As my admirable hero, Rush Limbaugh has appropriately named the News Media in the US, the "Drive By Media" or his latest (my favorite), "Lap Dog News Media", its time for the American People to see a fair and honest debate on the issues, without bias, slants, and out right fictious reporting.
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Let’s NOT Save The RINO Source: Obama White House Diaries -- Craig Covello
Some friends who admittedly do not share my politics sometimes have trouble distinguishing between Conservatives and Republicans. Perhaps you have some friends who do that as well. Everything is defined between the spectrums of right and left. It's a false analogy.
Republicans don't necessarily believe in small government with less control over individual economic and social freedom. Conservatives do. It's that simple. And to make the distinction, a term has been coined to describe Republicans who believe more along the lines of big government and then conservative principles. They're called RINOs, which stands for "Republicans in Name Only". Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is a good example.
This week, Robert Draper wrote a piece for the New York Times titled "This Year's Maverick". It's rather long, but provides some detailed insight into the mind of Sen. Graham. It reads as if Draper had spent some time following the senator around, but unlike McChrystal's career ending experience with Rolling Stone, Graham may have come out of the article unscathed, at least for now. Senator Graham is not up for reelection until 2014, but I believe the article will come back to haunt him.
Here are some excerpts, which may explain why: “Everything I’m doing now in terms of talking about climate, talking about immigration, talking about Gitmo is completely opposite of where the Tea Party movement’s at,” Graham said as Cato drove him to the city of Greenwood, where he was to give a commencement address at Lander University later that morning. On four occasions, Graham met with Tea Party groups. The first, in his Senate office, was “very, very contentious,” he recalled. During a later meeting, in Charleston, Graham said he challenged them: “ ‘What do you want to do? You take back your country — and do what with it?’ . . . Everybody went from being kind of hostile to just dead silent.”
In a previous conversation, Graham told me: “The problem with the Tea Party, I think it’s just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out.” Now he said, in a tone of casual lament: “We don’t have a lot of Reagan-type leaders in our party. Remember Ronald Reagan Democrats? I want a Republican that can attract Democrats.” Chortling, he added, “Ronald Reagan would have a hard time getting elected as a Republican today.”
Emanuel went on to say: “He’s willing to work on more things than the others. Lindsey, to his credit, has a small-government vision that’s out of fashion with his party, which stands for no government. . . . He’s one of the last big voices to give that vision intellectual energy.”
Still, such benchmarks seem as bygone as clap-o-meters and mood rings in a day when conservatives will savage one of their own for having the effrontery to characterize the president of the United States as “a good role model” or “an American just as much as anybody else.” Graham made both comments on “Meet the Press” in March.
Graham did not seem terribly shook up about it, to be honest. A few days earlier, he told me that his party’s unwillingness to work with the Obama administration amounted to an “opportunity” for him to be the Hill’s deal-maker in chief, adding with a laugh, “I mean, I’m not having to push through people to get to the front of the line.”
Whenever Graham speaks fondly of other legislators, Ted Kennedy’s name invariably comes up. He admired the Massachusetts senator’s energy and passion, but above all his practicality.
A similar element of kabuki theater attends Graham’s relationship with the Obama administration. “The president has said very nice things about me off the record to other reporters,” Graham recently told me, and a senior administration official confirmed that the White House places particularly high value on Graham.
Graham has already signaled that he would be receptive to confirming Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court this summer. First, however, he will extract his pound of flesh. “I want to make the case that she’s a liberal,” he told me. “Part of this whole exercise is to say to the public that if you want liberal judges, fine — vote for a liberal candidate for president.
On other matters, Graham has unabashedly supported the Obama administration. He credits the president for his attentiveness to Pakistan, for sending more troops to Afghanistan and for recently declaring a moratorium on deep-water drilling while remaining open to future domestic oil exploration.
For that matter, he said, “the environmental groups are great to deal with — but they think the planet’s gonna melt in five years. I don’t. I think carbon pollution, all things considered, is bad for human beings. But it’s not what I think of when I wake up in the morning. . . . I offer myself as a bridge, and I take a beating for that, and I get rewarded for that. It’s a business. Politically, it is who I am now. There’s no use for me to try to play another game.”
Graham’s political cunning may not in the end produce a lasting legacy, but as high-wire theater it rivals the parallel antics of his denouncers on the far right. “If you look at the Republicans who are likely to come into the Senate in 2010,” he said during our last meeting, “they’re gonna be more like me, not less like me.”
Analysis
Sen. Graham is totally out of touch with the pulse of the American people. He appears to have a moth-like attraction to the political spotlight and holds himself out as a bridge between parties. The senator thinks he's in the center of a left right continuum, but Graham fails to realize that people have grown increasingly weary of that model. The political website called Right Pundits summarized it very well.
“Graham misses what does unify the tea party members, I think. They share a belief that many of the nation’s institutions are out of their control, and perhaps out of control altogether. They thus seek some avenue to make this nation which they cherish representative of their values again. This vision clearly separates them from most Washington officeholders, and of the media elites who protect their positions. So what he fails to understand is that they are not fighting him because of his issue stances; instead, they seek to move the argument over who actually controls our government. Therefore, it may not be fair to use the same left-right alignment that politicians have become acclimated to judge this movement.”
Bill Bennett agrees:
"I will predict right now the Tea Parties will outlast the political viability of Lindsey Graham..But I hope they both survive a long time."
“(Tea Party activists) are not there to govern. That's not what the Tea Parties are there for, Tea parties are a way for people to voice their dissent, their disagreement, to address their grievances, as Thomas Jefferson said."
The polls agree as well. A new Pew Research study shows that 56% of Republican voters say they are more optimistic about voting this year than in previous elections. It's the highest percentage of Republican voter enthusiasm since 1994. The Obama White House Diaries also published an article on June 29 discussing a recent Gallup poll that shows a dramatic resurgence in the number of Americans who now consider themselves conservative. Not Republican, but conservative. So it's reasonable to assume that this renewed enthusiasm has been caused by the infusion of conservative principles back into the Republican talking points.
One final thought. Graham was quoted as saying
"I offer myself as a bridge, and I take a beating for that, and I get rewarded for that. It's a business. Politically, it is who I am now. There's no use for me to try to play another game."
Well, at the risk of taking the senator's statement out of context, this is not a game. Radical liberals have taken over the federal government and we are on a collision course that may not be recoverable. If the senator is correct in his assertion that Republicans coming into the Senate in 2010 are "going to be more like me, not less like me", then our country may not be recognizable a few short years from now. Perhaps it is better to let the RINO become extinct than the America that has brought us prosperity, freedom and hope for future generations.
A Slap In The Face For The Ruling Class -- Opinion Synoposis: If we learned anything from last night’s primaries, it’s that the current ruling class and everything they stand for was rejected. Our leader in the White House is a man with very littleexecutiveexperience. In the GOP primary in California voters chose Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman – two seasoned former CEOs – to take on Democratic icons Barbara “Call me Senator” Boxer and former Governor Jerry Brown. Source: Foxnews FoxForum The Alien In The Whitehouse -- Opinion
The distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed. Source: Wall Street Journel
Editor's note: This opinion piece by Dorothy Rabinowitz is well worth a read. The Smallest President By Geoffrey P. Hunt
Would someone remind us again why the nation elected this man to be president? A man with no resume, a man with no experience in running anything other than a political campaign, a man who is ignorant of history, economics, and technology? A man who is shallow and lazy? A man who shares neither character nor temperament with the American people in this vast republic? How did this happen? Voters were smitten by the ideological handmaidens of identity politics and the promise of big government. The identity politics substituted a cosmetic profile for character and experience. The promise was that big government has the benevolent power and enlightened expertise to remake America from the top down into a more capable, more caring, kinder, gentler, and more respected place.
What we've received instead was on display at the president's long-awaited press conference in the last week of May. Only a partisan or a fool could deny the irredeemable failure of these ideological handmaidens, the genius of Obama's shrinking presidency. No amount of posturing, buffing up, or Q&A briefing book drills could hide the reality that this man is on a raft at sea accompanied by an equally bewildered boatload of companions who have no idea how they arrived in such deep water, hundreds of miles from land, and with no clue that they are in trouble, let alone what to do about it.
What we've received instead from the ideology of identity politics and big government has been the spread of competency and accountability so thin that the federal government is utterly incapable of defending our shores and borders from invasion -- one by sea in the form of a massive crude oil slick, the other by land in the waves of illegal immigrants flooding Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. In utter exasperation, the citizens of Arizona finally took matters into their own hands, only to be vilified by Obama and his cohorts, who have neither the will nor the capacity to do anything about it.
Identity politics is where grievance-mongering and class resentment intersect with entitlement agitation and representational profiling. Those who use the currency of identity politics appeal to the ideals of justice and fair distribution of resources and outcomes. But in reality they prey on those who are underprivileged and dependent, making claims of dispossession against those who have enjoyed success and independence derived from their own sweat, equity, and competence.
Leaders who devote all of their energy and emotional capital to identity politics instead of creating a competent, skills-based organization soon discover that when critical decisions need to be made and highly skilled resources need to be mobilized, nobody is around who knows how to do it. Such leaders, eventually tuned out and abandoned by even their former acolytes, become irrelevant, easily overwhelmed by events and rivals, taking their organizations -- even a nation -- down with them.
ObamaCare was the progeny of a shrinking president preoccupied with identity politics accompanied by big government ideology and not much else, floated on the emotional chaise of justice and fair distribution. Yet its proponents thoroughly disregarded the vast, complex, and highly skilled bureaucracy needed to attain those ideals in a brand new, centralized, top-down social engineering monstrosity. It will require a bureaucracy ten times the size of the Pentagon.
And now we are watching in slow-motion agony the failure of identity politics and big government unwilling and unable to cope with the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster, gradually revealed like a developing image from a Polaroid instant print. Identity politics assured that no one with any skills or experience would occupy the top jobs in Obama's administration needed to navigate a crisis of this magnitude.
And where oh where is the president, anyhow? Playing another round of golf and hosting the Duke University women's basketball team.
Obama's presidency is finished because identity trumped competency. And without competency, his big government is dysfunctional and destructive.
So what's the alternative? Simple. The ideology of limited government. Why? Because limited government is the antithesis of identity politics. The ideology of limited government wouldn't need to rely on overextended organization competencies to manage vast and complex bureaucracies because those bureaucracies would be unnecessary and wouldn't exist. Without identity politics, people who actually know what they're doing could occupy key jobs.
Limited government has to assemble and target just those competencies needed to carry out the limited duties envisioned in the U.S. Constitution, such as providing for the common defense, facilitating interstate commerce and a monetary system, and defending the rights reserved to the people. Everything else can be better-managed by private enterprise, where distributed self interest can gather competencies in units small enough to accomplish something useful.
Identity politics combined with incompetence have exposed the absurdity in the ambitions of big government and made Obama the weakest, most anemic and flaccid president in the modern era. The Latinate word would be diminutive. In simple Saxon tongue, the word is small. This is Obama's presidency. Source: The American Thinker
KUHNER: WILL AMERICA BREAK UP? "The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not," --Thomas Jefferson Source: Washington Times
"I'm Tired" by Robert A. Hall
I'll be 63 soon. Except for one semester in college when jobs were scarce, and a six-month period when I was between jobs, but job-hunting every day, I've worked, hard, since I was 18. Despite some healthrs. I make a good salary, but I didn't inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, there's no retirement in sight, and I'm tired. Very tired. I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth around" to people who don't have my work ethic. I'm tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy or stupid to earn it. I'm tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to "keep people in their homes." Sure, if they lost their jobs or got sick, I'm willing to help. But if they bought McMansions at three times the price of our paid-off $250,000 condo, on one-third of my salary, then let the challenges, I still put in 50-hour weeks, and haven't called in sick in seven or eight yealeft-wing Congress-critters who passed Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act that created the bubble help them with their own money. I'm tired of being told how bad America is by left-wing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros, and Hollywood entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America offers. In thirty years, if they get their way, the United States will have the economy of Zimbabwe , the freedom of the press of China , the crime and violence of Mexico , the tolerance for Christian people of Iran , and the freedom of speech of Venezuela .. Won't multiculturalism be beautiful? I'm tired of being told that Islam is a "Religion of Peace," when every day I can read dozens of stories of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives and daughters for their family "honor"; of Muslims rioting over some slight offense; of Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren't "believers"; of Muslims burning schools for girls; of Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for "adultery"; of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls; all in the name of Allah, because the Qur'an and Shari'a law tells them to. I believe "a man should be judged by the content of his character, not by the color of his skin." I'm tired of being told that "race doesn't matter" in the post-racial world of Obama, when it's all that matters in affirmative action jobs, lower college admission and graduation standards for minorities (harming them the most), government contract set-asides, tolerance for the ghetto culture of violence and fatherless children that hurts minorities more than anyone, and in the appointment of US Senators from Illinois. I think it's very cool that we have a black president and that a black child is doing her homework at the desk where Lincoln wrote the emancipation proclamation. I just wish the black president was Condi Rice, or someone who believes more in freedom and the individual and less arrogantly of an all-knowing government.
I'm tired of a news media that thinks Bush's fundraising and inaugural expenses were obscene, but that think Obama's, at triple the cost, were wonderful; that thinks Bush exercising daily was a waste of presidential time, but Obama exercising is a great example for the public to control weight and stress; that picked over every line of Bush's military records, but never demanded that Kerry release his; that slammed Palin with two years as governor, for being too inexperienced for VP, but touted Obama with three years as senator as potentially the best president ever. Wonder why people are dropping their subscriptions or switching to Fox News? Get a clue. I didn't vote for Bush in 2000, but the media and Kerry drove me to his camp in 2004. I'm tired of being told that out of "tolerance for other cultures" we must let Saudi Arabia use our oil money to fund mosques and madrassa Islamic schools to preach hate in America , while no American group is allowed to fund a church, synagogue, or religious school in Saudi Arabia to teach love and tolerance. I'm tired of being told I must lower my living standard to fight global warming, which no one is allowed to debate. My wife and I live in a two-bedroom apartment and carpool together five miles to our jobs. We also own a three-bedroom condo where our daughter and granddaughter live. Our carbon footprint is about 5% of Al Gore's, and if you're greener than Gore, you're green enough. I'm tired of being told that drug addicts have a disease, and I must help support and treat them, and pay for the damage they do.. Did a giant germ rush out of a dark alley, grab them, and stuff white powder up their noses while they tried to fight it off? I don't think Gay people choose to be Gay, but I damn sure think druggies chose to take drugs. And I'm tired of harassment from cool people treating me like a freak when I tell them I never tried marijuana. I'm tired of illegal aliens being called "undocumented workers," especially the ones who aren't working, but are living on welfare or crime. What's next? Calling drug dealers, "Undocumented Pharmacists"? And, no, I'm not against Hispanics. Most of them are Catholic, and it's been a few hundred years since Catholics wanted to kill me for my religion. I'm willing to fast-track for citizenship any Hispanic person who can speak English, doesn't have a criminal record and who is self-supporting without family on welfare, or who serves honorably for three years in our military...those are the citizens we need. I'm tired of latte liberals and journalists, who would never wear the uniform of the Republic themselves, or let their entitlement-handicapped kids near a recruiting station, trashing our military. They and their kids can sit at home, never having to make split-second decisions under life and death circumstances, and bad mouth better people than themselves. Do bad things happen in war? You bet. Do our troops sometimes misbehave? Sure. Does this compare with the atrocities that were the policy of our enemies for the last fifty years and still are? Not even close. So here's the deal. I'll let myself be subjected to all the humiliation and abuse that was heaped on terrorists at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo, and the critics can let themselves be subject to captivity by the Muslims who tortured and beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or the Muslims who tortured and murdered Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins in Lebanon, or the Muslims who ran the blood-spattered Al Qaeda torture rooms our troops found in Iraq, or the Muslims who cut off the heads of schoolgirls in Indonesia, because the girls were Christian. Then we'll compare notes. British and American soldiers are the only troops in history that civilians came to for help and handouts, instead of hiding from in fear. I'm tired of people telling me that their party has a corner on virtue and the other party has a corner on corruption. Read the papers; bums are bipartisan. And I'm tired of people telling me we need bi-partisanship. I live in Illinois , where the "Illinois Combine" of Democrats has worked to loot the public for years. Not to mention the tax cheats in Obama's cabinet as well. I'm tired of hearing wealthy athletes, entertainers, and politicians of both parties talking about innocent mistakes, stupid mistakes or youthful mistakes, when we all know they think their only mistake was getting caught. I'm tired of people with a sense of entitlement, rich or poor. Speaking of poor, I'm tired of hearing people with air-conditioned homes, color TVs and two cars called poor. The majority of Americans didn't have that in 1970, but we didn't know we were poor. The poverty pimps have to keep changing the definition of poor to keep the dollars flowing. I'm real tired of people who don't take responsibility for their lives and actions. I'm tired of hearing them blame the government, or discrimination, or big-whatever for their problems. Yes, I'm damn tired. But I'm also glad to be 63. Because, mostly, I'm not going to have to see the world these people are making. I'm just sorry for my granddaughter.
Robert A. Hall is a Marine Vietnam veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts State Senate.
"As an American I am not so shocked that Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize without any accomplishments to his name, but that America gave him the White House based on the same credentials." - - Newt Gingrich
Let’s NOT Save The RINO