President Bush announced his resignation today. Former CIA chief and Texas Aggie Robert Gates has been nominated as his replacement.

There was some good news last night. My home state of Georgia continued to push further into the red. Sonny Perdue won in a landslide and Casey Cagle (whom this blog endorsed) won convincingly. Cagle is the First Republican Lt. Governor in Georgia history. The GOP almost had 2 pickups in the House (not that it would have made any difference) in Georgia’s 8th and 12th districts. Collins and Burns lost because of failures in the GOP at the National level.

But what is lost in all the hype of the Democratic takeover is the victory of property owners in the wake of the disastrous Kelo Supreme Court decision. 9 states passed provisions to restrict eminent domain. Voters in Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, and South Carolina all voted to restrict the use of eminent domain. The measure passed here in Georgia with 83% of the vote.

H/T: Boortz

Mike Pence:

Some will argue that we lost our majority because of scandals at home and challenges abroad. I say, we did not just lose our majority, we lost our way.

While the scandals of the 109th Congress harmed our cause, the greatest scandal in Washington, D.C. is runaway federal spending.

After 1994, we were a majority committed to balanced federal budgets, entitlement reform and advancing the principles of limited government. In recent years, our majority voted to expand the federal government’s role in education, entitlements and pursued spending policies that created record deficits and national debt.

This was not in the Contract with America and Republican voters said, ‘enough is enough.

Our opponents will say that the American people rejected our Republican vision. I say the American people didn’t quit on the Contract with America, we did. And in so doing, we severed the bonds of trust between our party and millions of our most ardent supporters.

As the 110th Congress convenes next year, Republicans must cordially accept defeat and dedicate ourselves to advancing our cause as the loyal opposition knowing that the only way to retake our natural, governing majority, is to renew our commitment to limited government, national defense, traditional values and reform.

Now will the rest of the GOP wake up and get back to its core principles? One can only hope.

H/T: The Blogfather

I just flipped to Fox and Friends, and though I caught DeLay midsentence I heard him say, “when you forget your principles, you lose; when you play not to lose, you lose.” What a joke. This is DeLay of the K Street Project, which empowered lobbyists in influencing Republican leadership. This is DeLay of the Medicare Part D vote, in which he kept the vote open into the wee hours of the morning arm-twisting the final votes to pass legislation that would please LBJ with his Great Society programs. DeLay is a representative of exactly where the GOP went wrong in the House, and for him to project his faults on others is ridiculous on its face. DeLay may be trying to portray himself as the last soldier of the Contract With America, but we all know that he is part of the power-comfortable disease that afflicted the House GOP. Good riddance to him and here’s hoping that Pence and Shadegg can assume the Republican leadership posts in the new House minority.

The decision of the NYGOP to unilaterally surrender to the Democrat party has proven a complete success, they were able to lose every single statewide race. Good times. Lessons?

1.) When you nominate unimpressive and incompetent candidates, you lose. cf. Jeannine Pirro.
2.) When you nominate otherwise intriguing candidates who have serious moral flaws, you lose. John Spencer failed to reach even 35 points, which I assumed anyone left of Zhirnovsky would post against Hillary.
3.) When you nominate good candidates but refuse to do anything to get them elected, you come off looking like a pack of idiots. Someone owes John Faso an apology. Running a conservative, only to stab him in the back to “prove” that conservatives can’t get elected in New York is BS.

Fortunately, no one is watching.