Before

After

Ahmadinejad, take notes.

Website here

Same old class warfare meme, and to top it all off he’s using Katrina as a nice political backdrop, one would think it would highlight the failure of big government, but instead he and millions of others see it as the need for bigger government. No one talks about the fact that small government states that relied less on the Feds and more on themselves (ie. Mississippi) fared much better in reconstruction that Louisianna. Quite frankly Gov. Blanco of LA is the most disgraceful governor in the country who failed miserably in her states time of need.

Oh and a video from John Edwards

In 2008 John McCain could well capture the Republican nomination for the same reason that Bob Dole did in 1996. Regardless of his chances against Bill Clinton, Republicans gave the nod to Dole because he’d earned it by long service to his party. It was his “turn.” McCain, by staunch campaigning in 2000 for the election of the man who defeated him in the primaries worked to earn what Dole had in the same way. By working hard for George Bush again in 2004 and for his party’s congressional candidates in 2006, McCain has amassed a huge stack of political chips among party leaders and back benchers. He wants people to believe that 2008 is his “turn”, no matter how he stacks up against his Republican competition or against his likely Democratic opponent. That could be enough to get major donors to commit to him early and hogtie enough Republican state organizations to pre-empt a competitive primary race. But McCain is mercurial. And when the heat is on, he often lashes out.

McCain has been a media darling ever since he grandstanded his “anti-torture” amendment in faux opposition to the Bush administration’s policy (which didn’t allow torture, a practice that was illegal years before McCain’s amendment). As McCain gains momentum toward ’08, his former media friends will be tossing him in the same frying pan as all the other potential nominees. All it will take is one big explosion of the McCain temper and those same former friends will be writing editorials and op-eds comparing him to Captain Queeg. McCain has a very long way to go before he’s locked up anything. And so does Sen. Clinton.

Real Clear Politics

Anybody who thinks that McCain, Hillary, Obama, or whoever has their nomination locked up knows little about how politics and campaigning work. All the hype by the media and the polls taken mean nothing two years out of an election. I have little doubt that John McCain will NOT be the GOP nominee and that is a wonderful thing. There are plenty of other candidates out there who would better represent our party who have yet to throw their hat in the ring. Don’t be fooled.

*Keating visits SC
*During his time as Governor, Keating apparently joked about killing teachers:

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The president of the Oklahoma Education Association says a quip Gov. Frank Keating made about a deadly way to deal with the teachers union hurts.

When Keating was asked by someone Monday night at Oral Roberts University what he considered the best way to deal with an Oklahoma education union, he paused and grinned and said ‘‘Homicide.”

Read the whole thing here…

Second, take yourself seriously. How many of you are over 18? All right. How many of you are over 21? Okay. Everyone of you is old enough to have been a rifleman in Vietnam. A number of you are old enough to have been platoon leaders, or company commanders, depending on the situation, and how rapidly you move up in rank. This is the same business, we’re just lucky, in this country, we don’t use bullets, we use ballots instead. You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power. In a sense, one of my challenges to the CR’s would be to grow up. Take yourself seriously, you’re not a child.

Don’t run around and play games. When one of your elders comes in and says, “I don’t like what you’re doing,” tell them “Tough”. They ain’t you. Do you like what they do?

Do you like the state of the Republican Party? Do you think you ought to respect Bill Brock because he has done such a great job? Or Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford, the only incumbent president since Herbert Hoover to lose an election? They have done a terrible job, a pathetic job. In my lifetime, literally in my lifetime, I was born in 1943, we have not had a competent national Republican leader. Not ever! We’ve had some guys who weren’t too embarrassed. But what’s the primary purpose of a political leader, above anything else? In this system, it is to build a majority capable of sustaining itself, because if we don’t do that, we don’t make the laws, we don’t write the taxes, we don’t decide how to start a war, we don’t keep the country strong, we don’t do nothing except carve from these people’s ability. And in my lifetime, we have not had a single Republican leader capable of doing that. Oh, they’ve had opportunities: The Korean War, rapid inflation, the racial crisis of the 50’s and 60’s, the Vietnam war. We’ve had tremendous opportunities and we’ve blown it, but we’re all nice people.

Now that things have calmed down in my life I will be posting more here and reviving my religion blog. On that note go checkout my new post over at Areopagus Blog on the Da Vinci Code phenemenon.

Courtesy of the New York Times: “Bipartisan Effort to Draft Immigration Bill.” Bush and Co. are going to get the amnesty and guest worker program they’ve been after now that the Democrats control Congress:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 25 — Counting on the support of the new Democratic majority in Congress, Democratic lawmakers and their Republican allies are working on measures that could place millions of illegal immigrants on a more direct path to citizenship than would a bill that the Senate passed in the spring.

The lawmakers are considering abandoning a requirement in the Senate bill that would compel several million illegal immigrants to leave the United States before becoming eligible to apply for citizenship.

The lawmakers are also considering denying financing for 700 miles of fencing along the border with Mexico, a law championed by Republicans that passed with significant Democratic support.

Details of the bill, which would be introduced early next year, are being drafted. The lawmakers, who hope for bipartisan support, will almost certainly face pressure to compromise on the issues from some Republicans and conservative Democrats.

Still, the proposals reflect significant shifts since the November elections, as well as critical support from the Homeland Security Department.

Proponents said the prospects for such a measure, which would include tougher border security and a guest worker plan, had markedly improved since Nov. 7.

There you have it, folks. The titular head of the Republican Party is in favor of granting lawbreakers citizenship, defunding a fence on our southern border intended to stop further illegal crossings, and cheapening our nation’s citizenship all for a little political gain and his quest to define his administration for history. It’s a sad day for the GOP when a Republican-controlled White House will go along with such nonsense, regardless of what party holds Congress.

Rumors are now swirling around DC that Obama has definitely decided to run. I will state that I believe him to be a very formidable candidate and I think probably in the top three most likely to be President in ‘08. (McCain, Hillary, Obama) The problem for conservatives is that Obama brings a new and much more intellectually honest voice to liberalism, something that really hasn’t been the case since JFK.

I stumbled across this article today on Real Clear Politics and I was 0verjoyed to see somebody still talking about the prospects, as slim as they are, of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford jumping into the Presidential fray for 2008. The author is spot on about his potential impact.

With the implosion of George Allen, movement conservatives no longer have a candidate in the presidential mix that looks and acts like one of them. Even though the field contains several heavy hitters, such as John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, the GOP grassroots has no one that is a natural fit.

If a small but growing number of conservatives have their way, however, a candidate that could truly excite the base might enter the fray: my old boss and current South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

On paper, a Sanford candidacy seems Quixotic. Entering the White House derby at this point would actually be late in the game, he’s little-known outside South Carolina and Washington, D.C., and his main foil the past four years has been the GOP-dominated legislature.

Well, who the hell ever heard of John Kerry before 2004? It’s never too late, especially if Larry, Curly, and Moe are the only three we’ve got at this point.

But if Republican primary voters decide that the 2008 standard-bearer needs to bring the party back to its Reagan roots, Sanford could be the dark horse to watch. The recently re-elected governor could capture conservatives’ imagination with his unrelenting adherence to core principles. Unlike most GOP governors who either pushed their state parties to the left or simply acquiesced to tax or spending increases passed by legislatures of either party, Sanford has battled profligate Republicans at every turn.

When the state House overrode all but one of his 106 spending line-item vetoes in 2004, Gov. Sanford stormed the Capitol the next morning with a piglet under each arm. Red-faced Republicans squealed, but voters loved the bold move. Realizing they couldn’t be quite as wasteful as their counterparts, the Senate sustained seven of the vetoes–but still overrode 99.

I give the piglet incident one of the boldest and gutsiest moves in American political history, and he did this to his own party. That is the kind of guy we need in the White House.

Sanford has been rankling fellow Republicans long before arriving in Columbia. As Congressman from 1995-2001, GOP leadership knew that he was beyond their control. In 1999, he and then-Rep. Tom Coburn (R-OK) used parliamentary procedures to save taxpayers a fortune. The farm spending bill came to the floor with an “open rule”–meaning any germane amendments could be offered. Reps. Sanford and Coburn together drafted 121 fat-trimming amendments, and after trudging through just a few dozen of them, House leadership pulled the entire bill. It was only re-introduced after $1 billion had been carved out.

Though it was exciting to work for Sanford, it wasn’t lucrative. His staff was consistently among the lowest-paid on Capitol Hill, and we were expected to pinch every penny in running the office. But a hypocrite Sanford was not; he slept on a cot in his office–all six years. Taxpayers were rewarded for his frugality. Sanford returned well over $1 million of his office budget to the Treasury during his tenure.

I am not going to paste the entire article as I think the point has been made, but you can read the rest of it here.

Mark Sanford would be the second coming of Ronald Reagan and I have no doubt that he would bring back the Reagan Democrats, Independents, and Libertarians that the Republican Party has pissed off for the last five years. I think this guy would destroy whoever the Democrats nominate because he is the honest real deal and Americans respect that.

I strongly urge any readers who want to save our party to write Governor Sanford and plead with him to run. I am moving to South Carolina this spring and as soon as I get down there I will not waste any time getting involved to try and make this man the next President of the United States.

I can’t say that I blame him. Everything he says is spot on. We’ve seen the largest growth of government ever under the Republican Party. Personal freedoms and liberties continue to erode in this country. The last four years of complete GOP control did not reverse that, but only add to it. More people need to wake up to what the Republicans are doing and start changing the trash or more will follow in Barr’s footsteps.

Bob Barr, who served eight years as a Republican congressman before losing his seat in 2002, announced Friday that he is now a “proud, card-carrying Libertarian.” And he encouraged others to join him.

“It’s something that’s been bothering me for quite some time, the direction in which the party has been going more and more toward big government and disregard toward privacy and civil liberties,” said Barr, 58, a lawyer and consultant living in Atlanta. “In terms of where the country needs to be going to get back to our constitutional roots … I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to do that is to work with a party that practices what it preaches, and that is the Libertarian Party.”

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/12/15/D8M1ILB00.html

This is not the way I would like for the Republicans to regain control of the Senate, but this morning it is looking like an almost sure thing now.

This is pretty serious……

Associated Press

Democrats tidying up a cluster of unfinished spending bills dumped on them by departing Republican leaders in Congress will start by removing billions of dollars in lawmakers’ pet projects next month.

The move, orchestrated by the incoming chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations committees, could prove politically savvy even as it proves unpopular with other members of Congress, who as a group will lose thousands of so-called earmarks.

“There will be no congressional earmarks,” Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., and Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., said Monday in a statement announcing their plans, which were quickly endorsed by incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D- Nev.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/12/11/D8LV029G0.html

Wow. I never thought I would live to see the day that the Republicans run up record deficits while the Democrats cut out the pork. Let’s see if they live up to their word and that this is not just a mere political ploy. Of course, trimming pork this one time won’t cut it, no pun intended. They need to continue to do it year after year and increasing the amount of fat that they trim.

Since the decorations and Christmas sales appeared this year before Halloween, I found it hard to get into the Christmas spirit. I was Jaded. I predict the first Christmas sightings shortly after Labor Day next year.

Well the scrooge in me has left and I am finally ready for Christmas. Enjoy

Congressman William Jefferson D-New Orleans, with his wife Andrea Jefferson speaks to supporters in New Orleans Saturday, Dec. 9, 2006. Jefferson defeated democratic State Representative Karen Carter for re-election.

I don’t generally like to make partisan comparisons because I hold my views and ideals far above being a Republican, but there is a noticable difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to upholding those principles. Case and point, William Jefferson. If a Republican Congressman had $90,000 stashed in a freezer in his house which he embezzled through bribery would that man be reelected to office, let alone even be allowed to run again? We took care of our Mark Foleys and Duke Cunninghams, but what of the Democrats? William Jefferson is just another to add to the list below Alcee Hastings, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Robert Byrd, Barney Franks, Gerry Studds, and so on and so on.

I shouldn’t be suprised though. This is the same city full of brainwashed welfare leeching trough feeders that reelected Ray Nagin to be their mayor.

Watch this: anti-Iraq propaganda.

Pure bs.

Heaven forbid we fight a war that we responded to after numerous terrorist attacks. Heaven forbid we fight the very people that who want to kill all of us. Heaven forbid we learn lessons from the past. Heaven forbid we don’t abandon people who have depended on us for several years to save them, to defend them, and to deliver them from tryanny.

I have never been so angered and emotionally touched by such B.S. videos. This video is complete and utter propoganda meant to smear and misrepresent the sacrifices this country made in Vietnam and the current war in the Middle East. Were mistakes made in Vietnam? Yes. Have mistakes been made in this war? Absolutely (I’m talking to you, Rumsfeld, follow the Powell Doctrine next time).

This does not excuse misrepresenting our focus and our goals in fighting this current war. This war is not WWII. This war is not Vietnam. Are ther parallels? Sure, there will be parallels between any two wars. This is a war against fundamentalist nutheads who want to either convert us or kill us all. There is no middle ground. There is no negotiation. We must kill every last one of these people who demand that we follow their cult or die. This truly is a fight for civilization; this is a fight for life or death.

Culture Shock on Capitol Hill: House to Work 5 Days a Week.

The more they work the more ways they will find to raise our taxes.

Its all Iraq Study Group, All the time.

Stop Her Now.

Republican Sen. Brownback to Explore 2008 White House Bid

The Orthodox and Catholic Churches are healing old wounds, but the Episcopal Church is on the verge of splintering.

Two of the country’s largest and most historic Episcopal congregations — both in Fairfax County — will vote next week on whether to leave the U.S. church on ideological grounds and affiliate instead with a controversial Nigerian archbishop. The decision could lead to a bitter court battle and the loss of $25 million in property.

Many members of The Falls Church and Truro Church, as well as some conservative leaders around the country, hope a split will establish a legal structure that would make it easier for dozens more like-minded congregations to also depart the national denomination.

At center of the split is the continuing divide between liberal and conservative wings of the Episcopal Church.

Some conservatives in the Episcopal Church, the U.S. wing of the worldwide Anglican Communion, believe the church abandoned Scripture by installing a gay bishop in New Hampshire in 2003, among other things. Those feelings of alienation were strengthened when Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori — who supports the New Hampshire bishop — was elected this summer to lead the national church.

It goes further, The Anglican Church, the Episcopal Church’s English brother, recently backed calls to end the life of babies born with severe disabilities. This movement is already prevalent among many US doctors and is simply Eugenics under a different name. Embryonic stem cell research being another tenant of the same meme.

It is the adoption of these and other liberal doctrines that threatens all of Christendom. The Epicopal Church fracture will setup opposing extremes that are more political than Biblical.

If the votes at The Falls Church and Truro succeed, as their leaders predict, the 3,000 active members of the two churches would join a new, Fairfax-based organization that answers to Nigerian Archbishop Peter J. Akinola, leader of the 17 million-member Nigerian church and an advocate of jailing gays. The new group hopes to become a U.S.-based denomination for orthodox Episcopalians.

Akinola and the Nigerian government are wrong for jailing those who commit homosexual acts because their is no grace in doing so, but are correct in standing up against the doctrinal lapses of the Anglican Communion. When the Episcopal Church splits, as it most certainly will, American Episcopalians may find themselves in a bitter feud that could last another 1000 years or until the 2nd coming.