdain that we most frequently get from the left.  Worse, when a conservative overcomes the GOP establishment, they tend to think all that remains is to defeat the left, but slowly and surely, the establishment crowd works its way back in.  Conservatives frequently find themselves wondering if there’s any difference between the Left and the Republican establishment.

One could examine the politics of Alaska to get an idea of how that all works.  Sarah Palin was a marvelous reformer who defeated a bastion of the GOP establishment when she beat Frank Murkowski on her way to victory and gubernatorial success. In 2010, Joe Miller defeated Murkowski’s daughter Lisa in the GOP primary, but as an establishment insider, Murkowski ran instead a write-in campaign, and defeated Joe Miller from the left.  This is emblematic of the way the establishment plays the game, and what quickly becomes apparent is how they’ll do anything to maintain power.  Lisa Murkowski won the Senate seat, but she had to abandon the base of the party she had claimed to support in order to get it done.  The Democrats voted defensively, by supporting her over their own candidate in many cases, because they knew they’d rather have Republican Lisa Murkowski than Tea Party-inclined Joe Miller. What that will mean in the future for Alaska politics is unclear, but I suspect the Tea Party and conservative base there are seething over her actions.

Naturally, this is just a microcosm of how it works in Washington DC.  where the establishment rules the Republican roost. When you notice that Republicans have wavered on this or that, you can almost always be assured that you will find one of the establishment pack at the root of the surrender.  It leads many to wonder, nowadays openly:  Is the Republican establishment really any better or any more than a fifth column for the institutional Left?  Of course, much like the Devil, whose best trick is purported to have been to convince others he didn’t exist, the GOP establishment denies their own existence too.  It’s actually a bit of a farce for George Will to have said this, but say it he did, and they run around pretending they do not exist.  Part of it is that they’re a bit slippery, because they will pose as conservatives on this bill or that, and come up with some dandy rationalizations for their sell-outs of conservatism.

Part of what makes conservatives wonder about the possibility of a “fifth column” appearance of all of this is that without fail, these are the same people to whom the media turns when they want a “republican” or “conservative” opinion.  Asking John Boehner on to speak on behalf of conservatism is roughly equivalent to asking Joe McGinnis his opinion on Sarah Palin.  John Boehner isn’t a conservative, though he frequently claims the title.  What Boehner really represents is a mind-set that Washington DC commands all, and that sometimes one must go along to get along.   The problem with Boehner, Cantor, et al, is that they really don’t care about the underlying principles in any issue.  They’re more interested in the appearance of a deal, but the deals are always with leftists, and they never, ever work out as advertised.

The great Debt Ceiling debate of last July is an example.  Boehner was catching hell from every direction, but in the end, who did he abandon?  Did he abandon his make-nice with the President?  No.  Did he force the issue via a shutdown?  No.  Instead, he sent another bill to the Senate after the bill his whole caucus had supported was pronounced “dead on arrival” by Harry Reid.  The truth of the matter is that the deal had been done for some time, and he was looking for cracks in his own party in order to push it through.  Boehner knew it, Reid knew it, and Barack Obama knew it too.  When you know your adversary’s alleged leader is undercutting his own folks in order to make a deal, you can go a long way in really pressing your advantage.  The Debt Ceiling debate ended with a victorious Obama and a devastated Republican base.  We watched people in whom we placed a great deal of hope walk the plank for John Boehner, and all to end up in the same boat just a little later in the year.

This prompted the question among many in the Tea Party at the time, including in this blog: “With friends like these…”  Of course, at the time we were turning our attentions to the Presidential primary season, but little did we conservatives suspect, with a field brimming with actual and potential candidates that the Republican establishment had a plan brewing for this too.  They managed to manipulate the early states forward, moving up the process for a purpose I still don’t think most have grasped.  Those early states are now bound by the rules to yield half of their delegates to the National convention.  Who will be choosing them, and who do you suppose they will be?  Conservatives?  Or more establishment hacks?  So you see, that’s been part of their back-up plan too, engineered to make sure they have a number of delegates they can throw to Mitt Romney if it comes down to it.  Drudge is happily running a story pointing out that Santorum will need to win 74% of delegates in order to win, but what he’s not reporting to you is that Romney will need almost 60% from this point forward.  While Santorum’s chore is an order of  magnitude more difficult, Romney’s road isn’t easy, even with the sandbag delegates the party now has put-away for just such an emergency.

All of this is much like what they did to Ronald Reagan in 1976.  They did everything possible to stymie him and still it came within a whisker of going his way.  I suspect if they could have stopped him in 1980, they would have, but they still managed to get one of theirs on the ticket.  In many ways, the conservative base of the party has been paying a price ever since.  Let’s be blunt, if we may, and suggest that in the halls of power, and where it matters, and in the money of the GOP, George HW Bush is still a terribly powerful force, or at least his legacy has been.  They’re already preparing the next generation, both for the Presidency, and up-and-coming, and there’s little doubt that they prepare a back-bench thick with their folks, ready to retake control when the opportunity arrives.  Given the way the GOP has been run since the Bush establishment took over, I wonder if we’ll ever see a time when our country is free of them, and if it’s even possible any longer.

I tend to agree with those who say that in order to be rid of them, the GOP must ultimately go the way of the Whigs.  The GOP establishment is nearly indistinguishable in their methods and goals from the institutional Left who is our open adversary, and in any case, they’re dragging the country in the same sad direction, albeit somewhat more slowly.  Win, lose or draw, when this election cycle ends, whatever happens, we’re going to be forced to confront this issue or accept that we’ve lost our country.  We tend to think of our fight for the country in terms of our battles with the Left, but I believe we must consider amending our thinking because I don’t know that we can ever defeat the left until we oust their friends from among our number.  We must at some point ask: Are these the actions of a friend?

 

 

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Posted in Bush Clan, Election 2012, Featured, GOP Establishment, News, Politics, RINO Alert, Statism, Tea Party | 4 Comments »

Chris Rock’s Insane Hatred Caught on Camera

Thursday, March 15th, 2012
sexy kim kardashian dresses

Chris Rock Attacks Camera

It seems that there’s something wrong with this guy.  Chris Rock’s hostility has always had a racial element, and his legendary rants on the subject of race have always bordered on the disturbed, but being a big Hollywood celebrity, he’s able to get away with all of this vile garbage under the heading of being a comic.  I would suppose that may work if his audience thinks what he has to say is funny.  Jason Mattera’s new book entitled Hollywood Hypocrites exposes some of the endless nonsense that so many of these leftists in Hollywood do, that contradicts so much of what they profess.  In this case, as Breitbart.com reports, Mattera was asking Chris Rock about his statements about the Tea Party in a 2011 Esquire Magazine interview, when Rock said:

“When I see the Tea Party and all this stuff, it actually feels like racism’s almost over. Because this is the last — this is the act up before the sleep. They’re going crazy. They’re insane. You want to get rid of them — and the next thing you know, they’re fucking knocked out. And that’s what’s going on in the country right now.”

When Mattera questioned Rock about this, he reportedly grabbed the camera and hurled it some fifty feet, before threatening a fight.  This isn’t sane behavior.  It’s called assault.  Watch the video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzDLGk0tvas]

This is inexcusable conduct, but be ready for the left to excuse it.  They will offer reasons why Mattera shouldn’t have asked the question, or similar, but what they will not do is to openly criticize Chris Rock’s thuggish behavior.  Mattera interviewed a number of Hollywood types for his book.  He says there will be more footage coming.  It’s long past time that somebody exposed the blatant hypocrisy in Hollywood.

Chris Rock talks about insane racism, and then puts on this display?  Projection?

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Posted in Media, News, Politics, Tea Party, Video | 4 Comments »

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