Alicia Colon has a great article in The New York Sun contrasting Rep. Charles Rangel with Herman Cain, two influential African American leaders, one still lives on the “Democratic plantation,” and works every day to keep others enslaved there, while the other has risen to become a star in the conservative movement and tirelessly works to free people from the chains of the Democratic plantation. A great read. Click to continue »
In a big surprise, Blunt (R-MO) was picked over David Dreier (R-CA) for the new “temporary” Majority Leader. Folks this is a big victory for social conservatives, as Dreier is a good guy for the most part, but Blunt is much better. DC is going to be a circus the next few weeks for sure.
Illegal immigration has increased while legal immigration has fallen, the oppositite of the ideal.
Since 2001, the number of legal permanent residents entering the United States has declined from 578,000 to 455,000, while the number of illegal immigrants has increased from 549,000 to 562,000. Legal, temporary residents account for the remainder of people entering the country.
President Bush has failed to defend our borders, but the Republicans in Congress have also failed. They have not (for the most) held the President’s feet to the fire on this issue. Big business and special interest groups have thwarted the will of the public on this issue for years, despite overwhelming support (even among Hispanics) for more and better border control. Not to sound too black, but I do not see this issue being resolved in the next ten years, and by then it will be too late.
Jonah Goldberg is depressed. I feel his pain. Politics has become so incremental (ie. no progress is being made whatsoever) that I have little or no love left for the GOP. We all know that they were a lousy minority party, but damn if they aren’t an even worse majority party. The Bush presidency is over, he will not get anything done for the duration and that is too bad because the man had some good ideas.
As SavetheGOPers Mark, Alex and Gary stood up to the leftist Communists this weekend in DC, so did fellow defenders of liberty in Poland, as they finally kicked out the remaining Communists from power, left over from the Soviet Union. Check it out here.
Posted in its entirety because it is that important. H/T TruthCaucus
SWIMMING WITH THE SHARKS
BY FRANKLIN FOER
REPUBLICANS LEARN THEIR DIRTY TRICKS BY PRACTICING ON ONE ANOTHER
Swimming with Sharks
by Franklin Foer
Issue date: 10.03.05
THE NEW REPUBLIC
[TNR, PRINTER FRIENDLY, REG REQ.]
Everyone who watched this summer’s race for College Republican National Committee (crnc) chair with any detachment has a favorite moment of chutzpah they admire in spite of themselves. Leading the count are the following: speaking sotto voce of your opponent’s “homosexuality”; rigging the delegate count so that states that support your candidate have twice as many votes as those that don’t; and using a sitting congressman to threaten the careers of undecided voters. I can understand the perverse appeal of each of these incidents. But I cast my vote for the forged letter.
The letter arrived via fax to the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, Virginia, on the eve of the crnc convention in June. The three-day convention is attended by student delegates from across the country who, after enduring a four-month campaign filled with importuning, backstabbing, and horsetrading, vote for a chair. Most campaigns culminate with the handpicked establishment candidate inheriting the two-year, $75,000-a-year position without much of a fight. But, this year, the establishment candidate, Paul Gourley – the handpicked successor of the last chairman, who was the handpicked successor of the chairman before him – faced a vigorous challenge from an insurgent, Michael Davidson, a smooth-talking 25-year-old Berkeley grad. Click to continue »
From NTU Blog:
Coburn’s Victory
Posted by Sam Batkins - September 22, 2005Taxpayers scored a victory last night when the Senate agreed to Senator Tom Coburn’s amendment to provide needed transparency in the budget process.
“The Coburn amendment requires that any limitation, directive, or earmarking be included in the bill’s conference report. Previous Senate procedures allowed the Senate to automatically approve earmarks or special projects included in the House version of an appropriations bill. Consequently, many earmarks that became law did not even come up for a vote in the Senate. This process was used to essentially hide millions of dollars of pork spending from public view.”
The Senate agreed to the amendment by a vote of 55-39. In case you were wondering, these are the 39 Senators who do not think it is a good idea:
Allard (R-CO), Baucus (D-MT), Bennett (R-UT), Bond (R-MO), Bunning (R-KY), Byrd (D-WV), Carper (D-DE), Chambliss (R-GA), Cochran (R-MS), Coleman (R-MN), Conrad (D-ND), DeWine (R-OH), Dole (R-NC), Dorgan (D-ND), Durbin (D-IL), Frist (R-TN), Grassley (R-IA), Gregg (R-NH), Hagel (R-NE), Harkin (D-IA), Hatch (R-UT), Hutchison (R-TX), Jeffords (I-VT), Johnson (D-SD), Kennedy (D-MA), Lautenberg (D-NJ), Leahy (D-VT), Lincoln (D-AR), Lott (R-MS), Murray (D-WA), Pryor (D-AR), Reed (D-RI), Reid (D-NV), Sarbanes (D-MD), Shelby (R-AL), Smith (R-OR), Stevens (R-AK), Thune (R-SD), Vitter (R-LA).
Allard? Bennett? Bond? Bunning? Chambliss? Cochran? Coleman? Frist? Gregg? Hatch? Thune? Vitter? What in the world was in their water. I must say that Thune and Vitter have really been two disappointments so far. Oh and as always Tom Coburn is soooo awesome.
Let’s get rid of RINO Chaffee!
Also check this out about the Top 5 Reasons Republicans are ruining Washington.
The drug importation one, I am a bit skeptical about but he’d dead on with the other four. Republicans shouldn’t be giving mucho taxpayer dollards to corporations.
I hope y’all listen to Derb Radio at NRO because this man captures the essence of my disatisfaction with the GOP, George Bush and tha Man.
I really have no idea what to say anymore. According to CRNC Truth Caucus a major story is about to break that will reveal even more corruption inside the CRs. I suppose this is a bad time for a collective SaveTheGOP “told ya so”
A shocking revelation will be exposed in Frank Foer’s story on the College Republican National Election.
“Amber VerValin claimed that she had forged constitutions for 15 Virginia CR chapters to create the impression of a larger Virginia CR contingent. This had triggered a rule that automatically granted the state, which resided in the Gourley camp, additional delegates. To prove her bona fides, VerValin held the phony documents and then her own driver’s license before the cameras. She had committed this act of deceit, she claimed, under pressure from her state chair.”
In the Virginia background, the quiet drumbeats of impeachment.
So let us rehash some things:
1. CRNC still has no new website
2. 7 field reps instead of the promised 12
3. The “Made in China” fiasco
4. More and more bad press
Well I mean I guess we’re getting what we deserve after re-electing HoplinCo.
It is about time there is organized resitance to the outragous Pork coming out of Washington. Here is a great start in accomplishing just that.
“How are we going to mobilize the blogosphere in support of cuts in wasteful spending to support Katrina relief? Here’s the plan.
Identify some wasteful spending in your state or (even better) Congressional District. Put up a blog post on it. Go to N.Z. Bear’s new PorkBusters page and list the pork, and add a link to your post”
This is the one of the best ideas I have heard in awhile. We need to put the fear of God in these Pork Loving politicians.
Not like this was surprising, but we need to refuse to allow people like Harry Reid to be referred to as “prolife Democrats.”
What good is it to voice opposition to Roe v. Wade and then oppose any nominee who might rectify the situation?
H/T Drudge
This just speaks for its self. So, yeah, let’s do have an investigation.
Today is Constitution day as we celebrate 218th anniversary of our Constitution. I have read the Constitution many times before, but as I was reading this amazing document today, I am still struck by how this document has guided our nation through so many trials and experiences throughout our nation’s history. But as John Roberts has said during his hearing, the constitution only works when it is adhered to and when the values within it are cherished. Roberts also points out that the former Soviet Union had a constitution that promised a lot of the same things our constitution does. The difference was that the Soviet Constitution was meaningless because it was mere words, which the government made no effort to adhere to. As we celebrate this day, remember that we must fight to ensure that our sacred constitution does not become mere nice sounding words.
Student Arrested After Pilot Uniform Found
The Associated Press
Friday, September 16, 2005; 11:39 PM
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A university student from Egypt was ordered held without bond after prosecutors said they found a pilot’s uniform, chart of Memphis International Airport and a DVD titled “How an Airline Captain Should Look and Act” in his apartment.
The FBI is investigating whether Mahmoud Maawad, 29, had any connection to terrorists. He is awaiting trial on charges of wire fraud and fraudulent use of a Social Security number.
Maawad, who is in the United States illegally, told the judge during a hearing Thursday that he is studying science and economics at the University of Memphis.
“My school is everything. I stay in this country for seven years; I stay for the school,” he said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Parker said Thursday that the airport-related items were found during a Sept. 9 search.
“The specific facts and circumstances are scary,” Parker said.
U.S. Magistrate Judge S. Thomas Anderson ruled that Maawad be held without bond.
“It is hard for the court to understand why he has a large concentration of those (aviation) items, and nothing else to indicate Mr. Maawad plans to stay in the community,” Anderson said.
Maawad had ordered $3,000 in aviation materials, including DVDs titled “Ups and Downs of Takeoffs and Landings,” “Airplane Talk,” “Mental Math for Pilots” and “Mastering GPS Flying,” FBI agent Thad Gulczynski testified.
The company reported Maawad to authorities when he didn’t pay for $2,500 of merchandise it had delivered, Gulczynski said.
So we wouldn’t have found out about this guy if he had paid them? What kind of company is selling these materials to begin with!?
It would seem that the initial $60 odd billion that has already been allocated by the Federal Government is not enough, the total amount of money uncontitutionally allocated to this disaster could top $200 billion.
President Bush deserves his 41% approval rating, I wish it were lower. Listening to the deluge of empty rhetoric streaming out of his mouth tonight it is clear this man never had any business being president.
Well, if the Pledge (merely because of the words “Under God”) is unconstitutional, how much longer will it be before the Declaration of Independence is also axed? The idea of the 1st Amendment has become so distorted that the Founders would not even understand what we are arguing about.
This is a must read for everyone. Edward Whelan is the man when it comes to Constitutional Law. You should all check out his comments at NRO’s Bench Memos.
As for Brown and Originalism, we at SaveTheGOP have had this discussion before. Whelan explains (like Bork, McConnell and Roberts) how the Supreme Court did not need to go off the philosophical deep end (i.e. invoking the “living constitution”) to get to Brown v. Board of Education.
The Left’s “killer” argument against an originalist reading of the Constitution is that adherence to the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment purportedly would not have yielded the just result — the end to the evil of segregated public schools — mandated by the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Margaret Talbot’s interesting but flawed profile of Justice Scalia and originalism in a recent issue of the New Yorker (which I wrote about here) is typical: The only “way to get to Brown,” she asserts, is “to embrace the ‘living Constitution.’ ” Why’s that? “[I]t’s hard to see an originalist justification” for Brown, since, she claims, the “same Congress that passed the Fourteenth Amendment segregated Washington schools.” Justice Scalia “sometimes acknowledges as much, saying that a faulty — that is, a non-originalist — method can occasionally produce good results, a Scalian variation on ‘Even a broken watch is right twice a day.’ ” And further, she tells us, liberal legal scholar Cass Sunstein has declared that a “doctrinaire originalist” would reject Brown. Case closed. No need for further discussion.
But wait: Every one of Talbot’s assertions is off the mark. First, the 37th Congress created segregated public schools for black children in D.C. in 1862, but it was a later, different Congress — the 39th — that in 1866 proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868. As the brilliant scholar (and now tenth-circuit judge) Michael McConnell explains in his 1995 Virginia Law Review article “Originalism and the Desegregation Decisions”: “At no time after the Fourteenth Amendment did Congress vote in favor of segregated schools in the District [of Columbia] (although Congress appropriated money for the segregated schools that already existed).” In addition, the restrictions of the Fourteenth Amendment apply only to states, not to Congress, so congressional action with respect to D.C. schools provides a shaky foundation for any inference as to the contemporaneous understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Click here to read the full text.
Daniel Henninger brings up some very interesting points in his article, that show the need for an open discussion on how our jurisdictions of our governments should be revised and reformed to better handle not only natural disasters, but bio/chemical weapons disasters as well.
Who Should Call
The Cavalry
If Katrina Calls?
September 9, 2005;
“When you fly over the Gulf, it looks like a WMD exploded,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul McHale told me this week. “Katrina very nearly approached the operational requirements of a WMD event; this was the first test of the high-end capability envisioned by the strategy.”
The “strategy” is a three-month-old document called “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support.” It describes the Defense Department’s plans to defend the U.S. from a WMD attack or deal with the rubble and mass casualties of such an attack. Traditionally DoD has always helped civil authorities contend with the ruin of natural disasters. That Katrina’s massive scale mirrored a WMD attack, obliterating a city, is a coincidence. But it raises the question of whether the states, or relatively vulnerable states like Louisiana, are up to the job of being “first responders” to a WMD attack or its natural equivalent. If they are not, we need to change some laws.
The popular impression left the past week — that the government was wholly unprepared for Katrina — is not true. Significant U.S. military assistance was on alert throughout the week prior to Katrina’s landfall. Why those highly trained and drilled assets did not move into New Orleans sooner is a question that should now sit at the center of a debate over who should have the authority — the states or the federal government — to be the “first mover.” Click to continue »
This report is more than just a little disconcerting and shows the length to which the Chinese are willing to go to get what they want. I would like to see some reform and progressive steps taken to address these issues, as they will become more and more frequent and dangerous in the future.