Let’s just suppose for a moment that this item from the Weekly Standard is true:

The boss hears from two sources that Hillary Clinton is considering stepping down as Secretary of State this fall in order to run for Governor of New York.

I have no idea about its accuracy, but if it is true: Does it mean Hillary is or is not planning a run for the presidency in 2012?

An early exit from Obama’s cabinet would certainly be interpreted (correctly, I would guess) as a slap at him, and as an effort to distance herself from a failing presidency. From this we would assume that she may be running.

On the other hand, it has often been said of Rudy Giuliani that running for governor would make a presidential run impossible; and therefore we would assume that the same applies to Hillary – running for governor in 2010 means she is not running for president in 2012.

I’m going to propose that the latter rule does not apply to Hillary. It may apply to Rudy, because running for the presidency in a conventional campaign would necessitate spending much of 2011 eating corn dogs at Iowa county fairs and shaking hands outside New Hampshire churches, tough for a sitting governor to justify. But an insurgent campaign, riding a wave of liberal anger against a failed presidency (if Obama’s administration is widely perceived that way two years from today), does not require constant presence in the early states. I don’t think today such a campaign would require the groundwork that a conventional campaign might.

Hillary Clinton does not need to introduce herself to voters. There are few people better known. She doesn’t have to do much to build a national organization; the skeleton exists, and a few email blasts to organize meetings in every county in the country would quickly put flesh on it.

If the mood of the Democratic base is ugly in late 2011 a Draft Hillary movement could be put together in weeks and the governor of New York could reluctantly accede to the wishes of the people and accept the draft. She might lose in Iowa, but then win in New Hampshire, and then … who knows?

I’m not saying that Hillary running for governor means that she is running for president. But it is something she needs to do to put herself in a position from which she can run if the timing looks right. If not, then 2016 is still open. If it happens, I would interpret it as a move to keep her options open.

(HT: Tommy Boy)

The President’s speech to Congress is being hyped as a big deal. After all, the networks need the ratings. How significant this speech to the future of Obamacare? History suggests that what we’re about to see is little more than a ceremonial performance.

What has been the most impactful Presidential speech of the past three Administrations? I’d have to say it was Bill Clinton’s 1998 State of the Union Address. Clinton’s address did not change any policies, but prior to the speech, the network had been talking about Clinton being forced to resign. The speech silenced much of the media chatter for at least six months until Clinton gave his non-tearful confession to the nation following his testimony before Ken Starr’s grand jury.

However, a Presidential speech impacting policy? That is hard to find. Over the past seventeen years, I’ve seen 17 state of the Union speeches, a speech to a joint session of Congress by George W. Bush following September 11th and now President Obama addressing congress on health care. The last eightteen addresses have led to no fundamental change in American foreign or domestic policy, and don’t expect from number nineteen.

Presidential speeches are not policy, they are for politics and mood. The Presidential addresses we remember define philosophy, they give us a crystaline picture of the time, or perhaps a sense of the man. Look at the great speeches from any great Presidential orator: Lincoln (“House Divided” Speech, Gettysburg Address, and Second Inaugural), FDR (First Inaugural, Speech after Pearl Harbor, D-Day Prayer), JFK (Inaugural), or Reagan (Inaugural, Challenger Accident Speech, Evil Empire Speech, “Tear Down that Wall” Speech.)

Can we say that any of these speeches changed history? Had FDR not called the Pearl Harbor Attacks a day of infamy would Congress have just forgotten about it? Great speeches are great performances.

Policy changes happen based on the hand you’re holding.  What great speech made passage of Civil Rights legislation and the great society possible for LBJ? And unfortunately for Obama, his opponents have drawn to an inside straight. Obama lacks the popularity that allowed his to jam an ill-advised stimulus through Congress. Despite the unprecedent hundreds of millions spent on the last campaign to ensure Obama a filibuster-proof Senate and an unbreak House of Representatives, he lacks the clout with his own party to make them do his will. 

Obama has a House literally divided and an opposition nearly divided against as Drudge reports that 44 Democrats will oppose the bill with a public option and 57 will oppose it without one. If Obama had House and Senate leaders of the caliber of an LBJ or a Sam Rayburn, he might have a shot, but instead of having leaders rich in political skills, Obama has the political equivalent of two losers who win the lottery and are quickly in the process of heading back to the poor house.

Obama’s political capital has been spent. He blew a ton on a stimulus he oversold and underdelivered, and wasted much of what he had “stupidly” inserted himself into a Cambridge arrest. 

The gamblers aren’t waiting for the speech. Those who’ve got money on the issue, are only giving the public option a 20% chance of approval before the end of this year.  The President will you swelling words and the teleprompter will probably not fail him.  He may give a Royal Flush speech, but that doesn’t change the fact that all he’s holding is a pair of deuces.

As reported by Ben Smith, of Politico, in preparation for the President’s speech tonight, the White House has sent out talking points to “allies”.  Interestingly, the White House decided to include a section devoted to former Gov. Palin:

Every non partisan organization that has looked at her claims say they are false. And the ideas in her op-ed are both scary and risky. Eliminating Medicare and giving our seniors vouchers instead is a bad idea that we shouldn’t adopt.

The fact that the talking points focused on Palin’s comments without mentioning Obamacare criticisms from any other Republican illustrates the former Governor’s skill at influencing the debate.

Update: As per the request of Tommy Boy, here is the Governor’s response:

I’m pleased that the White House is finally responding to Republican health care ideas instead of pretending they don’t exist.[1] But in doing so President Obama should follow his own sound advice and avoid making “wild misrepresentations”.[2] Medicare vouchers would give everyone on Medicare the chance to decide for themselves which health plan to use, rather than leave that decision to government bureaucrats. Such proposals are the kind of health care reform that Republicans stand for: market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven.

The White House talking points leave the rest of my arguments unanswered. They don’t respond to the idea that all individuals should get the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; that we must reform our tort laws; and that we should allow Americans to buy insurance across state lines. The White House also fails to respond to the Nyce/Schieber study indicating that wages will fall if the government expands coverage without reducing health care inflation rates.

One last thing: after President Obama’s speech tonight, listen for which pundits use the words “false”, “scary”, and “risky” in describing the proposals I put forward. That’s how you’ll be able to tell who the White House counted as “allies” worthy of receiving its talking points.

Lord knows I wouldn’t spend twelve dollars to read one hundred pages of Glenn Beck’s material, but upon stumbling onto his latest book, Common Sense, in perfect condition at half of the original price at a used book store, I decided to pick it up. The piece, aimed at the ordinary American, hopes to be a wake-up call to the public that its government is failing in the purpose it was charged with by the Founding Fathers.

Beck states at the outset of his book that violence is not the answer to the problems that America faces and that the American experiment has not yet failed. It is rather chilling that this should even need to be said, but by invoking the example of Dr. Martin Luther King and appealing to nonviolence against a government that is violating the citizenry’s natural rights, he puts himself in a class apart from, say, Gov. Rick Perry, who has raised the specter of secession.

It is somewhat confusing, though, that Beck would choose to emulate Thomas Paine of all the Founders. Paine was far and away the most “progressive” of them, calling for wealth redistribution, government-sponsored education, and a progressive income tax long before any of that became fashionable. This does not diminish Paine’s stature, of course; all classical liberals owe an enormous debt to him. But when Beck devotes a large portion of his book to advocating the implementation of a flat tax and defending the role of religion in the public square, he doesn’t come across as much of an heir to Paine.

Indeed, the book does not resemble Paine’s original tract in the least, so it is perhaps better to take it on its own merits: as a modern-day call-to-arms for the conservative grassroots to get organized. Beck lists offenses of the federal government: unsustainable debt that’s being laughed off by politicians obsessed with re-election, a complicated tax code filled with double standards for the powerful, the attitude by Congress that it’s of a higher breed and exists as an aristocracy rather than as a body to serve the people’s rights, and the idea of progressivism: the thought that government’s role is to shape society, rather than to protect its natural rights. Gerrymandering, environmental regulations, gun-grabbers, and people who choose the comfort of government over the responsibility of liberty are also eviscerated, often to devastating effect.

Aside from the sometimes juvenile tone that he takes, I can’t say that I have a problem with any of the content in Beck’s book, but it’s shockingly short of any tangible solutions. Yes, there are a few scattered bits — mostly meaningless platitudes. “Do not wait for anyone to say what you think or feel,” Beck exhorts. Well, okay — but what do you want me to do? It would have been nice to have a list of ways to get involved, since this book was, according to its introduction, not aimed at the activist. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet was so important because he ended it with a solution: independence. He was advocating a particular solution to a particular ill. Beck outlines a series of terrible problems and puts the blame, rightly, on both parties’ abandonment of the idea of natural right, but stops short of actually saying what must be done.

Beck apparently thought that his book was important enough to merit a straight-to-paperback publication just months before his newest tome is to be released, so what exactly is he advocating? Where’s the beef? If Beck is to be a true grassroots leader — as he seems to want to be — and not just a rabble-rouser, he’s going to need to do a little more than get people angry. Still, I see a lot of potential in Beck, if he would learn that without giving his followers a list of things to do, they represent nothing but dead capital.

Alex Knepper can be contacted at apkkib@aol.com

AP/GfK Political Survey

Overall, please tell me whether you approve or disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling his job as president.

• Approve 50% (55%)
• Disapprove 49% (42%)

Overall, please tell me whether you approve or disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job.

• Approve 28% (32%)
• Disapprove 69% (63%)

In general, do you support or oppose the health care reform plans being discussed in Congress?

• Support 34%
• Oppose 49%

What do you think the President and Congress should do when they come back to Washington this fall? Do you think they should…

• Keep working to pass a health care plan by the end of the year 39%
• Scrap the current negotiations and start over from scratch 42%
• Leave the health care system as it is now 18%

How important is it that any health care plan have the support of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress?

• Very important 56%
• Somewhat important 23%
• Not too important 9%
• Not at all important 11%

If President Obama and the Democrats in Congress are unable to win support from Republicans to pass a health care plan this year, what should they do? Should they…

• Go ahead and pass a bill without Republican support 28%
• Keep trying until they are able to make a deal with the Republicans 66%

Please tell me if you approve or disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling each of the following issues. How about…

The economy

• Approve 44% (50%)
• Disapprove 52% (46%)

Health care

• Approve 42% (50%)
• Disapprove 52% (43%)

Taxes

• Approve 38% (46%)
• Disapprove 50% (44%)

Federal budget deficit

• Approve 33% (39%)
• Disapprove 56% (51%)

Unemployment

• Approve 40% (49%)
• Disapprove 49% (40%)

Immigration

• Approve 34% (39%)
• Disapprove 46% (41%)

The situation in Afghanistan

• Approve 46% (55%)
• Disapprove 40% (32%)

The situation in Iraq

• Approve 47% (56%)
• Disapprove 41% (32%)

Terrorism

• Approve 44% (52%)
• Disapprove 42% (37%)

The environment

• Approve 51% (56%)
• Disapprove 35% (31%)

Energy

• Approve 50% (55%)
• Disapprove 37% (34%)

Gas prices

• Approve 37% (45%)
• Disapprove 41% (35%)

Relationships with other countries

• Approve 53% (58%)
• Disapprove 37% (33%)

Survey of 1,001 adults was conducted September 3-8. The margin of error is +/- 3.1 percentage points. Results from the poll conducted July 16-20 are in parentheses. Party ID breakdown: 39% (D); 33% (R).

A new campaign ad by team Rubio, taking Governor Crist to task:

With polls showing that the smear campaign launched against former VA Attorney General Bob McDonnell by the Washington Post involving his 1989 thesis has failed to helped the disastrous campaign of Sen. Creigh Deeds, the Post has launched a new round of attacks based on McDonnell’s opposition to the reappointment of Circuit Court Judge Verbena Askew in 2003.  Post writer Amy Gardner latches on to the liberal smear that McDonnell’s opposition was based on homophobia, a charge easily debunked by the National Review’s Jim Gerraghty.  After such a thorough dismantling of the pitiful Post piece, one must ask what will the crumbling Post come up with next to desperately try and save the horrid campaign of Creigh Deeds?

It’s been several days since the Washington Post ran a front-page story on Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell’s thesis from 20 years ago, and polls have shown that the story had little or no effect on the race. So this morning, the Post offers a front page story on… whether McDonnell opposed the reappointment of Circuit Court Judge Verbena Askew in 2003 out of homophobia.

Now, there are a couple of pretty darn relevant facts strewn hither and yon in the 26-paragraph story:

A sexual harassment complaint filed by another court employee against Verbena Askew had been previously settled with $64,000 in taxpayer funds by the City of Hampton. When Askew came up for reappointment to the bench, she did not disclose on her judicial questionnaire that she had been a party to a civil proceeding. A Virginia Employment Commission hearing officer found that Brenda Collins, who filed the sexual harassment complaint against Askew, was forced to resign her job as a court officer because of retaliation by Askew.

McDonnell said at the time of the hearing, “Homosexuality is not an issue with regard to the qualifications of a judge… I imagine we have gay judges on the bench now. That’s not a material inquiry.”

When voting against Askew’s reappointment, he gave four specific reasons for his no vote on Askew. They included:

1)      Askew had given confidential documents relating to the settlement to a local media outlet, contrary to the applicable confidentially agreement.

2)      An objective, anonymous survey of the Newport News Bar Association found 45 percent of respondents indicated her rating was unsatisfactory and 47 percent of respondents found her judicial demeanor unsatisfactory.

3)      The settlement amount of $64,000 was far more than a typical “nuisance claim,” and Collins had received positive performance reviews.

4)      There was a credible and documented pattern of retaliation against Collins by Askew after Collins filed a formal written complaint against Askew in August of 1999. McDonnell deemed the conduct unacceptable for a Circuit Court judge towards an employee.

McDonnell also noted that only 7 months earlier the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates  — a Republican — was removed from his leadership position after revelations of a sexual harassment claim and settlement became public, and concluded that a similar standard should be applied to judges.

None of these facts are in dispute; they were all widely reported in venues like the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Associated Press, the Virginian Pilot. Some of these rather relevant details made it past the Post’s editors; some did not.

The Post did find room to note that when Terry Scanlon, a reporter for the Newport News Daily Press asked McDonnell in 2003 whether or not he himself had ever violated Virginia’s “crimes against nature” statute (it prohibits oral and anal sex), McDonnell replied, “not that I can recall.”

Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk. Yes, let’s all have a big laugh about Bob McDonnell’s reticence to get into detail about his bedroom acrobatics with Mrs. McDonnell.

Meanwhile, the northern Virginia suburbs of D.C. have the second-highest congestion rate in the nation, and Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds won’t say what his transportation plan is.

Meanwhile, 525 of Virginia’s schools, or 28 percent of the statewide total, failed to make adequate progress under federal education law last year, and Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds offers a two-page education plan.

Meanwhile, the state is breaking out the party hats that the unemployment rate is only the second-highest it’s been in 16 years, and Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds had nothing on his campaign web site about the economy and jobs until June.

But hey, I’m sure Creigh Deeds is willing to tell a reporter whether or not he’s ever had anal or oral sexual contact, so that will earn him the Post’s endorsement this fall.

Follow Max Twain on Twitter.

My continuing series on Rick Perlstein’s, Before the Storm.  Two big lessons for today.

1.  True Believers are as useful as Trusted Friends-  In 1964, after the draft Goldwater movement led by Cliff White had done all the heavy-lifting, Barry Goldwater decided to put a cadre of friends (the Arizona Mafia) at the helm of his campaign.  One of them, the director of field operations, didn’t know what his position entailed.  These folks had scarcely a day of national campaign experience between them but apparently, Goldwater didn’t “know or trust” the experienced Goldwater Men who’d almost single-handedly put him in contention.  White was relegated to the shadows.  This turned out to be a colossal mistake.  Cliff White, in Perlstein’s description, could match FDR’s famous feat- draw a line through the country, name every county it passed through, and describe each county’s peculiarities.   So, a lesson from Barry Goldwater’s campaign to future candidates: it doesn’t matter if you know the people.  If they’re busting their butts in a thankless job, and with no apparent reward, to get you into the Presidency, you CAN trust them.  And if they know more about national politics than all of your friends combined, you probably should.  Cronyism is a quick ticket to disaster in the bigtime.

2.  Things don’t go well when the grassroots gets too far ahead of the candidate-  This isn’t a lesson just about Goldwater, but about another contender that year, Henry Cabot Lodge.  It’s also a lesson about Fred Thompson and maybe even Sarah Palin.  In the early 60′s, Goldwater was drawing crowds which were, comparatively speaking, Palin size.  And unlike Palin, he was getting good press.  What he wasn’t doing was campaigning, facing any tough questions or scrutiny, or learning the lessons of a rough and tumble political fight.  When he did start campaigning, people discovered that he was pretty raw, awfully disorganized, and just not ready for the prime-time.  By turning Goldwater into a celebrity and a star so early, conservatives made it impossible for him to adjust when he finally made up his mind to campaign.  Similarly, when Goldwater started to falter, the press and moderate Republicans began pumping up Vietnam Ambassador, and former Nixon VP candidate, Henry Cabot Lodge.  Lodge swept to victory as a write-in candidate in NH, one of the most remarkable political occurrences in the last 50 years.  Unfortunately for Lodgies, their candidate’s greatest advantage was his absence- an absence that prevented people from seeing his as the dry, Boston-Brahmin he’d been pegged throughout his career.  When that absence continued, the honeymoon ended and Lodge faded.

Fred Thompson…well, we all know the story of Fred Thompson.  The next Republican savior, who might have been a very good candidate indeed under different circumstances, campaigned with all of Barry Goldwater’s elegance at first.  His boosters raised expectations before he was ready to meet them.  I don’t know that Barry Goldwater would have ever been a good candidate- he was too trusting and too honest- but I do know that the Goldwater Men made it impossible for him to grow into the role.  He had to instantly guide (rather than just promote) the fortunes of a movement two decades in the making.  It would have been too much to ask of any man.  There’s also a problem of timing.  By jumping behind a fickle and unlikely Lodge, moderates made it more difficult to prepare a better challenger for Goldwater.  Similarly, by throwing in with Fred!, there wasn’t much grassroots juice left to promote an alternative to McCain.  The grassroots needs to be careful about who they boost, and they ought to be sure that the candidate can and will wage the long war; keep on them and make sure they’re ready.  Because sometimes these things just don’t translate.

-

Matthew E. Miller can be contacted at Obilisk18@yahoo.com

Keep up the hard work.  Keep up the phone calls to Congress, the Emails, the blogging, and the calls in to local talk radio.

Congressmen will be breathing easier being in the friendly-to-them territory of Washington, DC.  Because of the congressional vacation, Obama’s approval is back up to 50%, up from 45% just a few days ago; that will make a few Democrats feel better.  The far-left is very frustrated that the Democrats’ incredible majorities in both chambers have not succeeded with the ill-named “public option” for health care, and liberal activists will be applying enormous pressure to Democratic elected officials.

We’ve fought effectively up until now, but it’s no time to get comfortable.

______________________________________________________________

Benjamin Hodge publishes the Web site KansasProgress.com, based in Johnson County, KS, in the Greater Kansas City area.  Hodge is a delegate to the Kansas GOP and a former state lawmaker.  You can join Hodge’s efforts on Facebook, through his personal Web site, on Twitter, and through his PAC.

I watched a tennis match Monday.

Let me put that in perspective: For the first time in my life – I watched a whole tennis match.

I had been reading news stories about an American teenager upsetting some of the biggest names in the sport, and so I decided to tune in and watch the kid play. I then proceeded to spend the next two hours glued to the television – watching in awe as 17 year-old Melanie Oudin dispatched Nadia Pertrova in the fourth round of the U.S. Open. I will probably tune in again when she faces Caroline Wozniacki in the quarterfinals, so you can count me among the many Americans swept up in Oudin fever. For me, it’s just about watching a kid come into her own as the newset tennis powerhouse – good clean fun if it ever existed.

For some however – it had become aboout race. You see, assuming that she wins her next two matches, Oudin’s most likely opponent in the final is Serena Williams. I personally like that storyline – Serena and her sister Venus were probably the biggest Cinderella story in the sport’s history when they burst on the scene, and hence Serena is by far the most fitting final opponent for young Oudin.

However, people like sportswriter Greg Couch see only that Oudin is white blonde from Georgia and Serena is a black woman from Compton – and unfortunately people like Couch get front-page stories on AOL (at least it was there last night).

I apologize for saying this – but Mr. Couch can go to hell.

To reduce this amazing young woman to a projection of white supremacism is disgusting , demeaning, and an insult to tennis. She’s just seventeen, she’s on the ride of her life, and she deserves better than to have some bitter columnist chastise her because she has the wrong color skin. Heck, the man might as well have painted a Hitler mustache on Oudin’s picture while he was at it.

So – I hope young Oudin will forgive for laying down a gauntlet on behalf of her legions of newly converted fans. From here on in, any sportswriter who goes after this innocent teenager on a racial basis will be mentioned by me on this blog and called out for the racists they are. And frankly I would hope that a few other bloggers would be willing to help out with “Oudin Racism Watch”.

As a disclaimer, I have nothing but respect for the Williams sisters and what they have done for tennis. They have nothing to do with this debate and I refuse to drag them into this. Furthermore, I am actually rooting for Serena because I want Oudin to go up against the best if she makes the final – and Serena is the best. And just in case Mr. Couch wants to know – I like Melanie Oudin because she is six inches shorter than many of her opponents and can’t hit the ball as hard as they can. Yet, she beats them with quick feet and just plain old smart tennis. This would be equally impressive if she were black (or, frankly, if she wasn’t even American).

In my opinion, if we get an Oudin-Williams final at the U.S. open, there is a distinct possibility that we will see a good amount of racist writing on the part of certain people in the sports media, and as bloggers we know better than to trust the MSM to confront bigotry (see: Van Jones).

This is a time to draw a line in the sand. If we believe in a society where all of us are truly created equal, then we have a responsibility to defend Melanie Oudin. It will likely fall to the conservative blogosphere to smack down the hatred – and heaven help us if we allow the media to lynch this innocent young woman.

—

Oudin photo listed on Wikipedia under GNU Free Documentation License

David Frum is an anomaly in Canadian political circles.  He is an urban dweller, raised in a progressive city, to the mother of one of Canada’s most cherished and respected journalists, Barbara Frum.  Barbara wrote for the ultra-left wing Toronto Star and was a anchorwoman for the public broadcasting company (CBC).  As a young man growing up in Toronto, David Frum was an organizer and community activist for the far left New Democratic party of Canada, which embraces a similar economic, social and foreign policy as that of the French Socialist party.

Frum’s participation in Alinsky-style community activism ceased when Frum began attending liberal universities, where he claimed to have a political epiphany.  Through the magic of print and television, he was introduced to the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the political speeches of Ronald Reagan, who’s 1980 campaign he volunteered for.  Although not uncommon for those who inhabit the political center, for an educated adult to divorce himself from the policies of protectionism, social justice the and welfare state, to then embrace Reagan’s conservative orthodoxy, does cause one to question Frum’s motivation behind the radical shift in ideology.  That said, Frum’s contributions to the conservative cause, on both sides of the border, have been embraced and respected.

Frum was able to shed the socialist image of his family name, through two marriages.  Frum married Danielle Crittenden, writer for the Huffington Post and the step-daughter of Canada’s most respected center-right editors, and Frum’s sister Linda, married one of Ontario’s most successful land developers and the owner of the Toronto Argonauts Football club.

For nearly three decades, Frum promoted the conservative cause in both Canada and the United States.  He was employed by President G.W. Bush, became an editor with the National Review, joined right-wing public policy organizations and opposed the nomination of Harriet Miers on the grounds that she was insufficiently conservative.  In terms of conservative notoriety, Frum will most certainly be remembered most for writing the 2002 State of the Union - Axis of Evil address.  Frum’s embrace of conservatism has earned him fame, influence and wealth.

Upon leaving the Bush administration, Frum began vacillating on the importance of conservative media and policy to the Republican party and in late 2007, he began to liquefy his own conservative philosophy.  In very personal terms, he began to defile the most prominent conservative activists, politicians and broadcasters.  He challenged Republicans to distance themselves from their core beliefs on economic and social policy.  Most recently, while appearing on CNN, Frum suggested that conservatives should allow for Obamacare legislation to pass as it would lead to the rationing of services for those who rely on medicare.  Frum has adopted a smugness and elitist arrogance to his American journalism and broadcasting contributions, which is in sharp contrast to his humble and gratifying appearances on Canadian television, where Frum continues to fight for conservative values and conservative political leaders.

It is almost as if David Frum has two faces, two different persona’s, depending on what side of the 49th parallel he is on.

What is perplexing to many in the Canadian conservative hierarchy is how relentless Frum is with his attacks on US conservatives, yet HE secretly worked for Canada’s current Prime Minister, the drill now, pro-traditional marriage, anti-feminist, tax cutting, political hardball playing, Evangelical Christian, Stephen Harper.  David Frum wrote many of the campaign slogans and television ads that helped elect Harper’s Conservative party in 2006.  Many of these successful ads resemble the rhetoric that Frum has been attacking American conservatives for displaying.  Frum’s involvement in the 2006 campaign was kept quiet, as he had just resigned from the Bush administration, the most unpopular US administration in Canada since 1812-1814, when President Madison ordered the invasion of Upper and Lower Canada.

Having reached the professional ceiling within Canada’s media and political elite, Frum determined that personal, obstinate and bombastic political rhetoric was acceptable to Canadian audiences, but as he continued to build his career in the United States (with CNN and Newsweek) he decided this tumid political prose, practiced by many conservative politicians, writers and radio personalities was helping to elect Democratic politicians.

Whether Frum’s turn around in the US media is a display of his true leftist political colors or an attempt to further his American career in the beltway punditocracy, is an irrelevant question.  What should be worrisome to our conservative and libertarian causes is the impact that Frum is having on younger conservative writers and aspiring pundits.

Last week, fellow libertarian Jon Henke ignited a fierce ideological skirmish in the conservative blogosphere by adopting Frumian Vichy Republican talking points, by calling for an advertising ban on the most popular grassroots conservative site, WorldNetDaily.  Henke made this plea to his readers, the RNC and conservative groups, all because one of the WorldNetDaily contributors is a birther and publishes editorials using over-the-top rhetoric.  Henke compared WorldNetDaily and other like-minded grassroots sites to the ‘John Birch Society‘ and called them ‘hideously embarrassing for the Right‘.  I myself have called for the banishing of a few political leaders in the last 12 months, arguing that it was a necessary cleansing for the Republican party, but when more than 50% of adults receive their news and information from new media, a medium dominated by the far left for the last decade, why are insiders such as Frum and Henke calling for the excommunication of the rightosphere’s most prominent news site?

Many beltway insiders have joined Henke’s call for the ostracizing of grassroots conservative blogs and talk radio, including the Managing Editor of The Next Right, Patrick Ruffini.

In a well written post, but with a bizarre and confusing conclusion, Ruffini attempted to defend his colleague and friend, by suggesting the Republican party and the rightosphere adopt a policy platform and communication strategy of ‘conservative, ivy league elitism‘.  Ruffini suggested that all of the great conservative thinkers had ‘died off ‘and it was the duty of political insiders (probably such as himself, Henke, McArdle, Sullivan, Frum and Brooks) to assert themselves as the preeminent conservative cognoscenti.

Meanwhile, Frum’s newmajority.com blog continued its offensive on the conservative media and rightosphere by somehow lumping birthers and Glenn Beck together with the violent and criminal entity, The Black Panther party (talk about hideously embarrassing).  The morning after Van Jones was forced to resign for his psychotic paranoia, Frum attacked Glenn Beck for his investigative work and played wing-man for Henke, Sullivan, McArdle and Ruffini, repeating the claim that there were no longer any great conservative thinker and by invoking the same call for conservatives to adopt Buckleyite, east coast conservative elitism.

Henke, finding very few willing participants in the conservative media to join his call, decided to follow Frum’s path and turn to the far-left, truther media to make his argument.  Henke took his fight to the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC.  Since very few conservatives (if any) watch this program, what possibly could have been objective for Henke?

Like Frum, Henke was either displaying his true moderate colors (although I don’t believe that, as Henke is a true libertarian), or he decided that since conservatives turned their back on his appeal, he would use the opportunity to achieve free promotion for his blog, even if he did have to speak with a NSA wiretapping conspiracy theorist.

Henke is an intelligent and talented individual (and I generally agree with him policy), but to understand why he would team with Rachel Maddow to slander the Republican party, Michael Steele and the RNC, is above my pay grade.  What is clear to me, is that it was a Frumian presentation, eaten up by the leftist media for their own political gain and profit.  In fact, it was so successful for Rachel Maddow, Henke received an invitation to return before the segment ended.

My point to Frum, McArdle, Henke, Ruffini and other insiders, is that the intellectual wing of the rightosphere is failing to secure the attention of new media participants, Race42012 included.  Our social networking capability, infrastructure and innovation is inferior to the netroots-grassroots coalition and far right cyberspace.  Instead of attacking sister sites such as WorldNetDaily and accepting defeat at the hands of the new media left, why don’t we strive to earn the intellectual attention of our under-served community?  Let us provide readers with an alternative to WorldNetDaily, although not via a top-down approach, but through what David All calls, Trickle Up Activism.

Adopting the Frumian approach achieves nothing for our cause, but instead emboldens the left and further drives a wedge between Republican insiders and the grassroots.  Let us start listening and acting accordingly.

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Kristofer Lorelli can be contacted at lorville@rogers.com, on Facebook and Twitter/Kris_Lorelli

Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Jed Babbin has penned a fantastically relevant and revealing rebuttal to the Party of No meme the Dems have affixed to the GOP.  Babbin focuses on Republican solutions (which, for some strange reason, haven’t received much media coverage…) to five of the most contentious and significant issues raised since Obama’s inauguration: health care, TARP/bailouts, stimulus plans, federal spending/deficits and energy.  The entire article is worth your time, but I’ll highlight some of the best excerpts:

Health care: Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), chairman of the Republican Study Committee, has a better idea. His Empowering Patients First Act (HR3400) was introduced in July (and endorsed by Republican study committee and Americans for Tax Reform). It accomplishes tort reform by capping “punitive damages” and creating specialized “health courts” to decide malpractice claims.

Price’s idea is to put control over health care back into the patients’ hands through pooling mechanisms (association health plans and individual membership accounts, also expanding federal block grants for qualified pools), by allowing individuals to shop for health insurance across state lines, and providing a private insurance voucher option for Medicaid and SCHIP beneficiaries. It also assists job-to-job portability of health insurance, and would establish “establish doctor-lead quality measures.” It aims to lower federal costs primarily by calling for a 1% annual step-down in discretionary spending. (You can read the full text of the bill and read a Comparison to HR3200, the House Obamacare bill).

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, has a parallel measure, his Health Care Freedom Plan (S1324).

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) has another idea — HR-3478 — to enhance the benefits of health savings accounts. HSAs — already available — allow Americans to save tax-deducted money to fund their own health care costs. Gohmert’s idea includes requiring immigrants to have HSAs before they are allowed to enter the country. Obamacare — because it doesn’t prohibit it — extends the “public option” to illegal aliens.

TARP/Bailouts: Last June, Obama said “”I don’t want to run auto companies, and I don’t want to run banks.” If that were true, he’d have endorsed South Dakota conservative Sen. John Thune’s Government Ownership Exit Plan Act, S-1242.
Thune’s idea would prohibit further purchase of private entities’ stocks and bonds and establish a firm date — July 1, 2010 — for the sale of all government-held ownership of all private companies. Furthermore, Thune would prohibit government officials from making or influencing significant management decisions of those companies which the government owns a part.

Stimulus Plans: Rep. Gohmert had the best alternative to the president’s $1.2 trillion “stimulus” bill, which time has shown didn’t stimulate jobs or economic recovery. His idea — a two-month tax holiday — first surfaced last December and became HR143 this year.

Gohmert’s tax holiday plan is elegant in its simplicity: every American taxpayer would pay no federal income or FICA taxes for the first two months of 2009. For the typical American family — earning about $50,000 a year — that would mean they would keep about $2000 that would otherwise be paid to the government. He would have used the $350 billion in then-unspent bailout money to pay for it.

Gohmert’s plan doesn’t pay for Wall Street bonuses or let banks use bailout money to buy other banks or pay dividends. It doesn’t rely on bureaucrats to pay money out to the right people at the right time or try to stimulate the economy with token payments to people who don’t pay taxes.

And the best part of it was that it would have cost less than the $350 billion in bailout money which (at the time) hadn’t been spent.

Gohmert’s stimulus plan was real, cost-effective, and — naturally — anathema to Democrats because it put economic power in the hands of the voters, not the government.

Another conservative economic stimulus was proposed last fall by former Reagan economic advisor Martin Feldstein. Feldstein told a congressional committee that the only kind of government spending that reliably stimulates the economy is defense spending. It quickly results in high-paying jobs and produces a real societal benefit: increased national security. But the president and Defense Secretary Gates have cut spending on key defense programs such as ballistic missile defense and the F-22, to name just a few. And — without regard for the threats the Pentagon must be prepared to defeat — Obama has ordered Gates to find another $60 billion to cut out of the defense budget.

Federal Spending and Deficits: Just last week, the White House budget office revised its estimate of the resulting federal deficit over the next decade, increasing the estimate from $7 trillion to $9 trillion. The White House admitted that unemployment would exceed 10% this year, and that the recession was deeper than it had thought and projected a decrease in the Gross Domestic Product of 2.8%. Obama’s answer is, of course, to increase federal spending.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has a better plan. Jordan’s plan — the House Republican Steering Committee plan — would cut the Obama deficit by $6 trillion and balance the budget by 2019. Some of the details included: cessation of spending the remaining “Obama stimulus” and bailout money, mandating a 1% per year reduction in non-defense spending and fully funding the Pentagon budget. The plan didn’t reduce Medicare benefits or even touch Social Security.

It would make more money available to the federal treasury by doing things such as compelling the leasing of land for oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (a tiny corner of ANWR, in which drilling wouldn’t affect wildlife).

And the RSC budget proposal’s cuts were in programs that the federal government shouldn’t be funding in any event: the National Endowment for the Arts is a good example.

Energy: There are 104 nuclear power plants in the United States today, providing about 20% of our electricity. The Republican “American Energy Act” (HR-2828, introduced by Utah’s Rob Bishop) provides for the construction of 100 more in the next twenty years and would enable the safe storage and recycling of nuclear waste.

The proposal also would also create a “Renewable and Alternative Energy Trust Fund” out of federal revenues garnered from leases and already-existing taxes on offshore drilling and oil development in ANWR, both of which would be spurred by the act. The bill also would spur the development of America’s alternative fuels by repealing the prohibition on government purchasing fuels derived from sources such as oil shale, tar sands and coal-to liquid technology.

Correct me if my memory fails me, but Democrats did not take control of Congress in 2006 through the use of groundbreaking, credible new platforms (other than their soon-discarded Pay-Go budgeting promise). Republicans must show that they can accomplish this feat. To help achieve this goal, we Conservatives MUST spread the word about these Republican alternative solutions.  And we MUST explain to Independents and conservative Democrats that these proposals would result in real, measurable improvements.

1) Mitt Romney – Gov. Romney remains in the best position to win the GOP nomination in 2012. He continues to do everything right; good interviews, smart policy critiques of Obama without the red meat attacks, joining the he National Council for a New America, etc. He gave a wide ranging speech on national defense spending and budgets to the Heritage Foundation, the most convincing sign yet that Romney is all in for 2012.  Until someone else emerges clicking on all cylinders, he will remain poised as the undisputed front-runner for 2012. The misfortune of many 2012 potential candidates is beginning to make me think Mitt has a voodoo doll collection of GOP upstarts.  Their failings are Mitt’s gains, as he looks more and more the solid, intelligent, national leader with each passing day.

2) Tim Pawlenty - Minnesota’s governor has the proven ability to win in the bluest of states (even Reagan never won Minnesota) with his blue-collar Republican message.  I imagine T-Paw’s  Sam’s Club populism could be quite effective in 2012 after years of bailouts and debt. He is also an evangelical, and could give Palin and Huckabee a run for the support of values voters.  Governor Pawlenty could appeal to all sectors of the party in ways that the Big Three from 2008(Romney, Huckabee, Palin) have failed to do. Having decided against a third term bid, Pawlenty is now free to build a national organization and shape his message for a GOP primary. With the stumbles and affairs of Palin, Ensign, and Sanford, Pawlenty has the chance to become the new face in leading a revival for the GOP.  The Governor has been making several smart TV appearances and solid speeches, mirroring Romney in this regard.  His consistent attacks on the Massachusetts healthcare system are a direct attack on Gov. Romney, helping to position T-Paw as one of, if not the top rival to Mitt at this point.

3) John Thune - Senator Thune is the most likely member of the Senate to get the GOP nod in 2012.  He has the conservative resume to win over the base, the looks and communication skills to win over the broader electorate, and a chance in the Senate leadership to become the rhetorical counter to Obama the next four years.  Senator Thune could emerge as a unifying figure in a field with a number of candidates who have difficulty winning over certain parts of the party; Romney with evangelicals, Huckabee with fiscal cons, Palin with moderates.  His gun amendment was seen as many as a ‘coming out’ moment for the young senator, a chance to unite his party and divide Democrats on a difficult issue in swing states, showing Thune’s skill both politically and legislatively.

4) Newt Gingrich – Speaker Gingrich, amazing as it is, is beginning to look like an old, steady hand compared to some of the young guns, and given his potential for bold ideas and solid fundraising, puts him back near the top of the list.  It is quite possible that if Obama fails that the country would prefer a more proven, older leader to that of some new, young unknown.  Newt continues to build support behind the scenes and his 527 raised more then $8 million in the first half of the year, far more then any other potential candidate (though 527s have different rules then PACs).

5) Sarah Palin - After taking a hit due to her sloppy resignation, former Governor Sarah Palin seems to be finding her niche, and regaining her footing.  From the op-ed pages to her Facebook page, Palin has proven capable of shaping and even completely changing the debate.  Her ability to put the entire Democratic Party on the defensive over ‘death panels’ was pretty impressive, considering she did it all from a social networking site.  Palin continues to draw tremendous interest, both positive and negative.  However, she has settled in, and with her book on the way and her message machine finding it’s way, she appears to be on the right track.

6) Mike Huckabee – Huckabee continues to poll well while struggling to match his rivals in fund raising. This is Huckabee’s greatest problem; no matter how likable or how well he polls, his inability to raise money when hypothetically matched up against a billion-dollar Obama Machine will make Huck a tough sell for a party that will be desperate to win in 2012.  As Palin begins to regain her footing, and with other social conservatives like Rick Santorum threatening to scoop evangelical support, Huckabee’s chances could hinge on whether or not he can find a way to raise money like a candidate at this level should.

(more…)

Keep this up for about a year, Governor Citizen Palin, and you might make a fan out of me yet:

Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska and last year’s Republican vice presidential nominee, joined a group of conservatives signing a letter to Mr. Obama praising him for his management of Afghanistan and urging him to commit more troops there.

It’s not as if Ms. Palin has been all that supportive of Mr. Obama in other arenas. Just last month, she referred to his health care plan as “downright evil” and she asserted incorrectly that the president’s health proposals would institute “death panels” to cut off care to the elderly or infirm. She has criticized Mr. Obama’s spending plans and other initiatives.

Among others who signed the letter, organized by the Foreign Policy Initiative, a newly created conservative organization, were Karl Rove, the senior adviser to Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush; William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard; and Ryan C. Crocker, the former ambassador to Iraq.

And a new op-ed in the Wall Street Journal outlines Sarah’s thoughts on health care right now.

Common sense tells us that the government’s attempts to solve large problems more often create new ones. Common sense also tells us that a top-down, one-size-fits-all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for one-sixth of our economy. And common sense tells us to be skeptical when President Obama promises that the Democrats’ proposals “will provide more stability and security to every American.”

With all due respect, Americans are used to this kind of sweeping promise from Washington. And we know from long experience that it’s a promise Washington can’t keep.

First, ask yourself whether the government that brought us such “waste and inefficiency” and “unwarranted subsidies” in the first place can be believed when it says that this time it will get things right.

Now look at one way Mr. Obama wants to eliminate inefficiency and waste: He’s asked Congress to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an unelected, largely unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. In an interview with the New York Times in April, the president suggested that such a group, working outside of “normal political channels,” should guide decisions regarding that “huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . . .”

Given such statements, is it any wonder that many of the sick and elderly are concerned that the Democrats’ proposals will ultimately lead to rationing of their health care by—dare I say it—death panels? Establishment voices dismissed that phrase, but it rang true for many Americans.

Now if she could only sit down with, say, Meet the Press and discuss this. The invitations are surely pouring through her door. When will she accept them?

Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear a case examining the First Amendment questions perpetually raised regarding the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. It is peculiarly intriguing for its involvement of a campaign movie critical of Hillary Clinton, but the primary point of contest is the familiar one of the ongoing debate over the bill, whether campaign expenditures fit into the constitutionally protected category of free speech.

While Supreme Court case law has permanently fixed this as the necessary question to resolve, any passionate proponent of the libertarian ideal ought to wonder why we have limited ourselves through our own Constitution. Opponents of the bill, myself included, offer compelling arguments that campaign expenditures function in the process in the same manner as speech, and are in essence an expression of thought; the history of the First Amendment does in fact hold that government attempts at limiting the means by which expression is made violates that right.

Though modern Americans conceive of the right to free expression as a protection against censorship, particularly in the form of efforts to silence specific perspectives or opinions that are offensive to or critical of the authorities, in its origin and today the legal right is broader. With respect to press, where historically financing has always been necessary, freedom consisted of the institution existing independent of government reach; the absence of intentional censorship or the presence of content neutrality were not excuses. The First Amendment right to a free press was most clearly aimed at prohibiting prior restraint, which often involved censorship in the American colonies, but in its purest state took the form of print licenses or taxes on printing or advertising. In 1936 these methods were confirmed as unconstitutional.

Explicitly, one would be hard pressed to argue that limits on campaign contributions can be categorized as prior restraint, but the goal of the two is the same. Both serve to use government to control the flow of information in the political sphere, and both are deceptively benign because of their viewpoint neutrality. Attempts to limit the revenue of media of expression breaches a barrier erected between government and the press, and campaign finance certainly can be labeled as such.

Ultimately, however, only the perversion of our thinking that ignores the Ninth Amendment makes this effort at persuasion necessary. Campaign finance reform is unconstitutional because our system forbids the dangerous assumption of power that is a government controlling a private entity’s use of their property. A similar misapplication of the Bill of Rights occurs with respect to the right to privacy, which is said to live implicitly within several other important Amendments.

Some of the Founding Fathers who were skeptical of a Bill of Rights were so because they thought it might be misconstrued as an all inclusive statement of those rights possessed by citizens; the realization of this fear is confirmed in both the campaign finance debate and the privacy debate. The right to spend one’s money freely and the general right to privacy are protected in the American constitutional system because they are negative rights, and the protection of those rights is central to the individualism our government was founded to foster. This principle underlies our Constitution, and the Bill of Rights serves that principle, and not itself, as the end of our government. In a time when the invention of rights is popular, the rediscovery of this mode of thinking would serve our discourse well.

Luckily – David Michaels has to  be confirmed by the Senate if he wants to become head of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA).

In today’s episode of “Wheel of Czars”,we find out that Mr. Michaels actually wants to throw out a court case which says that judges have to double-check “scientific experts” before they are allowed to testify in front of juries. Of course – this regulation is meant to ensure that the “experts” are not liars and/or hacks. Apparently he thinks that it creates a “social imbalance” against a plaintiff if you throw out non-experts who are hired to lie about science in the courtroom.

Why does this particular one interest me? Well, it looks like Michaels is also one of the guys trying to scare the public about the chemical “BPA” (which is used in plastics). I’ve written about this subject before, and I think it’s pretty well established that you are more likely to be hacked to death by the tooth fairy than to suffer harm from BPA.

So - our new OSHA nominee is a professional scare-tactician who thinks you should be able to lie to a jury in order to ensure a “fair trial”.

To put it in a more visual  form – OSHA will now be using junk science to “prove” that your favorite consumer products look like this…

… when in actuality they look more like this…

Yes, I know posting those makes me a horrible person – but I think you get my point.

Headline: “Obama: ‘Find something you’re passionate about’”

Me: Does making you a one term President count?

Rasmussen Labor Survey

Do you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable opinion of labor unions?

• Very favorable 16%
• Somewhat favorable 33%
• Somewhat unfavorable 24%
• Very unfavorable 18%

To support the American labor force, Do you buy products made in the United States?

• Yes 76%
• No 10%

Do American workers work harder than people in other countries or not as hard?

• Harder 30%
• Not as hard 36%
• About the same 22%

Do labor unions make our country stronger, make our country weaker or do they have no impact?

• Stronger 26%
• Weaker 45%
• They have no impact 13%

Have labor unions outlasted their usefulness?

• Yes 48%
• No 29%

Survey of 1,000 adults was conducted August 30 – September 2. The margin of error is +/- 3 percentage points.

Inside the numbers:

Men are more critical of unions than women. Fifty-eight percent (58%) of men, for example, say unions make America weaker, compared to 33% of women. Fifty-nine percent (59%) of men say unions have outlasted their usefulness, a view shared by just 36% of women.

Given the longtime allegiance of organized labor leaders to the Democratic Party, it’s not surprising to find that 55% of Republicans think labor unions make the country weaker and 63% say unions have outlived their usefulness. What is perhaps surprising is that Democrats themselves are almost evenly divided on these questions. The plurality of adults not affiliated with either party agree with Republicans.

In terms of favorability, however, 64% of Democrats have a positive view of unions, while 60% of Republicans view them unfavorably. Unaffiliated adults are closely divided on the question.

Glenn Beck’s meteoric rise to prominence is surely the most curious event to occur in the conservative commentariat in the past year. At this time in 2008, Mr. Beck had a fanbase that was, all things considered, small — but loyal. It listened to him on the radio and followed his nightly program on the perennially undiscussed CNN Headline News. All that I knew about the man was that he was a second-tier conservative radio personality, that he’d authored a book that sold only moderately well, and that my friend Tiffany thought that he was a god among men. Fox News saw talent in Beck and took him on board — and the fact that he now stands alongside names like Limbaugh and Hannity is proof of his ascension. He is the conservative grassroots’ new pundit hero, left’s new whipping boy, and the pragmatists’ poster child for paranoia on the right.

Beck, who subscribes to the North American Union conspiracy theory and eerily proclaims that America is inching closer to giant missile parades — with no more or less irony than when Jon Stewart pillories Dick Cheney — has fashioned himself as a modern-day Thomas Paine, penning his own Common Sense tome (somewhat ironically, given Paine’s economic collectivism and assault on Christianity) and organizing a “9/12″ project based upon fairly uncontroversial American values that hits all the right God-Family-Country notes for the traditional right. In fact, that very phrase (in Latin) is the organization’s motto. A recommended reading list offered by the Beck consists primarily of favorable biographies of the Founding Fathers that include appendices of selections from their writings.

What’s so controversial about that? In less than a week, Beck’s followers will descend upon Washington for a march. They have fashioned themselves as modern-day revolutionaries, charged with the task of taking back their country from an enormously oversized government. The roughly half of the Republican Party that believes that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States — or isn’t sure — can be seen at the Tea Party events Beck has fashioned himself an unofficial leader of. These are the heirs of John Birch, not John Rockefeller. United around no specific agenda, libertarians and conservatives of all stripes have a cathartic experience, waving Gadsden flags, exhorting our leaders to read the bills they vote on, reminding them that “they work for us” — certainly fine. And make no mistake: only a President Obama — not a President McCain or even a Vice-President Palin — would have generated this sort of angry enthusiasm amongst the right. And there’s potentially a fantastic utility in all of this. But without a leader, without a central organization, without candidates to unite around, this sort of dispersed anger does the movement no good and amounts to little more than a collective temper tantrum. Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck on their own do not a new era of conservative leadership make.

The most obvious favorite with this crowd is Sarah Palin. Beck has been moved to literal tears upon being in the woman’s presence and she resonates with the Tea Partiers because she is as close to being one of them as they recall: not concerned with pleasing the intelligentsia, pleasingly quaint, concerned with motherhood and religion more than the latest tomes on policy. Miss Sarah goes to Washington. But what is Miss Sarah to do when she faces a skeptical electorate that has given no indication that it would ever accept her as a replacement for the sitting president it may otherwise be willing to toss? Worse still, she faces a fascinating and terrible conundrum: how is she to become well-read and articulate on policy without losing the folksy appeal she’s so beloved for by her admirers? How is she to appeal to 50% + 1 of the electorate without changing her image enough to make a noticeable difference?

The establishment is no alternative. Mitt Romney is hopelessly political (if not hopelessly untrustworthy), and while he’s made a lot of friends in the RNC, the grassroots hates the RNC for its lack of spine. 2010 and 2012 will not be good years to be part of the status quo. If 2008 was the Change Election for Democrats, 2012 will be the Change Election for Republicans seeking not a new Ronald Reagan, but a new George Washington. Tim Pawlenty and Mike Huckabee pose unviable alternatives: the former for his lack of passion, the latter for his disapproval from capitalists representing organizations such as the Club for Growth.

So what does this all have to do with Glenn Beck? Well, quite simply, Beck has stumbled onto a lot of influence. He and perhaps he alone has the power to identify a Republican leader, build him up, and make him a player. But he’s got to be the right one. He can’t be a Michele Bachmann type, and he can’t be a raging populist. There must be a leader out there that could resonate with the grassroots without turning off the center. Obscurity is not a problem –  Obama was plucked out of obscurity by an adoring faction: the media. Our own media can do the same if it wants to. For my money, Paul Ryan is the man to lead us forward. But he seems to have little ambition to go for it. He needs a little push, a little extra nudge. Someone like Beck could provide it. Not a lot of people in the media have been able to tap into grassroots rage like he has. I hope he can use it well.

Alex Knepper can be contacted at apkkib@aol.com

…according to President Obama’s mentor/spiritual adviser;

Opposing Obamacare obviously has nothing to do with prejudice against poor (black) people.  An editorial in the New Hampshire Union Leader outlines the failure of President Obama’s reform plan.   

President Obama is supposed to give another speech on health care reform tomorrow. The difference between this one and his nearly 30 previous speeches on the same topic is that this time, we are assured, he intends to say “in understandable, clear terms what our administration wants to happen with regard to health care, and what we are going to push for specifically,” Vice President Joe Biden said last week.

If the President is to tell us nothing more specific than “what we are going to push for,” then this speech will be no more effective than the dozens that preceded it. What President Obama wants is not in doubt. He has made his desires and intentions abundantly clear. In doubt is what the legislation would actually do.

With nearly every speech the President has given on health care, support for his plan has dropped. And in every speech, he has told us what he intends to accomplish. What he has not done is explain precisely how he would achieve his goals.

He said reform will save at least half a billion dollars in Medicare and Medicaid spending. But he hasn’t shown how. He said reform will reduce spending on unnecessary medical care. But he hasn’t shown how. These are the sort of details America needs.

Without them, it is fair to assume that the reform he proposes will cut expenses by slashing services and rationing care. (Who decides what care is “unnecessary”?) If the President won’t reduce spending by reducing services, let him show that. If he can’t, then the American people have good reason to reject his proposal.

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Kristofer Lorelli can be contacted at lorville@rogers.com, on Facebook and Twitter/Kris_Lorelli

We the People eventually determine what is truly politically correct and render the verdict. Elected Republicans need to recognize this fact; quit repeating MSM beltway-speak mantras that every damning revelation merely “raises more questions”; stop fearing the PC police and declare the obvious import of the facts about ObamaDemLibs.

Despite a press dominated by liberals, I never remember President Bush retracting any public statements; accepting the resignations of any employee due to public statements; nor revising websites to remove data then being discussed in the press.

The white Cambridge police were stupid racial profilers before they were worthy beer drinking partners of Obama & Biden @ The White House.

Van Jones was worthy of Czar status after Valerie “Chicago gun moll” Jarrett watched him for years before Da’ Boss stopped watching him. Turned out that CBS, NBC, ABC and the New York Times failed to inform Obama and the American people of the problem, yet miraculously, Jones assumed they all knew of it and quit his job at Midnight on Saturday. I just hope that the 25 jobs he had created are saved by the stimulus, but I digress.

Requests for “fishy” emails opposing ObamaCare and spam emails from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave to any one Earth were perfectly acceptable before Fox News dared look up the law. The White House website was scrubbed.

Turned out the Veterans Administration website was dirty with Death Manual invitations sent on Inauguration Day from an Administration that insists it doesn’t want to pull the plug in grandma. The non-existent death panel language was scrubbed from the House Bill.

More dirt sullied the Chief Executive’s Internet contribution with homework admonitions that they “support President Obama”, and so they washed that off too.

What do all these incidents have in common and what makes them significant going forward for the GOP and We the People?

Elected Republicans need not fear the Press nor speaking the blunt truth about President Obama.

We the People get it. Yes, many voters went into denial and elected the appointer of Communists, hater of white police, email privacy invader and God’s partner in life and death. But that was when John “to timid to mention the 20-year pew-parked butt in Rev. Wright’s Hate America Church McCain’s party held the nation’s highest office during a severe economic crisis and many had White Guilt to purge.

Well, that Cambridge police officer is not the only person to have purged his white guilt last November and now Obama and his party wield all power while the Great Recession lives.

Obama has been found out.

Oh yes, anyone with ears to hear found him out from his own past statements, associations and votes in Congress. But Americans don’t want to to think that clean, articulate black guy whose approval would make them feel even cleaner is a pre-conversion Malcolm X.

They wanted to believe he was the Cosby show. This 21st Century version just got cancelled in favor of New Jack City. Nino Brown wanted to bum rush the whole damn place but fell short.

Elected Republicans have been offered a spine by Town Hall attending voters. Obama can be, and in fact has been, rolled.

Stand up Pachyderms and remind the now receptive independence, blue dogs and former Reagan Dems of what Obama said before the election about teaching us a lesson with higher energy prices; favoring high gasoline prices that get high slowly; and bankrupting the coal industry so that a racist 911-Truther can create green jobs. 25 and counting. Aside: Green jobs are best understood in Dickens’ novels. Think jobs for Horse dung sweepers; chimney sweeps and death panels.

The fact is that the Obama Administration has avoided Van Jones like the plague because there simply is no explanation that can pass muster with a population living in economic hard times; fearful of losing their health insurance and no longer fearful of offending militant blacks lest they be called a racist.

The pocketbook trumps all the ObamaDem and Drive-by media bull and now, the sermons of Rev. Jeremiah Wright ring true. True, that is, about the one that was married by him; had his children baptized by him and titled his second biography after the CIA-AIDS-Truther’s Audacity of Hope.

If Elected Republicans will use the transplanted spine from We the People, Obama and the Dems will have no hope in 2010 and 2012. Using that spine means not waiting on a Liberal Press jury to render a verdict after answering questions they deem raised by events that have already occurred.

NO!

Events have not raised more endless questions about Obama

That MSM construct is part of decades’ old strategy of moving goalposts that the GOP too often falls prey to, that ends up with Republicans relenting and letting Democrats off the hook when they come up with a better lie that the MSM accepts.

NO! We have the answers, not more questions. We are the jury and they don’t get to ask more questions. GOP, render the damn verdict on the Marxist!

The events already compel a verdict beyond a reasonable doubt and that verdict is that Obama is a liar about the vetting of Van Jones and writ large about who he claimed to be while seeking votes last year. The verdict is that while he is under contract for four years, he works for We the People. he is not our Czar and his sycophant press can’t protect him any more than it could protect Carter or destroy the re-elected Reagan or George W Bush.

Ditch the beltway speak and start making the moral case against the policies of Obama and the Democrats.

Conservative beltway columnists must also ditch the conventional non-wisdom and for God’s sake, stop writing columns bemoaning the failed Obama “presidency” and offering him advice other than converting to a free market, limited government, strong defense conservative. No more advice on how he could trick us with lies and incremental ism.

In short and as usual, the best salesman for conservative is the experience of living under liberal rule. Conservatism is a hard sell, what with the product accessories not including batteries, i.e. a check.

But Obama has been seen for what he is by a public that so wanted to have hope. He is no longer believed. It was one thing to in indulge Jackson and Sharpton and those inspired by them. It is quite another to indulge it from the man that was hired by them in good faith to protect the nation and promote the general welfare.

A nation whose electorate is over 78% white will not be told they are racist by the black man they vote in. Obama’s Gates-gate was a seminal moment that proved that Inauguration Day ended an era of indulging black racist hustlers and their white liberal fools. Many that purged their white guilt last November were, in fact, moderate and liberal whites that resent being passed over due to race after busting their butts in academia and on the job.

Now, we will make our own hope.

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Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all verification links may be accessed.

We may all know it, but it needs to be repeated from time to time: The great political divide is between those who favor collectivism and those who favor individual freedom.

Collectivism on a national scale is necessarily statism. Human nature being what it is – instinctively self-preserving and self-advancing – such collectivism requires compulsion, or, to use a softer word, organization: the organization of an entire nation. (At least the nation: the ultimate collectivist dream is the global collective, the organization of the whole world.) And only a government, which is to say the state, has the power to do it.

A collectivized nation is not simply one that is under the rule of a common law. To the contrary, a society in which the citizens consent to be subject equally to the abstract authority of law (a constitution, or a body of laws made by representatives answerable to their electors), is a free society.

A collectivized nation is under the rule of human organizers who exert control of the people according to their own will. It is the opposite of a free society. Such a state is, in the true meaning of the word, a tyranny.

It may be a benign tyranny; its rulers, serially or in concert, could be (in laughable theory) persons of admirable uprightness, possessed of the utmost goodwill and kindly intentions, moved by the highest ideals, inspired by the loftiest visions of human happiness, but it is nevertheless a tyranny.

And besides, what sort of person can believe he knows what’s best for everyone else? How can he be a good sort? Wouldn’t such a man (or woman – there have been tyrannous queens) have to be an insufferably arrogant know-it-all? Or the sort who doesn’t really give a damn about the effects of his orders on others just so long as he has his own way? And is there likely to be a person who really can know enough to be the best arbiter of everyone else’s fate? Or can be trusted to set the best possible direction for millions of lives? And is it conceivable that one direction can be best for everyone?

Collectivists include Socialists, Communists, Nazis, Fascists, global government idealists, the Greens, and in sum the ideologists of any form of totalitarianism, including Islam.
There are two types of collectivist states and movements:

Non-egalitarian: such as Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Salazar’s Portugal, Islam.

This type, except for Islam, has too few devotees at present to constitute an ideological threat. (Islam is an active enemy of freedom, but not only because it is collectivist, so we won’t discuss it any further here.)

Egalitarian: such as Soviet Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Greens.

A collectivist state of the egalitarian type controls the distribution of material goods, of course. If goods are to be equally distributed, there has to be an agency doing the distributing, and that agency can only be the state. Having the monopoly of force, the state alone has the power to redistribute all property; to seize what is yours and bestow it on someone else. Maybe you worked long and hard for it, but nevertheless the state ordains that someone else who didn’t work for it has at least as much right to it as you have, in fact more. That’s the immorality of redistribution. It is called ‘social justice’. Equality of this sort is incompatible with liberty.

Millions pursue these egalitarian ideals, as ‘socialists’, ‘liberals’, ‘progressives’, or ‘greens’, despite their colossal failure wherever they’ve been tried in practice.

The attraction of an egalitarian collectivist system lies in its apparent guarantee of security. It offers you an alternative to a lonely struggle for survival. It will, theoretically, provide you with food, shelter, schooling, healing. And on top of all that, it will give you a sense of (communal) purpose, and a lifting of responsibility to make life-directing decisions for yourself. If you just do what you’re told, work where you are directed to work, live where you are allowed to live, eat what is made available to you, repeat the lessons you are taught, you will survive. And furthermore you‘ll have nothing to reproach yourself with; you can bear a lightness of moral being, certain that you are no higher or lower than anybody else, having neither to envy others nor to be annoyingly envied by them.

Paradise? For those who think it may be, there is bad news. The whole utopian structure is built on a fallacy. The idea that you will be more secure in the arms of the state than you are if left to your own devices is an illusion. What the state provides the state can withhold. If the state gives you a job, it can deny you a job. The same with housing, education, medicine. You are dependent on it, and if it fails you or punishes you by withdrawing its patronage, you will have no recourse. Your choice is to live as a slave obedient to the state, or perish.

The only real security lies always in your own ability to act for yourself (and your immediate dependents). It may not be easy, yet most who try succeed. The more freely you can act for yourself, the safer you are. The state’s only legitimate role is to safeguard you while you pursue your self-chosen aims, by protecting your country from external enemies with military strength, and you personally by enforcing the law.

The state is forever an incipient threat to freedom. It tends to accumulate power and encroach gradually on the freedom of the citizens. It needs to be kept from becoming too powerful. How to limit the power of government is the chief problem for representative democracies.

The state will take more power to itself in times of national crisis, such as war or severe economic recession. It can – and governments often do – invent crises as an excuse to take more power. They are doing so now. One of the most potent excuses that representative governments are seizing on to expand way beyond acceptable limits is ‘climate change’ with its ‘threats to the environment’.

It is in the name of an apparently overriding necessity – nothing less than the preservation of our planet – that governments are busy trying to organize populations into collective compliance with their will. All populations. The salvation of Earth is only possible, the environmentalists say, if their remedies are applied uniformly to the entire planet. Never has there been such a gift of an excuse for collectivists in power to organize the rest of us. We must all, they insist, henceforth live, work, play, travel, dress, eat, and house ourselves as they tell us to if we are to survive.

DO NOT BELIEVE THEM.

Post Script: Green is the new Red (as in Communist Red). The Communist Van Jones, briefly appointed as Green Jobs Adviser to President Obama, made no secret of why he liked the job. He said that the green economy would start off as ‘a small subset’ of a complete revolution, away from ‘grey capitalism’ toward redistribution of all the wealth. ‘We are going to push it and push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.’

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Jillian Becker is editor-in-chief of The Atheist Conservative at http://www.theatheistconservative.com/

Oh dear…

Without naming names, what if I told you that a former Vice President and a member of a party that was about to enter an open Presidential primary, is;

• a regular on the talk-show circuit
• extremely critical of the policies of the current administration and Congress
• younger than John McCain
• continuing to network in with influential conservatives
• distancing himself from the administration’s he served in
• writing a provocative book that is expected to be politically combative
• able to lay claim to the ’next in line’ theory for his parties nomination
• considered one of the most politically savvy Republicans in the country

Would you have any doubt he/she were running for President?

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Kristofer Lorelli can be contacted at lorville@rogers.com, on Facebook and Twitter/Kris_Lorelli

So Random Question:  would you tip on a to go order under $5?  I’ve ordered a few things lately from the local diner and they come out to, like, $4.66.  And I haven’t been leaving a tip because A.)  It feels like a dollar tip, 21.5%, is far too much for far too little work (the waitress just gives me the food in a container and I leave) and B.)  Because I don’t want to tip in change, since that seems ridiculous.  What say you?  Have I done wrong by these laborers?

When I heard last week that former Red Sox ace Curt Schilling was considering running for U.S. Senate, I was excited because it potentially gave the GOP a chance in Massachusetts. Since then, my opinion has changed – I’m now genuinely excited because I want Curt Schilling in the Senate!

While Mr. Schilling is not entirely sold on the idea of running, he did post a blog this weekend entitled “What I Believe“. After reading that, I have only one piece of advice for Mr. Schilling:

DUDE – If you don’t want to be a U.S. Senator, stop writing stuff like that! Otherwise, people are going to drag you kicking and screaming to the U.S. Capitol and tie you to Teddy Kennedy’s old chair.

I might be overstating it a bit – but I think Schilling unwittingly penned one of the better campaign stump speeches I have ever seen. The whole thing is worth reading, but these are probably the “money paragraphs”.

I was not even remotely active in the political scene until far too late in my life to sit on a pulpit and preach about history tells us this and history tells us that. That’s not a good thing, but it’s the truth.

Taxes? Sure I’ll pay them, regardless of the number. Would I prefer lower taxes? Sure, who wouldn’t? But I’ll pay, whatever they are, because that’s the cost of being able to live in this country and I’ve never had a problem with that.

Having said that I live in a state where I can’t drive 1/2 of a mile without a torn up road, or on a major highway without paying a toll, a large toll. How in the hell is this state broke? How in the hell has a state with supposedly as intelligent a voter base as Massachusetts allowed itself to be run into the ground by entrenched and often times corrupt ‘me first’ politicians? How did that happen? All the way down to the community level our papers are littered with stories, daily, of unethical behavior, scandal and outright criminal acts, BY OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS!.

Is there a larger breach of trust outside the family bond than that? Why have we allowed it to get this far, and why would we even consider allowing that to continue?

The rest of it was pretty good, as he gave a spot-on argument for why he would be a solid representative for Massachusetts despite the fact that his positions differ wildly from people like John Kerry and the late Senator Kennedy. Combine this with the fact that many people around the country are ready to march on Washington with pitchforks – then throw in Deval Patrick’s abysmal performance as governor – and I think there just might be the perfect storm to carry Schilling into the Senate.

Would Curt fit well in Washington? Heck no. He’d be a loud-mouthed bull in the world’s biggest China shop. But frankly, that is exactly what many people in this country (left or right) want right now.

I may not agree with Schilling on every last little detail, but I like his attitude and I think there’s a good chance that he will play well with working class Bostonians. I haven’t seen much, but I’ve seen enough to figure out that this guy has a tremendous amount of raw political talent.

One last little hiccup would be that Schilling is a registered independent and wouldn’t be able to legally change his registration before election day – I personally think this is a good thing.

As I see it, Schilling’s best bet is to run (and theoretically sit) as an independent. This way, he can rant and rave about not bowing to either party once he gets to Washington and avoid the Republican label that can be radioactive in cetain parts of New England. In all frankness, I think he would be better sitting as an Indy anyway. 

Sure, he can caucus with the GOP, but frankly I think they’d have a heck of a time trying to control him. We should accept his vote when it comes to who gets to be majority leader, and in return give him a few committee assignments. Other than that, I say leave Senator Schilling the heck alone and let him do as he pleases.

That said – I would be entirely in favor of the GOP yanking its candidates from the race and telling their voters to back Schilling. This is Massachusetts were talking about, and if they have half a chance to elect an Independent who will caucus with the Republicans, then they should take it.

It would still be a tough race, but with the Kennedys taking a pass and the Democrats headed for a bruising jungle primary – I say we should be on our knees begging Curt Schilling to get in this race.

Like many of you, I’m interested in observing how media consumption is changing, and what it means for the United States.

On August 13, I wrote in regards to RealClearPolitics.com citing “Facebook” as a news source.  Right in between an article in The New York Times and one in The Washington Post, RCP listed an article by Sarah Palin on Facebook.

Unanswered questions:

• How quickly are trends changing?
• Which changes are short-term “fads,” and which are more permanent?
• How does/will this affect American politics?

And:

• Would Nixon have even attempted Watergate, in an era with $100 10-megapixel cameras and the Internet?
• How much have things changed in the last 2-4 years?  Right now, we’re seeing The Washington Post’s over-the-top attempt to damage Virginia’s Bob McDonnell, and it appears to be completely failing.  What about 2006, George Allen’s 1% loss, “macaca,” and The Post?  Yes, the political environment is certainly different, but does that explain everything?  For better or worse:  since just 2006, has The Post lost enough political influence to the Internet, whereby George Allen would have won that Senate race?
• Does a greater “democratization of the media” help or hurt the conservative movement, or will it matter?

Of course, I didn’t say I have the answers to those questions.  But, in 20 and 40 years, I will be interested in learning how technology, the media, and politics are today interacting with one other.

Now, to Van Jones.  For what it’s worth, I think of the shoes “Vans” when I hear his name.

Van Jones was a United States “Czar.”  Of course, in reality, his “czar” role and title was nothing like a member of a president’s cabinet.  And now that at least one czar has embarrased President Obama, Obama probably wishes to diminish the significance of the czars.  But Obama can’t have it both ways:  Obama has appropriated tax money, some actual authority, and lots of perceived authority to these czars.  It’s unfortunate — for conservatives and liberals — but the resignation of a “czar” (whatever that is, legally) is a big deal.

As big of a deal, perhaps bigger, is that this Toppling of an American Czar was done without any assistance or real role from the mainstream media.

I’ll recommend today’s article by Andrew Breitbart in The Washington Times.  Breitbart challenges the mainstream media:

• “Inevitably, the American mainstream media – ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, et al – must be held to account for sitting on the sidelines as this major story kept building without them, went viral on YouTube, and then became so large that a key appointee of President Obama was forced to step down.”
• “What are you waiting for, Katie Couric?”
• “When the next big scandal hits – and it will, and it most certainly won’t come from traditional journalism – all eyes will be on “Pinch” Sulzberger to see if he does his job.  All eyes are on the media. We are judging them by the standard they taught us during Watergate: ‘The cover-up is worse than the crime.’”

Left noticeably unsaid, perhaps because of Breitbart’s obvious and significant role in the media:  because of powerful changes in the media marketplace, are we nearing a time in America where even the “mainstream media” no longer considers itself “mainstream,” and where conservatives simply ignore these news sources rather than directing energy toward holding today’s “mainstream media” accountable?

Lastly, on a different note, I chuckle at Breitbart’s use of the word “portals” in his Washington Times bio.  His audience (and probably Kavon’s) is large enough to warrant that term, but that’s a new term for me (it sounds like a phrase from Napoleon Dynamite: “Yeah, I run one or two portals… It’s kind of like entering a new universe.”).  I write that with all of the appropriate fear and respect towards Mr. Breitbart.

*Andrew Breitbart is publisher of the news portals Breitbart.com and Breitbart.tv. His latest endeavor, Big Hollywood (http://bighollywood.breitbart.com), is a group blog on Hollywood and politics from the center-right perspective.

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Benjamin Hodge publishes the Web site KansasProgress.com, based in Johnson County, KS, in the Greater Kansas City area.  Hodge is a delegate to the Kansas GOP and a former state lawmaker.  You can join Hodge’s efforts on Facebook, through his personal Web site, on Twitter, and through his PAC.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner/Public Opinion Strategies Survey on Israel and the Middle East

For each of the following people or groups of people, please rate each one using a 1 to 100 scale, where one means you have a cold/very unfavorable feeling, and one hundred means you have a warm/very favorable feeling, and fifty is neutral.

Mean Score (% Rating 51-100)

• Israel 66 (57%)
• Barack Obama 59 (54%)
• Benjamin Netanyahu 56 (36%)
• Arabs 51 (29%)
• The Palestinians 44 (22%)
• Mahmoud Abbas 34 (10%)
• Iran 32 (10%)
• Hezbollah 24 (3%)
• Hamas 22 (5%)
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 22 (5%)

Thinking about the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the Middle East, please tell me whether, in general, you consider yourself to be…

• A strong supporter of Israel 24%
• A supporter of Israel 35%
• A supporter of the Palestinians 7%
• A strong supporter of the Palestinians 1%

Regardless of which side you may support in this conflict, please tell me whether, in general, do you think America should be…

• A strong supporter of Israel 27%
• A supporter of Israel 36%
• A supporter of the Palestinians 6%
• A strong supporter of the Palestinians 2%

How committed do you think the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank and is led by President Mahmoud Abbas, is to reaching a peace agreement with Israel?

• Very committed 3%
• Somewhat committed 32%
• Just a little committed 29%
• Not at all committed 27%

How committed do you think the Palestinian leadership in Gaza, led by Hamas, is to reaching a peace agreement with Israel?

• Very committed 3%
• Somewhat committed 27%
• Just a little committed 31%
• Not at all committed 34%

How committed do you think the Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is to reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians?

• Very committed 8%
• Somewhat committed 49%
• Just a little committed 28%
• Not at all committed 11%

Do you believe that Israel is a country that respects freedom of religion, speech and press, or that Israel is a country that does not respect freedom of religion, speech and press?

• Respects freedoms 66%
• Does not respect freedoms 25%

Do you believe that Israel is a country that respects the rights of women, or that Israel is a country that does not respect the rights of women?

• Respects women’s rights 69%
• Does not respect women’s rights 21%

Do you believe that Israel is a country of moderates, or that Israel is a country of extremists?

• A country of moderates 70%
• A country of extremists 21%

I am going to read you a series of principles that Israel has put forward as the potential basis for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. After I read each one of these, please tell me whether you generally agree or disagree with each one.

Palestinians need to recognize Israel’s right to exist and acknowledge its standing as a Jewish state.

• Agree 95%
• Disagree 4%

For real peace, Palestinians must agree that Israel has a right to defend their citizens from Palestinian terrorists or actions that would threaten their citizens.

• Agree 97%
• Disagree 3%

Because Israel has been the target of more than 10,000 rockets over the past four years, in order for lasting peace, any new Palestinian state cannot be allowed to be a launching pad for attacks on Israel.

• Agree 90%
• Disagree 9%

Any peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians must be a lasting peace treaty that settles all conflicts and claims once and for all.

• Agree 86%
• Disagree 13%

I’d like to read you what leaders have said recently regarding the effort to move toward peace, and please tell me if you support or oppose the position taken by these leaders…

President Obama has said it is very important for Palestinians to continue to make progress in reducing the incitement and anti-Israel sentiments that are sometimes expressed in schools and mosques and in the public square, because all those things are impediments to peace.

• Support 90%
• Oppose 8%

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu promised that Israel would not build any new settlements in the West Bank, but that Israel must be allowed to accommodate natural growth of existing settlements.

• Support 72%
• Oppose 23%

Palestinian leaders said they will not restart peace negotiations with Israel until Israel halts all construction on settlements.

• Support 43%
• Oppose 53%

How serious of a threat do you think Iran poses to the United States?

• Very serious 44%
• Somewhat serious 37%
• Not very serious 12%
• Not serious at all 7%

How serious of a threat do you think Iran poses to Israel?

• Very serious 57%
• Somewhat serious 32%
• Not very serious 7%
• Not serious at all 1%

Do you believe that Iran has the right to develop nuclear weapons if it chooses to do so, or do you believe that the international community should prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons?

• Iran has right to nuclear weapons 12%
• Iran should be prevented from developing nuclear weapons 86%

How much of a chance do you think there is that diplomacy and negotiation by the United States government can stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons?

• A good chance 13%
• Some chance 25%
• Little chance 28%
• Hardly any chance 33%

How much of a chance do you think there is that diplomacy and negotiation by the United Nations, the United States and the European Union can stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons?

• A good chance 9%
• Some chance 27%
• Little chance 26%
• Hardly any chance 38%

Which statement comes closer to your own opinion?

• If negotiations and sanctions don’t work and Iran develops a nuclear weapon, it will not have a significant impact on my security and we should not use military force to stop it. 29%
• If negotiations and sanctions don’t work, we need to do everything possible to stop Iran even if it means targeted conventional military action. 63%

Which statement comes closer to your own opinion?

• With all the problems that America is facing at home now, we should reduce our efforts to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. 13%
• Even with all the problems that America faces at home now, we must still work hard to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. 84%

(more…)

Sorry, but anyone who thought that the president’s back-to-school speech was going to be some sort of indoctrination ceremony were dead wrong:

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.
Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

…

Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

…

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Totally harmless stuff. Some of it is even subtle: “You think your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball” — you think those were chosen accidentally? If just one young black kid in some inner-city school thinks about that, it’s worth it. He won’t be able to say “Oh, it’s just some crusty old white guy trying to get me to act white” — no. If Obama can do some good there, then good for him.

Methinks we ought to choose our battles a tad more appropriately.

I’ve been reading Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm:  Barry Goldwater and Unmaking of the American Consensus, a fantastic book so far, and I thought I’d post little observations as they occur to me.  Observation 1:  Barry Goldwater was EVERYWHERE in the years leading up to 1964.  He made, according to Perlstein, 225 speeches around the country in 1961 alone.  Think of that; that’s 4 or 5 speeches a week, 3 years before he’d start mounting an actual run.  I’ve been following Tim Pawlenty assiduously and I’d wager he’s made maybe a dozen speeches outside of Minnesota this year.  As best as I can tell, none of the other likely 2012 contenders have been much more active.  We can talk all we want about the increasingly long campaign cycles, but past politicians weren’t exactly sitting on their hands.  So a semi-rhetorical question: why aren’t more Republicans criss-crossing the country, making speeches to business groups, civic organizations, grassroots chapters, etc?  By all accounts, in 1961, the year of the 225 speeches, Goldwater had no plan to run for President.  By all accounts, Romney, Pawlenty, and a few others have more or less made up their minds (regardless of what they may claim) to run.  And yet we’re at the equivalent point in the cycle and things are just…quiet. 

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Matthew E. Miller can be contacted at Obilisk18@yahoo.com