A good subtitle would be “In Which I gush about House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA)“.

I read a nice tidbit about Rep. Cantor that I got via The New Ledger h/t Erick Erickson.  The Ambinder article is about Rep. Cantor’s counter to the DCCC’s assualt on, private citizen, Rush Limbaugh.  

Rep. Cantor is calling the President’s and his party’s bluff.  The people voted for hope, they were promised “Bipartisianship”, they are getting “Bipartisianship™“.   So Rep. Cantor, well let’s quote from the article:

will soon issue a statement contending that Obama’s promise to “put an end to petty politics” is “threatened” as the White House and their allies “are making political threats rather than crafting a bipartisan economic stimulus plan.”

This is an expected play at some point in any new administration.  Pit the President and his Party against themselves.  Can you say Comprehensive Immigration Reform™?  What is so great about this is that it is so soon.  

Rep. Cantor didn’t just stop there, although that was great in and of itself.  Whip Cantor called for President Obam to “immediately disavow” liberal interest groups like Americans United for Change*, who work regularly with the White House and the Congressional Democrats, who have created commercials targeting Republicans.

Here is the video set to target Sen. Murkowski

Now each of the videos is exactly the same except the endings differ depending on who is being targeted.  They also have a national version that pretty much just blame all Republicans and the Bush Admin…even in victory…classless, but I digress.  Where was I, oh yes, Rep. Cantor.

Let us be clear: attack ads will not create jobs or help struggling families but will only serve to undermine our nation’s desire for bipartisanship. Instead of thinking about winning at any cost, we should all be thinking about creating the jobs Americans need

Rep. Cantor was chanelling Bill Clinton in this quote…but I give him a pass on that for two reasons.  First, He is right.  If Obama employs a permanent campaign philosophy with us we will insure extreme discomfort as often as possible.  Second, this is the absolute reality of what is happening.  The Obama Adminstration and the Democratic Party in and out of Congress are engaging in incitement because they now can’t provide Hope™, none the less Change™.

I say everybody with a spare buck or two should drop a couple off right here, you know, just to show your appreciation.  Or don’t…and wave good bye slowly to the idea of the Republic.  Yep I said it.  We are at a tipping point in our nation.  The statist, socialists have a firm grasp on the reigns of power and if they go unchecked we are screwed. Bad.  Add to that the economic peril that we are in and quips about Weimar don’t seem so dang funny anymore.  

It’s time to stand up and fight, part of that is being their for our leaders like Rep Eric Cantor.  Cantor is as conservative as you can get, and this strategery sounds just right to me.  Go Donate now. You don’t have to donate a lot…I just gave $10…that is what my budget would allow right now.  Some of you can do more, some of you can’t give any money.  Those who can do more, I hope you do.  Those who can’t give money, you should be writing to the editors of you local papers and the national papers.  Write your congress men if you live in one of the targeted States, write the DCCC and let them know that you will never vote for them if they continue this partisan, machine politics where the opposition is silenced.

In sum, Thank you Rep. Cantor!!!!

In a 22 months the midterm elections will be upon us.  The way I see it this gives us 18 months to walk the walk before 6 months of intense campaigning begins.  I think we should start floating ideas via our leaders in Congress.  Each idea will invariably fail becuase we simply don’t have the numbers to get them past…but that doesn’t matter right now, as it would have other benefits regardless.   The ideas will get exposure from friendly media, the ideas will show us as more than obstructionists, the ideas will be setting the agenda for 2010 if we are able to capture the majority.  

Now these are just a couple rough ideas that I have, I am sure they can be improved upon.

* I would like to limit the amount of legislation that can come forward in any given year.  This would be a hard limit that could only be bypassed in emergency situations, which would be voted on and would require a 75% majority to justify exceptions to the rule.

* Tax Reform, We must get away from the progressive tax system.  10% across the board, including Corp/Capital Gains/Sales/Payroll (I am not an economist, I will defer to others on the actual rate and whether is should be across the entire spectrum)

* Open all available assets up for energy.  Oil, check..Natural Gas, check…Nuclear, check….Wind, check…Hydro-Electric, check…..all of it.  In coordination with this I would want to see the Dept. of Energy to take a step back and act as a simple mediator for the individual States.  The States should choose which Energy product will best meet their States need and infrastructure.  The Federal Gov’t dictating/mandating what product to use and where will not work.

Anyhow those are my three quick ideas.  Let me see yours.

One last note, no matter what ideas we present it won’t matter unless our leaders on the hill act on them.  If they simple win the majority and then cave….well Obama will be a two term President.  Your choice guys.

Recently Mbecker wrote an excellent diary thanking President Bush for the Man that he is.  One of the points was President Bush’s character displayed by his continued meetings with the families of those who gave their life in defense of freedom.  Unfortunately, one of the comments stirred some commotion down in the thread which resulted in a banning.

I am not writting this to in order to get that RedState member re-instated.  I am merely relating Bird’s explanation and apology so that his character doesn’t get the same treatment that the left gave to our President.  Below is the text of Birdmojo’s explanation of his comment and overall conflict with the war in Iraq.  I hope this gives you a bit more insight about Birdmojo and why he responds the way he does used to.

(I suppose that there may a discussion revolving around whether I was coving up for my sarcasm or whether I was sincere. Here’s an essay that I’d be happy to make into a diary if I am re-instated. If nothing else, perhaps seeing my take on the war could help resolve the question of whether my post was sarcasm and I’m lying by saying it wasn’t or whether my post was sincere and misread as sarcasm.)

9/11 blew me away. I was working 3-11PM at a tech support job at the time. I had a friend call me up from a sound sleep (my sleep hours were messed up) and he told me to turn on the television.

I was floored. I couldn’t believe that this had happened. Half of me stared in disbelief while the other half went down a checklist of the people who might have done this. The Russians? Nah. They’re preoccupied. China? Nah, not their style. Terrorists? Yeah, probably terrorists. I kept trying to get to news websites but they were down. I knew about sites like “instapundit” and he did a good job of posting links to sites that weren’t down… and I got information that way.

Half of me hoped that the American response wouldn’t include nukes, the other half of me hoped it would. Neutron bombs were cleanish, right? Drop them, they kill everybody, then you don’t have to do a whole lot of cleanup, right? That’ll make it okay on the neighbors of whomever we nuke and allow them to move into the now-vacant real estate.

Half of me wished that Clinton was still president. Half of me was glad that this had happened with a Republican in office.

As the weeks passed and the red faded from my eyes, I realized that, yeah, I was probably glad that we didn’t nuke two or three countries. That probably would have been a bit much… but what do we do? Well, Afghanistan was a gimme. Of course we had to go in there… and I was surprised that the Americans sat down to talk with the Taliban first… remember that? “Give us bin Laden.” We didn’t go in there with guns blazing, we didn’t go all Jack Bauer… we sat down to talk. And, of course, the Taliban were lying. Every thing they said was a lie to buy time and to hope/pray that the UN and the rest of the world would talk us down. Well, we went in… but we didn’t go in guns blazing. Every measure was made to protect civilians. Sure, we’d drop daisy cutters on the fighters in the mountains (remember reading about that? I read an article that quoted some British soldiers as saying “oh my god, the yanks are using nukes!”)… but in, say, Kabul, the Americans were downright acting against their own best interests.

Half of me still wanted blood, though.

When Iraq came up, I supported it whole-heartedly. I pointed out that the UN wasn’t certain that Saddam got rid of his weapons. When my lefty friends talked about how that wasn’t sufficient, I went through mailing lists and found quotes from them where they had defended Clinton’s bombing of Iraq against the isolationist Republicans using, wouldn’t you know it, UN reports saying that Saddam had not demonstrated that he had gotten rid of his weapons. I argued that Saddam was a monster, I argued that any country that had Official Secret Police *REQUIRED* intervention by anyone with the strength to do something. Well, that was the argument from half of me. The other half knew that if someone punched you in a bar and knocked you flat, you had dang well stand up pretty quickly and punch *SOMEBODY* out. Maybe the right person, maybe not. The important thing was to send the message to everyone else in the bar.

Iraq fell in, what? A time period better measured in days than weeks? Certainly better in weeks than in months. I watched Baghdad Bob and cackled at his audacity. Before you knew it, the Saddam Statue was being toppled and Iraqis were hitting Saddam posters with the soles of their shoes. See? I pointed out to my lefty friends. SEE???

A short while after that, Saddam was captured… and after that the mission was accomplished.

Half of me thought we should just leave a note on Saddam’s throne that read, in English and Arabic, “We don’t care who sits here. Sunni, Shiite, Baathist, Kurd, Iraqi, Iranian, or Israeli. Don’t make us come back.”

The other half of me thought that, well… we toppled Iraq, we should help it stand back up. These people were oppressed by Saddam for so long that they had forgotten how to be a free people. We needed to Kipling up. Help them back on their feet. Make them a beacon to the rest of the Middle East.

Well… let’s just say that a lot has happened since then. The whole “Weapons of Mass Destruction” thing didn’t pan out the way I thought it would. I honestly thought that he still had them, or (at the very least!) that he had a way to quickly make them again and get back to where he needed to be though, technically, he may have been following the letter of the law by not having the weapons, I thought that the components would be found in amounts that would allow me to point and say “see? He could have had weapons in days, if not hours!” For a while, I jumped on every report that mentioned stuff like proof that they had been smuggled into Syria or proof that they had been dumped in the desert or that a stockpile of mustard gas shells had been found… then I just went back to pointing out that, hey, nobody could have known that the WMDs weren’t there. Not even the UN was able to confirm it. Even Saddam was surprised that he didn’t have them.

But I was ticked at having been wrong.

I then focused on the burgeoning democracy. Remember those purple fingers? Man, I was proud of those. But the Iraqis kept fighting. They kept bombing. Police stations! These were people who were blowing up car bombs in front of POLICE STATIONS. I began to really resent the Iraqis. How could we have freed them from Saddam and have them blowing up car bombs in front of police stations in response? I began to wonder if staying in Iraq wasn’t a mistake. The cultural differences were far, far too much… we should have left a note in Saddam’s chair after all. These people were going to be killing each other whether or not our soldiers were there, why keep our soldiers in harm’s way?

But I kept reading reports from the soldiers who were there who kept saying “I believe in what we’re doing over there.” The soldiers who argued otherwise? They tended to be nuts like Jesse MacBeth. The soldiers who were on the ground and fighting… they wrote back saying that they believed in the Iraqi people. So I figured then, and figure now, that the soldiers know more about what’s going on than I do.

It still galls me to have been wrong about the WMDs and twice as much to have been wrong about how the Iraqi people would have responded to Saddam being gone. Half of me thinks “If I had known then what I knew now, I would have argued against the Iraq war, rather than for it.” The other half of me thinks that that’s wasted effort and, looking back, nobody knew that Iraq didn’t have WMDs, not the UN, not even Saddam.

As much as my being “wrong”, if you want to call it that, about the war galls me, Bush has met with the parents of the soldiers who died in Iraq. I merely defended Bush’s decision but *HE* is the guy who made it. As awful as I feel looking and seeing no WMDs, imagine what Bush feels when he thinks about it. As awful and resentful of the Iraqi people as I feel, imagine what Bush feels when he thinks about it. I guess part of me sort of assumed that he slowed down or even stopped meeting with parents after the Cindy Sheehan thing, but it looks like he didn’t. Even after being wrong about the WMDs and wrong about how the Iraqis would respond, Bush has the humility and strength to meet with the parents of the soldiers who fall in Iraq… these same soldiers who, surely, were writing home and saying stuff like “I believe in this mission” to their parents.

Bush sits down with the parents and looks them in the eye. That’s amazing.

Wow.

That’s mind-boggling.

That’s the essay I suppose I should have written rather than the comment that I left. Neil and Streiff probably think that it couldn’t have been written by the real birdmojo as it doesn’t mention “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” once.

And, I suppose, I should look at how the general response to my post was an automatic assumption of sarcasm rather than an automatic assumption that I meant the whole “amazing, wow, mind-boggling” thing (which, I assure you, I did). I don’t talk about the whole Iraq war because I have so many internal conflicts about supporting it in the first place (you know when people were shouting “NEOCON!!!” so much in 2003 and 2004? I knew that they were shouting at the Fiscal Conservatives who weren’t really Social Conservatives but believed in a vigorous Foreign Policy which is to say… I knew that when someone said “neocon”, they were talking about someone just like me). The main lesson I’ve learned from the Iraq War is to not automatically assume that the isolationists/non-interventionists are automatically wrong but I temper that with the whole “you didn’t and couldn’t have known” thing.

Anyhow, the post that got me blammed was *NOT* sarcastic, though I see now how it could have been interpreted as being so.

Birdmojo has never denied that he is not a registered republican.  Birdmojo was in fact closer to the classical liberal than the modern libertarian.  I knew Birdmojo (Jay) briefly while I live in Colorado, I know that his personal moral compass is true.  I know that I could agree with him 95% of the time, even if I didn’t agree with his way of getting his point across.  I know that his wit will be missed, at least by me.  I hope Birdmojo is not remembered as the guy who took President Bush’s commitment to character lightly, because that would be the absolute opposite of the truth.

Hopefully this will not be my last post, but if it is at least it will have been done for the right reason.  Truth.

Well, it is my first RedState birthday, and as it seems to be sort of a tradition ’round these parts, I decided to write a diary to celebrate. I came to RedState near the end of the primary flame wars, it was all but decided that McCain would be the nominee and any hope for a TrueConsevative™ entering the White House were pretty low. Despite this, the attitude and spirit of the site was high, everyone was ready to fight for their vision and, in part, the greater vision of the Republican Party. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how deep you dislike of McCain went, we lost the battle for 2008, but as I said this was just a battle, the war rages on.

There are so many people who I would like to thank, if I miss anyone I am truly sorry.  

First and foremost I would like to thank Erick in particular and the Directors in general, I came here from Politico so I fully appreciate the very existence of this site (anyone who was a member of Politico should understand this).  You guy’s have done a great thing for Republicans and Conservatives by allowing us to have a fairly unfiltered voice to some of the top echelons of the Republican Party.  Thank you very much for that.

Next i would like to thank E Pluribus Unum.  Without your diaries on Fred, Kirk, and conservatism in general, I may have never been able to understand and verbalize the very philosophy that I am a part of.  Thank you for the discussions, critiques, and encouragements.  Congratulations on your promotion to the status of FP contributor, it is truly deserved.

Gamecock…well what can I say brotha, you have challenged me in my thoughts and I love you for it.  Your writing style is so very unique.  I am so pleased that you found your way to our party and have taken up the banner of Reagan.  You unapologetically defend and promote the ideas that make our country great, I thank you for that.

Achance, thanks for trying to impart some knowledge to me, especially on the nuts and bolts.  Your experience invaluable and I hope to continue learning from you.  Although we may disagree on Gov. Palin on some points I appreciate you being frank and honest about what you know as fact and what you expect due to circumstance, that delineation shows character that many who dislike Gov. Palin simply lack.

Mbecker and Moe Lane thanks for the lessons in sarcasm (really that a compliment…;^)).  The two of you have helped me cut through the BS of trolls like a hot knife through butter…which I can then put on my big bucket of popcorn…;^)

Jaded, you remind me each day what it means to be a patriot.

PaRep…give me your luch money…now!!!

Neil, thanks for keeping the site up and running.

Birdmojo…I know you are still reading so let me just say, send me your email aaronbg.gardner@gmail.com …if I am ever in town we will have to close down Jose’s, thanks for all the great conversations.

Speciallist…love the pictures, you make each day speacial!!

Last but not least, AceinTX.  Thanks you so much for all the effort in exposing the fifth colunm within our party.  Never let up.  Conservatism will rise again and those b4stards will rue the day!!!

Ok I know that I have forgotten a buch of others who I should thank, but I have a 9 month old and haven’t slept through the night since her birth…so I apologize if I missed you, trust me though…your are all loved.

So, happy birthday to me….cake is in the kitchen and beer is on the deck, thanks for the education!!

I honestly don’t know where to begin with this diary…so I suppose I will just begin at the beginning.

 Some 200 plus years ago our forefathers took it upon themselves to set about to create a new nation.  A nation of free men.  A nation that governed from the bottom up rather than a nation that ruled from the top down.  
 
Upon declaring their indepence from the tyranny and totalitarian rule of King George they fought on the battlefields and in the debating halls.  They came up with a system of government which derived it’s power from the people.  They took caution to ensure that the powers of the government would be separated not only in the three branches of the Federal Government but also between the Federal Government and the State Governments which comprised the whole.  
 
It seems as though immediately after codifying these rules of government, which were meant to establish liberty and freedom for all, some began to usurp those same rules.  

Although the names of these groups has changed over the years the political philosophies have held steady in their basic nature, power belongs to me and not to thee. Today these ideals are held primarily by the Democratic party and, to a marginally lesser extent, by those whom we refer to as Rinos, or big government Republicans.

Today it seems as though we really only have one monolithic goverment with various aparati beneath that claim to be soveriegn governments of the States.  This may seem like a rather pessimistic view of our current situation, but I will provide a few examples of what I mean, so as not to come off as a melodramatic.

First, I will bring up Education in America.  Education, to me, is area of government that is best left to those who are closest to it and affected the most by it.  I was reading today an article about the coming budget battle that will take place in the Vermont Legislature. Gov. Jim Douglas, in his inaugural speech, chose to single out Education Reform as one of the many ways to wrangle in the budget shortfalls that Vermont will be facing. The article was good but it made me realize that there was really not a whole lot that the state on it’s own could do, at least without causing more trouble down the road. Here is a small excerpt from the the article:

We can’t ignore the fact that from FY 2006 through FY 2010 there has been a 23 percent increase in what we spend for our K-12 school system – yet we are educating 4,300 fewer students. We can’t ignore the fact that in the past decade we have added 3,500 positions to our schools, yet we are educating 10,000 fewer students. As the governor pointed out, for every three students we lose, we add a staff position, which, obviously, is an unsustainable trend.

Why is this happening? To a large extent, it’s the result of federal and state mandates. Unfunded mandates. School boards are not hiring additional people because they want the challenge of getting their budgets passed. They hire because they are being told to hire to fill a need.

Now, I am new to Vermont, so I can’t really argue for or against the need for these new positions. Although, I direct your attention to the bolded text. The Federal Government has taken upon itself a wholly unconstitutional ability to mandate to a State, and further the local community, how many positions should be created and thus filled and funded. The Democrat or Rino would read this and see a responsibility for the Federal Government to provide funding for this mandate. Well, needless to say, I am no Rino, and certainly no God forsaken Democrat.

The problem to me is obvious, we need to get rid of the Federal mandate. The only question that remains is how the hell are we gonna do that? Honestly, I don’t know and this was my catalyst for writing this diary.

Before I get too far let me offer up another example of the usurpation of which I speak. Equal Opportunity Employment and Affirmative Action. I am neither a bigot nor a racist, but I have no love for a policy instituted by the Federal Government, and mandated for implementation at all levels of both the private and public sector. Now, I am not going to even attempt to provide links to data sets or give anecdotal evidence that these policies are harmful to the Republic and by most interpertations go far beyond the Constitutional limits on the Federal Government, to me they are, well lets just say “self evident”.

Again, I am drawn back to the question, how the hell are we gonna do it? Again, I don’t know.

The only plausible answer to me is that it will take the majority of Americans becoming so entrenched in the misery of totalitarian government that they finally wake up and say “NO MORE!!!”

The saying goes that, “all politics is local”, this is true in that grassroots are needed to secure any political power.  I applaud Erick Erickson for creating The RedState StrikeForce of which I am a proud member. But, I am coming to the conclusion that we must be prepared to take our local issues and make them national. We must be willing to band together a coalition of pissed off conservatives, federalists, and libertarians to march to the steps of Congress, pitchfork and torches in hand, in order to change the landscape at the top in the hopes of returning to a Federal Government properly limited to the confines set forth in the plain reading of the Constitution, emanations and penumbras not withstanding.

A cultural, political, and philosophical insurrection is what it took to drag us to this point, maybe that is the only way to get back.

I hope that it doesn’t come to violence in the streets before our collective voices will be heard, but I fear that it may be too late.

If I have crossed the line in any way in what I wrote above feel free to replace it with a cute video of a cat jumping headlong into a mirror, it will pretty much convey the same feelings I am having about our current situation.

Yes Pecan. The profits from the sale of this new flavor will, of course, go to a “nonpartisan” group as briefly noted in the linked article:

The proceeds for the ice cream will go to Common Cause, liberally leaning and described as “a nonpartisan, nonprofit advocacy organization founded as a vehicle for citizens to make their voices heard in the political process.”

Now this is all well and good and I don’t really care that Ben and Jerry’s did this, but I believe that we here at RedState could have offered a plethora of names that would have been soooo much more clever and appropriate. The description of this new flavor is here but I will also quote so you don’t have to go to there page:

“YES PECAN!” An Inspirational Blend! Amber Waves of Buttery Ice Cream With Roasted Non-Partisan Pecans.

I think we could do better…Speciallist I expect you to have a great comment, maybe even two….;^)