Wow

Well folks newly elected Rep. Ellison, the first muslim elected to congress, called the cops on Rep. Tom Tancredo for… smoking a cigar in his office, which apparently is legal by house rules. Now here’s one thing  I don’t understand: did congress exempt itself out of the no smoking in the workplace rules that exist here in the People’s Republic of DC? If so, I am outraged. They should have to live by the same anti-freedom policies that they allow the rest of us who work in the District to live under.

Ugh.

A shell shocking document here

As for the Democrats in America, I tell them:

The people chose you due to your opposition to Bush’s policy in Iraq, but it appears that you are marching with him to the same abyss, and it appears that you will take part with him in the defeat and certain failure, with God’s permission. And the American people shall discover that you are all one side of the same coin of tyranny, criminality and failure; that failure which - by the grace of God - has neutralized the endeavors of the traitors who entered Kabul and Baghdad on the backs of American tanks, and has dashed their hopes as they see the Mujahideen come closer and closer to victory, which has led them to urgently appeal to America for help and implore it to continue to occupy their lands and raise the banners of the Cross over their heads.

It’s official. I am not sure who I am backing. Honestly, I don’t like any of them. I could support Newt, but I think he is too much of a policy wonk to win the Presidency. I know he says he is not running, but nobody makes that many trips to Iowa and New Hampshire and doesn’t run.

Representative Charlie Norwood (R, GA-10) passed away this morning from lung cancer. Our prayers are with his family and his friends, both personal and in the Georgia delegation.

An increase in the state minimum wage in Arizona is showing its effects:

Some Valley employers, especially those in the food industry, say payroll budgets have risen so much that they’re cutting hours, instituting hiring freezes and laying off employees.

And teens are among the first workers to go.

Companies maintain the new wage was raised to $6.75 per hour from $5.15 per hour to help the breadwinners in working-poor families. Teens typically have other means of support.

Mark Messner, owner of Pepi’s Pizza in south Phoenix, estimates he has employed more than 2,000 high school students since 1990. But he plans to lay off three teenage workers and decrease hours worked by others. Of his 25-person workforce, roughly 75 percent are in high school.

“I’ve had to go to some of my kids and say, ‘Look, my payroll just increased 13 percent,’ ” he said. ” ‘Sorry, I don’t have any hours for you.’ “

Messner’s monthly cost to train an employee has jumped from $440 to $580 as the turnover rate remains high.

“We go to great lengths to hang on to our high school workers, but there are a lot of kids who come in and get one check in their pocket and feel like they’re living large and out the door they go,” he said. “We never get our return on investment when that happens.”

There you have it.

Some more data and in-depth information about just how many minimum-wage earners are full-time working adults supporting families can be found in my earlier post here.

H/T to RedState. I think they can survive without the link.

I just voted in the GOP bloggers poll and was shocked to find Newt (26%) running a solid second behind Giuliani (34.4%), with McCain pulling a measly 2.6%. I am always shocked by how much the hatred for McCain runs in the blogosphere and in Republican inner circles. So if both hate him, how can he win? I am starting to think he is a very big paper tiger. Which could play right into the “Newt Bubble” imagine a McCain collapse in support in mid-fall, leaving just Giuliani and Romney… there is clearly room for a consensus candidate… Newt Gingrich who has shown surprising strength while running absolutely no official campaign. Now I am in no way endorsing Newt, but I do think the perfect storm necessary for him to win the nomination could be forming.

Consider that Newt would play to the desire for the base for a solid conservative (whether he truly is or not we could debate but no doubt he is publicly perceived as so) along with the distrust of Romney as a flip-flopper (a potent sting in a party that spent a billion dollars hammering flip-floppers in ‘04) and Giuliani (as well Giuliani, not to mention the corruption rumors that swirl around his consulting firm). If nothing else its interesting.

Tonight I had the opportunity, thanks to John McCormack, to debate at the CloseUp Foundation event in front of 200ish High School students from all across the country. Each student had a red card and a green card and they held up the red if they disagreed with what you said and the green if they agreed. It turned into an interesting chance to message test and see what a fairly large sample of students had to think about certain issues. So I wanted to share my findings.

1. We’re winning on abortion - Besides my support for allowing states to determine the drinking age, no statement of mine got a more lopsided response then “I want to protect every unborn _life_” We are clearly winning on this issue and I think its because of things like ultrasounds that allow people to understand it really is murder.

2. We’re losing on gay marriage - Probably for the same reason we are winning on the life issue. Our generation is the “fair” generation to them both abortion and banning gay marriage is unfair so they want to change them.

3. The “We were right on Vietnam” argument helps us on Iraq - The preponderance of red cards that popped up when I came out in favor of the surge was not surprising, but what was surprising was how many green cards went up when I said, “But we had this same argument thirty years ago, and we pulled out of Vietnam a huge mistake that resulted in the slavery of an entire subcontinent” I think in some odd way, Iraq has allowed conservatives to feel confident to rehash the Vietnam argument we lost in the 70s. Maybe in some odd way we want liberals to talk about Iraq. One guy, an admitted liberal, said that even he found our “abandonment” of the South Vietnamese appalling. Whoddathunkit?

4. Bush hatred runs deep - One of the first thing the liberal guy did in the debate was frame it about George Bush, a very good tactic, which stuck me in a hard position. Hatred for Bush runs indescribably deep and will be a liability for our party for years to come.

Calling all creative SAVE THE GOP readers. We will be releasing a limited edition STG T-shirt for our CPAC bash and we need your help. The winning designer will get a free t-shir.

SaveTheGOP is going to be an official CPAC blogger again this year so please stop by Bloggers Row to visit us. In addition, SaveTheGOP is going to be throwing one BIG party!

If you are a SaveTheGOP reader who will be in the DC area around March 3rd at 9PM then please come out to our party. It will be located at my house and there will be food, drinks, and politics, all the things you need for a good time.

EVITE HERE! 

RSVP to me at markdharris@gmail.com

Basically Rudy is trying to tell conservatives that he really isn’t interested in their vote, not that he wasn’t going to have to fight like hell for it anyway.

Giuliani says gun control helped reduce N.Y. crime

“I used gun control as mayor,” he said at a news conference Saturday during a swing through California. But “I understand the Second Amendment. I understand the right to bear arms.” He said what he did as mayor would have no effect on hunting.

The 2nd Amendment is not about hunting Rudy, it is about making sure men like you don’t overstep your authority once in office.  Despite his powerful name recognition I don’t see Giuliani having any chance of being elected in ‘08.

Its bad when you have to open your campaign with an apology to your former campaign manager because you slept with his wife. He will probably win anyway.

In this winter of their discontents, nostalgia for Ronald Reagan has become for many conservatives a substitute for thinking. This mental paralysis — gratitude decaying into idolatry — is sterile: Neither the man nor his moment will recur. Conservatives should face the fact that Reaganism cannot define conservatism.

George Will reviews John Patrick Diggins’s new book Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History for the Washington Post here. Basically Diggins (and Will) are saying that Reagan was an anomaly of the conservative movement and hint strongly that he perhaps wasn’t much of a true conservative himself.

Click to continue »

RESOLVED that conservative thought is and always will be about the fighting of the “long defeat”. Discuss.

“…through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.” - Galadriel (Lord of the Rings)

“Actually, I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic; so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ - though it contains some samples of final victory.” - JRR Tolkien

… it’s about protecting incumbents.

But now the contrast between McCain the presidential candidate and McCain the reformer can be jarring. McCain’s campaign says that he is still studying whether to forgo the public financing and spending limits he has long supported, but that he will not be handicapped by restrictions his competitors will not face in 2008.

McCain the reformer worked unsuccessfully through Congress and the courts to try to stop nonprofit political groups known as 527s from using unlimited donations to run political ads and fund other activities aimed at influencing voters in the run-up to elections. He reintroduced legislation last week to end 527 donations, but there appears to be little appetite in Congress to pass it.

McCain the candidate now expects Republicans to use the same big-money 527 groups in the 2008 elections to beat Democrats, if the groups remain legal. “The senator believes that both parties should be subjected to an even playing field. If Democratic organizations are allowed to take advantage of 527s, Republican organizations will, too,” said Mark Salter, a senior McCain adviser. The senator declined to be interviewed.

McCain the reformer relentlessly argued that six- and seven-figure “soft money” checks that corporations, wealthy individuals and unions were giving to political parties to influence elections were corrupting American politics. “The voices of average Americans have been drowned out by the deafening racket of campaign cash,” he warned just a few years ago.

McCain the candidate has enlisted some of the same GOP fundraising giants who created and flourished in the soft-money system, including Bush’s fundraising “Pioneers” and “Rangers,” who earned their designations by raising at least $100,000 or $200,000 for his campaigns.

At least six of McCain’s first eight national finance co-chairmen have given or raised large donations for political parties or 527 groups, campaign and IRS records show. In all, the finance co-chairs have given at least $13.5 million in soft money and 527 donations since the 1998 election.

They include former Bush moneymen such as lobbyist Thomas G. Loeffler and financier Donald Bren, whose personal and corporate donations total in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each in recent elections.

In key states, McCain has enlisted the likes of New York financier Henry Kravis, one of the GOP’s largest donors over the past two decades, and Texas energy executive Robert A. Mosbacher, the architect of the Republicans’ “Team 100″ fundraising machine that helped make soft money a staple of politics by raising $20 million in large donations to help Bush’s father win the presidency in 1988.

Story here, via Drudge.

Looks awesome.

The Video

Man…

This has to be on of the most depressing stories I’ve read lately. We have an entire political movement in this country fully willing to surrender…

‘GOP Blocks Senate Debate on Troop Buildup.’ So says the MSNBC headline about the vote for cloture that failed for the Warner-Levin non-resolution resolution expressing disapproval for the “surge” plan that is already going into effect in Baghdad.

From Wikipedia:

In parliamentary procedure, cloture (pr: KLO-cher) (also called closure, and sometimes a guillotine) is a motion or process aimed at bringing debate to a quick end.

I already linked to RedState’s outing of CNN on its failure to report the truth earlier today.

Since when is blocking cloture, which means extending debate on the bill at hand, blocking Senate debate? Apparently, according to the media, it’s when Republicans are the ones voting against cloture.