The assault against traditional marriage continues in our nation’s capital.

This past week, the Washington, DC Board of Elections voted “no” on allowing DC residents the right to vote on a citizen led referendum that would affirm a traditional definition of marriage. They claimed that allowing residents to vote on the issue would somehow violate the District’s Human Rights Act. 

This is the same City Council that recently voted to have our nation’s capital give legal recognition to homosexual “marriages” that are performed in other states.  The irony is this is the same city government that complains about not having representation in Congress…yet they won’t allow their own residents to represent their own views at the ballot box.

Step by step, Obama is undermining traditional marriage

This past week Obama signed a presidential memorandum extending federal benefits (normally reserved for married couples) to homosexual government employees and their “partners”.  Of course , this also only ads to the overall costs of government benefits as well, at a time of record deficits.  The bottom line is that Obama is now moving to use federal tax dollars to pay off a key portion of his political base.  In fact, John Barry, the openly gay Director of the Office of Personnel Management, stated: “This is a first step, not a final step”.

Obama’s Justice Department recently notified a homosexual couple that they could update their passports to reflect their new “married” names.  This comes after Obama’s State Department changed its policies to allow homosexual couples that travel overseas to apply for passports “under the names recognized by their state”, including gay marriages, domestic partnerships or civil unions.

As if they haven't done it enough already, here we are, more than six months after the election, and former McCain campaign staffers are STILL trashing Sarah Palin.

The most recent broadside comes in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, previewed here in the NY Daily News:

In an expansive story in the August edition of Vanity Fair, a slew of senior members of McCain's campaign team told reporter Todd S. Purdum that they suffer a kind of survivor's guilt following the 2008 presidential election.

"They can't quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be," Vanity Fair reports.

During the campaign, there were reports of anonymous McCain aides describing Palin, the governor of Alaska, as a "diva" and a "whack job." ...

Classy.

For her part, Palin didn't comment for the story, which is the smart move.  All she does is provide that much more attention for these bozos.

Anyone with any kind of political common sense whatsoever can see what's going on here.  You've got a woman who's one of the most popular Republican figures in the country...the biggest fundraising draw...and a name that pops up near the top of any poll of Republicans' preferences for a 2012 nominee.  All of which means it's time for the boys who support someone to take another low class swipe at her.  read more »

For the past few months, we've been running an online survey getting feedback from conservatives about the direction of the Republican Party, its leadership, and choices for a nominee in 2012.  So far, over 5,000 people have participated.

We intend to keep the survey open, promoting it every now and then in our newsletter and via Twitter, to expand the feedback from conservatives, as well as to see how these results might change over time.  From this point forward, we'll try to post updates results at the end of each month.

If you haven't taken the survey yourself, click here to add your voice to the mix.

Summary of survey results so far:

Conservatives don't think their party is doing nearly enough to communicate and apply conservative principles to today's issues.

Conservatives want the congressional Republicans to oppose Obama by proposing their own ideas - even if they lose.

Conservatives believe the best ideas come from the folks at the grassroots and conservative think tanks - not the politicians.

Romney and Palin lead the pack for 2012. 

Complete survey results:

How do you feel about the way Republicans are opposing Obama's agenda?

92%: They need to do much more!  read more »

Mark Steyn has a great column out entitled "Retreat into Apathy" in which his primary point is that it's apathy, specifically apathetic citizenship, that allows the type of big government bailouts and takeovers that we've seen (and are seeing) possible.

And each little area of our lives that we're apathetic enough to let the government take over creates another area of life we're conditioned not to worry about, since it's now Big Brother's job.

The issue at hand is health care.  Steyn writes:

Big government depends, in large part, on going around the country stirring up apathy — creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it’s easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them.

Take health care. Have you read any of these health-care plans? Of course not. They’re huge and turgid and unreadable. Unless you’re a health-care lobbyist, a health-care think-tanker, a health-care correspondent, or some other fellow who’s paid directly or indirectly to plough through this stuff, why bother? None of the senators whose names are on the bills have read ’em; why should you? ...
 read more »

We're now many, many moons and many, many billions of dollars past the implosion of Countrywide and its impact on our economy.  But what we still haven't finished hashing out is who did what, when, where and with whom that helped put the crisis in motion.

Of course, conservatives have a good idea, with many fingers of blame rightly pointing back to the government and decades long policies that encouraged financial institutions to loan money to people that couldn't pay it back.

But that's another issue.  What's at issue at the moment is the names of the politicians that took advantage of their positions to get sweetheart mortgage deals ordinary Americans could never get under what was known as the "Friends of Angelo" program.

Of course, "Angelo" is Angelo Mozilo, the former head of Countrywide who's been charged with insider trading and fraud by be the SEC.  And he had a lot of "friends" in Congress.  Friends that the Democrat leadership doesn't want the American public to know about.  Friends that California Republican congressman Darrell Issa is trying to force in the light of day.

What we know is that Senators Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad were among the VIPs who received sweetheart mortgages under the "Friends of Angelo" program. What we don't know is how many other government officials also received such favors, or what exactly Countrywide expected in return. A March report by Congressman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) highlighted internal Countrywide emails in which executives debated whether the mayor of Billings, Montana, was influential enough to warrant a waiving of his mortgage insurance premium. The company ultimately decided that he was. We can only imagine what Countrywide's internal emails might say about the benefits of "friendship" with Mr. Dodd, who chairs the Banking Committee of the U.S. Senate, or about others who benefited from the program.  read more »

Imagecolumn: 

It seems that every time we have a contentious judicial nomination process, especially for the Supreme Court, a great fuss is made over not asking certain questions.  More to the point, we're told that nominees should not answer questions that could disclose how they may rule on certain issues in the future.

Hogwash.

The problem with this notion is that the federal judiciary has grown ever more powerful over the years versus our other branches of government.  Further, the Supreme Court is held to be the final arbiter of what the Constitution actually "means" at any given point in time - information that's surely useful to the people that document is meant to govern.

This being the case, it's ludicrous to suggest that the US Senate, to say nothing of the American people, should not have a good idea "what" these would be solons will say the Constitution means once they're given a lifetime appointment.

Can you imagine a candidate for President telling voters that he can't answer specific questions about incredibly important (even constitutional) issues, and that they shouldn't even be asked such questions, but rather we should just trust that they're a wise, experienced and empathetic person?  (Insert laughter here...)  read more »

Yet another major Wall Street analyst is predicting that the US government will lose the AAA rating on its bonds in the near future.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Technical analyst Robert Prechter on Monday said he sees the United States losing its top AAA credit rating by the end of 2010, as he stuck by a deeply bearish outlook on the U.S. economy and stock market.

Prechter, known for predicting the 1987 stock market crash, joins a growing coterie of market heavyweights in forecasting the United States will lose its top credit rating as the government issues trillions of dollars in debt to fund efforts to bail out the economy.

Fears about the long-term vulnerability of the prized U.S. credit rating came to the fore after Standard & Poor's in May lowered its outlook on Britain, threatening the UK's top AAA rating. That move raised fears that the United States could face a similar risk, with the hefty amounts of government debt issued in both countries to pay for financial rescues causing budget deficits to swell. ...

In the end, this shouldn't surprise anyone.  It's really all about simple math.  Current debt, plus recent deficits, plus Obama's anticipated deficits equals an unsustainable obligation that will eat up a tremendous portion of our annual GDP, cause massive tax increases, further weaken the economy and, possibly, result in government default at some point to our bond holders.  read more »

Barack Obama and liberals in Congress are moving quickly to pass health care "reform" that opens the door for a national, government run health care system.

And Americans must speak out now and tell Congress "NO!" as loudly as possible.

Obama already laid the groundwork for this with the recent "stimulus" bill...which provided billions to study how to give us the same kind of socialized health care as Great Britain...with a "national health care board" that would decide who gets what kind of care, and when.

It's all about control.

Control over one-seventh of the entire US economy. Control over how we live our lives.

Click here and say "NO!"

Every behavior we engage in would be subject to regulation because of the cost of health care to the new government run (taxpayer funded) program.

Democrats are working to try and get a bill passed as quickly as possible - with as little debate as possible, and by letting as few details of the plan become public as possible before it becomes law.  read more »

Obama and his crowd have spent a lot of time trying to quell the fears of people who think he's coming to get their guns, so much that he publicly said he opposes a reinstatement of the Clinton era assault weapons ban.

Despite that fact, it would seem a good number of folks haven't believed the spin, given that sales of guns and ammo have gone through the roof since he was elected.

Well now they've got even more evidence to point to:

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency is proposing a new definition that could be used to eliminate 8 of 10 legal pocketknives in the United States right now, according to activists who are gearing up to fight the plan.

The federal bureaucracy is accepting comments – written only – that must be received by June 21 before its planned changes could become final, but Doug Ritter of KnifeRights.org, said the implications of the decision would be far-reaching, since many state and federal agencies depend on the agency's definitions to determine what is legal in the United States.

For a long time, those switchblades that have long stiletto blades that are spring-ejected powerfully from the side or end of the handle have been illegal in the United States, but now a review by the agency of its own approval in 2008 of a particular type of knife for import is raising serious alarms.  read more »

The latest Rasmussen poll shows that an overwhelming majority of the American people would seem to prefer "equal justice" under law, rather than "empathetic justice".  According to the poll:

Eighty-three percent (83%) of U.S. voters say America's legal system should apply the law equally to all Americans rather than using the law to help those who have less power and influence. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 8% disagree.

This belief is shared overwhelmingly by Republicans, Democrats and voters not affiliated with either party.

In other words, most Americans have it right.  Justice should indeed be blind, as "blind" justice is the only way to have "fair" justice, (which is a bit of an oxymoron I suppose).

But do people think it's actually working out that way with our judicial system today?  Not hardly.

...voters are more divided when asked how the legal system is actually performing today. Thirty-seven percent (37%) say the U.S. legal system generally provides unfair advantages to minorities, while 34% say it generally treats all Americans equally.  read more »