Sunday, October 31, 2010

The ‘big dog’ in campaign spending

From Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe:


WHAT SPECIAL interest is spending the most money to influence the 2010 election? The answer isn’t the US Chamber of Commerce, notwithstandingPresident Obama’s recent attacks on the Chamber’s campaign contributions. Nor is it the Karl Rove-backed network of pro-Republican campaign organizations, including American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, that have also been assailed by the White House and the focus of critical media attention.

In reality, the biggest outside spender is the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which is pumping almost $88 million into TV commercials, phone banks, and mailings to promote Democratic candidates.
“We’re spending big,’’ AFSCME President Gerald McEntee boasted to The Wall Street Journal. “And we’re damn happy it’s big. And our members are damn happy it’s big — it’s their money.’’
AFSCME isn’t the only public-sector union “spending big’’ to influence the vote on Nov. 2. So is the National Education Association and the Service Employees International Union, respectively the nation’s largest and fastest-growing unions. Together, the three government-employee unions will have spent nearly $172 million campaigning for Democrats in the course of this election cycle. That outstrips by more than $30 million what the Chamber of Commerce and the Rove network combined are pouring into the 2010 campaign.
I have no objection to close media scrutiny when business-linked organizations spend heavily on campaign ads. But it should be a far bigger story when public-employee unions do so. Indeed, it should be cause for concern.
“It’s their money!’’ the president of AFSCME declares, and the heads of the NEA and SEIU would presumably agree, but where does “their money’’ come from? From satisfied customers paying for goods and services they voluntarily purchased? From profits earned by designing safer cars, serving tastier meals, developing cleaner fuels? From investing prudently in the marketplace?
Of course not. Every dollar the government pays its employees is a dollar the government taxes away from somebody else. As it is, public employees generally make more in salary and benefits than employees in the private economy: For Americans working in state and local government jobs, total compensation last year averaged $39.66 per hour — 45 percent more than the private sector average of $27.42. (For federal employees, the advantage is even greater.) Which means that AFSCME and the other public-sector unions are using $172 million that came from taxpayers to elect politicians who will take even more money from taxpayers, in order to further expand the public sector, multiply the number of government employees, and increase their pay and perks.
Campaign contributions from public-sector unions, National Review editor Rich Lowry writes, drive “a perpetual feedback loop of large-scale patronage.’’ Not only don’t the unions deny it, they trumpet it. “We’re the big dog,’’ brags Larry Scanlon, AFSCME’s political director. “The more members coming in, the more dues coming in, the more money we have for politics.’’
Unlike labor unions in the private sector, government unions can reward politicians who give them what they want and punish those who don’t. The United Auto Workers has no say in hiring or firing the president of the Ford Motor Company, but public-sector unions like AFSCME and the NEA can use the political process to help elect the “management’’ that will have to negotiate with them. The unions flex their muscle to push not only for ever-more-lavish wages and benefits (including the exorbitant pensions and health plans that are devouring government budgets), but also for more government hiring and bigger government programs.
The cost of government has soared in tandem with the growth in public-sector unions — and those unions make no bones about their reliance on politics to enlarge their wealth and power. “We elect our bosses, so we’ve got to elect politicians who support us and hold those politicians accountable,’’ AFSCME’s website proclaims. “Our jobs, wages, and working conditions are directly linked to politics.’’ That is exactly the problem.
Public-sector unionism has been unhealthy for American democracy. The power to “elect our bosses’’ has turned government employment into a rigged game — rigged in favor of ravenous government growth and against the private-sector taxpayers who pay for it. AFSCME may be “damn happy’’ at the impact it has on US elections. But the rest of us ought to be alarmed.

The Inexplicables

From Victor Davis Hanson:


More debt, please?
1. Please explain this: Barack Obama entered office; nationalized health care; ran up record $1 trillion deficits; promised to hike taxes on the rich; pushed cap and trade through the House; took over large chunks of banks, insurance companies, and auto corporations; made hard-left appointments from Van Jones to Sonia Sotomayor — and in 21 months saw his positives crash from near 70% in January 2009 to little above 40%, with the specter of near record Democratic losses in the Congress just two years after the anti-Bush/anti-Iraq sweep of 2008.
All the polls of independents and moderates show radical shifts and express unhappiness with higher taxes, larger deficits, a poor economy, and too much government. In other words, the electorate is not angry that Obama has moved too far to the right or stayed in the center or borrowed too little money. A Barney Frank or Dennis Kucinich is looking at an unusually tight race in a very liberal district not because liberals have had it with them, but because large numbers of moderates and independents most surely have.
Yet if one were to read mainstream Democratic analysis, there is almost no acknowledgment that the party has become far too liberal. Indeed, they fault Obama for not being liberal enough, or, in the case of the Paul Krugman school, for not borrowing another trillion dollars for even more stimulus, despite the failure of the earlier borrowing. In fact, Obamaites offer three unhinged exegeses for the looming defeat: a) there is no looming defeat: the Democrats will still keep the House; or b) Obama did not prove to be the radical as promised; or c) the American people are clueless and can’t follow science and logic and therefore do not know what is good for them.
Do liberals really believe that had they rammed down cap and trade, borrowed $6 trillion instead of $3 trillion the last 21 months, and obtained blanket amnesty their candidates would be posed to ward off Republican attacks this election year? The problem right now with Greece is that it borrows too little, hires too few, and spends not enough?
Perpetual campaigning
2. What is it with former Democratic presidents? Cannot they let it be and recede into retirement in the manner of a Nixon, Ford, or Reagan? His multimillion overseas speaking junkets to oil rich dictatorships now nullified by Hillary’s tenure as secretary of State, a restless Bill Clinton is once more still shaking his finger, haranguing the electorate, knee deep in partisan politics, and now caught in intrigue trying to oust the African-American Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Florida.
Meanwhile our other Democratic president emeritus, Jimmy Carter, is still hawking yet another take on his failed presidency of some thirty years past. Not content with trying to undermine United Nations support for the U.S. during the 1991 Gulf War, or intriguing against the U.S. during the debate over the Iraq war as requisite for a long coveted Nobel Peace Prize, or calling George Bush, Sr. “effeminate,” or slurring George W. Bush as the “worst” president in history, or smearing Tony Blair, Carter now complains that we simply did not understand his magnificent tenure that ended in January 1981 with 21% interest rates, unemployment over 7%, inflation running at almost 14%, gas lines, and little growth — with Iran still holding hostages and the Soviets on the move in Afghanistan and Central America.
Why, in other words, cannot a Carter and Clinton, like Bush I and II, simply fade into the shadows without perpetually campaigning to remake their images? Why is not George H.W. Bush as angry as Carter at a lost second term? Does not George W. Bush feel the media demonized him over Iraq as much as they did Clinton during Monicagate? Apparently, they refuse to admit that the country is center-right and both do not understand that they were elected despite rather than because of that fact.
The people’s yacht
3. What is it with John Kerry? He is now pontificating again and once more furious with us, the idiots in his royal presence — “It’s absurd. We’ve lost our minds. We’re in a period of know-nothingism in the country, where truth and science and facts don’t weigh in. It’s all short-order, lowest common denominator, cheap-seat politics.”
Has he simply channeled the president’s earlier anger at our unscientific minds? But the yokels’ skepticism that man-made global warming was still controversial was born out by revelations of forged and inexact research, and human embryos proved not the only pathway to conduct stem-cell research, and Keynesian massive borrowing has little record of creating permanent wealth and employment.
This follows the more recent, “We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on, so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening.” (Translation = like in 2004, the sick voters are once again stupidly rejecting their medicine.)
Both outbursts remind us of the 2004 blurt-out about George Bush, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this idiot.” That was itself a prelude to the later 2006 put-down, “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” (Translation = George Bush really did not, really, really did not have higher SAT scores than I did, and I have no idea that education levels in the U.S. military exceed those of the general population.)
(P.S. The Tea Party would answer that its members at least know that it is not smart to buy a $7 million sailing yacht in the midst of a recession while trying to avoid $500,000 in assorted property and excise taxes, while advocating higher taxes on the upper-middle class.)
Kerryism — like Obama’s recent lamentations and expansions on his “clingers” speech — is simply a reflection of the angst of modern elite liberalism, and shared by everyone from Barack Obama to Al Gore. Its tenets are familiar: a) an anointed technocratic class, without much first-hand knowledge of the lives of its constituencies, is the self-appointed protector of the federally subsidized underclass against the ravages of the demonic private-sector robber classes; b) requisite knowledge to oversee us is adjudicated by certificates from Ivy League schools and soaring rhetorical tropes, never by a record of creating capital or jobs; to the degree one can make a clever argument, the economy is supposed to rebound, jobs follow, and peace spreads abroad; c) to the degree one demonizes the supposedly unthinking middle class, its lifestyle, its culture, and its worldview, the more one can enjoy without guilt the aristocratic good life — think of the penance that allows Al Gore’s jetting or mansions, John Edwards’s big house, or the Kerry playthings.
In other words, the thinking is “I care for “them,” even when they don’t fathom it. So my yacht provides necessary downtime for me to recharge before reentering the fray to fight for more redistributive largess for those who know not what I do.
What’s the matter with California?
4. Many have written to me along the following lines, “How can a bankrupt state like California vote for two figures like Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer so closely associated, fairly or not, with the ideology of massive government, higher taxes, unionized public employees, and hostility to private enterprise?”
Well, they have not won yet, and we never quite know what fickle Californians will do in the privacy of the voting booth. Yet why not? Lots of people like the present redistributive state, and want even more from government, not less. They are not worried that roughly 3,000 plus are leaving California each week, most of them higher income earners, or that we are creating third-generation families dependent on the dole, or that the highest paid teachers in the United States either cannot prevent, or are in some cases connected to, the fact that Californian youth earn among the lowest reading and math scores on standardized tests in the nation, or that almost half of the nation’s 11-14 million illegal aliens are (wisely) in California.
California may still have 1 billion recoverable, but untapped, barrels of oil, over a half-million acres of productive farmland taken out of production to help the three-inch delta smelt, and a great deal of natural mineral wealth and timber, but we deem ourselves wealthy enough not to need any of that, so smart are our professors, politicians, journalists, and community organizers in figuring out ways to redistribute the ill-gotten gains of agriculture, Silicon Valley, the Napa wine industry, and what manufacturing is left in California. The state has assumed that 101, 99, and I-5 will never be modern three-lane freeways in their entireties, and that our schools cannot turn out literate students, and that our government bureaus, from the DMV to emergency rooms, are Dantesque. It reminds of Greece. When I visited and lived there over the last 30 years, everyone shrugged that in theory the system could not go on, but the new EU would save it, and so enjoy it while it lasted. Californians suspect you cannot shut down industry and drive out wealth, but our EU salvation is the U.S. government.
Why are the Yanks so crazy?
5. Why would Europe, and France especially, be so hurt about Obama’s freefall? A series of articles has expressed shock that the American voter after just 21 months is sobering up and turning on their prince. How could they? Hmmm, let us count the ways.
Start with the model of Europe itself — as in we do not wish to end up broke like Greece, or shut down with rioting employees as we see in France. We see in Europe tax-cheating refined to an art form, as the VAT has created an entire black market in “pay in cash and we give you 20% off” sales.
We really do have primaries; our candidates are not pre-selected by party hacks or conniving parliamentarians, so a Sharron Angle or Rand Paul can appear out of nowhere, not relegated to the waiting line of party dignitaries to connive for a turn after twenty years of loyal service.
We are, it is true, in some sense a rejection of Europe’s class system that predetermines one’s slot in life, inasmuch as status is predicated there, even in a socialist state, on birth, parentage, accent, family tribal connections, and education — not mostly on money that is a far more fluid way of bestowing influence and rank.
We have no real tradition of the impoverished baron in his crumbling estate strutting on the parapets of society; we do see nobodies appear out of nowhere with millions in self-generated cash, who want to turn that capital into exposure, influence, and political and social status. I prefer the latter, as do most Americans.
So it is no wonder that we are quickly tiring of Obama’s European experiment, and no wonder Europeans are shocked that we are. They should be hurt; Tuesday’s election should be a loud, “please do not turn us into those folks” message. Expect after the election even more European outrage stories about Tea Party “zealots,” “racists,” and “fanatics” who questioned our first and only chance to embrace the European socialist/technocratic model.
Vote on Tuesday with a passion as if you have never voted before.

Support Jim Lucas (and all the other Republicans)!


Folks;
 
Jim Lucas is requesting help on election day , Tuesday Nov 2nd.
 
Please try to find a way to help him for a couple hours or more.
 
He needs supporters to help him at the polls. Dig deep in your time schedule and help Jim win.
 
Call Justin Kiel at     521-1281   to volunteer to help JIM LUCAS WIN Tuesday.

Friday, October 29, 2010

TAXES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE


TAXES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE (CONT’D): DNC Repeatedly Delinquent On Property Taxes.
The Democratic National Committee and the party’s private club in the nation’s capitol have been delinquent with tax payments on sixteen separate occasions over the last seven years, Pajamas Media has learned.
According to District of Columbia government records, since 2004 the Democrats’ main political committee and its National Democratic Club — an exclusive restaurant and hideaway on Capitol Hill where prominent Democrats and their guests dine — have been hit with fines and interest penalties in excess of $115,000 for failure to pay their property taxes on time.
They don’t pay taxes. They spend taxes.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Outside groups double spending on Ind.'s congressional racese

At The Indy Star:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee now is the biggest spender, paying more than $2 million for ads against the Republicans trying to defeat Rep. Joe Donnelly, D-Granger, and Rep. Baron Hill, D-Seymour.
Never mind what the PEOPLE in the 9th District might think!  The DCCC wants to get Baron re-elected because THEIR constituency (i.e. trial lawyers, unions and other special interest groupswants to keep a sure vote for their progressive, liberal agenda!!-SP


Most of the outside spending has gone to the Donnelly and Hill race — more than $3 million in each. Both rank among the top 25 House races nationwide for spending by outside groups, according to the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group tracking spending. 
 Both Hill and GOP challenger Todd Young had spent about $1.6 million through Oct. 13. Hill still had $379,052, and Young still had $148,274.

Of the $3 million in outside spending reported through Wednesday in the 9th District, about $1.6 million benefited Hill and $1.4 million benefited Young.

In addition to $1.3 million in help from the DCCC, Hill’s next-biggest backer is the Service Employees International Union, which spent $177,656 on radio and TV ads against Young. 
Oh yeah, that's the same SEIU whose radical, Saul Alinsky disciple, former president Andy Stern has been one of the most frequent visitors to the Obama Oval Office since 2009, along with George Soros.  Now, tell me again Baron about your respect for Hoosier values! -SP

Forgetting the Constitution

The assurance that “separation of church and state” is in the Constitution shows our elites’ ignorance.


From Thomas Sowell at NRO:



Politics is not the only place where some pretty brassy statementshave been made and repeated so often
that some people have accepted these brassy statements as being as good as gold.

One of the brassiest of the brass oldies is the notion that the Constitution creates a “wall of separation” between church and state. This false notion has been so widely accepted that people who tell the truth get laughed at and mocked.

A recent New York Times piece said that it was “a flub of the first order” when Christine O’Donnell, Republican candidate for senator in Delaware, asked a law school audience, “Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” According to the New York Times, “The question draw gasps and laughter” from this audience of professors and law students who are elites-in-waiting.


The 
New York Times writer joined in the mocking response to Ms. O’Donnell’s question, though admitting in passing that “in the strictest sense” the “actual words ‘separation of church and state’ do not appear in the text of the Constitution.” Either the separation of church and state is there or it is not there. It is not a question of some “strictest” technicality.

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States begins, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” There is absolutely nothing in the Constitution about a “wall of separation” between church and state, either directly or indirectly.

That phrase was used in a letter by Thomas Jefferson, who was not even in the country when the Constitution was written. It was a phrase seized upon many years later, by people who wanted to restrict religious symbols, and it has been cited by judges who share that wish.

There was no mystery about what “an establishment of religion” meant when that phrase was put into the Constitution. It was not an open-ended invitation to judges to decide what role religion should play in American society or in American government.

The Church of England was an “established church.” That is, it was not only financed by the government, its members had privileges denied to members of other religions.

The people who wrote the Constitution of the United States had been British subjects most of their lives, and knew exactly what an “established church” meant. They wanted no such thing in the United States of America. End of story — or so it should have been.

For more than a century, no one thought that the First Amendment meant that religious symbols were forbidden on government property. Prayers were offered in Congress and in the Supreme Court. Chaplains served in the military and presidents took their oath of office on the Bible.

But, in our own times, judges have latched onto Jefferson’s phrase and run with it. It has been repeated so often in their decisions that it has become one of the brassiest of the brass oldies that get confused with golden oldies.

As fundamentally important as the First Amendment is, what is even more important is the question whether judges are to take it upon themselves to “interpret” the law to mean whatever they want it to mean, rather than what it plainly says.

This is part of a larger question, as to whether this country is to be a self-governing nation, controlled by “we the people,” as the Constitution put it, or whether arrogant elites shall take it upon themselves to find ways to impose what they want on the rest of us, by circumventing the Constitution.

Congress is already doing that by passing laws before anyone has time to read them and the White House is likewise circumventing the Constitution by appointing “czars” who have as much power as cabinet members, without having to go through the confirmation process prescribed for cabinet members by the Constitution.

Judges circumvent the Constitution by reading their own meaning into its words, regardless of how plain and unequivocal its words are.

The Constitution cannot protect us and our freedoms as a self-governing people unless we protect the Constitution. That means zero tolerance at election time for people who circumvent the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. Freedom is too precious to give it up in exchange for brassy words from arrogant elites.

Democrats in deep danger

From the Editors of The Hill:


Hindsight is 20/20, but sometimes foresight is pretty clear, too.
The Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll, conducted over the past four weeks in 42 toss-up House districts, paints a clear picture of danger for Democrats.
In those races, all but two of which are currently in Democratic hands, Republican challengers were found to be ahead in 31. The Dems still held the edge in seven, and four were tied.
That 31, added to some 15 Dem seats that are so lost they weren’t even worth polling, would put the GOP pickup at 46 if voter sentiment does not change.
But 46 may lowball the Nov. 2 result by a considerable margin, too, because there are another 40 or 50 seats many experts say are in play. Republicans need to win only a handful of these to put their gains above the 50-seat threshold, and few would argue that 60 is impossible.
A margin of that size would be historic; the 54 seats Republicans won in 1994 to take control of the House for the first time in 40 years is still cited as a blowout, a revolution and other locutions suggesting massive importance. There have been bigger Republican wins, but you have to go back to the days of FDR to find one.
All this is appropriately chastening to the many in 2006 and still more in 2008 who suggested that the GOP was out for a generation. But big election results tend to be chastening only to the losers. Forty years in the minority did not stop the GOP adopting the ways of an over-comfortable majority once it had been in congressional power for a few terms. And it appears to have taken Democrats just two terms to make voters queasy.
Some of that is doubtless due to the general dyspepsia produced by a sour economy. But some, detectable in our poll numbers revealing disquiet over federal spending and a high level of disapproval of President Obama, suggests that Democrats may have failed to learn lessons about overreach that become clear during years out of power.
By this time next week we will know whether the indications in The Hill’s poll are borne out by voter actions in the nation’s polling booths. And soon thereafter, we may start to see whether another new majority has already learned or needs voters again to teach lessons the hard way.

The Coming Struggle

From R. Emmett Tyrrell at The American Spectator:

The upsurge of awareness is led by the Tea Party movement. It is composed of fallen away conservatives and independents with a smattering of Democrats thrown in. They are a welcome arrival to the conservative movement. The American conservative movement has steadily moved from the outer fringes of American politics in the 1950s to the center. America is now and has been a center right country. Do you remember but two years back all the talk about conservatism being dead? At the time conservatives outnumbered Liberals two to one.
One of the ways the conservatives achieved majority status was by welcoming every new arrival to the conservative cause. They did this in the 1970s with the Neocons. They did this in the 1980s with the Reagan Democrats. More recently they did it with the Christian Right, and now they are doing it with the Tea Partiers.
The Tea Partiers' arrival is auspicious. There are structural changes in the federal budget that are going to have to be made and they are aware of it. Had the Liberal press not encouraged the worst in the Liberal politicians, the Tea Partiers might not have been aroused to their present pitch of civic mindedness. The Liberals might have been able to muddle along building up debt. But the Liberals came in with their wholly unfunded stimulus program, Obamacare, and regulatory reforms that have impeded growth. The result is going to be a serious rethinking of the federal programs, and if we do not act the Tea Partiers are pointing to Greece as our future.
Already the reforms are being discussed. The retirement age for Social Security will have to be raised and alternate funding studied. Personal Retirement Accounts (PRAs) will be considered. Vouchers have been suggested to fund Medicare for the truly poor, along with means testing, and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). These and more economies are going to be considered. In this election it seems we have come to a turning point. A majority of Americans realize that the debt can no longer be kicked down the road. It must be faced.
The Tea Party's candidates must take their place in the conservative movement and continue to call for reform. They have allies such as Paul Ryan and the conservatives' other "young guns" willing to work with them. This can be a historic election but it is just the beginning. The deficit must be ended. 

He is right - this election will be historic!! but the job is only beginning.  We must ALL realize that what comes next ain't going to be pretty but it MUST be done if we are to continue as a GREAT nation!  It is up to us to convince the others that think we can continue to muddle through that sacrifices MUST be made to correct the unsustainable path we are on currently!  And the job begins in earnest on Tuesday!!!-SP

Scientists Find 'Liberal Gene'

From the "just when you think you had heard it all" category at NBC San Diego:



Researchers have determined that genetics could matter when it comes to some adults' political leanings.
According to scientists at UC San Diego and Harvard University, "ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4." That and how many friends you had during high school.
The study was led by UCSD's James Fowler and focused on 2,000 subjects from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Scientists matched the subjects' genetic information with "maps" of their social networks. According to researchers, they determined that people "with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults." However, the, subjects were only more likely to have leanings to the left if they were also socially active during adolescence.
"It is the crucial interaction of two factors -- the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence -- that is associated with being more liberal,” according to the study.
"These findings suggest that political affiliation is not based solely on the kind of social environment people experience,” said Fowler, who is a professor of political science and medical genetics.
The researchers also said their findings held true no matter what the ethnicity, culture, sex or age of the subjects were.

Read the comments-they are great!  Also, I would bet that taxpayer money was used to fund this "research".  And how does one become a "professor of political science and medical genetics"? Sheesh!-SP


Source: Scientists Find 'Liberal Gene' | NBC San Diego 

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Mike Pence may leave GOP leadership


Pence has long given signals that he is not tethered to the House. Most recently, he has rankled some Republican aides — both in leadership and elsewhere — with his Indiana-focused schedule, despite the fact that he has made a number of high-profile stops all over the country, including most recently in Florida, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
But his Indiana focus continues this week, just days before the critical midterm election that’s likely to catapult the GOP back into the majority in the House.
On Wednesday he begins the 2010 Mike Pence Road Team Bus Tour, a three-day ramble around the Hoosier state that will have him making 15 stops for more than a dozen statehouse candidates and four congressional hopefuls — Marlin Stutzman, Todd Young, Larry Buschon and Jackie Walorski.
(One of those stops is in Seymour on Friday, October 29 at 9:00 a.m.   and another stop will be in Corydon at 6:00 P.M.) Be there to support conservatives!!!!!

I don't know about you but I would LOVE to see Mike Pence come back and run/win for Governor in 2 years! -SP

Smug Democrats

From Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe:



THE HILLS are alive with the sound of liberal Democratic contempt for the electorate. So are the valleys, the prairies, and the coasts. For months, voters have been signaling their discontent with the president, his party, and their priorities; in less than a week, they appear poised to deliver a stinging rebuke. Yet rather than address the voters’ concerns with seriousness and respect, too many Democrats and their allies on the left have chosen instead to slur those voters as stupid, extremist, or too scared to think straight.
“Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared.’’
The smug condescension in this — we’re losing because voters are panicky and confused — is matched only by its apparent cluelessness. Does Obama really believe that demeaning ordinary Americans is the way to improve his party’s fortunes? Or that his dwindling job approval is due to the public’s weak grip on “facts and science’’ and not, say, to his own divisive and doctrinaire performance as president?
Perhaps he does. Or perhaps he just says such things when speaking to liberal donors. It was at a San Francisco fundraiser in 2008 that Obama described hard-pressed citizens in the small towns of Pennsylvania as “bitter’’ people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them . . . as a way to explain their frustrations.’’
Obama is far from alone in looking down his nose at the great unwashed. Last month, Senator John Kerry explained that Democrats are facing such headwinds these days because voters are easily swayed dolts: “We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on, so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth.’’
Meanwhile, the rise of the Tea Party movement, one of the most extraordinary waves of civic engagement in modern American politics and a major driver of the 2010 election season, has drawn no end of scorn from Democrats and their cheerleaders in the media.
Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray calls Tea Party members “nutcases,’’while ABC’s Christiane Amanpour is aghast that the grassroots movement has “really gone to the extreme’’ and is “not conservatism as we knew it.’’ Rob Reiner even smears the Tea Party as Nazi-esque: “My fear is that the Tea Party gets a charismatic leader,’’ the Hollywood director said last week. “All they’re selling is fear and anger and that’s all Hitler sold.’’ And the crop of citizen-candidates running for Congress this year, many of them with Tea Party backing? A “myriad of wackos,’’ sneers the influential liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas.
Trashing conservatives as “nutcases’’ and “wackos’’ — or worse — is all too common among left-wing pundits and politicos. But the electorate isn’t buying it. “Likely voters in battleground districts,’’ reports The Hill in a recent story on a poll of 10 toss-up congressional districts across the country, “see extremists as having a more dominant influence over the Democratic Party than they do over the GOP.’’ Among likely voters, 44 percent think the Democratic Party is overpowered by its extremes (37 percent say that about the Republicans). Even among registered Democrats, 22 percent think their party is too beholden to its extremists.
Heading into next week’s elections, Americans remain a center-right nation, with solid majorities believing that the federal government is too intrusive and powerful, that it does not spend taxpayer’s money wisely or fairly, and that Americans would be better off having a smaller government with fewer services. Nearly halfway through the most left-wing, high-spending, grow-the-government presidential term most voters can remember, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that so many of them are rebelling. The coming Republican wave is an entirely rational response to two years of Democratic arrogance and overreach. As the president and his party are about to learn, treating voters as stupid, malevolent, or confused is not a strategy for victory.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

The Tea Started Brewing Under Bush

From Timothy Dalrymple: (Note: this is  along post but here is the conclusion, read it all to get a fuller understanding of why the Progressives are wrong when they claim that "it was all Bush's fault" and "where was the TEA Party when Bush was in". -SP)



Democrats misread the moment of their ascendance. They thought Bush represented conservatism itself, rather than a particular strand of conservatism, and they interpreted the electorate’s repudiation of Bush as a repudiation of traditional conservatism. Whether the Democrats would have done anything differently, if they had better understood the world outside the echo chamber, is debatable. But they might at least have known that the American people as a whole were not ready for a rapid expansion of government amidst debts and deficits unseen since the Second World War. America as a whole has remained center-right, and it is entirely natural that those who rejected Bush for his government growth and deficit spending would become, when Obama exploded that growth and spending, the leaders of the Tea Party movement. Further, for many conservatives there was some amount of trust that Bush would not go too far, that his policies were pro-growth, that his deficits were more sustainable. Obama came along and tripled the rate at which the debt is growing, budgeted for trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye could see, and punishes the very same private sector that he so desperately needs to create jobs. This alone, without reference to racism or bigotry or irrational hatred, is sufficient explanation for the Tea Party movement.
For the GOP, the lesson should be sobering. If all goes well for the Republicans on November 2nd, in the midst of their celebration they should remember that their victory comes only because the Democrats took what the Republicans were doing and doubled and tripled down. And they should know that the Tea Partiers who are largely responsible for the enthusiasm gap will hold them accountable to their promises. Many Americans, and not only the Tea Party activists, feel that rapid government growth and the national debt constitute severe threats to the health of our economy and our nation. Republicans will be expected to take action, to fulfill their promises of financial responsibility, or to suffer a similar repudiation in 2012.
The tea started brewing under the Bush administration, and now it’s scalding hot against the Democrats. But it may burn Republicans too if they don’t change their ways.

Marco Rubio Gets It! Baron Hill Doesn't!

Jim Lucas Hosting The Mike Pence Bus Tour in Seymour Friday!

Do you want to see and hear Mike Pence and help support your local Republican candidates in the Seymour/Jackson County area?


Then come to the parking lot at US Highway 50 and the railroad in the middle of downtown Seymour on Friday October 29 at 9:00 a.m. (Directly across from the old Blish Mill grain bins).


Jim Lucas, candidate for State Rep. in District 66 will be the host for this event and many other of your Republican local candidates will be there.  Come out and show your support for them and Mike Pence!!


This is a golden opportunity for you to make your voices heard - PLEASE BE THERE IF YOU CAN!!!

Monday, October 25, 2010

Baron Hill Don't Tell Me How to Run my Office

From Dan Turkette:

Witnessess to berserk Baron Hill

Here are the statements of some folks from the Cornerstone Christian Church in Seymour, IN, relating an incident that took place in 2004 after Baron Hill had lost the election to Mike Sodrel.  It gives some insight into the real Baron Hill.

FactCheck.org exposes Baron Hill's disinformation machine

Sunday, October 24, 2010

They Hate Our Guts. And they’re drunk on power.

From P.J. O'Rourke at The Weekly Standard:


Perhaps you’re having a tiny last minute qualm about voting Republican. Take heart. And take the House and the Senate. Yes, there are a few flakes of dander in the fair tresses of the GOP’s crowning glory—an isolated isolationist or two, a hint of gold buggery, and Christine O’Donnell announcing that she’s not a witch. (I ask you, has Hillary Clinton ever cleared this up?) Fret not over Republican peccadilloes such as the Tea Party finding the single, solitary person in Nevada who couldn’t poll ten to one against Harry Reid. Better to have a few cockeyed mutts running the dog pound than Michael Vick.

I take it back. Using the metaphor of Michael Vick for the Democratic party leadership implies they are people with a capacity for moral redemption who want to call good plays on the legislative gridiron. They aren’t. They don’t. The reason is simple. They hate our guts.

They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any. Democrats hate men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, straights, the rich, the poor, and the middle class.

Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats.

Whence all this hate? Is it the usual story of love gone wrong? Do Democrats have a mad infatuation with the political system, an unhealthy obsession with an idealized body politic? Do they dream of capturing and ravishing representational democracy? Are they crazed stalkers of our constitutional republic?

No. It’s worse than that. Democrats aren’t just dateless dweebs clambering upon the Statue of Liberty carrying a wilted bouquet and trying to cop a feel. Theirs is a different kind of love story. Power, not politics, is what the Democrats love. Politics is merely a way to power’s heart. When politics is the technique of seduction, good looks are unnecessary, good morals are unneeded, and good sense is a positive liability. Thus Democrats are the perfect Lotharios. And politics comes with that reliable boost for pathetic egos, a weapon: legal monopoly on force. If persuasion fails to win the day, coercion is always an option.

Armed with the panoply of lawmaking, these moonstruck fools for power go about in a jealous rage. They fear power’s charms may be lavished elsewhere, even for a moment.

Democrats hate success. Success could supply the funds for a power elopement. Fire up the Learjet. Flight plan: Grand Cayman. Democrats hate failure too. The true American loser laughs at legal monopoly on force. He’s got his own gun.

Democrats hate productivity, lest production be outsourced to someplace their beloved power can’t go. And Democrats also hate us none-too-productive drones in our cubicles or behind the counters of our service economy jobs. Tax us as hard as they will, we modest earners don’t generate enough government revenue to dress and adorn the power that Democrats worship.

Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference. Democratic advocacy for feminism, gay marriage, children’s rights, and “reproductive choice” is simply a way to invade -power’s little realm of domestic private life and bring it under the domination of Democrats.

Democrats hate immigrants. Immigrants can’t stay illegal because illegality puts immigrants outside the legal monopoly on force. But immigrants can’t become legal either. They’d prosper and vote Republican.

Democrats hate America being a world power because world power gives power to the nation instead of to Democrats.

And Democrats hate the military, of course. Soldiers set a bad example. Here are men and women who possess what, if they chose, could be complete control over power. Yet they treat power with honor and respect. Members of the armed forces fight not to seize power for themselves but to ensure that power can bestow its favors upon all Americans.

This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order. Power has been trapped, abused and exploited by Democrats. Go to the ballot box and put an end to this abusive relationship. And let’s not hear any nonsense about letting the Democrats off if they promise to get counseling. 


P. J. O’Rourke, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author of a new book, Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards(Atlantic Monthly Press).