Ask Unemployed How the Stimulus is Working

From Diana Furchtgott-Roth at RealClearMarkets:

Some say things would have been worse if the stimulus funds had not been spent. They assume that more government spending, including the $862 billion stimulus, must be good for the economy. This form of Keynesian economics fell out of fashion decades ago everywhere, except in the halls of power in Washington.

If more government spending always helped the economy, why stop at $862 billion? Why not give each American an unlimited bank account? Then the unemployment rate would likely rise to 100%. But some economists would still offer unverifiable models to "prove" the benefit to the American public.

Bad economics does not make good government, and, as the economic data show, America is wallowing in bad economics.

Unemployed Americans know that they are worse off than before the stimulus package was passed, despite rosy estimates from CBO. It's time to try a different tack - lower taxes and spending - and budget numbers that are based on reality.

Read it all for some enlightening reasons why you can't believe the CBO's numbers about jobs the stimulus has supposedly provided.-SP

Time to give back the keys, Baron

From The Friends of Todd Young via email:

Just when Hoosier taxpayers think they’ve seen it all, Baron Hill finds a new way to waste their money.

According to the nonpartisan watchdog organization Opensecrets.org, taxpayers are ponying up $2,730 so Hill can cruise around in two 2009 Chevy Impalas.

Hill is the only member of the Energy and Commerce Committee – the congressional body responsible for creating energy policy, with two cars. Consequently, he also spends more money on transportation than any of his colleagues.

He claims the cars are necessary because of the large size of Indiana’s 9^thDistrict. The 20 county district is indeed expansive, but Todd has spent the last year traveling this part of the state in just his jeep. No other vehicles have been necessary.

These extravagancies are just further examples of Hill’s fiscal recklessness. After all, he voted for the $1 trillion stimulus, the job-killing cap and trade energy tax and President Obama’s federal take-over of our health care system.

Hill often talks of “restoring fiscal responsibility” in Washington. If he’s really serious about ending wasteful spending, he should start by looking in the mirror. Or, he can look in the rear view mirror of one of his two taxpayer-subsidized cars and see the $13.4 trillion debt and 2.35 million lost jobs his votes have left in their wake.

We need a representative in Congress who views his constituents as more than just an expense account. We need an advocate for responsible government and the economic growth that goes with it.  We’ll never get there with Baron Hill and Nancy Pelosi behind the wheel.

It’s time to ask Baron to give back the keys to the car. Or rather, cars. 


Friends of Todd Young 

Obama’s Washington: No experience necessary

From Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

After February 2009 and the establishment of Porkulus, Obama and his team haven’t deflected from its trajectory an iota, mainly because no one on his team has the experience to know how to change course.  None of them, as Robins points out, has ever had to run a business and reconsider strategies on the fly.  None of them have been responsible for managing stockholder assets nor held accountable for the real-world implications of their actions.  In short, this administration is a one-trick pony on economics, and now has no clue on how to formulate a Plan B.

The entire administration reflects incompetence.  They need a massive change in leadership, or more accurately, we need a massive change in leadership.

Read it all-SP.

Todd Young out raising Baron Hill - from individuals!

At Open Secrets:

Todd Young has raised more money from individuals that Baron Hill in this election cycle, but Baron has raised 10 times as much as Young from PACs (political action committees- i.e "special interests").  Now is the time to put your money where your mouth is - send a contribution to Todd Young TODAY!!  Here is the link. - SP

Baron Hill (D) *

Raised:	$1,427,444
Spent:	$319,842
Cash on Hand:	$1,108,668
Last Report:	June 30, 2010

	PAC contributions	$838,042	(59%)
	Individual contributions	$534,691	(37%)
	Candidate self-financing	$0	(0%)
	Other	$54,711	(4%)

Todd Young (R)

Raised:	$844,802
Spent:	$585,162
Cash on Hand:	$259,638
Last Report:	June 30, 2010

	PAC contributions	$50,500	(6%)
	Individual contributions	$794,011	(94%)
	Candidate self-financing	$0	(0%)
	Other	$291	(0%)

Howard Dean: Obama aides need to spend 'some time outside Washington'

At The Hill:

Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Sunday that President Obama's political advisers are out of touch with average Americans and need to "spend some time outside Washington."

"The people around the president have really misjudged what goes on elsewhere in the country, other than Washington," D.C.Dean told Candy Crowley on CNN's "State of the Union."

Howard gets it - let's just hope the rest of the Dems don't catch on before the election. - SP

Armey to GOP leaders: Get courageous

And at The Hill:

"The fact that he has only 13 cosponsors is a big reason why our folks are agitated against the Republicans as well as the Democrats," said Armey, who called Ryan "probably the most creative-thinking and most courageaous guy in Washington."

"The difference between being a cosponsor of Ryan and not is a thing called courage," Armey said. "And we have watched American public policy dominated by Democrats that don't care and Republicans that don't dare for a long time."

That, Armey said, could result in significant losses for Republicans as well as Democrats during the midterm elections.

"We're saying to the Republican Party, get some courage to stand up for the things that are right for this country. Don't stand there and hide from the issue because you're afraid of the politics," Armey said. "The issue of public policy that governs the future of my children is more important than your politics, and if you can't see that we'll replace you." (emphasis mine-SP)


AMEN!  I always have liked Dick Armey because he was never afraid to speak his mind.  He was one of those Republicans from 1994 that actually honored the term limits pledge.  We need more like  him now. - SP

Dick Armey to GOP: Why don’t you have the guts to support Paul Ryan’s roadmap?

At Hot Air:

A sizzlin’ piece of red meat for a slow Sunday afternoon. Things start to pick up halfway through the clip, but I recommend watching the whole thing lest you miss Granholm’s ode to government intervention and insistence that cutting spending so that we don’t have to keep borrowing from foreign creditors is somehow … playing right into China’s hands. Note also that she’s the one who brings up Ryan, not Armey; Gregory’s question has to do with tea-party candidates being out of the mainstream and she leaps from that to an attack on the roadmap. Partly that’s because Dems are in panic mode about losing seniors’ votes and figure thatdistorting Ryan’s plan is the best way to spook them into voting blue this fall. But as I’ve said before, part of it is also a function of Ryan being a serious policy thinker who’s not given to the sort of rhetorical excess that lends itself to the left’s “all conservatives are kooks” message. If they want to take him down, they’ll have to do it with guilt by association. Which is why he keeps making these surprise cameos in their Sharron Angle/Rand Paul messaging.

As for Armey, who offers a welcome defense of Ryan, two things. One: I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that he’s mistaken about Alvin Greene. America’s candidate has beenindicted on a felony charge but not (yet) convicted. (Or is he referring to someone else?) Second, I wonder how much support there’d be even on the right for the congressional GOP deciding to suddenly rally behind Ryan’s roadmap. I figure most tea partiers would love it as a show of fiscal conservative principle; centrists, who are loath to tinker with Social Security and Medicare, would likely freak out; and a third faction in the middle would welcome the move from a policy standpoint but would panic at the thought of Republicans handing the Dems a major opportunity to change the subject when they’re on the ropes. But then, that’s the problem with entitlements writ large, isn’t it? Everyone agrees that we need to talk about them — just not right now, when it’s politically inconvenient. Someday.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

So Far, the Tea Party Has Succeeded

From Chris Good at The Atlantic:

The Tea Party, in many respects, has been the political story of the last two years. When President Obama took office, few expected the force and virulence of the backlash against him, his presidency, and the broad legislative agenda he carried with him--including both the immediate measures he took to counteract the economic crisis and the thousand-page health-care bill Congress passed at his behest.

The Tea Party movement has continued along since its first protests in the spring of 2009, and in November it will face its first major test at the ballot boxes, as we find out whether this movement can succeed in reshaping American government by altering the congressional majorities and putting anti-Obama fiscal conservatives in office.

Read it all! - SP

The Point of No Return

From Thomas Sowell at NRO:

The warnings of Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln have never been more relevant.

How did we get to the point where many people feel that the America they have known is being replaced by a very different kind of country, with not only different kinds of policies but also very different values and ways of governing?

Something of this magnitude does not happen all at once or in just one administration in Washington. What we are seeing is the culmination of many trends in many aspects of American life that go back for years.
Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the institutions set up by the Constitution are enough to ensure the continuance of a free, self-governing nation. When Benjamin Franklin was asked what members of the Constitutional Convention were creating, he replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

In other words, a constitutional government does not depend on the Constitution but on us. To the extent that we allow clever people to circumvent the Constitution while dazzling us with rhetoric, the Constitution becomes just a meaningless piece of paper as our freedoms are stolen from us, much as a pick-pocket might steal our wallet while we were distracted by other things.



It is not just evil people who would dismantle America. Many people who have no desire to destroy our freedoms simply have agendas of their own that are singly or collectively incompatible with the survival of freedom.

Someone once said that a democratic society cannot survive for long after 51 percent of the people decide that they want to live off the other 49 percent. Yet that is the direction in which we are being pushed by those who are promoting envy under its more high-toned alias, “social justice.”
Those who construct moral melodramas — starring themselves on the sideof the angels against the forces of evil — are ready to disregard the constitutional rights of those they demonize, and to overstep the limits that the Constitution puts on the powers of the federal government.
The outcries of protest in the media, in academia, and in politics when the Supreme Court ruled this year that people in corporations have the same free-speech rights as other Americans were a painful reminder of how vulnerable even the most basic rights are to the attacks of ideological zealots. Pres. Barack Obama said that the Court’s decision would “open the floodgates for special interests” — as if all you have to do to take away people’s free-speech rights is call them special interests.

It is not just particular segments of the population that are under attack. More fundamentally under attack are the very principles and values of American society as a whole. The history of this country is taught in many schools and colleges as the history of grievances and victimhood, often with the mantra of “race, class, and gender.” Television and the movies often do the same.

When there are not enough current grievances for them, they mine the past for grievances and call it history. Sins and shortcomings common to the human race around the world are spoken of as failures of “our society.” But American achievements get far less attention — and sometimes none at all.
Our “educators,” who cannot educate our children to the level of math or science achieved in most other comparable countries, have time to poison their minds against America.

Why? Partly, if not mostly, it is because that is the vogue. It shows you are “with it” when you reject your own country and exalt other countries.
Abraham Lincoln warned of people whose ambitions can only be fulfilled by dismantling the institutions of this country because no comparable renown is available to them by supporting those institutions. He said this 25 years before the Gettysburg Address, and he was speaking of political leaders with hubris, whom he regarded as a greater danger than enemy nations. But such hubris is far more widespread today than just among political leaders.

Those with such hubris — in the media and in education, as well as in politics — have for years eroded both respect for the country and the social cohesion of its people. This erosion is what has set the stage for today’s dismantling of America, which is now approaching the point of no return.


— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010Creators Syndicate, Inc.

DeLay warns GOP: Don't underestimate Democrats this fall

At The Hill:

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said the Democratic Party's strong ground game could stave off midterm losses.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) on Wednesday warned Republicans not to underestimate Democrats this fall.

DeLay, fresh off having the Justice Department drop a federal investigation against him, said GOP wins in the midterm elections aren't "a given" due to the strength of the grassroots infrastructure Democrats built in 2006 and 2008.

"Over the last ten years, the Democrats, particularly the Democrats in the House, have put together one of the most powerful grassroots coalitions that I've ever seen," DeLay said during an appearance on Fox News. "So it's not a given that the Republicans are going to win all these seats this year, because the Democrats have had a grassroots organization to help stave off a lot of their losses."

Which is exactly why We The People and the other TEA Party groups need to continue their organizational efforts around GOOD Republican candidates and get out there knocking on doors and raising MONEY  to support those candidates. -SP

Who is extreme?

New ad from the RNC:

Obama boasts of most 'progressive' political triumphs in decades

At The Hill:

President Obama told a Hollywood fundraiser Monday night that he and congressional Democrats have passed the most progressive legislation in decades.

"We have been able to deliver the most progressive legislative agenda — one that helps working families — not just in one generation, maybe two, maybe three," Obama said.


I don't know about you but I'm not getting a real warm and fuzzy feeling about Obama's agenda!!-SP

A Tea Party Manifesto

The movement is not seeking a junior partnership with the Republican Party. It is aiming for a hostile takeover.

From Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe at The Wall Street Journal:

On Feb. 9, 2009, Mary Rakovich, a recently laid-off automotive engineer, set out for a convention center in Fort Myers, Fla. with protest signs, a cooler of water and the courage of her convictions. She felt compelled to act, having grown increasingly alarmed at the explosion of earmarks, bailouts and government spending in the waning years of the Bush administration. President Barack Obama, joined by then-Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, was in town promoting his plan to spend a trillion dollars in borrowed money to "stimulate" the economy.

Mary didn't know it, but she was on the front lines of a grass-roots revolution that was brewing across the nation. More than 3,000 miles away, Keli Carender, a young Seattle school teacher and a member of a local comedy improv troupe, was feeling equally frustrated. She started to organize like-minded citizens. "Our nation's fiscal path is just not sustainable," she said. "You can't continue to spend money you don't have indefinitely."

View Full Image

Associated Press

People hold signs and wave flags during the "Uni-Tea" Tea Party rally.

Today the ranks of this citizen rebellion can be counted in the millions. The rebellion's name derives from the glorious rant of CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who in February 2009 called for a new "tea party" from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. By doing so he reminded all of us that America was founded on the revolutionary principle of citizen participation, citizen activism and the primacy of the individual over the government. That's the tea party ethos.

The tea party movement has blossomed into a powerful social phenomenon because it is leaderless—not directed by any one mind, political party or parochial agenda.

The criteria for membership are straightforward: Stay true to principle even when it proves inconvenient, be assertive but respectful, add value and don't taking credit for other people's work. Our community is built on the Trader Principle: We associate by mutual consent, to further shared goals of restoring fiscal responsibility and constitutionally limited government. These were the principles that enabled the Sept. 12, 2009 taxpayer march on Washington to be one of the largest political protests in the history of our nation's capital.

More

• Tea Party Candidate Worries Colorado GOP Establishment
• Political Wisdom: Tea Party Money and Myths

The many branches of the tea party movement have created a virtual marketplace for new ideas, effective innovations and creative tactics. Best practices come from the ground up, around kitchen tables, from Facebook friends, at weekly book clubs, or on Twitter feeds. This is beautiful chaos—or, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek put it, "spontaneous order."

Decentralization, not top-down hierarchy, is the best way to maximize the contributions of people and their personal knowledge. Let the leaders be the activists who have the best knowledge of local personalities and issues. In the real world, this is common sense. In Washington, D.C., this is considered radical.

The big-government crowd is drawn to the compulsory nature of centralized authority. They can't imagine an undirected social order. Someone needs to be in charge—someone who knows better. Big government is audacious and conceited.

By definition, government is the means by which citizens are forced to do that which they would not do voluntarily. Like pay high taxes. Or redistribute tax dollars to bail out the broken, bloated pension systems of state government employees. Or purchase, by federal mandate, a government-defined health-insurance plan that is unaffordable, unnecessary or unwanted.

For the left, and for today's Democratic Party, every solution to every perceived problem involves more government—top-down dictates from bureaucrats presumed to know better what you need. Tea partiers reject this nanny state philosophy of redistribution and control because it is bankrupting our country.

While the tea party is not a formal political party, local networks across the nation have moved beyond protests and turned to more practical matters of political accountability. Already, particularly in Republican primaries, fed-up Americans are turning out at the polls to vote out the big spenders. They are supporting candidates who have signed the Contract From America, a statement of policy principles generated online by hundreds of thousands of grass-roots activists.

Published in April, the Contract amounts to a tea party "seal of approval." It demands fiscal policies that limit government, restrain spending, promote market reforms in health care—and oppose ObamaCare, tax hikes and cap-and-trade restrictions that will kill job creation and stunt economic growth. Candidates who have signed the Contract—including Marco Rubio in Florida, Mike Lee in Utah and Tim Scott in South Carolina—have defeated Republican big spenders in primary elections all across the nation.

These young legislative entrepreneurs will shift the balance in the next Congress, bringing with them a more serious, adult commitment to responsible, restrained government.

But let us be clear about one thing: The tea party movement is not seeking a junior partnership with the Republican Party, but a hostile takeover of it.

The American values of individual freedom, fiscal responsibility and limited government bind the ranks of our movement. That makes the tea party better than a political party. It is a growing community that can sustain itself after November, ensuring a better means of holding a new generation of elected officials accountable.

Mr. Armey, a former House Republican majority leader, is chairman of Freedomworks. Mr. Kibbe is president and CEO of Freedomworks. They are the authors of "Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto," out today from HarperCollins.

Lousy lawmakers, not low taxes, created fiscal woes

From Amity Shlaes at The Washington Examiner via Bloomberg News:

You can have low taxes, or you can have an economic recovery, but you can’t have both. That’s the message the administration is hammering this summer.

Read it all - SP

The Destiny of a Free Nation

GREAT STUFF!! from Doctor Zero via Hot Air:

In the comments to The Dominion of Liars, itzWicks asks:

The refrain that I hear over and over again at the conclusion of excellent essays such as this (as well as from the well articulated comments that follow on this blog) is sadly the same: “What are we going to do about it? What can be done now?”

That’s a great question.  It’s easy to react, analyze, and criticize.  It’s natural for a writer to spend much of his time doing so, when the philosophy he opposes holds all the power, and makes all the news.  Today’s current events are largely created by the Left.

I write essays like “The Dominion of Liars” because I believe every opportunity should be taken to present the case that statism is fundamentally flawed, from its mistaken premises to its corrupt conclusions.  It’s important to couple that prosecution with testimony about the power and virtue of freedom, along with a fair accounting of its dangers.

The scale of the challenge facing us is formidable.  Like all fearsome things, it is also exhilarating.  In the blood and bile of this dying statist economy, we can see the desperate future of an indentured nation… a truth many of us have refused to see, when displayed in bankrupt socialism around the world.  What is the destiny of afree nation?

It will be a future of responsibility. Irresponsibility leads to dependence, which makes demands.  It is impossible for anyone to be truly free until they renounce the obligation of others to provide their sustenance.  Until then, dependents and providers wear matching sets of chains, and great power resides in the State that decides how long those chains will be.  When resources are taken from each according to their means, and given to each according to their needs, the moral authority of those who balance those needs against each other becomes absolute.

No wonder the constituencies of socialist America regard their political elite as saints, compared to the captains of industry.  The system demands such faith from its subjects.  If politicians are selfish and corrupt, and their bureaucrats are blinded by dogma, who would trust them to fairly and logically ration subsidies and benefits?  Look around you, and learn beyond question that they are selfish and corrupt.  There is no brilliant design behind “stimulus” spending, ObamaCare, the massive federal budget, or central industrial policy.  They were born in the filth of insider deals and payoffs, ideology and greed.

The destiny of a free nation lies in overthrowing its aristocracy.  We have no need of a privileged class that makes plans to increase trillion-dollar deficits in between rounds of golf and lavish Spanish vacations.  It makes no sense to submit to commands from the same people who deliver endless loads of “unexpected” bad news about the economy.  We must decisively reject the feckless greed of a Party that demands billions more in revenue to fund a budget they haven’t even written.  Over two hundred years after our Founders wrote about the transcendent nature of freedom, we are still struggling with the enormous idea that it must be applieduniversally.

Reaching our destiny will require courage. We are the grandchildren of revolutionaries, both natural-born and adopted through immigration.  Together we are a family of builders, investors, explorers, and warriors.  The American posture is not a frightened crouch.  To discover what we are capable of, we must reject the vision of a hopeless future, where timid clients line up at government offices to receive benefits they cannot be trusted to create or purchase themselves.

Granting the State power over an industry is a concession that it can only be managed through force and compulsion, which are the State’s only resources.  Freedom is the rejection of compulsion, isn’t it?  Your choices are to be free, or be cared for… and keep in mind that the promises of those who promise to care for you can only be funded by taxing the labor of those who choose freedom.  Ask yourself how a system that devours itself to survive could end anywhere other than where Barack Obama has taken us.

Our future will grow from the energetic courtship of ideas. The statist suppresses ideas which challenge his ideology.  Note well how much effort the various organisms of the Left put into shouting people down, and burying dangerous ideas.  Watch them blink in confusion as reality defies their ideology.  Examine their rhetorical toolbox, and you’ll find nothing but the blunt instruments of class and racial insults.  The acolytes of Big Government offer nothing but lists of things free people supposedly cannot achieve.  We are foolish to allow those with such limited imaginations to tell us what is impossible.

The exercise of freedom through capitalism demands ready access to reliable information.  A consumer isn’t making a “free” choice when he’s suckered by a con artist… or when the true prices of goods and services are obscured by a multi-layered veil of subsidies and mandates.  Money is a medium of exchange for the value of your labor.  When money is devalued, prices are hidden, and income is siphoned away through the raw power of government, your time is being confiscated.  Free people seek employment, not servitude.

A destiny of freedom will also be one of accountability. We have been drenched in the proof that Big Government exists to shield its masters from accountability.  Every disaster born from government “partnership” with the private sector, from subprime mortgages to offshore oil spills, has ended with the political “partners” skipping away to even greater heights of power.

We require no further lessons in morality from a political class that throws extravagant parties for its successful criminals, to help them deal with the pain of their wrist slaps.  The elite of a monster government have too many interests to conduct their duties honorably.  We must express our absolute intolerance for wild deficit spending – the ultimate evasion of accountability, in which the cost of buying votes is pushed over a rapidly-approaching horizon.

The American people must choose between control and stagnation, or risk and growth.  No one can impose prosperity.  We will find it together, when we rid ourselves of mandatory “benefits” that crush small entrepreneurs.  We cannot hand over a vast portion of the private sector to government control, and expect the remainder to flourish.  Through our intelligence and industry, we each carry answers to the needs of our fellow citizens.  We can require them to earn our business through competition, or seize our labor through compulsion.  Choose the former, or suffer through the horrible extremes of the latter.  It never works, and it’s an idea that takes a lot of people with it when it dies.

Responsibility, courage, imagination, and accountability: these are both the destiny of a free nation, and the tools required to achieve it.  You will find scant evidence ofany of these things in the arrogant, greedy, sanctimonious, and corrupt beast dying of consumption in our national and state capitols.  Embrace these virtues, all at once… show people how each is related to the other, and how they blend into the antithesis of the failed super-State.  I believe they will rediscover the strength to dismantle this broken system, and reclaim the freedom represented by the trillions of dollars it has consumed.  The answer does not lie in a grand central plan.  It will be found after such plans have been shredded.

It won’t be easy, and success is not guaranteed… but haven’t we learned, halfway through this exhausted Presidency, that nothing great is achieved without vision, effort, and risk?

Coming events!

From Julia in Brown County:

Freedom Group of Brown County members and other patriots,

The Indianapolis Tea Party website has 2 items that you might be interested in:

1.       The bus trip from Indianapolis to Washington DC for the September 12 rally still has 25 open spots.  The bus leaves early on the morning of Friday September 10 and will arrive at a downtown hotel on Friday night.  The rally is on Sunday, so you would have Saturday free check out the sights in Washington.  Return will be after the rally on Sunday, arriving back in Indianapolis early on Monday morning.  Cost of the bus trip is $125.  Reservations must be made by this Sunday, August 15.  More details here:  http://www.indianapolisteaparty.com/events/2010-09-10/september-12-indianapolis-tea-party-hosts-bus-trip-washington-dc   Kathy and I took this bus last year and will be on it again this year.  We can vouch for the ladies who have organized this – they think of everything and do it right.  Last year they had snacks and drinks that they set up when the bus pulled into a rest stop, both coming and going.  Join us for the trip from Indy!

2.     On Friday, August 20, there is a fund-raiser in Plainfield, Indiana for State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, a very good guy who deserves to be re-elected.  Arizona’s Sheriff Joe will be there.  More info here:  http://www.indianapolisteaparty.com/events/2010-08-20/your-vote-not-enough-opportunity

Julia

In U.S., Confidence in Newspapers, TV News Remains a Rarity

In U.S., Confidence in Newspapers, TV News Remains a Rarity:

No more than 25% say they have a 'great deal' or 'quite a lot' of confidence in either
by Lymari Morales

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans continue to express near-record-low confidence in newspapers and television news -- with no more than 25% of Americans saying they have a 'great deal' or 'quite a lot' of confidence in either. These views have hardly budged since falling more than 10 percentage points from 2003-2007."

See a graph at the link - SP

Who Is Going to Be Our Newt?

W. James Antle III at The American Spectator:

I don't often cite Richard Lugar as an authority on the Republican Party's future, but he asks some of the right questions here.

"The question is, how creative will Republicans be in the face of this? If we get the majority, will there be the sort of negotiations that occurred between Newt Ginrich and Bill Clinton, for example?" he said. "And if so, who is going to be our Newt?"

Lugar was asked whether Republicans such as House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky can fill that role.

"Probably not," Lugar said. "But it's a very important question."

And even Gingrich largely fizzled out after 1996. To me, the Republicans' biggest problem is a lack of leadership ready to take over should they regain the majority. The leaders who took over after 1994 had been planning and had an agenda in place for quite some time. That strikes me as much more worth worrying about than a few Tea Party primary victories.

That's what the TEA Parties are trying to tell Republicans, we are looking for leadership - and still not  impressed with what we see.  Antle is right - today's GOP is still listening to consultants who tell them to stay away from issues that don't poll well.  That's not leadership, it's just more of the same.  We do need a new Newt - the old one doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected.  He's still got good things to say but he is unelectable.  Where is the new one and WHERE THE HELL IS THE NEW AGENDA!!   The GOP is about to blow a golden opportunity.- SP