FiveThirtyEight whiz Nate Silver recently asked whether Chris Christie is the anti-Romney or the anti-Perry.

The answer is yes.

Christie is the anti-Romney, because he genuinely and unapologetically embraces and enacts conservative policies, at least on fiscal matters—in particular entitlement reform, the most important policy realm our nation currently faces.

Critics charge that he’s not consistently conservative on issues such as global warming and gun control.  Yet Rick Perry critics complain that he’s not consistently conservative on issues such as immigration and the HPV vaccine, and most people wouldn’t call Perry a liberal.

Christie is the anti-Perry, because he knows how to identify, articulate, and justify his positions, using fiery, uncompromising rhetoric that doesn’t sound rehearsed, and isn’t afraid to say things that tick off hallowed interest groups.

Critics charge that he’s arrogant, has a temper, and insults people.  Yet his style has proven wildly popular with voters who are fed up with politicians who can’t or won’t stand up to bullying public employee unions that are bankrupting the nation’s most populous states.

If Mitt Romney held more consistently conservative positions on the major issues of the day, he’d be able to articulate them to voters.  But he doesn’t.

If Rick Perry were more articulate and had a better understanding of the issues, his positions would be conservative enough for most Republicans.  But he isn’t.  read more »

To all of the current (and potential) Republican Presidential candidates, here’s a tip: focus on Obama.  When we do, we win.

Remember, we are living in a country that is rejecting Obama and everything he stands for.  Poll after poll show him at the lowest ratings of his career, and election results from Scott Brown’s upset Senate win in Massachusetts, to November 2010, to the recent special elections in New York and Nevada prove that over and over.

Just as they say that the number one rule in real estate is “location, location, location”, the number one focus of this election should be “Obama, Obama, Obama”.  Period.  End of strategy.  As we evaluate the candidates, conservatives should choose the one who does the best job of doing just that.

Recently however, our candidates have been too focused on each other, instead of staying focused on Obama and how they would draw a distinction between his failures and conservative principles.

But Republicans don’t need the candidates to tell us what their opponent’s weaknesses are.  We’re all too familiar with them.  And as the process continues we’ll all have to come to grips with them and decide which of them we each feel does the least offense to our principles.  No one is perfect and we’ll all compromise somewhere in choosing a candidate.

But the important point here is beating Obama.

Make no mistake, this process is not about making a statement, or insisting on 100% orthodoxy and then going down in flames.  In that case, all we will have done is hand liberals the political means to continue remaking America in their own image.  read more »

Nearly Half Of Americans Believe Government Poses Immediate Threat To Liberties, Rights

In the latest Gallup Poll which asked people if they felt the government was a threat to their individual liberties, nearly half of the respondents said that the government WAS, in fact, a threat to their individual liberties. This is the highest it has ever been since the poll started being taken by Gallup back in 2003. Although only 28% of Democrats say that the government is a threat to their liberties, 61% of all Republicans and 57% of all Independents agree that the government is a threat. We can see the divide between party lines and those who are sticking with President Obama through thick and thin. As Gallup states, the numbers during the Bush Administration were also high, but not nearly as high as this and the number of Democrats were much higher than Republicans at that time, with Independents believing that no matter who is in office they are a threat to the freedom of the American people.

With these numbers getting higher and higher by the year, does the government have to start taking notice of what the American people feel or will they put it aside and not pay any attention to it? Pelosi, during the debate on Health Care Reform, responded very sarcastically to someone who asked her it was against the Constitution to pass such legislation. This is one of the reasons, I believe, that the numbers are much higher than they have ever been. The people see that the government is a threat to individual liberties if they do not understand where their power ends and the people’s power begins. The people in power are no different than any other people in history who wanted even more power once they tasted a little, and if we go down the road of those other civilizations we will end up in the trash heap of history along with them.  read more »

…and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly.
But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the galleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and wears their face and their garment, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.
He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106BC - 43BC.

We, in all our arrogant sophistication, have utterly failed to grasp what this ‘primitive’ philosopher knew forty two years before the birth of Christ.

The critical situation in which America now finds itself is a gut check of monumental proportions. There can be little doubt in any rational person’s mind that there are forces at work in this country which, left unchecked, will certainly extinguish the greatest beacon of democracy in the history of the world, resulting in the enslavement of free people’s souls. We’ve been served a constant diet of lies and prevarication for close to a century.  read more »

During the 1992 Clinton campaign there was a famous sign hanging in the campaign headquarters exclaiming “It’s the economy, stupid!”, reminding everyone that the focus of the campaign was that the economy (George Bush sr.’s economy) was terrible, and that it was all his fault.

Fast forward sixteen years and Obama ran his campaign on a similar notion, but now, three years into his first term and looking towards re-election, things are worse and blaming George W. Bush just won’t cut it.  So, for Obama, it’s all about the politics.

His recent “jobs” speech to Congress was, at its root, about just one job: his own, and his attempts to keep it.  The whole point was to have a prime-time TV opportunity to set the lay of the land for the coming re-election campaign.  His reading his “plan” from a teleprompter on national TV to members of Congress who are capable of reading it for themselves was neither capable of nor meant to accomplish anything else.

But why the sudden urgency on Obama’s part?  That the economy has been awful is nothing new.  Quite the contrary, it is something all Americans have seen and experienced first hand for several years (except maybe those who work for the government).

So again, why now?  As it turns out, it wasn’t a set of new economic indicators that drove Obama’s need to look busy, but rather new political indicators.

Obama ended the month of August with the lowest approval ratings of his presidency, (Gallup put him at just 40% approval).  The same held true for his standing with young voters, Hispanics and women, three voting blocs that were crucial to his 2008 election.  Only 40% of Independent voters approve of the job he’s doing, while 54% disapprove: putting him upside-down by -13%.  The most recent bi-partisan “Battleground Poll” reported that only 26% of voters said they would “definitely” vote to re-elect him.  And the Rasmussen poll’s approval index put those who “strongly approve” of Obama at just 19%, while 45% “strongly disapprove”: a difference of -26%, which means that there are a lot of people who are really passionate about seeing him lose next year.  read more »

Study Finds ObamaCare Will Jack Up Premiums By At LEAST 55%

We on the right are saying “I told you so” today, but it would not be the first time we did so. Since the bill was passed into law and signed by the President, individuals like myself have been pointing out that health care coverage prices would go up in some way, but those Democrats who are so happy to have this plan will not hear it. They are still happy about the passage of the law, even though they will have to pay more as well. With the taxes going higher, more money going to health care, and energy prices on the rise, we as Americans are going to have a lot less money when it comes to buying anything else that we enjoy. This is not because we did not fight hard enough against the law, because we did. We protested in Washington and made our stance to Congress that this is not what we wanted. The polls showed the majority of Americans were against the plan, yet the Democrats pushed it through. They were so excited and planned a whole march to the chamber to make sure everyone seen their accomplishments. The only problem is their accomplishments, if left unchecked by SCOTUS, will cost every single hard working American more money. I would ask the President and those Democrats in Congress how this is fair!

I have been around politics long enough to know that just because it is not fair doe not mean it will not happen. I am a realist, and the realist in me says the Democrats will do anything to make sure this law sticks. The only hope we the people have now is the Supreme Court, and that is not a sure bet. We have to come to the realization right now that we may be stuck with this, and if we are what will the Republicans do to get rid of it if and when they take the White House and also the Presidency next year. That question is something that has been asked of the candidates, but as we have seen in the past it is much more difficult to get rid of these programs once they are started than it is to stop them in their tracks when it comes to passing them. We have the fight of the century on our hands, and I am not so sure the American people are up for it.  read more »

It would seem that the country has seen and heard every single falsehood that Obama and the DeMarxists have foisted on the American people. If there was ever an address that underwhelmed the public purview of Barack Hussein’s pitch for ‘balance’ and more taxes against the ‘rich’, this was it.

The top 10% of earners pay 70% of the taxes in this country to start with. If you confiscated every dime of the wealthiest people in this nation it would scarcely run the Federal Government for more than about ninety days. I’ve never gotten a job from a poor person. So, then, it stands to reason that Obama is determined to to forever destroy the job creators in our country.

Never in my lifetime, and very possibly in the history of this country, have we seen someone who is so wrong in so many different ways. If Mr Hussein was a private citizen it wouldn’t make a hoot or holler of difference. We all know incorrigible knotheads… people for whom abject ignorance is a virtue. But they’re not the President of the United States.

There’s a lead picture on ‘Drudge’, showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Barry Obama at a meeting earlier today. Pull it up and check it out for yourselves. Obama looks like a man at the end of his rope. He’s presiding over a completely failed and ineffectual foreign policy with the sole purpose, as far as I can determine, of isolating the State of Israel, and doing everything in his power to advance the aims of the people who would see Israel in flames.  read more »

What do all of these three things have in common: Troy Davis, the death penalty, and race? Well, for starters, the supports of Troy Davis, the man who was executed earlier this evening in Georgia, are playing the race card yet again. I am here to try and be the voice of reason, although many in the black community will call me a racist, bigot, and whatever other term they learned from Left leaning radio.

First, I want to start out by telling everyone something that may surprise them: I am, in many instances, against the death penalty. I know that is very odd for someone who calls himself a Conservative, but I have my reasons. One of those reasons is because there are many doubts in many cases, and since our system is not fool proof, I believe that in many of the circumstances the death penalty can do more harm than the good it is supposed to do. Having said that, I also believe that there are times when it must be used. Some may call that hypocritical, but I call it being as consistent as possible on an issue that is never the same. Case by case we, from the outside, can look and judge for ourselves if we believe the person should die or not. The fact of the matter is that we, from the outside in many cases, only have some of the information or we choose to join the crowd that is against the death penalty because it pushes our belief system to the next level. Having said that, we need to look at this case in general. Those who are angry that this man was CONVICTED, and in subsequent appeals was not able to be set free or his death sentence set aside, are angry not at the process but those who made that decision.  read more »

History has taught us that the farcical “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority breaks down every single time it is forcibly initiated by the West.  The routine disintegrates because it always unpeacefully proceeds in the following manner: Palestinians make demands, and Israel agrees to them; Palestinians smell blood in the water and up the stakes, and Israel necessarily balks; Palestinians attack Israel, and Israel counterattacks; the world condemns Israel for its “disproportionate” response, and Palestinians secretly celebrate Israel’s global denigration without shedding a tear over the deaths of its own civilians; and then the whole sordid cycle starts again.

The Palestinians’ latest gambit for feigning legitimacy in the eyes of free nations is for PA President Mahmoud Abbas to request a platform for better infiltrating, isolating, and attacking Israel—I mean, “statehood”—at the United Nations’ Security Council meeting this Friday.  This entreaty would require fulfilling President Obama’s outrageous demand earlier this year that Israel return to its undefendable, pre-1967 borders and cede east Jerusalem to the Palestinians.  A usefully idiotic coalition of Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, and Lutheran priests in Jerusalem have boosted the PA’s bid.

The PA’s move on Friday will almost certainly be blocked by the United States, which, as a core member of the Security Council, has veto power over any such bid.  If its statehood attempt fails, Abbas has implied that the PA will present its case to the U.N. General Assembly, whose peanut gallery of Third World dictatorships will likely approve an upgrade for the PA from “entity” to non-voting, non-member observer state.  read more »

GM, UAW Agree On New Deal

As if GM should be making any kind of deals with unions to get them more, they have done just that and, in my mind, cemented their place as an automaker that will be looking for another bailout by the government that owns them in the very near future. The government and the unions do not understand economics and will never understand economics, or they would understand all this plan does is make for more problems in the future. We have to look at why the problems that GM faced in the first place came to be, and one of the major issues was the unions who wanted more and more and GM who kept giving them more. The unions were like crack heads looking for another fix, and the heads of GM at the time were the guys who were throwing money at the crack heads to get their fix. After a bailout that cost the taxpayers BILLIONS of dollars of money that we did not have to spend, we are back in the same position as we were before the bailout, with the unions getting more bonuses and pay increases for workers who already make so much money it would make our heads spin.

As the taxpayers go on with their lives and watch television to make up for their dull lives otherwise, GM (a company that has lost billions in taxpayer funds and continues to lose more with every dip in their stock) continues to make deals that support the unions more than the business. The individuals running GM right now have to understand this is the dumbest move they could have made, but when you have the unions down your throat the right answer is not always the good answer. The unions have the deck stacked at GM and know they can get what they want, but they should also know that the next time GM is about to fail there will be no more money left to bail them out again. The government needs to get out of the business of owning priority stake in auto companies, especially when those auto companies are run by individuals who are out to help the unions more than the individual worker. It is not about what kind of work a person does anymore, it is about what kind of union they are in and what that union can do for them which will determine the price of their labor. This is, in my eyes, the biggest reason for the collapse of GM and the new collapse that we could see within a year, I believe.  read more »