Senator John McCain’s future in the U.S. Senate may be a little less assured than previously thought.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely 2010 Republican Primary voters in Arizona finds the longtime incumbent in a virtual tie with potential challenger J.D. Hayworth. McCain earns 45% of the vote, while Hayworth picks up 43%.

Former Minuteman leader Chris Simcox gets four percent (4%) support, while two percent (2%) prefer some other candidate and seven percent (7%) are undecided.

Hayworth, a conservative former U.S. congressman who now is a popular radio talk show host in Phoenix, is reportedly interested in the race but has not formally declared for it.

John McCain ran a disastrous campaign last year. He could have won and been President McCain — I truly believe this — were it not for his own bungling. The stars did not align perfectly for Obama. There were plenty of mistakes made by the Obama campaign, plenty of cards McCain could have played. But his Democrat-Lite reputation pissed off a lot of people in his own party, and he made tons of mistakes. It no doubt left a sour taste in many voters’ mouths. And with amnesty about to rear its ugly head again, I’m not surprised that Arizona voters are considering kicking him to the curb.

Bill Kristol and AllahPundit are floating the possibility of Sarah Palin coming to bail him out. Allah goes over the reasons that this would be politically advantageous for Palin, but frankly, I hope she doesn’t. First, in my opinion, it’s high time we get rid of John McCain. He’s a giant squish who has made a career out of pissing off Republicans as much as possible. We need to be weeding out the RINOs right now, not doing everything we can to help them retain their seats. Second, Palin was treated abysmally by the McCain campaign staff. They handcuffed her, gagged her, and then once the campaign was over, abandoned her and then stabbed her in the back. McCain may himself have not said or done anything, but he looked the other way while it happened and certainly didn’t come to her defense. He is a brave, courageous man in many aspects, but in this one, he was a coward. Sarah Palin was a risky choice for him. He’s the maverick, the one who relishes being the media darling. I don’t think he enjoyed being hammered in the media, and she certainly didn’t lighten that load for him. He plucked her out of relative obscurity, and then left her to be fed to the wolves. Yet now, she’s supposed to come and bail him out? She’s a rising star; he’s an old has-been. He’ll probably need her help, and if I was Sarah Palin, I wouldn’t give it. The only downfall is it makes her look petty and vindictive. I would think the best move for her would be to endorse neither candidate and make some kind of non-committal statement about how McCain is a great person and not say much more.

Of course, Allah’s predicting that McCain will be too stubborn and prideful to go begging for her help. If he won’t, then it eliminates the burden off of her shoulders. Hopefully, that’s exactly what happens, and McCain fades into obscurity after this election cycle. His career’s frankly gone on way too long.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

Going Rogue is going gangbusters, and it looks like both Palin and her publisher, HarperCollins, are going to make some serious money off of it. According to industry insiders, Palin got a $7 million advance for her book. She’s earning a royalty rate of 15 percent, which means she makes $4.35 per book sold, and therefore needs to sell 1.6 million books to earn out her advance. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that HarperCollins had printed another 100,000 copies of Going Rogue, bringing the total in print to 1.6 million. Palin would need to sell all of those to earn out her advance, so it’s unlikely that’s going to happen.

But HarperCollins will be making money long before that. There’s a rule of thumb in the industry that publishers net about $10 per hardcover sold, after expenses, but before the cost of the advance. Once she’s sold 700,000 copies, then, HarperCollins is in the black. And what of that 1.6 million printed? An ideal “sell-through” rate is about 75 percent, which means HarperCollins thinks it’s going to sell about 1.2 million copies. At that level, Palin will have made $7 million and HarperCollins $5 million of its own.

A HarperCollins insider told The Daily Beast that the book sold a staggering 300,000 copies on the first day alone, which was Tuesday. “Sales are phenomenal, and we are convinced that the book will continue to sell phenomenally for some time to come,” says the insider. They’re not prevaricating: As of 2:30pm today, the book was #1 on Amazon, ahead of both Stephen King’s new novel, Under the Dome, and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. The latter sold 1 million copies on its first day, but that figure included the UK, and top fiction generally trumps non-fiction. Any way you carve it, Going Rogue looks to be a $12 million goldmine.

On top of that, her favorables are rising.

As Sarah Palin blankets the media on a whirlwind book promotion tour, the former vice-presidential contender is clearly back on America’s radar screen. Despite being characterized by many as a divisive force in her party and the nation, Americans are much more likely to give Palin a positive rating (47 percent favorable) than another prominent female leader — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (28 percent favorable). Moreover, about six in 10 Americans (61 percent) think Palin has been treated unfairly by the press, according to the latest Fox News poll.

Something tells me that the longer Democrats are in power, the more likeable Sarah Palin is going to be to Americans. Love her or hate her (and I love her), you cannot deny that she is on fire right now. 1500 people waited in the freezing cold to meet her. There’s even polling showing that, if the 2012 presidential race were held today, and Palin was running against Obama, they’d basically be in a dead heat among independents, the most important block of voters later. The mainstream media may try to demean and diminish her, but her star is clearly rising. And unless Obama suddenly turns into some kind of fiscal hawk overnight (not likely), she’s just going to keep looking better and better.

2012 is looking like a better and better year.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary or follow her on Twitter!

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

An excerpt of the 1924 Republican Party Platform:

The prosperity of the American nation rests on the vigor of private initiative which has bred a spirit of independence and self-reliance. The republican party stands now, as always, against all attempts to put the government into business.

American industry should not be compelled to struggle against government competition. The right of the government to regulate, supervise and control public utilities and public interests, we believe, should be strengthened, but we are firmly opposed to the nationalization or government ownership of public utilities.

In 1924 the GOP ran Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge for president. And he won on this platform.

Even then Democrats were trying to turn this country into a less powerful version of Europe by emulating its socialist systems. A proud Republican Party repudiated these socialist tendencies and reiterated its pride in the American way. These principles appealed to the true American spirit and also won elections.

Unfortunately, the very next president, himself a Republican, turned toward socialist, collectivist concepts and set the stage for what later became Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal destruction of the American economic system that compounded a market correction and turned it into “The Great Depression.” And save for a brief time under Ronald Reagan, it appears that the GOP has never recovered its principles as espoused in its 1924 platform.

Where are these strong principles today? Does the GOP stand for free markets, individual responsibility, self-reliance, and the right of the citizen to be left alone by a rapacious federal government under Democrats? It is getting harder and harder to think that the GOP does want to uphold these long-held American principles, those that made this country great.

So, let’s recall the words of the 1924 GOP Party platform and let us strive to return to these first principles.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

This is the final installment [of] my three part report on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s one day conference on The Roots of American Order. So here is part two of mine titled Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant? (Click for parts one and two)

After a break for lunch, Mark C. Henrie took up America’s Britishness. Henrie wrote the ISI’s A Student’s Guide to the Core Curriculum that explains the value of a traditional core of studies in Western civilization and his session reflected that study.

Capitalizing on Birzer’s citation of Edmund Burke who praised the colonist’s essential Britishness, Henrie made the point that America is best understood not as a break from tradition but as the culmination of a long series of continuous ideals that range back through Western history, specifically through England.

Henrie says that we get four essentials from England.

1. The English language and literature
2. The common law and a respect for the rule of law
3. A desire for self government
4. Manners and a social order

One of the questions that researchers have often wondered is why American English and British English are essentially the same? Why didn’t America reinvent English for its own purposes in the same way the Dutch altered German, for instance? Henrie says that the reason is that the focal point of language in the colonies was contained in the King James Bible and that pervasive reliance on a single source of language arrested any development of a widely diverging American version of English. We Americans inherited the English language through the Bible.

Next Henrie talked of our ideals of law. As an example of the American focus on the law, Henrie notes that Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Common Law was more popular per capita in the colonies than it was in England. He also said that it was likely that the ideals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” came from Blackstone.

Our ideals of self-government are also a British idea. Accordingly, Officials in Parliament were initially elected from their own local areas and sent to Parliament to represent the nation just as we continued to do in Congress.

In the Q and A afterwards, though, I noted that one of the reasons that the Crown couldn’t understand our point of view on representation in Parliament was because we took our representation a tad farther than the British did.

In England, once elected to Parliament it was expected that those that took their seat were to stop worrying about representing their home turf and consider themselves as representatives of the whole of Britain. On the other hand, since we in America were so geographically isolated and since we did not initially have here a national body in which to sit, we had a higher expectation that our local representatives would go into colonial government to represent the views of those that elected them. In many cases, Americans bound their representatives to the voters and allowed them little room for maneuver while members of the House of Commons in Britain had no expectation at all that their constituents back home would control their efforts in Parliament in any way.

So, when Americans expected to have an actual seat at the table in Parliament where our own officials might sit to represent us, British officials deemed such a thing unnecessary because all of Parliament sat in virtual representation of the whole of the Empire. The Crown simply saw no reason for Americans to sit in Parliament but this was an abrogation of their right to self-government as far as the colonists were concerned.

As an outgrowth of this expectation of self-rule all the way down to the local community, federalism was born and this was an entirely new idea.

Finally, as Burke noted, America was bequeathed a particularly British sense of manners, comportment, and a social order that also saw us more like the British than unlike them. The Britishness that undergirded our entire culture in all parts of the colonies was strong enough to stave off the various other European influences (French, German, Spanish, what have you) and maintain our status as the true heirs to British sensibilities.

Once again we see that we are beholden to our traditions.

Finally we heard from E. Christian Kopff on The Philadelphia Miracle.

Reflecting the religious theme of the day’s events, Kopff recalls how nearly every founder termed our founding as a miracle born of divine intervention and that our efforts were not just efforts for us but for all mankind.

But he noted that Machiavelli said that every nation must be forced back to its first principles at some time or lose itself and that we are today at such a crossroads.

Here I think another Machiavelli quote is pertinent to the discussion:

Princes and republics who wish to maintain themselves free from corruption must above all things preserve the purity of all religions observances, and treat them with proper reverence; for there is no greater indication of the ruin of a country than to see religion condemned.
– Niccoló Machiavelli, The Discourses. 1517.

I might also stretch this to include civil institutions along with those religious. We are today in a state of eschewing our civil and religious traditions and this has led to our current discontent as far as I am concerned.

Kopff discussed how he thinks the conventional wisdom on the Constitutional debates states that there was some unknown shift during the debate of the Constitution from the one-state-one-vote plan to the current system of proportional representation. Kopff thinks that the delegates were actually persuaded by arguments of proportionalism as opposed to cajoled by some corrupt bargain as some historiography has led some to believe.

Kopff notes that during the debate, John Dickinson of Delaware said that experience should be “our only guide” because rationalism may “lead us astray.” (see the quote I started this piece out with above) Not only does Kopff think that the delegates were persuaded by Dickinson’s argument here, but he thinks there was a realization by the delegates that tradition and history should serve as their bedrock.

He rejects that the Enlightenment influence was as pervasive as many argue it was. He points out that rationalism — as espoused by Rousseau, for one — as a thing that is born free of past encumbrance is impossible. Kopff asserts that rationalism can only be built on tradition and past experience, he posits that tradition validates rationalism.

To my mind, he makes a good point. After all fans of rationalism seem to imagine that at its inception rationalism represented an anti-religious ideal and a breaking from tradition, a new way of thought. Yet, these same people accept that rational thought can be born of nothing, not based on past experience? Isn’t that the same thing as divine revelation? I mean, divine revelation insists that it is born of God’s word and not of earthly traditions and man’s efforts. And here comes rationalism divorced from man’s tradition to be born as if from a miraculous revelation? It seems to me that the rationalists merely exchanged the idea that God is divine with the idea that the individual human’s mind is divine.

Without experience and tradition, rationalism most certainly can lead us astray. We are seeing that today with a left-wing wishing of what could be if only…! With the left’s insistence that our traditions and systems are useless, corrupt, or need the panacea of “change” to “fix” them, we are truly seeing the “rational” going uninformed by tradition and experience in America today.

We are all too often rejecting our American principles as venal and broken. We have for fifty years told the world that we are wrong, even evil. And now we have a president that has made it his duty in nearly every single speech he’s given to say that we have been wrong on everything. Is it any wonder that we have an enemy in radical Islamists that have taken our word for it and decided to punish us accordingly?

The truth is, we are not a nation that needs to be remade. We are a nation that needs to get back to first principles. Are there some problems with our early ideas? Certainly. But to throw the baby out with the bathwater is a fool’s action. The fact is, we are a great nation because of our traditions and principles, not despite them and we need to retrain our citizenry in those principles.

I was glad to have gotten the chance to attend this ISI conference and look forward to its future efforts. In the mean time, if you’d like to see a whole series of video and audio lectures on American exceptionalism, history, and traditions some that stretch back some 40 years, visit ISI’s lecture series on its website. There you’ll see some great lecturers from folks like the four I met this weekend (and including them). ISI also has an interesting blog called First Principles that is worth visiting.

Part One: Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant?

ISI Conference Part Two: Christ in Our Soul

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

This is part two of my three part report on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s one day conference on The Roots of American Order. So here is part two of mine titled Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant? (Part one can be seen here)

The second speaker of the day was Brad Birzer who regaled us on America’s Judeo-Christian History.

Bizer began his session by noting that historian Donald Lutz discovered that the founders used Christian references in their pre-war writing far more than any other source. St. Paul was the most referenced New Testament figure with Micah 4:4 being the most referenced Old Testament verse.

But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.

On this Lutz quotation, though, I want to clarify something. Many have bandied about the claim that Donald Lutz said that 34 percent of the founder’s writing contain direct Biblical citations. This claim is not altogether true. On the other hand, it is not something to quickly dismiss as fans of the Enlightenment influence want to do, either.

The problem is that Lutz’ research didn’t reveal that this 34 percent came “directly” from Biblical citations. What Lutz found was that the Bible and quotes from sermons of the period added up to his finding of 34 percent. Lutz wasn’t saying the 34 percent was made up solely of Biblical quotations. It is a bit misleading to say that this large number of citations “came from the Bible” when a portion came from the sermons of famous preachers of the era — and political sermons at that. Granted sermons are generally of religious content, but a quote for a sermon isn’t the same thing as a direct citation from the Bible.

Add to this the fact that Lutz also found that the Federalist Papers and the debates about the Constitution contain very few Biblical citations and we get another shade of this debate that is necessary to consider. Many Atheists and Enlightenment influence fans claim that the lack of Biblical citations during this second period of the American founding proves that religion was meaningless. But I warn these deniers that Lutz was also not saying that the Bible was meaningless. In his study, after he notes that the Biblical influence seemed to disappear from the founder’s writing during the Constitutional phase, Lutz says it isn’t “surprising since the debate centered upon specific institutions about which the Bible has little to say.”

The fact is that this 34 percent of Protestant Religious citations isn’t meaningless. It still shows that a great preponderance of the founder’s citations were religiously based, and of the Protestant religion at that. It also shows that religious appeals formed a large part of the thinking of the founding era as they geared up both for war with Britain and the formation of the United States of America.

I sort of wish that Birzer had gone into this further, but I understand why he didn’t. He had a finite amount of time and this diversion would have moved away from his main point. In any case, both sides make at the same time too much and too little of Lutz’ study.

Birzer next noted that America was, indeed, a land of religious freedom even if its particular parts were “islands of intolerance.” He notes that the religious freedom that our early years are famous for did exist, but not in the laissez faire style we’d like to wish it were. Sure it was illegal to be a Catholic in Maryland after 1689, for instance, or one had to be an Anglican to hold office in Virginia but those particular restrictions were less extent in other parts of the country. Each segment had its particular religious sect as the officially recognized religion, but there wasn’t a single religion for all of the colonies leaving people free to choose where they might like to live in accordance with their individual principles.

The summation is that religion played a supremely important part in the early days from the first colonists to the founding era.

As an example Birzer notes that as laid out in his “On Conciliation With America,” Edmund Burke’s characterization of the American Colonies was that the colonies were born of English liberty and religion.

In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole… This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth, and this from a great variety of powerful causes…

If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of the form of government, religion would have given it a complete effect. Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it.

Birzer, though, also pointed out that a chief motivating factor in rallying Americans to the revolutionary cause was an anti-Catholicism that was inflamed by the Crown’s 1774 Quebec Act that gave an official Crown-recognized status to French Catholics in Canada. This fear of “Papism” led many Americans to fear for their liberties expecting a creeping Catholic tyranny to invade their colonies through the Crown’s apostasy.

Birzer notes, though, that in many ways the establishment of local rule in the colonies was a bloodless coup of sorts. He gives the example of Charles Carroll of Carrollton a Roman Catholic who led Marylanders to form an extra legal government that eventually simply took over the colony as the official government in the minds of the people. At some point, the poor Royal Governor had to just go home because he was simply ignored by the whole colony as they favored their fellows instead.

Of course, Carroll’s efforts led him to become a celebrated citizen despite his Catholic religion and this, in turn, broke down some of those religious barriers for Catholics, at least in Maryland.

Birzer really pressed the point, though, that the main reason that colonists feared Papism was because of the top-down leadership of the Church, a style that necessarily negated, as far as they were concerned, the liberties that the colonists valued above all else.

He summed up his talk by asking of us all a question. In some parts of the colonies, men were required by law to bring two things to church with them on a Sunday morning: Their Bible and their rifle. These men were ready to give their all to protect their liberties. But are we today still ready to reclaim what is ours? With all the world flexing its muscles, from North Korea, to China to Iran, are we as Americans ready to fight to reclaim our legacy of freedom or are we to roll over and allow an out-of-control, socialist government to usurp our liberties as enemies gather at our gates?

Next: More British Than the British!

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

Is the United States a grand experiment, a new covenant invented out of whole cloth by the fertile minds of the founders from never before seen ideas or is it a nation spawned from deeply rooted traditions of western thought? This was the question posited in a one-day-long conference on classicism in America’s founding, sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) and held in Skokie, Illinois, a near northern suburb of Chicago.

The short answer is that the liberal mindset that holds that we should invent the USA anew with each succeeding generation is an erroneous conception of what the United States was meant to be when it was founded. Sure America has some ideas never before seen by political man, but at heart, America is rationalism informed by tradition, not some amorphous mélange of constantly changing ideas.

The founders created a new nation based heavily on Western ideas through British tradition, not one based solely on rationalist thinking. As they struggled to set their new nation on its new Constitutional course, for instance, the words of Founder John Dickinson of Delaware served as their benchmark.

Let experience be our only guide. Reason may lead us astray.

An intimate crowd of 60 some participants enjoyed four separate addresses by lecturers associated with ISI. Appearing behind the lectern were Bruce Thornton, Professor of Classics at Fresno State University; Brad Birzer, Professor of History at Hillsdale College; Mark C. Henrie, Senior VP and Chief Academic Officer of ISI; and E. Christian Kopff, Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

In these three installments, I will lay out what we talked about at this interesting one-day conference.

Part One: How it all Began

We began the morning with Bruce Thornton whose topic was America’s Classical Roots. Through Thornton we discovered the roots of democracy and western thought in classical Greek history.

As Thornton began, one of the points he made at the top was that politics is a result of citizenship and this was something new to man in the time of the ancient Greeks. Before the concept of citizenship men were governed by mere power as opposed to participation. What struck my mind with this point is that so many Americans today pronounce their disinterest in politics and have a mistaken conception that politics and politicians are separate from them. But, as Thornton reminds us, politics IS we the people. Politics isn’t separate from us, it IS us.

With this in mind, we must also remember that the law is also owned by we the people. Our politicians, our officers of the law do not own it. We do. It would behoove us to remember our role as citizens in this compact instead of sitting idly by grumbling about our out-of-control government.

Thornton warned us that it is a great mistake to dismiss the ancient Greeks (and Romans for that matter) as the fathers of our democratic freedoms just because they don’t today live up to our modern concept of what democracy and rights are. The idea of citizenship, though unevenly applied, was a revelation for the day and we cannot be over harsh in our judgment of their intellectual progress because they hadn’t yet reached the same level we have today. Yes, there was slavery, sure women did not have the same equal consideration under the law, but giving the citizen any role in government at all was an incredible breakthrough that should not be dismissed.

After all, for all of man’s history until the ancient Greeks (as far as we know) there were no other cultures that even had names for the totality of humanity. These peoples often used tribal words meant to describe people as “us” while everyone else was “them.” It manifested as if “them” were less than human, i.e. not “us.” But the Greeks philosophized about the human condition — again even though unevenly applied — they thought of humanity in totality.

Slavery is another touchy subject, of course. All the way until our Civil War, slavery was endemic to mankind. It had only been since the 1830s with England in the lead that the concept of slavery had at long last begun to suffer a loss of ready acceptance. So, to say that the Ancients are easily dismissed because they had slavery is ridiculous because they knew no other condition. But even at that, there is proof that the ancients were beginning to wonder about the legitimacy of slavery. Thornton related a concept from one of these philosophers (whose name I don’t recall) who said — and I paraphrase — The god makes men yet nature enslaves no one. The point here is that men use power to enslave. Slavery is not a natural condition but man made one.

Thornton’s main point was that the classical Greeks served as our touchstone, our bedrock for the American system. The main concepts of citizenship, participation, and the ideas of government were laid in those early centuries before Christ. Our founders cited the ancients more often than other influences except Christian principles in their tracts, letters and papers on their efforts to launch the U.S.A. So, to say that America was entirely “new” is absurd and a misreading of history.

Next: Christ in Our Soul

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

Get ready because I am going to slap George W. Bush around a little bit. Now, don’t get me wrong, it isn’t like I hated him. After all I voted for him twice. There was a lot that Bush did that I supported, mostly on the security and war fronts. But, I really stood against his domestic agenda almost completely. I was against no child’s behind left alone — er, I mean no child left behind — I was against the bailouts and against the drug benefit for seniors program. I disagreed with his “compassionate conservatism” narrative because it really was just an excuse for a little less big government than what the Democrats full-blown socialism would have been. About the only thing he wanted to do that I supported, the privatization of Social Security, he never pushed hard enough to implement.

With that in mind, George W. Bush made his first major appearance before the general public today in a speech announcing the George W. Bush Institute, a new public policy think tank to be housed in the Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

Mr. Bush wants his new institute to foster free market policies, small government thinking, education, global health and “human freedom”… to which I have to ask, so where were you for eight years on these things Mr. Bush?

During his speech, Bush said that with the $700 billion bank bailout he implemented in the waning days of his presidency he “went against” his free-market instincts. He said it was one of the “most difficult” decisions of his presidency. I’d say he failed the test. Juxtaposing his bailouts with the free-market, small government policies that he wants his new institute to push causes one to raise an eyebrow, of course. How do past actions jive with his future policy ideals?

To be sure, Bush will have a lot to live down in this vein. Mr. Bush’s newly appointed executive director of the G.W. Bush Institute, James K. Glassman, recently found this out first hand in what one might have thought would have been a friendly environment for him.

Glassman appeared as a guest speaker at a breakfast meeting at the State Policy Network’s 17th Annual conference held earlier this month in Asheville, North Carolina. SPN is a sort of trade organization for conservative state policy think tanks. Glassman was there to speak on Internet freedom (as opposed to net neutrality) but after his address not one question was asked about his ideas on the Internet. Every question thrown his way had to do with the Bush’s bad decision on TARP and what the audience considered his bad drug benefit program and his disastrous education policies.

Glassman saw his subject overwhelmed by the distaste a conservative audience had for his boss’s policies. I think this will be a harbinger of things to come for the projects that the Bush Institute tries to implement, at least until people stop being so angry about his presidency.

Now, let’s be clear about a few things. The Bush administration was pretty good on free markets. His work with emerging markets like India and Colombia, not to mention long-time trade partners like Canada, Mexico, et all, was great. But his bank bailouts went completely against free market principles.

As to education, a real conservative would rather see policies that denudes the federal government of all powers in this area. With no child left behind, it was plain that Bush felt that the federal government had a legitimate and growing role in education.

Still, I hope that the new George W. Bush Institute is successful in fostering only the best, conservative ideas and policies and helps the country and the world move more toward self-reliance, the free-market, and the like. It remains to be seen if his new organization will do that. But we can hope.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

A British reporter chatted-it-up with an American Muslim at the local mosque where murdering, Islamicist Nidal Hasan, worshipped.

Duane, the American Muslim, said he has “no pity” for the dead at Ft. Hood. He admits that we [infidels] will be shocked by his words but predicts that after 5 minutes we’ll forget about it and go on our way.

“Duane” must be issuing a challenge to Liberals, because I promise, Conservatives will not forget:

“it’s just like a majority of the people who hear this will be shocked and after 5 minutes they will forget about it and go on their way.”

Muslim-appeasing Liberals will forget Duane, but not I, not my liberty-loving friends. We won’t be forgetting, and you can sleep well knowing that our military will never, never forget – but they will protect your rotten soul – you who would never have the strength to live the rest of your life among your own “brothers,” as you affectionately refer to them, in the squalor of a real Muslim environment, where your life has no value. The only thing lower than you in a Muslim country are your women.

American Muslim “Duane” – attends Hasan’s local mosque – “no pity” for soldiers (video)

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

Sen. Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who developed a close friendship with President Obama when they served together in the Senate, is threatening to have the entire health care bill read on the Senate floor.
Senior Senate Democratic aides had heard Coburn was considering having potentially thousands of pages read aloud in effort to stall passage. “If he did this it would be even outrageous for a guy who’s become known as Dr. No around here,” one of them told POLITICO.
Coburn’s office confirmed that he is indeed thinking about having the bill read.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post

I have been missing from the site for several days and I’d like to explain why. I attended the State Policy Network 17th Annual conference in beautiful Ashville, North Carolina. Here is what I found:

Some final thoughts on the State Policy Network’s 17th Annual Conference.

It was invigorating to be able to share a conference with so many folks of like mind, a conservative, free market, liberty-minded mien. And with nearly 500 participants, the biggest conference they’ve yet had, it was something very worth attending if you are interested in furthering these sorts of policies among the various states.

But I have to say one thing that this conference proved and it is something that is, in the end, detrimental for the country. This was a 500 person conference where each participant spent no less than $1,000 to attend, many spent far more. There we saw free market think tanks from every state all trying to find ways to defeat the extreme Obama left. We have all this effort, all this money, all this time spent to defeat liberalism all in evidence at the conference. While that is good because it needs to be done, the sad thing is that it has to be done in the first place. The fact that this conference gets bigger every year and that more and more people from across the country have created state policy organizations to fight the un-American left is sad, when you get right down to it.

The left has become so pervasive, so detrimental to America’s economic, social, and military health that these 500 people who are representing many thousands more in their employ, who have invented their various organizations to save the livelihoods or many millions of Americans yearning for a return to America’s greatness, have been forced to take time out of their lives and money from their pockets to fight the left.

Many conservative groups are late to this game as the left has been doing this for many decades. But the fact that so many have come into being shows that the fight is not going ignored by the right. So, even as it is a shame that the fight has to be fought at all, it is heartening that it has been joined.

And lastly, this on the use of the Internet among these groups. In my discussions I found that some of these think tanks have good web presence, some are just feeling it out, and some have no web presence at all. But here is the worst part. Few of them really have a general public friendly out reach on line. As all of you who know me understand, I am all about putting current events and issues in reader friendly pieces of between 300 and 500 words length. Just enough for people to get the idea of what is going on and then links to sources for the reader to find more depth.

I wish that more of these think tanks and policy organizations had blogs that had short, easy to read, public friendly entries where people could get fired up about the important issues. Sure a 500 page white paper is a necessary thing and great to have but these sorts of things are only read by other think tankers and political wonks. Such long, dry, in depth research — much as it is needed — cannot appeal to the general public. And, whether these groups understand it or not, it is the general public, the voters, that they need on their side. Not just other policy wonks or mere politicians.

In any case, I know that all these organizations were in various stages of increasing their web presence, but they need to do it at light speed, not leisurely. I hope that they do get in gear.

My previous posts on the SPN2009 event:

SPN 2009 Conference: Final Day

State Policy Network Conference Update

The 17th Annual State Policy Network Conference

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post