and good riddance.

Remember this revealing statement:

Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., on Sunday guaranteed that if elected, Sen. Barack Obama., D-Ill., will be tested by an international crisis within his first six months in power and he will need supporters to stand by him as he makes tough, and possibly unpopular, decisions.

“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

I suggest today, October 26, 2008, we wish Hillary a happy birthday and appeal to her to put country over party to save our country from Obama’s policies. She knows as well as I do how incredibly dangerous they will be. So, Happy Birthday Hillary! I hope you joy, happiness and health throughout the course of your life. Unfortunately, I cannot support you in backing Obama. As a former Hillary supporter I am proud to say I now support McCain/Palin- 08. The reason is primarily because the Democratic Party has changed so much since the start of the primary season in 2007 and all the “boys” ganged up to beat you, they no longer represent my ideas/ideals/beliefs as a “US” citizen. Admittedly, the Republican Party does not represent all of them either, but I can honestly say Senator McCain and Sarah Palin do not scare me and Obama/Biden really scares the heck out of me. So, for now and the foreseeable future, I will be re-registering as an Independent and voting Republican for President. I pray that America see’s the light before November 4th.

Rage may feel good (temporarily)and be cathartic, but it turns off the middle and loses elections.

We need new ideas.

I want to see specific ideas for how we are going to untangle the government meddling in the finacial that we are engaging in.

I want to see specific ideas about how the federal government can start to give back more power to the states.

I want to see specific ideas about how the country can achieve energy independence with more domestic oil, nukes and green energy. This is a national security issue for the next 50 years.

Speaking for myself, I’ve felt the campaign has focused too much on tearing down the other side and not enough on promoting exciting, new ideas.

I thought the conservative revolution began with Goldwater; Reagan was its most popular leader.

This website is a microcosm of the larger hostile environment created by the modern GOP. In the past few weeks front page stories have been posted that directly attacked the GLBT community (Log Cabin Republicans unwelcome) and the atheist/agnostic community (Christians only, please). If your ideas are not strong enough to stand as the centerpiece of your political agenda and you must resort to attacking minority groups to form cohesiveness, there are fundamental problems that must be addressed.

When I tried to engage in discussion about ways to shift the debate on government to be more favorable to the GOP I was attacked. Those who are not open to new ideas will be marginalized as the national debate shifts away from the old, favorable framework.

Even if McCain wins no one can deny the likelihood that Dems will increase their lead in both houses of Congress.

But hey, we don’t need ideas or discussion, we need rage!

Brooks is right about one thing: “the [Republican] party is getting narrower and narrower.”

That is evident even on RedState, where the threshold for being banned has been becoming steadily lower and lower … with the result that moderate freethinkers who have a conservative leaning have been largely cleansed from the RedState and fromm the Republican Party.

Whatever the merits of strict conservativism, the “cleansing of moderates” has been a disastrous political strategy.

In 2006 Democrats won Congress for no other reason than that the American people were mad at Bush and sick of the war. Am I the only one who remembers this?

The didn’t run on any liberal issues, in fact they ran a mess of conservative anti-war candidates. They ran on getting out of Iraq and ending corruption in Washington.

During the general election season Obama hasn’t run on any liberal issues. He stopped talking at length about universal healthcare and gutting the military as soon as he won the nomination.

Now he’s running against Bush, lying about his pro-choice record and pretending that he’s a conservative. He even portrays his massive middle-class hand out in terms of a 95% tax-cut.

The American people don’t subscribe to the Democrat,s core beliefs and they don’t agree with them on most issues. And the DNC knows this. That’s why they ran conservative Democrats in ’06 and that’s why Obama is running as a conservative now.

The only time Democrats have won anything since Jimmy Carter is when Americans are angry at Republicans. And when America gets angry at Republicans it’s usually because they aren’t acting like Republicans.

the so-called “pendulum” concept — that the electorate swung right for Reagan and the Bushes, and now it’s ready to swing back left. But he contradicts himself. He correctly characterizes the country as center-right. This doesn’t jive with a Democrat reign of 10-15 years. The country tried swinging back to what it thought was the center with Clinton, but it was deceived and swung right again with GWB. Yes, I think there is a tendency to swing left at this point, especially given the current financial/economic situation. But Obama is way too far left. If (a big if) he wins, he won’t be reelected. Even if McCain is able to pull out a victory, I think it increases the odds that a moderate Dem will be able to win in ’12. But that’s a long time off, and anything can happen in the meantime.

But it’s changing. A movement that began in the US in opposition to communism and the New Deal killed one, but has more or less made peace with the other.

Had Bush governed more competently or as a conservative, things might have been different. But go back and look at this site–until the Harriet Miers nomination, Bush was rarely, if ever criticized in conservative circles (with some notable exceptions like Patrick Buchanan) even as he expanded the powers of the central government through a war on terrorism, no child left behind, and medicare part D.

What could have happened with the demise of communism was conservatism could have returned to its libertarian roots. But it didn’t.

Alas, I see no reason whatsoever to think it’s going to do that now. You people are far too eager to build walls, crawl into my bedroom, expand the military, and the enhance the supervisory capacity of the state.

Just a thought that has gotten me in more trouble than an American should be when voicing an opinion, but the more they dish out the more I demand!

We all know or have our opinions on current events in the Housing, Financial and general health of our country. We also know that media time and exposure is what moves Americans in one direction or another…its been proven by ad agencies hundreds of times.

With all this information being common sense and research…one must look at the bottom-line…which in America is ‘Money’. This said; who has the most to Lose with McCain and Palin in Washington….OPEC countries!

OPEC can flip our stock market on its head, and most-likely have been doing it.

Our nation sends Hundreds of Billions of dollars monthly to these OPEC countries, and they will gain the best of all worlds if someone like Obama gets into the White House. They can not only continue raping Americans for OIL, but they will get America out of that part of the World.

So Obama makes claims that he raised another $109 million dollars for advertising in the month of September…that is about a half billion dollars or more to date.

I know we have regulations concerning financing…but Obama didn’t follow McCains leads with Government financing…so McCain must account of every dime….not Obama. And, from Obama’s past history with answering questions…don’t expect him to give you anything more than Double talk.

My wife is concerned I will end up dead for this questioning. I told her I am an American, I served this nation in Uniform and gave an oath to protect it…so if by chance death is the price…so be it!

“It’s become intellectually exhausted, incurious…”

Tell it to Bobby Jindal and Paul Ryan.

Regardless of what happens on Nov. 4th, the future of the Republican party will be bright if we listen to brilliant conservative leaders like these.

The sooner people like Jindal and Ryan take over the party, the better.

David Brooks is making some good points. Read his article in the New York Times about how McCain ceded the middle. Let’s all be real here. George Bush’s favorability ratings have displayed that the American public is angered with the status quo. Any Republican was up against a mountain to climb this year. The primaries produced the one Republican, who could separate himself and maybe pull off a win. But for some reason, instead of going toward the center, as most do in the General, he ran to the right. Now, that might make plenty of you on this site ecstatic, but it was not the way to win the White House.

Whether the electorate has become center-left for just this election or for a good time coming, they wanted a progressive candidate to get out of the status quo. That is why McCain was picked, because he has been seen as a Maverick, but Palin sunk that ship. She was great for him for about 2 weeks, but then her image began to unravel. People see her as unready, too far to the right. Her pick has developed into an abandonment of McCain’s argument of experience and judgment. She has become the biggest lag on his candidacy and has been the primary reason for many moderates, like Gen. Powell, and conservatives, like Chris Buckley, for endorsing Obama.

There is something noble about going down with the ship with “rage,” but you don’t win that way. McCain would have had a better chance by picking a Ridge or a Lieberman. Yes, the base would have been upset, but would they really vote for Obama? Probably not. Then McCain could have hammered the argument that his ticket was the moderate-pragmatic way to restore this country, while Obama and Biden are too liberal for pragmatic leadership. He could have easily painted them as too far left. Unfortunately for him, however, he has decided to make this election into Right vs. Left, when the Country is tired of the last 8 years of Bush.

The gamble is not paying off.

Maybe your comment about Brooks is tongue and cheek, and if so, forgive me for being dense.

If you’re being sincere, then I respectfully ask you to consider the following:

Labeling people and then dismissing them because their ideology doesn’t suit you is self-defeating.

If you don’t agree with David Brooks that the Conservative movement is in decline, that’s great, but take on the argument, not the man or the label you’ve chosen to give him.

I happen to think this rhetorical approach, and the thought process it belies, is an important challenge for Conservatism going forward. Perhaps it’s what Brooks is talking about when he says that the GOP is no longer curious.

rather than in decline. Our problem is that we have no prominent leader who is grounded in Classic Liberal principles. There are none that come readily to my mind at the moment who articulate those principles.

There are plenty of citizens who agree on those principles, however.

I think the argument that DB is making that is being echoed by others like Frum is that the paradigm ha shifted and it is not de primarily to temporary circumstances represented by the economic climate we find ourselves in.
Fatigue has set in from the war both the military misadventures and the warring factions inside our cuture. The republican’s strategy of divide and win has exacted a price on the public’s tolerance of discord and division as a way of living in the world. It has been painful and they are looking for a way out of the pain. We tend to gravitate to the status quo except to escape discomfort. Bush actually help create the opportunity os a Obama presidency by the extreme level of dissatisfaction he was able to create. If Bush’s approval rating were at 45%, we would not be looking at BO as the next president.

I’m not trying to offend anyone, but we must focus more on liberty than the social issues. The younger the voter the less they care about abortion, gay marriage, or prayer in school. Within a generation a party based on that agenda will go the way of the Whigs.

To me conservative principals
means smaller less intrusive government, fiscally responsible economic policies and a strong defense. Today we have a government that wants to spy on us, huge budget deficits with out of control spending and a military so stretched that if a threat were to arrive on our shores we would have a real problem defending the homeland. Because social conservatives highjacked the party for 8 years and the neoconservatives got us in to war, the party is so fratured
that it calls for a major overhaul of the brand to ride the wave of changing public priority. The public now sees the Repubican party as the party of creationism, evangelicals,
intolerance and gun enthusiests not the Goldwater tenents of conservative principals These are the wedge issues that were used for political expediency
to win elections and now thay have become synonymous with the GOP brand. Short term benefit
with long term consequences.

…please be advised that he deliberately altered his account to try to cover his tracks; which should tell you everything that you need to know about his motivations and/or true opinion of this site.

He is welcome to email the Directors for reinstatement… but he and I both know precisely why he won’t dare do it.