From the inestimable Shaun Kenney, we learn of this rant by Michael Savage regarding the recent protests:

It is a pig story! It’s animal farm all over again. And also make no bones about it, it’s the greedy Catholic Church that was behind it because the people of America walked away from the molesters’ dens and they need to bring in people from the Third World who are still gullible enough to sit there and listen to the molesters…the Roman Catholic Church was behind this, the Roman Catholic Church started this a year ago. The Roman Catholic Church flooded the streets because they cannot get parishioners anymore amongst educated white people who have caught onto the racket and instead they need to import dummies to sit in the church pews. That’s the story and it is not difficult for you to understand—I’m telling you the truth. It’s all about greed. It’s greed at the top of the Catholic Church.

Make no mistake about why this is happening. This has nothing to do with compassion for Mexican workers. This has nothing to do with fairness for Mexican workers—it has to do with the greed…. That’s all there is to it. And that includes the Catholic Church pigs. And if you don’t like it, don’t listen to the show—I really don’t care anymore. I’m not going to be duped by this sanctimonious garbage that all churches are good and that the institution itself is good. Bah humbug. The institution is rotten from the top to the bottom.

Can’t conservatism purge this punk?

Par for the course

Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia struck a Capitol Hill police officer Wednesday morning after the officer, not recognizing her as a member of Congress, tried to stop her from stepping around a security checkpoint, police confirmed.

I guess Representative McKinney is too important to deal with the help. But this raises a much bigger issue. Does it realy only take a lapel pin to get past security on Capital Hill?

Carl DeMaio details San Diego’s fall from grace and its path to resurection.

Ten years ago, San Diego was considered one of the best run cities in America. The seventh-largest city in the country was long seen as a bastion of fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets, friendly to business, tourists and the military. That picture has since come crumbling down in a hail of mismanagement, corruption and scandal. In a widely documented fall from grace, San Diego is now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy–with a budget shortfall, a suspended credit rating and a $2 billion or larger hole in its municipal pension plan.

It turns out that San Diego had been covering up fiscal problems for years. Officials began raiding water and sewer funds in the mid 1990’s to cover up deficits. At the same time, the city budget began to swell as spending exploded. Once raids on water and sewer funds were insufficient to cover up the annual operating deficit, the City decided to raid its pension fund—starting in 1996. To do so, it needed to buy the cooperation of the leaders of the city’s powerful unions. The solution? In exchange for the city getting to shortchange its required pension payment, the city employees got a nice increase in pension benefits.

Enter Mayor Dick Murphy, a Republican elected in 2000. Murphy presided over the construction of a taxpayer-funded baseball stadium, pushed through plans for a new downtown library, and approved pay for city workers. Realizing that the budget could not be balanced for real, Murphy used accounting gimmicks to cover up the financial problems, spiked water and sewer fees by 30%, and accelerated the city’s underfunding of the pension system. In 2002, Murphy once again gave the labor unions a massive increase in benefits—in exchange for continuing the pension underfunding scheme. Politically, labor unions were quite happy. By this point, they had gained control of the City Council and had a nominally Republican Mayor in their pocket. The opportunity was now ripe to push for a tax increase. In 2004, Mayor Murphy and the labor-dominated City Council claimed that tax and fee increases would be the only way to address the City’s budget shortfall—which they claimed was a modest $20 million.

Republicans and RINOs in particular need to take note.

What can conservatives learn from the San Diego meltdown? The biggest key to good government is transparency. Tax and spend politicians will always hold up images of police cars, playgrounds and paramedics, promising a litany of pie-in-the sky services in exchange for just a little bigger piece of your paycheck. Government reformers must expose this as a false choice, and to do so, we must get in the trenches. If conservatives perpetually fight tax battles on this footing, the war will be lost. The fight has to be fought using solid research on how much it costs government to do simple processes or provide services. It must be fought by exposing inefficiency, waste, and poor results. If you shine a light on government at these levels, the people will look—and chances are they will not like what they see. And chances are, they will demand better.

Lyn Nofziger passed away yesterday. He was a military man, then journalist, and then Reaganite from the California days. He was also one of that breed of Reagan conservatives many of us didn’t know as much about as we probably should have.

Peter Robinson, who did know him, said this about him:
“He’s also the only man I’ve ever known who wore a Mickey Mouse tie to the White House every day—not that he could abide government work, even in the White House, long enough to remain on the federal payroll very long.”

You can learn a lot more about the man by reading his autobiography. He also had a website, although it seems a little weak on content.

We all know the left has gone, as they would put it, bats–t crazy. The latest evidence: Sean Penn likes to vent on an Ann Coulter doll.

Sean, it is a child’s play thing.

Blackwell, Ohio’s secretary of state, was the choice among 39 percent of registered Republicans who responded to a mail poll by The Columbus Dispatch, an 11-point edge over state Attorney General Jim Petro……….

Blackwell held a 3-to-1 margin in his home Cincinnati area and a 12-point lead in the Cleveland area. Petro was ahead by 5 points in the Columbus area. They received nearly the same amount of support in northwest Ohio.

This is awesome news for the Republican Party in Ohio. Blackwell has the ability to take the Ohio GOP back to its conservative roots and can put Ohioans’ trust back into the Republican Party after having it shattered by crooks like Bob Taft and the many others in the State Assembly affected by the RINO disease. I think Blackwell has an excellent chance of beating Strickland in November once his ideas get out and the people of Ohio get a better idea of his character. Hopefully, the Ohio Republican Party hasn’t already done too much damage to deprive him of that chance.

“You say it’s not amnesty, but it is,” Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa said of temporary worker proposals. “If it looks, acts and smells like amnesty, then in my eyes, it is amnesty.”

That’s about as plain and simple as you can put it. Bush once again is proving that he is out of touch not just with the Republican Party, but with the American people. Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to illegal immigration. Bush needs to drop this guest worker program now because he is not doing the Republicans any favors for the upcoming elections this year.

If Bush wants a guest worker program, fine, but no program until the 11 million illegal aliens are removed from this country and the government starts cracking down on businesses hiring them. The Republicans are more concerned about their big business contributors who profit off of illegal immigration, than they are about what is best for this country.

There are two things that irritate me more than liberal Democrats,
and they are Republicans that campaign as conservatives and vote
like Democrats, and then Republicans that put their careers and
special interests head of the interests of their constituents. I have come to find that when it comes to the conservative movement, Republicans are their own worst enemy. This is why primaries are so important.
In Georgia, my very own state house Rep. Stacey Reece, who is also running for the state senate seat being vacated by Casey Cagle, has recently made headlines in the Atlanta Journal Constitution because of dealings with Lobbyists. Reece who is engaged to be married, was given a wedding shower by 21 different lobbyists at an exclusive club in down town Atlanta. Reece accepted this against the personal advice of the members of the house leadership. What is also disturbing is that the fact that these lobbyists are involved in very important and controversial Bills that are before the state legislature. It is instances like this that lead to the big headline grabbers that Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff have managed to get recently. This is an election year, and with the all the attention already on the Republican Party, we don’t need any more headlines like these. When politicians put their personal careers and special interests ahead of the interests of their constituents and even their party, the ones who lose are the people. That is why what Mark and Alex are doing in Pennsylvania is so important. The tip of the spear is at the local level. Careerist, elitists and sellouts would never be in the positions of power if someone stood up to them early. Lets keep up the fight.

From the Club For Growth

In Survey USA’s latest Senate approval numbers, Senator Lincoln Chafee gets hammered by his own party. Among Rhode Island Republicans, Chafee’s approval numbers are:

Approve = 37%
Disapprove = 53%

What’s amazing about this besides the obvious fact that Rhode Island Republicans don’t approve of Chafee is that Democrats and Independents DO approve of Chafee:

Among Democrats
Approve = 57%
Disapprove = 38%

Among Independents
Approve = 53%
Disapprove = 40%

And, what’s equally amazing, is that Jack Reed, Rhode Island’s other Senator, gets a better approval rating than from Republicans than Chafee and he’s a self-avowed liberal!

Approve: 52%
Disapprove: 38%

These numbers are truly remarkable.

Casey Cagle, GOP candidate for LT. Governor in Georgia, is holding a grassroots organizational meeting this Saturday in Woodstock, Georgia from 10:30am to 12:00noon. The meeting will be held at:

Slapshots Grille
185 Woodstock Pkwy
Woodstock, GA 30188
770.516.4921
www.slapshotsgrille.com

Hope all you Georgians can make it.

Rick Santorum kicked off the grand opening of his reelection campaign office here in Pittsburgh this morning. The office was filled with supporters and members of the news media like Molly Hennenberg from Fox News. As usual, Rick gave a heart felt speech that was both uplifting and to the point. Pennsylvania cannot afford to lose him in November.

I had the lucky priveledge of being able to sit right in the front row so I got some good pictures. (Alex and Mark procrastinated and got there late so they had to stand in the back)

I can’t claim to know much about Illinois politics, and I trust Alex’s take on David McSweeney, yet this article in the National Journal raised some alarm bells…

Republicans took a step toward political revival Tuesday in Illinois, where they nominated viable moderates (relatively speaking) in two key races. Performances this fall by Judy Baar Topinka and David McSweeney, while isolated to specific races, could say a lot about how Republicans fare in midterms elections. Not just in the Land of Lincoln, but in suburbs across the country.
…
Hoping to take back Crane’s seat, Republicans in the 8th District this week nominated McSweeney, a conservative by some standards, but decidedly less so than his two main primary opponents. McSweeney’s nomination suggests, anecdotally at least, that Republicans have peered into the abyss of minority status, and are trying to back away.

By choosing a relatively moderate candidate in an increasingly competitive district, some GOP strategists say, they’re better positioned to compete with Bean and take back the seat this fall. “

Can someone fill me in on why McSweeney is a moderate? What’s the basis for this? (Social issues seemed to feature big later in the article.)

Our perenial lurker and my friend (and did I mention token “liberal”) Dave Shiffman has a great letter to the editor published in the Duke paper that shows just how ridiculous things can be on college campuses. Read it here.

So, my view on “Crunchy Conservatism” has shifted from annoyed/slightly amused, to simply angry when I read this in Jonah Goldberg’s excellent column in National Review: “Dreher embraces a smorgasbord of popular liberal-Left assumptions about the environment, organic foods, and what-not and says that, since he’s a good conservative, these things must be conservative too. This narcissism caused him to support a pro-choice liberal Democrat over Joe Barton, the incumbent pro-life conservative in his congressional district, because Barton is ’soft’ on pollution” (emphasis mine).

And John O’Sullivan, in the same issue, adds that Dreher and friends argue that “conservative support for free markets should be tempered by concern for nature, family life, religion, and social stability. My sense is that conservatism, as opposed to libertarianism, has always accepted such limits to pure capitalist competition” (emphasis mine).

Well said.

Hello bloggers:

I would like to take advantage of this glorious Sunday and direct your attention to the newest edition of the GW Patriot

Yours truly has an article on the Roosevelt Institution that you might want to check out, especially if you’re still in college.

That’s a lot of zeros. More at Sam’s post below. I just wanted everyone to see our new debt ceiling. Because we know the President will not veto it. He has yet to veto a bill during his Presidency.

Go here to make your picks for the 2008 Presidential elections. A pretty cool idea if you ask me. Hat tip, Peachpundit.com

The Senate voted Thursday to allow the national debt to swell to nearly $9 trillion, preventing a first-ever default on U.S. Treasury notes.

The bill passed by a 52-48 vote. The increase to $9 trillion represents about $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States. The bill now goes to President Bush for his signature.

This goes just beyond any practical logic. What is the point of having a debt limit if it can just be raised when the limit is reached? Once again, the Republicans have failed when it comes to fiscal discipline. There was no excuse for this measure to be taken when there is so much waste that could be cut.

Case and point:

Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa., appears poised to win an increase of $7 billion in new and real funding for education and health research. The $7 billion would effectively be used to break Bush’s $873 billion budget cap for 2007, which represents the most significant vestige of fiscal discipline remaining in Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg’s budget.

It’s pretty bad when the Republicans have to be lectured on fiscal discipline by Harry Reed.

“When it comes to deficits, this president owns all the records,” said Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. “The three largest deficits in our nation’s history have all occurred under this administration’s watch.”

God save us from the neocons.

There are simply some twisted people in the world. From Dawn Eden we are alerted to a young woman who had an abortion. Somehow I don’t think showing pictures of aborted children would change her mind…

So I found a brush, scooted the embryo up and out of the water, and put it on a square of toilet paper so I could look at it (and threw the brush away). I didn’t know what to think about it at first, but the more and closer I looked at it, the more I thought it had to be the single neatest thing I had ever seen. I didn’t want to touch it because it looked so gelatinous, like I might accidentally pop it. But I was looking at it and seeing the teeny face (it was at the point where it has the huge flat nose and looks kind of like a puppy) and the little webbed flipper feet and the huge black eyes, going “HOLY CRAP THIS THING IS FREAKING AWESOME.” I called Austin up to see it, and he wasn’t quite as giddy about it but he still wanted to see it. Apparently he didn’t realize it would have fingers and toes and all of that so soon.

I knew I couldn’t keep it in the freezer indefinitely or anything like that, so I took a few pictures of it and gave it a burial at sea. I kind of wanted to actually bury it, like all my fish and hamsters, but it would amount to the same thing eventually, so I decided there was no real reason.

and from her comments section…

[N]ot only did I want to keep it, I had all kinds of great ideas about making a fetusicle in the freezer, or getting some some of that plasticine crap and making myself an embryo medallion. As a conversation-starter, of course. “What the hell are you wearing?” “Oh, that’s my abortion.” “?!!!” Mwa ha ha!

Sick, sad, and terrifying. Pray for her.

In response to the SRLC straw poll taken last week which has been hyped about for various reasons (McCain’s attempts to turn his loss into a political win by encouraging votes for Bush, Mitt Romney having a strong showing, etc.), GopBloggers.org has started a blogosphere-wide 2008 Republican primary straw poll. The unique and useful aspects of this poll, while it isn’t scientific by any means, are that it casts a pretty wide net over Movement Conservatives who are prominent in the blogosphere, and that one can cast a favorable, unfavorable, or no vote on each individual primary candidate.

Unfortunately the results sheet will not come up accurately for SaveTheGop (maybe because we aren’t registered at GopBloggers), so I am redirecting you to RedState to vote on the ballot on their page. Go forth and be opinionated.

There you go Alex, I’m trying to motivate some more posting around here….