Isakson rejects run for governor

Lt. Governor Casey Cagle is again the front runner.

The Senate
“The Democratic Party loves to recruit losers.” So says Dekalb County CEO and Democratic Candidate for Senate Vernon Jones. Jones also claimed he voted for President Bush… twice. I doubt that. He knows he has little or no chance to unseat Senator Saxby Chambliss. Another “Pass the Popcorn” Democratic Primary race as Jones dukes it out against Jim Martin and former TV Reporter Dale Cardwell.

GA 8th
Republican candidate Rick Goddard has landed the endorsement of congressman Jack Kingston (R - GA1). This is no surprise at all but Kingston is well liked across Georgia, especially in south Georgia. Lets not forget Kingston was the lone Member of Congress to oppose the resolution honoring the the 2006 National championship by the Florida Gators. I am a Tech fan but I must admit that was pretty funny. I would love to jump in and fully support Goddard, but I am cautious about Republican candidates with such strong NRCC backing.

GA 5th
It appears Rep. John Lewis (D - GA5) is none too happy to have opponents for the July primary.

“I’m going to give them a non-violent kick,” promised Lewis, still a proper follower of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.

A “non-violent kick”? Is that possible? I guess he meant a love tap. Lewis said he was

“somewhat surprised that someone would challenge me and talk about change. That’s what I’ve been about all my life. I am change.”

Like most Washington Politicians, Lewis feels entitled to his job. “Change” in the 5th is definitely in order.

!UPDATE!
GA 12
Herodotus in the comments asked for an update on GA 12. The GA GOP has failed to find a great candidate for the 12th. Despite the fact former Congressman Max Burns gave incumbent Democrat John Barrow a close race in 2006, losing by less than 1,000 votes. There are 3 candidates facing off in the primary:

Ray McKinney, a mechanical engineer from Savannah
Ben Crystal, a talk show host from Savannah
John Stone, former aide for Rep. Burns and Rep. Norwood from Augusta

Of the three I would put my money on Stone. He has the connections, but some questionable policy decisions. This time last year McKinney was running for President. I do not know much about Crystal.

McCain offered an olive branch to the Christian right in a speech about the kind of judges he would nominate planned for Tuesday at Wake Forest University. The far right has been deeply suspicious of McCain, the expected GOP presidential nominee, because he has clashed with its leaders and worked against them on issues like campaign finance reform.McCain promised to appoint judges who, in the mold of Roberts and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, are likely to limit the reach of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

“They would serve as the model for my own nominees if that responsibility falls to me,” McCain said in his prepared speech.

Asheville Citizen-Times

I love how the author refers to those who have had reservations about McCain as the “far right.”

In any case, judges were a big issue with many conservatives concerned about what kind of judges McCain would nominate. I’m not too worried about it. The “Gang of 14″ that he forged to get Bush’s stalled nominees through, in hindsight was actually a decent idea on his behalf. I was critical of it at the time, but it allowed Bush to get some excellent judges through, like Janice Rogers Brown, whom we wouldn’t have been able to get if that hadn’t happened.

So, I’m not too concerned with McCain when it comes to judges, but quite honestly, I don’t know if it will be possible for him to get a pro-life judge through without cloture. Even in the best case scenario for Republicans this year we won’t have enough Senators to break a filibuster, which will definitely happen if the Democrats don’t think they can win an up or down vote.

Remember how John McCain promised that he’d learned from the McCain-Kennedy-Bush immigration fiasco last summer, and that he would seek enforcement-first as President because he respected the message he had received from the American people?

Well, so much for that.

The Arizona senator also seemed to move past his usual “secure the borders first” mantra in favor of calling for, as he put it, “comprehensive immigration reform.”

Last summer, McCain and Sen. Edward Kennedy led the charge on an immigration reform package that aroused the ire of conservatives and ultimately threatened to undermine McCain’s then-frontrunning presidential bid. (McCain also supported immigration reform bills in 2005 and 2006.)

“Unless we enact comprehensive immigration reform I don’t think you can take it piecemeal,” he explained Monday, answering a question about providing visas for skilled workers.

Oh boy.

State Representative Don Cazayoux defeated a former state legislator in Louisiana’s Sixth Congressional District last night, marking the second time in two months that Democrats have won a special election seat previously held by Republicans. Cazayoux took 49% of the vote to newspaper publisher and longtime political hand Woody Jenkins’ 46%.Cazayoux won Baton Rouge, the southern and western suburbs and most of West Feliciana and St. Helena Parishes, as well as the precincts surrounding Lake Pontchartrain. Jenkins took more traditionally Republican territory south and east of the city, as well as most of Livingston Parish. The two candidates split East Feliciana Parish, north of Baton Rouge along the Mississippi border.The special election win marks the first time in three decades since 1975 that a Democrat will represent the district, based around Baton Rouge and east to Livingston Parish, near the northwest shores of Lake Pontchartrain. More importantly, Cazayoux’s win offers further evidence that Republicans may face another Congressional landscape as difficult as the 2006 election, when the GOP lost thirty seats and the majority. A CBS News/New York Times poll out this week suggested 50% of Americans prefered a generic Democratic candidate for Congress, while just 32% prefered the Republican contender.

RealClearPolitics

Another seat that should not have been lost. I wonder how many more seats have to be lost before the party will get its act straight.

Boris Johnson has won the race to become the next mayor of London - ending Ken Livingstone’s eight-year reign at City Hall.

The Conservative candidate won with 1,168,738 first and second preference votes, compared with Mr Livingstone’s 1,028,966 on a record turnout.

He paid tribute to Mr Livingstone and appeared to offer him a possible role in his new administration.

Lib Dem Brian Paddick came third and the Greens’ Sian Berry came fourth.

Mr Johnson is expected to stand down as MP for Henley, triggering a by-election.

BBC News

Not only did the city of London vote for a conservative mayor, but the Tories picked up over 300 seats across England and Wales. Perhaps the British have finally had enough with the Socialist and authoritarian policies of the Labour Party that have sunk that country over the last 10 years and stolen more and more of their freedom away.

This seems to be a trend in Europe as of late. For the past five years we’ve been told about how our image abroad is tarnished, yet Germany elected Merkel, a pro-American conservative. France elected Sarkozy, another pro-American conservative. Italy just turned back to Berlusconi and now England is on track to return power to the Tories.

NEW YORK (AP) — Court records show that Rep. Vito Fossella had a blood-alcohol level of more than twice the legal limit when he was arrested on drunken driving charges this week.

Court papers indicate that Fossella’s blood-alcohol level was 0.17 percent when he was arrested early Thursday in Alexandria, Va. The legal limit in Virginia is 0.08 percent.

Fossella will have to serve a mandatory five days in jail if convicted.

The Washington Post

Man, Vito got a raw deal.  When Patrick Kennedy got his DUI and rammed his car into a security barrier he got chauffeured home by the Capitol Police.  I guess it’s different when you’re a Kennedy.

The new Jason oceanographic satellite, an undated and more accurate version of the Poseidon satellite that has monitored the oceans since 1992, says the “persistent Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has turned into its cool phase, telling us to expect moderately lower global temperatures until 2030,” reports the Canada Free Press.Noting the Jason satellite is run by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the newspaper says the PDO is driven by the “huge Aleutian low in the Arctic — but we don’t know what controls the Aleutian low. Nonetheless, 22½-year double sunspot cycles have been identified in South African rain, Indian monsoons, Australian droughts and rains in the United States’ far Southwest … arguing that the sun, not CO2, controls the earth’s temperatures.”

In another finding, the Antarctic deep sea is growing colder, stimulating the circulation of the oceanic water masses, reports Science Daily. Directed by Dr. Eberhard Fahrbach, oceanographer at the Alfred Wegener Institute, 58 scientists from 10 countries aboard the research vessel Polarstern in the Southern Ocean from Feb. 6 to April 16, studying ocean currents, temperature, salt content and trace substances in Antarctic seawater, made this finding.

Last month we pointed out that thus far in the 21st century, there has been no recorded global warming, raising the possibility that the world is entering a period of global cooling.

Carteret County News-Times

Wow, what an inconvenient truth for Al Gore.

This is why I continue to remain a skeptic on this issue. I don’t think anybody on either side of this really knows what the hell is going on.

So just the other day we were talking about where the big Democrat plan was they promised us to lower gas prices. Evidently, some Republicans in Congress are wondering the same thing.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Senate panel has agreed to block U.S. funding for Iraq reconstruction projects worth more than $2 million and to try to force Baghdad to cover the costs of training and equipping the country’s security forces.

The provision, included in a 2009 defense policy bill approved this week by the Senate Armed Services Committee, comes as Democrats draft a similar provision within separate legislation that would cover this year’s war spending.

The efforts are part of the latest push on Capitol Hill to get Iraq to spend more of its own money and spare U.S. taxpayers. Democrats and many Republicans say it is unfair that Iraq is looking at pulling in as much as $70 billion in oil revenues this year while Americans grapple with soaring fuel prices at the pump.

The AP

Way to go!  It is financially irresponsible and inconceivable to be spending millions of American tax dollars on Iraqi infrastructure while our own country is $9 trillion in the hole and has plenty of its own needs.  They have $70 billion in oil revenue.  That’s not enough for them to start paying for themselves?

Powerline has all the details.

This guy is an embarrassment to Georgia (where I reside), to the Oval Office, and to the United States of America.

Larry Kudlow has a great post at the Corner explaining why much of the economic hardship we are currently facing is self-inflicted.

Whether it’s energy, wheat, grain, corn, or whatever, since these raw materials are priced in dollars on global markets, a strong greenback will reduce commodity prices. And that, in turn, will lower both consumer and producer inflation. This would help corporate profits and would boost the purchasing power of wages.

In other words, a strong dollar would relieve gas prices and boost the economy. But so far as I know, the president never mentioned the dollar. And I don’t think any of the media people asked him about it.

Right now Mr. Bush should order his Treasury Secretary to appreciate the greenback and work with the G7 for concerted action that would send a strong signal to commodity and currency traders that they better close their short positions on the dollar and stop speculating on higher and higher commodity prices. Mr. Bush himself should adopt new rhetoric on a strong dollar. He should make it unambiguous.

Both Hank Paulson and Bush have beaten the drum loud and long on a “strong dollar” policy. Unfortunately that is all they have done and the US peso is now worth only $1.06 Australian, .5 Pound Sterling, $1.01 Canadian (!), .64 Euro, 103.4 Yen, and 1.03 Swiss Francs! This is beyond nuts it is only a course steered by someone with nothing left to lose. The reason we have crashed the value of the dollar is because that is the only way of keeping our ballooning national debt from taking away higher percentages of our GDP.

Now we are left with a weak US peso, inflation expectations of 6.8%, exploding food and fuel prices, an expanding national debt and greater federal spending than ever before. This is not how I expected the Bush years to end.

According to AllahPundit at HotAir:

The bottom line: After 20 years of friendship, if Obama didn’t know Wright held these beliefs he’s a moron and if he did know he’s a fraud.

Agreed.

Watch this video on Breitbart.tv.

While I am often a critic of President Bush’s administration, one can’t deny that the guy has passion and in some instances is not willing to back down from confrontation.

I do not know enough about the situation on the ground in Afghanistan to comment on our status there - but I do like his heartfelt response about how we must go after the “thugs and killers” i.e. the terrorists.

Now if only his administration could show this kind of fire in the belly when dealing with the region’s chief trouble maker, Iran…

After a super-majority of Ron Paul supporters captured control of the Republican state convention Saturday, state party officials abruptly canceled the event without electing delegates to the national convention.Early in the day, state delegates supporting Paul’s continued pursuit of the Republican nomination voted through a rules change that forced the state party to abandon its preset ballot of potential national convention delegates and open up the race to the rest of the state delegates.

The Reno Gazette-Journal

I like Ron Paul very much. I think he is one of the best Congressmen in Washington in regards to governing by our Constitution. However, these shenanigans by those who continue to support his failed Presidential bid need to stop.

I think Ron Paul would have made an excellent President and his candidacy was quite impressive, especially the amount of money he managed to raise, but it’s long past time to move on. There is absolutely no chance whatsoever that he will be able to get the Republican nomination and people like the ones who crashed this state convention are only attaching a negative connotation to the Congressman and making themselves look like a bunch of asses.

Republicans should sit back and enjoy the Democrats’ current chaos rather than drumming up their own.

What’s that saying about some environmentalists? Oh, yeah - the comparison to watermelon… green on the outside, red on the inside.

This is a good article detailing much of the sustainability movement’s political goals that exceed environmental conservation into the “social justice” that the Left espouses.

H/T to the Corner at NRO.

Former Republican Congressman Bob Barr, from Georgia, is now a Libertarian running for his party’s presidential nomination.  Here’s a really good interview with him in which I agree with much of what he says.

Save for his comments on Iraq (I don’t see how invading the country and deposing Saddam Hussein and then leaving wouldn’t lead to just another dictator popping up), I agree with most of his comments.

Just follow the link and see for yourself why the Bush Administration, the DoD and the Army brass are really letting down the soldiers who are returning from combat.

Where does all the money go I wonder?

UPDATE (Langley):  HotAir has the CNN video of the interview with the man who made the YouTube video, which has apparently gotten 70,000+ hits.  My grandfather told me it was in his local paper (Monroe, NC) this morning and area politicians are on it.  Web 2.0 strikes again forcing the government to think twice.

If you have missed it, here is the very good CBS 60 Minutes with SCOTUS Justice Scalia.  I recommend everybody watch the two parts of the interview.

He’s had it “described to him” and felt it necessary to call the NCGOP to the mat.

Oh, this is just rich.  Via Michelle Malkin.

McCain Math is the same as MSM Math: Southern + Republican + video featuring radical leftists who happen to be black = RACISTRACISTRACISTRACISTDANGERWILLROBINSON!