Conservative Republicans nationwide made a resounding comeback last Tuesday night, recapturing the majority in the U.S. House by picking up more than 60 seats – the biggest gains since 1948! In addition to the historic night in the House, Republicans added 6 seats in the U.S. Senate, 18 State House chambers switched, and there will be 11 new Republican governors starting in 2011.

President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and soon-to-be-ex Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi saw a repudiation of their irresponsible and out of touch left-wing agenda, and the comeback of a vibrant and hopeful conservative movement – with women leading the way.

A large number of Republican women ran for Congress this year – 51 to be exact – and those winning their races included Sandy Adams of Florida, Diane Black of Tennessee, Vicky Hartzler of Missouri, Jaime Herrera of Washington, Kristi Noem of South Dakota, and Martha Roby of Alabama, all of whom took over seats previously held by Democrats. They will join Fire from the Heartland cast members and incumbent Congresswomen Michele Bachmann, Cynthia Lummis, and Jean Schmidt in the House this January.

Some of the other notable GOP women who prevailed include rising stars Nikki Haley and Susana Martinez, the first female governors of South Carolina and New Mexico, respectively, and Kelly Ayotte, who trounced liberal Rep. Paul Hodes to become the junior U.S. Senator from New Hampshire.

When one traces the roots of the conservative movement, women have always served as its back bone.

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Oh, yes.  Elections have consequences and this one is a gem.  Rep. Ron Paul, who is extremely critical of the Federal Reserve and has called to abolish it or, at minimum audit it, may get the opportunity to oversee the Fed.

The Politico reports:

Paul is the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology on the Financial Services , which oversees the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Mint and American involvement with international development groups like the World Bank. Unless someone bumps him, he’s next in line for the subcommittee gavel.

Paul is critical of all the institutions he would oversee. He’s long called for killing the Federal Reserve, and this year tried to get an audit of the Fed into the Wall Street reform bill. He’s asserted that the dollar should be tied to the gold standard in order to keep it from losing its value.

In addition, Reuters reports that Paul reemphasized his push for scrutiny of the central bank:

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When it comes to defining the meaning of the Republican victory last Tuesday, Marco Rubio got it exactly right: “This is our second chance.” Just four years ago, Republicans were turned out of the majority because they had forgotten the spirit of 1994 that brought them there — succumbing to corruption scandals and accepting runaway spending and bailouts of the financial and automotive sectors. John Boehner has smartly echoed this humble tone both in his Election Night speech and post-election interviews.

The first key test of whether Republicans have learned their lesson will come in the decision on whether to weaken a crucial 1994 reform limiting the terms of Republican committee heads by waiving term limits for Rep. Joe Barton so that he can run for the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The term limits rule, by the incoming Republican majority in 1994 and enshrined in the Contract with America, was designed to break down the imperial fiefdoms at all important committees built up during 40 years of Democratic rule. When Democrats retook the House, they continued to allow their committee chairmen unlimited rein. The result: unchecked power on committee chairs like Charlie Rangel.

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What we’re witnessing in the south Texas (TX-27 – Corpus Christi and Brownsville) Congressional recount that followed the race is a dramatic interpretation of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle magic act.

With 28-year just defeated Democrat incumbent Solomon Ortiz portraying Bullwinkle the Moose, and Republican Congressman-elect Blake Farenthold reprising Rocky the Squirrel.

Farenthold: “And now…”

Ortiz: “Hey Rocky, watch me pull a ballot out of my hat.”

Farenthold: “Again?”

On November 2, Farenthold beat Ortiz by 799 votes.  A tight race to be sure, but one that could be described as outside the margin of ACORN.  I mean error.

The fairly Leftist Corpus Christi Caller Times even said in a November 6 editorial “Honor the vote, which went for Farenthold.”

But Ortiz did not – and has not –acquiesced.  He demanded a recount.  And that’s when the “Out of Thin Air” show began.  Ortiz, Inc. keeps finding new bags containing new ballots – many with his name on them.

Ortiz, Inc. first found in Robstown – the epicenter of Ortiz, Inc. support – a bag with seven whole ballots in it.  All of them (shocking) cast for Ortiz.

*Poof*

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Karen Sampson and her Colorado neighbors just won a serious victory for liberty.

In a unanimous decision on Tuesday, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Colorado’s disclosure laws for grassroots political groups.  This is a big deal.  As the Associated Press put it, “The issue is ripe for an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The federal appellate court held that Karen and her neighbors in the tiny subdivision of Parker North, Colo., should not have been forced to register with the government and comply with burdensome campaign finance laws simply for opposing a ballot issue involving the annexation of their neighborhood.

I wrote previously at Big Government that Karen and her neighbors opposed an effort to annex their town into a neighboring city because it would raise their taxes without providing them benefits.  So they printed up fliers and yard signs.  And then they got sued.

Under what basis?  Colorado’s campaign finance laws, which state that any group of individuals that spends over $200 magically becomes an “issue committee” that is forced to register with the state.  Further, they had to track and report all their “contributions” and “expenditures” and disclose the identities of anyone who gave them money.

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I’ve already written about the terrible work of the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO did an awful job on the stimulus, for instance, repeatedly asserting that diverting money from the private sector to government somehow would create jobs. CBO also was a disaster on Obamacare, claiming that a giant new entitlement program would reduce budget deficits. And the legislative bureaucracy even has argued that higher tax rates boost growth.

That sounds absurd (and it is), but CBO is not the only taxpayer-funded bureaucracy on Capitol Hill producing this kind of nonsensical analysis. The Congressional Reserach Service just published a new report asserting that higher tax rates will boost economic performance. Here’s an excerpt from that CRS publication.

…it is ambiguous whether tax cuts lead to more or less work, saving, and investment. The expiration of the tax cuts would nevertheless reduce the budget deficit, absent other policy changes, which economic theory predicts would have a positive effect on the economy in the long run.

To be fair, CRS doesn’t actually claim higher taxes are good for growth. And neither does CBO. But CRS and CBO both assert that there is no clear evidence that higher taxes hurt growth. Budget deficits, however, supposedly have a very negative impact on economic performance according to these Capitol Hill bureaucrats. More specifically, CRS and CBO believe that government borrowing leads to higher interest rates, and they think that higher interest rates reduce investment. And since investment is a key to long-run growth, this leads them to endorse any policy – including higher taxes – that reduces red ink.

Taking the CRS and CBO analysis to its logical extreme (and neither bureaucracy has stated that there are limits to their methodology), tax rates of 100 percent would be the most effective way of maximizing prosperity.

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Today, in 1938, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk died. He was the first president of the Turkish Republic and brought it into the modern world as a secular nation. His legacy is slipping away.

After first receiving a tip from a reader regarding a warning issued against the Alaska Public Employee Supervisers Union for their improperly campaigning against Senate candidate Joe Miller, a call to Robert Pearson of Alaska’s Department of Administration produced a copy of the offending email, see further below.

This first communique was sent in response to “several” complaints from Alaska State workers regarding the improper union communication.

From: Commissioners Office, DOA (DOA sponsored)

Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 2010 3:06 PM

To: SOA All SU Union members
Cc: Ludwig, Bruce (DOA sponsored); Brooks, Kevin A (DOA); Beecher, Carol L (DOA)

Subject: Election Email Follow-up‬

Dear SU Member,

Several of you wrote expressing concern about an email that was sent by your union on Thursday, October 28, 2010 with the subject line “Vote Tuesday November 2nd!” Article 9.12 of the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) stipulates that union emails regarding pending legislation or in-progress partisan election campaigns shall be non-positional. The State’s position is that the email violated this article of the CBA.

I asked Deputy Commissioner Kevin Brooks to meet with union representatives to explain the State’s position. He did and advised the Business Manager that further infractions could result in restriction of access to the State’s email system. It’s important that you know we follow the CBA in resolving these issues and I appreciate those who brought the matter to light.

Annette Kreitzer
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

While Alaska’s public employee collective bargaining agreement allows for the SU to use email for purposes of political communication, said emails are not to be positional in nature. Given the dynamics of the 2010 Alaska Senate race, it was the Department of Administration’s opinion that the following communication, sent out to approximately 2,000 state supervisers, violated the union’s collective bargaining agreement.

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In the wake of the Election Day conservative tsunami, rather than expressing gratitude that limited government conservatives and the Tea Party movement restored the GOP to majority status in the House of Representatives, establishment Republican Rep. Spencer Bachus lashed out at the movement and at Gov. Sarah Palin.

He even went so far as to blame Palin and the Tea Party for the Republican Party not winning the Senate — the same Senate that had all of forty Republicans back when the party ran on the big spending, me-too policies espoused by Spencer Bachus.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the GOP establishment is preparing to reward Bachus with the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee, this despite his well-known failings in performing as the Ranking Member of that very committee over the past four years.

Rep. Bachus lashed out against Palin and the Tea Party on November 4^th while speaking to the South Shelby (Ala.) Chamber of Commerce.  “The Senate would be Republican today except for states (in which Gov. Palin endorsed candidates) like Christine O’Donnell in Delaware,” Bachus said. “Sarah Palin cost us control of the Senate.”  He went on to say that Tea Party candidates did well in U.S. House races, but in the U.S. Senate races, “they didn’t do well at all.”  Bachus is mistaken in his attempts to place blame.  In fact, it is the very policies he champions that cost the GOP its chance to win control of the Senate.

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A fascinating interview with the former President in the Wall Street Journal:

One perception the president is determined to shift is that of his spending record. “Decision Points” contains one graphic: a table comparing, among other things, President Bush’s average spending-to-GDP (19.6%) to that of Bill Clinton (19.8%), Bush 41 (21.9%), and Reagan (22.4%). It also shows that his deficit-to-GDP was 2%—half that of Bush 41 and Reagan.

I come armed with a slew of spending questions. Why didn’t he veto more GOP spending bills? Why he didn’t use the war as a reason to cut back on domestic spending? But he shuts me down by referring to the chart. I point out that, chart or no, there is a perception he oversaw fiscal profligacy.

“Yes, there is,” he concedes. “I think the Medicare reform caused certain conservative writers to say ‘Bush has been fiscally irresponsible.’ And they did not look at the facts. And the facts are that we have a very solid fiscal record”—despite spending “a lot of money” on war, homeland security, and Hurricane Katrina.

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From the Associated Press:

A government audit says the advocacy group ACORN should reimburse the government $3.2 million for failing to adequately show that lead removal work was performed at a reasonable cost.

The auditors also say some grant money was spent inappropriately, including for political campaigns and fundraising.

Congress already has cut off ACORN’s federal funding after allegations of voter registration fraud and embezzlement.

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Thomas Paine in his Dissertation on First Principles of Government, published on December 23, 1791, wrote, “He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

Our nation is deep into the longest post World War II recession in our history, prolonged by the uncertainty created by the policies of the Obama Administration and the Democratic controlled Congress.  Businesses, large and small, are holding on to an estimated $3 trillion in cash and are not going to invest and create jobs without a dependable view of future taxation, regulation and health care costs.  The taxation question is the most pressing at this point in time because of the scheduled expiration of the current tax rates less than eight weeks away.

Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Congress must have never read Thomas Paine’s words, do not fully understand their meaning or simply choose to ignore them.  They are also acting like the recent election was not the repudiation of their agenda that it clearly was. They continue to divide the American people with class warfare by demonizing those taxpayers who earn more than $200,000 per year.

Mr. Obama and his supporters actually believe that the American people will be satisfied with only a temporary extension of current tax rates for those higher earning citizens while most others would see their current tax rates made permanent.  They are sure the private sector will embrace that move and unlock their capital.  They could not be more wrong!

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On Dylan Ratigan’s show, liberal cartoonist Ted Rall, author of the “Anti-American Manifesto”, suggests violence may be the only way to save America.

Ratigan himself asks “Are things in our country so bad, that it may be time for a revolution? The answer obviously is ‘yes’ ,the only question is ‘how to do it?”

Verum Serum has posted an excerpt from the Ted Rall book ‘The Anti-American Mainfesto” in which he calls for a violent socialist movement from within, here’s a little bit:

We are here because the U.S. is going to end soon. There’s going to be an intense, violent, probably haphazard struggle for control. It’s going to come down to us versus them. The question is: What are you going to do about it?…

Christian fundamentalists, the millennial end-of-theworlders obsessed with the Left Behind series about the End Times, neo-Nazi racists, rural black-helicopter Michigan Militia types cut from the same inbred cloth as Timothy McVeigh, allied with “mainstream” gun nuts and right-wing Republicans, have been planning, preparing, and praying for the destruction of the “Godless,” “secular” United States for decades. In the past, they formed groups like the John Birch Society and the Aryan Nations. Now the hard Right has a postmodern, decentralized non-organization organization called the Tea Party.

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The great Bernanke QE2 debate continues to heat up. In the run-up to the G-20 meetings, China, Russia, Germany, and others are all coming out against the Federal Reserve’s quantitative-easing agenda. They don’t want hot-money excess dollars to flow into their higher-yielding currencies.

The assault against Bernanke’s easy money has reached such fever that President Obama felt it necessary to defend the $600 billion in new-money printing in a news conference in India.

Meanwhile, World Bank president Robert Zoellick has actually called for putting gold back into global money, in order to use it as an international reference point to measure market expectations over inflation or deflation. The former Treasury and State Department official wants a successor to Bretton Woods. To my way of thinking, Zoellick is dead-on right.

And then there’s Kevin Warsh’s opus op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. I have written about Warsh in the past, and his sound-thinking views. Taking a bit of a shot at Bernanke’s QE2, the Fed board member basically says: Look, you want better growth, reform the tax code and stop regulating. “The Federal Reserve is not a repair shop for broken fiscal, trade, or regulatory policies,” he writes.

But in the key part of his op-ed, Warsh calls for a strictly limited QE2, not an open-ended commitment. He describes it as “necessarily limited, circumscribed, and subject to regular review.” And he goes on to say that if the dollar decline and run-up of commodity prices continues, these inflation signals should stop QE2, regardless of the unemployment rate.

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The balance of power shifted in dramatic fashion on Capitol Hill on November 2, as Republicans rode the Tea Party wave, seizing control of the House of Representatives and earning significant gains in the U.S. Senate.

Of course the spin from Obama/Pelosi/Reid on their historic thrashing was that voters were simply frustrated by the pace of the economic recovery. And there’s no doubt the state of the economy was top in the minds of voters as they took to the polls on Tuesday.

But according to an Election Day poll Judicial Watch conducted in partnership with the polling company™, inc./WomanTrend, the liberal spin on the election results doesn’t even begin to tell the full story.

Here’s the takeaway from the poll: The American people think the government is too big, too secret and too corrupt. And they do not want any more government bailouts, ever. Make no mistake. This was a complete repudiation of the Obama Big Government agenda and the corrupt manner in which this agenda has been implemented.

Here are some of the other highlights from the poll which we pulled from an excellent summary prepared by our polling partners:

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The Federal Reserve announced “Quantitative Easing 2” (QE2) last week, a stimulus program whereby the Fed will print $600 billion of paper money to buy U.S. government bonds. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke took the extraordinary step of trying to justify this action by writing an Op Ed in the Washington Post. The article claimed his goal is to drive down longer term interest rates and drive up stock prices, so that “a virtuous circle will support further economic expansion.” The concept is that if Americans felt richer because their 401Ks went up in value there would be a “wealth effect” encouraging the public to spend more money and businesses to increase capital investments. Unfortunately, this is like starting a barbeque with a flamethrower. You will surely create a fire, but it will probably burn down the neighborhood.

Back when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in the fall of 2007, the Fed panicked and “Quantitatively Eased” by slashing interest rates and purchasing $1.7 trillion of mostly dicey mortgage related bonds from the banks at full value. The price of food and other commodities were sent skyrocketing, oil climbed to an all-time record of $145 per barrel. Consumer price inflation rose by 5½% over the next year, but the higher costs of essentials hammered personal disposable income and consumers put the brakes on their discretionary spending. As the U.S. money supply leaped, hedge funds borrowed in depreciating U.S. dollars to invest in appreciating Asian currencies.

Instead of creating an economic boom, Chairman Bernanke actions caused the worst recession since the 1930s. As business profitability tanked due to lower sales and higher material costs; production was cut and workers laid-off. The rate of unemployment and underemployment soared on Main Street. When the bubble burst and the markets fell back “under their own weight” and a period of deflation began that is probably far from over.

Wall Street on the other hand, did quite nicely thanks to Ben and his buddies at the Fed.

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President Barack Obama’s now concluding trip to India seems to have turned out to be a failed or at the very least unhelpful effort. His false starts, unhelpful comments and bad policy moves mark this visit as a bit of a mess.

Obama made multiple gaffes not only for India but for his own party back home not to mention his nation. As his political party was delivered a severe blow and his agenda was cut off at the knees on election day he was seen dancing happily all across the continent with a lavish visit paid for at the taxpayer’s expense even as those same taxpayers were enraged at wild government spending sprees. As the Indians worried over Obama’s foreign policy he refused to call the those that attacked them in Mumbai terrorists and finally on his exit from the country he delivered yet another one of his digs at his own country saying that America is a nation in decline.

Things began going wrong for The One even as he first arrived in one of the most vibrant nations on earth. For one thing he arrived a lesser president than when he originally set up the trip. His party was delivered a stunning and historic blow as the GOP picked up over 60 seats in the federal seat of power and hundreds more in the state legislatures in the Nov. 2 election, a feat that hasn’t been repeated since WWII. So Obama arrived with his mandate splintered and his power diminished. He is a president with less power to help his Indian hosts do anything.

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