Just eight months after the election of Barack Obama, the latest poll from Gallup shows that Americans claim - by two to one - that they are getting more conservative.  Which really has to make you wonder, "where were these people on Election Day?" 

From the poll:

PRINCETON, NJ -- Despite the results of the 2008 presidential election, Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal, 39% to 18%, with 42% saying they have not changed. While independents and Democrats most often say their views haven't changed, more members of all three major partisan groups indicate that their views have shifted to the right rather than to the left. 

And did you catch that last sentence at the top?  "... more members of all three major partisan groups indicate that their views have shifted to the right rather than to the left". 

Which makes one wonder about the major elements of Obama's agenda...and probably explains why he's moving so fast.

It probably explains why his plan for a government takeover of healthcare is losing momentum...and why an increasing number of Democrats in Congress are opposed to the idea.

It also might be related to some numbers we've seen in other recent polls.  Such as the one showing Obama's favorable numbers are now below 50% in the swing state of Ohio for the first time.  And over 60% of Americans say they are against a second stimulus, about which Obama and high ranking Democrats have been dropping hints for the last few weeks.  read more »

Despite the fact that Obama ran for office (as so many Democrats do) saying he wanted to "reduce" the number of abortions, it doesn't seem to have any bearing on his party's support of unlimited taxpayer funding of abortion.  In this case in Washington, DC.

For the past several decades, taxpayer funding of abortions in the nation's capital has been blocked by what has been known as the Dornan Amendment.  But on Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee voted down a pro-life amendment designed to to stop Obam's plan to use taxpayer dollars to fund abortions with taxpayer dollars in DC - in keeping with Obama's direct request.

So much for "reducing" the number of abortions.

As everyone knows, if you want less of something, you tax it.  You want more of something, you subsidize it.  And now we're well on the way to subsidized abortions in DC.

As you can imagine, the NARAL crowd is thrilled:

But Nancy Keenan, the president of NARAL representing the minority of Americans who back the pro-abortion position, commended the members of the panel who voted for abortion funding.

She called prohibiting taxpayer funded abortions in the District of Columbia a "discriminatory policy" and applauded the panel for "follow[ing] President Obama's lead."

No Independence Day is complete without taking time to remember and reflect on the reason for the celebration, our Declaration of Independence.  Take some time and read every word.  Let it soak in.  Ask yourself how the words our Founders wrote apply today.  Then pass it on to someone else. 

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.  read more »

It seems fitting that on our Independence Day Americans would gather in locations all across our country and engage in that most American of activities - protest against the government.  Somewhere, our Founding Fathers are smiling.

Of course they're surely NOT smiling at the size and cost of the government they helped establish.  Which is the reason for the protests to begin with.  In fact, one could imagine the Founders wondering what's taken us so long to begin to seriously buck against the monstrous growth of a government who's finances are so unsustainable as to put the future existence of the country itself at serious risk.

People are finally waking up...

But finally there is an awakening going on all across our country, as the tremendous expansion of government control and government spending (and borrowing) proposed by Barack Obama is opening they eyes of many people who previously didn't give it much thought.

His first annual budget approached almost FOUR TRILLION dollars!  A budget that made a “down-payment” on socialized medicine and other massive expansions of government. 

In the past year we've added trillions of dollars to our national debt – which is currently over TEN TRILLION and counting!

There was the AIG bailout.  Then there was the bank bailout, (part one), and the auto bailout, (part one).  Then there was the “stimulus” bill.  Then a second auto bailout, and the Democrat's proposed energy taxes.  read more »

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.  read more »

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 »

Well, it didn't take too long for Specter to start to indicate a change of tune on card check after he went ahead and changed his party a few months ago.

Earlier this year Specter promised that he would oppose the job-killing "card check" bill, which essentially forces unionism on businesses by not allowing employees to have a secret ballot on union organization votes.  But now that he's switched to the party that's co-owned by by the unions (along w/the trial lawyers), Specter seems to be indicating that he's getting ready to go back on his word to protect American workers from harassment and intimidation by union thugs in the workplace.

Click here and catch it on video.

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? ...

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.