Republican Party officials say they will try next month to pass a resolution accusing President Bush and congressional Republican leaders of embracing “socialism,” underscoring deep dissension within the party at the end of Mr. Bush’s administration.

Those pushing the resolution, which will come before the Republican National Committee at its January meeting, say elected leaders need to be reminded of core principles. They said the RNC must take the dramatic step of wading into policy debates, which traditionally have been left to lawmakers.

“We can’t be a party of small government, free markets and low taxes while supporting bailouts and nationalizing industries, which lead to big government, socialism and high taxes at the expense of individual liberty and freedoms,” said Solomon Yue, an Oregon member and co-sponsor of a resolution that criticizes the U.S. government bailouts of the financial and auto industries. Republican National Committee Vice Chairman James Bopp Jr. wrote the resolution and asked the rest of the 168 voting members to sign it.

Washington Times

If this will be the new face of the RNC then I’m looking forward to the coming months and years.  For too long the RNC has been a mouthpiece for the party powerbrokers rather than the grassroots and the American people. Case and point:

In 2006, some party members presented a resolution challenging Mr. Bush’s plan to legalize illegal immigrants and enact a guest-worker program. Mr. Bush’s lieutenants fought back, arguing that the party should not tie the president’s hands on a policy issue, and the RNC capitulated, passing an alternate White House-backed resolution instead.

If we are to rebuild the party into a true voice for successful limited government policies then we need accountability all the way up to the top.

North Dakota Republican Party Chairman Gary Emineth said it’s time for the RNC to end the disconnect between what the party platform says and what elected Republicans do.

“It is time the party gets involved in policy issues and forces candidates to respond to the platform,” Mr. Emineth said. “Frankly the way we view the platform is a joke. We work hard to drive our principles into the platform, then candidates ignore it.”

“If the party doesn’t move in this direction, we will continue to be irrelevant. Whoever has the larger star power will continue to win, and what they stand for and believe will become less relevant,” Mr. Emineth said.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, both of whom voted for the financial bailout but opposed the auto bailout, declined to comment.

Of course they declined to comment.  What are those two bozos going to say?  Yes, you’re right?  We’ve been lying to you for the past eight years about we said we would deliver to the American people?

The dawning of groups like Rebuild the Party and the current actions of the RNC are beginning to give me some hope that maybe change really is in the air this time.  It’s unfortunate that it took the current malfeasance of the Bush Administration to ignite the flame, but better late than never, I guess.

It’s coming up again like every year.  Congress’ annual pay raise is right around the corner and as usual there is little resistance from the Congressional bodies to suspend it.  Congressman Jim Matheson (D-UT) seems to be about the only one in D.C. raising a stink about it.  He has been lobbying his fellow Congressmen for the past eight years to have the automatic pay raises put to a vote.  Have our Congressional representatives earned the over $4,000 cost of living increase they are about to receive, putting their annual salary at around $174,000?  That is a rhetorical question.

The National Debt tops $10 trillion.  Our currency has plummeted.  We are in the midst of the worst financial crisis in 70 years.  Thousands of jobs have been lost overseas.  If anything, their salaries should be significantly reduced until they turn things around.  The raise will assuredly go through with little objection and that is because the American people will let it.  Only we can stop it, but more times than not the American people have proven to be useless in controlling the actions of our government.

This is yet another wasted opportunity by Republicans.  Where is the GOP leadership on this?  John Boehner and Mitch McConnell could be holding a press conference right now protesting this pay increase and showing Americans of all stripes that the GOP demands accountability and positive results.  Instead all we hear our crickets and the crinkling of our money in their pockets.

Excellent commentary. He is spot on.

The first, on May 21, headed “Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts” , reported that the entire Alpine “winter sports industry” could soon “grind to a halt for lack of snow”. The second, on December 19, headed “The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation” , reported that this winter’s Alpine snowfalls “look set to beat all records by New Year’s Day”.

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

The Telegraph

The man-made global warming conspiracy is unraveling like a badly knit sweater and some in the media are finally talking about it, even in Europe.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the “hottest in history” and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to “natural factors” such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely “masking the underlying warming trend”, and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

For the first time in about 40 years Canada had a national white Christmas.  For the past few winters we’ve been seeing record cold temperatures all over the world and “scientific” predictions have been wrong over and over again.

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

I’ve said before that the idea of man made climate change is political and not based on real science.  This article was reference before by Mike discussing the growing number of scientists speaking out against the faux religion of climate change.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

This will be tell tale sign.  The Dalai Bama has already predicted a budget deficit of close to $1 trillion for 2009.  Will our new environmental extremist government and all of its European greenie weenie comrades-in-arms follow through with all of these economically devastating programs to “save the planet” when they’re facing rapidly rising unemployment and inflation caused by our global recession?  They’ll have to, right?  I mean, we’re all going to die in massive floods and hurricanes if they don’t.  They said so.  They certainly couldn’t put this on the back burner.  What good would a stable economy be if we all have to migrate to the Colorado Rockies in order to stay alive?

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for “emissions trading”, “carbon capture”, building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to “biofuels”, are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

I think the tide on this is turning, slowly, but turning all the same.  More and more people in the government and in the scientific community are opening their mouths and speaking out against this fraud.  It will obviously take time for the mainstream media to actually discuss this, but eventually they won’t have a choice or they’ll simply stop talking about climate change and let it slowly fade away into memory, like the Iraq War, global cooling, acid rain, and everything else they’ve been wrong about.  The Internet is allowing the truth to escape and we may be seeing the beginning of the end of our modern day Spanish Inquisition

News has been slow over the last week or so and will probably continue to be for a few more days as we approach New Years. In the mean time, the race for RNC Chairman and the debate over what it will take to rebuild a winning Republican coalition continues on.

Patrick Ruffini continues to do yeoman’s work over at The Next Right (see here and here. And Erick Erickson is as always, awesome.

Also, there was an article today in the Hill on the RNC race. Check it out.

When Alan Colmes (aka: The Poor Man’s Paul Begala) announced that he was tired of being Sean Hannity’s whipping boy, I wondered what would become of Hannity & Colmes. I just sorta figured that they’d find a new liberal wind-up doll to recite the DNC’s talking points. I was really hoping they’d promote Kirsten Powers, an intelligent and fair-minded lib, to replace Alan. At least then I could mute the show’s inane bickering and still have a reason to watch.

But no, it looks like Fox has decided to give Hannity his own daily ego boost called, creatively enough, Hannity. Now, putting aside my doubts about Hannity’s ability to carry an entire hour long TV show by himself, I think this is a serious blunder for Fox News, compounded by their recent hiring of Glenn Beck to host a 5pm show.

Look, most of the people who think Fox News is super-conservative are probably the same people who saw nothing wrong with Olbermann and Tingle Leg anchoring actual news coverage for MSNBC during the 2008 campaign. But let’s not kid ourselves either- Fox News leans right. Not as far as CNN leans left and certainly no where near to how far MSNBC, PBS, and the BBC lean left. I don’t really have a problem with Fox doing this-it provides a good counter to the rest of the media and covers stories, like the MN recount fiasco, that the liberal media would prefer to sweep under the rug.

But as we saw from Sam’s earlier post about the MN recount, liberals simply dismiss Fox News stories out-of-hand, as if Fox is somehow a conservative version of The Onion. By giving two hour-long shows to two very conservative hosts, it makes it harder for us to counter the claims of those liberals who see the network as nothing more than a right-wing propaganda machine. If Fox is going to call itself “Fair & Balanced”, then it needs a liberal voice in primetime, and it certainly shouldn’t let Hannity run free without someone countering him.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Harry Reid will command the biggest party majority of any Senate leader in a quarter century when the new Congress convenes in January. But the Nevada Democrat is already worried about his own re-election fight in 2010.

Sen. Reid, perhaps the most-vulnerable Democrat who will face re-election in a midterm race that is likely to favor his party once again, began interviewing campaign managers last week. The Senate majority leader also recently stepped up fund-raising.

Sen. Reid, however, faces a potentially tough fight. A recent Research 2000 poll of likely voters put his approval rating at 38% and his disapproval rating at 54%

Wall Street Journal

Reid’s numbers are not good and haven’t been for some time, but the election is obviously two years away so anything can happen between now and then.  I am amused, however, by the author’s presumption that the 2010 midterms are “likely to favor his party once again.”  That comment must have come from a Kool-Aid high because historical precedent says otherwise.  It is highly unlikely for the same party to benefit three election cycles in a row and if the Dalai Bama sticks to his campaign rhetoric I think it is very likely I will be correct.

Nevada is a swing state so anything goes.  Reid’s fate will be foretold by a few factors.  One is the political climate which I predict will favor the GOP, but nobody can know for sure.  Obama could surprise us.  Second will be Reid’s popularity.  The guy is one of the most sniveling wimps in the U.S. Congress, but if he can remake himself there is hope.  Lastly, the Republican candidate will obviously be a huge factor and since we are still some time away from knowing who that will be it’s difficult to predict anything.

While Bush was handing out pardons yesterday to drug dealers, those sitting in jail for having the courage to defend their nation from harm saw no such mercy.  I am speaking of border guard agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, two men prosecuted by Bush’s henchman, U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton, and thrown in jail for shooting a Mexican drug trafficker at the U.S./Mexico border.  If you remember correctly, Sutton actually used the shot illegal Mexican drug runner to testify against the border guards alleging that they wrongfully shot him and violated his civil rights.  Amazing, yet true.

Many supporters of the imprisoned border guards have been hoping and pleading to the President to pardon both men, but I have no such anticipation.  I fully believe that Bush is the reason these men are in jail.  Sutton serves at the behest of the President and the two go way back in Texas political circles, not to mention that Bush has always held Mexico in a higher regard than our own nation.  Ramos and Compean are political prisoners and their imprisonment has put our border patrol in danger as they are now hesitant to use their firearms for fear of meeting the same fate.

The New York Times allowed Bill Ayers, former domestic terrorist, to publish an op-ed in the paper.  They subsequently denied a response op-ed from the FBI agent who infiltrated the group.  But thanks to the wonderful online media, you can read it here via Pajamas Media.

The post “Senator Shelby comes out against the auto bailout” was written Nov. 13th by Alex, and is still being commented on - mainly by protectionist union clowns, and by Mike and I refuting every one of them.  Check it out if you so desire.  Oh, and I know why it has become so popular - if you Google (yes, it’s a verb) “shelby bailout blog,” the Save the GOP post is the first link that comes up.  Don’t know what other combinations yield similar results.

BLACKFIVE completely takes apart Gen. Wesley Clark.  Read it, it’s good stuff.

In Celtic’s recent post, Going to Pot, Several commenters put forth the argument that what does it matter if the institution of marriage is expanding to include same-sex marriages, it will not affect them and their marriage. I beg to differ as that argument has been put forth before by well meaning reformers. Read this entire post from a libertarian.

Marriage is a big institution; too big for me to feel I have a successful handle on it.

However, I am bothered by this specific argument, which I have heard over and over from the people I know who favor gay marriage laws. I mean, literally over and over; when they get into arguments, they just repeat it, again and again. “I will get married even if marriage is expanded to include gay people; I cannot imagine anyone up and deciding not to get married because gay people are getting married; therefore, the whole idea is ridiculous and bigoted.”

They may well be right. Nonetheless, libertarians should know better. The limits of your imagination are not the limits of reality. Every government programme that libertarians have argued against has been defended at its inception with exactly this argument.

Let me take three major legal innovations, one of them general, two specific to marriage.

Click to continue »

A local news outfit in Detroit went undercover to tape many Ford plant employees spending quit a bit of “work” time… at local bars. You have to watch this one to believe it.

To the union-paid people who have been commenting on how “un-American” those of us who don’t believe in bailouts are, please feel free to continue to argue why these types of workers, and the union rules that allow them to operate this way, and the companies that allow themselves to be run by the UAW, deserve taxpayer dollars when this kind of rubbish is going on. Come on, I dare you.

H/T to the Club for Growth.

As the GOP continues its post-election qi balancing, we are faced with what I refer to as the “libertarian conundrum”. Specifically- how libertarian should the Republican Party become? Most people on this page seem pretty economically libertarian, but what about social libertarianism? We’re almost uniform in expressing a desire for the federal government to stay as small as possible while incurring minimum expenses. But I’m curious as to how many of you feel the same way about the government’s role (if it has one) in social policy.

Events out of the Netherlands have caused me to consider these questions.

Amsterdam unveiled plans Saturday to close brothels, sex shops and marijuana cafes in its ancient city center as part of a major effort to drive organized crime out of the tourist haven.

The city is targeting businesses that “generate criminality,” including gambling parlors, and the so-called “coffee shops” where marijuana is sold openly. Also targeted are peep shows, massage parlors and souvenir shops used by drug dealers for money-laundering.

Asscher underlined that the city center will remain true to its freewheeling reputation.

“It’ll be a place with 200 windows (for prostitutes) and 30 coffee shops, which you can’t find anywhere else in the world - very exciting, but also with cultural attractions,” he said. “And you won’t have to be embarrassed to say you came.”

My Way News

Damn. Now have to change my Christmas vacation plans.

Now I’m a pretty libertarian conservative. I don’t think the government has any business regulating my personal behavior, so long as my personal decisions do not impact anyone else’s individual freedoms. Hence, I think both prostitution and marijuana should be legalized. I’m unsure about harder drugs, but I’m willing to listen to both sides. I think the FDA should be eliminated, people should be able to sell their organs for profit, and gambling should be legalized everywhere. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

My question for our authors and readers: do you think the GOP should become more libertarian, like I am?  If it does, it will become the true party of small government, in both economic and personal life. Then again, it will surly lose most of the Christian Coalition-esque backing that it’s counted on since the 1980’s. And I really don’t want to end up like the Netherlands either- finding out too late that a little government intervention isn’t necessarily a bad thing after your country turns to crud.

What do you think?

Is there any Republican leadership in Minnesota??  What is Norm Coleman doing?  Where is Tim Pawlenty??  Read this article from Fox News today and I guarantee you will be outraged at the bias and fraud being committed by the Canvassing Board in Minnesota in order to put Al Franken into the U.S. Senate by what they now predict will be a 78 vote margin.  Look at the ballot examples they are showing and the way the Canvassing Board is ruling on them.  They are throwing out votes for Coleman, but allowing the exact same mistakes committed on other ballots to go to Franken when it’s in his favor!

Update: I want to add one other thing.  For anyone in Minnesota reading this, call Norm Coleman’s office as well as Ron Carey, the State Republican Party Chairman, and ask these people what they are doing to preserve the integrity of this election.  Post the response you get in the comments section of this thread.

Ann Coulter authors the article detailing the rise of conservative star Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska and former Republican Vice Presidential candidate.

Key excerpt:

Like most Democrats, both Obama and Biden boasted of their humble beginnings, while having fully adopted the attitudes, pomposity and style of the elites.

Meanwhile, Palin is the sort of genuine American that brings out the worst, most egregious pomposity of liberals. For weeks, Carl Bernstein was showing up on TV to announce: “We still don’t have the date of first issuance of her passport.” Members of the establishment would be astonished to learn that more Americans have guns than passports.

Liberals were angry at Palin because they thought she should look and act like Kay Bailey Hutchinson: Upper crust, prissy and stiff.

Palin had a husband in the Steelworkers Union, a sister and brother-in-law who owned a gas station, and five attractive children — one headed for Iraq, one a Down’s syndrome baby and one the cutest little girl anyone had ever seen.

In a nutshell, Palin was everything Democrats are always pretending to be, but never are.

She didn’t have to conjure up implausible images of herself duck hunting as Hillary Clinton did. Nor was Palin the typical Democratic elected female official who went straight from college into politics, like Nita Lowey.

Like many on the Right, Coulter and HUMAN EVENTS believe that Palin has a bright future in the GOP.

Last words from the article:

But unless Palin is going to be the perpetual running mate of “moderate” Republicans who need conservative bona fides, she will need to become wiser and better read. Even Reagan didn’t run for President in his 40s. (True Obama is in his 40s, but we are not Democrats.)

Perhaps Palin’s year is 2012, but I would recommend that she take a little more time to become older and wiser. She ought to spend the next decade being a good governor, tending to her children so none of them turn out like Ron Reagan Jr., and reading everything Phyllis Schlafly, Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan and “Publius” have ever written. (She also might keep in mind that HUMAN EVENTS was Ronald Reagan’s favorite newspaper!)

In time, HUMAN EVENTS’ 2008 Conservative of the Year will be ready to be our President and someday can sweep into office and dismantle all the heinous government programs Obama and the Democrats are about to foist on the nation. Who knows? She might even be able to run as the candidate of “hope” and “change.”

Read the whole article, it’s a good one.

Vice President Dick Cheney blamed Congress for failing to bail out the auto industry, saying the White House was forced to step in to save U.S. car companies.

In an interview broadcast Sunday, Cheney said the economy is in such bad shape that the car companies might not have survived without the $17.4 billion in emergency loans that President George W. Bush approved on Friday.

“The president decided specifically that he wanted to try to deal with it and not preside over the collapse of the automobile industry just as he goes out of office,” Cheney said in an interview broadcast on “Fox News Sunday.”

Lawmakers “had ample opportunity to deal with this issue and they failed,” Cheney said. “The president had no choice but to step in.”

The AP

What an ample load of crap.  Throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at companies with failed business plans in another socialist exchange was not the only choice in preserving the viability of the automakers.  Bankruptcy was a viable solution and declaring bankruptcy doesn’t mean they’d be going under.  It would have allowed them to restructure their debt and more importantly bust the UAW which has been bleeding them dry for decades.

Was it not the President who also said we had no choice but to provide a $700 billion bailout to his friends on Wall Street, a bailout that was supposed to shore up bad mortgages and instead has been used for acquisitions and executive bonuses?  A bailout that has had no effect in rescuing the American economy out of recession, a recession that has in fact gotten worse since that time with foreclosures continuing to climb?

I never thought I’d ever say this, but I can’t wait until Obama is sworn in and becomes the next President.  I am wholeheartedly looking forward to it because it means we will be rid of these current buffoons in the White House forever.

Can we not measure the contribution of this family with a thimble?

From The Washington Post:

More than 40 higher-education leaders from across the country asked Congress today to commit 5 percent of any economic stimulus program to the nation’s colleges and universities.

President-elect Barack Obama has called for a massive package of government spending to jump-start the economy, and congressional Democrats are hoping to have one ready for him to sign when he takes office Jan. 20.

Many are familiar with the beginning of the old children’s story If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.  Quick refresher for those who are rusty in their early childhood literature:

1) Small part of the economy mouse asks for a harmless bailout cookie.

2) Once fed the other companies mouse asks for more

3) Ensuing vicious cycle of handouts

Most economists will agree that national investment in education contributes to long-run economic growth. That said, this story illustrates a shortcoming of large scale discretionary fiscal policy; everybody wants a cookie.

I love Consumer Reports magazine, mostly because it’s a private sector solution to problems that liberals insist can only be solved by the government. Taking less time and less money than any government bureaucracy could ever dream of, the private sector Consumer Reports tests, reviews, and publishes information on most every product conceivable. Honestly, I think we’d all be better off if, rather than wasting billions of dollars (not including compliance fees passed on to consumers) on incompetent “watchdog” bureaucracies like the FDA, the Feds just turn everything over to private research groups like Consumer Reports or Underwriters Laboratories.

Anyways, I bring this up because by coincidence, this month’s issue of CR features ratings of the best and worst sedan models. Since we’re all now partial owners of GM and Chrysler, I wanted to see how these impartial tests rated our good ol’ American manufacturing know-how.

The results, far from being surprising, give us all a clear picture of how the Big Three got to this point. I won’t got through the whole list, but here’s a brief synopsis:

Owner Satisfaction (done by survey)
Of all cars rated “most satisfying”, the only Big 3 cars on this list fall into the “Roadster” category- two versions of the Chevrolet Corvette. Every other category, from “small cars” to “upscale cars” to wagons and hatchbacks”, is populated by Hondas, Toyotas, Porsches, and Audis.

Of the 23 cars rated “least satisfying”, 20 of them come from the Big 3, including the worst ranked in each category.

Ratings
The magazine then rated family sedans based on several criteria, including reliability, safety, comfort, and road testing, among others. The results? Of sedans costing between $20,000-$25,000, nine of the top ten were foreign, the only exception being the Chevy Malibu (at #10, of course).

Of sedans costing between $25,000-$30,000, only two of the top ten reviewed cars were made by the Big 3- the Chevy Malibu (#7) and the Ford Fusion (#10).

No one wants to see people get laid off. No one wants to see companies that have become American institutions crumble and fail. But if they fail, they are failing because we the consumers have decided that we will not buy their inferior products at higher prices. All this bailout is going to do is reward these manufacturers for “achieving” the failing results detailed above. The Big 3 are bankrupt because they didn’t make a competitive product, gave too much away to labor unions, and mismanaged their companies. None of this is my fault. None of this is your fault. And yet now we’re being asked to bail them out so they can continue making the same mistakes that brought them here in the first place.

I weep for the future of my country. I weep harder for the kids and grandkids I may one day have, because I’m not even sure what sort of country they’ll inherit from us.