Rasmussen Poll has GOP leading Dems by 6 pts on Economy!

from Hot Air.com
June 8, 2009
by Allahpundit

Yes, yes, the usual caveats about Rasmussen polls apply, but we do after all have some timely corroborating evidence on this.

I don’t want to freak out the HA faithful with uncharacteristic optimism but I’m starting to feel hope-y about this change-y.

This is the first time in over two years of polling that the GOP has held the advantage on this issue…

Republicans also now hold a six-point lead on the issue of government ethics and corruption, the second most important issue to all voters and the top issue among unaffiliated voters. That shows a large shift from May, when Democrats held an 11-point lead on the issue…

For the eighth straight month, Republicans lead on national security. The GOP now holds a 51% to 36% lead on the issue, up from a seven-point lead in May. They also lead on the war in Iraq 45% to 37%, after leading by just two points in May and trailing the Democrats in April…

Democrats continue to hold the lead on the issues of health care, Social Security and education. While Democrats have a 10-point advantage on health care, that’s down from the 18-point lead the party had a month ago.

Too good to check? I get why the Democrats’ lead on health-care might have eroded; the GOP’s congressional leadership and righty pundits have finally started to make some noise. I get why the national security spread might have widened too; thank Dick Cheney for that. What I don’t get is the spread on ethics. Why the huge swing? Murtha’s been in trouble lately for his lobbyist sleaze but that’s hardly a major national story. Pelosi’s hedging about waterboarding probably hurt but that would seem to speak more to national security than to a classic ethical issue. Smells like Rasmussen simply might have gotten a bum sample here. Am I wrong? Convince me, please; I want to believe. Exit quotation from via Frank Fleming: “If the GOP is smart, they should build on this to create or save a political party.”
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Texas Gov: States will 'assert their independence'

from Politico.com
By ANDY BARR
5/15/09

Republican Gov. Rick Perry said Thursday that he expects to see a number of states follow his home state of Texas in pushing resolutions that will “assert their independence from the federal government.”

“If this administration gets its way, we’ll all be the same. We’ll all be the way Washington wants us to be,” Perry said on a call with Gov. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) and roughly 20,000 callers, which was sponsored by the Republican Governors Association and billed as Tea Party 2.0.

Asked by a caller about his support for a Texas state House resolution reaffirming the state's sovereignty under the 10th amendment, Perry said that the issue “goes right to the heart of what the tea parties are all about.”

“You are going to see more and more laws like that across the country where states assert their independence from the federal government,” he said on the call, which lasted for more than an hour.

The governors spent the call answering questions selected from more than 700 that callers submitted.

The number of participants was off from the 30,000 who signed up for the call, though the RGA explained that a surge of calls at the beginning proved too much for the conference system to handle, causing the system to disconnect some callers.

“I think we would have had a higher number without the technical problems,” said RGA spokesman Mike Schrimpf.

Both governors blasted the Obama administration and credited last month's anti-tax Tea Party protests for reviving grass-roots energy in the conservative movement.

“I am horrified with what is going on with inflation and the printing press they are running in Washington,” Sanford said.

Perry said that “the Tea Party movement is an example of the growing frustration among hardworking Americans, and it is just going to get bigger.”

The rallies were a “great moment in American history,” the Texas governor added, recalling that he watched “Ted Nugent at the Alamo riffing with Glenn Beck.”

“We’ve been watching this liberal love fest that has taken over our country for about a year now,” he said, “and we need to take back our country.”

Both governors stressed that the Republican Party should not become more moderate as a way to regain power in Washington.

“If you look at this notion of what we are really about I would liken the Republican Party to nothing more than a brand in business,” Sanford said.

When great businesses face down times, Sanford explained, “they don’t expand the tent…they go back to what made those companies great.”

“I don’t think it is in the Republican Party’s best interest as some people have said to tack to the center,” Perry said. “I don’t make any apologies to anybody about being a true-blue conservative.”

Perry and Sanford conceded that the party is in a tough spot at the moment but expressed hope for the future and excitement over the grass-roots energy that spawned the tea parties.

“It was really invigorating for me, to see them to see their passion,” Perry said of the three rallies he attended across Texas. “There isn’t anything more important than having this movement succeed.”

Sanford, meanwhile, urged those on the call to remain persistent in their opposition of the Obama administration and patient for incremental signs of progress.

“What matters in politics is sustained pressure over time on one specific area,” he said.
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Cheney: Obama endangers the nation

from The Washington Times
By Sean Lengell
Sunday, May 10, 2009

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday continued his verbal attack against President Obama, saying that the country is more vulnerable to a potential terrorist attack since the Obama administration took power.

Mr. Cheney said that administration's dismantling of many of the policies and protections instituted by President George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks — including the planned closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba and halting controversial prisoner interrogation techniques — have made the country more vulnerable to future attacks.

"That's my belief," Mr. Cheney said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "I think to the extent that those [Bush-era] policies were responsible for saving lives, that the administration is now trying to cancel those policies … means in the future we're not going to have the same safeguards we've had for the last eight years."

The former vice president defended controversial interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, saying that it had been an effective tool in extracting useful information from suspected terrorists such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of helping carry out the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks Washington and New York.

"He did not cooperate fully in terms of interrogations until after waterboarding," Mr. Cheney said. "Once we went through that process, he produced vast quantities of invaluable information about al Qaida."

Mr. Obama in January banned the practice on prisoners by U.S. interrogators.

Mr. Cheney said he believes it's his duty to speak out against the Obama administration "because I think the issues that are at stake here are so important."

Mr. Cheney also took a shot at former Bush administration Secretary of State Colin Powell, saying that the conservative broadcaster Rush Limbaugh is a more loyal Republican than the former Army commander.

"If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh," Mr. Cheney said.
Mr. Powell recently said that Republicans need to more move to the center politically and that Mr. Limbaugh's polarizing far-right rhetoric hurts the party's image.

Mr. Limbaugh retaliated by accusing Mr. Powell of being "just another liberal" and that he should become a Democrat.

"I think my take on it was Colin had already left the party," Mr. Cheney said. "I didn't know he was still a Republican."
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Is conservatism over? Well, of course it is!

Climb
Conservatives must have the courage to defend their convictions.

from The National Review
By Mark Steyn

Is conservatism over?

Well, of course it is. Everyone from James Carville to Colin Powell says so. “The Republican party is in deep trouble,” General Powell told some group willing to pay him serious money to deliver this kind of incisive insight. “Americans do want to pay taxes for services. Americans want more government in their lives, not less.”

Whether or not they want it, they’re certainly going to get it. And if you like big government now, just think how big it’ll be once both parties are fully signed up to the concept. You’ll recall that General Powell voted for Barack Obama, coming out and publicly stiffing his “beloved friend” John McCain, after years of more discreetly stiffing (in leaks to Bob Woodward and others) his not-so-beloved colleagues in the Bush administration. But, in fairness to the former secretary of state, his breezy endorsement of more government and more taxes is as near as we’ve ever got to a coherent political philosophy from him. If the GOP refuses to take his advice, I would urge him to run a third-party campaign on this refreshingly candid platform.

One of Powell’s more famous utterances was his rationale, after the 1991 Gulf War, for declining to involve the U.S. military in the Balkans: “We do deserts, we don’t do mountains.” Actually, by that stage, the U.S. barely did deserts. The first President Bush’s decision, at Powell’s urging, not to topple Saddam but to halt the coalition forces at the gates of Baghdad sent the world a message about American purpose whose consequences we live with to this day. As for the Kurds and Shiites to whom it never occurred that the world’s superpower would assemble a mighty coalition for the purpose of fighting half a war to an inconclusive conclusion, Saddam quickly took a bloody revenge: That’s an interesting glimpse of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Colin Powell’s much-vaunted “moderation.”

So I have no great regard for Powell’s strategic thinking, at home or abroad. As the general sees it, the Republican party ought to be a “big tent”: Right now, the tent is empty, with only a few “mean spirited” and “divisive” talk-radio hosts chewing the limbs off live kittens while gibbering to themselves. By comparison, over in the Democrat tent, they’ve got blacks, gays, unions, professors, Ben Affleck: diversity on parade.

In fact, the GOP’s tent has many poles: It has social conservatives, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, national-security hawks. These groups do not always agree: The so-cons resent the libertarians’ insouciance on gay marriage and abortion. The libertarians don’t get the warhawks’ obsession with thankless nation-building in Islamist hellholes. A lot of the hawks can’t see why the fiscal cons are so hung up on footling matters like bloated government spending at a time of war. It requires a lot of effort to align these various poles sufficiently to hold up the big tent. And by the 2006 electoral cycle, between the money-no-object Congress at home and a war that seemed to have dwindled down to an endless, half-hearted, semi-colonial policing operation, the GOP poles were tilting badly. The Republican coalition is like a permanent loveless marriage: There are bad times and worse times. And, while social conservatism and libertarianism can be principled to a fault, the vagaries of electoral politics mean they often wind up being represented in office by either unprincipled opportunists like Arlen Specter or unprincipled squishes like Lincoln Chafee.

Meanwhile, over in the other tent, they celebrate diversity with ruthless singlemindedness: In the Democrats’ parade, whatever your bugbear, government is the answer. Government is the means, government is the end, government is the whole magilla. That gives them a unity of purpose the GOP can never match.

And yet and yet . . . Last November, even with the GOP’s fiscal profligacy, even with the financial sector’s “October surprise,” even with a cranky old coot of a nominee unable to articulate any rationale for his candidacy or even string together a coherent thought on the economy, even with a running mate subjected to brutal character assassination in nothing flat, even running against a charming, charismatic media darling of historic significance, even facing the natural cycle of a two-party system, the washed-up loser no-hoper side managed to get 46 percent of the vote.

Okay, it’s not 51 percent. But still: Obama’s 53 percent isn’t a big transformative landslide just because he behaves as if it were.

To put it in Powellite terms, the general thinks the Republican party is in the desert, when in fact it’s climbing a mountain. All things considered, the resilience of American conservatism is one of the most remarkable features of contemporary Western politics. It’s up against significant members of its own party. It’s up against media for whom the Democrats’ positions are the default positions on almost anything that matters.
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Obama Sucks...politicians are the garbage clogging up the system

Another awesome video from Drinking With Bob

Jack Kemp, 1935-2009 - May You Rest In Peace

from Michelle Malkin.com
By Michelle Malkin
May 2, 2009 10:30 PM

Jack Kemp was diagnosed with cancer in January. He died today at the age of 73. Didn’t agree with him on many core issues, but he was a GOP institution with a wonderful family.
RIP.

***

Here’s a tribute from the Heritage Foundation:

Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner tonight issued the following
statement on the death of former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp:

“Jack Kemp was a leader – whether it was in a football huddle, a
national political campaign or a policy discussion about the Austrian school of
economics.

from Wikipedia:

Jack French Kemp, (July 13, 1935 – May 2, 2009) was an American politician and professional football player. In the 1996 election, he was Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole's running mate for Vice President. He had previously contended for the presidential nomination in the 1988 Republican primaries. Kemp began his political career with nine terms as a Congressman for Western New York, from 1971 to 1989, and subsequently served as Housing Secretary in the George H. W. Bush administration.

As an economic conservative, Kemp advocated low taxes and supply-side policies. His positions spanned the social spectrum, ranging from his conservative opposition to abortion to his more libertarian stances advocating immigration reform. As a proponent of both Chicago school and supply-side economics, he is notable as the molder of the Reagan agenda and the architect of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, which is known as the Kemp–Roth tax cut.

Before politics, Kemp was a professional quarterback for 13 years in the National Football League (NFL), Canadian Football League (CFL), and American Football League (AFL). He served as captain of both the San Diego Chargers and Buffalo Bills and earned the AFL Most Valuable Player award in 1965 after leading the Bills to a second consecutive championship. He played in the AFL for all 10 years of its existence, appeared in its All-Star game seven times, played in its championship game five times, and set many of the league's career passing records. Kemp also co-founded the AFL Players Association, for which he served five terms as president. During the early part of his football career, he served in the United States Army Reserve.

After his days in political office, Kemp remained active as a political advocate and commentator, and served on corporate and non-profit organization boards. He also authored, co-authored, and edited several books. He promoted American football and advocated for retired professional football players. Kemp was the benefactor of Pepperdine University's Jack F. Kemp Institute of Political Economy. In January 2009, he was diagnosed with cancer.

Arlen Specter is a switch hitter!

Arlen Specter Watch Out! - Darn, too late...that door hit you right in the butt

Arlen Specter makes it official; Flashback: Specter’s denial

from Michelle Malkin.com
By Michelle Malkin
April 28, 2009 12:00 PM

Well, it appears that the head of the Turncoat Caucus is finally making it official. Arlen Specter, we have just 10 words for you:

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter will switch his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat, according to sources informed on the decision.

Specter’s decision would give Democrats a 60 seat filibuster proof majority in the Senate assuming Democrat Al Franken is eventually sworn in as the next Senator from Minnesota. (Former Sen. Norm Coleman is appealing Franken’s victory in the state Supreme Court.)

“I have decided to run for re-election in 2010 in the Democratic primary,” said Specter in a statement. “I am ready, willing and anxious to take on all comers and have my candidacy for re-election determined in a general election.”

“Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.”

The readers at Human Events give Specter a nice send-off.
***

The Hill reminds us of the value of Specter’s word: Worthless:

In a March 17th interview with The Hill, Specter said he absolutely would not switch parties:

[Democrats] are trying very hard for the 60th vote. Got to give them credit for trying. But the answer is no.

I’m not going to discuss private talks I had with other people who may or may not be considered influential. But since those three people are in the public domain, I think it is appropriative to respond to those questions.

I am staying a Republican because I think I have an important role, a more important role, to play there. The United States very desperately needs a two-party system. That’s the basis of politics in America. I’m afraid we are becoming a one-party system, with Republicans becoming just a regional party with so little representation of the northeast or in the middle atlantic. I think as a governmental matter, it is very important to have a check and balance. That’s a very important principle in the operation of our government. In the constitution on Separation of powers.

Specter says today he won’t change his opposition to Big Labor’s Card Check bill.

Snort.
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