Say Anything Blog

Just one more reason that we must Draft Pence for 2008!

Let’s remember that Reagan too lost an election among Republicans in the 1976 Primary, so a defeat among “party faithful” really doesn’t mean much.

Much is said of the problem of out-migration in North Dakota. Most of what is said is in regards to what handouts and incentives can be given to bribe young people to stay in the state, but these only treat the symptoms, they do not address the real problems which are three-fold.

1. Tax Climate. North Dakota has been ranked 31st in Business Friendly Tax Policy by the conservative Tax Foundation. This ranking is the symptom of a burdensome tax code at the state level.

The result of this over taxation of course is the current $527 million budget surplus. By making it more expensive to do business in the state, many well paying jobs that would attract home-grown talent go elsewhere – such as South Dakota which has no income tax and is ranked #2 on the same list.

2. Student Debt. North Dakota graduates leave school with more debt than graduates of all but two states (Iowa and New Hampshire).

Given the poor tax climate for businesses, it is only logical that graduates would have to leave the state to find a job to pay back their debt in a reasonable amount of time. The same policies that make it hard for businesses to operate trickle down and cause fewer good jobs to be created.

Tuition is lower here than elsewhere, but the way financial aid is calculated means that less is granted to North Dakota on a per student basis as a result.

3. Attitude. Growing up I, and many of my classmates, were told “you are too good for North Dakota.” While it was probably a method of boosting the self-esteem of our age group, sometimes it seems that attitude was not far off.

As a result, many of the brightest minds do leave the state for greener pastures. Sure, a lot of them are coming back to raise their families after being gone, but why don’t our policies make it easier for them to stay here in the first place?

Why are we throwing taxpayer dollars at subsidizing the educations of students just to watch them walk out the door? What sense does it make to subsidize employers in other states and in turn increasing the tax revenues of those states? When graduates leave the state it is a failed investment.

There are arguments to be made for creating ways for graduates to earn discounts on their incurred student debt, but it probably won’t be enough to keep young people in the state without addressing these key issues first.

Washington - Conservatism lost its battle for the hearts and minds of House Republicans today.

By a vote of 168-27 the Republican Party came to the conclusion that the people of this country did not want a change within the Republican Party, in doing so they destroyed all pretext that the GOP is a conservative party aside.

House Republicans have determined that the status quo is the way to go and that the establishment is far more important than any philosophical beliefs.

Gotta give props where props are due.

Senate approves Indo-US nuke deal

The American Senate has passed the bill to implement civilian nuclear energy cooperation with India.

The bill was passed by a majority of 85-12 after a debate of six hours.

A total of 18 amendments were proposed during the debate and all ‘Killer’ amendments were rejected.

The Feingold and the Boxer amendments, that would have either wrecked the deal, forced renegotiation or made the implementation stage quite difficult, were part of the rejected “Killer” changes.

The Senate also rejected two amendments proposed by Democrat Senator Byron Dorgan.

The first amendment, rejected by a vote of 71 to 27, had proposed that the US administration should continue to support a UN resolution adopted after India’s nuclear tests in 1998.

It said New Delhi should stop further production of fissile material for nuclear weapons and cap its nuclear weapons programme.

Dorgan’s second amendment, rejected by a voice vote, pertained to the President making a determination to Congress that India has committed all reactors supplying electricity under IAEA inspections regime.

It also included a binding obligation on India not to assist, induce or encourage non nuclear weapons states to manufacture or acquire nuclear weapons and a Presidential determination that India is reducing stockpiles.

We all understand that India is not a threat to us like Iran and North Korea, but if we are not going to abide by UN Resolutions when it comes to our bilateral dealings with nations, how can we legitimately use another regime’s disobedience against them as we did in Iraq?

We all complain about how the UN is worthless; and it is.  But until we withdraw from that body, and we should; we cannot just use it when it fits our agenda.

Government admits improper farm payments

WASHINGTON - The Agriculture Department on Wednesday acknowledged making improper payments to farmers worth more than $2.8 billion last year.

Officials explained that most of the payments involved missing or incomplete paperwork.

“We take this very seriously,” said Chuck Christopherson, the department’s chief financial officer. “We know this is something that we can address and that we can fix.”

Federal law requires agencies to track erroneous payments, such as checks sent to farmers who were not eligible for a particular program, or payments for the wrong amount of money.

The amount of improper payments in fiscal 2006 was about 11 percent of farm program payments, the department said. The fiscal year ended on Sept. 30.

[...]

Separately, the department found $1.6 billion in improper payments made through the food stamp program. That amount was about 5.84 percent of all payments, Christopherson said, down from 5.88 percent a year before.

If we can track erroneous payments, why not just make the process a little more stringent?

Dorgan and Conrad will shut down the Senate to get more money for farmers, will they shut down this waste of money?

Now that the elections are over, there is still one major task that the citizens and voters of this state must undertake.  We must tell our representatives that we will not accept a 12.7% increase of the total state budget again; and that we will not accept such a large overall increase while the education budget is increased by only 3.5%. 

During the last legislative session spending on quote “general government” increased by 26.3% ($79million) while funding for education increased by 3.5% ($31 million).  While the document these figures are cited from does not define “general government,” it is certainly not a stretch to say these numbers are a little lopsided and should probably have been reversed. 

If the current majority wants to prove that it still is a vehicle for fiscal conservatism it will make actual cuts in the cost of “general government;” actual cuts, not just cuts in the rate of growth.  These cuts can then be added to the governors plan to increase education funding without a tax increase and without tapping the surplus.

There are still reasons that North Dakota votes for Republicans, and it is not to increase spending by 12.7%.  The voters of this state must not allow their elected representatives to squander their money.  It is bad enough that the taxpayers of this state were overcharged in the first place, but the surplus must not be used to pump up the ongoing budget outlays for the state, in turn causing future increases in taxation to be needed.

One priority for the surplus must be used to relieve property taxes by increasing funding to education. That increased state funding must be tied to local subdivisions either cutting property taxes or developing their own rainy-day fund.  Any state relief must be tied to the understanding that the funding is not for new spending.

A portion of the surplus must also be used to stem the skyrocketing cost of college tuition.  If the rate of tuition is not restrained the state will lose the competitive advantage of cost over schools in Minnesota and elsewhere.

No matter what the surplus is spent on, our representatives must be held responsible.  If the surplus is squandered on pet projects and obscene increases of spending, it can be assured that the current majority party will lose even more seats than it did last Tuesday.  The people elected them as conservatives, now it is time for them to be conservative.

Last session, the legislature managed to increase the budget by 12.7%. That huge increase was during the Republican Super-Majority, and without knowing about the $527 million surplus.

What is going to happen now that the seats are a little tighter and they have the suplus to spend?

As you can see, “general government” (whatever that entails) increased 26.3% while education funding increased 3.5%.

Something is definately wrong with that picture.

Here is a chart of how the last legislature showed very little restraint on spending:





Original File Here

Heads-Up from Club for Growth

Folks, Congress hasn’t learned one thing from the elections. As House leaders, John Boehner and Roy Blunt have three....count them, 3...new spending bills on the schedule today. Worse still, the bills will be under suspension of the rules so their passage is highly likely.

As Mark Tapscott writes,

“In other words, the leading guys who just got booted out are suspending the rules to create a “fast track” for approving even more spending and more new federal programs. And Boehner wants to be the new House Minority Leader and Blunt wants to be the Minority Whip!”

Not only is the GOP supporting these new spending programs, but 66 Republicans helped vote down a free trade bill with Vietnam yesterday (the bill would have granted the country “normal trade relations").

Where’s the re-energized GOP? Where’s the party that is recommitting itself to the principles of limited government? I can’t find it anywhere…

These fools are proving why they lost each day.

Human Events

The depleted House Republican caucus, a minority in the next Congress, convenes at 8 a.m. in the Capitol Friday on the brink of committing an act of supreme irrationality. The House members blame their leadership for tasting the bitter dregs of defeat. Yet, the consensus so far is that, in secret ballot, they will re-elect some or all of those leaders.

In private conversation, Republican members of Congress blame Majority Leader John Boehner and Majority Whip Roy Blunt in no small part for their midterm election debacle. Yet, either Boehner, Blunt or both are expected to be returned to their leadership posts Friday. For good reason, the GOP often is called “the stupid party.”

While an unpopular Iraq war and an unpopular George W. Bush were primary causes of last Tuesday’s Republican rout, massive public disapproval of the Republican-controlled Congress significantly contributed. While abandoning conservative principles, the spendthrift House had become chained to special corporate interests represented by K Street lobbyists.

This malaise is embodied in the avuncular Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, whose consistent response to accusations of failed leadership has been 20-minute lectures to closed-door party conferences pleading for Republican unity. As expected, Hastert is leaving the leadership now that the party is in the minority. But his departure leaves the other leaders in place, with their colleagues reluctant to turn them out.

That reluctance is typified by Rep. Eric Cantor, a 43-year-old third-term congressman from Richmond, Va., who has been his party’s chief deputy whip for four years since being appointed by Blunt after only two years in Congress. His voting record is solidly conservative, and he belongs to the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC). At the same time, Cantor is well regarded in all sectors of the party, which see him as the principled kind of rising politician that Republicans desperately need.

But Cantor is not seizing this post-election moment to seek an elected leadership position. On the contrary, he has been supporting Blunt for re-election as whip out of loyalty to his mentor and patron. Bright and able though he is, Cantor has drunk the Kool-Aid in viewing the Republican Party as a private club where personal loyalties must transcend all else.

Blunt, like Hastert, was hand-picked for leadership by Tom DeLay, the dominant Republican in Congress until his politically inspired indictment in Texas last year. When DeLay resigned as majority leader, the party’s lobbyist-connected establishment decision was to promote Blunt from whip to leader and make Cantor the whip. But with the feeling that some change was needed, Boehner defeated Blunt for the top job, and Blunt kept the second-ranking post. In fact, Boehner’s ties to K Street are even stronger than Blunt’s, and he seemed to lose interest in reform once he became majority leader.

Rep. Mike Pence, the current chairman of the RSC and a leader of reform, is an underdog candidate opposing Boehner. Rep. John Shadegg, Pence’s predecessor at the RSC who finished third in the race for leader last February, is running uphill against Blunt for whip on a reform platform. The conventional wisdom on the Hill is that, at best, only one of them can win because the Republicans would not dare elect two conservatives to the two top House leadership positions.

In fact, the voting records of Boehner and Blunt are nearly identical to Pence’s and Shadegg’s. The difference between them was demonstrated last Thursday when Blunt went to the Heritage Foundation to campaign for his retention as whip. He delivered a defense of earmarking, echoing the House appropriators’ claim that the elimination of earmarks would do “nothing but shift funding decisions from one side of Pennsylvania Ave. to the other.”

That is the view that led Republicans to earmark a “bridge to nowhere” and hundreds of other projects in competitive districts, hoping it would save them on Election Day. The House has been a place where Rep. Don Young (a notorious Alaska porker) was setting national transportation policy, where the “Cardinals” on the Appropriations Committee established earmarking records, where the pharmaceutical industry had a pipeline to party policy and where even Speaker Hastert was making personal profits on an earmark. Maybe that’s what Republicans want to retain, even in the minority.

Human Event’s has a piece about what the Lame Duck Congress should do.

Let me preface my thought’s by saying these are all great ideas.

However, I do believe in our form of Representative Democracy and The People have spoken.  The American People did not vote for the Democrats, they voted against the Republicans.  To try to sneak in and get things done, like has happened many other times, would not be all that great for moving forward the philosophy of governing by principles.

As much as I would like to see these policies implimented, it’s not exactly principled.

(more...)

Flashback to February 2006

Two years ago, when I presented the keynote address here at CPAC 2004, I likened the state of the Republican movement to a tall ship at sea—a ship that had drifted off-course from essential conservative principles.

I said we had lost our way. But I believed we could get back on course—would get back on course. We could make the corrections. We needed only to keep our eye on True North—our core principles of limited government and traditional moral values.

I believed that we were off course not because we’d abandoned these principles, or forgotten the shining city on the hill. We’d simply made honest, but flawed calculations on how to get there.

I no longer believe that.

It’s one thing to drift off course…

It’s quite another thing to continue that course when half the crew and passengers are pointing out that nothing looks familiar ... not to mention the tens of millions of Americans lining the shoreline screaming, “You’re going the wrong way!”

In a word, we’re no longer adrift. We might’ve been when we started but now “off course” is the accepted course.

(more...)

We were told that if the Democrats win the world as we know it would end.

Open Thread for Predictions of the exact date that the world will end.

Sheeple noun

1.) One who receives daily brain downloads from the Bush administration.

See also: Bushie, Party Whore.

Antonyms: Conservative.

Here’s a history lesson for everyone who accuses us of breaking Ronald Reagan’s supposedly sacred 11th Commandment.

H/T: Andrew at SaveTheGOP

Corner at National Review

WASHINGTON, DC - U.S. Congressman Mike Pence released the following statement today on the GOP’s midterm election loss:

“Election day 2006 will be remembered as a turning point in American political history. Twenty-five years after the Reagan Administration came to Washington with a conservative agenda of limited government, the American people chose a different course

“It is the duty of the losing party in a free election to humbly accept defeat and to acknowledge that the people are sovereign in the People’s House.

“As we examine the results of this election, it is imperative that we listen to the American people and learn the right lessons.

“Some will argue that we lost our majority because of scandals at home and challenges abroad. I say, we did not just lose our majority, we lost our way.

“While the scandals of the 109th Congress harmed our cause, the greatest scandal in Washington, D.C. is runaway federal spending.

“After 1994, we were a majority committed to balanced federal budgets, entitlement reform and advancing the principles of limited government. In recent years, our majority voted to expand the federal government’s role in education, entitlements and pursued spending policies that created record deficits and national debt.

“This was not in the Contract with America and Republican voters said, ‘enough is enough.’

“Our opponents will say that the American people rejected our Republican vision. I say the American people didn’t quit on the Contract with America, we did. And in so doing, we severed the bonds of trust between our party and millions of our most ardent supporters.

“As the 110th Congress convenes next year, Republicans must cordially accept defeat and dedicate ourselves to advancing our cause as the loyal opposition knowing that the only way to retake our natural, governing majority, is to renew our commitment to limited government, national defense, traditional values and reform.”

From SaveTheGOP.com

Despite this people are still running around trying to scare me. If I don’t vote GOP then Nancy Pelosi will become Speak of the House, the Cubbies will win it all and the world will end!

I would encourage everyone to vote tomorrow. Vote for the Republicans, vote for the Democrats, vote for the Libertarians, or vote for some good local independents. Whatever you do though, don’t vote out of fear. Don’t vote for a RINO you hate because you are afraid of the Democrats taking control and ruining this country. The tactics being used by the GOP and their proxies to GOTV this election cycle are bordering on obscene. Vote out of love for your country, not fear of liberals.

If I have to be coerced with terror tactics to go to the polls and vote for the GOP, a party that fights tooth and nail against everything I believe in, then I don’t have much of a choice do I? I sincerely hope what the GOP is saying about this election is not true, that if you care about this country and its future then you must vote Republican. If it is then we are living in a tyranny. If I cannot vote out of office Republicans that are corrupt and abuse the Constitution because it means that an even worse sort of politician could take control then what the hell does that say about GOP management of this nation for the last six years?

Let the Republicans lose and watch what happens . . . the world will keep turning. The sun will come up on Wednesday. The real question is what will the Republicans do to get their base back? Will they actually run conservative candidates? We’ll see I guess. If all of the horrible things that could happen do happen under Democratic leadership then it just may rouse the American people from their slumber. And that alone would be worth a thousand GOP victories at the polls.

Seriously, the next person who walks up to me and tells me to vote Republican because I don’t really have another choice is going to get unloaded on.