I’ve come to a cross roads, and I believe many of you are with me. I no longer have faith that members of the Grand Old Party can represent me as a classical liberal or more specifically as a Conservative-Libertarian, and neither do I believe the majority of the members of the party share true forms of those ideologies.

This feeling began developing after the 2010 election when several friends and colleagues of mine and I developed ConservativeCongress.com to assess every single candidate self-proclaimed to be running as a conservative in the entire country. Thousands of unpaid and thankless hours were put into the project by myself and my friends. I myself put in roughly 2,000 to 3,000 hours alone. Then I watched as various state Tea Party groups and supposedly conservative minding groups signed off on the status quo. I became sick as state after state sent D.C. main stays and beltway insiders back to flap their gums about conservative principles while we all watched continuous compromise and a lack of any leadership with the House at their disposal.

The final blow personally for me was when I watched a man take my home district who had not lived in his home state in 18 years and also did not even own property in the state in which he was running for office. I’ve had the great privilege in my lifetime to travel extensively and live in various areas of our great nation. I remember very clearly living abroad in Australia some seven years ago and then upon returning spending the next four years moving around for graduate school and work. When I made it back home I hardly recognized the place in which I grew up. Everything had changed.

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The proximity of the New Hampshire and South Carolina Republican primaries sets up an interesting discussion over the fate of right-to-work among the states. Indeed, after New Hampshire’s Republican voters cast their ballots for their party’s nominee for the general election, its legislators were already holding hearings to determine whether or not to transform New Hampshire into a right-to-work state. On the other hand, South Carolina’s status as right-to-work was made famous by President Obama’s assault on non-unionized jobs brought to the state by Boeing Co.

Remembering the old adage, “all politics is local,” Republican candidates weighed in on this topic during two consecutive debates in New Hampshire earlier this month. Mitt Romney claimed “Right-to-work legislation makes a lot of sense for New Hampshire.” In fact, it makes more sense for New Hampshire’s legislature to implement this policy than for most other local governments. How can the “Live Free or Die” state deny its workers the basic liberty to choose which organizations they associate with and contribute money to? Why would one of the first states to ratify our national Constitution continue to impose a policy that contradicts that document’s emphasis on freedom of assembly? In a nation of citizens who value their freedoms, right-to-work should be a common sense principle rather than a rare policy only enacted by 22 of 50 states. No one is doubting a worker’s right to join a union, so why must today’s liberals doubt their right to not join one?

Next Rick Perry asserted that a right-to-work labor market would make New Hampshire a “powerful magnet” for jobs in the region. Indeed since no other Northeastern state has adopted similar legislation yet, if New Hampshire became right-to-work, that state would be the first in the region to do so. As a result, any skilled workers in the area hesitant about union membership or businesses unable to meet the demands of unreasonable union bosses would flock to New Hampshire, providing a significant boost to its economy.

Although purporting to be the party that supports workers’ rights, the Democrats have risen in unified opposition to guaranteeing American laborers one of their most fundamental freedoms: the ability to choose whether or not to join a union. For instance, the Democratic Governor of New Hampshire, John Lynch, vetoed a previous right-to-work bill passed overwhelmingly by his state’s legislature.

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From the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) home page:

Protestors [sic] are assembling in New York and around the country to let billionaires, big oil and big bankers know that we’re not going to let the richest 1% force draconian economic policies and massive cuts to crucial programs on Main Street Americans.

Out-of-touch Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor said he is “increasingly concerned by the growing mobs.” Mobs? That must be what Republicans refer to as the middle class, or maybe the millions of unemployed Americans across the country.

As Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters, “The message of the American people is that no longer will the recklessness of some on Wall Street cause massive joblessness on Main Street…”

Send a message straight to Eric Cantor, Speaker Boehner, and the rest of reckless Republican leadership in Congress: (more…)

Michael Barone in The Washington Examiner:

This result is a rebuke to Barack Obama, but it is a rebuke as well—a stinging one, perhaps more stinging—to Senator Charles Schumer. He represented much of this district for 18 years. The now-disgraced Anthony Weiner was his staffer and pretty obviously Schumer’s chosen successor as congressman when he ran successfully for the Senate in 1998. In addition, Schumer has made it his special project to win back white middle class voters in places like metro New York for the Democratic Party.

In January 2007, just in time for the new Democratic majority in Congress, he published a book, Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time. It is a thoughtful essay on how Democrats can win the votes of the kind of voter Schumer himself has won over in his career as a congressman and senator, with specific policy recommendations as well as public relations advice. As one of the three Democratic leaders of the Democratic majority in the Senate—and by common reckoning the one who outshines in intellect the other two put together—Schumer has played an important role in fashioning Democratic policies, including but not limited to the 2009 stimulus package and Obamacare.

This vote is a startling repudiation of those policies by just the voters Schumer was hoping to win over.

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Three days ago, Dan Riehl shared news about powerful Illinois Democrats and members of the Illinois State Police circling their wagons to protect one of their own after a St. Patrick’s Day incident at a Carlinville, Ill., tavern.

Today, some much-anticipated details about events that lead to Ken Snider resigning from his posts as chair of the Macoupin County (Ill.) Democrat Party and president of the local school board (a.k.a., “SniderGate”) surfaced in an article and an accompanying editorial published in the Macoupin County Enquirer-Democrat weekly newspaper.

Mum’s the Word

The article, appearing under the headline, Investigation into Snider’s resignations stonewalled, recapped some of the basic aspects of the controversy before offering the paragraphs below under the subhead, “Mum’s the Word”:

Although the newspaper has questioned many eyewitnesses in an effort to obtain the details of the incident, no one would go on record as to what took place. Sources contacted have repeatedly said they are afraid to come forward with any facts concerning the alleged altercation between Snider and a Blackburn College student.

The newspaper sent its reporter Daniel Winningham to BC last Tuesday to learn more about the incident. Winningham visited the campus around noon and asked several students if they had heard of the incident and whether they had any knowledge of the incident, which occurred at the Anchor Inn.

Shortly after 5:30 p.m., Carlinville police officers entered the newspaper office looking for a person named “Dave.” The police were told there is no “Dave” employed at the newspaper. The officer then made a call, and whoever the officer called could not remember the reporter’s name. A newspaper employee then asked if they meant Dan or Daniel. The officer said, “Ya, that’s who we need to talk to.” When Winningham talked to the officers, they told him that BC had accused him of harassing students, and he was to never step foot on the campus again.

It went on to describe how, it appears, officials at Blackburn College reached the conclusion that the reporter — by asking questions that were sure to make some Illinois Democrats, including Gov. Pat Quinn and Snider, uncomfortable — should be banned from campus.

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From The Hill:

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate criticizing GOP groups for allegedly funneling foreign money into campaign ads have seen their party raise more than $1 million from political action committees affiliated with foreign companies.

House and Senate Democrats have received approximately $1.02 million this cycle from such PACs, according to an analysis compiled for The Hill by the Center for Responsive Politics. House and Senate GOP leaders have taken almost $510,000 from PACs on the same list.

The PACS are funded entirely by contributions from U.S. employees of subsidiaries of foreign companies. All of the contributions are made public under Federal Elections Commission rules, and the PACs affiliated with the subsidiaries of foreign corporations are governed by the same rules that American firms’ PACs or other PACs would face.

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From The Hill:

Likely voters in battleground districts see extremists as having a more dominant influence over the Democratic Party than they do over the GOP.

This result comes from The Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll, which found that 44 percent of likely voters say the Democratic Party is more dominated by its extreme elements, whereas 37 percent say it’s the Republican Party that is more dominated by extremists.

The revelations in a survey of 10 toss-up congressional districts across the country point to problems for Democrats, who are trying to motivate a disillusioned base and appeal to independents moving to the GOP ahead of the Nov. 2 election.

The polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland conducted the survey, contacting 4,047 likely voters by phone between Oct. 2 and Oct. 7. The margin of error for this sample is 1.5 percent.

More than one in every five Democrats (22 percent) in The Hill’s survey said their party was more dominated than the GOP by extreme views. The equivalent figure among Republicans is 11 percent.

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Peggy Noonan in today’s Wall Street Journal:

The Democratic Party right now is showing signs of coming apart under the pressure of the election and two years of an unpopular presidency. But it’s not a split in two, with the left versus the establishment. It’s more like a splintering, with left-leaning activists distancing themselves from the party’s politicians, and moderate politicians distancing themselves from Mr. Obama.

And part of what’s driving it is what is driving the evolution of the Republican Party. The Internet changed everything. Everyone has facts now, knows who voted how and why. New thought leaders spring up and lead in new directions. Total transparency leads to party fracturing. Information dings unity. We are in new territory.

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One must be careful not to draw exact parallels between a historical event and a current situation, at least not without sufficient evidence. I want to be cautious. However, as I was teaching a class on the Civil War era last week, I noticed what appeared to be a rather striking similarity in the fate of the Democrat party in the 1850s and that same party today.

Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas

Here’s the history: In 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois made an all-out push for a bill he sponsored called the Kansas-Nebraska Act. On the surface, it sounded good—let settlers moving into those areas decide for themselves whether or not slavery should be allowed. Douglas referred to his plan as popular sovereignty, and he saw no problem with it because for him slavery was not a moral issue. Whatever the people decided was fine.

Yet for many others, it was a moral issue, and an increasingly contentious one. The ideological divide between North and South was growing. Further, what Sen. Douglas’s bill did was to alter the agreement the Congress had reached back in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise. At that time, Congress decided to draw a line extending west from the southern border of Missouri that forbade slavery in any territory north of that line.

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Other than the Klan, is there a more useless organization in American than the NAACP? Violent crime in black urban communities remains unsettling, the learning gap between black and other students still exists, marriage is all but nonexistent among poor blacks, and all too many households are headed by single mothers.

So where does the NAACP level its attack? Beyond street crime, apart from dysfunctional communities, ignoring the skyrocketing rates of HIV AIDS, they say the real problem for black folks is … the Tea Party movement. Benjamin Jealous, the NAACP’s president, says Tea Party activism is “pushing the country backwards.”

But wait, the problems facing urban black communities pre-date the growth of Tea Party formations by a significant number of years. But facts aside, since the end of the 1980s, the NAACP has been completely unable to craft an authentic agenda dealing with the real issues facing black communities.

So what’s a stuffy, out-of-step civil rights group to do? It throws down the victim card and places blame for its organizational failures in odd places.

Last time I checked, most Tea Party formations are organized around issues like limited government, maximum individual liberty, free markets and fiscal responsibility. Issues of race have not been a featured part of any Tea party gathering in any place that I’ve been aware of.

But, facts to liberals are like kryptonite to Superman. And neither facts nor logic seemingly played a role in the NAACP’s decision to take up a resolution at its national convention condemning “The Tea Party”for“explicitly racist behavior.

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Remember the good old days of black rage, when it was common place to know better than to mess with the brothas? Many a white folk radiated a pheromone of fear around the melanistic men and women who could snap and issue a retroactive cathartic beat down at any moment if they thought whitey was trying to get mighty again.

It ain’t that way anymore…

Now white folks are afraid of how much black people are going to complain.

The NAACP has been the flagship of making the black community look like the biggest community of sissies in America, as they continually promote us as victims. For decades they’ve boo hoo’d about the white man, yet remain loyal to what has always been an oppressive party; the Democrat party.

I’ve explored the NAACP’S interactive timeline and legal milestones on their webpage, and they list the injustices of the Jim Crow laws, the bigotry of Woodrow Wilson, etc. They’re well aware of the evils perpetrated, but hesitate to call the evil doers by their name. They’re slow to acknowledge that these oppressive laws and legalities were imposed on the black community by the Democrat party.

If you dig deep into the bowels of their website there may be a reference or two about Democrat naughtiness that amounts to a lil’ pat on the boo-boo.

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Republicans should welcome a comparison of the history of the GOP with that of the Democratic Party – the party of slavery and socialism, Big Government and the Ku Klux Klan.  To quote from chapter one of Back to Basics for the Republican Party: “The more we Republicans know about the history of our party, the more the Democrats will worry about the future of theirs.”

Here, you can test your knowledge.  The answers are below.

Q. How many Democrats in Congress voted to abolish slavery?
127
95
34
0

Q. Which park was established by a future Chairman of the Republican National Committee?
Central Park
Griffith Park
Franklin Park
Lincoln Park

Q. Which former Republican presidential nominee declined a nomination for Chief Justice?
James Blaine
Wendell Willkie
Thomas Dewey
Bob Dole

Q. Who was the first Vice President to attend Cabinet meetings?
Levi Morton (R-NY)
Theodore Roosevelt (R-NY)
Calvin Coolidge (R-MA)
Charles Dawes (R-IL)

Q. Which archaeological site was discovered by a future Republican U.S. Senator?
Angkor Wat
Great Zimbabwe
Machu Picchu
Stonehenge

Click “More” for the answers.

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The parallels to 1994 are all around us.  A Democrat president is elected.  He pushes big government agenda items like health care.  His presidency gets mired by scandal and circumstances.  His poll numbers begin to drop quickly.   In 1994 Republicans rallied around a set of principles and won a congressional majority.  Today, unfortunately, those principles often appear to be missing.

The Contract with America was a critical piece of the Republican victory in 1994 because it let voters know there was an alternative to the big spending ways of the Democrat Party.  Today, not so much.

Republicans appear to be all over the map and the clear principled default lines are missing.

Nowhere does that appear more evident than on the Financial Reform legislation.  The bill passed the Senate after the Democrats broke the Republican dam.  Sen. Scott Brown joined others in moving the bill to a House Senate Conference where things are going from bad to worse.  Republicans didn’t help make the bill “better” by voting for amendment’s like the Durbin price control amendment.

The time has come to for Republicans to begin to draft distinctions between Democrats and their big government policies.  The Financial Reform legislation is a good place to start.  The bill contains bailouts, takeovers, and price control schemes — via the Durbin Amendment — that is corporate welfare at it’s worse.

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I’ve been joking recently that the political climate was moving into territory where it would be impossible for even the GOP to screw up the November elections. I was wrong. Tuesday’s special election to replace the deceased Rep. John Murtha, where a credible GOP candidate lost by almost ten points, proves that we should never underestimate the GOP’s ability to squander its advantages and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

First, lets dismiss with a few of the challenges the GOP faced in the special election. The district, Pennsylvania 12, is a gerrymandered mess, designed to elect a Democrat. There are twice as many registered Democrats in the district as Republicans. Although the Presidential election in 2008 was close, in prior years the Democrat candidate won the district in a walk.

The special election was scheduled on the same day as a hotly-contested Democrat primary, guaranteeing a boost in the party’s turnout. There was a gadfly “tea party” candidate auditioning for the role of spoiler and a somewhat complicated voting process where supporters of the GOP candidate, Tim Burns, had to vote twice; once in the GOP primary and again in the actual special election. And, the Democrat candidate had the full support of the left’s political machine and an army of supporters from Big Labor, in one of the few remaining districts where that matters.

All of these dynamics pointed to a close race. They do not, however, add up to the blowout suffered by Burns on Tuesday. Remember, Burns’ opponent, Mark Critz, was a former staffer for John Murtha. He actually campaigned that he was the economic development director for the former Congressman. He negotiated the earmark deals that cast an ethical cloud above the Congressman and filled a grand jury docket. He said he was a pro-life Democrat, as if that means anything in a post-Stupak world. Oh, and he said he opposed ObamaCare but wouldn’t vote to repeal it. It seems he was against it before he was for it.

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Given the strong prospects for GOP resurgence in the upcoming elections, and the intimate connection which said resurgence is sure to have with the fortunes of the Tea Party Movement, it is no surprise that advice is presently being offered to that movement from all sides. The most recent instance of that advice comes from Cato Institute scholar John Samples, who has released a video under the aegis of the Institute entitled “Advice to Tea Partiers.”

Advice to Tea Partiers

Samples is also the author of the book The Struggle to Limit Government, a political history book which convincingly makes the case for a libertarian resurgence within the GOP grounded on Reaganite principles. The video, which in some ways is a much simplified version of the book, offers five points of advice, many of which are well-taken, but some of which are grounded more in wishful thinking than in actual political savvy.

On that note, the video begins with the dubious statement that because of the “spending” and “expansion of government” that was present during the Bush years, “the Republican Party is part of the problem.” This is a lead-in to point 1, entitled “Republicans Aren’t Always Your Friends.” Samples points out, correctly, that when Reagan’s budget director David Stockman tried to get much-needed budget cuts through the White House, all the various department heads opposed these cuts even as they worked under one of the most spending-averse Presidents since Calvin Coolidge. He takes this as evidence that the culture of entrenched programs in Washington can corrupt everyone, Republicans included.

On this much he is right. However, it’s worth noting that part of the issue with Reagan’s cabinet was also that it had to be selected in order to pass a Democrat-controlled Senate confirmation process, and thus was probably more moderate than anything Reagan envisioned. Thus, the conclusion that can be drawn from Samples’s video is not that mistrust of Republicans is the right option, but rather that mistrust of Democratic legislatures is the right option, for even under Republican presidents, such legislatures can wreak havoc on the agenda of limited government.

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After Republicans suffered consecutive bruising defeats in 2006 and 2008, boastful Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee officials warned that Republicans faced a difficult decision: Go along with the sweeping agenda of the new administration, or suffer the disastrous consequences of taking on an enormously popular president in the 2010 elections.

Perhaps the GOP of 2005 would have taken the bait and swallowed the administration’s bad medicine. After all, Republicans during that period were guilty of spending too much and growing government too much, both of which would become hallmarks of the February 2009 stimulus plan and the loaded agenda that would follow. That GOP became a bloated, go-along to get-along body that forgot how to lead. We blew it, and we were rightfully fired by our bosses – the American people.

But the GOP in the House today is different. Very different. Led by a new generation of young and energetic leaders, we are committed to restoring the public’s trust in our ability to lead as responsible adults.

Let’s take a look at the last 16 months.

In the face of one-party Democratic rule, House Republicans learned fairly quickly that an election won on ‘change’ would result in a far more intrusive and expensive government. At the time, many political pundits joined the chorus of Democrats who warned that House Republicans faced political suicide if they didn’t support the President’s signature inaugural initiative – his stimulus plan. Yet we decided to fight. And we fought hard. The reason we were able to credibly oppose such a popular President was because we presented a much more responsible approach that would have created twice the jobs at half the cost of the eventual stimulus law that has failed to deliver as promised. A 178-seat minority isn’t going to win many legislative battles in the House. But it did prove sufficient to offer a clear contrast and provide the first glimpse of a Republican Party that had returned to its fiscally conservative roots.

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Unlike the “experts” on both sides of the political spectrum who will state with absolute certainty who the Tea Partiers are and what they stand for (invariably to support the reporter’s political persuasion), we will admit that at this point in time, we can only say for certain what the movement is not.  Like the storied Boston Tea Party of 1773 where the citizens of Massachusetts protested British taxes being imposed on them without any representation and dumped three shiploads of British tea into the harbor, the current movement is not a political party, at least not yet, and it probably never will be.

Of course every commentator and pollster is ready to tell us definitively what the meaning is of this unique new political movement.  Former President Clinton likened its followers to the odious Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City notoriety.   The former President knows better but as a loyal Democrat he apparently is willing to share in the heavy lifting to demonize the Tea Party.  Many Republican leaders say the movement is nothing more than an outcry against the policies of the current Administration, but in our view that would be an over simplification as well.

The common philosophical thread which does seem to run all through Tea Party adherents who speak out appears to be a sense that government has become too large, too overbearing, too much in debt and that it is muscling into our private lives as never before.  True, many attendees who are interviewed are outraged about specific issues like high taxes, the recently enacted health care bill and the tactics used to force its passage.  Divining coherency and consistency out of all of this is impossible even though we are treated daily to talking heads and newspaper analysts who state with absolute assurance what it all means.

Our take is that the movement can be attributed simply to frustration with the “political class” and a free-floating anxiety about whether any elected officials can provide inspiration and leadership in troubled times.  But any review of the history of the shifting political tides in our nation clearly shows that this movement has numerous antecedents . . . and that it is very healthy for our democracy.

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Hooray everyone! The Economy is growing!!

The video below was recently released by the Democrat Party, and it touts the Obama-Democrat “recovery” now under way.

Oddly, despite the numerous government CRA/Fannie/Freddie/Sally Mae/HUD scandals, and despite the fact that Democrats have controlled Congress since 2006, it blames ALL of America’s economic problems on reckless bankers, and Bush/Republicans.

Coincidentally, despite the fact that the Democrat controlled government just raised the debt ceiling so they could borrow more money against future generations in order to fund today’s entitlement/pubic sector payroll, the video assigns Democrats with ALL the credit for what they are calling a “recovery”.

The US Government is borrowing TRILLIONS of dollars from foreign countries in order to swell the government sponsored payroll, thereby making it appear on paper as thought there is a “recovery” underway, and the Democrats are crowing as though they have achieved something meaningful?

Don’t get us wrong. We would love to be able to live in the progressive utopia of Obamaland, and bask in the glory of the American economic recovery, if only it could be. We would all stand to gain from an economic recovery. But as fiscal conservatives have been pointing out for years and years and years now, the tab for this monstrosity of a government will come due, and when it does, it will leave us all in ruin.

Worse still, the government is apparently intent on taking ZERO responsibility for their role in our disastrous predicament (as evidenced in the video above). While that is the case, there is no hope of the system being reformed based on anything resembling reality and/or honesty.

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One in five democrats in Massachusetts is going with Scott Brown.

That’s bad enough.

Now there’s more bad news for democrat Martha Coakley…

Scott Brown is holding a press conference at 4:00 PM EST. (From contacts in Massachusetts) He may sue the Democratic Party for using his picture on ads as a UPS driver.

Red Mass has the document:

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President Obama told an audience at a Democratic Party fundraiser Wednesday night that Republicans often “do what they’re told,” but GOP voters don’t think their legislators listen enough to them.

Just 15% of Republicans who plan to vote in 2012 state primaries say the party’s representatives in Congress have done a good job of representing Republican values.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 73% think Republicans in Congress have lost touch with GOP voters from throughout the nation. Twelve percent (12%) are undecided.
These numbers are basically unchanged from a survey in late April.

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