If killing off carbon production and/or energy independence is so important, why didn’t congress spend $800 billion on building solar and wind farms instead of “green” jobs/programs that provided hardly any jobs in the USA?
Why can’t a politician (Republican, Democrat or other) that is asked a simple yes or no question even start his/her answer with the word yes or the word no?
The Obama administration will seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration, Attorney General Eric Holder said today.
“As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons,” Holder told reporters.
I will pick apart some of the things that he is attributed as saying in the article:
A not inconsequential side note. The companies that produce the assault weapons (and all of the side gear), employ a good number of Americans in well paying jobs. In the current economy, passing a new AWB will hurt the economy.
With Massachusettls election of Brown to the US Senate, I am thinking that Farouk Shami and Debra Medina both have a better chance of getting elected. Some people say that Brown’s win is about health care or President Obama. I disagree. I think it was a reflection of people’s anger with politics as usual. There is a feeling of antipathy toward current office holders of both parties. Neither party has truly listened to the moderates who swing elections. I think the overall election results in November will be very interesting.
I’m giving my thoughts on the current major party candidates for Texas Governor (mainly from a strong supporter of the Second Amendment and a libertarian). Please forgive any incoherence or typos, I’m on muscle relaxers for my injured shoulder and having problems typing.
Republican candidates:
Democratic candidates:
I’m not really looking at the third party candidates. Depending on who gets the major party nominations, I will probably vote for the Libertarian party candidate as a protest vote. Can someone actually give me candidates I would be happy to vote for? For a little bit, it looked like the Democrats might have had someone. But, they talked him and Kinky Friedman out of running for Governor.
Rhode Island Governor Vetos Domestic Partners Burial Bill
Summary: A couple had been together for 17 years. They had all the proper paperwork, including a marriage license from a different state. Yet, when one member of the couple died, the state would not let the other member of the couple choose the burial method. It took months of fighting with state officials to fulfill the wishes of the deceased. In response to this, the state assembly chose to pass a law that would prevent such things from happening again. The Republican Governor of Rhode Island vetoed this bill, stating:
“This bill represents a disturbing trend over the past few years of the incremental erosion of the principles surrounding traditional marriage, which is not the preferred way to approach this issue.
“If the General Assembly believes it would like to address the issue of domestic partnerships, it should place the issue on the ballot and let the people of the state of Rhode Island decide.’
The Republican party is concerning itself with issues where nobody is injured. Allowing domestic partners to claim the body of their partners in no way harms marriage. I am sick of the Republican party kowtowing to big business and the religious right.
The Republicans need to go back to being the party of smaller and more controlled government. The past 15 years has seen the party become about controlling others and expanding government authority. When the Republicans had complete control of federal legislation, they expanded the government, increased our debt and did next to nothing to stop the encroachment on our rights (including the Second Amendment). Meanwhile, since the Democrats have come into office, we have actually seen an increase in our Second Amendment rights. At the state level, in Republican race for Texas governor, I am faced with the following choices:
The Democratic choices are:
To be honest, the first two Democratic candidates will most likely at least not further restrict my rights, nor shall they try to sell my state out from underneath me.
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
- Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson hated newspapers, yet he would not see us without them. The thought of news organizations who would not report things the government did not want the citizenry told. Now, the Obama administration is seeking to ostracize a news organization for their opinion programming (they mistakenly call the opinion programs news programs). The truth is Fox News’ actual news programs are no more opinionated than CNN’s, MSNBC’s, or any other news organization’s. Now, the news organizations are circling the wagons. They rightly see that an attack on one of them, is an attack on all of them. An editorial in the Washington Post is equating the Obama administration’s actions as being similar to a third world dictator’s. When the Obama administration tried to get the national press pool to exclude Fox on a series of interviews with one of their staffers, they conferred and unanimously said no.
It is this kind of behavior on the part of the Obama administration that worries conservatives. We elected a President, not a dictator or king. The President’s powers are supposed to be limited. Yet, this administration seems to be always pushing to expand and control them. President Obama ran on a platform of inclusion, bipartisanship and transparency. Yet, we see him trying to exclude the opposition while steamrolling over their legitimate concerns and insisting on trying to ram through massive pieces of legislation without enough time for our representatives and the public to view them and voice their concerns. I hope that he will choose to change course and be a little more inclusive than he has been on major legislation.
Perry de Havilland has made a call for people who feel closer to the Republican ideals to change the party and bring it back to tru conservatism, instead of the fake, government in everbody’s business, statist conservatism it has now. Below is a quote:
2009 is going to be an interesting year, particularly in the USA. Big State Democrat Barack “The One” Obama crushed Big State Republican John “I Support the Bail Outs” McCain and this means the country is going to have a new president whose politics make him the most committed statist since LBJ. The country was given a choice between statism and statism and it voted for… statism.
Well to quote Mencken, the American electorate are going to get what they voted for good and hard, because this is also the year the global economy is truly going to crash, big time, plunging us into a recession and indeed a depression that will last longer and be driven deeper by the policies being implemented by governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
And this presents friends of liberty with a great many opportunities.
Never has there been a better time for cleaning house. The usual excuses given for pragmatic ‘broad church’ politics no longer apply on the so-called ‘right’… no amount of unity will change the fact that regulatory tax-and-spend politicians will be in charge for the next few years regardless of what people of a classical liberal disposition do. And so I would strongly urge such people to get into politics like never before, not primarily to fight the statist left just yet, but to create opposition parties that are actually worth voting for.
In short, I am calling on anyone who believes in liberty and limited government to reject all thoughts of party unity and work tirelessly to drive the statist right from their parties.
I am not calling for the ‘libertarianisation’ of the Republican party along the lines I would actually like, just for the party’s rationalisation. I am in essence calling for a nominally conservative party to become… conservative. The simple fact is that people can be fellow travellers on a path that leads to liberty without all marching in ideological lock-step. It just boils down to asking the question “do you want the state to have less control over people’s lives or more control?” If a person can honestly answer that they think the state is too powerful and needs to be reduced, that is a fellow traveller.
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What is needed is a return to the ideologically driven and highly successful Reagan days, but happily without the distorting bipolar reality of nuclear superpower rivalries to worry about. Compared to the Soviet Union, the threat posed by Islamic terrorism is nothing more than the yapping of an annoying poodle, albeit one with rabies. Face it, it was the Cold War and fears over his hawkish foreign policy leading to nuclear Armageddon that did in Barry Goldwater, the best president the USA never had.
So now is not the time for Republicans to spend most of their efforts pulling together against The One in the White House… no, it is the time to rip the Party apart, ruthlessly and quickly, so that it can eventually become something worth uniting around. Oh sure, put the boot into Obama at every opportunity as this is also the time to fight the culture war without cease or apology, but the most important thing now is for Republicans to get their own party in order and that will require some extremes of disunity to achieve.
But this all needs to be done sooner rather than later, at the juncture where the Democrats are unassailable and party unity is frankly pointless. Pull out the political knives on Inauguration Day as a way to take you mind off the nauseating waves of sanctimonious kack radiating across the media caused by Barack Obama’s living beatification. Concentrate instead on the much needed massive internal political bloodletting and leave Obama and his Congress to do their worst as in truth there is nothing the Republicans can do to stop them anyway.
The economic crisis needs to be re-branded for a start: this is not, and never was, a ‘crisis of capitalism’, it is in fact the ‘crisis of regulatory statism’. John Maynard Keynes said “in the long run we are all dead”… well sadly for the Keynesians of all parties, the long run has finally arrived as it always does with Ponzi schemes. The lesser evil, the easy option, is no longer a viable option at all and the sooner the failures of the past are not dealt with by more of the same, the better.
All-in-all, I agree with the spirit of this. Republicans need to get back to the basics of a minimum amount of government, stop pushing for new government programs, and stop pushing for religious rule in the USA.
President-elect Obama has chosen Eric Holder to be his Attorney General. Here are a few facts about Mr. Holder:
At the oral argument before the Fifth Circuit in United States v. Emerson, the Assistant U.S. Attorney (Holder) told the panel that the Second Amendment was no barrier to gun confiscation, not even of the confiscation of guns from on-duty National Guardsmen.
As Deputy Attorney General, Holder was a strong supporter of restrictive gun control. He advocated federal licensing of handgun owners, a three day waiting period on handgun sales, rationing handgun sales to no more than one per month, banning possession of handguns and so-called “assault weapons” (cosmetically incorrect guns) by anyone under age of 21, a gun show restriction bill that would have given the federal government the power to shut down all gun shows, national gun registration, and mandatory prison sentences for trivial offenses (e.g., giving your son an heirloom handgun for Christmas, if he were two weeks shy of his 21st birthday). He also promoted the factoid that “Every day that goes by, about 12, 13 more children in this country die from gun violence”–a statistic is true only if one counts 18-year-old gangsters who shoot each other as “children.”(Sources: Holder testimony before House Judiciary Committee, Subcommitee on Crime, May 27,1999; Holder Weekly Briefing, May 20, 2000. One of the bills that Holder endorsed is detailed in my 1999 Issue Paper “Unfair and Unconstitutional.”)
After 9/11, he penned a Washington Post op-ed, “Keeping Guns Away From Terrorists” arguing that a new law should give “the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms a record of every firearm sale.” He also stated that prospective gun buyers should be checked against the secret “watch lists” compiled by various government entities. (In an Issue Paper on the watch list proposal, I quote a FBI spokesman stating that there is no cause to deny gun ownership to someone simply because she is on the FBI list.)
After the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the D.C. handgun ban and self-defense ban were unconstitutional in 2007, Holder complained that the decision “opens the door to more people having more access to guns and putting guns on the streets.”
Holder played a key role in the gunpoint, night-time kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez. The pretext for the paramilitary invasion of the six-year-old’s home was that someone in his family might have been licensed to carry a handgun under Florida law. Although a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo showed a federal agent dressed like a soldier and pointing a machine gun at the man who was holding the terrified child, Holder claimed that Gonzalez “was not taken at the point of a gun” and that the federal agents whom Holder had sent to capture Gonzalez had acted “very sensitively.” If Mr. Holder believes that breaking down a door with a battering ram, pointing guns at children (not just Elian), and yelling “Get down, get down, we’ll shoot” is example of acting “very sensitively,” his judgment about the responsible use of firearms is not as acute as would be desirable for a cabinet officer who would be in charge of thousands and thousands of armed federal agents, many of them paramilitary agents with machine guns.
This is a man who will probably instigate a new Ruby Ridge or Branch Davidian incident with his heavy handed tactics and lack of respect for individual rights.
Now, in light of the election, many are asking: What is the future of the Republican Party?
But that is the wrong question. The proper question should be: Where is our country heading? There’s no doubt that a large majority of Americans believe we’re on the wrong track. That’s why the candidate demanding “change” won the election. It mattered not that the change offered was no change at all, only a change in the engineer of a runaway train.
In the rise and fall of the recent Republican reign of power these past decades, the goal of the party had grown to be only that of gaining and maintaining power — with total sacrifice of the original Republican belief in shrinking the size of government.
The opportunity finally came in 2000 to do something about the cancerous growth of government. This clear message led to the Republican success at the polls.
Once the Republicans were in power, though, the promises faded, and all policies were directed at maintaining or increasing power by trying to whittle away at Democratic strength by acting like big-spending Democrats.
The Republican Congress never once stood up against the Bush/Rove machine that demanded support for unconstitutional wars, attacks on civil liberties here at home, and an economic policy based on more spending, more debt, and more inflation — while constantly preaching the flawed doctrine that deficits don’t matter as long as taxes aren’t raised.
But what the Republican leadership didn’t realize was that ALL spending is a tax on middle-class Americans through price inflation and that eventually the inevitable consequence is paying for the extravagance with a financial crisis.
Opportunity abounds for anyone who can present the case for common sense in fiscal affairs, for protection of civil liberties here at home, and avoiding the senseless foreign entanglements which have bogged us down for decades and contributed so significantly to our fiscal and budgetary crisis.
During the debates in the Republican Presidential primary, even though I am a 10-term sitting Representative Member of Congress, I was challenged more than once on my Republican credentials. The fact that I was repeatedly asked how I could be a Republican when I was talking a different language than the other candidates answers the question of how the Republican Party can slip so far so fast.
My rhetorical answer at the time was simple: Why should one be excluded from the Republican Party for believing and always voting for:
• Limited government power
• A balanced budget
• Personal liberty
• Strict adherence to the Constitution
• Sound money
• A strong defense while avoiding all undeclared wars
• No nation-building and no policing the world
How can a party that still pretends to be the party of limited government distance itself outright from these views and expect to maintain credibility? Since the credibility of the Republican Party has now been lost, how can it regain credibility without embracing these views, or at least showing respect for them?
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