Palin: “Not Going to Close Any Door” on Presidential Bid

Elizabeth Williamson

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on Sunday suggested that she was open to a run for the presidency in 2012, and said in the meanwhile, she would continue her “fun gig” speaking to “awesome Americans.”

“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace asked the former Republican governor — who despite her current lack of a formal political job has endorsed 15 candidates and spends her days speaking at Republican and tea party gatherings — what was next.

“I’m going to keep this up.  I’m going to keep out there talking to people, hearing from people, those who desire a less intrusive government,” Palin said.

“It’s a fun gig.  It’s a great thing to get to do, to be across the country with my family, speaking to these awesome Americans who are quite concerned about our country.”

Wallace noted that Palin had said in February that she would consider running for president in 2012, if she decided it was best for the country and her family.

“You know, it really comes down to it not being about me or what I want or what I predict is going to happen,” Palin said. “If the voters of America are in the mood for a kind of unconventional, candid, honest public servant — and it doesn’t necessarily have to be me — but if that’s what they’re in the mood for, they’re going to let that be known and they’re going to help really propel and push that candidate forward.”

“I’m not going to close any door that perhaps would be open,” she said. “But you know, this is not about me. But I do appreciate the platform that I’ve been given.”

Palin resigned from as Alaska’s governor last year after having joined Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) as his running mate in his failed bid for the presidency in 2008.

Read the original article Blogs WSJ

NY Times: Mr. Limbaugh Victory

THERE are many theories for why very conservative Republicans seem to be doing so well lately, taking their party’s Senate nominations in Florida, Kentucky and Utah, and beating Democrats head-to-head in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia. Some attribute this to a generalized anti-incumbent mood. Others say it reflects the tendency of parties in power to falter in midterm elections. Recently it has been fashionable to ascribe right-wing success to the Tea Party movement.

But the most obvious explanation is the one that’s been conspicuously absent from the gusher of analysis. Republican success in 2010 can be boiled down to two words: Rush Limbaugh.

Mr. Limbaugh has played an important role in elections going back to 1994, when he commanded the air war in the Republican Congressional victory. This time, however, he is more than simply the mouthpiece of the party. He is the brains and the spirit behind its resurgence.

How did this happen? The Obama victory in 2008 left Republicans dazed, demoralized and leaderless. Less than six weeks after the inauguration, in a nationally televised keynote address to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Limbaugh stepped into the void with a raucous denunciation of the new president’s agenda and a strategic plan based on his belief that real conservatism wins every time. He reiterated his famous call for Mr. Obama to fail and urged the party faithful to ignore the siren song of bipartisanship and moderation and stay true to the principles of Ronald Reagan.

Democrats responded by branding Mr. Limbaugh — whom they considered self-evidently unattractive — as the leader of the opposition. The day after the conservative conference, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, went on “Face the Nation” and described Mr. Limbaugh as the “voice and the intellectual force and energy” of the G.O.P.

Mr. Limbaugh loved being tossed into this briar patch. He mocked the notion that he was the titular leader of the Republicans even as he was becoming the party’s top strategist and de facto boss.

His strategy was simple. With Democrats controlling Congress, Mr. Limbaugh saw that there was no way to stop the president’s agenda. He dismissed the moderates’ notion that compromising with the president would make Republicans look good to independents. Instead he decreed that the Republicans must become the party of no, and force Democratic candidates — especially centrists — to go into 2010 with sole responsibility for the Obama program and the state of the economy. And that is what has happened.

Mr. Limbaugh was not just the architect of this plan, he was (and continues to be) its enforcer. Dissenters like Arlen Specter, whom Mr. Limbaugh disparaged as a “Republican in Name Only,” found themselves unelectable in the party primaries. Moderates like Michael Steele, the party chairman, were slapped down for suggesting cooperation with the administration. When Representative Phil Gingrey of Georgia had the temerity to suggest that Mr. Limbaugh was too uncompromising, he was met with public outrage and forced into an humiliating apology.

When the Tea Party movement emerged, Mr. Limbaugh welcomed it. The movement’s causes — fighting against health care reform, reducing the size and cost of government, opposing the Democrats’ putative desire to remake America in the image of European social democracies — were straight Limbaughism. A very high proportion of the Tea Partiers listen to Mr. Limbaugh. Sarah Palin’s biggest current applause line — Republicans are not just the party of no, but the party of hell no — came courtesy of Mr. Limbaugh. (Ms. Palin gave the keynote address at the first national Tea Party convention.) Glenn Beck, who is especially popular among Tea Partiers, calls Mr. Limbaugh his hero.

So why the lack of attention? Mr. Limbaugh has studiously refrained from claiming credit for the movement. His only intervention thus far has been to quash talk about the Tea Party becoming a third party. He wants a unified, right-wing G.O.P. in 2010, and by all appearances he is going to get it.

Rush Limbaugh came along after the age of Ronald Reagan. He has never really had a Republican presidential candidate to his ideological satisfaction. But if the party sweeps this November under the banner of Real Conservatism, Mr. Obama will find himself facing two years of “no” in Washington and, very likely, a Limbaugh-approved opponent in 2012.

Read the original article New York Times

‘Tea party’-backed platform sails

Colin Woodard,

Portland, Maine

Conservative activists backed by “tea party” groups have rejected the Maine Republican Party’s proposed platform, replacing it with a document praising the tea-party movement and calling for a number of potentially radical changes, such as the sealing of borders.

An overwhelming majority of the 1,800 delegates at the party’s state convention passed the conservative platform Saturday. The move surprised many in the Maine GOP, which has a half-century reputation for moderation. The state’s two Republican US senators – Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins – are both considered moderates, as is their predecessor, Bill Cohen, who served in Bill Clinton’s cabinet.

“If you’re not a moderate, you don’t get elected in Maine,” says political consultant Chris Potholm, a professor of government at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. “Any candidate who gets nominated is going to ignore that platform, or he or she is going to lose.”

The development in Maine coincides with one in Utah, where the tea-party movement ousted Sen. Robert Bennett (R) at the state’s GOP nominating convention Saturday. Although Senator Bennett is generally considered a conservative, tea partyers had targeted him largely because of his 2008 vote in favor of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) for banks.

In Maine, the newly adopted GOP platform outlines various changes, although its ambiguous language leaves the meaning of many sections open to interpretation. There’s a call to restore “Constitutional Law as the basis for the judiciary,” to “reassert the principle that ‘Freedom of Religion’ does not mean ‘Freedom from Religion,’ ” to “return to the principles of Austrian Economics,” and to remove “obstacles created by government” to the private development of natural gas, oil, coal, and nuclear power.

Other parts are clearer: a rejection of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, elimination of the US Department of Education and the Federal Reserve, and a freeze and prohibition on stimulus spending. Healthcare is “not a right” but “a service” that can be addressed only by using “market based solutions.”

The wide acceptance of the platform at the convention surprised even its co-authors. “I had no inkling this would pass, and frankly we’d been told as much by people running the convention,” says co-author Steven Dyer, an evangelical youth pastor and vice chair of the Knox County Republican Committee, which sponsored the document. “They didn’t even make copies of it for the delegates. They just read it to them from the podium.”

Mr. Dyer says he and his co-authors aren’t members of the tea party, although some have attended such events. They were motivated by disappointment with the party’s “progressive” wing, which had “forgotten what it means to be a Republican,” he says.

He agrees that the document is vague in parts, but that was because they had expected it to be merely a draft to begin negotiations with less-conservative party members. To their amazement, it passed with the support of not only tea-party groups, evangelical Christians, and Ron Paul libertarians, but also a large number of presumably rank-and-file conventioneers.

State party chair Charles Webster denied that the platform represented a major change, saying it was just “more specific” than past platforms. “These are things that Republicans believe, especially working-class people,” he says. “If it had been really controversial, it wouldn’t have passed.”

It will help Republican candidates get elected, he says, even though Maine has been becoming increasingly Democratic in recent years.

Democrats currently control the governor’s mansion, both houses of the state Legislature, and both US House seats. Barack Obama won 15 of 16 counties in the 2008 election. Democratic control of the Portland City Council is threatened not by Republicans, but by Greens.

Seven Republicans, four Democrats, and two independents are running to replace Gov. John Baldacci, who is term-limited.

“If I was a Republican, I’d be a little nervous about this. And if I was a Democrat, I’d be cautiously optimistic,” says Mark Brewer, a political scientist at the University of Maine in Orono. He thinks that parts of the platform will play poorly with the general electorate in the gubernatorial race.

Professor Potholm played down the significance of the new platform, saying that candidates and voters will simply ignore it. “The party’s moderate constituency hasn’t changed,” he says. “It’s a tempest in a teapot.”

But longtime Republican state legislator Peter Mills, a moderate gubernatorial candidate, says it’s a mistake to underestimate the sentiment that fuels the tea-party activists. “They’re very small, very vocal, and very intense, but they reflect a wider feeling of frustration, discontent, and lack of confidence in government,” he says. “The challenge is to be able to harness that anger and frustration and, once elected, convert it into significant change.”

Read the original article Christian Science Monitor

Democrats to America: Drop dead

Krauthammer: Onward with Obamacare, regardless

By Charles Krauthammer

So the yearlong production, set to close after Massachusetts’s devastatingly negative Jan. 19 review, saw the curtain raised one last time. Obamacare lives.

After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes (Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts) and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to make one last push to pass his health-care reform.

The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a Feb. 25 Blair House “summit” with Republicans, followed five days later with a few concessions tossed the Republicans’ way.

Show is the operative noun. Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine that a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests and procedures being done for no medical reason? A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of his health-care bill.

As for the Blair House seminar, its theatrical quality was obvious even before it began. The Democrats had already decided to go for a purely partisan bill. Obama signaled precisely that intent at the end of the summit show — then dramatically spelled it out just six days later in his 35th health-care speech: He is going for the party-line vote.

Unfortunately for Democrats, that seven-hour televised exercise had the unintended consequence of showing the Republicans to be not only highly informed on the subject, but also, as even Obama was forced to admit, possessed of principled objections — contradicting the ubiquitous Democratic/media meme that Republican opposition was nothing but nihilistic partisanship.

Republicans did so well, in fact, that in his summation, Obama was reduced to suggesting that his health-care reform was indeed popular because when you ask people about individual items (for example, eliminating exclusions for preexisting conditions or capping individual out-of-pocket payments), they are in favor.

Yet mystifyingly they oppose the whole package. How can that be?

Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: a dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.

However (life is a vale of howevers) suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed — say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak is to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?

Perhaps something like 3 to 1 against, which is what the latest CNN poll shows is the citizenry’s feeling about the current Democratic health-care bills.

Late last year, Democrats were marveling at how close they were to historic health-care reform, noting how much agreement had been achieved among so many factions. The only remaining detail was how to pay for it.

Well, yes. That has generally been the problem with democratic governance: cost. The disagreeable absence of a free lunch.

Which is what drove even strong Obama supporter Warren Buffett to go public with his judgment that the current Senate bill, while better than nothing, is a failure because the country desperately needs to bend the cost curve down, and the bill doesn’t do it. Buffett’s advice would be to start over and get it right with a bill that says “we’re just going to focus on costs and we’re not going to dream up 2,000 pages of other things.” (Disclosure: Buffett is a director of The Washington Post Co.)

Obama has chosen differently, however. The time for debate is over, declared the nation’s seminar leader in chief. The man who vowed to undo Washington’s devious and wicked ways has directed the Congress to ram Obamacare through, by one vote if necessary, under the parliamentary device of “budget reconciliation.” The man who ran as a post-partisan is determined to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy despite the absence of support from a single Republican in either house, the first time anything of this size and scope has been enacted by pure party-line vote.

Surprised? You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned.

Read the original article on Washington Post

The ObamaCare Tragedy

Murtha’s death is another eerie coincidence.

JAMES TARANTO

Rep. John Murtha–best known in recent years as a onetime Iraq war supporter who abruptly switched sides–has died, CNN reports:

Murtha of Pennsylvania, a longtime fixture on the House subcommittee that oversees Pentagon spending, died after complications from gallbladder surgery, according to his office. He was 77.

The Democratic congressman recently underwent scheduled laparoscopic surgery at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to remove his gallbladder. The procedure was “routine minimally invasive surgery,” but doctors “hit his intestines,” a source close to the late congressman told CNN.

May he rest in peace.

After paying their respects, political observers wasted no time before speculating about what this means for ObamaCare. If you think the effort is dead anyway, as we guess we still do, the answer of course is nothing. But the president and congressional Democrats are, at least ostensibly, looking for a way to defy the voters and impose this monstrosity, and Murtha did cast an “aye” vote when the House approved its version of ObamaCare in November, 220-215.

The American Spectator’s Philip Klein does the math:

The one Republican who voted for it–Joseph Cao–has indicated that he would not support the bill a second time around given the weaker language on abortion in the Senate version. In addition, Florida Rep. Robert Wexler already retired prematurely. Factor in Murtha’s death [yesterday], and [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi is down to 217 votes.

With 433 representatives currently seated, 217 is a bare majority. so that Murtha’s death does not immediately deprive Pelosi of a needed vote. But the planned Feb. 28 resignation of Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D., Hawaii), who plans to run for governor, would reduce the number of remaining “ayes” to 216 out of 432, not enough for a majority.

What’s more, Murtha’s seat, to be filled in a special election, likely on May 18, could go Republican. The Cook Political Report rates the district, which John McCain carried in 2008, as a “toss-up.” There’s even a chance that Abercrombie’s heavily Democratic district, which includes Barack Obama’s birthplace, could go to the GOP in a special election. As NationalJournal.com notes, the GOP candidate, Charles Djou, is expected to face three Democrats, who could split the vote. A plurality would be sufficient to win.

The fate of ObamaCare is starting to have something of the feel of a Greek tragedy. We are not superstitious, but Murtha’s death as the result of medical error at a government-run hospital is certainly an eerie coincidence.

And this follows the demise of Ted Kennedy, who worked all his life for “universal” health care, then perished last year just as the realization of this aspiration seemed inevitable. If ObamaCare dies, it will have been because a Republican senator was elected to Kennedy’s seat last month.

As the Washington Times reports, some Democrats are so upset they can’t keep their metaphors straight:

“Many of us thought we were really at the one-inch line, then literally it was like being hit by a freight train with about 10 seconds’ warning,” said Ken Thorpe, a senior Health and Human Services official during the Clinton-era debate.

What does “literally” even mean when it modifies a simile? Anyway, Scott Brown would not be in the U.S. Senate had Massachusetts Democrats not twice fiddled with the procedure for filling a vacant Senate seat in the expectation of realizing a short-term gain.

In 2004, they took away the governor’s appointment power (so that Republican Mitt Romney would not be able to replace the haughty, French-looking then-junior senator, who by the way served in Vietnam, had he been elected president). Under the pre-2004 law, Gov. Deval Patrick would have appointed someone to serve until November. Under the post-2004 law, the seat would have remained vacant until a special election. Instead, the law was changed again so that Patrick could appoint someone in the interim. Result: Dems had 60 votes to push ObamaCare through, and Massachusetts voters had the opportunity to cut that number to 59.

So it’s really less like being hit by a train than like driving your own car off a bridge.

World Ends, Minorities Hardest Hit
“Veteran Congressman’s Death Adds to Barack Obama’s Woes”–headline, Guardian (London), Feb. 9

Obamatherapy
The Washington Post carries a wistful whatever-happened-to-the-hopey-changey-stuff report, which repeats one of the oddest tropes of reporting on Democratic politics–the youthful activist who gets involved with politics as a means of therapy for his personal problems:

“To be an activist is a lifestyle,” says Jenn Watts. . . . An Irish Catholic girl of 22 with a Fordham education in philosophy and urban and African American studies, she started as a fundraiser in the District [of Columbia], then went into the field in Iowa and followed the primary trail–Minnesota, Texas, Wisconsin. She helped organize the national convention in Denver and went home to Indiana for the finale.

Then she crashed. “I was malnourished. I was delusional. I hadn’t slept,” she says. She moved to Washington and began competing with fellow staffers for White House jobs. “I saw some people who turned into different people. I felt naive about it. We were all one big progressive happy family, I thought, and now it was, oh, this was about you and your career?”

“I had left my boyfriend of two and a half years. I had to rebuild my friendships. I was totally MIA to my family. . . . I had made all these sacrifices for two years, and the country is ready for change, and Obama is in the White House, but I had ceded everything to him to be an exhausted 26-year-old in debt.”

She decided to work for the president’s agenda from the outside, and now works at Repower America, a grass-roots network that lobbies for climate change legislation.

Post columnist E.J. Dionne, meanwhile, employs a peculiar metaphor to argue that Democrats should force ObamaCare through, the voters be damned:

If President Obama gets to sign a health-reform bill, as I believe he will, one reason may be Rep. Jay Inslee’s difficult experience renovating his kitchen. . . .

He recounted all the grief he and his family went through while work on their kitchen renovation dragged on and on and on. “During that time, I had blood lust against my contractor,” Inslee said. “Six months went by, and he was still arguing with the plumber. Eight months went by, and there were still wires hanging down everywhere, and he was having trouble with the building inspector.”

But eventually, the job got done. “And now I love that kitchen,” Inslee recalls saying. “I bake bread in that kitchen. My wife cooks great meals in that kitchen. The contractor’s now a buddy of mine, and I’ve had beers with him in that kitchen.”

Inslee looked at his colleagues and declared: “We’ve got to finish the kitchen.”

Except that Inslee’s kitchen was in his own house! A better analogy to ObamaCare would be if some guy down the street is unhappy because his daughter is having a lot of very bad personal problems, so to take his mind off it, he barges into your house and starts tearing apart your kitchen.

The Emperor’s Old Clothes
Remember the story of the emperor and his new clothes? The emperor is actually naked, a fact that everyone acknowledges after a child points it out.

In the sequel, “The Emperor’s Old Clothes,” the emperor is still naked, and everyone realizes it except for an Associated Press reporter who keeps writing paeans to the emperor’s wardrobe. Or something like that:

President Barack Obama’s administration is forming a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.

Climate change has drawn widespread concern in recent years as temperatures around the world rise, threatening to harm crops, spread disease, increase sea levels, change storm and drought patterns and cause polar melting. . . .

NOAA recently reported that the decade of 2000-2009 was the warmest on record worldwide; the previous warmest decade was the 1990s. Most atmospheric scientists believe that warming is largely due to human actions, adding gases to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.

The AP dispatch, by Randolph E. Schmid, makes no reference whatever to the recent revelations of scientific misconduct and misrepresentation at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the University of East Anglia and other academic institutions. Even the New York Times, in reporting on the new agency, acknowledges the scandals, if only to say that “planning for the new unit was not related to” them.

It’s a Tough Job, but Someone’s Gotta Do It

Readthe original article WallStreet Jornal

Texas Republican Primary Ballot Propositions

Ballot Proposition 1: Photo ID
The Texas legislature should make it a priority to protect the integrity of our election process by enacting legislation that requires voters to provide valid photo identification in order to cast a ballot in any and all elections conducted in the State of Texas. (For/Against)

Ballot Proposition 2: Controlling Government Growth
Every government body in Texas should be required to limit any annual increase in its budget and spending to the combined increase of population and inflation unless it first gets voter approval to exceed the allowed annual growth or in the case of an official emergency. (For/Against)

Ballot Proposition 3: Cutting Federal Income Taxes
In addition to aggressively eliminating irresponsible federal spending, Congress should empower American citizens to stimulate the economy by Congress cutting federal income taxes for all federal taxpayers, rather than spending hundreds of billions of dollars on so-called “federal economic stimulus”. (For/Against)

Ballot Proposition 4: Public Acknowledgement of God
The use of the word “God”, prayers, and the Ten Commandments should be allowed at public gatherings and public educational institutions, as well as be permitted on government buildings and property. (For/Against)

Ballot Proposition 5: Sonograms
The Texas Legislature should enact legislation requiring a sonogram to be performed and shown to each mother about to undergo a medically unnecessary, elective abortion. (For/Against)

Rangel: Lawmakers writing compromise health bill

By ALAN FRAM
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) – Leading lawmakers hoping to revive President Barack Obama’s stalled health care overhaul have started writing a compromise bill, but it’s unclear when the legislation will be ready for votes, a top House Democrat said Tuesday.

The measure would change the massive Senate-approved health bill to what bargainers from the White House, Senate and House agreed to last month, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said in a brief interview.

Rangel’s remarks, if borne out, could be the first concrete sign that Democrats will try enacting major health legislation in the wake of the Republican upset in a Massachusetts special election that cost them their crucial 60th Senate seat. Stunned by that setback, the White House and top Democrats have been conceding that they no longer know if they have the votes to pass health legislation, or what such a bill would look like.

In January, White House and congressional negotiators agreed to ease a Senate-approved tax on high-cost health insurance plans opposed by unions and many House Democrats. They also planned to remove a Senate provision having the federal government fully pay for an expansion of Medicaid coverage solely for Nebraska, one of whose senators, Democrat Ben Nelson, was the crucial 60th vote for the Senate bill at the time.

Rangel said leaders have to decide whether the health package would begin moving before or after Congress tackles legislation aimed at creating jobs.

“The question is when are we going to do it,” said Rangel, who chairs the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. “We got to move on with jobs. It’s not clear to me what the priority is going to be.”

He said a fight between liberal and conservative Democrats over how to limit federal financing for abortion remains unresolved.

In a remark underscoring the political sensitivities Democrats have about their two top issues, Rangel said, “The major things we’re talking about now are, one, don’t let health care even look like it’s not on the front burner. And don’t forget that the priority of people in their districts is jobs.”

The measure Rangel discussed would be a so-called reconciliation bill, a seldom-used procedure that only requires a simple majority of votes for Senate passage. He said he believed both chambers could muster the votes needed for passage, despite virtually unanimous GOP opposition.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., also voiced optimism about the approach in a conference call Tuesday with bloggers, while cautioning that final decisions to move forward remained to be made.

“We will not be deterred from this course of getting something done one way or another, and I’m hoping it will … be mainly by passing the comprehensive bill. That’s our plan,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi also said the House plans to vote next week on a small element of the massive health bill it approved in November stripping insurance companies of their decades-old exemption from certain federal antitrust laws. Pelosi’s office provided audio of the conference call.

Industry analysts see the effort as largely symbolic as courts have long allowed federal regulators to intervene when competition could be jeopardized.

Also Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., emerged from a meeting with Pelosi to say no decisions had been made about the health bill. Reid said a scenario in which the House produces a reconciliation package “seems like a strong possibility,” but is not the only option.

In a separate interview, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who was Obama’s first pick to lead the health care effort, said he thinks Democrats are back on track to finishing a bill.

“The bottom line is that this is still doable” because many Democrats realize they may take a bigger hit politically if they fail to deliver a bill, Daschle said. Republicans will still use the legislation to attack them, but Democrats won’t have any of the overhaul’s benefits to defend themselves unless they approve it.

“I don’t think any of this is easy to solve,” he said, adding that the likeliest window for action would be between the Presidents’ Day recess and the late March break for Easter and Passover.

Read the original article on Breitbart

Tea Party rattles America’s educated class

Feared and mocked, movement has become wild card of U.S. politics.

By Mitch Potter

WASHINGTON–Barely a week into a new decade that will redefine America’s place in the world, the feisty yet fractious Tea Party movement is readying its next brew.

A landmark Tennessee convention in early February is aimed at transforming a year of caffeinated conservative rage into a political force to make heads roll.

Sarah Palin will serve as pourer-in-chief, guaranteeing the firebrand former Alaska governor a bully pulpit from which to bash President Barack Obama. Who, in this instance, will be a victim of terrible timing, as Palin’s critique is scheduled hard on the heels of Obama’s State of the Union speech.

As Tea time approaches, nerves are jangling. New York Times columnist David Brooks, a conservative intellectual, made big waves this week with a piece voicing fears that the “Tea Party brigades” have “the potential to shape the coming decade,” using hard times to push the United States hard to the right.

Brooks’ analysis hinged on a succession of polls suggesting that not only are America’s natives more restless than ever, but that the grassroots fury is aimed at what he described as “the educated class” of Republicans and Democrats alike.

“The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year,” wrote Brooks.

“The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.” And so on with foreign affairs, Brooks said, pointing to new Pew Research Center numbers showing a sharp rise in American isolationist sentiment.

Brooks’ analysis – that the Tea Party phenomenon is on the rise – sparked frenzied debate.

Liberal blogger Bill Scher, author of the progressive political tome Wait, Don’t Move to Canada, went after him head-on at the Huffington Post, noting that despite a year of noisy protests, the Tea Party movement has proven itself capable of nothing more than snap, crackle and pop. Every element of the Obama agenda, from health care to climate to stimulus, is proceeding apace.

“The far-right was knocked out completely,” Scher told the Toronto Star. “Essentially the Tea people spent the entire year living in their own fever swamp, chanting ridiculous talking points like the `death panel’ smear. And it changed nothing.

“The only way I can see the right-wing fringe actually metastasizing into something more would be for President Obama to be seen widely as a failure. And I don’t think the middle of the country is anywhere close to making that judgment.”

Grassroots and populist, the amorphous Tea protesters comprise a hydra-headed amalgam of sensibilities, some undeniably ugly. But some, despite Brooks’ assessment, are actually extremely well schooled – and deeply offended by the notion that all opposition to Washington rests on ignorance.

“You do have people in the Tea movement who are – let’s face it – insane. People who think Obama is the anti-Christ,” said John Mark Reynolds, a philosophy professor at Biola University and an active voice for thoughtful conservatism.

“But the Tea Party is not a coherent ideological rage machine. And a huge number of people are drawn to it because they are mad as hell about government spending and bailouts. To parody them as ignorant buffoons is to completely misunderstand and underestimate them.”

Most agree the movement is the wild card of American politics today – one that could evolve toward third-party status, but more likely will flex its muscle within Republican circles by pressing for the nomination of “core-value” conservative candidates over moderates. Several such battles are already underway, with Tea Party supporters rallying behind upstarts Marco Rubio of Florida and Gary Johnson of New Mexico.

But what the Tea movement lacks most is an actual leader. For a long time, Reynolds held out hope that Palin might be the one. But his disappointment was palpable in the scathing chapter-by-chapter review of Palin’s Going Rogue he penned for firstthings.com.

Reynolds, an expert in Greek philosophy, was shocked to discover the book laden with misquoted citations of Plato and Aristotle – the result, he is almost certain, of a lazy attempt by the author (or ghostwriter) to quote-mine Google, to make Palin sound smart.

“It is just inexcusable. I’d like to be a Palinista but I want a president with a thoughtful world view – that is just a bare minimum requirement,” Reynolds told the Star.

“Unlike David Brooks of the New York Times, I believe good ideas can come from people outside the box. Populism can be just as thoughtful and intellectually engaged and it is dangerous to suggest otherwise.

“But in writing a book full of spurious misquotations, Palin demonstrates she is not serious. She has charisma in droves, she lights up a room. But if she is too lazy to sit down, read books, develop her political philosophy, we can’t just set the bar lower and lower for her until she passes it.”

Political watchers anticipate a Democratic slide in November mid-term elections. But with Tea Party’s future so amorphous and mainstream Republican strategy built around little more than obstructing Team Obama, an electoral reversal now might merely “contribute to the air of cynicism in which our citizens marinate,” conservative columnist Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

“Republican political professionals in Washington assume a coming victory. They do not see that 2010 could be a catastrophic victory for them if they seize back power without clear purpose,” Noonan wrote.

But the real battle will be in 2012, when the country takes the full measure of whether the Obama administration has put enough Americans back to work.

“It’s not fair to dismiss the Tea Party people as rubes,” said political blogger Scher.

“But the absolute bottom line for everything in 2012 is going to be the economy. Health care, climate, those elements of the Obama agenda are important but they don’t get implemented full bore until later.

“The main thing is enough people have to be back at work for the public to feel we’ve turned the corner, for people to be able to look at the Obama administration and say, ‘Okay, you are helping.’ Without that, I can certainly see a liberal-progressive moment lost.”

read the original article on TheStar.com

Why I Love Rush Limbaugh

Matt Lewis

Rush Limbaugh is out of the hospital now, and by his own account on his way back to work. But his recent health scare, and the ensuing vitriol from his detractors on the world wide web, got me thinking that many non-fans don’t truly “get” the Rush phenomenon. What I mean is, they don’t really understand why he’s so popular. Nor do they appreciate the depth of his appeal – and why many of his fans don’t just like his show, but would literally take a bullet for him.