Tag: republican party

GOP shuts down deficit-increasing ‘jobs’ bill.

Ace of Spades HQ sums up wonderfully (if originally profanely) the destruction of that 100 billion dollar (and 30 billion deficit-increasing) waste of tax money* known as a ‘jobs bill:’

Democrats: Give us $30 billion. GOP: Um….no. Democrats: Come on! GOP: Nah. Democrats: How come? GOP: One, I don’t have it; and two, you’re already into me for more than a trillion already. Democrats: So what’s another measly $30 billion? Please? GOP: Man, just [expletive deleted] off. Seriously. Democrats: WHY DO YOU HATE THE POOR! GOP: I don’t hate the poor. I just hate you.

But I would like to remind my readers of one thing: this blow for fiscal sanity?  Brought to you by Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins (via Instapundit), much to the consternation of Democratic partisans… which apparently includes the author of the Politico article.  Or possibly Politico was just supposed to be in on the stimulus, somehow? – It’s all kind of murky these days.

Moe Lane Continue reading GOP shuts down deficit-increasing ‘jobs’ bill.

The Maine GOP’s barbaric yawp.

Yes, Ezra Pound’s from Idaho it’s actually Walt Whitman, and I’m an idiot.

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers.

It must be admitted that when I read this particular article:

In a move that seemed to surprise many members of Maine’s Republican Party, a group of tea party-style activists redefined the party platform at the convention Saturday.

After the vote, in which a vocal majority supported a wholesale replacement of language worked on by the party establishment since at least January, a string of delegates congratulated Horatio “Ted” Cowan III, a retired marine electrician from Rockland who wrote the adopted amendment.

…I mostly snickered at The Outrage over what happens to be a fairly straightforwardly party platform that should have a good deal of appeal to conservatives, libertarians, and populists. I personally would have argued the hard line on illegal immigration and same-sex marriage, but the former is an argument over tactics and 53% of the voting population of Maine disagrees with me on the latter anyway.   So, really, business as usual, nice to see that the Ron Paul people were actually participating in local party structures like we had been asking them to do throughout all of 2008…  and, yeah, Maine’s lost to conservatism, so let them have their fun.

Then I read a few more details of what actually happened. Continue reading The Maine GOP’s barbaric yawp.

NRCC outrecruits DCCC with female candidates.

Way to bury the ledes there, WaPo.

I suppose that I should be nicer. After all, the Washington Post bothered to actually report that there has been a heavy surge in female recruitment by the GOP this cycle (H/T: The New Ledger):

Nearly two years after Sarah Palin became the Republican Party’s first female nominee for vice president, record numbers of Republican women are running for House seats, driving the overall count of women running for both the House and the Senate to a new high.

The surge in female candidates has taken place largely under the radar. The previous high came in 1992, the “Year of the Woman” that pushed the percentage of women in Congress into the double digits for the first time. That year, 222 women filed to run for the House and 29 for Senate contests.

So far this year, 239 women are candidates for the House and 31 for the Senate, according to data from the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics.

Continue reading NRCC outrecruits DCCC with female candidates.

Funny: I’ll believe that Bruce Bartlett is serious about helping the GOP recover…

…when it takes me less than ten minutes to track down his Congressional District (VA-10, Frank Wolf) or his local party apparatus (Fairfax County GOP).  Neither of which is particularly mentioned in his bio page, although a link to his book slamming President Bush is.  Prominently.  Where it’s the first thing that you can see, really.

This is fronted (via Instapundit) because this is the problem: we have lists and lists of people who want some nebulous Little Red Hen to fix their pet problem with the GOP.  Fixing the problems themselves?  Not so much.

Moe Lane

PS: Sure, you can join the Tea Parties next year, Bartlett. Just don’t expect to be given a task more involved than “make a sign to bring”…wow.  Can you even imagine Bruce Bartlett standing on a street corner, waving a homemade sign around and encouraging people to honk if they’re tired of the government spending too much of their money?  No, neither can I.

Which is more or less my point.

Crossposted to RedState.

Winning with ‘No.’

From last week’s article on the growing awareness of Democratic corruption, by the always-interesting Jen Rubin:

…with the growth of government and the enormous amount of cash sloshing through Washington, the corruption problem is about to get worse. The stimulus money could, according to the FBI, be the breeding ground for its own crime wave. If the experts are right and 10% of the $787B stimulus plan will be lost to fraud and abuse, then $80B worth of graft and the congressmen, officials, lobbyists, and donors with their fingers in the pie will make fodder for plenty of headlines — just in time for the 2010 races.

No wonder the MSM is nervously sounding the alarm. There is the prospect that the age of “liberal dominance” could come screeching to a halt before it’s even gotten up to speed. Not only does it portend an electoral train wreck and loss of a governing liberal majority, but it sheds doubt on the notion that government was the knight in shining armor needed to ride to the rescue when the free market “failed.” If bigger and bigger government gets us more and more crooks and tens of billions in fraud, then maybe there is a better way to go than inflating the size and scope of the federal government.

Continue reading Winning with ‘No.’

A handy checklist for people who wish to complain about the RiNOs in the GOP.

[UPDATE]: Here are couple more links for you:
Rebuilding the GOP: The Committeeman Project
Get Your STORC On

I am not ordering anybody to follow this checklist. I’m not even going to nag about it. I am merely suggesting that you consider answering the questions on them before you go off on how the party isn’t listening to you.

  • What is the name of your local GOP group, on the county / district level?
  • Who is the chair?
  • When do they meet?
  • What was discussed at the last meeting?
  • What happened at that meeting that you disagreed with the most?
  • How did they address your concerns?
  • When does the group or sub-group that would best resolve your concerns meet?
  • Who else in that group or sub-group would you say is your best ally in resolving that concern?
  • Who in your area is running for state, county, and local office?
  • What did they say that they needed the most help with?
  • Who is the greatest obstructionist in your group, and how do you get around him or her?

I’ll keep saying it until it sinks in: there’s no cavalry coming to save us, ladies and gentlemen. That’s because we’re the cavalry.

And we are perfectly capable of saving ourselves.

Crossposted to RedState.

How the GOP can come back: A *practical* suggestion.

I think that RS McCain gets why we lost in 2006 and 2008 exactly right:

…the Democrats did something very smart after 2004. Instead of freaking out over those “values voters” and getting all down in the dumps, they got busy organizing and raising money so that when the GOP hit a long streak of bad moves and bad news in 2005-06, the Dems were ready to take advantage of it. A day of organizing is worth a week of blathering about “strategy,” and an hour of fund-raising is worth far more than a month of navel-gazing op-ed columns pumped out by the punditocracy.

But the pundits always want to over-intellectualize everything, because that’s what they get paid to do, and the consultants always want to talk “strategy,” because they’s what they get paid to do. Grassroots organizing, candidate recruitment and fundraising — those are the three things the GOP needs to focus on in the near term.

Read that, and read John Hawkins’ helpful six keys… and then actually do something about it.

Moe Lane

PS: Whining does not count as “doing something about it.” Neither does demanding that the Party drop everything to concentrate on your pet issue, stapling your hand to your forehead about how the awful Party never listened to you, and/or threatening to move out to the countryside with a full load of ammo and survival gear. All any of that does is depress people who are trying to actually fix things.

PPS: No, I don’t particularly care if you like that characterization or not. Was there anything else?

Crossposted at RedState.